When I first came to Australia I was delighted to encounter the Victorian Readers and the Education Department’s School Magazine which came once a month or so.  These were the mainstay of the primary school reading program in those days, and they are so fondly remembered that the set of eight books was reprinted not so long ago.  Although today sometimes derided for being jingoistic and sexist, the collection included many memorable stories and poems, and the one which I remember best of all is the story of Australia’s heroic Antarctic explorer, Sir Douglas Mawson (1882 -1958).

As I remember the tale, Mawson and his companions Mertz and Ninnis were making good progress when Ninnis fell into a crevasse, along with most of the dogs, most of the rations, and the tent.  Their efforts to rescue Ninnis failed and they had to head back to base with what they had.  Starving, they ate the sled dogs, and the excess of Vitamin A in the dogs’ liver caused some kind of poisoning which led to their skin peeling off, to dysentery, and ultimately to Mertz’s death.  Mawson then had to go on alone, and he too fell into a crevasse but was able to haul himself back up.   The delay cost him dearly: he missed the ship back to Australia by a few hours and had to winter in Antarctica along with the rescue party that had been sent to look for him.

In the South Australian Museum there ’s an exhibition about Mawson, the most vivid artefact of which is the knife that Mawson used to cut his sled to make it smaller and more manageable for the journey alone.  It is hard to imagine a more poignant and interminable task than using a knife to cut a wooden sled in half for the lonely journey back to the base.  There’s a website about it, but  it’s not comparable with the compelling story that I remember from all those years ago.  That was based on Mawson’s own story, The Home of the Blizzard, The Story of the Australasian Antarctic Expedition, 1911-1914, and faithful to it, although some of the more grisly details of Mertz’s last moments of madness were excised for young readers.  These days you can read it online at Project Gutenberg but it’s worth shelling out for the recent reprint by Wakefield Press because it includes maps, diagrams and photographs, one of which was taken of Mawson after his epic sledge journey.  It also includes the narratives of others in the expedition and of the rescue party, but it is Mawson’s words which are unforgettable:

There was no sound from behind except a faint, plaintive whine from one of the dogs which I imagined was in reply to a touch from Ninnis’s whip.  I remember addressing myself to George, the laziest dog in my own team, saying “You’ll be getting a little of that, too, George, if you are not careful.”

When next I looked back, it was in response to the anxious gaze of Mertz who had turned round and halted in his tracks.  Behind me nothing met the eye except my own sledge tracks running back in the distance.  Where were Ninnis and his sledge?

…

It was difficult to realise that Ninnis, who was a young giant in build, so jovial and so real but a few minutes before, should thus have vanished without even a sound. (p160-1)

Mawson writes movingly about the dogs, their faithful companions:

Poor brutes! That was the way they all finished up; from putting little or no weight into the harness they relapsed into an uncertain ‘groggy’ pace with a slack trace; a few miles more and they would commence to totter and stumble, soon to rise no more. (p172)

And about Mertz with generous praise:

It was unutterably sad that he should have perished thus, after the splendid work he had accomplished not only on that particular sledging journey but throughout the expedition.  No one could have done better.  Favoured with a generous and lovable character, he had been a general favourite amongst all the members of the expedition. Now it was all over, he had done his duty and passed on. (p185)

This is the passage that I remember so vividly from my schooldays:

From the start my feel felt curiously lumpy and sore.  They had become so painful after a mile of walking that I decided to examine them on the spot, sitting in the lee of the sledge in brilliant sunshine. I had not had my socks off for some days for, while lying in camp [while Mertz lay dying] it had not seemed necessary.  On taking off the third and inner pair of socks the sight of my feet gave me quite a shock, for the thickened skin of the soles had separated in each case as a complete layer, and abundant watery fluid had escaped saturating the sock.  The new skin beneath was very much abraded and raw.  (p187)

Wondering whether there was ‘ever to be a day without some special disappointment’, Mawson could do nothing but bind the skin casts back in place, and struggle on.’ (p187) . 

Struggle on he did, to the moment of crisis when he dangled at the end of a rope above the depths of a treacherous crevasse:

In my weak condition, the prospect of climbing out seemed very poor indeed, but in a few moments the struggle was begun.  A great effort brought a knot in the rope within my grasp, and after a moment’s rest, I was able to draw myself up and reach another, and at length hauled my body on to the overhanging snow-lid.  Then, when all appeared to be well and before I could get to quite solid ground, a further section of the lid gave way, precipitating me once more to the full length of the rope.

There, exhausted, weak and chilled hanging freely in space and slowly turning round as the rope twisted one way and the other, I felt that I had done my utmost and failed, that I had no more strength to try again and that all was over except the passing.  It was to be a miserable and slow end and I reflected with disappointment that there was in my pocket no antidote to speed matters; but there always remained the alternative of slipping from the harness.  There on the edge of the great Beyond I well remember how I looked forward to the prospect of the unknown to be unveiled.  From those flights of mind I came back to earth, and remembering how Providence had miraculously brought me so far, felt that nothing was impossible and determined to act up to Service’s lines:

“Just have one more try – it’s dead easy to die,

It’s the keeping-on-living that’s hard.” [1]

My strength was fast ebbing; in a few minutes it would be too late.  It was the occasion for the supreme attempt.  Fired by the passion that burns the blood in the act of strife, new power seemed to come as I applied myself to one last tremendous effort. (p192)

What triggered these musing on my childhood hero Mawson was that today I read that there is to be a new expedition to find the remains of  his plane in Antarctica.  Well, not actually a plane, because although he took it there in 1911 it didn’t work and so they converted it into a tractor.  Still, it was the first plane ever taken to Antarctica, on Australia’s first expedition:

“[It is] the first aircraft ever built by the Vickers company in the UK, built in 1911, just eight years after the Wright Brothers’ first flight….Using it there, it didn’t fly unfortunately, there was damage to the wings but they converted it and used it as a tractor to tow things around on the ice. But it was the first aircraft ever taken to a polar region and we feel it’s still there.”  (Tony Stewart, leader of the expedition team, quoted on ABC Online).

It would be a fitting tribute to the ingenuity and courage of Mawson if they find it.

Author: Douglas Mawson

Title: The Home of the Blizzard, The Story of the Australasian Antarctic Expedition, 1911-1914

Publisher: Wakefield Press, 1996 ( reprint of the 1930 popular edition, abridged from the 1915 2 volume edition).

ISBN: 9781862543775

Source: Personal copy, purchased at the Museum of South Australia. 

[1] From the poem, The Quitter, by Robert Service (1874-1958)

I’ve come across two books by Peter Grose, both of them myth-busters.  An Awkward Truth is the story of the Japanese raid on Darwin during World War II in 1942, and A Very Rude Awakening is about the three midget submarines that entered Sydney Harbour on May 31st 1942, and sank HMAS Kuttabul, a converted ferry which was moored at Garden Island. 

Both these books show just how unprepared Australia was for war.  Having relied on the British Navy for security since settlement, Australia had not long realigned its foreign policy towards the US, but was still shocked by the Fall of Singapore on February 15th, 1942.  However government censorship meant that civilians didn’t know much about the subsequent bombing of Darwin on February 19th and according to Grose, the war still seemed remote and there was no rush to enlist in Australia’s defence.

Grose painstakingly recounts the catalogue of errors that enabled three Japanese midget submarines sneaked through the harbour defences.  Past indicator loops, navy patrols and an anti-submarine net across the entrance.  When the subs were finally observed and a report was brought to the attention of the navy, it was ignored.  Grose’s argument is, and it seems hard to refute, that the only reason there was so little loss of life that night was sheer luck.  Although there were instances of courage, there was also crass stupidity, laziness and incompetence, and the damage that could have been done to Allied shipping should give everyone pause for thought.  The 27 men who died, should not have;  heads should have rolled, and didn’t.

Unfortunately Grose’s scorn sometimes gets the better of him, and it makes me wonder a bit about his objectivity.

If you are interested in learning more about the attack, Australia’s War 1939-1945 is an excellent site with maps, images, animations and video.

Author: Peter Grose

Title: A Very Rude Awakening:  the night the Japanese midget subs came to Sydney Harbour, read by James Wright.

Publisher: Louis Braille Audio, 2007

ISBN: 978 0 7320 3349 1

Refugees and Rebels: Indonesian Exiles in Wartime Australia, by Jan Lingard (Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2008)

Jan Lingard’s book, Refugees and Rebels – Indonesian Exiles in Wartime Australia is a humane, interesting, informative and readable book. Every person interested in the history of the Australian and/or Indonesian people should read this book. It should be on the reading lists of high school and university history of Australia courses. The book describes and analyses the experiences of  5000s Indonesians living, working and engaging in political struggle in both cities and country towns in Australia between 1942 and 1947, the period of Japanese occupation of their country and the beginning of the armed struggle for Indonesian independence which started soon after the proclamation of Independence on August 17, 1945.

 The book describes and analyses events which are precious to the collective memory of the Australian people, and in particular to the Australian working class.  The collective class memory, and even the national memory, of the events in this book has been mostly erased, and where that has proved awkward, domesticated. This book is an important step forward in recovering that memory. In follows more than two decades later the work by the Communist journalist, Rupert Lockwood, who wrote Black Armada. Lockwood chronicled one aspect of the experiences and struggle of Indonesians in Australia in the 1942-47 period, their involvement in the black banning of Dutch ships in Australian ports which were supposed to be heading north to help the Dutch army retake Indonesia and make it again a colony.

Lingard’s research and writing enormously expands the picture of the experience and struggles that was inherited from Lockwood. Lockwood wrote mainly from his direct experience and the materials that he had at hand in the port unions and at the offices of the Tribune newspaper offices. Tribune was the newspaper of the Communist Party of Australia (CPA), which was an active participant in joint activities with some of the Indonesians active in Australia during this time. Lingard’s book takes us through the experiences of the black armada, but also into the hostels and labour camps where many Indonesian merchant seamen, evacuated employees of the Dutch colonial state as well as its prisoners lived and worked. She provides a series of short biographical sketches of many of the Indonesians and Australians involved, as well as a more detailed narrative of the most active and interesting figures.

As she points out clearly in her book, the special character of the presence of these 5,000 Indonesian men and women (although the women were a tiny minority) was an acute anomaly in what, in 1942, was still very much the White Australia of “Advance Australia Fair”. Furthermore, most of these “javos” as they were sometimes called (although by no means were they all from Java) were highly political, demonstrative of their refusal to accept exploitation and subordination. Those that had been in the terrible Boven Digul Dutch-run prison camp in western Papua were union militants, nationalist activists or communists. Merchant seamen and other sailors and employees who were drafted into militarised labor camps were often no less rebellious. And eventually almost all became involved in, as Lingard put it, executing the Indonesian revolution on Australian soil.

The richness of the human as well as the political experience of these people, and the internationalist Australians who worked with them (as well as the Australians that simply became their social friends and acquaintances) deserves to be a cultural and political asset for the Australian people, and especially the working class, today. This is not to romanticise the experience: Lingard documents the unevenness of reception at the grass-roots level as well as the considerable apathy about the cause of Indonesian independence that existed among the Australian public. Whether it was a white Australian’s negative response to the aromas of Indonesian food next door or hostility to romantic relationships between brown or white, the warts on the experience of interaction are there, as well as the inspiring stories of friendship and comradeship.

The book also documents Australian and Dutch government policies, showing the consistent deep colonial attitudes and policies of the Dutch and the contradictory policies of Australia, caught between a strong democratic sentiment in society and the interests of the Australian state in cooperating with a fellow white imperial state, as was the Dutch. A contradiction did develop between the Dutch and Australian ruling classes, which was sharpened by the campaigning initiated by the Indonesian activists in Australia.

It is the struggles of the Indonesian seamen’s union and the Indonesian Independence committees and the strikes and protests of Indonesian workers against imprisonment and economic mistreatment, and the solidarity and friendship of many Australians that should be a part of the collective memory of the Australian people. It would be one powerful antidote against the white racism of the Australian working class as well as an inspiring cultural asset.

Lingard comments in her conclusion that it was a fortuitous circumstance that there was a Labor government in Australia during these years and not a government headed by Robert Menzies, the head of the coalition of conservative parties that made up the parliamentary opposition. She points out that Menzies, as well as most of the Australian press, consistently supported the Dutch colonial interests on almost every issue and opposed every concession made by the Labor government to Indonesia and its supporters in Australia. It was important that the Labor party was in power, not because of innate tendency of the Labor Party and its government to support Indonesia but because the Labor Party leadership in parliament- especially before the 1980s – was still susceptible to pressures from its support base in the trade unions.

Lingard’s point is not only important as an assessment of where parties stood over the issue – and there is plenty of good material on this in her book – but also important in explaining how the memory of this very exciting, inspiring and humane event was erased from class and national memory. The Labor government was followed by 17 years of government by Menzies (1949-1966). During almost all of this time the Australian government adopted a hostile attitude to Indonesia, supplying arms to rightist military rebels against the Indonesian government in the 1960s and waging a propaganda, diplomatic and military opposition towards the anti-imperialist policies of president Sukarno in the 1960s. It is not surprising that solidarity with the Indonesian militants of the 1940s was encouraged to disappear. (A history of how that actually happened would also be interesting, including how and when it disappeared from the institutional memory of Australian trade unions).

Now, occasionally, the belated Australian government support in the United Nations for Indonesian independence after 1946 will get a mention in official speeches about Australian Indonesian relations. This domestication of the memory of those events is based on the erasure of memory of the working class, grass-roots fundamentals of that experience.

This is a very important book. Buy it and read it, is my suggestion.

2009, 549p plus notes

This is an absolutely beautiful book.

Physically, it is a thing of beauty.  It is hard cover, brimming with photographs and drawings (some glossy museum pictures juxtaposed with current photographs that the author has taken herself), with thick, luxuriant white pages.   And beautiful it should be, I suppose, supported as it is by the City of Sydney, the Australia Council, the Australian Academy of Humanities and the State Library of NSW.  In fact at first I thought it was a coffee table book to accompany a series (there was an SBS series of that name) but it’s not.  It’s a history (with the humility to designate itself a history rather than the history) fair and square, without apologies.

Karskens nails her colours to the mast: she is writing as an historian, and participating in a historical conversation with other historians:

This book has its roots deep in a great mountain of existing research, thinking and histories.  Historians work collectively, within a wider community of scholars.  So history writing is less an individualist pursuit than a collective quest, and an ongoing process.  This is one reason references are so important: they rightly acknowledge the work of past scholars, as well as guiding future readers and scholars into the literature.  In the notes and bibliography of this book you will find, besides original manuscripts and archival records, maps and pictures, an extraordinary and diverse body of scholarship about early Sydney, works mainly by historians, but also archaeologists, economists, anthropologists, art and architectual historians, ecologists, geologists, museuologists, geographers, biographers and local and community historians.  (p. xii)

She is true to her word.  There’s a heavy debt to Inga Clendinnen here, not only in content but in writing style, and likewise to Alan Atkinson- two historians I deeply admire whose writing turns an event around and looks at it from different angles, giving us the gift of coming to the familiar with new eyes.   There’s also a connection with James Boyce whose recent book Van Diemen’s Land is almost a pigeon-pair with this book in its re-visioning of the penal colony as a new environment with new opportunities.  Unlike Robert Hughes’ The Fatal Shore, this book joins other histories- John Hirst’s work springs to mind-  written with  a determination to look beyond Hughes’ gulag and horror: it looks to the agency, optimismism and opportunism of ordinary people in a new environment instead of just the dregs of the old world.

The history itself is a thing of beauty too.  It breaks free of many straitjackets: more than perhaps any other history of Australia that I have read it interweaves Aboriginal history, archaeology, women and environmental history throughout the book.  Not content with the almost obligatory “before” chapter dealing and then dispensing with “the aborigines”, she asserts that Sydney remained an Eora town- that Eora people continued to live within Sydney on their own terms, with their own geography and in resistance to christianizing impulses, into the 1830s and 40s. Indeed, they have never left.

The environmental theme carries throughout the book as well.  She starts in deep time and emphasizes the connection between landscape and food supply not just along the coastal regions, but inland along the rivers and ravines.  Unlike other histories which are drawn to the inland and the importance of crossing mountains and going towards the centre, she turns back towards the sea, just as the early Sydney people did.  She reminds us that Sydney had three beginnings: the abandoned Botany Bay settlement;  Port Jackson (truly a ‘port’ city where early convicts settled into the Rocks with their own raucous, uninhibited subculture), and then the third, more ordered attempt to start again in Parramatta by imposing conformity onto the layout.  She reminds us that once settlers spilled onto the Cumberland Plain, confronted by different tribes, the same battles had to be fought anew with new opponents.   The Europeans of early Sydney were not the industrialized huddled-masses; they were pre-modern people bringing with them the patterns of village tradition and the pre-industrial paradox of deference combined with the English moral economy.  At the same time, though, they were a consumer society, tied into the broader imperial economy by virtue of the port which serviced and was served by British trade routes and markets.

In Karsken’s book Macquarie is not the benign “Father of Australia”.  Instead she depicts both Lachlan and Elizabeth Macquarie as landscape artists, imposing their improving architectural vision onto Sydney, obliterating the emergent, spontaenous eruption of the workers’  lifestyle and culture by appropriating public space for the ‘respectable’ in mimicry of  a modern European urban landscape.

Nor, despite her obvious respect,  does she let Clendinnen’s romantic vision of dancing strangers blind us to the violence that was the first response and default position;  unlike Clendinnen she is not so enamoured of Watkin Tench that she sees his expedition under Phillip’s orders as a face-saving farce.

In her review of the book  Cassandra Pybus she chided Karskens for following the well-worn and well-mined biographies of  governors, scribbling military officers, Macquarie, Ruse and a few high-profile convicts.  I’m not sure that this is fair: the book is studded with small stories that move into the spotlight then fall back to the wings- not grand narratives to be sure, but small solo items that illuminate and make larger arguments human before moving on.  There is the grand design of official planning and policy, but she emphasizes that there was a complementary,unofficial, spontaneous counter-reality that emerged from the myriad small stories and small lives of ordinary people.

Some quibbles?  Karskens had succeeded so admirably in integrating an aboriginal worldview and interaction throughout the book, but two lengthy chapters at the close of the book focus on black/white relations in the Cumberland region.  Given that she was already handling this so naturally and unselfconsciously these two chapters deflected the book into another direction.  They are both long chapters.  Up to this point, there had been such elegance in the writing, at both structural and sentence level, but the conclusion of the book is  weighted unevenly and the work as a whole loses its symmetry.

The book is richly illustrated, so much so that I was surprised to find colour plates half-way through.  I had assumed that it was black and white only, and there was no reference in the text (e.g. Plate 3) to prompt the reader to search for them.  I felt almost cheated to find them later.  Likewise, maps would have reinforced her argument about the importance of waterways and coast and the pattern of the spread of settlement.

Ah, but these are just quibbles.  This is an insightful, intelligent, deeply human history with immaculate scholarship.   In his review published in The Monthly, Alan Atkinson wrote that the book  “propels Karskens straight to the first rank of Australian historians”- high praise indeed.  It’s certainly had me engrossed for about the last three weeks (hence the paucity of other book reviews recently), and you know- I think I’ll read it again one day.

© Edna Walling Collection, La Trobe Picture Collection, State Library of Victoria Accession No.: H96.150/278 Subject/s: Shows Edna Walling looking down at her Rolleiflex camera as she shoots her own portrait.

Just wanted to let everyone know that I haven’t abandoned blogging – I’m just really busy with end-of-semester assignments. When I no longer have any pressing commitments to attend to I plan to write on the following topics:

• Same-sex marriage
• Martha Vicinus’ essay “Lesbian History: All Theory and No Facts or All Facts and No Theory?,” Radical History Review, Vol. 60, 1994, pp. 57-75 and the privileging of the mannish woman and visibly marked difference in lesbian history and historiography.
• Misogyny in “indie” and/or “alternative” music and white “hipster” culture.
• The prostituted women who was charged (and later acquitted) of anally raping her male “customer” in Melbourne earlier this year.
• Woman-loving and sisterhood.
• Prostituted women, disability rights advocates and men’s sexual access to women as a ” human right”
• A reappraisal of Valerie Solanas

The photograph is of Edna Walling (1895-1973), the Australian landscape gardener, photographer and journalist. She was a lesbian  and spent much of her life among single, independent women. You can read more about her here.

I hope all of you are in good spirits and good health. In sisterhood, redmegaera.

Peter Lalor

(Born on February 5, 1827 in Tinakill, Queen’s Country, now County Leix.  Died February 9, 1889 in Melbourne),  a politician who, when he was a miner in 1854, led the gold miners’ uprising at the Eureka Stockade in Ballarat, Victoria, one of the most celebrated rebellions in Australian history.

Trained as an engineer in Ireland, Lalor emigrated to Victoria in 1852, working first on the Melbourne railway and then at the Eureka goldfield in 1853.  He joined the Ballarat Reform League, formed by miners on Nov. 11, 1854, to protest high license fees, police mistreatment, lack of representation, and shortage of land.  When the league’s petition for reform went unanswered by the government, the miners organized to fight on November 30 and chose Lalor as their leader.  He went into hiding after the rebellious miners were driven out of the Eureka Stockade on December 3 and emerged again after charges against the rebel  leaders had been dropped.  After the Eureka uprising, most of the miners’ grievances were redressed.

Lalor was one of the first goldfield representatives, elected to the Victoria Legislative Council in 1855 and then to the Legislative Assembly (lower house) 1856-71 and 1875-89.  He served as postmaster general (1875), commissioner of trade and customs (1875, 1877-80), and speaker of the assembly from 1880 to 1887.

Visual source:  mininghall

The Barossa Valley

Savour the delights, experience the culture

Vintage delights down in the valley.

The Barossa Valley – one of the world’s greatest wine producing areas … a focus for outstanding festivals, food and hospitality … a rural community with a special place in Australian history and culture .. a timeless landscape beckoning you to share its charms … and only one hour from the city of Adelaide.

Raise your glasses … there’s so much to celebrate.

Vines among gumtrees ..

A European chateau surrounded by Australian gumtrees full of birdlife.  The Barossa has blended its rich German heritage with the best of Australia.  A delicious variety of premium wines are ready to taste in imposing settings, vie-covered courtyards or humble stone cottages.  And don’t forget the food!  The famous Barossa butchers, bakers and restaurateurs have many delicacies with a taste of Europe – and why not then tour the charming villages and historic homesteads for a flavor of pioneer life?

A time to indulge.

Seeking a special experience?  Then sweep over the valley by hot air balloon to see the patchwork of vines, a scattering of cockatoos and glistening church spires spread before you Touch down to a champagne breakfast before exploring the many art galleries and craft shops.

Spend the night in a cosy cottage, country hotel or luxurious lodge.  Linger in front of that winter log fine and savour the atmosphere – you deserve it!

In tune with the season …

When you enter the valley, you switch into Barossa time – a life in harmony with the grapevine …  of spring green, summer fruit and autumn gold.  And music keeps time with the season – with the rejoicing of church balls, organs and choirs … and the celebrations of brass bands, street fairs and parades of harvest time.  Whether you prefer a party atmosphere or peaceful retreat, the choice is yours in this special world.  Locals call it ‘Gemutlichheit’ – you’d call it ‘the good life’ and you’re very welcome to share it.

Visual source:  singlestravel

***WARNING: What follows is the first half of an essay I wrote earlier this year about the abuse of women comitted to Parramatta Girls Training School and the Hay Girls Institution as teenagers between 1961 and 1974. It could be triggering for survivors of domestic violence and sexual abuse. It’s also not that well written.***

Parramatta Girls Training School

In this essay, discussing with reference to the experiences of women who were committed to Parramatta Girls Training School and the Hay Girls Institution as teenagers in the period between the 1961 Parramatta riots and the institutions’ ‘closure’ in 1974, I ask how individual experiences contribute to our present understandings of Australian identity and history. Drawing on former inmates’ personal accounts of their experiences in the New South Wales juvenile corrections system—including literary works, personal essays and interviews and submissions to the 2004 Senate Inquiry into Children in Institutional Care—I explore the lives of women labelled “delinquents” by the State and attempt to situate their experiences within the context of a long history of the incarceration and abuse of disadvantaged women and girls in Australia. How do their stories challenge popular representations of life in Australia during the 1960s and 1970s? How do public versions of the past, such as those constructed through Child Welfare Department reports, newspaper coverage and Senate and House of Representatives Hansards, both enable women to discuss their negative memories of institutionalisation and constrain or proscribe limits to the ways in which those memories are understood?

The Parramatta Girls Training School (hereafter Parramatta), also known as the Parramatta Girls Home, the Industrial School for Girls and the Parramatta Girls Training Home, was established in 1866 at Fleet Street, Parramatta. From 1911 the site operated as both an Industrial and Training School, with girls considered “less corrupt” housed in the Training School and others who were deemed “corrupt” sentenced to the Industrial School. In 1925 the institutions were remerged in the interests of “economic efficiencies”.[1] Between 1961 and 1974 Parramatta was a punitive institution designed for girls who, in the terminology of the day, were deemed “anti-social, maladjusted, incorrigible, hardened, wayward, uncontrollable and, ultimately, ‘delinquent’.”[2] According to the findings of the 2004 Senate Inquiry, large, barrack-like industrial schools such as Parramatta “were set up in Australia to provide rudimentary education and industrial training for children who were not necessarily orphans but who subsisted in poverty or whose parents did not provide for them.”[3] Its function also complemented the Child Welfare Department’s foster care system in that girls who ‘failed’ in foster care were committed to Parramatta for a period of ‘training’.[4] Processed through the Children’s Court, girls would be sentenced on a general committal charged with non-criminal ‘status offences’ such as truancy, uncontrollability and exposure to moral danger for an indeterminate period, usually six to nine months.[5] As Kate Gaffney writes in her history of the Winlaton Youth Training Centre at Nunawading, ‘semi-penal’[6] institutions such as Parramatta were promoted by authorities “as a solution to female juvenile delinquency of all kinds: criminality, sexual promiscuity, homelessness or parental neglect.”[7] According the Tasmanian Department’s 1956 annual report into the Ashley Home for Boys at Deloraine, the purpose of training schools was “to provide care and training for older wards, who, because of maladjustment and delinquency, require special institutional control.” This is a description which could apply to any of the “training” homes or schools established in Australia before 1974.[8] In practice, however, it’s likely that a majority of the “delinquent” and “maladjusted” girls committed to Parramatta in 1961-1974 came from family situations of sexual abuse, incest or domestic violence.[9] For example, Irene Byrne who was committed to Parramatta as a fourteen year-old girl in 1962 recalls

Dad…was listed as dangerous, he was on TV. He was captured and placed in the North Ryde Psychiatric Hospital…When I was a child I always knew when we were going to cop it, as Dad would screw his mouth and he would go all white, pure white around his mouth. We would cop a kicking, thrown from wall to wall. Hit on the jaw, steel-capped boots in the backside if they weren’t shiny enough…I got bashed a lot from my father as well as made fun of by the kids at both schools I went to. Because of the way we dressed, our shoes. Our family was the poorest of the area. I would also bash up the local kids. I wagged school a lot because of how we were treated.[10]

Of the events leading up to her appearance before the Children’s Court in 1962 she writes

One day my siblings and I were hungry, my stepmother Frances and my father were not feeding us, so Johnny and I and some aboriginal [sic] kids break into the Newtown Tech School tuckshop. I took food, I didn’t vandalise the ship but did break the window and bend the bars. Johnny and I went home with the food. Police came to our house and took me to the Newtown Police Station and put me in the cells for a while, until Dad got there. He never came.[11]

After spending a night at the Metropolitan Girl’s Shelter in Glebe, Irene appeared before the Children’s Court and was committed to Bidura Children’s Home. She escaped custody but was arrested again by police on Erskineville Road, Newtown on a visit to her siblings. Following her arrest she was taken to Newtown Police Station and charged with absconding lawful custody and “exposed to moral danger”.[12] Unfortunately, Irene’s story is not unusual. Jennifer Curtis and Carol Ann Capes were abused by their fathers; Teresa Finley’s mother was an alcoholic.[13] According to the Senate References Committee’s report on Australian’s who experienced institutional or out-of-home care as children, the entry books to Parramatta show that “girls who were raped or the victim of incest often found themselves committed to the institution, while the perpetrators remained free.”[14] Anonymous’ case, for example, is almost paradigmatic. At fourteen years of age Anonymous was pack-raped and abandoned in the bush separating housing at St Marys from the tanneries and munitions formerly operated by Australian Defence Industries in western Sydney.[15] After the perpetrators were charged, brought to trial and later acquitted Anonymous “took off to join the season pickers at Leeton” where she was arrested by police and sent to the Children’s Court at Glebe. Leaving home again in 1969, Anonymous was surrendered to the police by her mother and committed to Parramatta Girls Training School.[16]

Many women committed to Parramatta ran away from home; Maree Giles was sixteen years-old in 1970 when she ran away to her boyfriend’s rented accommodation at Manly[17] and other women report in their submissions running away from situations of sexual abuse, domestic violence and family dysfunction. Once on the streets, girls were presumed by authorities to be “sexually promiscuous” and would be arrested and subjected to a vaginal examination on remand while awaiting court appearance. As one of the NSW Department’s field officers told Joanna Penglase, little thought was given to the sensitivities of the girls “because they were regarded as juvenile prostitutes.”[18]

In many respects institutions like the Parramatta Girls Training School were reminders of the continuing hold that Victorian ideas about class and female sexuality had on Australian public life. The pathologizing of poverty, prostitution, alcoholism and criminality by nineteenth-century eugenicists and degeneracy experts was an attitude that persisted in Australian social policy well into the later part of the twentieth-century.[19] As Peter Quinn argues, from the institutions’ inception girls committed to Parramatta and Hay were considered part of a “delinquent class”. Girls were not treated as victims of domestic violence or sexual abuse but “as the progeny of a criminal class destined for the most part to remain part of that class.” This perception coloured all aspects of the way in which they were treated by authorities— “specifically lack of resources, the dominance of economic consideration over the welfare of children, excessive regimentation, harsh discipline and illegal punishments.”[20] The idea of a ‘delinquent class’, Quinn explains, originated in Britain in the early nineteenth-century where, in slum areas of London such as St. Giles and Seven Dials—both places in which there was a high concentration of Irish immigrants— there was “great public apprehension at a perceived increase in juvenile crime, and the creation of a dangerous, self-perpetuating class of professional criminals.”[21] While the idea of a delinquent class was never openly conceded, the actions and privately expressed attitudes of politicians and administrators are crystal clear. For example, in the Annual Report of the Girls Industrial School, Parramatta for 1914 the Superintendant refers to the girls there as “a low-class human type—a mere bundle of appetites of animalism…eminently biologically predisposed to prostitution of the lower type”.[22] He then goes on to report complaints from members of the public about the perceived wastefulness of spending money on girls they felt would surely end up as prostitutes.[23]

The Department also took a different attitude to delinquent girls compared with boys.  Girls were universally accepted to be more difficult to control and rehabilitate than boys. This was attributed in part to the fact that girls in institutions were claimed to have lower intelligence quotients than boys, but in practice had more to do with the perceived sexual precocity of delinquent girls, their predisposition to prostitution and the notion that their bad conduct was of an aggravated kind because they were “spreading venereal disease throughout the State.”[24] Similar attitudes persisted well into the twentieth-century. For example, in his famous ‘Forgotten People’ speech of 1942 Prime Minister Sir Robert Menzies implied a link between poverty and lack of intelligence:

…to say that the industrious and intelligent son of self-sacrificing and saving and forward-looking parents has the same social desserts and even material needs as the dull offspring of stupid and improvident parents is absurd.[25]

Similarly, in 1956 R. J. Heffron, the NSW Deputy Premier and Minister for Education wrote that

Deprived children, whether in their own homes or out of them, are a source of social infection as real and serious as are carriers of diphtheria and typhoid.[26]

By 1961 “there was thus a general view, extending over so many years that had become entrenched in the attitudes of those who were involved in the treatment of girl delinquents.”[27] This view was reflected in the institutional practices of places like Hay and Parramatta. Parramatta was highly-regimented, punitive institution. On their arrival girls were subjected to a compulsory vaginal examination, a practice which had been carried out routinely at Parramatta for many years. According to Peter Quinn, committal registers for Parramatta in the period before the First World War refer to girls as “NVI”—an abbreviation for non virgo intacta.[28] Such examinations were accepted by courts as evidence of the extent of sexual misbehaviour and were used in sentencing. Most girls were traumatized by the experience. In 1964 a visiting medical officer referred in passing to “the fact that when girls resisted vaginal examination, the practice was to bring them to his surgery, where the examination was conducted under general anaesthetic.[29]In her play Parramatta Girls[30]writer Alana Valentine records the following exchange:

GAYLE: My file had two lines on it.

JUDI: What’s that?

GAYLE: That’s the number of fingers the doctor was able to insert.

JUDI: Maybe it was something else.

GAYLE: It wasn’t something else. It was the number of fingers. If he could get two in that meant you were still a virgin, if he could get three in you’d had sex, if he could get four in, well. I’ve never met anyone with four lines on their file. Have you?[31]

Without exception every ex-Parramatta girl who made a submission to the 2004 Inquiry into Children in Institutional Care recalls the shame and humiliation of being subjected to a compulsory vaginal examination by “Dr Fingers”. Irene Byrne writes

I thought I was going to be deloused like I was in GGS [Glebe Girls Shelter]. I kept hearing other girls talk about the duck beak and I didn’t know what they meant and I never asked them…The nursing sister looked like a Nazi in a concentration camp. She had a hard, bad look on her face. She had an accent. I lay on the table, legs up, Dr. at one end. The nurse put the duck beak in. Suddenly my legs shook and my whole body shook. The Dr. inserted his fingers first and moved them around and then he stuck a stick inside and it really hurt. The nurse shone a torch at my pubic area and under my arms. I was too young.[32]

Sharyn O’Brien, a former inmate at both Parramatta and Hay writes in her submission

Some of the treatments were to have an internal vaginal check by a “doctor” on arrival who used stainless steel implements and his fingers to examine me, standing in line to have nightly showing of the crotch of our underpants by the officers, how embarrassing and soul-destroying for young teenage girls to do this…[33]

Delousing by cutting and washing hair in kerosene was also common.[34] Head-shaving, a practice first introduced by Governor Ralph Darling in 1826 as a form of punishment applied to women in the third penitentiary class of female prisons,[35] was a common disciplinary measure[36] and life at Parramatta was heavily regimented. Up until the mid-1960s, “all doors were normally locked so that passage of girls from one activity to another was habitually interrupted by the routine of locking and then unlocking the doors.”[37] Most activities were regulated by bells and the girls were only allowed to talk to each other for one hour a day. There were frequent musters where the girls were counted and detailed records were kept of the girls’ menstrual cycles.[38] Inmates wore “uncomfortable underwear made of unbleached calico which was not changed daily, and they were not issued with brassieres or sanitary pads.”[39]Sharyn O’Brien remembers menstrual blood running down the girls’ legs and “wetting ourselves while waiting for permission to be allowed to go to the toilet.”[40]Illegal punishment, including periods of isolated detention well-exceeding the allowable maximum time, was endemic in the system and persisted into the 1980s.[41]

Because of the harsh condition and oppressive regime, riots were a frequent occurrence at Parramatta with the earliest recorded in 1887 and others drawing public attention in 1890, 1898, 1899, 1941, 1942, 1943, 1945, 1946, 1953, 1954 and 1958.[42] In February 1961 the first of a new spate of serious riots took place at Parramatta, when more than twenty “screaming, hysterical girls defied police and fire brigade officers” [43] and climbed through an attic onto the roof where they shouted “obscenities” and hurled roof tiles at the police.[44] As in the 1940s and 1950s the methods used to counter the problem of riots and large-scale abscondings were coercive and the girls were removed after midnight by use of fire hoses. An even bigger riot occurred the following day, with a hundred girls climbing on the roof and hundreds of passersby gathering in the street outside to watch. The girls “stripped naked and tore tiles from the roof, smashing windows, destroying furniture and causing thousands of pounds worth of damage.”[45] According to the Sunday Telegraph, six girls “climbed to the steep, galvanized roof of the school and scuffled with two uniformed policemen who were trying to force them down.”[46] Girls who were inmates at the time later alleged they had been beaten with rubber hoses.[47] As had been the case in the riots of the 1940s, the ringleaders were taken before the Children’s Court and sentenced to terms ranging from one to three months.[48] Those who were old enough were committed to Long Bay Gaol. Marlene Riley, then fourteen years-old was one of the youngest ringleaders. Although the Report of the Minister for Child Welfare and Minister for Social Welfare described the riots as isolated to “a small group of girls who were emotionally disturbed, unusually violent and unruly or inclined to be hysterical,”[49] Marlene Riley remembers things differently:

Myself and another girl were the first to get on the roof at Parramatta which was to escape the brutal bashing we knew we would get for leaving the laundry. Mr. Johnson was then in charge, he was a brutal man and within that week I had seen him bash and kick a girl that he had been molesting to try and induce a miscarriage. I still carry the horror of that incident in my mind as it went on for thirty minutes. Her name was Barbara…I knew that I would be flogged because I was on the roof, so I decided to ‘out’ him and verbally screamed that I knew what he was doing to Barbara…I screamed that it disgusted me as he was the worst abuser there at the time. He said he was going to kill us and tried to climb onto the roof. I realised that I could break the tiles loose I did this to protect myself and try to keep away from him…I was sick of all the bashings, the poor food, the conditions and the brutality of Johnson and Gordon and that  if we stuck together in the future we would receive better conditions and treatment. I put this to the older girls when I was released and that was how the riots began.[50]

It was the official view of the Department that one of the main factors contributing to the riots at Parramatta was that the “present facilities [did] not permit a satisfactory segregation of those girls showing serious behaviour problems from those who are more amenable to the training situation.”[51] Thus, as a result of the riots, Harold Hawkins, Minister for Child Welfare and Minister for Social Welfare announced that a special institution for troublesome girls would be established at Hay on the site of a disused gaol.[52] According to officials its purpose was not punitive but to provide girls with a “degree of individual attention out of the question at Parramatta”.[53] In reality, it was a place of punishment for girls who incited rebellion or otherwise misbehaved at Parramatta. Department reports claimed that the emphasis at Hay “[was] on productive activity of a kind that [would] encourage a sense of achievement”[54] and boast that “broken paths, rank grass and accumulated rubbish in the grounds [had] been replaced by trim lawns, gay flower beds and flourishing vegetable gardens.”[55] Most girls remember it as a kind of hell on earth. Jytte Divargue, for instance, remembers being ordered by a female officer to scrape paint off a cell wall with the back of a wooden brush.

A female officer comes into the cell every now and then, to check how I’m doing with my task. This time she has decided to tell me how I can get the paint off: “You take the brush, turn it around, use the wooden side, scrub and thus scrape the paint off; but don’t tell anybody I told you.” I stayed in the cell and scrubbed for seven days until the bare brick.[56]

Girls sent to Hay were drugged with the anti-psychotic drug Largactil and taken, without warning, at night to Strathfield or Campbelltown stations.  Once there they were placed on the Naranderra via Junee train and handcuffed to the armrests for the duration of the trip.[57] At Hay they faced a regime far more oppressive than that at Parramatta and in many cases experienced sexual and physical abuse at the hands of senior staff. In 1962 The Hon. Ann Press raised the issue of cruelty in the NSW Parliament after a copy of the Riverina Grazier, dated Friday 10^th of August 1962 reported that residents of east Hay had heard “pitiful screams” coming from the institution.[58]

[2] Joanna Penglase, Orphans of the Living: Growing up in Care in Twentieth-Century Australia, Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2005, p. 248.

[3] The Senate Community Affairs References Committee, Forgotten Australians: A report on Australians who experienced institutional or out-of-home care as children, Canberra: Community Affairs References Committee, August 2004, p. 37.

[4] Parramatta Female Factory Precinct, “Parramatta Female Factory”, http://www.parragirls.org.au/id2.html

[5] Peter Quinn, “‘Unenlightened Efficiency’: The Administration of the Juvenile Correction System in New South Wales, 1905-1988”, PhD Thesis, University of Sydney, 2004, p. 13.

[6] Alana Barton, Fragile Moralities and Dangerous Sexualities: Two Centuries of Semi-Penal Institutionalisation for Women, Hampshire & Burlington: Ashgate, 2005, pp. 3-4.

[7] Kate E. Gaffney, “The Best of Intentions: Winlaton Youth Training Centre: 1956-1993,” Masters Thesis, Monash University, 1998, p. 11.

[8] Joanna Penglase, Orphans of the Living, p. 248.

[9] Ibid., pp. 225-226.

[10] Irene Byrne, , Submission no. 416 to Senate Community Affairs Committee Inquiry into Children in Institutional Care, Submissions received by the Committee as at 17/3/05, Parliament of Australia Senate, http://www.aph.gov.au/senate/committee/clac_ctte/completed_inquiries/2004-07/inst_care/submissions/sub416.pdf.  Accessed 13 August 2009.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Barry Curtis, Submission no. 488 to Senate Community Affairs Committee Inquiry into Children in Institutional Care, Submissions received by the Committee as at 17/3/05, Parliament of Australia Senate, http://www.aph.gov.au/senate/committee/clac_ctte/completed_inquiries/2004-07/inst_care/submissions/sub488.pdf. Accessed 13 August 2009.  Carol Ann Capes, Submission no. 325 to Senate Community Affairs Committee Inquiry into Children in Institutional Care, Submissions received by the Committee as at 17/3/05, Parliament of Australia Senate, http://www.aph.gov.au/senate/committee/clac_ctte/completed_inquiries/2004-07/inst_care/submissions/sub325.doc. Accessed 12 August 2009. Teresa Finley, Submission no. 530 to Senate Community Affairs Committee Inquiry into Children in Institutional Care, Submissions received by the Committee as at 17/3/05, Parliament of Australia Senate, http://www.aph.gov.au/senate/committee/clac_ctte/completed_inquiries/2004-07/inst_care/submissions/sub530.pdf. Accessed 14 August 2009.

[14] The Senate Community Affairs References Committee, Forgotten Australians, p. 55.

[15] Name withheld, Submission no. 511 to Senate Community Affairs Committee Inquiry into Children in Institutional Care, Submissions received by the Committee as at 17/3/05, Parliament of Australia Senate, http://www.aph.gov.au/senate/committee/clac_ctte/completed_inquiries/2004-07/inst_care/submissions/sub511.pdf. Accessed 10 September 2009.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Maree Giles, Submission no. 284 to the Senate Community Affairs Committee Inquiry into  Children in Institutional Care, Submissions received by Committee as at 17/3/05, Parliament of Australia Senate, http://www.aph.gov.au/senate/committee/clac_ctte/completed_inquiries/2004-07/inst_care/submissions/sub284.doc. Accessed 14 August 2009.

[18] Joanna Penglase, Orphans of the Living, p. 243.

[19] Diana H. Wyndham, “Striving for National Fitness: Eugenics in Australia: 1910s to 1930s”, PhD Thesis, University of Sydney, 1996, pp. 228-279.

[20] Peter Quinn, “Unenlightened Efficiency”, p. 3.

[21] Ibid., p. 19.

[22] Ibid.

[23] Ibid., p. 188.

[24] Annual Report, Child Welfare Department 1922-1925 quoted in Peter Quinn, “Unenlightened Efficiency”, p. 259.

[25] Sir Robert Menzies, “The Forgotten People”, The Sir Robert Menzies Memorial Foundation Ltd. Menzies Virtual Museum, http://www.menziesvirtualmuseum.org.au/transcripts/ForgottenPeople/Forgotten1.html. Accessed 21 September 2009.

[26] R.J. Heffron, quoted in Joanna Penglase, Orphans of the Living, p. 219.

[27] Peter Quinn, “Unenlightened Efficiency”, p. 259.

[28] Ibid., pp. 312-313.

[29] Ibid., p. 314.

[30] Parramatta Girls is an example of what is called “verbatim theatre”—a form of documentary theatre where the playwright interviews people that are connected to the topic that the play is about and then uses their testimony to create the piece. Valentine interviewed a number of women committed to Parramatta, several of whom are named in the acknowledgements, and constructed a play based on their experiences.

[31] Alana Valentine, Parramatta Girls, Sydney: Currency Press, 2007, p. 10.

[32] Irene Byrne, Submission no. 416, http://www.aph.gov.au/senate/committee/clac_ctte/completed_inquiries/2004-07/inst_care/submissions/sub416.pdf.

[33] Sharyn O’Brien, Submission no. 238 to Senate Community Affairs Committee Inquiry into Children in Institutional Care, Submissions received by the Committee as at 17/3/05, Parliament of Australia Senate, http://www.aph.gov.au/senate/committee/clac_ctte/completed_inquiries/2004-07/inst_care/submissions/sub238.pdf. Accessed 14 August 2009.

[34] Senate Community Affairs References Committee, Forgotten Australians, p. 86.

[35] Joy Damousi, Depraved and Disorderly: Female Convicts, Sexuality and Gender in Colonial Australia, Melbourne & Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, p. 85.

[36] Teresa Finley, Submission no. 530, http://www.aph.gov.au/senate/committee/clac_ctte/completed_inquiries/2004-07/inst_care/submissions/sub530.pdf

[37] Peter Quinn, “Unenlightened Efficiency”, p. 285.

[38] Ibid.

[39] Ibid., p. 286.

[40] Sharyn O’Brien, Submission no. 238, http://www.aph.gov.au/senate/committee/clac_ctte/completed_inquiries/2004-07/inst_care/submissions/sub238.pdf.

[41] Peter Quinn, The Senate Community Affairs References Committee, “Official Committee Hansard, Reference: Children in institutional care, 4 February 2004, Parramatta”, Canberra: Community Affairs References Committee, 2004, Pp. CA107-CA108.

[42] Parramatta Female Factory Precinct, “Parramatta Female Factory, http://www.parragirls.org.au/id2.html.

[43] Unknown, “Girls Climb on Roof, Defy Police”, Daily Telegraph, 25 February 1961 in Bonney Djuric (ed.), 14 Years of Hell: an anthology of the Hay Girls Institution 1961-1974, Hay: Women About Hay, 2008, p. 8.

[44] Peter Quinn, “Unenlightened Efficiency”, p. 271.

[45] Ibid. pp. 271-272.

[46] Unknown, “Rooftop Riot by Girls”, Sunday Telegraph, 26 February 1961 in Bonney Djuric (ed.), 14 Years of Hell: an anthology of the Hay Girls Institution 1961-1974, Hay: Women About Hay, 2008, pp. 8-9.

[47] Peter Quinn, “Unenlightened Efficiency”, p. 272.

[48] Ibid.

[49] “Report of the Minister for Child Welfare and Minister for Social Welfare on the work of the Child Welfare Department for the year ended 30^th June 1961” in Bonney Djuric (ed.), 14 Years of Hell: an anthology of the Hay Girls Institution 1961-1974, Hay: Women About Hay, 2008, p. 11.

[50] Marlene Riley, “Marlene” in Bonney Djuric (ed.), 14 Years of Hell: an anthology of the Hay Girls Institution1961-1974, Hay: Women About Hay, 2008, pp. 15-17.

[51] “Report of the Minister for Child Welfare and Minister for Social Welfare on the work of the Child Welfare Department for the year ended 30^th June 1961”, p. 11.

[52] Peter Quinn, “Unenlightened Efficiency”, p. 273.

[53] Report of the Minister for Child Welfare and Minister for Social Welfare on the work of the Child Welfare Department for the year ended 30^th June 1962”, in Bonney Djuric (ed.), 14 Years of Hell: an anthology of the Hay Girls Institution 1961-1974, Hay: Women About Hay, 2008, p. 26.

[54] Ibid.

[55] Ibid., p. 25.

[56] Jytte Divargue, “Jytte” in Bonney Djuric (ed.), 14 Years of Hell: an anthology of the Hay Girls Institution 1961-1974, Hay: Women About Hay, 2008, p. 31

[57] Bonney Djuric in Bonney Djuric (ed.), 14 Years of Hell: an anthology of the Hay Girls Institution 1961-1974, Hay: Women About Hay, 2008, p. 6.

[58] NSW Hansard, Legislative Council, 12-9-1962: 305 in Bonney Djuric (ed.) 14 Years of Hell: an anthology of the Hay Girls Institution 1961-1974, Hay: Women About Hay, 2008, p. 28.

Copyright the author of this blog.

When considering early Australian and New Zealand history, you have to keep your bifocals on. Isolated ‘down here’,  ten thousand miles from ‘home’, with at the least a six month round trip for any official communication,  it’s possible to view events and people through a local lens with a type of nonchalance about pronouncements and edicts that arrived from the other side of the world.   But taking a broader view, the network of relationships and communications between the colonies themselves and the Colonial Office formed another type of reality- not as immediate perhaps, but imbued with the finality of ultimate veto.  But both local and distant views have the illusion of solidity: neither is as straightforward as it appears.

The “Fatal Necessity” described in Peter Adams’ book refers to the mission creep that accompanied the creation and signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in New Zealand in February 1840.   The Colonial Office developed the treaty from a theoretical duty springing from the legal bond between subject and state, in order to control and protect British subjects who had chosen to go to New Zealand.  A second imperative was the increased humanitarian concern for the aboriginal people already there.   A third imperative, more urgent from the Antipodean perspective than that of the Colonial Office, was to prevent Maoris selling their land to strangers- particularly the French who were perceived to have designs on New Zealand.  The Colonial Office originally planned to gain sovereignty over only parts of New Zealand, but when the New Zealand Company despatched large numbers of settlers under systematic colonization, the Colonial Office realized that the whole colony had to be annexed.

This book shifts between the motivations and actions of individual men at the local, antipodean level- Gipps, Busby and Hobson- and the political manoeuvering of pressure groups and politicians to influence Colonial Office policy in London.  In particular Adams concentrates on the Church Missionary Society and its president Dandeson Coates, and the New Zealand Association- later the New Zealand Land Company- a group of investors influenced by Wakefieldian ideas of systematic colonization.   Diametrically opposed in their objectives, these two pressure groups circled around the main political and bureaucratic figures in colonial affairs, conducting meetings, petitioning and lobbying all as part of the game of politics and patronage.

Ten thousand miles away, Gipps, Hobson, Busby and Wentworth may have thought that they were key players and that their actions and submissions were influential, but this was a delusion. More important was the political make-up of British parliament and the always-present imperative to retain power.  Hence we see the clash of the Lords – Lord Howick, Lord Durham, Lord Melbourne, Lord Glenelg – doing deals, appeasing, jockeying and saving face as part of another dance of politics far removed from the lawn of the Resident’s House overlooking a quiet bay on the other side of the world.

Recently I read The River of Doubt about President Theodore Roosevelt’s journey on an unmapped river in South America, also called the Roosevelt-Rondon Scientific Expedition.  A friend lent me the book.  It is a fascinating account and coming from the desert the detailed explanations of the river, the amazon environment and its adaptive nature was intriguing given the stark contrast to my own environment.

My friend who lent it to me said that Marechal Rondon, the Brazilian Military Officer who led the journey with Roosevelt, was a remarkable figure so prominent in the history of South America.  In that region his name is recognised extensively.  The book gives account after account of Rondon’s philosophy and approach towards the indigenous peoples; how he refused to support confrontation despite being in the face of danger and hostility; how his practice was to leave food and goods as gifts; how his discipline and honour and strong sense of nationalism was highly regarded.  My friend asks why we don’t have similiar figures recognised by our own Australian history?  

Judging by our own account of history during the 1800s it seems Rondon’s philosophy and approach would have been quite a departure from accepted opinion.  His was progressive in the sense of accepting pluralism but different from many established opinions (such as responding to hostility with strength and force).  The fact that Rondon received such widespread recognition accounts to the fact that this position and philosophy was recognised as central to the development of general identity and recognition in South America.  My friends question opens up important thoughtlines!

Ah….convicts! Ahh…convict cannibal!!  Ahhhh…convict cannibal movie!!! This is Australian history teaching paradise. I haven’t seen the film yet, but go here for the trailer of the movie Van Dieman’s Land. There’s also an interesting interview with the director and lead actor about the film.

This is brilliant. Kate Blanchett stepped out in crochet couture, to open an event at the Australian Center for the Moving Image (ACMI) at Federation Square.

Says the All Toil and No Reward blog (‘how to find joy and fulfillment through love, work and sewing’):

“My word, if I ever needed any more proof that craft is the new cool, this is most definitely it. A crochet dress. A one-shouldered, full sleeved, ruffle-ornamented crochet dress. Worn without any sense of irony at all. And it looks bloody great – I especially like the double ruffle layer at the bottom.”

If you’re from down under, where Cate Blanchett is from, your nana had at least one of  these crocheted blankets in her home. It’s the Aussie form of quilting. The hours of work gone into this dress, makes this dress a very high maintenance creation for an actress to choose to wear out. In Australian terms, Kate brings the bedroom at Nana’s house, to the red carpet. Or, ‘my nana loves me’ is the subliminal message as well as ‘I am Australian’s nana of the arts and moving image.’ Whatever the message is, I love it. Crafty crochet couture, handmade with love.

Love Cate Blanchett’s nerve, to be fashion forward by going  backwards into the past. Proof that this Australia beauty’s taste in fashion, can be worn anywhere! By the way, the Australian Noir, moving image library at ACMI, is to die for. Yummy Aussie cinema from the archives proudly on show. Go Australia and the filmic arts!

Dear Reader,

A few years ago (1984) some obscure academic was making an address to a bunch of Rotarians in Warrnambool, and the main point of his little after-dinner speech was to say that Asians were going to take over Australia unless we did something about it.

The “we” he was referring to would have been other white men like him, i would be guessing.

So this made him famous overnight. On account of being a racist cunt.

Rarely in the history of the modern world has a nation given such preference to a tiny ethnic minority of its population as the Australian Government has done in the past few years, making that minority the favoured majority in its immigration policy,

quoth he. It is unclear how “Asians” (one third of the world’s population) could be described as “a tiny ethnic minority,” but there you go.

People were shocked by this stunning piece of xenophobia from someone who had a locker in the Professor’s change room at a University, so he followed up his little rant with a piece in The Age:

I do not accept the view, widely held in the Federal Cabinet, that some kind of slow Asian takeover of Australia is inevitable. I do not believe that we are powerless. I do believe that we can with good will and good sense control our destiny … As a people, we seem to move from extreme to extreme. In the past 30 years the government of Australia has moved from the extreme of wanting a white Australia to the extreme of saying that we will have an Asian Australia and that the quicker we move towards it the better.

He coined the term “Asianisation,” and became the poster-geezer for racial intolerance and anti-Asian redneckery. He went on to be shunned by his University, and so he wrote a book called “All for Australia,” which apparently sold well in the sort of regional bookshops that also stock a wide range of feral pig hunting magazines.

Blainey was the guy’s name, and he was an expert in History. Believe it or not.

Hilariously, in 2005, this remarkable xenophobe had a Chair in History named after him at the University of Melbourne, where, two decades earlier, students protesting his racist views forced him to cancel his lecture series on “How to Hate Asians Like a Proper White Man” because of fears for his safety.

He was in the paper again today, this prick.

Prof Geoffrey Blainey said one of the biggest changes over the past 50 years was the astonishing improvement in pronunciation and grammar.

“That clearly has come from television and radio and films, not from what’s been taught in schools,” he told the Herald Sun.

Prof Blainey said earlier generations used to say things like “them days” and “all of youses”.

“I’m not criticising them, that’s what they learned in childhood, but that old grammar has virtually vanished,” he said. “Even when you listen to the footballers today, they all speak well.”

And for “that old grammar” read “that bad grammar.”

Not content with attacking Asian people, he has now turned his interests toward linguistic eugenics.

Oh, yes, Professor. Let’s all talk like pompous stuck up ponces with plums in our mouths and our tongue up Queen Victoria’s sphincter.

You know, the way *you* talk.

Personally, i find that “old grammar” you deride so readily as being the domain of the uneducated (note the reference to footballers who – when you’re a Historian – are uneducated thugs with nary a braincell to rub together) to be a defining aspect of my ethnic background.

As an Historian, you would probably realise that we Australian-English speakers have only been developing our dialect for a little over two hundred years. We’ve just started differentiating our tongue from Nanna England, and now you want us to be stripped of this uniqueness and turned into TV-English speakers instead?

How about you just fuck off back to your History Wars and leave us alone.

(The History Wars, dear Reader, are over whether or not we non-Aborigine Australians should hate the Aborigine Australians. He’s pro hate, BTW, in case you couldn’t guess.)

The article reporting all this senile ranting concludes to reassure the glancers of the Herald-Sun that Blainey hasn’t given up hating Asians, and wanting to warn us of their threat to our way of life.

Prof Blainey said he was also very concerned about universities becoming export industries and feeling pressure not to fail full fee-paying foreign students.

For “full fee-paying foreign students” read “Asian students.”

Why are we hearing from this washed-up old Jingoist? Well, he’s just been nominated by the National Trust as one of Australia’s “100 national Living Treasures.”

I. Shit. You. Not.

Yours multiculturally,
Gullybogan

1998, 368p

I’d already worked out what I was going to say in reviewing this book.

I am not keen on institutional histories.  I dislike their celebratory nature and the way that their authors obviously feel compelled to doff their hats and gush over the institutional big-wigs and stalwarts.  You can often sense the shadowy presence of the steering committee in the back-ground and that a publicist and risk-management expert are hovering in the wings.

However, I was drawn to read this history of the Royal Women’s Hospital after hearing a Radio National Hindsight program on it, available for download here.  Janet McCalman, from the University of Melbourne ( I see that she, at least still works there, given the University’s decimation of its Arts faculty) wrote Struggletown: Public and Private Life in Richmond 1900-1965 - a history of the working-class suburb of Richmond,  and Journeyings: The Biography of a Middle Class Generation 1920-1990, which followed the No 69 tram through the middle-class suburbs of Melbourne.  She’s obviously drawn to writing larger social histories by focussing her lens on a small patch of inquiry.

And so Sex and Suffering: Women’s Health and a Women’s Hospital carries on an approach that she obviously feels comfortable with.  As the title might suggest, this is not just a history of an institution: instead it deals with sex and the experience of being woman, health and institutions.

The experience of childbirth is intimately woven into the hidden parts of private lives and soon overlaid by the other experiences and achievements of a growing person.   It is common to us all, and for a short period of time is overwhelming in its effect on the mother at her exposed, most basic core and on the people closest to her.   So it was fascinating to consider the act childbirth- that most intimate and personal of events- as part of a social phenomenon that can be handled at the structural level in so many ways.

The book itself follows a chronological approach, with seven sections covering roughly 20-30 year periods.  The emphasis varies in the sections, from the clinical (particularly in the sections discussing sepsis and antisepsis) to the social and structural (where the judgments of upper-middleclass doctors and the Board of Management were trained onto the predomiantly working-class and migrant clientele).   Throughout most of the book, she draws on the case notes of individual women- helpfully supplemented with a glossary of medical terms in the margin- to make real her discussion of anaesthesia and surgery and its effect on horrendous labour situations, the horror of clostridium welchii which could kill a woman in hours, and the changes in attitudes towards labouring women and their partners.  Ye Gods- some women had enormous babies- particularly in the post-Gold Rush period when women who had suffered malformations of the pelvis through malnutrition themselves as children, especially in Ireland,  gave birth to large babies when their own diets had become carbohydrate-heavy in a new country.  There’s something stark in reading the case notes reproduced at the end of the book that chart the death over a number of days of a woman, knowing that there are mothers and fathers, husbands and other children who have been left bereft.

I know that when I was in labour with my children, I was very conscious that I was part of a chain of labouring women in my family and thought -even then!- about how absolutely dreadful it would be to die in childbirth. Hormonally, physically and from an evolutionary sense, every sinew of your being in focussed on giving birth to that child then and there, even if it is your twelfth or illegitimate.  I felt as if I was surrounded by generations of women who had given birth before, and that I was stripped down to my essential female-ness.  In reading this book I was made conscious of the effects of bad births- those fistulas you now only know of in Third World countries,  the lifelong invalidism that followed some births, and the amount of pain that lingered on year after year.  It made the knowledge of my maternal grandmother’s seven births and several miscarriages, and my paternal grandfather’s first wife’s death in childbirth, more meaningful.

There are wonderful photographs and diagrams in this book.  The photographs of Melbourne in the early chapters from both the La Trobe Picture collection and the Royal Women’s Hospital Archives are clear and showed perspectives of my city that I hadn’t seen before.  The internal photographs of the hospital, again from the hospital archives,  while deliberately posed, speak volumes about hospital discipline and nurses’ roles.

A second thread that runs through the book is a commentary on class and gender in Melbourne. The more feminist, women-centred  Queen Victoria hospital stands as a counter-point to the more traditional, male-dominated Royal Women’s Hospital, and the class perspectives of the charity-oriented upper-middle class female board members run through the attitudes towards sexually-transmitted disease, abortion and adoption that the hospital had to deal with.

Well, this is what I was going to say until I got to the last part of the book.  The last section, unfortunately, descended into that boosterism and oily fulsomeness of the standard institutional history.  Probably for privacy reasons, the case histories dropped out of the narrative.  Although they were replaced by oral history reminiscenes of experiences in the Women’s, they lacked the immediacy and contingency of those earlier case notes.   Judgments about individuals who are alive and likely to read this book need to be tempered, and as a still-operating (though re-located) hospital , there is the equivalent, I guess, of the doctor’s  “do no harm” in writing about the institutional culture.  The management-speak of the final pages reflects the funding and political milieu in which institutions now exist, but I also suspect that it has been carefully vetted by the current hospital administration as well.

So, if you read this book- and I exhort you so to do- you might want to stop after Section VI in 1970.  To that point, it’s fascinating.

Some time ago, I rather flippantly (and crassly?) suggested that the 6th February- the night of drunken revellry on the Sydney Cove beaches- might be a more appropriate celebration of Australia Day than 26th January. You know the story- Robert Hughes has the couples rutting between the rocks; Tim Flannery started his The Birth of Sydney with it; Tom Keneally fictionalized it; and the tele-doco The Floating Brothel based on Sian Rees’ book of the same name re-enacts it.  Now I find that perhaps this “foundational orgy” never occurred.

Grace Karskens in her beautifully written and presented book The Colony: a history of early Sydney pins the origin of the “foundational orgy” on Manning Clark’s Short History of Australia, but Manning Clark himself backtracked on the story when he re-read the original sources.  Too late- the story (and let’s face it- it IS a striking one) was off and running.

There is no real evidence that the orgy ever occured. Surgeon Arthur Bowes Smith wrote that “the men convicts got to them soon after they landed” and that it was “beyond my abilties to give a just description of the scene of debauchery and riot that ensued during the night.”  Perhaps because that’s because he wasn’t there- he was on the Lady Penrhyn moored out in the harbour.  The sailors on his own ship were issued with rum rations, but the convicts were not.

Ralph Clark described the women’s tents of  “Seens of Whordom” but he called all convict women “whores”.  He describes the punishments meted out to male convicts and sailors alike who tried to have sex with the women, but not on or around 6th February.  He mentions the thunderstorm, but nothing else.  Neither does anyone else- in fact, Watkin Tench mentioned that “nothing of a very atrocious manner appeared” during February.

So, Karskens asks, does it matter?  Are we going to let the facts get in the way of a good story?  It does matter, she claims, because told as a story of  “loose  whores and randy drunken men”  it validates, and even celebrates certain types of male behaviour.  Even more than this,  Hughes et al claim this “scene” as the foundation of Australia’s sexual history- a sensationalist view that obscures the real legend- the fruitfulness and growth of relationships between men and women in those early years.

I am duly chastened.

References:

Grace Karskens The colony: a history of Early Sydney pp.313-315

So we come to 1603 and a Dutchman named Willem Janszoon. In the last years before the formation of the Dutch East India Company he set sail for the East Indies as the captain of the Duyfken.

This ship was a lightly armed Barque 65 feet in length with a 110 tonne displacement and shallow draft. Her career was to be short (1595 to 1608), but noteworthy in terms of our historical journey.

By the time of Janszoon’s departure in 1603 she had already sailed twice from the Netherlands to the Dutch East Indies, been engaged in a naval battle with the Portuguese and undertaken a voyage of exploration where she got separated from the fleet, finding her way home alone in early 1603.

However, the plucky little Duyfken founder her way into the history books when Janszoon was sent to search for other outlets of trade in the East Indies. He was to sail the Duyfken beyond the ends of the known lands, to the east and south. The Duyfken’s shallow draught (some eight feet) made her perfect for coastal exploration.

So in 1605, the Duyfken sailed under the command of Willhelm Janszoon from the trading port of Bantam in modern day Indonesia towards the west coast of New Guinea. Janszoon took with him a hand picked crew for this voyage to unknown lands.

Reaching New Guinea, they encountered a densely wooded land. The dependable Duyfken followed the coast and at one point they dropped anchor in an inlet and sent a boat crew to shore to explore and forage. It was then they were attacked by natives who fired arrows relentlessly at Janszoon’s  crew. In response the crew  raised their muskets, fired and fell back towards their boat loosing with eight dead. Despite the set back, the Duyfken and crew pressed on along the coast. However, they ran into difficulty when they met an opposing current running from the east around the New Guinea coast, forcing them to turn south east.

Very soon they encountered a totally different landscape. For mile after mile after mile they charted a barren land, without colour and, seemingly, people.

But it is finally here, in 1606, we have our first authenticated European sighting of the Great Southern Land. Janszoon and his crew had inadvertently sailed south and were following the west coast of the Australia’s York Peninsular.

Over the following days they charted some 300 miles of coastline until running low on supplies they decided to turn about at Cape Keerweer (Cape Turnaround). They sailed back up coast reaching the mouth of the Batavia River. Again they were met with trouble. Desperate for food and supplies they sent a longboat ashore, but again they were met by local natives. This time they did not wait for an attack and fired, leading to the natives retaliating and spearing one of the oarsmen.

It was here that Janszoon, now with less than half of his original crew, decided enough was enough. They were low on supplies and the surrounding lands offered little in sustenance, but a lot of trouble. It was time to turn for home. However, they were still a long way from a friendly shore.

Despite the situation, the crew rallied under Janszoon, and headed to the closest port, that of Aru.

Finally, Europeans had made it to the shores of the Great Southern Land…and Janszoon was not finished yet…he was to return…

Engine Station, between Chewton and Fryerstown, VIC

Yesterday I went out to the Victorian Goldfields. This photograph is of  the “Duke of Cornwall” Engine House, erected  by the Cornish immigrant R.L.M Kitto for the Australian United Gold Mining Company in 1869. Unfortunately the quality’s quite poor because it was taken on my mobile phone.

Today, in lieu of something more substantial,  I’m just going to post some miscellanea.

Would be that I were Sappho,

Greece my land, not this!

There the noblest women,

When they loved, would kiss

- Lesbia Harford (1891-1927) from Untitled 4/4/1915

Sources for women’s history in Australia:

The Australian Women’s Register

The Women’s Pages: Australian Women and Journalism since 1850

Australian Lesbian and Gay Archives

National Archives of Australia

National Foundation for Australian Women

Australian War Memorial

Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies

‘Red Jessie’: Jessie Street (Uncommon Lives from The National Archives of Australia)

Reason in Revolt: Source Documents of Australian Radicalism

She’s Game: Women making Australian sporting history

Australian Indigenous Index

In Her Gift: Women Philanthropists in Australian History

Public Record Office of Victoria

Women and the Vote

1891 Women’s Suffrage Petition

Women in Australia’s Working History

Women in the Making of Canberra

Carrying on the Fight: Women Candidates in Victorian Parliamentary Elections

First Ladies: Finding Women in the Public Record Office Victoria

Mura Gadi

Australian in my difference: Women and migration in Australia since 1945

Australian Women in War

Being seen and heard: Migrant women organising in Australia

Faith, Hope, Charity Australian Women and Imperial Honours: 1901-1989

Bringing Them Home Name Index

Woman of the Day

Tove Jansson

Tove Jansson (1914-2001)  artist, novelist and children’s book writer.