Lexical Adventures in Suffixland: Getting Creative with Naut and Nik

Posted on June 3, 2015March 17, 2024 by funambulator@live.com

Literary & Linguistics, Popular Culture, Society & Culture

Two of the more interesting suffixes borrowed by English and put to good neologistic use are -naut and -nik. The origins of the word ‘naut’ have connotations of travel and water, Naut derives from an Ancient Greek word, translated as ‘naútēs‘, meaning ‘sailor’, sometimes rendered as ‘to navigate’. From naut we get the word ‘nautical’, something nautical relate of course to water and ships, although the root word naut has been employed to form new words which relates more to the sky or to atmosphere rather than to water.

✒︎ The Argonauts

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The first use of this suffix in the above sense seems to emanate from Greek mythology and the story of Jason and his crew who sailed according to legend in search of the Golden Fleece – the Argonauts. The etymology is: Classical Latin Argonauta; from Classical Greek Argonautēs; from Argō, Jason’s ship + nautēs, sailor; from naus, ship [Webster’s New World College Dictionary]. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles dates it’s use in English from 1596, so it’s been in currency for a long time.

The post-war phenomenon that has given naut words their impetus and continued relevance was the Space Race from the late 1950s, initially involving only the USSR and the United States. The US space program brought astronaut into common use , a word formed by simply conjoining the prefix astro (= stars) with naut. Far from being newly coined, the word itself has a history that long pre-dates the 1950s and 60s “Race to the Moon”. In 1930 the term was used in a pioneering Sci-Fi short story, ‘The Death’s Head Meteor’ by Neil R Jones (and there are other instances of the word in fiction go back to the late 19th century). The explorations of space fired the popular imagination, propelling astronaut into common usage to describe those (especially American) who ventured into space on behalf of the “Free World”. Astronaut may have been influenced by the term aeronaut (aero meaning air or atmosphere, as in aeronautics, from Ancient Greek aēr = air) in use to describe balloonists dating from the 1780s [http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronaut]. With the long-term goal of reaching the Moon accomplished by the US in 1969 and further Moon missions planned, it was of no surprise that the more precise lunarnaut soon crept into the vocabulary.

As the Soviet Union entered the bipartite race with the intention of ‘conquering’ space and establishing a technological superiority over the US, the Russian Cold Warriors wanted for ideological reasons naturally enough to differentiate their extra-planetary achievements from those of their capitalist foes. So when the first successful spaceman Yuri Gagarin went up in Vostok I in 1961, the word cosmonaut (from Cosmos, the Universe, from Ancient Greek Kosmos = order) came into the lexicon – the New York Times attributed its genesis to Premier Khrushchev “and Soviet publications” [‘Russians coin a word for him: “Cosmonaut”, NYT, 13 April 1961].

✒︎ “astroboy” touches down

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Astronauts by other names
The expansion of the Space Race to other nations outside of the big two spawned a whole lot of other naut-based neologisms. The first Indian in space (1984) was initially depicted as a cosmonaut (because he flew under the Soviet space program), but Indian pride and patriotism and the advancement of their own, homegrown space program, soon led to the evolution of a distinctive term for Indian space-traveller, vyomanaut (from Sanskrit vyoman (= sky). Although among Hindi-speakers there has been some debate about the rival merits of other terms, eg, there is a measure of support for anthanaut (or antharnaut), derived from anthariksh, meaning ‘space’ in Hindi.

When China joined the “Man-in-Space Club” by launching their own pilot beyond the stratosphere in 2003, the Chinese inevitably found their own term to describe it – tàikōnaut (taikon the Chinese word for space or cosmos, derived from tàikōngrén = spaceman) [‘Taikonaut’, Language Log, http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/]. Although it was apparently a Chinese-Malaysian who first used the term for Chinese astronaut and the Xinhua News Agency uses it in its English-language publications (but not the Shenzhou space program).
NB: For a pure Chinese rendering of the concept, either hángtiānyuán or yūhángyuán (literally translated as sky navigator or sailor and Universe navigator or sailor respectively) more accurately capture the essence of the meaning [ibid.]

Another word invented to describe the profession of space explorer of a specific country or region is spationaut, meaning a French astronaut, from Fr: spationaute (= space navigator). Spationaut is also used more generally to delineate astronauts from other European states, although a more suitable, generic term for this might be Euronaut.

Along the lines of aeronaut we also have aquanaut which might be a grander way of describing an underwater diver (the prefix ‘Aqua’, from Ancient Greek for water), which is distinct from an oceanaut whose scientific marine exploration is done in a submarine. ✒︎ A NASA aquanaut (source: theatlantic.com)

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Other -naut-suffixed terms signifying navigation in either a precise or looser sense include:

• chrononaut (a time-traveller – inspired by Doctor Who or Back to the Future?)
• cryonaut (one whose body is preserved by cryonics)
• cybernaut (a voyager in cyberspace; user of the internet or virtual reality. Could also be called an infonaut)
• gastronaut (person with a keen appreciation of food, ie, a more formal name for a ‘foodie’)
• hallucinaut (a hallucinator)
• neuronaut (one who studies the brain especially the effects of psychedelic drugs). cf. psychonaut who explores one’s own psyche under the effects of drugs.
• oneironaut (one who explores dream worlds)

As can be gleaned from the above there is a high degree of artificiality in the construction of many of these naut words. Some involve the choice of a convenient word (eg, gastronaut) rather than involving an act of literal navigation. Another concocted naut word with an interesting medical-related origin is responaut. The term was first applied c.1964 to a group of people at a particular facility in England with severe breathing difficulties whose condition needed them to be attached virtually permanently to the newly invented iron lung (mechanical respirator) in order to preserve their lives. ‘Responaut’ (formed from combining respirator + naut) was chosen because these patients experience similar problems to astronauts and oceanauts in establishing and maintaining communications and vital air supplies [Sunday Times (Lon), 12 January 1964, cited in Word Finder (Oxford English Dictionary), http://findwords.info/term/responaut].

The word Juggernaut contains the form of the naut suffix only by coincidence. It it unconnected to the idea of navigation or sailing, having come into English currency from a difference language group. Juggernaut derives from Sanskrit via a Hindi word, jagannath, meaning literally, world lord or protector. In English it has come to signify anything to which persons blindly devote themselves to or are ruthlessly crushed by [Shorter OED on Historical Principles].

Yinglish and spacerace-speak
Turning to words with the suffix ‘nik’, these come to English from a different path being of Slavonic origin with some Yiddish influence. Nik suffixes are very common in Slavonic languages, we find for example polkovnik (meaning colonel) in Russian, Polish, Czech, Bulgarian, Ukrainian and so on. Just as the Space Race gave naut words a new impetus, nik also found its way into English from Russian after the Soviet Union’s successfully launched a space craft named Sputnik in 1957.

The word beatnik was coined by journalist Herb Caen [San Francisco Chronicle, 2 April 1958] to describe adherents to the “Beat Generation”, a sort of subculture movement characterised by youthful anti-conformism, rebelling against the mainstream and hip culture (“being cool, man!”) (cf. the word ‘hipster’ as used today). Other traits include devotion to jazz, drug use and Eastern religions, and pseudo-intellectualism. Through the writings of ‘Beat’ leaders such as Jack Kerouac, other neologisms followed the pattern of beatnik … jazznik, bopnik, bugnik [Jack Kerouac, Brandeis Forum, ‘Is there a Beat Generation?’, 8 Nov. 1958, www.wnyc.org/story/.]

The Cold War tensions of the 1970s spawned another new word formed from the root nik – refusenik. Originally, refuseniks were individual citizens (many Jewish but not exclusively so) of the USSR and other Eastern Bloc countries who were denied permission by the Communist authorities to emigrate. Over time the application of ‘Refusenik’ in colloquial English has broadened to take on the meaning of “a person who refuses to do something, especially by way of protest” [Oxford English Dictionary (online)].

Peacenik is a word which has often been used in a derogatory way to describe someone who is an activist or demonstrator who opposes war and military intervention [www.dictionary.reference.com/browse/peacenik] (cf. “woke”/”wokeism”).The term is thought to have originated in the 1960s [possibly 1962 according to www.wordorigins.org]. Its precise origin is not known but very likely the term arose out either out of the anti-nuclear weapons movement or the anti-Vietnam War movement of the sixties. Peacenik is a synonym for pacifist or dove.

Holics – taking it to the nth degree
An unrelated but similarly manufactured word to peacenik is peaceoholic (sometimes spelt peaceaholic). Peaceaholic and other words with an -aholic or -oholic postfix are back-formed by analogy with the word alcoholic (into English from Arabic via French or Middle Latin). So we have shopaholic, workaholic, chocoholic, sexoholic, etc. which convey the sense of an addiction to or obsession with an activity or object.

Other nik words with a Yiddish flavour to them include Nudnik and Kibbutznik. Nudnik means obtuse, boring, a bothersome person a pest (nudyen = to bore). The Jewish Chronicle reports (18 February 2009) that Nudnik has entered modern Hebrew … “a common and even respected modus operandi in Israeli society”. A nudnik is someone “who is constantly asking you for something or otherwise taking up your time” [www.thejc.com]. Kibbutznik is a name given to workers who are members of an Israeli collective farm (a Kibbutz).

Whither West Papua? A One Way Trip on the Integration Highway

Posted on May 26, 2015October 31, 2024 by funambulator@live.com

International Relations, Politics, Regional History

The western half of the island of New Guinea has been known since its discovery by Europe by different names, varying according to just who is doing the delineating. To the Dutch colonialists it was, unsurprisingly, Dutch New Guinea, to the Indonesians it was initially Irian Barat and then later after a dubious plebiscite endorsed Indonesia’s takeover of the territory, Irian Jaya (Victorious Irian), and more recently, Central Irian Jaya, West Irian Jaya and Irian Jaya when Indonesia divided it into three provinces (only to subsequently revert to the present arrangement of two after Papuan opposition). To the indigenous pro-independence movement and most outside observers it is West Papua.

The struggle of the indigenous population of West Papua to determine its own destiny long precedes the period of subjugation at the hands of their current overlords, Indonesia. From the Sixteenth Century on, the Portuguese, the Spanish, the Germans, the Dutch and the British, have all staked claims on various parts of the island of New Guinea. Spanish mariner Alvara de Saveedra on visiting the territory in the 1520s named it Isla Del Oro (Island of Gold), which turned out in light of the later discovery of its vast mineral wealth, to have been very prescient [Bilveer Singh, Papua: Geopolitics and the Quest for Nationhood].

When the emergent Indonesian nation won independence from the Dutch colonists in 1949, the Netherlands refused to cede Dutch New Guinea to the newly-created Republic of the United States of Indonesia. The Indonesian Government argued at the time and have done so ever since in the international forum that, as the successor state to the Dutch colonial territory, it should by right have possession over the entire area of the former Dutch East Indies which included the western part of New Guinea. The Dutch Government’s rebuff of Indonesia’s claim to Western New Guinea was predicated on the fact that its inhabitants were ethnically different to the rest of the East Indies populace [ibid.]. This was Amsterdam’s stated view anyway, on this basis it proposed to guide Western Papua to self-determination at a time to be deemed appropriate.

But as Professor Peter King described the Indonesian mindset on the issue, “(their) agreement to the temporary ‘loss’ of the territory was never anything more than an expedient” [‘Indonesia and Ethno-nationalist “Separatism” since Independence: East Timor, Aceh and Papua’, University of Sydney, Papuan Paper # 6 (Nov. 2013), www.sydney.edu.au/]. Indonesia responded diplomatically by raising the issue at the UN General Assembly four times between 1954 and 1957, but failed to obtain a two-thirds majority. After the last failure Indonesia’s president, Sukarno, changed tack. Taking a more proactive approach, Sukarno seized Dutch enterprises in Indonesia and expelled 46,000 Dutch nationals from the country [PH Kratoska, Southeast Asia, Colonial History: Independence through Revolutionary War].

Through the 1950s tensions between the Dutch and the Indonesians over West Papua were high and intensified after 1957. At the time of the Indonesian Republic’s foundation western powers had indicated that they supported the Dutch plan to bring West New Guinea to self-determination, but by the early sixties the intensification of the Cold War had prompted the United States to reassess it’s priorities. The US’s focus had turned to Asia and the perceived influence of Red China on Indo-China and Southeast Asia in general. It was eager to ensure that geostrategically-important Indonesia did not become lost to communism. Sukarno’s lean to the left, bringing the burgeoning PKI (Indonesian Communist Party) into the political framework, was a particular concern for Washington at this time [95/03/06: Foreign Relations Series, US Department of State, 1961-63, Vol XXIII, Southeast Asia (March 6, 1995). www.dosfan.lib.uic.edu].

The late 1950s saw the Netherlands step up Dutch New Guinea’s preparedness for autonomy, laying the groundwork for an autonomous Papuan entity: new infrastructure was built, education was expanded, political parties and labour unions were created [‘Neglected Genocide: Human Rights Abuses against Papuans in Central Highlands, 1977-78’, (AHRC/HRPP), www.tapol.org/sites/default/files/sitesy/default/files/pdfs/NeglectedGenocideAHRC.pdf].

Following the appointment of the indigenous representative New Guinea Council in April 1961 to produce a manifesto outlining the Papuans’ feelings on the issue of self-determination, an official raising of the Morning Star flag took place on 1 December 1961 in Hollandia, now Jayapura (Victory City), celebrated as West Papua’s Independence Day (these hopes for independence were however to be dashed on the rocks of political pragmatism within a year). All of these unwelcome developments prompted Jakarta to issue threats to invade the Western New Guinea territory by force. A naval military clash in early 1962 (Battle of Arafura Sea) saw the conflict reach a dangerous flashpoint. An Indonesian attempt to infiltrate West Papua by landing troops in the territory to incite rebellion against Dutch rule was repulsed by Dutch air and naval forces with losses incurred by the Indonesian side [‘Battle of Arafura Sea’ (Wikipedia entry), www.en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Arafura_Sea].

The expediency of American foreign policy and the manoeuvrability of its stand on self-determination was exposed bare through statements by US President Kennedy. Freshly into the White House in 1961 Kennedy espoused the principle of self-determination, powerfully so in light of the Berlin Wall crisis, advocating the right of West Berliners to choose freedom in the face of threats from the Soviets and the Eastern Bloc. Simultaneously, demonstrating the ascendancy of realpolitik, Kennedy did a complete volte-face on West New Guinea. The US President summarily dismissed the Papuans’ right to choose their own future, intoning the disdain of the ‘superior’ white man: “The West Berliners are highly civilized and highly cultured, whereas those (only seven hundred thousand) inhabitants of West New Guinea are living, as it were, in the Stone Age” [cited in David Webster, ‘Self-Determination Abandoned: The Road to the New York Agreement on West New Guinea (Papua), 1960–62], Indonesia, No. 95 (April 2013)]. The Americans, in the end, reasoned that giving West New Guinea to Indonesia was the price it was happy to pay to keep the Republic out of the Soviet and/or Chinese camps.

In this polarised climate Western opinion had well and truly shifted on the issue from supporting the Dutch position to the Indonesian one. With Washington putting pressure on the Netherlands and things becoming increasingly uncomfortable for the Dutch in their former colony, the Kingdom advanced its exit plan to completely wash its hands of the East Indies. The US brokered a series of negotiations between the Dutch and the Indonesians which led to the signing of the New York Agreement in August 1962 (significantly no representatives of the West Papuans took any part in the talks). The Agreement stipulated that a plebiscite would be held in West New Guinea by 1969 to determine its future, all adults would be allowed to participate in the “Act of Free Choice”, and the Musyawarah (consultative councils) would be instructed as to how the referendum should reflect the will of the people. Under the Agreement’s provisions the territory was placed under temporary UN administration (UNTEA) until May 1963 when it was handed over to Indonesia to administer in accordance with the pre-agreed conditions for holding a vote to determine independence or incorporation.

From the start Jakarta was determined to snuff out any semblance of Papuan separatism and desire for autonomy. Assimilation into the Indonesian economy and culture was the plan. Government policy and programs aimed at diluting the tendency of the indigenous population to identify themselves as Melanesians, and trying to substitute in them a sense of being Indonesian [Dale Gietzelt, ‘Indonesization of West Papua’, Oceania, 59(3), March 1989]. As part of this policy the Papuans’ use of Dani and other Melanesian languages was forbidden by the Government [‘Neglected Genocide’, op.cit.]. Papuans were reclassified as ‘Irianese’ by Jakarta. To keep a close watch on the indigenous population and especially those the Government identified as subversives, Indonesia had troops on the ground in Irian Barat right from the onset of the interim UN period and the military build-up continued apace [Pieter Drooglever, ‘The pro- and anti-plebiscite campaign in West Papua: before and after 1969’ in P King, J Elmslie & C Webb-Gannon (Eds.), Comprehending West Papua.].

The military (ABRI) influx and crackdown in West Irian, which escalated in the years up to the Act of “Free Choice” had a secondary purpose, aside from neutralising opposition to Indonesian integration. After the 1963 takeover Sukarno welcomed foreign multinational companies to the new province to engage in what would become a ruthless exploitation of natural resources. The Dutch during the colonial era established that the territory was incredibly rich in minerals. At Tembagapura (“Copper Town”), the large US company Freeport Copper and Gold built a giant gold mine, Erstberg Mine (Dutch for “Ore mountain”), and later near Puncak Jaya, a second even larger open pit mine called Grasberg, the largest in the world – and in partnership with Rio Tinto, the world’s third largest copper mine.

One of the principal functions of the large military presence was to protect these vital economic assets from sabotage. Both mining operations were given free rein by Jakarta with the predictable resultant environmental damage. Freeport Copper became a lucrative source of patronage for the government, especially for the later, Suharto regime. In return, the regime protected Freeport, politically and physically [Denise Leith, ‘Freeport and the Suharto Regime 1965-1998’, Contemporary Pacific, 14(1), Spring 2002].

After the fall of Sukarno in 1966, it was business as usual for his replacement, General Suharto, in regard to the corrupt practices and under-the-table money transfers between the Indonesian regime and huge US corporations. In fact the quid pro qua relationship between Jakarta and foreign capital was further extended with a widening of mining licence access and concessions to US business interests. Suharto’s New Order government and US multinationals were now partners for the long haul [‘Neglected Genocide’, op.cit.].

Acquiring the 420 thousand square kilometres of West New Guinea in 1963 allowed Indonesia a means of easing the archipelago’s demographic pressures on the overpopulated islands. The Government instigated a transmigration program, moving mainly Javanese, Sumatran and Sulawesi Indonesians to live in West Irian. Jakarta provided special autonomy funding (in part sourced from the World Bank) in effect to divide and rule the Papuan population. By favouring certain Papuan elites and regions who were more cooperative with it, over others, the Government was able to undermine and weaken the local separatist movement [Peter King, ‘Self-determination and Papua: the Indonesian Dimension’ in P King et al (Eds), op.cit.]. Despite Government pledges that there would be no transmigration to West New Guinea, the transplanted population from other Indonesian provinces by as early as 1964 was estimated at 16,000 (twice the maximum number of Dutch residents in the territory pre-UN administration) [John Saltford, The United Nations and the Indonesian Takeover of West Papua, 1962-1969: The Anatomy of Betrayal].

The growing presence of loyal, pro-Indonesia migrants in the West Irian province was also designed to shift support toward the unification goal of the Government. The attempt to assimilate Melanesian locals into Indonesian life, culture and economy was however counterproductive because the money Jakarta poured into the province creating new jobs in work projects benefitted the subsidised Asian newcomers much more than the urban and rural Papuans. This had the effect of marginalising Papuans from the rewards of economic development. Therefore ironically, rather than binding them to Indonesia the experience with the centre resulting in a sharpening of their sense of racial and cultural distinctiveness, laying the seeds of an embryonic nationalism [Gietzelt, op.cit.].

With the Act of Free Choice required by the terms of the NYA to take place by the end of 1969, Indonesia lost no time in consolidating its plans to secure West Irian. Occupation of the territory was accomplished in a three-pronged strategy, by transmigration of non-Papuans into Irian (as outlined above), through a bureaucracy dominated by Javanese and other Indonesians intent on keeping a tight rein on the Papuan majority, aided in this by in excess of six thousand well-equipped Indonesian soldiers on the ground in West Irian. Jakarta’s objective for ABRI (the Indonesia armed forces) was to pacify the resistance to integration, so that the referendum, when it came, would be assured of a vote for unification with the Republic.

From about 1965, ABRI, under the command of General Suharto, engaged in a “secret war” against the Papuan resistance group, OPM (Free Papua Movement) as well as a terror campaign against targeted groups of Papuan villagers. This involved aerial bombings of Papuan villages located in the Arfak Mountains as well as the Ayamaru, Teminabuan, Paniai and Enarotali regions. The indigenous uprising against the Army in the Arfak highland continued sporadically over several years with the security forces eventually suppressed it, killing approximately 2,000 tribesmen and villagers in the process. Military operations in other parts of West Irian, ie, Ayamaru, Teminabuan and Inanuatan (code name: Operasi Tumpas (Obliteration)), resulted in an alleged 1,500 deaths, including whole villages being wiped out by aerial strafing [‘The Indonesian Army – Act of Free Choice’ (Joseph Daves), www.theindonesianarmy.com]; ‘Papuan Conflict’, (Wikipedia entry), www.en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papua_conflict].

In the lead-up to the Act of Free Choice, the Indonesians stepped up the intimidation of Papuans. President Suharto issued thinly-veiled threats: anyone who opposed West Irian’s integration with Indonesia would be “guilty of treason” [Brian May, Indonesian Tragedy, cited in Daves, ibid.].

The military command, aside from intimidation and force, used other methods to win over the population (or at least the various tribal elders). Brigadier General Moertopo, put in charge of the ground operations by Suharto, alternated coercion with transparent bribery to secure acquiescence. Planeloads of much-valued consumer goods were distributed to selected local chiefs and community leaders to bring them across to the Indonesian side. Those that accepted the Indonesian largesse would be required to help deliver the pro-integration vote [‘The Indonesian Army’, ibid.]. Many of the Papuan separatists captured by ABRI, such as the Arfak leader Lodewijk Mandatjan, “turned” (dibina) against the resistance or in some cases were recruited to the Indonesian cause by the Red Berets in West Irian [ibid.].

The provisions of the New York Agreement (NYA) which stipulated that self-determination had to be allowed to take its course were breached by the military repeatedly right up to the plebiscite. Because of the tight control kept by the Indonesian administration and army the native population was denied the freedom of speech, movement and assembly that Jakarta had pledged to guarantee in the 1962 accord [Socratez Sofyan Yoman, ‘The injustice and historical falsehood of West Papua’s integration into Indonesia through the Act of Free Choice, 1969’ in King et al, op.cit.].

When it came to the vote itself, the decision-making process was profoundly flawed. Instead of the specified fully-participatory referendum, exercising the one adult one vote principle, the Indonesians set up a consensus by discussion mechanism (Musyawarah Dewan) to decide the matter. Further, the ABRI manipulated the process, appointing a hand-picked consultative committee, 1,026 men (out of a total population of nearly 810,000) who in an open forum with the army standing menacing by, opted for incorporation with Indonesia. Thus, the community representatives who voted to join Indonesia did so because they were either cowed or bribed into doing so it. Papuan students and anyone else suspected of expressing support for independence were rounded up and detained during the consultative meetings to prevent them demonstrating against the ‘yes’ vote [May, op.cit., Indonesian Tragedy].

The Act of Free Choice was thus completely undemocratic, a travesty of justice. To compound the crime, the UN itself was complicit in the Indonesians’ act of “deceit and theft”, bestowing upon it an air of legitimacy [ibid.]. The UN’s representative in attendance, F Ortiz-Sanz, despite blatant evidence of the illegality of the process, basically rubber-stamped the Indonesians’ actions (detailing only minor objections to the process in his report). Consequently the UN Secretary-General (U Thant) merely ‘noted’ that the Act had resulted in West New Guinea’s integration into the unitary Republic of Indonesia [ibid; UN General Assembly Resolution 2504 (XXIV).]. Papuan and external critics of the Act would come to refer to it as “an Act of No Choice” or “an Act Free of Choice” [Nonie Sharp, Review of RJ May, ‘Between Two Nations: The Indonesia-Papua New Guinea Border and West Papua Nationalism’, Journal of Polynesian Society, 97(3), Sept. 1988].

With Indonesia making the outcome a fait accompli by force and the UN giving a half-hearted nod of approval, other countries such as Australia and the UK basically looked the other way. The Americans by 1969 were deeply embroiled in Vietnam and in the region were all about advancing the cause of anti-communism [‘Indonesian Army’, op.cit]. The integration outcome was seen as good for political stability and for business. ‘Strongman’ Suharto and his New Order regime had the green light to apply an even firmer clamp on radicalism in West Irian. And the retention of a territory abundant with minerals, oil and timber by a friendly power open for business (especially American) was a status quo that suited Washington economically as well as politically.

Malice in Tinseltown: Hollywood’s Role in the Cold War and the Spy Sub-genre

Posted on May 11, 2015April 20, 2019 by funambulator@live.com

Cinema, Media & Communications, Society & Culture

Like the ‘Hot’ War (WWII) preceding it, the Cold War has always been fertile ground for the stuff of Hollywood drama (and melodrama). Right through the era the alleged plots of communists, whether identified explicitly or implicitly, provided inspiration for writers and directors of both film and television. The persona of the vilified communist agitator neatly slotted into the ‘bad guy’ role once occupied by the native American Indian in Westerns, particularly conveniently so at a time when the Western was starting to lose its mass entertainment appeal on cinema and TV screens.

In the political aftermath of the Second World War the USA and the USSR found themselves locked into an international power struggle for global supremacy with the capitalist system pitted against the communist one, culturally as well as militarily and economically. In the prevailing atmosphere of tension and mutual distrust, espionage and counterintelligence flourished. Inevitably the new international “spy game” found its way on to the pages of novels, comic books and into films and television. In the 1960s the interest in the espionage/sabotage dimension of the Cold War escalated into a “spy craze” on both the big and the small screens. On television two successful British spy series, Danger Man and The Avengers❈, both preceded the first film of the cinematic espionage game-breaker, the James Bond series.

The espionage/spy film sub-genre of course did not begin in the 1960s but can be traced back to the pre-war era with its first-wave popularity established to a large extent by suspense king, Alfred Hitchcock, with films such as The Man Who Knew Too Much, The 39 Steps, Secret Agent and Sabotage [AMC Film Site, (Suspense/Thriller Films), www.filmsite.org ]. The driving force for the popularity of the 1960s Spy movie was the extraordinary (and enduring) success of the James Bond Agent 007 series franchise. The Bond movie phenomena spawned a flurry of imitators, including parodies (some good, some mediocre or worse), from the mid-sixties, eg, Our Man Flint, The Silencers (Matt Helm series), The Ipcress File, Agent 8¾, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, The Spy with a Cold Nose, Torn Curtain, A Dandy in Aspic, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., I Spy, Get Smart, etc.

Despite the Communism (Soviet Russia) V Capitalism (America) conflict being at the core of the Cold War drama,it’s cessation by the early 1990s did not result in the demise of the TV and film spy genre, far from it! James Bond, post-Soviet Union, pits himself against “an (unnamed) international terrorist network far more amorphous than the KGB”. The ongoing success of the Jason Bourne series of movies in a post-9/11 world sees special agent Bourne foiling the evil schemes of one terrorist ring after another, some with a seemingly Slavic hue to them, others projecting something more generally Middle-Eastern in flavour. It seems, as Tony Shaw put it, “that the Cold War had never really gone away, at least not from our cinema and television screens” (T Shaw, ‘Hollywood’s Cold War’, Australasian Journal of American Studies, Vol. 21, No 1, Jul. 2008).

The original on-screen preoccupation with the theme of the Cold War has its origins in the McCarthyist intrigues in Hollywood. From 1947 the House Committee of Un-American Activity (HUAC), spearheaded by Junior Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy, turned its attention on Hollywood with a view to systematically weeding out communists and “fellow travellers” from the film industry. As the fear and paranoia generated by the ‘Red Scare’ impacted on Hollywood, the studio moguls responded to HUAC’s pressure by voluntarily climbing on board the anti-communist witch-hunt for ‘subversives’, commissioning films with an undisguised anti-communist message. The upshot of the Committee turning the torch on Tinseltown was sadly the ‘blacklisting’ of many promising actors and behind-the-camera practitioners. Rising actors like Larry Parks and John Garfield had their careers truncated or ended by the activities of HUAC, as did the group of writers, directors and producers known as the Hollywood Ten.

Emerging post-war social realism films stymied
The big studio heads’ decision to focus on films exposing the supposed communist infiltration of the United States also had an adverse effect on social realism films which in that same year (1947) were starting to have an impact. Hollywood’s enlistment in the war against internal communism largely put paid to the trend towards “problem pictures” dealing with social issues such as anti-Semitism (Gentlemen’s Agreement), alcoholism (Smash-Up) and schizophrenia (Possessed)[Daniel J Leab, ‘How Red was my Valley: Hollywood, the Cold War Film, and I Married a Communist‘, Journal of Contemporary History, 19(1), Jan. 1984].

Following 1947 there was an ongoing sequence of crudely propagandist “Reds under the bed” films with titles like Walk a Crooked Mile, The Red Menace, Conspirator, I Married a Communist, Invasion, U.S.A., The Jet Pilot. The movies and especially ones like John Wayne’s Big Jim McLain and My Son John (both 1952 releases) overtly attacked the communist lifestyle and sought to show that subversives were actively at work undermining the American fabric of life. Most of the stock standard B-movies seeking to exploit the Red Scare were abysmal, often completing losing the plot and portraying Communism more as “a variety of gangsterism” than as an alternative ideology systematically trying to achieve world domination [ibid.].

Other US anti-Red films took a more indirect if thinly-veiled approach. Them (1954) employed the allegorical device of megasized mutant ants threatening society to convey the communist menace. The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) was thematically similar, depicting emotionless alien clones (read ‘Communists’ infiltrating Planet Earth). California Conquest (1952) put the issue into a historical context: Spanish Californians circa 1840 thwart a Russian attempt to take over the Pacific Coast colony [ibid.]. I Married a Communist (1950) took the laboured, crude message to a new height (perhaps that should be depth!). This RKO film was a pet project of Howard Hughes, the only Hollywood studio boss who fully shared HUAC’s conviction of the ‘Red Peril’ to heart, fervently launching his own anti-communist crusade within RKO. Hughes went so far as to remove the individual credits from industry persons he suspected of being communists [ibid.].

The television arm of Hollywood similarly wasted no time in jumping on the anti-communist bandwagon. From the early fifties right through the decade the studios turned out a slew of short-lived, jejune Cold War TV dramas with homogeneous-sounding names such as Shadow of the Cloak, The Door with No Name, Foreign Intrigue, I Spy (two distinct series used this title 10 years apart), Secret File, U.S.A., Top Secret, Passport to Danger, Behind Closed Doors. Counterspy was another one, interesting only because it had started life as a WWII radio drama with Nazis as the villains, only to be upgraded in the Cold War, swapping Nazis for communists as the new villains [‘Commie Fighters of the ’50s’, www.for-your-eys-only.com ]. The sole stand-out fifties spy series with any kind of longevity was I Led Three Lives, which dramatised the real-life experiences of American double agent Herbert Philbrick [‘The anti-communist spy as TV entertainer’, www.jfredmacdonald.com].

By around the end of the fifties the Cold War films and TV series of this ilk with their crude, oversimplistic and formulaic style, as West versus East propaganda had become out-of-date. McCarthyism was on the downward slide, détente had started to thaw out international relations with the Eastern Bloc. The ideological enemy to Americans was no longer a singular one, Communist China had cemented itself as the new bogeyman for the self-appointed guardian of democracy. The perception was now, mixing racism with politics, that a yellow threat to the Free World was a factor along with the earlier red one [Leab, op.cit.].

The flip side of the McCarthyist-inspired pictures of the 1950s which were driven by the hysteria and paranoia of the communist witch-hunt was a whole host of movies which sought to exploit the Cold War for laughs. Among these pseudo spy/espionage comedies was My Favourite Spy, The Iron Petticoat and The Mouse that Roared (1950s), Carry On Spying and The Russians are Coming,The Russians are Coming (1960s), through to Spies Like Us and Stripes (1980s). These sort of movies tended to portray Russian agents and military types as often bungling, humourless semi-robots (or if female, stereotyped as cold, charmless and unsexed).

Note: the ‘spoofiest’ of all Bondesque films was the one based on the book written by the Bond author himself, Ian Fleming, Casino Royale (1953) (Ex-agent Fleming’s first James Bond novel), with David Niven (Sir James Bond) and Woody Allen (little Jimmie Bond) as the most absurdist of James Bond incarnations! Also see PostScript.

The Cold War has been the subject or inspiration for countless films and TV episodes over the past 60-plus years. The form of the sub-genre has shifted over time. In the black-and-white 1950s we had the crude, sombre “Reds under the bed” films and television programs. In the 1960s the hysteria diminished and celluloid representations of espionage were generally less bleak than in the preceding decade. The Ur-secret agent James Bond Agent 007 was the measure and model of the sub-genre, the unbroken series of films kicking off with Dr No in 1962.

PostScript: Spy Spoofery
The secret agent trope was in itself inverted with the advent of spy spoofs on cinema and TV screens (most famously Get Smart, but also Austin Powers, Johnny English, Spy Hard). The TV and movie spy satires weren’t really interested in peddling an anti-communist message, their creators just wanted to exploit the Cold War genre for all its comedic worth!

With the demise of the Cold War in the early 1990s, the slick, transparently escapist Bond film (not to mention it’s myriad of imitators using or misusing the skills of actors like James Coburn, Dean Martin and Dirk Bogarde) reinvented itself by discovering new (non-Soviet) antagonists and dangers, and the franchise continues to be mega-profitable, churning out a new Bond film for a receptive and insatiable global audience every couple of years.

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❈ Christopher Bray makes an intriguing comparison of the motives (or lack thereof) of The Avengers and James Bond. Whereas Bond’s rationale was clear cut, to stop Spectre from achieving its goal of world domination, Steed and Mrs Peel enter a Kafkaesque world each week to avenge the murders of public servants by villains acting for some ‘unseen’ and ‘unknown’ powers whose seem utterly motiveless, Christopher Bray, 1965: The Year Modern Britain Was Born (2014)

Medlow Majestic in the Wilderness: Transforming a White Elephant into a White Palace?

Posted on April 30, 2015January 10, 2023 by E Curb Nottus

Built Environment, Bushwalking, Commerce & Business, Social History, Travel

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!’

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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.

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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].

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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.

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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.

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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!

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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 state courthouse.

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