MORAL and physical decay was a preoccupation consuming the minds of Victorians in the late 19th century. Many Britons harboured nagging doubts that the world’s foremost empire might be in decline? The fear manifested itself in the art and literature of the day, especially in Gothic novels such as Dracula and The Strange Case of Dr Jeckyll and Mr Hyde. Contemporary commentators, social campaigners, liberal imperialists and advocates of ”national efficiency” proffered a raft of varied explanations for the alleged condition of society. Blame was attributed to the rising crime rate, insanity, poverty, unemployment, immigration, radicalism, sexual deviance, feminism, VD, the transformation away from rural life to the disease-ridden towns and the very stresses of modern civilisation (labelled “the dark side of progress”) (‘Deviance, disorder and the self’, www7.bbk.ac.uk).
The Second Boer War in South Africa, breaking out in 1899, did nothing to ease concerns that, maybe, British manhood was not made of “the right stuff” after all…Imperial Britain’s early sub-par performance in the conflict against a “rag-tag” army of Afrikaner farmers fed into the rising tide of British fears of the degeneration of its racial stock. The first portends emerged even before the hostilities began – in the recruitment halls of Britain. The early Boer victories required British reinforcements from home leading to a manpower dilemma – the unhealthy British cities and slums churned out recruits from the working class who were “narrow-chested, knock-kneed, wheezing, rickety specimens” of men. At the time of the Boer War the average British soldier was of diminished stature, shorter than that of 1845…40% of those volunteering in Manchester recruitment halls were rejected as unfit for military service. By 1901 the percentage had increased even moreⓐ.
Afrikaner guerrilla warfare
Once the fighting began, the lacklustre efforts of the British soldiers struggling to gain the upper hand left their Australian and New Zealand counterparts with a negative impression of the home country’s martial capability. While British soldiery laboured, the Australasian contingents of soldiers equipped themselves quite well. Colonial troops from Australia and New Zealand possessed natural ability to shoot and ride, equipping them to perform well in the open war on the veldt…this plus their ‘bushman’ capacity to live off the land, meant that they clearly adapted to the South African conditions better than the British soldiersⓑ.
The Australian and NZ dominion soldiers’ take-home message from the South Africa affair was that the “old Britons” were in decline, and that they, the “new Britons”, represented the “coming man”. This view fed into earlier established myths and assumptions – Australia benefitted, it was said, from a climate infinitely better than Britain, a lavish land … making for a vigorous and healthy ‘race’. WK Hancock described the Australian ‘type’ of man as a harmonious blending of all the British types, nourished by a “generous sufficiency of food (good diet) …breathing space (vast countryside) and sunshine”. At the same time British voices were ominously warning of “racial suicide” and the waning of the nation’s “racial energy”, the self-styled “Better Britons” of Australia and New Zealand were talking up their own supposed “racial vigour”.
Reassuring symbolism: Britannia saving the world from barbarism (Source: teachmiddleeast.lib.uchicago.edu/)
Footnote:“Degeneracy” out of vogue As Victorian Britain evolved into Edwardian Britain, the fears of racial deterioration didn’t diminish, birth-rates which were already in decline going back decades had plummeted dramatically since the Victorians. However, by the time of World War I degeneration theory had lost favour, advances in the understanding of genetics and the vogue for psychoanalytic thinking had prompted its obsolescence (‘Degeneration theory’, www.artandpopularculture.com).
Source: Pinterest
Postscript: Decadence and decay “Decay” is closely related to the word “decadence” (Latin, decadentia, meaning ‘fall”. In 19th century imperialist thinking decadence and decay was a characteristic associated with the colonial anxieties of empire. The phenomenal success of the imperial powers, it was thought as in the case of past examples like Rome, made the elite complacent and weak, thus the seed of its downfall. The response of contemporary Europeans was a preoccupation with the morality and cultural values of their own societies (‘Decline and Fall’, William Rees, History Today, January 2023).
ⓐ one contemporary commentator, cricket writer Albert E Knight, thought the remedy for the physical and moral degeneration of Englishmen lay in cricket – advocating for the creation of more playing fields as an antidote to the decline of young working class men, so that they could be the beneficiaries of the ”cricket way of making honest and healthy Englishmen”
ⓑ a UK report conducted in 1904 with the title “Inter-Departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration” confirmed that Britons were even more physically unfit than the war had suggested
The United States’ belated entry into the global fight against German Nazism and its Axis partners and the Allies’ strategy of “Germany First” had the consequence of seeing some 1.5 million American troops moving through the United Kingdom between January 1942 and December 1945. This aggregation of forces personnel included 150,000 black American troops (some sources put the figure at 240,000).
This development was to prove problematic both for the US military and its British host as the American armed forces maintained a strict policy of segregation of its personnel…White and African-American servicemen and women served in separate regiments, lived and ate in separate quarters and did not generally mix even in combat situations𝓪. Black servicemen were usually barred from combat roles𝓫 and utilised primarily in support or supply roles in the war (driving trucks, engineering works, catering, etc) [‘“They treated us royally”? Black Americans in Britain during WW2’, Imperial War Museums, (Emily Charles), www.imperialwarmuseums.org.uk].
An African-American regiment seeking directions from an English “bobby” (source: Channel 4)
Meeting American expectations of a segregated army: The dilemma was more acute for the Brits, Churchill had tirelessly courted Roosevelt with the objective of getting the US to intervene in the conflict on the allies’ side, Britain needed Washington’s military involvement and it needed America to bankroll the crippling cost of waging the escalating world war. The thorn in the side for Churchill was that American troops coming to the UK brought with them the US’ “Jim Crow” racial discrimination system which the American military was uncompromisingly wed to𝓬. A recent BBC documentary, Churchill: Britain’s Secret Apartheid, explores how the Conservative war-time government calculatingly turned a blind eye to the Americans’ discriminatory practice towards its own citizens (a practice which Britain itself would not countenance). And yet Britain and its Allies were fighting a war of the highest stakes against Hitler, for freedom from totalitarian dictatorship [‘Channel 4 Examines UK’s ‘Secret Apartheid’ during WWII’, sphere abacus, 07-Oct-2024, www.sphere-abacus’s.com]. The irony of this contradiction was certainly not lost on the African-American servicemen and women stationed in Britain.
The Anglo–American special relationship:With the Churchill government intent on consolidating a “special relationship” with the US, in characteristically British fashion it settled for compromise, it “wouldn’t enforce the US’s extreme race policy, but wouldn’t ask any awkward questions about it either” [‘Churchill: Britain’s Secret Apartheid, review: clickbait title masks a moving wartime story’, Anita Singh, Telegraph, 19-Oct-2024, www.telegraph.co.uk]. Britain acquiesced to Washington’s insistence on segregation but did so covertly, although Churchill biographer Baron Roberts of Belgravia contends that the British prime minister’s 1942 war cabinet comment that Britain would not assist the US Army in enforcing the segregation policy exonerates the Churchill government of collusion (sphere abacus). British soft-pedaling extended to mollifying American sensitivities by officially encouraging Britons in towns where Black soldiers were barracked not to get “too friendly” with them (Charles).
PM Winston Churchill (photo: PA)
Grass roots community support: Thus officially sanctioned, the prejudicial attitudes of White soldiers and officers (and military police) towards their Black countrymen in Britain continued to be given voice. What particularly inflamed the ire of White troops and led to violent clashes between the two groups was the sight of coloured servicemen fraternising and dancing with and enjoying the romantic company of local (white) English women. In fact, despite their government’s appeasing of the US, its failure to object to the colour bar in Britain thus perpetuating the inequality of Black troops, the ordinary people of the UK in the main took a much more positive and accepting view of the Black GIs and airmen (further enraging bigoted White servicemen). A 1943 poll in the UK indicated that the majority of British people opposed segregation [‘The Second World War, 1935 to 1945: Segregation’, RAF Museum, www.rafmuseum.org.uk]. Many Britons during the US occupation voiced a preference for the usually good-mannered Black servicemen over their entitled White counterparts.
Black GIs in rural England (photo: David E. Scherman/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty)
Battle of Bamber Bridge:A pitched “battle” between a Black truck regiment and White MPs occurred in this small Lancashire village in 1943, the prolonged exchange of fire between the two groups resulted in one Black soldier being killed and several injured. The catalyst of the violent confrontation was the action of racist White officers who tried to coerce the three pubs in Bamber Bridge into serving whites only, this incident coming closely on top of news of a race riot back home in Detroit which had heightened tensions between the two groups of serving personnel in England. White prejudice was reinforced in the way the confrontation was dealt with by the top brass…the US military command in England chose to view the incident as an act of mutiny on the part of the Black soldiers and 30 of those involved were charged, convicted and court-martialled, whereas none of the White MPs were charged. Later in 1943 there was another inter-racial shootout between African-American and White soldiers stationed in Launceston, Cornwall. Again the trigger was attempts to exclude Black servicemen from the market town’s pubs and again the American military identified the offending party as the Black GIs, characterising them as “mutineers”. At the court-martial proceedings the Black Bamber Bridge defendants aired grievances which make clear their status in Uncle Sam’s army was that of second-class soldiers – compared to white troops they were given poor food, forced to sleep in their trucks when stopped at White bases and they were the victims of military police harassment for minor transgressions which were typically ignored for White GIs [‘UK village marks struggle against US Army racism in World War II’, Danica Kirka, AP, 24-June-2023, www.apnews.com].
Park Street, scene of the Bristol riot, 1944
War-time clashes between White and Black American military personnel weren’t confined to England…there were physical altercations between the two groups in Wales where many Black GIs were stationed at the ports, assigned to work as manual labourers. Blacks were also employed as labourers at the docks in nearby Bristol (west country England) under the supervision of less competent White officers. The city’s worse disturbance, known as the Park Street Riot (July 1944), escalated after heavy-handed attempts by White MPs to discipline the coloured soldiers, resulting in one White MP being stabbed, a Black GI killed and several wounded in the fracas.
The sight of inter-racial couples dancing together, even if in Britain and involving non-American women, was enough to enrage the more bigoted of White American servicemen (source: Gregory S. Cooke Collection)
𝓪 the US Army didn’t end segregation in the ranks until 1948
𝓫 those Black troops who volunteered for combat roles often had to relinquish their rank and take a pay cut…”the Army did not want a Black sergeant commanding a White private” [‘This WWII battle wasn’t against Nazis. It was between Black and white GIs in England’, Lauren Frayer & Fatima Al-Kassab, NPR, 21-Jun-2023, www.npr.org].
𝓬 the British Foreign Office had initially tried to persuade the US not to send Black troops on the grounds that it would create tensions but Washington ignored the request
Exegesis: Relegating the author IN literary and artistic aesthetics the intentional fallacy occurs when readers or viewers use factors outside the text or visual work (such as biographical information) to evaluate its merits, rather than ignoring these “external” factors and relying solely on the textual or visual evidence of the novel, play, poem, painting, etc. to assess the work in question (what’s actually in the text and nothing outside). This key precept of the New Criticism school declares that a poem (or other work of art) does not belong to its author, it is (as stated by the term’s originators WK Wimsatt and MC Beardsley) “detached from the author at birth and goes about the world beyond his power to intend about it or control it”1⃞. Authorial intention is a non-consideration in the assessment of the work. The text or work has an objective status and its meaning belongs solely to the reading or viewing public. The reader’s task in literature, advocates of New Criticism assert, is to eschew subjective or personal aspects such as the lives and psychology of authors and literary history and focus entirely on close reading and explication of the text (A Glossary of Literary Terms (4th edition, 1981), edited by M.H. Abrams).
The intentional fallacy, elaborated in Wimsatt’s 1954 The Verbal Icon
The intentional fallacy doctrine has a corollary in the affective fallacy which adheres to the same principles. Wimsatt and Beardsley affirmed that evaluating a poem by its effects—especially its emotional effects—upon the reader, is an erroneous way of approaching the task. Giving rein to the emotions a work of art evokes in you, negates an appreciation of “the (work’s) inherent qualities and craftsmanship” that an objective analysis permits (Prince Kumar, ‘Understand Affective Fallacy from Example’, LitforIndia, 23-Dec-2023, www.litforindia.com).
(source: cornerstoneduluth.org)
Semantic autonomy, Intentionalism, Anti-intentionalism: The intentional and affective fallacies as prescriptive “rules” of hermeneutics held sway from the 1940s to the 1970s, however this is not to say that there was no pushback from scholarly dissenters. Proponents (primarily American) of what is called “Reader-response theory” reject the claims of New Criticism of this prescribed mode of interpreting and critiquing a work of literature. Some of these objected to the fallacy’s nothing outside the text rigidity for constricting exploration of all possibilities of a work’s meanings. Critic Norman Holland frames it in a psychoanalytical context, the reader, he affirms, will react to a literary text with the same psychological responses he or she brings to events in their daily lives, ie, “the immediate goal of interpretation is to fulfil (one’s) psychological needs and desires” (‘Psychological Reader-response Theory’, Nasrullah Mambrol, Literary Theory and Criticism (2016), www.literariness.org). Theorist ED Hirsch in his “Objective Interpretation” essay also took issue with the expositors of the intentional fallacy thesis, arguing that on the contrary authorial intent (intentionalism) was integral to a full understanding of the work…the only meaning that is permanent and valid is that of the author in question, the reader should confine him or herself to interpreting what the author is trying to say (E.D. Hirsch, Jr, Validity in Interpretation, 1967) .
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A quite different kind of fallacious argument is the argument from silence (Latin: argumentum ex silentio). This arises when a conclusion or inference is drawn based on an absence of statements in historical documents and source materials…the argument seeks not to challenge or rebut specific things an author includes in a book or document, but is critical of the author for something they should have said but didn’t! The most common instances of the argument from silence in practice relate to biblical debates and controversies, but a contemporary classic example of a non-theological, historical nature, one generating considerable heated discourse, concerns the 13th century merchant and explorer Marco Polo and the famous book of his travels in the East.
Medieval Venezia at the time of Marco Polo (source: Bodleian Library, Oxford)
Medieval world travelogue guru?: Known by various namesincluding Description of the World (Divisament du monde), Book of the Marvels of the World, Il libro di Marco Polo detto il Milione, The Book of Ser Marco Polo, the Venetian, or simply The Travels of Marco Polo, the book is one of the most celebrated tomes in the annals of literature dealing with the experiences of travellers to distant and unknown lands. The story, told and retold in numerous languages over centuries, presents Marco and his father Niccolò and uncle Maffeo embarking on an epic road trip along the Silk Road to the court of the Great Khan in Khanbaliq (Beijing). The book recounts Marco’s travels in Cathay (North China) and Manji (South China), among other Eastern lands. The consensus among most historians is that Signor Polo, despite a tendency to exaggerate and embellish the tales of his travels2⃞, did nonetheless journey to China as he claimed in the book. The publication of Did Marco Polo Go to China? by Frances Wood in 1995 controversially swam against this tide. Wood infers serious doubts about Polo’s achievements, suggesting that despite his being away from his native Italy for the best part of a quarter-of-a-century, he never reached his intended destination China. According to Wood, he got only as far as Constantinople and the Black Sea where he accumulated all of his information on Chinese society and other Asian lands (his source material for the “Travels”) from picking the brains of visiting Persian merchants.
A page from the Polo travelogue
Doubting “Marco’s millions”: What made Wood so convinced that Marco Polo never visited China? Firstly, there is the book’s puzzling itinerary, it proceeds in a disjointed, incoherent fashion, is not uniformly chronological, has some odd detours and gets some geographical place names in China wrong. Then, while acknowledging The Travels of Marco Polo contains references to porcelain (from Fujian province), coal, rice-wine, paper currency and other items, Wood hones in on the fact that the Venetian traveller failed to mention certain other quintessentially Chinese things—namely the Great Wall of China, tea, chopsticks, cormorant fishing and the practice of foot-binding—in the pages ofhis “Travels’. Wood also picks up on Polo’s failure to learn Chinese during his sojourn in the Middle Kingdom. Allied to these omissions was the absence of Polo’s3⃞ name in any official Chinese document of the period, which Wood believed, further incriminated Marco as the perpetrator of a fraud.
A crumbling section of the not-so-great wall in north China built prior to Polo’s time (photo: John Man, The Great Wall)
Wood herself is perpetrating a pattern of reasoning which is problematic by recourse to an argument from silence. As Sven Bernecker and Duncan Pritchard in The Routledge Companion to Epistemology (2010) (ISBN0-415-96219-6Routledge pp. 64–65) note, “arguments from silence are, as a rule, quite weak; there are many examples where reasoning from silence would lead us astray.” Academic critics have been quick to pinpoint the shortcomings and misconceptions in Wood’s argument. There are, they counter, manifestly valid reasons why Polo would not refer to the Great Wall, for one, it was largely not there in the period of his residency in China! The impressive edifice of the Great Wall as we think of it was primarily a product of the Ming Dynasty (from 1368, three-quarters of a century after the Polos’ stay)…what there was of the not-so-Great Wall prior to that was a much more modest, unprepossessing sight (“a discontinuous series of derelict, pounded earth ramparts”) (‘F. Wood’s Did Marco Polo Go To China?’, A Critical Appraisal byI. de Rachewiltz, http://openresearch–repository.anu.edu.au). With the matter of the Chinese penchant for tea-drinking, perhaps Polo didn’t think the topic simply sufficiently noteworthy to rate a mention4⃞. The question of the omission of foot-binding, chopsticks and Polo’s linguistic ignorance of Chinese in the travelogue can all be accounted for. China and the royal court was under Mongol control (Yuan Dynasty) in Marco’s time, accordingly Polo moved in those circles, tending not to mix with the (Han) Chinese population. and so lacked the motivation (or opportunity) to learn Chinese. Likewise, he wouldn’t have encountered many upper class Chinese women in their homes, this was the strata of society that practiced female foot-binding, not the Mongols. Again, with chopsticks, not a utensil of choice for the Mongols who Polo tended to fraternise with (Morgan, D. O. (1996). Marco Polo in China-Or Not [Review of Did Marco Polo Go to China?, by F. Wood]. Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 6(2), 221–225. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25183182). As for “the Travels’” silence on fishing with cormorants, the activity was not a widespread phenomena in China during the Yuan era, confined to the remoter areas of Sichuan Province (‘Cormorant Fishing in China’, Sally Guo, China Travel (Upd. 04-April-2021), www.chinatravel.com).
MP (source: caamadi.com/de/marco-polo-in-venice)
Filtered Marco Polo – Rustichello et al: And there’s another line of thought when considerating the book’s glaring omissions, inconsistencies and inaccuracies that Frances Wood doesn’t seem to have factored into her thesis…The Travels of Marco Polo, the published book we read today, is a different beast in form and content to the original article from the late 1290s. In fact the original manuscript which Polo dictated to his amanuensis, an imaginative romance writer Rustichello de Pisa —who had licence to inject his own theatrical flourishes and flavour into Marco’s original story—was lost early on, so “the Travels” have gone on an untraceable and interminable journey through “dozens of translations of translations, none of which are necessarily accurate” (‘The Travels of Marco Polo: The True Story of a 14th-Century Bestseller’, Anna Bressanin, BBC, 09-Jan-2024, www.bbc.com). Of the 54 extant manuscripts (out of around 150 distinct copies in all languages), no two copies are entirely alike with “improvements” and edits made by each copyist and translator. We should also remember that Marco was in prison, relying on his memory to recount a multitude of events and experiences, some of which stretched back over 20 years, hardly surprising then if readers have to contend with the recollections of a not entirely reliable narrator (‘Marco Polo’s book on China omits tea, chopsticks, bound feet’, Peter Neville-Hadley, South China Morning Post, 04-Oct-2020, www.amp.scmp.com).
The Marco Polo saga has spawned a long history of film and television versions with romantic adventure taking precedence over story accuracy
Heavily redacted archives: The issue of Polo’s claim to have been an official in Kublai Khan’s service—and in particular governor of Yangzhou—was seized on by Dr Wood who pointed out that Marco’s name does not appear in any historical official Chinese archives. Rather than being necessarily proof of Marco fabricating a presence in China as Wood assumes, other factors may explain the discrepancy…no other Italian merchants known to have visited medieval China are mentioned in any Chinese sources, even the Papal envoy to the Great Khan’s court, Giovanni de Marignolli, doesn’t rate a mention (‘Marco Polo was not a swindler. He really did go to China’, Science News, 16-Apr-2012, www.sciencedaily.com). Another factor germane to this is the fact that the Ming (Han) Dynasty that succeeded the Mongol-dominated Yuan Dynasty initiated the practice of erasing the records of earlier non-Han officials (Morgan).
(source: LibriVox)
One particularly vocal critic of Did Marco Polo Go To China?, Sinologist Hans Ulrich Vogel from the University of Tübingen, produced a research paper demonstrating that Marco’s descriptions of currency, salt production and revenues from the salt monopoly in China were of a standard of accuracy and uniqueness of detail5⃞, that produces a very high level of proof that Polo had to have been in China, close to the wheels of power, to be privy to such comprehensive knowledge (www.sciencedaily.com).
Chinese salt production (source: Wellcome Images)
The “logical fallacy of weak induction”: Frances Wood’s iconoclastic book was certainly an attention-grabber, both for medieval scholars and Sinologists and for the general public, causing a furore upon its publication in 1995 and spawning several TV documentaries. China and the world of the Great Khan is a central tenet of the Marco Polo story, making it unthinkable to most scholars, almost a sacrilege, to suggest that the legendary Venetian traveller never set foot in the Middle Kingdom! The weight of the counter-argument unleashed against Wood’s thesis throws a spotlight on the hazards of trying to “treat the absence of evidence as evidence itself”, as Steven Lewis summarises the fallacious nature of the argument from silence (‘The Argument from Silence”, Steven Lewis, SES, www.ses.edu).
(image: silk–road.com)
Frances Wood, Did Marco Polo go to China? (1995, Secker & Warburg, London)
1⃞ Wimsatt and Beardsley’s 1946 ‘Intentional Fallacy’ essay to some extent has its antecedents in the earlier debate between CS Lewis and EMW Tillyard, published as The Personal Heresy: A Controversy (1939), in which Lewis argued that an author’s own personality and biography has negligible to zero impact on the literary text, while Tillyard enunciated the contrary position: that an author’s own imagination and story can have an indelible influence on a work of literature
2⃞ and there had been doubters even in Marco’s time and later about some of his more wilder and fantastic claims, earning him the epithet Il Milione or “the Millions”) (aka “Marchus Paulo Millioni”). Wood’s particular slant on Polo’s book follows the lead of earlier German Mongolists
3⃞ who had claimed to have been an emissary in the emperor’s service
4⃞ Wood herself concedes that Rustichello may have edited out references to tea on the grounds of it being “of no interest to the general public”
Macrologist: a person who engages in long and tiresome talk; ie, a bore [Gk. makrós, (“long”) + –logo (“word”) + -ist]
Macromastic: pertaining to large breasts; (Med.) (also called gigantomastic breasts) breasts which are usually heavy and pendulous with nipples and areolas facing down [Gk. macrós- (“long”) + -mastia (“abnormality of the breast”)]
Macromastic
Macrophallic: having an unusually large phallus [Gk. macrós- (“long”) + -phallós (“penis”)]
Megapod: having large feet [from Gk. mégas (“great”) + -poús “foot”)] 👣
Menseful: considerate; neat and clean [from mensk, from MidEng. menske (“courtesy”; “honour”)]
Mentulate: Referring to or characterised by a large penis; well-hung [from mentula (“cock”; “dick”; “penis”) + -ātus (“-ed”)]
Merkin: a pubic wig for women (Grose’s Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue: “counterfeit hair for women’s privy parts”) [Origin uncertain but prob. from malkin, a derogatory term for a lower-class young woman]
Merkin (photo: Merkin Museum)
Metoposcopy: using the physical appearance of the face (esp the pattern-lines on the forehead) to judge someone’s character [from Gk. métōpon, “forehead”) + -scopy]
Metoposcopy
Minimifidianism: having virtually no or almost no faith or belief [from L. minimus (“small”; “little”) + –fidian (?) + -ism]
Monandrous: having only one malesexual partner over a period of time [monós (“one”; “single”; “only”) + –androus (“man”; “husband”)]
Mummer: an actor in a traditional masked mime (a mummer’s play) [OldFr. momeur from mommer (“act in a mime”)]
Mummer (photo: sixsellov.live)
Murcid: slothful; shirking work or duty (OU)
Mystagogue: one who instructs in mystical or arcane lore or doctrines [Gk. mystagōgos, from mystēs (“initiate”) + –agein (“to lead”)]
The Zorro story is deeply embedded in western popular culture, especially in the world of Anglophone cinema and television which trades heavily on all the familiar tropes, “carving the ‘Z’ on someone or something (the zigzagging mark of El Zorro)”; “secret identity of the protagonist, the elusive fox”🇦; “masked avenging angel fighting the powerful in the cause of the powerless”, etc. The fictional Zorro inherits the tradition of storied folklore heroes like Robin Hood and the Scarlet Pimpernel…in this Zorro is a worthy member of that exalted pantheon of morally-superior righters of heinous wrongs.
Batman: wardrobe tips from Zorro
Clark Kent aka Superman
Before Batman, Superman and the Lone Ranger: Zorro, he of the rapid rapier and distinctive black mask covering only his eyes, was a precursor to the iconic, quintessential American heroes of comic book and screen. There are transparent linkages between Zorro, the caballero (Spanish gentleman)–cum–rebellious outlaw, and Batman, the crusading superhero of Gotham City…both heroes effect a double identity. Both Don Diego de la Vega (Zorro) and Bruce Wayne (Batman) are wealthy aristocrats who feign unheroic personalities in their open identities🇧(compare Don Diego’s foppish even effeminate affectations with Wayne’s playboy persona). The dual/secret identities trope is also exhibited in the Supermen franchise, in times of great crisis or peril mild-mannered loser-type Clark Kent only has to dash into the nearest phone booth to instantly transform into peerless crime fighter Superman. The parallels extend to popular American TV westerns fare in the 1950s with the masked Lone Ranger who “was little more than Zorro in a western guise”, substituting the swashbuckler Zorro’s black garb and accessories with a lawman’s white outfit, etc. Zorro and Lone Ranger share another similar trait to their makeup, as does Batman. Unlike Superman, they don’t rely on superpowers or extra human strength but utilise “stealth, dexterity and ingenuity” to best the bad guys and end “corruption and abuse, and establish a world of moral justice” [John J. Valadez. (2016). The Lone Ranger Unmasked: Zorro and the Whitewashing of the American Superhero. Filmmaker Essay. Chiricú, 1(1), 135–151. https://doi.org/10.2979/chiricu.1.1.11]. In Batman’s case, he relies on his “scientific knowledge, detective skills and athletic prowess” [Bradford W. Wright, Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America (1968)].
(source: archive.org/)
Over 40 films, several TV series, novels, a musical, cartoons and comics, and the obligatory merchandise, Zorro as an entertainment phenomenon has been the complete package for over a century. But it all started with a simple and seemingly nondescript adventure story, The Curse of Capistrano by Johnston McCulley, appearing in print in a dime pulp magazine. First serialised in 1919, the template was picked up almost immediately by Douglas Fairbanks Sr (a Zorro tragic!) and his production company and developed into a box office hit silent movie, The Mark of Zorro in 1920. On the strength of The Mark of Zorro’s success McCulley serialised the Zorro tale, producing in all over 60 stories by the time of his death in 1958. The Curse of Capistrano by itself has sold more than 750 million copies worldwide!
Time setting for ‘Zorro’? McCalley’s Zorro stories are vaguely set during the later era of Spanish California (ca.1800–1821), however some of the film adaptations locate Zorro much closer to the gold rushes and the US takeover (late 1840s).
Guy Williams, the iconic Zorro of ‘50s television, and creator Johnston McCulley
Chicano bandit prototypes for Zorro: McCulley drew on sources from literature and legend—primarily Robin Hood and Baroness Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel—for inspiration for the Zorro character, but he also gleaned much from the pages of history, especially of early California. McCulley seems to have modelled Zorro partly on various 19th century Californio bandidos, in particular Joaquin Murrieta whose actual historicity is uncertain🇨. The popular legend has Murrieta immigrating to the California gold fields but when gringos committed murderous atrocities against his family, the Mexican wreaks revenge on the American killers and embarks on a short but violent career of robbery and banditry. Murrieta’s “exploits” polarised opinion, Californian authorities identify him an enemy of the state and place a high price on his head while to Chicanos the romanticised outlaw has become a symbol of Mexican resistance to Anglo-American economic and cultural domination in California [‘Joaquin Murrieta’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]🇩.
Moviemakers even roped Zorro into the Italian Sword-and-Sandals (peplum strongman) sub-genre during its apotheosis, with Zorro Contro Maciste (1963)
Another Mexican bandit (more historically authenticatable than Murrieta), Tiburcio Vásquez, provided similar inspiration for fiction author McCulley. Vásquez attributed his 20-year career in crime to retribution for the racist attitudes of the norteamericanos—the white settlers from the US who had taken over Alta California after it had become an American state—and their treatment of non-Anglo (especially Mexican) inhabitants of California. Vásquez’s bold defiance earned him a folkhero following within the 19th century Méxican-American community (Valadez).
William Lamport (by PP Rubens)
An Irish Gaelic Zorro?: A decidedly non-Latino historical influence on the creation of Zorro is attributed to the career of Irish adventurer William Lamport, noted for being both an accomplished swordsman and a ladies’ man. The peripatetic Lamport served as a captain in the Spanish army and was sent to New Spain (Mexico) with a new, Hispanicised name to spy for the Spanish crown. The Eirish adventurer was appalled by the treatment of Amerindians and Black slaves in Mexico and sought to advance their liberation. Lamport was eventually arrested and accused of sedition and intending to set himself up as king of an independent Mexico. The Irishman was tried by the Mexican Inquisition and executed as a heretic in 1659 [‘The Man Behind the Mask of Zorro’, History Ireland, www.historyireland.com].
Banderas & Zeta-Jones in the 2005 sequel to ‘The Mask of Zorro’
TriStar Pictures’ 1998 production, The Mask of Zorro, with a vigorous, athletic Antonio Banderas in the title role, revived interest in the Zorro story and earned a cool US$250,000,000 at the box office. In the 1960s Disney’s television adaptation of the Zorro story (starring Guy Williams, the Anglo-sounding screen name of Armando Catalano) was one of the most popular programs on the box, especially with kids. So is Zorro just some innocuous action-adventure entertainment fare? Well, not according to some critical voices from the Latino community who see the Zorro phenomena as perpetuating Hispanic myths within the wider white-dominated mainstream, reinforcing “classic stereotypes of the Latin Lover (see also Footnote below) fighting endless series of inept Méxican villains” and misrepresenting the “multiethnicity and cultural complexity of of early California [‘Zorro still makes his mark’, Lewis Beale, Los Angeles Times, 28-June-2005, www.latimes.com]🇪. Others are critical of Zorro’s ethnicity, UCLA professor, Rafael Perez-Torres, emphasises the point that the “Robin Hood of the pueblo” is Criollo, a white Spaniard born in the New World of purely Spanish blood, he is always represented as the “honourable good ” against the evil and corrupt Méxican officials (Beale). Novelist Isabel Allende with an unorthodox take on Zorro (El Zorro: comienza la leyenda, 2005) subverts this idea of Eurocentric Zorro by reinventing his origin as a mestizo (mixed parentage: Spanish aristocrat father and Shoshone warrior mother).
The dandy Don Diego & macho he-man alter ego Zorro in the Walt Disney TV ‘Zorro’
Footnote: Celluloid Zorros One of the tropes employed by filmmakers in Zorro’s frequent screen appearances is Zorro as “sexy Latino lover”, as portrayed in the versions (big screen and small) by a bevy of heart-throb testosterone-charged actors – Tyrone Power, Guy Williams, Alain Delon, Antonio Banderas, George Hamilton (though Hamilton in the 1981 Zorro: The Gay Blade, tagline: “Zexy, Zany and Zensational!”, plays the black caped avenger purely for (campy) laughs).
🇦 zorro in Spanish translates as “fox”
🇧 Bob Kane co-creator of the Batman character admitted Zorro—and in particular the Douglas Fairbanks Sr swashbuckling portrayal in Mark of Zorro (1920)—heavily influenced his shaping of the “caped crusader” of Gotham City
🇨 Murrieta’s story is mostly recounted through a contemporary novel, The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta: The Celebrated California Bandit (1854)
🇩Californio Salomón Pico was another historical figure in 1850s California with a similar sounding story embellished by local legend – grievously wronged by white settlers so he turns to banditry against the powers that-be and shares his booty with the local Mexican poor
🇪all of which is not to deny that there are countless other Latinos (and other peoples) who have derived genuine inspiration from the story and legend of Zorro to help fortify them in their very real, everyday struggles against unjust, authoritarian and oppressive regimes
Prior to the creation of the Malvern Hill estate, there were earlier subdivisions in Croydon which were unregulated, poorly planned and haphazardly implemented
In earlier (July 2018) blogs on this site I presented the backstory of two socially desirable but very different garden suburbs in Sydney – Daceyville in Sydney’s east, ‘Planning for a Working Class Lifestyle Upgrade, a Template for the Sydney Garden Suburb: Daceyville, NSW’, and Haberfield in Sydney’s inner west, ‘Planning for Suburban Bliss, a Template for the Sydney Garden Suburb: Haberfield, NSW’. Just a kilometre away from the centre of Haberfield is Croydon, contained within this small suburb is the Malvern Hill estate, known for “its salubrious residential streets” (Johnson, John, Malvern Hill, Dictionary of Sydney, 2008, https://dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/malvern_hill, viewed 10 May 2024) (including Edwin, Thomas, Walter, Reed, Murray, Tahlee, Dickinson, Lea and Highbury streets, Malvern Avenue and Paisley Road).
The subdivision of the Malvern Hill estate proceeded in two phases (May and September 1909)
Gads Hill to Malvern Hill dress circle: The Malvern Hill estate came into being from a 1909 subdivision, prior to that the area was known as Gads Hill and already boasting a rich colonial architectural stock, famous for its stately 19th century villas…Gads Hill Villa, two-storey mid-Victorian home of Ashfield mayor Daniel Holborrow from 1873–1904, and ‘The Hall’, the residence of Samuel Dickinson (which with fellow publican George Murray owned an early estate in the suburb𝐚. The new estate was intended to a “quintessential Federation period “garden suburb”𝐛, with complex designs, multiple gables, tall chimneys and generous verandas. The estate’s growing affluence was reflected in a great number of the new buildings being architect-designed, a notable surviving example is the Malvern Hill Methodist (now Uniting) Church, a red brick Federation Gothic-style structure designed by prominent architect Alfred Newman (Johnson). A sense of what the estate was offering in prestigious residences can be gained from this description of a Federation house in the Crescent (2 Dickinson Ave) valued at in excess of £4,700 in 1917….”one of the finest houses in Croydon, interior fittings elaborate and costly, 8 rooms, including a billiard room, large area of land, beautifully laid out, having motor garage etc” (Johnson).
Uniting Church, cnr Murray St & Malvern Ave (Newman: red brick Fed style)
Acquiring an American taste in architecture: By around 1912 Californian bungalows started to be built alongside the Federation homes. In contrast to them the bungalows had low pitched roofs (and thus low ceilings), squat chimneys, dark brick roughcast walls and deep verandas supported by massive pylons [‘Malvern Hill Estate – Croydon, NSW, Australia – Australian Historical Markers’, www.waymarkers.com]. Attached to residential approval was a covenant requiring all buildings to be of high-quality brick or stone (or both), with slate or terracotta tiled roofs. Semi-detached and terrace dwellings were banned, with no commercial buildings within the estate (these were strictly confined to The Strand shopping strip [‘C29 Gads Hill, Croydon Heritage Conservation area’, Inner West Council, www.innerwest.nsw.gov.au].
Calif. bungalows: One-time homes of 1930s NSW premier Bertram Stevens in the MH estate (above) 15 Malvern Ave (below) 26 Malvern Ave
The Strand: The Strand, lined with Canary Island date palms, “was designed as a broad and elegant shopping street and promenade” running south from the train station, leading to the residential streets. The Federation-style post office was the first building construction on the Strand (1913), followed by a line of shops on the western side (the eastern side shops didn’t start to appear until 1917) (Waymarkers.com). A fruiterer, a florist, grocery, bakery, pharmacy, bottle shop, a couple of cafes, Italian, Thai, Japanese, Chinese, Indian/Sri Lankan eatery and spices shop, two pizza places, dance studio, art studio, hairdressers, Scottish speciality shop, but NO supermarket Goliaths!
1913 Fed style Post Office + dentist + chocolate shop
Due to the high-quality structure and distinctive character of many of the Malvern Hill dwellings the area was placed under heritage protection as early as 1983-86, this is in stark contrast to Croydon’s adjoining suburbs Ashfield and Burwood which are both characterised by an abundance of high-rise units and high density living. The desirability of living in the Malvern Hill estate makes it Croydon’s expensive pocket with realty prices soaring upward with a North Shore-like trajectory.
Burwood’s “toweropolis” (photo: Issuu)
Endnote: Mystery of the name The name “Malvern Hill” is not locally significant, and its origin is not known. Topography offers no real clues as the only elevation in the estate is no more than the mildest upslope running from the rail line to the Liverpool Road ridge. Possibly the name references Malvern Hills, a rural district in Worcestershire, UK (Johnson).
𝐚 both men have streets named after them in the estate, as was the practice with early landowners
Turnverein (Pl. “Turnvereine”) from German: turnen (“to practice gymnastics”) + –verein (“club” or “union”)
𖥠𖥠𖥠𖥠𖥠
The earnest pursuit or physical exercise and a healthy lifestyle isn’t the first thing you think of in regard to fast-foodified, modern America and Americans. But it was the case for many German-Americans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These immigrants and sons and daughters of immigrants formed themselves into Turnvereins (German gymnastic/athletic clubs) in the US which, inspired by pioneering early 19th century Prussian physical educationalist and nationalist, JFLC ‘Vater’ Jahn (“the Father of Gymnastics”), promoted physical culture, German cultural traditions, freethinking and liberal politics1⃞.
Cincinnati Turners, 1909 (source: Indiana University Library)
The members of these Turnvereins, known as “Turners”, played leading roles in sponsoring gymnastics as an American sport and a subject for school, helping to popularise physical exercise and callisthenics as a way of life. Turner gymnastics, the centerpiece of the societies’ activity, comprised distinctive calisthenics routines and apparatus exercises which emphasised masculine strength and agility [‘Milwaukee Turners’, Encyclopedia of Milwaukee, https://emke.uwm.edu]. The Turners’ clubs and associations (Vereininigte Turnvereins Nordamerika) spread out from the Ohio Valley throughout the US. At one point, around 1894, Turnerism reached its zenith with 317 societies and approximately 40,000 members. The Turnvereins performed a multi-functional purpose, aside from the physical activities they fulfilled a social role for recent arrivals from Germany, helping them to integrate into their new home while facilitating the retention of German culture (the societies’ halls (Turnhalles) were havens for social get-togethers). In so doing the Turners fostered a form of group solidarity among German-Americans by preserving their ethnic culture and identity [Annette R. Hofmann, ‘The American Turners: their past and present, Revista Brasileira de Ciências do Esporte’, Volume 37, Issue 2, 2015, Pages 119-127, ISSN 0101-3289, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rbce.2014.11.020.]
Central Turner Hall, Cincinnati, Oh.
The Turner societies were politically progressive, supporting the liberal brand of Republicanism in the 1850s and 60s.2⃞. Turners were strong abolitionists, both antebellum and during the Civil War, when many of the members fought for the Union side. Later, the Turnen associations embraced homegrown causes in the US such as the struggle to achieve women’s suffrage and equality3⃞ and workers’ rights under capitalism; in the interwar years the Turnvereins were vocal in their opposition to the rise of fascism and Nazism in Europe [‘The Milwaukee Turners at Turner Hall’, www.milwaukeeturners.org).
Milwaukee Turners (source: Encyclopedia of Milwaukee)
By the early 20th century the Turnverein impulse in America was losing its intensity, partly this was generational, the American-born Germans were increasingly less fluent in German and more attuned with the mainstream US culture. The associations were less radical and socialist and more conservative in their outlook and American government WWI hostility to Germany and Germans and Prohibition in the decade-plus after it were factors that further undermined Turner solidarity. The pull of assimilation and an inevitable “Americanisation” process severely weakened the cultural affinity with things Germans within the associations and the number of Turner societies dropped off dramatically from the 1920s on 4⃞ (Hofmann).
Today, the Turnen movement in America, massively diminished in size and influence with the number of active clubs having plummeted to under 50 and shorn both of its political activism and its Teutonic focus, maintains its existence as gymnastics (and other sports) clubs and social associations, while espousing the motto “a sound mind in a sound body” and still advocating the core virtues of physical fitness and exercise.
100th anniversary of Baltimore Turners (source: Indiana Memory Hosted Digital Collections)
Endnote: while the gym and physical fitness remains central to the societies’ ethos, the modern American Turner clubs have diversified their repertoire of group activities beyond the exclusive practice of gymnastics. The Riverside Turners (New Jersey) for instance offers a range of activities including darts, shuffleboard, horseshoes, basketball and golf, while the Milwaukee Turners provide members looking for something more challenging with rock and ice climbing walls.
Photo: Facebook, Milwaukee Turners
1⃞ unfortunately Jahn’s training regimen which tended towards the militaristic had a downside…it also directly influenced the Nazis and the Hitler Youth movement of the following century [‘A History of Gymnastics, From Ancient Greece to Tokyo 2020’, Meilan Solly, Smithsonian Magazine, 26-July-2021, www.smithsonianmag.com]
2⃞ in the 1850s the Turners found themselves in bitter conflict with the short-lived, nativist “Know-Nothing” party
3⃞ which contrasts starkly with the record of gender exclusion within the Turnen societies themselves…women were firmly ensconced in a subordinate role as the Turnvereins remained male preserves right up to recent times
4⃞ German culture was submerged under “Apple pie Americanism” with German references in the organisation’s names such as Demokratischer Turnerbund shelved…from 1938 the national movement officially and permanently became “American Turners”
The sixth letter in the alphabet is the consonant “F”. Pre-English, the Phoenicians used to write “F” with a symbol that looked a lot like “Y,” and pronounced it waw. The ancient Greeks changed it into digamma and put a tip on the “Y”, transforming it into the sixth letter in the alphabet we readily recognise today. The “f” sound has a kindred spirit in the “ph” as the two can be interchangeable in spelling, eg, people who live in the Philippines are called “Filipinos”. “F” for frank and forthright and “F” for frivolous and fickle…it would however be remiss of us to not acknowledge that the expression “F-word” has another, polarising, connotation which for many in society is still is a taboo one, as, to use a somewhat old-fashioned-sounding term, a “swear” word… “fuck” and its many derivatives such as “motherfucker”, “fucker”, etc. ad nauseam. So there you have it, “F”, all in all a letter for all seasons and dispositions!
Falerist (or Phalerist): someone who collects and studies medals, badges, pins, ribbons and other decorations [from the Greek mythological hero Phalerus: Gk. Phaleros]
Farraginous: consisting of a confusing mixture, orig. of grains for cattle feed (cf. Farrago); jumbled; messy; heterogenous[L. far “spelt” (ie, grain)]
Favonian: pertaining to the west wind (esp mild, gentle) 💨 [L. fovēre (“to warm”)] (cf. Zephyr)
Firmament: (Relig.) the vault or arch of the sky; the heavens; the field or sphere of an interest or activity [Late Latin. firmamentum, from L. firmare (“support”)]
Firmament
Flâneur: a man who saunters around observing society; a stroller (fem: approx comparable to Flaneuse). [Old Norse. flana (“to wander with no purpose)]
A metropolis full of flâneurs (image: The Art Story)
Flexiloquent: speaking evasively or ambiguously [L. flexibilis (“that may be bent”) + –loquēns (“speaking”; “talking”)]
Florilegium: an anthology esp excerpts of a larger work; collection of flowers [L. flos (“flower” +-legere (“to gather”)] 🌺
Frotteur: (Psycho-sex.) a person who derives sexual gratification—Frottage—thru contact with the clothed body of another person in a crowd [Fr. frotter (“to rub”)]
Funambulist/Funambulator: a tightrope walker; an acrobat who performs balancing acts on a taut, high horizontal rope (also known as an Equilibrist [L. funis (“rope”) + –ambulare (“to walk”)]
Funambulist ice-veined Philippe Petit with his flares at full mast, at his day job, Twin Towers 1974 (photo: Alan Welner/AP)
Fusilatelist: someone ( with a lot of time on their hands) who collects phone cards from telcos (origin unknown)
Fuselatelist: UK £5 telco cards (source: chinarfidfactory.com)
Futilitarian: a person devoted to futile pursuits; one who believes that human striving is futile [(19th neologism, a portmanteau word formed from blending “futile” and “utilitarian”]
Fysigunkus: a person devoid of curiosity [Scot. Eng, (19th. origin unknown]
“Pedestrian”, just a fancy word for walker, you say? Its certainly got nothing to do with the vocational activity we euphemistically call “street walker”, a very different kind of “pedestrian”. As we understand the term today, It’s hard to imagine that pedestrian with the suffix -ism added was the name of a highly popular and seriously competitive sporting pastime 150 years ago.
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Like golf, outdoor tennis, association football and the rugby codes, pedestrianism, a historical name for organised, competitive walking, has its origins in Britain Something of its sort was around in the 1600s but the activity reached a fuller expression in the 18th century, becoming a regular fixture at regional fairs along with horse racing and running.
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Image: Victorian-era.org
One such instance of pedestrian racing involving the exchange of money was within the purview of upper class gentlemen making carriage journeys between English cities and towns. Wagers would be laid by groups of gentlemen on their travels as to which of their footmen can beat the others to the intended destination, going on foot in advance of their masters’ carriages.
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Foster Powell (Poster published by C. Johnson n.d.)
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Fore-walkers of the ultra-marathon
By the late 18th century we start to learn the names of individuals like Foster Powell who devote all of their time and energy to great feats of walking endurance for monetary reward. Powell, the star of long distancing walking in his day (flourished 1760s–1790s) is considered the first leading exponent of the activity, prefiguring the rise of the professional ultra-marathoners in the late 20th century. Powell’s greatest accomplishment was a 640km distance walk—London/York/London—in five days and 18 hours in 1792, the fourth and final time he had attempted and completed the feat [‘Foster Powell, the Great Pedestrian’, Andrew Green, gwalter, 26-Jun-2020, www.gwalter.com].
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Often leading pedestrians would go head-to-head in wagered races (Image: US Lib. of Congress)
⟡Multi-day walkingLater in the 19th century the British enthusiasm for pedestrianism spread overseas to Canada, the US and Australia. In the last quarter of the century Six-day races including for women pedestrians were very popular both in the US and the UK, attracting up to 70,000 paying visitors during the event. The leading exponents included George Littlewood (the Sheffield Flyer) whose 1888 world record for the six days—623 miles, 1,320 yards—remained unbeaten for 96 years! In America serious money could be made…Edward Payton Weston won a $10,000 prize in 1867 for completing a walk of 1,828 km in 30 days (Portland, Maine to Chicago). Powell didn’t achieve the hoped-for riches from his marathon walking, he died in an impoverished state, but many others that followed him found that success in the activity could pay handsomely. Captain Robert Barclay Allardice in 1809 earned himself the sobriquet the “celebrated pedestrian as well as a purse of 1,000 guineas for walking 1,000 miles in 1,000 hours, an amazing test of (strength), stamina and sleep denial” [‘Captain Robert Barclay-Allardyce’, www.nationalgalleries.org]. For Allardice’s numerous extraordinary exploits on the road, the title of “father of modern race-walking” has been ascribed to him.
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Pedestrianism was exceedingly popular in post-bellum USA, drawing great crowds of paying spectators (Image: Alamy/BBC)
Professional pedestrianism in the Victorian era was not confined to males, the most famous and successful woman pedestrian was probably Londoner Ada Anderson. Her accomplishments, particularly the breaking of Capt Allardice’s “1000 in 1000” record prompted the Leeds Times to dub her “Champion Lady Walker of the World” in 1878. Anderson whose preparation included training in severe sleep deprivation, after dominating UK pedestrianism, found great acclaim on the American walking circuit.
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Source: 7 News
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Curbing the proclivity for “speed walking”
As pedestrianism became codified, the “fair heel and toe” rule was established for races. This meant that “the toe of one foot could not leave the ground before the heel of the other foot touched down”𝖆, however in practice “rules were customary and changed with competition” and walkers got away with jogging and trotting in races. [Pedestrianism’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]. The controversy over what constitutes legal walking has continued to dog the modern sport of race-walking to the present with disqualification of athletes in Olympic 20,000 and 50,000 km road events for “lifting” still a common occurrence.
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Olympic final (men), 3500m Walk, 1908
By the 1890s the Victorians’ vogue for pedestrianism had given way to cycling and other organised team sports. The 1800s activity of competitive walking for monetary gain morphed into the amateur sport of race-walking which found a permanent home in the Summer Olympics in the 1908 London Games. The IAAF/World Athletics organises a series of elite walking events for both men and women including the Olympics and world championships.
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Johnny Day with Nimblefoot 1870 Melb Cup (Image: Herbert James Woodhouse)
Footnote: Prodigy day walker nonpareil
It was not unusual for competitive walkers in the 19th century to turn their hand to other pursuits, some took up cycling, even a few like Ada Anderson ventured into the theatre. In the case of Australian walking wiz-kid Master Johnny Day, he transitioned from wonder boy pedestrian to Melbourne Cup-winning jockey in 1870𝖇. Day by age 10 had won a remarkable 101 walking contests (never beaten) and was hailed as world champion juvenile walker, before pursuing a career as an apprentice jockey in his teens [‘Master Johnny Day, Australian Champion Pedestrian’, National Portrait Gallery, www.portrait.gov.au].
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𝖆competitive walking in thst era was all about technicalities…as well as keeping one foot on the ground at all time walkers were required to ensure that their leading leg remained straight until passed by the trailing leg
𝖇 the premier race on the Australasian racing calendar
❝ It is the prohibition that makes anything precious ❞ ~ Mark Twain
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Prohibition, an international movement (Source: PBS)
IN the early decades of the 20th century a number of countries passed laws to restrict the domestic consumption of alcoholic beverages, most notably the US with its interwar Prohibition injunction. Typically the ban only lasted for limited periods of time in these countries before the laws were repealed. One country that was an exception to this was Iceland which established a countrywide “dry” era that lasted, officially at least, for over seven decades. Following advocacy from the country’s temperance and pro-independence movements1⃞ a referendum was held in 1908 in which adult male Icelanders2⃞ voted 60% in favour of outlawing alcohol, to take effect from 1915.
Denmark and Iceland
No to alcohol, no to Danish interdependence Part of the anti-alcohol drive emanated from political motives, prohibition coincided with the struggle of Icelanders to gain its independence, by rejecting alcohol they were distancing themselves from the parent, Denmark, and the Danish lifestyle (Danes have traditionally been among the heaviest drinkers of beer) (‘Why was Beer Banned in Iceland?’, Reykjavík Tourist Info, 27-Feb-2022, www.blog.rekyjaviktouristinfo.is).
The ban on wine was lifted in 1922, partly at least due to economic imperatives and the effect on Iceland’s GDP. Pressure came from its Iberian trading partners. The loss of their Icelandic market for red and rosé wines prompted Spain and Portugal to threaten to cease importing Iceland‘s salted cod. Lifting of the ban on spirits followed in 1935. Internally, a relaxing of the law was facilitated by the medical profession as doctors began prescribing the consumption of wine as a medicinal measure for the population. The banning of bjor (beer) however remained in force (‘Why Iceland Banned Beer’, Megan Lane, BBC, 01-Mar-2015, www.bbc.com).
Skál! (Photo: Scandification)
A ban on beer but not on all “beer products” Like what happened elsewhere, consumers of beer were still able to access and imbibe the frothy ale from several sources. The Icelandic war on beer was targeted at full-strength beer…beer (usually of the pilsner kind) which didn’t exceed 2.25% alcohol was not deemed illegal. The watered-down variety and “beer substitutes” were available, such as brennivin (distilled “beer-like” potato vodka). Home-brew (Landi) flourished, as did smuggling of the amber substance (fishermen could get their hands on a case or two easily enough). If you were a diplomat you could get access to beer as part of your official state duties.
The Prohibitionists’ reasoning The 20th century rolled on and the Icelanders’ ban on beer persisted. With beer less expensive than either wine or spirits, the authorities’ worry was that if cheap beer was freely available, this would lead to a contagion of heavy drinking in the community, especially among adolescents. By the 1970s there were signs of societal attitudinal change. Duty-free liquor could be purchased at airports by airline crews and foreign travellers, by the end of the decade this dispensation was extended to returning locals.
Icelandic White Ale 5.2% ABV (Photo: Muse on Booze)
End of the beer drought
Finally by 1988 more liberal attitudes towards the alcoholic brew’s place in modern Icelandic society prevailed. Polls in the 1980s showed that 6 in 10 citizens favoured beer’s legalisation…a groundswell of rising opinion against the ban’s continuance pushed the Althingi (Icelandic parliament’s) hand3⃞. The upper chamber of the national legislature voted (fairly narrowly, 13–8) to repeal the ban on beer, effective from 1 March 1989 (which henceforth became celebrated annually in Iceland as “Beer Day”).
Traditional sour Gose beer, Icelandic style (Photo: issuu.com)
Today the beer flows in Iceland, especially at this time in late January when Thorri Seasonal Beers are made available to the public4⃞. At any time of the year city locals can freely drink the latest Euro-fashionable craft beers infused with herbs and Arctic blueberries and just about anything else imaginable in microbreweries. Regulation of beer however has not entirely vanished…outside of airports citizens can only buy beer at the government-owned Vinbúdin stores and if you are under 20 the law still bars you from purchasing any grog in the stores or airports.
Endnote: government monopolies on consumer items are a bit of a thing in Iceland. Between 1910 and 1977 the only outlet where you could buy that staple of domestic sustenance, milk, was the Mjólkurbúò, a state-owned milk store (‘Fun facts about Iceland — Strange customs, weird laws and interesting facts’, Reykjavik Excursions, 15-Aug-2022, www.re.is). Tobacco sales are also regulated by the same state monopoly company as alcohol, Vinbúdin.
1⃞ at the time Iceland was in a “Personal Union” with Denmark, not securing full sovereignty and independence until 1944
2⃞ women were not permitted to vote in the poll although overwhelmingly they were in support of the liquor ban
3⃞ legislators were also persuaded by the tax revenue boost that legalisation of the popular brew would bring
4⃞ during Thorrabjór Icelanders can drink traditional beer brews flavoured with, for instance, smoked whale testicles (5.1% alcohol) – a drop decidedly NOT popular with conservationists though!
I’D never heard of Bill Nix until one day recently when I stumbled upon a selection of his paintings on display at the old Mark Foy’s building (these days reincarnated as the legal eagle-infested Downing Centre). His one-syllable name rhymes with that of another, very different artist of a different era from Europe, Otto Dix, who was one of the principal dissident artists who visually chronicled the social and political decay of post-World War I Weimar Republic German society, and the scourge of Hitler and the Nazis.
Dix’s 1920 ‘The Skat Players’
Nix’s paintings behind the glass of Liverpool Street Mark Foy’s entrance have a unmistakable gritty realism to them and are of a different ilk, style-wise, to the unglamourised, intended-to-shock, expressionistic and surrealistic paintings of Otto Dix, depicting the grotesque, the deformed and the anguished denizens of interwar Germany. The collection of Nix’s work at Mark Foy’s, also unglamourised, adhere to a single theme, the depiction of work life at the long-disappeared Cockatoo Island shipbuilding industry. Nix’s group portraits of the workers, blue collar, office workers and other employees of Cockatoo Island between 1950 and 1980, contain an intimacy borne of personal experience…the artist worked on the island in the 1960s and 70s first as a errand boy, then apprenticed as a fitter-and-machinist and lastly as a draughtsman.
The artworks on display, all done in oil and charcoal on canvas, are a part of larger collection of Nix’s paintings and drawings entitled ‘The Boys from Cockatoo’, focusing on a range of work activities relating to the shipyard including catching the ferry to work, ship repairing and labouring, union meetings, blacksmith shop, the drawing office, the canteen, etc.
‘The Boys from Cockatoo’ series had its public debut in 2008 with a 20-painting exhibition at the Australian National Maritime Museum, which Nix later expanded on to add new works inspired by his memories of the variety of day-to-day routines undertaken by workers at Cockatoo Island.
MORAL and physical decay was a preoccupation consuming the minds of Victorians in the late 19th century. Many Britons harboured nagging doubts that the world’s foremost empire might be in decline? The fear manifested itself in the art and literature of the day, especially in Gothic novels such as Dracula and The Strange Case of Dr Jeckyll and Mr Hyde. Contemporary commentators, social campaigners, liberal imperialists and advocates of ”national efficiency” proffered a raft of varied explanations for the alleged condition of society. Blame was attributed to the rising crime rate, insanity, poverty, unemployment, immigration, radicalism, sexual deviance, feminism, VD, the transformation away from rural life to the disease-ridden towns and the very stresses of modern civilisation (labelled “the dark side of progress”) (‘Deviance, disorder and the self’, www7.bbk.ac.uk).
The Second Boer War, erupting in 1899, did nothing to settle these concerns. Imperial Britain’s early sub-par performance in the conflict against a “rag-tag” army of Afrikaner farmers fed into the rising tide of British fears of the degeneration of its racial stock. The first portends emerged even before the hostilities began – in the recruitment halls of Britain. The early Boer victories required British reinforcements from home leading to a manpower dilemma – the unhealthy British cities and slums churned out recruits from the working class who were “narrow-chested, knock-kneed, wheezing, rickety specimens” of men. At the time of the Boer War the average British soldier was of diminished stature, shorter than that of 1845…40% of those volunteering in Manchester recruitment halls were rejected as unfit for military service. By 1901 the percentage had increased even moreⓐ.
Afrikaner guerrilla warfare
Once the fighting began the lacklustre efforts of the British soldiers struggling to gain the upper hand left their Australian and New Zealand counterparts with a negative impression of the home country’s martial capability. While British soldiery laboured, the Australasian contingents of soldiers conversely equipped themselves well. Colonial troops from Australia and New Zealand possessed natural ability to shoot and ride, equipping them to perform well in the open war on the veldt…this plus their ‘bushman’ capacity to live off the land, meant that they clearly adapted to the South African conditions better than the British soldiersⓑ.
The Australian and NZ dominion soldiers’ take-home message from the South Africa affair was that the “old Britons” were in decline, and that they, the “new Britons”, represented the “coming man”. This view fed into earlier established myths and assumptions – Australia benefitted, it was said, from a climate infinitely better than Britain, a lavish land … making for a vigorous and healthy ‘race’. WK Hancock described the Australian ‘type’ of man as a harmonious blending of all the British types, nourished by a “generous sufficiency of food (good diet) …breathing space (vast countryside) and sunshine”. At the same time British voices were ominously warning of “racial suicide” and the waning of the nation’s “racial energy”, the self-styled “Better Britons” of Australia and New Zealand were talking up their own supposed “racial vigour”.
Britannia saving the world from barbarism (Source: http://teachmiddleeast.lib.uchicago.edu/historical-perspectives/middle-east-seen-through-foreign-eyes/islamic-period/image-resource-bank/image-07.html)
Footnote:“Degeneracy” out of vogue As Victorian Britain evolved into Edwardian Britain, the fears of racial deterioration didn’t diminish, birth-rates which were already in decline going back decades had plummeted dramatically since the Victorians. However, by the time of World War I degeneration theory had lost favour, advances in the understanding of genetics and the vogue for psychoanalytic thinking had prompted its obsolescence (‘Degeneration theory’, www.artandpopularculture.com).
Source: Pinterest
Postscript: Decadence and decay “Decay” is closely related to the word “decadence” (Latin, decadentia, meaning ‘fall”. In 19th century imperialist thinking decadence and decay was a characteristic associated with the colonial anxieties of empire. The phenomenal success of the imperial powers, it was thought as in the case of past examples like Rome, made the elite complacent and weak, thus the seed of its downfall. The response of contemporary Europeans was a preoccupation with the morality and cultural values of their own societies (‘Decline and Fall’, William Rees, History Today, January 2023).
ⓐ one contemporary commentator, cricket writer Albert E Knight, thought the remedy for the physical and moral degeneration of Englishmen lay in cricket – advocating for the creation of more playing fields as an antidote to the decline of young working class men, so that they could be the beneficiaries of the ”cricket way of making honest and healthy Englishmen”
ⓑ a report conducted in 1904 with the title “Inter-Departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration” confirmed that Britons were even more physically unfit than the war had suggested
THE absence of cars in cities during the coronavirus lockdown has been a boon to cyclists, both for the recreational kind and for commuter cyclists. There has been an “unprecedented surge in popularity” of bicycle traffic—even in the land of the automobile, the United States—with many bike shops reporting a doubling of their average sales…such is the demand now that bike manufacturers can’t build them fast enough [‘Cycling ‘explosion’: coronavirus fuels surge in US bike ridership’, (Miranda Bryant), The Guardian, 13-May-2020, www.theguardian.com; ‘Australia is facing a ‘once in a lifetime opportunity’ as cycling booms, advocates say’, (David Mark), ABC News, 16-May-2020, www.abc.net.au].
Starley’s Rover (Source: sewalot.com)
The renewed present enthusiasm to take up bike-riding in response to the pandemic recalls earlier periods of “bike-mania”in the West—late 1860s to mid-1870s and the 1890s—as the humble bike was evolving into its modern form. Credit for the basic look of the standard, no-frills bicycle as we we think of it today is generally given to John Kemp Starley for his 1885 invention, the “Rover Safety Bicycle”. The Rover’s similar-sized wheels, chain drive attached to the crankshaft and rear wheel, diagonal frame and relative lightness (20kg) retains the basic design of the modern bicycle [‘Pedal Your Way Through the Bicycle’s Bumpy History’, [Evan Andrews), History, 30-Jun-2017, [www.history.com].
1889 Ladies Rover Safety Bike (Image: bicyclehistory.net)
The Rover was seen as a curiosity at first, but when two years later John Boyd Dunlop manufactured the pneumatic tyre, it was a game changer for the new bicycle. Starley’s prototype and all two-wheelers that followed now had a smoother, cushioned ride on the typically bumpy roads of the 19th century. Being lighter the new bike also went faster [‘How bicycles transformed our world’, (Roff Smith), National Geographic,17-Jun-2020, www.nationalgeographic.com].
Most folk are aware that before the modern bicycle there was the penny-farthing – also known as the high-wheeler or by the all-purpose term, the ‘ordinary’. The farthing, whose feasibility owes much to French mechanic Eugène Meyer’s innovation of the tension-spoked wheel, was popular through to the end of the 1880s but prone to accidents❉. The lineage of the modern bike however goes back still further – to the bulky, all-wood laufmaschine (“running machine”), invented by Karl von Drais in 1817 in western Germany. The laufmaschine⌧ was the first mode of transport to utilise the in-line, bi-wheel principle, but slim-lined and graceful it wasn’t! Bereft of pedals, brakes and chains, it was propelled by the rider pushing against the ground. The addition of pedals came with another German inventor, Philipp Moritz Fischer, and modified by a French blacksmith/ inventor, Pierre Michaux, both contributing to the development of the modern bicycle. The 1860s brought a variant on the velocipede known as the ‘boneshaker’ (aptly describing the experience for the rider). Nonetheless, with its stronger and malleable metal frames it sparked the first bicycle craze in France which then spread worldwide. By the 1870s the ordinary was state-of-the-art in bikes with its hollow steel tubular frames and forks, steel rims and solid rubber tyres. By now the bike epicentre had crossed the Channel to England and the new standard became the ‘Ariel’ model designed by James Starley of Coventry (uncle of John K Starley), who added centre pivot steering, tangent spokes and a mounting step [‘A Beautifully Illustrated History of Nearly Two Centuries of Bicycle Design and Technology’, (Tony Hadland & Hans-Erhard Lessing), Slate, 22-Jul-2014, www.slate.com; ‘From boneshakers to bicycles’, Britannica, www.britannica.com].
The Drais Laufmaschine, 1817
1890s, the world gone crazy for the bicycle
By the 1890s demand for the new safety bicycle saw mass production take off. The earlier “high rollers” were now past tense. Bikes were now practical and stable vehicles with gears and brakes, the earlier serpentine-shaped frame replaced by a diamond pattern. By the decade’s end most bicycles were only 11 to 16 kg in weight (Britannica). Another technological breakthrough making riding easier for the cyclist came in 1898 when Briton William Reilly invented the prototype for variable gears, a two-speed gear called “The Hub”. Columbus Bicycles in Hartford, Connecticut, could make a bicycle a minute due to the speed of its automated assembly line – a technological innovation later successfully copied by the automobile industry⟴. The transfer of technology from bicycles could be seen in various ways. Both Henry Ford and the Wright brothers started as bike mechanics before making the switch to the invention and production of other, more advanced forms of transport (Smith).
Instrument of freedom and independence
The bicycle gave the masses mobility, it no longer mattered that the less well-off couldn’t afford to travel by horse and carriage…bicycles were affordable, lightweight and easy to maintain. Ordinary folk suddenly were able to explore the countrysides, visit towns and places – far and near. Just about everyone, it seems, got into the act of riding bicycles – royalty and rulers in places like Russia, Zanzibar and Afghanistan took up cycling; First-wave feminists – Susan B Anthony declared that “bicycling emancipated women more than anything else”; women were especially enthusiastic as the activity allowed them to escape their voluminous and cumbersome Victorian skirts for more practical attire such as bloomers. When the lighter, less unwieldy safety bicycles came along, police in the UK were quick to adopt them in their work. Likewise, the NYC police commissioner Teddy Roosevelt mounted the city police on bikes to apprehend the new “public danger” of ‘scorchers’ (“speed demon” cyclists ) (Smith).
Source: Pinterest
The new craze for bicycles got the nod of approval from the US medical fraternity as well…advocated by doctors as “a boon to all mankind, a thing of beauty, good for the spirits, good for health and vitality” [David McCullough, The Wright Brothers: The Dramatic Story Behind the Legend, (2015)].
The conventional explanation for the demise of the bicycle boom is the rise of the commercially-viable automobile, but other factors may have contributed to the bicycle’s decline, such as the rapid growth of the early mass transit systems such as streetcars and trams which were a more practical alternative to bikes, especially in bad weather (Britannica).
1971 Tour de France (Source: Profimedia)
Endnote: in 2020 with the wholesale disruption to international sport due to COVID-19, the world’s premier event in the cycling calendar, the Tour de France was in a very select group of major sporting events given the green light to go ahead as normal, albeit delayed.
Columbia Bicycles, Connecticut (Source: etsy.com)
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❉ the penny farthings were inherently unsafe hence the name applied to Starley’s improved-design bike, the Rover safety bicycle. Also appearing around this time were the tricycle and the unicycle
⌧ it also went by other names, draisienne and vélocipède, and by the derogatory name, “dandy horse”
⟴ Columbia Bicycles got into the business in the 1870s when its proprietor and bike enthusiast Albert A Pope starting importing Excelsoir Duplex ordinaries from England, the manufacturer also formed the League of American Wheelmen to advocate for better roads in American for bicycling – the “Good Road Movement” of the 1890s [‘Albert Augustus Pope’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]
❝I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream❞
~ the words of a popular 1927 novelty song…prompting numerous later references to the refrain dotted throughout American popular culture, eg, ads for Hersey’s ice cream; a prison chant in Jim Jarmusch’s cult 1986 indy film Down by Law; etc., etc.
‘Down by Law’.
🍦🍦 🍦 🍦 🍦 🍦
Source: truelocal.com.au
For anyone growing up in suburban Melbourne or Sydney or one of the larger conurbations in 1960s and 1970s Australia, the familiar strains of the “Greensleeves” tune permeating the local neighbourhood in Spring or Summer-time could mean only one thing – the approach of a Mr Whippy ice cream van. Within seconds queues of animated parents and children would form in anticipation of indulging in their favourite soft-serve frozen ice delight.
Like most popular commercial trends the mobile ice cream van was an import to these shores. The archetype Mr Whippy emerged from the English Midlands city of Birmingham in 1958, starting with a modest six vans and copying the formula, look and business plan of America’s Mister Softee ice cream trucks (see below). By 1961 the homegrown Mr Whippy fleet on the road had extended to 150 vehicles. Mr Whippy came to Australia when company founder Dominic Facchino shipped six pink and white Commer Karrier vans out to Sydney in 1962. Two years later Mr Whippy vans landed on the shores of New Zealand. By this time Facchino had sold the business which was eventually acquired by industry giant Unilever. By the 1970s the Mr Whippy franchises down under were sold to private operators who varied the vans’ styling and colours (‘1962 Mr Whippy arrives in Australia’, Australian Food TimeLine, www.australianfoodtimeline.com.au). The NZ Mr Whippy operators switched vehicles (to Isuzu Elfs) as well as colour schemes (a common choice became orange and white with a yellow stripe)𝟙.
The ubiquitous Mister Softee (Photo: Elena Kadvany)
1956 was Year Zero for the mobile ice cream vendor. The first soft whip ice cream truck to venture onto the streets of suburbia✱ was the brainchild of two Irish migrants to America, William and James Conway, living in Philadelphia. The initial ice cream run was prompted by St Patrick’s Day celebrations with the two brothers selling green-coloured ice cream in cones to the local West Philly community𝟚. The single van quickly morphed into a franchise business under the name “Mister Softee”, with headquarters in Runnemede, New Jersey, since 1958. At the height of the Mister Softee phenomena (late 1960s) they were operating 1,000 trucks across 15–18 American states. Today, the Mister Softee operations, still owned today by the Conway family, has scaled back the number of trucks as a consequence of both the growth of competing business and a national drop in the consumption of ice cream𝟛 (‘A Brief History of Mister Softee’, Daniela Galarza, Eater, 17-Jul-2015, www.eater.com).
Marchetti Bros ice cream van, 1980s Glasgow
A deadly serious side to the business
The sensory pleasures, the nostalgia, associated with the iconic ice cream van masks a darker chapter in its history. Glasgow in the UK in the 1970s and 80s was blighted by the growth of vast housing estates in its peripheries. With massive unemployment and a lack of infrastructure servicing these estates, the city’s ice cream van vendors experienced a boom in business𝟜. The success elicited interest from Glasgow’s organised criminal gangs who sought to muscle in and use the trade’s popularity to sell drugs, bootleg commodities like cigarettes and even weapons. Rival gangs vied for a piece of the action, resulting in turf wars. The gangs employed intimidation and violence to coerce van drivers and owners into cooperation…in a notorious incident one local driver, Andrew Doyle, refused, with fatal consequences. Doyle worked for one of the “competing ice cream factions” (Bloomberg) in Glasgow, Marchetti Bros. After a failed attempt to kill Doyle on his ice cream van route, a rival gang succeeded in murdering the recalcitrant driver along with five members of his family in an arson attack on their home. Two men were convicted and sentenced, but were ultimately released on appeal after spending two decades in prison.
Mr Whippy Clones (Photo: 9Nine.com.au)
Generic Mr Whippy and the Clone Cone Vans
The popularity of Mr Whippy unsurprisingly has spawned numerous imitators wherever the original has had a retail impact. So much so that the name “Mr Whippy” today is a generic term for any ice cream truck selling the familiar soft-mix in single cones. Trademark holders of the name—such as Mr Whippy P/L/Franchise Food Co in Australia—have attempted to make small, independent operators in the field comply with their exclusive right to use the name and the playing of ‘Greensleeves’. Consequently, many imitators resort to using names that echo the famous original, eg, “Mr Softy”, “Mr Soft Serve”, and “Miss Whippy”, whilst continuing to offer up the standard menu of soft-serves, sundaes and milkshakes.
NYC’s ice cream turf war
Across the Pacific the premier US soft-mix seller Mister Softee has been embroiled for years in an acrimonious turf war with an upstart competitor. A disgruntled former employee started his own rival ice cream truck business which infringed Mister Softee‘s trademark by blatantly copying it’s blue and white colour scheme, cursive lettering, mascot and distinctive jingle, not to mention ripping off its name. Mister Softee took the copycat “Master Softee” to court, forcing it off the road. Master Softee responded by rebranding itself as “New York Ice Cream” and allegedly launching a campaign of intimidation against Mister Softee drivers (‘As Summer Begins, NYC’s Soft-Serve Turf War Reignites’, Stefanie Tuder, Eater, 30-May-2017, www.eater.com). For its part, Mister Softee hasn’t been entirely squeaky clean in the affair, it resorted to hiring private eyes to spy on the movements of New York Ice Cream’s drivers.
early Good Humor vending truck (Source: mahoninghistory.org)
Endnote: From special treats for the elite to mass consumption item
The ice cream van made the frozen confectionary more accessible to more people but it wasn’t responsible for its popularity with the public. The treat itself goes way back. Imperial rulers in antiquity such as Alexander the Great and Roman emperors Nero and Claudius were known to have a sweet tooth for snow and ice concoctions flavoured with honey and nectar and other fruits. “Cream Ice” desserts graced the royal dinner tables of English and French monarchs in the 1600s. US presidents Washington and Jefferson were big fans (‘The History of Ice Cream’, IDFA (International Dairy Foods Association), idfa.org ). In the 20th century the imposition of prohibition in America—together with technological improvements—more efficient refrigeration and better ice cream production methods—were a catalyst for the widespread popularising of ice cream in society…the nationwide ban on booze and bars left a void which ice cream and ice cream parlours rapidly filled (‘Why Ice Cream Soared in Popularity During Prohibition’, History Channel, 28-Jan-2021, www.history.com).
Photo: Manchester Evening News
𓁽𓁽𓁽𓁽𓁽𓁽𓁽𓁽𓁽𓁽𓁽𓁽
✱ not necessarily the first mobile ice cream vehicle though…in 1920 Harry Burt in Youngstown, Ohio, began selling his “Good Humor” chocolate-coated ice cream bars from Ford trucks equipped with rudimentary freezers
𖡽𖡽𖡽𖡽𖡽
𝟙 in New Zealand the franchise passed into the hands of ice cream manufacturer Tip Top
𝟚 William and James at the time worked for Sweden Freezer, a leading manufacturer of ice cream machines in the US
𝟛 to about 350 franchisees and 625 trucks
𝟜 the ice cream vendors also were purveyors of household staples (milk, bread, newspapers, etc) for the estates’ residents
When it comes to Hollywood horror cinema, zombies, vampires and Frankensteinish monsters seem to take pride of place in the Pantheon of celluloid supernatural “baddies”. The werewolf𝟙 on the other hand has tended to be find himself assigned to a backseat in the screen horror caper, often consigned to a secondary role, “second banana” to some other omnipotent monstrous brute, eg, as in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943)𝟚.
Wolfmania ⌖ ⌖ ⌖ Cinema-goers got their first glimpse of werewolf horror in 1935 in a Universal film called Werewolf of London…storyline: an English botanist contracts lycanthropy after being bitten by a Tibetan werewolf, result, werewolf terror in London. But it was another Universal movie six years later, The Wolf Man𝟛, written by Curt Siodmak, that elevated the werewolf character to horror flick star status, making its star Lon Chaney Jr into an icon of the genre. The Wolf Man is a sympathetic “portrayal of a man who has no power over the raging beast within “ (Jim Vorel, ‘The 100 Best Horror Movies of All Time’, Paste, 5-Oct-2022, www.pastemagazine.com.
Chaney & Evelyn Akers in ‘The Wolf Man’
The premise in The Wolf Man and its various spin-offs is that the main character (Larry Talbot) is transformed into a therianthropic (hybrid) wolf-like creature, the result of either a curse or a bite or scratch. The film popularised many of the planks of werewolf mythology. The lycanthrope’s metamorphosis is triggered by a full moon; the werewolf is killed only by a silver bullet; the protagonist’s silver-headed walking cane, etc. Although there has been werewolves depicted on the silver screen before The Wolf Man, Chaney’s portrayal was “the incarnation that solidified much of the (werewolf) lore as we know it today” (‘The Werewolf Classic That Defined A Genre’, Stephanie Cole, Nightmare on Film Street, 28-Jan-2019, www.nofspodcast.com).
The Wolf Man formula was eminently copyable…Chaney reprised his Wolf man role in a sequel Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, described as Universal’s first “Monster Mash”𝟜 (‘Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man’, TV Tropes, www.tvtropes.org), and then in 2010 there was a remake of Wolf Man with Benicio Del Toro in the title role. All three movies are serious flicks, straight-up pure horror movies. Many other Hollywood versions of the werewolf legend however have been out and out comedies or horror/comedies. Box office-topping comedy duo of the Forties and Fifties Abbott and Costello were unenthusiastic about a Monster Mash movie, however the producers wanted to exploit the emerging screen popularity of “Franky” and “Wolfie” – the result: Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948) (with the Wolf Man thrown into the mix). The movie didn’t radiate much joy with the critics but proved a massive hit with fans, spawning a series of Abbott and Costello horror-themed comedies.
One werewolf comedy-horror flick emanating out of Hollywood that has scored some critical kudos is John Landis’ 1981 An American Werewolf in London 𝟝. The film’s successful blending of comedy and humour and its innovative if grisly makeup made it a cult classic and a box office triumph, returning over ten times its original outlay. More blandly prosaic is Teen Wolf (1985) with Michael J Fox as an average high school kid who shape-shifts into a werewolf. Described as a romantic, coming-of-age fantasy movie, it got mixed reviews but struck gold at the box office, taking in over $US80 million on a budget of just $US1.2 million.
Folklore: Werewolves in the popular psyche⌖ ⌖ ⌖ The werewolf may have been a subject for fun and even derision in the world of cinema, but in past times it has been viewed with total seriousness, especially in Europe. The genesis of the werewolf legend is nebulous, but the notion of a human taking a (malevolent) animal form is millennias old. Depictions of and references to men taking on a lupine appearance goes back to antiquity. From Medieval times folklore-driven fear of the werewolf was common in Europe and led to werewolf panics, especially in areas such as France and Germany which contained large populations of wild wolves (“A German Werewolf’s ‘Confessions’ horrified 1500s Europe”, Isabel Hernández, National Geographic, 13-Oct-2022, www.nationalgeographic.co.uk).
While Hollywood favoured the view that potent curses, wolf bites and full moons were the transformative agents for human to werewolf form, German folk tales from centuries ago reveal that all a man needs to do to turn into a ravaging lupine monster doing the Devil’s work is to don a belt or strap made from wolf’s fur (‘Werewolf Legends from Germany’, edited & translated by D.L. Asliman, www.sites.pitt.edu).
Lycanthropy/witchcraft nexus ⌖ ⌖ ⌖
In the Late Middle Ages and Early Modern era the hunting down and persecution of alleged werewolves and alleged witches to some extent went hand-in-hand. It was not uncommon for people accused of being witches by the church to be vilified for supposedly also being werewolves. The supposed ability of both to “shapeshift” seems to be at the nub of this guilt by association (‘Werewolves and Witchcraft’, Danny Sargent, Llewellyn, 13-Oct-2021, www.llewellyn.com).
London pamphlet (1590), primary source for Stumpf trial
Werewolf of Bedburg ⌖ ⌖ ⌖ If you were outed as a putative werewolf in this age of werewolf hysteria you could expect swift and savage, even barbaric, retribution from inquisitors, witchfinder-generals and other coercive control mechanisms of the state. One of the worst instances came from the Nordrhein-Westfalen region of Germany in the late 16th century. Peter Stumpf (or Peeter Stubbe), an alleged serial killer was accused and tried for werewolvery, witchcraft and cannibalism in 1589. Stumpf’s execution was one of the most brutal recorded – torn apart limb by limb on a wheel, beheaded and his body burned𝟞. Stumpf may or may not have been a serial killer𝟟, what he wasn’t is a werewolf. The wealthy farmer’s “confession” was extracted under torture and there is a suggestion that he might have the victim of political sectarianism. At a time of heightened Catholic/Protestant antagonisms, Stumpf is believed to have been a convert to Protestantism, so it may have been payback (‘Peter Stumpp: The Werewolf of Bedburg’, Darcie Nadel, Exemplore, 17-Aug-2022, www.exemplore.com; ‘Zum Fall Peter Stump’, www.elmar-lorry.de).
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𝟙 Old English: “wer” + “wulf”, literally “man/wolf”
𝟚 not to neglect a raft of others, minor supernatural fiends on the big screen, such as The Invisible Man, The Mummy and Gillman
𝟛 highly commended for its special effects by makeup artist maestro Jack Pierce who had provided FX for earlier classics of the horror genre, Frankenstein and The Mummy
𝟜 a coming together of monsters
𝟝 influential critic Roger Ebert was a dissenting voice on the movie’s merits
𝟞 it was believed that burning was another of the very few ways a werewolf could be killed
On August 12 this year Booker Prize-winning novelist Salman Rushdie was stabbed multiple times while giving a lecture in the lake resort community of Chautauqua in western New York State. It remains unclear to what extent Rushdie’s assailant was motivated by the Iranian fatwa against the Anglo-Indian author who suffered serious if not life-threatening injuries in the attack. The attempt on Rushdie’s life for engaging in free speech occurring at the Chautauqua Institution is ironic, given that organisation’s long tradition of the free exchange of ideas. [‘Chautauqua, where Salman Rushdie was attacked, has a long history of promoting free speech and learning for the public good’, Charlotte M. Canning, The Conversation, 25-Aug-2022, www.theconversation.com].
Source: the guardian.com
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For all the wrong reasons the crime has shone a light on the Chautauqua Institution with its nearly 150-year-old history. The organisation was the brainchild of a Methodist minister and a Midwest businessman, initially established in the 1870s to provide training to Sunday school teachers and church workers. The first Chautauqua ”event” organised was at Lakeside, Ohio (1873), quickly followed the next year by Chautauqua, New York. Although founded by Methodists the Chautauqua concept was from the start non-denominational in spirit [‘Chautauqua‘, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]. In the tranquil lakeside outdoor setting of Chautauquaⓐ, the roots what would grow into an institution of seasonal (summer) education and culture programs for adults took shape.
Source: the attic.space
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Non-sectarian Chautauqua
From its parent base in western New York a movement soon spread across the US with “Daughter Chautauquasas” springing up everywhere…at the movement’s peak, around 1915, there were about 12,000 such rural-based communities, all independent of the parent institution. While some Chautauquas remained religious-oriented, the movement as a whole became more secular and wider in its scope, coinciding with the Progressive Era (circa 1890–1920), a time in which political and social reforms were flourishing in America (Canning). A factor in this was that Chautauquas tended to foster free thinking which was incompatible with the strain of evangelical Christianity permeating the organisation. Chautauqua philosophical emphasis was on life skills, self-improvement and transformation of lives, ‘What is Chautauqua, the site of the Rushdie attack has a long history’, Kelsey Ables, Washington Post, 13–Aug–2022, www.washingtonpost.com).
Redpath Chautauqua, “circus like promo” (Source: Culture Under Canvas, Harry P Harrison)
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Chautauquas under ”the Big Top”
By the early 1900s Chautauquas were evolving away from permanent independent assemblies to a new variant (aided by the expansion of railways), the spawning of itinerant Chautauquas, where promoters took the Chautauqua idea on the road, travelling to different country regions and setting up temporary “circuit” or “tent” Chautauquas with an itinerary of week-long programs packaged as “culture” experiences. A host of “performers” would be engaged to appear on the circuit at these events—lecturers and speakersⓑ, showmen, singers, musicians and dancers, politicians, opera stars, magicians, preachers—comprising a series of “travelling talent circuits”ⓒ. These Chautauquas added entertainments to the traditional serving of education and religious instruction intended to be “morally uplifting” and culturally enhancingⓓ [‘“The Fourth American Instiution” Understanding Circuit Chautauquas‘, Brittany Hayes, U.S. History Scene, www.ushistoryscene.com]. The tent Chautauquas, the most prominent of which were the Redpath Chautauquas, were in competition with the popular entertainment of the day, vaudeville. The Chautauqua circuit sought to elevate itself above vaudeville which it viewed as a baser and more vulgar form of entertainment (Wikipedia). The tent Chautauqua circuit catered for a wide variety of entertainment, resulting in a wide gulf in quality…at the lower end its engagement in animal acts and slapstick comedy blurred the line with the vaudevillian world [The Chautauqua Movement’, The Colorado Chautauqua, (2020), www.chautauqua.com. Some observers in fact characterise the tent circuits as “Chautauqua” in name only, having appropriated it to add cachet to their business enterprise [‘The Lingering Magic of Chautauqua’, Paul Hendrickson, Washington Post, 01-Jul-1978, www.washingtonpost.com.
Kansas Tent Chautauqua, 1906
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Chautauquas made a contribution at the local level to the enrichment of rural Americans‘ social lives and fostered individual self-improvement. Some observers also saw the movement as a buffer against the effects of rapid urbanisation in that period by giving support to local communities and their traditional values…a counterweight to the centripetal forces luring especially the young to the cities, emphasising the virtues of small town “good life” in rural America (Canning).
Source: joplinglobe.com
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Decline of the Chautauqua
The 1920s was the last great decade of Chautauquas. By the Thirties with the devastating economic impact of the Depression taking its toll, the movement’s popularity was on the wane. Hastening its fall was a combination of factors – the rise of the car culture made extended travel more accessible for rural dwellers; other forms of entertainment were supplanting the Chautauquas’ appeal, especially the advent of sound movies and commercial radio; new educational opportunities for women were opening up; etc [‘Chautauqua in Santa Barbara’, Michael Redmon, Santa Barbara Independent, 14-Sep-2016, www.independent.com; Ables].
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Criticism of Chautauqua
Chautauqua’s cachet at its high water mark was undeniable—President Theodore Roosevelt described the movement as ”the most American thing in America”—however it was not without its detractors. Famed novelist and Noble laureate Sinclair Lewis was dismissive of the Chautauquas’ educational merit and intellectual pretensions. Lewis’ Main Street describes the movement as a “combination of vaudeville performance, Y.M.C.A. lecture, and the graduation exercise of an elocution class…” (Hayes). Chautauquas in their heyday effected positive change in the lives of people, helping working class and middle-class women in particular to acquire the educational and vocational training to allow them “to launch ‘real careers’ (‘Chautauqua Movement’). The movement nonetheless had its limitations. Chautauqua enunciated freedom of expression and thought but did not have an overt political stance. It never challenged the White Protestant hegemony in American society…(it) was “not revolutionary and never led the charge on issues like suffrage or civil rights” and racial inequality (Canning).
Still in the business of providing adult education today, the Chautauqua Institution was a pioneer of the principle of what we call life-long learning, which takes many worldwide forms such as TED Talks, University of the Third Age, and a raft of other continuing education programs.
Photo: oldsite.chq.org
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Endnote: the Chautauqua circuit movement was to some degree a throwback to the earlier Lyceum movement which flourished before the American Civil War. Public lyceums anticipated the Chautauquas by organising circuits of adult public education programs involving travelling lecturers and teachers – featuring 19th century American luminaries such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and even Abraham Lincoln.
Chautauqua (pronounced “Shuh-TAW-Kwa”) etymology: believed to be an Iroquois (Seneca) word, possibly meaning either or both “a bag tied in the middle” and/or ”two moccasins tied together”.
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ⓐ the idea of an outdoor setting was gleaned from camp meetings in rural South and West
ⓑ giving literary readings and drama recitals
ⓒ speakers who featured on the Chautauqua circuit included the women’s suffragette leader Susan B Anthony, inventor Thomas Alva Edison and national politician William Jennings Bryan
ⓓ “look up and lift up” was a slogan of Chautauqua
Gobeithio y gwnewch chi fwynhau eich arhosiad yma.
“We hope you have a pleasant stay in Portmeirion.”
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Image: nytimes.com
British architect Sir (Bertram) Clough Williams-Ellis spent half a century (1925 to 1976) on a pet construction and town planning project in the Snowdonia region of North Wales, handcrafting his ideal of a village from scratch. The eccentric, autodidactic architect with a penchant for wearing knickerbockers called his back country village “Portmeirion”, drawing inspiration for his Welsh labour of love from the Italian Riviera fishing village of Portofino. What Williams-Ellis created was a scaled-down village comprising a picturesque patch-quilt of individual buildings built primarily for decoration, known in the architectural business as follies.
Photo: Pinterest / M Serigrapher
Piecing together the mosaic
Architecturally, Portmeirion is “an eclectic pastiche” (Gruffudd 1965) with stylistic borrowings from Gaudi, the Mediterranean and the Italian Renaissance, from the Arts and Crafts Movement and from Nordic Classicism et al, juxtaposed and intertwined together. Trompe l’oeil windows, Baroque murals, gargoyles, inverted copper cauldron, Classical details, all contributing to a quirky, multi-coloured panorama of buildings with a Mediterranean feel – in North Wales. Williams-Ellis sourced materials from disused estates and ruined castles across the UK for the village. (“Portmeirion Village: Fifty Years Since The Welsh Resort Starred In TV’s Iconic ‘The Prisoner’”, John Oseid, Forbes, 22-Mar-2017, www.forbes.com). Williams-Ellis’s use of salvaged fragments led him to describe his creation as “a home for fallen buildings”.
Reconciling structures with landscape
Williams-Ellis was a champion of preserving rural life, inspiring a Welsh movement, CPRW, guardians of Cymru Wledig…his philosophy applied to architecture was that “the development of a naturally beautiful site need not lead to its defilement”, new buildings, done well, could enhance the landscape (‘Portmeirion: A Passion for Landscape and Buildings’, Rachel Hunt, Gwanwyn, Spring 2018, cprw.org.uk). For the site of his cherished Italianate village William-Ellis choose a “neglected wilderness” which had formerly been part of the Aber Iâ① estate. Over the years the constituent parts of the village took shape – the Citadel (an Italianate campanile (bell tower)), Battery Square, Village Green, Gothic pavilion, Bristol Colonnade, blue-domed Pantheon and statue of Hercules, Italianate landscaped gardens. The Victorian manor from the old estate was transformed into the village hotel. The plan had been to incorporate a 19th century castle, Castell Deudraeth (named after an extinct 12th century castle in the locale), but this didn’t happen in Clough’s lifetime. Since 2001 the castellated building has functioned as a hotel for Portmeirion tourists.
Source: wheretogowithkids.co.uk
Academic architecture hasn’t rated Portmeirion highly, tending to dismiss it as an “idiosyncratic playground of little interest”, a mere “hodge-podge” of differing styles (Manosalva, M.A., 2021. One-man-band: Clough Williams-Ellis’ Architectural Ensemble at Portmeirion. ARENA Journal of Architectural Research, 6(1), p.3. DOI: http://doi.org/10.5334/ajar.268). Not that this in any way deflected Williams-Ellis from single-mindedly pursuing his own peculiarly personal architectural vision of a “fantasy village”②… the architect freely admitted to taking what he described as “a light opera approach”, wanting to give people architecture that was pleasurable and fun to behold and enjoy.
‘The Prisoner’ being filmed on site (Source: radio times.com)
Sixties‘ TV spy culture augments the Village’s celebrity and tourism
While Portmeirion’s uniqueness guaranteed its fame and its standing as a niche holiday resort, its selection as the set for a cult 1960’s TV series magnified that fame exponentially. The Prisoner, a Sci-fi dystopian series, created by and starring Patrick McGoohan, was filmed in and around the village in 1966-67. The 17-episode series about a government agent who finds himself mysteriously transported to a beautiful, charming but bizarre community—where for inhabitants, imprisoned betwixt mountains and sea, there is no escape — a community impersonalised to the point where everyone is a number and no one knows who’s in charge. The Prisoner‘s enduring cult status has ensured a constant stream of loyal fans from far and near making the pilgrimage to Portmeirion each year (Covid permitting). The local tourist industry has done its bit to capitalise with a Prisoner souvenir shop, tours of the film locations, etc. The giant chessboard in the square which appeared in the TV show has been (permanently) reconstructed to further cash in on the series’ appeal.
Beatle George visits the Village – “fab!” (Source: North Wales Live)
Endnote: Enticing the rich and famous
A host of celebrities can be numbered among the endless throng of visitors to Portmeirion over the decades…GB Shaw, HG Wells, Bertram Russell, Frank Lloyd Wright③, Brian Epstein, George Harrison, to name but a few. Noel Coward wrote the first draft of his comic play Blithe Spirit during a stay at the seaside resort.
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① Welsh: “ice estuary”
② when his architectural “day job”, designing other people’s houses and buildings in various parts of the UK and Ireland allowed it
③ apparently FLW approved of the architecture of the place
There have been untold zillions of words written or spoken about the Beatles—in books, in music mags, in newsprint, on the web, in doco films and videos—over the last six decades. Anyone vaguely following the Liverpudlian Foursome’s stellar musical journey would be familiar with the major secondary personalities that feature prominently in the Beatles’ narrative (manager Epstein, producer Martin, the various wives and girlfriends, a few of the band’s musical peers like Jagger and Clapton, the so-called “Fifth Beatles” and so on), but after wading through weighty Beatles biographies by Hunter Davies and Phillip Norman and others, I’m more curious about the lesser dramatis personae who feature peripherally in the Beatles saga. As the Beatles journey on their irresistible path from provincial obscurity to global mega-celebrity, these less well-known names pop in and out of the various accounts of John, Paul, George and Ringo’s formative days on the nascent Liverpool rock scene…so let’s shift the spotlight away from the quartet of pop music icons momentarily on to some of the background players to note their particular part in the Beatles’ back story — most were fleeting and insignificant, others flitted in and out of the Beatles’ orbit without impact and a few were important participants out of the limelight.
⥉ Lennon & Shotton (Source: forums.stevehoffman.tv)
The bulk of the minor figures getting a mention in the early Beatles story tend to connect directly with John Lennon, not surprisingly as he was the band’s founder and driving force in the rise of the Beatles phenomena. John’s best friend in childhood was Pete Shotton, who attended the same schools as the future ‘First’ Beatle (Dovedale Infants School and Quarry Bank Grammar). Shotton was there at Lennon’s earliest foray into musical bands, initially in John’s mid-1950s skiffle boy band which became the “The Quarrymen”. Other friends of John joined them in the band including Nigel Whalley, Rod Davis Ivan Vaughan, Len Garry, Eric Griffiths, Ken Brown, Colin Hanton, Chas Newby, Bill Smith, John Duff Lowe…and a little later of course Paul McCartney and his baby-faced pal George Harrison and Stu Sutcliffe (Quarrymen membership history was very fluid). Vaughan’s not insignificant claim to fame resides in his being the member/friend who introduced Paul to John at that famous 1957 church fete. Shotton, Vaughan and Whalley had the further distinction of forming the nucleus of John’s “Woolton Gang”…a mischievous, juvenile ”gang of four” imitating and paying homage to Lennon’s all-time favourite hero of children’s fiction, ’William’ from Richmal Cromwell’s Just William books. Of his many childhood friends and associates, John’s connexion with Pete Shotton lasted the longest. When the Beatles achieved fame and fortune Shotton was a beneficiary, managing first a supermarket owned by the Beatles and then the Apple Boutique. Eventually Shotton severed his business nexus with the band and founded his own chain of restaurants, Fatty Arbuckle’s.
⥉ The Quarrymen performing in 1957 (pre-Paul & George)
In 1958 Lennon, having abjectly failed his ‘O’ Level exams at Quarry Bank High, shuffled off to Liverpool Art School. Lennox’s art school period was a key phase in the formation of the scruffy “Teddy boy’s” relationships, meeting his first girlfriend Thelma Pickles, his first wife Cynthia (née Powell) and close friend and early Beatle Stu Sutcliffe whose gifted artistic merit influenced him greatly. John formed other friendships at the art school including with Jeff Mohammed who took on a older brother sort of role in helping John try to cope with the trauma of his mother Julia’s sudden death; and with Bill Harry who went on to create Mersey Beat , a local music publication which helped the band gain early traction in Liverpool music circles. Harry also published Lennon’s poems and drawings in the newspaper.
⥉ Allan Williams (Source: Meet the Beatles for Real)
Before Brian Epstein stumbled upon the Beatles the lads had another manager of sorts, Allan Williams. Williams owned The Jacaranda club in Liverpool which the young John and Paul frequented. Williams‘s role as booking agent and manager for the early Beatles (known variously as “The Quarrymen”, “Johnny and the Moondogs” and “The Silver Beetles” before settling on “The Beatles”) was a somewhat informal relationship, coming to an abrupt end in 1961 over a fee dispute, leaving the way clear for Epstein to assume the grid position and steer the Beatles’s career trajectory⦑1⦒. Williams did make an important contribution to the band’s early development as a musical force, he was the one who arranged for the band to undertake the first of a series of nightclub performances in Hamburg, West Germany, where the Beatles over three visits between 1960 and 1962 really honed their musical skills.
The Cavern Club in Liverpool was synonymous with the early Beatles who debuted in its damp, dingy warehouse cellar as the Quarrymen in 1957⦑2⦒. Ringo Starr then in another skiffle band had already made his first appearance in the club a week earlier (Ringo went on to join Liverpool’s top ‘beat’ band prior to the Beatles’ ascendancy – “Rory Storm and the Hurricanes”). A key Cavern figure was its longtime emcee/DJ Bob Wooler, instrumental along with Bill Harry in helping arrange Brian Epstein‘s first visit to the Cavern to see John, Paul, George and Pete play.
⥉ Pete & Mona (Photo: John Smart/Associated Newspapers/Shutterstock)
Another regular Liverpool venue for the Beatles in their various early incarnations was the Casbah Coffee Club, owned by the mother of the band’s drummer pre-Ringo (Pete), Mona Best. Not only were the Beatles able to perform there on dozens of occasions (tallies differ as to the exact number), Mrs Best allowed the fledgling band use of the Casbah’s basement to practice in.
After Epstein and his NEMS Company⦑3⦒ took over managing the four Liverpudlian ‘Moptops’ he recruited Tony Barrow from Decca to handle publicity for the group. In the full flush of Beatlemania fame Barrow found the task easier with the press now scurrying after him, but he was still there to extinguish any Beatles crises that might occur, such as John’s incendiary “more popular than Jesus” claim. Barrow wrote liner notes for the Beatles’ EPs and albums and was also the one who came up with the “Fab Four” tag.
⥉ Neil Aspinall filling in for George in the “Fab Four” lineup (Source: independent.ie)
When the Beatles started getting bookings outside of Liverpool they got themselves a road manager, Neil Aspinall, who had gone to high school with Paul and George at the Liverpool Institute. An accountant by training, Neil’s main attribute for the ‘roadie’ job—which he scored by being ‘besties’ with Pete Best at the time—was that he owned a battered old Commer van which was used to ferry round the boys and their amps to venues, and to London for their famous Decca audition on New Year’s Day 1962. After Epstein’s death Aspinall became CEO of the flagship Apple Corps and ran the Beatles’ business empire for 40 years⦑4⦒.
Another Beatle backgrounder Epstein put on the payroll was Tony Bramwell. During their Liverpool school years Bramwell was “besties'” with George Harrison and also a friend of Paul McCartney. From roadie in the Beatlemania days Bramwell rose to become CEO of Apple Films. Today, Bramwell is one of the very few surviving Beatles’ insiders.
⥉ Paul & Bodyguard Mal return from safari in Kenya
When Aspinall got promoted to Beatles’ PA in 1963, the doorman at the Cavern, the 1.98m-tall Mal Evans got the ‘roadie’ gig. As well as being ‘roadie’ for the Beatles’ 1964 and 1965 US tours, Mal copped the brunt of the violent backlash by enraged Filipinos against the “Fab Four” during the notorious 1966 tour of that country. Evans also served as the band’s bodyguard and in-attendance ‘gofer’ for any personal items required by any of the four musicians.
⥉ Derek Taylor (Source: Pinterest.co.uk)
While Mal Evans took care of most of the Beatles’ simple day-to-day needs, NEMS employee Derek Taylor was tasked with organising holiday trips for the boys as well as taking care of more complicated matters like copyright issues and acquiring personal properties on behalf of the four members, plus acting as “spin doctor” for the Beatles, for all of which he earned the sobriquet “Mr Fixit”.
Someone else behind the scenes who did very well from his connexion with the Beatles was music publisher Dick James. Just as the Beatles’ juggernaut was starting its ascent in 1963 James brokered a deal with Lennon and McCartney through their manager Epstein which enriched the publisher and his business partner but more crucially resulted in the two principal Beatles songwriters losing control of their own songs for ever!
⥉ George Martin (Source: USA Today)
Footnote: The Fifth Beatle
Beatles watchers have long speculated on particular individuals whose contribution/ role in the band’s story warrant, justified or not, the appellation fifth Beatle…the “would-be” candidates for the title are so manifold that it invites comparison with the list of numerous contenders regularly thrown up for “eighth wonder of the world“. Those ascribed the Fifth Beatle label over the years include George Martin, Brian Epstein, Neil Aspinall, Stuart Sutcliffe, Peter Best, Chas Newby, Jimmy Nichol, Tony Sheridan and Billy Preston.
🎵🎶🎼🎼🎸♫♬
⦑1⦒ securing for Williams the unenviable epithet, “the man who gave the Beatles away”
⦑2⦒ the band didn’t actually play the Cavern as the Beatles until February 1961, but within two-and-a-half years had racked up close to 300 appearances at the venue
⦑3⦒ North End Music Stores
⦑4⦒ after the band broke up Neil became the closest confidant of each of the ex-Beatles
‘Coniston’ Ashfield, Bea’s first home (Source: hafs.org.au)
You’dbe hard pressed to come up with a personality that epitomised 20th Century Sydney eccentricity more than the legendary Bea Miles who died in 1973. When the subject arises even today, so many Sydneysiders of a certain vintage have a Bea Miles anecdote to tell. Either it’s a chance (and sometimes disconcerting) encounter they had as a school kid—usually on inner Sydney public transport—with the larger (and louder) than life character herself, or one recounted to them by their mother or father. Such was her profile in this city that newspapers in the Forties and Fifties claimed that Bea (or ‘Bee’ as she later insisted it be spelt) was “more widely known than the prime minister” of the day. Bea’s popularity was rooted in that honoured tradition of Australian larrikinism, the unusual thing about this was that she was female※.
Early days, the athletic Bea Miles
Born into a wealthy merchant family, young Beatrice Miles was already exhibiting the rebellious nature that made her buck against the straitjacketed proprieties of conservative Sydney (and specifically North Shore) society, when the illness befell her that would profoundly change her forever. Contracting Encephalitis Lethargica at 21, Bea over time changed physically from a tall, trim and athletic young woman to a seriously overweight, matronly-looking woman.
(Photo: Daily Tele)
Going rogue
More immediately and crucially, Bea underwent a complete personality change, becoming totally disruptive, hyper-kinetic, manic and basically uncontrollable§. When her father couldn’t cope any more with her behaviour he had her committed to an asylum, she was shuffled around between psyche facilities in Gladesville, Kenmore (Goulburn) and Callan Park. After her last escape attempt a Sydney tabloid,Smith’s Weekly,ran a story which exposed Bea’s dire plight in the psychiatric gulag of Callan Park (with sensationalised headline “Mad House Mystery of Beautiful Sydney Girl”) which helped secure her release.
No fixed address
Unable to return to the family home in St Ives, Bea had a sojourn in Sydney’s Kings Cross where she mixed happily with the locale’s Bohemian artists and writers. After this she lived rough in Sydney, finding shelter where she could – a Rushcutters Bay stormwater drain, a cave above a Sydney beach, a park bench opposite Central Station, the steps of a church rectory, etc. Ratbags author Keith Dunstan called her “very nearly the first drop-out, the first hippie”.
Bea with men of the press, circa 1946
CV: Enemy of authority, laws and law-enforcers, habitually disruptive public presence
Bea revelled in being controversial and confrontational, especially towards political and social authorities…abusing police, doctors and magistrates came instinctually to her, and she certainly had plenty of practice at it! By her own (not necessarily reliable) count she was “falsely convicted 195 times, fairly 100 times”…Bea defiantly refused to pay for public transport or to enter cinemas. Other offences earning her the ire of the law included swearing in public and vagrancy.
Bea’s recital services board
Bea Miles, literary oratorBea loved pulling stunts and making a spectacle of herself, some she did for the heck of it—like riding a man’s push bike through the streets while wearing a formal evening dress—other stunts were to earn money after her grandmother’s inheritance allowance dried up – on the street she would hold a sign up to passing punters advertising her declamatory services, for a set “schedule of fees” she would verbatim quote passages from Shakespeare.
Main Reading Room, NSW State Library (Flickr)
Rogue scholar
Under the rough edges of Bea’s (very) public persona, was a formidable intellect. She had excelled at school (Abbotsleigh Girls) and gained admission to medicine at Sydney University. In her post-illness nomadic years, the “wayward waif” as one article called her, never held a formal job and generally gave her occupation as ‘student’. Bea was a habitué of public libraries, especially the State Library in Macquarie Street¶…a life-long voracious reader and produced her own collection of writings, such as “Dictionary by a Bitch”φ.
Bea in the driving seat? (Photo: Daily Telegraph)
Scourge of taxi drivers
The stunts Bea is best remembered and most notorious for involved her with taxis and their drivers. Her propensity for refusing to pay for taxi trips and commandeering taxis to demand that they take her to vastly distant locations has gone into folklore. Legendary instances of this were the 19-day taxi trip she took to Perth (fortunately for the female cabbie involved Bea paid her £600 for the assignment), as well as trips to Broken Hill via Melbourne and Adelaide). As is the way with legendary public figures, some of her outrageous taxi exploits were more urban myths than actual events, like the tale that used to circulate of Bea taking a taxi to Broken Hill and then on approaching the outskirts of the town she was supposed to have done a runner leaving the poor hapless driver fleeced of his massive fare. Bea’s most dramatic encounter with a cab, one that did happen, saw her respond to the driver’s refusal to take her by wrenching the door completely off the taxi’s hinges (she was a big woman!). This legendary “Bea-act” landed her in Long Bay Gaol for a spell (and a rest).
“Bee in charcoal”, Roderick Shaw (Source: portrait.gov.au)
Terror of trams
Tram drivers didn’t escape the attentions of Bea either…the popular press labelled her the “Terror of Trams” and on at least one occasion her antics flirted with real danger as one tram driver who refused to move until Bea paid the fare discovered. Bea, never one to back down, hijacked the tram, seizing its controls and piloted it to Bondi, even stopping to pick up passengers on route.
The Bea Miles “signature look”: The original “bag lady” apparel
Bea’s unorthodox ways made her a Sydney institution and an unmissable sight. Her irregular and unkempt mode of dress made her readily recognisable wherever she went…Bea’s regular ‘outfit’ described by the Sydney Morning Herald as a “down-at-heel uniform” of tennis shoes, white (or was it green) tennis sun visor and ever more scruffy overcoat. Always pinned to the overcoat’s lapel was a £5 note (Bea’s idea of countering any notion the police might get about arresting her for vagrancy).
Years of homeless living, sleeping rough, took its toll on Bea and in 1964 she was taken in by the Little Sisters of the Poor Home for the Aged in Randwick. Those last nine years of her life allowed Bea a clean, dry bed and gave the inveterate bookworm that she was joyous access to another library (borrowing an average of 14 books a week from the Randwick branch library).
(Sydney Morning Herald)
Footnote: Deviating from the mainstream, inheriting some of her father’s idiosyncrasies
Despite the love-hate conflict with her father and his eventual disowning of her, Bea gained quite a number of her radical and non-conformist predispositions and beliefs from him. In his own right, wealthy businessman William J Miles was also an individualist and an eccentric. Miles was a rationalist and a secularist (Bea herself was a staunchly committed atheist❡)… from him she also got her love of Shakespeare and her anti-British imperialist/strident Australian patriotism). In the late 1930s pater Miles’ odd brand of political extremism found its voice in The Publicist. Funded and edited by Miles, the journal advocated fascism (curiously in tandem with Aboriginal rights), wholeheartedly embracing German Nazism and anti-Semitism𝄢. Bea endorsed his pro-Aboriginal and anti-British stand but never enunciated far-right or racist sentiments during her life, although at the end she did express some views that inferred the supremacy of the “white race”.
✠✠✠✠✠✠✠✠✠✠✠✠✠✠✠✠✠✠✠✠✠✠✠✠✠✠✠✠
※ one of precious few non-male Aussie public larrikins, Dawn Fraser also comes to mind
§ though she still retained her sharpness of intellect afterwards
¶ until she was barred from the library in the late 1950s for being a nuisance (What, Bea?!? Never!)
φ example of an entry, “Duty: an excuse for showing unwarranted interference in somebody else’s business”
❡ there’s some dispute over whether her deathbed conversion to Catholicism was genuine or merely Bea’s way of thanking the church for taking her in off the streets in her twilight years
𝄢 it was a forerunner of the Australia First Movement. William’s dalliance with fascism prompted Cunneen’s assessment that, “with dangerous obsessions and money to spend, Miles represented an unstable element in Australian society”
ℼℼ~ℼℼ~ℼℼ
Articles and websites consulted:
Chris Cunneen, ‘Miles, William John (1871–1942)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/miles-william-john-7576/text13225, published first in hardcopy 1986, accessed online 27 October 2021.
Judith Allen, ‘Miles, Beatrice (Bea) (1902–1973)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/miles-beatrice-bea-7573/text13219, published first in hardcopy 1986, accessed online 27 October 2021.
Pip Wilson, ‘Bee Miles One of Sydney’s favourite individualists’, Wilson’s Almanac, 18-Feb-2012, web.archive.org
Robert Kaplan, ‘Miles From Her Father’, Quadrant, 07-Aug-2016, http://quadrant.org.au
Between 1899 and 1902 Britain and the Afrikaner republics of Transvaal and Orange Free State were locked in conflict in the Second South African War, more commonly known as the Boer War (or more accurately the Second Anglo-Boer War). With the overconfident British failing to secure the expected quick victory over the Boers’ “citizen army”, the war dragged on into a long guerrilla engagement. In 1901, in the middle of the conflict in South Africa, of all things a cricket team from South Africa visited England and Ireland to take part in a series of international matches. How did this sporting incongruity take place while the two countries were engaged in a controversial, bitterly fought and increasingly divisive war?
Lord Hawke’s MCC tourists to SA 1898-99
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Making it happen: JD Logan, the “Squire of the Southern Karoo”
In fact, the tour of Britain had been originally meant to occur in 1900ⓐ, but was cancelled due to the outbreak of hostilities, understandably enough. At this point in stepped Cape Province-based expat entrepreneur and cricket patron James Douglas Logan with his (long-cherished) plan to organise a new tour. Logan negotiated with the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) through the highly influential Lord Hawke, who managed to persuade the MCC to give the tour the green light. Despite the war still very much raging and the outcome far from decided, it was rescheduled for the following year. The announcement for the tour to take place in 1901 unleased opposition and misgivings from within both countries.
Newspaper cartoon of James Logan (Source: hermanus-history-society.co.za)
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The South African press lambasted the team chosen–a mix of “socialite-gentleman” cricketers (including Logan’s own son who had never played first-class cricket!) and more skilful players—for being overall well below par. Moreover, the press criticised the private venture by the “Laird of Matjiesfontein” as being not legitimate because the touring players predominantly from the Cape Colony had not been officially selected by the South African Cricket Union (which had suspended the Currie Cup and disbanded with the onset of war) {Sport Past and Present in South Africa: Trans(forming) the Nation, Scarlett Cornelissen, Albert Grindingh (Eds.), (contributor Dean Allen) 2013; Peter Wynn Thomas, The Complete History of Cricket Tours At Home and Abroad, 1989}.
Sherlock’s creator: make war, not cricket
From the host country, probably the most vociferous critic was world renowned author (and cricket fan and amateur player) Arthur Conan Doyle. Conan Doyle, in the forefront of countering the anti-war propaganda within the British homeland with his own pro-war propaganda, was incensed that a team of predominantly English-speaking cricketers should be coming to Britain to play when they should be stay in South Africa and fight the Boers. The vexed authorof Sherlock Holmes called it “a stain on their manhood” (Cornelissen, Grindingh).
Conan Doyle in cricket gear, definitely a “gentleman” (Source: arthur-conan-doyle.com)
Despite the dissenting voices, what ultimately clinched it for Logan’s private tour was the MCC and the major English county clubs’ agreeing to give the tour matches first-class status. Even then there were second thoughts on the South Africa side and a suggestion made that the tour should not go ahead…this was scotched by the MCC who insisted it proceed to prevent the dislocation of the 1901 English season (Cornelissen, Grindingh).
Jimmy Sinclair (Photo: Cricket Weekly Record)
The crickettour 🏏
Logan’s 14-man team was predominantly Uitlanders (‘foreigners’, immigrants, mainly British in composition but from other countries as well)…it included one Afrikaner cricketer Johannes Kotze who proved one of the more accomplished performers. The South Africans’ ‘gun’ batsman coming in to the tour was JH Sinclair, however his batting never really got going on the tour (unlike his bowling which was quite effective). Sinclair had been captured by the Boers but escaped in time to make the trip to Britain. Maitland Hathorn was the most successful “willow-wielder” on the tour (827 runs, average 35.95). Overall the team performed moderately though it did beat five of the major counties and tied one. Financially, Logan lost a substantial sum on the venture.
1901 Sth African tourists (Source: ebay.com)∘
Cricket’s special role serving the Empire
To the English, cricket, the game they invented, was the quintessential sport, and an essential companion of empire building. This was the “golden age“ of cricket (1895-1914) with WG Grace’s shadow still very much dominating the sportⓑ. The Victorians revered cricket as an established institution, it was integral to the ethos of the English gentleman and a sign of his cultural supremacy. Moreover cricket was considered educative, part of an Englishman’s training. Spreading the game to the Empire, to Australasia, the West Indies, the Indian Sub-continent and Southern Africa, symbolised the “civilising mission of the Englishman abroad”. Participation in cricket was equated with the civility of English Victorian society and an endorsement of Anglo-Saxon values. Cricket tours by the MCC, the sport’s governing body in England, stimulated the colonies‘ interest in the English game, but its deeper purpose was to “promote imperial ideology”, extolling the virtues of allegiance to Britain, Empire and patriotic duty {Dean Allen, Empire, War and Cricket in South Africa, Logan of Matjiesfontein, 2015}. Allen’s thesis is that cricket was injected by the English ruling classes into South Africa “as much for political and propagandistic reasons as for sporting ones”
War an instrument of empire with cricket the mentor
The late Victorians affirmed that “manly games” were integral to training for life. Above all the ‘school’ of cricket taught lessons of “discipline, self-abnegation, a sense of fair play and team-work”, it built character. Britain’s willingness to engage in the 1899 War to enlarge the Empire—the scramble for colonies in Africa in competition with Germany and France—brought the cricketing fraternity squarely into the frame. Cricketers, to the English mind, were “made of the right stuff” for mortal combat, they were up for martial challenges (Donaldson, Peter (2017) ‘We are having a very enjoyable game’: Britain, sport and the South African War, 1899-1902. War in History, 25(1). ISSN 0968-3445). Many cricketers enlisted in the South African War (some former teammates found themselves on opposing sides), and there were cricketing casualties in the conflict {Dean Allen (2005) ‘Bats and Bayonets’: Cricket and the Anglo-Boer War, 1899–1902, Sport in History, 25:1, 17-40, DOI: 10.1080/17460260500073033}, including some fine players of the day like Anglo-Australian test bowling ace JJ Ferris.
Australian troops playing cricket at the front in SA (Photo: awm.org.au)∘
Endnote: Pioneering South African XI on the Sub-continent
An unintended co-occurrence of the Boer War was that it led to the staging of the first cricket match between South Africans and local cricketers on Sub-continent soil, 90 years before Apartheid sport ended in South Africa. ‘Representing’ South Africa were Afrikaner POWs incarcerated in Ceylon…Diyatalawa Camp v Colts XI, Nondescripts Club ground, Colombo 1901. The local XI won! {‘The First South Africa. side to play in the sub-continent: Boer Prisoners of War in 1901’, CricketMash, 4-Jul-2020, www.cricmash.com}.
Mafeking reported in (not exactly balanced) cricketing terms (source: independentaustralia.net)∘
Postscript: 1899 South African War, cricket as antidote to physical and moral degeneration
The poor health of many Boer War recruits and Britain’s early reversals in the war added weight to prevailing concerns about national and ‘racial’ degeneration {Robb, George. “The Way of All Flesh: Degeneration, Eugenics, and the Gospel of Free Love.” Journal of the History of Sexuality, vol. 6, no. 4, University of Texas Press, 1996, pp. 589–603, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4617222.} Some commentators of the day, bemoaning the ”neglect of an active athleticism“, called for more playing fields as an antidote to the decline of young working class men, so that they could be the beneficiaries of the ”cricket way of making honest and healthy Englishmen” {Anthony Bateman, Cricket, Literature and Culture: Symbolising the Nation, Destabilising Empire, 2016}.
𓁾𓁽𓁾𓁽𓁾𓁽𓁾𓁽𓁾𓁽𓁾𓁽𓁾𓁽
ⓐ the English MCC side had just concluded their own tour of South Africa in April 1899, just six months before the war commenced
ⓑ Dr Grace loomed larger than life in cricket during this period as the sport’s first genuine superstar
The first two decades of the 21st century have been witness to a raft of passing fads and rages, we’ve seen the likes of Planking, Twerking and Tebowing, etcad nauseam, it makes me wonder whatever happened to the wholly sedentary craze of pole-sitting? Like most crazes, I guess, it was of its time and the shelf life is never infinite. It’s day, or its heyday, was in the 1920s up to around the early 1930s when the peak of the craze subsided.
‘Shipwreck’ Kelly at work ▙
Pole-sitting
The initial exponent of pole-sitting or specifically flagpole-sitting, so far as we know, was New Yorker Alvin ‘Shipwreck’ Kelly. Prior to his preoccupation with pole-sitting, Kelly was a jack-of-all-trades, trying his hand as a steelworker, steeplejack⋖a⋗, high diver, boxer and movie double. He also was a naval ensign during WWI and held a pilot’s licence and performed aerial stunt flights. Opinions differ on how ‘Shipwreck’ got into the business of pole-sitting, one view goes that the habit came early, scrambling up a pole at the tender age of seven, others attribute it to a dare or to a publicity stunt for a Philadelphia department store [‘Body of ‘Shipwreck’ Kelly Lies Unclaimed in Morgue’, Sarasota Herald-Tribune, 13-Oct-1952, (Google News Archive)]. In January 1924 his ‘career’ took off with a record-setting sit atop a pole for 13 hours and 13 minutes to help promote a Hollywood film. Kelly’s best-ever effort was 49 days and one hour, Atlantic City 1930.
AK keeping up with the news at ground-level ▙ (Photo: Everett/Fine Art America)
❕
At the height of his popularity Kelly was earning $500 a day, coming from charging money to people to watch his feats of endurance, from books about his life, from endorsements and personal appearances. His fame also led to a 28-day tour of the United States, sitting on poles in a different city on each day of the tour. But the glory days did not last, the onset of the Great Depression saw his popularity plummet rapidly, Americans quickly lost interest in spending precious money watching men sit on poles with more serious and urgent concerns taking centre stage in their lives (Saratosa Tribune).
▙ ‘Dixie’ Blandy (Source: Facebook)
❕
Pole-sitting became competitive with Richard ‘Dixie’ Blandy challenging and even besting Kelly’s 49-day record. Brandy’s accomplishment, 77 days, was the stuff of legend, sustained as it was on a diet of bottles of whiskey and three packs of cigarettes a day [‘The Mad 1920s: Fad of Pole-Sitting’, Messynessy, 25-Sep-2020, www.chic.com]. Interestingly, prior to being bitten by the pole-sitting bug Blandy, like Kelly, tried an assortment of jobs including circus worker, boxer, house painter, steeplejack, riveter, merchant marine, salesman and (wait for it) flagpole painter. Unlike Kelly though, the Louisiana-born Blandy didn’t become inactive because of the Depression, continuing the activity and even breaking his 1933 record twice more, the second time in Stockholm, Sweden, added to Dixie’s legend – a sit of 125 days in a chair affixed to a pole 200-feet above the ground, while consuming 92 bottles of whiskey and his customary diurnal 3 packs of cigs⋖b⋗.[‘Richard Ernest “Dixie” Blandy’, Findagrave, www.findagrave.com]. Blandy actually died on the job, killed in 1974 when the flagpole supporting him collapsed.
▙ Publicity shot: Dixie was popular with the ladies, married 6 times (all his wives met him via the phone at his pole-sitting events) (Source: Dayton Daily News)❕
▙ Paalzitten (Noordwijkerhout)
❕
Blandy notwithstanding, the fad had seen its day after the Depression bit hard. Since then there have been attempts from time to time to revive the pole-sitting caper. In the Netherlands for example pole-sitting became a competitive sport In the 1970s – the Dutch call it Paalzitten (literally “sit tight”). This is a world away from the pursuit that made Alvin and Dixie famous, the poles in the Netherland sit above not solid ground but water and nose-bleeds are uncommon as Dutch derrières are perched barely two arm lengths from the level of the water…“a tourist attraction more than a spectator sport”. [‘Paalzitten Is A Dutch Competitive Sport Where You Have To Sit On A Pole For Hours’, The Engineer, www.wonderfulengineering.com].
💢 💢 💢
Stylites
The fad of Pole-sitting originated in the 1920s as we have seen, but there are historical precedents for this curious pastime. In the early Christian period certain ascetic monks of a particularly fanatical bent practiced something broadly analogous to pole-sitting. These holy men of Late Antiquity were called ‘Stylites’ (from Greek stylos, ‘pillar’). Stylites were “pillar-dwellers” not pole-sitters, and their motivation was spiritual salvation rather than money and fame which spurred on ‘Shipwreck’ Kelly and his ilk. Stylites’ also differed from the pole-sitters in modus operandi, standing on the pillars was their preferred position. Sitting was something they tended to resort to only when overcome by fatigue or perhaps sleep.
▙ 6th century depiction of Ur-Simeon Stylites
The ‘poles’ in question were in fact narrow columns or towers atop which were small platforms which housed the Stylite. The platform were usually encircled by a railing of sorts to prevent the hermit-preacher from falling off. The most famous of the practitioners—the ur-Stylite—was Simeon Stylites the Elder whose early zeal for Christianity led him to ascend a pillar in Syria in AD 423. Later he relocated to a second, nearby pillar more than 15 metres above the ground, apparently staying in it till his death 37 years later⋖c⋗.
▙ Icon depicting both Simeon the Elder & Simeon the Younger
❕
Simeon’s devotion to the practice made him quite a celebrity in the Christian world, he corresponded with the high and mighty including the Eastern emperors Theodosius II and Leo I, even exerting some influence on ecclesiastical matters, such was his standing. Visitors flocked to observe him praying, preaching and fasting on his high platform. Pilgrims and sightseers sought spiritual counselling, healing for the sick, intervention on behalf of the oppressed, etc. Simeon was too popular, a double wall had to be constructed around his pillar to keep the thronging multitudes from getting too close and disturbing his prayer sessions [‘St. Simeon Stylites’, Britannica, www.britannica.com].
▙ Luke the Stylite
❕
The pre-Medieval Christian lifestyle caught on among the more ascetically inclined of the early Byzantine clergy (including women) with many following the prototypical Stylite, some even adopting his name. The more notable of these include St Daniel of Constantinople, St Simeon Stylites the Younger (Antioch), St Alypius of Paphlagonia (north-central Anatolia) and St Simeon Stylites (III) of Lesbos. As this list shows, prominence in the Stylite calling was a passport to sainthood. The Stylites needed to be a stoical lot as they were exposed to all kinds of weather at the top (although some were fortunate enough to be furnished with a small hut to escape into in time of severe inclemency).
▙ Georgian hermit headquarters (Source: Vintage News)
Footnote: If you think the Stylites were confined to the so-called “Dark Ages”, think again! The practice has not entirely been extinguished in the 21st century. A monk in Georgia (Maxime Qavtaradze) in 2013 celebrated 20 years of lofty solitude as a ascetic hermit atop a mountain pillar a la the Stylites⋖d⋗. The original Stylites however would not recognise their barest of existences in the Georgian pillar set-up…Maxime lives in a small cosy cottage with adjoining church house on the top of his pillar, and the monk descends twice a week to the village below to say prayers with his parishioners [‘Georgian Monk Renews Tradition, Lives Atop Pillar’, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 11-Sep-2013, www.rferl.org].
⋖a⋗ perhaps serving as a kind of altitude training for his later pole-sitting marathons
⋖b⋗ to avoid a calamitous outcome in marathon stints, the pole-sitters tied their legs to the vertical structure when wanting to sleep
⋖c⋗ meagre parcels of food were fetched to Simeon by his disciples
In 1953, two years after George Whitman resurrected Sylvia Beach’s famed Shakespeare and Company in Paris, the bookshop that was to become its trans-Atlantic soul mate, City Lights, opened its doors in the North Beach area of San Francisco🄰.
(Photo: Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley)
Two landmark ‘indie’ bookshops
The story of Shakespeare and Company’s evolution into an legendary bookshop has been sketched in a previous blog piece: ‘Hanging Out at Shakespeare and Company’, 21-July-2021. On the other side of the Atlantic another distinctive stand-alone bookshop was staking it’s undeniable claim for iconic status in the world of independent booksellers.
A literary community
Lawrence Ferlinghetti envisaged City Lights as “a literary meeting place”—just like Whitman and Shakespeare and Company—a haven for aspiring writers to hangout and find creativity. A poet himself, Ferlinghetti attracted an emerging group of fiction writers and poets that coalesced into the “Best Generation”, including Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder and Gregory Corso. The Beat writers and poets found themselves a comfortable niche hanging out together in the basement reading room of City Lights.
(Image: Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley)
Not only that, Ferlinghetti was proactive in his support for the Beats’ budding careers by starting a publishing arm at City Lights, bringing to the public collections of poetry, offbeat and radical books ignored by the mainstream press. Ferlinghetti’s disavowal of the commercial mainstream saw him promote alternative newspapers and magazines as well (‘Lawrence Ferlinghetti, poet and founder of City Lights bookshop, dies aged 101’, Sian Cain, The Guardian, 23-Feb-2021, www.theguardian.com).
(Image: citylights.com)
Maverick bookseller
City Lights was always an innovator in the bookselling biz. It arose with the onset of the paperback revolution, a wave that the San Fran bookshop happily rode. Hard covers were expensive so City Lights became the first all-paperback bookshop in the US (co-founder Paul Martin’s idea). The bookstore bucked the bookselling status quo – before City Lights came along readers could only buy paperbacks from drugstores, bus stations and newsstands (‘The Beat Generation in San Francisco’, Bill Morgan, www.citylights.com). Ferlinghetti’s store was a democratising force in US bookselling, City Lights’ paperbacks were cheap, all budgets could afford their quality pocket books. City Lights’ innovativeness extended to opening hours. Unlike the bulk of mainstream American bookshops who usually closed early in the Fifties, City Lights stayed open seven days a week and late into the night.
🔺 the ’emperor of City Lights
Bookshop outreach
The bookshop extended outreach activities to the local community. The store maintained a community bulletin board, disseminating info for the North Beach literary set, thus helping to foster the local counterculture community. Ferlinghetti also furnished the City Lights store with letter racks for itinerants who frequented the triangular storefront to collect their mail.
The ‘Howl’ episode
In 1956 Ferlinghetti published and distributed a poem by an unknown Beat poet Allen Ginsberg. Police in an undercover sting operation confiscated Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’🄱 collection and arrested Ferlinghetti who was charged with selling “obscene material and corrupting America’s youth”. The subsequent trial became a cause celeb in the industry. The judge found that the publication had “redeeming social significance” and therefore was not obscene🄲. The trial publicity was great for Ginsberg’s poetry and for City Lights. ‘Howl’ became an underground best-seller and a symbol of both the counterculture and the Beat Generation🄳 (Morgan).
🔺 Ferlinghetti outside City Lights, 1950s
Politicalpoetics
The character of City Lights reflected Ferlinghetti’s own political and social activism. The “philosophical anarchist” was a bulwark for left causes, eg, using the bookshop venue to host many sit-ins and protests against the Vietnam War (“books, not bombs”). Ferlinghetti believed that poetry was a social force capable of raising the consciousness of the people.
Ferlinghetti & Ginsberg (Source: SFist)
Precarious business model?
Profitability was not City Lights’ raison d’être. Staying out of “the red” was a constant challenge. To stay afloat sometimes the publishing side needed to bail out the retail sales which was losing money and at other times it was vice versa (Cain). What didn’t help matters financial were the activities of shoplifting gangs in the Seventies which targeted the bookshop. And if it wasn’t them it was insiders like poet Gregory Corso helping himself liberally to the till (Morgan).
Whitman & Ferlinghetti (seated) in 2002 (Photo: Mary Duncan/Paris Writers Press)
Footnote: the extent to which Shakespeare and Co and City Lights can be called sister bookshops comes down largely to the personal visions of their founders Whitman and Ferlinghetti🄴 who were both lifelong book tragics🄵, “(sharing a) love of literature and poetry (and a) devotion and commitment to the power of words” (‘The Beats go on…’, Alix Sharkey, The Guardian, 02-Mar-2002, www.theguardian.com). For Whitman and Ferlinghetti however, the bookshop was more than a receptacle for selling books, it filled the roles of haven and incubator in nurturing new writers as well as a hub for the local literary community. Sister bookstores they may be but they are clearly not identical twins when it comes to the interiors and decors of the two bookshops…City Lights’ book displays are neatly-ordered and arranged whereas Shakespeare and Co is clutter central to the max!
City Lights (Photo: Literary Hub)
𓂉𓂊𓂉
Lawrence Monsanto Ferlinghetti, poet, painter, social activist, and co-founder of City Lights. The New York born, Paris educated, bookseller and publisher, died on 22nd February 2021, aged 101.
⊞⊟⊠⊡⊞⊟⊠⊡
🄰 City Lights’ address, 261-271 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco 94133, places it technically within Chinatown but the store identifies with the adjoining precinct of North Beach
🄱 ‘Howl’, ‘I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness…’ was a thunderbolt against the conservative poetry establishment of Fifties America, the prototype for a new poetry which immersed itself in “wide-eyed truth-telling”
🄲 the basis of the acquittal was a precedent called on in later attempts to overturn bans on works like Tropic of Capricorn and Naked Lunch
🄳 although often associated with them, City Light’s publishing arm never confined itself to the beat writers, it also publishes the work of non-Beat luminaries like Charles Bukowski, Sam Shepard and Malcolm Lowry
🄴 strictly speaking Ferlinghetti wasn’t the founder of City Lights, that was sociology academic Paul D Martin but Ferlinghetti got into the business on the ground floor in 1953 and took sole charge of the bookshop within two years after Martin left
🄵 Whitman literally slept in a room in the store overflowing with books
France’s penal colony network in New Caledonia (see preceding post) was not exactly a summer camp for delinquents, it was a brutal, unforgiving and unrelenting environment for existing rather than living. Comparatively though, it pales into lesser significant when stacked up against the unimaginable inferno of its South American equivalent in the colonies pénitentiaires of Guyane française.
The Napoleonic manoeuvre In 1851 Napoleon’s nephew Louis-Napoleon, elected president of the French Republic, staged a coup from above. With army backing he neutralised the national parliament and enacted a new constitution giving himself sweeping new dictatorial powers, a decisive step on the road to emulating his uncle by declaring himself emperor, Napoleon III, in 1852. With France’s jails and hulks overflowing with the incarcerated multitudes, swollen further by the emperor’s defeated opponents, much of the surplus prison population was transported to France’s Algerian colony. At the same time Louis-Napoleon took the opportunity to establish a new penal colony in French Guiana and send out the first lot of transportés. Transportation to penal colonies, especially to Guyane, to New Caledonia and to Algeria, allowed France to rid itself of dangerous and incorrigible offenders at home, and to punish them for their sins by subjecting them to a life of hard labour❋ [Jean-Lucien Sanchez. ‘The French Empire, 1542–1976’. Clare Anderson. A Global History of Convicts and Penal Colonies, Bloomsbury, 2018. hal-01813392. HAL Id: hal-01813392].
Economies of labourAside from cleansing France of the criminal element, transportation served another purpose for Napoleon III. Slavery had been the engine of growth for France’s colonial empire, but France’s abolition of the institution in 1848 resulted in a massive shortage of cheap labour. Turning French Guiana (FG) and other French colonies into penitentiaries—replacing the lost plantation workers, the freed black African slaves (known as Maroons) with convicts in FG—neatly solved the problem [‘France’s “dry guillotine” a hell on earth for convicts’, (Marea Donnelly), Daily Telegraph, 22-Aug-2018, www.dailytelegraph.com.au].
Bagne le plus diaboliqueThe penal system in Guyane française revolved around two principal locations⧆, one was the Prison of Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni which functioned as the destination of first arrival for transportés (and usually only a temporary home for the majority). From here, the worst of the bagnards (convicts), the recaptured escapees and the relégués (recidivists), were relocated down the coast to the other Guyane penitentiary, Bagne de Cayenne. Here, a small group of off-shore islands, Îles du Salut (Salvation Islands) comprised the penal colony on which French Guiana’s dark reputation hangs. Better known as Devil’s Island, a collective descriptor for three distinct islands, the farthest away and most inaccessible of which, Île du Diable, was reserved for a select group of prisoners⦿.
(Image: www.thevintagenews.com)
The history of Devil’s Island is one of notoriety and longevity (operating from 1852 to 1946). Conditions for inmates were horrendous… hard labour from six in the morning to six at night (including being assigned to endlessly building roads that were never intended to be finished); working and living in a malarial coast and tropical jungle environment; susceptibility to a host of diseases including yellow fever, typhus, cholera and malaria; the more dangerous prisoners solitarily confined to tiny cells 1.8m x 2m indefinitely, and often exposed to the elements [‘French Guiana Prison That Inspired “Papillon”, (Karin-Marijke Vis), Atlas Obscura, 11-Aug-2015, www.atlasobscura.com].
Île du Diablo (Photo: Romain Veillon / www.thespaces.com)
A tropical death camp A sense of mortality in the penal colony was ever-present – convicts fought and murdered each other, punishment by execution (by guillotine) was regularly meted out❂. For those who could no longer stand the psychological and physical torture of incarceration in such a sub-human hell hole, driven to near-insanity, the urge to escape (“Chercher la belle”) exerted a powerful pull. This however was virtually a suicidal course of action as would-be escapees faced shark-infested waters and jungles teeming with jaguars, snakes and other deadly beasts [‘The story of the world’s most infamous penal system – ever?’, (Robert Walsh), History is Now Magazine, www.historyisnowmagazine.com]. In the first 14 years of the Guyane prisons’ operation, two-thirds of the convicts perished (Sanchez) At its worst point Devil’s Island had a 75% death-rate.
The sentencing regime was particularly harsh…bagnards transported to FG were subjected to the penalty of ‘doubleage’. This meant that on the expiration of a prisoner’s sentence, he or she✦ had to remain working in the colony for an additional period that was equivalent to the original sentence. And if prisoners were sentenced to terms of more than eight years, this automatically became a life sentence (Donnelly).
⌂ the Dreyfus Tower
Dreyfus Affair puts the spotlight on Devil’s Island Among the over 52,000 déportés sent to Devil’s Island/Cayenne from its inception to 1936, its most famous inmate was Alfred Dreyfus, who had been wrongful arrested on a trumped-up charge of selling military secrets to Germany. Dreyfus endured over fours years on solitary Île du Diable before his case became a cause célèbre taken up by prominent citizens like novelist Emile Zola. Protests forced the French government—in a convoluted set of developments—to reopen Dreyfus’ case, retry him, re-convict him then free him and eventually exonerate him. The Dreyfus affair exposed entrenched anti-Semitism in the French military and in society [‘Devil’s Island Prison History and Facts’, Prison History, www.prisonhistory.net/].
⌂ the Devil’s Island story became widely known after ex-inmate Henri Charriere’s published account of his escape, ‘Papillon’, was made into a Hollywood movie in the early 70s
An anachronism of incarceration historyThe penitentiaries at Cayenne and Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni persisted for an inordinately long time, considering that apart from absorbing the overflow from the prison system in Metropolitan France they didn’t achieve all that much that was positive. The penal colonies were not only a humanitarian catastrophe, but an economic disaster…the planted crops failed badly and self-sufficiently was never achieved, signalling a complete failure in the objective of transforming the bagnards into settlers. In one year alone, 1865, the soaring cost of the FG enterprise reached in excess of 3.75 million francs! (Sanchez). After Salvation Army adjutant Charles Péan exposed the horrors, the utter inhumanity, of France’s Devil’s Island in a damning investigation⌽, the French authorities dragged their feet for another 25 years before they finally drew the curtain on this shameful chapter of their penal history [‘Devil’s Island’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].
(Map: BBC News)
Endnote: These days France calls Guyane française an overseas department rather than a colony, and the colonial prisons are barely a distant memory. Instead today FP hosts the Guiana Space Centre (close to the town of Kourou), a Spaceport run in conjunction with the European Space Agency.
Changing pattern of deportations from metropole to colonies1852-1866: majority of deportees sent to French Guiana From 1866: deportees from Europe sent to New Caledonia From 1866: deportees from North Africa, Asia and the Caribbean sent to French Guiana
§§ a rider to the system was that the ultimate destination of deportees could also depend on whether they were common or political prisoners
▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂.▂▂▂▂▂
❋ while lightening the burden on the government for domestic prison expenditure
⧆ plus a scattering of sub-camps of convicts located around different parts of French Guiana
⦿ mainly traitors (or accused ones like Dreyfus) and political dissidents. In WWI it housed spies and deserters (Donnelly). Others falling foul of French colonial justice ended up in Caribbean penal holdings on islands such as Guadalupe and Martinique
❂ the macabre pet name of inmates for Devil’s Island was the “Dry Guillotine” (“it kills it’s victims more slowly than the actual guillotine but kills them just as certainly”)
✦ women convicts were transported to FG, but there were only just shy of 400 deported in the duration of the penal colony
⌽ in 1928 duty of care was still non-existent: the prison administrators’ gross negligence was still resulting in 400 inmates dying each year and 2,400 freed prisoners left to fend for themselves
The United States over the years has had a mania about banning lots of things—there’s been an unspoken exemption granted to bad taste—but one of the more curious prohibitions in the 20th century was that on the seemingly innocuous pinball machine.
In the early 1930s the Gottlieb Company of Chicago introduced the first coin-operated, machines, the “Baffle Ball”. The timing was right, the Great Depression had hit, playing pinball was a cheap and accessible form of entertainment for the financially impoverished masses, and the machines caught on. A few years later machines became electromechanical and automatic score counters were added, making games more appealing [“The History of Pinball Machines and Pintables”, BMI Gaming, www.bmigaming.com/].
The moral legislatorsBy the time of America’s entry into WWII pinball’s popularity had grown exponentially. Not all sectors of American society however were enthusiastic about the game. Churches and school boards harboured a perception of pinball as corrupting the morals of American youth, asserting that children would steal coins and skip school to play❋. Lawmakers too viewed pinball negatively because they saw it a game of chance and thus was a form of gambling. They shared the view that it “a time and dime-waster for impressionable youth”. Legislators were also suspicious that it may be a “mafia-run racket” because of Chicago’s centrality in pinball machine manufacturing, a “hotbed of organised crime” [“That Time America Outlawed Pinball”, (Christopher Klein), History, upd. 22-Aug-2018, www.history.com ; “11 Things You Didn’t Know About Pinball History”, (Seth Porges), Popular Mechanics, 01-Sep-2009, www.popularmechanics.com].
⍌ City authorities vandalising the machines
(Source: Chicago Sun-Times)
New York City’s crusade against the pinball
The mayor of NYC, Fiorello LaGuardia, took these perceptions to heart, launching a very proactive approach to rid the city of these “insidious nickel-stealers” by ordering the police force to make “Prohibition-style pinball raids” on candy stores, bowling alleys, speakeasies, cigar stores, drugstores, amusement centres, etc [“The Mayor Who Took a Sledgehammer to NYC’s Pinball Machines”, (Conor Friedersdorf), The Atlantic, 18-Jan-2013, www.theatlantic.com]. Illegal pinball machines and slot machines were confiscated and some were smashed in staged, publicity-conscious showcases (Klein).
LaGuardia’s anti-pinball machine crusade took on extra zeal after Pearl Harbour, which allowed him to characterise it as a patriotic cause…the line run by the NYC mayor was that the copper, aluminium and nickel components of the outlawed machines could be better utilised in the materiel requirements of America’s war efforts (Klein). This didn’t prevent many machines ending up dumped in NYC harbour.
⍌ 1963 ‘Swing Time’ Gottlieb machine
Banned, but not eliminatedOther cities were quick to follow NYC’s example, Including Chicago, Milwaukee, Los Angeles and New Orleans, with pinball bans extending across the country. Other cities like Washington DC didn’t go as far but prohibited children from playing it during school hours. The inevitable consequence of banning was to drive pinball activity underground (resurfacing in places like the back rooms of ‘porno’ book shops). Thus marginalised, pinball become “part of rebel culture”⧆ (Klein).
⍓ Roger Sharpe, “calling the shot!”
(Source: IFPA)
The long ban, ended by a ‘Sharpe’ player Remarkably, the outlawing of pinball machines persisted until the 1970s – despite the technical innovation of “flippers” (pivoted arms activated to propel the ball back up the table) introduced in Gottlieb’s 1947 “Humpty-Dumpty” machine which made the game more one of reflexes (skill) than of chance. Finally, in 1974 the Californian Supreme Court, accepting the skill component, overturned the prohibition in that state. In 1976 NYC councillors were still skeptical about pinball and it took a spectacular courtroom demonstration by one of the game’s top exponents, Roger Sharpe, to break the impasse. Sharpe won over the doubters by nominating beforehand which lane he would propel the ball through and then making the shot, demonstrating that patience, hand-eye coordination and reflexes, not luck, were the ingredients for success in the game◰[“How One Perfect Shot Saved Pinball From Being Illegal In The US”, (Matt Blitz), Gizmodo, 19-Aug-2013, www.gizmodo.com.au].
⍓ An “Indiana Jones” Williams machine with revolver for plunger
With the ‘liberation’ of pinball, player interest revived in the late Seventies, but it was a short-lived triumph. The advent of video games provided compelling competition (the newer technology requiring fewer repairs and less space). By the Nineties the writing was on the wall for arcades and the coin-op industry, as home video-games and the internet were rendering them obsolete [“The First Family of Pinball: Meet the local wizards behind the game’s huge resurgence”, (Ryan Smith), Reader, 03-May-2018, www.chicagoreader.com]. In any case, the repealing of the prohibition wasn’t uniformly implemented…Chicago city authorities resisted, still associating pinball machines with “nests of gangs and drugs” for juveniles [“Chicago once waged a 40-year war on Pinball”, (Ryan Smith), The Bleader, 03-May-2018, www.chicagoreader.com]. Prohibition in Kokomo, Indiana, was not ended till 2016✦ [“Pinball—once a source of vice and immorality—now, legal in Kokomo, Ind., after 61-year ban”, (Ben Guarino), Washington Post, 15-Dec-2016, www.washingtonpost.com].
PostScript: Surviving if not exactly thrivingToday, the Stern Pinball Co (Chicago) is the only manufacturer of machines left in the business in America. If not played by casual gamers in anything like its numbers in the “Baby Boomer” era (except in video game mode), it has experienced a resurgence of sorts – as an annual series of professional tournaments (Stern Pro Circuit) (among its internationally ranked seeds are Roger Sharpe’s two sons).
⍓ Roger Daltry (Tommy “Pinball Wizard”) at the controls
❋ Seth Porges identifies something quasi-religious in the anti-pinball position, a “temperance-fuelled” belief that the activity was “a tool from the devil” corrupting young people (Friedersdorf)
◰ the councillors were also persuaded to overturn the ban by the eloquent testimony mounted by Sharpe, who went on to be a pinball star witness in subsequent, successful hearings in other states. Another factor in the outcome may have been revenue-raising, eg, Mayor Daley in Chicago wanted to lift the ban so as to tax individual machines and licensing operators (Smith, “Chicago once waged”)
⧆ the rebel image remained into the late 1960s and ‘70s with the anti-establishment tone of The Who’s rock opera about a “pinball wizard”, Tommy
✦ it was a similar story in Nashville, TN, for anyone under 18, and in some places and times it is still illegal – such as on Sundays in Ocean City, N.J. (Porges)
Sydney’s long-debated second international airport is slated to be completed—in so far as anything can be asserted with any confidence in the post-coronavirus age—by 31st December 2025❋. The site selected and given final approval by the Commonwealth government in 2014, Badgerys Creek, is on 1,780 hectares of land in greater western Sydney in indigenous Darug country.
(Source: SMH)
The saga begins in 1946. Towra Point (in Sydney’s south) is mooted by the NSW state government as a likely site for the second airport◲…over the next 40 years at least 20 sites are put forward as prospective locations for another airport to ease congestion at the existing Kingsford Smith Airport. Successive federal governments of differing political hues cast the net far and wide—to the north, south and west of Sydney—in the hope of finding a site that best meets the needs. When the government flags that it favours Somersby (Central Coast) and Galston (northwest) in the early 1970s, outbreaks of NIMBY-ism (vocal grass-roots protests from the locals) leads Canberra to back down. Another candidate, Holsworthy (southwest), is rejected because of an unknown number of unexploded military projectiles littering the site from a nearby army base and its proximity to a nuclear facility, only to be unfathomably resurrected as a prospect in the mid-1990s by the Howard government and then quickly dropped again on grounds of “environmental unsuitability”. Goulburn, 200km southwest of Sydney, too gets shelved – because of the high capital costs involved [‘Second Sydney Airport – A Chronology’, Parliament of Australia, www.aph.gov.au/].
(Source: www.aph.gov.au/)
Frustrated at the ongoing failure to resolve a viable site for the second airport, the Commonwealth toys with the idea of ditching the whole project and looks at an alternative plan sans second airport – the construction of a third runway at Kingsford Smith Airport and complimenting it with a VFT (very fast train) connecting Sydney and Canberra (the VFT never materialises). By the mid-1980s only two sites remain in the running – Wilton and Badgerys Creek⊞. By 1986 Badgerys Creek is ”last man standing” and the Crown purchases land there.
Even after settling on the location, progress on the second airport mimics the more inane capers of TV’s Yes Minister – a stop-start pattern of self-limiting actions, deferment of decisions, vacillations. Feasibility and EIS studies come and go, budgetary problems always loom, the Commonwealth and the state government bickers over what form the airport should take, engaging in political points-scoring, etc. The achievement of anything tangible, actual progress, is grotesquely underwhelming. One example will suffice: 1988, the incumbent government proposes to fast track the construction of Badgerys Creek, but no action follows the words. In 1991 another study contradicts this, finding there’s “no pressing need” to rush the second airport. Three more years on and fast tracking is back on the agenda, the new urgency is the 2000 Olympics. But in 1995 it is reported there “has been little or no development at Badgerys Creek” (“token construction works to date”) and later that year the Commonwealth announces that “the airport won’t be ready for the Sydney Olympics”… and so it goes (‘Second Sydney Airport’).
⌂ Blue Mountains anti-airport bumper sticker
Consistent with the past fraught nature of the second airport issue, the choice of Badgerys Creek is far from consensual. Opposition from Blue Mountains Council and its residents’ groups is particularly vocal – the litany of objections include its likely impact on the national park’s ecology, the threat to its UNESCO World Heritage site status, health hazards, air and noise pollution, [‘Council study finds airport noise on natural areas overlooked’, WSROC, 08-Dec-2017, www.wsroc.com.au]. Some have again raised the question of whether a second airport is really necessary, arguing that existing airport capacity at Bankstown and Richmond airports could be expanded to lighten the domestic passenger and cargo transport burden on Kingsford Smith [‘Is a new airport at Badgerys Creek really needed?’, (Peter Martin), Sydney Morning Herald, 15-Apr-2014, www.smh.com.au].
⌂ Future aerotropolis?
✑ ✑ ✑ ✑ ✑ ✑
Sorting out the nomenclature
Once the Commonwealth red-inks the Badgerys Creek site in 2014, a media debate ensues over whose name the new airport should bear. The early favourite is Sydney Harbour Bridge engineer John JC Bradfield, strongly lobbied for by politicians from both sides (LNP prime minister and premier, Labor state opposition leader, etc) [‘Bradfield Airport has universal approval’, (Danile Meers), Daily Telegraph, 06-Nov-2014, www.dailytelegraph.com.au]. Others including Wollongong councillors and the Royal Aeronautical Society plump for Lawrence Hargrave, a seminal figure associated with advances in the field of aeronautical pioneering (unlike Bradfield). From a western Sydney viewpoint, a Penrith City councillor makes a pitch for William ‘Billy’ Hart, who flew a box-kite plane (based on Hargrave’s earlier breakthrough invention) from Penrith to Parramatta in 1911 [‘Penrith Council defer naming of Western Sydney Airport site’, (Krystyna Pollard), Liverpool City Champion, 02-Mar-2017, www.liverpoolcitychampion.com.au].
Badgery of Badgerys Creek
The most intriguing candidate, is one with both pioneering credentials like Hargrave and Hart, and real geographical “skin in the game”…(Andrew) Delfosse Badgery, whose family gives its name to the suburb encompassing the airport site—great-grandfather James Badgery settled the area in 1799—was the first person to fly a plane of his own construction in Australia. Badgery flew from Sutton Forest to Goulburn, a distance of less than 50 miles, in 1914)❂. The case for “Delfosse Badgery Airport” is supported by the aviator’s family and the St Marys Historical Society [‘Pilot’s claims has wings: Aviation pioneer Andrew Delfosse Badgery built the first plane in Australia at Badgery’s Creek…and Flew It!’, (Ian Walker), Daily Telegraph, 12-Nov-2014, www.dailytelegraph.com.au].
⌂ Del Badgery & his 1914 bi-plane
(Picture: Liverpool City Council)
And the winner is? With one eye on gender-inclusiveness and PC “brownie points”, and a nod perhaps to North American precedents◗, the Morrison government in 2019 opts to name Sydney’s second international airport after Nancy Bird-Walton, a pioneer aviatrix icon of Australia – for a brief summary of Bird-Walton’s achievements in flight see my blog dated 27-May-2017, ‘Equality at 10,000 Feet: The Pioneer Aviatrix in the Golden Age of Aviation – Part I’.
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❋ no bets on the chances of this being a lay down misère, given the vicissitudes of the second airport story
◲ after opposition from the Sutherland Shire local government over concern about noise levels, the Gorton government kills off the scheme in 1969, citing “environmental difficulties”
⊞ indicative of government indecisiveness, Badgerys Creek is on and off the short list of candidates several times over a span of 45 years before the final take-up by the Abbott government
❂ it is a matter of uncertainty whether Badgery built the plane (a Cauldron bi-plane) on the family farm at Badgerys Creek or at Sutton Forest in the Southern Highlands (Pollard)
◗ airports in Niagara-Ontario and Kansas named (respectively) after pioneering aviatrixesDorothy Rungeling and Amelia Earhart
As all of us are only too aware, COVID-19 has cut a swathe through public gatherings, large aggregations of people are a “no-no” in 2020. Across the globe all manner of events have been on the receiving end of a different sort of cancel culture treatment. The superhero-studded world of comic book conventions has not been immune to this contagion. Comic-cons everywhere, including the San Diego Comic-Con International, America’s oldest comic book convention, have been red pencilled in this year of the plague. But if we turn the clock back some 70 years we might observe a time when the existential threat was directed at the product itself, the actual comic books.
There were no organised comic-cons in the more cautious and conformist 1940s and 50s, but this in no way equated with a lack of popularity of comic books. In fact the Forties had been a Golden Age, especially for American comic books, Comic strip creators were riding high with a slew of superhero characters—including Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman and Captain America, the Avengers and Captain Marvel—proving lucrative for companies like Detective Comics (DC Comics), Entertaining Comics (EC Comics) and Timely Comics (Marvel Comics). By mid-decade comic books were the most popular form of entertainment in the US (with 80 to 100 million copies being sold per weekBy the late 1940s comic books were well and truly being marketed towards adults as well…”fed by the same streams as pulp fiction and film noir, titles (began to tell) lurid stories of crime, vice, lust and horror” [David Hajdu, The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America, (2008)].
♦️ Wonder Woman (Sensation Comics, 1942)
‘Seduction of the Innocent’ Dark clouds appeared over the comics industry’s blue skies in 1954 with the publication of Seduction of the Innocent by a Bavarian-born neurobiologist Fredric Wertham. The book was “a full-throttled attack on the lurid contents of various crime, horror, and even super-hero titles, (with an emphasis on) graphic illustrations of wife-beatings, sado-masochism, and gruesome murders”⁕ Sean Howe, Marvel Comics: The Untold Story, (2012)]. Wertham’s inditement of the American comics of the day was that they corrupted impressionable youth, inveigling them into fanaticising about evil, leading them on a ruinous path to criminal behaviour, etc.[‘History of Comics Censorship, Part 1’, CBLDF, www.cbldf.org/].
♦️ Crime SuspenStories, 1950
1940s, North and bonfires Wertham was not the first critic to take aim at the US comic book industry. In the view of CBLDF✥, since the 1930s “the comics medium has been stigmatized as low-value speech”. In 1940 conservative commentator Sterling North urged parents and educators to guard against the influx of “mayhem, murder, torture and abduction—often with a child as the victim” in contemporary comic strips. North also decried the incidence of “voluptuous females in scanty attire, machine gun (-wielding hoodlums) and “cheap political propaganda” in the comics. The effect on children, he went on to say, of these “badly drawn, badly written and badly printed” strips was “a strain on young eyes and young nervous systems” as well as constituting “a violent stimulant” to them [North, Sterling. “A National Disgrace”. Childhood Education. 17.1, 1940: 56. Print.]. During WWII religious and patriotic organisations conducted public burnings of ‘disapproved’ comic books in American neighbourhoods – in ironic juxtaposition of the war being fought overseas concurrently against Nazi Germany (’Comic Censorship, Part 1’).
♦️ Dr Wertham, researching
“>
“Pop culture McCarthyite” But it was Seduction of the Innocent that struck the strongest chord in a 1950s America “looking over its shoulder” for real or imagined enemies of society in the grip of a hysteria heightened by McCarthyism. It triggered a public outcry, prompting an investigation into the industry by a Senate sub-committee. Publicity from the hearing was damning and the fallout was devastating. Comic books were denounced by Wertham and other moral crusaders as contributing to juvenile delinquency⚉. At the height of the moral panic, comic book publishers were sometimes treated as though they were mobsters, and the cartoonists, as if they were pornographers [‘The Caped Crusader’ (Jeet Heer), Slate, 04-Apr-2008, www.slate.com; ’Comic Censorship, Part 1’].
The emasculated comic book Threatened with both public and government censure, the comics industry choose to self-regulate, introducing the Comic Code Authority, “a censorship code that thoroughly sanitized the content of comics for years to come”. The new code (something analogous to the film world’s draconian Hays Code) was taken to ridiculous lengths, it forbade comics from showing zombies, vampires, ghouls and werewolves; words like ‘horror’ and ‘terror’ couldn’t be mentioned in the story lines; nor could criminals be portrayed sympathetically and the institution of marriage could not be seen to be disrespected (Howe).
♦️ The imprimatur of the self-censor
Comic book publishers were forced to produce ‘purified’ comics suitable for a younger market—more infantile and tamer stories, squeaky-clean but ‘dopey’ heroes replacing the previous super-overachievers—in short, “safe fantasies” for the youngest readers (’Comic Censorship, Part 1’).
The economic and human toll The new reality of the world of comic books decimated the industry’s hitherto prosperity…between 1954 and 1956 the number of titles produced was cut by more than half – from 650 in 250 over that two-year period!✧. By summer 1954 15 comics publishers in the US went belly-up. EC Comics, up to then one of the market leaders, discontinued all its comics lines…its much-vilified publisher William Gaines switching production solely to the satirical Mad magazine. Over 800 jobs in the industry vanished more or less immediately (Howe; Hajdu). Many talented inkers and pencillers left the industry for good, many for economic reasons but others due at least in part to the stifling of their creative artistic output.
Endnote: Demise of adult comics Both Wertham and North in their hatchet jobs on the comics genre made the error of completely disregarding the significant adult readership of comic books. The recovery of the industry, the winning back of that readership, took many years…it didn’t really happen until the emergence of ‘Underground’ comics in the 1960s with publications like Zap Comics and comic artists like R Crumb§ [‘History of Comics Censorship, Part 2, CBLDF, www.cbldf.org/].
♦️ Detective Comics, 1945
PostScript: The Wertham thesis unpacked After it became accessible in 2010 Wertham’s research on comics books was investigated and his conclusions found largely baseless…Wertham was said to have manipulated data, overstated, compromised, and fabricated evidence. A further weakness of his work was that he used non-representative samples as the basis for his conclusions. Scorn was also poured on Wertham’s contentions that the comic character Superman harboured Nazi SS tendencies, that the Batman/Robin relationship had homoerotic overtones, and that Wonder Woman was a lesbian role model (Wertham saw this as wholly undesirable)[‘Fredric Wertham’,Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org; Heer].
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⁕ that serious comics of the period were laden with violence, misogyny and racism, could not be disputed (Heer)
✥
⚉
dislike of popular comics. Wertham considered their consumption blocked children from an appreciation of literature and fine arts(Hajdu; Heer)
✧
§ the fashionability of adult readership was further advanced by the advent of graphic novels
Captain Marvel and protege
⁕ that serious comics of the period were laden with violence, misogyny and racism, could not be disputed (Heer)
✥ Comic Book Legal Defense Fund
⚉ a sense of elitism also coloured Wertham et al’s dislike of popular comics. Wertham considered their consumption blocked children from an appreciation of literature and fine arts
✧ in excess of 100 pieces of anti-comic book legislation came into effect in the Fifties (Hajdu)
§ the fashionability of adult readership was further advanced by the advent of graphic novels
The Green Gang (Qing Bang) was a Chinese form of mafia organisation based in Shànghâi, best known for their activities in the 1920s and 1930s as a web of street gangs. The career of their paramount leader, Du Yuesheng, has been well documented in a previous blog, The Emperors of Vice and Crime of Shànghâi‘s Yesteryear (February 2020). But the origins of the gang (which might be more usefully thought of as a clique) were rooted in a specific type of brotherhood associated with boatmen in the early Qing Dynasty (17th-18th centuries).
The story starts with “three sworn brothers”, Weng Yan, Qian Jian and Pan Qing, who won a contract from Emperor Yongzheng (Yinzhen) to manage the transport of grain materials on the Yellow River (Grand Canal) route in Old China. The trio went on to form an association of boatmen which utilised Luojiao principles (Buddhist sect) to attract workers. The organisation that evolved on the Canal was a kind of professional trade federation dedicated to serving the interests of it’s waterborne employees (including the use of strong-arm tactics to protect them from corrupt officials and local thugs) [Brian G Martin, The Shànghâi Green Gang: Politics and Organized Crime, 1919-1937, (1996)].
🔺 The Grand Canal
Over time, the structure took on a quasi-government character with specific departments formed to handle different functions. It also evolved into a secret society with very strict membership criteria involving a seven-year process before members would be fully admitted. The society’s activities earned the ire of the authorities and was driven underground. After experiencing disruptions in the Grand Canal trade the business eventually dissolved [‘Shanghai’s Shadowy Green Gang’, (Sun Jiahui), (The World of Chinese), 28-Aug-2015, www.theworldofchinese.com].
But the society and the boatmen adapted to the changes, segueing into the salt smuggling business in northern Jiangsu Province – in the process forming a new organisation, Anqing Daoyou (literally “Friends of the Way of Tranquility and Purity”), which was a direct forerunner to the modern Green Gang organisation (‘Shanghai’s Shadowy Green Gang’).
Green versus Red
For a brief period in the early 20th century the Green Gang shared the underworld spotlight in Shànghâi with a rival body, the Red Gang (Hong Gang)❇. In the years of the early republic the ‘Reds’ managed to establish “a complete monopoly over the illicit trade of (Shànghâi) opium” in cooperation with the Green Gang and the Big Eight Mob (the ubiquitous Green Gang boss Huang Jirong had links to the Red Gang)[‘Shanghai’s Gangs in the Early 20th Century’, (Clay Capra), 10-Dec-2018, www.umdjanus.com]. By the 1920s the ‘Greens’ by themselves were a formidable mob organisation in Shànghâi, trafficking in opium, using stand-over tactics to intimidate workers and business owners [‘The Green Gang of Shanghai’, (Pat Welsh), (China Insight), 01-Nov-2013, www.chinainsight.info].
Du and the KMT
Huang (and his wife Lin Guisheng) elevated Du Yuesheng to a leadership position in Green Gang based in the French Concession area, from which he never looked back. The Green Gang formed an interesting two-way relationship with the KMT (Kuomintang), it received protection from the KMT and was given a free hand to carry on it’s various illegal business activities in Shànghâi. In return the Green Gang smuggled weapons and money (eg, opium profits) to the KMT and Chiang Kai-shek✡ co-opted Du’s Green Gang in the suppression of the communist element in Shànghâi in 1927 (up to 5,000 communist opponents of Chiang liquidated). Chiang and the Nationalist government—with only a nominal hold over the country—needed the support of local warlords and drug lords like Du as much as they needed the KMT’s imprimatur [Derks, Hans. History of the Opium Problem: The Assault on the East, Ca. 1600-1950. Vol. 105, Brill, 2012. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.1163/j.ctv4cbhdf. Accessed 21 Feb. 2020].
🔺 Chiang Kai-shek
A secret society of gangsters and a …
The Green Gang was a criminal confederation of leviathan proportions, a Chinese Triad coordinating a wide network of individual gangs with connections to powerful and influential figures in Shànghâi. But another arm of the organisation had a social welfare role through membership of the secret societies. Peasants for example who were driven off their land and into the city could find aid in the banghui – a “mutual help group”[‘Green Gang’, www.streetsofshanghai.pbworks.com; ’History of the Opium Problem’].
Footnote: Drawing the curtain on the Green Gang
With the defeat and flight of Chiang’s KMT in 1949, the Green Gang also fled Shànghâi for Hong Kong where it opened up heroin refineries, but couldn’t establish itself in the market against the stiff competition of the local drug syndicates in HK. By 1955 Qing Bang had disappeared from the scene [‘Green Gang’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org/].
✡ Chiang himself may have been a member of the Green Gang during the years he lived in Shànghâi, however the evidence is hazy on this (‘Shanghai’s Shadowy Green Gang’)
This piece in the China Daily Show caught my eye recently…”the first season of CSI’s much-anticipated ‘Shanghai’ spin-off has been cancelled, after scriptwriters failed to take into account the East Coast city’s complete absence of crime”. It goes on to say, “plotlines involving corruption, sexual harassment and high-end ergotou[𝕒] were shelvedafter quality-control cadres for the State Administration of Radio Film and Television (SARFT) cited an ’insufficient suspension of disbelief’ for viewers”[𝕓].
🔺 The formula: the standardShànghâiperiod crime series
This amused me, less for the satirical tone inherent in the piece (CSI detectives investigating “high level wok theft”), but because every time I switch on the television in China and flick through the drama offerings on China’s subscription network, a more than healthy proportion of the fare seems to be fixated on 1930s Shànghâi noir and underground crime gangs.
Chinese television entertainment csars of course trade on the viewing public’s nostalgia for a past time where Shànghâi pulsated to a rhythm of decadence, glamorous nightspots and ostentatious ritzy opulence, counterposed against an underbelly of sin, gangland warfare and corrupt police. While these television series, such as the popular Meng’s Palace and New Bund, are pure and typically exaggerated fictions, the sources of their invention were very real.
If the Shànghâi of the 1920s and ‘30s that we visited in the preceding blog deserves it’s glowing epithet, “the Paris of the South”, then it’s other sobriquet, “the whore of Asia”, to describe the seedy and violent underbelly of the same city, is every bit as applicable. The “freebooting capitalism” of Shànghâi in the interwar years[𝕔] and it’s rewards, spawned a wave of criminal activity with underworld bosses vying for a bigger piece of the city’s stupendous economic pie. Like the legitimate commercial powerhouses on the Bund, the gangland “Mr Big’s” were very much part of Shànghâi’s “movers and shakers”.
The Big Three?
The conventional view of Shànghâi‘s criminal underworld in the Twenties and Thirties is that there were three main gang chiefs who ran most of the show. This triumvirate of crime was made up of Du Yuesheng, Huang Jinrong and Zhang Xiaolin, …of the three gang bosses (san daheng), Zhang was of lesser significance, confined to playing a secondary role to Du. The older Huang was first to attain prominence, entering the French Concession police force and rising through the ranks to become police chief. From this advantageous post the corrupt Huang could play both sides and garner a cut of the criminal profits [𝕕].
Huang—Lin—Du
Huang was eventually dismissed from the FP constabulary which led to him going full-time as a criminal overlord. The sacked cop made his fortune with a scheme involving the stealing of incoming opium from the docks, which his gang then transported into Huang’s residence by a back entrance. Huang had the opium—which cost him zilch!—distributed throughout China through his Sanxin Company [‘Murder, Mayhem and Money’, (Ni Dandan), Global Times, 12-Mar-2013, www.globaltimes.cn]. It was the pockmarked Huang’s first wife (Lin Guisheng), an influential behind-the-scene figure in Shànghâi power circles, who provided the boost to the career of the third of the crime triumvirate. Madame Huang took on the young Du Yuesheng as a partner in a French Concession operation, the start of a business empire for Du which ultimately eclipsed that of her husband’s. Du’s power base and muscle was the much feared Green Gang, which numbered as many as 20,000 members at it’s zenith [‘Shanghai in the 1930s’, World History, http://world history.us].
Du and the Green Gang
“Big-eared” Du was a complex and fascinating figure in the Shànghâi underworld scene. As zongshi (grandmaster) of the local crime operation, he was ruthless in business and intimidating in method (he would despatch coffins to the houses of gangland rivals who had earned its displeasure as a grim warning). Yet he forbid members of his Qing Bang gang to violate women, the wealthy Du was generous and wrote off many debts owed him by friends. Du’s business scope was panoramic … opium dens, gambling shacks, prostitution rings strung out across the city, kidnapping, protection rackets, labour contracting, heroin and morphine labs, as well as more ‘legit’ activities. He also founded a boys’ school in the French Connection and was president of the Chinese Red Cross during the Sino-Japanese War. And, in a perverse twist, Du, having made a ‘motza’ from his cur of the proceeds of the opium monopoly, was ultimately made president of the “National Board of Opium Suppression Bureau”! [Derks, Hans.History of the Opium Problem: The Assault on the East, Ca. 1600-1950. Vol. 105, Brill, 2012.JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.1163/j.ctv4cbhdf. Accessed 21 Feb. 2020].
Du’s political ties to the Chinese republic’s political elite
Du sided with Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalists in the conflict against Mao’s communists, playing a role in the 1927 Shànghâi purge. After the Japanese invasion in 1937 Du fled to Hong Kong, a move which lost him goodwill in Shànghâi. After the war Du wanted to return to the city but was not welcomed back and died in Hong Kong exile [‘The three tycoons of gangsters’ Shanghai’, Timeout, 22-Mar-2016, www.timeoutshanghai.com].
It didn’t end in a happy story for the other two ‘tycoons’ either. When the Japanese army invaded, Xiaolin switched sides and aided the Japanese efforts to root out subversive (ie, anti-Japanese) elements in Shànghâi, making him a wanted man by the Nationalists. In 1940 he was executed by one of his own bodyguards. As for Huang, his ultimate downfall was the communists’ takeover in 1949. Stripped of his great wealth, Huang was forced to submit to “self-criticism” and take up lowly work as a street sweeper (‘The three tycoons’).
1932 Hochi map of Shànghâi🔺
A Mexican ‘godfather’ of Shanghai crime?
Another name—juxtaposed against that of Du—occupied a similar senior role in the gangland power structure in Shànghâi. Carlos Garcia, a Mexican who migrated to the fabled city of the east, carved out a lucrative (illicit) business shipping Mexican tequila via Shànghâi back to prohibition-hit California. He has been depicted as the closest thing the Shànghâi underworld of the day had to a “capo di tutti capi”[𝕖]…gang boss Garcia proved indispensable in his ability to adjudicate disputes and ensure that they didn’t develop into internecine gang warfare [‘The Canidrone Tower Gang’, Paul French, (‘That’s Shanghai’), 23-Sep-2019, www.thats,mag.com].
During the 1920s and 1930s it is estimated that there was some 100,000 gangsters in Shànghâi (around three percent of the city’s population at the time) [Brian G Martin, The Shanghai Green Gang: Politics and Organized Crime, 1919-1937, (1996)]. The vice empires of Du and his ilk were built on control over the city’s prostitution, gambling and drug trade, especially opium.
The law-enforcers’ role
The city’s police, tempted by tangible graft and corruption all around, were inherently weak, explaining why Shànghâi fell prone to unchecked lawlessness and gangsterhood. Irredeemable “bad apples” like the discredited Huang thrived in the tainted civil police agencies of 1920s and ’30s Shànghâi. The individual carve-up of the city constabulary into three distinct and unrelated entities, added to the police’s overall inefficiency. Law enforcement suffered hugely as a result of the absence of a single, paramount city police force, making it very difficult for the police to operate strategically and cohesively to rein in the city’s countless ’villains’ [‘The Shanghai Settlements’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].
Endnote: Gangs of old Shànghâi
Carlos Garcia’s key role in the city’s crime business is a reminder of the importance of the non-Chinese element in the Shànghâi underworld. As well as Garcia, there were other “blow-ins”, characters like ’Lucky’ Jack Riley. Riley, an escaped convict from the US, “lucked-in” in a big way on settling in the inter-war East Asian crime capital. Riley succeeded in cornering the Shànghâi slot machine market (patronised heavily by the foreign military personnel in residence), and with a Jewish criminal associate, he ran from a business from Shànghâi servicing prohibition-era America’s habit for heroin. Roaming the mean streets of 1930s Shànghâi were a host of multicultural gangs—Portuguese gangs, Spanish gangs, Mexican gangs, Jewish gangs, etc—giving the cosmopolitan edge of Shànghâi another dimension [‘Those Rogue Foreigners Ruled the Streets of 1930s Shanghai’, (Seth Ferrenti), Vice Media, 22-Jun-2018, www.vice.com].
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[𝕒] a white-coloured liquor (a type of baijiu) popular in China; literally ”second pot head”
[𝕓] “’CSI: Shanghai’ cancelled due to lack of crime”, (Ping’an Jiedao), China Daily Show, 20-Feb-2020, www.chinadailyshow.com[𝕔] Ferranti: 2018[𝕕] of the several territorial police forces in Shànghâi, the French was the most corrupt – according to Bernard Wassermann, Secret War in Shanghai: Treachery, Subversion and Collaboration in the Second World War (2017, 2nd Ed.)[𝕖] ”boss of bosses”
The Luddites of Britain’s Industrial Revolution: Technophobes with an Excessively Destructive Bent or Practitioners of Last Resort Workplace Bargaining?
We’veall heard the term bandied round—anyone who is reluctant to embrace new technology or the world of computers gets labelled aLuddite. TheCambridge Dictionarydefines it as “a person who is opposed to the introduction of new working methods, especially new machines”. Many of us would also have an inkling of the term’s origins, deriving from the group of English workers in the early 19th century whose method of resisting new work technologies in Georgian factories and mills took on a very “hands-on”, destructive manner. Beginning with weavers in the textile industry in Nottinghamshire taking to the new machines with sledgehammers in protest, the movement soon spread to other parts of the Midlands and the North of England.
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Rampage against the machine provokes a repressive reaction
The British government wasted little time in sending in an army of soldiers(𝓪 ) in defence of capital. Their assignment was to protect the factories and quell the workers’ revolts. Parliament enacted laws making the workers’ trail of destruction against the machines a capital offence, and many of the offenders were summarily and violently dealt with (shootings, hangings, transportation to New Holland for 14 years). Consequently, the Luddite movement lost energy and cohesion and petered out within a few years [‘The Original Luddites Raged Against the Machine of the Industrial Revolution’, (Christopher Klein), History, 04-Jan-2019, www.history.com].
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Class loyalty
The ruling elite of the day viewed the actions of the workers in attacking the private property of employers as merely bloody-minded vandalism, a perspective that still held an attraction for some modern conservative historians in the 20th century… eminent historian JH Plumb for instance dismissed the Luddites’ revolts as nothing more than “pointless, frenzied industrial jacquerie”. But was that all there was to it, nihilism, the mindless, purposeless, random savagery of working class vandals?
In a ground-breaking article in the early Fifties radical historian EJ Hobsbawn took issue with the conventional “nihilistic sabotage” view of historians like Plumb. Hobsbawn places the rebellious workers’ actions in their proper context, that of the Industrial Revolution and the economic vicissitudes of the period. The machine-breaking by the weavers and other workers was a direct action form of industrial strategy initiated by labour, Hobsbawn calls it “collective bargaining by riot” [EJ Hobsbawn, ‘The Machine Breakers’,Past and Present, No 1,(Feb., 1952), pp.57-70]. EP Thompson describes Luddism as “a violent eruption of feeling against unrestrained industrial capitalism” [E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, (1966)](𝓫).
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The threat accompanying automationWorkers such as the weavers in Nottinghamshire around 1811/12 foresaw the dire implications for them of the introduction of new inventions like the mechanical loom. The economic downturn Britain experienced during the drawn-out Napoleonic Wars resulted in loss of profits for the merchants who owned the mills and factories. But it harmed working families even more…unemployment was widespread, food became scarce and therefore more expensive. Magnifying the problem, trades like the stocking knitters and the lace workers were in decline. By using the new technology, employers could increase production allowing them to engage untrained workers at lower wages. This directly and adversely affected the weavers and other artisans who had spent years learning and honing the skills of their craft. Now the new machines were being taken over by untrained workers who produced inferior work. The job security of textile craftsmen were thus imperilled, by the use of the (new) machinery in (as they saw it) “a fraudulent and deceitful manner” to circumvent standard labour practices(𝓬). The danger identified, the textile workers found themselves limited in the forms of protest available to them—they could not legally form trade unions and they could not strike(𝓭 ). Smashing knitting frames and other machines was conceivably the only effective way to protest the inevitable erosion of their economic livelihood [George Binfield, quoted in Klein; ‘What is a Luddite?’, wiseGEEK, www.wisegeek.com].
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Not technophobes of the Industrial Revolution
Hobsbawn is at pains to stress that the protesting mill and factory workers bore no hostility to the machines per se(𝓮). Notwithstanding that the concept of trade unionism was inchoate and still barely nascent at this time, Hobsbawn describes the “wrecking (as) simply a technique of trade unions in the period before (and during) the early Industrial Revolution“. A more contemporary historian George Binfield concurs with Hobsbawn’s central thesis, stating that the derisory ‘technophobe’ tag is a mischaracterisation of the movement—the textile artisans were not against the new technology of the Industrial Revolution, but against the use of it to produce shoddy clothing and depress the wages of skilled workers (Binfield in Klein)(𝓯). Actually, far from being inept, many of the Luddites in the textile industry were highly skilled machine operators [‘What the Luddites Really Fought Against’, (Richard Conniff), Smithsonian Magazine, March 2011, www.smithsonianmag.com].
Poster notice offering a reward for information leading to the arrest of the frame-breakers who attacked George Ball’s Notts. workshop in 1812🔻
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Antecedents and successors of the Luddites
Luddism, as Donald MacKenzie put it, “was neither mindless, nor completely irrational, nor completely unsuccessful” [DA MacKenzie, ‘Marx and the Machine’, Technology and Culture, Vol 25, No 3, July 1984, pp.473-503]. Hobsbawn scuttles any suggestion that the Luddites’ movement was a one-off phenomena. Arguing that it’s antecedents can be traced back as far as the 17th century, he details instances of other English workers utilising the same industrial tactic as the Luddites—West of England clothing industry , 1710s-1720s; weavers in Somerset, Wiltshire, Gloucestershire and Devon, 1726/27(𝓰); rioting of textile workers in Melksham (Wilts), 1738; and not confined to the textiles business – coal miners employed the same wrecking tactic in the Northumberland coal-field in the 1740s (𝓱). Hobsbawn notes that the Luddites’ tactic of destroying the tools of production in a calculated fashiondid not end with the movement’s swift demise. He cites the riots in Bedlington (Durham) in 1831 in which strikers wilfully wrecked the capitalists’ winding-gear.
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No unmitigated failure; the preventative measures tactic
Although the Luddites’ revolt ended in suppression and broken dreams, Hobsbawn makes the case that there were successes in the workers’ efforts in other episodes of machine-breaking. In some instances, the mere threat from disgruntled craftsmen to wreak havoc on factories and mills was sufficient to dissuade some employers from introducing the machinery as planned, eg, this was the case earlier with weavers in Norwich and shearmen in Wiltshire. Hobsbawn concludes that “invariably, the employer, faced with such hazards” decided to delay or not implement the new technology, cognisant of the latent threat to his property and even his own life. In several of the cases cited by the historian, the threats were a successful bargaining tool to stop employers from cuttingworkers‘ wages, and in the instance of the Northumberland coal miners, their provocative action in burning the mine’s pit-head machinery actually won themselves “a sizeable pay rise”.
🔺‘Ned Ludd’(sometimes transcribed as Ned Lud) (Image: Granger Collection, NY)
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Footnote: The eponymous ‘leader’ of the movement
The Luddites’ leader was supposed to be one “Ned Ludd”, sometimes referred to as ‘General‘, ‘Captain’ or even ‘King’ Ludd. Purportedly he was an apprentice in the late 1770s who was either beaten or berated by his master and took revenge by damaging the factory’s stocking frame. It seems that in all probability Ned is apocryphal in the fashion of Robin Hood, the English personification of the mythical figure invoking social justice. Ned can be viewed as a symbolic leader for the wrongly-treated to rally round in pursuit of righting (in this instance) the workplace injustices foisted upon skilled industrial craftsmen (Ludd was even said to reside in Sherwood Forest, another nod to the inspiration of the Robin Hood legend in hisinvention).
(𝓪) some 12,000 troops in total were despatched, more than the number under the command of Wellington concurrently in the Peninsula War, a classic, heavy-handed overkill by the British authorities
(𝓫) one writer applies the term “labor strategists” to the Luddites as a de factovocational appellation, [Brian Merchant, ‘You’ve Got Luddites All Wrong’, (Tech By Vice), 03-Sep-2014, www.vice.com]
(𝓬) being prevented from forming trade unions left industrial workers already behind the eight-ball when IR mechanisation came along—they were unable to establish a minimum wage, establish workers’ pensions and set standard working conditions
(𝓭) the technology the Luddites railed against did not necessarily need to be new, the stocking frame for instance had been invented 200 years earlier (Conniff)
(𝓮) nor were they “heroic defenders of a pre-technological way of life” – as romantically portrayed later in some quarters (Conniff)
(𝓯) as Binfield contends, the Luddites were in fact willing to adapt to mechanisation…it was the direction that enhanced productivity was heading—enriching the merchant owners, not the workers—that was their beef. Their objective was a share of those profits, or at the very least, a decent wage
(𝓰) their attack on the property and materials of masters and blacklegs had the positive outcome of gaining them a “collective contract” of sorts
(𝓱) workers in the East Midlands hosiery trade also resorted to frame-breaking as part of the riots in 1778 to protest wage erosion…Hobsbawn calls these hose-makers “the ancestors of Ludditism”
Bridge Street in the city is one of Sydney’s oldest streets dating back to the formative days of the colony. Where Bridge Street is today, 500 metres south of the Circular Quay railway station and ferry terminus, was the site of the first bridge in the Port Jackson settlement. It was a simple log construction, erected in October 1788 just months after the colony was founded, and allowing passage over the Tank Stream, the source of Sydney’s main fresh water supply in the early days.
After several timber bridges came and went, they eventually put up a more substantial (supposedly ‘permanent’) stone bridge in its place (near the corner of Bridge and Pitt Streets), which also had to be replaced owing to it being considerably less substantial than first thought and not permanent at all◵. Bridge Street at that time was called Governors Row as it housed the colony’s first seat of government and the governor’s residence (on the corner of Phillip Street). A commemorative stone on the site (now housing the Museum of Sydney) marks the historic location.
An early painting of the city (a facsimile of which can be viewed on a wall in The Rocks) shows Governors Row (Bridge Street) extending all the way from the water at Darling Harbour up the hill to the first Government House.
Governors Row became Bridge Street when Lachlan Macquarie took over the colony’s governorship in 1810 and initiated a renaming project of Sydney’s streets as part of his reform program. In 1846 Bridge Street was extended up to Macquarie Street and Government House was relocated to its present location as a domain within the Botanic Gardens.
Lower Bridge Street: Residential to Commercial
Early on, the lower part of Bridge Street contained many fine houses, but these were gradually replaced by the head offices of shipping and trading companies because of the advantage of being close to the harbour.
Upper Bridge St: Chock-full of Heritage sites
From the mid 19th to the early 20th century construction in the upper part of Bridge Street formed the architectural character that distinguishes it today. A series of government buildings—grand in scale and elegance and richly elaborate—were built using sandstone quarried from nearby Pyrmont.
Treasury and Audit Office building (1849-51)
Corner of Macquarie and Bridge Sts. Architect: Mortimer Lewis. During the NSW gold rush shipments of gold were stored here. Today the building with a high vertical extension added is the huge, 580-room Intercontinental Hotel with a section housing the Sydney annex of Southern Cross University.
Chief Secretary‘s Office⍟ (1869)
Victorian Italianate building directly opposite the Treasury building. Architect: James Barnet. Equally impressive sandstone block. One of the most aesthetically endearing features are the five carved figures of women on the corner of the facade. The megasized building block wraps around into the western corner Phillip Street.
Department of Education (1914) and Lands Department (1877-90) buildings
These two havens of state bureaucrats, further down Bridge St, round out the classical sandstone quartet. The Lands Dept block, built to the design of James Barnet, is a Classical Revival style building. Like many of the public buildings of the era it’s built from Pyrmont sandstone. The Education building (Architect: George McRae) is of a later architectural trend reflecting the popular Beaux-Arts fashion.
Commercial buildings dominate the lower end of Bridge St. The Royal Exchange Building (1967) at № 21 Bridge St stands on the original site of the Royal Exchange building (1857) – the first home of the Sydney Stock Exchange. Numerically next to the REB (at № 17-19) is the Singapore Airlines House (1925), an elegant example of the Commercial Palazzo style of architecture.
Perhaps the standout architectural piece of the lower commercial sector is the old Burns Philip and Co head office building (1898-1901) close to George Street, with its elaborate sandstone and brick Neo-Romanesque facade. Architect: Arthur Anderson. Burns Philip were big players in the Australian shipping and trading business. Originally, a convict lumber yard sat on this site.
The pick of the rest of the commercial buildings for compact elegance are probably the brace of adjoining buildings, № 4 Cliveden and № 6, (across the road from BP&Co). The street’s first commercial high-rise building, constructed 1913 in the Federation Free Classical style. Next door to the left of Cliveden is Anchor House (1960), for many years the HQs of the NSW Liberal Party. The site in the early Colonial period contained a female orphan’s asylum which later relocated to a site in Parramatta (now part of a Western Sydney University campus).
Postscript: Macquarie Place
Halfway up Bridge Street,making a refreshing break of greenery from all the high monolithic buildings dominating the streetscape, is Macquarie Place. A diminutive triangular park which in colonial times was part of the governor’s garden. The park which now backs on to a trendy bar frequented by big-end-of-town ‘suits’ contains some gear salvaged from the First Fleet (anchor and cannon of HMS Sirius). A feature of interest of the park for passionate monarchists are two plane trees planted by the Royal duo Liz and Phil back in 1954(now very tall and expansive).Macquarie Place as it was in the early colonial period, unrecognisable today (Source: http://dictionaryofsydney.org/)
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◵ the bridge was finally demolished in the 1840s when the Tank Stream got channelled into an underground tunnel where it remains, what’s left of it that is
★ The genesis of this piece resides in my curiosity about the street name’s origin. The first association anyone has with Sydney, especially the city itself (ie, the CBD), is the Harbour Bridge. The city is the Harbour Bridge! It’s part of its lifeblood. So I guess I’d always just took it for granted that the street was named in honour of THE Bridge and thought no more about it. Then one day I was casually flicking through the pages of a 1922 Sydney street directory —as you do—when I had the (mini) eureka moment, Bridge Street was listed, it was there on the map, a good ten years before the Harbour Bridge made its debut! That set me off searching for what actually lay behind the naming of the street.
From the end of the Sixties the militant Weathermen in the US rode a global wave of youth and student rebellion against “the establishment” (see blog, 17-Jan-2020). Their emergence was in part a direct consequence of the student protests and violent clashes with the police and security forces that shook the leading cities of Europe and elsewhere in 1968 (the “Generation of 1968”). That same wave that gave impetus to the first stirrings of violent resistance by the Weathermen also ushered in other paramilitary organisations in Western Europe around the same time. The two of these that gained the most publicity/notoriety are discussed below.
|⫸ West Germany: Red Army Faction (Ger: Rote Armee Fraktion) AKA Baader-Meinhof Gang❉ Ideology: anti-fascist, communist revolutionary, Marxist-Leninist, Maoist, anti-Zionist
The radical studentcritique: The West German “fascist state”
West German youth by the late 1960s were experiencing a sense of alienation from the Federal Republic (BDR). The source of this disquiet lay in the nature of West German society and politics. The BDR that they had grown up in was now prosperous, but it was moving away from the direction of liberalisation and reform toward a polity that was increasingly authoritarian under the veneer of democracy. The postwar West German government, allying itself to the US and to NATO, and with Berlin on the front line of the Cold War, was charting an increasingly illiberal course, as the country’s politicised youth saw it – the West German Communist Party had been banned in 1956; the police had violently over-reacted to student protests killing one unarmed student activist; the Brandt government had introduced the Radikalenerlass (German for “Radical decree”) law in 1972 barring radicals (as defined by the state) and those with a ‘questionable’ political persuasion from holding public sector jobs. Many in the student left railed against what they saw as hypocrisy from Bonn – assuming the guise of an advanced liberal democracy while at the same time hosting visits fromruthless dictators like the Shah of Iran, not to mention it’s other politically uncomfortable associations [‘Red Army Faction’, (Military Wiki), http://military.wiki.org].
The Wirtschftswunder(the West German “economic miracle”) and its creator, economics minister Erhard 🔻
Students and those on the left generally viewed the postwar denazification of West Germany with justifiable suspicion, it’s outcomes were ineffective and at best incomplete. The policy was breached repeatedly, eg, Chancellor Adenauer’s appointment of a former Nazi-sympathiser to high political office; even more alarmingly, Kurt Kiesinger, a former Nazi Party member, roseto the republic’s top political post, Bundesrepublikkanzler, in 1966; and many ex-Nazis were still able to walk into government positions at the local level up. Many on the left in the BDR were convinced that the republic’s conservative media, controlled by Axel Springer, was biased in favour of the establishment, while the more liberal press in BDR was heavily censored by the government. At the same time radicals looked on aghast when the two major parties, the Social Democrats and the Christian Democrats, formed themselves into a “Grand Coalition” (‘Red Army Faction’, (Military Wiki).
As the succeeding generation, many students were left with a feeling of war-guilt as inheritors of the nation’s Nazi past. Added to this was the disillusion many Germans felt at their country being associated with a blatantly imperialist war in Vietnam. All of these dilemmas coalesced into a conviction for many on the left that the BDR government lacked legitimacy and was tantamount to a “fascist state”. Hence the collective call of West German youth for radical social change. The radicalisation of many in the republic’s student movement was partly fuelled by healthy doses of Marxist economic theory (it should be remembered that in 1966 the BDR economy had gone into recession—for the first time in 15 years) [‘German students campaign for democracy, 1966-68’, (Global Nonviolent Action Network), http://nvdatabase.swarthmore.edu].
BMG – terrorising the BDR
Student disaffection and that of other activists in the West German New Left was rife, many protested their disapproval, some turned to more violent and direct ways of voicing their opposition. Into this turbulent milieu came, among others, the first incarnation of the Red Army Faction, better known courtesy of the media’s tag, the Baader-Meinhof Gang (BMG), at the end of the Sixties. Its founders and main leaders were Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof, Gudrun Ensslin and Horst Mahler.
BMG started by engaging in arson as a protest against the Vietnam War and graduated to bomb attacks on US military facilities, German police stations and media outlets controlled by the Springer press. To bankroll their terrorist activities the gang robbed banks and kidnapped VIP hostages for ransom✫ [‘The Red Army Faction and the Stasi’, TELOSscope, 24-Oct-2016, (Review of Elliot Neaman’s Free Radicals), www.telospress.com; ‘Red Army Faction’, (Military Wiki)]. Among BMG’s victims were symbols of the BDR regime (individuals from the political and economic elites), US military personnel, as well as a number of unfortunate bystanders in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Despite killing some 34 people during its urban guerrilla ‘career’, RAF managed to elicit a measure of support from within West German society. For scores of disillusioned young West Germans at the time, there was support for or at least acceptance of RAF’s actions…(as Siegel put it), owing to the (still recent) Nazi legacy many “guilt-ridden liberals saw (RAF’s) panache as a countercultural critique of West Germany’s boring bourgeois life”. There is evidence also that there was collusion between BMG and East Germany and specifically the DDR’s Stasi (secret police) (Neaman). BMG also underwent some guerrilla training from the Palestinian al-Fatah in Jordan – which didn’t go exactly to plan. Andreas Baader, the group’s leader, deliberately cultivated an outlaw image, likening himself to Clyde Barrow (of Bonnie and Clyde criminal infamy) [‘The Romance of Evil’, by Fred Siegel, City Journal, 18-Sep-2009]§. Baader, Meinhof and their close associates were arrested in 1972 and the leaders died in custody within a few years—apparently by their own hands (though some are skeptical that these were in fact suicides).
The two eponymous leaders of BMG 🔻
With the founding members in prison, a “second generation” of RAF cadres emerged, sympathetic to the group’s cause, picking up the terrorist-guerrilla baton where the incarcerated pioneers left off. This “RAF 2.0” was proactive between 1975 and 1979, especially during what became known as the “German Autumn” of 1977. They held personnel hostage at the West German embassy in Stockholm, perpetrated hits on public prosecutors and bankers, kidnapped industrialists, etc.). In the 1980s and 1990s a” third generation” of RAF materialised and was intermittently active for some years, but since 1998 RAF has been considered to be moribund.
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|⫸ Italy: Red Brigades (It: Brigate Rosse) Ideology: anti-fascist, communist revolutionary, Marxist-Leninist, Maoist
As with theirWest German counterpart, the Red Brigades (BR) had its antecedents in the massive-scale student protests of 1968 against the state, and the workers’ struggles in Italy in 1968-69 to bring about social andpoliticalchange. The militant organisation was formed from a leftist student group at the University of Trento in Italy’s north set up by Renato Curcio and Margherita Cagol. BR claimed a membership of up to 1,000 strong at its peak (others have put it at about 400 to 500 full-time members) plus an indeterminate number of supporters [“Years of Lead” — Domestic Terrorism and Italy’s Ref Brigades’, Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, www.adst.org ; Sundquist, Major Victor H. “Political Terrorism: An Historical Case Study of the Italian Red Brigades.” Journal of Strategic Security 3, no. 3 (2010) : 53-68. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5038/1944-0472.3.3.5. Available at: https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/jss/vol3/iss3/5].
CDP-PCI’s “compromiso storico”
In Italy BR was able to tap into the prevailing student and worker discontent with the government (at first through it’s grass-root activism in northern industrial cities like Milan and Turin). Many radicalised sections of Italian workforce were disillusioned by the ‘historic’ coalition formed between the conservative Christian Democrats and the Italian Communist Party (PCI), and a belief lingered that PCI’s deal with the main bourgeois party would not ultimately represent the interests of the country’s working class (Sundquist)(cf. the CDU/SDP coalition in West Germany).
Red Brigades in “the Years of Lead”
From the early to the late 1970s BR unleashed a series of terror strikes, a chapter in what became known in Italy as “the Years of Lead” (It: Anni di piombo), which was a longer period of postwar social and political turmoil in Italy characterised by terrorist attacks from both right- and left-wing paramilitary groups. Material help for BR was forthcoming from the USSR and Czechoslovakia (weaponry). After the arrest of Curcio and Cagol in 1974, a “second generation” of radicals took up the ‘war’ against the Italian authorities. The act most associated with the BR Mach II (now led by Mario Moretti) and earning it its greatest notoriety and opprobrium was the kidnapping and eventual murder of former Italian prime minister, Aldo Moro, in 1978. BR’s murder of the highly popular Moro lost it much public support, including that of some sections of the left◔.
The assassination of Moro galvanised the nationalgovernment, the Italian security forces and the Carabinieri into launching an all-out war against the leftist terrorist organisation☌. With a more concerted counter-terrorist strategy including intelligence from paid informers, the authorities were ultimately successful in capturing the leaders and a large chunk of BR cadres, effectively eliminating the threat to the country during the 1980s◎. [‘The Red Brigades’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org ; ‘Years of Lead (Italy)’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org; Sundquist]. Despite its eventual failure and demise, BR was lethally effective in its methods – between 1973 and 1994 the terrorist group killed 223 people in its assaults (Global Terrorism Database, University of Maryland). One academic calls it “the most menacing radical group in Italy‘s post-WWII history”, [‘Learning from thePast: Case of the Red Brigades in Italy’, Daniela Irrera, Counter Terrorist Trends and Analyses. Vol. 6, No 6 (JULY 2014]. International Centre for Political Violence and Terrorism Research. URL: www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26351263].
Fmr PM Moro paraded in front of a BR banner
Methods of the “Red Euro-terrorists”
Both RAF and BR used similar tactics and strategies – primarily sabotage, arson, bank robberies, kidnappings and assassinations. The human targets were generally politicians (almost all right-wing), senior police, judges, industrialists and bankers, though BR also went after trade union officials in Italy which eventually helped undermine its support. Initially, BR refrained from lethal violence, often inflicting the punishment of aginocchiare (kneecapping) on its selected targets. But, as the Seventies rolled on, they were taking a more direct and extreme retribution on the capitalist state expanding the scope of terror to murder.
RAF ‘wanted’ poster (source: www.vukutu.com)
These two far-left European terrorist groups according to their pronouncements shared roughly the same broad, radical objectives as the Weather Underground – to destabilise the state and bring down the country’s capitalist regime◘. The two, also like the Weathermen, took great inspiration and more than a few tips from the Tupamaros urban guerrilla group of Uruguay. The Weather, BR and RAF all pursued a avowedly violent strategy against the authorities, but the Weathermen, when compared to BR and RAF, were “terrorism-lite”. Whereas the Weather targeted material damage only, meticulously avoiding the endangering of human life, the two European terrorist groups had no such compunctions or qualms.
Endnote: RAF and BR – red militants in a crowded field of left-wing Euro-terrorists
Neither RAF in Germany or BR in Italy were sole traders in the leftist-terrorism game in their respective countries, such is the splintering nature of ultra-left, extremist groups. There were a string of other terrorist groups operating at the same time, the most consequential of these were Prima Linea (Italian for “First Line”) in Italy and the Revolutionary Cells (Ger: Revolutionäre Zellen – RZ) in West Germany—the latter having a lower profile than RAF but actually perpetrating more bomb and arson attacks on the state than it (Military Wiki).
❉ sometimes also called Baader-Meinhof Group. Red Army Faction was its official organisational name
✫ BR went one better in fund-raising it’s revolutionary mission, getting involved in drugs and arms trafficking which included doing business with the Neapolitan mafia, the Camorra (‘Red Brigades’, Wiki)
§ a trait shared by the Weathermen
◘ BR also had another, more specific objective of wanting to force Italy to leave NATO
◔ this did not stop BR Mach II from making another high-profile kidnapping, that of American deputy chief of staff, General Dozier, in 1981. This time Italian police managed to rescue the general unharmed (Italian and NATO security forces executed successful retaliatory action against BR (Sundquist)
◎ BR though didn’t entirely disappear…after it split into two separate groups in the early 1980s, the more hardline splinter group continued into the 2000s (amounting to a third organisation claiming to represent BR)
Ambrose Bierce, American short story writer, man of letters, journalist and civil war (Union side) veteran, is best known for his unorthodox lexicon, The Devil’s Dictionary, a humorous, satirical and very personal take on a selection of words in the English language. The dictionary was compiled by Bierce over three decades, being initially published in instalments in various newspapers and magazines. Eventually the collection was published in book form, first as The Cynic’s Word Book in 1906 and then as The Devil’s Dictionary in 1911, two years before Bierce’s never satisfactorily-explained disappearance in Chihuahua, Mexico, where the journalist was visiting to gain first-hand experience of the Mexican Revolution.
Highly influential literary critic of the first half of the 20th century, HL Mencken, heaped lavish almost doting praise on The Devil’s Dictionary… “the true masterpiece of the one genuine wit that These States have ever seen“…”some of the most gorgeous witticisms in the English language“…”some of the most devastating epigrams ever written“.⇑First (1911) edition of the Dictionary
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Cynicism and satire provide the backbones of Bierce’s provocative dictionary. So, an interesting place to start looking is how he handles these terms – the words ‘satire’, ‘cynic’ and ‘dictionary’ themselves. Despite being fully versed in the craft himself, Bierce views the practitioner of cynicism less than favourably.
Cynic: A blackguard❅ who sees things as they are, and not as they ought to be (which presumably is the definition of an optimism۞).
Satire: An obsolete kind of literary composition in which the vices and follies of the author’s enemies were expounded with imperfect tenderness✫.
Dictionary: A malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic.
Bierce goes on to add with tongue firmly planted in his cheek that his dictionary, however, is “a most useful work”.
But a cynic Bierce certainly is. At one point he sweepingly declares, in the blanket fashion that is his trademark, that “all are lunatics, but he who can analyze his delusions is called a philosopher” (in which case, what would Bierce have made of Freud and the “dark art” of psychotherapy!?!). This perception of the author reminds me to some extent of the distinction often made between a person with an erratic behavioural pattern who is poor (and is labelled insane), and a person with an erratic behavioural pattern who is wealthy (labelled merely eccentric).
Romance and true love falls by the wayside with Bierce’s cynic always hovering around ground level:
Love: A temporary insanity cured by marriage.
Politics is even more fertile ground for Biercian cynicism…even the highest office in the land is not spared. With characteristic directness, there is:
President: The greased pig in the field game of American politics.
Senate: A body of elderly gentlemen charged with high duties and misdemeanors.
Diplomacy: The patriotic art of lying for one’s country.
And of course, to Bierce, ‘capital’ (ie, the capital) is defined as “the seat of misgovernment”.
The contemporary power politics of the day is very entrenched in Bierce’s cynic’s consciousness:
Cannon: an instrument employed in the rectification of national boundaries.
In a similar vein Bierce gives recognition to the tradition of his nation’s imperialistic ambitions in possibly the most quoted and most acute of Bierce’s definitions:
War: God’s way of teaching Americans geography⬲.
Bierce’s entries can go off on a tangent☒, often making extensive use of quotations from “eminent poets” to underscore his definitions (Father G Jape, SJ, is a much relied upon prop for Bierce). Sometimes this involves recourse to wordy anecdotes and phrases. In contrast to lengthy descriptors, some Devil’s Dictionary‘s entries are succinctly on the mark, some are absolute poetic corkers:
Absent: Peculiarly exposed to the tooth of detraction.
Erudition: Dust shaken out of a book into an empty skull.
Envy: Emulation adapted to the meanest capacity.
Fib: A lie that has not cut its teeth.
Martyr: One who moves along the line of least reluctance to a desired death.
Saint: A dead sinner revised and edited.
And even more succinctly summarised is:
Hope: Desire and expectation rolled into one.
Some of Bierce’s ‘opinions’ veiled as definitions are little more than whimsical nonsenses or clever wordplays:
Incumbent: A person of the liveliest interest to the outcumbents.
Harbor: A place where ships taking shelter from stores are exposed to the fury of the customs.
The Devil’s Dictionary dishes up irony in spades, repeatedly turning the mirror back on the reader:
Bigot: One who is obstinately and zealously attached to an opinion that you do not entertain.
Bierce’s lexicon is strewn with idiosyncratic elements, one is a recurring motif of robbers and theft, regularly he describes a situation where someone’s hands are in someone else’s pockets:
Alliance: In international politics, the union of two thieves who have their hands so deeply inserted in each other’s pocket that they cannot separately plunder a third.
Bierce is often lauded for his humanist perspective of the world…the major organised religions do not escape his critical eye:
Religions are “conclusions for which the facts of nature supply no major premises”
Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.
He can be irreverent – “Christians and camels both receive their burdens kneeling”.
The Dictionary dishes up a smorgasbord of satirical, ironic and often bitter definitions of the world as seen by Ambrose Bierce (one of the acerbic writer’s nicknames was “Bitter Bierce”). But Bierce is of course a creature of his time with all the glaring faults and prejudices of the 19th century white man’s mindset. So, through the satire and cynicism we witness the less savoury traits and predisposition of the lexicographer. Casual assumptions of racism and misogyny run through the pages of The Devil’s Dictionary.
Witch: A beautiful and attractive young woman, in wickedness a league beyond the devil.
Widows are depicted as “pathetic creatures”, whereas wives are dismissed as merely “bitter halves” (big surprise: Bierce was separated from his own wife). On occasions he crosses the line that even he should not have ventured, such as advocating or at the very least implying a violent impulse towards the female sex:
Bang: The arrangement of a woman’s hair which suggests the thought of shooting her.
The dreaded ‘N’ word is wheeled out in the cause superior of cynicism:
African: A nigger who votes our way.
And there is more than a hint of a general misanthropic disposition emerging from the pages of the Dictionary:
Birth: The first and direst of all disasters.
Marriage is the union of “two slaves”.
AB’s miscellany of hobby horses
Politicians and philosophers are on Bierce’s “hit list”, as are lawyers who get a predictable assessment:
Lawyer: One skilled in the circumvention of the law.
Liar: A lawyer with a roving commission.
Historians, in The Devil’s Dictionary are reduced to “broad-gauge gossips”, and ‘history’ is summarily pigeonholed as “mostly false (and) about unimportant events”.
Although he doesn’t specifically give medical students a definition entry, his regular references to them through the book might prompt one to conclude that their single defining feature is that of “grave-robbers”∞.
Places like New York City and specifically Wall Street are “dens of iniquity”, the sort of Biblical association Bierce employs to those things or entities representing (in his eyes) absolute evil.
Bierce’s idiosyncratic designation of ‘happiness’, as “an agreeable sensation arising from contemplating the misery of another” dovetails neatly to the definition of the German term Schadenfreude (substituting the word ‘perverse’ for ‘agreeable’ perhaps).
Bierce’s dictionary is also prone to outbursts of elitism – such as:
Laziness: Unwarranted repose of manner in a person of low degree.
Idiot: A member of a large and powerful tribe✪ whose influence in human affairs has always been dominant and controlling (an ‘idiotocracy’ perhaps).
EndNote: Bierce’s cold trail
The mysterious disappearance of Bierce has fascinated interested parties for the hundred plus years since the author vanished in Mexico. Speculation has been wildly unrestrained and rampant as to the writer’s supposed end (eg, he hooked up with Mexican bandit leader Pancho Villa and he was killed by Federal troops, or by rebels, or by his own hand or by Villa himself). Novelists, playwrights and filmmakers have all had a go at unravelling the mystery, but the reality is that no one really knows what happened to Bierce [‘The Death of Bierce’, The Ambrose Bierce Appreciation Society, www.biercephile.com].
👿
⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝
❅ Bierce defines ‘blackguard’ as an “inverted gentleman”, like a box of cherries that displays the fine ones on top but with the box “opened on the wrong side”
۞except that Bierce’s ‘optimist’ is “a pessimist (who) applied to God for relief”
✫ obsolete or not, it doesn’t stop AB from indulging in the device
⬲ it is not universally accepted that this most famous of Bierce-isms originated with Bierce himself, see for instance “The Ambrose Bierce Site”, www.donswain.com
☒ for example see the entry for ‘story’
∞ maybe overstated but Bierce was not fabricating a connection – “body snatching” for medical education was a very real and very lucrative activity at the time
✪ Bierce tended to view different societal groups as tribal entities
Burwood is an old, established suburb in what is today called the Inner West of Sydney, but was once (broadly) just called the “Western Suburbs”. In the colonial period and even into the early days of Federation, Burwood’s standing in the “pecking order” of Sydney suburbs was probably somewhat higher than it is today, if the grandness of its large, surviving houses and mansions, especially towards the southern end of Burwood Road, Burwood, is anything to go by.
Appian way, or if you prefer, the Appian Way, is a reminder of the more exalted social status that Burwood perhaps once commanded. In the midst of the “Strata-titleland” that is modern day Burwood is the Appian Way, you’ll find it perched between Burwood Road (South) and the seminal Liverpool Road. Appian Way is just a short, little street which charts a serpentine course, looping not far from its eastern end. Within this loop lies the street’s main interest…at least as far as this correspondent is concerned.
Hoskins Estate
More of that later but first some background. Appian Way (with its obvious nod to Ancient Rome’s illustrious highway) had its genesis with wealthy industrialist George John Hoskins. Hoskins who along with his brother Charles extracted their immense capital from successful engineering and steel-making works, purchased the land which hitherto had been called Humphrey’ Paddock just after the turn of the 20th century✽. London-born Hoskins conceived of it as an (upmarket) model housing estate to accommodate the executives of his businesses in close proximity to himself. That is, a haven for citizens of his own socio-economic class. The estate of some 20 acres in area was intended for houses of a standard that would attract ‘respectable’ businessmen and professionals … a harmonious social community having all the facilities desirable for a self-contained suburban lifestyle” [‘A model community’, Cheryl Kemp and John Johnson, Inner West Courier, 28-May-2019, www.innerwestcourier.com.au].
Hoskins, exhibiting a tendency which nowadays we might describe as that of a “control freak”, leased rather than sold the estate’s houses, which allowed the industrialist and developer to monopolise all aspects of the community (only one solitary house in the tree-lined street had been sold by the time of Hoskins’ death in 1926) [ibid.].
The houses
The Dictionary of Sydney describes the Appian Way as a “heritage-listed precinct of Edwardian houses”. The architecture is of that period but the houses are best characterised as asymmetrical and very variable in style. Essentially, together the original estate comprises some of the finest examples of Australian Federation style with their multi-gabled roofs, wide use of slate and terracotta tiles, and drawing on a variety of domestic designs. The grounds of the properties are more than generously spacious – large blocks, expansive frontages, manicured lawns and landscape gardens. Appian Way includes a nature strip in the midst of these bushy and leafy residences which is neatly maintained and occupied by Brush Box trees [‘Appian Way’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].
‘Erica’ – perhaps the Way’s standout ▲
The original houses still standing in Burwood’s Appian Way are a rich sample of different Federation styles. Among the variants of the genre is the Queen Anne Federation (‘Alba Longa’ and ‘Colonna’), the Arts and Crafts Federation (‘Erica’ and ‘St Ellero’) and the Bungaloiw Federation style (‘Casa Tasso’ and ‘Ostia’). One or two modern redbrick houses have also infiltrated the street, but these undistinguished abodes stick out by virtue of the paucity of their character in comparison with the elegant ‘Feds’.
Appian Way Recreational Club
On the eastern side of Appian Way the street forms a curve which envelops a communal reserve – this is Hoskins estate’s most distinctive feature回. The sign on the iron gate of the reserve spells out the acronym “AWRC’- Appian Way Recreational Club. The AWRC purportedly runs a lawn tennis club on the green field, but when I visited, the lines of the courts had not been recently marked and the nets nowhere to be seen✣. With the gates of the club firmly padlocked, it did not look like there had been a game in jest or earnest for some time.What tennis courts? ▲
When the estate’s houses were eventually offered for sale after Hoskins had passed on, the standing arrangement was that each house sold came with a share in the communal reserve (owned collectively by the Appian Way Recreational Club) [‘A model community’].▲ Bush plants and agaves surround the ‘courts’
Footnote: I have a distant but nonetheless pretty firm recollection (dating from around late 1970s) that before the lawn tennis courts existed at the AWRC, the field was used as a croquet court…which would be an altogether appropriately patrician pastime for the financially well-connected community of the estate’s earliest days – what today we might call “the big end of town”.
▫️▫️▫️▫️▫️▫️▫️▫️▫️▫️▫️▫️▫️▫️▫️
✽ recipient of the original land grant at Burwood was one William Faithful who came to the colony as a private in the NSW Corps in 1792
回 it is speculated that Hoskins may have derived inspiration for this distinctive feature from ‘The Parade’ in nearby Enfield [‘A model community’]
✣ let alone the semblance of an actual player or two
Vladivostok, the principal city and port of Far Eastern Russia, is nearly 4,000 miles from the Russian Federation’s capital, Moscow, yet it is only some 830 miles from China’s capital, Beijing. That stark fact of geography goes a good way to explaining the Russian Far East’s destiny. The inhospitable remoteness of the wild East from the capital of Russia, be it under empire, union or federation, has in its history never been until very recently❉ in the forefront of the minds of the country’s political leaders.
RFE today: the demographics
Russian: Дальний Восток России/ Dal’niy Vostok Rossi (trslit. Russian), literally “The distant East of Russia”.
Where exactly is it? The Russian Far East is a vast region within the world’s largest single-state political entity; roughly RFE extends from Eastern Siberia and Lake Baikal through to the Pacific coastline.
Area: 6,952,000 kms (comprising 40.6% of all the Russia territory)
Population according to the 2010 Census: 6.3 million (constituting a population scarcity of less than one person per square kilometre).
Composition: the majority are ethnic Russians and Ukrainians, with traditional indigenous and other ethnic minorities – including Mongols and Buryats, Aleuts and Inuits, Chukotko-Kamchatkan peoples, Koryats, Turkic peoples, Korean people (Koryo Saram).
Political division: RFE comprises four oblasts, three krais, an autonomous okrug (Chukotia) and the Sakha Republic⚛️.
Historical background
The Russian Empire, emerging out of its tentative, early Moscovy origins, was not quick to explore (and eventually conquer) the regions to the east of the Russian heartland. Exploration of the area got its impetus and propulsion under the rule of Ivan the Terrible (Tsar Ivan IV) in the late 16th century. Cossack Hetman Ermak’s 1581 victory over the Khanate of Sibir led to other eastern expeditions by other Russian atamans and ultimately to the defeat of the other khanates (the Golden Horde) and the incorporation of their lands under the Russian imperial banner. Aside from empire-building, the Russians were motivated by the mystique that had attached itself to the Asian hinterlands to the east, the reported vast quantities of wealth thought to be on the other side of the Kamen (a traditional name for the Urals)[‘Meeting of Frontiers: Siberia, Alaska and the American West’, (Library of Congress project), www.frontiers.loc.gov].
The image many hold of Sibir
Once the explorers and the conquerors had established the territory in the name of the tsar, the trappers, traders and merchants followed in their footsteps, populating the enormous reaches of Siberia. The promyshelenniki typified these pioneers, the frontiersmen who harvested and distributed the lucrative fur trade, much sought after by the European market. Finally, in 1639, the Russians reached the Pacific at the Sea of Okhotsk with Ivan Moskvitin’s expedition [ibid.].
Yakutsk (capital of Yakutia)
Yakutia, a land with a grim past to match its climate
Yakutia in RFE’s north, today the Sakha Republic (Coordinates: 66°24’N 129°10’E), (not to be confused with the Sakhalin Oblast comprising the Sakhalin and Kuril Islands) achieved legendary notoriety during the Soviet era. Described as “a prison without bars”, Yakutia was the location of somewhere in the region of 105 to 165 of Stalin’s Gulags. Between 1930 and 1950 the Soviets operated brutal forced-labour camps where many victims of Stalin’s autocracy were tasked with building the USSR’s infrastructure in conditions that were intolerable harsh and unbearable cold (arctic permafrost, frozen tundra, etc)⊙.
Contemporary Yakutia typifies the dilemma of RFE. The present government’s commitment to developing RFE is viewed with cynicism by most in the Sakha Republic. The town of Mirny (37,000 inhabitants) is the unofficial diamond capital of Russia, 25% of the world’s commercially mined diamonds are found here❂. In addition the region is blessed with ample deposits of gold and coal. Another more niche commodity found below ground in the republic are the bones of prehistoric woolly mammoths – many of which find a ready home on the black market [‘Left Behind in Russia’s Far East’, (Dmitriy Frolovskiy, The Diplomat, 24-Jul-2019, www.thediplomat.com].
Yakutia locals see the development priorities and benefits accruing from the new emphasis on the RFE differently to that of Moscow. In their eyes the increased wealth extracted from the region goes one way only – back to the centre. This has deepened Yukutians’ sense of isolation from “the mainland” (as the locals sometimes call the rest of Russia). Notwithstanding that the Republic of Sakha is critically underpopulated (around 1M residents in an area of 3,103,200 sq km), many locals also express dissatisfaction with the federal government’s recent attempts to bolster the depleted population of RFE with new intakes of migrants, largely from the ‘Stans’ of Central Asia’ [ibid.].
Norilsk, another ‘Gulagtown’ trying to live down its past
Current day Norilsk is overshadowed by a similar back storyto Yakutia’s gulag towns…a remote location in Krasnoyarsk Krai, also supra-Arctic Circle, with no roads or rail lines into the city. Norilsk-Talnakh contains the largest-known deposits of nickel-copper-palladium in the world. In the days of Stalin’s “campaign of terror” Norilsk was “a node in the network of similar camps that Alexandr Solzhenitsyn (described) in the Gulag Archipelago” [‘Norilsk: The remote Russian mining town uneasy about its gulag past’, (Tom Parfitt), The Times, 06-May-2018, www.thetimes.co.uk].
Norilsk Golgotha, a monument to the city’s gulag prisoners
Repopulating RFEwith Eastern Ukrainians
Ukrainians have been (forcibly) resettled in Siberia and RFE since the 17th century. In the formative years after the Russian Revolution of 1917, Ukrainians resettled in the area known as Zeleny Klyn◚(sometimes also called Transcathay) tried to secede from the newly established Bolshevik Far Eastern Republic and create their own Eastern Russian entity, Green Ukraine. Fast-forward to 2016, President Vladimir Putin, in the wake of Russia’s annexation of Crimea, launched a Ukrainian resettlement program, voluntary this time with inducements of free land in underpopulated northern towns like Igarka for refugees from East Ukraine [‘Green Ukraine’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org; ‘Meeting of Frontiers’, loc.cit.]. The free land carrot had already been offered to Russians living in the Federation to migrate to the Far East.
The follow-up second part of my Russian Far East blog piece will deal in more detail with contemporary developments in RFE including Putin’s desire and strategy to turn the region into an economic powerhouse, and the vexing question of foreign investment in RFE, especially that of China.
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❉ the current and greatly enhanced interest shown by the ultra-nationalistic Putin government in Russia’s Far East will be more thoroughly addressed in Part 2 of this blog
⚛️ oblasts, krais and okrugs are terms for administrative divisions with a fair degree of elasticity, although okrug is sometimes rendered as ‘district’ (raion)
⊙ known to get down to temperatures of -70° Celsius
❂ the ALROSA group of companies accounts for 95% of the country’s diamond production and dominates the Russian Far East’s economy◚literally “thegreen wedge”
The Brill Building at 1619 Broadway in Midtown New York City, architecturally, has few distinguishing features to set it apart from most any other homogeneous looking commercial medium high-rise building in the “Big Apple” (save for a rather dazzlingly decorative archway entrance). But for a period from the end of the Fifties to the late Sixties it was the fulcrum (if not quite the epicentre) of innovative and groundbreaking Rock and Pop music-making in the USA.
The young professionals are in the Building! The collaborative and creative energies of the Brill Building produced a conducive environment for young professional songwriters of the period to work with music producers to create highly productively musical outcomes. So there were song-writing teams that emerged around 1960 (often they were couples) – (Carole) King and (Gerry) Goffin, (Barry) Mann and (Cynthia) Weil, (Jeff) Barry and (Ellie) Greenwich – who linked up successfully with young producers like “wonder-kid” Phil Spector※ [‘The Brill Building: Assembly-Line Pop’, (Reebee Garofalo), Encyclopaedia Britannia, www.encyclopaediabritannia.com].
⬆ Kirshner, King & Goffin
But the Brill Building’s genesis as a revolutionary force in 1960s US pop music actually started in a building across the road – at 1650 Broadway. Here in 1958 “pop entrepreneur” Don Kirshner and musician Al Nevins formed Aldon Music✳. Aldon’s reading of the popular music zeitgeist of the day was that rock and roll’s original impact had dissipated and somewhat lost its way. Kirshner’s remedy was “to take its energies and reapply the old-fashioned Tin Pan Alley❁ disciplines to the craft and professionalism of making hits for the youth market” [Inglis, Ian. “‘Some Kind of Wonderful’: The Creative Legacy of the Brill Building.” American Music, vol. 21, no. 2, 2003, pp. 214–235. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3250565]. Kirshner put together a stable of aspiring young songwriters, including Goffin and King, Mann and Weil, as well as Howard Greenfield and Neil Sedaka.
1619 + 1650 = the Brill Building styleThe term “Brill Building” in the musical context doesn’t confine itself exclusively just to that one building…Brill Buildingas a descriptor for the achievements inNYC pop and rock creativityof the day is an omnibus reference for what was happening at two addresses, 1619 and 1650 Broadway, New York.
The pioneers of the new professionalism that was to become labelled as “Brill Building” were probably the song-writing team of Leiber and Stoller (Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller) who had earlier written for Elvis Presley, started to write hits for the Drifters from the late 50s that mark the starting-off point for Brill [Garofalo, loc.cit.]. A new wave of songwriters began to etch out pop songs from within the walls of 1650 Broadway and 1619 Broadway (the Brill Building adopted Aldon’s ‘hothouse’ style of songwriting from youthful collaborators with a creative overlap between the two addresses)✥ [Inglis, op.cit.].
Distinguishing features of Brill Building musicand music-makersKirshner’s writing staff at 1650 Broadway were not only dedicated professionals, they were remarkably youthful…the eighteen songwriters Kirshner had in his employ in 1961 (roughly equally male and female) were aged between 19 and 26, a clear departure from the status quo ante of “middle-age men churning outnovelty songs” [ibid.].This contemporary generation of songwriters, not much older than their target audience, grasped the idiom of teenagers and wrote exclusively for the youth of the 1960s [Garofalo, loc.cit.]♕.
Other composer/lyricist teams to thrive in the environment ofthe Brill Building included Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman, Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart (who later worked with Kirshner and the Monkees) and the extraordinarily prolific hit-making duo of Burt Bacharachand Hal David.
The songwriting teams at Brill allowed women a measure of gender equality unusual for that period. Brill provided a leg-in in the industry for female pop and rock songwriters like King, Weil and Greenwich. Their ascent to the fore corresponded with the rise of the girl groups of the early 60s in the US…these female writers wrote hits for the Shirelles, the Crystals, the Chiffons, the Ronettes and the like [Inglis, op.cit.]✪.
⬇ The Ronettes: “Big hair” sound!
‘Brill’ place, ‘Brill’ music?Recollections of the songwriters’ working conditions at the Brill Building doesn’t suggest an ideal environment to inspire the creation of Top 40 hits: writers were assigned their “respective cubby holes” (Carole King), “a tiny cubicle the size of a closet”…”no window or anything” …(an upright) “piano and a chair” …”we’d go in and write songs all day” (Barry Mann, ibid.). The creators of pop and rock worked in an assembly line fashion in something akin to a standard nine-to-five office job [Garofalo, loc.cit.]. Kirshner would play one young writing team off againstanother to enhance their productivity [Sociology of Rock, Simon Frith (1978)].
The hit factoryAnd yet despite these strictures it somehow worked! The songwriting team did come up with “teenage drivel” from time to time, but collectively, the youthful penners of contemporary Sixties song generated a steady series of musical hits for a Pop-crazy world! Fusing the urgency of R & B with “the brightness of mainstream pop” melodies, Goffin and King, Greenfield and Sedaka and the other B.B. star writing teams came up with perennial pop classics like “Will you Love me Tomorrow?”, “Calendar Girl”, “Leader of the Pack” and the much revered “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin'” [ibid.].
A vertical integration of the pop music biz on a micro-scaleThe “B.B. factory” was good at matching artists to appropriate material. By 1962 the Brill Building contained 165 separate music businesses. This meant a B.B. musician “could find a publisher and printer, cut a demo, promote the record and cut a deal with radio promoters, all within this one building”, Garofalo, loc.cit.; ‘The Brill Building’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org; Continuum Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World Volume 8: Genres: North, (Edited by John Shepherd, David Horn), 2013, www.books.google.com.au]
Time call on the Brill BuildingBy the mid to late 1960s the B.B. music line was losing its energy. A new creative force was rapidly filling its void – the rise of the singer-songwriter, heralding a new era of artists who wrote their own material. The new wave led by the phenomenal global success of the Beatles (the unsurpassed potency of the Lennon/McCartney songwriting duo) and the guru-like acclaim afforded Bob Dylan, fairly swiftly relegated the Brill Building writers to the edges of pop music relevance [Garofalo, loc.cit.].
Footnote: A Brill Building ‘sound?’The Brill Building style of songs drew inspiration from diverse strands of earlier music – R & B (rhythm and blues), Latin, jazz and African-American gospel. The result was often referred to as the “Brill Building sound” but there actually wasn’t a specific or distinctive sound at all. The only similarities between the Brill ‘products’ was in the recurring themes and components in the song lyrics (might be described as “First World problems” seen through the eyes of 60s American youth) [‘The Brill Building pioneered assembly line pop music but left a legacy of hits’, (Troy Lennon), The Daily Telegraph, 13-Sep-2017, www.dailytelegraph.com.au]; Inglis, op.cit.].
⚀⚁⚂⚃⚄⚅⚅⚄⚃⚂⚁⚀⚀⚁⚂⚃⚄⚅⚄⚃⚂⚁⚀⚁⚂⚃⚄⚅⚅⚄⚃⚂⚁⚀⚀⚁⚂⚃⚄⚅⚄⚃⚂⚁
※ Spector was both a collaborator with the Brill songwriters and a customer of their compositions
✳ described by Ian Inglis as “a crucial moment in the development of Brill Building’s pop sensibilities”
❁ Tin Pan Alley was a loose collection of composers, lyricists and music publishers based in NYC who dominated the industry for several decades through the first half of the 20th century (Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, the Gershwins, Sammy Cahn, Hammerstein and Rodgers and many more)
✥ although two of the mainstays of the Brill team, Goffin and King, never actually worked in the Brill Building, producing their entire creative output in the period over at Aldon Music (they did however sell some of their compositions through the Brill Building)
♕ many of the Brill songwriting alumni went on to be highly successful performers in their own right – top of the totem included industry names like Neil Diamond, Gene Pitney, Paul Anka and Paul Simon
✪another interesting juxtaposition emerging from the Brill Building music factory was the ethnic contrast between writer and artist – the songwriters were all white and mostly Jewish, writing largely for emerging black girl groups (Inglis)
⇩ Cobb & Co coach at Scarborough, NSW(Photo: Powerhouse Museum, Sydney) ⇧
See also the preceding post The Rise and Decline of Cobb & Co – Part I
By the 1880s Cobb & Co’s coach lines had become so successful in Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland that most of its competitors had been either relegated to the ranks of commercial obscurity, gone out of business altogether or been swallowed up by the ubiquitous, dominant transport market leader (or all three!)
Overreach and eventual decline
Cobb & Co’s foray in new areas of enterprise led it, and specifically company boss James Rutherford, into more and more diverse fields – everything from gold and copper mines to horse-breeding to newspapers. The inevitable downside of over-diversification was diminishing success…moreover the failures were often the result of bad and even disastrous investments (a Lithgow iron ore mine, a 1880s railway construction project connecting Glen Innes and Tenterfield)💮and in this the blame lay squarely with Rutherford. Rutherford as GM had some glaring shortcomings – he was often impetuous in business when he should have been measured, and made important (and increasingly unwise) decisions without consulting his partners [Kathy Riley), Australian Geographic, 18-Oct-2011, www.australian geographic.com.au].
⇩ A fully loaded six-horse Cobb & Co coach
(Photo: www.visityuleba.com.au) ⇧
Other factors contributing to Cobb & Co’s downfall
In addition to the instability of taking on too muchconcurrently, the company was a victim of misfortune and circumstance. The 1890s was a decade that brought drought and a depression to the colonies. The drought hit Cobb & Co like a sledgehammer – the cost of feed for their thousands of horses sky-rocketed! During just the four years from 1898-1902, the cost was £70,000, which was nearly half of Cobb & Co’s total revenue. Compounding this was further devastation arising from the drought – losses of livestock, plummeting of the values of company’s properties [ibid.].
The introduction of commercial railways in the inland regions of Australia from the 1870s was a forewarning that the demise of coach transport was on the horizon. Cobb & Co in Victoria and NSW survived the new competition from the railroad for a time – in part because the coach line adopted the strategy of providing a complimentary service to it (joining the dots between the rail routes)✪. It also pushed its operations further westwards into NSW to service new localities and communities beyond the rail terminus [‘Coaching days in NSW’, (Cobb & Co in NSW), http://www.orange.nsw.gov.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Cobb-Co-Resource.pdf].
UltimatelythoughCobb & Co was simply delaying the inevitable in the two southern colonies…Victoriaceased its company operations in 1890. The NSW operations’ decline led to itsBathurst and Bourke factories closing down not long after…all later coach-making was done through the CharlevilleCoachPlant in Queensland. By 1897 all the NSW lines ceased except those in the Bourke area [ibid.]. In 1902 Cobb & Co experienced a net loss of over £18,000 and owed considerably more than that to bankers and creditors [Riley, op.cit.]. Liquidation of the company soon followed. The following year the company was reformed but this wasn’t able to revive its flagging fortunes.
Queensland, the last outpost for Cobb & Co coaches
Only “vast and untrammelled” Queensland held out against the railways’ dominance, maintaining “a solid demand for coaching” beyond Federation and into the new century, with routes in the colony peaking at more than 7000km in 1900. Queensland Cobb & Co lines lingered on, gradually losing business to the railways, their routes shrivelling up bit by bit. The advent of motor vehicles, while still at a rudimentary stage, foreshadowed that horse coaches were dinosaurs as a long-term prospect. Cobb & Co itself dabbled in automobiles and in store-keeping, but these ventures brought it no success [ibid.].
Air mail anyone?
The embryonic development of commercial air travel was another sign of the imminent end of the road for Cobb & Co. In 1922 QANTAS (Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services) launched its inaugural air mail and passenger flying service (based in central west Queensland). Cobb & Co made its final trip in 1924 on the Yuleba to Surat (Qld) route. Thus the curtain was drawn for good on what had been Australia’s first ever privately-owned public transport system [ibid; Simpson, loc.cit.].
Endnote: A television series rip-off
In the late 1950s and early 1960s there was a fictionalised TV take on the Cobb & Co story…made in Australia by ITV Britain♚. A fairly unexceptional piece of television adventure and light on historical accuracy, Whiplash was marketed in Australia and the US as “an Australianised Western”, it starred the serviceable American TV actor Peter Graves as the fictional “Chris(sic) Cobb”. Some of the episodes were written by the future creator of Star Trek Gene Roddenberry [‘Whiplash’, Classic Australian Television, www.classicaustraliantv.com].
⇧ ‘Whiplash’: Peter Graves in a scene (Photo: www.nostalgiacentral.com)
Fittingly, given that Queensland was the state that maintained the Cobb & Co tradition the longest, it has a museum dedicated to the memory of the Cobb & Co pioneers. Located in country Toowoomba, the museum houses historic Cobb & Co coaches as part of an extended collection of horse-drawn vehicles – the ‘National Carriage Collection’. (Source: www.queensland.com)
⥰⤽─⤽─⤽─⤽─⤽─⤽─⤽─⤽─⤽─⤽─⤽─⤽⥰
💮 which left Cobb and Co a very sizeable £130,000 in debt
♚ filmed on location at Scone, NSW, and at Artransa ParkStudios in French’s Forest, (northern Sydney) which then contained a suitably bushy backdrop
✪ this contrasted markedly with the fate of coach transport in England – where the introduction of railways, occurring from the 1830s, killed off the coaches in quick time [‘Cobb and Co coach’, Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, (Margaret Simpson, Curator, Transport), 12-Jun-2013, http://maas.museum]
❝Such days as when the Royal Mail was run by Cobb & Co❞ ~ Henry Lawson
🌀-🌀-🌀
Cobb and Co is a name that still has much currency within Australian and New Zealand society. In New South Wales in the rural tourist industry there is the “Cobb & Co Heritage Trail” which invites travellers to take the “historical self-drive” following the outback route from Bathurst to Bourke that the celebrated erstwhile coach service once trekked. Queensland holds a Cobb & Co festival each year to honour the historic Surat to Yuleba route. There are touring bus and coach businesses operating that have also appropriated the name…in addition there are “Cobb & Co hotels” and “Cobb and Co bottle shops” scattered around regional areas of the eastern states※.
⇓ Cobb & Co Heritage Trail
All of this is testimony to the fame of the original Cobb & Company which was once a household transport name, etching for itself a place in the folklore of Australia’s outback regions. The company’s story begins in the goldfields of Victoria in the 1850s. In 1853 the American Adams & Co coach firm despatched Freeman Cobb and three American colleagues⚀ to Melbourne with the objective of establishing a local operation which would capitalise on the hordes of fortune seekers flocking to the Victorian gold rushes. As things transpired, Cobb ended up starting his own coach service together with the other Americans🔰, thus was born Cobb & Co.
Freeman Cobb ⇑ (Photo: www.geni.com)
The first trip (January 1854) of Cobb & Co carrying passengers, goods and equipment went from Collins Street (Melbourne city) to the Forest Creek goldfields (now Castlemaine) and to Bendigo✫. Cobb & Co was a winner pretty much from the outset…by 1856 the company was worth £16,000 (in 2011 values around $2.1 million). Freeman Cobb however didn’t stick around to see the full flowering of it’s success, after three years he sold out of his eponymous company, moving on to other (less successful) ventures. Cobb & Co changed hands a couple of times, and then in 1861 it was purchased by a consortium of nine US and Canadian businessmen for £23,000 ($3.4m in 2011) [‘Cobb & Co: historical transport’, (Kathy Riley), Australian Geographic, 18-Oct-2011, www.australian geographic.com.au].
The driving force of the firm under the consortium was another American immigrant, James Rutherford. Rutherford began by organising all of the company’s lines (the different routes), making them more profitable concerns. Under his leadership Cobb & Co expanded into NSW and Queensland (the NSW operations were based at Bathurst). At the company’s peak in the 1870s, it’s coaches were covering a distance of nearly 45,000km a week with routes stretching from the very top of Queensland (the Gulf of Carpentaria and Cooktown) down to southern Victoria [ibid.; ‘In the Days of Cobb & Co’, Sydney Mail, 20-Apr-1921, www.trove.nla.gov.au]. As one one chronicler of the iconic transport company’s story observed, Cobb & Co was many things combined – “the Qantas, the Australia Post, the TNT and the Holden of its day” [Sam Everingham, Wild Ride, The Rise and Fall of Cobb and Co, (2007)].
James Rutherford⇓
(Photo source: State Library of Queensland)
What accounted for Cobb & Co’s spectacular success in the coach transportation business?
The decisive factors were manifold but basically Cobb & Co beat it’s competitors in several logistical areas. It’s coaches were faster and more efficient…while the rivals used heavy, rigid English coaches for their runs, Cobb imported American Concord coaches (made in New Hampshire and used in the American West) which were rounded and lightweight and had supple coach bodies – far more suited to the rugged Australian landscape than the cumbersome English coaches. Consequently Cobb & Co’s coaches gave a smoother, faster ride [Riley, loc.cit.] (the Concords, though superior, apparently didn’t always deliver that smooth a ride as they were known colloquially as the “red bone-shakers”).
A replica C & C Concord coach on display at Timbertown, NSW ⇓
The Concord coaches were fitted with leather braces and straps in place of the inflexible iron ones used on other horse-drawn vehicles which had a tendency to snap too easily (leather also provided greatly superior suspension for the carriage). Concord coaches were made to last the rugged journey and so contributed to a reputation for reliability that the Cobb service was able to establish [‘Days of Cobb & Co’, loc.cit.].
A master stroke by Cobb was to establish a series of changing stations every 16-32km along the routes. This gave Cobb & Co journeys the big advantage of always having fresh horses, enabling the drivers to maintain high speeds over long distances.
Cobb & Co coachmen – risky adventures, pitfalls and hazards of the job
The drivers themselves employed by the company were possessed of extraordinary skills in managing their horses and vehicles. They had to be to negotiate all the difficulties and obstacles in their paths and still keep on schedule…atrocious roads made worse by inclement weather, flooding of creeks and rivers, and unpredictable encounters with dangerous bushrangers◘, were all recurring events that challenged the mettle of the coach drivers. The dangers aside, experiencing the thrills and (near) spills and the full-on ‘wildness’ of a Cobb & Co journey through “the bush”, must have been an exhilarating experience for colonial travellers in the day.
Many of the drivers, some of which Cobb and (later) Rutherford recruited from the US, were colourful characters in addition to being accomplished horse handlers…blokes such as Dick Houston, Jim Conroy, ‘Silent’ Bob Bates, H Barnes, and not least “Cabbage Tree” Ned Devine. Devine, with his team of distinctive light grey horses, was by all accounts a particularly exceptional driver (earning himself a very good wage of £17 a week)…when the first English cricket team toured Australia (HH Stephenson’s, 1862), Devine was their driver on the Victorian leg of the tour [K. A. Austin, ‘Devine, Edward (Ned) (1833–1908)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/devine-edward-ned-3405/text5169, published first in hardcopy 1972, accessed online 31 May 2019].
Ned ‘Cabbage Tree’ Devine ⇓
(Photo source: State Library of Victoria)
Similarly, Cobb & Co’s grooms played an integral role in the highly organised operation…each groom was personally responsible for eight to ten horses and for their gear. The clockwork operation saw the drivers sound a bugle when they were one mile from the next staging post, this alerted the grooms to have the fresh team of horses primed and ready the minute the coach arrived. The pay-off for such a high level of efficiency, superior speed and dependability was that Cobb & Co scored lucrative mail contracts from the colonial governments [ibid.].
Cobb diversifies from its passenger and goods transport base
General manager Rutherford was the catalyst for Cobb & Co’s diversification into new businesses. Initially this payed dividends with its first move, appropriately enough, into coach and buggy building at Bathurst, NSW. Just four years into this activity Cobb & Co could boast that it was the largest coach-maker in Australia [ibid.].
Rutherford also acquired pastoral properties for the company, another profitably step for Cobb & Co. By 1877 they had nine sheep and cattle stations across NSW and Queensland covering an area of 11,000 square kilometres and turning a net profit of £77,500 (equivalent to $11.3M in 2011)…this was at a time that the company’s revenue from coaching – the principal business – was yielding only £11,500 ($1.7M) a year by comparison [ibid.].
By the end of the 1870s Cobb & Co had been in business for 25 years and had already established itself in the eastern mainland states as something of an institution in the “wide, brown land”. It had undergone diversification and experienced growth, but as I will show in Part II, the remarkable good fortunes of Cobb & Co was about to take a decided turn for the worse.
💫–💫–💫
PostScript: Exporting the Cobb & Co model
Unsurprisingly, the spectacular trajectory of Cobb & Co’s rise in fortune and fame drew imitators elsewhere. A number of coaching services, some using the same name (although totally unrelated to the original eastern Australian company), sprang up independently in South Australia, Western Australia, New Zealand, Japan and South Africa. This last concern was started up by Freeman Cobb himself in 1871, hoping to cash in on the discoveries of diamonds and gold in the Kimberley and the Transvaal (unfortunately Cobb couldn’t reproduce his Australian success, dying in South Africa still in his 40s) [K. A. Austin, ‘Cobb, Freeman (1830–1878)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/cobb-freeman-3237/text4883, published first in hardcopy 1969, accessed online 29 May 2019].
‘Kiwi’ Cobb & Co
The New Zealand version was begun by Charles Cole, who’d previously ran Cobb & Co’s Smyth’s Creek to Ballarat line in Australia❎. As in Victoria and NSW the impetus for the initiative in NZ was the gold rush in Otago (1861). Cole’s Otago coach proprietorship was in partnership with the Hoyts brothers (operating as Cole, Hoyt & Co., proprietors of Cobb & Co. Telegraph Line of Coaches)…later the service was extended to Christchurch and Canterbury. The legendary Ned ‘Cabbage Tree’ Devine worked at one time for the New Zealand outfit, driving the Dunedin to Palmerston and Oamaru routes [Austin, ‘Ned Devine’, loc.cit.; ‘Cobb & Co (New Zealand)’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].
⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛
※ in fact there are all manner of commercial enterprises in Australasia using the “Cobb & Co” handle as a trading name – restaurants, bars, B ‘n Bs, screen printers, clockmakers, kitchen manufacturers, etc.
⚀ the others were James Swanson, Anthony Blake and John Murray Peck (who later became a successful stock and station agent in Melbourne and a vice-president of the Essendon Australian Football Club)
🔰 the average age of the four American founders was just 22 – although they did have combined experience working for Adams, Wells Fargo and other coach companies in the US
✫ Cobb charged £5 per passenger for the roughly 110 ml journey [‘Days of Cobb & Co’, loc.cit.]
◘ one of the best known bushranging incidents involving Cobb & Co was the 1863 holdup at Eugowra (in the NSW central west)…notorious bushranging gang led by Frank Gardiner and Ben Hall robbed a Ford & Co coach (the firm was takes over by Cobb & Co one week later) of £14,000 in gold and banknotes from the goldfields [‘Details of the Robbery’, (Welcome to Eugowra in the heart of bushranger country), www.eugowra.aus.net]
❎ Colebrought one of the custom built Concord coaches across the Tasman with him to Otago
First World problem – Cadbury’s or Nestlé’s?FOR children of the Fifties and Sixties growing up in the West, the preference of chocolate usually came down to a shelf choice between two, Cadbury or Nestlé. My recollection is that my own juvenile palate tended towards Nestlé, but only partly due to taste…yes I did as a kid have a fondness for Nestlé’s slim, pocket-size milk chocolate bars but Nestlé was also great for youthful card collectors. Each bar contained a different colour card (vintage cars, planes, etc.) that you could paste into your Nestlé Car Club book or Sky Club book or into their “Conquest of Space” series book. A glance at the enduring popularity of Cadbury’s chocolate is confirmation that the British confectioner did not miss my preference for their Swiss rival.
(photo courtesy of www.historyworld.co.uk)
As a child I was very aware that Cadbury’s had a chocolate factory in Tasmania (known as “the factory in the garden”)…the idyllic image of rustic Claremont was imprinted in my head courtesy of innumerable Cadbury TV ads (spectacular mountain scenery didn’t improve the taste of the chocolatier’s product but it gave it the perception of an extra lustre). What I wasn’t aware of as a young chocolate consumer was that that Cadbury’s—nay, almost all of the English pioneering chocolate manufacturing industry—was a Quaker company. Cadbury’s kicked off from a small shop in Birmingham, England, in 1824, but before Cadbury’s there was Fry’s Chocolates which opened its first shop in Bristol in 1761, and after it Rowntree’s (established 1862, in York{a}). All of these chocolatiers were founded by English Quakers and the companies business ethos imbued with the Quaker philosophy.
(photo courtesy of www.historyworld.co.uk)
In business by circumstance and conviction British Quakers in the 19th century not only cornered the chocolate market, they excelled in business in a multiplicity of fields, ranging from banking (Barclays, Lloyds) to biscuit manufacturing (Huntley and Palmers, Carrs) to footwear (Clarks’ Shoes) to match manufacturing (Bryant and May) [‘How did Quakers conquer the British sweet shop?’, (Peter Jackson), BBC News Magazine, 20-Jan-2010, www.bbc.com].
The circumstance that Quakers found themselves in guided their decision to embrace the world of business. As a Christian non-conformist group in a sea of English Anglicanism, adherents of the Quaker faith in the 1800s were subjected to the systematic discrimination befalling religious outsiders – exclusion from the universities (until the 1870s) meant the leading professions of medicine and law was barred to them. Naturally enough, this barrier to the industrious, go-ahead Quaker person, turned them towards business and commerce [ibid.].
The senior Cadbury⤋
Kings of the chocolate business{b}
The Quaker philosophy incorporates a commitment to social reform and the pursuit of justice and equality. This ethos informed their business practices, Cadbury’s and other Quaker firms established a reputation for being honest and reliable. This gave them a competitive advantage over their non-Quaker competitors. The perceived ethical nature of Quaker confectionery firms was rewarded with customer loyalty. John Cadbury and his successors were among the first to set a firm (and fair) price – this was a clear departure from the hitherto customary retail practice of point-of-sale price bartering [ibid.]{c}.
Cocoa the health drink
Founder Cadbury started off mainly selling cocoa drinks (solid chocolate came later)…this was borne out of 19th century social concerns – a Quaker (by definition teetotal) response to the “perceived misery and deprivation caused by alcohol” in British society (Helen Rowlands, Quaker historian){d}. The Cadburys marketed cocoa as a cheap available drink, one that was healthy (the process involved boiling thus removing the impurities lurking in the dubious public water supplies of the day)[ibid.]{e}.
Democratising cocoa and drinking chocolateCocoa and drinking chocolate had been around in England since the 1650s but before Cadbury’s came along it had been a luxury beverage for the elite. John Cadbury’s improvements to the product gave it more varieties and made it a more palatable drink, and after the Gladstone government reduced taxes on imported cocoa beans in the mid 1850s, the cost of cocoa became within the reach of the greater majority of Britons. Cadbury’s introduction of unadulterated “cocoa essence” in the 1870s coincided with a government crackdown on the widespread adulteration of food in the UK. The upshot was free ‘plugs’ for the purer Cadbury product and a boost in fortunes for the Quaker business [‘The Story of Cadbury. Early Days – A One Man Business’, www.cadbury.com.au].
Even ‘Lancet’ was lavish in it’s praise of Cadbury’s Cocoa⤋(photo courtesy of www.historyworld.co.uk)
Worker welfare and satisfaction a priority The Cadbury brothers, Richard and George (sons of the founder), placed an uncommon degree of emphasis on the fitness and health of their workforce (again philosophically driven by their faith). After moving their factory to a greenfields site south of Birmingham to cope with the business’ growth, George built the Bourneville village in the vicinity – this was a model village community for Cadbury’s workers – replete with schools, leisure facilities (including a lido) and parks, canteen, a carillon and its Friends meeting house. Cadbury’s employed doctors and dentists for the benefit of Bourneville employees and was among the first to pioneer pension schemes for their workforce [Jackson, loc.cit.]. The village included attractive “Arts and Crafts” style cottages in picturesque surrounds, but no pubs were permitted on the Bourneville estate{f}.The Bourneville factory ⤊
Chocolate you can eat! Cadbury Dairy Milk Richard and George’s acquisition of a new cocoa press reduced the cocoa butter content, further improving the taste of the Cadbury cocoa drink. The press also helped Cadbury’s make a breakthrough with eating chocolate in the 1890s…learning from the Swiss prototype, Nestlé, it started to create milk chocolate bars to rival those on the Continent. In 1905 Cadbury’s introduced Dairy Milk Chocolate which would go on to become its and the UK’s top selling chocolate bar (60% UK market share in 1936). DCM, together with Bourneville Cocoa, have established themselves as Cadbury’s two all-time stand-outs, iconic products in the history of the company [‘The Story of Cadbury’, loc.cit.; Deborah Cadbury, The Chocolate Wars: The 150-Year Rivalry Between the World’s Greatest Chocolate Makers, (2010)].
(photo courtesy of www.historyworld.co.uk)
Following success came expansion – in 1918 Cadbury’s opened a new factory in Tasmania (the first outside the UK). In 1910 Cadbury’s finally overtook J.S.Fry & Sons in chocolate and cocoa sales…Fry’s got the block of solid chocolate right before Cadbury’s but the legendary “glass and a half” merchants surged ahead in the end. [ibid.]. So much so that Cadbury’s acquired its biggest domestic rival in 1919 (giving it Fry’s top lines, ‘Chocolate Cream’ and ‘Turkish Delight’). In 1967 Cadbury’s added the Australian chocolate manufacturer MacRobertson(‘Freddo’, ‘Snack’){g}.
Family Fry and partnersThe Fry chocolate business was another dynastic Anglo-Quaker confectioner. The original Joseph Frystarted the company in the mid Georgian period in Britain, taking on a partner, John Vaughan. Upon Fry’s death his widow Anna Frytook over the family business and the firm name changed to Anna Fry & Son. Joseph Storrs Frysucceeded her and partnered with a Dr Hunt. Storrs Fry patented a method of grinding cocoa beans using a Watt steam engine. The company then devolved to his sons, Joseph, Francis and Richard, as joint partners. Under the next generation of Frys (Joseph Storrs Fry II), the business reached its commercial pinnacle before it got swallowed up by the vast Cadbury empire [‘J.S.Fry & Sons’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].
Shadowing Cadbury’s, the rise of Rowntree’s Rowntree’s, Cadbury’s other domestic rival in the sweets trade, was the creation of Henry Rowntree. Like Cadbury’s Rowntree applied Quaker principles to his business and always insisted on the best quality ingredients [‘Rowntree’s’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]. JosephRowntree, Henry’s brother, joined as partner in 1869, and being a staunch advocate of social reform, steered some of the firm’s profits towards his Quaker philanthropy. The company’s first big success was with ‘Fruit Pastilles’ and ‘Fruit Gums’ which allowed it to follow Cadbury’s earlier move in purchasing aVan Houten press. This enabled Rowntree’s to produce chocolate sans cocoa butter, so as to compete with Cadbury’s successful ‘Cocoa Essence’ [Robert Fitzgerald, Rowntree and the Marketing Revolution, 1862-1969, (2007)]. Rowntree’s, as their rival Cadbury’s did, created a dynasty of chocolatiers, merchants, philanthropists and social reformers – succeeding sons and brothers kept the family name at the helm of the company (Joseph Rowntree Jr, Henry Issac Rowntree, John Stephenson Rowntree).
Rowntree’s later created the consumer favourites ‘Kit Kat’, ‘Aero’ and ‘Smarties’, and went on its own expansion journey, merging with the Halifax “Toffee King” Mackintosh in 1969 (which added ‘Quality Street’ and ‘Rolo’ to its product inventory). Rowntree’s (rebranded Rowntree Mackintosh Confectionery) then acquired Australian chocolate manufacturer Hoadley’s (1972) which gave RMC Hoadley’s ‘Violet Crumble’ bar.
Rowntree’s introduced the ‘Yorkie’ bar in the Seventies which put a serious dent in Cadbury Dairy Milk’s market share and contributed to Rowntree’s reaching fourth spot in the world chocolate manufacturers’ ladder by the Eighties{h}. This was Rowntree’s apogee however as its underperforming shares saw it fall victim to a successful takeover from the Swiss giant Nestlé in 1988 [‘Rowntree’s’, op.cit.].
Nestlé’s Yorkie, a dubious sales pitch: the “NestléGoliath” was clearly tone deaf to the advantages of presenting as inclusive when they designed this, a chocolate bar which discriminates on the grounds of gender? ⤋
“Not for girls!”
A British institution undone
Cadbury’s, despite its continuing success, in 2010 suffered the same fate as Rowntree – swallowed up by another Goliath of the food business, US Kraft Foods (operating now as Mondelēz International). The loss of Cadbury’s, a household name in British manufacturing for 186 years, was highly controversial, causing an outcry in the UK. What was especially galling to many patriotic Brits was that Kraft had to borrow £7bn to seal the acquisition deal, and the banker brokering the financial transaction was itself British – the Royal Bank of Scotland [Deborah Cadbury, op.cit].
Ft-Note: Pseudo-QuakersThe runaway commercial success of Quaker food and confectionery companies did inevitably lead to imitation. A US food manufacturer in the 1870s introduced “Quaker Oats” to the cereal market…on the packets and in product advertising are images of a man dressed in Quaker garb, despite the US company having NO connexion whatsoever with the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers){i}. The company states that it chose the “Quaker Man” as its figurehead “because the Quaker faith projected the values of honesty, integrity, purity and strength”, [‘Quaker Oats website’, (FAQ 2009), www.quakeroats.com] (an early example of retail “identity theft’ to try to cash in commercially on the high regard, ethically, Quaker businessmen were held in).
تتتتتﭢ ت ﭢ تتتتتتتتتتﭢ ت ﭢ تتتتت
PostScript:Third World cocoa beans and the Quaker chocolatiers – an uncomfortable associationIn the late 19th century the Cadbury brothers and other British chocolate-makers started exporting a large proportion of their cocoa beans from the islands of São Tomé and Príncipe (Portuguese West Africa)…by the turn of the century this amounted to 55% of Cadbury’s total supply of beans. Although Portugal had abolished slavery in its colonies, the rigid labour contract system which replaced left the African labourers working the plantations in a de facto slave status. This uncomfortable connexion of an ethical Quaker business to neo-slavery prompted one of the managing grandsons, William Cadbury, to commission an investigation of worker conditions in São Tomé and Príncipe in the 1900s. Cadbury eventually found an alternative source of cocoa beans (the Gold Coast) and organised a boycott of the two Portuguese plantations, but not before he had to fend off a spate of newspaper attacks on Cadbury’s alleging that it profited from the labour of slaves [‘William Cadbury, Chocolate, and Slavery in Portuguese West Africa’, (Lindsey Flewelling), 11-May-2016, https://britishandirishhistory.wordpress.com/2016/05/11/william-cadbury-chocolate-and-slavery-in-portuguese-west-africa/].
(photo courtesy of www.historyworld.co.uk)
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{a} the non-Quaker exception to this was Terry’s (established 1767, York, UK), famous for “Terry’s Chocolate Orange” and now owned by Kraft Foods
{b} the Quaker chocolatiers’ success was remarkably out of proportion to their numbers…with Quakers just one in fourteen out of a total UK population of 21M in 1851, they comprised >0.1% of the population [Jackson, loc.cit.]
{c} descendant and family historian Deborah Cadbury states that the Cadbury founder practiced a brand of “Quaker capitalism” that valued hard work and “wealth creation for the benefit of the workers, the local community, and society at large” [Cadbury, op.cit.]
{d} John Cadbury had a long connexion with the Temperance Society
{e} later with the move into making chocolate bars, what gave the Quaker confectionery businesses an added edge over rival manufacturers was their preparedness to invest in new, state-of-the-art machinery [Jackson, loc.cit.]
{f} the Cadbury village inspired the American non-Quaker Milton Hershey(a Pennsylvanian Mennonitein fact) to create his own ‘utopian’ village for his chocolate factory workers [Cadbury, op.cit.]
{g} a 1969 merger with soft drink giant Schweppesproved less enduring with the two partners demerging in 2008
{h} behind Mars, Hershey and Cadbury’s
{i} in recent years some brethren of theQuaker movement have objected to the way the company’s advertising depicts Quakers, ‘Quaker Oats Company’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]
❛ Wherever you look, it’s a case of “Blow you, Jack, I’m all right”. ❜
(Stanley Windrush)
☬ ☬ ☬ ☬ ☬ ☬ ☬
The Boulting Brothers created some of postwar Britain’s most distinctive films across several genres, but it is their joyous 1959 comedy I’m All Right Jack that stands tallest in the film-making twin brothers’ oeuvre of cinematic comedy classics.
I’m All Right Jack takes up pretty much where it’s prequel, Private’s Progress, left off. The protagonist of both movies is the gullible and seemingly gormless Stanley Windrush (played to a tee by Ian Carmichael). Naive and good-natured, the persona of Stanley can be best summed up as epitomising the bungling, accident-prone, upper class twit.
In Private’s Progress Windrush “pussyfoots” his way through his army war service, causing unintended mayhem and allowing himself inadvertently to be duped…then by mistake he precipitates a chain of events leading to the capture of a division of enemy German soldiers and ends up an accidental war hero of sorts!
In I’m All Right Jack the Boultings reprise several of the previous film’s characters and actors…as well as ‘Stanley’ there is his scheming, unscrupulous “Uncle Bertie”, Bertram Tracepurcel (played by the urbane Dennis Price) and his harassed personnel manager, “Major Hitchcock” (the gap-toothed “professional cad” Terry-Thomas). Richard Attenborough plays “Sydney Cox”, Tracepurcel’s co-conspirator in perfidy and supposedly Stanley’s old friend from the war – the smoothest of smooth con men!
Ian Carmichael (Stanley) with ‘IARJ’ co-star Liz Fraser ◬
I’m All Right Jack satirises 1950s British society, still coming out of the straitjacket of postwar austerity, with sabre-like sharpness. The Boultings’ film fixes its microscope on industrial relations in a missiles production factory, exposing both the bosses and its blue collar workforce as unconscionable and utterly self-serving, solely out for what they can get for themselves! The Boulting brothers are “equal opportunity satirisers”, skewering management and labour alike to a commensurate degree. For both sides of the workplace divide, self-interest is unchallengingly the “drug of choice”, hence the film’s title⍟. The Boutlings also dish up a few barbs aimed at the fact-loose world of advertising along the way.
◬ Stanley’s bubble-car at the gate of Missiles Ltd
The film portrays the plant workers as work-shy and devious in their tunnel-visioned pursuit of the singular goal of doing less work than they are required to do✥…Stanley unknowingly upsets the “apple-cart” by demonstrating to the company’s T & M man (the ever-dour John Le Mesurier – another Boulting recruit from Private’s Progress) just how much work can actually be done in a day if one makes a “fair dinkum” effort (and of course this results in him being ostracised by the factory’s union). The factory management show themselves to be equally duplicitous – engaged in enriching themselves through a corrupt, clandestine arms deal with a swarthy, shonky Middle Eastern intermediary.
I’m All Right Jack also takes a comical pot shot at other societal institutions of the day – government for its torpid ineptitude, the English class system, advertising and the tabloid media for their falseness and alarming capacity to sway public opinion – lampooning each of them in turn! The Boultings are showing a Britain that is corrupt at its core, one that unearthed a late 1950s generation of “angry young men” dissatisfied with the blandness of society of the status quo [‘I’m All Right Jack review – Philip French on the Boulting brothers’ biting state-of-the-nation satire’, The Guardian, 18-Jan-2015, www.guardian.com].
Peter Sellers as Fred Kite is the movie’s stand-out, producing a gem of a performance. Kite is the comedy’s pivotal character, the chief shop steward who orchestrates the factory floor’s “go-slow” work culture, zealously obstructing management at every opportunity. “Red Fred” is your archetypal ‘Bolshy’ minor trade union official (with a Hitlerian moustache), but a union ‘heavy’ more ridiculous than menacing…a “Stalinist Don Quixote, tilting with alarming predictability at the windmills constructed by his own class enemies” [Timeout, www.timeout.com]. Sellers’ ‘Kite’ is given to awkward, Gothic turns of phrase and a pompous, halting, almost robotic mode of speech…in his essence he is hilarious as a blinkered Sovietphile idealist: “Ahhh (he sighs wistfully), Russia. All them corn fields and ballet in the evening”❂ [‘ I’m All Right Jack and The Organizer: Bread and Roses and a Lot of Laughs’, Criterion, (Michael Stragow), 19-Jan-2018, www.criterion.com].
Sellers as “Bolshy” Kite (centre) ◬
The success of I’m All Right Jack—it was the number one box office hit in the UK for 1959 and winner of a BAFTA award—led the way for a number of British films focussing on the world of worker/management relations – including the diametrically different in tone The Angry Silence (1960) (also with Richard Attenborough).
The film climaxes with Stanley, having finally ‘twigged’ to the IR game he has unwittingly been a pawn in, exposing both sides for their greed and duplicity on national television. I’m All Right Jack ends with Stanley ‘retiring’ to a rural nudist colony…he is invited by a bevy of naked women, discretely obscured by a hedge (it was 1959 after all!) to a game of tennis. The characteristically nervous Stanley bolts at the suggestion and is last seen hareing full-tilt across a meadow frantically pursued by the bare damsels.
PostScript: A punchline for the nascent anti-Apartheid movement
The Boultings’ film resonated in unexpected circles. The New Zealand Rugby Union, unwilling to offend South Africa’s racist policy of non-contact between whites and non-whites in sport, declined to select any Māori players for the 1960 All Blacks tour of South Africa (the Nash Labour government was fully complicit in this gutless act of appeasement). The ensuing controversy provoked widespread protests within NZ (a call for “No Maoris, no tour”) and a most memorable placard inspired by the film: “I’m All White, Jack!”
✲ directed by John Boulting, produced by brother Roy, and written by John with Frank Harvey from a novel by Alan Hackney (the same creators of Private’s Progress)
⍟ “I’m All right Jack” (of naval origin) was a popular UK expression of the period, meant to signify a smug and complacent self-centredness
✥ a recurring Boulting theme…in both Private’s Progress and I’m All Right Jack Windrush enters a world of “gold-bricks”, people doggedly determined to go the last mile to evade work of any kind
❂ apparently BBC Television in 1979 canned a scheduled screening of I’m All Right Jack for fear that Sellers’ ‘Kite’ might prejudice viewers against the Labour Party in an upcoming election! [ibid.]
An essential part of a tour of Independent Samoa’s main island, Upolu, is a trip to Aggie Grey’s…Samoa’s historic hotel in Beach Road on the western bank of the Vaisigano River. The place is a South Pacific institution, as was its legendary eponymous founder.
Aggie Grey’s Hotel (#77) on Apia map⍗
The ‘Aggie’ of Aggie Grey’s was born Agnes Genevieve Swann✲, the offspring of an English pharmacist from Lincolnshire and his Samoan wife, a local taupou (a ceremonial maiden). Business seemed to be in Miss Swann’s DNA – in her early twenties she opened her first club in Apia, the Cosmopolitan Club, and in 1933 started a Samoan private tourism company, Grey Investments (later called the Grey Investments Group).
No luck with ‘Kiwi’ spouses
The early death of Aggie’s first New Zealand husband left her without support and with four children to care for…the addictive gambling of her second husband squandered what money they had. In addition Aggie now had three more children and desperately needed to find a way to revive and consolidate her precarious financial situation.
With the advent of the Pacific War and American involvement, the resourceful and inventive Aggie eventually found the solution in 1942. She had earlier borrowed US$180 to purchase a colonial home which previously had been the “British Club”. As New Zealand’s prohibition laws were in force in Western Samoa⊡, Aggie started ‘Aggie Grey’s’ as a snack bar selling hamburgers and coffee to US servicemen on their tours of duty [Lonely Planet Samoan Islands, (M Bennett, D Talbot & D Swaney) (4th Ed 2003)].
The Hotel in 2006 ⍐
The American GIs in the South Pacific had plenty of money to splash around on their R & R activities, but the prohibition on liquor was a hand-brake on Aggie’s capacity to grow her business. Aggie found a inventive method of circumventing the ban…although serving alcohol was illegal, Aggie got round it by dispensing “medical permit doses” of booze to the American servicemen [‘Aggie Grey: West Point Hotelier, Legend – Apia, Upolu, Samoa’, in The Samoans: A Global Family, Frederic Koehler Sutter, (1989)].
⍗Aggie Grey: on the maiden Pan Am flight from Pago Pago (American Samoa) to Sydney International Airport, 1962(photo: John Mulligan)
From a backwater-town bar to a tourist hub
Beyond the war, over the following years, Mrs Grey turned the Apia hotel from a modest “drinking club” to a 200-room international hotel (arguably vying with Suva’s Grand Pacific Hotel for the mantle of the South Pacific’s premier international hotel) [‘Memories of the incomparable Aggie Grey’, Samoa Observer, (Terry Dunleavy), 26-Apr-2016, www.samoaobserver.com].
An ‘aiga welcome
The key to this success can be found largely in Aggie’s management style – her warm interpersonal skills, authentic, convivial personality, and her innate “understanding of the human condition”. Through her personal example of showing hospitality she imbued “Aggie Grey’s” with an atmosphere of “laid back Samoan friendly fa’aaloalo” (‘respect), conveying to each guest a sense that they were ‘aiga (‘family’) [Dunleavy].
In the formative days the hotel thrived as a result of Aggie’s ability to network… forging business links with the world outside Samoa – with the management and crews of TEAL (forerunner of Air New Zealand), and in encouraging celebrity A-listers (especially from the US) to make Samoa and Abbie Grey’s a regular stopover on route to film assignments in French Polynesia [ibid.]. Accordingly, the likes of Hollywood stars Marlon Brando, Dorothy Lamour, William Holden and Gary Cooper✥et al would be regular AG guests. Aggie sought to capitalise on the celebrity aura by naming each of the hotel’s fales (rooms) and bungalows after visiting movie celebs.
Stay in the Marlon Brando fale (№ 93) at AGs⍗
The hotel’s postwar success rested on a number of contributing factors. The arrival of trans-Pacific airlines (TEAL/Air NZ, Pan Am, QANTAS, then later Virgin’s Polynesian Blue) brought increasing numbers of tourists to replace the WWII servicemen. Aggie also had the right people behind her…a son with a good head for business, and a irreplaceable and devoted handiman, a “Mr Fixit” by the name of Fred Fairman, who Aggie could always rely on to keep the ‘wheels’ of the hotel running smoothly [ibid.; Sutter, loc.cit.].
Aggie Grey’s made it’s owner very wealthy…Aggie, a stalwart of the Samoan hospitality industry, continued at the hotel’s helm into her old age. In 1988 she died age 91, having long been one of the most respected members of the Apia business community.
Footnote: In December 2012 Cyclone Evan severely damaged Aggie Grey’s, closing it down for over three years. In August of the following year, management of the hotel complex, still under repairs, passed to the Sheraton’s hotel chain. Aggie Grey’s reopened in 2016, now operating under the name Sheraton Samoa Aggie Grey’s Hotel & Bungalows. A second Aggie Grey’s complex in Upolu, Aggie Grey’s Lagoon Resort, was opened in 2005 off a coral reef in the west of the island (a joint venture between the Grey family, the governments of Samoa and New Zealand and Virgin Samoa). 🇼🇸
PostScript: Prototype for Bloody Mary?
One of the US servicemen who frequented Aggie Grey’s during the War was travel adventure author James A Michener. Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific was later adapted into the hit Broadway musical South Pacific. One of it’s main characters, the loud and formidably forceful “Bloody Mary”, was widely thought to have been modelled on Aggie Grey, a comparison that didn’t endear itself to the Apia hotelier! [‘Lonely Planet’, op.cit.].
⍐‘Return to Paradise’ – Samoan film set & resources of ‘Aggie Grey’s’ 🇼🇸 (see below)
◲◲◲◲◲◲◲◲◲◲◲◲◲◲◲◲◲◲◲◲◲◲◲◲
✲ ‘Grey’ was the surname of Aggie’s second husband from New Zealand
⊡ New Zealand administered Western Samoa as it was called at this time, under a League of Nations mandate
✥ Cooper in fact made a movie in Samoa, Return to Paradise in 1953 (pretty stock standard South Seas adventure stuff), and of course Aggie came on board to contribute to the production …Aggie Grey’s hotel providing logistical support and a base for the project’s accommodation, and the indefatigable hotelier personally supervised the catering unit for the film [Dunleavy]
Most motorists who regularly drive within a 10-15km radius of the city centre of Sydney have found themselves at some time at the intersection of Parramatta and Liverpool Roads – not uncommonly in heavily banked-up peak traffic. In the pioneering days of the New South Wales colony, the routes of the two major roads played a seminal role in the exploration and discovery of new areas to the west, south and north of Sydney.
The first rough tracks crudely carved out of the wilderness by the colonists in 1788 pretty much follow the routes of Parramatta and Liverpool roads as they were later constructed✲. For many of the early explorers of NSW this intersection of the Great Western Road (to Parramatta, the Blue Mountains and beyond that the Central West and the continent’s vast interior) and the Great Southern Road (to Liverpool and the Southern Tablelands), was the jumping-off point for many exploratory treks into the colony’s hinterland.
The intersection at the junction of three inner west Sydney suburbs, Ashfield, Summer Hill and Haberfield, is thus the ideal place to commemorate those early heroic efforts of exploration, endurance and hardship, and in 1988 as part of Australia’s Bicentennary of European settlement, this is precisely what happened.
If you turn from Parramatta Road into Liverpool Road, immediately on your right, between a fast food chicken outlet and the corner, you will see a small, narrow tree-lined park (about 85-90m x 35m). The most intriguing association of the park is its name – Explorers Park✪.
The park comprises as its centrepiece a long arched trellis covered with the thick, verdant vines of a climbing plant, forming a tunnel effect. On the paved floor, along the length of the trellis, are plaques which celebrate those early 19th century Australian explorers. Starting with Blaxland, Wentworth and Lawson, who with the inestimable help of local aboriginal trackers from various clans and tribes, made the breakthrough discovery of a viable route across the Great Dividing Range, there are plaques with brief summaries of the achievements of all those who followed – the likes of Oxley, Mitchell, Sturt, the tragic Kennedy, Hume and Hovell (one half of which gave his name to the iconic Hume Highway that has its genesis at the intersection).
At the north end of the park, there’s a dome-shaped trellis which backs on to Parramatta Road. The trellis contains a white wall with a stencil pattern depicting images of the participants who made the pioneering achievements of exploration possible – the explorers themselves, their mode of transport (the camels) and their invaluable indigenous guides.
Long before the advent of the Bicenntenary triggered the construction of Explorers Park, the location was a busy thoroughfare for mounted travellers, horse and carts and livestock, especially after Liverpool Road was opened in 1821. One hundred years later exactly, with the age of the automobile established as the dominant and future mode of transport, this exact block of land was purchased by a motor engineer Frank Dale. Two years later in 1923, he built a motor service station (Dales Garage) on the site. Over the following decades ownership of the garage regularly changed hands (Major Motors, Western Service Station, etc.). Eventually the land was acquired by the DMR (Department of Main Roads) and the garage demolished to allow for the widening of the high-traffic intersection [‘Sydney’s fork in the road’, Inner West Courier, 19-Feb-2019 (Ann O’Connell, Ashfield Historical Society)].
Dales Garage (photo: Inner West Courier) ∇
Footnote: An early landmark pub for travellersOpposite the Explorers Park site, across Parramatta Road (in what is today Haberfield), there used to be another building at this important intersection…this was a hotel called Speed the Plough Inn (often abbreviated to ‘The Plough Inn’), one of Sydney’s iconic travellers’ pubs of the early colonial era. The Inn was built by a pioneering settler of Haberfield, David Ramsey in the late 1820s [‘The Dobroyde Estate’, (Ramsey Family History), http://belindacohen.tripod.com/ramsayfamilyhistory/dobroydestate.html]. ▲An early drawing of the hotel by George W Roberts (c.1845) (State Library of NSW)
Long gone, but in it’s day the Plough Inn went far beyond merely providing food, drink and shelter…boasting extensive stabling for livery and coach horses, as well as ample enclosures and water for livestock (the yard and adjoining paddocks were used for sheep and cattle sales) [Harvest of the Years – The Story of Burwood, 1794-1974, Eric Dunlop (1974 Burwood Municipal Council)]. The Plough Inn closed down in 1911 with the land becoming part of the Haberfield subdivision.
Speed the Plough Inn, Parramatta Road ∇
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✲ as illustrated in Captain (later Governor) John Hunter’s An Historical Journal of Events at Sydney and at Sea at the time
✪ Explorers Park is only metres from the larger Ashfield Park which features a statue of the popular children’s literature character Mary Poppins, commemorating the fact that the author of the Mary Poppins books, PL Travers, once lived in the suburb
The northern coastline of suburban Sydney, with its abundance of picturesque beaches, is a magnet in summer for many visitors from far and near. One of the less frequented of the Northern Beaches, owing to its relative inaccessibility and lack of a rock pool✲, is Bungan Beach.
What drew me to Bungan this summer was not however the pristine waters of its uncrowded beach, but one particular unusual building standing out high up on Bungan Head…Bungan Castle, which this year celebrates 100 years since it was constructed.
Situated as one later observer noted “on a bold headland of the coast, about eighteen miles from Sydney” [1] (Newport, NSW), Bungan’s castle was built at the very pinnacle of a cliff-top by Gustav Adolph Wilhelm Albers, a German-born Australian artists’ agent. Today it is hemmed in and surrounded by a raft of modern, multi-million dollar mansions which share its unparalleled breathtaking views. But when Albers built “Bungan Castle” on what is now Bungan Head Road, the imposing high dwelling was surrounded only by bush and cleared scrub and completely neighbourless!✪
∆photo (ca.1928): National Library of Australia
Albers in 1919 was considered something of a doyen of the Australian art community, he represented local artists like Sidney Long and JJ Hilder, and the castle (his abode at weekends and holidays❇) acted as a kind of 1920s arts hub, an unofficial Sydney artists’ colony. The leather-bound visitors’ book (still surviving) records the names of numerous artistic personalities of the early 20th century including the formidable and influential Norman Lindsay.
photo: NSW Archives & Records∆
Aside from creating a skyline haven for practitioners of the art community, the eccentricity of Albers’ personal taste in decor is worthy of elaboration: he furnished Bungan Castle with an idiosyncratic and vast array of collectibles, a number of which the art connoisseur acquired on his regular jaunts overseas✤. The castle interior was inundated with a phenomenal “hotch-potch” of antiquated weaponry – including Medieval armour, Saracen helmets, Viking shields, sword and daggers including a Malay kris, battle-axes, muskets, flint-lock guns, Zulu rifles; convicts’ leg-irons and Aboriginal breast-plates.
∆ photo: Fairfax Archives
In addition to the assortment of objects of a martial nature, there were numerous other oddities and curios, such as a big bell previously located at Wisemans Ferry and used to signal the carrying out of convict executions in colonial times; a human skull mounted above the hall door (washed up on Bungan Beach below the castle); a sea chest; a variety of ships’ lanterns; “tom-toms” (drums) and various items of taxidermy [2].
This home is a castle – a “Half-Monty” of a castle
From the road below, staring up at the tree-lined Bungan Castle, it does bear the countenance of something from a pre-modern time and not out of place in a rural British landscape. Constructed of rough-hewn stone (quarried from local (Pittwater) sandstone), it contains many of the castellated features associated with such a historic piece of architecture – towers and turrets, a donjon (keep), battlements, vaults, a great hall, a coat-of-arms, etc.
This said, Bungan Castle lacks other standard features – a drawbridge with a portcullis and a barbican ; visible gargoyles; and a moat (although Edinburgh Castle also lacks a moat, being built up high on bedrock it doesn’t require one for defensive purposes); and it is also bereft of a dungeon! And of course, most telling, parts of the southern and eastern facades are clearly more ‘home’ than castle! One could easily dismiss any claim to it being thought of as an authentic facsimile of the “real thing” (some early observers described it, erroneously, as a ‘Norman’ castle), but with a bit of licence we can reasonably ascribe the descriptor (small) ‘castle’ to Bungan, much as New Zealand tourism promotes the lauded Lanarch ‘Castle’ on the Otago Peninsula (also without many of those classic features).
A family concern
GAW Albers’ prominence in the Northern Beaches area and the talking point uniqueness of Bungan Castle led many locals to dub the Sydney art dealer “the Baron of Bungan Castle”. Albers died in 1959 but the ‘baronial’ castle has remained firmly in family hands. The current owners are Albers’ nephew John Webeck and his wife Pauline. John maintains the family’s artistic bent as well, having like Uncle William had a career as an art dealer.
Artists’ Mecca? museum? both?
Webeck has signalled that he would like to reprise the castle’s former mantle as an artists’ Mecca, but I can’t help feeling that with such a wealth of out-of-the-ordinary artifacts within its walls, that its future might be most apt as an historical museum. Such suggestions have been made in the past – the Avalon Beach Historical Society referred to Bungan Castle having been an “unofficial repository for many articles, (sufficient to deem it) Pittwater’s first museum”[3].
—⇴—⇴—⇴—⇴—⇴—⇹—⇹—-⇹—⇹—⇹—⇸—⇸—⇸—⇸—
✲ the close proximity of larger beaches with on-site car parks (absent from Bungan) – Newport, The Basin and Mona Vale – make them a more popular choice for beach-goers
✪ at the time there was only three other homes on the entire headland
❇ Albers’ principal family home was in Gordon, 25 km way on the North Shore of Sydney
✤ although the bulk of the castle’s collection were donated to Albers by others who thought it an appropriate home
[1] WEM Abbott, ‘Castle on a Cliff Edge’, The Scone Advocate, 25-Mar-1949, http://nla.gov.au.news-article162719685
[2] ‘Castle Turrets on Sydney’s Skyline’ (Nobody Wants them…Our Baronial Halls), The Sun (Sydney), 08-May-1927, http://nla.gov.au.news-article223623550. The author of this article goes on to lament the fact that Sydney’s castle homes had fallen out of fashion for the well-heeled “princes of commerce” in search of a suitable ancestoral mansion…in 1927 their preference was apparently for modern Californian villas with all the latest conveniences.
[3] ‘A Visit To Bungan Castle By ABHS’, Pittwater Online News, 14-20 Oct 2018, Issue 379, www.pittwatetonlinenew.com
Britain’s sporting lingua franca has by general consensus long been football (better known as ‘soccer’ in Australasia and the United States). For the bulk of the 19th century the “round-ball game” was exclusively the domain of men, but by the 1890s women in Britain were embracing the popular outdoor pastime with passion. Women’s clubs, many based in North London, were formed at this time, beginning with the British Ladies’ Football Club (BLFC), comprising mostly middle-class women (see Footnote).
Working class women discover footballWhat really kicked the sport along for women however was World War I. The escalating demand on manpower to feed the war effort depleted the country’s vital industrial factories of its male blue-collar workers. The same priority had a similar draining effect on the (English) FA’s (Football Association’s) player stocks. The manpower shortages took women in large numbers out of the home to meet the factory shortfall of men. With few men around to play the game, after season 1914/1915 the premier men’s competitions, the FA Cup and the English championship, were suspended and didn’t get going again until 1919/1920. Into this breach, almost by a process of natural evolution, stepped the newly employed (working class) women of England’s factories ‘FA History’, www.thefa.com].
Dick, Kerr’s Ladies FCWith the new infusion of working women taking up football competitively, the stronghold of women’s football moved to Preston in the north-eastern county of Lancashire. Over the next several seasons up until the early years of the interwar period, one women’s club team stood tallest…Dick, Kerr’s Ladies was created out of the female workforce of Dick, Kerr & Co, Preston locomotive and tramcar manufacturers. The highly successful Dick, Kerr’s Ladies side was spearheaded by one of football’s most remarkable ever female players, the chain-smoking, openly gay Lily Parr who scored over 1,000 goals in a 31-year career✱.Dick, Kerr’s Ladies were pioneers of international women’s matches with French women’s sides⍟ and the Preston team’s popularity soared through and beyond the war years. In 1920 a game between Dick, Kerr’s and St Helens’ Ladies at Goodison Park (Everton) drew a crowd of 53,000 – with the gates locked leaving thousands more outside! [‘WW1: why was women’s football banned in 1921?’, (Gemma Fay), BBC News, 12-Dec-2014, www,bbc.com].
Notwithstanding the enormous contribution of Lily Parr, Dick, Kerr’s Ladies was no “one woman band”…centre-forward Florrie Redford netted a phenomenal 170 goals for the Preston-based club in 1921 [Dick, Kerr Ladies FC 1917-1965′, www.dickkerrladies.com]. Another female football star of the day – who DIDN’T play for Dick, Kerr’s XI – was Northumberland’s Bella Reay who played in the north-east Munitions’ comp. Bella’s 130-plus goals in the 1917/1918 season propelled her unbeaten club Blyth Spartans Ladies FC to victory in the Munitionettes’ Cup (drawn from women workers in munitions factories and docks in the north-east who played amateur football to raise funds for charity) [Fay, ‘BBC’, loc.cit.].Bella Reay, Blyth Spartans star striker⬆️
The (FA) empire strikes backImmediately following the Great War the women’s game was at a high point and on the ascent✥. But after demobilisation, able-bodied men who had fought in the global conflict, streamed back into the English workforce…this meant that the great bulk of the women who had filled their boots on the factory floor were now surplus to requirements and so were “quietly shunted back into domestic life” [ibid.]. Englishmen also returned to playing the number one sport with the Football League recommencing in 1919/1920. The FA authorities in England had tolerated rather than supported women’s football during the enforced absence of the men’s league.
Football – a “health hazard” for women!The FA’s disapproval had an ally in some prominent members of the medical profession which shared its lack of enthusiasm for female football – on medical grounds!◘ These medicos tended to endorse the assumption of Harley Street specialist Dr Mary Scharlieb who opined that football was a “most unsuitable game, too much for a women’s physical frame” [ibid.]. At this point (1921) the FA stepped in, banning women and the country’s female competitions from using FA grounds, echoing the (predominantly male) medicos’ sentiments that the sport was “quite unsuitable for females, and ought not to be encouraged” [‘The FA’, op.cit.]. Aiming for overkill, the FA decreed that its officials (referees and linesmen) could not take part in women’s matches, a step intended to further hamper the development of the female game.
To underscore the justification for its arbitrary and discriminatory treatment of the women’s’ leagues, the FA alleged (without any proof) that the women’s setup had failed to give an adequate percentage of its gate revenue towards charitable objects”. This was a classic double standard posture as the men’s clubs was never asked to donate any gate receipts to charity. In response, the captain of the Plymouth Ladies team accurately described the FA as being “a hundred years behind the times”✫ and said the ban was nothing more than “purely sex prejudice” [‘1921: the year when football banned women’, History Extra, (Jim Weeks), Dec. 2017, www.historyextra.com].
So was the FA simply exhibiting a blatant, sexist chauvinism towards the women players? The short answer is yes…but could there be something else behind their draconian action as well? During the war the women’s leagues had built up a considerable following and were enticing impressive crowd numbers to the matches. The FA’s overwhelming remit has always been the health of the men’s game and it was concerned that the women’s demonstrable pulling power might have a detrimental affect on attendances to the Football League (men’s) games [ibid.]. Applying a handbrake to the burgeoning women’s game, indeed sidelining it altogether, was considered a great ‘leg-up’boosting the FA’s objective of rebuilding men’s professional football after the WWI hiatus.
Aftermath of the banThe FA’s ruling did not put an end to women and girls playing football altogether, but the effect of it was to relegate the top-tier players in England to mostly friendly matches. The elite Dick, Kerr’s Ladies team (later renamed Preston Ladies FC) did its best to stay active. In 1922 it organised a tour of North America but even here the meddling hand of the English FA was at work doing what it could to stymie the club’s tour. On direction from the FA the Canadian FA banned the Dick Kerr women from playing in Canada. The team did however manage to organise nine matches in the US which were played against men’s sides [ibid.].
Preston Ladies, 1939➡“Fem-soccer”: Women’s football goes “gangbusters!”The ban stayed in force…beyond the formation of the Women’s FA in England in 1969. It was not until July 1971 that the FA, and then only under pressure from UEFA (Union of European Football Associations), finally lifted the ban. Held back no more by gender stereotypers, the women’s game has gone from strength to strength – in 1972 the first women’s FA Cup, in 1984 the first women’s European Championship, followed by the World Cup in 1991 (the 2011 World Cup Final was played in front of a packed 83,000-strong crowd).
Footnote: “Nettie Honeyball”The founding of the first women’s team British Ladies’ FCis attributed to ‘Nettie Honeyball’…this was a pseudonym for the middle-class female activist (identity unknown, possibly one Mary Hutson) who organised the first women’s match in North London in 1895 (“The North” thrashed “The South” 7-1 before an estimated 11,000 spectators) [‘British Ladies’ Football Club’], Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].
PostScript: The Scottish FA, closed ranks with its English brethrenThe FA in England was not “Robinson Crusoe” among the home countries in enforcing discriminatory practices against women players. Other football associations took a similarly blinkered view. In the 1924/1925 season three Scottish clubs (Aberdeen, Queen of the South and Raith Rovers) all had their requests to use their club grounds for women’s matches uncermoniously vetoed by the men of the Scottish FA [‘The Honeyballers: Women who fought to play football’, BBC News, 26-Sep-2013, www.bbc.com].
– —– ——–– — -– ——–– —– —– —– ——–– — -– ——–– —–—- ——- — ✱ in 2002, many years after her death, Parr was the first (and so far only) woman player inaugurated into the FA’s Hall of Fame⍟ although there had been a much earlier women’s match between a Scottish XI side and an English XI that took place in 1881✥ in 1920 there was around 150 women’s teams playing the sport in England plus many more in Scotland and Wales◘ back as far as 1894 medical professionals had advocated that women and girls be barred from taking part in football [‘The Honeyballers’, loc.cit.]. Aside from “medical concerns”, another reason that has been suggested for the opposition to female footballers at the time was that they were seen as threatening the perception of football as a “masculine game” [Mårtensson, S, ‘Branding women’s football in a field of hegemonic masculinity’, Entertainment and Sports Law, 8 (June 2010)].✫ 8.4M British women had recently received the vote, the breakthrough achievements of women’s football was paralleling the Suffrage Movement [Weeks, op.cit.]
Hillbilly (noun) informal, chiefly derogatory: an unsophisticated country person [Oxford Dictionary of English]. Etymology: unknown, however the explanation favoured by Anthony Harkins is persuasive if not definitive – coming from the melding of “hill-fort” with “billie” (friend or companion) by Scottish highlanders [‘Hillbillies’, Encyclopedia of Arkansas History and Culture,www.encyclopediaofarkansashistoryandculture.net✱]
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The title of this blog references a popular 1950s movie series which neatly encapsulates the essence of the negative stereotypes of the ‘hillbilly’ conveyed through cinema and television that the jaundiced eye of Hollywood has delighted in perpetuating over the decades – in the name of humour. “Ma and Pa Kettle” are two impoverished and uneducated but headstrong back-country bumpkins on a dilapidated wreck of a farm with 16 mostly out-of-control children (“Hen-pecked” ‘Pa’ is slow-thinking and pathologically indolent, singularly dedicated to the pursuit of the avoidance of any work; ‘Ma’ is a large and loudly haranguing woman and only one cog brighter than her not-intellectually-overburdened husband!). The characters made their visual debut in a 1949 movie The Egg and I (based on a novel by Betty McDonald) in supporting parts but proved so popular that Universal Studios elevated them to leads which segued into nine more films with titles like Ma and Pa Kettle Go to Town, Ma and Pa Kettle at the Fair and Ma and Pa Kettle at Waikiki⌑.
In popular currency the notion of the hillbilly has an overwhelmingly pejorative connotation anywhere within the reach of American culture (ie, everywhere!), especially as a topic of discussion or comment outside the American South. The stereotype is deeply embedded in and has been perpetuated through the agency of American popular culture – in literature, there have been long-running hillbilly comic strips ridiculing country folk as basically “dumber than dumb”, especially seen in ‘Li’l Abner’ and ‘Snuffy Smith’ (at left). But the idea of hillbillies as backward, ornery and all the other negative connotations associated with them, has been nowhere more pervasive than on the celluloid screen, both big and small.
The Southern Appalachians⬇️ ️️The perception given by popular cinema and television comedy is that hillbillies can be found in a loosely defined geographical region somewhere in the American South. If need arises in a storyline to pinpoint their location more precisely, screenwriters will tend to locate them in mountainous areas, and if named it will usually be in one of two southern physiographic regions, either the Ozarks (extending over parts of Arkansas, Mississippi, Oklahoma and Kansas) or the massive Appalachians (several systems of mountains but usually “Appalachian hillbillies” are depicted as coming from Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia, and (parts of) Ohio)✥.The Ozarks (“Hillibilly haven”)⬆️
The hillbilly tropeHollywood, from the pioneering days of the film industry, has been happy to resort to negative stereotypes of the hillbilly. The early film emphasis was on showing the hillbilly as an agent of violence and social menace, as degenerates and outcasts, only after WWII do we start to see hillbillies as a screen vehicle for innocuous farce and comic effect with the advent of Ma and Pa Kettle and the TV comedies that followed in the Sixties [A Harkins, Hillbilly: A Cultural History of an American Icon, (2005)]. The motion pictures’ use of a hillbilly trope can be seen in films as far back as the 1904 silent The Moonshiner…in fact the story of the hillbilly clandestinely making ‘moonshine’ in the backwaters while evading the law has been a much-used trope in movies, recurring for example recently in the Prohibition-era ‘bootlegging’ flick Lawless (2012) [‘Portraying Appalachia: How the Movies Can Get it Wrong’, (Tom Porter), Bowdoin News Archive, 09-Jun-2017, www.community.bowdoin.edu
The South is “a different country”: More audience fodder for HollywoodIn the television age Hollywood’s “go-to” take on hillbillies typically utilises the persona for pure comic intent, mercilessly exposing and ridiculing the (usually) working class hillbilly for his or her wilful ignorance, lack of education and sophistication, depicting him or her as “pre-modern and ignorant hillbillies” (in Anthony Harkins’ words) to create, “one of the more lasting and pervasive images in American popular iconography” [Harkins, op.cit.]. Given that areas like Appalachia with its coal-dependent economy are cyclically prone to recurrent “booms and busts”, poverty is a familiar reality for very many of those residing in such places, accordingly Hollywood has traditionally seen hillbillies as soft targets, comfortable in showing up their unworldliness and illiteracy for a laugh…the Beverly Hillbillies of that popular American TV comedy of the same name are “dirt-poor” until Jed makes a fortuitous discovery on their ‘worthless’ land which transforms the ‘Hicksville’ family into “oil-rich tycoons”.
‘Monstrous mountaineers’ and other ‘psychopaths’The comedic hillbilly has proved a rich source of material for movies and television, but as a variant from time to time Hollywood has also presented a very different, menacing on-screen hillbilly persona – the classic cinematic example of this is perhaps the 1972 Deliverance movie. Deliverance portrays hillbillies as sadistic, lawless types bereft of any semblance of moral compass, ‘inbred’✪ nefarious individuals who commit acts which are both morally and sexually depraved⍍. In hillbilly movies of this type, in place of the benign and fun-loving “Good Ol’ Boys”, are more brooding and sinister Southerners, sometimes isolated loners, psychotic serial-killers and even corrupt sheriffs. Meredith McCarroll, in a study focusing on the Appalachians [Unwhite: Appalachia, Race and Film, (2018)], has identified several distinct tropes of hillbilly movies. McCarroll’s typology includes Monstrous Mountaineer [Deliverance, Wrong Turn (2003), Timber Halls (2007)]; Heroic Highlander [Next of Kin (1982)], Killing Season (2013); Lazy Hillbilly [Our Hospitality (1923), Kentucky Moonshine (1938)]✜.
Where are the “black hillbillies?” “Honorary non-whites?”McCarroll in her just published book focussed on the fact that the hillbillies portrayed in Hollywood movies and television are phenotypically white…the towns of Hillbilly films and TV comedies typically, are uniformly devoid of black people, eg, The Andy Griffith Show/Mayberry, R.F.D. (despite the reality, a concentration of large numbers of African-Americans in the South!?!). Leaving aside the anomalous element of that scenario for a moment, in Unwhite McCarroll argues that the depiction of white hillbillies on the screen – characteristically disparaging – signifies that the TV and film-makers are applying the same kind of negative trope traditionally employed by Hollywood to vilify non-white minority groups (native Americans, Black and Hispanic peoples), as part of the ‘other’ in society [McCarroll, cited in ‘McCarroll’s book debunks myths about Appalachia’, (Lucas Weitzenberg), Bowdoin Orient, 28-Sep-2018, www.bowdoinorient.com].
The 2018 independent documentary Hillbilly (Sarah Rubin and Ashley York) offers a similar critique on the vilification of specifically Appalachian, but of Southern culture generally. Decrying the screen prevalence of negative hillbilly stereotypes (represented as promiscuous, “buffoonish alcoholics” and “trailer trash”), at the same time York and Rubin make a link between those stereotypes and the corporate exploitation of the Appalachian Mountains’ natural resources [‘”Hillbilly” Reclaims Appalachia’s Identity Against Lasting Insidious Stereotypes’, Pop Matters, (Argun Ulgen), 21-Nov-2018, www.popmatters.com; ‘”Hillbilly” explores stereotypes of Appalachia’, Times-Tribune, (Brad Hall), 19-Sep-2018, www.thetimestribune.com].
Escaping to an imagined and idealised SouthHollywood’s hillbilly stereotypes extend to a romanticisation of the hillbilly, often their lives are romanticised as simple and uncomplicated (much as native and Black Americans and Mexicans are!). The hillbilly is shown as backward and quaintly pre-industrial, embodied in the famous river bank scene in Deliverance of hillbillies lazing about with nothing better to do than mindlessly pluck banjos [McCarroll, op.cit.]. Allied to this perception, Hollywood’s hillbilly tropes are a component of “using the South as a foil for modern life”…for Americans living in the Sixties and Seventies it was a confrontational time, full of harsh realities and worrying big issues such as the conflict over the Vietnam War, race riots, poverty and the Cold War. Feeding the viewing public a diet of idyllic and irenic images of Southern harmony, a distorted sense of life not being too serious, provided a palatable form of escapism for Americans in the big cities. So we got shows like The Andy Griffith Show, Petticoat Junction, Green Acres and The Dukes of Hazzard, presenting fictional Southern ‘Hicksville’ towns with names like ‘Mayberry’ and ‘Hooterville’, peopled by harmless hayseed sheriffs and shopkeepers [‘The Weird History of Hillbilly TV’, (Gabe Bullard), www.bittersoutherner.com].
‘Hicksploitation’ reality obsessionIn the age of reality TV saturating our screens, the subject matter of hillbillies has far from abated. The trope has perpetuated itself within this sub-genre of television with a string of titles pitched fairly and squarely at the LCD in society…Swamp People, Moonshiners, Bayou Billionaires, Hillbilly Handfishin’, American Hoggers, and even Lady Hoggers, as well primus inter pares, the much-hyped docu-drama Duck Dynasty. Reality hillbilly shows keep faith with the standard formula, peopled with folk who are not exactly what you’d call cerebral, rather they are raucous, profane, intolerant, “anything goes” ‘rednecks’…so lots of guns around, wild animals of various kinds, ‘Down-South” stills producing copious amounts of “sly grog”, “hunting-and-a-fishing”, excessive facial hair, Confederate flags, lack of respect for authority, etc. Despite the often appalling and sometimes degrading behaviour exhibited in “redneck reality TV”, viewers continue to subscribe in meaningful numbers to this brand of “televisional fare”. Testimony perhaps to the fact that “people will (always) tune in to see themselves on screen or the extremes of another culture” [“‘Redneck’ reality TV is one big ‘Party'”, (Patrick Ryan), USA Today, 09-Dec-2014, www.usatoday.com].
PostScript: “Warring Hillbillies” folkloreOne of the well-trawled narrative sources for hillbilly films and TV programs has been the historical feud between the Hatfield and the McCoy clans (1860s-1890s). The protracted conflict between the two neighbouring mountaineering families, stretching from West Virginia to Kentucky, a part of Appalachian folklore, caught the imagination of Hollywood, providing it with ample material for screen productions over the years. This has included both comedies and dramas, ranging from Abbott and Costello’s farcical Comin’ Round the Mountain to the more recent (2012) Hatfields and McCoy miniseries.[see also the following article – ‘The Much Mooted ‘Hillbilly Wars’ of Appalachia : The McCoy v. Hatfield Feud’]
∇ Ma minus Pa – the Kettles’ swan-song
✱ the Encyclopedia of Arkansas History and Culture points out that the word ‘hillbilly’ is often used interchangeably with several other derogatory epithets – eg, ‘redneck’, ‘white trash’ and ‘cracker’
⌑ despite being depicted as quintessential ‘hillbillies’ (as defined by popular culture), Ma and Pa Kettle, both in the original book and in the films live in a rural locale somewhere in Washington state…not Appalachia or the Ozarks or anywhere in the South (although one of the series entries is The Kettles in the Ozarks). Not confining itself to the negative profiling of hillbillies, the Kettle movies delve even deeper into stereotypes with a thorough “hatchet job” on the series’ two dim American ‘Indian’ characters – ‘Crowbar’ and ‘Geoduck’
✥ although people labelled as ‘hillbillies’ don’t necessarily have to live in the mountains per se to be thus categorised
✪ remember, Elvis made a ‘hillbilly’ movie called Kissin’ Cousins
⍍ we see through Hollywood’s lens suggestions of promiscuity, of inbreeding, bestiality, all manner of sexual deviance, attributed to the on-screen hillbilly [Hall, loc.cit]. To balance the negative slant slightly, as Tom Porter notes, on rarer occasions screen depictions do exist which present mountaineers more positively – as rugged and even heroic folk living outside societal norms living independently on their wits (somewhat akin to filmic representations of the “Wild West” prior to the 1970s), Porter, loc.cit.]
✜ McCarroll also nominates an infinitely smaller list of “hillbilly movies” which manage, to greater or lesser degree, to avoid the standard stereotypes [eg, Winter’s Bone (2010), Norma Rae (1979), Matewan (1987)]
In Part 1 we saw how robust intervention of the United Fruit Company and other commercially aggressive American companies in Central and South America brought about the socio-economic conditions that led to the characterisation of some of the countries therein as “banana republics”. This second part will focus on the experience of one particular country in the region, British Honduras (modern-day Belize), which, although a different type of polity to the other neighbouring states at the time, nonetheless exhibited the same or similar patterns of disruption and exploitation from the North American banana barons.
Pre-conditions for the banana importersBritish Honduras in 1900 was a British crown colony, a status it had since 1862✱. At the head of the colony, the Crown’s representative, was the governor [‘British Honduras’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]. Before bananas, the prized commodity in BH was timber – logwood, cedar, chicle, and above all mahogany✪. Moberg notes that despite the abolition of slavery in 1838, the conditions peculiar to British Honduras (BH) continued to perpetuate a debt servitude of rural workers to an oligarchy of local and immigrant land-holders. Nineteenth century BH economy was dependent on mahogany exports, a situation which created what has been described as an elite ‘forestocracy’ made up of timber companies and merchants (both domestic and foreign) [CH Grant]. This bound generations of forestry workers in BH to the powerful employer-class…one resident colonial secretary described the plight of the workforce as being “virtually enslaved for life”. Moberg’s case study describes the role of the British authority in this status quo as one of aiding and abetting the goals of the timber and mercantile elites [Moberg 1996].
Br.Honduras mahogany exports ▸
The debt peonage that the unskilled BH farm workers were forced into (known locally as the “advance-truck” system), helped create a climate favourable to industry (ie, cheap and docile labour force) in the later American intervention by banana companies. Banana industry workers on plantations inherited similar harsh working conditions, including being subjected to the draconian ‘Masters and Servants’ Acts. Checks on what the United Fruit Co (UFCo) could do within British Honduras resided at least on paper with the colonial chief official, the governor (after 1884), (formerly the lieutenant governor 1862-1884, who during which time was subordinate to the governor of Jamaica). As Moberg’s study shows, the will to resist United Fruit’s incursions into the colony varied considerably from governor to governor. Early governors like Goldsworthy earned the ire of the resident elites who agitated for more political power. Under pressure from the business elites and oligarchs, the Colonial Office (in London) was forced to curb the power of governors in the 1890s and give the Legislative Council (and especially its five ‘unofficial’ members) a right of veto over the governor. In the 1900s governors like Sweet-Escott and Swayne made token efforts to dilute the members’ clout on council (with minimal success), but most governors ultimately conceded power to the elites [ibid.].
Acceding to the demands of big foreign capitalThe governors discovered that the interests of foreign capital in British Honduras – initially through British mercantile and timber firms but increasingly through a burgeoning of US investors❅ – could not be ignored. By around 1900 bananas represented 71% of the value of exports to the US✥. It amounted to increasingly significant revenue for the colony’s coffers. The British Honduras government saw it as vital to the colony’s economy. Moberg indicates that “despatches from the governors to the Colonial Office reveal an eager accommodation to the banana multinational”. One of the most compliant, Governor Wilson, proposed to his masters in London that the government build railroads in the colony as an incentive for United Fruit to invest. Governor Swayne, undergoing a 180° turn from his earlier opposition to UFCo, started to act like a “virtual agent for the company in London”, negotiating the approval of incredibly generous land concessions to UFCo…under its terms United Fruit was asked to pay only $1 an acre compared to between $3 and $8 an acre required of small landholders (and UFCo was largely exempted from standard land tax). Sometimes UFCo received land gratis or for virtually nothing in exchange for the company’s promise to build railroads in the tropical lowlands (which of course benefitted UFCo’s business!) [ibid.].
United Fruit Co’s corporate muscle-flexingOn the rarer occasions that the BH government were reluctant to automatically lay down and do the American banana giant’s bidding, UFCo’s immediate reflex was to engage in bullying tactics against the government and threaten retaliatory action. When United Fruit asked the government for the unprecedented control of the British Honduras wireless (a very “banana republic” situation by which the British Central American colony’s entire radio communications would be held in foreign hands!), the Colonial Office declined its request. UFCo responded by withdrawing its steamship passenger line from service until the Colonial Office finally caved in to its demands for control of the radio system in 1911. UFCo took the same measure with its service on another occasion (which deprived the colony of mail delivery for over a month) in order to extract a higher subsidy payment from the government [ibid.].
United Fruit Co’s strategy in BH: Beginnings of the ‘Musaocracy’When it commenced business as a buyer of bananas in Central America (1899/1900), UFCo embarked on a strategy that envisaged a monopoly situation end-game. One of the first moves was into transport. In 1900 UFCo acquired majority ownership of six Caribbean coast steamship lines⌖, this also gave it the government mail contract as well (the Belize Royal Mail). The strategy to maximise its stake in the colony’s bananas was clinical and precise: UFCo first raised the price it was paying to independent growers, this allowed it to eventually crush all competition from other buyers…a monopoly of the market achieved, the company was now free to “dictate ruinous prices and conditions to private growers”. At the same time United Fruit thwarted the marketing efforts of independent growers, thus denying them alternate sources for the sale of their produce [ibid.].
Restrictive competitive practices 101: United Fruit achieves vertical integration in bananasAfter securing a stranglehold over the exporting side of the banana game in Belize and having established its own rail network to transport the produce, UFCo’s next step was to create its own banana plantations in the colony’s south at Stann Creek and Toledo. As a major BH producer United Fruit consolidated its position in several stages, it set about monopolising the land available for cultivation. By 1930, the land area of Belize cultivated by the company comprised 139,000 acres, but UFCo also held over 20 times this area of unused land in BH, seriously limiting the area of cultivable land available to competing planters. United Fruit’s price-fixing had the ultimate effect of decimating the local banana growers✧ [ibid.]Fusarium wilt (‘Panama disease’)⬆️
Industry reversals and exit strategyIn the 1910s the banana business in British Honduras was hit by a series of natural and climatic disasters…heavy rains causing flooding with loss of 90% of banana crop; infectious diseases especially the Panama disease (a soil-borne fungus), particularly devastating to UFCo’s Middlesex and Stann Creek estates; poor cultivation techniques exacerbated the losses (reliance on primitive milpa cultivation). The persistence of Panama disease⊠ further depressed production and United Fruit gradually reduced its banana operations in BH and in some cases, in locations like South Stann Creek, eventually replaced banana cultivation with citrus fruit [ibid.].
⬇UFCo promotional booklet (Source: JJ Burns Library, Boston College)
Successive Belize colonial governments were repeatedly outwitted by United Fruit negotiations leaving it in a default position vis-á-vis the US company that was inferior and subordinate. One weakness stemming from the contractual arrangements was the governors’ abject failure to make UFCo keep its side of bargains. When things started to go “belly-up” for United Fruit in the banana colony, UFCo in imperious contempt of their contractual obligations simply pulled the plug. To compound the folly, subsequently, the colonial officials meekly bought back the key Middlesex estate from United Fruit✜, incredibly and bizarrely on terms which allowed the withdrawing company to make a profit! [ibid.].
United Fruit’s activities in British Honduras were typical of its approach throughout the Caribbean littoral. Large-scale integration into the local economy with massive infrastructure, using its economic clout to manipulate the local authorities into making advantageous concessions banana market…control of the market in bananas allowed it to set artificial low prices which Belize suppliers were obliged to accept because they were bereft of alternate viable markets. BH, being a colony of the British, varied from the prevailing pattern in other Central and South American countries in only one respect, a lack of personal graft. Unlike the banana republics, UFCo had no recourse to bribery with the colony’s British career diplomats, but bluff and intimidation usually produced the results it sought. As Moberg noted, “Colonial officials acted on behalf of the multinational not from venality or corruption…rather (it) reflected an ascendant US political and economic influence…one that officials found increasingly difficult to resist” [ibid.].
Tentacles of ‘El pulpo’ (“the octopus”)United Fruit was particularly adept at playing one country off against another. When British Honduran officials kicked back against the demands of the company, UFCo would make clear that not acquiescing to what it wanted, had serious consequences. A standard ploy was to pit British Honduras against neighbouring states. On the occasions that the BH governor would deviate from his default submissive position to UFCo demands, the company manager in Belize Town would drop none-too-subtle hints about moving the centre of United Fruit’s Central American banana operations to Puerto Cortés in Hondurus. Similarly, United Fruit would also periodically issue threats to both Guatemala and British Honduras that it would switch its investments from one to the other [ibid.]
PostScript: Modern BelizeTiny British Honduras was one of the last crown colonies in the Americas to shed the shackles of European colonialism. It achieved self-governing status in 1964, renamed Belize in 1973, it finally gained full independence from Britain in 1981. Mestizos, Creoles, Maya and Garifuna make up around 90% of the population. Belize’s much delayed passage to full independence largely stems from its neighbour Guatemala’s long-standing claim on the territory of Belize (or part thereof). Guatemala’s largely military regimes have aggressively pursued its claim (including making a number of threats to invade Belize and border-massing of troops since the 1940s), with Guatemala refusing to recognise the new nation in 1981. Accordingly the UK maintained armed forces in Belize after independence (till 2011) [‘Belizean-Guatemalan territorial dispute’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].
𖤼𖤼𖤼𖤼𖤼𖤼𖤼𖤼𖤼𖤼𖤼𖤼𖤼𖤼𖤼𖤼𖤼𖤼
✱ although as far back as 1783 a local British presence had existed following the Treaty of Versailles which gave them the right to cut logwood between the Hondo and Belize Rivers
✪ the following, outlining what transpired in British Honduras in particular between 1900 and 1920, is heavily based on a case study by Mark Moberg [Moberg, Mark. “Crown Colony as Banana Republic: The United Fruit Company in British Honduras, 1900-1920.” Journal of Latin American Studies, vol. 28, no. 2, 1996, pp. 357–381. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/157625]
❅ by the early 1900s US capital had attained a hegemonic position in BH (overtaking British capital) as it was in the rest of the Caribbean littoral
✥ at the same time the Belize mahogany trade was starting to taper off
⌖ UFCo’s passenger and cargo ships were known as the Great White Fleet. The ships were painted white apparently to keep the shipment of bananas cooler! [‘United Fruit Company: The Great White Fleet’,https://visitpuertoarmuelles.com]
✧ tactics replicated elsewhere in the region with similar results – the independent Jamaican growers, the Jamaican Banana Producers’ Association, resisted the United Fruit Co dominance of the Caribbean island’s market for a time but in the end couldn’t compete in a price war
⊠ United Fruit established very large plantations in different countries (known as ‘divisions’), when Panama disease hit, it would abandon the farm and relocate…each time UFCo would “systemically destroy the infrastructure (railroads, bridges, telephone lines, etc) to prevent competitors from being able to renew production on a smaller scale” [PI Bourgois, Ethnicity at Work, cited in Moberg]
✜ these days United Fruit Co goes under the banner of ‘Chiquita Brands International’ (still extensively in bananas)
Banana republic: In politics the term “banana republic”✱ describes a politically unstable country with an economy dependent upon the exportation of a limited-resource product such as bananas or minerals. The term was coined in 1901 by American author O. Henry as a depiction of Honduras and neighbouring countries under intense economic exploitation by US corporations as typified by the United Fruit Company of Boston [‘Banana Republic’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]
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When I first heard the saccharine, content-lite melodies of “Bubblegum Pop’s” 1910 Fruitgum Company, I didn’t realise that the name of this innocuous, syrupy 1960s musical group was a corny pun on a historic commercial entity that I did not know of at the time…this commercial enterprise was in fact something much less edifying and infinitely more sinister and consequential – the United Fruit Company of Boston, Mass. As the following will show, the United Fruit Co would come to epitomise the high degree of hegemony established by US business interests in the tropical regions of the Americas after the late 1890s.
Boston Fruit C°’s ‘Golden Vale’ plantation, Jamaica⬇From railroads to plantationsThe United Fruit Company had its origins in 1899 from a merger of various fruit exporting concerns (including the Boston Fruit Company which had already embedded itself in the banana trade in Jamaica) controlled by American railroad constructor and entrepreneur Minor Cooper Keith. Earlier Keith stumbled into the banana trade virtually by accident. In 1872 Costa Rica defaulted on it’s bank loans and was unable to pay Keith for constructing the country’s railroad. In lieu of part of what it owed Keith, he was granted over 5% of vacant Costa Rican land. Accordingly the American used the land to establish banana farms alongside his newly finished railroad. The crops when yielded had a ready-made, on-the-spot transport line to carry the produce to port. Keith’s early banana experiments in Costa Rica proved a lucrative earner and paved the way for United Fruit’s later role as producer and exporter of the fruit. From that base in Costa Rica Keith the banana trader looked further afield in Latin America for other openings.
Monopoly, oligarchy? Other players in the tropical banana tradeAlthough classically monopolistic in its practices, United Fruit Co (UFCo) was not the only player (American or foreign) in the Central American/Caribbean banana game. In fact at the turn of the 20th century there was plenty of competition in bananas, in 1899 some 114 firms were engaged in importing bananas to the US via New Orleans [Davies 1990, cited in S Striffler et al, (Eds.), Banana Wars: Power, Production, and History in the Americas, (2003)]. UFCo grew by acquisition, quickly adding 20 smaller banana export firms to its list of business holdings.
United Fruit’s main rival during this time was the Standard Fruit Company. This company was first known as the Vaccaro Bros & Co✧. The Vaccaros began by importing fresh produce – initially coconuts and then bananas – from Honduras. After establishing a beachhead in the region the company diversified into operating steamships✪ and eventually provided the ice for onboard refrigeration❅. In 1924 Vaccaros Bros reformed into the Standard Fruit Company (in 1926 renaming itself ‘Standard Fruit and Steamship Co)…during this period Standard Fruit and United Fruit maintained competitive relations with each other for the lucrative banana trade in New Orleans – the principal marketplace in the US for banana sales. Like its gargantuan rival United Fruit, Standard Fruit’s profound impact on the economies of Latin American countries like Honduras courtesy of the high degree of control it was able to exert over the supposedly sovereign governments, contributed to the perception of these nations as banana republics. Hondurus was particularly vulnerable to the Banana barons with its banana monoculture and economic reliance on a single export crop. In the 1960s Standard Fruit was acquired by the Castle & Cooke Corporation (which in 1991 was renamed the Dole Food Company). [‘Standard Fruit Company’,‘Vaccaro brothers’, Wikipedia entries].
United Fruit Co soon extended its tentacles (the Latin American press was fond of labelling the firm El pulpo – “The Octopus”) beyond the Caribbean littoral, establishing banana exporting concerns in Columbia, Panama, Spanish Honduras, British Honduras (Belize), Jamaica and elsewhere in the region. Everywhere it invested, UFCo would rely on its famous “dollar diplomacy” to induce the local elites to grant it concessions which allowed the company ever increasing monopoly control over the banana trade.
Rivalry with mutual benefitsIn addition to Standard Fruit, another US rival of United Fruit was the Cuyamel Fruit Company. Cuyamel started in transportation as the Hubbard-Zemurray Steam Ship Co and morphed into a large New Orleans-based agricultural corporation (see ‘Sam the Banana Man’ below). The three American companies in the Central and South American banana business (United Fruit, Standard Fruit and Cuyamel) were separate business entities, each in competition for bananas et al products from the same tropical region. And yet there was something slightly schizophrenic about the relationship between the three…concurrently with the earnest rivalry was the existence of a cartel-like cooperation between the companies – which was of mutual benefit financially, eg, being able to launch joint business efforts in advertising and in increasing banana agricultural outputs in Honduras. United Fruit Co’s dominant position in the triangle (always the senior player) facilitated this arrangement…it had both a 60% stake in Cuyamel and a 50% stake in Vaccaro Bros⊠ [Ralph Lee Woodward Jr, Central America, a Nation Divided (3rd ed. 1999), cited in ‘Cuyamel Fruit Company’ (Wikipedia entry].
‘Sam the Banana Man’Schmuel Zmurri was an immigrant from the Russian Empire (born in Bessarabia, in modern Moldova) who changed his name to Samuel Zemurray after coming to the United States. Zemurray was to become a major player and shaper in the banana republic phenomenon, a seminal figure who contributed to the massive imprint left on the tropics by American banana barons.
Zemurray, establishing himself in Honduras around 1908, was to have a career as a “recidivist Yankee intervener” that made him one of the most controversial figures in the Central American banana republics’ tainted and sorry history. When the current Honduran regime favoured the rival Vaccaro Bros over Cuyamel, Zemurray agitated to foment a series of coups against President Dávila. The first coup failed but Zemurray in 1911 having chosen former president Manuel Bonilla to replace the elected Dávila government, bankrolled two Americans (“soldier of fortune” Lee Christmas and New Orleans gangster Guy “Machine Gun” Molony) to overthrow Dávila. With the malleable Bonilla back in charge, Zemurray’s Cuyamel was soon the beneficiary of generous land and tax concessions [‘The ousting of the president of Honduras, 1911’, (Stephen Kinzer), www.libcom.org]. Zemurray’s unconscionable incursion into the domestic politics of an independent state by hijacking its political process was to set a dangerous precedent for other banana republics.
Zemurray’s company made deep inroads into the Honduran banana trade (Zemurray became universally known as “Sam the Banana Man”), but at great cost to the national sovereignty of the country and to the detriment of the local economy✥. In 1930 Zemurray was able to sell his company to United Fruit for $31.5M in stock, after a short retirement he returned to active banana involvement, managing to join the board of UFCo and eventually take the helm of it (CEO and president until retiring for good in 1951) [K Norsworth & T Barry, Inside Honduras, (2nd Ed. 1994), cited in ‘Cuyamel Fruit Company’ (Wikipedia entry)].
United Fruit “a state within the state” of Guatemala: another intervention by Zemurray in the banana republicsAlthough no longer UFCo president, Zemurray wasn’t quite finished meddling to gain a financial advantage for United Fruit, he had one last contribution to the destabilisation of Central American regimes. The Guatemala banana trade had long been one of United Fruit’s most prized possessions…from the early 1900s President Manuel E Cabrera’s cosy relationship with UFC saw him grant the company a 99-year concession in Guatemala. United Fruit’s role in Guatemala has been described as “a state within a state” [William Blum, cited in ‘1954 Guatemalan coup d’être’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]. In 1953 Zemurray enlisted UFCo in a US State Department propaganda campaign to overthrow the left-leaning but democratically elected Guatemalan government of Colonel Jacobo Arbenz. The campaign together with the active intervention of the CIA paved the way for a coup the following year which ousted Arbenz and replaced it with a military junta which immediately reversed Arbenz’s decision to expropriate a portion of the unused land owned by the United Fruit Co [‘Sam Zemurray’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]. The fallout from the 1954 coup – for which the contribution of Zemurray and UFCo was no small part – was long-term destabilisation for the Guatemalans. The country, through a succession of military rulers, descended into three decades of civil war, 200,000 deaths including genocidal outrages against the native population [‘Ghosts of Guatemala’s Past’, (Stephen Schlesinger), New York Times, 04-Jun-2011, www.nytimes.com].
United Fruit thrives in neo-colonial conditionsUFCo and Zemurray’s banana export and production triumph in the equitorial Americas owed in no small measure to the compliance of the countries’ political elites. In some instances, compliance, especially from right-wing authoritarian/military regimes, was bought. The neo-colonial charge against the banana republics and against UFCo as an employer, also concerned a claim of exploitative treatment of its labour force. In Part 2 I will focus on a case study of the United Fruit Company in one country which is instructive in detailing the pattern of how United Fruit went about securing and consolidating its “banana hegemony” in much of the region in the period.
PostScript: Banana WarsThe banana as a metaphor for the region lends itself to the pattern of American imperialist intervention in Latin America over the course of the 20th century. Coined by Lester D Langley in the early 1980s, the “Banana Wars” descriptor has been applied collectively to a sequence of ‘backyard’ US military occupations and police actions – these include the ‘1000 Days War’ (American intervention in support of Panamanian independence from Columbia/protection of US future interests in construction of the Panama Canal); the Spanish-American War (US invasion and occupation of Cuba and Puerto Rico); Dominican Republic (ongoing and intermittent occupations between 1903 and 1924); Nicaragua (an in/out pattern of occupation 1912-1933); the Border War with Mexico (1910-1919, including the occupation of Veracruz 1914); Haiti and the 1st and 2nd Caco Wars (occupation 1915-1934); and Honduras (seven interventions between 1903 and 1925). Aside from that, between 1869 and 1897 the US sent it’s warships a total of 5,980 times into Latin American waters to protect its national commercial interests [Greg Grandin, Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, The United States and the Rise of the New Imperialism, (2005)].
✱ in political taxonomy, ‘republics’ they may (nominally) be, but in practice most so-called banana republics are grotesquely dysfunctional ‘republics’, typically, thinly masking what effectively are dictatorships and or regimes of ruthless military juntas
✧ the founders being three Italian-American businessmen brothers from Sicily (and their brother-in-law)
✪ expansion of fleet ownership was achieved by buying surplus steamships at a discount…by 1935 Standard Fruit had 35 ships in operation
❅ ultimately earning company president Joseph Vaccaro the sobriquet “Ice King”
⊠ this was a characteristic stratagem of United Fruit’s upward trajectory in Central America…the stake-holdings in Cuyamel and Vaccaro’s enterprises in Honduras were an initial import foothold on the path to becoming a direct producer in its own right – when United Fruit later acquired its own Honduran plantations in Trujillo and Tela [Woodward]
✥ as a disadvantaged party in its business dealings with UFCo, Honduras was worse off than all other banana republics in that it was unable to either urbanise or diversify its economy beyond the banana industry (for which its equatorial location was ideal) [Norsworth & Barry]
The further I delved into my “war-ravaged” copy of Wilson’s 1922 Authentic Director of Sydney and Suburbs, the more snippets of hitherto unearthed information, little gems of Sydney’s yesterday, I stumbled upon.
Among the minutiae of miscellaneous info contained in the directory’s index, one item that got my attention was a list of the consuls and overseas government agents in Sydney in 1922. Interesting to see that at that time there were consulate offices established in Sydney for tiny international entities like Latvia, Nicaragua, Columbia, Ecuador, Honduras, Serbia and the Czechoslovak Republic, but being not yet four years after the cessation of the hostilities of WWI, no consulates for the countries deemed by the victors to be the “guilty parties”, Germany, Austria, Hungary and Turkey. So much for moving on!!!…and we all know where that path catastrophically led!
Another curio I discovered was that among the State and Commonwealth government departments listed in the index, there were several with city addresses in Richmond Tce, The Domain. The questionably named Aborigines (spelt ‘Aborogines’) Protection Board, the Pharmacy Board of NSW, the Dental Board of NSW, the Medical Board of NSW, the Metropolitan Meat Industry Board and the Inspector-General of the Insane(sic) were all located in this east side of the city street…interesting in that this street, Richmond Terrace no longer exists!
Ad for the Orient Line
A total of forty-six shipping line companies were recorded as having offices in Sydney’s CBD. These included British-India SN Co, China-Australia Mail SS Line, Nippon Yusen Kaisha, the Adelaide Steamship Company, New Guinea, New Britain and the Solomon Islands (Line), the White Star Line✲ and the more contemporarily familiar P & O Line. Only one of the 46 placed a (full-paged and quite detailed) ad in the directory, the Australia to Britain Orient Line.
Royal Autos in ‘Wilson’s’
City clubs and buildings of interest
In a section of the index Wilson’s lists the various clubs, chambers, banks and arcades that formed part of the cityscape in 1922. The more ‘highbrow’ of the clubs, predominately “Gentlemen’s” establishments, tended to congregate ‘uptown’ (the end closer to Circular Quay) considered to be the smarter and more affluent part of the city. The clubs included the Australian Club (corner of Bent and Macquarie Sts)[¹], the Automobile Club of Australia (132 Phillip St)[²], the Country Club (17 Castlereagh St), the Catholic Club (107 Castlereagh St ), Masonic Club (216 Pitt St)[³], the N.S.W. Club (Bligh St)[⁴], the Soldiers’ Club (426 George St), the Union Club (2 Bligh St)[⁵], the Warrigal Club (145 Macquarie St). Also in the city were clubs associated with the sport (and business) of horse racing – these three used to be situated in the CBD, the Australian Jockey Club (now the Australian Turf Club) (8 Bligh St), the Canterbury Park Race Club (15 Castlereagh St) and the Rosehill Racing Club (32 Elizabeth St). Another city club intricately linked to horse racing is Tattersall’s Club (202-204 Pitt St). Traditionally the haunt of old style bookmakers, “City Tatts” as it is better known, still stands and operates on its original land, 123 years after its foundation.
The 1922 city’s chambers are a predictable lot with numerous entities bearing largely homogenous Anglo-(Saxon)Celtic names scattered around Phillip Street, the traditional law hub of the city. That equally upstanding and status quo affirming pillar of society in that day, the banks, are spread over a wide radius of the CBD. The only point of note about them is discovering that in the 1920s Australia financial climate, with regulation of the sector very tight, two foreign banks had Sydney branches and were allowed to trade here at that time… the French National d’Escompté de Paris, a forerunner of Banque National de Paris? (24 Hunter St) and even more surprisingly, the Japanese Bank (Falmouth Chambers, 117 Pitt St).
The original (1907) Challis House
One of the city buildings identified in Wilson’s Director with a busy and interesting history is Challis House, N⍛ 4-10 Martin Place. Eponymously named after merchant and University of Sydney benefactor John Henry Challis, the House has a long association with the University as well as many financial tenants over the decades. During WWI it was used as the recruiting campaign headquarters for New South Wales. The office building at the time of Wilson’s publication was in its original Victorian architectural state…in the Thirties it received a new (Art Deco) facade and later in 1993 it underwent major renovations [‘Challis House’, Sydney Architecture, www.sydneyarchitecture.com]
Blue Mountains – a “Tourist’s Guide”
Although it’s a street directory whose ambit is Sydney and suburbs, the Wilson’s directory ends with an extensive section (73pp) on the Blue Mountains. The entry even encompasses the town of Lithgow (also called ‘Eskbank’ in 1922) which is 15 miles west of the Blue Mountains. The book has lots of detailed information on the BM suburbs, each suburb has an entry on accommodation and the scenic natural highlights of the Mountains with select maps indicating points of interest.
The “Half-way House” of Blue Mts
The directory gives a picture of Springwood, the largest of the Lower Mountains towns✥, that suggests a warm place in an otherwise cold region – “sheltered by its westerly walls from the cooler air of the higher altitudes…pleasant sunshine all year round…in winter the climate is so equable that many families make Springwood a permanent residence”. An opinion echoed by Springwood house and land agent R.F. Harvey’s ad extolling “The Best Winter Climate in the World”. For day visitors to Springwood, the Hotel ‘Oriental’ awaits their patronage (ad, right).
Katoomba, the “largest of the mountain tourist resorts” with its “wide choice of charming and picturesque views”. Despite being 68 miles from Sydney, “horses and vehicles are always obtainable” – as this advertisement (left) on page 706 offering trips to the famous Jenolan Caves in luxury Buicks testifies.
Nearby Leura is “celebrated for the beauty of its great showpiece – the Leura Falls…in themselves alone worth the trip to the mountains”. With unfettered enthusiasm the writer goes on to laud the town in extravagant terms: “the place has been so well laid out as a tourist resort that it offers a perfect kaleidoscope of the views”. The object of Wilson’s Director is clearly to sell the Mountains to visitors from Sydney which synergises nicely with the numerous accommodation ads (funny that!) that appear such as this one (right) for Leura’s Hotel Alexandria (still in business in 2018).
The spa town of Medlow Bath, is “a pretty little village, rising rapidly in tourist favour”. The tiny Upper Mountains town is famous for its Hydro-Majestic hotel resort where in the day the better-off citizens of Sydney would periodically retreat to benefit from its therapeutic mineral waters and clean mountain air. Built by retailer Mark Foy (Jr) as a hydropathic sanatorium, the “Hydro-Maje” in the Twenties was where the cream of Sydney’s elite flocked on the weekends to socialise.
Jenolan tourer (Blackheath)
One station further west, the mountains tourist resort of Blackheath, had the writer reaching for new superlatives! The bush trails and valleys (the “Valley of the Grose” as he calls it) lead to “world-famous Govett’s Leap (waterfall), a stream which plunges headlong over a perpendicular wall of dark-tinted rock on to a mass of boulders, some 520 feet below”. Mermaid’s Cave is “like a glimpse of a fairyland…a more picturesque scene cannot be imagined”, etc. The other attraction of Blackheath in 1922 was that “there is every probability of its having a permanent water supply in the near future”. The accommodation ad below is for Blackheath’s ‘Ivanhoe Hotel’, replaced in 1938 by the now quite old-looking ‘New Ivanhoe Hotel’.
Mt Victoria, 79 miles by paved road❂ from Sydney, the highest point of the Blue Mountains (the guide gives it at 3,424 feet above sea-level)⍍, is praised for the scenic countryside surrounding the town dotted with charmingly named spots like Fern Cave, Fairy Bower, Fern Tree Gully and Witch’s Glen, for the walker to explore.
Upper Blue Mts map (‘Wilson’s’)
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[¹] the Australian Club (still at the same address, 165 Macquarie St), is the oldest men-only club in the country, dating from 1838
[²] the Automobile Club changed both its name to the Royal Automobile Club of Australia (RACA), and its location to Castlereagh St North, in the year of the directory’s publication (1922)
[³] the Masonic Club still exists but the premises relocated to a new building at 169-171 Castlereagh St in 1927
[⁴] the N.S.W. Club House is still in existence at 25-31 Bligh St, but the Club itself amalgamated with the Australian Club in 1969 and the building has had a series of commercial tenants since (currently occupied by the Lowy Institute for International Affairs)
[⁵] still in operation (since 1857), these days at 25 Bent St and now called the Union, University and Schools Club
✲ of Titanic fame, White Star Line merged with Cunard in 1934 as White-Cunard, before eventually becoming defunct
✥ Blaxland and Glenbrook, two other Lower BM towns, get very short shrift from Wilson’s, relegated to brief, passing mentions only
❂ the Great Western Highway, which bisects the Blue Mountains, was still called Bathurst Road in 1922
⍍ although according to markers on the spot, One Tree Hill on the south side of Mt Victoria, is the highest point in the Blue Mountains at 3,654 feet
I remember getting my first street directory as if it was 55 years ago – which it was! It was a Gregory’s of course, it was 1963 and UBD hadn’t quite yet entered the road map reproduction game (they brought out their first street directory the following year!) I had just starting playing soccer (the St George and Southern Sydney’s A-League – Ankle-biters League!) and my parents bought it to get me to season games in tricky-to-find and awkward-to-get-to places across Sydney.
Soccer aside, the Gregory’s spent more time in my bedroom than it did in the glovebox of my father’s VW. I loved perusing its contents, examining the colourful maps, sometimes in piecemeal fashion, other times randomly, learning about all the different parts of Sydney that in most cases I never knew existed let alone had been to! I discovered all sorts of faraway places (to a 10-y-o!) with exotic, magical-sounding names like Avalon, Burraneer, Oyster Bay, Picnic Point and Chipping Norton.
The 1960s Sydney motorist’s Vade mecum
I used to spend long hours during my childhood pouring over the maps of Sydney, preparing me for the future career as a taxi driver that I never had (phew!)…instead I learned lots of useless stuff like the fact that there were two separate bushland places called Warrimo. The name is well-known to many as the small town in the Blue Mountains, but my 1963 Gregory’s showed me that it was then also a suburb adjoining St Ives. Later it was renamed St Ives Chase but Warrimo Oval and Warrimo Avenue in the suburb are reminders of its association.
I got a lot of mileage out of that vintage 1963 Sydney street directory, and continued to do so even after I brought a new Gregory’s when I got my driver’s licence and my first car in the early seventies.
Footnote: Not sure what my father did for road directions before the 1963 Gregory’s came into our family’s life. He certainly had cars before then, at one time I recall he had a crank-start relic of an Austin! Maybe he had one of those fold-out maps that in my hands often end up in a tangled mess.
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WAD: the ante-(now)dated street directory
I got my second street directory around the same time as we got the ’63 Gregory’s, and it was a very different animal to the current edition of the Gregory’s, it was in fact the nearest thing I have had to an antiquarian book. I have recounted in a previous post (Part 1) how I got handed down a 1922 edition of Wilson’s Authentic Director: Sydney and Suburbs and shared some insights into how the WAD depicted different parts of Sydney then and some of the idiosyncratic aspects of the maps contained in the book. I want to focus here on the advertisements contained in the directory which are legion in number and tell an interesting story about life in 1922 Sydney in themselves.
Ad-bonanza
In a book 735pp long, even if I count the pages comprising the indexes and maps there were considerably more pages with ads than without! Some ads were full-page, some pages contained two or more separate ads, some firms like Rickard’s’ (below) had multiple entries of ads in the book. The directory is so ad-rich that the advertisement sales alone were a nice little earner to Wilson & Co. And with each copy retailing to the public at 4/6p, there was obviously more than enough takers to warrant the cost to the advertisers to be in it.
▲ Webber’s “One stop shop”!
Who advertised in ‘Wilson’s Authentic Director’?
Well just about anybody who traded, who had a business in Sydney at the time! Professional men, financiers, engineers, builders, bakers, butchers, chemists, builders, undertakers, stationers, carriers, ironmongers, haberdashers, drapers, milliners, mercers and tailors, retailers of Manchester, furniture suppliers, lime and cement merchants, glass manufacturers, all manner of service or product providers. Where the business being advertised related more directly to the world of motorists or to moving people from place to place, was where you got the lion’s share of ads.
▲ Strathfield: free from “Influences of the Sea Air”
Purveyors of property
The footprints of the auctioneer, the valuator and the real estate agent are visible throughout the directory, often in prominently displayed ads. Some who could afford to, placed more lavish ads which mega-hyped the virtues of certain suburbs and their homes – such as the Orton Bros ad (left) pitching homes in the “favourite suburb” of Strathfield, pushing the (alleged) “health benefits” of the area, “away from the “Influences of the Sea Air”. Presumably if Orton Bros had been selling houses in Clovelly or Coogee Beach, they would have taken a different attitude to the “harmful effects of sea air”!
▲ The “Digger” Agents at Roseville
Another property heavyweight Arthur Rickard & Co, appearing and reappearing across the directory, specialised in sub-division and the creation of new estates, eg, selling as “the New Model Suburb” of Toongabbie✲. Rickard’s had a full-page ad offering a choice of two estates, Toongabbie Park (“a most promising estate, fertile soil and good rainfall”) – the buyer could opt for a large home or a Rickard Farmlet, 1 acre to 4½ acres from £50 10s. per acre; or the Portico Estate (“city water, proximity to consumers’ markets, building conveniences”) – “designed on the latest and most up-to-date town-planning – a wonderful scheme of beauty”. Some property agents like Hough and Barnard emphasised their WWI service credentials to help flog their homes, displaying ads (at right) which proudly announced their AIF associations⊡.
Newtown 1922: Hire-a-luxury wedding vehicle
Transport options a-plenty!
Up there with the estate agents and developers were advertisers for anything to do with the automobile. Hire car companies posted ads for vehicles available for any special purpose. Ads from proprietors of motor garages are liberally sprinkled through the directory, these business often rented out touring vehicles for people both wanting to explore the far reaches of Sydney using Wilson’s of course as their guide. The plentiful motor garage ads naturally catered for all the motorists’ touring and driving needs – ‘Bowserised’ (often Shell) fuel, Benzine oil, ‘vulcanised’ tyres, mechanical repairs, etc.
▲ Bulli Motors: cars, motorcycles, bicycles, for Bulli Pass
The reach of Wilson’s publication was not narrowly limited to the city and suburban district boundaries that encompassed Sydney in 1922… business advertisers buying space in the directory came from as far away as the Blue Mountains and from the Illawarra/South Coast, as evidenced by the ad at right from a Bulli motor garage who also specialised in automotive services for the motor(bike) cyclist.
▲ A horse-intensive removals firm!
The Removalists
Domestic carriers were also well represented in the ads in the street directory. Ads for businesses, describing themselves variously as removalists, carriers or furniture carters, filter through the book. The removal business ads signal an interesting crossover between the old and the new technologies…in 1922 motorised vehicles as a form of transport would still be numerically inferior to horse-drawn carts, the ads in Wilson’s show original horse-power still much in demand on Sydney streets, side-by-side with the new, motor-driven furniture vans and vehicles.
‘Tradie’ ads
Tradesmen were regular advertisers in Wilson’s Street Directory, keen to take advantage of Sydney’s growing numbers of home occupiers and new areas of urbanisation – carpenters, plumbers/gasfitters, electricians, tilers, slaters, painters and decorators, sign writers, metal workers, galvanised iron workers, etc. Some of the most refreshing and humorous ads were from 1920s tradies like the two in the directory reproduced here. ▼ ▶
A miscellany of ads
Most every other avenue of (legal) private endeavour that you’d expect to be plying its business in early 1920s seems to get a shout-out in the street directory. Several ads that popped up in the vicinity of the Lidcombe entry and maps were for stone and marble masons. Considering that Lidcombe was (and still is) home to Rookwood Cemetery, reputed to be the biggest cemetery in the Southern Hemisphere, it is of no surprise to find a troop of monumental masons showcasing their artisan wares here.▼
Rookwood handiwork
A trifecta of disparate WAD advertisers from north of the harbour:▼
▲ 1922: Home entertainment unit
The piano – pride of place in the living room of Sydney homes in 1922
Many of the domestic carrier ads that I have alluded to above emphasised “careful piano removal” as one of the fortes of their trade. This is a reminder that in the early twenties, before the advent of radio and television in Australian households, both of how valuable pianos were and the key role they played as principal providers of home entertainment.
Accommodation and pleasure at Sandringham by the seaside
The first ad below at left is for the ‘Prince of Wales’, a popular beachfront hotel on Botany Bay, a local institution in the St George district since the 1860s drawing crowds to its lavish luncheons, parties, picnics and recreational pursuits on its pleasure grounds. Proprietor in 1922 William Langton was just one of very many publicans who had a go at running (with wildly varying success) the ‘Prince’ since 1866 (the hotel was demolished in 1961). ▼
Footnote: the LJ Hooker of his day:
Of the myriad real estate admen in the directory, the company name recurring most throughout is Stanton & Son, Ltd. Stanton’s features in six separate ads (pp.92, 155, 430, 503, 622, 644) to advertise its offices at Pitt St City, Summer Hill, Haberfield, Edgecliff, Randwick, North Sydney and Rosebery. Proprietor Richard Stanton was one of the founders of the Real Estate Institute of NSW and an advocate of the Garden City Movement (see later blogs on Early 1900s Sydney Garden Suburbs).
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✲ developer Rickard was in fact busy selling property all over Sydney and beyond…such as the Central Coast and the Blue Mountains where he talked the rail authorities into building new stations at Warrimo and Bullaburra to service his new estates there, Peter Spearritt, ‘Rickard, Sir Arthur (1868–1948)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/rickard-sir-arthur-8206/text14357, published first in hardcopy 1988, accessed online 12 July 2018.
⊡ realty men were no means the only business advertisers who played the AIF card, tradesmen et al were similarly not slow in slipping into the pitch their record of loyal service to King and Empire during the Great War
I had lots of old books when I was a kid growing up, but maybe only one or two books that would possibly generate the curiosity of an antiquarian✲. One of these books was given to me by my mother when I was about ten or eleven…a most unwise move on her part as it transpired.
‘1922 Wilson’s Director’
The humble but rarely spotted 1922 street directory
This book was the Sydney street directory for the year 1922, to give it it’s correct and full title, Wilson’s Authentic Director, Sydney and Suburbs 1922. This small but squat little publication (5½” x 4½”, 735pp), the original owner of which was almost certainly my carpenter-builder maternal grandfather (an early owner of a motor vehicle I believe), came into my hands in something approaching pristine condition, notwithstanding that the directory was then already more than 40 years old!
Today although I still possess it, it is an almost unrecognisable shadow of its once immaculate state! As my juvenility slowly gave way to adolescence I managed to write (things entirely unrelated to Sydney street maps), scribble and doodle on its quasi-virginal pages. Equally as bad, I haphazardly tossed the book around with such careless abandon over the decades that the front cover (a orangey-brown hard cover) became separated from the spine and eventually disappeared forever. Of course if cornered I could sheet home part of the blame for my repeated if unintended acts of vandalism to my parents who showed such egregiously bad judgement in trusting such a historically valuable tome to a ten-year-old Visigoth in the first place! But ultimately mine was the hand that caused the damage…I suppose if I was scratching round to find any compensating factors, I might say that at the very least no one can accuse me of neglecting my parent’s gift. Far from it! As a “child-distractor” Wilson’s Street Director performed yeoman’s service! I certainly made extensive, if not good, use of it.
The directory maps
The maps of each area of Sydney are neatly and clearly drawn by hand, but lack the computerised preciseness and uniformity of a map today…the cartographers in an effort to make the street names stand out by using large, bold type, have the effect of some disproportionality in the maps…streets look a bit out of alignment with each other (refer also to Eastwood below). Moreover, a critical flaw of the maps is the absence of a distance guide.
Curiously there are some variances in the kinds of type-face used in different maps, some use a Gothic font in contrast to the classic style. ◀ The Redfern-Darlington map at left differs from the type used in most maps. On a few seldom occasions maps make reference to the traditional, nineteenth century British land concept of parishes (eg, the Parish of Gordon)…this seems extraneous as the maps and the book largely follow a division by municipalities.
Gordon Rd – in the days before the upgrade to a highway and renaming
Very many of the street names that were current then survive to this day, although with some surprising little twists – the Pacific Highway, the seminal road leading north from the harbour bridge out of Sydney, was then called Gordon or Lane Cove Road. After Wahroonga it becomes Peat’s Ridge Road. Church Street, Parramatta, traditional haunt of car yards, was at the time alternately called Sydney Road.
Similarly Liverpool Road, starting from Parramatta Road, bears the alternative name “Great Southern Road” on the map (now the Hume Highway). The Princes Highway, the longest road in South-east Australia, is not to be seen! Curiously some suburbs or parts of suburbs are not shown on the maps at all!
The colliery (deepest mine shaft ever sunk in Aust.) in the 1940s (still operating at that time)
The suburb descriptors
One of the most interesting parts of the directory are the brief summaries of individual suburbs. Newtown is described as “thickly populated suburb adjoining the city” (well, no change here!), but its “numerous works and factories” have made way for the suburb’s relatively recent gentrification of modern living spaces☸. St Peters, just to Newtown’s south, is noted in the directory as being “for years the chief brick-making centre for the city” (these days the remaining, redundant kilns and chimneys are a historical curio within the undulating, expansive Sydney Park). Balmain, aside from its “fine public buildings” is “noteworthy as being the location of the deepest coal shaft in the Southern World – 3000 ft” (Balmain Colliery, corner of Birchgrove Rd and Water St, Birchgrove; an exclusive residential estate, Hopetoun Quays, today sits atop the former mine).
The Glebe
The map on page 223 details inner city Darlington (which in 1922 included the locale “Golden Grove”), then as now a suburb most approximate to the University of Sydney…the map shows that the grounds of the University had not at that time encroached onto the eastern side of City Road. The directory describes Darlington as “essentially a workers’ suburb, and being in close proximity to the City, is favoured by workers, who chiefly preside therein”.
Mascot with a racecourse where the airport should be!
Botany and Mascot are old adjoining suburbs in South Sydney. Map 151 (of Botany) and Map 405 (of Mascot) both document the existence at that time of Ascot Racecourse in Mascot…it was located on land adjacent to Botany Bay that now forms part of Sydney Airport⌽. Drummoyne is “a picturesque suburb which has made rapid strides since the tram was opened in 1902”.
Killara on Sydney’s leafy North Shore earns itself a stellar wrap that would make the burghers of the suburb today glow with pride: “(Killara) may justly claim to be both attractive and select. There are many substantial residences, the homes of the well-to-do citizen, and altogether the dwellings are of a superior class” (but not entirely exclusive because prestigious Hunters Hill also had “well-to-do citizens”).
East Subs’ residential paradise
Not to be outdone by the North Shore, the Eastern Suburbs gets even more of a ringing endorsement…the directory goes overboard with Vaucluse, and especially Watson’s Bay, lavishly portrayed as a “romantic looking and historical region, (standing) perhaps highest on the list of Australian ‘beauty spots’ “. Waxing lyrical, the writer ends with a frenzy of capitalisation extolling “the FORTIFICATIONS, LIGHTHOUSES, LIFEBOAT, SIGNAL STATION, and the WORLD-FAMED GAP, near the scene of the wreck of the ill-fated Dunbar” (a disastrous shipwreck occurring off South Head in 1857).
The other side of Strathfield municipality
Strathfield, seven miles west of the GPO, was lauded for its “numerous magnificent and substantially built dwellings (today we wouldn’t hold back, we’d simply say ‘mansions’), the homes of the wealthy citizen”. Strathfield’s maps include the locale of ‘Druitt Town’, now called South Strathfield. The map on page 583 includes the less salubrious side of the municipality (the Government Abattoirs and Rookwood Necropolis), a striking contrast with the world of Strathfield’s croquet-playing set.
Eastwood map, p235: site of future MQ University just to the south of Lane Cove River
On the other side of Parramatta River, Ryde (which in 1922 encompassed present-day West Ryde, North Ryde and Macquarie Park) is described as a “famous fruit-growing district on the Parramatta River”. The present location of Macquarie University in the northern reaches of the Eastwood district (set on generous acreage between Marsfield and North Ryde) was in earlier days the site of largely Italian market gardens and (citrus) orchards, interspersed incongruously with a greyhound racing track. An interesting feature shows a preponderance of street names around the present site of the campus with a martial theme – named after overseas battles (or campaigns) including Balaclava, Waterloo, Crimea, Culloden, Agincourt, Trafalgar, Sebastopol, Khartoum. When Talavera Rd was added later, this brought the number of streets commemorating the Crimean War alone to four.
Mosman, still today a suburb whose affluence makes real estate agents salivate at the prospect of dollar symbols followed by multiple zeros, was ever thus the sought-after destination for the cashed-up aspirational denizen…”(a thriving suburb) situated on a charming arm of Port Jackson…on the abrupt sides nestle red-tiled villas in many quaint styles of architecture…but a few years since the tramway rendered its beauties easily accessible to city men”, etc.⊡
Dee Why
Freshwater (on the Northern Beaches) is depicted as being a “pleasant one-half mile walk” from the Brookvale tram stop at Curl Curl, (comprising) “permanent camps and excellent surf-bathing”. Similarly, close-by Dee Why, reflecting its use as a vacation destination in the day, is a “delightful and charmingly situated sea-side resort (with) a lot to be proud of” – one factor of which presumably is the safety of its beach of which “drowning casualties are up to now unknown”.
Manly, by 1922 already long-established as a “must go-to” day trip for Sydneysiders, is described as a “delightful (ferry) trip down the harbour”…the writer is unrestrainedly fulsome in praise of its virtues, “Few resorts offer such a diversity of attractions – bathing in surf and baths, riding, driving, cycling, and motoring; while golf, cricket, football, la crosse, rifle, rowing, sailing, tennis, croquet, bowling clubs are all in full swing. Open air entertainments and band concerts nightly, and the usual attractions of a popular watering place”.
Vying with Manly for the beachside glamour stakes (then as now) was Bondi (subsumed under Waverley in the directory). Bondi Beach, in the words of Wilson’s, was equipped with baths and municipal “surf sheds” which accommodated 4500 men and 1500 women (clear evidence that 1922 was indeed a pre-feminist era devoid of the slightest pretence to gender equality!)…the (beach) park, the writer went on, “remodelled with the construction of the sea wall” was “now a rendezvous for natural pleasure seekers”. Beach accessible suburbs are always in demand with homebuyers, as underlined in the description of Maroubra – “a favourite place for surf bathers and is advancing with lightning rapidity and they are building fast there” (no hyperbole spared!)
South Kenso & Daceyville
Page 513 illustrates how much can change over lengthy periods of time. In 1922 Sydney’s second university, the University of New South Wales, was still 27 years away, but the future UNSW site was then occupied by Kensington Racecourse✾ and Randwick Park. Nearby was Randwick Asylum, now the Prince of Wales Hospital, and the Randwick Rifle Range, further south on Avoca St, is no more. Anzac Pde runs through the present suburb of Kingsford which in 1922 was called South Kensington with a small part of this suburb forming the locale of Lilyville.
Penrith & the (“world-class”) Nepean
Even suburbs located far the city CBD were given a positive spin by Wilson’s – Penrith, 34 miles from the GPO is described as “the centre of a fertile agricultural and fruit-growing district” only one hour’s journey by rail. The township is “well lighted with electricity and excellent water supply”. Among its attractions are the Nepean River, “world famed for its championship sculling courses, which is recognised by many as the best course in the world” and beautified by its “rugged grandeur of mountain scenery (which draws in) tourists and camping parties”. It also offers short day trips to the “delightful villages” of Mulgoa, Wallacia and Luddenham for shooting and fishing.
The township of Hornsby in the north-west of Sydney is the “centre of a prosperous district”. And with its high elevation (594 ft above sea level), Wilson’s Directory talks up Hornsby as a “metropolitan sanitarium”. The country of its environs “abound with charming drives and magnificent scenery”. Galston is “seven miles north by good metal road” (the “famous Galston ZIG-ZAG”).
Hurstville is depicted as “the centre of a large and progressive district…charmingly situated nine miles south by rail from Sydney”. It includes Mortdale, a township of recent growth, most of the property owned and occupied by the working class”. Also within the Hurstville municipality, the book refers to the suburb of Dumbleton – now called Beverley Hills (conspicuous today for its plethora of restaurants favouring Cantonese Hong Kong and Guangzhou cuisines).
The cover of my edition is long gone but the 1926 edition is very approx.
Pertinent omissions
There is an arbitrariness to the scope of the 1922 directory, it doesn’t extend to most peripheral districts like Liverpool, Blacktown, Campbelltown and Windsor/Richmond, all of which are included within the perimeters of contemporary greater Sydney. This perhaps provides a pointer to the trajectory of the early development patterns and communications of Sydney. Significant population and urban infrastructure reached districts like Penrith and even to parts of the Blue Mountains before it got to Windsor for instance☉.
‘ Gregory’s’ 1st street directory of Sydney 1934
PostScript: Swallowed up by Gregory’s expanding empire of streets? ‘Gregory’s’ before there was a Gregory’s?
In 1934 Gregory’s Street Directory (of Sydney Suburbs and Streets) made its debut, it was not long after this the Wilson’s Street Directory discontinued its annual publication and went out of business. I haven’t been able to ascertain for sure but I suspect a correlation between the two…it is quite feasible that the demise of Wilson’s was linked to the rise of Gregory’s, the latter becoming a household name in metropolitan street directories (and until the advent of GPS an unwaveringly constant companion of the majority of automobile glove-boxes).
Footnote: Taking the Eastwood map (above) as an example of the deficiencies of scale of the directory’s maps, the block between Herring St and Culloden Rd bisected by Waterloo Rd, encompasses the land occupied today by the rump of the campus of Macquarie University. This is some 16 hectares in area, but due to the use of large bold fonts for streets which condenses the sizes of blocks, the area seems quite small on the map!
More nomenclature change: the maps refer to the Municipality of Prospect and Sherwood, later the council was renamed ‘Holroyd’. Prospect retains its identity as a suburb but there is no longer a ‘Sherwood’ locality.
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✲ is Wilson’s Authentic Director, Sydney and Suburbs 1922 an antiquarian book? The key words in any definition of a antiquarian book are ‘old’ and ‘rare’. The perception of ‘what is old’ is subjective and can be related to a given individual’s experience. To me (even way back when I first got hold of it) it was old then and is ancient now! The quality of ‘rareness’ though might be harder to attribute to this book, short of conducting a survey of the remaining second-hand bookshops in this city (these days an increasingly less difficult task to accomplish) I have no earthly idea of how many copies there are in existence. It is certainly the only hardcopy of the publication that I have encountered in its physical state, however I am aware that multiple copies exist online in microfiche form. I suspect then that strictly speaking it probably falls short of the standard definition of antiquarian, so I am happy to go with any variation on a theme that retains that association…quasi-antiquarian, semi-antiquarian, even pseudo-antiquarian!
⌽ Mascot’s Ascot Racecourse (named after the premier horse-racing course in Britain) was the site from where the first aeroplane flight in Sydney took place (1911), [‘Ascot Racecourse, Sydney’, Wikipedia, www.en.m.wikipedia.org]
⊡ appropriately enough to match its elite and exclusive status, Mosman, along with North Sydney, are afforded the only inset maps in “three colors” in an otherwise entirely black-and-white publication (alas these too were casualties of my cavalier treatment of the book during my juvenile years – the tricoloured inset maps of the two suburbs were torn off long ago!)
✾ the maps of the South Sydney area indicate how littered it was with racecourses in 1922…in addition to Kensington and Randwick, there were racecourses at Ascot (see below) and at Eastlakes (Rosebery Racecourse) now occupied by The Lakes Golf Course
☸ the locale of South Kingston gets a nod in the book but these days this name for part of the Newtown suburb has long fallen into disuse and is obsolete
☉ the Penrith and Windsor districts are both roughly equidistance from Sydney (moreover, Windsor was settled as early as 1791, a mere three years after the British takeover of the continent!). Blacktown’s omission is even more puzzling, being considerably closer to the GPO than Penrith!
The walk from The Spit to Manly is one of Sydney’s classic walks along a wild, rugged yet suburban coastline. The full journey is 10km through lush, dense bush land and spectacular lookouts. The first half of the walk (rated Grade 3 by NPWS) – Spit Bridge to about Balgowlah Heights – has a lot of up-and-down, crossing over foot bridges, winding steps but nothing too steep. The water views looking across to Little Manly, North Head and South Head are singularly impressive, and offer a sharp contrast with the contours of the walking track, through promontories dominated by a thick covering of nature.
The aesthetic significance of The Spit to Manly walk is evident to anyone who follows its sinewy trail, but it was also intriguing for me to discover little snippets of local history along the way. In my previous post (‘Sydney’s Heritage and History Trails: Manly Scenic Walkway’), I featured some of the historical points of interest pertaining to the eastern end of the Manly Scenic Walkway (Fairlight to Manly Wharf).
Spit Bridge (current)
Spit Bridge
Our starting point for the MSW walk going west to east, The Spit✥, a narrow channel of land jutting out from the northern part of affluent Mosman, was originally known as the “Sand-Spit”. Although there had been some tentative type of service earlier, Peter Ellery started the first truly effective ferry service from the Spit to Sydney’s Northern Beaches. Ellery ran the service from land he had acquired for farming in present-day Clontarf (today where Ellery’s Punt Reserve is situated) in a direct line over the water to the tip of The Spit. Ellery charged the users of his hand-operated punt ⅙d for a horse and cart and 6d for pedestrians. His service proved popular, popular enough for it to become a public ferry by 1871 (in 1888 a steam punt◙ replaced the hand-cranked boat) [‘The Spit – Historical Overview’, (Local Studies Service, Mosman Library, www.mosman.nsw.gov.au)].
The growing pressure for improved communications and transport lines between Sydney and the Manly area prompted a series of proposals (1862, 1888, 1915) for a bridge to be built across The Spit, before finally the go-ahead was given and a low timber bridge constructed and opened in 1924. Manly Council financed the bridge, and in a deal with the state government was permitted to reimburse its expenditure by collecting tolls for its use. In 1930 control of the bridge was passed to the Department of Main Roads [‘The Spit – Historical Overview’, ibid.].
The current bridge, a bascule lift span type made from steel and concrete, dates from 1958. The bridge, constructed in the same position as the erstwhile timber one, is also low-lying … consideration was given to making it a higher level bridge, but displaying a regrettable lack of foresight, the powers-that-be eventually plumped for the easier option and their legacy is still bedevilling Sydney motorists today! The Spit Bridge is believed to be the only Australian lift bridge still in operation on a major arterial road [‘Spit Bridge’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].
Clontarf Pleasure Grounds
A beautiful tranquil reserve fronting the beach sits on the land where Clontarf Pleasure Grounds once stood (owned for many years by publican Issac Moore (Sr) and his descendants). For around half-a-century from circa 1860 the Grounds was a popular venue for numerous leisure activities…including games of quoits, skittles and cricket, picnics, swimming and of course drinking! Clontarf Grounds were reputed to be “the oldest, largest, and most shady pleasure grounds in the harbour” [MacRitchie, John, ‘Clontarf’, Dictionary of Sydney, 2008,http://dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/clontarf, viewed 31 Oct 2017]. Over the years Sydney’s Clontarf has had several associations with Ireland: the name itself derives from the Battle of Clontarf, 1014 (a town close to Dublin); in the 1800s the grounds drew huge crowds during holidays including the Catholic Young Men’s Societies on anniversary days.
Plaque in Clontarf Reserve remembering the dramatic 1868 incident
Attempted royal assassination in the Pleasure Grounds
In March 1868 a lone, mentally disturbed Irishman (and alleged Fenian sympathiser⌘) Henry O’Farrell took the opportunity during a visit by Prince Alfred Duke of Edinburgh to Clontarf, to shoot but not kill Alfred, Queen Victoria’s son. The British Prince was not badly wounded (the would-be assassin’s bullet was impeded by the “double thickness of the Duke’s trouser braces”). Prince Alfred was ferried to Sydney’s Government House for treatment. One unintended upshot of the incident was the establishment of the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital (RPA) at Camperdown through publicly subscribed funds raised to commemorate the Royal’s safe recovery◬. O’Farrell’s fate was sealed, he was summarily tried and hastily hanged within a month. His lawyer tried to run an insanity defence (entirely plausible) but in the prevailing climate of outrage O’Farrell’s case was a hopeless one. The incident had provoked pro-royal Australians into unleashing a torrent of prejudice aimed at Catholics, Fenians and Irish folks generally [MacRitchie, ibid.]
Clontarf Beach ‘Tent City’
During the Great Depression this now fashionable beachfront and reserve at Clontarf was the site of an impromptu tent city comprising several hundred homeless people down on their luck…the makeshift tent ‘homes’ were cobbled together with posts found in the bush and hessian (coated with whitewash, lime and fat as waterproofing)[MacRitchie, ibid.]
PostScript: MSW’s white sands
One of the pleasures of walking the stretch of the MSW track between Clontarf and Fairlight Beaches is coming upon the various little beaches that jot the coast. Often sheltered in bays away from the powerful ocean currents, some of these “mini-beaches” are accessible only from wooden staircases leading down from high on the promontories around Dobroyd Head and Balgowlah Heights. Bearing names like Castle Rock Beach, Forty Baskets Beach, Reef Beach and Washaway Beach, walking on these pockets of sandy white strips convey a sense of being in a remote and deserted location, despite most of the spots being a only a stone’s throw from middle class suburbia.
Grotto Point Aboriginal carvings
A short diversion off MSW onto a side track on the Dobroyd Point stage of the walk will allow you to view a number of archaic Aboriginal engravings – this part of the headland is known as Grotto Point. Enclosed in wooden pens are various depictions of whales, boomerangs and small fish carved into the rock platform.
🅰︎🅱︎ for more on Clontarf and the whole Sydney pleasure grounds era see also my 2014 post ‘A Day-Trippers’ Paradise: The Vogue for Pleasure Grounds in 19th/20th Century’
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✥ a Spit (or sandspit) is a deposition bar or beach landform that juts out from the coast
◙ the introduction of the steam punt at The Spit later on (1911) would allow the Manly trams to be carried across Middle Harbour [MacRitchie, ibid.]
¤ as a result Northern Sydney motorists continue to be plagued by traffic bottlenecks every time the Spit Bridge opens in the middle for passing water crafts
⌘ It seems to have been generally assumed at the time that the Irishman was acting on behalf of the Irish Underground Fenian Brotherhood but this remains inconclusive
◬ the adjacent Duke of Edinburgh Parade is named in honour of Prince Alfred
Of the many, many coastal walks afforded by “the finest harbour in the world, in which a thousand sail of the line may ride in the most perfect security…”(Governor Arthur Phillip’s appraisal of Port Jackson after sighting Sydney for the first time in 1788), the seaside walk on the southern side of the suburb of Manly✳ is certainly right up there with the most picturesque of them.
‘Father of Manly’
Henry Gilbert Smith
Pivotal to Manly Scenic Walkway (henceforth MSW) and to the seaside community of Manly as a whole is the historic Manly Wharf, the original of which was built by Henry Gilbert Smith in 1855⌽. Smith, known as the “Father of Manly”, had a vision of how the undeveloped bushland that dominated Manly in the 1850s could be transformed into a thriving seaside resort. Purchasing and leasing in excess of 300 acres of land, Smith built Manly’s early hotels, including one (as a sop to the local Temperance Society?) that served only soft drinks! As well the pioneer entrepreneur was responsible for planning the layout of Manly’s streets and parks as they still exist today [‘Manly Heritage Plaques Walk’, www.manlyaustralia.com.au]
(Source: Pinterest)
Carrying passengers to Manly
Creating a seaside resort a good 11.3km from Sydney (a formidable distance in the 19th century) necessitated a good transport link. Travel by water was the obvious mode of transport for the beach suburb. HG Smith started the first regular service from the wharf operated through the paddle steamer Phantom which ferried day-time visitors to Manly and night-time theatre-goers to and from Sydney in the 1860s. From the 1870s the Port Jackson and Manly Steamship Company. controlled the suburb’s ferry services. Briefly in the early 1890s the Port Jackson Co had competition from a new rival, the Manly Cooperative Steam Ferry Co which lowered fares and increased services. By 1896 the Manly Co-op business however faltered and was wound up and Port Jackson Co resumed its monopoly.
The Port Jackson and Manly Steamship Co, whose motto was “Seven miles from Sydney and a thousand miles from care”, continued to serve the public at Manly until 1972 when its role was taken over by Brambles Industries which in turn passed ownership to the state government two years later [‘The Heart of Manly Heritage Walk’, www.manly australia.com]. In the early 1990s the government operator introduced Catamaran vessels, JetCats, to replace the unreliable and costly hydrofoils…the Manly service is now operated by Bass and Flinders Cruises operating as Manly Fast Ferries.
Venetian carnivals
East Esplanade was the venue for many of Manly’s early cultural activities, such as the Venetian Carnival which flourished from around 1913 on. The carnival comprised stalls with food and entertainment (eg, “chocolate wheels and other gambling devices”), costumes, fireworks and a water pageant [‘The Heart of Manly Heritage Walk’]. By 1930 the annual Venetian Carnival was promising the greatest “new attractions, new frolics and new stunts … ever organised in the Southern Hemisphere” with the inclusion of aeroplane rides, a “night time raid”, a “monkey speedway” and participation by Manly Surf Club. The event in 1930 ran for three weeks during Summer with the proceeds pledged to Manly Hospital and other local charities [The Sydney Mail, 15-Jan-1930 (Advertisement)]
Tram, The Corso (c.1905) (Photo: State Lib. NSW)
A meander along the Esplanade
Rows of Norfolk Island pines (no surprise to learn was also the idea of HG Smith!) flank MSW with narrow strips of sand on both sides of the wharf forming beaches sheltered in the cove from the ocean. Standing in front of the wharf building opposite Manly’s famous (Italian-inspired) Corso, if you go left, past the fast food outlets on West Esplanade the walking path heads back toward the suburb of Fairlight. Right, past Aldi◘ takes you on to East Esplanade and the walkway curves around past an assortment of clubs devoted to aquatic pursuits (Manly Yacht Club, 16ft Skiff Club, etc) and connects up with the locale known as Little Manly.
If you head further east where the Esplanade ends, the road will make its way to Little Manly Beach and Point with its spectacular promontory views. Little Manly today is uniformly residential but for a very long period (1883-1964), the Manly Gas Works located at Manly Point Park met all the area’s domestic gas needs.
North Head Q-Station
Beyond Little Manly is the dense pristine heathland known as North Head, a sandstone promontory with a significant history of military and immigration activities. North Head’s surviving fortifications were strategically important to the country’s eastern coastline defence especially during WWII. The headland also functioned as Sydney’s Quarantine Station for a huge stretch of New South Wales’ history (1832-1984), isolating smallpox and other infectious diseases from entering the community.
Little penguins and large selachii
Starting back at the wharf and heading in a western direction this time, along West Esplanade, we note the first of numerous stencilled messages on the walkway alerting walkers to the presence of little penguins. Manly Wharf and its surrounds are known nesting grounds (May/June) for migrating colonies of Eudyptula minor.
Further along MSW one of the first complexes we pass is the Manly Sea Life Sanctuary, a public aquarium displaying sharks, stingrays, little penguins (easier to spot here than on the nearby shoreline!) and other refugees from the ocean. A lure for thrill-seeking visitors is the “Shark Dive Xtreme” (swimming with 3m plus grey nurse sharks). The Sanctuary has been somewhat of an institution in Manly for 52 years¤ but is now in the final chapter of its Manly story – in March this year the management announced its upcoming closure, citing that the business, in a small ageing building, was no longer viable [B Kay, ‘Manly Sea Life Sanctuary aquarium to close at the end of the year’, Manly Daily, 30-Mar-2017].
If we follow MSW walkway to its natural end-point, it would take us past magnificent, dense bushland, serene bays and scenic lookouts on a trek of 10km to the low-lying Spit Bridge – this archaic looking bridge is the curse of motorists forced to twiddle their thumbs in peak-time gridlock whilst the bridge opens in the middle to let various sea craft through its passage.
Two Manly ‘pollies’ from Federation era
The walkway passes another local landmark Manly Pavilion (a bistro/reception venue these days) and continues up the stairs. At the top two base relief bronze plaques greet walkers and joggers, these are of Federation era politicians Edmund Barton and the somewhat itinerant Henry Parkes, both residents of the area in the 19th century. Apparently these are replacement plaques as the originals were stolen from the site in 2014 [J Morcombe, ‘Federation fathers Barton and Parkes stolen from Manly’, Manly Daily, 01-Apr-2014]
Fairlight House (site)
The MSW path soon reaches the suburb of Fairlight, in the 1920s, along with Balgowlah collectively known as Manly West. Fairlight was named after Fairlight House, the mansion home of Henry Gilbert Smith (that seminal figure in Manly’s development again!). English-born Smith took the name from a village in Sussex. Built in the 1850s by colonial architect Edmund Blacket, the house was demolished in 1939. All that is left to remind us of its one-time grandeur is a plaque on the spot showing a grainy old photo of the grand house.
Fairlight Beach
Fairlight Beach Dutch submarine episode
The small beach at Fairlight with its rocky shore and unpredictable breaks holds no attractions for board surfers but its position nestled into the cove and small tidal pool makes it kid-friendly. A tourism sign on the beachfront recounts its connection with a Dutch submarine which had seen action in the world war against the Japanese (the K.12 succeeded in torpedoing several enemy warships). The K.12 sub had been residing in Manly harbour when heavy storms in 1949 prompted the leasee, the Port Jackson Co, to try to tow it to a safer haven in Neutral Bay. Unfortunately in the process it became grounded near Fairlight Beach and sat there for 18 months before being refloated early in 1951…the K.12 was salvaged for scrap and eventually finished up in a new location near Ryde Bridge where it sank again! Parts of the sub’s engine and the bow are still wedged on rocks at Fairlight Beach [G Ross, M Melliar-Phelps, A century of ships in Sydney Harbour (1980); ‘Submarine Refloated, Salvaged for Scrap’, Sydney Morning Herald, 18-Jan-1951]The grounded WWII sub at Fairlight
(Photo: Manly Municipal Library)
PostScript: Kay-ye-my, the Aboriginal name for Manly Cove and North Harbour
Long, long before the Europeans came to the area, Manly was home to two indigenous Eora peoples, the Cannalgal and Kay-ye-my (AKA Gamaragal) clans, who were the custodians of the land. On one part of the walkway overlooking North Harbour there’s information signage which celebrates the Kay-ye-my clan who for millennia contentedly inhabited the Manly region, living a traditional lifestyle of hunting and gathering.
The Gamaragal were situated on the north shore of Port Jackson – occupying the land from Karabilye (Kirribilli) to the cliffs of Garungal or Carangle (North Head) and the sandy bay of Kayyeemy (Manly Cove) [‘Gamaragal – Aboriginal People of Manly and Northern Sydney’, Dictionary of Sydney, 24-Sept-2013, www.home.dictionaryofsydney.org
Kay-ye-my Point
FootNote: Manly East and Manly West
Less than one hundred years ago Sydney cartographers divided the suburb of Manly and its greater surrounds neatly into East and West Manly…as illustrated in the following street maps taken from the 1922 Wilson’s Street Director (predecessor of the standard Sydney street directory Gregory’s). Today’s distinct suburbs of Fairlight, Clontarf, Seaforth, Manly Vale and North Manly are not identified on the maps, and ‘Balgowlah’ and ‘Dobroyd'(sic) are listed as locales only. Note also no bridge at The Spit in 1922.
Manly EastManly West
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✳ the origin of the name for the suburb can be traced back to Phillip himself…on his visit to the area the first governor described the aboriginal inhabitants as ‘manly’ in physique. As if to demonstrate the veracity of Phillip’s observation forcefully, one of the clansman in fact speared the governor over a misunderstanding at Little Manly Beach! (Phillip recovered from his wound and to his credit did not seek to inflict retribution on the native population)
⌽ later a second parallel wharf was built for cargo transport which became redundant after the construction of Spit Bridge in 1924 enabled easier road transport. In 1928 the cargo wharf was converted into a Fun Pier which operated until 1989
◘ where the Manly Fun Pier was until its closure and demolition in 1989
¤ starting in 1965 as Manly Marineland and later known as Oceanworld Manly before its present handle
The history of the Kroger Grocery Company has parallels with the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, another pioneering powerhouse of American food retailing. Both grocery businesses started in the 19th century as tea and coffee purveyors, however Kroger, unlike A&P Tea, has survived through the centuries and still trades today as lucratively as ever. In the 2016 fiscal year Kroger was the largest supermarket chain by revenue in the US (yielding US$115.34 billion). It shares a roost with Walmart at the top of the US retail tree…it is number 2 general retailer behind Walmart in the US, and is the third largest retailer in the world[1].
Origins, growth and expansion of the Kroger name
The man behind the Kroger Company was Bernard Kroger, better known as ‘Barney’. Kroger (below), the son of German immigrants, got into the retailing world at the basement level – working door-to-door selling coffee first for the Great Northern and Pacific Tea Co and then the Imperial Tea Co. By 1883 Kroger was in business for himself, his first store traded under the name the Great Western Tea Co…soon renamed Kroger Grocery and Baking Co✳. The Cincinnati-based business expanded exponentially into the 20th century, by the end of the 1920s decade Kroger had over 5,500 stores in the US[2].
The Kroger business ethic
Not afflicted with the curse of Hamlet, Barney Kroger was not one to overthink or complicate matters, as his simple motto attested: “Be particular. Never sell anything you would not want yourself.” Kroger’s business style was heavily and idiosyncratically micro-managerial, the businessman personally maintained an account book which meticulously recorded all the firm’s financial transactions. Kroger’s business credo was “First: Do it first. When seasonable goods come into the market, have the first. When prices go down, be the first to reduce them. Second: Never sell anything except for just what it is, and don’t sell it then if it isn’t good. Third: Advertise as liberally as business income permits. Fourth: sell on a small margin and make the turnover rapid”. The Ohoian entrepreneur’s pragmatism emphasised “duplicating and reduplicating…what works”[3].
One of Barney Kroger’s most enduring contributions to grocery retail revolves around his minimum cost/high volume approach to trading. He is remembered for introducing the template of the low-cost grocery chain, still much duplicated in modern retailing. Kroger was also innovative in his store design, adding distinct bakery, meat and seafood departments in his grocery stores[4].
In-house food manufacturers
Bread-making was a good example of the Kroger cost minimisation strategy…at variance with most grocers in the early 20th century who purchased the product from independent bakeries, Barney Kroger baked his own bread. This way he could further cut the price for customers and still make a profit. Kroger after the death of Barney has rapidly expanded its own product manufacturing facilities, now making thousands of comestibles within the company[5].
A typical mid-century Kroger store
Merger juggernaut
From the 1950s on Kroger embarked on an ongoing series of mergers with smaller firms to consolidate its market position in the US grocery/supermarket trade. The most significant of these, in 1999, was with Fred Meyer, Inc., then the fifth biggest American grocer. This new acquisition by Kroger saw it reach a new high of 2,200 stores in 31 states, netting the supermarket giant billions in annual revenue[6].
Kroger innovations
Kroger has led the way in retail grocery innovations…the innovations pioneered by the company include ‘firsts’ for a grocery chain, eg, the routine monitoring of product quality and the scientific testing of foods; testing of electronic scanners. As well Kroger was a pioneer in modern consumer research in grocery lines[7].
Kroger’s position today as a market leader in the US grocery and supermarket field (FN1) rests firmly on the solid foundations laid down by its founder Barney Kroger. Contemporary growth by the company has continued a trajectory of diversification well beyond the grocery staple into fuel centres, florists, drug and convenience stores.
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✳ eventually the company name was shortened simply to Kroger
[1] as at December 2015 Kroger operated a total of 2,778 supermarkets and multi-department stores across 34 American states, ‘Kroger’, Wikipedia, http://Wikipedia.org
[2] ibid.
[3] ‘Bernard Heinrich Kroger (1860-1938)’, (Zachary Garrison, 08-Jun-2011), Immigrant Entrepreneurship: 1730 to the Present, www.immigrantentrepreneurship.org; BM Horstman, ‘Barney Kroger: Hard work, marketing savvy won shoppers’, Cincinnati Post, 17-Jun-1999, www.webarchive.org
[4] Horstman, ibid.; ‘Kroger’, Wikipedia, loc.cit.
[5] ‘History of Kroger’, (Kroger), www.thekrogerco.com
[6] Dana Canedyoct, ‘Kroger to Buy Fred Meyer, Creating Country’s Biggest Grocer’, New York Times, 20-Oct-1998, www.nytimes.com
[7] ‘History of Kroger’, loc.cit.
“The Germanic peoples can endure heat and cold, but they can’t do without beer”.
~ Tacitus
If you delve into the story of beer’s prehistoric origins, you are instantly struck that its trajectory parallels that of another contemporary alcoholic beverage, wine. Just as with wine, drinking beer❈ was perceived from the earliest times not only to have an euphoric effect on consumers, but to contain tangible nutritional and medicinal properties.
Another aspect common to both beer and wine concerns the question of which region made the earliest beverages. The question is a fluid one as regular bouts of fresh archaeological findings and research continue to throw up new claimants for the title.
Clay tablet: Sumerians drinking beer through bent, elongated straws
⬇️
The majority view among historians is that the production of beer probably started in Western Asia, more exactly in the ancient lands of Mesopotamia. Dating its beginnings is hard to say with precision, the best evidence lies in discoveries of ancient drinking vessels and utensils. The earliest such artifacts are possibly some 7,000-year-old pottery jars with traces of beer substances that were found in Iran (Persia), and a 6,000-year-old Sumerian tablet of people drinking a beer-like beverage through reed straws[1]. Another finding, a tablet recording a poem written in the 19th century BCE in honour of the Sumerian goddess of beer, Ninkasi, also represents the first known recipe for the craft of brewing beer[2].Bread or beer – what came first?
In the beginning there was the domestication of cereal grains, the transition from hunter-gatherers to agriculturalists … well not quite the beginning, this occurred (very roughly) 10,000-year-ago in the Neolithic period. The precedence of cereal grains is incontrovertible. What the next step was is not so black-and-white. The conventional wisdom has been that the cultivation of cereals was undertaken for the production of food. The grain would permit crops such as emmer wheat, einkorn wheat and barley to be grown … this led to the baking of bread and other food items.(photo: AP)Beer came about, according to this view, by association with bread, possibly by accident. A likely explanation for this might entail a situation where a farmer or a baker samples water in which bread had been sitting for some period of time. The water having undergone spontaneous fermentation, the natural spoilage of the germinated grain created a beer substance. The sampler liked the taste and it caught on, and thus a beer culture was born[3].Beer the conduit for permanent human settlement?
But did humankind get serious about crop cultivation solely to produce flour for bread-making, this theory is still the orthodox view but a body of research over recent decades suggests that the earth’s grains were possibly domesticated for beer before they were for bread. This counter-view has its genesis in the early 1950s with two scholars, Robert J Braidwood and Jonathan D Sauer. It was anthropologist Braidwood who posed the question “Did man once live by bread alone?” As a result of research on a site in Jarmo (present-day Iraq) Braidwood hypothesised the earliest farming of wheat and barley was more to do with the taste that had been acquired for beer. Botanist Sauer proposed that “thrist rather than hunger may have been the stimulus behind the origin of small grain agriculture”. Beer being a “palatable and nutritious beverage” (was a) “greater stimulant” for the cereal producers[4]. The desire for the beverage according to this view was the lever that prompted humans to begin forming permanent settlements[5].Building on this argument, Katz and Voight in the 1980s argued that beer had a dual appeal in antiquity: people enjoyed “the altered state of awareness” that sufficient intake of beer engendered, and at the same time they benefitted from beer’s nutritional superiority to every other food in their diet aside from animal proteins[6]Recent anthropological studies conducted in Mexico support the contention that beer took primacy over bread. Teosinte, the ancestral grass of modern maize common to Meso-America, was much more suited to beer making than for making corn flour for bread or tortillas. Mexican farmers only managed to domesticate the grass into the diet staple maize much later[7].First draughts: Sumer, Mesopotamia and the Levant
Although the Greeks traced the genesis of beer to Ancient Egypt, the general consensus of scholars would attribute its origins, based on clear archaeological evidence, to Mesopotamia, and more specifically, mainly to sites in modern-day Iraq. Recent research from Simon Fraser University (Canada) suggests the importance of the brewing of beer to Natufian culture (the Levant) in the Late Epi-Paleolithic period (around 10,000-9,500 BCE[8]. The Godin Tepe (“Grand Mound”) site (Tepe Gawra settlement) in Northern Iraq is one of the oldest in the world to yield evidence of beer production and consumption. More recently, there was a discovery of even earlier wine activity in another Natufian settlement near Haifa, Israel [‘Traces of 13,000-Year-Old Beer Found in Israel’, (Brigit Katz), Smithsonian Magazine, 13-Sep-2018, www.smithsonianmag.com].Chinese rice-beer brewmasters
As is the case with the origin of wine, the Orient has thrown up a worthy contender for the mantle of the first known instance of the brewing of beer. Recently a team in Jiahu (Yellow River Valley), Northern China, found pottery residues of a 5,400 to 4,900 year-old⊛ beer made from rice, barley and other grains[9]. Just as the Chinese used rice in their beer, other early brewers experimented with different materials aside from wheat and barley – rye in Thracian beer (as did the Russians later to make kvass), date palms and pomegranates in Babylon. Excavations at a 2,500-year-old Celtic site in Eberdingen-Hochdorf (Germany) unearthed the remnants of beer mixtures which had added the ingredients henbane, mugwort and carrot seeds to a base of barley malt[10].Beer, a healthy option?
The Mesopotamians and Ancient Egyptians believed that beer had health benefits. The brewing process involved in producing beer killed off any inherent bacteria and viruses, this made drinking beer preferable to water which retained various pollutants that made it unsafe by comparison. It was also nutritionally advantageous – providing much-needed carbohydrates, proteins and minerals. The Ancient Egyptians moreover thought that sage and thyme contained anti-cancer properties and integrated these herbs into their beers. Positive medicinal effects in ancient beer included the essential amino acid lysine and the brews were high in B-vitamin content. The Egyptians identified the existence of some 100 remedies in beer. Further south on the Nile the Ancient Nubians 2,000 years ago infused their beers with antibiotic medicine, tetracycline[11].
⬆️ Ancient Egyptian artisan brewing up beerBeer in ancient times was integrated into mythology and religion, thus elevating its status. It was part of the Sumerian “god myth” with Babylonians believing that beer was “a gift from the gods’ – or more precisely the ‘goddesses’ (Ninkasi – the ancient Sumerian titular goddess of beer). Egyptians associated their main goddesses, Hathor and Heqet, with the creation and consumption of beer (zytum¤), as was Tenenet (or Tjenenyet) who was the “Goddess of Beer and Childbirth” … beer was an integral part of the religious festivals and state occasions of Ancient Egypt (for which ‘special’ beer brews were produced)[12].Beer Vs Wine
Ancient Greeks and Romans were generally less enamoured with beer than other ancient civilisations – although each still produced the beverage. In both societies wine was the preferred drink and one that bestowed social status. The great Ancient Greek philosophers and historians (eg,Xenophon in Anabasis) derided beer as a low-class drink for ‘Barbarians’. An indicator of the Greeks’ low opinion of beer as a beverage was that they exported it to Mediterranean ports as an aid to craftsmen to soften ivory in the making of jewellery[13]. A common perception concerning Ancient Egypt is that whilst the lower echelon of society drank beer (the “poor man’s” liquor), the upper strata right up to the Pharaohs drank wine only which was much more expensive. It would appear though that, to the contrary, beer was a staple in the diet of all Egyptians regardless of class, the Pharaohs included[14].
PostScript I: Women – the original home brewers
Sumerian society was structured around the home, the men hunted and the women collected and prepared the ingredients for eating and drinking. Within the domain of the home the first beers were brewed – by women! Women brewers in Sumeria were often also priestesses and thus held in high social esteem. When Babylon eclipsed the Sumerian Empire Babylonian women also enjoyed a similar prestige – having the right to divorce and own a business and property, and to work as brewsters (professional female brewers) and as tavern keepers (and as well as bakers)◘[15]. Early beer making elsewhere was also the preserve of (elite) women! eg, the indigenous Wari (Sp: Huari) society in the Andes in Southern Peru that flourished before the rise of the Inca Empire[16].
🍺 ♁ 👧🏾🍺 ♁ 👱🏽♀️🍺 ♁ 👩🏾🦰
Beer brewing and the product’s distribution and sale remained women’s work until brewing moved away from the home when beer-making took on a commercial-scale of activity. By the Industrial Revolution the brewing of beer had been fully taken over by men[17] .
PostScript II: The world according to beer
In 2011 a documentary, How Beer Saved the World, screened on the Discovery Channel. The film, once you get past the irritatingly over-the-top, megaphonic introduction, makes a reasoned case for beer’s fundamental role in shaping the world as we know it. A battery of scientists and anthropologists take turns explaining the breadth of the ancient (and the modern) world’s debt to beer – eg, it fuelled the building of the Great Pyramid of Giza (workers were paid in beer۞); it prompted the invention of mathematics and the world’s first form of writing, Cuneiform (the film argues that arithmetic and writing was necessary to account for beer’s production and distribution); it contributed to the modern process of pasteurisation. It also reinforces the view that barley was grown for beer before bread, and that the brewed beverage came about by accident.
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❈ with the seemingly inexorable onslaught on the market of craft beers today, brewers are sifting increasingly exotic and sometimes weirder ingredients into their brew concoctions (so much so that lentil beer for instance seems almost a mild deviation from orthodoxy). For the ancient pioneers of beer-making though the basics comprised water, barley (or similar grain, eg, emmer, malt), yeast, but not hops … this last naturally growing plant ingredient was somewhat of a late-comer added to the composition of beer, it seems that the human cultivation of hops came much later (ca. AD 12th century), ‘The Short and Bitter History of Hops’, (D Martorana, Philly Beer Scene, Apr/May 2010), www.beerscenemag.com
⊛ early Yangshou period, flourished c.5,000BCE
¤ the honey-flavoured Hqt or Heqet was the most popular of the beer brews in Ancient Egypt
◘ this brings us back to the beer or bread debate – was beer-making an offshoot of bread-making or vice versa? Evidence from Ancient Egypt doesn’t resolve this question, but we do know that specially made bread was the basis for some of the beer brewed (beer loaves); also in Sumeria bippar (twice-baked barley bread) was used in the brewing of beer, Hornsey, loc.cit
۞ each one received a daily allowance up to one gallon of low-alcohol beer
🛡️✦🛡️✦🛡️
[1] ‘History of the word Beer’, (Beer100.com Your place for everything Beer), [NDP] www.beer100.com[2] ‘Discover the Oldest Beer Recipe in History from Ancient Sumerian, 1800 B.C.’, (Open Culture), 03-Mar-2015, www.openculture.com[3] B Mauk, ‘When was beer invented?’, (Live Science), 18-Jan-2013,www.livescience.com[4] JW Arthur, ‘Beer through the Ages: The Role of Beer in Shaping Our Past and Current Worlds’, Anthropology Now, 6(2), Sept 2014), www.jstor.org; D Spector,’How Beer Created Civilisation’, Business Insider Australia, 27-Dec-2013, www.businessinsider.com.au[5] although the “beer first” thesis has enjoyed a vogue, some scholars reject the argument wholly, eg, Paul Mangledorf: “Man cannot live on beer alone … Are we to believe that the foundations of Western Civilization were laid by an ill-fed people living in a perpetual state of partial intoxication?”[6] Spector, loc.cit.[7] JP Kahn, ‘How Beer Gave Us Civilisation’, The New York Times, 15-Mar-2013,www.mobile.nytimes.com[8] ‘What Was Brewing in the Natufian? An Archaeological Assessment of Brewing Technology in the Epipaleolithic’, Hayden, B, Canuel, N & Shanse, J. J. Archaeol Method Theory (2013), 20:102. Doi:10/1007/s10816-011-9127-y[9] J Wang et al, ‘Revealing a 5,000-year-old beer recipe’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, (113:201601466), 23-May-2016, www.pnas.org[10] B Bower, ‘2,550-Year-Old Celtic Beer Recipe Resurrected’, (Science News), 17-Jan-2011,www.wired.com[11] C Seawright, ‘Ancient Egyptian Alcohol: Beer, Wine and the Festival of Drunkenness’, 02-Jan-2013, www.thekeep.org; ‘Wiki History of Beer’, (Wikipedia), www.em.n.wikipedia.org; S Webb, ‘Did Beer create civilisation?’, Daily Mail (Aust), 21-Dec-2013,www.dailymail.co.uk[12] SH Katz & MM Voight, ‘Bread and Beer: The Early Use of Cereals in the Human Diet’,www.semanticsscholar.org; IS Hornsey, A History of Beer and Brewing (2003)[13] Hornsey, ibid.; JJ Mark, ‘Beer in the Ancient World’, Ancient History Encyclopedia, 02-Mar-2011, www.ancienthistory.org[14] ‘Ancient Egypt Online’, www.ancientegyptonline.co.uk/index.html[15] T Nurin, ‘How Women Brewers Saved the World’, 21-Apr-2016, www.bearandbrewing.com[16] RR Britt, ‘Elite Women Made Beer in Pre-Incan Culture’, (Live Science), 14-Nov-2005, www.livescience.com[17] ‘Women in Brewing’, (Wikipedia), www.em.n.wikipedia.org
Where did the story of wine and wine-making begin? As with many things whose beginnings are shrouded in the mystery of ancient and even pre-historic times, it is very hard to pinpoint a one hundred percent, definitive answer to this question. The evidence for when and where humans might have first cultivated Vitis vinifera va. sylvestris (the wild grape fruit)❈ lies in the realm of archaeology.
🔝 Today’s Transcaucasian republics – physical map
The timeline for the first experiments with wine-making, thanks to a wealth of archaeological evidence, puts it in the pre-recorded history stage of humanity, more precisely in the Neolithic Era (in Eurasia this was, very roughly, from 9,000 to 4,000 BCE). The consensus view has traditionally tended to be that the rudiments of viticulture can be located in the area around Mesopotamia and the Caspian Sea (see also footnote).
The Fertile Crescent: home of Ur-winemakersTranscaucasia (the Caucasus), that relatively narrow strip of multi-ethnic lands separating the Black Sea from the Caspian, stretching south to include the northern parts of Turkey and Iran, has perhaps the best claim to the honour. Archaeologists have discovered early signs of wine activity and implements in southern Georgia, north-western Azerbaijan, and northern Armenia, suggesting that “Stone Age people took advantage of a temperate climate and availability of wild fruit species to experiment with cultivating grapes”[1].
Wine expert Caroline Gilby identifies three basic pre-conditions for successful wine-making in the Neolithic era, (i) a stable human population settled in the one place for some time, (ii) invention of pottery/clay vessels for storage✜, and (iii) existence of wild grapevines (plus a self-fertile plant to cross-pollinate with). Transcaucasia fits the bill – plant cultivation for most of the major agricultural crops began in the Middle East region around 10,000 years ago. Within the greater Caucasus, Georgia for which wine is a national obsession has 500 distinct varieties of the vine, whilst Turkey and Armenia have around 600 and 200 respectively[2].
🔝 Zagros Mountains
Not to be outdone, Iran itself has a claim worthy of contention for longevity of vine production. In the mid 1990’s evidence of mey (Persian: wine), dating to about 5,400 BCE, was found in excavated jars at the Hajji Firuz Tepe site in the Zagros Mountains of north-western Iran. What was especially significant about this location was that it also contained evidence of the preservation of wine (in the form of a resin from the local terebinth tree)[3].
Armenia: site of oldest known vineyard
In recent years archaeologists discovered and excavated the Areni-1 Cave – the earliest known site of wine production (pre-historic “wine-making on an industrial scale” not hitherto unearthed)[4]. Items found at the vineyard at Vayots Dzor included a wine-press, fermentation vats, jars and cups[5]. The clay receptacles with their wine traces were radiocarbon-dated after being chemical analysed at between 4100 BCE and 4000 BCE. A side-effect of the recent vinaceous archaeological discoveries has been squabbling among the various Transcasusian states as to who were the first wine-makers[6].
🔝 Egyptian winery, 2nd millennium BCE
Mediterranean wine culture
Transcaucasian wine production and consumption clearly predates those from the Mediterranean region. Egypt is closest in time to the northern Eurasian area, its oldest traces of wine (yrp or irep), found inside the Tomb of the Scorpion King (Abydos, Upper Egypt), is about 5,000-years-old. Interestingly they were found to be spiked with natural medicines (effectively herbal wine). These medicinal additives were later adopted by Greek and Roman winemakers who followed the Egyptian practice[7]. The ancient Egyptians, who had a preference for red wine, were the first to depict wine and wine-making in their hieroglyphics.
🔝 Roman wine jars – great & small
In Grecian Macedonia fragments of crockery and assorted pottery with wine traces have been found dating back to around 4,500 BCE. Evidence of wine cultivation – dating from the mid-3rd century BCE – was also found on the Greek island of Crete. For ancient Romans wine was the drink de jour … initially Roman attempts at the craft of wine-making were derivative of the established Greek (and Etruscan) methods of viticulture but the Romans later drew on the ample supply of indigenous vines in southern Italy to produce their own varieties. With the ever widening reach of Roman imperial expansion – through war, trade and settlements – the Romans spread wine consumption and viticulture to the countries and regions it conquered (especially France, Germany, Spain and Portugal)[8].
Vino in eastern Asia: China’s early wine origins
In the mid 2000s China emerged as a candidate for the world’s earliest consumers of wine. An international team of archaeologists (Chinese, American and German) dug up an early Neolithic village (Jiahu) in Henan Province, unearthing pottery with traces of “wine-like drinks”(sic) (a fermented mixture comprising rice, honey and hawthorn fruit and grape). The beverage has been dated somewhere between the year 7,000 BCE and 5,500-6,000 BCE[9].
Whether China has the bragging rights to being the earliest consumer of wine (and perhaps the first centre of wine production), or Transcaucus does, one point remains clear: the interest and active, on-going work of archaeologists in this field, ensures that ownership of the title has a fluidity to it. Yet more candidates for the world’s earliest pioneers of viticulture are likely to be unearthed in the future.
🔝 Georgian vineyard (photo: BBC Travel)
FN: A vintage Georgian drop🍷 🕸🕸🕸The fertile valleys and protective slopes of Transcaucasia and modern-day Georgia were conducive to grapevine cultivation and Neolithic wine production. Archaeological evidence from Georgia suggests wine production there at least 8,000 years ago with the recent discovery of clay pots containing the residue of wine [‘Oldest Evidence of Winemaking Discovered at 8,000-Year-OldVillage’, (Andrew Curry), NationalGeographic, 13-Nov-2017, http://news.nationalgeographic.com; ‘Georgia’, Vinolgue, (Miquel Hudin & Daria Kholodolina, Georgia: a guide to the Cradle of Wine, 2017)].
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❈ the European grape-vine common to western Eurasia – between the Mediterranean and Caspian seas
✜ ceramic containers were invented around 20,000 years ago
𖣸𖣿𖨘 𖣸𖣿𖨘 𖣸𖣿𖨘
[1] T de Waal, The Caucasus: An Introduction, (2010). For instance, discoveries in the 1960s of domesticated grape pips in N/W Azerbaijan have been dated at around 6,000 BCE; in Shulaveri, Georgia, University of Pennsylvania academic Patrick McGovern found wine residues in the shards of 8,000-year-old ceramic vessels, A Friedrich, ‘Georgia’s Vintners Thrist for the Past’, The Washington Post, 22-Feb-2004
[2] C Gilby, ‘The Birthplace of Wine?’, Decanter, (Jan. 2012), www.winesofturkey.org. The domesticated form of the grape has hermaphrodite flowers which self-pollinate, KK Hurst, ‘Wine and its Origins – The Archaeology and History of Wine Making’, (About Education), www.archaeology.about.com
[4] Dig project co-director Boris Gasparyan, cited in Gilroy, op.cit.
[5] ‘History of Wine’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org
[6] Gilroy, loc.cit.
[7] the Scorpion I wine did not emanate from a local production point, but was imported to the Nile from the Levant, B Handwerk, ‘Scorpion King’s Wines — Egypt’s Oldest — Spiked with Meds’, National Geographic News, 13-Apr-2009, www.news.nationalgeographic.com; J Butler & R Heskett,
Divine Vintage: Following the Wine Trail from Genesis to the Modern Age, (2012)
[8] ‘Ancient Rome and wine’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org
[9] ‘Chinese People were Drinking Wine 9,000 Years Ago’, (Phys Org) 19-Dec-2004, www.phys.org
The association of America with Napoléon Bonaparte for most people probably revolves round the US government’s bonanza real estate deal with Napoléon in 1803…the US cheaply acquired huge swathes of territory (the Louisiana Purchase) which the French emperor wanted to offload to build up France’s finances for war. Napoléon Bonaparte (Italian: Nabulione Buonaparte) never came to the United States or to anywhere in the New World –- although in the event of his grand scheme to conquer Europe going pear-shaped (as it ultimately and irrevocably did in 1815), his “Plan B” was just that, to make good an escape to the American Republic [1]. However it was Napoléon’s older brother Joseph (born Giuseppe) Bonaparte, formerly installed as king of Spain and the Indies, and before that, king of Naples and Sicily, who did come to the American continent and moreover lived in the US for some 17 or more years after the Emperor’s fall from power.
Sibling & HM King Joseph
Joseph succeeded in his getaway where Napoléon failed, slipping out of French waters and travelling incognito to New York, albeit narrowly avoiding detection by the British. In America Joseph styled himself the Comte de Survilliers … after living in New York and Philadelphia for a period Bonaparte purchased a palatial residence in Bordentown, New Jersey called “Point Breeze” – one of the finest country houses in the Delaware Valley. Joseph was able to afford (and subsequently vastly improve) one of the republic’s grand mansions because he had brought the Spanish Bourbons’ crown jewels with him which he had acquired when abdicating the Spanish throne. With his dubiously acquired riches Bonaparte made other land acquisitions in upstate New York on the Black River (a locale still known as Lake Bonaparte)[2].
‘Point Breeze’, Bordentown, NJ
Joseph AKA the Count of Survilliers largely led a quiet, uneventful and comfortable life in the US, taking no interest in a political role … when Mexican rebels and expat French supporters gave their backing to him to be made emperor of Mexico (1820), he demurred at the offer. In 1832 Bonaparte returned to Europe (although he did return briefly to the US and his much loved mansion ‘Point Breeze’❈ in 1839), living for a while in London and in Italy where he died in 1844. The ineffective, former ‘puppet’ king of Spain was never permitted to return to his native France again because of the French government’s concern that it might provoke a groundswell for a Bonapartist restoration[3].
Joseph was not the only Bonapartist to flee to America following his brother’s downfall in 1815. The return of the Bourbons with the ascension of Louis XVIII prompted a “witch-hunt” of Bonapartists in France. Many followers of Napoléon escaped to America to avoid arrest and recriminations … once there some of Napoléon’s loyal soldiers set up Bonapartist colonies in Alabama (Vine and Olive Colony) and Texas (Champ d’Asile) – which were uniformly unsuccessful and short-lived[4].
Joseph’s (Spanish) Royal Monogram 👑
PostScript: Napoleon’s “life in America”
A) Rescue plans – before exile and on St Helena
In the aftermath of the disaster of Waterloo rumours abounded about various plots and attempts to rescue Napoléon. One plot involved a mega-wealthy French-born banker Stephen (Étienne) Girard living in the US who supposedly hatched an elaborate plan to transport the deposed emperor to Virginia (a claim made in the Baltimore American, 1902). According to some sources Girard also played a role in the Louisiana Purchase machinations[5].
Napoléon’s island prisonBy far the most bizarre plot involved a Brit of Irish parentage Tom Johnson, who as well as being a recidivist smuggler had a bit of a reputation as an escape expert. Johnson’s claim was that in 1820 he was offered £40,000 to rescue Napoléon from St Helena, using two primitive types of submarines he had designed as the “getaway” vessels. Johnson’s colourful account reads as highly fanciful and the plot was in any case never implemented … the one plausible element of the story being that Johnson’s underwater crafts (for which designs did exist) were inspired by Robert Fulton’s 1806 submarine -–the American engineer and inventor had earlier worked for both Napoléon and the British government on armed maritime vessel projects (what is less certain is whether Johnson had actually met Fulton as he claimed)[6].
B) Exploring the “What If …” scenario for Napoléon
Devotees of alternative history have speculated lyrically about what might have happened had Napoléon made good his escape to the Americas. One of the early imaginative conjectures (1931) came from British historian HAL Fisher who hypothesised that the exiled emperor might have established a base in New York and then gone on to Spanish America to liberate the masses, before finally drowning at sea whilst attempting to conquer India[7].
Outlawed in Europe after Waterloo, it would have been logical for Napoléon to gravitate towards America … the US had only recently engaged in hostilities with Britain (War of 1812), so the locals would probably have been disposed or at least neutral towards him, he would have been able to live as a free man. The US was a new country born of revolution (and one inspiring a revolution in his native France which promoted his own rise). An American base would position the ambiguous ex-monarch well to marshal his resources and launch an invasion of Central and South America which was ripe for revolution against the Spanish conquerors. One of Napoléon’s aides-de-camp in fact made the suggestion to him that he should make himself “emperor of Mexico”[8] (anticipating what transpired with a later Habsburg royal).
A recent alternative history (Shannon Selin, Napoléon in America) postulates three possible theoretical courses of action for Napoléon – settling on the eastern (Atlantic) seaboard, living peacefully, probably near his favoured brother Joseph (possibly biding his time, building up the necessary support for another go at overthrowing the French Bourbons and reclaim the throne either for himself or for his son); establishing a colony within the US peacefully (in fact Bonapartists later attempted to forge colonies in Alabama and Texas – both then controlled by Spain); and as with Fisher’s supposition, invading Spain’s American colonies and thereby securing a new throne[9].
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❈ as boys Frank and Charles Woolworth (the future giant retail empire founders) lived close to ‘Joe’ Bonaparte’s abandoned Bordentown mansion, spending lots of their leisure time playing at ‘Point Breeze’
۵~۵~۵
[1] originally Napoléon and Joseph had laid plans for the two of them to seek refuge together in America in the likelihood of a worst-case scenario. A location in New Jersey was picked out as the optimum place for settling but Napoléon missed a real chance to escape to the US by stealth, having prevaricated too long waiting for anticipated passports which did not come, and then making the fateful decision to give himself up to the British authorities, CE Macartney & G Dorrance, The Bonapartes in America, (1939), www.penelope.uchicago.edu (see also PostScript above)
[2] R Veit, ‘Point Breeze (Bonaparte Estate)’, (2015), www.philadelphiaencyclopedia.org; ‘Joseph Bonaparte at Point Breeze. New Jersey’s Ex-King and the Crown Jewels’, Flatrock, www.flatrock.org.nz
[3] ibid.
[4] ‘Bonapartist Refugees in America, 1815-1850’, www.napolun.com
[5] L Weeks, ‘What if Napoleon Had Come to America’, NPR, 10-Feb-2015, www.npr.org. Girard also underwrote the American war effort in the War of 1812
[6] M Dash, ‘The Secret Plot to Rescue Napoleon by Submarine’, Smithsonian Magazine, 08-Mar-2013, www.smithsonian.com
[7] H.A.L. Fisher, ‘If Napoleon had Escaped to America’, (Scribner’s Magazine, Jan. 1931), www.unz.org
[8] M Price, ‘How Napoleon Nearly Became a U.S. Citizen’, History News Network, 28-Dec-2014, www.historynewsnetwork.org
The seeming ubiquity of Woolies?Woolworths is an internationally known name synonymous with traditional merchandising budgeted within the reach of the average consumer. When I was a kid I thought that the Woolworths variety store-cum-supermarket chain in cities and towns strewn all around Australia and New Zealand was an offshoot of the famous pioneering Woolworths “dime and nickel” company in the US. Until I actually went to South Africa I wasn’t even aware that there was Woolworths in that country as well. When I did discover its existence travelling around the RSA garden route I initially assumed that it too was a spoke in the far-reaching American F W Woolworth imperial retail wheel.
Only much, much later did I learn of the total absence of any business or corporate connection between the three ‘Woolworths’ entities (sometimes displayed in singular form, sometimes plural, sometimes with an apostrophe). Both the retail chain in Australasia and the one in South Africa got the name ‘Woolworths’ through the same legalistic loophole. When a collection of businessmen began the Australian retail enterprise they acquired the name because the original American company had not registered the name in NSW (or anywhere in Australia). Thus the first store in Sydney CBD’s Imperial Arcade in 1924 was called Woolworths Stupendous Bargain Basement. The transition to the eventual nomenclature used (simply ‘Woolworths’) was not quite that simple. Before settling on ‘Woolworths’, the first notion that came to Percy Christmas (Woolworth’s inaugural CEO) and his directors was to call it ‘Wallworths Bazaar’, a pun on the American retailer’s name[1].
Somerset Mall ‘Woolies‘
Western Cape RSA
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Similarly, the South African ‘Woolworths’ acquired the name because there was no legal trademark impediment to it using the name in South Africa. Founder Max Sonnenberg and his son Richard started the first Woolworths store in Cape Town in 1931, and like the Australian namesake it has never had any financial connection to the prior existing F W Woolworth Co business. Woolworths South Africa-style was a different sort of retail animal, modelling itself on the upmarket British Marks and Spencer rather than the F W Woolworth bargain basement store concept[2].
Woolworths ground zero: Creating the retail templateThe American phenomenon started in 1878 when Frank Winfield Woolworth, son of a poor potato farmer, started his first store in Utica, New York, the basis of his business strategy was to sell a wide selection of items at low price (initially all the merchandise was set at 5 cents each). The store was poorly located and failed abjectly but Woolworth persisted, opening a second dry goods and variety store the following year in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and the formula eventually caught on. The entrepreneur expanded his store concept to a “five-and-dime” one (items set at 5¢ and 10¢ each).
The early F W Woolworth & Co
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Woolworth’s brother Charles (known as ‘Sum”) got in on the business, starting up his own retail stores soon after his older brother’s. Frank expanded F W Woolworth Co into a chain by mergers and partnerships with his cousin Seymour Knox I and with other relatives and friends❈. By gathering together a little club of owners Woolworth could purchase large quantities of goods directly from the manufacturers. As the US stores multiplied and prospered, Frank, remembering his own disadvantaged childhood, took pride in the fact that the “ordinary man” could afford to buy from Woolworth stores[3].
From 1890 FWW would embark on annual (sometimes biannual) large-scale buying trips to Europe, always paying the suppliers in cash on principle. Exposure to European manufacturers promoted awareness of market potentiality in other countries and may have prompted Woolworth’s eventual decision to branch out internationally. Anglophile Frank had his eye firmly on Britain as his 1890 trip diary indicates: “a good penny and sixpence store, run by a live Yankee, would be a sensation here”[4]. The chain had already extended north to Canada and subsidiaries were launched in the UK, Germany, Austria, Mexico and Cuba. The UK Woolworth sub-set itself opened stores in the Republic of Ireland, Palestine, Cyprus, the British West Indies and Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe).
FW Woolworth store in Glasgow (Source: Pinterest UK)
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British F W WoolworthWoolworths came to Britain in 1909 with the first store, selling clothing, stationary and toys, opening in Liverpool in northern England (family cousin Fred Moore Woolworth was the British arm’s first managing director). The pricing strategy matched the US “five-and-dime” one with items selling at 3d and 6d. The British chain flourished from the 1920s on, becoming a household name through the UK, so much so that most consumers in Britain and Ireland believed that their ‘Woolies’ shops were a local invention, “where sixpence once went a long way”[5].
Like the parent company in America, British Woolworths proved a retail innovator. The Liverpool store introduced lunch counters (followed by Blackpool and other large UK stores)回, which were the precursor to the standard food courts which became integral to shopping malls later in the 20th century[6]. The Woolies restaurants also adhered to the 3d and 6d price formula, although by 1941 there had been some increases, eg, a split lobster salad had risen to the princely sum of one shilling (12d or 1/-)[7].
Woolworth UK’s rise and fallThe 1930s marked a high point for Woolworth in the UK … outside of the Christmas season the chain was opening a new store every five days! During the price inflation of the late 1930s the Woolworth giant kept the sixpence limit on its prices by asserting its buying power to coerce suppliers into accepting lower margins for their goods¤. By 1958 F W Woolworth Co had amassed 1,000 branches in Britain[8].
The first signs of the downturn in Woolworth UK’s fortunes can be traced from the 1960s, the parent company forced the British arm into introducing Woolco, a series of one stop shops usually located out-of-town. These did not succeed, as they had in America because the UK lacked the US’s higher car ownership which suited out-of-town shopping. This was also an unwise move away from Woolworth UK’s strength, its high street stores. The UK business’ problems continued in the 1970s – Britain’s decimalisation in 1971 caught Woolworth unprepared because unlike other retailers it had resisted the move to self-service. The upshot was costly to Woolworth (£5 million and a five-year process trying to replace their over-abundance of store cash registers. Also in the 1970s a number of Woolworth stores in Britain and Northern Ireland burned down, attributed at least in part in incompetent and short-sighted management … resulting in brand damage to the trusted F W Woolworth name from which it never entirely recovered[9].
Closing down: Bromsgrove store (Worcs.)
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British elements (principally Kingfisher plc) finally gained a controlling interest in the UK enterprise in 1982, but Woolies, this British institution on the retail landscape ultimately fell foul of intense competition from cut-price retailers … many customers defected to British supermarket giants Tesco and Sainsbury’s. Falling sales❀ and a cash-flow crisis affected its entertainment arm. The downturn was exacerbated by the adverse effects of the Global Financial Crisis of the late 2000s. In 2007 Britain’s Woolworth Co experienced its first trading loss in 95 years … and much worst was to come. Over Christmas 2008 807 stores in the UK closed. With Deloitte’s administrating, the whole Woolworth chain had a complete shutdown over a 41 day period (months short of what would have been 100 years of operation in the UK). The carve-up saw restructure specialists Hilco Capital acquire the retail business and the Shop Direct Group (owned by the Barclay brothers) taking over the online retail sector … this too however was closed down in 2015[10].
Rise and fall of the prototype organisationThe America parent Woolworth company was spectacularly successful in creating a chain of “cash-and-carry” dime stores. By 1977 there were 3,414 stores in the US, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands and 1,884 outside of the US[11]. The pioneering merchandising methods of F W Woolworth with the founder’s emphasis on sales and customer service, and direct purchasing, established a solid base to enable his successors as CEO to continue to sustain and grow the Woolworth retail empire. However after WWII there was shift in the nature of shopping propelled by the burgeoning car culture … retailing in America and elsewhere moved on from the high street stores which had been the mainstay of Woolworth to the new malls located in the suburbs. Woolworth tried slowly to adjust but found itself less able to adapt to this change than its major competitors.
Woolco, Canada (Photo: Reddit)
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By the 1960s the original five-and-dime stores had morphed into other commercial entities: whilst the Woolworth flagship was retained there was a move into speciality stores and the large discount retail chain Woolco, which had a measure of success. Through the eighties and into the nineties the ailing FWW giant lingered on.
La Crosse (Wisconsin) store, 1992 (Source: La Crosse Tribune)
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In 1997 F W Woolworth Co in the US folded, following years of diminishing competitiveness with its rivals (the chain in 1996 posted a crippling loss of $US37 million). The Venator Group took its place and F W Woolworth ceased to be a trading name. Venator’s retail focus fixed on the foot ware market with Foot Locker and Kinney Shoes. This was a sudden end to a gradual process by which Woolworth Five-and-Dimes were overtaken by the likes of more dynamic enterprises, Wal-Mart, Kmart (formerly Kresge), Target and other commercial players who adapted to change far better than the veteran Woolworth[12].
F W Woolworth Co ultimately suffered the same fate as the British Woolworth – an accumulated obsolescence. As Jennifer Steinhauer summarised its plight, it had “faded in the collective memory of a nation warmly nostalgic for old stores but not willing to shop in them”. The pioneering retailer had become increasingly irrelevant to American consumers … the advantage of convenience it once possessed (where shoppers could get “lipstick, diapers and a milk shake at a discount, all under the one roof”) was now all-too-easily available at the abundance of handy drugstores, supermarkets and discount stores popping up everywhere[13].
PostScript: South Africa and Australia – Higher and HigherWhilst the Woolworths brand name no longer decorates the urban commercial landscape in the US and Britain, the Woolworths name in the Southern Hemisphere is a different story. Over the last 20 years both Woolworths Holdings Limited (RSA) and Woolworths Limited (Australia) have experienced impressive growth through expansion and diversification.
Woolworths Holdings Ltd (WHL) achieved a net income of R3.12 billion in 2015 as a provider of clothing, footwear, accessories, groceries, beauty products, home wares and financial services. WHL has pursued an aggressive campaign of expansion, taking over companies in South Africa (Mimco, Trenery) and Australia (David Jones stores, Country Road, Witchery).
Woolworths Casula (NSW)
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Woolworths Limited (WL) made a net surplus of A$1.2 billion in 2016 with its variety stores (Big W), supermarkets (Countdown, Food For Less, Safeway, Flemings, etc), grocers (Thomas Dux). Part of the company’s impressive growth has come from diversification – into petrol stations (Caltex-Woolworths) and into liquor stores (taking over BWS and Dan Murphy’s), hotels and gambling (Australian Leisure and Hospitality Group)[14]. The Aussie Woolworths brand currently maintains a presence in Australia, New Zealand and India▤. Business success aside, it has not been all smooth sailing for the RSA and Australian companies … both WHL and WL have been embroiled in controversies in their home countries from time to time. In 2010 WHL removed Christian magazines from its shelves (a financial decision by Woolworths), provoking a huge outcry from the powerful Christian community in South Africa with WHL having to back down[15]. WL’s move into alcohol has been extremely profitable (together with Coles it is estimated to account for ¾ of Australian liquor sales). Allied to this is Woolworths’ impact on poker machine gambling … through its ALH arm it has in excess of 12,650 pokies in pubs. Anti-gambling campaigners have accused WL of targeting children to push up pub sales by offering loyalty reward cards to frequent gamblers (and placing “Kid’s Club” playgrounds close to the poker machine areas in its hotels)[16].
﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌❈ FWW’s mergers absorbed Knox & Co, Kirby & Co, Charlton & Co, C S Woolworth & Co and Moore & Co
回 the concept was an elaboration on F W Woolworth’s ‘Soda Fountain’ introduced in his Lancaster (US) store in 1907
¤ a similar bullying practice to that used by Woolworths Australia (and its rival Coles) this decade against local manufacturers
❀ one exception being the old Woolies favourite, the pick ‘n’ mix confectionary lines
▤ in 1989 Industrial Equity Ltd (IEL), part of the AdSteam Group (Adelaide Steamship Company), successfully took over Woolworths Australia … however the Woolworths company was subsequently publicly floated several years later
[2] after WWII the South African firm actually had a business relationship with Marks and Spencer for a number of years, ‘Woolworths (South Africa)’, Wikipedia, http://em.n.wikipedia.org
[3] One incident in particular resounded with him, being unable to afford an item in a Watertown store as a child, ‘Biography of F.W. Woolworth’, (Woolworths Museum),www.woolworthsmuseum.co.uk
[4] J Robinson, ‘Woolworths: the rise and fall of the departmental store giant’, The Guardian (London), 20-Nov-2008, www.theguardian.com
[5] ‘Christmas Past and Christmas Presents’, (Woolworths Museum),www.woolworthsmuseum.co.uk
[6] ‘The British Lunch Counter 1938-41’, (Woolworths Museum),www.woolworthsmuseum.co.uk
[7] ibid.
[8],’A potted history of F.W. Woolworth’, (Woolworths Museum),www.woolworthsmuseum.co.uk
[9] ibid.;’Preparing for decimalisation “D-Day” on 15 February 1971′, in ibid.
[10] ibid.; Robinson, op.cit.
[11] J N Ingham, Biographical Dictionary of American Business Leaders, Vol. 4
[12] F W Woolworth also tended to cling to outmoded lines, eg, in its toy department old-fashioned puzzles and no action figures, J Steinhauer, ‘Woolworth’s Give Up the Five-and-Dime, New York Times, 18-Jul-1997, www.nyt.com
[13] Woolworth Co’s competitors ultimately offered more choice of products, quicker checkouts and often lower prices,ibid
[14] Woolworths’ move into hardware stores via Masters Home Improvement was far less successful with the retail giant getting badly singed, E Stewart, ‘Masters: Five reasons Woolworths is pulling the plug on struggling hardware chain’, 18-Jan-2017, ABC News, www.mobile.abc.net.au
[15] ‘Woolworths (South Africa)’, op.cit.
[16] L Mulligan, ‘Woolworths under fire from anti-poker machine groups for introducing gambling rewards card in pubs’, ABC News, 17-Sep-2015, www.abc.net.au
By the mid 1930s the allure of “scientific racism” was on the wane in advanced western countries❈. Although scientists were in the thick of the movement both as eugenicists and as propagandists, significant numbers of scientists and politicians never bought the shonky scientific approach of the eugenics movement☫. Many in the science community never accepted the methodology for the eugenicists’ grand schemes[1]. Information on heredity was far from comprehensive in that era, the science was misguided and there was a vastly imperfect understanding of genetics, at best rudimentary, at the time. Eugenic hygiene organisations were unable to produce reliable statistics. As John Averell pointed out, “proof’ of research” in the field comprised “primarily statistical correlation within conveniently constructed ‘races’ rather than individual case studies to see if the desirable characteristics were actually inherited”[2].
The scientific genesis of the 20th century eugenics movement was located in the rediscovered research of 19th century Austrian monk Gregor Mendel. Mendel experimented in plant hybridisation and his laws of inheritance based on the crossing of garden peas✥ were the foundation for the theories of eugenicists like American Charles Davenport. Davenport et al applied the Mendelian method to human traits such as eye colour which he argued was inherited (as the colour of Mendel’s pea plants were). The eugenicists employed an overly simplified dominant/recessive scheme to account for complex behaviours and mental illnesses, this was a fundamental flaw in their thinking (derived from ‘pedigrees’ based on Mendelian inheritance), a single-gene explanation of human characteristics and conditions. Contemporary science unequivocally accepts that these traits are in fact shaped by (many, many) multiple genes, ie, the existence of polygenic traits[3].
Although eugenics was portrayed by its adherents in the early 20th century as a “mathematical science”, a clinical method of predicting traits and behaviours and controlling human breeding, its drew criticism from scientific quarters on a number of levels. The ‘evidence’ was typically shoddy, such as the research into determining just who was to be classified as being ‘feeble’ and ‘unfit’ in society. The eugenicists relied often on subjectivity, second-hand accounts and hearsay to establish the lineages of the ‘undesirable’ gene pool (see PostScript 1), or on visible observable (physical) features (the resort to phrenology and the like). The theories of eugenics did not seem adequate to explain some traits, such as shyness – rather than being an immutable genetic condition, this could be subject to change over time (ie, some people grow out of shyness!). In addition eugenicists took no account of factors external to a person’s gene makeup in the categorisation of the ‘unfit’, such as his or her contracting a transmissible disease such as syphilis[4].
The scrutiny on eugenics, its growing characterisation as a pseudoscience unable to stand up to academic scientific rigour, prompted some proselytisers of eugenics to claim that eugenics was more than merely science, that it was tantamount to a new religion or moral code[5]. One of the eugenics practitioners who typified this was Alexis Carrel, an American-based French surgeon and Nobel Laurette biologist. Carrel’s eugenics was a strange mix of science, religion, clairvoyance and ultra right-wing politics … his extreme ideas were infused with an anti-materialist, holistic spiritual mysticism. In his 1935 international best-seller, Man, the Unknown, Carrel warned against the degenerative effect of modernity and outlined his notion of an autocratic utopia in which the dysgenic elements were eradicated from society[6].
The eugenics scene in Australasia mirrored Europe and America in questioning the correctness of the ‘science’. The scientific community although entrenched in the vanguard of the eugenic movement threw up its share of dissenters from within its ranks. One such was geographer Griffith Taylor who championed “racial hybridity” and cast serious doubts on the goal of race purity and its assumptions that underpinned eugenics. Moreover there was a lack of cohesion and camaraderie among the individual eugenicists who are often rivals of each other … this of itself did not make for a strong, lasting movement in Australia[7].
J B Watson, Behaviourist (image: Practical Psychology)
The Behaviourist counterpoint:
The rise of behaviourism in the West as a valid analytical tool for explaining human nature was a counterweight to the biological determinism of eugenics whose advocates preached that biology was destiny. The behaviourist backlash against the persuasive eugenics ideology was led by pioneering American psychologist John B Watson▣ around the time of the Great War. Watson, rejecting Freudian concepts of the unconscious mind, or that mental states or ‘instincts’ were significant, arguing instead that observable behaviour was the key to explaining human traits and complex mental states. In doing so, Watson was also refuting the view that heredity played a role in this construct. For Watson, and for B F Skinner who later took up his mantle as a radical behaviourist, the environment, modelled behaviour, was the source of human change. The work of Watson and Skinner and other behaviourists undercut the eugenics movement’s singular reliance on nature by shifting the debate to the significance of nurture in the process[8].
PostScript 1: ‘Feeble’ family studies template
The belief of eugenicists that all social ills – poverty, alcoholism, prostitution, criminality, venereal disease, epilepsy – could be traced back to one genetic flaw, and that intelligence was determined by heredity, was shaped by seminal pioneering studies in the field. One of the most influential was by psychologist Henry Goddard (1912) who analysed the genetic pattern of one man’s lineage (known as “Martin Kallikak” – fabricated name derived from the conjunction of ‘kallos’ beauty and ‘kakos’ bad). ‘Kallikak’ produced two widely divergent types of families (one ‘good’, one ‘bad’), which despite being nurtured in two radically different environments, the patterns of which Goddard concluded was solely the result of heredity[9].
PostScript 2: Polygenism debunked
The polygenists accepted that the species had more than one origin (cf. monogenism – deriving from one, common ancestor). Morton (see FN 2 below) believed that races were arranged in order of intelligence … the fairer the skin the more intelligent. DNA evidence, tracing human markers, has disproved the theory by proving that all Eurasians, Americans, Austronesians, Oceanians and Africans, share the same, common ancestor[10].
▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬
❈ Scientific racism uses ostensibly scientific or pseudoscientific techniques and hypotheses to support or justify racial inferiority or superiority, Scientific racism’, Wikipedia, www.en.m.wikipedia.org
☫ Scientific racism was denounced by UNESCO in a 1950 statement on race
✥ for what Mendel described as ‘factors’ (the “heredity unit”), the early eugenicists substituted the word ‘genes’
▣ Watson’s life reads like some kind of early 20th century Mad Men persona (influential ad man, marital infidelities, monumental falls from grace, self-exile, etc)
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[1] for instance in the interwar period, Thomas Hunt Morgan, a Noble Prize winning evolutionary biologist, rejected the eugenicists’ inadequate methodology, ‘Eugenics in the United States’, Wikipedia, www.en.m.wikipedia.org
[2] this view prescribed a hierarchical order of races, an Anglo-Saxon ‘race’, a Nordic ‘race’, and so on down the line. Polygenists in the 19th century like Samuel G Morton contended that different races were in fact different species, each with separate origins, ‘Science: 1770s-1850s: One Race or Several Species’, RACE, www.understandingrace.org; J Averell, ‘The End of Eugenics … or is it?’, Melrose Mirror, www.melrosemirror.media.mit.edu
[3] ‘Mendelian genetics cannot fully explain human health and behaviour’, DNA from the beginning, www.dnaftb.org; ‘Rocky Road: Charles Davenport’, www.strangescience.net
[4] Eugenics and scientific racism had been described as “folk knowledge validated by scientific inference”, S A Farber, ‘U.S. Scientists’ Role in the Eugenics Movement
(1907-39): A Contemporary Biologist’s Perspective’, Zebrafish, 2008: December; 5(4), www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
[5] A H Reggiani, ‘Drilling Eugenics into People’s Minds’, in S Currell [Ed.],
Popular Eugenics, National Efficiency and American Mass Culture in the 1930s
[6] ibid
[7] D H Wyndham, ‘Striving for National Fitness: Eugenics in Australia 1910s to 1930s’ (Unpub. PhD, Dept of History, University of Sydney, July 1996), www.kooriweb.org
[8] ‘Eugenics movement reaches its height 1923’, A Science Odyssey (PBS), www.pbs.org; ‘John B. Watson’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org
Decline of eugenics in AustralasiaUnlike the US the eugenics movements in Australasia failed to even make legislative inroads, let alone implement their theories with any measure of success. Mandatory sterilisation did have genuine community support – from eugenicists, the medical profession, the health bureaucracy, racial hygiene and feminist organisations – but its extreme agenda did not secure the acquiescence of the general public behind it. Moreover, Claudia Thame concluded in her 1974 paper that only a “small minority of zealots” in Australia (some members of the BMA – British Medical Association) held an extreme position on sterilisation[1]. Most practitioners of eugenics in the country tended towards the segregation approach.
Eugenics ideas continued to have some credence after World War II – although not legislated by state authorities, sterilisations continued to be performed on the disabled, especially those with an intellectual disability. Commonly in rural Australia this was done without proper consent (or only with the consent of a third party). Girls from impoverished backgrounds unfortunate enough to be chosen for sterilisation often were told they were having appendectomies. In an era of deinstitutionalisation the eugenic motive for sterilisation tended to be overridden by that of contraception. It was an easier alternative for medical authorities to resort to hysterectomies and tubal ligations than to spend money on educating disadvantaged parents on how to handle their children’s sexuality[2]. There remains a continuity with present practices❃.
ef=”http://www.7dayadventurer.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/image-7.jpg”> 1928 Mental Defectives Bill: New Zealand[/cap
In New Zealand the 1928 Mental Defectives Amendment Bill was the eugenicists’ best legislative hope for Aeotearoa. It provided for the establishment of a national eugenics board and its sterilisation clauses came close to being law but failed to pass due to a combination of government doubts about the public support for sterilisation and the concerted political opposition to it from Peter Fraser and the Labour Party and intellectuals like university professors Thomas Hunter and Arthur Fitt[3]. Subsequently, the Act’s provision for the registration of mental ‘defectives’ was pursued by the state “without enthusiasm or notable result”[4].
As with Australia and other western countries the lack of legislative support for sterilisation did not prevent its continued ad hoc practice in NZ. Data on involuntary sterilisations of the disabled in postwar New Zealand is sketchy but the numbers of women involved are thought to be significant … like elsewhere, the eugenic motives of the prewar period have a diminished importance, in their place the demand for sterilisation is driven by the priority of managing the sexuality and reproductive capacity of disabled girls and women (also as “an adjunct to the management of bodily hygiene”)[5].
Many churches went along with the eugenics orthodoxy and some Protestant clergymen actually advocated eugenics✥. The Catholic Church however, with its large Irish-Catholic working class following in Australia as well as New Zealand, staunchly opposed eugenics on theological (moral) grounds (the Vatican condemned artificial methods of birth control which interfered with “natural reproduction”)✦. Another formidable institution with class-based objections to the goals of eugenics was the trade union movement. Although not operating as a unified opposition against the spread of eugenics, there were significant sections of organised labour who were concerned that laws affecting mental defectives would heavily target working class children and withheld their support for it[6]. There was considerable skepticism within the Australian and New Zealand working classes about eugenics, many on the left saw it as espousing “elitist definitions of unfitness”[7].
IQ tests continued to be fashionable in the 1950s & beyond: giving ‘scientific’ credence to the stigmatising of those in society labelled as “less intelligent” (Source: The Creativity Post)
By the 1950s in Australasia eugenics had become unfashionable and had fallen out of favour with the public at large … biologists and other scientists, distancing themselves from the discredited eugenics tag, were shifting their focus and energies to working in the dynamic and burgeoning field of human genetics.
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❃ incapacity for parenthood is still used as a valid justification by the Australian judiciary to authorise sterilisations – eg, the ‘burden’ of parents having to deal with the menstrual management of their disabled daughters, even in some cases where the girl was pre-menstrual!, ‘Fact Sheet: Forced Sterilisation – People With Disabilities Australia’, (C Frohmader, Women With Disabilities Australia, submission, 53rd Session of the Committee Against Torture, Geneva, Nov 2014)
✥ non-Catholic church support for eugenic aims in Australia and New Zealand was not as powerfully concentrated as it was in the United States
✦ practicing Catholics as a block tended to oppose eugenics, including writers of the faith such as G K Chesterton, Graham Greene and James Joyce
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[1] C Thame, ‘Health and the State: the Development of Collective Responsibility for Health Care in Australia in the first half of the Twentieth Century’, (PhD dissertation, ANU, 1974)
[2] J Goldhar, ‘The Sterilisation of Women with an intellectual disability’, ‘Law and Society Conference’ (Brisbane, December 1990), www.austlit.edu.au
[3] T Taylor, ‘Thomas Hunter and the Campaign Against Eugenics, NZJH, 39(2) 2005
[4] M Finnane, ‘From dangerous lunatic to human rights?: the law and mental illness in Australian history’ in C Coleborne [Ed.], Madness in Australia: Histories, Heritage and the Asylum
[5] C Hamilton, ‘Sterilisation and intellectual disabled people in New Zealand – still on the agenda’, Kōtuitui: the New Zealand Journal Social Sciences Online, 7(2), Nov 2012
[6] S Garton, ‘Eugenics in Australia and New Zealand: Laboratories of Racial Science’, in A Bashford & P Levine [Eds.], The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics
[7] ibid.
As egregiously bad as the atrocities committed by the German National Socialists under the guise of “eugenics science” were, it would surprise some to learn that it did not put a death knoll on the practice and advocacy of eugenics in western countries. After the war governments and some eugenicists tended to be a bit more circumspect in talking about the subject but in countries like Great Britain and the United States, rather than disappearing, eugenic ideas and (especially in the US) programs continued to flourish.
The British Welfare State and National “Social Efficiency”
Comparatively, Britain never remotely matched that the eugenics legislative zeal of the US, after WWII however UK policy-makers’ enthusiasm for and belief in eugenics remained high. In 1946 influential English macroeconomics guru John Maynard Keynes was still proclaiming that eugenics was “the most important and significant branch of sociology”[1].
The British Eugenics Society (BES) adopted a manoeuvrable position in the wake of the widespread discrediting of eugenics after the war. BES directed its efforts towards the “rebrand(ing) of race … by arguing that it remained a valuable concept for study” and dismissing the Nazi experience as an aberration which distorted and abused the concept of eugenics. The restrained, liberal stance taken by BES in the United Kingdom ensured the continued support for the Society of progressive and respected scientists like Julian Huxley and J B S Haldane[2].
Clare Hanson characterises eugenics as less a science than a social and cultural movement, drawing its power from its “dissemination across a range of discursive fields”[3]. Hanson notes that eugenics played a key role in post-war British reconstruction, its ideas sustained and incorporated into the development of the country after 1945. The national efficacy goals of eugenics were visible in the Attlee Labour government’s endorsement of the ‘meritocratic’ ideal. Postwar education reform in the UK illustrates this: the division of secondary education into three strands – grammar, technical and modern – was a philosophical approach geared to the needs of social efficiency, not social justice. A further connexion with pre-WWII’s eugenics was the seminal roles in public policy in the postwar reconstruction and foundation of the welfare state played by eugenics advocates William Beveridge and Richard Titmuss[4].
America: controlling the reproduction of minorities
Across the Atlantic in the US there seems to have been broad support for sterilisation prior to WWII. This was inferred by two polls taken in 1937 … one by Fortune magazine found that 66% supported the existing sterilisation laws, the second, a Gallup poll found 84% in favour of sterilising the chronically mentally ill[5]. Eugenics programs continued to have a vitality after the war. Moreover in a number of states of the US there was a continuance (albeit a reduction in numbers) of forced sterilisations (over 64,000 American people were sterilised under eugenics legislation between 1907 and 1963[6]. The word ‘eugenics’ was removed or downplayed but eugenics ideas still circulated in public discourse (as in Britain) – in the 1950s it manifested in the emphasis placed on family values and child rearing (ie, concerns about the quality of the population). US eugenicists who had flourished in the 1930s reinvented themselves postwar as “genetic scientists” and “marriage counsellors”, some using the term “genetic counselling” to explain what they did[7].
Dr Gamble
One of the leading American eugenics propagandists was Dr Clarence Gamble (heir to the Procter and Gamble “Ivory Soap’ fortune). Gamble funded ‘Birthright’, a birth control organisation, and embarked on a sterilisation drive through the South and Midwest in the 1940s, having most success in North Carolina where he established a ‘showcase’ sterilisation program. Gamble had an intense personal involvement (and financial investment) in the compulsory sterilisation cause, spearheading a saturation campaign of national television ads. Significantly, eugenics activities in postwar America, in a shift from prewar, targeted minorities for remedial action (ie, sterilisations). Enforced sterilisation programs in California were directed primarily at Asians and Mexicans whilst the southern states’ preoccupation was with controlling the African-American population[8].
The end of eugenics? … or a new, ‘better’ form of eugenics by a different name?
As indicated above, revelations of the horrors of Nazi eugenics during the Third Reich and the news of the worse excesses of sterilisation in the US and elsewhere did not put an end to belief in the supposed efficacy of eugenics or to the practice itself. The term was in the main quietly sidelined but the thing itself is like Ulysses’ “bag of winds” or Pandora’s Box – once opened, it is virtually impossible to stop. The desirability of breeding better humans has continued to exercise the minds of the scientifically curious. Eugenics may have passed out of the lexicon (in any positive sense at least)❈ but interest in genetic arguments and ideas remain✥. Many in the scientific community agree with evolutionary theorist R A Fisher that “technically advanced civilisation is unsustainable without eugenics” (The genetical theory of natural selection. A complete variorum edition, 1930)[9].
Public opinion in Britain and America after the war, influenced by a growing recognition of civil and human rights of citizens, became increasingly disaffected with the illiberal idea of coerced sterilisation. Consequently the practice largely came to a halt in the US around the early to mid 1960s[10]. However isolated calls for ad hoc voluntary sterilisation continue to be voiced—often under the guise of “social protection”—regarding people labelled as “low IQ”, “mentally defective” or with large welfare-dependent families[11].
PostScript: A comparative look at the exceptionalism of Scandinavian eugenics
The pattern of legislation on eugenics in the Nordic countries was quite different to the experience of politicians in other western countries. At the height of the eugenics phenomena in the twenties and thirties, sterilisation and marriage bills had an easy passage into law in Scandinavia, with surprisingly little opposition. In the case of Sweden especially, the 1934 Act was not repealed until 1975, by which time there had been upward of 63,000 sterilisations performed on citizens deemed ‘unfit’ by the state to procreate (the great majority on women)回. Scandinavian historians have tended to attribute this to a combination of factors many of which were peculiar to the pheripheral region of North-eastern Europe. These include the rapid industrialisation and modernisation of towns from the late 19th century … the emerging secular and scientific nature of life in Scandinavia contributed to this easy acceptance. Other factors in the explanation for why there was general consensus with the eugenic objectives was the commonality of the Lutheran faith and culture and the relatively egalitarian character of the Scandinavian social structure[12].
Sweden’s eugenic practices stretched from the mid 1930s to the 1970s, with the targeted groups of people coming from the poor, of mixed racial quality or of non-Nordic stock. Often the victims were labelled as educationally ‘inferior’, their sin being that they had learning difficulties such as poor eyesight preventing them from reading the class blackboard[13].
Nils Roll-Hansen has pointed out that Scandinavian society was quick to reject the excesses and unscientific attitudes of eugenics (eg, in Nazi Germany), whilst not rejecting the basic ideas and beliefs of eugenics. The political structure inherent in the Nordic countries was considered conducive to the success achieved by proponents of eugenics. The dominant labour parties (especially the Swedish Social Democratic Party) elicited effectively co-operation from the labour organisations in implementing social policy (as part of the country’s “social contract”). Roll-Hansen has contended that the region’s liberal-democratic tradition with its stress on the rights of the individual ensured that the eugenic practices that were put in place were moderate only[14]. The unearthing of Roll-Hansen and Broberg’s ‘bombshell’ had a big effect on Scandinavians, especially the Swedes … in 1999 Sweden agreed to compensate victims of forced sterilisations, offering each individual affected up to 175,000 kronors[15].
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❈ to be replaced with terms like “human genetic science” or “human genetic engineering”
✥ eradicating disease, lengthening the human lifespan, the human genome project, genetic enhancement, environmental and food applications, etc.
回 Sweden was the only one of the Nordic states with a national eugenics society
[1] V Brignall, ‘The eugenics movement Britain wants to forget’, New Statesman, 9-Dec-2010,www.newstatesman.com
[2] G Schaffer, Racial Science and British Society, 1930-1962. With the name ‘eugenics’ becoming a taboo word post-WWII the BES eventually changed its name to the Galton Institute … likewise in the US, the American Eugenics Society finally changed its name in 1973, becoming the more neutral-sounding Society for the Study of Social Biology
[3] C Hanson, Eugenics, Literature and Culture in Post-war Britain; S Garton, ‘Eugenics in Australia and New Zealand: laboratories of racial science’, in A Bashford & P Levine [Eds.], The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics. Eugenics has also been described as a straight out political movement, a form of ruling class consolidation, M Quigley, ‘The Roots of the I.Q. Debate. Eugenics and Social Control’, PRA (Professional Research Associates), www.publiceye.org
[4] ibid.
[5] Also, the New York Times in 1933 opined that the US policy on sterilisations was “harmless and very humane”, P Levine, Eugenics: a Very Short Introduction
[6] states leading the way were California, Virginia and North Carolina, ‘Eugenics in the United States’, op.cit.
[7] L Ko, ‘Unwanted Sterilizations and Eugenics programs in the United States’, PBS, 29-Jan-2016 www.pbs.org; P Lombardo, ‘Eugenic Sterilization Laws’, in the Eugenics Archive, www.eugenicsarchive.org; Encyclopedia of American Social Movements, Ed. by I Ness (D Hoff, ‘Survival of Euugenics’). Genetic counselling had the same euphemistic usage in Britain after the war with the first genetic counselling clinic in the UK opening in 1946
[8] K Begos, ‘The American eugenics movement after World War II’ (3 parts), Indy Week, www.indyweek.com. Paul Ehrlich’s highly influential Population Bomb (1968) in advocating world population control derives its premise from eugenics thought and rhetoric
[9] F K Salter, ‘Eugenics Ready or Not’, Quadrant, 11-May-2015, www.quadrant.org.au
[10] although it has been revealed that as recently as the mid 1970s over 3,000 native American women were involuntarily sterilised by the IHO (the US Indian Health Service), G W Rutecki,’Forced Sterilization of Native Americans: Late Twentieth Century Physician Cooperation with National Eugenic Policies’, Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity, 8-Oct-2010,www.cbhd.org
[11] ‘Compulsory Sterilization’, Wikipedia, www.em.n.wiki.org
[12] N Rolls-Hansen, ‘Conclusion: Scandinavian Eugenics in the International Context’, in G Broberg & N Rolls-Hansen [Eds], Eugenics and the Welfare State: Sterilization Policies in Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Finland
[13] ‘Sweden admits to racial purification’, The Independent,, 25-Aug-1997, www.independent.co.uk
[14] Rolls-Hansen, op.cit.
[15] ‘Sweden to reflect on eugenics past’, The Local (Sweden), 21-Dec-2005, www.thelocal.se
Australia’s “impure origins” as a convict colony in 1788 cast a shadow over the country’s European inhabitants which stayed with them long after transportation to the colonies was halted (with the exception of South Australia whose citizens have take a perhaps inflated self-satisfaction from its status as the sole free colony from its foundation)[1]. The deep imprint of the “convict stain” was a difficult burden to throw off but as Australia became more involved in world events especially external wars, this dubious tag started to recede and a new, more estimable self-identity started to take shape in the consciousness of Australians. A catalyst for this gradual change of self-perception was the roll-call of British Empire wars in which valiant Australians distinguished themselves on the field of battle – South African War, WWI (Gallipoli, the Western Front, Palestine). The feats of Australian soldiers in war worked as an antidote to the lingering convict inferiority complex[2].
Geo. Wood, “Convict Stain” debunker
The ‘stain’ of colonial Australia continued into the Federation era but in 1922 the intervention of a Sydney University history professor into this debate presented a new (positive) perspective for Australians to build on. George Arnold Wood in his highly influential book, The Discovery of Australia, reassessed the early colonial era, repudiating the “convict stain” and argued that Australia’s convict legacy should elicit admiration rather than being the enduring object of shame for Australians. Wood tapped into a powerful Antipodean undercurrent of the time, by exulting the convict heritage and raising up the current generation of their descendants, he was emphasising a (superior) point of difference with the character of Britons back in the mother country. Wood contended that Australians were free of the environmental drawbacks that was sapping the vitality of the working class Briton (industrial grime, overcrowded tenements in cities, etc). From the late 19th century some observers had started to view the Australian and New Zealand “White Dominions” as being the region of “the coming man” vis-à-vis the mother country[3].
New Zealand, unlike Australia, did not have the stigma of a convict society to overcome, but New Zealanders had been cultivating their own distinctive image of the country which set it apart from Britain. New Zealanders nourished a national myth that NZ was peopled by highly selected stock, “Better Britons” or “Britain of the South”❈ as New Zealanders described themselves and the country that they inhabited (the claim to possess exclusive racial stock was referenced in NZ medical journals of the time)[4].
The “coming man” hypothesis bought into a number of prevailing Antipodean myths of the period. The 1850s phenomenon of the gold-rushes in Eastern Australia led some to conclude that only the best men from Britain migrated to Australian goldfields, having what it took to make the journey and prosper … the thinking was that Australia had attracted the “pick of Britain’s stock” and therefore it was somehow better than Britain[5]. Immigration patterns have contributed to the modified sense of Australian identity. With migrants being drawn predominately from the British Isles and Ireland until the 1950s, James Jupp has argued that a belief has persisted that Australians (especially native-born ones) were both of British racial and cultural descent and “superior to the British”. The ‘ordinary’ English working and lower-middle classes were often seen as “dirty, servile, unhealthy, inferior” and held in low regard by Australians[6].
Conditions in Australia were often cited as a building block for the construction of a ‘superior’ cut of British man. Australia benefitted, it was said, from a climate infinitely better than Britain, a lavish land … making for a vigorous and healthy ‘race'[7]. W K Hancock (Australia, 1930) described the Australian ‘type’ of man as a harmonious blending of all the British types, nourished by a “generous sufficiency of food (good diet) … breathing space (vast countryside) and sunshine”, endorsing a view of environmental determinism[8]. A sense of ‘racial vigour’ was a recurring motif in contemporary references to the coming or ‘new’ man in Australasia✤.
South African Boer War – coming crisis in British Manhood?
Imperial Britain’s performance in the Boer War (especially early on) against a “rag-tag” army of Afrikaner farmers fed into the rising tide of Britain’s fears of the degeneration of its racial stock. Britain’s sudden reverses in the war required reinforcements from home, leading to a manpower dilemma – unhealthy British cities and slums, from where the foot soldiers were drawn, churned out recruits from the working class who were “narrow-chested, knock-kneed, wheezing, rickety specimens” of men[9]. The average British soldier in 1900 was shorter than that of 1845 and over three-fourths of those volunteering in Manchester recruitment halls were rejected as unfit for service[10]. This crisis gave further credence to the idea of Australia and New Zealand as embodying the coming man. Whilst British soldiery seemed to struggle and its martial supremacy stumbled (albeit temporarily), the Australasian contingents of soldiers conversely equipped themselves well. The Boer War reversals only accentuated anxieties about the racial deterioration of working class Britons[11]. A report conducted in 1904, with the title “Inter-Departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration”, confirmed that Britons were even more physically unfit than the war had suggested.
The “proof” of Gallipoli
The valour and skill exhibited by Australian and New Zealand soldiers in WWI vis-à-vis the perception of the British troops, reinforced the coming man stereotype[12]. Even English social Darwinists such as Randolf Bedford (London Times, 1915) described the ANZAC troops as a “race of athletes”. These ‘athletes’, it was claimed, were scientifically superior to their British cousins. Prominent in the myth-making was Great War correspondent C E W Bean who attributed Australian achievements on the battlefield to a sense of mateship and the democratic culture bred in the Australian bush[13]. Regeneration of the white stock was only achievable through the “new Anglos” to be found in Australasia amongst its soldiers and athletes, so this myth went.
Depletion of racial stock
The Great War, and specifically the Gallipoli campaign, was a “defining moment” for New Zealanders and Australians, a “global test that proved the manhood” of those “representatives of the ‘coming man'”[14]. The war was also a devastating loss of that same manhood … both countries lost a “chunk of their tallest and healthiest A1 stock” with New Zealand suffering casualties of 59% of its entire forces¤. In a talk in Australia NZ eugenicist-physician Truby King, lamenting the loss of manhood, implored white women to “repair the war wastage” by producing more babies from good stock and preventing infant deaths[15].
⍗ The 1905 champion All Blacks (“the Originals”)
(source: www.telegraph.co.uk)
This Antipodean sporting life … demonstrating superior prowess through sport
Manhood through the testing experience of war – imperial and global – helped shape Australians and New Zealanders’ sense of their own national identities, another definer of character was sport. The dominant performance of the 1905 All Blacks (New Zealand rugby team) in the UK, with its formidable physical power and skill proving too much for the best of the British Isles and Irish rugby … the Kiwis’ display of “muscular manhood” on tour made an unmistakeable impression at home. For many the All Blacks’ triumph was confirmation that NZ was “the best place to build strong bodies”. Prime Minister Richard (‘King Dick’) Seddon attributed the team’s dominance to the country’s “natural and healthy conditions of colonial life (which produced such) “stalwart and athletic sons” as the NZ players in the rugby touring team[16].
The following year, 1906, the South African tour of the British Isles saw the South African ‘Springboks’ triumph over the rugby home countries as well (two years after that the Australian ‘Wallabies’ toured Britain and Ireland, also winning the great bulk of games it played). As rugby was considered in Britain as “a sport of the elite” (played by gentlemen), defeat at the hands of these ‘colonial’ teams was a savage blow to British pride and another indicator for many of the home nation’s racial decline[17].
Not all contemporary observers accepted the distinctiveness and pre-eminence of the ‘new’ Australian and New Zealander as espoused by Wood and Bean et al. John Fraser, a visitor from Britain, observed in Australia: the Making of a Nation (1910), that the native-born Australian lacked vim and vigour, and would degenerate without “infusion of British blood”. Fraser concluded that Australians were “just transplanted British people”, albeit “modified by the influence of climate” and social environment[18].
The race card: immigration and border control
Backers of the eugenics movements and believers in the notion of the “coming man” in Australia and New Zealand tended to view new immigrants as suspect. In the reasoning of the authorities it was imperative that the numbers of the ‘unfit’, the “social undesirables” already in Australasia do not swell further. A watertight immigration control, determining who is ‘fit’ and appropriate to enter the country, would compliment the eugenic measures of sterilisation and segregation. Accordingly in 1899 New Zealand, and 1901 Australia, passed Immigration Restriction Acts. Australia’s legislation barred permanent entry for non-white people. The White Australian Policy reflected Australian fears of invasion from the north … Australia’s sense of isolation and vulnerability at the proximity of what racists depicted as “teeming hordes of Asiatics” (concerns intensified by Japan’s population spurt coinciding with a trend towards low rates of birth for Australia)[19].
In a work breaking new ground Alison Bashford in Imperial Hygiene has focused attention on the function of quarantine in Australia’s racially motivated immigration policies that came into force after Federation. Positioning quarantine as an integral part of the White Australia Policy, Bashford argues that the quarantine line on Australia’s border was also a “racialised immigration restriction line”, and together with the immigration restriction measures, part of an “international hygiene”. In an effort to block so-called “racially impure” and “unfit” immigrants from entering the country, Australia wrote mental health and hygiene criteria into its immigration laws and regulations (as did other western nations including Britain, the US and Canada)[20].
PostScript: D H Lawrence and Australia
DH (Bert) Lawrence in his novel Kangaroo, written entirely with the exception of the final chapter while the peripatetic English novelist was in Australia (1922), fleetingly entertained the possibility of Australia becoming a new and uncorrupted Britain. One of Lawrence’s enduring preoccupations, informed by his readings of Herbert Spencer and other early eugenics proponents, was the degeneration of western industrial society. In other works also Lawrence subscribed to the notion of the coming man, eg, in Aaron’s Rod (written before his visit to Australia) Lawrence described an Australian character as a “new and vital version of an English man”[21].
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❈ with such fidelity did New Zealand uphold the notion of being (better) Britons, that it wasn’t until 1948 that New Zealanders ceased to be British citizens and became “New Zealand citizens”
✤ the idea of the common or new man in society and its association with eugenics was not confined to Australasia, the Southern Hemisphere or even to the Anglo-Saxon world, for an account of the Italian eugenics movement see F Cassata, Building the New Man: Eugenics, Racial Science and Genetics in Twentieth-Century Italy
¤ this was an imperial anxiety for the British and the Dominions, the loss of the best or fittest elements killed on the battlefield, a diminution of the “pool of fit white stock”, J M Hobson, The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics: Western International Theory, 1760-2010
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[1] J Hirst, ‘An Oddity from the Start: Convicts and National Character’, The Monthly, July 2008, www.themonthly.com.au
[2] D Walker, ‘National Identity’, in J Jupp [Ed.], The Australian People: An Encyclopaedia of the Nation, Its People and their Origins
[3] S Garton, ‘Eugenics in Australia and New Zealand: Laboratories of Racial Science’ in A Bashford & P Levine [Eds.], The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics
[4] A C Wanhalla, ‘Gender, Race and Colonial Identity: Women and Eugenics in New Zealand, 1918-1939’, Unpub. thesis, MA in History, 2001 (University of Canterbury, NZ)
[5] J Jupp, quoted in A Jamrozik, Chains of Colonial Inheritance: Searching for an Identity in an Subservient Nation
[6] ibid.
[7] Walker, op.cit.
[8] Walker, op.cit.
[9] C Hitchens, ‘Young Men in Shorts’, (The Atlantic Monthly, June 2004), www.theatlantic.com
[10] P Thorsheim, Inventing Pollution: Coal, Smoke and Culture in Britain since 1800,
[11] S Dubow, ‘Placing Race in South African History’, in W Lamont [Ed], Historical Controversies and Historians
[12] the Great War in Bean’s vision was the fulfilment and defining feature of Australia’s manhood – shaper of the nation’s character, S Garton, ‘War and Masculinity in Twentieth Century Australia’, JAS, 22:56 (1998)
[13] Garton, ibid
[14] P Mein Smith, A Concise History of New Zealand (2nd ed. 2011)
[15] ibid.
[16] the British press noted that the All Blacks rugby players (the ‘Originals’) possessed superior fitness (and utilised professional training techniques), T Weir, ‘Professionals, Cheats and Superior “Muscular Madhood”: British Domestic Responses to the 1905 New Zealand “All Blacks” Rugby’, (University of York, 2011), www.academic.edu; P M Smith, A Concise History of New Zealand
[17] ‘The Boer War: British Fears of Physical Deterioration and the Build up to World War I’, www.boerwar.weebly.com
[18] Fraser noted as further evidence of decay the country’s birth-rate decline from 1901, Walker, op.cit (Fn: Although according to Statistique Internationale the downward trend in Australia, NZ and GB began in the 1870s)
[19] Garton, ‘Eugenics in Aust & NZ’, op.cit.. As David Walker has noted, from the 1880s on there emerged a “powerful, masculinising and racialising impulse in Australian nationalism” which coincided with the advent of a “geo-political threat (from an) awakening Asia”, D R Walker, Anxious Nation: Australia and the Rise of Asia, 1850-1939 (1999)
[20] A Bashford, Imperial Hygiene: A Critical History of Colonialism, Nationalism and Public Health
[21] D Game, D.H. Lawrence’s Australia: Anxiety at the Edge of Empire (2015)
The period in the first part of the 20th century when advocates of eugenics solutions ran rampant, “playing God” with the lives of society’s powerless unfortunates, was an abomination on many levels. Deeply flawed by racial and class biases, self-righteous eugenicists categorised a typology of ‘lesser’ humans. They then arbitrarily assigned certain of their country’s citizens to this ‘underclass’ of ‘unworthies’, trampling all over their human rights and liberties in the name of an allegedly ‘scientifically’ determined inferiority. The inequity of individuals being singled out for ‘special’ treatment based on perceived racial stereotypes, mental or physical capacity or because of ‘inherited'(sic) criminality, and the denial of their basic human rights, cannot be overstated, nor can the devastating consequences for its victims (segregation, removal from birth family, sterilisation, even liquidation in extreme cases).
The harm and wrong-headedness of eugenics ideology with its ‘scattergun’ approach lies fully exposed to scrutiny today, and is viewed with the opprobrium it deserves. The eugenicists in all countries practicing eugenics were offering nothing less than a recipe for racial cleansing. Notwithstanding the ‘bad'(sic) eugenic applications of that era, it is important to note that the phenomenon paradoxically did lead to changes in Australian and New Zealand health practices that were significant, progressive and far-reaching to society. As cogently argued by Diana Wyndham, putting aside eugenics’ alarming consequences for a moment, the movement in Australia also involved a genuine attempt to “increase national efficiency and vitality through enlightened state intervention programs” in areas such as “sanitation (eg, cleaning up or eradicating slums) town planning and quarantine” … and of course in health[1]. The Queenslander in 1914 praised its state health authorities for pursuing what it called “practical eugenics”, vital pre-natal and after-birth care for the infant, a pre-condition for a “strong and healthy race”[2].
Eugenics as preventative care
Those who enthusiastically took up the banner of eugenics in the early 20th century were in the main well-meaning if ill-conceived in their reasoning. The scientist-eugenicists genuinely saw themselves as engaging in science for the benefit of “social efficiency”, and what they were doing, targeting the “unfit and feeble-minded”, was in accordance with Benthamite principles of the greater good of society. They believed that breeding a higher calibre of person was ‘proof’ of rational, social progress and civilisation … eugenics was just such a simplistically enticing blueprint for society’s ills and problems, eliciting the support of social reformers as well as leading international intellectuals including J Maynard Keynes, Bertrand Russell☼, T S Eliot, W B Yeats, Virginia Woolf, D H Lawrence and the Fabian socialists H G Wells, G B Shaw and the Webbs, as well as businessmen and politicians, eg, Alexander Graham Bell, the Rockefellers, Teddy Roosevelt (see PostScript) and Winston Churchill[3].
Dr Cumpston: advocated making Australia “a paradise of physical perfection”
The Australian and New Zealand medical practitioners who sought to introduce eugenic programs (such as Dr. John Cumpston, first director-general of the Australian Commonwealth Department of Health) believed that by stopping the ‘unfit’ from breeding they were in fact practicing preventative medicine (or that’s at least how they rationalised it)[4]. Eugenics in Australasia was the domain of scientific experimenters and social reformers as well as the governors[5], and touched areas which included child welfare, birth control, sex education, moral purity, temperance advocacy and urban planning.
1930s Australian poster warning against VD
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National fitness and advances in health care
Emphasising one of the eugenics movement’s objectives as national fitness, Wyndham identifies a number of positive spin-offs of in Australia – it put the focus on maternal care and on the care of the child❈; it played a part in the fight against both VD and TB; in the provision of sex education and birth control; it stimulated the study of genetics (before 1938 not part of the university training of Australian doctors). Eugenics influenced the advancement of Australian health services, especially in family planning and public health (introduction of baby health centres, child endowment schemes, a national health bureaucracy, etc.)[6]. New Zealand eugenicist and health reformer Dr Truby King established the Plunket Society (pioneering early childhood health and development service) as well as introducing innovative child-rearing techniques.
Bjelke-Petersen School of Physical Culture, exercise demonstration(Syd) during WWII (Source: Nat Lib of Aust)
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Embracing physical culture in Australia
Stephen Garton has noted other positive developments that grew out of the eugenics movement, most prominently a push for citizens to engage in more outdoors, healthy activities. As an antidote to the confining and often unhealthy milieú of urban life, eugenics encouraged people to take to the outdoors and to partake in physical exercise. Bush-walking and hiking clubs were formed, Boy Scouts and Girl Guides associations were encouraged and Police Citizens Boys Clubs sprang up. The establishment of gymnasiums and fitness centres (especially in NSW and Tasmania by the Bjelke-Petersen brothers) extended the emphasis on physical culture, allegedly important to maintain eugenic health[7]. An emphasis on physical culture as the method of attaining good genes also flourished in New Zealand, largely inspired by one German eugenicist.
Sandow the Strongman’s ‘System‘
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Environmental eugenics and physical culture in New Zealand
Eugenics is commonly described as “the belief in the power of nature over that of nurture”, reducing it to a question of a person’s character being shaped by heredity[8], this is the eugenics orthodoxy. But environmental eugenicists like Eugen Sandow sought to improve the human condition by improving the external factors of one’s environment✤. Sandow, a Prussian-born strongman based in London from the turn of the 20th century, was a eugenicist who believed that the flagging racial stock of the white race could be improved by nurture, which would overcome any natural flaws in a person[9]. He pioneered the art of body-building, developing his own training regime involving repetition and barbells (which he called the “Sandow System”) which he sold to the public by mail order. Sandow toured the world giving “artistic performances” in music halls, including an extended stint in Australasia in 1902-1903. Sandow was principally responsible for popularising the physical culture movement and giving it a kick-start in New Zealand. After his successful tour of NZ Sandow-inspired gymnasiums and physical culture institutes sprang up all over the country[10].
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As elsewhere in the advanced western nations, New Zealanders were plagued by the notion of their supposed physical inadequacies (especially after the Anglo-Boer War in 1899-1902). The disclosure that half of the young NZ men seeking to serve in the British navy were rejected as medically unfit reinforced the view that New Zealanders had poor physiques. Physical culture was presented as a panacea, a remedy to ward off the possibility of physical and mental infirmity. As Caroline Daley has shown, the potentiality of Sandow’s exercise program led to shifts in the way New Zealanders viewed their bodies. Men, with the correct dedicated training, could achieve the “He-man” physique of Sandow. The Sandow technique also pitched its message to middle class NZ women, in line with the eugenic goal of increased procreation by the elite, mothers-to-be could be trained to develop the right muscles for childbirth. After the passage of the Physical Welfare and Recreation Act in 1937 physical culture became “a state sanctioned leisure activity” in New Zealand. The Act was a boost to sport for adults, and with the outbreak of WWII the government promoted the idea that New Zealanders had “a duty to be fit”, it was now patriotic. From its initial eugenic wellspring physical fitness and culture had become firmly entrenched in the mainstream of NZ life[11].
The physical underdevelopment of the nation’s young was much in the mind of New Zealand eugenicists in the early 20th century. In this milieú school physician Elizabeth Gunn pioneered the health camp movement for school age children. An avowed eugenicist, Gunn was instrumental in getting schoolchildren out of indoors, either into active camp life or into classes conducted in the open air [12].
PostScript: Racial fitness in America – EROAgain, like the British eugenicists’ pronouncements, new ideas from America fell on receptive ears in Australasia. The centre of the American eugenics movement revolved around biologist Charles Davenport and his Eugenics Records Office whose activities reached eugenicists worldwide. Davenport and his ERO eugenicist associate Harry Laughlin were both chicken breeders illustrate the link of agriculture to eugenics[13]. Race reinvigoration in the US was championed from the very highest quarters. At the turn of the century soon-to-be president, Teddy Roosevelt, appealed to his country’s citizens to take up “the strenuous life” (his message was aimed primarily at native-born Americans of good Anglo-Saxon stock). And Americans did heed his words: many took up sports for the first time, American (college) football became popular as the ultimate physical test of manhood, competitive athletics and cycling were taken up in the quest to demonstrate masculine physical strength and endurance. Roosevelt’s urgings led to the popularity of hiking, hunting and mountain climbing among Americans. Behind all of these feats of physical exertion lurked the same self-doubts of the dominant white race as elsewhere. The depression of the 1890s and the enervating affects of industrial society accentuated these anxieties. The US was experiencing a shift in immigration patterns at this time which had started to favour especially Southern and Central Europe over immigrants from Britain and Northern Europe⚀. The more affluent, native-born Americans predictably called for a halt to immigration[14] with the purpose of stopping the ‘poorer’ stock of immigrants coming into America (Italians, Jews, Slavs, etc). The pattern of restricting particular ethnic groupings was duplicated concurrently in other western countries (eg, the WAP in Australia).
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☼ Nietzsche was another leading philosopher who earlier embraced the theory of eugenics as a panacea
❈ in New Zealand as well, “national efficiency” was high on the agenda … degeneracy anxieties (c.1920 NZ had the world’s 2nd highest mortality rate for mothers, much worse than its (Pākehā) infant mortality rate) prompted a safe maternity campaign in NZ. Eugenic concerns led the state to intervene in maternity services (P Mein Smith, A Concise History of New Zealand)
⚀ immigration from the British Isles, Ireland, Scandinavia and Germany fell dramatically from 1900, replaced by immigration surges from Italy, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Russia and the Baltics
✤ Known as the science of euthenics (AKA “the science of controllable environment” (Ellen H Richards) – cf. eugenics “the science of controllable heredity”)
∝∝∝∝∝∝∝∝∝
[1] D H Wyndham, ‘Striving for National Fitness: Eugenics in Australia 1910s to 1930s’ (Unpub. PhD, Dept of History, University of Sydney, July 1996), www.kooriweb.org
[2] The Queenslander (Bris,), 11-Apr-1914, quoted in E Wilson, ‘Eugenic ideology and racial fitness in Queensland, 1900-1950’, (Unpub. PhD, Dept. of History, University of Queensland) www.espace.library.uq.edu.au
[3] in a memo to the prime minister in 1910 Churchill said: “The multiplication of the feeble-minded is a very terrible danger to the race”, V Brignell, ‘The eugenic movement Britain wants to forget’, New Statesmen, 9-Dec-2010,www.newsratesmen.com. Churchill is on public record for even more unequivocal and explicit statements of pro-eugenics sentiments, eg, “I do not admit… that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia… by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race… has come in and taken its place” (1937)
[4] Wyndham, op.cit
[5] as well as that of socialists, feminists and other radicals, S Garton, ‘Eugenics in Australia and New Zealand: laboratories of racial science’, in A Bashford & P Levine [Eds.], The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics
[6] Wyndham, op.cit
[7] Garton op.cit.; the physical culture school founder, Lt-Col. H C Bjelke-Petersen, exploited the anxieties around eugenics at the time to promote the B-J brothers’ physical fitness schools, E J Wilson, ‘Eugenic ideology and racial fitness in Queensland, 1900-1950’, (Unpub. PhD, Department of History, University of Queensland, May 2003), www.espace.library.uq.edu.au
[8] C Daley, Leisure and Pleasure: Reshaping and Revealing the New Zealand Body, 1900-1960
[9] the emerging physical culture movement dovetailed neatly into eugenics thinking at the time. Latching on to the prevailing perception that the “racial stock” of white settler societies such as Australia and New Zealand had become “soft and weak”, the tangible positive benefits of an active exercise plan (as illustrated by Sandow) presented itself as the obvious counter to this growing ‘feebleness’ on a national level. The popularisation of the Japanese self-defence skills, judo and ju-jutsu, for women in Australasia early in the 20th century also grew out of the ‘race’ anxieties (athlete and entertainer Florence LeMar toured Australasia with a ju-jutsu vaudeville act in the 1910s), C Macdonald, Strong, Beautiful and Modern: National Fitness in Britain, New Zealand, Australia and Canada, 1935-1960
[10] Sandow inspired a generation of home-grown NZ bodybuilders who opened gyms, such as Fred Hornibrook and Dick Jarrett, Daley, op.cit.
[11] ibid.
[12] M Tennant, ‘Gunn, Elizabeth Catherine’, TEARA – The Encylopedia of New Zealand, (Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, Volume 3 1996), www.teara.govt.nz
[13] S A Farber, ‘U.S. Scientists’ Role in the Eugenics Movement (1907-39): A Contemporary Biologist’s Perspective’, Zebrafish, 2008: December; 5(4), www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
[14] J Murrin, P Johnson, J McPherson, A Fahs, G Gerstle, Liberty, Equality, Power: Volume II: Since 1863 (Enhanced Concise Edition)
Probably the most iniquitous part of the eugenics movements’ social engineering, certainly in Australia and New Zealand, was the policies and practices of state governments towards their indigenous populations in the first half of the 20th century. The measures against aboriginals and Māori are the most manifest examples of the premise, the assumption, on which eugenics sits, that “some human life is of more value than other human life”[1].
The systematic discrimination and abuses of native Australians was conducted in the main by paternalistic, middle class white men who believed, or convinced themselves that they believed, they were doing the right thing, the humane thing, for the black people of the continent who were thought to be “irreconcilably backward”.
The perception of the “aboriginal issue” in Australia was fed by the prevailing eugenics ideologies at the time, and the treatment of aborigines was typified by the approach adopted in Queensland, Western Australia and the Northern Territory. All chief protectors of aborigines in Queensland during the years 1900-1942 advocated a policy of racial segregation❈. Whilst governments and administrators emphasised that this was a ‘protective’ measure for the ‘good’ of the aboriginals themselves, the self-serving eugenic motives of the power wielders was always very close to the surface of public policy.
f=”http://www.7dayadventurer.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/image-6.jpg”> Orphanage of removed children, WA c1930[/capt
The perimeters of white Australia’s assimilation policy for indigenous peoples was set in the 1937 Commonwealth and states conference which agreed on the policy objective of absorbing at least “the natives of Aboriginal origin but not the full blood”[2]. Australian political leaders and administrators generally followed an assimilation approach which had two planks to it – a mandatory biological assimilation (to ‘outbreed’ the blackness of aborigines), and a cultural assimilation aimed at “half-caste” aboriginals (removing them as children from their indigenous familial environment and nurturing them into the white ways of Australian society and ‘civilisation'[3].
Emily Wilson has shown the extent to which miscegenation and racial contamination was an overriding concern for decision-makers in Queensland✤. There was an inordinate and obsessive fear of “half-castes” whose numbers many thought were on the rise◈. Queensland eugenicists believed this imbalance’ threatened the supposed “inviolate purity” of the White Australian Policy. Marriages or unions between other coloured minorities, such as the Chinese, and aborigines was also frowned upon by the Queensland authorities. Governments went sometimes to extreme lengths to keep whites and blacks separate to spare whites from the dangers of supposed aboriginal degeneration. This meant moving indigenous people out of the cities and into rural reserves where they could be better controlled.
Apprehension of miscegenation played on white minds constantly … fears were voiced on the street and in parliament about that worst of all fates, the mixing of different racial blood, be it black-on-white or coloured-on-white. The political class in Australia, left, right, protectionist or free trader, were all on a unity ticket in the debates on the necessity of achieving a White Australia, eg, (John) Chris Watson, Labor Party leader of the house, vented against the mixing of the coloured and white peoples (resulting in) “the possibility and probability of racial contamination” [Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, 6-Sep-1901]; as did Issac Issacs, high court judge and future governor-general, warning of the need to avoid “the contamination and the degrading influence of inferior races”[Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, 12-Sep-1901].
With Aboriginal protectors like these …
Colonial attitudes of “white supremacy” of the protectors(sic) were at best transparently disguised under the thinnest of veneers … Cecil Cook, the Chief Protector of Aborigines for the Northern Territory, called for authorities to “breed out the colour” of aborigines – making a mockery of his job title![4] Cook also endorsed segregation of black Australians, favouring forcible institutionalisation of aboriginals … Cook argued this was integral to public health policy, describing it as “a prophylactic measure” for white health.[5]. Cook as chief medical officer of NT had a great fear that blacks would with the aid of health interventions come to outnumber the white population in NT. Accordingly his view on aboriginal women with gonorrhoea was to leave them untreated and leave them to die out, putting a hold on aboriginal numbers in the Territory[6].
“Smoothing the dying pillow”
The white majorities in both countries believed that the “full-blood” tribal aborigines and the Māori people were racially inferior and destined to die out[7], and that the country should be inhabited by “good white stock” who would be capable of defending the Empire. The European elite pursued assimilation policies towards its indigenous minorities, the plan was to ‘absorb’ and ‘uplift’ the “half-castes” in society. The indigenous population bore the brunt of policies of eugenics ideology enacted by the government. In Australia A O Neville, an avid proponent of eugenics and Chief Protector of Aborigines for Western Australia for 25 years from 1915, was responsible for the controversial policy of removing aboriginal children from their families (the “stolen generation”). Neville’s two-pronged approach to ‘controlling’ the indigenous population involved “biological absorption” – deciding just who aboriginals under his control could marry, and by ‘assimilating’ the offspring of those marriages into white society.
Neville, like Cook in the Northern Territory, was haunted by the prospect of aborigines eventually swamping Western Australia with their numbers … his master-plan for realising an “all-white” WA involved the diluting of the skin colour of aborigines – a deliberate but controlled (‘progressive’) miscegenation, so that each succeeding generation would have lighter skin. After two or three generations the result would be an appearance acceptable to the non-indigenous community, aboriginals would be “perceived as white” and the indigenous settlements could be closed … the process would eradicate all aboriginal characteristics from white society. Neville’s scheme was thwarted by the hostile opposition of racist white people in WA who refused to countenance the planned mixed marriages[8].
Early 20th century Maori village
In New Zealand the race planners crafted a fail-safe policy to deal with the Māori ‘issue’ – assimilation was proposed for those Māoris who did not succumb to what polygenists thought would be their ultimate destiny, extinction. NZ’s Taranaki Herald of 1852 proclaimed almost triumphantly, “The Maori race is doomed wherever the Anglo-Saxon appears”. The perception of the Māori in NZ as transitory was underlined by the fact that in NZ ‘Official Yearbooks’ prior to 1940 the national population figure was given “exclusive of Māori”. Even after demographic trends had demonstrated that the Māori birth rate was again on the ascent (Māori population rose from 40,000 in 1896 to 50,000 in 1911), many white eugenicists clung on to this prejudicial and outdated notion of ultimate extinction of the race[9].
PostScript: Pākehā Pseudo-medicine, Craniology
The New Zealand eugenicists assumed that the Māori would be fully absorbed into the dominant and supposedly superior Pākehā culture[10]. The dominant Pākehā society accepted the untested conventional wisdom that the Māori had inferior mental capacity, and army surgeon Dr A S Thomson ‘proved’ this in reaching the conclusion after random testing that Maori heads were smaller than European heads![11]
❈ in the 1940s the Queensland absorption policy on aborigines gave way to one of assimilation
✤ the eugenics preoccupations of the governing class in Queensland were further exacerbated by climate conditions. The tropics of Northern Queensland were widely thought unsuitable for white men and women, whereas they were believed to suit the “different constitution” of aboriginal and other coloured peoples (eg, Kanaks) … thus raising another source of anxiety for whites already fearing that their potency was waning
◈ the white elite enunciated this concern whilst completely sidestepping the uncomfortable reality that it was white men who brought about any such increase in “half-castes” by raping and impregnating black women
☣︎☣︎☣︎☣︎☣︎☣︎
[1] be the value of that preferred life to the state, the nation, the race, or to future generations, Levine and Bashford described this as the “evaluative logic” at eugenics’ core, A Bashford & P Levine, ‘Introduction’, in A Bashford & P Levine [Eds], The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics
[2] ‘No 3. Aboriginal Societies: The Experience of Contact. Changing Policies Towards Aboriginal People’, (Australian Law Reform Commission), www.alrc.gov.au
[3] What Stefan Haderer accurately if somewhat dramatically calls “the white supremacist biological and cultural assimilation project of the twentieth century”, S Haderer, ‘Biopower, whiteness and the Stolen Generations: The arbitrary power of racial classification’, Critical Race and Whiteness Studies, 9(2) 2013, www.acrawsa.org.au
[4] E J Wilson, ‘Eugenic ideology and racial fitness in Queensland, 1900-1950’, Unpub. PhD thesis, (Department of History, University of Queensland, May 2003),
www.espace.library.uq.edu.au
[5] Cook in 1930 government report, quoted in A Bashford, Imperial Hygiene: A Critical History of Colonialism, National and Public Health
[6] ibid.
[7] this myth lingered on far past its use-by-date, in Queensland still maintaining some currency as late as 1949, Wilson, ibid.. The white colonialists in both countries (Aust. & NZ) subscribed to the notion of “smoothing the dying pillow” (a term popularised by anthropologists Daisy Bates and A P Elkin). To the European mindset aborigines and Māori were assumed to be doomed races and the ‘best’ thing was to facilitate their demise, a miscegenation solution resulting in a hybrid race but one dominated by the “biologically superior” white stock, ‘Smoothing the Pillow of a Dying Race. A.A. Grace’, Maoriland : NZ Literature 1872-1914 (NZ Electronic Text Collection), www.nzetc.victoria.ac.nz
[8] ‘Bring them home – chapter 7’, Australian Humans Rights Commission, www.humanrights.gov.au; G R Robertson, ‘Well-intentioned Genocide’, www.geoffreyrobinson.com
[9] ‘Page 2 – Overview of Māori and Pākehā relations in the twentieth century’, New Zealand Race Relations, NZ History, www.nzhistory.govt.nz;
C Leung, ‘Australia’, 24-Feb-2014, (Eugenics Archive Aust). Retrieved 8-Nov-2016 from www.eugenicsarchive.ca/discover/connections/530b8d09acea8cf99a0000000001, J Stenhouse, ‘The Darwinian Enlightenment and New Zealand Politics’, in R M MacLeod & P F Rehbock [Eds.], Darwin’s Laboratory: Evolutionary Theory and Natural History in the Pacific
[10] J Belich, ‘European ideas about Māori – the dying Māori and Social Darwinism’, Te Ara – the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, http://www.TeAra.govt.nz/en/European-ideas-about-maori/page-4 (assessed 6-November-2016)
[11] Stenhouse, op.cit.
Melbourne: Hub of the Australian Eugenics Movement
Melbourne, and more precisely, the University of Melbourne, played a pivotal role in eugenics before WWI and especially during the interwar years. Melbourne University was in the forefront of the academic dissemination of eugenics ideology, its academics persuasive in their efforts to shape public policy on health❈. With professor of anatomy Richard Berry the principal advocate of the racial ‘purification’ cause on campus, the university spawned the Eugenics Education Society (EES). According to Ross Jones the EES “eugenicists operated primarily as a pressure group within the university, the education department and various government agencies and committees”[1]. Later the society morphed into the Eugenics Society of Victoria (1936). The obsessive skull-measurer Berry declared war on “rotten heredity”, calling for mandatory sterilisation and segregation of aborigines, the poor, homosexuals, prostitutes, criminals, alcoholics, the mentally ill, people with small heads and those with low IQs. Berry also advocated for a “lethal chamber” to euthanise “the grosser types of our mental defectives” as he described them (including Australian aborigines)[2].
Berry was the zealous “campaign director” for the dissemination of egregious ideas about race and the advocacy of eugenic interventions in Victoria, but he had plenty of other willing collaborators at Parkville (the university). Other Melbourne U professors up to their elbows in the eugenics movement included educationalist Frank Tate¤, biologist Baldwin Spencer and one-time vice-chancellor John Medley. Zoologist Wilfred Agar, like the others also honoured with an eponymous building at the university[3], was at one time “chief protector” of Aborigines(sic) in Darwin where he vilified aborigines and happily oversaw the removal of indigenous children from their families[4]. Another influential proponent of eugenics was Berry’s friend, the psychiatrist William Ernest Jones. Jones railed against “low-class Roman Catholic Irish” in whom he detected an “inherent lunacy”[5]
The campaign driven by the Victorian Eugenics Society resulted in mental deficiency legislation passing through Victorian parliament in 1939 but the eugenics policies were never implemented¤ ※ initially because of the onset of war (and later on after shocking revelations about the Holocaust came to light)[6]. Meanwhile, over the border in NSW, eugenicist doctor and minister for health Richard Arthur met similar difficulties with his 1930 mental defectives bill which failed to be passed. The so-called ‘reform’ eugenicists whilst still intent on denying sectors of the community some of the fundamental rights of citizenship (including the right to marry and to reproduce), also undertook interventions aimed at societal improvement (slum clearance, health reforms, educational reforms)[7]. Despite the wholesale discrediting of the eugenics movement from the 1940s the Eugenics Society of Victoria lingered on until 1961, having steered a course away from outright endorsement of eugenic measures.
Other pillars of Victorian society also firmly entrenched in the eugenics camp included newspaperman Sir Keith Murdoch (Rupert’s father), the CEO of the organisation that became CSIRO, Sir David Rivett, and the founder of ACER (Australian Council of Educational Research) Kenneth Cunningham. The involvement of many of the eminent has not received the scrutiny that Berry has … academic Ross Jones suggests a “conscious cover up” of prominent Melburnians took place post-war with the whole subject of eugenics becoming taboo[8] (there seems to be a pattern of excising the unsavoury activities of eugenicists from biographies to ensure reputation preservation for many implicated in the Australasian movements – see also PostScript).
Feminist-Eugenists and the Racial Hygienists
The progressive circles of Australasian society with an interest in eugenics included middle class women’s groups. Several prominent feminists, for the most part well-educated, were in the vanguard of the eugenics movement. Their agenda was focused very much on birth control for poorer, working class women. In Australia the NSW Racial Hygiene Association (RHA), founded by Lillie Goodisson, Marion Piddington (an early advocate of artificial insemination) and Ruby Rich in 1926, endorsed selective breeding to end hereditary disease and defects, and campaigned without success for the “mentally handicapped” to be segregated and sterilised. The Sydney-based RHA started the first birth control clinic in Australia in 1933✤. As the practice of eugenics became increasingly stigmatised the RHA shifted its focus to family planning with an organisational name-change in 1960 reflecting this change.
The RHA were instrumental in campaigning for pre-marital safeguards to ‘purify’ the White stock … hygiene clinics, mental and physical tests and the issuing of certificates of approval to engaged couples who tick all the right boxes for ‘purity’. In a similar vein south of the Murray the Eugenics Society of Victoria were demanding compulsory pre-nuptials health checks for couples as late as 1947[9]. The New Zealand bureaucracy had matrimonial ‘purity’ checks as well … those couples who obtained an official Eugenic Certificate received a piece of paper affirming that they had been adjudged to possess “a perfect physical and mental balance and unusually strong Eugenic Love possibilities (necessary for) “the future welfare of the race”.
New Zealand women for “race improvement”: organised volunteers and ‘femocrats’
Across the Tasman various NZ elite women’s groups were active in combating what they saw as the degeneracy of society. As noted by Angela Wanhalla, “New Zealand women’s organisations were among the most vocal supporters of eugenic attempts at race betterment”[9]. These middle-class dominated groups included the National Council of Women, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and the Farmers’ Union (Women’s Division)[10]. As well as the volunteer organisations! many ‘femocrats’ in the professions and government bureaucracies added their voices to the chorus advocating eugenics as the way forward to a better New Zealand[11].
‘Grass roots’ racial fitness in NZ
New Zealand’s quest for ongoing, nationwide improvements in the eugenic fabric of the country included the periodical measurement of Pākehā schoolchildren. In 1927 bureaucrats delighted to announce that New Zealand children were taller and heavier than their English counterparts (and than Australian as well!)◘. These findings reinforced the belief that New Zealand was the ideal nursery for British stock. Agricultural-based New Zealand missed no opportunity to promote itself as “Britain’s farm”, the exporter of primary products to the ‘Mother’ country[12].
PostScript: No retrospective … the iniquitous past practice that dare not speak its name
Devotees of conspiracy theories would revel in the apparent hush-up subsequently of the involvement of many prominent Australasians in eugenics. A cursory thumb-through of ADB and DNZB✡ biographies of Australasian public figures (especially medical practitioners, scientists and educationalists), largely written before the 1990s, is very revealing. In the mini-bios of figures who were significant and even integral in some cases to the eugenics movements in Australia and New Zealand, eg, Richard Berry, Frank Tate, Kenneth Cunningham, Raphael Cilento, Harvey Sutton, Elizabeth Gunn, Truby King and Duncan MacGregor, eugenics doesn’t rate a mention – any reference to their key historic roles in eugenic causes have been discreetly omitted (or if mentioned at all their eugenics careers have been swiftly glossed over). By the 1950s most eugenicists still practicing in Australia and New Zealand had, as elsewhere, sought to distance themselves from the negative connotations of the eugenics title by adopting new designations such as “human geneticist”, ‘sociologist’ or ‘demographer'[13].
▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬
❈ the University of Melbourne’s counterpart in the US was the University of Virginia, a stronghold of the belief and practice where a “eugenics mania” existed (see also ‘The Eugenics Movement in Australasia IV’)
¤ one of Tate’s pet projects as director of education was aimed at excluding working class kids from secondary and tertiary education, in sharp contrast to his NSW counterpart Peter Board’s equality of opportunity approach
※ compare with the success of eugenics legislation in the US – in the 1920s and ’30s sterilisation laws were passed in 24 of the (then) 48 states
✤ the RHA and other elite other women’s groups were undoubtedly inspired and enlightened by the international trail-blazers in the birth control field … British palaeobotanist Marie Stopes and American nurse and sex educator Margaret Sanger, both strongly committed eugenics ideologists
◘ measurement to determine physical fitness became a pastime of state officials on both sides of the Tasman. In Australia, welfare worker Dr Mary Booth was a consistent advocate for even more anthropometry, as was eugenicist Dr Harvey Sutton. Many of the anthropometrically-inclined like fitness expert H C Bjelke-Petersen were perturbed to discover that the chest-girth of the typical white schoolboy in Australia was “distressingly small”, W Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health and Racial Destiny. All of the eugenic emphasis on measurement did have a utilitarian purpose in encouraging statistics-gathering by the state
✡ Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University; Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, NZ Ministry for Culture & Heritage)
⚜︎ ⚜︎ ⚜︎ ⚜︎ ⚜︎ ⚜︎
[1] R L Jones, ‘Eugenics in Australia: The Secret of Melbourne’s Elite’, The Conversation, 21-Sep-2011, www.theconversation.com
[2] Australasian politicians were pretty much in synch with the eugenicist-scientists, certainly in regard to craniometry – in 1911 Australian PM Andrew Fisher urged the state premiers to regularly measure the heads of state schoolchildren, Walker, op.cit. Craniology – examining the human skull to ascertain supposed racial differentiation, harks back to the earlier (19th century) pseudo-science of phrenology which purported to divine(sic) character and mental capacity by also examining the skull; E Cervini, ‘A theory out of darkness’, Sydney Morning Herald, 13-Sep-2011, www.smh.com.au
[3] community disquiet about the retention of eugenicist nomenclature at Melbourne University is a topic that is gaining heat, E Cervini, ‘Its time Melbourne Uni stopping honouring eugenicist Richard Berry’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 6-March-2016. The focus remains on the unapologetic Berry who never recanted his eugenicist beliefs and maintained a collection of aboriginal ancestral remains in the Anatomy building on campus
[4] M Dobbin, ‘Heart of darkness: Melbourne University’s racist professors’, The Age (Melbourne), 30-Nov-2015,www.theage.com.au
[5] S G Foster, ‘Jones, William Ernest (1867–1957)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/jones-william-ernest-6882/text11929, published first in hardcopy 1983, accessed online 19 November 2016
[6] Jones, ‘Secret of Melbourne’s elite’, op.cit.
[7] R L Jones, ‘The master potter and the rejected pots: Eugenic legislation in Victoria, 1918-1939’, Australian Historical Studies, 1999; 30(113)
[8] A C Wanhalla, ‘Gender, Race and Colonial Identity: Women and Eugenics in New Zealand, 1918-1939’, Unpub. Thesis for MA in History, (University of Canterbury, NZ, 2001)
[9] Cervini, ‘Theory out of darkness’, op.cit.
[9] Wanhalla, op.cit.
[10] A Bashford, Imperial Hygiene: A Critical History of Colonialism, National and Public Health
[11] A Rees, ‘The Quality and not only the Quantity of Australia’s People. Ruby Rich and the Racial Hygiene Association of NSW’, Australian Feminist Studies, Vol 27 2012 – Issue 71, http://dex.doi.org/10.1080/08164649.2012.648262, pub. online: 07-Mar-2012; ‘The Racial Hygiene Association of New South Wales’, (Wikipedia), http://en.m.wikipedia.org; A C Wanhalla, ‘Gender, race and colonial identity : women and eugenics in New Zealand, 1918-1939’, (CORE, University of Canterbury 2001), www.core.ac.uk
[12] P Mein Smith, A Concise History of New Zealand
[13] D H Wyndham, ‘Striving for National Fitness: Eugenics in Australia 1910s to 1930s’, (Unpub. PhD thesis, Department of History, University of Sydney, July 1996)
The belief in eugenics, the science (or as modern eyes would see it — the pseudoscience) of “improving the quality of the human race, especially by selective breeding”❈, had a powerful hold on societal thinking in Australia and New Zealand in the first half of the twentieth century, as it did elsewhere in the world, predominantly in western countries or western-implant societies.
href=”http://www.7dayadventurer.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/image.jpg”> Sir F Galton[/
The term “eugenics” itself was coined in the latter 19th century by English polymath and statistician Francis Galton, whose views had been informed by the theories on “the preservation of favoured races” (Origins of the Species) of his second cousin Charles Darwin (coincidentally Darwin’s son, Leonard, was a leading eugenicist in Britain)⍍. Galton linked heredity to Social Darwinism. Sometimes called “race science” or more euphemistically “racial hygiene”, eugenics ideology in its day had a duality to its basis that was inherently contradictory. On the one hand it assumed the natural superiority of the white race (because of its ‘good’ genes), on the other, that same ‘superior’ stock was being assailed by a countervailing threat of physical, psychological and moral degeneration of the race coming from those elements of society labelled as ‘inferior’ (the dysgenic or cacogenic sections of society).
A cycle of low fertility rates in the West commencing in the late 19th century together with rising levels of crime and the emergence of welfare state dependency provoked concerns of moral and physical degeneracy of the white race[1]. In Australia this concern prompted a Royal Commission into the Decline of the Birth Rate in NSW in 1904. The widespread perception in Western countries was that the decline was hitting the “good stock” hardest, as a consequence ‘inferior’ people of “low racial stock” were out-breeding the ‘superior’ stock of the country❇.
White societies like Britain and the Dominions were viewed as becoming ‘soft’ and ‘weak’ and the foundations being laid for the welfare state in the UK were attacked as contributing to this ‘decay’ – the survival and multiplication of the poor, the deranged and other “social undesirables” was a financial burden on the state, driving up the welfare costs. Even the man who later provided the blueprint for the British welfare state post-WWII, pursued a strong eugenics agenda. William Beveridge in 1909 called for the ‘defectives’ within society to be denied their “citizen rights” – “the franchise … civil freedom and fatherhood”[2].
Britain, the US, New Zealand, Australia and other countries were informed by ‘scientific’ notions of eugenics and sought to implement policies and practices which remedied this trendஐ. This was a two-fold process, the first involving so-called positive eugenics – elevating or ‘purifying’ the racial stock by encouraging the so-called ‘fit’ people in society to procreate more (in New Zealand the act of providing literature on contraceptives was proscribed in the 1900s). Simultaneously the states sought to deal with negative eugenics (or more precisely ‘dysgenics’¤), identifying those members of society thought to be ‘unfit’ for procreation (people of unsound mind, of physical deformity, the intellectually-handicapped, the epileptic, the criminal classes including prostitutes, slum dwellers, homosexuals, dipsomaniacs, the indigenous non-white population and other marginalised sections) and either segregating them, preventing them from marrying or having them sterilised to stop their sexual reproduction[3].
The E tree
Some of the contemporary popular fiction produced in Britain, Australia, New Zealand, etc. played on the anxieties of a “race war” which put the supremacy of the white European in peril. Influential writers such as Charles H Pearson in Australia, helped to shape these perceptions with books like National Life and Character: a Forecast which argued that it was the “racially defiled” non-white races with their higher birth-rates, not the white race with its relentless imperial juggernaut, that was on the ascendency[4].
What sectors and groups of society were in the Vanguard of the Eugenics Movements in Australasia?
The eugenicists and fellow travellers of the eugenics movement were drawn from the elite circles of Australian and New Zealand society§ – including politicians, scientists, medical practitioners, educators, academics, social workers, women’s groups, churches and clergymen (excluding the Catholic Church). Other professionals such as psychiatrists, anthropologists and magistrates aided and abetted the work of the movement. Eugenics was not a left /right thing, support for it came from across the political spectrum – from socialists and conservatives both.
Opponents of Eugenics in Australasia
Although eugenic thought was accepted as the normative approach to tackling social problems in the interwar period, it was not universally countenanced by all sectors of Australian and New Zealand society. Opposition to eugenics came from organised working class elements, ie, the trade unions, as well as from the Catholic Church, from moral campaigners (concerned that sterilisation might lead to increased promiscuity), from some medical practitioners (also concerned that the poorly educated sterilised would be sexually indiscriminate and spread VD[5], plus wary of the legal ramifications of sterilising citizens), and from public intellectuals and scientific dissenters.
The eugenics movement in Aeotearoa
New Zealand in the first 40 years of the 20th century presents a similar story to its large trans-Tasman neighbour. The New Zealand Eugenics Education Society, founded in 1910, led the call for eugenic measures necessary it claimed to manage the population and ensure a healthy country. Grass roots pressure prompted a government investigation in 1924 which concluded that there was a birth-rate disparity distorting the population’s genetic balance – “the ‘fit’ were being swamped by the ‘unfit'”. It informed a view that NZ was in racial decline as a consequence of growing numbers of the feeble-minded and social defectives which eugenicists argued posed a social menace[6].
PM Stout (Picture: www.digitslnz.org)
Chief Justice Sir Robert Stout was one of the leading figures in NZ eugenics in the first half of the century. Stout, in a discursive and often anecdotal lecture to the Wellington Eugenics Society in 1912, espoused the standard eugenicist position. Stout linked heredity to fatal diseases, condemned high levels of alcohol consumption and cigarette-smoking, and warned that “the peerage” was committing “race suicide”, “the best blood” was being “enervated” and supplanted by the “second best”, “the extinction of the race was being seen everywhere”, etc[7]. Chief Justice Stout’s race views carried even more weight because he had previously been premier of NZ in the late 19th century. William Chapple was another leading NZ eugenicist who was influential in the NZ movement through his dual roles as medical practitioner and Liberal Party politician. His book Fertility of the Unfit advocated enforced sterilisation in certain circumstances.
In touch with the latest currents in eugenics thinking in Britain and the US, eugenicists in Australia and New Zealand whole-heartedly set about rejuvenating the racial ‘fitness’ of Australians. This would be achieved they believed by encouraging the elite in society to procreate, whilst at the same time, with the aid of legislators, denying those they labelled as “social misfits” or ‘degenerates’ that same right to reproduce[8].
RBP – the Scoutmaster-General (Source: www.bbc.com)
PostScript 1: British Models
The Australian and New Zealand eugenics movements took impetus from the larger and more advanced movements in Britain and the US. The leading British eugenicists themselves acknowledged a debt to Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Scouting movement. Baden-Powell’s emphasis on the traits of character[9], discipline, citizenship and patriotism were appealing to eugenicists such as Karl Pearson and Caleb Saleeby. Dr Saleeby wrote in ‘The progress of eugenics’: “If national eugenics is ever achieved in Great Britain, it will come through the Boy Scouts and the Girl Guides”[10].
PostScript 2: Eugenics, an agricultural template
Sidestepping the moral and ethical considerations, some contemporary eugenics enthusiasts made the argument for efficacy based on agricultural models. They advocated the utilisation of the successful principles of selective stock and plant breeding, applying them to the reproduction of humans to improve the quality of future generations. One US agricultural society member in 1911 summed it up in a straightforward, no nonsense sort of way, “better horses, better cattle, better hogs …. (why not) … better babies?”[11] The agriculture/eugenics nexus has a further dimension in the US … two of America’s foremost eugenicists, Charles Davenport and Harry Laughlin, had been chicken breeders.
﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌
❈ some basic definitions to begin with – the etymology of the word ‘eugenics’ is Greek, from eugenes, root derivation: eu-, ‘good’ or ‘well’, + -genos, ‘birth’ or ‘stock’ … contrast with dysgenics, dys (‘bad’ or ‘ill’) + -genos, Collins Concise Dictionary (Australian Edition, 1995)
ஐ the US in particular was a hotspot of the eugenics movement, producing pro-eugenic films like The Black Stork (1917) which preached a chilling message of “Kill defectives, Save the Nation”
¤ this dysgenic sensibility, that race disintegration was occurring was so universally pervasive in the early 1900s that even black intellectuals in America led by W E B DuBois advocated that the ‘Negro race’ guard against racial decay by elevating up the “talented tenth” of the black community
⍍ Charles Darwin himself was ahead of the movement expressing elitist eugenics views in 1871 in The Descent of Man, “We civilised men…. do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed and the sick.. . thus the weak members of society propagate their kind.”
❇ the offspring of “low stock” were characterised as “the increasingly disproportionate progeny of the criminal” who were “swamping civilisation”, R Waddell, (Preface) The Fertility of the Unfit, cited in E J Wilson, ‘Eugenic ideology and racial fitness in Queensland, 1900-1950’, Unpub. PhD thesis (Department of History, University of Queensland, May 2003),
www.espace.library.uq.edu.au§ pointedly, many of the top figures (especially the medical doctors) in the Aust/NZ eugenics movements were born in Britain and migrated to the Antipodes
[1] the self-doubt harboured by Britons and by colonials in other dominions of the Empire was accentuated by a further sense of diminution after the Anglo-Boer War felt by the British professional classes, resulting what has been described by C L Bacchi as a “gloomy heredity determinism”, C L Bacchi, ‘The Nature-Nurture Debate in Australia, 1900-1914, Historical Studies, (19) 1980, quoted in M Cawte, ‘Craniometry and Eugenics in Australia: R.J.A. Berry and the Quest for Social Efficiency, Historical Studies, (22) 1986
[2] D Sewell, ‘How eugenics poisoned the welfare state’, The Spectator, 25-Nov-2009, www.spectator.co.uk
[3] ‘Story: Contraception and sterilisation Page 5 – Information about contraceptives’ Encyclopedia ; ‘Eugenics – Positive And Negative Eugenics’, http://medicine.jrank.org/pages/2210/Eugenics-Positive-Negative-Eugenics.html; some eugenicists, driven by fear of miscegenation, advocated complete segregation of races, especially prominent in South Africa and the USA; S Dubow, ‘Placing “Race” in South African History’, in W Lamont [Ed.], Historical Controversies and Historians, (1998),www.disciplinas.stoa.usp.br
[4] ‘Charles Henry Pearson’, Wikipedia, www.en.m.wikipedia.org. The race war notion – especially in regard to Japan’s emerging Pacific presence – found a fervid home in the Australian and New Zealand press and literature in the early century, eg, ‘The Commonwealth Crisis’, published in The Lone Hand, presents a fantasy scenario of a Japanese invasion of the Northern Territory, D Walker, ‘National Identity’, in J Jupp [Ed.], The Australian People: An Encyclopaedia of the Nation, Its People and their Origins
[5] Venereal disease was exceptionally virulent during the Great War, and in the prevailing eugenics environment in Australia, an indicator of what constituted racial ‘unfitness’ … the dilemma for society’s ruling elite as the war went on was that ‘respectable’ citizens also found themselves victims of the disease!, M Larson, ‘The iconography
[6] A Wanhalla, ‘New Zealand’, 23-Oct-2014, (Eugenics Archive NZ). Retrieved 8-Nov-2016 from www.eugenicsarchive.ca/discover/connections/544873c7d861fb0000000001
[6] ‘Eugenics – Problem of the Race – a lecture by Sir Robert Stout’, Evening Post (Wellington), 6-Aug-1912 https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/EP19120806.2.53
[7] Neo-Malthusian ideas informed eugenics thinking, especially regarding fertility control, R A Soloway, ‘Neo-Malthusians, Eugenists, and the Declining Birth-Rate in England, 1900-1918’, Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies, Vol. 10, No. 3 (Autumn, 1978)
[8] Baden-Powell declared in 1911: “Our business is to … pass as many boys through our character factory as we possibly can”, M Rosenthal, The Character Factory: Baden-Powell and the origins of the Boy Scout movement
[9] M A Hasian, The Rhetoric of Eugenics in Anglo-American Thought
[10] C Muir, The Broken Promise of Agricultural Progress: An Environmental History
In this age of deregulated, worldwide passenger flight with more commercial airlines in the game than there are countries in the world (or so it seems anyway), its interesting to reflect that back in 1906 two American brothers had a monopoly on the very concept of human flight. Of course in 1906 there was no commercial flights – being still at the first dawn of aviation endeavour, but the only attempts at flight at all then (in a legal sense at least) were with the express say-so of those same two brothers.
href=”http://www.7dayadventurer.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/image-12.jpg”> The 1906 Patent[/
In 1906 the Wright brothers – Orville and Wilbur – were granted a patent by the US Patent Office (after two earlier failed applications) for their “flying machine”, or more precisely, for their demonstrated method of controlled, powered, heavier-than-air flight. The bicycle shop owners-cum-aviation inventors had managed to demonstrate some measure (albeit minimal) of aerial control of the third version of their Wright flyer in all three axes of aerodynamics – pitch, yaw and roll[1]. The basis of the patent was the Wrights’ experiments in 1902-1903 and the successful (852 feet/59 seconds) glider flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in December 1903.
⇓1903 Wright Flyer at the Smithsonian
The Wright brothers defended their exclusive aircraft patent against all-comers (“copiers and imitators” as they saw everybody else in the game) with a monomaniacal religious zeal that would have befitted their overbearing United Brethren minister father Milton. Orville and Wilbur freely sued and issued writs against anyone who attempted to construct and fly a new aircraft without purchasing a licence from them. As this was the pioneering era of aviation there were a lot of inventors trying to do just this[2]. Accordingly, the Wrights spent a lot of time locked in legal disputes with other manufacturers in America and overseas who were trying to avoid the patent fee. The Wrights staunchly defended their world monopoly over flight in unequivocal terms as a ‘moral’ and a ‘legal’ right, treating all other contemporary inventors in the field as in effect “hobbyists”![3].
Glenn Hammond Curtiss, a New York engineer and aviator, was one of many inventors who fell foul of the litigious Wright brothers when he added ailerons (French: “little wing”), a movable attachment to a fixed wing for greater control, to his experimental aircraft. Unfortunately for Curtiss he became the main focus of the Wrights’ wrath and in their eyes their greatest nemesis … in 1913 the Wrights won lawsuits for patent infringement against Curtiss et al, when US courts ruled that ailerons fell under the ambit of the Wright patent. Consequently Curtiss and his business partners (Aerial Experiment Association – AEA) were forced into bankruptcy[4].
The Wrights’ broad litigious reach was generally less effectively outside of the USA. Many European inventors were able to escape paying the patent fees, sometimes with the aid of sympathetic European courts. The Wrights’ demands for royalties were ignored or evaded, or if they were contested, one strategy was to stretch the case out until the patents had expired[5].
The Wright brothers’ obsession with enforcing their legal patent❈ had wider ramifications for the industry to the point of retarding progress in the development of US aviation. Beyond the early breakthroughs in lateral control, the brothers did not really add much to their aviation achievements (consequently in these years Curtiss pulled far ahead of them in design innovation). After America entered the Great War in 1917, the brothers’ perversely rigorous enforcement of the patents left America woefully short of new airplanes at a time they were desperately needed. The upshot was that the US forces in WWI had to secure French fighter planes for their military pilots[6].
Because of the Wrights’ unwavering stance on their patents (after 1912 Orville alone, as Wilbur died that year), resentment towards the brothers was strong, they were accused of being greedy by licensees, eg, by demanding “money first” from prospective buyers BEFORE giving a demonstration of the prototype flyer, or by setting too high a royalty fee (at one point demanding 20% of sales); after a string of fatal air crashes in Wright planes Orville Wright lost sympathy with the public by attributing the accidents solely to “pilot error” (characteristically giving no consideration to the fact that the Wrights might be at fault for not having tried to make improvements to their prototype Flyer’s basic design[7].
Eventually, inevitably, the US authorities moved to close down the Wrights’ monopoly. A patent pool system was introduced in 1917 whereby all aircraft manufacturers in the country joined an association requiring the payment of a relatively small fee for patent use. The pooling of the aircraft patents signalled the end of the Wrights’ patent wars … by this time Orville had already sold his interest in the Wright Company at handsome profit and moved on to other (non-aviation) ventures[8].
PostScript: Curtiss-Wright parallels
Intriguingly, Curtiss shared a common background with the brothers Wright, like them he began as a bicycle shop owner, designing, building and repairing bikes in small-town USA. But before moving into aviation Curtiss excelled in another area, motorcycles … he began designing V-8 powered motorcycles. The adventurous Curtiss even raced them, winning several races and setting a world record speed of 136 mph (earning himself for a brief period the tag of “the fastest man on earth”).
Despite the early setbacks at the hands of the Wrights, Curtiss went on to have a stellar career in aviation (and in naval aviation), designing practical seaplanes and airplanes, the viability of which he happily demonstrated in public (cf. the Wrights who tended to shroud their aircraft projects in secrecy). With financial backing from the famous inventor Alexander Graham Bell and from Bell’s wife, Curtiss’ international prize-winning planes (“The June Bug”, “The Albany Flyer”, “The Jenny”) completed the first publicly witnessed flight and the first long distance flight in North America (220 km, Albany to New York City). Curtiss, far superior to the Wrights as a pragmatic, go-ahead businessman, quickly became a multimillionaire. Curtiss possessed a flair for publicising and promoting his inventions that the brothers did not exhibit, and turned his inventions into rapid sales of units[9]. In a superb irony given Orville’s fierce, lifelong antipathy to Glenn Curtiss, the two aviation companies eventually merged in 1929❦ to form the Curtiss-Wright Corporation[10].
◖◗ See also the related November 2014 blog article ‘Wright or Not Right?: the Controversy over who really was “First in Flight?” ‘
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❈ the stock joke the Curtiss people liked to tell at the time went … (the two brothers were so litigious that) every time somebody jumped in the air and waved his arms, the Wrights would demand a patent royalty or threaten to sue!
❦ by which time neither man had active roles in their respective companies any longer … Notwithstanding that Orville still objected to the new corporation’s title listing Curtiss’ name first!
[1] activating the pitch (moving the aircraft’s nose up and down) and yaw (moving the nose side-to-side) of the projectile was the previous, understood (but unsuccessful) method of controlling flight … the Wrights reasoned that these worked only in unison with the third element of rotation, roll (lateral movement through the novel wing-warping feature of the Flyer). Warping (twisting) of part of the wing on either side causes the plane to roll or bank in that direction, Phaedra Hise, ‘The 1903 Wright Flyer’, Air & Space Magazine (Smithsonian), March 2003. The addition of twin-rudders to the rear of the 1902 model of the Flyer helped stabilise it and prevent it spinning out of control, ‘Rudder – Yaw (Wright 1903 Flyer)’, (National Aeronautics and Space Administration), www.wright.nasa.gov
[2] as W J Boyne described it, the Wrights went about “systematically sueing anyone suspected of infringing their patents, which really meant everyone attempting to make a living from building or flying airplanes”, Walter J Boyne’s “World Aviation History”, (‘The Wright Brothers: The Other Side of the Coin’), 2008, www.wingsoverkansas.com
[3] Sparks of Invention: Need for Speed, (Series 1, episode 5, TV documentary 2015, 9-NOW Network, screened 23-Oct-2016); ‘Wilbur Wright to Octave Chanute’, (letter, Dayton, Oh. 20-Jan-1910), cited in ‘Wright Brothers patent war’, Wikipedia, www.en.m.wikipedia.org
[3] ibid.
[4] ‘Wright Brothers patent wars’, ibid.
[5] ibid.
[6] ibid.
[7] Boyne, op.cit.; Phaedra Hise, ‘How the Wright Brothers Blew It’, Forbes, 19-Nov-2003, www.forbes.com
[8] Wright Brothers patent wars’, op.cit.
[9] ‘About the Man – Glenn H. Curtiss’, Glenn H. Curtiss Museum, www.glennhcurtissmuseum.org
[10] Flying (magazine), ‘Century of Flight’, 130(12), Dec 2003
La Perouse is a quiet little coastal suburb in Sydney’s south overlooking the entrance to Botany Bay. At the end of Anzac Parade where the grassy headland starts, the 394 bus loops round and stops at the bus shed before commencing its inward journey back to Circular Quay. The sign on the side of the shed announces “La Perouse – Australia’s French Connection”.
Lapérouse
The suburb, as most Sydneysiders probably know, derives its name from the French explorer, Jean-Francois de Galaup, better known as the comte de la Perouse. Lapérouse whilst on a scientific expedition of the Pacific landed here in 1788, building a stockade, an observatory and a vegetable garden in Phillip Bay (anticipating the later Chinese residents). Lapérouse’s men explored the bay area for six weeks before sailing off north to the Solomon Islands and disappearing from sight for good❈.
The Aboriginal connection
Today La Perouse is a pleasant day trip for picknickers, beach goers and bush walkers, and a haunt for scuba divers, snorkellers and fishermen. It is also part of the traditional lands of the Dharawal people, the clans of Gweagal and Kameygal, signifying over 7,500 years of continuous indigenous occupation in La Perouse/Yarra Bay[1]. From the 1890s until deep into the 20th century Yarra Bay was the site of an aboriginal mission.
Unsurprisingly some sections of the aboriginal community have taken umbrage at what they see as white society’s recent efforts to re-brand La Perouse with the “French Connection” tag – an emphasis which they see as taking some gloss off the significance of indigenous Australia’s unbroken bond with the area. A recent manifestation of a divergence of opinion on this has concerned the content and orientation of the Lapérouse Museum on the headland (formerly a cable station connecting the telegraph to New Zealand). The La Perouse Aboriginal Land Council’s position is that rather than solely telling the (six week) Lapérouse story in Australia as intended by the French-Australian community, the Museum should reflect an integrated history, ie, the French chapter of the La Perouse story is but one part in a much longer narrative of thousands of years of indigenous occupation and land use in the area[2].
At the beginning of the 20th century La Perouse started to move ahead as a place to live. Part of the drive came from Redfern counsellor and developer George William Howe. Howe with William Rose set up the Yarra Bay Pleasure Grounds. The pleasure grounds popularity benefitted from the tram line being extended to La Perouse in 1902. Howe built 72 huts for campers and fishermen, as well as refreshment rooms[3], a boatshed and stables to accommodate 150 horses. As a result weekend visitor and holidayer numbers from the city increased.
The famous snake pit (Source: WeekendNotes)
A form of Sunday sideshow entertainment at La Perouse developed and some aboriginals earned money from the emerging tourist industry by selling boomerangs and souvenirs such as decorative shell necklaces[4]. The other prominent sideshow element at La Perouse was the snake pit show which originated near the tram loop around 1909. By 1919 the show was run by George Cann, a curator of reptiles at Taronga Zoo. Cann the snake man’s performances drew crowds from the suburbs weekly. Cann continued running the shows until 1965 and created a dynasty of “snake men” with his sons (George Jr and John) maintaining the family’s snake pit shows until 2010 (when it was taken over by the Hawkesbury Herpetological Society)[5].
Another lure for visitors from the suburbs was a kind of cultural curiosity – a chance for many to view the “native inhabitants” of La Perouse (government practice had been to remove indigenous people from the more populated parts of Sydney). This weekly influx of tourists however caused problems for Aboriginal Reserve inhabitants (leading to restrictions on their freedom of movement – eventually they were confined effectively to the Reserve). After WWII the population of La Perouse underwent further diversification with many recent refugees from the Baltic States and other war-ravished places in Europe ending up living there[6].
Bare Island: The Russians are coming? … maybe not
Captain Cook took special note of this small, rocky bluff of an island at the point just off La Perouse in 1770 (giving it its name “small, bare island” in his journal). By the 1870s the British colonial authorities started to take Sydney’s security more seriously in the context of a perceived push into the Pacific from Tsarist Russia. Botany Bay had long been thought vulnerable as a “back door” entry point to Sydney for a hostile power⊗. To protect Sydney’s southern flank from a surprise Russian invasion, a fortification was built on Bare Island in the 1880s. The emplacements on Bare Island were supplemented by a second battery at Henry Head to the east of Bare Island, a small promontory jutting out from the coast. The Bare Island fort was part of a network of foreshore military installations built by the colonial government in Sydney to deal with a Russians menace that never eventuated❦.
Henry Head emplacements
Designed by the military engineer Peter Stratchley, construction was in the hands of colonial architect James Barnet. Unfortunately the construction was a shambles, the materials were of poor quality and the structure started to crumble before it was completed. Furthermore the fort’s armaments were out-of-date by the time it became operational. A Royal Commission ensued in 1890, finding Barnet culpable of incompetence and effectively ended his architectural career. By 1902 the fort was decommissioned and its defence role wound up within a few years.
Bare Is.
By 1912 Bare Island had become (Australia’s first) war veterans home, housing retired military personnel from earlier wars that Australians saw action in (Crimean War, Maori Wars, Sudan, etc). It remained a veterans’ home until 1963 (except for 1941-1945 when the army re-occupied and re-armed it as part of the coastal defence against the Japanese threat – its guns however were never fired in anger during WWII). From 1963-1975 the fort was home to the Randwick (Council) Historical Society Museum. Since 1967 it has been administered by the National Parks and Wildlife Service (the eastern strip of the coast near the NSW Golf Club, part of Kamay Botany Bay National Park, has retained its dense bush land texture). The firing of live ammo from the fort’s nine and ten inch guns ceased in 1974[7].
La Perouse, Happy Valley, a refuge in the Depression
In 1929 La Perouse and its environs was still somewhat isolated from more central and built-up parts of Sydney. With the effects of the Great Depression hitting home in the early 1930s (pernicious levels of unemployment becoming the norm), many such affected people converged on La Perouse and Yarra Bay. Shantytowns shot up, the largest (c.3,000 occupants in 130 encampments) acquired the name Happy Valley (other camps for the poor went by names such as “Frog Hollow” and “Hill 60”). The occupants of Happy Valley scrounged the bush for materials to construct meagre huts which were hardly better than “lean-tos”유. Eventually there were calls for the squatters to be evicted, the well-heeled, socially-conscious members of the close by NSW Golf Club objected to their unsightly presence and the mayor of Randwick added his voice to the calls[8]. By 1938/39 the camps had been shutdown[9] and the state government had to create cheap public housing to cater for the unemployed.
The Chinese Presence
La Perouse with its ample supply of land established flourishing market gardens early in the colony. After the onset of the gold rushes control of the market gardens gradually shifted from European settlers to the Chinese. By 1900 La Perouse’s market gardens had largely fallen into the hands of city merchants from Dixon Street and Hay Street who were sponsoring low-paid labourers from China to do the work. By the 1920s the Chinese market gardens found themselves under pressure from large-scale agribusiness.[10]. Later when the unemployed came to La Perouse in the 1930s to live rent free in the scrub it was the Chinese gardeners and the local fishermen that they turned to for food to survive[11].
La Perouse as shown above boasts a rich and varied past, a “French connection” as the sign proclaims? … yes but the suburb is much more as well – an unbroken link of aboriginal custodianship stretching back to a Australia of an ancient age, a Chinese agricultural connection, a military installation of short-lived significance, a seaside pleasure grounds and a haven for the poor in time of economic catastrophe.
Bastille Day celebrations 2013
Postscript – the lingering French Connection:
The second European to be buried on the east coast of Australia[12] was a Frenchman, he was Pere Laurent Receveur, a member of the 1788 Lapérouse expedition. According to the La Perouse monument dedicated to his memory, he was a “Priest of Friars Minor and a scientist”. Lapérouse himself has a monument on the headland (constructed by the Baron de Bougainville in 1825 and funded by the French Republic). Every year on 14 July (Bastille Day) at La Perouse headland the local French community commemorates Lapérouse’s landing, replete with late 18th century French military uniforms, weapons and canons. The 2016 event included a dramatic touch of Napoleonic war re-enactment.
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❈ Captain James Cook (1770), and later Governor Arthur Phillip and comte de la Pérouse, all visited this spot on the northern shore of Botany Bay. Phillip, arriving a few days before Lapérouse, rejected the peninsula out of hand as a possible site of settlement, declaring it a swampy, ‘unhealthy’ place and quickly moved on up the coast, deciding on Sydney Cove as the best place to found the colony
⊗ already, earlier in the 19th century local surveillance had been a priority … a castellated watchtower (at one stage used as a customs house) on the headland was built to keep an eye on smugglers in Botany Bay
❦ the other emplacements are (or were) located at South Head, Middle Head, Georges Heights and North Head
유 a lucky minority of the unemployed managed to secure one of Howe’s huts
[1] the Timbery family, members of which still reside in La Perouse today, can trace their descendants back to pre-European times, Julia Kensy, ‘La Perouse’, Dictionary of Sydney, 2008, http://dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/la_perouse, viewed 19 October 2016
[2] R Sutton, ‘La Perouśe’s unknown historical significance’, (‘SBS News’), 29-Nov-2012, www.sbs.com
[3] all the huts were demolished in the 1960s, ‘Howe Refreshment Rooms’, Dictionary of Sydney, http://dictionaryofsydney.org/
[4] Kensy, op.cit.
[5] ibid
[6] ibid
[7] ‘Bare Island Fort’, (NSW Office of Environment & Heritage), www.environment.nsw.gov.au; ‘History of Bare Island, La Perouse’, (24-Mar-2015), www.postcardsydney.com
[8] ‘Happy Valley, Chinese Market Gardens and Migrant Camps’, (‘At the Beach, Contact, Migration and Settlement in South East Sydney’), Migrant Heritage Centre of NSW, www.migration heritage.nsw.gov.au
[9] except for Frog Hollow an aboriginal camp which was closed in 1954, Kensy, op.cit.
[10] ibid. ; ‘Chinese market gardens’, (NSW Office of Environment & Heritage), www.environment.nsw.gov.au
[11] the government’s contribution to the shantytowners’ plight was to provide one pint of milk per day provided by the Dairy Farmers’ Co-op, ‘Happy Valley, op.cit.; ‘Blast from the Past – HAPPY VALLEY’, LAPEROUSE – Social Change not Climate Change, www.laperouse.info
[12] the first was Forby Sutherland, a Scottish seaman on Cook’s 1770 voyage to Australia. Sutherland died and was buried at Kurnell in what is now called the Sutherland Shire, named in honour of the AB seaman, ‘Forby Sutherland’, Monument Australia, www.monumentaustralia.org.au
A dilution of Russian connectivity among Kaliningrad’s population?
Eighty-seven per cent of the population of Russia’s Kalininskaya province (out of 941,873 residents (2010 Census)) are ethnic Russians. Because of Kaliningrad’s geographic isolation from the rest of the Russian Federation (it is a distance of 1,095km from Moscow), it depends on its trade links with nearby EU states. When Vladimir Putin embarked on trade wars with the West over Crimea, Kaliningrad was hit hardest by the ensuing food embargo. In this environment, proximity allowed many Kaliningraders to venture outside the domestic Russian orbit – especially going to Poland on shopping sprees without requiring visas. School children in the Oblast, many of whom have studied in neighbouring Lithuania, Poland and Germany, have only hazy recognition of the names of Russian cities. Kaliningraders, who can afford to, have been buying properties in EU countries¹.(Photo: www.britannia.com)
Some meaningful Kaliningrad statistics:
► 25% of residents have Schengen (Treaty) visas► 60% have foreign passports
► 34% identify as SBNR (spiritual but not religious) cf. 30.9% Russian Orthodox and 33.1% Atheist or non-religious (2012 official survey, Arena – Atlas of Religions and Nationalities in Russia)
The cumulative effect of all these developments has seen a trend, as Professor V Shulgin observed in a controversial article on www.stoleti.ru, involving an identity shift (especially in younger Kaliningraders) away from Russian nationalism to a more liberal and European identity².
Prof Shulgin paid a personal price for expressing a pluralistic opinion that the Kremlin did not want to hear voiced, but the question remains – with so many younger residents of the Oblast perceiving themselves as European – will that eventually snowball into a collective desire by Kaliningraders to join the European Union? Given Moscow’s firm grip on Kaliningrad at the moment❈, this doesn’t appear on the horizon in the short-term at least.
In 2006 Moscow introduced a SpecialEconomic Zone in Kaliningrad. This was intended to provide duty-free trade opportunities in the Oblast and transform Kaliningrad into Russia’s version of Hong Kong or Singapore. The SEZ however failed miserably, it was unable to achieve the necessary economic integration into the Baltic Sea region³, nor did it create a viable tourist trade. Kaliningrad hasn’t had a good track record with SEZs – in 1996 a Yantar✺ Special Economic Zone was started but it has achieved only limited success⊙. The closure of Kaliningrad’s SEZ in April 2016 has left the Oblast with questions marks over its economic direction from here⁴.
A conflict zone? See also the preceding blog which details how Kalingrad in the 2010s has become a central pawn in a highly dangerous regional hotspot in north-eastern Europe:
❈ despite the Russian Republic not having a contiguous border with its most western oblast
✺ yantar is amber – the region’s premier mineral
⊙ Kaliningrad was part of the Amber Road in ancient times, a trade route for transporting amber from the North and Baltic Seas to the Mediterranean Sea and Imperial Rome
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¹ ‘The Invasion of Crimea is Hurting Russia’s Other Enclave’, (Interview with Ola Cichowlas), Forbes, 6-Jun-2014, www.forbes.com; P Goble, ‘From Siberia to Kaliningrad: the fledging independence movements gaining traction in Russia’, The Guardian (London), 16-Aug-2014, www.theguardian.com
² cited in R Piet, ‘Kaliningrad: The Last wall in Europe’, (19-Nov-2014), Aljazeera, www.aljazeera.com
³ at its core the economic failures had political roots … Moscow maintained tight reins on the province’s economic activities because of the old fear that giving it too much autonomy might create the conditions for it to secede from the Republic, S Sukhankin, ‘Kaliningrad: Russia’s stagnant enclave’, Economic Council on Foreign Relations, 31-Mar-2016, www.ecfr.eu
⁴ D Crickus, ‘Kaliningrad: Russia’s Own Breakaway Region?’, The National Interest, 21-Mar-2014, www.nationalinterest.com
Eighty years ago this month the IOC’s most controversial Olympiad was held. 1936 was a momentous year for the Olympic movement – the official Summer Olympic Games were held by the Nazis in August in Berlin. Back in February of that year another part of Germany, Garmisch-Partenkirchen*, had hosted the Winter Olympiad[1]. And in July there had been, or should have been, an alternative, anti-Nazi Olympiad in Barcelona … more of that later.
Never before had a modern games been manipulated for propaganda purposes to the extent that the Germans under Hitler did at Berlin. When the Summer Games were awarded in 1931 Germany was still under the governance of the democratic (but ill-fated) Weimar Republic, but with Hitler coming to power two years later Germany swiftly took on a more unsavoury and increasingly sinister complexion. The Third Reich was soon savagely attacking the liberties of Jews, communists and the Roma (gypsies) … and much worse was to come!
(Image: www.olympic-museum.de)
As it got closer to the event there were questions asked within the Olympic community about whether the Games should go ahead in Berlin. The Nazi regime’s transparent violations of human rights at home, and it’s failure to behave like a good international citizen (eg, pulling out of the League of Nations in 1933, illegally occupying the Rhineland in March 1936, etc), prompted a number of nations to consider boycotting the event.
In America public opinion was far from consensual on the issue. 500,000 Americans signed petitions demanding an alternate site” to Berlin and several newspapers, including the New York Times registered objections to US participation [Peter Carroll, The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigades, (1994)].
f=”http://www.7dayadventurer.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/image-18.jpg”> Berlin olympischstadion 1936[/capt
The US Olympic Committee debated the issue at great length. American Olympic association heavyweight, Avery Brundage (later controversial head of the IOC) was “gung-ho” for going ahead with participating, running the (now hackneyed) line that politics had no place in sport. The head of the American Amateur Athletic Union, JT Mahoney, and many others, were in favour of boycotting. The authoritarian patrician Brundage was widely thought to be anti-Semitic and racist (in 1935 he alleged there was “a Jewish-communist conspiracy” trying to prevent the US team’s participation in Berlin). Ultimately Brundage’s lobby narrowly carried the AAAU vote in favour of going. The American decision to participate in Berlin was pivotal in salvaging the Games for the host city[2].
Brundage, defender of the Nazi OlympiadInternational opposition to the Nazi Olympics remained very vocal in the lead-up to the event. Spain and Barcelona in particular had a vested interest, having lost the bid to hold the 1936 Games to Berlin (the German city won easily, 43 votes to 16)♔. SASI (the international federation of workers’ sports) decided to hold the next instalment of its Workers’ Olympiads (see my previous post) in Barcelona in 1936. The Catalan Committee in Favour of Popular Sport (CCEP), boosted by the election of the leftist Popular Front in Spain in February 1936, worked with SASI to plan and prepare the Barcelona Olympiad♕, scheduled to begin just two weeks before the start of the official (Berlin) Games … clearly timed to steal Nazi Germany’s (and the Führer’s) thunder!
(Source: Bernard N. Danchik Papers; ALBA 033; Box 2; Tamiment Library / Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, NYU)
In the end, although only two countries, the USSR and Spain, withdrew from the Berlin Games in favour of the Barcelona Olympiade, support for the Barcelona alternative games was widespread. The Olympiad was not state-sponsored in the fashion of the IOC carnival but backing came from progressive bodies and associations within western countries (trade unions, socialists, communists, anarchists, syndicalists, etc.). The Peoples’ Olympiad was also supported by various individuals – eg, dissident Germans with first-hand experience of the Hitler state and Jewish-American athletes opposed to Nazism[3].
SASI preached a cooperative and fraternal spirit to the 6,000 athletes from 22 countries who committed to participate. Whereas the Berlin Games were perceived as an affront to the Olympic ideals, Barcelona was intended to be based on a foundation of international solidarity that would elevate the “brotherhood of men and races” and “show the sport-loving masses (a Olympiad) that is neither chauvinistic or commercialised”, one devoid of the “sensational publicity of stars” that was characteristic of the IOC-run Games[4].
The organising committee for the Peoples’ Olympiad employed an emblem which reinforced the SASI themes of solidarity, brotherhood and world peace … three male athletes standing defiantly side-by-side, one white, one coloured and one (to all appearances) of mixed or Asian ethnicity (no females in the poster to be seen however … inclusiveness apparently hadn’t extended that far by then!)[5].
Most of the mainstream IOC sports had been slated for inclusion in Barcelona and one or two former ones like amateur rugby revived. Also tacked on to the Olympiad were a variety of cultural activities such as folk dancing, theatre, music, chess♚ and an “Art Olympiad” (the promoters advertised the event also as a “Folk Olympiad”)[6].
Avery Brundage and the IOC were not alone in condemning the ‘rebel’ Olympiad in Catalonia, the Spanish right-wing press slammed the idea saying, variously: it would be a “second class Olympics” because it was open to all-comers, it was a “Jewish-communist” games, etc.[7]. On the Left the Spanish Marxist Workers’ Party (POUM) opposed the Peoples’ Olympiad on two grounds – the preoccupation with sports was “a waste of time” distracting the working class from its ‘proper’ objectives, and they mistrusted the motives of the democratic socialists (ie, SASI)[8]. Another instance of the lack of unity of the European Left in the face of the threat from the totalitarian Right.
El Estadio de Montjuic
In July 1936 on the eve of the games opening, the Peoples’ Olympiad was thwarted when the Spanish military led by General Franco staged a coup against the republican government. The outbreak of a full-scale civil war in the country resulted in the Olympiad’s cancellation. It was a double blow for the city of Barcelona as it had earlier also lost out on the 1924 Olympic bid (to Paris). Some of the overseas athletes A number of the overseas athletes who had already arrived in Barcelona stayed, joining the Republic side and fighting in the International Brigades against Franco’s Falange forces. The Berlin Olympics kicked off as planned on 1st August with the politics indeed overshadowing the sport[9]. Barcelona and its Montjuïc Stadium had to wait another 56 years before it finally got its chance to hold the Olympic Games in 1992.
_________________________________________
* the infrastructure for the sports tournament was already in place – the main stadium and hotels (to be converted into a state-of-the-art Olympic village) had been constructed for the 1929 Barcelona International Exposition and upgraded for the city’s bid for the 1936 Games
♚ Chess has a long tradition (since 1924) of staging its own brand of international Olympics, the Chess Olympiads, now held biennially
─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─
[1] such was the furore that surrounded the Berlin Olympics, the Garmisch-Partenkirchen Games, comparatively, have been largely overlooked by history … Hitler did take a more low-key approach to the Bavarian event, however it was not entirely without controversy, eg, the “Jews not wanted” signs prominently displayed in the town had to be hastily removed from sight (albeit only temporarily); the German army undertook military manoeuvres in the vicinity during the Games, A Meyhoff & G Pfeil, ‘Garmisch-Partenkirchen’s Uncomfortable Past: German Ski Resort Represses Memory of 1936 Winter Olympics’, Spiegel International Online, 22-Jan 2010, www.spiegel.de
[2] H Gordon, Australia and the Olympics ; ‘The Movement to Boycott the Olympics of 1936’, (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum), www.ushmm.org
[3] British support of Barcelona (and opposition to Berlin) was formidable, promising a big representation of UK athletes for the Olimpíada Popular, TUC (Trade Union Congress), ‘Labor Chest – Opposition to the Nazi Games, British Workers’ Sports Associations’ (Press Release), 9-Jun 1936), in Documents on the Popular Olympiad from “Trabajadores: The Spanish Civil War through the eyes of organised labor”, BTU Congress (Modern Research Centre, University of Warwick), www.contentdm.warwick.ac.uk
[4] ibid.
[5] J Freedland, ‘The Anti-Nazi Games that never were’, Evening Standard (Lon.), 16-Jul 2012
[6] ‘The Peoples’ Olympics in Barcelona’, http://iberianature.com/
[7] G Calomé & J Sureda, ‘Sport and Industrial Relations’ (1913-1939): the 1936 Popular Olympiad’, (1995), www.ddd.uab.cat
[8] ibid.
[9] Photos of the Berlin Games at the time of the event capture how completely Nazi propaganda lorded it over the ideals of the Olympics – the massive Nazi swastika symbol is seen to dwarf the Olympic Rings at venues, ‘The Olympics: Playing Political Games’, (Modern Research Centre, University of Warwick), www2.warwick.ac.uk
1936 was a momentous year for the Olympic movement, the official, IOC-sanctioned Olympic Games was hosted by Nazi Germany’s Berlin. Never before had a modern games been manipulated for propaganda purposes to the extent that the Germans under Hitler did in Berlin 80 years ago this month. When Berlin was awarded the Games in 1931, Germany was still under the governance of the democratic Weimar Republic, but with Hitler coming to power two years later Germany swiftly took on a more unsavoury and increasingly sinister complexion. The Third Reich was soon savagely attacking the liberties of Jews, communists, the Roma (gypsies) and other targeted groups of German society … and much worse was to come!
As it got closer to the event there were questions asked within the Olympic community about whether the Games should go ahead in Berlin. The Nazi regime’s transparent violations of human rights at home, and it’s failure to behave like a good international citizen (eg, pulling out of the League of Nations in 1933, illegally occupying the Rhineland in March 1936, etc), prompted a number of nations to consider boycotting the event.
The US Olympic Committee debated the issue at great length. American Olympic association heavyweight, Avery Brundage (later controversial head of the IOC) was “gung-ho” for going ahead with participating, running the (now hackneyed) line that politics had no place in sport. The head of the American Amateur Athletic Union, JT Mahoney, and many others, were in favour of boycotting. The patrician Brundage was widely thought to be anti-Semitic and racist (in 1935 he alleged there was “a Jewish-communist conspiracy” trying to prevent the US team’s participation in Berlin). Ultimately Brundage’s lobby narrowly carried the AAAU vote in favour of going. The American decision to participate in Berlin was pivotal in salvaging the Games for the host city[1].
Catalonia’s Olympiad Stadium
International opposition to the Nazi Olympics remained very vocal in the lead-up to the event. Spain and Barcelona in particular had a vested interest, having lost the bid to hold the 1936 Games to Berlin (the German city won easily, 43 votes to 16)♔. SASI (the international federation of workers’ sports) decided to hold the next instalment of its Workers’ Olympiads (see my previous post) in Barcelona in 1936. The Catalan Committee in Favour of Popular Sport (CCEP), boosted by the election of the leftist Popular Front in Spain in February 1936, worked with SASI to plan and prepare the Barcelona Olympiad♕, scheduled to begin just two weeks before the start of the official (Berlin) Games (clearly timed to steal Nazi Germany’s thunder!).
Politics and sport, the National Socialist way
In the end, although only two countries, the USSR and Spain, withdrew from the Berlin Games in favour of the Barcelona Olympiade, support for the Barcelona alternative games was widespread. The Olympiad was not state-sponsored in the fashion of the IOC carnival but backing came from progressive bodies and associations within western countries (trade unions, socialists, communists, anarchists, syndicalists, etc.). The Peoples’ Olympiad was also supported by various individuals – eg, dissident Germans with first-hand experience of the Hitler state and Jewish-American athletes opposed to Nazism[2].
SASI preached a cooperative and fraternal spirit to the 6,000 athletes from 22 countries who committed to participate. Whereas the Berlin Games were perceived as an affront to the Olympic ideals, Barcelona was intended to be based on a foundation of international solidarity that would elevate the “brotherhood of men and races” and “show the sport-loving masses (a Olympiad) that is neither chauvinistic or commercialised”, one devoid of the “sensational publicity of stars” that was characteristic of the IOC-run Games[3].
Olimpíada Popular poster: International worker-athlete brotherhood
The organising committee for the Peoples’ Olympiad employed an emblem which reinforced the SASI themes of solidarity, brotherhood and world peace … three male athletes standing defiantly side-by-side, one white, one coloured and one (to all appearances) of mixed or Asian ethnicity (no females in the poster to be seen however … inclusiveness apparently hadn’t extended that far by then!)[4].
Most of the mainstream IOC sports had been slated for inclusion in Barcelona and one or two former ones like amateur rugby revived. Also tacked on to the Olympiad were a variety of cultural activities such as folk dancing, theatre, music, chess♚ and an “Art Olympiad” (the promoters advertised the event also as a “Folk Olympiad”)[5].
Avery Brundage and the IOC were not alone in condemning the ‘rebel’ Olympiad in Catalonia, the Spanish right-wing press slammed the idea saying, variously: it would be a “second class Olympics” because it was open to all-comers, it was a “Jewish-communist” games, etc.[6]. On the Left the Spanish Marxist Workers’ Party (POUM) opposed the Peoples’ Olympiad on two grounds – the preoccupation with sports was “a waste of time” distracting the working class from its ‘proper’ objectives, and they mistrusted the motives of the democratic socialists (ie, SASI)[7]. Another instance of the lack of unity of the European Left in the face of the threat from the totalitarian Right.
Estadio Montjuïc
In July 1936 on the eve of the games opening, the Peoples’ Olympiad was thwarted when the Spanish military led by General Franco staged a coup against the republican government. The outbreak of a full-scale civil war in the country resulted in the Olympiad’s cancellation. Some of the overseas athletes A number of the overseas athletes who had already arrived in Barcelona stayed, joining the Republic side and fighting in the International Brigades against Franco’s Falange forces. The Berlin Olympics kicked off as planned on 1st August with the politics indeed overshadowing the sport[8]. Barcelona and its Montjuïc Stadium had to wait another 56 years before it finally got its chance to hold the Olympic Games in 1992.
유유유유유유유유유유유유유유유유유유유유유유유유
♔ a double blow for Barcelona as it also earlier had lost the 1924 Olympic bid (to Paris)
♕ the infrastructure for the sports tournament was already in place – the main stadium and hotels (to be converted into a state-of-the-art Olympic village) had been constructed for the 1929 Barcelona International Exposition and upgraded for the city’s bid for the 1936 Games
♚ Chess has a long tradition (since 1924) of staging its own brand of international Olympics, the Chess Olympiads, now held biennially
─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─
[1] H Gordon, Australia and the Olympics ; ‘The Movement to Boycott the Olympics of 1936’, (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum), www.ushmm.org
[2] British support of Barcelona (and opposition to Berlin) was formidable, promising a big representation of UK athletes for the Olimpíada Popular, TUC (Trade Union Congress), ‘Labor Chest – Opposition to the Nazi Games, British Workers’ Sports Associations’ (Press Release), 9-Jun 1936), in Documents on the Popular Olympiad from “Trabajadores: The Spanish Civil War through the eyes of organised labor”, BTU Congress (Modern Research Centre, University of Warwick), www.contentdm.warwick.ac.uk
[3] ibid.
[4] J Freedland, ‘The Anti-Nazi Games that never were’, Evening Standard (Lon.), 16-Jul 2012
[5] ‘The Peoples’ Olympics in Barcelona’, http://iberianature.com/
[6] G Calomé & J Sureda, ‘Sport and Industrial Relations’ (1913-1939): the 1936 Popular Olympiad’, (1995), www.ddd.uab.cat
[7] ibid.
[8] Photos of the Berlin Games at the time of the event capture how completely Nazi propaganda lorded it over the ideals of the Olympics – the massive Nazi swastika symbol is seen to dwarf the Olympic Rings at venues, ‘The Olympics: Playing Political Games’, (Modern Research Centre, University of Warwick), www2.warwick.ac.uk
The second week of the Rio Olympics is now in full swing with the track and field disciplines having taken over from the swimming events. The conspicuous media coverage of the ‘unofficial'(sic) medal tallies in these games and the keen, vicarious interest of patriotic supporters in the performances of their national teams is as high as ever. By way of contrast to today’s highly competitive and commercialised IOC Olympics, I thought it might be interesting to take a look at a very different kind of Olympiad, one lacking in individual competitiveness, centring largely round the Second World in the 1920s and 1930s.
During the interwar period (1919-1939) the newly-communist state of the USSR isolated itself from the capitalist world, this also meant opting out of the western system of sport, including the quadrennial Olympic Games♜. The USSR leaders viewed the Olympics as a capitalist and inherently exploitative and chauvinistic sporting event run by and for the West’s elites¹. The Bolsheviks certainly wanted to engage the Soviet citizenry especially its youth in physical activity, but wanted to create a sporting and physical culture that was ‘proletarian’ in nature to match the state’s avowed ideological position². Eschewing the IOC games’ ‘bourgeois’ individualism and record-seeking, the Soviets envisaged a sporting movement that would be class-based, collectivist and mass-oriented³.
Spartakiad 1931
As an alternative to the Olympics the Soviet Union in the early 1920s introduced the Spartakiad⁴, an ongoing, international multi-sports event sponsored by itself. The state organisation responsible for organising the event was called Red Sport International♔ (RSI or Sportintern), under the aegis of the powerful Comintern (the Communist International). The Spartikiad was the brainchild of RSI’s first president, Nikolai Podvoisky who came to the position from being Vsevobuch (responsible for organising the military training of Soviet youth).
RSI was formed in opposition to the IOC’s First World-dominated Olympics, but also in opposition to the rival Socialist Workers’ Sport International (Ger: Sozialistische Arbeitersport Internationale, SASI) which was founded as the Lucerne Sport International and based in that German-speaking Swiss city in 1920 (see Postscript). SASI organised a series of Workers’ Olympiads over the ensuing two decades.
The early (unofficial) Spartakiads were purely Soviet Republic affairs involving formations of the Red Army and Spartak Youth Physical Culture. Later participants included trade unions, the Dynamo Physical Culture Sports Society, the Patriotic Defence Society (DOSAAF) and other labour-based sports clubs and associations. From 1928 to 1937 athletes from sports clubs and associations outside of the USSR were invited to take part in the Spartakiads.
RSI Vs SASI
Predictably the separate sports tournaments of the USSR-sponsored RSI and the SASI (backed by the German parliamentary socialist Left and a mixture of independent socialists, syndicalists and anarchists) became vehicles to endorse the virtues of each body’s political stance … the Soviets saw the sporting activities of RSI as opportunities for political education of the masses (although they were quite frustrated at the limited success in this objective). There were calls in the 1920s for SASI and RSI to unify their multi-sport movements and some tentative connections made, but these were made against a backdrop of the non-crystallisation of the Left in Europe. Communists and social democrats committed the fatal political mistake: bickering and fighting with each other rather than focusing on the common enemy, a greater threat to them from fascism and the Far Right in Europe (eg, as happened in Weimar Germany). Ultimately the two workers’ sporting organisations couldn’t bring themselves to merge as the ideological divide between moderate (democratic) Left and Far Left widened⁵.
Both sports internationals were large-scale organisations, each with over two million members by 1928. Both professed to be anti-bourgeois but crucial differences surfaced rapidly. SASI took a strongly anti-militarist stance (the Olympiad’s slogan was “No More War”), and insisted that members follow its policy of political party neutrality (on both counts antithetical to RSI). SASI’s political non-alignment drew hostility from RSI who attacked it for a failure to espouse revolutionary goals, labelling its members as ‘Mensheviks’ and ‘reformists’. RSI also pursued a strategy of trying to ‘white-ant’ SASI by forming communist factions within it. SASI for its part earnestly resisted attempts by RSI to radicalise its movement and impose a communist dominance over it⁶.
Frankfurt WO 1925
SASI held its first Workers’ Olympiad in Frankfurt-am-Main in 1925. Around 150,000 spectators attended and a world record was broken in the 4 x 100 metres women’s relay race. SASI fostered the ideals of international solidarity and brotherhood among athletes, this was in stark contrast to the IOC which had compromised its own Olympic principles by allowing Belgium and France to ban the defeated (so-called) “aggressor nations”, Germany and Austria, from the 1920 and 1924 Olympics♕. The display of national flags and anthems at Worker Olympiads were forbidden … all athletes competed under a single red flag and “The Internationale” was sung at ceremonies which comprised displays of free exercises by a mass of gymnasts. The sense of brotherhood engendered by SASI discouraged the quest for records and the idolisation of individual athletes⁷.
Another feature distinguishing the Workers’ Olympiad from the IOC Olympics was that the best performed athletes were awarded diplomas instead of medals. As well, there was no exclusive accommodation for competitors such as Olympic villages, worker-athletes were billeted with local, working class families⁸.
The 1931 SASI Olympiad in Vienna♚ was probably the most successful tournament, introducing innovative sports such as fitness biathlon (run-and-swim) and “military sport”. It attracted 250,000 spectators (more than attended the 1932 Los Angeles Games), with competitors from 26 countries numbering in excess of 75,000 (cf. a mere 1,410 competing at the LA Games). Workers’ Olympiads were not restricted to elite performers, they were in fact overtly non-elitist … open to participants regardless of ability. SASI’s games had a more socially progressive approach … where the IOC had only 107 women competitors in LA in 1932 (about 7% of the total), Vienna had 25,000 female athletes attend in 1931⁹.
The next Workers’ Olympiad was set to take place in Barcelona in 1936, the same year as the Berlin Olympics, and was intended to be a protest against the IOC’s awarding of the Games to Hitler’s Germany. It was however called off at the 11th hour owing to the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War (see separate post). Hastily rescheduled for 1937♤ in Antwerp, this Olympiad was considerably reduced in scale (15 participating countries) … no German athletes because the Workers’ Gymnastics and Sports Federation of Germany (ATSB) had been outlawed by the Nazi regime upon coming to power. As a partial reconciliation SASI did permit RSI sporting clubs and bodies to take part. Exotic or novel sports at Antwerp included Basque pelota, Czech handball, table tennis, motor cycling and chess¹⁰.
Antwerp WO 1937
The 1937 Workers’ Olympiad was the last of SASI’s sexennial multi-sports labour-centred events, as the outbreak of World War II put paid to plans to hold the 1943 Workers’ Olympiad scheduled to take place in Helsinki. The global war also called a halt to the Moscow-controlled Spartakiads (Red Star International itself was dissolved in the late 1930s).
Emerging from the war as allies of Britain, France and the US, the USSR moved towards a position of greater engagement with the world. Embracing the West, to the extent it did this, was partly a recognition of the need to modernise the Soviet Union, and this was essential if the USSR was going to compete with and overtake the capitalist world in industry, technology and agriculture. A key part of engaging internationally was to integrate into the Western international sports system, starting with the major sports in the USSR, football and weightlifting. The Soviets got themselves onto the world governing federations in these sports and then extended the process to other highly participatory sports¹¹.
As the muscle-flexing of the Cold War was starting up, the USSR recognised the value of using sport to project and enhance great-power status, so a clear aim was re-admission to the Olympic Games fraternity. The Soviets did not try to participate at the 1948 London Games but timed their return for the 1952 Games in Helsinki where they were successful in winning 22 gold medals. At Melbourne in the 1956 Olympics the USSR finished first (above even the mighty USA) in the medal tally. Such a demonstration of communist sporting supremacy over capitalist nations in this world arena brought the Soviet Union a real measure of international recognition¹² (in the same way as Soviet technological breakthroughs in the “Space Race” did).
In the post-war period the Soviet Union continued holding Spartakiads, but they now had new purposes. The Spartikiads and other such massive-scale, multi-sport extravaganzas (kompleksnye sorevnovania) were still PR vehicles to propagate positive values of youth, optimism and world peace. The Spartakiad continued right up to the breakup of the USSR, and its sporting activities bolstered national defence by providing paramilitary training for Soviet youth. But the event was now held one year prior to the Olympics, the Spartakiad became an internal Olympics trial, a mechanism to find and develop new talent for the upcoming Games¹³.
Postscript:
The origins of worker gymnastic and sporting associations and clubs lie in Central Europe in late I9th century and arose out of an increase in workers’ leisure time, eg, Germany led the way with the formation of the Worker-Gymnasts Association (Arbeiter-Turnerbund – ATB) in 1893. Swimming, sailing, athletics and other sports swiftly followed suit. By soon after the turn-of-the century these types of organisations had spread to other European states. In 1913 worker sport associations representing Germany, England, Belgium, France and Austria, met at a congress in Ghent and formed the first International Workers’ Sports Association. The advent of world war the following year however put the IWSA’s activities in abeyance for the duration¹⁴.
₪┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅₪
♜ in this formative stage of the Soviet Union, “Socialism in One Country” was the prevailing strategy of the Party (advanced by Stalin) – consolidating the ‘progressive’ and revolutionary conditions within the USSR, which meant postponing its export to the outside world
♔ originally known as the International Red Sports and Gymnastics Associations, underscoring gymnastics’ place in organised recreational pursuits in this period
♕ both worker sports associations (especially SASI) railed against the IOC for its practice of social exclusion, racist attitudes and failure to promote policies of gender equality at the Games
♚ the same year RSI held an All-Unions Spartakiad in Berlin
♤ the 1937 Summer workers’ event was preceded by an Arbeiter Olympiade Winter in Czechoslovakia
─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─
References:
¹ a succession of aristocratic heads of the IOC (de Coubertin, de Baillet-Latour, Brundage) accentuated the elitist nature of the organisation and the event
² more pragmatically, the government also understood that the proletarian sports meets would provide youth with valuable training for later national military service
³ B Keys, ‘Soviet Sport and Transnational Mass Culture in the 1930s’, Journal of Contemporary History, 38(3), 2003, www.blogs.bu.edu
⁴ the Spartakiad took its name from Spartacus, the 1st century Thracian gladiator who led the slave rebellion against Rome, a deliberate contrast with the Modern Olympics movement which took its inspiration from the Ancient Olympics with its aristocratic nod to the mythology of Greek Gods, ‘Spartakiad’, (Wikipedia), https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spartakiad
⁵ ‘A Workers’ Olympics?’, Workers’ Liberty, 01-Aug 2012,www.workersliberty.org
⁶ DA Steinberg, ‘The Workers’ Sports Internationals 1920-28′, Journal of Contemporary History, 13(2), Apr 1978
⁷ B Kidd, ‘Radical Immigrants and the Workers’ Sports Federation of Canada, 1924-37′, in G Eisen & DK Wiggins [Eds], Ethnicity and Sport in North American History and Culture
⁸ ‘A Workers’ Olympics?’, op.cit.
⁹ ‘Socialist Workers’ Sport International’, (Wikipedia), https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SocialistWorkersSportInternational; ‘Red Sport International’, (Wikipedia), https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RedSportInternational; Kidd, op.cit.
❛❛Life is all right in America,
If you are all-white in America ❜❜
~ Stephen Sondheim, West Side Story
❛❛Travel is fatal to prejudice❜❜ – Mark Twain (inscription on the cover of the 1949 edition of ‘The Green Book’)
“Carry your Green Book with you … you may need it!” (the publication’s motto)
༄࿓༄࿓༄࿓༄࿓
An earlier (and subsequently) a rival publication from the US Black community▼
In the early 1930s an African-American postal employee from New York, Victor Hugo Green, came up with the idea of producing a book for Black Americans to guide them in travelling safely around their own country. Green got some inspiration from the Jewish-American press which for several years had been publishing travel guides for its community’s travellers, and from earlier, embryonic and less successful efforts to service the African-American community (eg, the Negro Business Directories from the early 20th century)[1].
In the 1930s, with the era of “Jim Crow” segregation still very much alive, the experience of Black Americans migrating or travelling around the United States was a very precarious and outright dangerous activity. The notorious white-only “Sundown towns”* were in force, not just in the South but right across the country. The open and legally sanctioned discrimination practiced against Black people in their everyday domestic lives extended to their travel experiences. Victor Green understood that the emerging Black middle class aspired (like all other Americans) to car ownership which held the tantalising promise of individual freedom. For African-Americans, having your own vehicle was the means of escaping a degrading reliance on segregated public transport[2].
▼ American auto dreams!The project like many entrepreneurial dreams started small, The mailman-cum-entrepreneur Green initially focused his efforts on helping African-American motorists and travellers locate businesses (lodgings, restaurants and other food outlets and fuel stations) in the greater New York metropolitan area that would accept their custom. As the business grew (with assistance from the US Travel Bureau) Green expanded his guide to the rest of the US, and to Alaska, Bermuda and parts of Canada and Mexico. The Green Book’s aim was to help Black and Coloured travellers chart a safe path through a segregated America by pinpointing exactly where on route they could stop and get the services they required to make the trip a happy and pleasant one.
In 1947 Green retired from the New Jersey Postal Service, and together with his wife Alma, started their own travel agency in Harlem. International editions of the book followed with the firm also handling air travel business for the Black community. The Green Book gradually added extra service providers including drug stores, barbers and hairdressers, tailors, salons, garages, nightclubs, taverns, liquor stores and doctors’ offices.
According to the civil rights leader, Julian Bond, Green used his network of contacts in the Postal Workers Union to ascertain where Black visitors would be welcome[3]. Early on, Green visited the locations he would include in his Green Book to check them out personally, but when the book took on a national (and international) focus this became impractical[4]. Aside from hotels and motels, other accommodation options advertised in the Green Book included “tourist homes” (the private residences of African-Americans made available to travellers) and the Harvey House hospitality chain[5].
The Green Book, or to give it its full title, The Negro Motorist Green-Book (later called The Negro Travelers’ Green Book), had its debut edition in 1936 with a green-coloured cover. Green’s intention for the book was to equip Black travellers with the information to avoid the pitfalls, the very real dangers and manifold inconveniences of travelling across a landscape still largely hostile to their race. People could use the Green Book as a vade mecum to find African-American friendly services and hospitable havens on their journeys. It gave travellers the assurance that they could travel with dignity, and not have to suffer the ignominy of being constantly turned away and put down by racist accommodation providers. Green in fact advertised his book as making it possible to have a “vacation without humiliation”.
◥ 1949 Negro Motorists’ Green Book
The Green Book circulation was initially 15,000 copies a year. It was sold in the first instance by mail order through participating Black businesses, and later via Esso gas stations[6]. The cost of the 1936 edition was a Depression-conscious 25 cents, rising to $1.95 by 1960. Some Black enterprises, especially newspapers, eventually sponsored the book, as did Esso, whose gas stations had an unusually high number of Black franchisees in this period … this was reflected in its prominent place in the Green Book’s list of friendly businesses. According to historian Gretchen Sorin, under an agreement with Standard Oil, Esso service stations were selling two million copies of the Green Book annually by 1962[7].
◥ 1956 Negro Motorists’ Green Book
The 1956 edition – whose cover bizarrely featured two unmistakably fair-haired, white motorists(!?!) – made the assertion “Assured Protection for the Negro Traveler”, and it did offer Black travellers some element of choice, where hitherto going to an unfamiliar town was a total lottery. In 1955 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, only about six motels out of 100-plus on Route 66 took Blacks – so without a copy of Green’s road trip companion with them travellers could be faced with a long, frustrating and demoralising series of fruitless enquiries[8].
Ernest Green (a member of the defiantly brave band of schoolchildren known as the “Little Rock Nine” which ran the gauntlet of racist bullies at the first desegregated school in the South in 1957) used the Green Book in the 1950s to travel the 1,600km from Arkansas to Virginia. Green, no relation to publisher Victor, later described the book as “one of the survival tools of segregated life”[9]. Other accolades for the Green Book followed … “A credit to the Negro race” (William Smith); “The Bible of Black Travel”.
Undeniably, the book’s popularity for nearly 30 years (spawning imitators as well) is testimony to how appreciated it was by ordinary African-Americans … the practical guidebook was invaluable to travellers by minimising or avoiding inconvenience, embarrassment and harassment whilst on trips and vacations around the US.
Victor Green died in 1960 however his family kept the Green Book going until 1966. Rebranding was tried with the word ‘Negro’ dropped from the title to try to widen the publication’s appeal, but with the implementation of the landmark Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the outlawing of racial discrimination in public housing, it’s relevance to 1960s America had dwindled away.
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Victor Hugo Green ▼
When the resourceful Mr Green published the inaugural Green Book in 1936, he wrote in the preface that he looked forward to the day when “this guide will not have to be published”. That day was a long time happening (sadly not in Victor’s lifetime) … but it did come.
Footnote: In the decades after the publication folded, the story of the Green Books slipped more or less completely out of the public consciousness. It was only by happenstance that it resurfaced after playwright Calvin A Ramsey met an elderly traveller in the South in 2001 who asked him where he could get a “Green Book”. Curiosity aroused, Ramsey did some background research and eventually wrote two books – a children’s story and a play – on the topic. Since then revived interest in the Green Books has amounted to a bit of a ‘Renaissance’ … there has been the Schomburg Center’s GB digitization project (‘Revisiting a Jim Crow Era Guide for Traveling While Black’), the National Parks Service Route 66 Corridor Preservation Project, as well as numerous recent articles, blogs, museum exhibitions, documentaries (including Ric Burns’ current Driving While Black project) and podcasts, all on the Green Books[10].
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* so called because visiting Blacks were systematically warned to be out of town “by sundown” or risk violent reprisals from the local white population. This phenomenon was by no means restricted to backwater redneck, hick towns. Sundown towns included large suburbs such as Warren, Michigan (pop. 180,000), Levittown, New York (80,000) and Glendale, California (60,000).
[1] K Kelly, ‘The Green Book. The First Travel Guide for African-Americans Dates to the 1930s’, Huffington Post, 8 Mar 2014
[2] ibid. Although car ownership was liberating for African-Americans it did lead to other problems such as racial profiling by police (deliberate targeting, harassment and random arrest on suspicion of Black drivers on the street) … still very much a threat to the civil liberties of the African-American community today, T Owen, ‘Driving While Black: Cops Target Minority Drivers in this Mostly White New Jersey Town’, 11-Apr 2016, (Vice News) www.news.vice.com
[3] ‘ “Green Book” Helped African-Americans Travel Safely’, Talk of the Nation, 15-Sep 2010, www.npr.org
[4] C Taylor, ‘The Negro Motorist Green Book’, www.taylormadeculture.com
[5] C McGee, ‘The Open Road Wasn’t Quite Open to All’, New York Times, 22-Aug 2010
[6] Kelly, op.cit
[7] McGee, op.cit. Sorin, cited in J Driskell, ‘An Atlas of self-reliance: The Negro Motorist’s Green Book (1937-1964), 30-Jul 2015, www.americanhistory.si.edu
[8] ‘The Green Book Video Transcript – Route 66’, www.ncptt.nps.gov
[9] E Lacey-Bordeaux & W Drash, ‘Travel Guide helped African-Americans navigate tricky times’, 25-Feb 2012, www.edition.cnn.com
[10] See ‘Mapping the Green Book’, (MGB production blog), www.mappingthegreenbook.tumblr.com
October 7 this year marks the 100th anniversary of the Taronga Zoological Park, or as it is simply known to successive generations of children and parents of Sydney and its environs, Taronga Zoo (Taronga: Abor. for “beautiful sea view”). Sydney’s premier zoo can in fact trace its genesis considerably further back than that to the formation of the Zoological Society of New South Wales in 1879‡.
The Society’s initial purpose was to import English birds (and other introduced species) to the Antipodes and to acclimatise them to the conditions before distributing them to different parts of the continent. In 1883 the Sydney City Council gave permission to the Zoo Society to open a public zoo on government land allocated to it in Moore Park (3.5km south of the city centre). The location of the zoo was in a part of Moore Park known locally as Billy Goat Swamp, today occupied by Sydney Girls High (zoo remnants survive, still visible within the school grounds, ie, two bear pits in the ‘Lowers’ area adjoining Sydney Boys High). The zoo was designed by Charles Moore, responsible for the earlier creation of Sydney’s Royal Botanic Gardens[1].
🔝 the Primitive lion enclosure at Moore Park
As more animals were added to it, the zoo soon outgrew its original land grant of 7.5 acres[2]. Gradually the zoo’s space encroached on more and more of the Moore Park parkland. Mostly in the 19th century, the new additions of animals for big public zoos came from engaging overseas professional hunters to capture exotic animals for their collections[3]. Melbourne Zoo acquired its hippos and monkeys, and Moore Park its Californian and Cinnamon bears, via this channel. Others like Jessie the Asian elephant were gifts for the Sydney zoo from the King of Siam.
By 1910 Moore Park Zoo was too small for the burgeoning number of animals accumulated. As a result the New South Government made 43ha of bushland§ between Little Sirius Cove and Bradleys Head (Mosman) available as a new site for Sydney’s zoo[4]. Around 1913-14 most of the zoo inhabitantsφ were bused from Moore Park to Circular Quay and then ferried by flat-top barge across the harbour to Mosman. With the taller animals, the elephants and giraffes, the zoo authorities eventually realised that it would be prudent to transport them to their new home in the middle of the night to avoid a public commotion in the streets. The sight of the massive beasts silhouetted against the night skyline whilst being barged across the water would have provided an inspiring, even poetic, vision.
Melbourne Zoo was founded in 1862 at Royal Park (Parkville). Heavily modelled on London Zoo, it has often been described as the first zoo in Australia[5], but this is not strictly correct – as there were small, private zoos in Sydney that predate it. Melbourne’s position however as the first public zoo in the country is certainly not in dispute, starting up some 22 years before Sydney’s Moore Park Public Zoo (Royal Melbourne Zoo is also the longest, continually operating zoo in Australia).
The concept of a zoo in the NSW colony has its origins in Hyde Park in the centre of Sydney Town in 1810. Soon after taking office Governor Macquarie established Sydney Common as a “people’s park”. Hyde Park initially housed a racecourse which by 1825 had given way to a menagerie of domestic and imported animals¥. By 1848 one Captain William Charlesworth, having procured exotic animals from India, and with the imprimatur of the Australian Museum, displayed them in a private menagerie-cum-small zoo in the Park[6].
🔝 Botany Zoological Gardens
🔝 In memory of the elephant at Banks Zoo
The Hyde Park zoo experiment was short-lived and in 1851 its exhibits were ‘gifted’ to the publican (William Beaumont) of the Sir Joseph Banks Inn in Botany in Sydney’s south. The Botany hotel included a large land holding which was turned into pleasure grounds, with the private zoo being one of its star attractions. Among the new zoo’s animals acquired from Hyde Park were a ‘docile’ Asian elephant, a Bengal tiger, a gorilla, male and female Himalayan bears, black Bengal sheep and a pair of Manilla red deers[7].
After a change of hotel lease-holders the zoo folded and the animals were sold (late 1850s) to another pub at Watsons Bay in Sydney’s eastern suburbs – the Marine Hotel, owned by Henry Billing. “The Marine” was originally a private mansion built by Colonial Architect Mortimer Lewis ca 1837 and initially named “Zandvilet” (or “Zandoliet”) and then “Marine Villa’ under different owners (known simply as “Watsons Bay House” to many).
Billing located the zoo in Robertson Park (Clovelly Street Watsons Bay) in the grounds of the Marine Hotel, which he later renamed Greenwich Pier Hotel⊕. The private zoo (and hotel) had its own wharf for visitors. The collection included a lion (which was obviously tame, and perhaps worst, declawed, as the zoo advertised that it was available for visitors to ride!), elephants, tigers and harnessed zebras (no further information available on this but the inference is that the zebras might have been used bizarrely to pull carriages – like a horse!)[8].
The ‘showman’ Billing tirelessly promoted his private zoo as the largest and finest collection of wild animals in the Australian colonies, with “the wonder of the world, the Monstor Bengal Tiger Hercules, three East Indian Leopards, East Indian Porcupines, a Brahmin Cow, Egyptian Sheep, Golden Pheasants, Mongoose and English Ferrets”[9].
🔝 Dunbar House – former grounds of Watsons Bay Private Zoo
Not surprisingly, the zoo was a big hit with the punters, especially when combined with the on-site pub! Unfortunately in 1861 the zoo suffered a setback when one of the Bengal tigers mauled its keeper. This resulted in litigation against Billing and although cleared of any blame, the hotelier soon after died. His widow tried to get the colonial zoological board to purchase the animals, but the government rejected her request. Her excessive reaction, sadly, was to poison the 18 animals (some reports list the number as higher) in the Robertson Park zoo. A few years later Mrs Billing embarked on a new “show business” venture, operating a waxworks in Sydney[10]. There is no record of whether it was a successful business or not, but at least it didn’t involve any animals.
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‡ the Zoological Society was formed to carry on the role of the Acclimatisation Society, viz. the introduction and acclimatisation of (especially English) song birds and game (Royal Zoological Society of NSW)
§ an additional 9ha of Ashton Park bushland was later made available to the zoo
φ calculated at 228 mammals, 552 birds and 64 reptiles (Taronga Conservation Society Australia)
¥ Mrs Macquarie was reputed to maintain a personal menagerie of animals at Government House in Parramatta during her husband’s governorship.
⊕ the building housing Billing’s hotel in Robertson Park can boast a most colourful and manifold history. Since Billing’s ownership it has continued to change hands and names. Later in the century it got a new name, this time becoming the Royal Hotel, which had an open-air cinema added to its rear. From 1924 it was the municipal chambers of Vaucluse Council until the Council was abolished and merged into Woollahra Council in 1948. Part of the house became a library for a time. In the fifties as “Fisherman’s Lodge” it hosted wedding receptions and the like. Today it is the revamped Dunbar House, owned by the Grand Pacific Group, and hired out for events and operating as a cafe/restaurant for the many visitors to Watsons Bay
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[1] the Botanic Gardens provided many exotic birds for the new Moore Park Zoo aviary, ‘Who’s Who in the Moore Park Zoo?’, Centennial Parklands, History & Heritage, 7 May 2015, www.blog.centennialparklands.com
[2] pointedly,the Australian Town and Country Journal expressed “surprise that such a charming effect should be obtained in so comparatively small an area”, ‘The Zoological Gardens – a popular holiday resort with Sydney young folk’, Australian Town and Country Journal (Sydney), December 17 1892, www.trove.nla.gov.au
[3] ‘The Zoo’s first hippos stars: William and Rosamund’, (Culture Victoria),www.cv.vic.gov.au. There was more of an overlap of zoos and circuses in that era with both obtaining their ‘wild’ animals from this same source. It wasn’t until much later that zoos developed an interest in conservation and education
[4] a thriving artists’ colony, Curlew Camp, on the cove at Ashton Park, was closed down to make way for the zoo. Arthur Streeton and Tom Roberts, two of Australia’s most celebrated late colonial artists were members of the Curlew Camp group. As it eventuated the camp section of the bush headland was not used by the zoo. A bush track (the Harbour Hike) skirts around the Taronga fence and is part of the Sydney Harbour National Park
[5] eg, ‘Le Souëf Family Archives: Royal Melbourne Zoological Gardens’, www.austehc.unimelb.edu.au; ‘Melbourne Zoo’, www.en.m.wikipedia.org
[6] T Lennon, ‘Colonial Sydney went wild for first zoos at Hyde Park and Botany’, Daily Telegraph, September 10 2015
[7] ‘Sydney’s First Zoo’, Sydney Morning Herald, 24 October 1931 (Trove collection online). The picnic grounds at Sir Joseph Banks Park contain a series of zoo animal statues commemorating the zoo’s one-time existence there
[8] W Mayne-Wilson, ‘Robertson Park Its Secret Past’, Historic Environment, 17(3) 2004. Beaumont retained some of the Botany zoo animals which were later donated to the Moore Park Zoo
[9] V Campion, ‘Bayside Beauty – Dunbar House revives forgotten 1830s glamour’, Daily Telegraph, 10 May 2011
[10] Robin Derricourt, Watsons Bay, Dictionary of Sydney, 2008, http://dictionary of Sydney.org/entry/watsons_bay, viewed 30 April 2016
I wanted to do a follow up walk to an earlier exploration of the Olympic Precinct and the Millennium Parklands, extending it into the Newington and Silverwater hinterland on the other side of the Armory. Taking the ferry wharf at Sydney Olympic Park as our starting point this time, we embark on the 3km riverfront walk to Wilson Park (near the Silverwater Bridge), our first stop.
On the left side of the path we get glimpses through the fence of the Newington Nature Reserve. This huge area (48ha), marshy with mudflats and mangroves, and long neglected before the Olympics, underwent extensive remediation in the 1990s as part of the plan to create a ‘green’ Olympics in 2000. Its native vegetation was regenerated and the land was transformed into an estuarine wetland system and a woodland rich in turpentines and ironbarks. The public is not permitted access as it is a wildlife sanctuary for eagles and frogs and sundry other fauna. An additional prohibitive factor is that the wetland area is still believed to contain an unexploded ordnance[1].
As we come towards the old Armory site a curious feature is the retention of several old disused navy buildings on the waterfront. This detritus was scattered along the water’s edge, pieces of abandoned wooden and brick buildings tagged with faded building numbers. Some had been fenced up in a valiant but doomed attempt at vandal-proofing, and others near the Naval Depot simply boarded up as best they can be.
Near the always popular Armory Cafe, reborn out of the ashes of the burnt down original building, is the Blaxland Riverside Park, set on a sloping terrain, a treat for children with its flying fox and playground. The park contains several more of those earth mounds, a feature throughout the Bay (I can only surmise that these too are hiding nasty toxic surprises like the other mounds closer to the Olympic Precinct).
“http://www.7dayadventurer.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/image-1.jpg”> Wilson Park: walkers & cyclists[/captio
We stop at the park just before Silverwater Bridge – Wilson Park, there’s a history of toxic contamination here too. The site was occupied in the 1950s by PACCAL (Petroleum and Chemical Corporation of Australia Ltd) which refined gas from petroleum, a process which produced three tonnes of tar sludge a day. The park was where the unwanted waste products ended up! Similarly some of PACCAL’s stockpile of dioxins eventually seeped into Duck River on the other side of the Bridge[2].
We cut through the once highly contaminated Wilson Park with its athletics and soccer fields which stand where the gas processing plant used to be, and come out on to Newington Road. Halfway up the street we come to the high, ugly scarred wall of Silverwater Correction Centre. The very large prison, both minimum and maximum (remand) security inmates. The women’s prison, previously known as Mulawa (Aboriginal: in the shadow of trees), these days has mostly minimum security prisoners (in the main for crimes like fraud) but in the past it had ‘celebrity’ inmates such as Lindy Chamberlain (who unwillingly took the rap presumably for an unnamed Australian dingo for the murder of her baby daughter and was wrongfully convicted and incarcerated).
The men’s prison at Silverwater has also been the scene of one of the most daring jail escapes ever in Australia. In 1999 the Russian girlfriend of an inmate in Silverwater hijacked a helicopter at gunpoint and landed inside the prison, enabling her convict lover to get away by air. Six weeks later they were both cornered and caught and the girlfriend (dubbed “Red Lucy” by the Australian media) ended up behind bars in Mulawa as well (Note: no third person ever materialised to bust them both out of gaol!)
The history of the land the Silverwater prison occupies is a varied one and some traces of of its historic existence can still to be seen … only though if you are a prisoner or a staffer at Silverwater. Within the facility grounds are several old colonial homes, most notably ‘Newington’ built by early landowner John Blaxland§. The Newington Estate, some 520ha of land, was named after the Blaxland family home in Kent.
Newington House has been variously used over the last 180 years. Initially Blaxland’s principal home, after his death it became the hub of Newington College (established by the Methodist Church in 1863) before the preppy college was relocated to Stanmore in inner city Sydney. The Newington Estate was acquired by land-owner John Wetherill who subdivided it for residential settlement (Homebush Village) but the public didn’t clamour to take the lots on offer (even the majority of the workers at the nearby Abattoir and Brickworks were not interested in living there!).
The government purchased a part of the Newington Estate, turning it into a hospital for the mentally ill – an aged women’s asylum. Buildings named in honour of notable early colonial women (Catchpole, Chisholm, Reiby) were added to Newington House as hospital wards. Later the asylum was extended to male patients and was categorised as a “state asylum for dependent adults with infirmity or illness of “incurable character”[3].
By 1960 the hospital had closed and was handed over to the Department of Prisons. Ten years later Silverwater Gaol opened in a very large block fronting on to Holker Street and incorporating the grounds of the hospital. Newington House itself is still used as the administration wing of the corrective centre.
The entrepreneurial flair of John Blaxland led to the estate use’s in the 19th century for numerous commercial enterprises including salt production, lime kiln, flour mill, tweed mill and coal mining (this last venture proved unsuccessful)[4].
We turn off Holker Street and into Jamieson Street and walk past the newer part of the prison, these days called the Metropolitan Remand and Reception Centre (the gaol entrance point for visitors). On the right we get a fuller view of the vast expanse of the Armory’s restricted area. About halfway up Jamieson Street we come across a fenced-off section of the Armory with a series of old military-style huts set on green pastures. This is the Sydney Olympic Park Lodge, an urban holiday camp run by the YMCA and offering school kids a mix of outdoor and educational activities drawing on the resources of the Armory. Although part of the Olympic Park accommodation portfolio these rather spartan looking dormitories are certainly not likely to be mistaken for luxury five-star accommodation for Olympics or other sports-related VIPs.
The Lodge is buffeted from Blaxland Reserve by a large nature reserve. As we come back to the Parramatta a River trail we spot some more of the artificially created earth mounds, so characteristic of the Bay area. From the impressive gatehouse of the Armory it’s only about one-and-three-quarters kilometres back to our SOP ferry wharf starting point.
§ in the earlier posts Homebush Bay Perambulations I and Homebush Bay Perambulations III I referred to the Wentworth family’s role in the early development of Homebush Bay, being the beneficiaries of the grant of a large swathe of land in the area. Blaxland’s early land acquisitions led to him and his family having a similar imprint on the western part of Homebush Bay. At around the same time, Blaxland’s younger brother, Gregory (of Blue Mountains explorer fame), purchased the Brush Farm Estate in Eastwood from the father of his exploration companion, WC Wentworth – another interaction between the two great colonial families.
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[1] ‘Management Plan for Newington Nature Reserve’, (SOPA, 2003), www.environment.nsw.gov.au
[2] ‘Industrial History’, Sydney Olympic Park Authority, www.sopa.nsw.gov.au
The ferry wharf at Olympic Park is a good starting point for a ramble through Homebush Bay commencing from a ferry and ending at the rail line. From the wharf we walk down Hill Road, passing a dense concentration of light industrial businesses, turning left at either Monza or Baywater and walk through the Wentworth Point estate to the Promenade, a pleasantly wide and newish waterfront path (1km walk from the ferry).
If you take a left at the Promenade, the bay path passes large residential blocks, removals and waste disposal companies before it morphs into a very thin bush strip. The strip which doubles as a rubbish dump meanders on for a bit but ends up against a high residential fence about 100m from where workers are currently building a non-vehicular bridge across the Bay to the homogenous looking towers of Rhodes. Taking a look at the skyline on both sides of the Bay it is less than a “Sherlock Holmesian” deduction to conclude how much the newer Wentworth Point waterfront has come to resemble the Rhodes prototype – albeit there is less of it.
You can happily skip this dead-end digression and just head south from the end of Baywater Drive … the path becomes a narrow trail which swings round a bend closer to Bennelong Parkway. We pass a gated estate within touching distance of its largish but shallow communal swimming pool (at least we can touch the reinforced glass that separates the pool from the boardwalk). The pool is in a nice location but there’s zero privacy for the bathers it seems to me, right on the public boardwalk. Personally I’d be somewhat put off by the regular stream of passers-by.
This is the ideal spot to view one of the best examples of a distinctive feature of Homebush Bay, a number of old vessels deliberated shipwrecked and left to co-habit with nature. The steam collier SS Ayrfield was scuttled and broken up in 1972 and here sits its rusty, rotting steel hull, impressively assimilated with the water-bound vegetation and crops of mangroves. The tree growth sprouts out of the hull so luxuriantly that is looks like something organic and even artistic in its visual effect.
At the end of the trail we turn left at Bennelong and (carefully) cross the often busy road on to the right side to cross the small bridge spanning the Bay. About 30 metres after the bridge cross over Bennelong Pkwy and follow the trail into the bush. Almost immediately you come to a side track with a plaque on the ground identifying a Shipwreck Lookout. This is a dedication to the “remnant hulks” of Homebush Bay. These are abandoned, rusting wrecks resting here, like the Ayrfield, scattered along the shoreline and overrun by vegetation and mangroves✱.
The curved path continues around the Bay, and it is common to see white egrets and purplish-blue crested Puekekos (AKA Australasian swamp hens) lurking around the water’s edge. As you continue on the trail, if you keep glancing to the right you will shortly notice a bird hide camouflaged in the vegetation to allow glimpses of the waterbird refuge – the Charadriiformes population inhabiting these tidal waters include Pacific Golden Plovers, Black-winged Stilts, Bar-tailed Godwits, Red-necked Avocets, ducks and black swans. Look for the observation tower to the left of the nature strip where the path turns south…in several places in the bay’s mangroves the observation towers are useless as they are now surrounded by mangroves which have ascended above the viewing point! (note the prevalence of large spiders webbed above the pathway).
Approaching Bicentennial Park a turnoff on the right takes you on to a zig-zagging boardwalk through the Badu Mangroves, a dense patchwork of grey and olive-coloured mangrove growth which leads to the Bennelong Ponds and the western side of Bicentennial Park. If you choose not to do this diversion continue south to the next crossway and go left opposite the tinny looking Field Studies Centre building. After passing a small bridge and another of those observation towers in the mangroves you soon reach the far-eastern edge of the park and a path which heads north along the water, parallel to Homebush Bay Drive.
It’s about 1.5km from this point to Rhodes Station. When the Wentworth Point to Rhodes bridge is completed, walkers including lunchtime walkers from the Rhodes Waterside Mall and Nestlés will be able to do the walk as a loop starting at Rhodes Station and returning from Homebush Bay to the same start point.
໒꒱໒꒱໒꒱໒꒱໒꒱໒꒱໒꒱໒꒱໒꒱໒꒱໒꒱໒꒱໒꒱໒꒱໒꒱
✱ for more details of the vessels involved and the ship-breaking industry in Homebush Bay during the 1970s see G Blaxell, ‘The Wrecks of Homebush Bay’ (May 2008), www.afloat.com.au
The north-western part of Homebush Bay in Sydney’s west was once a backwater of swampy industrial and military dumping grounds and wastelands. The rubbish dumps are still there but no longer visible and the entire surface area of the Bay now boasts a diverse range of interesting walks for the enthusiastic pedestrian. The network of walkways allow you to commence a walk in Homebush Bay* from various points of the compass … we shall start with a walk from the north-west commencing at Silverwater Bridge and throw in some digressions and let’s see what we can unearth.
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The Rivercat on route to Sydney Olympic Park
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As you set off by foot on the south bank along the pathway you can see across the River the predominantly low-level housing of Ermington and Melrose Park, each one characterised by the same identikit appearance. There is not much river traffic around this part of the waterway but expect to see the sleek green-and-white Rivercat glide by at regular intervals.
1897 Gatehouse
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The first item of historic interest we encounter is the former Royal Australian Navy site, Newington Armory. There is a modern (‘Armory’) cafe, an older shop that also sells coffee and some play facilities here, near to the naval depot entrance. The entrance area is much as it was when the Navy abandoned the site in 1999 – still standing is an 1897 brick gatehouse (also known as “the Cooperage”), with a rail track leading down from the gate to where the wharf used to be. Two old, grey-toned cranes (circa 1960s) stand fixed in time on the edge of the river.
The site’s custodians, Sydney Olympic Park (S0C), Authority describes the Armory site as it exists today as “compris(ing) a range of historically significant natural and cultural features including former army and navy ammunition storehouses, workshops, offices, small gauge railway and other infrastructure associated with the operation of a naval armament depot”¹. One hundred years ago (1916) it was a military powder magazine and five years after that a munitions store for the navy.
When the navy moved out there were skiploads of old armaments and other dangerous pollutants lying around the depot, so the department simply buried them and fenced off a large section of the site from the public. Other sections of the former naval property still have limited access for commercial activities on the weekend only (eg, rides on a historic electric locomotive which had been used for moving armaments around the ordnance depot). Blaxland Riverside Park nearby has flying fox rides and tunnel slides. Not far from here is the new Newington housing estate.
Continuing down the waterfront path, you come to a side path next to a high electricity tower. This bush-lined path (named in honour of paralympian Louise Sauvage) can be either a digression to take in the view from the second highest point in the Bay (after the Treillage), or an another route to the Sydney Olympic Precinct (railway station) via the lush Narawang Wetland and Haslams Creek.
“Woo-la-ra“
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There’s a steep, linear walk up a very large conical-shaped earth mound full of dangerous chemicals and other toxins² buried under several layers of top and middle soil … atop this geographical marker (SOC calls these mounds scattered round the Homebush Precinct “Bay Markers”) is the best view around here – a 360-degree panorama incorporating the river, the uniform-shaped high-rise of Rhodes and Liberty Grove and the numerous Olympia stadia. Steeply descending the mound trail to the bottom you immediately ascend again, this second hilltop not as steep as the mound but with a plateau at the top, bears the name ascribed to it by the local, Wan-gal clan, Woo-la-ra(= lookout).
From the high ground of Woo-la-ra you have a choice (several choices in fact): you can take the path down to Hill Road where you can walk along the forest trail parallel to Hill Road**. The Sydney Olympic Park Wharf is about one kilometre away, where you can catch the ferry back to Circular Quay or west to Parramatta.
Kronos Hill
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We decide to continue the path for a further 2.5km through the Millennium Parklands down to Haslams Creek. Here on the south-eastern shore of the Creek there is another high mound known as Kronos Hill, and also full of hidden toxic surprises³. You can follow a staggered, concentric trail up to the summit and be rewarded with sweeping 360-degree views of the Olympic Precinct (Allphones Arena and ANZ Stadium are both in the immediate foreground). From atop Kronos Hill it is only about half-an-hour walk’s back to the Olympic train station.
————————————————–* “Homebush Bay” strictly historically speaking refers to the inlet, the body of water, off Parramatta River. The area that is now generally thought of as Homebush Bay (including Wentworth Point and the Sydney Olympic Park) was described in the early part of the 20th century as being part of “Lidcombe North”. The name “Homebush” itself derives from D’Arcy Wentworth who was granted a large land grant in the area in 1810, literally “his home in the bush”. ‘Homebush out to make a point’, Daily Telegraph, (Sydney), 04 January 2009, www.dailytelegraph.com.au
** Optional diversion: you might consider a side trip from the corner of Bennelong and Hill. From the intersection its about 400 metres to the Olympic Archery Field … catch a look at a bunch of wannabe “Robin Hoods” in “bow and quiver” action (not a skerrick of Lincoln green in sight though, I’m afraid!).
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¹ ‘Armory History: The Military Magazine’, (Sydney Olympic Park Authority), www.sopa.nsw.gov.au. During WWII the US Navy Pacific arm had its own ammo depot at the Armory, ‘Newington Armory’ (Wikipedia), http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newington-Armory² these include dioxins (DDT, pesticides and herbicides), hydrocarbons, lead, heavy metals, asbestos, benzenes and phenols, Sharon Beder, ‘… And what the tourists will not see’, Sunday Age, 18 June 2000
³ Haslams Creek is heavily polluted with toxins (especially dioxins) as are all of the waterways and wetlands around Homebush Bay. Largely this is a direct result of chemical pollution by the Union Carbide/Timbrol Rhodes Plant between 1949 and 1976. The giant chemicals manufacturer poured the waste by-products of dioxins as well as other toxic landfill along the shoreline of the Bay. This practice (unbelievably) was sanctioned by the Maritime Services Board on the grounds that it “reclaimed stinking wetlands for a useful industrial purpose”. Consequently the US Environmental Protection Agency in 1994 ranked Homebush Bay as one of the five worst dioxin hotspots in the world, ‘A race against toxins’, The Irish Times, 19 August 2000.
Whichever way you look at it, it’s one absolute corker of a good walk … a leisurely 8km or so saunter from Rhodes Station around the foreshore to the former estate of the fabulously rich Walkers of Concord. Whether it’s your step-counting, fitness-conscious walker, your dedicated dog-walker or your insouciant, wandering flaneur, the Concord shoreline walk is a varied and interesting stroll through rustic, undulating fields and flat, serene bayside paths bordered by mangroves and what remains of a eucalyptus forest. A walk through the erstwhile Walker estate takes you past historic reminders of grand Victorian/Edwardian homes and World War repatriation hospitals and convalescence facilities.
As we leave the western side of the railway station, we immediately have our first encounter with one of the local historical personages. Walker Street (next to the rail line) is named after Thomas Walker, the first of two Thomas Walkers to leave a weighty footprint on the area of Concord/Rhodes. This first Thomas Walker, an officer in charge of government stores in the early colony, purchased land at Uhrs Point, a locale which eventually became the suburb of Rhodes, named after the house Walker had built for himself.
Rhodes – a background of industrial polluters of the environment and the suburb’s homogeneous, characterless domestic makeover
Heading north along Walker Street, we pass the sites previously occupied by many commercial and industrial enterprises including the large paint manufacturer Berger’s and the multinational giant Union Carbide’s Chemicals plant…notorious first for being the site of the US company’s manufacture of devastating “Agent Orange” (the US military’s aerial terrorist weapon of choice during the Vietnam War) and then as an environmental dumper, for its reprehensible practice of discharging the dioxins that make the lethal herbicide into the Parramatta River. In their place we see the shape of the post-industrial landscape that dominates Rhodes today – masses and masses of homogeneous semi-high rise blocks of modern apartments and large clumps of new ones still going up. At the end of Walker Street there is a nice little park touching the river (Point Park) where members of the ubiquitous local Asian community perform their daily Tai chi exercises.
Walking under the railway line and passing some light industry and the big IKEA warehouse, we loop around Uhrs Point below the 1935 Ryde Bridge near the sea scouts hall and turn south in the direction of Concord. After a stretch of nondescript street we reach Brays Bay Reserve, named after the first land-owner in Rhodes, Alfred Bray, who built the now long demolished ‘Braygrove’ in ca 1800 (the pioneering Brays owned property in Rhodes from 1794 to 1909).
In the Bray Reserve we walk onto a vacant concrete pier on the edge of the river, no indication that it once housed a Philips Industries site when they were in the bike manufacturing business. On the other side of the square there is a plaque with some rusty old sides of a ship signifying the former presence of Tulloch’s Iron Works in Rhodes (during WWII it functioned as ‘Commonwealth Shipyard # 4’). The remnants of a railed track with ship names engraved on the ground … female names, all curiously enough starting with the letter ‘E’.
Kokoda commemorative walk:
The next section of the trail, densely cordoned on one side by thick mangroves, comprises the 1990s constructed Kokoda Track Memorial Walkway. The walkway is set in a rainforest tropics-themed garden with Kokoda Campaign audio ‘stations’ named after various battles and campaigns of the New Guinea conflict (Efogi, Iorabaiwa, Myola, etc) positioned at different points. There is also a memorial with two high, semi-circular walls surrounded by a rose garden in the rainforest, and a small kiosk-style cafe at the mid-way point of the track. When the path reaches the open side gate to Concord General Hospital, the Kokoda Walkway ends and we take the path deviating to the left.
The path (usually muddy here) skirts round the back of the Concord Repatriation Hospital, which itself continues the WWII theme. It was built in 1940 as the 113th Australian Army General Hospital, taking in wounded and convalescing servicemen from the War. The ground on which the hospital dominated by the huge “Multi Building” stands passed to the Crown after the death of Dame Eadith Walker, daughter of the second Thomas Walker associated with the area. This Thomas Walker was a Scottish migrant in the 19th century who made it (very) big from property and stock investment and finance in Australia (in his later years he was president of the Bank of NSW). At the time of his death his personal worth was estimated at up to £2,000,000, a staggering amount for 1886!
🔺 Walker Convalescent Hospital
Walker estate and convalescent hospital:
This is a very tranquil part of Concord, with only the occasional dog-walker or jogger to be seen on the dirt track. As we come round the bend in the path, dense bamboo woods on our left, we get our first glimpse of the first convalescent hospital on the peninsula (much, much smaller than the Concord Repat). Walker left £100,000 for the construction of what became the Thomas Walker Memorial Convalescent Hospital, designed and built by famous Australian architect John Sulman in the early 1890s after the injection of a further £50,000 from Eadith and her aunt and other relatives for the project’s completion. The hospital was an amazingly extensive complex in its day and the central core of the hospital remains, albeit a lot of the surrounding adjunct buildings have not survived.
At its height the adjoining structures included an admin block, separate dining rooms and pavilions for men and women, concert hall and servants’ quarters, with a tennis court for convalescing patients. Staying on the foreshore path we reach the distinctive Dutch bell tower (above) on the water, from where a long stepped pathway leads impressively up to the hospital entrance. In the time it was a working hospital the bell tower was the landing-point for ferries conveying patients from Circular Quay, and it also served in a secondary function as a smoking room – for male patients only!
Walker’s convalescent hospital admitted 683 patients in its first year of operation and over the following 80 years took in thousands free of charge in accordance with Walker’s bequest. During WWII it was used to house the 3rd Australian Women’s Hospital. By the 1970s however it was no longer viable as a free convalescent hospital and in 1979 it began functioning as the Rivendell Adolescent Unit for the rehabilitation of emotionally disturbed youth, and it is still operating as such today.
Following the path further south we pass coastal bush and mangroves and come to a series of stairs (down and then up again) which are behind the Mental Health Unit of Concord Hospital – a newish facility relocated from Callan Park/Rozelle in 2008. The path curves around the peninsula into Yaralla Bay and the newer buildings (mental health and drug health) give way to a series of old, very dilapidated looking buildings comprising the hospital’s engineering and works divisions.
We walk toward a clear, grassy area and take a sharp left out of the hospital grounds, near the helipad, at its south-western end where the mangroves are at their most dense. This leads into desolate bush and scrubland alongside the bay. Pretty soon the path becomes fairly marshy and prone to be boggy after rain (avoid if waterlogged during a walk by veering to the right over the higher ground of the fields which has better run-off). This field is one of a series of large, empty and fenced off paddocks in this part of the former Walker Estate. What looks like a bare and fallow piece of land has become a hotly contested bit of Canada Bay.
(Source: New Ltd)
Agistment wars:
The paddocks had been used for decades by local horse-owners for the agistment of their steeds. The state government held an inquiry in 2012/2013 which found that the tenant in charge had mismanaged the site (fences not properly maintained leading to some horses escaping into the hospital helipad and adjoining streets, and other conditions of the agistment licence not fulfilled by the licensee). The government health authority then did a late night deal with the Mounted Unit of the NSW Police giving them the green light to move their 18 service horses from the city (Surry Hills) to the freshly vacated paddocks of Yaralla Estate. Then the government suddenly backflipped on its decision to move the police horses to Yaralla (prompting an ICAC inquiry into the whole matter of the paddocks’ usage). However it still went ahead with the revoking of the tenant’s lease and the recreational horses were turfed off the estate, causing a vociferous outcry from the aggrieved horse owners. Since then there have been signals from the government of an intention to turn the land into 18ha of parklands for future public use. However the agistment paddocks remain idle and unoccupied, giving further cause for protest from the ejected horse lovers at the current impasse. So far, a lose-lose situation!
Continuing the path south through the second Walker peninsula we come to the grand villa, Yaralla House, set up on raised land 150 metres from the shoreline. Around it are the various auxiliary buildings of the Yaralla Estate. The Walker Estate was acquired by the millionaire banker in piecemeal fashion in the 1840s-1850s from the beneficiaries of Isaac Nichols, convict-cum-colonial postmaster and the original crown landowner in Concord. Yaralla House itself is an architecturally significant, asymmetrical Victorian Italianate mansion, the original alabaster white villa was built by colonial architect Edmund Blacket (1850s-60s) with John Sulman adding extensions to it in the 1890s.
Squash courts built 1920 for future Edward VIII but apparently not used by him on his visit (Source: www.slhd.nsw.gov.au)
Self-contained ‘Walker World’:
After Eadith Walker inherited the Yaralla Estate from her father she built the built up the property holdings piece-by-piece, adding a swimming pool, squash and tennis courts, croquet lawn, stables, coach-house, guest houses and other auxiliary buildings. The squash court was installed specifically for the use of the then Prince of Wales (later Edward VIII) on his visit. However the Royal personage (and later fan-boy of the German reichsführer) declined to play on it because of its concrete floor (his cousin and travel companion Louis (Lord) Mountbatten “had a hit up” instead!).
Yaralla also had its own dairy farm (supplying milk to the Walkers’ hospital and to other local hospitals), piggery, fowl enclosures, bakery, fire brigade and powerhouse (Yaralla was the first building in Concord to have electricity!) A good chunk of the 40ha-plus grounds were used as a golf course – some of its members later established the Royal Sydney Golf Club in North Bondi. The rest broke away from the Sydney Club and formed the Concord Golf Course (Club) on land, then known as “Walker’s Bush”, that had been part of the Walkers’ holdings.
Eadith lived alone at Yaralla – in the sense that she never married, however in a very real sense she was far from alone, even after her companion/adopted sister Anne left to marry the architect Sulman. Dame Eadith maintained a huge retinue of some 200 servants, maids, grooms, cooks, gardeners, engineers and other live-in staff. In addition, twin cousins of the family from Tenterfield, northern NSW, Egmont and George (Walker), lived there for many years (each having a room named after him!)
Rockery from Italy:
Dame Eadith spared little expense on the beautification of her estate. Stonemasons were imported from Italy to build an sculptured Italianate terrace and a grotto. The grotto is a series of sculpted rockery caves interspersed with exotic flora, ferns, palms and especially succulents, lying at the foot of the bluff on which the former Walker home sits. The area between the grotto and the shoreline once contained the Walkers’ swimming pool complete with its own pumping station. There is also a decorative sunken garden and the evocative Four Winds Fountain located near the house.
(Source: www.slhd.nsw.gov.au)
At one period around WWI Eadith was a regular holder of lavish parties and charitable fetes and balls at Yaralla (Walker received her DBE for charitable activities). For the socially advanced, “old money” set, it was the place to be seen! Periodically she entertained royalty … both the Prince of Wales (the future Edward VIII) and the Duke of Gloucester (the future George VI) stayed at the Yaralla Estate. Lesser luminaries, including governor-generals and premiers, also stayed at the Estate. In one celebrated incident aviator Ross Smith landed on the front lawn in a bi-plane in 1920 and had cucumber sandwiches on the lawn with the good Dame Commander. From her art and artifacts collections garnered from frequent overseas’ trips she brought back many Indian treasures to incorporate into a special showcase Indian room at Yaralla. After visiting Scandinavia she had a Norwegian cottage shipped out and reassembled on the Concord estate.
During the Great War the patriotic Eadith gave over Yaralla’s grounds to the army to be used as a ‘tent’ hospital. Yaralla House (less well-known by the name Eadith Walker Convalescent Hospital) fell into the Crown’s hands after her death sans heirs in 1937. It eventually came under the trusteeship of Royal Prince Alfred Hospital (the RPA) and then that of the Sydney Local Health District (SLHD). RPA now uses the former villa (and other on-site cottages) as a residential care facility to house HIV and dementia outpatients.
After Dame Eadith died, the contents of the Yaralla properties were auctioned in 1938 by auctioneers Lawson’s and de Groot. Held over eight days, it was the biggest auction held in Australia to that time. Some of the Yaralla items sold are now in the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney.
Fortunately for the vast Estate, there has been a lot of conservation and restoration work carried out at Yaralla in recent years – a combined effort by the City of Canada Bay Heritage Society, the Council itself, and the SLHD. We resume the walk, past the grotto, where the path slopes gently down towards a dense patch of very tall and wild bamboo on the water side with a small child care centre on the right. If you look west up the road that leads away from the centre, you will see a row of planted trees which guards an elaborate rose garden created by Eadith.
In the next section of the walk the narrowing path is encroached upon by overhanging branches in what is a pleasant little, untamed stretch of bush. Shortly we come to a metal fence signifying the boundary where the Yaralla Estate once ended, it has a gate that is no longer locked. Past the gate is a large, well-kept park which looks out on to Majors Bay. A small but dense turpentine-ironbark forest leads to the right in the direction of Nullawarra Road which is flanked by Arthur Walker Reserve (coincidentally named after an apparently unrelated ‘Walker’!).
The expansive park curves around Majors Bay with a continuous trail of dense mangroves on the foreshore and sporting fields on the right. The concrete pathway ends, abruptly and surprisingly, at the back fence of someone’s house. Surprising because, with just a little imaginative urban planning and some funding, a bracket-shaped boardwalk could have extended the foreshore path around the houses to connect with close-by Shadrock Shaw Reserve (much in the manner achieved with sections of Salt Pan Creek and other coastal walkways).
The conclusion of a wonderful walk full of interesting history and natural beauty and charm … a tranquil corridor of nature with an air of unhurried ambience. From the Majors Bay Reserve end-point you can choose between walking on through the Mortlake and Breakfast Point streets to the ferry at Cabarita, or heading west, cutting across Concord Road to the nearest train station at Concord West.
Footnote: Yaralla tradesman’s entrance
The entrance to Yaralla is the main (wrought iron) gate and the Hyacinth (Gatekeeper’s) Cottage at the junction of Nullawarra Rd and The Drive. In its heyday however, the Estate extended as far west as Concord Road (the original gate being where the Masonic hall is on Concord Road). Where privately owned red brick cottages and Californian bungalows are today, Dame Eadith constructed retirement cottages for her loyal staff to live in at the end of their working lives.
Dame Eadith, portrait with her British imperial medals
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Bibliography:
Sheena Coupe, Concord A Centenary History (1883-1983), Sydney 1983.
Jennifer MacCulloch, ‘Walker, Dame Eadith Campbell (1861-1937), Australian Dictionary of Biography, ANU, published in hardcover 1990
Patricia Skehan, ‘Yaralla estate’, Dictionary of Sydney, 2011, http://dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/yaralla_estate, viewed 31 January 2016
Graham Spindler, Uncovering Sydney: Walks into Sydney’s Unexpected and Endangered Places, Sydney 1991
Whilst I was anticipating my upcoming trip to Poland with much relish, as to Eastern Europe as a whole, the prospect of visiting the Auschwitz-Birkenau site wasn’t one I was looking forward to. I wasn’t at all keen on visiting the former Nazi concentration camp … maybe I have been fed on too much of a vicarious experience courtesy of the SBS network’s televisual obsession (so it appears at times) with all things to do the Holocaust, Nazism and World War II!
To me it was an unappetising and gruesome prospect … but it was after all an option – it was my choice. In the end a combination of firm encouragement from my young Catholic Polish friend and the fact that we were going to be close to the site once in Kraków itself (75km west of the city), I decided to do it, reasoning that going all the way to Southern Poland and not including it in the itinerary seemed like something I might regret later. Incidentally, some Polish people told me that nothing raises the blood pressure of Poles like hearing Auschwitz-Birkenau described as a ‘Polish’ concentration camp, as some non-Polish tourists have occasionally and very erroneously done. To Poles it was always and unequivocally a German or Nazi concentration camp – which happens to be located within the borders of present-day Poland!
Today, Auschwitz is a much-visited museum and a memorial to the victims of the Third Reich. There was a crowded, chaotic scene at the entrance, long lines of tourists queuing up. Eventually we got inside the building after making it past the bag checks and scanning of the heavy security screening at the gate. It was an eerie feeling walking through those notorious, infamous gates of Auschwitz I (notwithstanding that the ominous sign “Arbeit Macht Frei” we passed under is only a replica of the original one which was stolen in 2009). The incongruity of the scene was very stark, very apparent – constant streams of people milling all over the onetime prison, going from block to block, in a place that otherwise was just so barren, desolate and abandoned!
Auschwitz was a harrowing experience but one in hindsight I wouldn’t have wanted to have missed. The various barracks were full of unforgettable sights …. grim but also very, very poignant stuff, from the zoo-sized glass display cabinets of hair (incredibly, a vast room of scalps!), countless labelled but abandoned suitcases, artificial limbs, shoes, including children’s (two large rooms of shoes both 30m long x 12m wide). Each block has a thematic element (“Prisoners’ Life”, “Material Evidence of Crime”, etc).
A room full of discarded footwear
Also displayed throughout the blocks are an amazing amount of official, incarceration documentation (Nazi reports on inmates, medical treatments/punishments, etc). This really was a surprise to me, that such a minutiae of official, day-to-day documents had been preserved. My preconceived notion would have been that such incriminating material for the Nazis would have been destroyed. I can only deduce that the sudden, rapid advance on the territory by the Soviet Red Army in 1945 caught the occupying German Army out and it hastily fled Poland before it had time to dispose of all the evidence.
After the Kirkbride complex at Callan Park started as a hospital for the mentally ill in the 1880s, patients held at Gladesville Asylum and other psychiatric institutions in Sydney were routinely redirected to it. Kirkbride had been carefully planned by the hospital’s collaborators, architect Barnet and superintendent Manning, and purpose-built from the start to hold a maximum of 666 patients. But such was the demand for its services that the hospital’s patient population had reached close to 1,000 within three years of its opening (1888), and continued to grow unchecked. By 1960 Kirkbride contained something close to 2,000 patients resident there and in the adjoining auxillary wards.
Unfortunately, political support for care of the insane from around the turn of the 20th century started to diminish, with predictable adverse consequences for mental institutions generally. Without a much-needed injection of capital expenditure from government—a reflection of public apathy about the plight of mentally ill at the time—the essential new building infrastructure required to keep pace with the increasing demands of psychiatric care was stifled. Hospitals like Callan Park, with fewer resources and too many patients, were forced to resort to medical treatments (surgical, chemical and mechanical interventions) to cope with the sheer numbers [M Lewis, Managing Madness. A Social History of Insanity 1788-1980]. The financial stringency occasioned by the Depression and World War was a further blow to hopes for increased funding for mental health.
During the first half of the century there were the occasional, tentative inquiry into the deteriorating conditions in state psychiatric institutions, but these, like the 1948 Public Service Board enquiry, never really went anywhere. In terms of the overcrowding at Callan Park, measures that were at best only stop-gap were employed from time to time, eg, additions to the existing buildings at Kirkbride and Garryowen … which were architecturally out of step with the original Barnet and Manning designs [Peter Reynolds and Ken Leong, “Callan Park Mental Hospital”, Dictionary of Sydney, 2008, http://dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/callan_park_mental_hospital, viewed 07 December 2015].
There were some positive signs, finally, in 1955 with the Stoller Report which forced the Commonwealth Government to provide funds for mental health care in Australia. 1958 marked a watershed year for mental health with the passage of the NSW Mental Health Act, the first significant legislation in the field of institutional psychiatry for 60 years (replacing the 1898 Lunacy Act). The 1958 Act, in an long-overdue enlightened step, legislated that insanity should no longer be viewed as a criminal offence. It also made provisions for welfare officers to do follow-up visits of patients after their release. A further consequence of the Act was the construction of North Ryde Psychiatric Centre, the first such NSW institution in 35 years!
Within three years of the new act a Royal Commission on Callan Park was undertaken (in 1961), the first detailed investigation into mental health in NSW for 60 years. The Royal Commission was in part triggered by revelations of staff delinquency and dereliction of duty made by Dr Harry Bailey (newly appointed medical superintendent of Callan Park) in early 1960. The reformist-minded but over-zealous Bailey impetuously went over his superior’s head in presenting a report directly to the head of the PSB. Bailey’s act of ‘whistle-blowing’ concerned allegations of staff cruelty to and neglect of patients, and the discovery that staff were withholding food and groceries from patients with the purpose of profiting from these stolen supplies.
Bailey’s action provoked a revolt amongst the workers with staff members of the Nurses Association and the Hospital Employees Union taking industrial action. Bailey, who was later universally reviled for his central role in the horrific Chelmsford Hospital “Deep Sleep Therapy” scandal, was ‘scapegoated’ and pressured by the government into resigning the following year. But, with the newspapers demanding answers, the health minister was forced to initiate a Royal Commission into Callan Park, which confirmed many of Bailey’s charges but found others to be grossly exaggerated [“A history of medical administration in N.S.W. 1788-1973] Public Health Administration: Chief Medical Officer – Director General of Public Health, (2003),http://www0.health.nsw.gov.au/resources/aboutus/history/pdf/pt2cmo.pdf; Stephen Garton, ‘Bailey, Harry Richard (1922–1985)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/bailey-harry-richard-12162/text21793, published first in hardcopy 2007, accessed online 12 December 2015].
The Commission’s predictable findings brought to the attention of the public what was commonly known by anyone who had regularly visited the facility. Callan Park (Kirkbride Block) was too large, too overcrowded, with low standards of accommodation. The orientation at Kirkbride was custodial rather than rehabilitative, there was evidence found of cruelty, neglect and corruption … Callan Park had, as it is standard to say today of such matters, failed in its “duty of care”, it had become “a byword for all that was bad in mental health care” [Tanner Architects, Callan Park Rozelle Volume I, Conservation Management Plan, www.callanparkyourplan.com.au].
One of the specific findings of the Royal Commission into the Callan Park complex identified a group of male nurses and attendants who were bashing, starving, verbally abusing patients, as well as neglecting their state of cleanliness. Sadistic nurses were a recurring feature of Callan Park, going back to the institution’s infancy, ex-patients had testified as to the cruelty meted out by these “mechanical, inhumane creatures” [“Sydney’s shameful asylums: The silent houses of pain where inmates were chained and sadists reigned”, The Daily Telegraph (Sydney), 3 March 2015].
The incidences of illegalities and misdemeanours unearthed by the Royal Commission hinted at the deep, structural problems that had plagued Callan Park since its early days. Bailey’s actions in exposing malpractice at Callan Park, though injudicious in method (Bailey secretly taped a conversation he had with NSW health minister Sheahan), ensured that the institution’s activities stayed in the public’s mind and in the media’s gaze in the years after 1961.
Broughton Hall at the North Leichhardt (southern) end of the broad Callan Park area has experienced all the highs and lows of fortune over its 170 years of existence. Broughton House (as it was first called) was built by John Ryan Brenan after he had obtained the block of land from the old Perry (Township) Estate in the early 1840s. Brenan’s home was a brick stuccoed, two-story dwelling in the Regency style. Brenan’s financial woes forced him to sell his assets in the mid-1860s, but Broughton House stayed in private hands as a Victorian gentleman’s estate until the 20th century. A succession of owners and leaseholders held the property until ironmonger/importer John Keep acquired Broughton House (which he renamed Broughton Hall) and the nearby Kalouan (renamed “Broughton Villa” around 1870). Work on Broughton Hall extended the home to a 20-room mansion. Keep also started to cultivate a large garden on his estate.
After Keep’s death, Annandale timber merchants, the Langdon brothers, eventually acquired Broughton Hall in 1912, intending to use it as the site for a sawmill. When news of the carnage of Gallipoli shocked Australia, the brothers changed their minds and in a patriotic gesture offered the estate to the Commonwealth Government as convalescence and psychiatric hospitals, thus it became the 13th Australian Army Hospital for repatriated soldiers who were suffering the effects of “shell-shock”.
After the war Broughton Hall became NSW’s first voluntary psychiatric admissions clinic✪, Rozelle Psychiatric Hospital (1921), whilst Callan Park remained the place for more serious, longer-care cases. Broughton Hall (BH) and the auxiliary wards that later sprang up around it found themselves servicing an increasing number of out-patients as well.
The BH clinic’s driving force was its Medical Superintendent Dr (Sydney) Evan Jones who also took charge of the building designs and planned a distinctive garden and ground layout, using Keep’s garden as a starting point. Jones did a complete makeover of the existing grounds, creating a curvilinear garden comprising a forested jungle of tropical ferns, oaks and lanky bamboo with fish streams, quirky Japanese and Oriental miniature bridges and ornaments in the gardens. The landscaping of the grounds consisted of “building hills where none had been, valleys, sunken gardens, streams, bridges and stone walls” [Medical Journal of Australia, 26 June 1948, p 806, cited in Peter Reynolds, “Broughton Hall Psychiatric Clinic,” Dictionary of Sydney, 2008, http://dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/ broughton_hall_psychiatric_clinic, viewed 04 December 2015]. Critically, Dr Jones encouraged BH patients to actively assist in the creation of the amazing flora park.
Jones introduced the practice of occupational therapy into patient treatments (echoing the earlier approach of Manning at Kirkbride). This took the form of animal-assisted therapy—Jones added a zoological park to the hospital with kangaroos, emus, peacocks, cockatoos and parrots (the last remnant of the zoo, the ‘Roo House, was demolished in 1972)—as well as the creation of an environment of dense garden jungles and plants, all integral parts of the BH therapy approach (Reynolds).
If Moore’s Kirkbride garden can be described as a “pleasure garden”, then Jones’ Broughton garden well merits the epithet “fantasy’ garden”! It’s magical, coloured little bridges with their Japanese motifs and their ‘humpy’ paths and curvilinear shapes and the dense forested setting, all combine to bestow a particular fairytale enchantment on the place. Jones stated the gardens should be used “as machinery whereby a patient’s mind could be directed from neurosis to normality.”[cited in Sydney University, Sydney Medical School website].
During Jones’ period at the helm (1925-48), the Broughton Hall complex became the largest voluntary admission facility for psychiatric treatment in Australia, with close links to Sydney University (Jones himself lectured at USyd)[Tanner Architects, Callan Park Rozelle Vol I Conservation Management Plan, www.callanparkyourplan.com.au]. The interwar period saw Broughton Hall in the vanguard of “a virtual revolution in mental health care” as the number of voluntary admissions in Australia exploded. In-house psychiatrists utilised a range of therapies and treatments, in contrast to the incarceration policy of the large institutions [S Gorton, Medicine and Madness]. Later BH patients were encouraged to tend the “community garden” which backs on to Glover Oval (planting vegetables and flowers).
Accordingly, a building campaign began in the 1930s with a series of new wards built, supplementing the original Broughton Hall. A second building spurt occurred from 1956 to 1963 with new, small-scale residential buildings and landscaped surrounds. It also included a new occupational therapy building, new electrotherapy unit, IPC units and canteen [Building Ideas (Dec. 1963) cited in “Tanner Architects”]. New building work in Church Street (opposite the historic BH building) resulted in a modern hexagonal building housing a new outpatients clinic and day hospital. Also constructed on this block was a lecture hall named in honour of Evan Jones (there is some disagreement as to when these buildings were built, some sources say 1962-63, some, 1971). The complex is currently being converted into a Sydney campus for the University of Tasmania [See “Tanner Architects” and Peter Reynolds, “Broughton Hall Psychiatric Clinic”].
Broughton Hall (the original house) after WWII functioned initially as a female ward, then as an integrated rehabilitation ward, finally as a home for patients of the hospital’s Adolescent Unit in the 1970s. It was renamed, with unconscious irony, Rivendell, from the JRR Tolkien novels – “a place of goodness, peace and strength, devoid of all evil.” Rivendell’s relocation to Thomas Walker’s old Concord estate on the Parramatta River was a death-knell for Broughton Hall. The once great mansion became derelict, was vandalised and damaged by fire. It was boarded up in the 1980s and left in an abandoned, déshabillé state [Peter Reynolds, “Broughton Hall Psychiatric Clinic”].
Broughton Hall today
In 1976 the psychiatric hospital in the Broughton Hall precinct was formally amalgamated with the Kirkbride and the entire Callan Park complex was renamed Rozelle Hospital. Treatment and care of the mentally ill continued at Broughton Hall until 2008 when all psychiatric operations of Callan Park/Rozelle (BH and the Kirkbride Block) were moved to the newly constructed psychiatric facility at Concord Hospital. Since 2008 the former BH wards have operated as a drug and alcohol admissions clinic run by WHOS.
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✪ prior to this there was a voluntary ward for men only at the Darlinghurst Reception Centre – the Darlinghurst patients were transferred to Broughton Hall after it opened
Up from the water’s edge, the staggered hills, fields, woods, bush and scrubby vegetation, form the grounds that used to be known as Callan Park. On the pathway below, cyclists speed and joggers and walkers scurry along the popular Bay Run which skirts Sydney’s Iron Cove. Further up the undulating slopes of the park’s environs, the primary daytime activity seems to be the exercising of all manner of dog breeds by the local denizens.
The Gardener’s cottage
Callan Park is six kilometres west of the Sydney CBD, a broad area of some 61 hectares of largely park and woodland with scattered pockets of bush. If you stroll round its numerous, roughly concentric and hilly streets and walkways, you will find a very pleasant, tranquil parkland with an undulating landscape, gently sloping down till it reaches the foreshore of Iron Cove on the Parramatta River. The only residual sign of the presence of the area’s indigenous custodians, the Wangal clan (of the Eora tribe) who for thousands of years moved up and down its ridges and through its dense forests of Blackbutts and Ironbarks, are some traditional rock carvings out on the point of the Cove.
The sense of tranquility that the visitor gets is joined by a second sense, that of a pervading air of abandonment. When I first explored the area with only a vague grasp of these old cottages and workshacks being somehow part of Callan Park, the disused, dilapidated buildings left me with the initial impression that I had stumbled onto some sort of industrial wasteland, much like you might encounter in Peter Carey’s early short stories, but with decrepit, crumbling, asbestos-ridden buildings replacing the decrepit, rusty dismantled cars of The Fat Man in History. So many of the old brick-and-stone buildings jotted across the land are in varying degrees of decay, some boarded up to prevent assault from vandals, for others it is too late – they are already showing the pockmarks of wilful destruction … countless broken windows and doors and graffiti everywhere. Almost all of the structures bear the familiar yellow-and-black warning sign “DANGER ASBESTOS” or more ambiguously, “MAY CONTAIN ASBESTOS”.
At least since the beginning of the 20th century it’s been an urban cliché in Sydney to hear the name “Callan Park” casually thrown around … people suspected of aberrant thoughts or exhibiting the slightest deviance from the norm would regularly be on the receiving end of a comment like “You should be in Callan Park!”. This often would be in a flippant tone but sometimes the intent was more threatening, or at least, definitely condemnatory. Such is the stigma of Callan Park’s long-held reputation as a place to dump the mentally ill.
The first significant European use of the land at Callan Park flowed from local land grants made by Governor Macquarie in 1819-20. Land speculators moved to try to acquire the smaller plots and consolidate them into larger estates. In the 1830s two men in the colony with influence and means led the way in this. At the southern end of the park Deputy Surveyor-General Samuel Perry acquired an estate known as Spring Cove (now in Leichhardt North) where he built an impressive mansion home he called Kalouan, around 1840-41.
“Garryowen”
At more or less the same time, John Ryan Brenan, the colony’s Crown Solicitor and Police Magistrate, consolidated his holdings at the northern part of the land where he constructed an elegant Georgian stone home which he named Garryowen (the closest pub to Kirkbride, just over from the park in Darling Street, is named after this pioneer home). Brenan also acquired land near Perry’s estate and built a second, more palatial home called Broughton House. By the mid-1860s Brenan, facing bankruptcy, was forced to sell his properties and holdings. At this point any idea that the land might be used as an asylum hadn’t been contemplated. The new owner of the Garryowen Estate, businessman John Gordon, renamed the estate “Callan Park” with the idea of subdividing it to create a bayside suburb. Gordon’s plans were trumped by the NSW Colonial Government after colonial architect James Barnet persuaded Premier Henry Parkes to purchase the whole site for £12,500 in 1873.
The government was coming under community pressure to address the increasingly critical overcrowding in public asylums, especially in the main Sydney asylum at Tarban Creek (Gladesville). By 1876 Callan Park’s first in-patients were transferred into Brenan’s former homestead, Garryowen House from Darlinghurst. This was only a stopgap measure and Barnet together with the Medical Superintendent of Tarban Creek, Dr Frederick Manning, eventually convinced the government to seek a more permanent solution for the burgeoning numbers of the mentally ill. Barnet and Manning persuaded the Parkes Government as to the wisdom of building a brand new hospital. Both men wanted to create a more humane environment than that prevailing in the appalling, gloomy, prison-like conditions of Tarban Creek (which frankly wouldn’t have been hard, so parlous was the state of the Gladesville asylum!) A site was chosen, directly across from Garryowen, to construct a very large complex intended as a state-of-the-art psychiatric hospital providing a curative and therapeutic environment.
Kirkbride & it’s Italianate Tower
Between 1880 and early 1885 some 33 graceful sandstone buildings in the Victorian classical style were erected on a raised rock and earth platform and then enclosed within four sandstone perimeter walls. The complex was eventually named ‘Kirkbride‘ (often referred to as the Kirkbride Block) was named in honour of an influential American psychiatrist who advocated that pleasant surroundings for patients were conducive to “moral therapy”. The hospital’s first director of mental health, Dr F Norton Manning (also the NSW Inspector-General for the Insane), shared the prevailing moral therapy view of insanity as sinful, a character flaw that could be cured (or at least ameliorated) by preoccupation with work (outdoor gardening and trades for men and domestic service for women). If you coupled that with an attractive physical environment and religious instruction, this was the pathway to recovery, according to its advocates [S Garton, Medicine and Madness. A Social History of Insanity in NSW 1880-1940]
The Kirkbride complex, with its Free Classical style sandstone design, was the work of colonial architect James Barnet. It was the largest building project completed to that time in the colony (in fact the largest undertaken until the 20th century) at a then enormous cost of £250,000. Barnet collaborated with the hospital’s), whose designs for Kirkbride were based on the Chartham Downs institution in Kent. Kirkbride was designed with spacious, pavilion wards and sun-lit verandahs and connecting courtyards. To compliment the aesthetic virtues of Kirkbride, an attractive lawn setting and a tree-lined picturesque (sunken) garden was constructed below the block. The appealing garden and the spaciousness of the Hospital was meant to break down the effects of the patients’ natural feelings of confinement by affording them more scope for movement.
These grand, pleasure gardens were designed by Charles Moore, the Director of the National Botanic Gardens, with which they share some stylistic similarities. The gardens also contain something of a cross-cultural curio, a war memorial in the Spanish mission style [Graham Spindler, Uncovering Sydney, (1991)]. The eastern part of the park, near to Balmain Road, is lined with Port Jackson fig trees. At the northern end of Kirkbride, near where North Crescent circles round to become Central Avenue, are a couple of massive ancient Moreton Bay figs with the most amazing, gigantic root system.
Before taking up his post as Superintendent of Kirkbride Manning travelled overseas, researching the most modern methods of treating the insane. As well as creating the right aesthetic environment, his philosophy focused on the need to engage patients in meaningful work and recreational activities, such as growing their own produce and other farming pursuits (in this sense Manning was something of a harbinger in advocating the use of “occupational therapy”, a term and concept not in vogue until the 20th century) [Callan Park Conservation Management Plan, www. Leichhardt.nsw.gov.au.
Dr Manning also placed an emphasis on the quality of staffing, and played a key role in advancing the professional status of psychiatric nurses in Australian institutions. He insisted that nurses and attendants at Callan Park have proper training to be competent in working effectively in an asylum, and advocated that they be appropriately remunerated for their work.
‘Clockless’ Clock Tower & rear wall
A highlight of the architecture of the Kirkbride Block is the decorative Venetian “clock tower”(sans clock – it was never installed for some reason!). The tower is part of Kirkbride’s built-in reticulation system, on top of the tower is a tidal ball copper spire which indicates the water level of the underground reservoir below. Rainwater from the run-offs is collected in two underground tanks and pumped to the wards (one tank is reserved for any fire emergency). The surrounding walls of the complex employed a device called a “Ha-Ha” Wall. Barnet would have learned this from the work of 18th century English landscape architect ‘Capability’ Brown. A Ha-Ha Wall is where a steep ditch is dug along the inside of the wall to prevent patients scaling it, whilst at the same time retaining the exterior view (allowing patients views from their verandahs extending to the Blue Mountains)[“Rozelle Hospital Heritage Study” 1991 report (PDF), www.callanparkyourplan.com.au; “Kirkbride Past & Present”, SCA, www.sydney.edu.au].
The 5.1HA block was designed to be entirely self-contained, with its own kitchens, separate dining halls, capacity for 666 patients (with an even 333 split for each gender) in the rooms and dormitories (male and female were segregated at opposite ends of the block with other sections in the middle). The complex also contained staff residences, bathhouses, laundries, bakery, workshop, lecture halls, library, chapel, morgue and administration block. To the south of the tower is a furnace stack which was used to generate steam required for the laundries.
Manning’s successor as Inspector-General Eric Sinclair was also ahead of the game! He introduced more specialised (special admissions) wards, such as the Female Cottage Hospital, to treat curable cases through early intervention, and advocated to have treatment of mental disease put on a more scientific basis [Peter Reynolds and Ken Leong, “Callan Park Mental Hospital”, Dictionary of Sydney, 2008, http://dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/callan_park_mental_hospital, viewed 05 December 2015].
Sadly, over the course of the next century, Manning’s vision of an enlightened psychiatric hospital using modern scientific methods to care for those unfortunate enough to suffer from mental illness, floundered on a sea of inadequate government funding, staffing problems and chronic overcrowding, and until more recent times, met largely with public indifference. The overcrowding was a contributing factor in Kirkbride patient treatment becoming less rehabilitative in emphasis and more custodial as time went on.
If ever you take a tour of China, one of the first places you will probably want to visit is Xi’an, home of the Terracotta Warriors and Horses site and its Museum. Once you get there, while being driven to the venue from Xi’an Xianyang Airport or perhaps from your city hotel after a ride around Xi’an’s impressive City Walls, there’s a good chance that your Chinese tour guide while giving you his or her information talk will bring up the topic of Bill Clinton’s famous 1998 visit to Xi’an. This celebrated occasion has entered into local folklore and most Chinese guides in the Terracotta “palace” are armed with the “special Clinton anecdote”. I’ll get to that story soon enough but first some basic background on the Terracotta Warriors.
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The Yangs do some digging with totally unexpected consequencesThe whole phenomena of the Terracotta Warriors has its origin in March 1974 when several dirt-poor peasant farmers (thought to be seven in number) in Xiyang village in Lintong County, were digging for water in the dry, forbidding countryside 35km east of Xi’an. One of the farmers, Yang Zhi’fa, struck something hard with his hoe which he thought was a bronze relic of some kind. Digging a bit deeper he discovered the object had the form of a shoulder and torso. The other farmers, thinking they were human remains and fearful of Buddhist superstitions, urged Yang to rebury it so as not to offend the ancestors (ghost lore has been commonplace in the eastern Xi’an region for centuries). Yang was unperturbed and shortly later took the dismembered clay warrior to the Lintong Museum. Before long archaeologists from Beijing were swarming all over the site and so commenced a massive state-run excavation (of three pits) which has unearthed over the course of the last 40 years, an army of terracotta soldiers, horses and chariots, of what is the Mausoleum of the first Chinese Emperor, Qin Shi Huangdi who unified China c. 221BC (imperial Qin Dynasty).
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The Terracotta Warriors discovery: Profitable to some involved but not to others!The government eventually expropriated the land from the farmers to give free rein to the excavations, effectively destroying the Yang village. The dispossessed villagers were inadequately compensated for the disruption to their lives. By the early 1990s, after years of meticulous and arduous preparation work, the site area was opened as a museum and rapidly became a modern wonder of the world and a tourist mecca. The permanent exhibition proved to be a great little supplementary ‘earner’ for local Communist Party officials and many enterprising business people also profited enormously from the financial opportunities. This propitious good fortune has not been shared by the statues’ discoverers or by the Yang community as a whole. In fact Yang’s fellow farmers blamed him for the loss of their plots and livelihoods, and he was ostracised by his neighbours. Other misfortune followed for the community, two of the farmer Yangs died, only in their fifties due to impoverished circumstance and another, Wang Puhzi, hanged himself. To the farmers who had feared that the feng shui of the location would be disturbed by digging up the area, these tragic outcomes confirmed in their minds that it had been cursed.
A Terracotta Army fan with good connexionsOver in Washington DC, President Bill Clinton, when he wasn’t being leader of the “Free World”, had been following the unfolding archaeological story of the Xi’an terracotta army with growing interest and fascination. So, not long after, on a scheduled 1998 state visit to Beijing, Clinton requested that PRC allow him to make a side trip to Xi’an so he could see the terracotta marvels in situ for himself. The Chinese authorities, sensing a PR coup in the making, arranged for Mr Yang to be on hand at the site to meet the American president before the news cameras. For the occasion the (presumably) illiterate farmer was taught a few words of English to greet the president with. As it transpired, Yang got very nervous at the prospect of meeting the US leader and when introduced to Clinton on the day, instead of saying “How are you?”, what came out of Yang’s mouth in his halting English was “Who are you?” to which Clinton instantly responded, “I’m Hillary’s husband!” The flustered Mr Yang replied,”Me too!” Everybody laughed…on the Chinese officials’ part it was more of a nervous laugh!
⬅️ When Bill met Yang (yes but which Yang?)
Mr Yang, ‘professional’ book-signerThe encounter between president and peasant farmer generated a second anecdote: at the meeting Clinton asked Mr Yang for his autograph. Yang, who could neither read nor write, simply drew three circles on a piece of paper. Followed a slightly uncomfortable moment … not least for the embarrassed Chinese officials in attendance. Consequently, the local authorities later sent the uneducated Yang for calligraphy lessons, after which Yang was given a job by the government in the Terracotta Warriors tourist shop. His task was to sit at a table all day signing books on the Terracotta Warriors (leading to his being called by some people, “China’s First Professional Signer”). It should be added that Yang Zhi’fa subsequently disputed the inference of this story circulated by a Chinese newspaper in 2002 that he was illiterate, contending that he in fact had a primary school education. Yang sued the newspaper and was eventually awarded damages [Yu Fei, ‘Living with the Terra-cotta Army’, (Consulate-General, Peoples Republic of China in Houston), www.houston.china-consulate.org].
Crafty Mr YangIf you venture into the Emperor Qin Museum shop in Xi’an, as I did three years ago, you will still see the same unsmiling Mr Yang, inscribing his signature on the inside of countless coffee table books, none of which are written by him! Although he looks distracted and bored in his sedentary confinement, he is in actual fact ever vigilant, on the lookout for maverick tourists trying to snap his precious photograph, something he is peculiarly adverse to. While he was looking the other way, and thinking I was out of the line of his peripheral vision, I tried to grab a surreptitious, sneaky photo of Yang from the side…just as I was about to, the sour-faced septuagenarian, suddenly and without looking towards me, raised a cardboard sign in my direction which said in large English letters, “NO PHOTOS OR VIDEOS ALLOWED!”.But is it the ‘real’ Clinton? ⤴
Other spots, other ‘Yangs’If you wander further afield around the Terracotta Warriors complex you may chance upon other individuals also purporting to be “Mr Yang”. It’s quite an industry in Xi’an! In one building near the entrance to the complex there is Yang Xi’an who passes himself off the discoverer of the warriors (although his banner actually says “the discover of the warriors”), displaying a photo of himself posing with Clinton as proof of his credentials. It transpires that this Mr Yang was in fact the manager of a Xi’an factory making replicas of the warriors at the time of Clinton’s 1998 visit – this explains the photo taken when “Slick Willie” stopped off at the factory on route to the Terracotta Museum.
Would the real Mr Yang, the genuine “Discoverer of the Terracotta Warriors’, please stand up?In the glow of world attention being lavished on the terracotta army discoveries and the recognition bestowed on Mr Yang, it is not surprising that the other three surviving farmers present at the 1974 archaeological find wanted to get in on the act. Yang Quany was also given a spot in the museum signing books for a small stipend and began promoting himself as “the discoverer of the treasures”. The remaining two Yangs followed suit. Yang Zhi’fa however discredits his fellow Lintong farmers’ motives and insists that it is he who was primus intra pares (first among equals) in discovering the Emperor Qin relics.
And it doesn’t stop there by any measure. Zhao Kangmin, retired curator of the nearby Lintong Museum, has made his case for recognition as the real discoverer. The way Mr Zhao tells it, after the initial finding Yang Zhi’fa brought the fragment of the terracotta relic first to him at his museum and that he went back to investigate the discovery, and later he reconstructed the first terracotta warrior and horse. Zhao argues that he was the one who had the expertise to grasp the significance of the cultural relics, and that “seeing” as Yang and the others merely did, “doesn’t mean discovering”. You’ll find Zhao, despite being retired, most days at the Lintong Museum where he has set up a small display of the terracotta figures. Zhao spends the day signing postcards for tourists, on the cards he writes, very deliberately: “Zhao Kangmin, the first to discover, restore, appreciate, name and excavate terra-cotta warriors” [Ibid].
Whilst the Lintong farmers haven’t made much money from discovering (or being associated with the discovery of) the terracotta army, the same can be said of the workers who did most of the hard physical work of unearthing and restoring the statues. Most of those recruited to curator Yuan Zhongyi’s archaeological team found themselves working round the year with only a break at the time of the Spring Festival holiday for a wage of only 1.72 yuan (US $0.28) a day in 1976 [Zhao Xu, ‘Yang Zhifa, 76, soldiers on amid terracotta warriors’, (09-XII-2014),China Daily USA, www.chinadaily.com].
A Terracotta Warriors discoverer–impostor industryBack at the Qin Terracotta Warriors and Horses Museum, as the fame and popularity of Emperor Qin’s Mausoleum grows, more impostors continue to spring up. These “fake discoverers” of the warriors were like Yang Xi’an, not even present at the discovery of the relics in 1974 (some are not even old enough to have been there!). A manager of one of the gift shops admitted that the complex shops hire men who fraudulently passed themselves off as discoverers of the relics to facilitate the sale of terracotta warrior books by the retailer [Simon Parry, ‘Curse of the Warriors’, South China Morning Post, 15 Sept 2007, www.scmp.com].
“The three in the middle just moved!” ⤴
PostScript: Discovery of yet more warriors made from fired clayMeanwhile back in the football field sized excavation pits at Lintong, Emperor Qin’s life-sized army of clay statues continues to grow. Archaeologists working in pit Nō 2 recently made a fresh discovery, one which might yield another 1,400 warriors, archers, horses and charioteers (and 89 chariots of war) [‘China’s Terracotta Army has new recruits’, Daily Mail, 6 May 2015, www.dailymail.co.uk]. Chinese officials have speculated that there may be around 6,000 terracotta warriors at the site still to be excavated … ensuring no doubt that there will be plenty of new and ongoing opportunities for discoverer-impostors in the future.
The Hydro Majestic Hotel stands on the upper slopes of the Megalong Valley in the Blue Mountains, about 116 kilometres west of the Sydney CBD. Last December it re-opened for business six years after it’s resale and interim closure in 2008. The new owners, the Escarpment Group (a consortium of Sydney developers headed by Huong Nguyen and George Saad), have an ambitious vision for the Medlow Bath hotel, including an extension to its facilities and services, and a major renovation of the once great Blue Mountains landmark to restore some of its past glory. About four years passed before construction work even commenced on the site. Initially the new owners had to undertake a big clean-up job of the vacated property as a very large amount of assorted clutter was left behind by the previous occupants [‘Saving a grand old beauty’s soul’, Peter Munro, Traveller, 7 January 2013, www.traveller.com.au].
The Hydro Majestic through the agency of a renovation that cost $30 million has been transformed—from its erstwhile state of dishevelment and disrepair—to again rise seemingly phoenix-like in 2015. The new exterior makeover resulted in the complex’s buildings being painted uniformly white, clearly the developers are hoping that the anticipated returns will repay the investment (all up a reported $40.5 million including the purchase price) so that the venture doesn’t end up a ‘white elephant in all senses!’
Mark Foy’s Liverpool St store
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The Majestic’s current incarnation however is only the latest of many manifestations and reinventions that the hotel has undergone over its long, colourful history. The Hydro Majestic’s genesis lies in the overseas travel experiences of retail baron Mark Foy around the turn of the twentieth century. Foy was co-owner with his brother Francis of the large Sydney department store, Mark Foy’s (named after his father Mark Foy Sr) in Oxford Street, Sydney, later relocated to Liverpool Street in a famous piazza building. The young entrepreneur’s experience of health spas on the Continent gave him the idea for starting a hydropathic therapy operation in Australia. In 1902 Foy purchased several large blocks of land in the Blue Mountains to re-create a similar spa resort to the highly-popular sanatoriums he had visited in Europe. The site chosen at Medlow Bath was supposedly located on natural mineral springs that incorporated the earlier Belgravia Hotel [John Low, ‘Palace in a Wilderness: Hydro Majestic Medlow Bath’, www.bmcc.nsw.gov.au].Foy’s Blue Mountains ur-health resort
Upon completion in 1904 Foy opened his Medlow Bath hydropathic sanatorium (the first health resort in NSW) which he named the Hydro-Majestic. By this time whatever springs were present (if they ever existed) had dried up. Consequently Foy imported large quantities of mineral water from Germany for use in his establishment [www.hydromajestic.com.au (Wikipedia entry)]. He also introduced a German-manufactured generator to supply the Hotel and the surrounding township with electricity (purportedly four days before the city of Sydney achieved electricity!) [www.hydromajestic.com.au, ibid.].
A series of spa pools connected by springs to the hotel generator were constructed in the nearby bush for the use of guests. Foy advertised that the Hydro would provide cures for nervous, alimentary, respiratory and circulatory ailments. Foy from the establishment’s start was also intent on trying to broaden the Hydro’s appeal, advertising it as “the most enjoyable place to spend one’s holidays” [Elaine Kaldy, ‘Medlow 1883 and Now’ (1983), cited in ‘Mb002 : Hydro Majestic’, NSW Office of Environment and Heritage, www.environment.nsw.gov.au]. To coordinate the therapeutic programs Foy brought out a Dr Bauer from Switzerland to introduce guests to his “diets of weird and wonderful treatments” [www.hydromajestic.com.au].
Playboy business tycoon
Mark Foy, to all accounts, was not particularly hands-on in his business pursuits, leaving it to a host of managers and agents. The Hydro for instance was apparently leased to influential hotelier and parliamentarian James Joynton Smith in 1913 [‘K032 : Carrington Hotel’, NSW Office of Environment and Heritage, www.environment.nsw.gov.au]. Foy’s conspicuous affluence and delegation of tasks to others allowed him the leisure to pursue outdoor activities. The business baron also had a reputation of being something of a playboy-about-town in the ‘Great Gatsby’ mould, legendary for throwing lavish parties for his friends at the Hydro and at his other homes at Bellevue Hill and Bayview.
Mark Foy Jr
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The Hydro Majestic owner was a keen sportsman, yachtsman and motor-car enthusiast. He was such a car enthusiast that he would periodically have sales of bulk numbers of his vehicles on site at his Bellevue Hill property [“MARK FOY’S MOTORS” (Advertisement), Sydney Morning Herald, 3 September 1910 – an adroit coupling of business with pleasure on his part; cited in Pittwater Online News, Issue 102 (17-23 March 2013), http://www.pittwateronlinenews.com/mark-foy-history.php]. Foy used his fleet of cars to ferry guests on trips from Medlow Bath to nearby Jenolan Caves. He also kept horses on the grounds for guests to explore Megalong Valley by horseback [Office of Heritage and Environment (Hydro Majestic), www.environment.nsw.gov.au].
Majestic skyline
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Network of bush walks and sustainable agriculture
Foy had a series of bush walk tracks built on the cliffs below the Hydro Majestic. The walking tracks provided spa guests with a physical outlet that would complement Dr Bauer’s therapeutic programs. Guests were encouraged to exercise in the fresh mountain air as part of their recovery. These tracks with local physical features with names like Tucker’s Lookout, Sentinel Pass and the Colosseum offer breath-taking cliff views of the Megalong Valley, and are still explored by bush walkers today.As well as the hotel site itself Mark Foy purchased a considerable amount of land in the Megalong Valley to grow food for the Majestic hotel dinner tables. Foy built a large rural holding at Megalong which he called the Valley Farm, on it was a racecourse, stables, diary farm and a piggery. The farm grew corn, turnips and oats [‘Mark Foy – Retail Tycoon and Megalong Valley Farm’, www.megalongcc.com.au]. The produce grown in the valley was transported up to the resort by a flying fox Foy had rigged up.
The business tycoon also maintained personal properties on the Medlow Bath complex, including a cottage in the Valley known as the Sheleagh Cottage. This property with its great views of the valley, now called “Mark Foy House”, is today listed as a mountains getaway available for rental. It is unclear how much time the constantly on-the-go Foy spent at Sheleagh, or for that matter at any of his Sydney properties, as the newspapers of that day regularly reported him as embarking with his family on yet another world or European tour [cited in Pittwater Online News, op.cit.]. I can easily imagine Foy’s name cropping up constantly in the Vice-Regal column that used to appear in the Sydney Morning Herald.
‘The Lost World’
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༘༘༘Resort’s luminaries
At the height of its popularity, in the twenties, the Hydro-Majesty was THE fashionable venue to visit, “the place to be seen” by the denizens who grace Sydney’s social pages. Over the years it has had more than its fair share of VIP guests, such as Sherlock Holmes creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle whose novel The Lost World was inspired by the vast wilderness environment that the Hydro was set in. Other guests include Indian rajahs, Australia’s first Olympic swimming gold medal winner Freddie Lane, and the Commonwealth’s inaugural Prime Minister Edmund Barton, who died whilst staying at the resort in 1920. Boxer Tommy Burns set up a training camp at the hotel where he prepared to fight Jack Johnson for the World Heavyweight Championship in the most famous bout in Australia boxing history at Sydney Stadium in 1908. The entertainment and amusements provided by Mr Foy at the Hydro Majestic took various forms. In its heyday when it was a luxury tourist resort, balls and concerts were regular events. Singers such as the soprano queens Dames Nellie Melba and Clara Butt were hired to perform at these concerts. A curious feature was the cross-dressing costume parties of well-to-do guests in which the husband and wife swapped clothing with each other for the event [‘Saving a grand old beauty’s soul’, op.cit.].
An architectural mixed bag
Taken at its broad scope the Hydro-Majestic is an impressive if a bit discordant sight, a long line of arranged buildings, albeit positioned in a somewhat higgledy-piggledy fashion stretching for some 1.1 kilometres across the Megalong escarpment. The Hotel’s architecture is hybrid in character, with buildings being added in an ad hoc fashion over time and in a novel mixture of styles: Victorian, Edwardian, Belle Époque and a blend of Art Deco and Art Nouveau interior design.
The Hydro – in its down-market days
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The Majestic’s most distinctive external feature is the Casino building with its imposing Chicago-manufactured dome (this ‘casino’ has been used as an entertainment hall or pavilion rather than as a gaming house). The changing fortunes of the Hydro Majestic as a whole over the decades was symbolised in the fate of the Casino itself: going from the scene for grand balls and concerts in the 1920s and 1930s to a repository for (how the mighty have fallen!) pinball machine entertainment in the 1980s!
A Zimmerman
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Resident artist with obsessive-compulsive tendencies
One of the most intriguing interior features of the Hydro Majestic is the so-called Cat’s Alley, a long corridor whose windows back in the day were draped with peacock feathers. Scone-and-cream afternoon tea visitors to the hotel would stroll down the corridor strewn with puff-pillowed lounge chairs and a set of bizarre panelled scenes, hunting scenes from different historical periods, the work of a Swiss artist called Arnold Zimmerman. Panel after panel comprised Prehistoric cavemen hunting wooly mammoths, Assyrian warriors slaughtering lions, British Raj mounted horsemen hunting tigers in India, Roman soldiers killing elephants, and so on and so on. The first time I ever visited the Hydro I marvelled somewhat bemused at Zimmerman’s paintings, finding them slightly disturbing in their obsession with the monumental struggle between man and beast, terrible but also engaging in a visceral way. Visitor access was blocked to the Alley for some years but it is pleasing to note that it is opened again after the refurbishment with additional seating.
The immediacy of a vast wilderness of National Park bushland has regularly posed a danger to the Hydro Majestic. In 1905 fire destroyed the Gallery building and in 1922 did the same to the original Belgravia wing. There have been several other close calls, the latest in 2002 when Medlow Bath’s “Gothic tourist pile”, as one article described it, narrowly avoided a spot fire blaze [Margaret Simons, ‘Majestic tourist icon survives ordeal by fire’, Sydney Morning Herald, 9 December 2002].
The Hydro-Majestic over the course of its century-plus existence has undergone a number of transformations. What started off as a hydropathic spa pretty soon morphed into a luxury tourist retreat after 1909 (“Mr Foy’s Private Lodge”), only to revert more modestly to a family hotel for ordinary guests and day-trippers. In WWII the Hydro was converted into the 118th US General Hospital to care for convalescing American soldiers, some of which showed their “gratitude” by inflicting damage on the hotel’s decor during their stay. After the War the Hydro reverted to a hotel and guesthouse. By the 1980s the buildings had declined alarmingly despite receiving a heritage preservation order in 1984, business had dropped off and the very visible signs of wear and age eventually necessitated a revamping in the 1990s and again in the last few years.
In keeping with the hybrid nature of the hotel, parts of the new Hydro Majestic exude a distinctly oriental flavour. The Salon Du Thé features a Shanghai chic tea room and bar and both it and the Cat’s Alley reprise many of the oriental traits of the original 1900s Medlow hotel which featured a Chinoiserie style favoured by Mark Foy. The Majestic’s original Salon Du Thé displayed ornaments and furnishings which included large Chinese vases and porcelain vessels, bamboo-look furniture and silk umbrellas [www.hydromajestic.com.au].
Footnote: Regaining its past glory? Will the refurbished Hydro Majestic rise again to the exalted heights it attained in the inter-war period? Will patrons flock to it again as they once did? Will it be able to attract the higher socio-economic clientele associated with a luxury resort? It is far too early to tell, but it should be noted that there is a lot more choice now in Sydney with high-class hotels and resorts. Nonetheless, the Hydro’s traditional high tea is back, the complex has more restaurant options than ever before, though the guest rooms are still on the small side! What also hasn’t changed to its advantage are the magnificent panoramic views of the Megalong Valley, they remain one of the Hotel’s strongest magnetic attractions.
Above: Flagship of the Mark Foy’s retail empire. The city department store opened in 1885, moving to the Liverpool Street site in 1909 where an ice skating rink was installed on the 5th floor in 1950 for “Fashion Fantasy on Ice” parades. In 1980, having been earlier acquired by Waltons, it ceased trading permanently. Today the monolithic heritage building renamed the Downing Centre functions as a local and district court
The Epic Film: Myth and History, by Derek Elley (re-published 2014, originally published 1984)
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The onset of the 21st century seemed to herald a revival in the epic genre in film. Large-budget “Sword-and-Sandal” movies of the early 2000s such as Gladiator and Troy, labelled “Neo-epic films” by cinema critics, have reinvigorated the genre. At the same time, a new blockbuster phenomenon in the shape of the Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter series of films, padded with wall-to-wall distinguished British (and Commonwealth) actors, have extended the epic genre, and in the case of the ‘Rings’ cycle, given the flagging “Sword-and-Sorcery” sub-genre a new lease of life.
The author’s approach to his subject is a somewhat scholarly one, although the book also remains accessible purely on an entertainment level. Elley begins by making clear the distinction between the heroic and the epic … “heroes alone do not make an epic,” other ingredients especially the “all-important mythic quality” is needed to elevate the narrative to a higher plane, the ‘supra-human’ dimension. The author then proceeds to trace the transition from the epic in its original, literary form to its cinematic form.
The book concerns itself to a large extent with the type of epic film much in vogue in the fifties and sixties, drawn from the history and mythology of antiquity (Greece, Rome, Egypt, Mesopotamia). Right up front I’d have to say that I think that the author is inclined to take the genre a bit too seriously. The epic movie, in whatever phase or incarnation it takes, has been something difficult to be especially serious about! By definition the standard form of the epic has tended to be characterised by an indulgence in excess – grandiosity, vulgarity, basically everything 8XL in size! Mention the epic film and people often think of monumental Hollywood flicks like Ben-Hur, Spartacus, Cleopatra, and the like. Conspicuous consumption the order of the day, so much so so that it could be suggested that epic films should be primarily seen as a kind of parody of themselves.
The Epic Film spends a good deal of time examining another type of epic movie, the Continental Sword-and-Sandal variant of the species which further takes away from the serious side of the genre’s purpose. The “Sword-and-Sandal” as the book points out is also known in the trade as a Peplummovie …from peplos the type of ancient Greek robe or tunic worn by women (as modelled below). Strictly speaking ancient men wore chitons, a lighter, simpler and usually shorter garment than the feminine peplos, but the name ‘Peplum’ stuck for the epic movie!
This sub-genre had its heyday between the late 1950s and the mid 1960, usually set in Ancient Greece or Rome and often filmed at Cinecittà in Rome (for a time the world’s film studio of choice) and/or in the campagna in Italy or Spain. The elements of the genre are well-known and entirely formulaic: heroic but one-dimensional gladiatorial strongmen, a bevy of immaculately beautiful but defenceless heroines in sexy, ultra-mini peplums, a paper-thin storyline appallingly scripted and only coincidentally unrecognisable as history, incoherently edited, low budgets, sloppily shot with atrociously wooden acting and haphazardly dubbed into English.
Footnote: the popularity of the Italian Peplum provided career change opportunities for body builders as many would-be actors like Steve Reeves, Mark Forest and Kirk Morris, made the transition from the bodybuilding game to become leads in Sword-and-Sandal sagas. Interestingly, many of the Italian musclemen-stars took Anglo-sounding names in an attempt to make them more appealing to the American market, thus the well-known Sergio Ciani became on screen the aptly named “Alan Steel”.
Steve Reeves’ phenomenally successful Labors of Hercules (1957) was the springboard for a spate of strongman-centred Pepla. From the mid sixties a number of the Peplum strongmen made the switch to Spaghetti Westerns which spectacularly filled the void when the popularity of the Sword and Sandal costumers began to wane. Spaghetti Westerns utilised the same device of giving its Italian stars American-sounding names, the most famous of which were the ‘Trinity’ duo, Terence Hill and Bud Spencer.
Whilst acknowledging the limitations of many of these B-grade epics Elley soberly proceeds to unearth all manner of meaningful cinematic aesthetics from the likes of Samson against the Moon Men, Hercules and the Tyrants of Babylon, etc, etc. The author describes his text somewhat grandly as an extended essay on defining “the epic form in its filmic context”. The definition in the book that took my eye is attributed to Charlton Heston, “There’s a temptingly simple definition of the epic film: It’s the easiest kind of picture to make badly” (Chuck should have known – he appeared in his fair share of dud epics in his career).
Strongman ‘Maciste’
Elley points out that spectacle is the most characteristic trademark of the epic genre, and that trait is (or was) synonymous with Hollywood. Although we connect the Pepla of that era with Italy and the Continent, we tend to associate the wider phenomenon of epics with America. The author quotes Peter Ustinov to good effect: “I’ve always thought that only the Americans can do Ancient Rome pictures. Both cultures have the same kind of relaxed, rangy pomp. Both have exactly the same kind of bad taste”.
⇧ Transparent marketing attempt to capitalise on the famous ‘Ben-Hur’ chariot racebut failing to meet those expectations
The book is adorned with some 88 pictures in glorious black-and-white and these may hold for some readers the greatest interest. Amongst these is a still from the 1964 movie The Fall of the Roman Empire, a long range shot of a Late Roman frontier fortress under attack – complete with a modern Italian villa and two parked fiats close by in the background. Another revealing picture contains a close-up of the cleft-chinned Kirk Douglas as the fabled Ulysses, his heroic countenance somewhat spoiled by the clearly visible but unsightly appearance of Kirk’s varicose veins! Or equally entertaining, is the photo (below) of Victor Mature as Samson, teeth gritted, valiantly wrestling a ‘savage’ lion which looks like it’s been recently rejected by a local Los Angeles taxidermist.
Many of the era’s epic films that came out of Hollywood tend to be prone to snatches of excruciatingly bad dialogue. The book provides a wealth of atrocious quotes from the genre. Savour if you will these little vignettes which run the gamut from overblown dramatic(sic) intensity to inane absurdity:
“When you speak of destiny, this is something I must at last believe” (delivered with exaggerated emphasis), Genghis Khan, in Genghis Khan (1965).
“Love and hate are horns on the same goat”, Rune woman, in The Vikings (1958).
“At one time, when you were a little fella, you were always asking questions!”, Joseph, to Jesus, in The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965).
This last line of dialogue, tinged with more than a touch of folksy mid-western Americanism, could easily have rolled from the mouth of failed actor-turned-US president, Ronnie Reagan, whilst whittling wood on the back-step of his Californian ranch.
By focussing on 50s and 60s Hollywood and Italian epics Elley largely neglects the first resurgence of the Sword-and-Sorcery film which took place in the late 70s and early 80s … the Star Wars cycle, Excalibur, Conan the Barbarian, etc (all made before The Epic Film‘s original publication in 1984). Other (admittedly minor) sub-genres of the epic such as the Sinbad saga films (The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger, and so on) and the Swashbuckler/Pirate films don’t get a guernsey at all … although the Sinbad movies could just as well be categorised as adventure-fantasy films, rather than strictly Sword-and-Sorcery ones.
Elley’s study of the epic film genre is informative and instructive in so far as it goes. Ancient Greeks and Romans, Biblical figures, barbarians and Norsemen, all get a good run, but Elley’s historical survey cuts off at the end of the Dark Ages. I’m left with a tinge of regret that he didn’t take a more expansive approach in the book to include the grand and occasionally grandiloquent epic movies made about legendary Britons of a later era like Arthur and Robin Hood, as well as the more modern epics like Lawrence of Arabia or Dr Zhivago and even extend it to examples of the genre as diverse as 2001 a Space Odyssey and Planet of the Apes.
To the vast majority of people, especially in America, the name Wright brothers and the first mechanically-propelled flight in a heavier-than-air craft have always been synonymous with each other. The reality is that the achievement of Orville and Wilbur’s “First Flight” has always been strongly contested from certain quarters within the aviation industry in the United States – and internationally as well.
Not long after the news spread about the momentous event at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, on 17 December 1903, the significance of what the Wrights’ had done found itself under challenge, especially as time went on from the European aviation community. French newspapers after 1903 described the celebrated American brothers as bluffeurs (bluffers). Doubts were raised about their achievements when the Wrights failed to release the photo of the Wright Flyer in flight at Kitty Hawk until nearly five years after the groundbreaking 1903 flight … newspapers acerbically asked: “Were they fliers or liars?”, Paris edition of the New York Herald (10 Feb 1906); ‘Wright Brothers: European skepticism’, www.spiritus-temporis.com.
The state of North Carolina has harboured no such doubts, proudly displaying the slogan First in Flight on its car number-plates. Whether you accept the Wrights’ claim to be first in flight, or some other contender (of which there are several), in a sense could depend on what is meant by manned, aeronautical flight. Orville Wright’s first successful if brief powered flight was by no measure the first human flight in history. The genesis of intentional manned air travel can be traced back to the late 18th century with the advent of large hot air balloons (starting with the Montgolfier brothers of France in 1783).
As well, in the 30 years preceding Kitty Hawk, there was a host of aviation pioneers experimenting with monoplanes, biplanes, box-kites and gliders including, 1874: Félix du Temple; 1894: Hiram Maxim; 1894: Lawrence Hargrave; 1898: Augustus Moore Herring [B Kampmark, ‘Wright Brothers: Right or Wrong?’, Montréal Review (April 2013]. These flights however were either pre-power ones, or if motorised, they have been largely discredited as having been either unsustained, uncontrolled or as at the least not sufficiently controlled [P Scott, The Shoulders of Giants: A History of Human Flight to 1919].
The achievements of Orville and Wilbur in their 1903 Wright Flyer moved beyond the brothers’ earlier experiments in motorless gilders, but there are at least two other rival claimants prior to December 1903 whose aeronautical experiments were also mechanically-driven and became airborne albeit briefly – Gustave Whitehead in 1901 and Richard Pearse in 1902/1903. The late 1890s and early 1900s were awash with would-be plane makers, there was a veritable aircraft mania world-wide with people all the way from Austria to Australasia trying to construct workable “flying machines”.
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Richard Pearse ⇓
Pearse’s somewhat erratic aircraft experiments in New Zealand, far away from the salient aeronautical developments in the US Eastern Seaboard and Europe, largely flew under the radar (to invoke an obvious pun!). The evidence suggests that Canterbury farmer Pearse’s home-built glider (equipped with tricycle wheels and an air-compressed engine) made at least one (but probably more) flights, but with little control over the craft. What was to Pearse’s credit was that unlike the Wright Flyer which managed only to travel in a straight line on 17 December 1903, the New Zealander was able to turn right and left during his flight on 11 May 1903 [PS Ward, ‘Richard Pearse, First Flyer’ The Global Life of New Zealanders, www.nzedge.com].
Pearse’s low-key approach to his attempts meant that no photographs were taken, although Geoffrey Rodcliffe identifies over 40 witnesses to Pearce’s flights prior to July 1903 [http://avstop.com]. Pearse did not actively promote his own claims for a place in aviation history (unlike the consistently determined and even pathological efforts of the Wright brothers to consolidate their reputation), and he himself conceded that the Wrights’ flight achieved a “sustained and controlled” trajectory, something that he had not. But Pearse did contribute to aviation’s development nonetheless through the creation of a monoplane configuration, wing flaps and rear elevator, tricycle undercarriage with steerable nosewheel, and a propeller with variable-pitch blades driven by a unique double-acting horizontally opposed petrol engine [G Ogilvie, ‘Pearse, Richard William’, Dictionary of New Zealand Biography (Te Ara) 7 Jan 2014].
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Gustav Whitehead⇓
G A Whitehead was a German migrant (born Gustave Weisskopf) living in Connecticut who started experimenting with gliders (variations on the glider prototype design developed by aviation pioneer Otto Lilienthal) in the mid-1890s, at a time when Wilbur and Orville were still making and repairing bicycles in Dayton, Ohio. The case in support of the flight made by Whitehead on 14 August 1901 in what must be noted was an improbable-looking, bat-shaped, engine-propelled glider at Fairfield near Bridgeport, was first taken up in 1935 (in an article in an industry magazine, Popular Aviation, entitled ‘Did Whitehead Precede Wright In World’s First Powered Flight?’)回. Whitehead’s claim lay dormant until the 1960s when army reservist William O’Dwyer, took up the German-American engine-maker’s cause and did his upmost to promote his “flying machine”.
A surprise rival to the Wrights’ crown
Supporters of Whitehead recently received a further boost through the research of Australian aviation historian John Brown who discovered a photo (lost since the 1906 Aero Club of America Exhibition) purporting to be of Whitehead’s № 21 Gilder in flight. Largely on the basis of this, Brown was able to convince the premier aviation journal, Jane’s All the World’s Aircraft, to recognise Whitehead’s claim over that of the Wrights’ as the first powered and navigable flight in history [“An airtight case for Whitehead?”, www.fairfield-sun.com, 24 August 2013]. Doubts remain however about the Whitehead thesis. Brown’s reliance on the newly-discovered photo remains problematic, the image even ultra-magnified is indistinct and inconclusive of anything much. In any case the providence is questionable, there is no irrefutable evidence yet unearthed linking it to Whitehead’s 1901 flight. [“The case for Gustave Whitehead”, www.wright-brothers.org]
⇑ Whitehead & his № 21 Glider
Footnote: The newly-acquired kudos of Connecticut arising from Jane’s recognition of Whitehead, has led to the amusing suggestion from some Connecticuters, that the state’s number-plates now be inscribed (at the risk of some serious grammatical mangling), Firster in Flight“, as a counterfoil to North Carolina’s “First in Flight”❈.
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Santos-Dumont’s biplane ⇓
Santos, breaking through for Europe (and Brazil)
A case has also been made for Alberto Santos-Dumont, a Brazilian aviator-inventor as the first to fly a mechanised aircraft – the 1906 Paris flight of his 14-bis biplane (Condor # 20). Supporters of the Brazilian aviator argue this on the grounds that it, not the Wrights 1903 flight, represented the first officially witnessed, unaided take-off and flight by a heavier-than-air craft. Brazilians, whilst acknowledging that the Wright Brothers conducted a successful flight earlier, argue that Santos-Dumont should be given pre-eminence because the 14-bis‘ take-off was made from fixed wheels (as was Pearse’s flight in NZ incidentally) rather than catapulted into the air from skids as happened with the Wright Flyer in 1903 [‘The case for Santos-Dumont’, www.wright-brothers.org]. The patriotic Brazilians, always ready to embrace a national hero, sporting or otherwise, have gone to great and amusing lengths to register their pride in Santos-Dumont’s achievement. Many Brazilian cities have an Avenida Santos Dumont named in honour of the aviator. In a characteristically Brazilian vein of jocularity, some Brazilians have taken a “stretch-limo” approach, rendering the street name into English thus: Santos Dumont the True Inventor of the Airplane and Not the Wright Brothers Avenue [V Barbara, ‘Learning to Speak Brazinglish’, New York Times, 8 November 2013].
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Hargrave at Stanwell Tops⇓
Hargrave down under: providing lift
More seriously, Santos-Dumont’s 1906 successful, powered flight in Paris (dismissed by the Wrights as a series of “long hops”) owed a large debt to Lawrence Hargrave, Santos’ Condor biplane being based on Hargrave’s box-kite construction. Not just Santos but many other aviation pioneers, including the brothers Wright, all benefitted from Hargrave’s conscious decision not to patent his designs. The Australian inventor has an under-recognised role in the history of aviation, but he contributed massively to the first successful airplane through the development of three critical aeronautical concepts – the cellular box-kite wing, the curved wing surface, and the thick leading wing edge (aerofoil). The world’s first commercial aircraft built by Frenchman Gabriel Voisin incorporated the stable lifting surfaces of Hargrave’s box kites. In addition, Hargrave invented the radial rotary engine which drew great interest from Europe and was later used extensively in military aircraft [‘The Pioneers: Aviation and Aeromodelling – Independent Evolutions and Histories’ (Lawrence Hargrave 1850-1915), www.ctie.monash.edu.au].
Illawarra’s place in the pioneering story of manned flight: Hargrave started off constructing ornithopters (“mechanical birds’ utilising a ‘flapping’ method) before experimenting with designs based on kites. Hargrave’s cellular or box kites provided the basis for a rigid, stable aeroplane. In 1894 at Stanwell Park in the Illawarra region, south of Sydney, Hargrave tested his own four-kite device which got the inventor airborne for a distance of five metres, the world’s first ”flying contraption” to achieve aerial lift from a fixed-wing [‘Aviation in Australia Hargrave’s flying machines’, State Library of NSW,www.sl.nsw.gov.au].
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Jane’s magazine’s decision in 2013 to jettison the Wrights’ primacy and endorse Whitehead’s claim to be the first powered flight is in marked contrast to the position of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum on the subject. The key to understanding the Smithsonian’s rigid, on-going refusal to countenance the Whitehead case, or even to have an open mind on it (the Smithsonian dismissively refers to it as the “Whitehead Myth”), has its roots in the testy relationship that prevailed between the Wrights and the Institution. From the start the Smithsonian did not immediately and unconditionally embrace the Wright brothers’ Kitty Hawk achievement. Instead, the Institute sought to elevate Samuel Pierpoint Langley‘s unsuccessful Aerodrome craft on an equal footing with the Wright Flyer (at one point Langley was Secretary of the Smithsonian – a clear suggestion of a conflict of interest within the Institution). In retaliation the Wrights refused to display their 1903 “First Flight” aircraft in the Smithsonian. Orville, after Wilbur’s early death, eventually shipped it off to England where it was exhibited in the Science Museum in South London instead [‘History of the 1903 Wright Flyer’, (Wright State University Libraries), www.libraries.wright.edu].
The intriguing twist in this story occurred in 1942 when the remaining Wright, Orville, relented on the Smithsonian ban, but only after a deal was struck. The Smithsonian recanted its long-standing statement that Langley’s Aerodrome was the first machine capable of flight in favour of the Wrights’ claim. In return the Washington DC Institution was allowed to hold and exhibit the 1903 Wright Flyer. The rider which contractually committed the Smithsonian stated that if the Institute ever deviated from its acknowledgement that the Flyer was the first craft to make a controlled, sustained powered flight, then control of the Flyer would fall into the hands of Orville’s heirs.
On display at the Smithsonian (National Air & Space Museum)⇓
Critics of the Institute believe that the Smithsonian’s indebtedness to the Wrights’ legacy (the fear of losing the historic Flyer to the estate executors) prevents it from recognising the merits of Whitehead’s pioneering achievement irrespective of the weight of evidence put forward [J Liotta, ‘Wright Brothers Flight Legacy Hits New Turbulence’, www.news.nationalgeographic.com]. Clearly this is a powerful disincentive to the Smithsonian objectively assessing the merits and new evidence for any rival claims to the Wrights (not just Whitehead’s) which may be unearthed.
The Wright stuff
There were numerous aviation pioneers, engineers and technologists experimenting with new forms of aircraft at the turn of the 20th century, so what was it that made the Wright brothers stand out from the others? The preservation of identifiable photographic evidence and documentation of the December 1903 attempts certainly contributed to the strengthening of the brothers’ argument for being “First”. Another factor is that the brothers scrupulously consolidated and cultivated their reputation as the foremost air pioneers. Clearly the Wrights had an eye on history which contrasts with the less calculated approach of their rivals (especially Whitehead and Pearse). The Wrights vigorously defended the accomplishments of their Flyer against that of competing airships. They also went to great efforts to protect their technologies against intellectual theft … the propensity of the Wrights to resort to lawsuits when they felt their interests (eg, patent preservation) was threatened, pays testimony to this.
The Wrights, unlike most of the competition, kept on improving the quality and capability of their airplanes (at least up until they got bogged down in patent litigation), eg, the development of “wing warping” helped control the aircraft through enhanced aerodynamic balance. [D Schneider, ‘First in Flight?’, American Scientist, 91(6), Nov-Dec 2003]. The patents issue and the brothers’ preparedness to play “hardball” with their rivals led them into questionable ethical terrain, eg, their refusal to acknowledge the influence on their designs of pioneers who came before them, such as the Anglo-Australian Hargrave [‘The Pioneers’ op.cit.].
The credence given to the Wright brothers’ claim to be the first successful flyers should perhaps come with an asterisk, signifying it as heavily qualified, as in David Schneider’s all-inclusive, tongue-in-cheek description: “First in Sustained, Piloted, Controlled, Powered, Heavier-than-air Flight of Lasting Technological Significance” [ibid].
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Many in the public at large would hold with tradition and still attribute the crucial breakthrough in aerial navigation to the Wright brothers…but can we really say that in that start-up era of aeronautics that any one of the countless attempts by aviation pioneers was absolutely the definitive one? The differences between what Whitehead, Santos-Dumont, Pearse, the brothers Wright and Herring achieved with their best efforts seems to be one of degree, not kind.
Augustus Moore Herring, the darling of Michigan aviation enthusiasts, managed a flight of only 73 feet and no more than 10 seconds in duration, no more than an extended hop according to National Air and Space Museum curator, Tom Crouch, but it registered as a lift-off nonetheless [TD Crouch, A Dream of Wings]. “Bamboo Dick” Pearse’s optimal flight in Temuka, NZ, travelled a mere 50 feet or so and abruptly ended 15 feet up in a gorse-hedge! The last and best attempt of Orville in the Wright Flyer on that December day in 1903 lasted 59 seconds and travelled some 852 feet in distance. Gus Whitehead’s best try on 14 August 1901 was half a mile according to him, but it was poorly documented, lacked verification and any pellucid images of the feat.
Did any of the documented early flights per se achieve “sustained and controlled flight”? Human conquest of the sky didn’t happen in one quantum leap, surely it came about in a series of small, measured steps, each building on the one before. It is more meaningful to see the development of viable flying machines as something that happened incrementally, an aerodynamic puzzle put together piece-by-piece. It was an international effort, the culmination of the accumulated efforts of gifted pioneering aeronautical designers such as George Cayley, Octave Chanute, Samuel Langley, Lawrence Hargrave and Otto Lilienthal whose experiments made it possible for the Wrights and others to experiment with flight, coming closer and closer to the realisation of successful manned, powered flight.
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PostScript:Pittsburg 1899
In a documentary shown on national ABC television (Australia) John Brown made the case for an even earlier attempt at powered flight by Gus Whitehead, which occurred in the city of Pittsburg in 1899. Brown does not contend that this flight by the German-American should be recognised as the first successful attempt because it was not controlled – to the point that the aircraft actually crash-landed into a brick building, Who Flew First: Challenging the Wright Brothers, (DTV 21, ABC 2016).
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回 freelance writer Stella Randolph was responsible for maintaining interest in Whitehead’s aviation pursuits, researching and writing The Lost Flights of Gustave Whitehead in the 1930s
❈ then there’s the claims of Ohio and specifically Dayton to their part in aviation history, the Wright Flyer being manufactured in Dayton
◖◗ See also the related article on this blogsite (October 2016) – “The Wright Way, the Only Way: the Aviation ‘Patent Wars’ and Glenn Curtiss”
IF you didn’t know it was there, you would drive right past it. In a quiet back street in the Illawarra beachside village of Thirroul … No. 3 Craig Street, no signs or plaques. For two or so months in 1922, this inconspicuous bungalow with the jokey, alt-spelt name ‘Wyewurk’❂ was home to one of the 20th century’s greatest English-language writers, DH Lawrence. That Bert Lawrence resided briefly in a far-flung part of the world like Thirroul NSW was not exceptional in itself. In the course of his “stop-go” global peregrinations Lawrence during his truncated life resided in over 300 addresses across the world! What gives it import and binds the great writer to this country was that he used this sojourn in the Illawarra to write all but the final chapter of his 421-page novel about Australia, Kangaroo.
⍙ “Valley of the Cabbage Tree Palms”
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After the 1914-18 War DH Lawrence (DHL), opted for a life of voluntary exile, eventually journeying to Australia with his German wife Frieda, the latest destination in a globe-trotting quest by the writer for a peculiar degree of spiritual fulfilment. They stayed two weeks in Perth⊞, before sailing on to Sydney. Lawrence’s initial plan was to live in Sydney for an extended time, however a day trip up to Narrabeen Lakes apparently convinced him that Sydney was decidedly not to his taste. The people with their displays of unbridled, rampant democracy, he found jarring to his sensibilities. He discovered little to enthuse about in the town…in the novel he describes pre-Harbour Bridge Sydney as “loused over with small promiscuous bungalows around which lay an aura of rusty tinned cans” (its fortunate that DHL didn’t pursue a career as a real estate agent on Sydney’s foreshore suburbs). He also rather extremely went so far as to wish that something akin to a tsunami would engulf the city. The Lawrences escaped from Sydney finding refuge in a small, coal-mining settlement 70km south. That Lawrence found a haven from the suburbia of Sydney in a (then) coalmine-littered Thirroul is a choice irony, given his hatred of coalmining, the vocation of his father back in Lawrence’s native Nottinghamshire.
⍙ The “Pale sea of green glass” at the front of Wyewurk
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Descriptions abound in Kangaroo of the bungalow in which they lived, and of Thirroul more widely. Lawrence evocatively depicts the beach directly below ‘Wyewurk’—which he gives the name “Coo-ee” in the novel—as “the pale sea of green glass that fell in such cold foam. Ice-fiery, fish-burning … full of brilliantly clear water and delicately-coloured shells … strangely sea-scooped sharp sea-bitter rock floor, all wet and sea-savage”. In the thinly-autobiographical novel Lawrence calls Thirroul ‘Mullumbimby’ – presumably he came upon the name ‘Mullumbimby’ on a state map as it’s the name of an actual town in the “hippie hinterland” of north coast NSW. The bungalow Wyewurk/Coo-ee is delineated thus: “The house inside was dark, with its deep verandahs like dark eyelids half closed … overlooking the huge rhythmic Pacific.”
The hastily written and skimpily revised novel Kangaroo itself is not valued highly in the overall oeuvre of DHL by critics or academe, eg, “Kangaroo is little more than an egregious failure” [Macdonald Daly, 1997 Penguin edition of Kangaroo; “a generic gallimaufry with a primarily pastoral focus”, Joseph Lenehan Davis, ‘Place, pastoral and the politics of the personal: a semi genre-based exploration of D.H. Lawrence’s Kangaroo‘, PhD dissertation, University of Wollongong, 1992]. What the novel has attracted recent commentary for revolves around the thesis advanced by Robert Darroch and others – its depiction of a secret right-wing army in Australia which was allegedly planning a coup d’état. Lawrence in Kangaroo seems to have anticipated the advent in the late twenties and early thirties of semi-fascist groups in Australia such the Old Guard and the New Guard.
David Herbert (Bert) and Frieda outside ‘Wyewurk’, 1922⍙
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In the isolated village of Thirroul—between the sea and the escarpment—DHL found an anonymity and ‘stillness’ that he had craved but had hitherto eluded him. The freedom, artistically, he found in Thirroul, enabled him to write over 3,000 words a day of his ‘great’ modern Australian novel [John Worthen, DH Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider] . Frieda and Bert left Thirroul and Australia in August 1922 for the US via Wellington, NZ. Settling near Taos in New Mexico, Lawrence completed the final chapter of Kangaroo and hastily edited the book. The serene native pueblos and western ranches of Taos were the next staging post in Lawrence’s lifelong “savage pilgrimage“, his descriptor of the relentless search for a more fulfilling lifestyle than that delivered by industrialised Western civilisation. Lawrence believed that “every continent has its own great spirit of place”. In the course of DHL’s terrestrial wanderings, both Taos and to a much lesser extent Thirroul embodied in their different ways aspects of the powerful life-spirit he was seeking.
Lawrence grappling with the menacing Kangaroo on the veranda of “Wyewurk”. ⍙ The Struggle’ by Garry Shead (Wollongong Art Gallery)
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In the years after the Lawrences departed Australia Thirroul slowly extricated itself from its coalmining preoccupation. Largely, it has remained a sleepy holiday coastal town while building a thriving arts community for local artists and musicians. Wyewurk, bereft of the DHL aura, slumbered back into a cloak of invisibility. It continued to be owned by the Southwell family whilst a succession of renters occupied it. In the 1970s people (some local, some from further afield) started to take a renewed interest in the literary significance of the writer’s 1922 residence. Unfortunately for the growing public interest but hardly surprisingly, the occupants of Wyewurk at the time (a dentist and his wife) repeatedly denied visitors access to the house and grounds.
⍙ ‘Wyewurk’, the Craig Street bungalow
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This situation got worse from the perspective of the DH Lawrence “fan base” after a local real estate agent bought Wyewurk from the Southwells in 1984. The new owner categorically refused any access to the property at all. Lawrence scholars (who would later coalesce into the “Friends of Wyewurk” and also form the nucleus of the DH Lawrence Society of Australia) grouped together to lobby politicians resulting in an interim conservation order being placed on Wyewurk. Despite this the owner submitted plans with Wollongong Council to add a two-story extension to the bungalow (which if implemented would effectively “cape cod” it).
Thus began a protracted period of litigation, the outcome of which saw the Heritage Council of NSW reject the owners’ ‘Pavilion’ plan. The Wyewurk group rallied support for the preservation of Lawrence’s house in its original form from public figures like Patrick White, Manning Clark and Judith Wright, from various national and international DHL scholars, and the local community. Later, support was also forthcoming for its retention on architectural grounds after the architects’ council declared Wyewurk to be the oldest surviving example of the Californian bungalow style in NSW (possibly in Australia) [S Jobson, ‘How we battled to save Wyewurk’, Rananim, Nov 1995, 3(3)]
The Wyewurk saga dragged on for several years more with the community divided on the issue. With all the publicity about Lawrence’s house, the Sydney Morning Herald weighed in with a predictable LCD tag, referring to Wyewurk as “Lady Chatterley’s beach house” [SMH, 29 July 2003]. Submissions to the Commission of Inquiry followed including proposals to turn Wyewurk into a centre for arts activities, but none of this bore fruit. At one point the owner himself is believed to have approached Wollongong Council with a view to the Council purchasing the house. The Council, adopting a breathtakingly tunnel-visioned approach, rebuffed the proposal outright…it’s woeful lack of acuity signifying a real missed tourism opportunity! Despite the building’s literary and cultural significance, the Commissioner ultimately ruled that the owner be permitted to erect a one-story addition to Wyewurk. To everyone’s surprise, in the end the owner decided not to proceed with the approved changes to the bungalow![Jobson, ibid.]
⍙DH Lawrence Reserve
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Wyewurk today is still there in Craig Street, pretty much as it was (the exterior at least) in Bert Lawrence’s time, though more strongly fortified now – given its challenges a minor miracle of survival! The preservationists won, but since sightseers and Lawrence devotees are barred from viewing its lawns, verandahs and the jarrah wood table on which Kangaroo was crafted, it remains something of a Pyrrhic victory. Since the mid Eighties the estate agent/owner has done all he could to block the public’s view of the bungalow through fences, the planting of trees and dense shrubs, a garage and a marauding dog on the property ready to bark at inquisitive and unwelcome visitors. There are no plaques in front of the cottage proclaiming its connection to the great English novelist and poet. The only indication signalling that “Lawrence was here” is 35 metres away in a tiny reserve overlooking Lawrence’s “green glass” Pacific. In late 1998 the Council named the reserve in honour of DHL and installed a commemorative plaque.
Bert & Freida in the backyard at ‘Wyewurk’ with visitors ⍙ (photo: Mr AD Forrester)
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Footnote: the current inaccessibility of the bungalow to DH Lawrence enthusiasts and the ordinarily curious over the last few decades was not ever thus! After the Lawrences’ departure for America, the owners at the time, grasping the significance of their recent famous tenants, kept the house as a sort of shrine for the 20th century literary icon. They maintained the furniture that Frieda and Bert used during their stay, including the table on which Kangaroo was penned! They even kept a visitors’ book for the many literary “pilgrims” who undertook the trek to Craig Street [‘Wyewurk’, (built circa 1911) NSW Office of Environment & Heritage, www.environment.nsw.gov.au].
⍙ Wyewurk with cute, friendly “dangerous dog” sign
Postscript: Lawrence’s visit and the publication of Kangaroo have exerted a profound influence on a number of Australian artists and other creative practitioners in the arts field. These include composer Peter Sculthorpe, Nobel laureate Patrick White, artists Sidney Nolan, Brett Whiteley and Garry Shead. Sydney artists Whiteley and Shead set up their easels in the backyard of the cottage next-door to “Wyewurk” (with the similarly-themed quaint name of ‘Wyewurrie’) in about 1973 and painted several Lawrence-themed pieces❈ including a diptych of the bungalow where Lawrence penned Kangaroo [Sandra Jobson Darroch, ‘Claws in the Arse’, www.dhlawrencesocietyaustralia.com.au].
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❂ the ‘Wyewurk’ theme is extended to the house the Lawrences/Somers stayed briefly in at Murdoch St Cremorne – which in the novel DHL calls ‘Torestin’ (“to rest in”)
⊞ DHL penned a short story here while being simultaneously inspired and frightened by the WA bush
❈ the Shead paintings of DHL’s sojourn are memorably jocular ones, especially riotous is the one (see reproduction above in the text) which depicts Lawrence frantically trying to ward off a frenzied attack from a large red non-metaphorical kangaroo on the back verandah of ‘Wyewurk’, while an unperturbed Frieda serenely admires the view
A couple of years ago there was some talk in the media about the possibility of a rugby match between the Australian Rugby Union and the Australian Rugby League sides under composite rules [‘Kangaroos Vs Wallabies hybrid game: Why?’, The Roar, 25 October 2011]. In the end nothing came of the proposed code versus code match, but it did have echoes of the past in Australian sport. In 1909 an exhibition game of sorts between the two national rugby codes did take place as a “one-off” [‘The game begins’, League of Legends:100 Years of Rugby League in Australia, www.nma.gov.au/].
The best empirical example of hybridised football has probably been the fusion of Australian football (AFL) and Gaelic football. An all-Australian AFL side has played a Gaelic national side from the Republic of Ireland in a hybrid form of football (known as “International Rules” in Australia and “Compromise Rules” in Ireland) every year or every other year since 1984.
Rugby league test Aust v GB (Photo cr: Queensland State Library)
Back in the early days of rugby league in this country (from 1908), fairly concerted efforts were made by the Victorian Football League (VFL) and the NSW Rugby League (NSWRL) to arrive at a single, universal code of Australian football using elements of both professional games (Australian Rules and Rugby League). On two separate occasions, 1914 and again in 1933, the executives of both associations sat down together and tried to negotiate agreement on a universal code of football. How serious the codes were about this goal, and whether the realisation of a single, composite set of rules would have led to an actual merger of the two codes, remains a moot but ultimately unanswerable point.
In 1914 the initiative for a merger appeared to come from the VFL. Elements within the VFL (with some support from the South Australian and West Australian Leagues) led by Charles Brownlow, Geelong Club secretary and delegate to the Australian National Football Council (ANFC), viewed the 1914 All-State National Rules Carnival in Sydney as much of a failure. Interest in the carnival and in Australian football in general was down compared to that in the fledgling sport of rugby league, which was drawing big crowds (especially the Australia-Great Britain tests of that year). A point not lost on the VFL – the 1914 Melbourne Grand Final drew only 30,000 spectators compared to crowds of up to 41,000 for rugby league test matches during the same season! Brownlow (later memorialised eponymously in the Brownlow Medal) was of the opinion that a new combined sport of rugby league and Australian rules could produce a better spectacle, which would add thousands of pounds to the gate takings for games. The NSW Rugby League’s long-time secretary, Horrie Miller, was also favourable to the idea of a merger [‘The Australian and Rugby League Game Combine?’, NSW Football History Society (July 2014), www.nswfootballhistory.com.au].
(Photo cr: The Mercury (Tas.))
A series of conferences were held during 1914 where the representatives of VFL clubs, the other equivalent, state football bodies and the rugby league authorities, discussed the various pros and cons of such an amalgamation. The Australian Press conducted a running commentary on the universal code proposal, with some commentators wholeheartedly talking up its merits, eg, WH John in The Winner. John’s article in the Melbourne paper, ‘Universal Code further examined: Success predicted in Australia’ (9 December 1914), argued that 18 players-a-side in “Australian Rules” was too many and the field was too large! The Registrar (Adelaide) suggested that a fusion of the two codes would demonstrate the best of the “British race”, quoting outgoing NSWRL Secretary Ted Larkins’ view that the hybrid game would embody the “characteristics of Britishers” (a notion which seems to echo the then popularly accepted belief in the validity of eugenics) [The Registrar (25 May 1914)].
Other newspaper commentators were less sanguine about the chances of merging the two codes. JC Davis writing under the apt pseudonym, “The Cynic”, opined that the status quo would not change, because the love of the game of Aussie rules in Victoria and of rugby league in Sydney was too deeply-ingrained in each code’s grass-roots supporters to allow them to accept the proposed alterations to their own game [‘The Universal Football Code’, The Referee (Sydney), 14 October 1914].
Another factor in the dynamic, as Martin Sharp has observed, was that Sydneysiders, even prior to the advent of rugby league in 1908, were reluctant to embrace Australian football due to the perception that “Victorian Rules (was) a Melbourne invention” [M Sharp, ‘Australian Football in Sydney Before 1914’, Sporting Traditions, Vol 4, No 1 (November 1987)]. This point is endorsed by Matthew Healy who noted that Sydney was a rugby (union) stronghold from 1880 to 1914, with the Victorian football establishment making little inroad in promoting the ‘southern’ code up north during this period [M Healy, ‘Hard Sell: Australian Football in Sydney’, unpublished MA thesis, Victoria University (Melb.), 2002]. The era of the Sydney Swans was still far into the future in those says.
It wasn’t from any lack of trying! The VFL certainly made a wholehearted effort to create a foothold for Australian football in the harbour city. The Vics had a good local advocate for its game in NSW politician Edward O’Sullivan who declared that NSW should “support a game that was invented by Australians for Australia”. The VFL invested money into promoting the code in Sydney via visiting school ‘lecturers’, but by the early 1910s rugby league was easily pulling the biggest crowds in Sydney [Sean Fagan, ‘Aussie Rules almost had Sydney’; ‘The Superiority of the Melbourne Game’, Australian Rugby History, www.saintsandheathens.wordpress.com]. The Sydney Football League competition launched in 1903 remained a minnow in Sydney when compared to either rugby code.
At the conferences on amalgamation Brownlow and Miller’s proposals to combine the codes met with a mixture of vocal and determined opposition from individual VFL club delegates (especially Carlton) and indifference. Despite the NSWRL and the SANFL in February 1915 agreeing to amalgamate, no decision was reached at the conferences involving Victoria, Tasmania, West Australia, Queensland and NSW. With the nation becoming more preoccupied with its involvement as part of the British Empire in the Great War, the issue of amalgamation soon ran out of steam [op.cit. ‘Australian and Rugby League Game Combine?’].
In 1933 elements within the Australian football and rugby fraternity reignited the cause of a single, universal code of football. Again, the catalyst seems to have been that year’s 10-day interstate carnival in Sydney. Consequently, a conference was held in August, bringing together the state delegates of the ANFC and the delegates of the NSWRL (significantly the discussions were boycotted by the Queensland Rugby League). Supporters of an Australian football/rugby league fusion (including once again the NSWRL Secretary HR Miller) held the view that the future of football would be assured by adopting one code which combined the best features of both games [‘One Code of Football’, Daily Advertiser (Wagga Wagga), 28 July 1933].
(Photo cr: www.australianfootball.com)
This time the proponents of code amalgamation approached the issue in a more systematic manner. HR Miller drafted a specific set of rules for the new code which included 15 players-a-side (splitting the difference in numbers between AF and RL), an oval field but reduced in size, abolition of the scrum and replacing it with a bounce, limited off-side would be allowed, behind posts replaced by a H-shaped rugby goalpost, and the scoring of both tries and goals permitted. In talks Miller pitched the new rules’ appeal to the Australian football leagues in terms of making it more of an open, action-plus game, “We are giving what you Australian rule (sic) people are asking for and what the Australian public require – that is action … at no stage of the game would the ball be dead.” [‘Amalgamation of Games – Second Time Round’, NSW Football History (July 2014); Sydney Morning Herald, 27 July 1933; ‘Rugby League Proposed Unification in 1933: The game they never played’ www.footystats.freeservers.com].
NSW v Qld 1949 interstate game (Photo: nswrl.com.au)
On the basis of Miller’s “compromise rules” a clandestine match was played at the RAS Sydney Showground at Moore Park with the players drawn from the Queensland Football League supplemented by some local rugby league players. The game was somewhat of a shambles – it was supposed to be 14-a-side contest but there was not enough numbers available, none of the participants were familiarised with the new rules, the Queensland AF players had just completed a hard game against the Canberra AF side the previous day – and so did not advance the cause of the composite code game! [op.cit. (‘Amalgamation of Games’)].
The proposals put to the ANFC by Miller on behalf of the NSWRL were taken back by the state delegates to their leagues for consideration. The football leagues ultimately however did not consider themselves bound by the ANFC’s recommendation. In the end the respective authorities of each code were not prepared to compromise by making concessions to any meaningful degree in the alteration of their game (the off-side rule remained a particular “bone of contention” to the negotiators[ibid.].
(Photo cr: www.rugby-league.com)
As a consequence, the case for amendment leading to a universal code of football floundered. The NSWRL committee subsequently voted 15 to 10 against further consideration of a fusion with Australian football [‘Football Merger: Rugby League not to Pursue – Not Impressed by Conference’, Canberra Times (ACT), 15 August 1933; ‘Football Merger left in Air – No decision for renewal of Conference’, Canberra Times, 12 August 1933]. Thus, all discussion of a hybridised AFL/RL football code was quietly dropped … this time for good!
🎭Long, long before megaplex cinemas, massive outdoor theme parks and home entertainment centres, Australians were discovering new outlets of activity to occupy their precious and increasing if hard-earned leisure time. In the 19th century one outlet for Sydneysiders which filled the bill for outdoor entertainment and activities was the suburban pleasure ground.
Europe: The Medieval fair
The origins of pleasure grounds in Australia can be traced back ultimately to British and European antecedents such as the Medieval countryside fairs, whose purpose was primarily trade and commerce but whose rituals included an important element of “merry-making” [www.medieval-life-and-times.info/]. In England these would be occasions to celebrate feast days and milestones in the calendar like Midsummer Solstice and St Swithuns Day, and would involve feasting and drinking, bawdy games, musical interludes, races and other physically active pastimes.The type of pleasure grounds that evolved in Australia also drew inspiration from the great English pleasure gardens of centuries gone by. These pleasure gardens, of which, Vauxhall Gardens in South London, was arguably the most famous in Britain, were the primary providers of mass, public entertainment in the 18th and 19th centuries. Vauxhall (AKA New Spring) Gardens charged admission to see performances of tightrope walkers, hot air balloon ascents, concerts and fireworks. Vauxhall and others such as its closest London rival, Ranelagh Pleasure Gardens, were the forerunners to the modern amusement park, eg, Luna Park/Coney Island, Blackpool Pleasure Beach [‘History of London: Pleasure Gardens’, www.history.co.uk].In Sydney pleasure grounds popped up at all points of the metropolitan compass during the Victorian and Edwardian eras. They could be found in districts as far afield as Prospect Creek/Fairfield (Latty’s Boatshed and Pleasure Grounds), Waratah Bay/Hawkesbury River (Windybanks’ Paradise), Vaucluse (Nielsen Park), La Perouse/Yarra Bay (Howe’s Pleasure Grounds) and the Kurnell Pleasure Grounds at the southern tip of Botany Bay.
🔺 The original Banks Inn
Joseph Banks Pleasure Grounds
One of the earliest such venues was the Botany (or Sir Joseph Banks) Pleasure Grounds (BPG), established along with the Banks Inn on 75 acres of land and seafront in the 1840s by Thomas Kellett. At its peak, BPG was described variously as “zoological gardens”, “a Victorian garden with arbours” and an aggregation of first-rate sporting fields.
BPG was a popular spot for annual St Patrick’s Day Sports Carnivals which comprised, in addition to sports, singing, dancing, drinking, the riding of penny farthings and various circus acts. The road from Sydney to the Pleasure Grounds was of such a poor condition that many visitors came to the Botany attraction by steamer – a round trip fare on the “Sir John Harvey” in the 1850s cost 10/-. An indication of the popularity of the grounds and hotel can be gauged by the fact that over 5,000 people attended on Boxing Day 1852 [‘Australia’s First Zoo’, The World’s News (Sydney), 15 March 1952].
Control of BPG went through many hands with new leasees and owners regularly being turned over. The zoo was introduced by leasee William Beaumont in the early 1850s. It was Australia’s first private zoo with a menagerie acquired from the original colonial zoo at Hyde Park that included Australia’s only elephant, Manila red deers, Indian goats, black Bengal sheep and Bengal tigers, both a Himalayan and a Californian grizzly bear, and an ape.
The Banks pleasure grounds and zoo were purchased in 1875 by Frank Smith, an entrepreneur and publican, and incorporated into the Sir Joseph Banks Hotel complex. A grand ballroom catering for up to 1,000 diners and a bathing house were also added to BPG [M Chaffey, ‘A review of Botany’ (Botany Library local history files) quoted in M Butler, ‘Botany’ (2011), The Dictionary of Sydney, www.dictionaryofsydney.org; ‘Sir Joseph Banks Pleasure Gardens Botany Bay’,www.prowse.com.au].
🔺 Sir Joseph Banks Athletics Track, Botany NSW
Sporting fields for cricket, football, archery and athletics were also appended to the Joseph Banks Gardens. Aboriginal runners from the Randwick/La Perouse area participated in foot races on the Botany track (quaintly known in the day as “pedestrian contests”). In the 1870s and 1880s BPG hosted Australia’s earliest professional footrace, the Botany Bay Gift, which attracted top international athletes and large crowds. 1888 was probably the high point of professional sprinting in Australia with £800 being offered in prize money at that year’s Bay Gift.Wagering on the outcome of the Botany running contests was extensive and eventually the money involved led to some sharp practices occurring which affected the outcome of races. As a consequence, after several years the annual Gift was discontinued, though it was briefly resurrected in the late 20th Century. A well-known running club, the Botany Harriers (later the Randwick-Botany Harriers), had its beginning at the Sir Joseph Banks track [‘History of the Sir Joseph Banks Hotel’, www.thebanks.net.au].Around 1908–1910, after yet another change in ownership, BPG became the Olympic Recreational and Picnic Grounds. In March 1908 the Joseph Banks Ground hosted the first-ever game of rugby league in Australia, a match between a South Sydney Probables team and a Possibles side which preceded the inaugural season of the Sydney Rugby League [‘Centenary of Rugby League’, www.monumentaustralia.org.au].Fairyland Pleasure Grounds
Another suburban pleasure ground that greatly captured the imagination of Sydneysiders in its day was Fairyland Pleasure Grounds. It was situated on the Upper Lane Cove River in an area now incorporated into the Lane Cove National Park. From its inception as a pleasure ground in the early 1900s, up to when a main arterial road in North Ryde (Delhi Road) was linked with it, it was largely only accessible by boat to a wharf specially built by the operators of Fairyland (FPG).The Swan family, owners of the bushland, initially cleared the area for market gardens but also constructed a timber siding on the river which they called “The Rest”. Robert Swan later turned the site into a pleasure ground for day-trippers to visit, adding a kiosk, a playground, a dance hall and picnic area. ‘Fairyland’ was chosen as the name for the pleasure ground apparently because it exuded the atmosphere of a magical and mysterious place, Swan enhanced this theme with fairy-like structures and motifs – quirky fairytale huts, a slippery-dip in the shape of a sleeping giant (thought to be modelled on the character ‘Bluto’ from the ‘Popeye’ comics), and cardboard representations of imaginary and supernatural creatures such as fairies and elves positioned high up in the trees [www.friendsoflanecovenationalpark.org.au].Swan acquired a good deal of equipment from the closure sale at White City Fun Park in Rushcutters Bay in 1917 (from 1922 site of the White City Tennis courts✱). Amongst the items Swan brought to FPG were strength-testing machines, coin-operated machines through which you could view silent movies, and entertainment rides such as the’Ocean Wave’ (a “razzle-dazzle”) and a fairly rudimentary ‘Flying Fox’.
The former ‘Fairyland’, Lane Cove River: now overgrown by coastal bush land 🔺
Just getting to Fairyland in the early days could be quite a lengthy exercise. Walter Baker, a schoolboy during WWI, recalled how it took one hour to get to FPG travelling by motor boat from nearby Gladesville! [reported in The Catholic Press (Sydney), 18 July 1918]. Many associations and organisations held their yearly outings at FPG. In 1963 Sydney radio station 2UW sponsored a “Rock ‘n Roll Spectacular” on the grounds. After WWII there was widespread availability of private cars allowing people to journey further afield, consequently Fairyland’s popularity declined [‘Heritage and History’ (FLCNP), www.froghollow.com.au]. It lingered on as a venue for leisure activities, but falling attendances aided and abetted by a series of floods and more modern leisure choices saw the pleasure grounds close in the early 1970s.A similar pleasure ground to Fairyland was Palmer Pleasure Grounds, also on the northside at Castle Cove. Danish migrant HC Press started his entertainment venue in 1910 (which survived till 1964). Palmer (later renamed Press) PG was replete with picnic area, pergolas, fernery, three dining pavilions, swings and slippery dips, swimming pool, wharf, and a 100-yard sprint track. Press charged for admission with crowds of up to 900 pleasure-seekers visiting daily [Gavin Souter, Time and Tides: A Middle Harbour Memoir, 2012]
🔺 Wonderland in ‘Glamarama’
Tamarama Wonderland
In Sydney’s eastern suburbs, Tamarama was the location of a popular if relatively short-lived pleasure ground, which was known under various names at different times, the Bondi Aquarium (though not situated in the suburb of Bondi), the Royal Aquarium, Wonderland City (this name resonates with the later sobriquet acquired by Tamarama, ‘Glamarama’). The Aquarium, opened in 1887, was the first coastal amusement park in Sydney. It comprised a collection of sea creatures including tiger and wobbegong sharks, seals and a solitary penguin. The distinguishing physical icon of Wonderland was the serpentine-like roller coaster (called the “Switchback Railway”) which weaved around the cliffs of Tamarama beach. The carnivalesque entertainments included a ‘camera obscura‘, ‘merry-go-rounds’ and vaudevillian acts. Later, a waxworks was added to the park.
🔺 Tamarama Beach clubhouse mural
In the early 1900s the Aquarium was purchased by theatrical entrepreneur William Anderson who revamped the complex (now renamed ‘Wonderland City’). Under Anderson, the ‘Airem Scarem’ (an airship tracked on a cable from cliff to cliff), an artificial lake and open-air ice skating rink, was added to the entertainment venue. A haunted house and maze further underlined Wonderland City’s position as a precursor to the later Luna Park at Milson’s Point. The opening night in 1906 lured an estimated 20,000 visitors (during summer-time on weekends 2,000 Sydneysiders regularly attended the Wonderland park).Wonderland was dogged by controversies such as William Anderson’s attempts to block swimmers from the beach by erecting a barbed wire fence across the Tamarama site. After a tic-for-tac exchange between the disaffected local swimmers and management, the NSW Government eventually intervened in the conflict and re-established beach access. The bad press experienced by Wonderland over the blockade of the swimmers was followed by further adverse publicity – safety concerns over breakdowns on the Airem Scarem, complaints made about the treatment of the animals, local resident unhappiness about the disruptive nature of weekend revellers. By 1911, with attendances having declined for several years, Wonderland closed its doors. Anderson was said to have lost £15,000 on the venture [‘Wonderland City’, www1.waverley.nsw.gov.au; J Spedding, ‘Wonderland City’ (2011) in Dictionary of Sydney, www.trust.dictionaryofsydney.org].
🔺 Clontarf Pleasure Grounds (Source: Manly Art Gallery & Museum)Other pleasure grounds in Sydney in the 19th and 20th centuries didn’t have quite the colour or pulling power of Fairyland and Wonderland, but were significant providers of popular leisure pursuits in their own right. The Clontarf Pleasure Grounds (CPG) in Sydney’s north was founded in 1863 by hotelier Issac Moore (see footnote at end of the article for the connexion between pub-owners and pleasure grounds in Australia), who provided an off-liquor license at the grounds. Day-trippers would arrive by ferry to engage in games (quoits, skittles, cricket, etc), dancing, swimming and picnicking. The steamer Illalong ferried visitors from Circular Quay to Clontarf in the last quarter of the 19th century for the sum of 2/-. CPG was a particularly favourite venue for picnics and anniversaries like St Patrick’s Day, and for the celebrations of religious and trade union organisations (eg, Catholics Youngmen’s Societies, United Protestant Societies, Telegraph Construction Branch, Amalgamated Slaughtermen).
🔺 Attempted royal assassination at Clontarf
Clontarf Pleasure Grounds
The Clontarf Pleasure Grounds had another association in the 19th century, this one noted for its infamy. It was the site of an attempted assassination on the life of Prince Albert, Duke of Edinburgh (Queen Victoria’s son) in 1868 by a Irish supposed supporter of the Fenian movement. Issac Moore’s sons took over the family business from their father and continued the Clontarf Pleasure Grounds for over 35 years…at one stage the sons sued The Bulletin paper for labelling the Pleasure Grounds’ dance event an ‘orgy’ [www.manly.nsw.gov.au; www.balgowlahonline.com.au].
St George and Shire Pleasure Grounds
The southern suburbs of Oatley and Como had their own pleasure grounds. Harry Linmark started Oatley Pleasure Grounds in the early part of the 20th century (the park where it was located still retains this name). OPG was popular for fishing and swimming parties and for picnics. When it acquired by Hartlands, they introduced a miniature zoo and a noisy wine bar which earned the ire of local residents. In 1934 Kogarah Council acquired the pleasure grounds and closed down the bar [www.kogarah.nsw.gov.au]. The nearby Como Pleasure Grounds was created in 1895 to celebrate the extension of the southern rail link to the Shire. It boasted a ‘RazzleDazzle’ circular ride (similar to the one in operation at Fairyland on Lane Cove River) which drew the crowds to Como by train [www.sutherlandshireaustralia.com.au].
Pleasure grounds in Sydney came into fashion in the 19th century, providing an outside outlet for people away from their everyday, often unexciting urban existences. The locations of pleasure grounds allowed workers to escape on the weekends by taking a nice train day trip or a ferry boat ride. The venues conveyed a romantic connotation for day-trippers, a kind of rustic paradise which promised carefree social and recreational activities. Some of the operations floundered financially and were closed down within a relatively short interval. Others that managed to achieve a measure of longevity, like Fairyland and the Botany Pleasure Grounds, eventually became simply “old hat”. Society had changed, there were new, slicker forms of entertainment that people preferred. The convenience and proximity of big amusement complexes in the city like Luna Park made them a more attractive option for workers’ leisure time, and as the pace of life quickened, the appeal of pleasure grounds as unhurried, bucolic ‘paradises’ receded.
🔺The Pleasure Garden: translated into Swedish for the title of this 1961 film gives the outdoor entertainment concept a quite different connotation
PostScript: Pleasure Grounds in Melbourne – a lesser feast for the public
Interestingly in Melbourne at that time, pleasure grounds/ gardens for whatever reason didn’t catch on to anywhere near the same degree as in Sydney. Probably the only one that rose to any significant heights, albeit ephemerally, was Cremorne Gardens on the Yarra River at Richmond – which acquired the somewhat pretentious appellation “Cremorne Gardens-Upon-Yarra” (CGUY). Under its proprietor, theatrical entrepreneur George Coppin, CGUY had an amusement park aspect to it, with trapezes, balloon ascents, dances, theatres, a Cyclorama (a panoramic painting set against a concave wall), a bowling alley, a menagerie, firework displays, with a few extra features taking advantage of the Yarra, such as regattas and gondola rides. It also had a hotel on-site as with many of the Sydney pleasure grounds. Coppin’s gardens was inspired by the prototype Cremorne Gardens in London.
🔺 Cremorne Gardens-upon-Yarra, 1865
Though Coppin poured a lot of money into it, CGUY lasted only from 1853 to about 1863, unable to attract the patronage required to sustain it as a viable enterprise. The wowser element in Melbourne played its part in CGUY’s demise, many in the community objected to the presence of alcohol and the use of the Gardens by prostitutes to ply their trade. Dreamland, on St Kilda Beach, was even less successful than Cremorne, winding up after barely three years in 1909 (although the same site became a permanent entertainment fixture a few years later with the advent of Luna Park) [R Peterson, A Place of Sensuous Resort, (Online edition), www.skhs.org.au]. Some people at the time concluded that the Melbourne weather (more inclement than Sydney’s) was not conducive to outdoor amusements [‘# 1933. Cremorne Gardens Plan’ (Picture Victoria), www.pictures.libraries.vic.gov.au].
FN: An intriguing if not exactly surprising footnote to the pleasure grounds in Australia were the large number of proprietors of the operations who were also publicans
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✱ today the White City location is a reconstructed Jewish sporting complex known as Maccabi Tennis
Walter Burley Griffin’s untimely death in India in 1937 provoked only passing comment, even in Australia where he and Marion had lived a high-profile existence, practicing their particular craft for over 20 years. Mahony returned to Chicago from Australia around the end of 1938, and set about the valiant but ultimately fruitless task of trying to consolidate Walter’s reputation. The vehicle for the restoration of WBG’s name (principal among which was defending Griffin against the poisonous invective of one Frank Lloyd Wright) was Marion’s epic memoir (The Magic of America), a massive work of over 1,400 pages and 650 illustrations [www.artic.edu]. Marion was dissuaded by a family friend from her intention to try to have The Magic of America published. Regrettably, the ‘friend’ advised her than there was insufficient interest in Burley Griffin within American architectural circles at that time (the 1940s).
Burley Griffin’s main period of productivity in America amounted to a narrow corridor of time, from about 1905 when he went into practice on his own to 1914 when he and Marion left to take charge of the Capital City project in Australia, entrusting their US work to new partner Barry Byrne. Griffin spent the entire second half of his life living and creating structures and communities outside of America, denying himself the opportunity of recognition and esteem that he would otherwise have likely received from his countrymen and women had he stayed.
Consequently a note of ambivalence about the extent of the Chicagoan’s architectural significance persists in America. As recently as 2002 and 2003 two of the early Illinois houses designed by Griffin were demolished without any real public clamour (it is difficult to imagine this happening to one of Wright’s houses in this day without a resounding hue and cry) [‘Silence deafening as home by noted architect razed: Elmhurst teardown fails to stir outcry’ (N Ryan) Chicago Tribune, 19 May 2002)].
Notwithstanding this, Walter’s lavish abilities as a planner, designer and landscaper are more widely recognised today. He is acknowledged as an outstanding innovator in domestic architecture, and is credited with having invented the carport, developed the L-shaped floor plan and the use of reinforced concrete. WBG was a pioneer of open plan living and dining areas. His work in the Prairie School was characterised by his attention to vertical space, contributing critically to the development of split-level space interiors (not in widespread use until after WWII) [M Maldre & P Kruty, Walter Burley Griffin in America]. As I enlarged on in an earlier blog, Griffin also invented the Knitlock construction method in Australia in 1917 which had the practical advantage of enabling houses to be built quickly and cheaply [M. Walker, A. Kabos & J. Weirick, Building for Nature: Walter Burley Griffin and Castlecrag].
Marion L Mahony, as a pioneering woman in the field of architecture, encountered all of the prejudices and assumptions that was commonplace about female professionals in the day. The first staffsperson to be released from her cousin Dwight Perkins’ architectural office when there was a downturn in business. Despite Frank Lloyd Wright’s (perhaps) begrudging praise of the sublime quality of her architectural rendering, Marion was never treated as anything close to an equal by the great architect. After Mahony returned to her homeland at the end of 1938, her efforts to turn her talents to community planning and to re-enter architecture in the US met largely with discouraging indifference.
Marion’s silkscreen watercolour of Walter’s plan for Griffith, NSW
Since the 1990s there has a renewed focus on the work of pioneering women architects, especially in the US [eg, “The 10 Most Overlooked Women in Architecture History”, www.archdaily.com], and Marion has been a beneficiary of this, receiving overdue acknowledgement of her contribution to modernist art and architecture. American architecture expert David Van Zanten made the case that Mahony’s extraordinary delineating talent ranked her as “the third great progressive designer of turn-of-the-century Chicago after Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright” given that the Chicago School placed an extraordinary emphasis on drawings [D Van Zanten in D Wood (Ed), Marion Mahony Griffin: drawing the form of nature].
After her marriage to Griffin, Mahony was perfectly content to live in the shadow of her more illustrious partner, to be “a slave to my husband in his creative work” [quoted in J Wells, “The collaboration of Marion Mahony Griffin and Walter Burley Griffin”, www.griffinsociety.org/]. Notwithstanding Marion’s freely-chosen subordinate role, she and Walter worked smoothly and cohesively as a team. The respective strengths each brought to architecture and planning were different, but on specific projects these abilities were pooled together to produce a harmonious and advantageous fusion. WBG’s imagination allowed him to conceptualise complex ideas and solutions for building problems and plan intricate landscaped communities, but his talents as a draughtsman, a delineator of great schemes, were at best modest. MMG with her superb draughting technique filled this void perfectly. Former Castlecrag resident, Wendy Spathopoulus, recounted the pair’s peculiar style of co-working, “silent communication … a kind of fusion … expressing the same ideas, the same philosophical ideas, but coming at them from a different angle” [interviewed in ‘City of Dreams: Designing Canberra’ (2000 documentary).
Wright’s residential magnum opus: Fallingwater, Penn.
The Griffins were part of the Prairie School style of architecture, the best-known practitioner of which was the prolific and highly-revered F L Wright. An interesting point of comparison between Wright and Griffin is that the greatest architectural achievements of Wright’s career, the Fallingwater house in Bear Run, Pennsylvania (chosen by the American Institute of Architects in a national survey in 1991 as “the best all-time work of American architecture”) and the Guggenheim Museum in New York, occurred long after FLW had turned 60, the age at which Griffin died. It remains a speculative consideration but a reasonable question to ponder, what more might WBG have accomplished had he lived on into old age as FLW did? (Wright worked productively in architecture till the age of 91!)[‘The Griffins – Canberra’ (PBS broadcast), www.pbs.org; www.griffinsociety.org].
A balanced evaluation of the achievements of the Griffins in Australia as architects and planners reveals a mixed legacy. The plan for a capital city in Canberra was stunningly original in its vision of an unseen land, and the pictorial and diagrammatical representation of the city by Marion was an artistic accomplishment in itself of the highest order. As we know the implementation of Griffin’s plan for Canberra remained unrealised. This can be attributed to a combination of factors, bad luck and timing, political opportunism by both sides of parliament using WBG as a pawn, outright sabotage by vested interests (sectors of the public service, envious Australian architects), and idealism and naivety on Walter’s part. As a result, the shape of Griffin’s original plan was heavily distorted by successive politicians and bureaucrats, key components of the plan were excised altogether in the name of expediency. Perhaps worse of all, not one of the designed buildings for Canberra on WBG’s drawing board were ever constructed!
Castlecrag: Griffin Country
If we turn to Castlecrag, the Burley Griffin imprint on the ‘would be’ suburban bush utopia again met with mixed results. The Griffins did manage to engender a sense of community and cultural affinity in Castlecrag from adherents who like Walter and Marion came to cherish the virtues of living in a natural environment. This was realised by WBG’s careful planning of houses within a thriving organic landscape. Having established the aesthetic miliéu conducive to artistic activity, Mahoney provided a great deal of the community leadership (and the infrastructure) that led to the flourishing of creative energies. To top this off, Marion and Walter, far from being remote leaders of the community perched high above everyone else in an ivory tower, were committed participants in the everyday life of the early community. They joined and were actively involved in the Castlecrag Progress Association from its inception in 1925.
Griffin’s inventive use of windows and fireplaces in Castlecrag won praise from admirers and provided inspiration for later Australian architectural practitioners. Not everyone however had a favourable view of the WBG concept of the model house. Many home-buyers were not attracted to the utilitarian plainness and the restrictive compactness of the standard Griffin house with its flat, odd cubic shape. In addition, the quite puritanical covenants concerning individual property use, whilst implemented to protect the natural environment and for egalitarian purposes, served to turn many would-be Castlecrag residents off.
There were other issues with the form and character of the Griffin house which suggest that the American architect did not fully appreciate the local, Australian conditions. The absence of practical features like verandahs, eaves on roofs and hoods on doorways, did not address the exigencies of a harsh environment and climate. Similarly, some critics pointed out that Griffin did not apply himself sufficiently to the specific problems arising in Castlecrag such as drainage on horizontal roofs and the challenges of building on a rocky terrain [Walker, Kabos & Weirick, op.cit.].
Marion’s drawing of Walter’s design for an Indian-inspired “Sydney Opera House”
The final chapter of the Griffins’ life together, in Lucknow, India, saw the reuniting of the old creative team – with Walter as innovator and Marion as delineator. Their work in collaboration, produced a prolific harvest anew, a churning out of plans and designs for a host of new buildings which married the ancient architectural forms of India with the Griffins’ take on modernism. In less than 18 months the couple designed some 95 projects for India ranging from university buildings to exhibition pavilions to palaces to bungalows, even finding time to create a design for an ‘Opera House for Sydney’ featuring an Indian-influenced central domed roof [A Kabos, ‘Walter Burley Griffin’, www.griffinsociety.org].
Through the efforts of interested groups like the Walter Burley Griffin Society (NSW), the Walter Burley Griffin Society of America (St Louis, Mo.) and local historical and architectural groups in the Castlecrag/Willoughby (Sydney) area, the legacy of the Griffins’ have been preserved. These organisations, through their publications and websites, have promoted the couple’s accomplishments to newer generations.
The Griffin footprint in Castlecrag & Australia
The Griffins’ story, spanning three continents, has all the elements – drama, tragedy, political intrigues, obsessions, spurned love❈, the clash of great personalities – that would make it eminently filmable. At centre, two temperamentally different but like-spirited idealists, highly gifted if flawed artists striving against convention to articulate their distinctive beliefs and feelings of nature and democracy through the practice of their architectural and artistic pursuits. In Australia they were ground-breakers in a number of areas, as trailblazing environmentalists, as passionate landscapers, as creators of affordable, ready-to-assemble homes for the average person. Had the Griffins returned to the US as originally intended, after the expiration of WBG’s contract with the Australian Government in 1917, they would undoubtedly have left a much weightier artistic and cultural footprint on the built environment in America.
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❈ there is a suggestion that Walter may have married Marion on the rebound. Griffin originally proposed to Frank Lloyd Wright’s sister, Maginel, but was rejected … this rebuff can hardly have lessened the growing animosity between the two rival architects (WBG and FLW)
NOW that Scotland have expressed an inclination, but not a preference, to secede from the Union with England (the UK), it would be interesting to take a gander at other secession attempts both closer to home and around the world. The impulse for or advocacy of secession by a section or part of an established, multi-ethnic nation state is a recurring feature in contemporary international relations.
The enthusiasm with which so many Scots embraced the notion of “going it alone” and their, so it seemed up to polling day, excellent prospect of pulling it off, is a fillip for long-lingering secessionist movements around the world – Catalonia, the Basque Country, Québec, Flemish Belgium, Kurdistan (although some of the several Kurdish groups seek only autonomy, not outright independence) [“The Kurdish Conflict: Aspirations for Statehood within the Spirals of International Relations in the 21st Century”, www.kurdishaspect.com]
In the Southern Hemisphere, on this very continent indeed, in the state of Western Australia, an air of secessionism has tended to linger, much like the relieving breeze visited upon Perth in the afternoon from the Indian Ocean’s “Fremantle Doctor”. The Western Australians, from the very outset in 1900, were reluctant to join the Commonwealth of Australia…in fact the state’s name was conspicuously omitted from the original Federation document of 1 January 1901! A special provision (Section 95) guaranteeing that a planned inter-colonial tariff would only be gradually phased in, had to be added to the Constitution before the West would sign up. A further inducement that clinched it was the prospect of a transcontinental railway to be built linking WA with the eastern states.
The proposed colony of ‘Auralia’ – an irredentist goldfields colony
𓂃𓂅𓂅𓂅𓂃
In the end, what swayed WA in joining (as argued by Tom Musgrove) was the affinity with the East held by recent settlers lured to WA by the goldfield discoveries. The huge population surge in the 1890s in WA, due to the influx of these Eastern fortune-seekers made them more numerous than the established residents on the coast who were, conversely, distinctly isolationist in their outlook. The miners formed a pressure group advocating that the eastern goldfields area (calling itself the colony of ‘Auralia’) break away from the rest of WA and unilaterally federate with the Commonwealth. The WA Parliament eventually succumbed to the threat of being splintered and losing the goldfields, and committed to the Federation [T Musgrove, ‘Western Australian Secessionist Movement’, The Macquarie Law Journal, www.austlil.edu.au; ‘Separation Movement on the Eastern Goldfields, 1894-1904’, West Australian Historical Society 1949, 4(5) 1953]. So, even prior to Federation, a bent for Western secession was evident.
Black Swan State
𓂃𓂅𓂅𓂅𓂃
The secessionists succeed…or do they?
The threat of ‘Westralian’ succession has been a recurring theme in the state’s history since the early days of colony… lying dormant for years before being triggered into prominence by the emergence of some economic upheaval or issue (more recently over the distribution of mining revenues by the Commonwealth). In 1933 the issue of secession was actually put to the electorate of WA in a referendum held concurrently with the state election. The pre-conditions leading up to such a momentous development were brought about by the Great Depression. Wheat, WA’s top primary product export-earner was decimated (the price per bushel declined by less than half in three years) and unemployment in Perth reached 30 per cent. The WA Dominion League spearheaded by H Keith Watson agitated from 1930 for secession in the West. As a result of the League’s vigorous campaign (contrasting with the lacklustre campaign of the Federal League’s ‘No secession’ campaign), the referendum resulted in a greater than two-thirds vote (68 per cent) in favour of secession. Interestingly, the only region of the state to oppose the secession motion was again the goldfields!
“Westralia Shall Be Free”
𓂃𓂅𓂅𓂅𓂃
The Electorate’s each-way bet!
Paradoxically at the same time, the WA electors dumped the incumbent Nationalist/Country Party Coalition from power (even though the NCPC had backed the ‘Yes’ camp), and elevated the Labor Party opposition, who had opposed secession, into office in the state. The apparent contradictory behaviour of the electors has been explained thus: support was given to the ‘Yes’ case because there was widespread dissatisfaction with WA’s situation vis-à-vis the eastern states (WA had long identified itself as the “Cinderella State” of the Commonwealth, it’s perception being one of it contributing more to federal funds than it receives back). At the same time, the unacceptable state unemployment situation in 1933 resulted in voters seeking to punish the incumbent conservative government by turfing them out (as was done federally to the Scullin Labor Government in 1932) [‘Secession 1929-39: Western Australia & Federation’ www.slwa.wa.gov.au].
The WA delegation bringing the petition to secede to London
𓂃𓂅𓂅𓂅𓂃
Westminster or “Yes Minister”!
The new WA premier, Philip Collier, after some prevarication, appointed a delegation which took a petition for WA secession to the UK. Westminster, in a farcical turn of events which the writers of the popular 1980s TV series Yes, Minister would be proud to put their name to, simply sat on the issue, doing nothing! The British Government after a lengthy delay informed the WA Government that it could not act on the petition without the assent of Canberra. By 1935 the economy had recovered somewhat, the secessionist movement and the Dominion League lost momentum and the issue petered way for ordinary West Australians as they got on with the day-to-day task of making the best of what they could with the status quo [ibid.].
Western successionism, a simmering pot!
The media in WA helps to keep the issue alive with periodical appeals to the spectre of “secessionist redux” (with regular articles appearing with titles like “Why the West should secede” and “Secession still on our mind”). Secessionism has remained a rallying cry for disgruntled Western Australians whenever they feel aggrieved about what they see as the excesses and encroaching powers of Canberra. In the 1970s maverick millionaire/WA mining magnate Lang Hancock tried to revive the state’s secessionist trajectory with his short-lived “Westralian Secessionist Movement”, in effect a political campaign against the allegedly ‘socialist’ policies of the Whitlam Labor Government.Most recently this reared its head again in the concerted opposition to the Rudd and Gillard Labor Governments’ mining taxes.
‘Prince’ Leonard & his consort – in the ‘Principality’
PostScript: Fringe micro-secessionists – seceding from the secessionist state!
In 1970 West Australian wheat farmer Leonard Casley declared his 18,500-acre agricultural property near Northampton (south of Geraldton) to be ‘independent’ of the Commonwealth and the state of Western Australia when Canberra and the WA government tried to limit the size of his wheat crop. In true “comic-opera” style, the eccentric Casley turned his farm into the Hutt River Province Principality, adopting the title of “His Majesty Prince Leonard I of Hutt”, and in so doing spawned a whole new wellspring of tourism for the locality. Enthused with the spirit of commercial opportunity Leonard and his Hutt River ‘micro-nation’ has gone the whole hog…flag, coat-of-arms, royal seal, coins, stamps, medallions, passports, souvenirs, etc. The response from the Australian authorities to such a “bold act” of “unilateral independence” has been a “softly-softly” approach, not seeking to unduly push the matter, a bit surprising as the Hutt River ‘Principality’ purportedly owes the Commonwealth many years of unpaid taxes (although it does make rate payments to the local government authority, the Shire of Northampton)…the state and the federal governments seem to gravitate between being nonplussed and amused by the eccentric entity❈ and generally try to ignore it! [M Siegel, “Micronation Master: Prince Leonard of Hutt River”, 17 May 2012, www.businessweek.com]; ‘Principality of Hutt River’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wiki.org
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❈ the Prince’s pattern of bizarre and idiosyncratic behaviour includes trying to seize government land surrounding his farm to increase his wheat quota; invoking the 1495 British Treason Act as proof of Hutt River Province’s status as a de facto monarchy; and declaring war on Australia (for four days in 1977!)
The type of dwelling Burley Griffin envisaged as the model house for the new bush suburb of Castlecrag was based on a new technological innovation in building called Knitlock Construction, or as Griffin more grandly termed it, Segmental Architecture. The American had pioneered and co-patented (with D C Jenkins) the Knitlock system in 1917 whilst working on the Canberra Capital Project. The Knitlock technique was to become the archetype for all of WBG’s subsequent domestic architecture.
Griffin’s Segmental Architecture was a quantum step forward from previous building technologies used in Australia (eg, Mack Slab) [M Lewis, ‘Knitlock’, www.mileslewis.net]. Intended by Walter for use on workmen’s cottages in Canberra (before the disintegration of his Capital City dream), the technique heralded a variety of radical advances in construction. With a simplicity and economy of design, the Segmental Architecture method constructed walls from ‘segments’ of precast reinforced concrete which were easier and quicker to construct than other methods (Griffin was one of the early developers of prefabrication). The Knitlock bricks, machine-manufactured on the southern side of the ‘Crag estate in a shed set up on the corner of The Redoubt and The Rampart, were light yet compact and sturdy. The bricks were reinforced with a dual ‘vertebrae’ structure which forms a concrete skeleton. The sections were easy to transport, easy to assemble as walls and cheap to make [W B Griffin, Australian Home Builder, No 1 (August 1922)].
Added to this, another major advantage of Knitlock was the convenience. The bricks did not require cutting, bedding or plastering, working instead on an interlocking join to connect them together (the prefab concept). A further advance was that Knitlock technology allowed for greater diversity in shapes for features of the house [‘Landmarks: Urban Life’ (National Museum of Australia) www.nma.gov.au/.].The beauty of Burley Griffin’s domestic construction using this system was that it could produce buildings that were simply designed and quickly constructed – non-standard workers’ cottages which were affordably priced. Affordability was an important requirement for the Griffins, the capacity of workers to afford their own home squared with their own espoused egalitarian and democratic principles.
The prototype for all of the Knitlock houses built in the Castlecrag and Haven Estates by WBG was ‘Pholiota’, the Griffin’s own small, ultra-modest home set among red gums and bush in Heidelberg, Victoria, before they moved to Castlecrag. This most basic, pared to the bone, single-roomed, utilitarian house, provided an example that any layman self-builder could follow. As proof of this, ‘Pholiota’ was erected in double-quick time apparently by Walter and Marion themselves with the assistance of a local chicken farmer! [P Y Navaretti, ‘Melbourne’, www.griffinsociety.com; Jenny Brown, “Humble ‘humpy’ masters miniature”, (19 May 2012), www.news.domain.com.au/].
‘Fishwick house’
Burley Griffin’s finest architectural achievement in Castlecrag is probably Fishwick House (№ 15 The Citadel). Because of his client’s requirements (large budget, expansive house), Walter deviated from his usual prescription of a small-scale “no frills”, minimalist, unembellished cottage. Fishwick House is a more grand house, emphasising horizontal eaves and porticos. At the sides and rear of the house judicious placement of large picture windows and glass doors permits cascades of filtered sunlight to enter the living room from varying angles [www.griffinsociety.org/]. This aspect of Fishwick House echoes the interior courtyard of Stanley Salter House in Toorak, Melbourne, which some architectural specialists rate as WBG’s best residential building [eg, James Birrell, cited in ‘Stanley Salter House’, De de ce, www.dedece.com]. Griffin’s use of open-plan interiors demonstrates the architect’s belief that the house shouldn’t be a haven for withdrawal from the outside world, but rather “a place for reflection and engagement with the surrounding environment” [ibid.]. WGB defied the conventions of the day for home design, putting “living rooms at the rear and opening to the landscape and views, and had utility rooms such as kitchens and bathrooms fronting the street” [M Petrykowski, ‘Architecture’,www.griffinsociety.org/].
‘Duncan house‘
The attitudes of pioneering residents of the Castlecrag Estate to the Griffin signature home were mixed. Some like Frank and Anice Duncan were delighted with the nature-centredness and functionality of Walter’s dwellings. The Duncans lived in no less than four of the houses over the years. The fourth one, the Duncan House at 8 The Barbette, specially commission by them, was the last Griffin-built home in Castlecrag.
However other residents were less sanguine about the houses – some with very good reason. The flat roofs on the early Knitlock constructed homes had a tendency to leak. Ellen Mower, first occupant of № 12 The Rampart (Mower House), was plagued by leaking roofs and eventually Griffin had to buy back the house from the owner [www.griffinsociety.org]. Mower House, incidentally, was the last home Marion lived in after her return from India after Walter’s death in 1937. Similarly, Mrs A E Creswick, who commissioned the small house built at 4 The Barbette (Creswick House), was similarly dissatisfied with the standard of her home and the Griffins had to re-purchase this dwelling as well [Castlecrag Progress Association, www.castlecrag.com.au/].
WBG fountain memorial
Dr Edward Rivett, who converted the King O’Malley House in Sortie Porte into Castlecrag’s first hospital, also commissioned the Griffin-designed 148 Edinburgh Road, however he altered the original plans to add a pitched tile roof and interior walls which were brick rendered. Griffin through GSDA, his company, sued Rivett for breach of Covenant and a lengthy legal battled ensued which was eventually won by Dr Rivett. Other potential buyers also had problems with the Covenants imposed by WBG and many turned away from Castlecrag, opting instead for the railway-serviced suburbs on the Upper North Shore which didn’t have restrictions on the size or type of house or on how or whether you landscape your property [‘Castlecrag’,www.sydneyforeveryone.com.au/].Because of the restrictions and other contentious issues surrounding the construction of GSDA dwellings in the estate, banks became less willing to approve loans on Griffin houses. The onset of the Depression strangled the economy which affected development everywhere in Sydney, but subdivisions that were less popular like Castlecrag suffered its effects hardest [ibid.]. Castlecrag had to await the postwar building boom to achieve significant inroads in development.
Another factor holding back Castlecrag’s development at this time was getting to and from the Middle Harbour promontory! In the 1920s the Middle Harbour promontory was severely hamstrung relative to transportation options. Before the Sydney Harbour Bridge was constructed it was a very long haul by road to Castlecrag (cars in the 1920s were in any case still fairly scarce), and the eastern part of the Northern suburbs lacked a main arterial road (Eastern Valley Way was a post-war development). In addition, trams on the north side of the harbour did not go as far as Castlecrag in the interwar period [G Wotherspoon, ‘Ferries’ (2008), www.dictionaryofsydney.org/]. A story told by the son of Edward Haughton, Burley Griffin’s Melbourne estate agent and valuer, is instructive. The father and 10-year-old son came to Sydney to assist WBG in promoting the Castlecrag Estate. Haughton’s son later recalled how difficult it was and how long it took to reach Castlecrag (from the city: walk/ferry/elevator/tram/walk) [recollected for M Walker, et al, ‘forming the Greater Sydney Development Association’, www.teachingheritage.nsw.edu.au/].
Burley Griffin’s attitude towards building materials was every bit as rigidly purist as his attitude was to how the finished product should look. He championed the use of concrete and stone (particularly local Castlecrag sandstone which blended in with the natural setting). Conversely, he railed against the popularity of the standard building materials of the day, brick and tile, which he rejected.
Marion was equally purist in her aesthetic preferences. Bernard Hesling, a Castlecrag resident in the Thirties recalled Mahoney “scrambling the hills like a billy goat” and pointing southwards to the predominance of red roofs and lack of trees in Northbridge, exclaiming loudly in her thick Midwest American accent “It’s hoorabul, hoorabul! Walter and I wanna keep the Crag voigin bush!” [‘Willoughby Walking Tours’ (Willoughby City Council), www.walks.willoughby.nsw.gov.au/].
The proportion of Burley Griffin designs converted into houses by GSDA over a 14 year period was quite low. Only 15 built in the Castlecrag and Haven Estates (none built north of Edinburgh Road, the area known as the Wireless or Sunnyside Estate) with about four or five other houses designed by one of WBG’s acolytes but approved by him. In what is somewhat of a trademark feature of Griffin’s oeuvre, many houses proceeded no further than the drawing board. WBG designed in the vicinity of 35 or so others for the ‘Crag that were not carried through to completion [‘The Idealists: creating Castlecrag’, ABC RN, Hindsight, 8 July 2012]. There was a host of reasons for this as outlined above, but sometimes sheer bad luck played its part in Griffin’s fortunes. Global developments had a tendency to intervene to stymie his noble intentions. Just as his vision for a physical landscape in Canberra worthy of the capital city of “a nation of ‘bold democrats” ran smack into the war effort of WWI which redirected valuable Australian resources away from WBG’s project, the development of Griffin’s estate in Castlecrag had its momentum undercut by the crippling effects of the Great Depression [‘Creating a new nation’s capital: The Griffins’ vision for Canberra’, (National Archives) www.naa.gov.au/].
When Walter’s private and GSDA commissions started to dry up, he increasingly took on industrial building design work. By the mid-1930s, frustrated by the lack of work in Castlecrag, Burley Griffin took up an invitation to design buildings for the University of Lucknow. The move to India, only intended to be a temporary one, served to re-energise Griffin’s architectural ambitions, allowing him to explore the fusion of ancient Eastern architecture with Western modernism. WBG engrossed himself in many new Indian projects but unfortunately, in a familiar story, the local colonial bureaucracy obstructed the realisation of most of the projects [G Sherington, ‘India’, W B Griffin Society, www.griffinsociety.org/].
‘Camelot’
EM Nicholls: Keeper of the Griffin flame
After the Griffins left Australia, his protege-cum-associate Eric Milton Nicholls took over the running of GSDA in Sydney and became the “keeper of the flame” for Griffin’s architectural vision. Nicholls soon started to design houses in Castlecrag in his own right. The pick of Nicholls’ work are probably Camelot (formerly called Pangloss) at № 3 The Bastion, and the all-white Moriaty House at № 215 Edinburgh Road. Camelot, with castle features including a Martello tower, is distinctively Nicholls’, but its circular stone design shows the clear influence of WGB’s earlier design for the Symington Parapet project [‘Castlecrag’, (Willoughby Dist. Hist. Soc.), www.willoughbydhs.org.au/].
Nicholls was a prominent architect in the Willoughby area, designing many domestic and public buildings in Sydney and Melbourne. An Anthroposophist like the Griffins, he was involved in the establishment of Steiner Glenaeon Schools in Middle Cove and Pymble [‘Eric Nicholls’, (Willoughby City Council), www.willoughby.nsw.gov.au]. Burley Griffin’s influence lives on in Castlecrag and elsewhere … The Griffin (8 Rockley Street), designed by Alex Popov in 1990, won the Robin Boyd Award (Australia’s leading residential architecture prize) – the building was described by the judges as “a reverent tribute to Griffin” [WDHS, op.cit (‘Castlecrag’).].
8 The Barbette
Footnote: The WBG sales pitchThe sales brochure of the Greater Sydney company (the Griffin’s firm) reads: “Castlecrag architecture has struck a distinct bold note in Australia. In place of the high peaked tile roofs … the handsome landscape style, with the stone walls and flat roofs, has been introduced in harmony with the great amphi-theatre of stone and forest”.
Walter Burley Griffin had been captivated by the magnificent harbour of Port Jackson upon first sailing into Sydney. Now, free of the seven-year Canberra fiasco, he was able to turn his mind to the search for a new project. After investigating sites at Longueville and Beauty Point Griffin’s creative energies were given direction when he discovered a large and quite choice stretch of virgin ground situated on two peninsulas on the upper part of Sydney’s Middle Harbour. WBG managed to secure an option to buy 263 hectares of largely cleared land, which included nearly 6.5km of untouched water frontage (still forested), for a very reasonable amount of money (there is some disagreement about whether the amount was $25,000 or £25,000). The scoop netted the Griffins the entire south-west part of what was to become Castlecrag, a large chunk of modern day Castle Cove, and around half of Middle Cove [“The Legacy of the Griffins” (Castlecrag Community), www.castlecrag.org.au/history/history.htm].
The original Castle Rock, Edinburgh EH1 Scotland
Griffin’s focus fixed itself on the southernmost of these promontories (Castlecrag), which he decided to subdivide and develop into different estates (while Middle and Castle Cove were put on hold for the time being to be developed later). WGB formed his own public company, the Greater Sydney Development Association (GSDA), to build homes in the Castlecrag Estate (and later the Haven Estate) which he would design. Shareholders in GSDA were offered a free block of land if they bought a home off the plan. Walter planned the first estate using a similar geometric pattern to the Canberra design, with a series of parallel semi-circular roads rippling out from a central point (a high rock), which he thought resembled the castle rock of Edinburgh Castle in Scotland (hence the name ‘Edinburgh’ chosen for the main road dissecting the peninsula). This resemblance also accounted for Griffin’s choice of name for the rocky promontory, Castlecrag. The fortress theme extended to the connecting roads which fanned out from Edinburgh Rd, with each of the streets given names that were derived from the concept of a castle – The Rampart, The Parapet, The Bastion, The Citadel, The Redoubt, The Outpost, etc, etc.
Griffin’s town planning ethos reflected his Prairie School training, but in Castlecrag he was to take urban development to a degree that was quite radical and purist in its strictures. Walter’s approach to the model community experiment in Middle Harbour was to be characteristically holistic. The natural features of Castlecrag defined how the suburb took shape. WBG planned the streets to follow a curvilinear line to fit in with the rocky sandstone contours of the promontory, parallel-running roads would be linked by pathways.
Griffin mapped out the road and allotment pattern of the estate by foot, walking all over the rocky terrain and leaving markers for the surveyor to follow [Teaching Heritage, “Forming the Greater Sydney Development Association”, www.teachingheritage.nsw.edu.au]. He then placed the planned homes very carefully and very strategically so that they didn’t impinge on the natural setting. It was all about the harmonisation of the built and the organic environment. Griffin stated that “a building should be the logical outgrowth of the environment in which it is located” [Walter Burley Griffin Society, S Read, “Landscape Architecture”; M O’Donohue, “Castlecrag”, Sydney, www.griffinsociety.org]. The young Griffin was guided by the famous maxim of his fellow Chicagoan and architectural mentor, Louis Sullivan – “form follows function”. Intended to blend in with the natural world rather than clash with it like much of modern architecture, Griffin’s houses were designed to recede into the landscape.
Griffin Prairie style cottage, The Parapet, Castlecrag
One story recounted by one of the early Castlecrag residents emphasises the extent to which Walter went to pursue his own peculiar brand of the “back to nature” philosophy in architecture. When one of the cottages was being built, several branches of particular trees were encroaching upon the site. Instead of simply cutting the ‘offending’ trees, WBG tied them back until the cottage was completed and then released the branches so that they sprang back and engulfed most of the house [“Willoughby Walking Tours” (Burley Griffin’s Castlecrag), www.walks.willoughby.nsw.gov.au/].
Griffin summarised his vision for Castlecrag in what is an oft-repeated quotation of his: “I want Castlecrag to be built so that each individual can feel the whole landscape is his. No fences, no boundaries, no red roofs to spoil the Australian landscape: these are some of the features that will distinguish Castlecrag.” [Griffin, 1922, AHB, S Read, op.cit., www.griffinsociety.org]. The Castlecrag Estate (and subsequent subdivisions) were to be characterised by tree retention, roofs were to be flat, not pitched in shape. WBG insisted on the use of building materials with textures and colours which mixed in well with the sandstone and native bushland, using local stone where possible. WGB also planned for ‘traffic islands’ at the intersections of streets, small triangular oases of planted natives and bush which allowed pedestrians respite from the vehicle-dominated roadway.
‘Grant house’
All over the estate, strategically positioned between each clutch of houses, Griffin planned bushland reserves for the residents, created to preserve the major landforms and rocky outcrops of the terrain. These ‘internal’ reserves were easily accessible from the houses by specially allocated pathways and were meant to encourage the owner-residents to take an interest in the maintenance of the retreats [ibid.]. In the Griffins’ idealistic philosophy, by creating these ‘common spaces’ which accentuate the natural beauty of the bush, for all of the neighbourhood to use, Castlecrag would realise the high democratic ideal of a model urbanised community that Canberra had failed to be. WGB forbid development along the foreshore of the promontory so that it would be kept as public open space for everyone to enjoy, therefore, access to all of the natural beauty of Castlecrag would be democratised. He implemented a system of covenants which was intended to control land use in the estate so that out-of-character development didn’t occur, and flora and fauna could be protected [M Walker, A Kabos, & J Weirick, Building for Nature: Walter Burley Griffin and Castlecrag, (WBGS)].
Haven Amphitheatre
The Griffins moved permanently to Castlecrag in Autumn 1925 with the intention of fully and actively embracing the local community. Whilst WBG set about creating his utopian vision for Castlecrag, MMG as usual provided the behind-the-scenes support. She assisted in GSDA’s work by preparing drawings, promoting sales, hosting VIPs, etc. Marion’s main role at Castlecrag however was to be a leader of the community, organising various cultural activities and meet-ups, from ballet classes to classical drama. She organised productions for the Haven Scenic Theatre in an amphitheatre in a rock-gully in Castlehaven Reserve, doing set and costume designs for plays [Peter Harrison, “Griffin, Walter Burley (1876–1937)”, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Vol 9, 1983, http://adb.anu.edu.au; Bronwyn Hanna, “Marion Mahony Griffin”, Dictionary of Sydney, www.dictionaryofsydney.org, 2008].
Marion’s key role in the cultural and artistic life of Castlecrag allowed her to revisit her past interest in acting, she had been enthusiastically engaged in drama back in her undergraduate days at MIT. The type of people that were attracted to the Griffins’ new garden suburb, were an intriguing mix. Often, they were drawn from non-conformist circles, including literary types, artists, musicians, environmentalists, spiritualists, bohemians, people of ethnic background, people with radical political convictions and other outsiders [“The Idealists: creating Castlecrag”, Hindsight, broadcast 8 July 2012, ABC Rational National]. Certainly in her leading role in Castlecrag, Marion affected the appearance of a bohemian lifestyle with lavish, ostentatious costume parties, but as her friend Louise Lightfoot said, “Marion could be said to be a ‘square bohemian’ …. completely unconventional yet strict” [L Esther, The Suburb of Castlecrag: A community history].
MMG
Griffin and GDSA initiated a number of measures to try and promote Castlecrag and boost house sales on the estate. A brief silent promotional film made in 1927 and entitled “Beautiful Middle Harbour” was shown in local cinemas. In it, the Castlecrag model suburb is presented as comprising “cool forests”, “Sylvan Glades”, “verdant bush” and “picturesque stone villas”. The last part of the film suggests the theatrical touch of Mahony with maidens frolicking in the Middle Harbour bush and being carried off by exotic masculine types dressed like Rudolph Valentino in ‘The Sheik’ (a Hollywood movie phenomena of the day) [‘Beautiful Middle Harbour’ (Keepin’ Silent series of Australian doco films) www.aso.gov.au]. Griffin wrote articles for architectural and trade journals as well as detailed brochures, all extolling the merits of Castlecrag. Large advertisements for home sales for the estate were also placed in Sydney newspapers [Teaching Heritage, op.cit.].
Although road construction on the rocky promontory was difficult and therefore slow (not to mention costly) [‘Castlecrag’, Willoughby District Historical Society, www.willoughbydhs.org.au/], the GSDA methodically went about the construction of stone cottages in accordance with Griffin’s plans. Two demonstration homes were quickly erected in Edinburgh Road, one became Marion and Walter’s temporary home and the other was used as the Castlecrag office for GSDA. Others followed including King O’Malley House, later converted into a hospital and a small strip of shops (extended into what is today the Griffin Centre). Many in the community who agreed with the Griffins’ emphasis on the fusion of human life with the natural world began to refer to Walter as the “Wizard of Castlecrag”, but Griffin’s idealism was to be lost on some who had the experience of living in his ‘model’ homes.
Marion Mahony and Walter Burley Griffin travelled to Australia in 1914 armed with Walter’s blueprint for transforming the Canberra plains into a model “democratic” Capital. The Griffins as part of an early 20th century US movement known as the Prairie School (or as Mahony preferred, the “Chicago School”), introduced Australia to the new ideas of modern American architecture. The Prairie School practitioners, the most famous of which was Frank Lloyd Wright, employed low, horizontal lines (flat roofs) and lack of decoration in their buildings. The idea behind this primarily residential architectural style was that the built environment should blend in with nature. Specifically given the School’s origins in Chicago, its inspiration was the flat landscape of the American Midwest.
When the Canberra project turned sour for Burley Griffin, after hostile local forces and circumstances conspired to block the realisation of his Capital “vision”, the Griffins channelled their energies into their private practice. WGB’s focus on the business in Melbourne was productive with a regular supply of commissions coming in from clients wanting to have their house built by the celebrity American architect living within their community. Griffin designed houses in the Melbourne suburbs of Carlton, Canterbury, Surrey Hills, Toorak, Heidelberg, Kew, Black Rock, Ivanhoe, Armadale, Eaglemont and Frankston (the Frankston and Heidelberg dwellings were designed as residences for the American couple). MMG by herself was credited with the design of one Melbourne house in East Malvern [P Navaretti, “Melbourne”,http://www.griffinsociety.org/].
Palais Theatre,
St Kilda, Vic.
Burley Griffin, with assistance from Mahony, also designed a number of commercial buildings in Melbourne at the time, including Newman College (Melbourne University), the Palais de Danse and Palais Picture Theatre (both in St Kilda), the Kuomintang Club for the Chinese Nationalist Party, Café Melbourne, the Capitol Theatre (Mahony’s crystalline ceiling design comprising 4,000 coloured globes for the theatre was an absolute tour de force). The Capitol was described by prominent architect and academic, Robin Boyd, as “the best cinema that was ever built or is ever likely to be built” [The Australian, 24 December 1965]. Whilst in Melbourne, WBG’s exceptional flair for town planning was reignited and demonstrated in the imaginative plans he created for the Ranelagh Estate of holiday homes on Mornington Peninsula and the Glenard and Mount Eagle subdivisions in Eaglemont.
Rock Crest/Glen
After coming to Australia the Griffins maintained their architectural office in Chicago working through a partner, Barry Byrne, to design some distinctive houses (Rock Crest/Rock Glen) in Mason City, Iowa. WGB would send back his plans for US projects for Byrne to follow through on but unbeknownst to Griffin, Byrne was altering Griffin’s plans to suit his own aesthetic and proceeding with his own designs on the business’ projects. WGB eventually twigged to what Byrne was doing and severed their partnership [James Weirick, “Walter Burley Griffin: In his Own Right”, US PBS program broadcast 1999 (www.pbs.org)]. As if the Griffins didn’t have enough headaches with the vicissitudes of the Australian projects already. Around 1920/1921 Walter let go of his personal vision of the new capital, cutting himself free from the Canberra project morass and turned his focus elsewhere.
Concurrently with the Melbourne practice, the Griffins through Mahony ran a Sydney architectural office from Bligh Street in the City. During the Canberra period the Griffins lived mainly on Sydney’s North Shore (at Cremorne, Neutral Bay and then Greenwich). Walter had been attracted to Sydney’s spectacular harbour from his initial arrival in Sydney in 1913. Whilst in Sydney WGB found time to to take on individual commissions, designing private homes at Pymble (two), Wahroonga, Killara, Avalon and Telopea (all of which exist to this day), plus two other residences in the South Sydney municipality now demolished. In addition, a few of WBG’s designs for commercial buildings were realised, such the facade for the Paris Theatre (cinema) in the Sydney CBD.
Plan of Leeton, NSW (1913)
Whilst on the Australia east coast Walter maintained his strong interest in urban planning. Among the many, many town plans WBG created in Australia, were designs for new towns in Leeton and Griffith (part of the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Project), Culburra Beach (Jervis Bay), North Arm Cove (Port Stephens), Milleara (Keilor East), Newcastle and St Kilda, as well as two university campuses in Sydney [J Birrell, Walter Burley Griffin, cited in Di Jay, “Urban Planning”, www.griffinsociety.org]. Disappointingly, the overwhelming majority of Griffin’s urban plans in this country were never implemented, or sometimes only ever partially so.
The downturn in the economy occasioned by the Depression adversely affected the Griffins’ building sales in the Castlecrag Estate. Needing a new source of finance to continue his residential work, WGB took an opportunity to venture into industrial commissions. At this time municipal councils in Australia were under pressure to find new solutions for the growing problem of waste disposal, instead of simply dumping refuse at sea as had been the prevailing practice. WBG joined up with the Reverberatory Incinerator & Engineering Co, headed by a former client of his. In the 1930s he designed 13 such incinerators in collaboration with Eric Nicholls in several states and the ACT. Griffin and Nicholls promoted their incinerators as being “hygienic, efficient and aesthetically pleasing” [“Burley Griffin Incinerator”, sydneyarchitecture, http://sydneyarchitecture.com/GLE/GLE27.htm].
The initial reverberatory furnaces built (Ku-ring-gai/West Pymble and Essendon) were relatively small structures and church-like or large residence-like in appearance and scale. Later Griffin/Nicholls incinerators took on a more monumental and imposing countenance, utilising Art Deco styles and Pre-Columbian motifs (eg, Willoughby, Glebe, Pyrmont). Simon Reeves argues that the catalyst for the change was the growing interest of Walter, and especially Marion, in the spiritual beliefs of Anthroposophy, describing the Pyrmont incinerator as representing “the geometric massing of archaic power, embellished with symbols” [S Reeves, “Incineration and Incantations” in J Turnbull & P Y Navaretti (Eds), The Griffins in Australia and India]. From the early 1930s Anthroposophical belief did appear to inform WBG’s architecture and planning, the American Anthroposophical Society affirms that “buildings should be ecologically sound and reflect the character of the region or culture …(and should enhance) … physical, psychological and spiritual well-being”. To this end Griffin’s work certainly possessed a crucial ecological purpose [J K Notz Jr, “A Beginning, an End and Another Beginning” (Marion Mahony Griffin, Architect), Chicago Literary Club address, 23 April 2001].
Burley Griffin’s industrial construction represented some of his most striking work in Australia. Marion considered Pyrmont with its distinctive Mayan influences and towering chimney to be Walter’s best Australian building [“Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin”, www.griffinsociety.org; PY Navaretti, “Incinerators”, ibid.]. Sadly, it was allowed to fall into disrepair by a neglectful Sydney City Council and demolished in 1992 to make way for a block of units. [“WB Griffin Incinerator”, www.teachingheritage.nsw.edu.au]
With his Canberra dream unfulfilled, Burley Griffin continued to search for a suitable site that could be moulded into a community compatible with the Griffins’ nature-centric philosophy, where the built world could be integrated into the natural world. This led Griffin to find a favourable location in Middle Harbour on the north side of Port Jackson, on an isolated, rocky promontory. Walter would call it “Castlecrag”, here, he would try to create an “organic solution”, a way of living in harmony with nature.
On-site residential bushland retreat, The Crag
Once the idea took root and the foundations started to take shape, the Castlecrag community was to become the Griffins’ abiding passion, right up until they left Australia for Imperial India in the mid 1930s. Planning and guiding this small, community from scratch allowed Griffin to give full vent to his talent for landscape architecture and his and Marion’s) deep love of nature. Integrating the habitat with the natural world was intimately personal for Walter and Marion in Castlecrag, as the couple were to live, fully engaged, within the local community for the longest term of their marriage. I will outline the Castlecrag chapter of the Griffins’ story in Australia in a separate blog.
The seeds of Marion Mahony Griffin and Walter Burley Griffin’s prolific partnership as designers and planners contain an ironic provenance. The individual who inadvertently brought them together was Frank Lloyd Wright (FLW), destined to become the Griffins’ lifelong bête noire. The future couple met as a result of Walter Burley Griffin (WBG) joining Wright’s architectural firm at Oak Park, Illinois, in 1901, where Marion Mahony (MMG) was already employed. WBG was a recent graduate of Illinois University and MMG was—in a de facto sense if not actually given the title by Wright—head draughtsman. Both were qualified architects, Marion had been the second US female graduate in architecture (from MIT in Boston), and if not the first, one of the very first licensed female architects in the world)[“Marion Mahony Griffin, Frank Lloyd Wright’s First Employee,” Jackie Craven, (Thought Co), (2014, updated 13-Dec-2016), www.thoughtco.com]
MMG, soon after graduating from MIT University
It can be said that MMG’s role in the architectural and town planning projects that she was involved in, indeed her whole career up until WBG died, revolved around her personal relationships with male architects in which her place was always the subservient one (willingly so as far as she was concerned) – perhaps hardly surprising given the period. As Lynn Becker put it, Marion Mahony was “one of a series of pioneering women architects and designers who have disappeared into the deep shadow of their male associates” [L Becker, “Frank Lloyd Wright’s Right-Hand Woman”, www.lynnbecker.com]. In her case, the men venerated by Mahony were in sequence her cousin Dwight Perkins, Wright and Griffin. Her first job in the field after graduating was working for Perkins, which was short-lived as Dwight, still trying to build up his business, didn’t have enough work for Marion and had to let her go in 1895. From that year many of the progressive young architects practicing in that period (including Wright, Griffin, Mahony, Spencer, Perkins, the Pond brothers, Myron Hunt, etc) coalesced in Steinway Hall (a building itself which MMG had contributed to its design). The loft in Steinway Hall became a kind of incubator for new ideas for these young forward-looking architects seeking to extend the boundaries of the profession. Becker described it aptly … “it could be said that this (Steinway Hall) was an aviary where the Prairie School of Architecture was hatched” [Becker, ibid.].
FLW
Marion’s relationship with Frank Lloyd Wright was a complicated one which, due to circumstance, underwent change over time. She was with Wright many years, apparently she enjoyed working for him and being in his company, and perhaps there was an element of hero-worship involved in the early period. For his part, Wright clearly found her indispensable as a highly valued draughtswoman and as an administrator [Becker, ibid.], in FLW’s words, she was his “most capable assistant” (high praise indeed from one not usually given to positive affirmations of others!). That Mahony was even closer to FLW’s wife, Catherine, strengthened the bond with the Wrights. Many of the male staff in FLW’s office publicly pronounced on the sublime quality of Mahony’s drawing board work and its preeminence to that of anyone else in the studio, even Wright wasn’t prepared to dispute this consensus of views. One of the studio’s architects, Barry Byrne (later for a time Walter’s partner in the US before an acrimonious split) in his reminiscences wrote that the informal design competitions held between the employees in FLW’s studio were mostly won by Mahony, and that Wright filed away her drawings for future use and rebuked anyone who described them as “Miss Mahony’s designs” [F A Bernstein, “Rediscovering a Heroine of Chicago Architecture”, New York Times, 1 January 2008].
The Mahony/Wright relationship proved very advantageous to FLW in the advancement of his professional business – to put it mildly. In his immensely influential two volume folio of lithographs, the Wasmuth Portfolio published in Germany during the period of his European elopement (with a client’s wife!), Wright liberally used Marion’s drawings, over half of which comprised the Wasmuth folio, without acknowledgement. Consequently, FLW’s fame in the architecture world, at the expense of Mahony’s anonymity, spread exponentially after the Wasmuth publication. Architectural historian Vincent Scully described Wasmuth as “one of the three most influential treatises of the twentieth century” [Janice Pregliasco, “Life and Work of Marion Mahony Griffin”, Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies, Vol 21, No 2 (1995)].
K C DeRhodes House (Sth Bend, Ill.) designed by Marion, credited to Wright
MMG’s contribution to Wright’s architecture is spectacularly seen in the planning of two of the Wisconsinite’s most celebrated early Midwest buildings, K C DeRhodes House and Unity Temple. In the design for both works, Mahony’s drawing technique, heavily inspired by Japanese woodblock prints, led her to create a new style of architectural rendering, one that emphasised depth, light and landscape in her drawings, and characterised by richly detailed foliage giving a frame and focus for the house itself, a technique that according to Paul Kruty became the gold standard for later Prairie School designs [Kruty cited in Becker, op.cit. (“FLW … Woman”).]. Marion’s exceptional renderings were an important part of the promotion of Wright’s early work through various publications and exhibitions [Pregliasco, op.cit.].
Light fitting, Capitol Theatre Melbourne (MMG)
The excellence of Marion’s design work extended to home and furnishing designs. She had a real flair for interior design, creating designs for panels, coloured and leaded glass windows, mosaics, murals, light fittings, furnishings, drawings and illustrations, that not only added value to the projects and commissions of FLW (and WBG), but contributed in their distinctiveness to the development of Prairie School interior features [Craven, op.cit. ; [Anna Rubbo, “Marion Mahony Griffin: A larger than life presence in early 20th century architecture”, in A. Watson (Ed), Beyond Architecture].
David Amberg House (1910). MMG.
The lofty regard Marion held for Wright eroded to some extent as she became more comfortable with Walter, resulting in a transference to WBG of her habitual adulation of a strong male figure. But what really offended and disenchanted Marion in respect of FLW was his scandalous behaviour in 1909 in abruptly eloping to Europe with the wife of a client, in so doing deserting his wife and children (MMG was best friends with Wright’s wife). FLW offered Marion charge of his office, which she declined, however in her characteristically conscientious manner she picked up the pieces of Wright’s unfinished commissions which he had abandoned (along with his family!) in such a startlingly unprofessionally way, and worked with another architect to finalise FLW’s outstanding projects. One of these completed homes, Amberg House in Michigan, designed by Mahony, was so widely admired that later both Wright and the collaborating architect von Holst claimed it as their own [Pregliasco, op.cit.].
After Mahony and Griffin severed all links with Wright and started to be noticed in architectural circles for the work they were doing on their own, the scurrilous Wright hardened his views on the Chicago couple. Whenever anyone would mention Marion and Walter and their latest projects, FLW would decry their achievements and write them off as hack designers (“Griffin was merely a draughtsman”) [“Walter Burley Griffin”, (Sydneyarchitecture), http://sydneyarchitecture.com/ARCH/ARCH-Griffin%20.htm]. In her memoirs MMG railed against the poisonous words of Wright but never once mentioning him by name, referring to him simply as the “cancer sore”.
◄ { MMG’s interior, Capitol Theatre, Melbourne
Marion’s critical role in Walter’s success in winning the Canberra Capital City project has been well canvassed (see my previous blog, “WB & MLM Griffin and the Canberra Federal Capital Project: A Democratic City Lost?”). Once the Griffins settled in Australia, despite voluntarily taking a supporting, secondary role in her husband’s career (see PostScript), Marion’s artistic output did not altogether abate…her work as a designer of buildings, it is true, was subordinated, but she sought out and found other artistic endeavours for her flourishing and creative impulses. A lot of MMG’s finest artistic achievements occurred in Australia, whether it was collaborating with WBG on his Capitol Theatre in Swanston Street, Melbourne, enhancing it by her magnificent crystalline lighting ceiling (above), or the superb tree paintings and drawings she independently did of the Tasmanian forest (below).
Tasmanian Forest portrait
In their building and design work Walter and Marion brought very different but complementary strengths and qualities to their professional partnership – Griffin the architect, the landscaper, the town planner, Mahony the artist/illustrator, the delineator of perspective and design, the bush garden planner. Alasdair McGregor said of the Griffin partnership: “Walter had wonderful three-dimensional imaginings … yet as a draftsman he was stillborn … by contrast Marion was probably the most gifted draftsperson–renderer of her times” [quoted in “Unearthed Griffin treasure returned to the Archives”, NAA, Issue 3, July 2011, www.yourmomento.naa.gov.au]. Where he was deficient or lacking in some part of the process, Mahony was there to fill the void and raise the finished product up a notch or two, giving it that special, added lustre. No more was this more apparent than in the Griffins’ winning submission for the Federal Capital Project in Canberra.
MMG was a complex personality, despite her exceptional talents, she did not push herself forward at all (the antithesis of the egotistical Wright). Whether this was due to an innate insecurity she felt as a woman in a staunchly male profession or something else, her inclination was to avoid the limelight, to stay busy, beavering away behind the scene. Interestingly, MMG maintained a keen side-interest in acting, whilst at MIT and later again in Castlecrag. The theatre was perhaps a vehicle for her to express herself individually whilst under the cover of it being only play-acting. As Alice Friedman described Marion, she was an architect but a particular sort of architect, “a collaborator in a field of individualists, a builder of communities and connections in an increasingly fragmented and competitive professional world” [A T Friedman, “Girl Talk: Marion Mahony Griffin and Frank Lloyd Wright and the Oak Park Studio”, (Design Observer Group), www.places.designobserver.com].
MMG rendering of a FLW house
Walter Burley Griffin’s star was on the rise when he and Marion married, he was becoming famous and starting to get more prestigious commissions in the US. Mahony was very content from that point on to devote herself wholly to the betterment of his career, to derive some measure of vicarious satisfaction from contributing to his achievements in architecture and planning. MMG, in her unpublished 1940s memoir, “The Magic of America”, described herself as having been “a very useful slave” to Griffin (the 1400-plus page manuscript in itself was Marion’s attempt to elevate and preserve the reputation and status of WBG as a first-rank American architect and town planner). So often, when WBG had to shift projects, MMG was there to fill the void, when Griffin went to Canberra the first time, Mahony was left to mind the shop in Chicago. When Griffin journeyed to India in search of more lucrative commissions, she was there, again, to keep the Castlecrag business going.
MMG rendering of Library & Museum plan, Lucknow (India).
Marion’s anthroposophical contacts helped Walter gain new sources of work in India. in 1936 MMG joined her husband in Lucknow with her creative energies renewed, prompting Griffin to remark that Marion was “back at the drawing board” for the first time in 14 years [L Becker, “Marion Mahony Griffin – in Australia and beyond”, www.lynn.becker.com]. MMG collaborated with Griffin on the design of over 100 Prairie School-influenced buildings which were a departure from the prevailing British Raj style in India. The standout example of Mahony’s rendering of Griffin’s designs in the Sub-continent was the library and museum for the Raja of Mahmudabad [ibid.].
After Walter’s sudden death in 1937, Marion finalised Griffin’s outstanding Indian commissions before returning to Australia. Eventually after leaving the Australian business in the hands of WBG’s partner, Eric Nicholls, she left Sydney to return to her native Chicago. In the 1940s Mahony turned her hand to community planning, securing commissions from a prominent US peace activist, Lola Maverick Lloyd, to plan townships in New Hampshire and Texas. Lloyd, Unfortunately, died at this time and the plans were never carried through. A further town plan Mahony did for South Chicago also did not eventuate. Notwithstanding that the projects in Texas and New Hampshire did not materialise, they reinforce MMG’s role as a pioneering woman in architectural planning, representing as they do, “the first communities in the world designed entirely by a woman”[Pregliasco, op.cit.].
Whatever disappointments there were for the Griffins and for WBG especially (the setbacks of the Federal Capital project in particular), the relevant statistics, as calculated by Anna Rubbo, point to an output that was very productive and overall quite impressive. In 26 years together, in the US, Australia and India, Walter and Marion, together as “Team Griffin”, collaborated in around 280 architectural, town planning and landscape projects, of which nearly 180 were completed [A Rubbo, in Watson, op.cit.]. Whilst history has in recent times addressed an oversight in relation to Griffin and finally afforded him something akin to his rightful place amongst the 20th century practitioners of architecture, Marion’s contribution to modern architecture has tended to be overlooked or as least obscured under the focus on her husband. During the last decade several architectural writers have drawn attention to the neglect of Mahony, eg, D Van Zanten (Ed), Marion Mahony Reconsidered; D Wood (Ed), Marion Mahoney Griffin: Drawing the Form of Nature; “Marion Mahoney Griffin”, Mass. Institute of Technology, http://web.mit.edu/museum/chicago/griffin.html].
The MMG monogram
PostScript: Marion’s self-determined role as a “support player”
The number of houses MMG designed in her own right was small, in Australia for instance only one (in suburban Melbourne), and a handful in America (some wrongly attributed to Wright – see Amberg House above) [P Kruty, “Marion Lucy Mahoney Griffin”, (Walter Burley Griffin Society of America), www.wbgriffinsociety.org]. Lack of opportunities afforded to a woman in the profession in that era, goes a good way to explaining this, but so does her willingness to ever be the collaborating “assistant”. It was in her work as a artist and draughtsman that Marion really came into her own. Influential architectural critic Reyner Banham described her as “the greatest architectural delineator of her generation” – male or female [Architectural Review (1973)].
Mention the name Walter Burley Griffin and people in Australia will think, especially since last year’s lavish Capital Centenary celebrations, of Canberra. In the Australian psyche the American architect is largely associated with the planning of the capital in Canberra 100 years ago. However, there was a lot more to the Australian story of Walter Burley Griffin (WBG) and his wife Marion Lucy Mahony, than the seven frustrating years they spent in Canberra, but I will concentrate in this blog on the Canberra chapter of his life in Australia (and that of his wife).
Early Griffin project {Carter House Evanston, Illinois}
In 1911 Griffin was a young Midwestern architect living in Chicago, working within the modernist style of the Prairie School and making inroads in the profession. The Illinoisan was establishing himself in his own practice and building up a portfolio of important commissions in America. Walter’s wife and architectural partner, Marion Mahony Griffin (MMG), found out about Australia’s Federal Capital Design Competition and badgered him into completing the plans for entry (they only just made the extended deadline for entry submission by the tightest of margins!).
WBG’s design for the capital-to-be was selected in 1912 as the winning entry. No small part in Griffin’s success was due to the exemplary quality of the plan and perspective presentations superbly rendered by Marion. They comprised 14 immense ink on satin drawings, the standard size was five feet wide by two-and-a-half feet (some even were a staggering eight feet by up to 30 feet long!). Some of the amazing drawings and paintings were done in triptych fashion, opening out into three-hinged panels in the style of Japanese woodcut prints [National Archives of Australia(Your Momento To), “Unearthed Griffin treasure returned to the Archives”, Issue (July 2011)]. Fred Bernstein has described the effect of MMG’s beautiful drawings thus, “the rugged Australian landscape seemed to embrace Griffin’s buildings”… and this was despite the fact that MMG had never set eyes on the country [F A Bernstein, “Rediscovering a Heroine of Chicago Architecture”, New York Times, 20 January 2008].
A second factor that worked to the Griffins’ advantage was that whilst other competitors in the national capital design competition (there were 137 entries in all!) failed to take into account the topography of the site in their presentations, the Griffins’ submission managed to harmonise with the site’s landform and natural features [National Archives of Australia, “A vision for a democratic capital”, www.naa.gov.au.
▼ BELOW {MMG: Ink on satin painting – the city from across the valley}
With a little help from our compatriots? Ultimately, the support of the Australian Minister for Home Affairs, King O’Malley, was decisive. The colourful O’Malley, himself an erstwhile American like the Griffins, as the minister with overall responsibility for bringing the new national capital to fruition, made the final decision in favour of WBG’s submission against concerted opposition from within the Australian community [Alasdair McGregor, “Rebels & Gilt-spurred Roosters: Politics, Bureaucracy & the Democratic Ideal in the Griffins’ Capital”, a paper delivered in A Cultivated City, (Seminar, 2 May 2013)]. Unfortunately for Griffin, O’Malley’s support for WGB’s plans for the capital was not sustained beyond the original decision. It transpired that O’Malley was in reality prepared to use a hotchpotch of the three leading designs for the purpose of implementation (the Griffins, the second place-getter from Helsinki and the third from Paris) [“An Ideal City? The 1912 competition to design Canberra”, www.idealcity.org.au]. My hunch is that the manoeuvrable and expedient O’Malley probably considered Griffin’s city plan of no greater merit than the Finnish and French bids, but it was the sublime quality of Marion’s artwork presentation that tipped the scales in the American architect’s favour.
Over a year passed after the contest victory before WBG received an invitation to come to Australia. During this interval the Department Board in Melbourne set up by O’Malley had persuaded the minister into allowing them to rework the Griffin plan. Only after an outcry from the architectural community at this amateur effort at town planning, did the Government reverse this and reinstate the Griffins’ winning plan [‘City of Dreams – Designing Canberra’ (2000 documentary)]. Upon his arrival in 1913 Griffin initially received a warm reception from the Australian press, Advance Australia introduced him to the public as “Walter Burley Griffin – Architect and Democrat”. Walter’s optimism at the outset was understandably pronounced, saying “I have planned a city not like any other city in the world. I have planned it not in a way that I expected any government authorities in the world would accept.” Unfortunately in the fullness of time this faith in the Australian power-brokers was to prove sadly misplaced.
Griffin then returned to the US to put in place provisions for the maintenance of his Chicago practice during the Griffins’ absence from America. During this time WBG spent a long while waiting round for an invitation from the Australian Government to return and start work on Canberra, which he was obviously keen to do. It was only after a change of government in Melbourne (then the interim national capital) in 1914, that the new Home Affairs Minister, William Kelly, finally invited the Griffins to return and paid for their passage [G. Korporaal, “Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin were drawn together on Canberra”, The Australian, 9 March 2013]. Marion and Walter established bases for their work in both Sydney and Melbourne.
Blueprint for a “Democratic Capital”
In accepting the Federal commission Walter had the highest hopes for his vision of what Canberra could become, the realisation of the idea of a democratic city. This political element of the Canberra project was important to Griffin in itself. Politically, the Griffins were idealistic liberal progressives, followers of radical political economist, Henry George, whose egalitarian single tax on land struck a resonant cord with his fellow Americans, especially his tenet that the value of land should be owned equally by all citizens. WBG attempted to put this tenet into practice when appointed Federal Capital Director of Design and Construction, exerting his influence on the Government – when residential plots were first opened up in the ACT, land was not sold. Instead it was offered up for rent on 99-year leases [K Williams, “William Burley Griffin”, www.prosper.org.au]. Having a chance at shaping the Canberra experiment was an overriding priority for WBG, so much so that when offered the chair of the Department of Architecture at the University of Illinois shortly after winning the Australian prize, he declined it [“Walter Burley Griffin in his Own Right”, US PBS broadcast documentary, www.pbs.org. WBG’s blueprint envisaged the new Federal Capital as an “irregular” amphitheatre with a centrally located parliamentary triangle, surrounding artificial lake with a concentric pattern of residential streets moving away from the centre.
The Lake
Griffin’s grand plan for the new capital city was however cynically undermined from the start. Even before WGB had set foot in Australia, a specially-appointed departmental board pressured O’Malley into making changes to WBG’s Canberra design [“Canberra – Australia’s Capital City”, www.australia.gov.au]. Instead of making Mt Kurrajong a public space and placing Parliament House lakeside in the valley below, as Griffin wanted to do (part of WBG’s scheme for the democratisation of the capital), the bureaucrats positioned Parliament on the mountain (Capital Hill). In a spooky parallel with what was to happen to Jørn Utzon and his design for the Sydney Opera House half-a-century later, the Griffins met with continual bureaucratic interference and obfuscation, and eventually became disillusioned.
Canberra: the winning blueprint
For sure Griffin rubbed certain people in the government and the public service the wrong way, but there was clearly a coordinated attempt to sabotage the implementation of his “vision”. Some working on the Canberra project decried his plan as being vastly extravagant and incapable of ever being brought to fruition [Peter Harrison, “Walter Burley Griffin” in Australian Dictionary of Biography, Vol. 9 (1983)]. He was further criticised for “poor administration of the project”. The situation was further complicated by funding for Canberra starting to dry up due to the priorities of the war, and by injudicious comments by WBG himself in the middle of World War I opposing Australia’s participation in it. The progress of WBG’s work was also subject to the vicissitudes of alternating national governments during the war years, as he waxed in and out of favour with every new minister appointed. In the end WBG had had enough, the forces of dissent had won, and he resigned his post as Director of the Federal Capital program in 1920, removing himself from all further involvement in the Canberra project. Walter’s architect brother-in-law, Roy Lippincott (who accompanied the Griffins to Australia), described the experience as “seven years of struggle and slander” [McGregor, op.cit.]. Virtually none of WBG’s designed buildings for the Capital were ever completed (the only structure by erected by Griffin was a monument to a general killed in the Gallipoli Campaign), and both his extensive lakes scheme (only implemented after heavy modification nearly half-a-century later) and his railway proposals were not taken up.
GSDA Sydney Office, 35 Bligh Street
The Griffins: Architectural Life after Canberra – Sydney, Melbourne, private practice and the GSDA
In the late 1910s, as implementation of the plan for Canberra and construction of works stalled, Walter could see the writing on the wall, but interestingly the wilful WBG didn’t pack up and return to Chicago where there was plenty of work for him and the likelihood of a chair in architecture at the university. Instead, the Griffins turned more to developing their Australian private architectural commissions. Marion took charge of the couple’s New South Wales office in Bligh Street, Sydney, whilst Walter ran the newly created Melbourne office, seeking out new residential projects in the southern city to shore up the couple’s finances.
One hundred years ago tomorrow, 5 August 1914, at 12.39pm (Aust. EST), the first hostile action of World War I took place, not in Europe but in the eastern entrance to Port Phillip Bay in Melbourne. Refer also to my earlier blog of 27 February 2014, First engagement of hostilities? Very odd angry shots indeed!, for more details of the circumstances.
The first shot came from the Australian military gun emplacements stationed at Fort Nepean on the extremity of Melbourne’s Mornington Peninsula overlooking the stretch of open water which separates Port Phillip Bay from the Bass Strait. The target was a German steamer, the SS Pfalz, (the name a reference to the German Rhineland-Palatinate region), was carrying 200 tons of coal intended to supply the nearby warships of the Pacific Squadron of the Imperial German Navy.
The incident that followed is now reasonably widely known – Britain (and by necessity, the British Empire) was expected to declare war on Germany that day. As soon as the news was cabled through from London that this had happened, on instructions from the naval command at nearby Fort Queenscliff, the Fort Nepean battery was given a command to stop the (now enemy) vessel from leaving Australian waters. Two warning volleys were fired from the Fort battery before the German captain surrendered (it seems scarcely credible to believe but the first hostile shot launched by the Allied side in the Second World War 25 years later was also fired from the same gun at Fort Nepean!)
The not-so-certain element of this story is the intriguing question of who actually fired on the SS Pfalz, effectively the first shots of World War I. Among the numerous news items currently circulating in the Australian press, the Age identifies Sergeant John Purdue as the individual who fired that first momentous shot 100 years ago [“Fort Nepean’s Sergeant John Purdue fired first shot of World War I”, The Age, 4 August 2014]. Concurrently with this, some papers are running articles on the role of Corporal William Carlin, which suggest that it was Carlin who fired the first shot [“Historic shot echoes a day later”, The Standard (Warrnbl. Vic.) 4 August 2014; “Marshall’s First Shot Connection”, The Surf Coast News (Bell. Pen. Vic.) 31 July 2014]. Both servicemen are now long deceased, and interviews with members of their families reveal their great pride in the part played by their respective kinsman.
Ft Nepean today
The apparent contradiction can be possibly explained as Sgt. Purdue issuing the on-the-ground command to fire, and Corp. Carlin, or another gunner, launching the shells. Given that the gun emplacement crew at Fort Nepean consisted of five or six men, the reality is that we will probably never know in any definitive sense which gunner fired the first shots across the bow of the German coal steamer. At the very least, we do know that both Sgt. Purdue and Corp. Carlin played key roles in the exact operation which symbolically marked the onset of the World War’s hostilities.
◖◗ See also the earlier, related article on this blogsite – “First engagement of hostilities? Very odd angry shots indeed!”
Visionary thinkers in the 19th Century such as Robert Owen, Comte de Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier, provided the impetus for a whole host of attempts to create new communities which aspired to an ideal or utopian existence. Old Europe looked towards to the ‘New World’, the Americas, as the optimal location for the realisation of an ideal society. Many transplanted “would-be” utopian communities ended up in the United States (with bucolic names like New Harmony, Icaria, Fountain Grove and Altruria), but increasingly many seekers of a better life looked optimistically to the less developed reaches of South America as fertile ground for a model community (the US National Parks Service on its website www.nps.gov identifies literally hundreds of communal utopian experiments in the early period of the United States – article “The Amana Colonies: Utopias in America”).
In this piece I want to focus on two late 19th Century Paraguayan utopian experiments, the colonies of Nueva Germania and Nueva Australia. The German and the Australian colonies were both spectacularly unsuccessful in their aims, hardly surprising perhaps considering how unrealistically high they had set the bar, and how incredibly idealistic were their aims. On the surface the German and the Australian utopian experiments seem very different beasts, one a haven for Nordic exclusionists and the other for disillusioned Antipodean agrarian labourers, ideologically though, as I will attempt to show below, the two colonies had much in common in their character and aspirations.
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The remnants of Neuva Germania today
Neu Deutschland im Amerika: Germany’s “would-be” Aryan colony in the Americas
New Germany in Paraguay was the brainchild of Elizabeth Nietzsche and Bernhard Förster, the sister and brother-in-law of the great German philosopher, Frederick Nietzsche. Förster had been prominent in the far right German People’s League, known for its extreme anti-Semitic nationalism. His big idea, supported by his wife, Elizabeth, was to create a model German community in the Americas which embodied Aryan racial purity, free from what the Försters believed to be the “virulent contamination of Europe by Jews”. In the febrile minds of the anti-Semitic couple, the virgin ground of depopulated rural Paraguay held the promise of creating an exclusively Aryan society.
In 1886 Förster and Nietzsche organised the emigration of a small number of select families from Saxony (who were characteristically Nordic in appearance) to South America. The scheme of the Försters was to build the foundations of a supreme Aryan ‘New World’ colony in the Paraguayan jungle. Förster’s hopes initially were high for Nueva Germania, envisaging an “idyllic Naumburg on the Aguarya-umi” River [Ben MacIntyre, Forgotten Fatherland]. In addition to the racial dimension, Förster and Frau Förster-Nietzsche’s Aryan utopia was based on the pillars of German nationalism, Lutheranism and vegetarianism [JF Williams, Daniela Krause & Harry Knowles “Flights from Modernity: German and Australian Utopian Colonies in Paraguay 1886-1896?”, Journal of Australian Studies (1 Sept 2001)].
The dreams of a German-South American Paráiso en Tierra very soon came to dust as the colony abjectly failed to establish any cohesion or viability. A combination of factors contributed to this including disease affecting the colonists, crop failure and infighting among the migrants from Saxony [Simon Romero, “German Outpost Born of Racism in 1887 Blends into Paraguay”, New York Times, 6 May 2013]. The fact that only a small proportion of the settlers were actually farmers was a factor in the colony’s inability to yield sufficient crops on their land [James Brooke, “Nueva Germania Journal; from a Bigot’s Planting, a Garden Assimilation”, NYT, 18 March 1991].
San Pedro (site of the Germany colony): in the middle of the country, south of Concepción
The elitist personal behaviour of the Försters in Nueva Germania affected the colony’s cohesion and disaffected its members. This manifested itself in displays of megalomania by Förster and the Försters’ demonstrably obvious social and economic advantage which markedly set them apart from the other colonists who were for the large part fairly impoverished families. For example, the Försters built themselves an elegant mansion in the San Pedro wilderness called ‘Försterhof‘, in stark contrast to the meagre and pitiful living conditions of the other settlers; the commune’s farmers in the fields were forced to stop work and submissively bow to Förster every time the overbearing leader rode past! [Romero, op.cit].
Other factors (including biological) undermined any prospect the colony of Nueva Germania ever had of flourishing. A community of only 14 families (as it was originally) would almost inevitably be vulnerable to the likelihood of some degree of inbreeding, especially given the racial homogeneity doctrine on which the commune was based [MacIntyre, op.cit.]. This only served to undermine harmony in the commune and exacerbated tensions among the settlers.
Commune leader Förster, in heavy debt, facing the spectre of bankruptcy and in despair at the utopian disaster, committed suicide in 1889. Nueva Germania struggled on without its main spearhead, now led by Elizabeth Nietzsche who made an attempt to recruit more members from the Fatherland – with little return for her efforts. However in 1893 Frau Förster-Nietzsche abandoned the Aryan Paraíso and it’s settlers, returning to Germany to take charge of her famous brother’s affairs and care for him (Nietzsche had fallen into a state of insanity probably as a result of contracting syphilis). In the years after the philosopher’s death in 1900 the warped Elizabeth proceeded to convert him into a kind of intellectual “pin-up boy” on behalf of the emerging Fascist and Nazi movements of Italy and Germany. Significant to note that Nietzsche, when still in full control of his faculties, had been on record as expressing his complete disapproval of anti-Semitism and of the Försters’ plans for establishing an Aryan colony. Elizabeth, who later became a wholehearted supporter of Hitler, criminally and comprehensively traduced her brother’s reputation by falsely resurrecting Nietzsche as a prophet of the German “master race” to come. [J. Golumb & RS Wistrich (Eds), Nietzsche, Godfather of Nazism? On the Uses & Abuses of a Philosophy.]
Cassava, stable crop of NG
Following Elizabeth’s departure from Paraguay, the San Pedro-based colony of German farmers did not disappear altogether but limped on, surviving by scrimping together a bit of income from the growth of yerba mate and other subsistence crops. Nueva Germania (NG) still exists today in San Pedro – as far as ever from being remotely anything like a utopian community. With the bursting of the racial purity myth, the small group of German settlers intermarried with the local Mestizo–Guaraní-Spanish people, and as a result are not conspicuous from the rest of the Paraguayan population. They tend to speak Guaraní, the widely-spoken native language, in preference to German, and are set apart from other Paraguayans only by the retention of German family names (Fischer, Küch, Haudenschild, Stern, and so on).
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Australian economic and labour woes in the 1890s: Seeking a socialist paradise new start
The colony of ‘New Australia’ had its origins in the economic conditions and labour relations in pre-Federation Australia, especially in eastern Australia. In the early 1890s the onset of a crippling financial depression and a series of shearers’ and dock strikes in Queensland suppressed heavy-handedly by British troops fostered widespread disillusionment among bush workers. An idealistic English socialist journalist, William Lane, a maverick of the Australian labour movement, formed the New Australia Cooperation Settlement Association (NACSA) with the aim of establishing a “workers’ paradise” in South America.
The Association looked initially in Argentina for land to settle, but when this proved fruitless, Lane turned to neighbouring Paraguay where they found a government much more amenable. Lane’s scheme to export Australian workers suited the Paraguayan Government which was desperate to replenish the loss of manpower in the 1860s suffered in a disastrous war against Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay. Paraguay, hopelessly outmatched, by war’s end, lost its territorial access to the sea and somewhere between 60 and 70 per cent of its male population during the war, leaving the country with an estimated total of only 28,000 adult males [Thomas Whigham, “The Paraguayan Rosetta Stone”, Latin American Research Review (1999)].
Consequently the Paraguayan Government freely granted NACSA an ample tract of grasslands near Villarica (in the modern-day Caaguazú Department),south-east of the capital, Asuncíon, to the new settlers. Lane brought over 200 colonists to Paraguay including the famous Australian socialist poet, Mary Gilmore, who was the colony’s schoolteacher. The settlement which became known as Colonía Nueva Australia met with formidable obstacles right from the outset.
Benign dictator of Nueva Australia?
A big part of the problem was the leadership itself. William Lane imposed strict rules on the community which alienated many who had followed him on the venture. Members of the colony were forbidden to drink, which given the combination of the oppressive heat and the plentiful supply of cheap caña (sugar cane rum) in Paraguay, was not a realistic proposition. Lane banned the male colonists from having sexual liaisons with the local Guaraní women, who given that they were 80 per cent of the population, was also an impractical notion. He also displayed a puritan streak by insisting that all members of the commune marry for life. In Lane’s own words, the colony was “a commonhold of English speaking whites, who accept among their principles, Life marriages, Teetotalism and the Colour Line.” [Cosme Monthly, Sept 1896].
‘Commandant’ Lane – a left-wing “Captain Bligh”
William Lane was by nature “autocratic, under pressure his simplistic communism and mateship developed a non-denominational but distinctly religious tinge” [Gavin Souter, ‘William Lane’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 9, (MUP), 1983]. Lane’s leadership style, like Föster’s, clearly inclined towards millenarianism and the messianic [John Kellett, “William Lane and ‘New Australia’, Labour History, 72 (May 1997)]
Racism was always a key feature of Lane’s credo of utopian socialism and his overall philosophy. Back in Australia, this had already shown itself in his race novel, White or Yellow? and in his strident opposition to the introduction of Polynesian labour in Australia. Lane’s vision of utopian socialism put great store on the exalted nature of ‘mateship‘, but as the South Australian Register reported on 1 January 1895, many of the settlers thought the leader impractical, “there was too much talk about mateship and not enough of crops and cattle” [Kellett, ibid.].
El Chaco Austral
Added to this, the conditions under which the Nueva Australinos found themselves were very harsh, the climate was inhospitable, the land was not as arable as had been hoped (less like outback Queensland than initially thought); mosquito and parasite infestation plagued them, tigrés or jaguarés prowled around the camps at night [Ben Stubbs, “The New Australians of South America”, www.australiangeographic.com.au]
Nueva Australia was established on the basis of a socialist cooperative enterprise, the colonists were compelled to commit all of their personal savings to a communal fund. Once underway, all cash in the colony was held collectively. Inevitably, this lead to bickering which was ongoing. Some members were accused of withholding money from the collective ‘kitty'[The West Australian, 29 December 1893, The Brisbane Courier, 9 July 1894]. Harmony within the colony by now was already strained.
Things only deteriorated, an anti-Lane faction developed and Lane expelled some of these dissenters from the commune. At the same time Lane was accused of favouring a friend of his who had transgressed the colony rules [JB Henderson, William Lane, the prophet of Socialism”, Journal of the Royal Historical Society of Queensland, 8(3) 1968]. Inevitably there was a backlash against Lane’s ‘Law’ by the majority of the settlers. Ideological disputes and personality clashes intensified to the point where Lane was forced to break away from the original settlement and start a new community (he called Colonía Cosme) which adhered to his over-the-top brand of puritanism. The rebels under trade unionist Gilbert Casey maintained the original settlement, Nueva Australia, but disbanded the communistic methods in favour of a more individual approach to financial arrangements.
Banknote from ‘Colonía Neuva Australia‘
Both colonies continued to struggle for viability. The Australian newspapers of the day regularly reported entreaties to the authorities from individual families for assisted passage back to Australia owing to their destitution [Brisbane Courier, 12 February 1896, Barrier Miner (Broken Hill, NSW), 20 January 1897]. Lane tried to recruit new members to Cosme from England but was only at best marginally successfully. By 1899 Lane himself had abandoned his own utopian project and returned to Australasia, eventually to do a political volte-face, becoming a conservative journalist in New Zealand.
By the end of the 1890s it was transparent to all that both utopian experiments were abject failures and the Paraguayan Government stepped in and ended the communal nature of the colonies, offering the remaining members (such as there were) individual plots of land to work. In this transformed fashion the settlements stumbled on, sans communism. Today the remnants of Lane’s idealist vision remain in two townships, one called Nueva Australia and the other (somewhat curiously), Nueva Londres.
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“Eugenically-pure”(sic) New Australia
One of the most pervasive and influential ideas in Western thinking in the late 19th Century was the notion of eugenics. This pseudo-scientific belief underpinned the theoretical framework of both Paraguayan utopian societies. The practice of strict racial separation, whether that be white/native American or German/Jew, was an essential tenet of Nuevo Germania and New Australia, based on the supposed inherent superiority of people of English/German stock. The widespread acceptance of Social Darwinism at that time fed into that self-perception of superiority. Lane envisaged a new type of Australian man of pure English (Anglo-Saxon) stock forged out of the South American jungle, an antidote to racial decay of the white man…the theoretical underpinnings of Lane’s ‘New Australia’ brought him uncomfortably close to Förster’s vision for Nueva Germania – an Australian colony in the wilderness providing the breeding ground for a new, higher and purer ‘race’ (sic) of Saxon stock [MacIntyre, op.cit; Williams, Krause & Knowles, op.cit.].
As indicated above, there were a number of distinct similarities between the leaders of the German and the Australian aspirational utopian colonies in their beliefs and prejudices. Both were religious fanatics imbued with peculiar forms of Agrarian Christian Socialism. Both were wowsers and racists harbouring a deep fear of miscegenation [Williams, Krause & Knowles, op.cit.].
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Remnants of Nueva Australia
PostScript: Inflexible, impractical, headstrong leadership and a failure to adapt to Paraguayan conditions
The Australian and German colonies in Paraguay in practice were neither utopian or viable. They failed, partly because, on both counts, there was a sense of unreality about the entire project. Poor leadership retarded the communes’ development. Lane and Förster’s fantastically dreamy visions were not rooted in anything concrete. “Authoritarianism for authoritarianism’s sake” succeeded only in alienating the settlement members. Both leaders were unrealistic in expecting them to blithely accept unreasonable demands that they abstain from drink, from meat, from physical contact with the local women, forgo money, and so on. In addition to all of this, the harshness of conditions in the jungle and wilderness of Paraguay tested the new settlers and repeated crop failures prevented them from making a decent economic livelihood from the land, condemning those that remained to a life of subsistence agriculture.
Most Australians have at some time or other glimpsed the grainy old Cinesound newsreel footage or the still pictures of the dramatic events of the opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge in March 1932. What should have been a moment of glory for the NSW Premier, Jack Lang, declaring open Bradfield’s engineering wonder of a bridge, was turned into a minor public relations coup for a shadowy fringe paramilitary group called the New Guard through an audacious act by one of its members.
De Groot’s ‘coup’
Just as the Bridge ribbon was about to be cut by the NSW Premier, Captain Francis De Groot who had attached himself undetected to the escort cavalry, rode forward and pre-emptively slashed the ribbon. In doing so he declared the bridge open “in the name of all decent and respectable people of New South Wales”. De Groot, the Irish-born antique dealer, furniture restorer and part-time soldier, with one outrageous swipe of his sword, secured his “15 minutes of fame”, embarrassed the Lang Labor Government and thrust the New Guard deeply into the consciousness of Sydneysiders at large!
Primrose’s ceremony at the Northern Pylon
Now all this is well known, but what is largely not known is what was happening at the northern end of the Bridge whilst attention was focused on the high drama at Dawes Point. Soon after De Groot “opened the bridge” in unorthodox fashion at the southern pylon end, another member of the New Guard cut the ribbon at the northern pylon. Hubert Leslie Primrose, Mayor of North Sydney, was an assistant adjunct and quartermaster-general in the New Guard. Primrose as mayor had organised his own bridge-opening ceremony from the North Sydney side. Although NSW Police (and Premier Lang) had decided reservations about Alderman Primrose’s Northside celebration of the Bridge, because of his involvement in a suspect para-military movement that was under investigation (the New Guard), they ultimately made no attempts to stop the municipal representative going ahead with his act of public ceremony.
So, remarkable as it may seem to us today, the opening of both ends of that most iconic of Sydney symbols, the Sydney Harbour Bridge, was accomplished by the New Guard. These deeds (one undertaken officially and the other without state sanction) were achieved by a small, para-military organisation that at best was only ever a marginal player in provincial Australian politics.
Harbour Bridge from Kirribilli (looking south)
Primrose’s fascination with the New Guard, like many of its initial supporters, was short-lived. In June 1932 he was one of many New Guardsmen elected to the Legislative Assembly for the new conservative force in party politics, the United Australia Party (forerunner to the Liberal Party of Australia), later rising to the rank of UAP Minister for Health, and later Minister for National Emergency Services. Primrose Park in the northern Sydney suburbs of Cremorne and Cammeray is named in his honour, but clearly not for his activities on behalf of the New Guard!
Footnote: Apart from his right wing, para-military enthusiasms, Captain De Groot, the stealer of Premier Lang’s thunder on thatillustrious day, had a respectable day job as the proprietor of a successful antique furniture business in Sydney’s eastern suburbs. The plaque below stands on the site of the former shop in Rushcutters Bay.
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Refs: Australian Dictionary of Biography (Vol 11) 1988, HL Primrose, ADB, (Supp. Vol) 2005, FE De Groot, both articles by Andrew Moore
I have long thought that one of the more intriguing back stories of 20th century Australian history is the rise and (rapid) fall of the New Guard movement. The New Guard which flourished in the early 1930s was Australia’s own home-grown, ‘wannabe’ fascist organisation, one of a number of disgruntled, peripheral Australian Alt-Right groups in the Depression years.
The New Guard was a fairly obscure fringe organisation in early 1931, formed by ex-World War I army officers who broke away from an existing organisation (the Old Guard) deemed by them to be too cautious in its anti-socialist methods❈. The singular incident associated with the New Guard that resonates most clearly in the public consciousness today is the intervention by Francis De Groot (divisional commander in the New Guard) in the opening ceremony of the Sydney Harbour Bridge in March 1932. The fanatical, sword-wielding De Groot, on horseback, upstaged the State Labor government by dramatically cutting the ribbon at the southern pylon of the bridge before NSW Premier JT Lang could do so officially.
At its height the New Guard had somewhere between 50,000 and 80,000 members in New South Wales❅ (men only, women were not permitted to join the New Guard). Included in these numbers were prominent Australians such as the famous aviators, Charles Kingsford Smith and Charles Ulm, Sir Thomas Henley (Nationalist Party MP), Hubert Primrose (Mayor of North Sydney, later NSW UAP Minister for Health), and leading business figures in industry and agriculture such as the Patricks (Patricks Stevedore and Shipping Lines) and the MacArthur Onslows (sheep barons). Interestingly, it has been alleged (though not substantiated) that Lyall Howard, the garage owner-father of former PM John Howard, was very likely to have been a New Guard member (Andrew Moore, ‘The New Guard & the Labour Movement 1931-35’, Labour History, No 89).
JT Lang in typical demagogic mood
.The background to the New Guard’s emergence was the societal dislocation caused by the Great Depression and the sudden and calamitous level of unemployment of the early 1930s. This gave the New Guardsmen the impetus to thrive as it did to right-wing authoritarian political forces in Europe during the same period. In October 1930 a left-leaning Labor Government was elected in NSW under the demagogic nationalist Jack Lang. Lang’s scheme to tackle the state’s catastrophic economic crisis comprised repudiating Australia’s international loan obligations and refusing to make any further interest payments to British bondholders (and re-channelling those retained monies into job creation for the state). This polemical stand not only enraged Big Capital interests but also made fringe groups on the right, especially the New Guard, flare up in hostile opposition to Labor.
Lt.Col Campbell
The leader of the New Guard (NG) was a Sydney North Shore solicitor, company director and WWI army officer of patrician stock, Eric Campbell. The attraction of men who followed Campbell into NG was that it appeared to offer a fresh, alternative solution to the problems of society to those espoused by the democratic parliamentary parties of the day⊚. NG viewed communism and socialism as having a corrosive and degenerative effect on Australian society. Campbell characterised the incumbent Lang government as avowedly socialist, and thus tried to relegate the Labor Party to the status of being abject co-conspirators with the communists working against the liberties of loyal Australians.
Lt-Colonel Campbell asserted that New Guard was “staunchly patriotic”, but by this he meant patriotic to the British Empire, so intricately linked in his mind was Australia with the ‘mother country’, Britain. In effect the New Guardsmen were undisguisedly über-British loyalists. So, when Lang signalled his intent to default on loans to British banks, this infuriated Campbell and loyalists to the British Crown generally. Campbell and his executive redoubled the movement’s efforts to bring Labor down. NG believed in minimalist government and individualism, in “sane finance” as Campbell put it, in freeing up private enterprise to get on with business…Lang’s plans to expand the public sector to alleviate the unemployment crisis, put ‘Langism’ very squarely in the ideological cross-hairs of NG.
Campbell & his NG acolytes giving a familiar salute at a Sydney rally
By late 1931, disillusioned with parliamentary party politics, the New Guard adopted more aggressive tactics in the fight against the left. New Guardsmen also started to display some of the trappings of fascist parties (military uniforms and armbands, the Nazi salute, ID badges) and began to break up meetings of communists and the unemployed. NG’s unleashing of its paramilitary arm provoked the left into forming communist and Laborite militias which eventually led to pitched street battles with the NG forces.
The most significant, physical confrontation between these groups, occurring in early 1932, became known as the “Battle of Bankstown”. The New Guard in its coercive actions in Bankstown and elsewhere in Sydney did succeed in its aim to disrupt meetings of the labour movement, but these mobilisations ultimately proved counterproductive to the NG leaders’ attempts to consolidate the new movement. The Bankstown mêlée had two adverse effects for NG. First, the leadership’s decision to up the ante in NG’s strong-arm tactics against their ideological opponents alienated a lot of the movement’s rank-and-file and many disaffected members resigned in the aftermath of Bankstown. At an NG meeting soon after some members moved motions of no confidence in the leadership of Führer (the leader) Eric Campbell, ibid.
Secondly, the level of New Guard violence exhibited at Bankstown, and to a lesser extent at other NG mobilisations like Newtown, Drummoyne and Canterbury, following upon De Groot’s bridge antics, convinced NSW Police of the need to take the threat to law and order posed by Campbell’s organisation seriously. The promotion by Premier Lang of an uncompromising, aggressive Glaswegian, Big Bill MacKay, to Acting Metropolitan Superintendent, was the catalyst for a much tougher police line taken against the right-wing paramilitary groups. MacKay intimidated Campbell and De Groot and other NG leaders and exhorted the State police to respond with unrestrained force every time the New Guard initiated a public fracas.
Given free rein by A/Supt MacKay, the white-helmeted state police launched a savage assault on the trouble-making New Guardsmen, especially in an incident that became known as the “Liverpool Street Police Riot”. Campbell’s enthusiastic but volunteer guardsmen proved no match for a well-trained, disciplined and highly motivated police force. The largely middle class NG members who clashed with the police found the experience distinctly not to their liking. Under instructions from MacKay, the police went at the New Guardsmen full-tilt and absolutely brutalised Campbell’s militia. MacKay’s tactics of intimidation and savage counter-violence against NG paramilitaries kept the agitators in check and dissuaded many from continuing their active involvement in the right wing organisation (Moore, ibid).
Berrima Gaol, NSW
NSW Police in early 1932 undertook investigations aimed at unearthing a possible plot by Campbell to use his so-called Secret Army to launch a coup d’être against Lang’s Labor Government. It was widely rumoured in the press that the New Guard planned to overthrow the Government, kidnap and imprison Lang and his senior cabinet ministers in the disused Berrima Gaol in country NSW, (‘The revolution that wasn’t’ (www.matthewleecunningham.com). Whether Campbell was planning such a strike on democracy or not (he publicly denied it however Major Treloar, disaffected NG deputy commander, informed police that this was indeed Campbell’s true intention)(Robert Darlington, Eric Campbell & the New Guard). The question became academic in May 1932 when the Governor, Sir Philip Game, sacked the Lang Government for withholding revenues deemed owing to the Commonwealth as part of the debt to British financiers. The incoming State UAP Government quickly shelved the CID’s investigation into the alleged New Guard plot.
⇑ Gov. Game, co-conspirator in a class conflict?
In what sense could the New Guard movement be said to be fascist in nature?Historians have long debated whether the New Guard organisation was a fascist one or even a quasi-fascist one – as they have done with regard to Franco’s Falange Party in Spain and other authoritarian-right movements. If we stack the New Guard up against the classic Italian and Germany models of inter-war fascism, it is of course a ludicrous comparison. The New Guard movement, in addition to lacking a totalitarian systemic structure, falls well short even of fulfilling the criteria for a semi-fascist organisation like the British Union of Fascists, whose leader, Sir Oswald Mosley, Campbell expressed great admiration for. Campbell visited Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany in 1933 and came away deeply impressed by the Nazi and Fascist systems of rule, and subsequently did integrate some aspects of Mussolini’s Italian Corporatism into the New Guard’s ideology. The most that can be said about Campbell’s organisation however was that it was heavily influenced by the success of the European fascist movements and was openly sympathetic to fascism (Matthew Cunningham, ‘Australian Fascism? A Revisionist Analysis of the New Guard’, Politics, Religion & Ideology , 13(3)).
Real fascists ⇓
Nor can it be said that the New Guard had any claims to be considered as a mass movement in NSW politics. NG remained fundamentally a middle class organisation, the core of its base were urban professionals and small businessmen, like Campbell himself (Cunningham, Ibid.). Unlike many other fascist/authoritarian parties in Europe, it lacked for significant working class participation (Moore, op.cit.). Moreover, geographically, the New Guard was very limited in scope. It was confined almost entirely to one state, NSW, and even more, was essentially a Sydney metropolitan phenomena with only around 3,000 members from rural areas outside of Sydney (Cunningham, ibid.).
The staunchly pro-monarchist and pro-capitalist (and distinctly non-radical) positions of the New Guard demonstrates that the organisation didn’t cross over into a fascist character…contrast the monarchist fervour of Campbell and NG with the positions of Hitler and Mussolini in their countries, Hitler had no interest in restoring the exiled Kaiser during his Reich, and Il Duce merely ignored the powerless Italian King. Rather, the retention of these allegiances shows that the NG movement retained an essentially conservative authoritarianism in appearance (Cunningham, ibid.).
1930s New Guard propaganda against Premier Lang
Why did the New Guard decline and dissolve so swiftly in the mid 1930s?As alluded to above, one reason for the disaffection and eventual alienation of much of the respectable, middle class membership from the New Guard was the resort to more extreme violent means by the leadership from around the end of 1931. Vigilante action by the Fascist Legion, a splinter grooup within NG, did nothing to assuage the doubters in the organisation. In May of that momentous year several of the Fascist Legion members, clad in black Ku Klux Klan style hooded capes, attacked and bashed Jock Garden, a prominent communist and trade union official in his Maroubra home (Garden was a close associate of Premier Lang). This violent act, what we would now call home invasion, brought disastrous publicity to the New Guard (Richard Evans, ‘A menace to this realm’: The New Guard & NSW Police, History Australia, 5(3). This coming on top of the general perception that NG leadership was seriously contemplating taking extra-legal action against the elected Lang Government, made many people distance themselves from the increasingly extremist actions of the New Guard. Interestingly, afterwards the Deputy Leader of the opposition Nationalists came out in parliament denying any involvement by NG in Garden’s bashing, alleging it was a Labor “put-up job” in which Garden himself was complicit! (Darlington, op.cit.).
The ‘Maroubra incident’ 1932 Garden’s bashing by NG thugs
One week after the Maroubra bashing of Jock Garden, the State Governor dismissed Lang and at the subsequent election Labor was soundly beaten by the UAP led by Bertram Stevens. The removal of Lang–Labor had been the New Guard’s overriding objective, so with Lang gone and the conservatives firmly in control, a large part of NG’s raison d’être was at an end. The sacking of Lang released the tension that had been building up between the various opposing forces in the political crisis of 1932.
The signs of a gradual recovery of the economy starting from late 1932 encouraged many who had joined the movement from a fear of socialism to drop their political allegiance to NG (Darlington, op.cit.). The New Guard’s strength dwindled after 1932 and by 1935 the NG support base had largely eroded. In that year Campbell tried to revive the movement’s fortunes by forming a new political group, the Centre Party, and contesting the state elections. Campbell’s last despairing grab at some semblance of power, a electoral bid for the seat of Lane Cove, went nowhere, and soon after, he faded into political obscurity.
PostScript: The New Guard – the Mini-series? A few years ago I suggested to SBS that the story of the New Guard and its ambitious if deeply flawed leader, Eric Campbell, would have the makings of a first-rate mini-series for television, and that they might like to explore the possibilities of this. They never got back to me!
I think this episode in Australian history has the same kind of dramatic ingredients and appeal as the successful Bodyline mini-series made for TV in the 1980s where the English cricket captain’s s breaching of the rules of the “Gentlemen’s game of cricket” forced many Australians (momentarily at least) to question their loyalty to Crown and Empire. Lang’s refusal to back down and the establishment’s uncompromising response was the makings of a high political stakes drama set against the turbulent background of the depression and a very real chance of a bitterly antagonistic explosion of class conflict; the violence of the New Guardsmen and the counter-violence from organised labour, and the unleashed mayhem and retribution of the NSW Police; there are the colourful and complex personalities in the story, larger than life figures such as Jack Lang and Bill MacKay, the paradoxical and enigmatic Campbell. There was also Sir Philip Game – the political executioner of the rebellious Lang, was he acting to safeguard the interests of international capitalism or was he just the dutiful King’s representative, an honest broker bring to heel a dangerously out of line state premier?
Was there a conspiracy or not? – a coup, behind-the-scenes, shadowy figures intent on usurping by whatever means the premier, an arrogant demagogue but nonetheless a democratically elected head of a provincial government (a forewarning of 1975?). How far did NG infiltrate the Sydney establishment and the conservative Nationalist Party? Then there was the question of the bashing of the communist union official Jock Garden, who was really behind it? Many questions to explore.
The New Guard had something of a chameleon–like character, many in society and in the press didn’t take it very seriously with its pompous and overblown leader and his supporters who at times resembled a ‘Dad’s Army’ trying to imitate the real thing in Germany and Italy (the NSW Labor press regularly referred to them as the ‘Boo Guard’). Some however were concerned, especially on the left, including European émigrés with an insight into the threats to liberty a nascent fascism might pose – these sectors viewed the New Guard’s brief moment in the sun very gravely. Others in the community of a more traditional, conservative bent, well-connected politically and socially and often from the North Shore and the Eastern Suburbs, took a different and more sanguine view of the New Guard and endorsed the fringe group’s need and right to inject some new energy into the stalled world of parliamentary politics.
Drama, tension, intrigue, civil unrest, all set against an international context of fascism and communism on the rise. Unfortunately, SBS did not express any interest in this proposition, but I still maintain that the subject conveyed through a mini-series remains a most worthy project – done well! An expert academic history consultant for the period (such as Andrew Moore or Robert Darlington) working with a good screenwriter and some money, could produce a very good product, both as entertainment and as historical reconstruction of a not terribly well known chapter of our history. Perhaps the ABC … budgetary constraints in the reality of a national Liberal coalition government permitting?
𖠔𖤑𖠔𖤑𖠔𖤑𖠔𖤑𖠔𖤑𖠔𖤑𖠔𖤑𖠔𖤑𖠔𖤑𖠔𖤑𖠔𖤑𖠔𖤑𖠔𖤑𖠔𖤑
❈ the New Guard in rhetoric also distanced itself from the establishment conservative parties as well, the National (or Nationalist) Party and the Country Party (despite there being a good amount of conspicuous cross-membership!), seeing them as failing to take action against the communists and trade unions, and seeing itself as a legitimate, alternative right-wing movement
❅ an active membership of around 36,000 was claimed by the NG leadership
⊚ Campbell himself had impeccable establishment credentials…a professional man, a Freemason, a company director, the Turramurra resident was a member of all the right clubs (Imperial Services, the Union, the NSW, Rotary, Royal Sydney Golf and Killara Golf), [Keith Amos, ‘Campbell, Eric (1893–1970)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/campbell-eric-5487/text9331, published first in hardcopy 1979, accessed online 31 May 2014].
While spending a long weekend on the glorious Mornington Peninsula last year at a boozy wine festival (is there any other kind?!?), I stumbled upon a most unexpected discovery, a tiny curio slice of history that has never travelled far beyond the annals of the Mornington Historical Society. Thumbing through the pages of a peninsula tourist publication, I came across an article reproduced from a local newspaper which focused on the little-known role of Fort Nepean on the southern part of the peninsula near Portsea during both world wars.
The article detailed the claim for the fort to be viewed as the site where the first shots in anger in bothWorld War I and World War II were fired! This most improbable, double occurrence took place in the same stretch of water in Port Phillip Bay, a location as far removed from the major theatres of global war as could be imagined.
SS Pfalz 1914
The fortifications at Port Phillip Bay were strategically located to guard the narrow heads at the entrance to the harbour of Melbourne. Almost 100 years ago, on 5th August 1914, the outbreak of the Great War was imminent, Germany had declared war on Russia, and a reaction from Britain (as Russia’s ally) was anticipated. The command at Fort Nepean was receiving intelligence on the movements in Melbourne of a German ship, SS Pfalz, which was loading coal on board in Victoria Dock. The captain of the Pfalz was anxious to get his ship out of the harbour before hostilities were declared, and got underway before loading was completed.
Melbourne Herald headline
As the German coal steamer approached the heads, Britain declared war on Germany, automatically dragging Australia into the war. The commander at Fort Nepean was ordered to “stop or sink” what was now identified as an enemy vessel. Signal warnings to stop were flown from the fort but were ignored by the Pfalz, resulting in a single shot from a 6-inch MK VII gun being fired across the bow of the ship. The pilot on board the Pfalz apparently persuaded the captain to turn the steamer round and surrender, thus avoiding any fatalities. The crew were arrested at Portsea and interned for the duration of the war. The Pflaz was found to have 4-inch guns mounted on it, so had it made it’s escape to the open sea, it could well have posed a significant threat to Australian war-time shipping. Instead, it was renamed and used as a Allied troop carrier during the war [http://historic-landmarks.com/fort-nepean-protecting-the-entrance-to-port-phillip/].
25 year later, Fort Nepean, remarkably, was the scene of a parallel incident at the onset of the Second World War. When Britain declared war on Germany by Britain on 3rd September 1939, Australian PM Menzies followed suit immediately, and Fort Nepean was ordered to monitor all maritime traffic entering the heads. The next day the fort command at Point Nepean challenged an incoming vessel to identify itself. The freighter, a Bass Strait trader called the SS Woniora did not comply with the gun battery’s orders, and a single warning shot from another 6-inch gun was fired across the bow of the Woniora. The shaken crew of the freighter quickly identified itself and was allowed to proceed on its course to Melbourne. Like 1914, this was the first Australian shot fired in anger in the world war, in this case though, this was the first shot fired in confusion as well![‘Fort Nepean’, http://weekendnotes.com/]
Today, the long disbanded fort is now part of Point Nepean National Park, a nature conservancy where visitors can explore the remaining gun emplacements including the two gun barrels (A1 and B1) which fired the first shots of war (originally sold for scrap after WWII but later restored)
PostScript:Definitive bragging rights?The shots from A1 and B1 on those two occasions were the only ones ever seriously launched from Fort Nepean in its history! Were these the first shots fired in anger by anyone in the two world wars? Probably this can’t be said in any absolute definitive sense, there is too much that can’t be certain about the exact start of hostilities in both conflicts. ‘Firsts’ are not always a straight forward phenomenon to try to pin down in historical fact. The established wisdom had accepted without serious disputation for 100 years that the Wright Brothers were the first persons to successfully make a manned, heavier-than-air flight, and then along came the counter-claims for Gustave Whitehead and Santos-Dumont et al, and the comfortable ‘certainty’ of this ‘first’ was suddenly up for serious reconsideration and hotly-contested debate. With much more confidence, we can say that the actions of the Fort Nepean gun battery on those two occasions represent the first Australian shots in anger in the two world wars, and almost certainly the first also by the Allied forces.
Image: Victorian-era.org
Foster Powell (Poster published by C. Johnson n.d.)
Often leading pedestrians would go head-to-head in wagered races (Image: US Lib. of Congress)
Pedestrianism was exceedingly popular in post-bellum USA, drawing great crowds of paying spectators (Image: Alamy/BBC)
Source: 7 News
Olympic final (men), 3500m Walk, 1908
Johnny Day with Nimblefoot 1870 Melb Cup (Image: Herbert James Woodhouse)
Prohibition, an international movement (Source: PBS)
Denmark and Iceland
Skál! (Photo: Scandification)
Icelandic White Ale 5.2% ABV (Photo: Muse on Booze)
Traditional sour Gose beer, Icelandic style (Photo: issuu.com)
Iceland: Whale testicle beer (Source: au.whales.org)
Dix’s 1920 ‘The Skat Players’
Nix’s paintings behind the glass of Liverpool Street Mark Foy’s entrance have a unmistakable gritty realism to them and are of a different ilk, style-wise, to the unglamourised, intended-to-shock, expressionistic and surrealistic paintings of Otto Dix, depicting the grotesque, the deformed and the anguished denizens of interwar Germany. The collection of Nix’s work at Mark Foy’s, also unglamourised, adhere to a single theme, the depiction of work life at the long-disappeared Cockatoo Island shipbuilding industry. Nix’s group portraits of the workers, blue collar, office workers and other employees of Cockatoo Island between 1950 and 1980, contain an intimacy borne of personal experience…the artist worked on the island in the 1960s and 70s first as a errand boy, then apprenticed as a fitter-and-machinist and lastly as a draughtsman.
The artworks on display, all done in oil and charcoal on canvas, are a part of larger collection of Nix’s paintings and drawings entitled ‘The Boys from Cockatoo’, focusing on a range of work activities relating to the shipyard including catching the ferry to work, ship repairing and labouring, union meetings, blacksmith shop, the drawing office, the canteen, etc.
‘The Boys from Cockatoo’ series had its public debut in 2008 with a 20-painting exhibition at the Australian National Maritime Museum, which Nix later expanded on to add new works inspired by his memories of the variety of day-to-day routines undertaken by workers at Cockatoo Island.
Starley’s Rover (Source: sewalot.com)
1889 Ladies Rover Safety Bike (Image: bicyclehistory.net)
Fischer’s pedal-bike: Tretkurbelfahrrad
(Photo: www.schweinfurtfuehrer.de)
The Drais Laufmaschine, 1817
Sturmey-Archer, 3/4-speed gears (Image: www.sturmey-archerheritage.com)
Source: Pinterest
1971 Tour de France (Source: Profimedia)
Columbia Bicycles, Connecticut (Source: etsy.com)
‘Down by Law’.
Source: truelocal.com.au
Like most popular commercial trends the mobile ice cream van was an import to these shores. The archetype Mr Whippy emerged from the English Midlands city of Birmingham in 1958, starting with a modest six vans and copying the formula, look and business plan of America’s Mister Softee ice cream trucks (see below). By 1961 the homegrown Mr Whippy fleet on the road had extended to 150 vehicles. Mr Whippy came to Australia when company founder Dominic Facchino shipped six pink and white Commer Karrier vans out to Sydney in 1962. Two years later Mr Whippy vans landed on the shores of New Zealand. By this time Facchino had sold the business which was eventually acquired by industry giant Unilever. By the 1970s the Mr Whippy franchises down under were sold to private operators who varied the vans’ styling and colours (‘1962 Mr Whippy arrives in Australia’, Australian Food TimeLine, www.australianfoodtimeline.com.au). The NZ Mr Whippy operators switched vehicles (to Isuzu Elfs) as well as colour schemes (a common choice became orange and white with a yellow stripe)𝟙. 
The ubiquitous Mister Softee (Photo: Elena Kadvany)
Marchetti Bros ice cream van, 1980s Glasgow
Mr Whippy Clones (Photo: 9Nine.com.au)
Mr Softee’s bête noir Master Softee (Photo: Newtown Pentacle)
early Good Humor vending truck (Source: mahoninghistory.org)
Photo: Manchester Evening News
Chautauqua Lake (Image: cullencartography.com)
Source: the guardian.com
Source: the attic.space
Redpath Chautauqua, “circus like promo” (Source: Culture Under Canvas, Harry P Harrison)
Kansas Tent Chautauqua, 1906
Source: joplinglobe.com
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Photo: oldsite.chq.org
⥉ Lennon & Shotton (Source: forums.stevehoffman.tv)
⥉ The Quarrymen performing in 1957 (pre-Paul & George)
In 1958 Lennon, having abjectly failed his ‘O’ Level exams at Quarry Bank High, shuffled off to Liverpool Art School. Lennox’s art school period was a key phase in the formation of the scruffy “Teddy boy’s” relationships, meeting his first girlfriend Thelma Pickles, his first wife Cynthia (née Powell) and close friend and early Beatle Stu Sutcliffe whose gifted artistic merit influenced him greatly. John formed other friendships at the art school including with Jeff Mohammed who took on a older brother sort of role in helping John try to cope with the trauma of his mother Julia’s sudden death; and with Bill Harry who went on to create Mersey Beat , a local music publication which helped the band gain early traction in Liverpool music circles. Harry also published Lennon’s poems and drawings in the newspaper.
⥉ Allan Williams (Source: Meet the Beatles for Real)
The Cavern Club in Liverpool was synonymous with the early Beatles who debuted in its damp, dingy warehouse cellar as the Quarrymen in 1957⦑2⦒. Ringo Starr then in another skiffle band had already made his first appearance in the club a week earlier (Ringo went on to join Liverpool’s top ‘beat’ band prior to the Beatles’ ascendancy – “Rory Storm and the Hurricanes”). A key Cavern figure was its longtime emcee/DJ Bob Wooler, instrumental along with Bill Harry in helping arrange Brian Epstein‘s first visit to the Cavern to see John, Paul, George and Pete play.
⥉ Pete & Mona (Photo: John Smart/Associated Newspapers/Shutterstock)
⥉ Neil Aspinall filling in for George in the “Fab Four” lineup (Source: independent.ie)
⥉ Paul & Bodyguard Mal return from safari in Kenya
⥉ Derek Taylor (Source: Pinterest.co.uk)
⥉ George Martin (Source: USA Today)
‘Coniston’ Ashfield, Bea’s first home (Source: hafs.org.au)
Bea with men of the press, circa 1946
Bea’s recital services board
Main Reading Room, NSW State Library (Flickr)
Bea in the driving seat? (Photo: Daily Telegraph)
“Bee in charcoal”, Roderick Shaw (Source: portrait.gov.au)
(Sydney Morning Herald)
▙ Publicity shot: Dixie was popular with the ladies, married 6 times (all his wives met him via the phone at his pole-sitting events) (Source: Dayton Daily News)
▙ Luke the Stylite
▙ Georgian hermit headquarters (Source: Vintage News)
(Photo: Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley)
(Image: Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley)
The ‘Howl’ episode
In 1956 Ferlinghetti published and distributed a poem by an unknown Beat poet Allen Ginsberg. Police in an undercover sting operation confiscated Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’🄱 collection and arrested Ferlinghetti who was charged with selling “obscene material and corrupting America’s youth”. The subsequent trial became a cause celeb in the industry. The judge found that the publication had “redeeming social significance” and therefore was not obscene🄲. The trial publicity was great for Ginsberg’s poetry and for City Lights. ‘Howl’ became an underground best-seller and a symbol of both the counterculture and the Beat Generation🄳 (Morgan).
Ferlinghetti & Ginsberg (Source: SFist)Whitman & Ferlinghetti (seated) in 2002 (Photo: Mary Duncan/Paris Writers Press)
Banned, but not eliminated
Other cities were quick to follow NYC’s example, Including Chicago, Milwaukee, Los Angeles and New Orleans, with pinball bans extending across the country. Other cities like Washington DC didn’t go as far but prohibited children from playing it during school hours. The inevitable consequence of banning was to drive pinball activity underground (resurfacing in places like the back rooms of ‘porno’ book shops). Thus marginalised, pinball become “part of rebel culture”⧆ (Klein).
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If the Shànghâi of the 1920s and ‘30s that we visited in the preceding blog deserves it’s glowing epithet, “the Paris of the South”, then it’s other sobriquet, “the whore of Asia”, to describe the seedy and violent underbelly of the same city, is every bit as applicable. The “freebooting capitalism” of Shànghâi in the interwar years[𝕔] and it’s rewards, spawned a wave of criminal activity with underworld bosses vying for a bigger piece of the city’s stupendous economic pie. Like the legitimate commercial powerhouses on the Bund, the gangland “Mr Big’s” were very much part of Shànghâi’s “movers and shakers”.
Du and the Green Gang
“Big-eared” Du was a complex and fascinating figure in the Shànghâi underworld scene. As zongshi (grandmaster) of the local crime operation, he was ruthless in business and intimidating in method (he would despatch coffins to the houses of gangland rivals who had earned its displeasure as a grim warning). Yet he forbid members of his Qing Bang gang to violate women, the wealthy Du was generous and wrote off many debts owed him by friends. Du’s business scope was panoramic … opium dens, gambling shacks, prostitution rings strung out across the city, kidnapping, protection rackets, labour contracting, heroin and morphine labs, as well as more ‘legit’ activities. He also founded a boys’ school in the French Connection and was president of the Chinese Red Cross during the Sino-Japanese War. And, in a perverse twist, Du, having made a ‘motza’ from his cur of the proceeds of the opium monopoly, was ultimately made president of the “National Board of Opium Suppression Bureau”! [Derks, Hans. History of the Opium Problem: The Assault on the East, Ca. 1600-1950. Vol. 105, Brill, 2012. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.1163/j.ctv4cbhdf. Accessed 21 Feb. 2020].
After several timber bridges came and went, they eventually put up a more substantial (supposedly ‘permanent’) stone bridge in its place (near the corner of Bridge and Pitt Streets), which also had to be replaced owing to it being considerably less substantial than first thought and not permanent at all◵. Bridge Street at that time was called Governors Row as it housed the colony’s first seat of government and the governor’s residence (on the corner of Phillip Street). A commemorative stone on the site (now housing the Museum of Sydney) marks the historic location.
Treasury and Audit Office building (1849-51)
Chief Secretary‘s Office⍟ (1869)
Department of Education (1914) and Lands Department (1877-90) buildings
Commercial buildings dominate the lower end of Bridge St. The Royal Exchange Building (1967) at № 21 Bridge St stands on the original site of the Royal Exchange building (1857) – the first home of the Sydney Stock Exchange. Numerically next to the REB (at № 17-19) is the Singapore Airlines House (1925), an elegant example of the Commercial Palazzo style of architecture.
Perhaps the standout architectural piece of the lower commercial sector is the old Burns Philip and Co head office building (1898-1901) close to George Street, with its elaborate sandstone and brick Neo-Romanesque facade. Architect: Arthur Anderson. Burns Philip were big players in the Australian shipping and trading business. Originally, a convict lumber yard sat on this site.
The pick of the rest of the commercial buildings for compact elegance are probably the brace of adjoining buildings, № 4 Cliveden and № 6, (across the road from BP&Co). The street’s first commercial high-rise building, constructed 1913 in the Federation Free Classical style. Next door to the left of Cliveden is Anchor House (1960), for many years the HQs of the NSW Liberal Party. The site in the early Colonial period contained a female orphan’s asylum which later relocated to a site in Parramatta (now part of a Western Sydney University campus).Macquarie Place as it was in the early colonial period, unrecognisable today (Source: http://dictionaryofsydney.org/)
RAF ‘wanted’ poster (source: www.vukutu.com)
Highly influential literary critic of the first half of the 20th century, HL Mencken, heaped lavish almost doting praise on The Devil’s Dictionary… “the true masterpiece of the one genuine wit that These States have ever seen“…”some of the most gorgeous witticisms in the English language“…”some of the most devastating epigrams ever written“.
⇑ First (1911) edition of the Dictionary
Cynicism and satire provide the backbones of Bierce’s provocative dictionary. So, an interesting place to start looking is how he handles these terms – the words ‘satire’, ‘cynic’ and ‘dictionary’ themselves. Despite being fully versed in the craft himself, Bierce views the practitioner of cynicism less than favourably.
Romance and true love falls by the wayside with Bierce’s cynic always hovering around ground level:
The Dictionary dishes up a smorgasbord of satirical, ironic and often bitter definitions of the world as seen by Ambrose Bierce (one of the acerbic writer’s nicknames was “Bitter Bierce”). But Bierce is of course a creature of his time with all the glaring faults and prejudices of the 19th century white man’s mindset. So, through the satire and cynicism we witness the less savoury traits and predisposition of the lexicographer. Casual assumptions of racism and misogyny run through the pages of The Devil’s Dictionary. 
Appian way, or if you prefer, the Appian Way, is a reminder of the more exalted social status that Burwood perhaps once commanded. In the midst of the “Strata-titleland” that is modern day Burwood is the Appian Way, you’ll find it perched between Burwood Road (South) and the seminal Liverpool Road. Appian Way is just a short, little street which charts a serpentine course, looping not far from its eastern end. Within this loop lies the street’s main interest…at least as far as this correspondent is concerned.
Hoskins, exhibiting a tendency which nowadays we might describe as that of a “control freak”, leased rather than sold the estate’s houses, which allowed the industrialist and developer to monopolise all aspects of the community (only one solitary house in the tree-lined street had been sold by the time of Hoskins’ death in 1926) [ibid.].
The houses
The Dictionary of Sydney describes the Appian Way as a “heritage-listed precinct of Edwardian houses”. The architecture is of that period but the houses are best characterised as asymmetrical and very variable in style. Essentially, together the original estate comprises some of the finest examples of Australian Federation style with their multi-gabled roofs, wide use of slate and terracotta tiles, and drawing on a variety of domestic designs. The grounds of the properties are more than generously spacious – large blocks, expansive frontages, manicured lawns and landscape gardens. Appian Way includes a nature strip in the midst of these bushy and leafy residences which is neatly maintained and occupied by Brush Box trees [‘Appian Way’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].
‘Erica’ – perhaps the Way’s standout ▲
What tennis courts? ▲
▲ Bush plants and agaves surround the ‘courts’
(Photo: https://nypost.com)
⬆ Kirshner, King & Goffin
(Photo: Powerhouse Museum, Sydney) ⇧
(Photo: www.visityuleba.com.au) ⇧
⇧ Vic Museums (Photo credit: https://collections.museumvictoria.com.au/items/1256058)
⇧ Cobb & Co Charleville coachworks (Qld) (Photo: www.qhatlas.com.au/) 
(Source: www.queensland.com)
Freeman Cobb ⇑ (Photo: www.geni.com)
The Concord coaches were fitted with leather braces and straps in place of the inflexible iron ones used on other horse-drawn vehicles which had a tendency to snap too easily (leather also provided greatly superior suspension for the carriage). Concord coaches were made to last the rugged journey and so contributed to a reputation for reliability that the Cobb service was able to establish [‘Days of Cobb & Co’, loc.cit.].
Many of the drivers, some of which Cobb and (later) Rutherford recruited from the US, were colourful characters in addition to being accomplished horse handlers…blokes such as Dick Houston, Jim Conroy, ‘Silent’ Bob Bates, H Barnes, and not least “Cabbage Tree” Ned Devine. Devine, with his team of distinctive light grey horses, was by all accounts a particularly exceptional driver (earning himself a very good wage of £17 a week)…when the first English cricket team toured Australia (HH Stephenson’s, 1862), Devine was their driver on the Victorian leg of the tour [K. A. Austin, ‘Devine, Edward (Ned) (1833–1908)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/devine-edward-ned-3405/text5169, published first in hardcopy 1972, accessed online 31 May 2019]. 
(Photo source: State Library of Victoria)
Kings of the chocolate business{b}
The Quaker philosophy incorporates a commitment to social reform and the pursuit of justice and equality. This ethos informed their business practices, Cadbury’s and other Quaker firms established a reputation for being honest and reliable. This gave them a competitive advantage over their non-Quaker competitors. The perceived ethical nature of Quaker confectionery firms was rewarded with customer loyalty. John Cadbury and his successors were among the first to set a firm (and fair) price – this was a clear departure from the hitherto customary retail practice of point-of-sale price bartering [ibid.]{c}.
Democratising cocoa and drinking chocolate Cocoa and drinking chocolate had been around in England since the 1650s but before Cadbury’s came along it had been a luxury beverage for the elite. John Cadbury’s improvements to the product gave it more varieties and made it a more palatable drink, and after the Gladstone government reduced taxes on imported cocoa beans in the mid 1850s, the cost of cocoa became within the reach of the greater majority of Britons. Cadbury’s introduction of unadulterated “cocoa essence” in the 1870s coincided with a government crackdown on the widespread adulteration of food in the UK. The upshot was free ‘plugs’ for the purer Cadbury product and a boost in fortunes for the Quaker business [‘The Story of Cadbury. Early Days – A One Man Business’, www.cadbury.com.au].
(photo courtesy of www.historyworld.co.uk)
The Bourneville factory ⤊
(photo courtesy of www.historyworld.co.uk)
Rowntree’s later created the consumer favourites ‘Kit Kat’, ‘Aero’ and ‘Smarties’, and went on its own expansion journey, merging with the Halifax “Toffee King” Mackintosh in 1969 (which added ‘Quality Street’ and ‘Rolo’ to its product inventory). Rowntree’s (rebranded Rowntree Mackintosh Confectionery) then acquired Australian chocolate manufacturer Hoadley’s (1972) which gave RMC Hoadley’s ‘Violet Crumble’ bar.
Ft-Note: Pseudo-Quakers The runaway commercial success of Quaker food and confectionery companies did inevitably lead to imitation. A US food manufacturer in the 1870s introduced “Quaker Oats” to the cereal market…on the packets and in product advertising are images of a man dressed in Quaker garb, despite the US company having NO connexion whatsoever with the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers){i}. The company states that it chose the “Quaker Man” as its figurehead “because the Quaker faith projected the values of honesty, integrity, purity and strength”, [‘Quaker Oats website’, (FAQ 2009), www.quakeroats.com] (an early example of retail “identity theft’ to try to cash in commercially on the high regard, ethically, Quaker businessmen were held in).
PostScript: Third World cocoa beans and the Quaker chocolatiers – an uncomfortable association In the late 19th century the Cadbury brothers and other British chocolate-makers started exporting a large proportion of their cocoa beans from the islands of São Tomé and Príncipe (Portuguese West Africa)…by the turn of the century this amounted to 55% of Cadbury’s total supply of beans. Although Portugal had abolished slavery in its colonies, the rigid labour contract system which replaced left the African labourers working the plantations in a de facto slave status. This uncomfortable connexion of an ethical Quaker business to neo-slavery prompted one of the managing grandsons, William Cadbury, to commission an investigation of worker conditions in São Tomé and Príncipe in the 1900s. Cadbury eventually found an alternative source of cocoa beans (the Gold Coast) and organised a boycott of the two Portuguese plantations, but not before he had to fend off a spate of newspaper attacks on Cadbury’s alleging that it profited from the labour of slaves [‘William Cadbury, Chocolate, and Slavery in Portuguese West Africa’, (Lindsey Flewelling), 11-May-2016, https://britishandirishhistory.wordpress.com/2016/05/11/william-cadbury-chocolate-and-slavery-in-portuguese-west-africa/].
⍓⍓⍓⍓⍓⍓⍓⍓⍓⍓⍓⍓⍓⍓⍓⍓
The ‘Aggie’ of Aggie Grey’s was born Agnes Genevieve Swann✲, the offspring of an English pharmacist from Lincolnshire and his Samoan wife, a local taupou (a ceremonial maiden). Business seemed to be in Miss Swann’s DNA – in her early twenties she opened her first club in Apia, the Cosmopolitan Club, and in 1933 started a Samoan private tourism company, Grey Investments (later called the Grey Investments Group).
The Hotel in 2006 ⍐
Most motorists who regularly drive within a 10-15km radius of the city centre of Sydney have found themselves at some time at the intersection of Parramatta and Liverpool Roads – not uncommonly in heavily banked-up peak traffic. In the pioneering days of the New South Wales colony, the routes of the two major roads played a seminal role in the exploration and discovery of new areas to the west, south and north of Sydney.
If you turn from Parramatta Road into Liverpool Road, immediately on your right, between a fast food chicken outlet and the corner, you will see a small, narrow tree-lined park (about 85-90m x 35m). The most intriguing association of the park is its name – Explorers Park✪.
The park comprises as its centrepiece a long arched trellis covered with the thick, verdant vines of a climbing plant, forming a tunnel effect. On the paved floor, along the length of the trellis, are plaques which celebrate those early 19th century Australian explorers. Starting with Blaxland, Wentworth and Lawson, who with the inestimable help of local aboriginal trackers from various clans and tribes, made the breakthrough discovery of a viable route across the Great Dividing Range, there are plaques with brief summaries of the achievements of all those who followed – the likes of Oxley, Mitchell, Sturt, the tragic Kennedy, Hume and Hovell (one half of which gave his name to the iconic Hume Highway that has its genesis at the intersection).
Long before the advent of the Bicenntenary triggered the construction of Explorers Park, the location was a busy thoroughfare for mounted travellers, horse and carts and livestock, especially after Liverpool Road was opened in 1821. One hundred years later exactly, with the age of the automobile established as the dominant and future mode of transport, this exact block of land was purchased by a motor engineer Frank Dale. Two years later in 1923, he built a motor service station (Dales Garage) on the site. Over the following decades ownership of the garage regularly changed hands (Major Motors, Western Service Station, etc.). Eventually the land was acquired by the DMR (Department of Main Roads) and the garage demolished to allow for the widening of the high-traffic intersection [‘Sydney’s fork in the road’, Inner West Courier, 19-Feb-2019 (Ann O’Connell, Ashfield Historical Society)].
▲ An early drawing of the hotel by George W Roberts (c.1845) (State Library of NSW)
What drew me to Bungan this summer was not however the pristine waters of its uncrowded beach, but one particular unusual building standing out high up on Bungan Head…Bungan Castle, which this year celebrates 100 years since it was constructed.
∆photo (ca.1928): National Library of Australia
photo: NSW Archives & Records ∆
Artists’ Mecca? museum? both?
Dick, Kerr’s Ladies FC
With the new infusion of working women taking up football competitively, the stronghold of women’s football moved to Preston in the north-eastern county of Lancashire. Over the next several seasons up until the early years of the interwar period, one women’s club team stood tallest…Dick, Kerr’s Ladies was created out of the female workforce of Dick, Kerr & Co, Preston locomotive and tramcar manufacturers. The highly successful Dick, Kerr’s Ladies side was spearheaded by one of football’s most remarkable ever female players, the chain-smoking, openly gay Lily Parr who scored over 1,000 goals in a 31-year career✱.
Dick, Kerr’s Ladies were pioneers of international women’s matches with French women’s sides⍟ and the Preston team’s popularity soared through and beyond the war years. In 1920 a game between Dick, Kerr’s and St Helens’ Ladies at Goodison Park (Everton) drew a crowd of 53,000 – with the gates locked leaving thousands more outside! [‘WW1: why was women’s football banned in 1921?’, (Gemma Fay), BBC News, 12-Dec-2014, www,bbc.com].
Notwithstanding the enormous contribution of Lily Parr, Dick, Kerr’s Ladies was no “one woman band”…centre-forward Florrie Redford netted a phenomenal 170 goals for the Preston-based club in 1921 [Dick, Kerr Ladies FC 1917-1965′, www.dickkerrladies.com]. Another female football star of the day – who DIDN’T play for Dick, Kerr’s XI – was Northumberland’s Bella Reay who played in the north-east Munitions’ comp. Bella’s 130-plus goals in the 1917/1918 season propelled her unbeaten club Blyth Spartans Ladies FC to victory in the Munitionettes’ Cup (drawn from women workers in munitions factories and docks in the north-east who played amateur football to raise funds for charity) [Fay, ‘BBC’, loc.cit.].
Bella Reay, Blyth Spartans star striker ⬆️
The (FA) empire strikes back
Immediately following the Great War the women’s game was at a high point and on the ascent✥. But after demobilisation, able-bodied men who had fought in the global conflict, streamed back into the English workforce…this meant that the great bulk of the women who had filled their boots on the factory floor were now surplus to requirements and so were “quietly shunted back into domestic life” [ibid.]. Englishmen also returned to playing the number one sport with the Football League recommencing in 1919/1920. The FA authorities in England had tolerated rather than supported women’s football during the enforced absence of the men’s league.
So was the FA simply exhibiting a blatant, sexist chauvinism towards the women players? The short answer is yes…but could there be something else behind their draconian action as well? During the war the women’s leagues had built up a considerable following and were enticing impressive crowd numbers to the matches. The FA’s overwhelming remit has always been the health of the men’s game and it was concerned that the women’s demonstrable pulling power might have a detrimental affect on attendances to the Football League (men’s) games [ibid.]. Applying a handbrake to the burgeoning women’s game, indeed sidelining it altogether, was considered a great ‘leg-up’ boosting the FA’s objective of rebuilding men’s professional football after the WWI hiatus.
“Fem-soccer”: Women’s football goes “gangbusters!”
The ban stayed in force…beyond the formation of the Women’s FA in England in 1969. It was not until July 1971 that the FA, and then only under pressure from UEFA (Union of European Football Associations), finally lifted the ban. Held back no more by gender stereotypers, the women’s game has gone from strength to strength – in 1972 the first women’s FA Cup, in 1984 the first women’s European Championship, followed by the World Cup in 1991 (the 2011 World Cup Final was played in front of a packed 83,000-strong crowd).
In popular currency the notion of the hillbilly has an overwhelmingly pejorative connotation anywhere within the reach of American culture (ie, everywhere!), especially as a topic of discussion or comment outside the American South. The stereotype is deeply embedded in and has been perpetuated through the agency of American popular culture – in literature, there have been long-running hillbilly comic strips ridiculing country folk as basically “dumber than dumb”, especially seen in ‘Li’l Abner’ and ‘Snuffy Smith’ (at left). But the idea of hillbillies as backward, ornery and all the other negative connotations associated with them, has been nowhere more pervasive than on the celluloid screen, both big and small.
The perception given by popular cinema and television comedy is that hillbillies can be found in a loosely defined geographical region somewhere in the American South. If need arises in a storyline to pinpoint their location more precisely, screenwriters will tend to locate them in mountainous areas, and if named it will usually be in one of two southern physiographic regions, either the Ozarks (extending over parts of Arkansas, Mississippi, Oklahoma and Kansas) or the massive Appalachians (several systems of mountains but usually “Appalachian hillbillies” are depicted as coming from Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia, and (parts of) Ohio)✥.
The Ozarks (“Hillibilly haven”) ⬆️
The South is “a different country”: More audience fodder for Hollywood
In the television age Hollywood’s “go-to” take on hillbillies typically utilises the persona for pure comic intent, mercilessly exposing and ridiculing the (usually) working class hillbilly for his or her wilful ignorance, lack of education and sophistication, depicting him or her as “pre-modern and ignorant hillbillies” (in Anthony Harkins’ words) to create, “one of the more lasting and pervasive images in American popular iconography” [Harkins, op.cit.]. Given that areas like Appalachia with its coal-dependent economy are cyclically prone to recurrent “booms and busts”, poverty is a familiar reality for very many of those residing in such places, accordingly Hollywood has traditionally seen hillbillies as soft targets, comfortable in showing up their unworldliness and illiteracy for a laugh…the Beverly Hillbillies of that popular American TV comedy of the same name are “dirt-poor” until Jed makes a fortuitous discovery on their ‘worthless’ land which transforms the ‘Hicksville’ family into “oil-rich tycoons”.
‘Monstrous mountaineers’ and other ‘psychopaths’
The comedic hillbilly has proved a rich source of material for movies and television, but as a variant from time to time Hollywood has also presented a very different, menacing on-screen hillbilly persona – the classic cinematic example of this is perhaps the 1972 Deliverance movie. Deliverance portrays hillbillies as sadistic, lawless types bereft of any semblance of moral compass, ‘inbred’✪ nefarious individuals who commit acts which are both morally and sexually depraved⍍. In hillbilly movies of this type, in place of the benign and fun-loving “Good Ol’ Boys”, are more brooding and sinister Southerners, sometimes isolated loners, psychotic serial-killers and even corrupt sheriffs. Meredith McCarroll, in a study focusing on the Appalachians [Unwhite: Appalachia, Race and Film, (2018)], has identified several distinct tropes of hillbilly movies. McCarroll’s typology includes Monstrous Mountaineer [Deliverance, Wrong Turn (2003), Timber Halls (2007)]; Heroic Highlander [Next of Kin (1982)], Killing Season (2013); Lazy Hillbilly [Our Hospitality (1923), Kentucky Moonshine (1938)]✜.
Escaping to an imagined and idealised South
Hollywood’s hillbilly stereotypes extend to a romanticisation of the hillbilly, often their lives are romanticised as simple and uncomplicated (much as native and Black Americans and Mexicans are!). The hillbilly is shown as backward and quaintly pre-industrial, embodied in the famous river bank scene in Deliverance of hillbillies lazing about with nothing better to do than mindlessly pluck banjos [McCarroll, op.cit.]. Allied to this perception, Hollywood’s hillbilly tropes are a component of “using the South as a foil for modern life”…for Americans living in the Sixties and Seventies it was a confrontational time, full of harsh realities and worrying big issues such as the conflict over the Vietnam War, race riots, poverty and the Cold War. Feeding the viewing public a diet of idyllic and irenic images of Southern harmony, a distorted sense of life not being too serious, provided a palatable form of escapism for Americans in the big cities. So we got shows like The Andy Griffith Show, Petticoat Junction, Green Acres and The Dukes of Hazzard, presenting fictional Southern ‘Hicksville’ towns with names like ‘Mayberry’ and ‘Hooterville’, peopled by harmless hayseed sheriffs and shopkeepers [‘The Weird History of Hillbilly TV’, (Gabe Bullard), www.bittersoutherner.com].
‘Hicksploitation’ reality obsession
In the age of reality TV saturating our screens, the subject matter of hillbillies has far from abated. The trope has perpetuated itself within this sub-genre of television with a string of titles pitched fairly and squarely at the LCD in society…Swamp People, Moonshiners, Bayou Billionaires, Hillbilly Handfishin’, American Hoggers, and even Lady Hoggers, as well primus inter pares, the much-hyped docu-drama Duck Dynasty. Reality hillbilly shows keep faith with the standard formula, peopled with folk who are not exactly what you’d call cerebral, rather they are raucous, profane, intolerant, “anything goes” ‘rednecks’…so lots of guns around, wild animals of various kinds, ‘Down-South” stills producing copious amounts of “sly grog”, “hunting-and-a-fishing”, excessive facial hair, Confederate flags, lack of respect for authority, etc. Despite the often appalling and sometimes degrading behaviour exhibited in “redneck reality TV”, viewers continue to subscribe in meaningful numbers to this brand of “televisional fare”. Testimony perhaps to the fact that “people will (always) tune in to see themselves on screen or the extremes of another culture” [“‘Redneck’ reality TV is one big ‘Party'”, (Patrick Ryan), USA Today, 09-Dec-2014, www.usatoday.com].
Pre-conditions for the banana importers British Honduras in 1900 was a British crown colony, a status it had since 1862✱. At the head of the colony, the Crown’s representative, was the governor [‘British Honduras’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]. Before bananas, the prized commodity in BH was timber – logwood, cedar, chicle, and above all mahogany✪. Moberg notes that despite the abolition of slavery in 1838, the conditions peculiar to British Honduras (BH) continued to perpetuate a debt servitude of rural workers to an oligarchy of local and immigrant land-holders. Nineteenth century BH economy was dependent on mahogany exports, a situation which created what has been described as an elite ‘forestocracy’ made up of timber companies and merchants (both domestic and foreign) [CH Grant]. This bound generations of forestry workers in BH to the powerful employer-class…one resident colonial secretary described the plight of the workforce as being “virtually enslaved for life”. Moberg’s case study describes the role of the British authority in this status quo as one of aiding and abetting the goals of the timber and mercantile elites [Moberg 1996].
Acceding to the demands of big foreign capital The governors discovered that the interests of foreign capital in British Honduras – initially through British mercantile and timber firms but increasingly through a burgeoning of US investors❅ – could not be ignored. By around 1900 bananas represented 71% of the value of exports to the US✥. It amounted to increasingly significant revenue for the colony’s coffers. The British Honduras government saw it as vital to the colony’s economy. Moberg indicates that “despatches from the governors to the Colonial Office reveal an eager accommodation to the banana multinational”. One of the most compliant, Governor Wilson, proposed to his masters in London that the government build railroads in the colony as an incentive for United Fruit to invest. Governor Swayne, undergoing a 180° turn from his earlier opposition to UFCo, started to act like a “virtual agent for the company in London”, negotiating the approval of incredibly generous land concessions to UFCo…under its terms United Fruit was asked to pay only $1 an acre compared to between $3 and $8 an acre required of small landholders (and UFCo was largely exempted from standard land tax). Sometimes UFCo received land gratis or for virtually nothing in exchange for the company’s promise to build railroads in the tropical lowlands (which of course benefitted UFCo’s business!) [ibid.].
Restrictive competitive practices 101: United Fruit achieves vertical integration in bananas After securing a stranglehold over the exporting side of the banana game in Belize and having established its own rail network to transport the produce, UFCo’s next step was to create its own banana plantations in the colony’s south at Stann Creek and Toledo. As a major BH producer United Fruit consolidated its position in several stages, it set about monopolising the land available for cultivation. By 1930, the land area of Belize cultivated by the company comprised 139,000 acres, but UFCo also held over 20 times this area of unused land in BH, seriously limiting the area of cultivable land available to competing planters. United Fruit’s price-fixing had the ultimate effect of decimating the local banana growers✧ [ibid.]
Fusarium wilt (‘Panama disease’) ⬆️
Tentacles of ‘El pulpo’ (“the octopus”) United Fruit was particularly adept at playing one country off against another. When British Honduran officials kicked back against the demands of the company, UFCo would make clear that not acquiescing to what it wanted, had serious consequences. A standard ploy was to pit British Honduras against neighbouring states. On the occasions that the BH governor would deviate from his default submissive position to UFCo demands, the company manager in Belize Town would drop none-too-subtle hints about moving the centre of United Fruit’s Central American banana operations to Puerto Cortés in Hondurus. Similarly, United Fruit would also periodically issue threats to both Guatemala and British Honduras that it would switch its investments from one to the other [ibid.]
𖤼𖤼𖤼𖤼𖤼𖤼𖤼𖤼𖤼𖤼𖤼𖤼𖤼𖤼𖤼𖤼𖤼𖤼
When I first heard the saccharine, content-lite melodies of “Bubblegum Pop’s” 1910 Fruitgum Company, I didn’t realise that the name of this innocuous, syrupy 1960s musical group was a corny pun on a historic commercial entity that I did not know of at the time…this commercial enterprise was in fact something much less edifying and infinitely more sinister and consequential – the United Fruit Company of Boston, Mass. As the following will show, the United Fruit Co would come to epitomise the high degree of hegemony established by US business interests in the tropical regions of the Americas after the late 1890s.
From railroads to plantations
The United Fruit Company had its origins in 1899 from a merger of various fruit exporting concerns (including the Boston Fruit Company which had already embedded itself in the banana trade in Jamaica) controlled by American railroad constructor and entrepreneur Minor Cooper Keith. Earlier Keith stumbled into the banana trade virtually by accident. In 1872 Costa Rica defaulted on it’s bank loans and was unable to pay Keith for constructing the country’s railroad. In lieu of part of what it owed Keith, he was granted over 5% of vacant Costa Rican land. Accordingly the American used the land to establish banana farms alongside his newly finished railroad. The crops when yielded had a ready-made, on-the-spot transport line to carry the produce to port. Keith’s early banana experiments in Costa Rica proved a lucrative earner and paved the way for United Fruit’s later role as producer and exporter of the fruit. From that base in Costa Rica Keith the banana trader looked further afield in Latin America for other openings.
Monopoly, oligarchy? Other players in the tropical banana trade
Although classically monopolistic in its practices, United Fruit Co (UFCo) was not the only player (American or foreign) in the Central American/Caribbean banana game. In fact at the turn of the 20th century there was plenty of competition in bananas, in 1899 some 114 firms were engaged in importing bananas to the US via New Orleans [Davies 1990, cited in S Striffler et al, (Eds.), Banana Wars: Power, Production, and History in the Americas, (2003)]. UFCo grew by acquisition, quickly adding 20 smaller banana export firms to its list of business holdings.
Rivalry with mutual benefits
In addition to Standard Fruit, another US rival of United Fruit was the Cuyamel Fruit Company. Cuyamel started in transportation as the Hubbard-Zemurray Steam Ship Co and morphed into a large New Orleans-based agricultural corporation (see ‘Sam the Banana Man’ below). The three American companies in the Central and South American banana business (United Fruit, Standard Fruit and Cuyamel) were separate business entities, each in competition for bananas et al products from the same tropical region. And yet there was something slightly schizophrenic about the relationship between the three…concurrently with the earnest rivalry was the existence of a cartel-like cooperation between the companies – which was of mutual benefit financially, eg, being able to launch joint business efforts in advertising and in increasing banana agricultural outputs in Honduras. United Fruit Co’s dominant position in the triangle (always the senior player) facilitated this arrangement…it had both a 60% stake in Cuyamel and a 50% stake in Vaccaro Bros⊠ [Ralph Lee Woodward Jr, Central America, a Nation Divided (3rd ed. 1999), cited in ‘Cuyamel Fruit Company’ (Wikipedia entry].
‘Sam the Banana Man’
Schmuel Zmurri was an immigrant from the Russian Empire (born in Bessarabia, in modern Moldova) who changed his name to Samuel Zemurray after coming to the United States. Zemurray was to become a major player and shaper in the banana republic phenomenon, a seminal figure who contributed to the massive imprint left on the tropics by American banana barons. 
United Fruit “a state within the state” of Guatemala: another intervention by Zemurray in the banana republics
Although no longer UFCo president, Zemurray wasn’t quite finished meddling to gain a financial advantage for United Fruit, he had one last contribution to the destabilisation of Central American regimes. The Guatemala banana trade had long been one of United Fruit’s most prized possessions…from the early 1900s President Manuel E Cabrera’s cosy relationship with UFC saw him grant the company a 99-year concession in Guatemala. United Fruit’s role in Guatemala has been described as “a state within a state” [William Blum, cited in ‘1954 Guatemalan coup d’être’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]. In 1953 Zemurray enlisted UFCo in a US State Department propaganda campaign to overthrow the left-leaning but democratically elected Guatemalan government of Colonel Jacobo Arbenz. The campaign together with the active intervention of the CIA paved the way for a coup the following year which ousted Arbenz and replaced it with a military junta which immediately reversed Arbenz’s decision to expropriate a portion of the unused land owned by the United Fruit Co [‘Sam Zemurray’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]. The fallout from the 1954 coup – for which the contribution of Zemurray and UFCo was no small part – was long-term destabilisation for the Guatemalans. The country, through a succession of military rulers, descended into three decades of civil war, 200,000 deaths including genocidal outrages against the native population [‘Ghosts of Guatemala’s Past’, (Stephen Schlesinger), New York Times, 04-Jun-2011, www.nytimes.com].
Among the minutiae of miscellaneous info contained in the directory’s index, one item that got my attention was a list of the consuls and overseas government agents in Sydney in 1922. Interesting to see that at that time there were consulate offices established in Sydney for tiny international entities like Latvia, Nicaragua, Columbia, Ecuador, Honduras, Serbia and the Czechoslovak Republic, but being not yet four years after the cessation of the hostilities of WWI, no consulates for the countries deemed by the victors to be the “guilty parties”, Germany, Austria, Hungary and Turkey. So much for moving on!!!…and we all know where that path catastrophically led!
Ad for the Orient Line
Royal Autos in ‘Wilson’s’
The original (1907) Challis House
The “Half-way House” of Blue Mts
Katoomba, the “largest of the mountain tourist resorts” with its “wide choice of charming and picturesque views”. Despite being 68 miles from Sydney, “horses and vehicles are always obtainable” – as this advertisement (left) on page 706 offering trips to the famous Jenolan Caves in luxury Buicks testifies.
Nearby Leura is “celebrated for the beauty of its great showpiece – the Leura Falls…in themselves alone worth the trip to the mountains”. With unfettered enthusiasm the writer goes on to laud the town in extravagant terms: “the place has been so well laid out as a tourist resort that it offers a perfect kaleidoscope of the views”. The object of Wilson’s Director is clearly to sell the Mountains to visitors from Sydney which synergises nicely with the numerous accommodation ads (funny that!) that appear such as this one (right) for Leura’s Hotel Alexandria (still in business in 2018).
The spa town of Medlow Bath, is “a pretty little village, rising rapidly in tourist favour”. The tiny Upper Mountains town is famous for its Hydro-Majestic hotel resort where in the day the better-off citizens of Sydney would periodically retreat to benefit from its therapeutic mineral waters and clean mountain air. Built by retailer Mark Foy (Jr) as a hydropathic sanatorium, the “Hydro-Maje” in the Twenties was where the cream of Sydney’s elite flocked on the weekends to socialise.
Jenolan tourer (Blackheath)
Mt Victoria, 79 miles by paved road❂ from Sydney, the highest point of the Blue Mountains (the guide gives it at 3,424 feet above sea-level)⍍, is praised for the scenic countryside surrounding the town dotted with charmingly named spots like Fern Cave, Fairy Bower, Fern Tree Gully and Witch’s Glen, for the walker to explore.
Upper Blue Mts map (‘Wilson’s’)
The 1960s Sydney motorist’s Vade mecum
▲ Webber’s “One stop shop”!
▲ Strathfield: free from “Influences of the Sea Air”
▲ The “Digger” Agents at Roseville
Newtown 1922: Hire-a-luxury wedding vehicle
▲ Bulli Motors: cars, motorcycles, bicycles, for Bulli Pass
▲ A horse-intensive removals firm!
Rookwood handiwork
▲ 1922: Home entertainment unit
▲
‘1922 Wilson’s Director’
Curiously there are some variances in the kinds of type-face used in different maps, some use a Gothic font in contrast to the classic style. ◀ The Redfern-Darlington map at left differs from the type used in most maps. On a few seldom occasions maps make reference to the traditional, nineteenth century British land concept of parishes (eg, the Parish of Gordon)…this seems extraneous as the maps and the book largely follow a division by municipalities.
Gordon Rd – in the days before the upgrade to a highway and renaming
The colliery (deepest mine shaft ever sunk in Aust.) in the 1940s (still operating at that time)
The Glebe
Mascot with a racecourse where the airport should be!
East Subs’ residential paradise
The other side of Strathfield municipality
Eastwood map, p235: site of future MQ University just to the south of Lane Cove River
Dee Why
South Kenso & Daceyville
Penrith & the (“world-class”) Nepean
The cover of my edition is long gone but the 1926 edition is very approx.
‘ Gregory’s’ 1st street directory of Sydney 1934
Middle Harbour: 1922 Sydney street directory
Spit Bridge (current)
Plaque in Clontarf Reserve remembering the dramatic 1868 incident
‘Father of Manly’
(Source: Pinterest)
Tram, The Corso (c.1905) (Photo: State Lib. NSW)
North Head Q-Station
Two Manly ‘pollies’ from Federation era
Fairlight House (site)
Fairlight Beach
The grounded WWII sub at Fairlight
Kay-ye-my Point
Manly East
Manly West
Origins, growth and expansion of the Kroger name
The man behind the Kroger Company was Bernard Kroger, better known as ‘Barney’. Kroger (below), the son of German immigrants, got into the retailing world at the basement level – working door-to-door selling coffee first for the Great Northern and Pacific Tea Co and then the Imperial Tea Co. By 1883 Kroger was in business for himself, his first store traded under the name the Great Western Tea Co…soon renamed Kroger Grocery and Baking Co✳. The Cincinnati-based business expanded exponentially into the 20th century, by the end of the 1920s decade Kroger had over 5,500 stores in the US[2].
The Kroger business ethic
Not afflicted with the curse of Hamlet, Barney Kroger was not one to overthink or complicate matters, as his simple motto attested: “Be particular. Never sell anything you would not want yourself.” Kroger’s business style was heavily and idiosyncratically micro-managerial, the businessman personally maintained an account book which meticulously recorded all the firm’s financial transactions. Kroger’s business credo was “First: Do it first. When seasonable goods come into the market, have the first. When prices go down, be the first to reduce them. Second: Never sell anything except for just what it is, and don’t sell it then if it isn’t good. Third: Advertise as liberally as business income permits. Fourth: sell on a small margin and make the turnover rapid”. The Ohoian entrepreneur’s pragmatism emphasised “duplicating and reduplicating…what works”[3].
A typical mid-century Kroger store
Kroger innovations
Kroger has led the way in retail grocery innovations…the innovations pioneered by the company include ‘firsts’ for a grocery chain, eg, the routine monitoring of product quality and the scientific testing of foods; testing of electronic scanners. As well Kroger was a pioneer in modern consumer research in grocery lines[7].
(photo: AP)
Building on this argument, Katz and Voight in the 1980s argued that beer had a dual appeal in antiquity: people enjoyed “the altered state of awareness” that sufficient intake of beer engendered, and at the same time they benefitted from beer’s nutritional superiority to every other food in their diet aside from animal proteins[6]Recent anthropological studies conducted in Mexico support the contention that beer took primacy over bread. Teosinte, the ancestral grass of modern maize common to Meso-America, was much more suited to beer making than for making corn flour for bread or tortillas. Mexican farmers only managed to domesticate the grass into the diet staple maize much later[7].
⬆️ Ancient Egyptian artisan brewing up beer
🔝 Today’s Transcaucasian republics – physical map
🔝 Zagros Mountains
🔝 Egyptian winery, 2nd millennium BCE
🔝 Roman wine jars – great & small
Outlawed in Europe after Waterloo, it would have been logical for Napoléon to gravitate towards America … the US had only recently engaged in hostilities with Britain (War of 1812), so the locals would probably have been disposed or at least neutral towards him, he would have been able to live as a free man. The US was a new country born of revolution (and one inspiring a revolution in his native France which promoted his own rise). An American base would position the ambiguous ex-monarch well to marshal his resources and launch an invasion of Central and South America which was ripe for revolution against the Spanish conquerors. One of Napoléon’s aides-de-camp in fact made the suggestion to him that he should make himself “emperor of Mexico”[8] (anticipating what transpired with a later Habsburg royal).
PostScript 2: Polygenism debunked The polygenists accepted that the species had more than one origin (cf. monogenism – deriving from one, common ancestor). Morton (see FN 2 below) believed that races were arranged in order of intelligence … the fairer the skin the more intelligent. DNA evidence, tracing human markers, has disproved the theory by proving that all Eurasians, Americans, Austronesians, Oceanians and Africans, share the same, common ancestor[10].
IQ tests continued to be fashionable in the 1950s & beyond: giving ‘scientific’ credence to the stigmatising of those in society labelled as “less intelligent” (Source: The Creativity Post)
Clare Hanson characterises eugenics as less a science than a social and cultural movement, drawing its power from its “dissemination across a range of discursive fields”[3]. Hanson notes that eugenics played a key role in post-war British reconstruction, its ideas sustained and incorporated into the development of the country after 1945. The national efficacy goals of eugenics were visible in the Attlee Labour government’s endorsement of the ‘meritocratic’ ideal. Postwar education reform in the UK illustrates this: the division of secondary education into three strands – grammar, technical and modern – was a philosophical approach geared to the needs of social efficiency, not social justice. A further connexion with pre-WWII’s eugenics was the seminal roles in public policy in the postwar reconstruction and foundation of the welfare state played by eugenics advocates William Beveridge and Richard Titmuss[4].
Dr GambleNils Roll-Hansen has pointed out that Scandinavian society was quick to reject the excesses and unscientific attitudes of eugenics (eg, in Nazi Germany), whilst not rejecting the basic ideas and beliefs of eugenics. The political structure inherent in the Nordic countries was considered conducive to the success achieved by proponents of eugenics. The dominant labour parties (especially the Swedish Social Democratic Party) elicited effectively co-operation from the labour organisations in implementing social policy (as part of the country’s “social contract”). Roll-Hansen has contended that the region’s liberal-democratic tradition with its stress on the rights of the individual ensured that the eugenic practices that were put in place were moderate only[14]. The unearthing of Roll-Hansen and Broberg’s ‘bombshell’ had a big effect on Scandinavians, especially the Swedes … in 1999 Sweden agreed to compensate victims of forced sterilisations, offering each individual affected up to 175,000 kronors[15].
South African Boer War – coming crisis in British Manhood?
Imperial Britain’s performance in the Boer War (especially early on) against a “rag-tag” army of Afrikaner farmers fed into the rising tide of Britain’s fears of the degeneration of its racial stock. Britain’s sudden reverses in the war required reinforcements from home, leading to a manpower dilemma – unhealthy British cities and slums, from where the foot soldiers were drawn, churned out recruits from the working class who were “narrow-chested, knock-kneed, wheezing, rickety specimens” of men[9]. The average British soldier in 1900 was shorter than that of 1845 and over three-fourths of those volunteering in Manchester recruitment halls were rejected as unfit for service[10]. This crisis gave further credence to the idea of Australia and New Zealand as embodying the coming man. Whilst British soldiery seemed to struggle and its martial supremacy stumbled (albeit temporarily), the Australasian contingents of soldiers conversely equipped themselves well. The Boer War reversals only accentuated anxieties about the racial deterioration of working class Britons[11]. A report conducted in 1904, with the title “Inter-Departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration”, confirmed that Britons were even more physically unfit than the war had suggested.
(source: www.telegraph.co.uk)PostScript: D H Lawrence and Australia DH (Bert) Lawrence in his novel Kangaroo, written entirely with the exception of the final chapter while the peripatetic English novelist was in Australia (1922), fleetingly entertained the possibility of Australia becoming a new and uncorrupted Britain. One of Lawrence’s enduring preoccupations, informed by his readings of Herbert Spencer and other early eugenics proponents, was the degeneration of western industrial society. In other works also Lawrence subscribed to the notion of the coming man, eg, in Aaron’s Rod (written before his visit to Australia) Lawrence described an Australian character as a “new and vital version of an English man”[21].
1930s Australian poster warning against VD
Sandow the Strongman’s ‘System‘
°
NZ physical welfare instructors, early 1940sAgain, like the British eugenicists’ pronouncements, new ideas from America fell on receptive ears in Australasia. The centre of the American eugenics movement revolved around biologist Charles Davenport and his Eugenics Records Office whose activities reached eugenicists worldwide. Davenport and his ERO eugenicist associate Harry Laughlin were both chicken breeders illustrate the link of agriculture to eugenics[13]. Race reinvigoration in the US was championed from the very highest quarters. At the turn of the century soon-to-be president, Teddy Roosevelt, appealed to his country’s citizens to take up “the strenuous life” (his message was aimed primarily at native-born Americans of good Anglo-Saxon stock). And Americans did heed his words: many took up sports for the first time, American (college) football became popular as the ultimate physical test of manhood, competitive athletics and cycling were taken up in the quest to demonstrate masculine physical strength and endurance. Roosevelt’s urgings led to the popularity of hiking, hunting and mountain climbing among Americans. Behind all of these feats of physical exertion lurked the same self-doubts of the dominant white race as elsewhere. The depression of the 1890s and the enervating affects of industrial society accentuated these anxieties. The US was experiencing a shift in immigration patterns at this time which had started to favour especially Southern and Central Europe over immigrants from Britain and Northern Europe⚀. The more affluent, native-born Americans predictably called for a halt to immigration[14] with the purpose of stopping the ‘poorer’ stock of immigrants coming into America (Italians, Jews, Slavs, etc). The pattern of restricting particular ethnic groupings was duplicated concurrently in other western countries (eg, the WAP in Australia).
The E tree
The Wright brothers defended their exclusive aircraft patent against all-comers (“copiers and imitators” as they saw everybody else in the game) with a monomaniacal religious zeal that would have befitted their overbearing United Brethren minister father Milton. Orville and Wilbur freely sued and issued writs against anyone who attempted to construct and fly a new aircraft without purchasing a licence from them. As this was the pioneering era of aviation there were a lot of inventors trying to do just this[2]. Accordingly, the Wrights spent a lot of time locked in legal disputes with other manufacturers in America and overseas who were trying to avoid the patent fee. The Wrights staunchly defended their world monopoly over flight in unequivocal terms as a ‘moral’ and a ‘legal’ right, treating all other contemporary inventors in the field as in effect “hobbyists”![3].
Because of the Wrights’ unwavering stance on their patents (after 1912 Orville alone, as Wilbur died that year), resentment towards the brothers was strong, they were accused of being greedy by licensees, eg, by demanding “money first” from prospective buyers BEFORE giving a demonstration of the prototype flyer, or by setting too high a royalty fee (at one point demanding 20% of sales); after a string of fatal air crashes in Wright planes Orville Wright lost sympathy with the public by attributing the accidents solely to “pilot error” (characteristically giving no consideration to the fact that the Wrights might be at fault for not having tried to make improvements to their prototype Flyer’s basic design[7].
Lapérouse
The Aboriginal connection
Today La Perouse is a pleasant day trip for picknickers, beach goers and bush walkers, and a haunt for scuba divers, snorkellers and fishermen. It is also part of the traditional lands of the Dharawal people, the clans of Gweagal and Kameygal, signifying over 7,500 years of continuous indigenous occupation in La Perouse/Yarra Bay[1]. From the 1890s until deep into the 20th century Yarra Bay was the site of an aboriginal mission.
Bare Island: The Russians are coming? … maybe not
Captain Cook took special note of this small, rocky bluff of an island at the point just off La Perouse in 1770 (giving it its name “small, bare island” in his journal). By the 1870s the British colonial authorities started to take Sydney’s security more seriously in the context of a perceived push into the Pacific from Tsarist Russia. Botany Bay had long been thought vulnerable as a “back door” entry point to Sydney for a hostile power⊗. To protect Sydney’s southern flank from a surprise Russian invasion, a fortification was built on Bare Island in the 1880s. The emplacements on Bare Island were supplemented by a second battery at Henry Head to the east of Bare Island, a small promontory jutting out from the coast. The Bare Island fort was part of a network of foreshore military installations built by the colonial government in Sydney to deal with a Russians menace that never eventuated❦.
Henry Head emplacements
Bare Is.
Bastille Day celebrations 2013
Kaliningrad
(Photo: www.britannia.com)
In 2006 Moscow introduced a Special Economic Zone in Kaliningrad. This was intended to provide duty-free trade opportunities in the Oblast and transform Kaliningrad into Russia’s version of Hong Kong or Singapore. The SEZ however failed miserably, it was unable to achieve the necessary economic integration into the Baltic Sea region³, nor did it create a viable tourist trade. Kaliningrad hasn’t had a good track record with SEZs – in 1996 a Yantar✺ Special Economic Zone was started but it has achieved only limited success⊙. The closure of Kaliningrad’s SEZ in April 2016 has left the Oblast with questions marks over its economic direction from here⁴.
Eighty years ago this month the IOC’s most controversial Olympiad was held. 1936 was a momentous year for the Olympic movement – the official Summer Olympic Games were held by the Nazis in August in Berlin. Back in February of that year another part of Germany, Garmisch-Partenkirchen*, had hosted the Winter Olympiad[1]. And in July there had been, or should have been, an alternative, anti-Nazi Olympiad in Barcelona … more of that later.
Never before had a modern games been manipulated for propaganda purposes to the extent that the Germans under Hitler did at Berlin. When the Summer Games were awarded in 1931 Germany was still under the governance of the democratic (but ill-fated) Weimar Republic, but with Hitler coming to power two years later Germany swiftly took on a more unsavoury and increasingly sinister complexion. The Third Reich was soon savagely attacking the liberties of Jews, communists and the Roma (gypsies) … and much worse was to come!
(Image: www.olympic-museum.de)
International opposition to the Nazi Olympics remained very vocal in the lead-up to the event. Spain and Barcelona in particular had a vested interest, having lost the bid to hold the 1936 Games to Berlin (the German city won easily, 43 votes to 16)♔. SASI (the international federation of workers’ sports) decided to hold the next instalment of its Workers’ Olympiads (see my previous post) in Barcelona in 1936. The Catalan Committee in Favour of Popular Sport (CCEP), boosted by the election of the leftist Popular Front in Spain in February 1936, worked with SASI to plan and prepare the Barcelona Olympiad♕, scheduled to begin just two weeks before the start of the official (Berlin) Games … clearly timed to steal Nazi Germany’s (and the Führer’s) thunder!
(Source: Bernard N. Danchik Papers; ALBA 033; Box 2; Tamiment Library / Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, NYU)
The organising committee for the Peoples’ Olympiad employed an emblem which reinforced the SASI themes of solidarity, brotherhood and world peace … three male athletes standing defiantly side-by-side, one white, one coloured and one (to all appearances) of mixed or Asian ethnicity (no females in the poster to be seen however … inclusiveness apparently hadn’t extended that far by then!)[5].
El Estadio de Montjuic
As it got closer to the event there were questions asked within the Olympic community about whether the Games should go ahead in Berlin. The Nazi regime’s transparent violations of human rights at home, and it’s failure to behave like a good international citizen (eg, pulling out of the League of Nations in 1933, illegally occupying the Rhineland in March 1936, etc), prompted a number of nations to consider boycotting the event.
Catalonia’s Olympiad Stadium
Politics and sport, the National Socialist way
Olimpíada Popular poster: International worker-athlete brotherhood
Estadio Montjuïc
Spartakiad 1931
Antwerp WO 1937
In the early 1930s an African-American postal employee from New York, Victor Hugo Green, came up with the idea of producing a book for Black Americans to guide them in travelling safely around their own country. Green got some inspiration from the Jewish-American press which for several years had been publishing travel guides for its community’s travellers, and from earlier, embryonic and less successful efforts to service the African-American community (eg, the Negro Business Directories from the early 20th century)[1].
The project like many entrepreneurial dreams started small, The mailman-cum-entrepreneur Green initially focused his efforts on helping African-American motorists and travellers locate businesses (lodgings, restaurants and other food outlets and fuel stations) in the greater New York metropolitan area that would accept their custom. As the business grew (with assistance from the US Travel Bureau) Green expanded his guide to the rest of the US, and to Alaska, Bermuda and parts of Canada and Mexico. The Green Book’s aim was to help Black and Coloured travellers chart a safe path through a segregated America by pinpointing exactly where on route they could stop and get the services they required to make the trip a happy and pleasant one.
According to the civil rights leader, Julian Bond, Green used his network of contacts in the Postal Workers Union to ascertain where Black visitors would be welcome[3]. Early on, Green visited the locations he would include in his Green Book to check them out personally, but when the book took on a national (and international) focus this became impractical[4]. Aside from hotels and motels, other accommodation options advertised in the Green Book included “tourist homes” (the private residences of African-Americans made available to travellers) and the Harvey House hospitality chain[5].
◥ 1949 Negro Motorists’ Green Book
◥ 1956 Negro Motorists’ Green Book
When the resourceful Mr Green published the inaugural Green Book in 1936, he wrote in the preface that he looked forward to the day when “this guide will not have to be published”. That day was a long time happening (sadly not in Victor’s lifetime) … but it did come.
🔝 Taronga – southern (ferry end) entrance
🔝 Taronga – southern (ferry end) entrance
🔝 the Primitive lion enclosure at Moore Park
🔝 the Primitive lion enclosure at Moore Park
🔝 Botany Zoological Gardens
🔝 Botany Zoological Gardens🔝 In memory of the elephant at Banks Zoo
🔝 Dunbar House – former grounds of Watsons Bay Private Zoo
🔝 Dunbar House – former grounds of Watsons Bay Private Zoo
As we come towards the old Armory site a curious feature is the retention of several old disused navy buildings on the waterfront. This detritus was scattered along the water’s edge, pieces of abandoned wooden and brick buildings tagged with faded building numbers. Some had been fenced up in a valiant but doomed attempt at vandal-proofing, and others near the Naval Depot simply boarded up as best they can be.
Newington House has been variously used over the last 180 years. Initially Blaxland’s principal home, after his death it became the hub of Newington College (established by the Methodist Church in 1863) before the preppy college was relocated to Stanmore in inner city Sydney. The Newington Estate was acquired by land-owner John Wetherill who subdivided it for residential settlement (Homebush Village) but the public didn’t clamour to take the lots on offer (even the majority of the workers at the nearby Abattoir and Brickworks were not interested in living there!).
We turn off Holker Street and into Jamieson Street and walk past the newer part of the prison, these days called the Metropolitan Remand and Reception Centre (the gaol entrance point for visitors). On the right we get a fuller view of the vast expanse of the Armory’s restricted area. About halfway up Jamieson Street we come across a fenced-off section of the Armory with a series of old military-style huts set on green pastures. This is the Sydney Olympic Park Lodge, an urban holiday camp run by the YMCA and offering school kids a mix of outdoor and educational activities drawing on the resources of the Armory. Although part of the Olympic Park accommodation portfolio these rather spartan looking dormitories are certainly not likely to be mistaken for luxury five-star accommodation for Olympics or other sports-related VIPs.
If you take a left at the Promenade, the bay path passes large residential blocks, removals and waste disposal companies before it morphs into a very thin bush strip. The strip which doubles as a rubbish dump meanders on for a bit but ends up against a high residential fence about 100m from where workers are currently building a non-vehicular bridge across the Bay to the homogenous looking towers of Rhodes. Taking a look at the skyline on both sides of the Bay it is less than a “Sherlock Holmesian” deduction to conclude how much the newer Wentworth Point waterfront has come to resemble the Rhodes prototype – albeit there is less of it.꧁𝓯=”𝓱𝓽𝓽𝓹://𝔀𝔀𝔀.7𝓭𝓪𝔂𝓪𝓭𝓿𝓮𝓷𝓽𝓾𝓻𝓮𝓻.𝓬𝓸𝓶/𝔀𝓹-𝓬𝓸𝓷𝓽𝓮𝓷𝓽/𝓾𝓹𝓵𝓸𝓪𝓭𝓼/2016/04/𝓲𝓶𝓪𝓰𝓮-8.𝓳𝓹𝓰” 𝓻𝓮𝓵=”𝓪𝓽𝓽𝓪𝓬𝓱𝓶𝓮𝓷𝓽 𝔀𝓹-𝓪𝓽𝓽-5044″> 𝓢𝓢 𝓐𝔂𝓻𝓯𝓲𝓮𝓵𝓭[/𝓬𝓪𝓹𝓽☬༒꧂ figcaption>
𝔥𝔱𝔱𝔭://𝔴𝔴𝔴.7𝔡𝔞𝔶𝔞𝔡𝔳𝔢𝔫𝔱𝔲𝔯𝔢𝔯.𝔠𝔬𝔪/𝔴𝔭-𝔠𝔬𝔫𝔱𝔢𝔫𝔱/𝔲𝔭𝔩𝔬𝔞𝔡𝔰/2016/04/𝔦𝔪𝔞𝔤𝔢-11.𝔧𝔭𝔤” 𝔯𝔢𝔩=”𝔞𝔱𝔱𝔞𝔠𝔥𝔪𝔢𝔫𝔱 𝔴𝔭-𝔞𝔱𝔱-5049″&𝔤𝔱; 𝔖𝔥𝔦𝔭𝔴𝔯𝔢𝔠𝔨𝔰 𝔭𝔩𝔞𝔮𝔲𝔢[/𝔠𝔞𝔭𝔱𝔦𝔬[/𝔠𝔞𝔭𝔱𝔦𝔬𝔫]
The curved path continues around the Bay, and it is common to see white egrets and purplish-blue crested Puekekos (AKA Australasian swamp hens) lurking around the water’s edge. As you continue on the trail, if you keep glancing to the right you will shortly notice a bird hide camouflaged in the vegetation to allow glimpses of the waterbird refuge – the Charadriiformes population inhabiting these tidal waters include Pacific Golden Plovers, Black-winged Stilts, Bar-tailed Godwits, Red-necked Avocets, ducks and black swans. Look for the observation tower to the left of the nature strip where the path turns south…in several places in the bay’s mangroves the observation towers are useless as they are now surrounded by mangroves which have ascended above the viewing point! (note the prevalence of large spiders webbed above the pathway).
Approaching Bicentennial Park a turnoff on the right takes you on to a zig-zagging boardwalk through the Badu Mangroves, a dense patchwork of grey and olive-coloured mangrove growth which leads to the Bennelong Ponds and the western side of Bicentennial Park. If you choose not to do this diversion continue south to the next crossway and go left opposite the tinny looking Field Studies Centre building. After passing a small bridge and another of those observation towers in the mangroves you soon reach the far-eastern edge of the park and a path which heads north along the water, parallel to Homebush Bay Drive.
It’s about 1.5km from this point to Rhodes Station. When the Wentworth Point to Rhodes bridge is completed, walkers including lunchtime walkers from the Rhodes Waterside Mall and Nestlés will be able to do the walk as a loop starting at Rhodes Station and returning from Homebush Bay to the same start point.
°
The Rivercat on route to Sydney Olympic Park
1897 Gatehouse
The site’s custodians, Sydney Olympic Park (S0C), Authority describes the Armory site as it exists today as “compris(ing) a range of historically significant natural and cultural features including former army and navy ammunition storehouses, workshops, offices, small gauge railway and other infrastructure associated with the operation of a naval armament depot”¹. One hundred years ago (1916) it was a military powder magazine and five years after that a munitions store for the navy.
“Woo-la-ra“
Kronos Hill
In the Bray Reserve we walk onto a vacant concrete pier on the edge of the river, no indication that it once housed a Philips Industries site when they were in the bike manufacturing business. On the other side of the square there is a plaque with some rusty old sides of a ship signifying the former presence of Tulloch’s Iron Works in Rhodes (during WWII it functioned as ‘Commonwealth Shipyard # 4’). The remnants of a railed track with ship names engraved on the ground … female names, all curiously enough starting with the letter ‘E’.
The path (usually muddy here) skirts round the back of the Concord Repatriation Hospital, which itself continues the WWII theme. It was built in 1940 as the 113th Australian Army General Hospital, taking in wounded and convalescing servicemen from the War. The ground on which the hospital dominated by the huge “Multi Building” stands passed to the Crown after the death of Dame Eadith Walker, daughter of the second Thomas Walker associated with the area. This Thomas Walker was a Scottish migrant in the 19th century who made it (very) big from property and stock investment and finance in Australia (in his later years he was president of the Bank of NSW). At the time of his death his personal worth was estimated at up to £2,000,000, a staggering amount for 1886!
At its height the adjoining structures included an admin block, separate dining rooms and pavilions for men and women, concert hall and servants’ quarters, with a tennis court for convalescing patients. Staying on the foreshore path we reach the distinctive Dutch bell tower (above) on the water, from where a long stepped pathway leads impressively up to the hospital entrance. In the time it was a working hospital the bell tower was the landing-point for ferries conveying patients from Circular Quay, and it also served in a secondary function as a smoking room – for male patients only!
Walker’s convalescent hospital admitted 683 patients in its first year of operation and over the following 80 years took in thousands free of charge in accordance with Walker’s bequest. During WWII it was used to house the 3rd Australian Women’s Hospital. By the 1970s however it was no longer viable as a free convalescent hospital and in 1979 it began functioning as the Rivendell Adolescent Unit for the rehabilitation of emotionally disturbed youth, and it is still operating as such today.
Following the path further south we pass coastal bush and mangroves and come to a series of stairs (down and then up again) which are behind the Mental Health Unit of Concord Hospital – a newish facility relocated from Callan Park/Rozelle in 2008. The path curves around the peninsula into Yaralla Bay and the newer buildings (mental health and drug health) give way to a series of old, very dilapidated looking buildings comprising the hospital’s engineering and works divisions.
Continuing the path south through the second Walker peninsula we come to the grand villa, Yaralla House, set up on raised land 150 metres from the shoreline. Around it are the various auxiliary buildings of the Yaralla Estate. The Walker Estate was acquired by the millionaire banker in piecemeal fashion in the 1840s-1850s from the beneficiaries of Isaac Nichols, convict-cum-colonial postmaster and the original crown landowner in Concord. Yaralla House itself is an architecturally significant, asymmetrical Victorian Italianate mansion, the original alabaster white villa was built by colonial architect Edmund Blacket (1850s-60s) with John Sulman adding extensions to it in the 1890s.
Self-contained ‘Walker World’:
After Eadith Walker inherited the Yaralla Estate from her father she built the built up the property holdings piece-by-piece, adding a swimming pool, squash and tennis courts, croquet lawn, stables, coach-house, guest houses and other auxiliary buildings. The squash court was installed specifically for the use of the then Prince of Wales (later Edward VIII) on his visit. However the Royal personage (and later fan-boy of the German reichsführer) declined to play on it because of its concrete floor (his cousin and travel companion Louis (Lord) Mountbatten “had a hit up” instead!).
Yaralla also had its own dairy farm (supplying milk to the Walkers’ hospital and to other local hospitals), piggery, fowl enclosures, bakery, fire brigade and powerhouse (Yaralla was the first building in Concord to have electricity!) A good chunk of the 40ha-plus grounds were used as a golf course – some of its members later established the Royal Sydney Golf Club in North Bondi. The rest broke away from the Sydney Club and formed the Concord Golf Course (Club) on land, then known as “Walker’s Bush”, that had been part of the Walkers’ holdings.
Rockery from Italy:
Dame Eadith spared little expense on the beautification of her estate. Stonemasons were imported from Italy to build an sculptured Italianate terrace and a grotto. The grotto is a series of sculpted rockery caves interspersed with exotic flora, ferns, palms and especially succulents, lying at the foot of the bluff on which the former Walker home sits. The area between the grotto and the shoreline once contained the Walkers’ swimming pool complete with its own pumping station. There is also a decorative sunken garden and the evocative Four Winds Fountain located near the house.
Fortunately for the vast Estate, there has been a lot of conservation and restoration work carried out at Yaralla in recent years – a combined effort by the City of Canada Bay Heritage Society, the Council itself, and the SLHD. We resume the walk, past the grotto, where the path slopes gently down towards a dense patch of very tall and wild bamboo on the water side with a small child care centre on the right. If you look west up the road that leads away from the centre, you will see a row of planted trees which guards an elaborate rose garden created by Eadith.
The conclusion of a wonderful walk full of interesting history and natural beauty and charm … a tranquil corridor of nature with an air of unhurried ambience. From the Majors Bay Reserve end-point you can choose between walking on through the Mortlake and Breakfast Point streets to the ferry at Cabarita, or heading west, cutting across Concord Road to the nearest train station at Concord West.
Whilst I was anticipating my upcoming trip to Poland with much relish, as to Eastern Europe as a whole, the prospect of visiting the Auschwitz-Birkenau site wasn’t one I was looking forward to. I wasn’t at all keen on visiting the former Nazi concentration camp … maybe I have been fed on too much of a vicarious experience courtesy of the SBS network’s televisual obsession (so it appears at times) with all things to do the Holocaust, Nazism and World War II!
Today, Auschwitz is a much-visited museum and a memorial to the victims of the Third Reich. There was a crowded, chaotic scene at the entrance, long lines of tourists queuing up. Eventually we got inside the building after making it past the bag checks and scanning of the heavy security screening at the gate. It was an eerie feeling walking through those notorious, infamous gates of Auschwitz I (notwithstanding that the ominous sign “Arbeit Macht Frei” we passed under is only a replica of the original one which was stolen in 2009). The incongruity of the scene was very stark, very apparent – constant streams of people milling all over the onetime prison, going from block to block, in a place that otherwise was just so barren, desolate and abandoned!
A room full of discarded footwear
The 61HA expanse of the Park
During the first half of the century there were the occasional, tentative inquiry into the deteriorating conditions in state psychiatric institutions, but these, like the 1948 Public Service Board enquiry, never really went anywhere. In terms of the overcrowding at Callan Park, measures that were at best only stop-gap were employed from time to time, eg, additions to the existing buildings at Kirkbride and Garryowen … which were architecturally out of step with the original Barnet and Manning designs [Peter Reynolds and Ken Leong, “Callan Park Mental Hospital”, Dictionary of Sydney, 2008, http://dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/callan_park_mental_hospital, viewed 07 December 2015].
Within three years of the new act a Royal Commission on Callan Park was undertaken (in 1961), the first detailed investigation into mental health in NSW for 60 years. The Royal Commission was in part triggered by revelations of staff delinquency and dereliction of duty made by Dr Harry Bailey (newly appointed medical superintendent of Callan Park) in early 1960. The reformist-minded but over-zealous Bailey impetuously went over his superior’s head in presenting a report directly to the head of the PSB. Bailey’s act of ‘whistle-blowing’ concerned allegations of staff cruelty to and neglect of patients, and the discovery that staff were withholding food and groceries from patients with the purpose of profiting from these stolen supplies.
The Commission’s predictable findings brought to the attention of the public what was commonly known by anyone who had regularly visited the facility. Callan Park (Kirkbride Block) was too large, too overcrowded, with low standards of accommodation. The orientation at Kirkbride was custodial rather than rehabilitative, there was evidence found of cruelty, neglect and corruption … Callan Park had, as it is standard to say today of such matters, failed in its “duty of care”, it had become “a byword for all that was bad in mental health care” [Tanner Architects, Callan Park Rozelle Volume I, Conservation Management Plan, www.callanparkyourplan.com.au].
Broughton Hall at the North Leichhardt (southern) end of the broad Callan Park area has experienced all the highs and lows of fortune over its 170 years of existence. Broughton House (as it was first called) was built by John Ryan Brenan after he had obtained the block of land from the old Perry (Township) Estate in the early 1840s. Brenan’s home was a brick stuccoed, two-story dwelling in the Regency style. Brenan’s financial woes forced him to sell his assets in the mid-1860s, but Broughton House stayed in private hands as a Victorian gentleman’s estate until the 20th century. A succession of owners and leaseholders held the property until ironmonger/importer John Keep acquired Broughton House (which he renamed Broughton Hall) and the nearby Kalouan (renamed “Broughton Villa” around 1870). Work on Broughton Hall extended the home to a 20-room mansion. Keep also started to cultivate a large garden on his estate.
The BH clinic’s driving force was its Medical Superintendent Dr (Sydney) Evan Jones who also took charge of the building designs and planned a distinctive garden and ground layout, using Keep’s garden as a starting point. Jones did a complete makeover of the existing grounds, creating a curvilinear garden comprising a forested jungle of tropical ferns, oaks and lanky bamboo with fish streams, quirky Japanese and Oriental miniature bridges and ornaments in the gardens. The landscaping of the grounds consisted of “building hills where none had been, valleys, sunken gardens, streams, bridges and stone walls” [Medical Journal of Australia, 26 June 1948, p 806, cited in Peter Reynolds, “Broughton Hall Psychiatric Clinic,” Dictionary of Sydney, 2008, http://dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/ broughton_hall_psychiatric_clinic, viewed 04 December 2015]. Critically, Dr Jones encouraged BH patients to actively assist in the creation of the amazing flora park.
If Moore’s Kirkbride garden can be described as a “pleasure garden”, then Jones’ Broughton garden well merits the epithet “fantasy’ garden”! It’s magical, coloured little bridges with their Japanese motifs and their ‘humpy’ paths and curvilinear shapes and the dense forested setting, all combine to bestow a particular fairytale enchantment on the place. Jones stated the gardens should be used “as machinery whereby a patient’s mind could be directed from neurosis to normality.”[cited in Sydney University, Sydney Medical School website].
Accordingly, a building campaign began in the 1930s with a series of new wards built, supplementing the original Broughton Hall. A second building spurt occurred from 1956 to 1963 with new, small-scale residential buildings and landscaped surrounds. It also included a new occupational therapy building, new electrotherapy unit, IPC units and canteen [Building Ideas (Dec. 1963) cited in “Tanner Architects”]. New building work in Church Street (opposite the historic BH building) resulted in a modern hexagonal building housing a new outpatients clinic and day hospital. Also constructed on this block was a lecture hall named in honour of Evan Jones (there is some disagreement as to when these buildings were built, some sources say 1962-63, some, 1971). The complex is currently being converted into a Sydney campus for the University of Tasmania [See “Tanner Architects” and Peter Reynolds, “Broughton Hall Psychiatric Clinic”].
Broughton Hall today
The Gardener’s cottage
The sense of tranquility that the visitor gets is joined by a second sense, that of a pervading air of abandonment. When I first explored the area with only a vague grasp of these old cottages and workshacks being somehow part of Callan Park, the disused, dilapidated buildings left me with the initial impression that I had stumbled onto some sort of industrial wasteland, much like you might encounter in Peter Carey’s early short stories, but with decrepit, crumbling, asbestos-ridden buildings replacing the decrepit, rusty dismantled cars of The Fat Man in History. So many of the old brick-and-stone buildings jotted across the land are in varying degrees of decay, some boarded up to prevent assault from vandals, for others it is too late – they are already showing the pockmarks of wilful destruction … countless broken windows and doors and graffiti everywhere. Almost all of the structures bear the familiar yellow-and-black warning sign “DANGER ASBESTOS” or more ambiguously, “MAY CONTAIN ASBESTOS”.
“Garryowen”
Kirkbride & it’s Italianate Tower
‘Clockless’ Clock Tower & rear wall
Manning’s successor as Inspector-General Eric Sinclair was also ahead of the game! He introduced more specialised (special admissions) wards, such as the Female Cottage Hospital, to treat curable cases through early intervention, and advocated to have treatment of mental disease put on a more scientific basis [Peter Reynolds and Ken Leong, “Callan Park Mental Hospital”, Dictionary of Sydney, 2008, http://dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/callan_park_mental_hospital, viewed 05 December 2015].
But is it the ‘real’ Clinton? ⤴
Would the real Mr Yang, the genuine “Discoverer of the Terracotta Warriors’, please stand up?
In the glow of world attention being lavished on the terracotta army discoveries and the recognition bestowed on Mr Yang, it is not surprising that the other three surviving farmers present at the 1974 archaeological find wanted to get in on the act. Yang Quany was also given a spot in the museum signing books for a small stipend and began promoting himself as “the discoverer of the treasures”. The remaining two Yangs followed suit. Yang Zhi’fa however discredits his fellow Lintong farmers’ motives and insists that it is he who was primus intra pares (first among equals) in discovering the Emperor Qin relics.
Whilst the Lintong farmers haven’t made much money from discovering (or being associated with the discovery of) the terracotta army, the same can be said of the workers who did most of the hard physical work of unearthing and restoring the statues. Most of those recruited to curator Yuan Zhongyi’s archaeological team found themselves working round the year with only a break at the time of the Spring Festival holiday for a wage of only 1.72 yuan (US $0.28) a day in 1976 [Zhao Xu, ‘Yang Zhifa, 76, soldiers on amid terracotta warriors’, (09-XII-2014),China Daily USA, www.chinadaily.com].
“The three in the middle just moved!” ⤴
The Hydro Majestic Hotel stands on the upper slopes of the Megalong Valley in the Blue Mountains, about 116 kilometres west of the Sydney CBD. Last December it re-opened for business six years after it’s resale and interim closure in 2008. The new owners, the Escarpment Group (a consortium of Sydney developers headed by Huong Nguyen and George Saad), have an ambitious vision for the Medlow Bath hotel, including an extension to its facilities and services, and a major renovation of the once great Blue Mountains landmark to restore some of its past glory. About four years passed before construction work even commenced on the site. Initially the new owners had to undertake a big clean-up job of the vacated property as a very large amount of assorted clutter was left behind by the previous occupants [‘Saving a grand old beauty’s soul’, Peter Munro, Traveller, 7 January 2013, www.traveller.com.au].
Mark Foy’s Liverpool St store
Foy’s Blue Mountains ur-health resort
Upon completion in 1904 Foy opened his Medlow Bath hydropathic sanatorium (the first health resort in NSW) which he named the Hydro-Majestic. By this time whatever springs were present (if they ever existed) had dried up. Consequently Foy imported large quantities of mineral water from Germany for use in his establishment [www.hydromajestic.com.au (Wikipedia entry)]. He also introduced a German-manufactured generator to supply the Hotel and the surrounding township with electricity (purportedly four days before the city of Sydney achieved electricity!) [www.hydromajestic.com.au, ibid.].
Mark Foy Jr
Majestic skyline
‘The Lost World’
The Hydro – in its down-market days
A Zimmerman
In keeping with the hybrid nature of the hotel, parts of the new Hydro Majestic exude a distinctly oriental flavour. The Salon Du Thé features a Shanghai chic tea room and bar and both it and the Cat’s Alley reprise many of the oriental traits of the original 1900s Medlow hotel which featured a Chinoiserie style favoured by Mark Foy. The Majestic’s original Salon Du Thé displayed ornaments and furnishings which included large Chinese vases and porcelain vessels, bamboo-look furniture and silk umbrellas [www.hydromajestic.com.au].
Above: Flagship of the Mark Foy’s retail empire. The city department store opened in 1885, moving to the Liverpool Street site in 1909 where an ice skating rink was installed on the 5th floor in 1950 for “Fashion Fantasy on Ice” parades. In 1980, having been earlier acquired by Waltons, it ceased trading permanently. Today the monolithic heritage building renamed the Downing Centre functions as a local and district court
The onset of the 21st century seemed to herald a revival in the epic genre in film. Large-budget “Sword-and-Sandal” movies of the early 2000s such as Gladiator and Troy, labelled “Neo-epic films” by cinema critics, have reinvigorated the genre. At the same time, a new blockbuster phenomenon in the shape of the Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter series of films, padded with wall-to-wall distinguished British (and Commonwealth) actors, have extended the epic genre, and in the case of the ‘Rings’ cycle, given the flagging “Sword-and-Sorcery” sub-genre a new lease of life.
The book concerns itself to a large extent with the type of epic film much in vogue in the fifties and sixties, drawn from the history and mythology of antiquity (Greece, Rome, Egypt, Mesopotamia). Right up front I’d have to say that I think that the author is inclined to take the genre a bit too seriously. The epic movie, in whatever phase or incarnation it takes, has been something difficult to be especially serious about! By definition the standard form of the epic has tended to be characterised by an indulgence in excess – grandiosity, vulgarity, basically everything 8XL in size! Mention the epic film and people often think of monumental Hollywood flicks like Ben-Hur, Spartacus, Cleopatra, and the like. Conspicuous consumption the order of the day, so much so so that it could be suggested that epic films should be primarily seen as a kind of parody of themselves.
Footnote: the popularity of the Italian Peplum provided career change opportunities for body builders as many would-be actors like Steve Reeves, Mark Forest and Kirk Morris, made the transition from the bodybuilding game to become leads in Sword-and-Sandal sagas. Interestingly, many of the Italian musclemen-stars took Anglo-sounding names in an attempt to make them more appealing to the American market, thus the well-known Sergio Ciani became on screen the aptly named “Alan Steel”.
Strongman ‘Maciste’
“When you speak of destiny, this is something I must at last believe” (delivered with exaggerated emphasis), Genghis Khan, in Genghis Khan (1965).
Elley’s study of the epic film genre is informative and instructive in so far as it goes. Ancient Greeks and Romans, Biblical figures, barbarians and Norsemen, all get a good run, but Elley’s historical survey cuts off at the end of the Dark Ages. I’m left with a tinge of regret that he didn’t take a more expansive approach in the book to include the grand and occasionally grandiloquent epic movies made about legendary Britons of a later era like Arthur and Robin Hood, as well as the more modern epics like Lawrence of Arabia or Dr Zhivago and even extend it to examples of the genre as diverse as 2001 a Space Odyssey and Planet of the Apes.
Not long after the news spread about the momentous event at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, on 17 December 1903, the significance of what the Wrights’ had done found itself under challenge, especially as time went on from the European aviation community. French newspapers after 1903 described the celebrated American brothers as bluffeurs (bluffers). Doubts were raised about their achievements when the Wrights failed to release the photo of the Wright Flyer in flight at Kitty Hawk until nearly five years after the groundbreaking 1903 flight … newspapers acerbically asked: “Were they fliers or liars?”, Paris edition of the New York Herald (10 Feb 1906); ‘Wright Brothers: European skepticism’, www.spiritus-temporis.com.
The state of North Carolina has harboured no such doubts, proudly displaying the slogan First in Flight on its car number-plates. Whether you accept the Wrights’ claim to be first in flight, or some other contender (of which there are several), in a sense could depend on what is meant by manned, aeronautical flight. Orville Wright’s first successful if brief powered flight was by no measure the first human flight in history. The genesis of intentional manned air travel can be traced back to the late 18th century with the advent of large hot air balloons (starting with the Montgolfier brothers of France in 1783).
As well, in the 30 years preceding Kitty Hawk, there was a host of aviation pioneers experimenting with monoplanes, biplanes, box-kites and gliders including, 1874: Félix du Temple; 1894: Hiram Maxim; 1894: Lawrence Hargrave; 1898: Augustus Moore Herring [B Kampmark, ‘Wright Brothers: Right or Wrong?’, Montréal Review (April 2013]. These flights however were either pre-power ones, or if motorised, they have been largely discredited as having been either unsustained, uncontrolled or as at the least not sufficiently controlled [P Scott, The Shoulders of Giants: A History of Human Flight to 1919].
G A Whitehead was a German migrant (born Gustave Weisskopf) living in Connecticut who started experimenting with gliders (variations on the glider prototype design developed by aviation pioneer Otto Lilienthal) in the mid-1890s, at a time when Wilbur and Orville were still making and repairing bicycles in Dayton, Ohio. The case in support of the flight made by Whitehead on 14 August 1901 in what must be noted was an improbable-looking, bat-shaped, engine-propelled glider at Fairfield near Bridgeport, was first taken up in 1935 (in an article in an industry magazine, Popular Aviation, entitled ‘Did Whitehead Precede Wright In World’s First Powered Flight?’)回. Whitehead’s claim lay dormant until the 1960s when army reservist William O’Dwyer, took up the German-American engine-maker’s cause and did his upmost to promote his “flying machine”.
Critics of the Institute believe that the Smithsonian’s indebtedness to the Wrights’ legacy (the fear of losing the historic Flyer to the estate executors) prevents it from recognising the merits of Whitehead’s pioneering achievement irrespective of the weight of evidence put forward [J Liotta, ‘Wright Brothers Flight Legacy Hits New Turbulence’, www.news.nationalgeographic.com]. Clearly this is a powerful disincentive to the Smithsonian objectively assessing the merits and new evidence for any rival claims to the Wrights (not just Whitehead’s) which may be unearthed.
The credence given to the Wright brothers’ claim to be the first successful flyers should perhaps come with an asterisk, signifying it as heavily qualified, as in David Schneider’s all-inclusive, tongue-in-cheek description: “First in Sustained, Piloted, Controlled, Powered, Heavier-than-air Flight of Lasting Technological Significance” [ibid].
Did any of the documented early flights per se achieve “sustained and controlled flight”? Human conquest of the sky didn’t happen in one quantum leap, surely it came about in a series of small, measured steps, each building on the one before. It is more meaningful to see the development of viable flying machines as something that happened incrementally, an aerodynamic puzzle put together piece-by-piece. It was an international effort, the culmination of the accumulated efforts of gifted pioneering aeronautical designers such as George Cayley, Octave Chanute, Samuel Langley, Lawrence Hargrave and Otto Lilienthal whose experiments made it possible for the Wrights and others to experiment with flight, coming closer and closer to the realisation of successful manned, powered flight.
David Herbert (Bert) and Frieda outside ‘Wyewurk’, 1922 ⍙
Lawrence grappling with the menacing Kangaroo on the veranda of “Wyewurk”. ⍙ The Struggle’ by Garry Shead (Wollongong Art Gallery)
The best empirical example of hybridised football has probably been the fusion of Australian football (AFL) and Gaelic football. An all-Australian AFL side has played a Gaelic national side from the Republic of Ireland in a hybrid form of football (known as “International Rules” in Australia and “Compromise Rules” in Ireland) every year or every other year since 1984.
Rugby league test Aust v GB (Photo cr: Queensland State Library)
In 1914 the initiative for a merger appeared to come from the VFL. Elements within the VFL (with some support from the South Australian and West Australian Leagues) led by Charles Brownlow, Geelong Club secretary and delegate to the Australian National Football Council (ANFC), viewed the 1914 All-State National Rules Carnival in Sydney as much of a failure. Interest in the carnival and in Australian football in general was down compared to that in the fledgling sport of rugby league, which was drawing big crowds (especially the Australia-Great Britain tests of that year). A point not lost on the VFL – the 1914 Melbourne Grand Final drew only 30,000 spectators compared to crowds of up to 41,000 for rugby league test matches during the same season! Brownlow (later memorialised eponymously in the Brownlow Medal) was of the opinion that a new combined sport of rugby league and Australian rules could produce a better spectacle, which would add thousands of pounds to the gate takings for games. The NSW Rugby League’s long-time secretary, Horrie Miller, was also favourable to the idea of a merger [‘The Australian and Rugby League Game Combine?’, NSW Football History Society (July 2014), www.nswfootballhistory.com.au].
(Photo cr: The Mercury (Tas.))
Other newspaper commentators were less sanguine about the chances of merging the two codes. JC Davis writing under the apt pseudonym, “The Cynic”, opined that the status quo would not change, because the love of the game of Aussie rules in Victoria and of rugby league in Sydney was too deeply-ingrained in each code’s grass-roots supporters to allow them to accept the proposed alterations to their own game [‘The Universal Football Code’, The Referee (Sydney), 14 October 1914].
In 1933 elements within the Australian football and rugby fraternity reignited the cause of a single, universal code of football. Again, the catalyst seems to have been that year’s 10-day interstate carnival in Sydney. Consequently, a conference was held in August, bringing together the state delegates of the ANFC and the delegates of the NSWRL (significantly the discussions were boycotted by the Queensland Rugby League). Supporters of an Australian football/rugby league fusion (including once again the NSWRL Secretary HR Miller) held the view that the future of football would be assured by adopting one code which combined the best features of both games [‘One Code of Football’, Daily Advertiser (Wagga Wagga), 28 July 1933].
(Photo cr: www.australianfootball.com)
NSW v Qld 1949 interstate game (Photo: nswrl.com.au)
The proposals put to the ANFC by Miller on behalf of the NSWRL were taken back by the state delegates to their leagues for consideration. The football leagues ultimately however did not consider themselves bound by the ANFC’s recommendation. In the end the respective authorities of each code were not prepared to compromise by making concessions to any meaningful degree in the alteration of their game (the off-side rule remained a particular “bone of contention” to the negotiators[ibid.].
(Photo cr: www.rugby-league.com)
The Victorian football and code of choice
Fairyland Pleasure Grounds
Another suburban pleasure ground that greatly captured the imagination of Sydneysiders in its day was Fairyland Pleasure Grounds. It was situated on the Upper Lane Cove River in an area now incorporated into the Lane Cove National Park. From its inception as a pleasure ground in the early 1900s, up to when a main arterial road in North Ryde (Delhi Road) was linked with it, it was largely only accessible by boat to a wharf specially built by the operators of Fairyland (FPG).The Swan family, owners of the bushland, initially cleared the area for market gardens but also constructed a timber siding on the river which they called “The Rest”. Robert Swan later turned the site into a pleasure ground for day-trippers to visit, adding a kiosk, a playground, a dance hall and picnic area. ‘Fairyland’ was chosen as the name for the pleasure ground apparently because it exuded the atmosphere of a magical and mysterious place, Swan enhanced this theme with fairy-like structures and motifs – quirky fairytale huts, a slippery-dip in the shape of a sleeping giant (thought to be modelled on the character ‘Bluto’ from the ‘Popeye’ comics), and cardboard representations of imaginary and supernatural creatures such as fairies and elves positioned high up in the trees [www.friendsoflanecovenationalpark.org.au].Swan acquired a good deal of equipment from the closure sale at White City Fun Park in Rushcutters Bay in 1917 (from 1922 site of the White City Tennis courts✱). Amongst the items Swan brought to FPG were strength-testing machines, coin-operated machines through which you could view silent movies, and entertainment rides such as the’Ocean Wave’ (a “razzle-dazzle”) and a fairly rudimentary ‘Flying Fox’. 
🔺 Wonderland in ‘Glamarama’
🔺 Attempted royal assassination at Clontarf
🔺 Cremorne Gardens-upon-Yarra, 1865
Lucknow in India’s “Uttar Pradesh”
Marion’s silkscreen watercolour of Walter’s plan for Griffith, NSW
Wright’s residential magnum opus: Fallingwater, Penn.
Castlecrag: Griffin Country
Griffin’s inventive use of windows and fireplaces in Castlecrag won praise from admirers and provided inspiration for later Australian architectural practitioners. Not everyone however had a favourable view of the WBG concept of the model house. Many home-buyers were not attracted to the utilitarian plainness and the restrictive compactness of the standard Griffin house with its flat, odd cubic shape. In addition, the quite puritanical covenants concerning individual property use, whilst implemented to protect the natural environment and for egalitarian purposes, served to turn many would-be Castlecrag residents off.
Marion’s drawing of Walter’s design for an Indian-inspired “Sydney Opera House”
The Griffin footprint in Castlecrag & Australia
NOW that Scotland have expressed an inclination, but not a preference, to secede from the Union with England (the UK), it would be interesting to take a gander at other secession attempts both closer to home and around the world. The impulse for or advocacy of secession by a section or part of an established, multi-ethnic nation state is a recurring feature in contemporary international relations.
The proposed colony of ‘Auralia’ – an irredentist goldfields colony
Black Swan State
The WA delegation bringing the petition to secede to London
‘Prince’ Leonard & his consort – in the ‘Principality’
Griffin’s Segmental Architecture was a quantum step forward from previous building technologies used in Australia (eg, Mack Slab) [M Lewis, ‘Knitlock’, www.mileslewis.net]. Intended by Walter for use on workmen’s cottages in Canberra (before the disintegration of his Capital City dream), the technique heralded a variety of radical advances in construction. With a simplicity and economy of design, the Segmental Architecture method constructed walls from ‘segments’ of precast reinforced concrete which were easier and quicker to construct than other methods (Griffin was one of the early developers of prefabrication). The Knitlock bricks, machine-manufactured on the southern side of the ‘Crag estate in a shed set up on the corner of The Redoubt and The Rampart, were light yet compact and sturdy. The bricks were reinforced with a dual ‘vertebrae’ structure which forms a concrete skeleton. The sections were easy to transport, easy to assemble as walls and cheap to make [W B Griffin, Australian Home Builder, No 1 (August 1922)].
‘Fishwick house’
‘Duncan house‘
Dr Edward Rivett, who converted the King O’Malley House in Sortie Porte into Castlecrag’s first hospital, also commissioned the Griffin-designed 148 Edinburgh Road, however he altered the original plans to add a pitched tile roof and interior walls which were brick rendered. Griffin through GSDA, his company, sued Rivett for breach of Covenant and a lengthy legal battled ensued which was eventually won by Dr Rivett. Other potential buyers also had problems with the Covenants imposed by WBG and many turned away from Castlecrag, opting instead for the railway-serviced suburbs on the Upper North Shore which didn’t have restrictions on the size or type of house or on how or whether you landscape your property [‘Castlecrag’,www.sydneyforeveryone.com.au/].Because of the restrictions and other contentious issues surrounding the construction of GSDA dwellings in the estate, banks became less willing to approve loans on Griffin houses. The onset of the Depression strangled the economy which affected development everywhere in Sydney, but subdivisions that were less popular like Castlecrag suffered its effects hardest [ibid.]. Castlecrag had to await the postwar building boom to achieve significant inroads in development.
Burley Griffin’s attitude towards building materials was every bit as rigidly purist as his attitude was to how the finished product should look. He championed the use of concrete and stone (particularly local Castlecrag sandstone which blended in with the natural setting). Conversely, he railed against the popularity of the standard building materials of the day, brick and tile, which he rejected.
The proportion of Burley Griffin designs converted into houses by GSDA over a 14 year period was quite low. Only 15 built in the Castlecrag and Haven Estates (none built north of Edinburgh Road, the area known as the Wireless or Sunnyside Estate) with about four or five other houses designed by one of WBG’s acolytes but approved by him. In what is somewhat of a trademark feature of Griffin’s oeuvre, many houses proceeded no further than the drawing board. WBG designed in the vicinity of 35 or so others for the ‘Crag that were not carried through to completion [‘The Idealists: creating Castlecrag’, ABC RN, Hindsight, 8 July 2012]. There was a host of reasons for this as outlined above, but sometimes sheer bad luck played its part in Griffin’s fortunes. Global developments had a tendency to intervene to stymie his noble intentions. Just as his vision for a physical landscape in Canberra worthy of the capital city of “a nation of ‘bold democrats” ran smack into the war effort of WWI which redirected valuable Australian resources away from WBG’s project, the development of Griffin’s estate in Castlecrag had its momentum undercut by the crippling effects of the Great Depression [‘Creating a new nation’s capital: The Griffins’ vision for Canberra’, (National Archives) www.naa.gov.au/].
‘Camelot’
The sales brochure of the Greater Sydney company (the Griffin’s firm) reads: “Castlecrag architecture has struck a distinct bold note in Australia. In place of the high peaked tile roofs … the handsome landscape style, with the stone walls and flat roofs, has been introduced in harmony with the great amphi-theatre of stone and forest”.
Walter Burley Griffin had been captivated by the magnificent harbour of Port Jackson upon first sailing into Sydney. Now, free of the seven-year Canberra fiasco, he was able to turn his mind to the search for a new project. After investigating sites at Longueville and Beauty Point Griffin’s creative energies were given direction when he discovered a large and quite choice stretch of virgin ground situated on two peninsulas on the upper part of Sydney’s Middle Harbour. WBG managed to secure an option to buy 263 hectares of largely cleared land, which included nearly 6.5km of untouched water frontage (still forested), for a very reasonable amount of money (there is some disagreement about whether the amount was $25,000 or £25,000). The scoop netted the Griffins the entire south-west part of what was to become Castlecrag, a large chunk of modern day Castle Cove, and around half of Middle Cove [“The Legacy of the Griffins” (Castlecrag Community), www.castlecrag.org.au/history/history.htm].
The original Castle Rock, Edinburgh EH1 Scotland
Griffin mapped out the road and allotment pattern of the estate by foot, walking all over the rocky terrain and leaving markers for the surveyor to follow [Teaching Heritage, “Forming the Greater Sydney Development Association”, www.teachingheritage.nsw.edu.au]. He then placed the planned homes very carefully and very strategically so that they didn’t impinge on the natural setting. It was all about the harmonisation of the built and the organic environment. Griffin stated that “a building should be the logical outgrowth of the environment in which it is located” [Walter Burley Griffin Society, S Read, “Landscape Architecture”; M O’Donohue, “Castlecrag”, Sydney, www.griffinsociety.org]. The young Griffin was guided by the famous maxim of his fellow Chicagoan and architectural mentor, Louis Sullivan – “form follows function”. Intended to blend in with the natural world rather than clash with it like much of modern architecture, Griffin’s houses were designed to recede into the landscape.
Griffin Prairie style cottage, The Parapet, Castlecrag
‘Grant house’
Haven Amphitheatre
MMG
Palais Theatre,
St Kilda, Vic.
Rock Crest/Glen
Plan of Leeton, NSW (1913)
Pyrmont Incinerator (demol. 1992)
Willoughby Incinerator (1934)
On-site residential bushland retreat, The Crag
MMG, soon after graduating from MIT University
FLW
K C DeRhodes House (Sth Bend, Ill.) designed by Marion, credited to Wright
Light fitting, Capitol Theatre Melbourne (MMG)
David Amberg House (1910). MMG.
Tasmanian Forest portrait
MMG rendering of a FLW house
MMG rendering of Library & Museum plan, Lucknow (India).
The MMG monogram
Early Griffin project {Carter House Evanston, Illinois}
Blueprint for a “Democratic Capital”
The Lake
Canberra: the winning blueprintGSDA Sydney Office, 35 Bligh Street
The first shot came from the Australian military gun emplacements stationed at Fort Nepean on the extremity of Melbourne’s Mornington Peninsula overlooking the stretch of open water which separates Port Phillip Bay from the Bass Strait. The target was a German steamer, the SS Pfalz, (the name a reference to the German Rhineland-Palatinate region), was carrying 200 tons of coal intended to supply the nearby warships of the Pacific Squadron of the Imperial German Navy.
Ft Nepean today
Owen’s imagined ‘New Harmony’
The remnants of Neuva Germania today
San Pedro (site of the Germany colony): in the middle of the country, south of Concepción
Commune leader Förster, in heavy debt, facing the spectre of bankruptcy and in despair at the utopian disaster, committed suicide in 1889. Nueva Germania struggled on without its main spearhead, now led by Elizabeth Nietzsche who made an attempt to recruit more members from the Fatherland – with little return for her efforts. However in 1893 Frau Förster-Nietzsche abandoned the Aryan Paraíso and it’s settlers, returning to Germany to take charge of her famous brother’s affairs and care for him (Nietzsche had fallen into a state of insanity probably as a result of contracting syphilis). In the years after the philosopher’s death in 1900 the warped Elizabeth proceeded to convert him into a kind of intellectual “pin-up boy” on behalf of the emerging Fascist and Nazi movements of Italy and Germany. Significant to note that Nietzsche, when still in full control of his faculties, had been on record as expressing his complete disapproval of anti-Semitism and of the Försters’ plans for establishing an Aryan colony. Elizabeth, who later became a wholehearted supporter of Hitler, criminally and comprehensively traduced her brother’s reputation by falsely resurrecting Nietzsche as a prophet of the German “master race” to come. [J. Golumb & RS Wistrich (Eds), Nietzsche, Godfather of Nazism? On the Uses & Abuses of a Philosophy.]
Cassava, stable crop of NG
The Association looked initially in Argentina for land to settle, but when this proved fruitless, Lane turned to neighbouring Paraguay where they found a government much more amenable. Lane’s scheme to export Australian workers suited the Paraguayan Government which was desperate to replenish the loss of manpower in the 1860s suffered in a disastrous war against Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay. Paraguay, hopelessly outmatched, by war’s end, lost its territorial access to the sea and somewhere between 60 and 70 per cent of its male population during the war, leaving the country with an estimated total of only 28,000 adult males [Thomas Whigham, “The Paraguayan Rosetta Stone”, Latin American Research Review (1999)].
Benign dictator of Nueva Australia?
El Chaco Austral
Banknote from ‘Colonía Neuva Australia‘Remnants of Nueva Australia
De Groot’s ‘coup’
Primrose’s ceremony at the Northern Pylon
Harbour Bridge from Kirribilli (looking south)
Nor can it be said that the New Guard had any claims to be considered as a mass movement in NSW politics. NG remained fundamentally a middle class organisation, the core of its base were urban professionals and small businessmen, like Campbell himself (Cunningham, Ibid.). Unlike many other fascist/authoritarian parties in Europe, it lacked for significant working class participation (Moore, op.cit.). Moreover, geographically, the New Guard was very limited in scope. It was confined almost entirely to one state, NSW, and even more, was essentially a Sydney metropolitan phenomena with only around 3,000 members from rural areas outside of Sydney (Cunningham, ibid.).
SS Pfalz 1914
Melbourne Herald headline
Today, the long disbanded fort is now part of Point Nepean National Park, a nature conservancy where visitors can explore the remaining gun emplacements including the two gun barrels (A1 and B1) which fired the first shots of war (originally sold for scrap after WWII but later restored)
