Oatley is a prime piece of residential real estate in the southern suburbs of Sydney. The suburb faces on to the Georges River (Tucoerah River in the local indigenous language). Large leafy blocks of land and water views abound in this “north shore” status locality of the south. One of the star attractions in the western fringe of Oatley is the 45-hectare Oatley Park, a dense concentration of natural bushland with Edwardian era baths and sandstone ‘castle’ built during the Great Depression and now encircled by lofty smooth-barked Angophoras Costatas.
If you cross the railway line to the east side of Oatley you can see a tower dedication to the early Sydney settler the suburb is named after – James Oatley. Oatley was yet another transported felon made good in New South Wales’ formative years. The Oatley tower in the high street contains a clock face which alerts us to J Oatley Esq’s association with timepieces. Oatley from Staffordshire in the West Midlands got napped for stealing two featherbeds and linen to the value of £16, sentenced to death for his crime but transported instead to Australia in 1814. Oatley put his watch and clock making skills to good use, winning a conditional pardon and a Georges River land grant from Governor Macquarie in 1821. On his Georges River land—stretching from Gungal Bay in the west to Boundary and Hurstville Roads—where he established a farm on his property called “Needwood Forest” after the woodland in his native Warwickshire. Oatley’s Needwood Forest grant included the area of today’s eponymous suburb.
Appointed colonial clockmaker, Oatley plied his trade from a shop in George Street opposite the Sydney Town Hall, with a bit of a flair for constructing grandfather clocks. His best known work was the clock in the turret at the Hyde Park Prisoners’ Barracks built by fellow emancipist Francis Greenway (Oatley’s clock has featured on the Australian $10 note).
Oatley’s work also won favour with later governors who granted him 515 acres in the Hurstville area between 1831 and 1835. The clockmaker died on his residential property ‘Snugburough’ in 1839. The precise location of Snugburough in Sydney is not certain…some sources give it as Canterbury, others Beverley Hills or Pubchbowl. After Snugburough was sold by Oatley’s family, future owners had to accede to a curious condition of sale – they were required to retain Oatley’s sepulchre and his body on the property. Clockmaking stayed in the family after Oatley’s demise, his third son took over the George Street shop.
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Books and sites consulted:
Frances Pollon, The Book of Australian Suburbs (1988)
Brian and Barbara Kennedy, Sydney and Suburbs: A History and Description (1982)
Oatley, James (1770–1839)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/oatley-james-2514/text3399, published first in hardcopy 1967, accessed online 30 March 2021
In 1937 the Nazi regime organised two art exhibitions in Munich concurrently, separated only by a park and a few hundred metres. One was intended to hammer home to the German volk the inequity of the type of art that the führer Adolf Hitler found abhorrent, ie, anything in art that even hinted of modernity. The other representing all that Hitler found good in art was the complete antithesis of this – a paean to traditional, realistic painting and sculpture and art that conformed to classical themes and forms.
⇧ A Hitler, landscape (Source: Widewalls)
Hitler’s early experiences and his perceived emotional pattern suggest a motive of personal revenge contributing to the Nazis’ fanatical war on the modern and the avant-garde in art. As a young man Hitler dreamed of a career as an artist but a double rejection by the Vienna art academy saw those aspirations dashed. His paintings were summarily dismissed as passe by the art establishment in favour of abstract and modern styles (Burns), leaving the future Reich leader with a bitter aftertaste and a grudge①.
In Mein Kampf Hitler avers that “Cubism and Dadaism are symptoms of biological degradation threatening the German people”, Werckmeister, O. K. “Hitler the Artist.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 23, no. 2, 1997, pp. 270–297. JSTORwww.jstor.org/stable/1343984. Accessed 2 March 2021.
The purging of so-called “degenerate art”
The Degenerate Art Exhibition (Entartete Kunst) in 1937 was the culmination of a concerted campaign waged by the Nazis to root out all manifestations of avant-garde art in Germany. The first efforts by Hitler’s henchmen were a reaction to the preceding liberal and permissive Weimar era which had embraced the modern style in art and especially Expressionism. In 1933 the Nazis held their first art exhibit of the supposed “degenerate art” in Dresden. Allied to this, the systematic confiscation of modern artworks from museum across Germany took place. Hundreds of thousands of the plundered art pieces including works by modern masters were sold by the Third Reich (some of the proceeds were siphoned off into armament production)②. Much of the minor, less marketable art works were ultimately burnt.
⇧ Beckmann: ‘The Night’
The “wrong type” of art
Hitler rejected the avant-garde and modernity in part for aesthetic reasons. Hitler like many of his Nazi followers had an innate conservative aesthetic taste in art. Politics and ideology also played a part, the führer associated modernism with Jews and communism, and by extension, with democracy and pacifism. Jewish influences, Hitler held, had contaminated the classical art styles so beloved by him. At the same time he denounced what he called “cultural Bolshevism” for weakening German society. Modern art, the Nazis believed was an evil plot against the German people, a “dangerous lie” which would poison German minds. In chilling words given the Nazis’ later unbridled lethal use of eugenics Hitler stated that “anyone who paints a green sky and fields blue ought to be sterilised”.
⇧ Kokoschka: ’Portrait of a Degenerate Artist’
“Sick art” and culture as a propaganda tool
Hitler and the Nazis believed that art played a critical role in defining society’s values. Expressionism③ and the group Die Brücke (“The Bridge”) and artists like Oscar Kokoschka and Ernst Kirchner got singled out for extra repressive measures. The Nazis depicted avant-garde art as the lowest of the low—”impure and subversive”, it’s artists ‘diseased’ specimens corrupted by mental, physical and moral decay—conversely they elevated classical Greek and Roman art to a sublime place, the highest of cultural planes.
⇧ Hitler viewing the ‘Degenerates’
The Degenerate Art Exhibition
The Nazis’ 1937 exhibition was carefully stage-managed as a propaganda vehicle to mock and deride the modern art Hitler so detested. The exhibition comprised Expressionist, Dada, Cubism, Abstract (allocated its own room designated the “Insanity Room”) and New Objectivity artworks. Paintings were hung in a careless, haphazard fashion, with graffiti scrawled on the walls which defamed the artists. Actors were hired to prowl through the gallery loudly denouncing the “Modernist madness”. Adolf Ziegler, the Reich”s top arts bureaucrat and Hitler’s favourite artist, declared the displayed works “monstrosities of insanity, insolence, incompetence and degeneration”. And to ram home the degeneracy point, the vilified artworks were juxtaposed alongside paintings by the enfeebled and the disabled, by psychotic patients and the like. According to the Nazis, degenerate art was the product of Jews and Bolsheviks, but interestingly only six of the 112 artists whose work was displayed in the exhibition were Jewish. The 650 paintings, prints and sculptures included works by Grosz, Dix, Klee, Beckmann, Nolde, Chagall, Picasso, Wandinsky, Marc and Mondrian.
⇧ Führer taking in the “good art”
Exhalting in the “pure Aryan art”
To provide Germans with a favourable point of comparison, the Nazis simultaneously held the Great German Art Exhibition in the same Munich neighbourhood. This displayed ‘Ayran’ art➃, the type of art Hitler approved of. Often gargantuan in scale⑤ – statuesque blond nudes, idealised heroic and duty-bound soldiers and imagined pastorals and idyllic landscapes (reflecting Hitler’s predilection for realistic paintings of outdoor rustic settings). Characteristically the favoured Nazis’ male figures in art represented the concept of the Übermensch (an idealised ‘superman’). Hitler’s intention was that the Groß deutsche Kunstausstellung propaganda would help mobile the German people behind the Nazis’ values.
Footnote: The outcome of the dual 1937 exhibitions was not anticipated by Hitler and the Nazis: Entartete Kunst proved wildly popular, attracting more than two million visitors, whereas Groß Kunstausstellung only managed less than a third of this number. The “Degenerate Art” show was such a hit that it was toured on display throughout the German Reich after the Munich premiere closed.
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Postscript: German artists deemed ‘degenerate’ understandably were more at risk of persecution from the Nazis from those outside the country. Special attention was given to artists like George Grosz and Oscar Dix who were openly critical of the totalitarian regime. Grosz mocked Hitler on canvas while Dix earned the enmity of the Nazis for his excruciating depictions of the horrors of war. As one writer put it, “the Nazis labeled Dix a ‘degenerate,’ but the term is better applied to the society he depicted—cannibalizing itself and hurtling toward destruction” (Alina Cohen).
Dix’s ‘Seven Deadly Sins’ (1933)
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① Hitler’s own preference for subject matter as an artist was for painting buildings and largely unpopulated pastoral landscapes (the future “world leader” had no talent for capturing the human form)
② Hitler and the National-Socialists’ notion of modern art as being the product of entartung (degeneracy) can be traced to a Jewish Austro-Hungarian social critic Max Nordau who decried the new art and literature in 1890s Europe as being the work of diseased minds
③ the focus on Expressionism as a target for the Nazi “culture police” proved a particular problem for Joseph Goebbels. The propaganda minister had early on championed the Expressionist movement and had to backtrack swiftly on this to avoid the führer’s opprobrium
➃ Ayran art uniformly infuses a celebration of youth, optimism, power and eternal triumph
⑤ the Nazi taste for mega-scale art reached its apogee in architecture, massive structures like ‘Germania’. “Monumentality and solidity (exuding power), simplicity and timeless eternity” were the bywords of Nazi architecture
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Bibliography
‘Degenerate art: Why Hitler hated modernism’, (Lucy Burns), BBC News, 06-Nov-2013, www.bbc.com
‘Degenerate Art: The Attack on Modern Art in Nazi Germany, 1937’, (Jason Farago), The Guardian, 13-Mar-2014, www.theguardian.com
‘Degenerate art’, Wikipedia, https://en.m.wikipedia.org
‘Nazi architecture’, Wikipedia, https://en.m.wikipedia.org ‘Why “Degenerate” Artist Otto Dix Was Accused of Plotting to Kill Hitler’, (Alina Cohen), Art Sy, 11-Feb-2019,www.artsy.net ‘Art as Propaganda: The Nazi Degenerate Art Exhibit’, Facing History and Ourselves, (Video, 2017)
‘Adolf Hitler’s war against modern art’, The Canvas, (Video, 2019)
Like the great majority of the world’s population I’ve never been to North Korea…but unlike most people I have been to the very edge of Kim Jong-un’s secretive “Hermit Kingdom”. In 2019 I ate at restaurants run by North Korean exiles in the vibrant, lively Chinese border city of Dandong (directly opposite the seemingly dead NK city of Sinŭiju). I have also bought North Korean souvenirs from ex-pat market stall-holders on the Yalu River, the DPRK’s western boundary. Technically, I can even boast of having penetrated deep into North Korean territorial waters, having sailed around and across the river in a tourist boat➊.
Source. CFR
Kim Jong-un took the helm of the North Korean regime in 2011, succeeding his father Kim Jong-Il. Given his youth, 28, and lack of experience, external observers have had doubts whether the novice could establish a lengthy hold over the country. But ten years later Kim Jong-un is still firmly in control. This can be explained by a number of factors.
The first two Supreme Leader Kims (Photo: Reuters)
Stalinist purges – Korean “Game of Thrones”
The Kim dynasty had been entrenched for over 60 years by the time it was Kim Jong-un’s turn, allowing him to inherit a stable regime commanding absolute authority as “Supreme Leader” (Suryong). Kim Jong-un also inherited the “Stalinist dictatorial public persona of his grandfather (cult of personality) and the political nous of his father” (Patrikeeff). On top of this the young Kim has adopted a ruthless approach to dealing with potential threats to his leadership through periodic purges … senior military figures removed from high office, politicians including his own uncle executed and a half-brother assassinated in Malaysia. In this Kim Jung-un (KJU) was following the pattern of his predecessors in “coup-proofing” his rule (playing off one institutional rival against another, coupled with the purging of latent threats) (Habib). Kim’s purge targets include the North Korean economic elites (the Donju who like the army had benefitted from the Supreme Leader’s patronage system). Purges keep the elites in a state of instability, unable to predict Kim’s moves (Michael Madden).
Flag of WPK
Hegemonic role of the Party
Another strategy employed by KJU to consolidate his hold on power was to reinvigorate the effectively obsolete Worker’s Party of Korea (WPK) as the core political organ of the state. This saw the emergence of a new pecking order under KJU – the rhetoric of Party / State / Army signalled the relegation of the military in politics to a role of secondary importance➋.
(Photo: Korean Central News Agency via AP Images)
The Kim Jong-un ‘vision’
Modernisation and beefing up the DPRK’s lethal strike force are high on the totem pole of KJU’s objectives. Kim has ploughed ahead with nuclear tests and missile launches in a transparent show of strength and intimidation aimed at the state’s enemies. The “Dear Leader”, as he likes to be called, is intent on more than military modernisation. Kim wants to be seen as a modern leader of a modern country, pursuing economic development as an instrument to “hook into the South Korean economic engine”…which goes a good way to explaining KJU’s diplomatic change of tack (the recent pivot to diplomatic relations with Seoul) (Ken Gause).
Leader Kim & Sister Kim
Succession plan?
The only apparent dark shadow on the landscape for Kim Jong-un➌ is the state of his own health. Overweight, a heavy smoker with a preference for rich imported foods and alcohol, rumours intensified after his three week disappearance in April 2021. Succession talk has surfaced with a possible candidate being Kim’s younger sister Kim Yo-jong.
“Crazy and irrational” Kim Jung-un
It’s tempting to write off KJU, with his erratic behaviour and bombastic pronouncements—as some sections of the mass media do—as crazy and irrational. Benjamin Habib demurs from the caricature image of Kim, contending that it deflects from the existence of a rational strategy by the regime. The argument goes that the nuclear flexing by KJU and the blustering official statements are all part of a calculated rhetoric.
(Source: The National Interest)
In this view Pyongyang’s raison d’etre in an ultimate zero-sum-game is it’s existential survival and the over-the-top weaponising is more about projecting a deterrence to South Korea, Japan and the US, rather than an aggressive intent to carry through with the threats. In the logic of North Korea’s circumstance, the use of military force is the “only credible security guarantee in what it perceives to be a strategically➍ hostile environment”. The country’s H-bomb/A-bomb and ballistic missile capability, Habib suggests, should not automatically be seen as signifying an intention to deploy on the part of the North Koreans (Habib).
Kim has stepped up the elaborate military parades recently (one in October 2020 and again in January 2021), this can be seen as a show of resilience for public consumption in the face of the triple threat to the country – Covid-19, a wave of economic sanctions and a spate of natural disasters (WPR).
Inhuman excesses
Human rights are of course at a premium in such a doctrinaire totalitarian state, but Kim’s excesses and violations again can be viewed as part of “the rational and predictable politics” which are standard in authoritarian dictatorships such as the DPRK (Habib). Social control under KJU has a distinctly Orwellian tinge with the Songbun system which herds citizens into three distinct “socio-political” classes – ‘loyal’, ‘wavering’ and ‘hostile’ (HRW).
Juche Torch, Pyongyang
🇰🇵 Endnote: ‘Juche’ – Official state ideology
The “Hermit Kingdom” endorses a philosophy of Juche, devised by Kim Il-sung. Roughly translated as “self-reliance”, by which the regime means that the Korean masses acting as the masters of their own destiny make it possible for the nation to become self-reliant and strong and thus attain true socialism (‘Juche Idea: Answers to Hundred Questions’).
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➊ peering over the border into Kim Jong-un-World, even from the excellent high vantage point of Hushan Great Wall, didn’t disclose much evidence of human habitation. I saw kilometres and kilometres of not unattractive empty fields and meadows, lots of green countryside but no people to speak of. The DPRK’s population of 25 million must be somewhere over there but clearly not on this borderland of the country
➋ since the 1990s Songun “military first” (over other elements of society) had been a key ideological tenet of the regime
➌ leaving aside the possibility of Kim miscalculating his hand or overreaching himself internationally with his policy of aggressive regional brinkmanship
➍ we might add “and ideological”
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Bibliography
‘The dangerous enigma that is Kim Jong-un’, (Felix Patrikeeff), InDaily, 08-Jan-2016, www.indaily.com.au
‘5 assumptions we make about North Korea — and why they’re wrong’, (Benjamin Habib), Nest, (2017?), www.latrobe.edu.au
‘North Korea’s Power Structure’, (Eleanor Albert), Council on Foreign Relations, 17-Jun-2020, www.cfr.org
‘North Korea Events of 2018’, Human Rights Watch, www.hrw.org
‘North Korea’s Latest show of Strength Masks Its Weaknesses’, WPR, 28-Jan-2021, www.worldpoliticsreview.com
Pyrmont Bridge Road in the inner suburb of Camperdown—no small distance from the now pedestrian only Pyrmont Bridge itself—is where you’ll find the brew house of James Squire, reputedly Sydney’s first brewer. It’s current name, Malt Shovel Brewery, is a yesteryear nod to the “Malting Shovel Tavern”, a pub run by the brewery’s namesake and founder James Squire at Kissing Point (present-day Putney on Sydney’s Parramatta River) commencing ca. 1798.
Squire (or possibly ‘Squires’) commenced cultivating hops on the riverside location around 1806. Squire is considered to be the first person to brew beer successfully in Australia, although some claim the title on behalf of one John Boston who made corn beer in Sydney in 1796 with the aid of an encyclopaedia. Boston’s Indian corn-based beer “was so successful that he erected at some expense a building proper for the business” (Iltis).
Squire also was particularly successful at it, so much so that he eventually acquired a vast estate that stretched from Parramatta River to a point north of Victoria Road. Squire’s real estate empire wasn’t exactly down to superior business acumen on the brewer’s part…Squire kickstarted his land holdings monopoly by revelling in decidedly unethical behaviour.
But more of that later, first let’s look at the earlier chapter of Squire’s life, the sequence of events that brought him to Britain’s colony at Port Jackson. From his early years in England Squire found himself on the wrong side of the law, arrested for highway robbery which launched him on a path of recidivism. He was subsequently nabbed for pilfering from somebody else’s hen house and managed to escape the noose through transportation to Botany Bay with the 1788 First Fleet. Being transported didn’t cure Squire of his predilection for thievery however. Stealing hops (an illustrious start to brewing immortality!) got him 300 lashes of the ‘Cat’ (150 immediately and another 150 on “lay-buy” when his back was deemed up to it again).
After winning his freedom Squire was granted a small plot of land which with “a little skillful swindling” from other less diligent emancipist-land grantees he managed to grow into an estate in excess of 1,000-acres (the “unethical behaviour” alluded to above).
Squire’s business was the recipient of government incentivisation a few years later when Governor King began encouraging the brewing of beer as a counter to the pernicious trafficking of rum and corruption perpetrated by the colony’s military. King’s largesse bestowed on the “enterprising rogue” included a cow and the title of Australia’s first brewer.
The brewery and Malting Shovel Tavern at Kissing Point was strategically located, roughly equidistant from the colony’s two arms of settlement (Sydney Cove and Parramatta) …very handy for thirsty passing sailors and boat passengers on the river. By 1820 James Squire was producing a weekly output of 49 hogsheads of beer most of the year long (Walsh).
Squire’s wealth did not rest on the brewery concern. Due to the vagaries of the local grain market and the import trade at the time, it rested on a number of diversified interests which included farming and grazing as well as beer making (Walsh).
Interestingly, the James Squire brewing company of today has, rather than playing it down, whole-heartedly embraced the “scoundrel’s’ legendary ill-repute as a marketing ploy. Convict-related names biographically referencing the exploits and misdemeanours of the man himself resound in the label titles of James Squire beers – “One Fifty Lashes”, “The Swindler”, “Broken Shackles”, “Hop Thief”, “Four Wives” (a reference to JS being married four times) and the like.
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Bibliography
G. P. Walsh, ‘Squire, James (1754–1822)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/squire-james-2688/text3759, published first in hardcopy 1967, accessed online 16 March 2021.
Judith Iltis, ‘Boston, John (?–1804)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/boston-john-1804/text2051, published first in hardcopy 1966, accessed online 16 March 2021.
