Late Communist Era Capitalist Cravings: The Pepsi Swap

Posted on by funambulator@live.com
Commerce & Business, Comparative politics, International Relations, Military history, Popular Culture

During the Cold War not many people outside of the USSR knew of the Russian penchant for it’s ideological rival’s second most popular cola drink. The Soviet Union’s love affair with Pepsi-Cola started with a meeting between Premier Khrushchev and US Vice-President Nixon in 1959. As part of what was a rare cultural exchange for the time, Khrushchev was introduced to the sugary, carbonated beverage, the taste apparently meeting with the Soviet premier’s approval.

⏏️ Pepsi’s role in the Nixon-Khrushchev Kitchen Debate So began a novel bilateral trade. With Russian rubles not valued outside of the USSR, a barter system was forged. The Russian and other Soviet people got to drink Pepsi, in return vodka (in the form of the state-owned brand Stolichnaya) was made available in the US market.

Things went smoothly enough until 1980…the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan threatened the Pepsi deal. Americans boycotted Soviet goods including Stolichnaya…the popular vodka’s sales plummeted in the US. In the late 1980s the Pepsi company—mindful that seven billion Russians were drinking Pepsi each year—hit upon a new and more unorthodox US/Soviet exchange deal.

To keep the Pepsi flowing to Russian consumers, Pepsi accepted a flotilla of ageing Soviet warships in lieu. Taking possession of 17 rusty Soviet warships plus a few other auxiliary naval vessels. The fleet was far from being in A1 shipshape condition, but it enabled the soft drink giant to boast that it possessed the world 6th most powerful navy at the time – on paper if not on water!

(Source: www.naval-encylopedia.com)

Pepsi’s move earned the displeasure of the US military but the company CEO’s slightly disingenuous rejoinder to the Pentagon was that it was dismantling the Soviet fleet faster than they were!*

Pepsi didn’t hang on to the decidedly decrepit Russian fleet for long, selling the warships to a Swedish scrap-recycling business in the early 1990s. A few years later Coca-Cola usurped it’s place in the Russian market.

____________________________

* undoubtedly Pepsi’s billion-dollar stake in the USSR remained it’s primary motive

Sites/works consulted: 👁‍🗨👁‍🗨👁‍🗨

’When the Soviet Union Paid Pepsi in Warships’, (Anne Ewbank), Atlas Obscura, 12-Jan-2018, www.atlasobscura.com)

‘ How Pepsi became the 6th largest military in the world‘, (Tom Kirkpatrick, We Are The Mighty, 28-Jan-2019, www.wearethemighty.com

‘Pepsi Navy: When the Soviets Traded Warships for Soft Drinks’, Sandboxx, 06-Nov-2020, www.sandboxx.com

A Doomsayers’ Day Out: The Manic Panic of 1910 over a Passing Celestial Event

Posted on by Sloane Snodgrasse
International Relations, Natural Environment

We take our leave of the year of Corona, 2020 and enter a new, who-knows-what-will-bring year. With the renewed intensity of the 2nd wave pandemic across the globe, we’ve seen echoes of a return to the panic-buying and manic hoarding of household essentials that characterised the middle months of 2020. But of course there is panic and there is panic! Covid-19 doesn’t hold a candle to the doom-cringing that accompanied the approach of Halley’s Comet to Planet Earth in 1910.

Astronomer Edmond Halley set the whole phenomena of comet prediction in motion back in the early 18th century when, using Newton’s laws of gravity and motion, he determined the periodicity of the recurring comet that came to bear his own name. Halley calculated its return to Earth occurring every 74 to 79 years, marking the first time that science, wresting control from the astrologers and prophets, predicted a future occurrence in nature❆ (prior to Halley astronomers viewed the periodic appearance of the comet as distinct and separate occurrences) [‘Apocalypse postponed: How Earth survived Halley’s comet in 1910’, (Stuart Clark), The Guardian, 20-Dec-2012, www.theguardian.com; ‘Halley’s Comet: Facts about the most famous comet’, (Elizabeth Howell), Space.com, (2017), www.space.com/].

Talking up planetary peril
With Halley’s Comet due to return in 1910, in February of that year the Yerkes Observatory undertook spectroscopic analysis and announced that there was cyanide (poison gas) in the tail of the approaching comet. When he became aware of this, French astronomer Camille Flammarion observed that the comet “could impregnate the atmosphere and possibly snuff out all life all life on the planet”. The “Yellow Press” of the world seized on this, sensationalising the claim (the Comet was depicted as “the evil eye of the sky”). Flammarion’s comment and the alarmist reporting generated widespread public fear and hysteria, triggering all manner of drastic actions in response to the Comet’s imminent arrival. Some people in despair of impending doom went on dangerous alcoholic binges, one person in Hungary even suicided convinced of the probability of global immolation. In America, forebodings of doom accorded with a particular interpretation of the Bible in the Midwest and Rockies states and prompted intemperate reactions to the Comet (farmers selling off all their property, slaughtering their livestock, etc) [‘Halley’s Comet: Topics in Chronicling America’, Library of Congress Research Guides, www.guides.loc.gov/; ‘Memories of Halley’s Comet (1910) – Group Oral History Interview’, SCARC, Oregon State University, www.scarc.library.oregonstate.edu].

⤵ 1910 Comet over Gary, Indiana

Altering nature and the environment
Elsewhere the (irrational) fear of a huge ball of toxic gas hurtling towards Earth at 190,000 km per hour led some folk to wildly predict dire consequences for the planet – in France the River Seine would be flooded, it was said, it would cause the Pacific to change basins with the Atlantic, and so on [‘Halley’s Comet, Covid-19, and the history of “miracle” anti-comet remedies’, (Sylvain Chaty), Astronomy, 09-Oct-2020, www.astronomy.com/; ‘Fantasically Wrong: That Time People Thought a Comet Would Gas Us All to Death’, (Matt Simon), Wired, 01-Jul-2015, www.wired.com/].

In China the comet kerfuffle contributed to the social and political unrest that culminated in the Xinhai Revolution in 1911, which brought to a close the reign of the last Chinese emperor [James Hutson, Chinese Life in the Tibetan Foothills, (1921)].

⤴ Postcard, 1910 Comet (Source: www.sciencesource.com)

Art anticipates life
Interestingly, just four years earlier, pioneering science-fiction novelist HG Wells had provided what many, over-stimulated by the Comet’s presence, saw as a different omen. Wells’ novel In the Days of the Comet pictured a “green trailing trail” plummeting inexorably to Earth…the only difference being that the destruction that  the socialist Wells’ comet was going to inflict on the world was on the “voracious system of capitalism”  [’The Doom of the World’, (Vaughan Yarwood), New Zealand Geographic,  www.nzgeo.com/].

The impending cataclysm brings out the fraudsters
Right on cue with the diffusion of hysteria was the emergence of charlatans and scammers peddling ”sure-fire” remedies to counteract the devastating effects of Halley’s Comet’s impact with Earth (cf. the Donald Trump-endorsed bleach and other quackery claiming to be an antidote to Covid-19). in 1910 there were ‘miracle’ anti-comet pills (comprising sugar and quinine) and a cure-all “Halley’s Comet elixir” (Chaty). Just as Coronavirus 2020 prompted a run on toilet paper and hand sanitiser in the supermarkets, people started panic-buying gas masks while some flocked to their churches to seek divine intervention to save them from the Comet [‘The Halley’s Comet Fuss of 1910’, (Jacob vanderSluys), Jacob vanderSluys, 18-Aug-2020, wwe.jacobvsndersluys.medium.com].

⤵ 1986 Comet (Image: NASA)

As things transpired the reality turned out to be something of an anti-climax…Halley’s Comet safely passed by Earth, missing it by at least 400,000 kilometres (as it had done previously every 75-76 years for millennia!)✧ and normality returned to everyday life across the globe (Chaty).

⤵ Bayeux Tapestry depicting 1066 Comet

Footnote: All down to Halley’s Comet
Coincidences occurring during the periodic passage of the Comet has provided fertile ground for doomsayers. Edward VII’s death in May 1910 during the period Halley’s Comet was visible, was ‘proof’ to many of the Comet’s ‘paranormal’ power to wreak havoc and destruction on the Earth♉︎. Similarly, it was noted that author Mark Twain’s lifespan encompassed the exact duration between the 1835 and the 1910 comets. People in 1066 saw the passage of Halley’s Comet as a foreboding sign…for English king, Harold II, this premonition preceded his loss and death in the Battle of Hastings later in that year. The Great Comet of 1680 facilitated a scientific breakthrough, in this year German astronomer Gottfried Kirch was the first to sight Halley’s Comet through a telescope.

⤴ 1680 Comet over Rotterdam (Lieve Verschuier)

𖥸 𖥸 𖥸

the next perihelion of Halley’s Comet is predicted for 2061

………………………………………………………………
❆ Unfortunately Halley himself didn’t live long enough to witness the next cycle of his eponymous comet (1758)

✧ subsequent scientific testing confirmed that the tail of the Comet contained no toxic gas

♉︎ In Julius Caesar Shakespeare wrote, “when beggars die there are no comets seen, The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes”

Norfolk Island’s Auxiliary Settlement: Penal Origins and Pitcairn Continuities

Posted on by E Curb Nottus
Local history, Regional History

Just five weeks after the First Fleet led by Captain Arthur Phillip arrived in Port Jackson in 1788, Lieutenant Philip Gidley King was despatched to Norfolk Island 1,673 km north-east of Sydney to establish an ancillary settlement of convicts and free settlers※. The British, recognising the island’s strategic importance in the western Pacific and the need to keep it out of French hands, had a further, practical motive for colonising Norfolk Island. Captain James Cook on his 1774 Pacific voyage identified the island’s (Norfolk Island) pines and (New Zealand) flax plant as invaluable materials for the construction of masts and sails. As it turned out they weren’t, being too brittle for this purpose, although the island’s soil proved good for agriculture and farming (in the early settlement days Norfolk served as Sydney’s ”food bowl”) [Robert Macklin, Hamilton Hume, Our Greatest Explorer, (2019); ‘History’, (Norfolk Island National Park), www.parksaustralia.gov.au].

≜ Norfolk Is penal settlement, ca.1790 (Geo. Raper) (State Lib. of NSW)

From the early days of settlement the convicts made an unsuccessful attempt to depose King. In 1800 Rum Corps officer Joseph Foveaux was made commandant of Norfolk Island, and he successfully but ruthlessly suppressed a new insurrection in 1801 by United Irish prisoners. Foveaux summarily executed some of the convicts without due legal process and courted controversy for his practice of selling female prisoners to settlers. However overall he was commended by the authorities for the advancement of public works on the island under his administration [B. H. Fletcher, ‘Foveaux, Joseph (1767–1846)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/foveaux-joseph-2062/text2567, published first in hardcopy 1966, accessed online 30 December 2020].

(Image: www.lonelyplanet.com)

Abandonment and penal rebirth
Settlement on Norfolk Island went in fits and starts. In 1814 it was abandoned altogether◕ due to a combination of factors – a poor harbour made for perilous landing sites; isolation and remoteness; too costly to maintain; diminished necessity (Sydney had achieved self-sufficiency in food) [‘Looking at History’, 14-Aug-2015, wwwrichardjohnbrblogspotcom]. In 1825 the island was resettled again as a penal colony. This was the beginning of Norfolk’s darkest chapter of its history. The British determined that the reestablished penal colony would be home to the worst case prisoners. Norfolk Island’s second penitentiary has been described as a “planned hell”, with a series of convict uprisings and escape attempts a recurring feature (eg, the 1846 “Cooking Pot” rebellion resulted in its 12 leaders being executed for the murder of four minor officials [Burridge, K. (2013). Review of Mühlhäusler, Peter, and Joshua Nash, Norfolk Island: History, people, environment, language. Oceanic Linguistics, 52(2).] (see Postscript for a different perspective on the question of the penitentiary’s severity).

In the wake of the Bounty
By 1855, with transportation to New South Wales ended, there was only eleven residents left on Norfolk Island (the colony’s remaining 119 convicts had already been relocated to the draconian Van Diemen’s Land prison system). The following year the island was turned over to (194) descendants of the Pitcairn Island mutineers and their Tahitian families. Each was entitled to 50-acre grant of land on Norfolk. Some of the new settlers returned to Pitcairn within ten years but many who stayed pursued their traditional vocations of farming and whaling❂.

(Photo: Getty Images/Lonely Planet)

By the late 19th century the settlers on NI were engaged in a range of industries – forestry, cattle and the growth of export crops (lemon, passionfruit, banana). Changes in land use altered the ecosystem of Norfolk Island. The intensive agricultural use, the clearing of native land, saw the original subtropical rainforest give way to a pastoral landscape of rolling green hills encircled by rocky outcrops (‘Norfolk Island NP’).

Norfolk Island, inching towards autonomy and self-rule
After Australia achieved federation Norfolk Island was administered as an external territory, control alternating between the Australian Commonwealth and NSW. During WWII an Allied airfield was constructed on the island, testimony to its strategic importance in the Pacific theatre of the war. In 1979 Norfolk Island was granted limited self-government by Australia. A constant theme for Norfolk Island throughout its post-war history—perhaps even existing from the initial Australian takeover before WWI—has been the tensions and ambiguities resulting from a search for identity…the NI community is aware of the constant shadow of Australian governance over it and yet it also sensing in its distinctive Pacific Island nature a yearning for self-rule and independence (Burridge). In 2015 Canberra delivered a body blow to the autonomous aspirations of locals when, on the back of an NI economic decline due to the GFC and diminished tourism, it rescinded the Island’s self-government [‘Norfolk Island broke, set to be stripped of self rule’, (Nine News), 19-Mar-2015, www.9news.com.au].

(Image: www.mapsland.com)

Endnote: The period since the transportation of convicts to NI ended has been marked by an absence of violent crime. However early in the 21st century the tranquility was punctured by not one but two murders in the peaceful island community. In 2002 a young woman (an Australian mainlander working in NI) was murdered in mysterious circumstances. Two year after this, the NI government’s deputy chief minister was fatally shot in Kingston the NI capital…the murder had a family rather than a political motive and was not connected to the earlier homicide [New Zealand Herald, 20-Jul-2004].

≜ NI’s old and newer prisons with the iconic Norfolk Is Pines in the background (Source: www.aucklandmuseum.com)

Postscript: Norfolk Island, a “punitive hell” for incorrigibles or an overstated case?  
The conventional view of Norfolk Island as a penitentiary by the mid-19th century is that it “was the most notorious penal station in the English-speaking world and represented all that was bad about the convict system”⚃ (eg, convicts universally brutalised by sadistic gaolers). The colonial secretary in London directed Governor Brisbane in NSW in 1825 to send “the worst description of convicts” to Norfolk, (those) “excluded from all hope of return”. The characterisation of the NI penal colony as “hell-on-earth” is myth not fact according to historian Tim Causer who demurs from the consensus opinion. He argues that the NI inmates were not predominantly of the worst kind, not recidivists, not “doubly-convicted capital respites”, as widely stated. Using the available data Causer shows a contrary picture: over 2,400 of the convicts were first offenders who came directly from Britain and Ireland; nearly 70% sent to NI were sentenced for non-violent crimes (against property) (“‘The worst types of sub-human beings’? The myth and reality of the convicts of the Norfolk Island penal settlement, 1825-1855”, (Tim Causer), March 2011, www.researchgate.net].

__________________________________________
※ the original inhabitants of Norfolk Island were Polynesian seafarers (14th-15th century) who journeyed there from the Kermadec Islands or the North Island of New Zealand

◕ and replaced as a penal destination by Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania)

❂ roughly half of the present NI population of 1,800 are descended from Pitcairners

⚃ at the time NI penitentiary was universally synonymous with criminality and perversion, even alluded to by Charles Dickens in Hard Times. NI was widely considered equal to or worst than the barbaric penal colony at Macquarie Harbour (Tasmania)

Suburban Sydenham: A Mixed and Changing Landscape of Grand Estates, Workers’ Cottages, Industrial Concentration and Airport Encroachment

Posted on by Sloane Snodgrasse
Aviation history, Built Environment, Heritage & Conservation, Leisure activities, Local history, Politics

Sydenham is a tiny inner suburb of Sydney which sits on traditional Cadigal land, part of the Eora nation, some eight kilometres south-west of the CBD. In the formative colonial period Sydenham was subsumed under a wider area known as Bulanaming which stretched from Petersham to Cook’s River  and included  a chunk of undesirable swampy land  (Gumbramorra Swamp).

(Map: www.dictionaryofsydney.org/)

Grand designs Sydenham
From the 1850s on, the better land on the eastern part of the suburb was turned into grand estates for well-to-do colonial businessmen. These large villa estates occupied an area from Unwins Bridge Road back to Cooks River Road (later renamed Princes Highway). Perhaps the pick of these “large country retreats” in Sydenham, located between Reilly and Grove Streets, was the Grove Estate, with its two-storey Georgian villa, owned by John George Church. Adjoining the Grove Estate was ironmonger Richard Reilly’s Tivoli Estate with a similarly impressive Georgian villa➀ [Meader, Chrys, Sydenham, Dictionary of Sydney, 2008, http://dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/sydenham, viewed 25 Dec 2020].

The working class swamped
Commencing in the 1880s, the grand estates started to be broken up by subdivision and the suburb’s complexion took on a recognisable working class character. Rows of Victorian cottages sprang up, many occupied by workers at the nearby Albion and other brickworks in nearby St Peters. At the same time developers sold cheap, unviable land in the swamp area to the working class. This was the notorious Tramvale Estate—badly designed, lacking in basic sewerage facilities, low-lying, prone to flooding and poor drainage—resulting in the spread of disease, plagues of mosquitos in summer and an all-pervasive, persistent stench, leaving the owners holding what amounted to a “white elephant” they couldn’t re-sell (Meader).

Adjoining suburb: Cooks River Road, St Peters (1935) 🔻

(Photo: State Library of NSW)

Industrial landscape and dichotomy
The swamp was finally drained in the 1890s and the land on it repurposed for heavy industry and engineering works. Factories took root, such as Australian Woollen Mills and the Sydney Steel Company (supplier of steel for the Sydney Harbour Bridge construction)➁. By the early 20th century Sydenham had taken on a twofold complexion: an industrial western part and a primarily residential eastern part (Meader)

The post-WWII period brought an influx of migrants to the inner west suburb, mostly Greeks, Macedonians, Croatians, Serbs and Slovenes from the former Yugoslavia, Turks and later Vietnamese. In the 1950s and 60s Sydenham proved a good recruiting ground for young athletic Aboriginal men who would go on to play rugby league for the Newtown club (Meader).

🔺 Sydenham farms

Sydenham cultural and entertainment ‘hub’  
Sydenham has at best been only modestly endowed with shopping options  (a handful of shops trailing off from the railway station➂) in comparison with  surrounding urban hubs like Marrickville, the local Sydenham community could boast a pub (the General Gordon) and a cinema, the Sydenham Picture Palace, later superseded by the art deco Rex Theatre (47 Unwins Bridge Rd) closed in 1959 and converted into a roller-drome in 1960. Sydenham at one point also had its own live theatre venue, Norman McVicker’s Pocket Playhouse (94 Terry Street), which operated from 1957 to 1973 [‘Pocket Playhouse’, www.budgeebudgee.wordpress.com].

🔻 Vivien Leigh attending the Pocket Playhouse with proprietor Norman McVicker, 1961

From under the radar to under the runway  
In the early 1990s the Federal government spearheaded a plan to add a third runway to Sydney Kingsford Smith Airport  which presaged irreparable change to Sydenham’s (eastern) residential zone. The scheme was vigorously opposed at a grass-roots level and supported by a Coalition of (thirteen) Sydney Councils including Marrickville Council (although it later did a volte-face and sided with the government). Although supposed to be ‘voluntary’, some Sydenham residents who were reluctant to sell and move were ‘persuaded’ to comply by intolerable noise levels for residents from the airport just 2km away and from adjacent demolition work in progress [‘The fight to save Sydenham’, (Tom Wilson), Green Left Review, 24-Oct-1995, Issue 208, www.greenleftreview.org.au].  When the dust had settled, in excess of over 120 Sydenham houses had been acquired and demolished for the runway go-ahead…this clean-out were described by the Sydney Morning Herald as the airport “gobbling up a whole suburb”. Only a solitary cottage of the row of historic dwellings in the frontline Railway Road survived the decimation, No 19, “Stone Villa” (now an artists’ studio)➃.

PostScript: Sydenham Green  
By way of compensation for the demolished houses in Railway Rd, Marrickville Council was handed back the land in 1994…after deliberation the Council turned it into Sydenham Green, a  public park with ‘funky’ community sculptures and a skate park—and being directly under the flight path of the third runway—a quirky arch monument of sorts recounting the local community’s valiant efforts to stop its realisation. By its very presence, Sydenham Green stands as an “everyday reminder of how aircraft noise tore the heart out of a suburb” (Meader).

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➀ both the Grove and the Tivoli villas were demolished during WWI

➁ largest employer in the Marrickville Municipality, >7,500 staff

➂ known as Marrickville Station until 1895 when the Bankstown line opened and Marrickville got its own railway station

➃ a belated casualty was Australia’s first Coptic Church (24A Railway Road), which had dodged the authorities’ demolition plans for two decades only to see a fire reduce its survival efforts to ashes in 2017