“Would you please send me one of your pipes that you may have laid aside and you will not be likely to be using again,” wrote Mr Reece. “If it should be a bit strong, no matter. I know of a process that will overcome that. I have not been able to get a decent pipe for years.”

A quick glance was enough to tell me that this was not what I was looking for. But I printed the letter out for a closer look anyway. The writer was an aged pensioner, he said, twenty days short of seventy-five years, living alone in New Norfolk, Tasmania. He has raised a family of six daughters and three sons. All of the sons had served in the recent war, he added, with one still with the occupying force in Japan.

Reece had “battled for Labour” since he joined the Amalgamated Miners Union in 1889. “I started in poverty and I’m ending ditto, but I’ve no regrets and have no apologies to offer for my support of the ‘Grand Old Labour Movement.’”

If Mr Chifley were to visit Hobart during the forthcoming federal election campaign, and if Reece is spared that long, he promises to be in the audience. He is very optimistic that the Chifley government will be returned with a strong majority (it was). “I wish you and your good colleagues all the good luck that wishes can express.”

I was busy that day and so, having studied the letter for a few minutes and enjoying a giggle about the pipe thing (what was that all about?) I tossed it aside and moved on. Fortunately, the pile I tossed it into was the “do not throw out under any circumstances” pile, where it stayed until the inevitable desk clean-up late last year when, at last, Mr Reece finally had my full attention.

This is my favourite thing, the deep study of a single archival record. It could be a letter, a telegram or a bunch of postcards discovered in a junk shop. It is remarkable what can be gleaned from seemingly insignificant clues, especially now that these clues can be run through so many newly digitised sources. Becoming deeply immersed in someone else’s life, trying to see the world through their eyes, must be my form of meditation.

Why this Mr Reece though? What is it about him in particular? Partly it was his surname that guided my hand that day towards the “do not throw out” pile rather than the recycling bin. I grew up in Tasmania and I remember my parents talking about the redoubtable Eric Reece, a former long-time Labor premier known as “Electric Eric” because of his ardent support for hydroelectric projects. Surely it had to be the same family.

But mainly I was captivated by what I perceive as a yearning on Reece’s part to stay connected with the world. It’s unintentionally expressed, but it’s there. Looking back over his long life, this proud and, I think, lonely man tells of the things that most matter to him: his work, his family and the labour movement. Not only that, he also imagines Labor’s next victory even if he is not alive to see it.

And the pipe thing? Chifley made his pipe a signature accessory and was rarely seen without one, but it does seem awful cheek to expect him to simply hand one over on request. Chifley wrote back: “Dear Mr Reece, thanks for your letter… I am sorry that for the present I haven’t a suitable pipe to send you. As you say, good pipes are very scarce these days.” (Actually Chifley usually had several on hand, gifts from family and well-wishers.) “I was interested to read of your lengthy support of the Labour Movement. You must have many memories to look back on.” And he signed off with best wishes.

Reece didn’t get his pipe but I doubt he was disappointed. Pipe smoking was a companionable habit the two men shared but Reece’s request, I suspect, was just an opening gambit. It has been said of Chifley that he used the lighting of his pipe as a stalling tactic while he thought through a response to a problem. And so, preliminaries over, Reece felt perfectly free to address his prime minister as an equal, one Labor man to another, to tell his story.

The letter wasn’t really about the pipe, and — fair warning — this essay is not really about it either.

William Henry Reece (often known even in official records as Will Harry Reece) was born in 1872, and he was indeed an uncle to Eric Reece. Fortunately for me, there is a biography of Reece the younger, Jillian Koshin’s Electric Eric: The Life and Times of an Australian State Premier (2009).

Koshin’s book begins with an examination of the Reece family’s working-class origins in mining towns in the northeast and west of Tasmania. The discovery of minerals — gold, silver, copper, tin — in the 1870s brought a sudden and massive economic boom to the colony based on interstate investment, higher export income, higher wages and increased incoming migration. In his 2012 history of Tasmania, Henry Reynolds describes the 1880s as one of Tasmania’s “sunniest” decades.

Patriarch Owen Charles Reece established himself as a miner in the 1870s but was frequently on the move looking for work. Koshin is at pains to show how the wealth that enriched investors and beautified the cities rarely trickled down to the poorest folk who had laboured to produce it. Across three generations, even in so-called good times, little changed for the Reece family.

Owen and his wife Jane had fourteen children but the first three, triplets, died in infancy. Jane was thirty-eight when she died in Scottsdale hospital giving birth to twins, who also died. Owen was left a widower with nine children to raise; our man Will (“I started in poverty…”) was the eldest. A few brothers down the line was George, eventually to become the father of Eric, who was born in 1909.

The Reeces’ lives were characterised by insecure and dangerous work and the strain and expense of constantly moving from one primitive slab-and-shingle hut to another in remote and isolated settlements. Because these clusters of dwellings were expected to be temporary, authorities would rarely invest in public amenities. Close-knit families relied on one other.

Out of these struggles emerged a writer, Marie E.J. Pitt. Originally from Victoria, she was married to a miner, William Pitt, and for about a decade beginning in the 1890s went with him to mining settlements in the northeast and west of Tasmania. They had four children, one of whom died.

Scribbling by lamplight, Pitt wrote of “an austere land of mountain gorges of ice and snow, and raging torrents of creeping mist and never-ending rain.” The land spoke another language, “superb in its silence, appalling in its melancholy grandeur.” Her pen was also driven by anger. This is how she begins her poem “The Keening”:

We are the women and children
Of the men that mined for gold:
Heavy are we with sorrow,
Heavy as heart can hold;
Galled are we with injustice,
Sick to the soul of loss —
Husbands and sons and brothers
Slain for the yellow dross!

Over nine more bitter stanzas she attacks mine owners, politicians and churchmen for having averted their gaze from the misery right in front of them. “The Keening” was published in 1911, but by then the Pitts had moved to Victoria because William had contracted miner’s phthisis. He died in 1912.

Will Reece, his siblings, nieces and nephews were among those children of the men that mined for gold. All the Reece men became union men. Poetry aside, trade unionism was the practical agent of change, the structure within which to advocate for safer working conditions, better wages and political representation.

Reece was a seventeen-year-old apprentice blacksmith at the tin mine in Ringarooma when he joined the Amalgamated Miner’s Union in 1889, the year of its formation in Tasmania. For some reason, though, he broke away from the family and left the mines behind. His parents were married with Baptist rites but Will appears to have converted to Catholicism, a most unusual thing to do in those sectarian times, and certainly enough to cause a family rift.

From the late 1890s he roamed through several agricultural districts in the northeast and in 1909, at St Mary’s, he married a woman named Catherine Cannell. In 1912 they went south to New Norfolk, a town nestling in the Derwent valley thirty-five kilometres northwest of Hobart. The landscape was far kinder than anything Will Reece had known growing up, and here the family settled for good.

Literate, articulate and gregarious, Reece would join anything. He played cricket and football, would swing an axe at a local woodchopping event and was always ready to chair a meeting, MC a church fundraiser or write a letter to an editor about some local grievance. Forced in 1915 to give up blacksmithing because of an accident, he opened a photographic studio; it failed, and he was declared bankrupt in 1921.

Clearly this man had bucketloads of self-belief. He stood twice, unsuccessfully, for the municipal council and then, undeterred, turned to state politics and was a candidate for Labor in the elections of 1919, 1922, 1925 and 1928. He failed each time.

Meanwhile he became an organiser for the Australian Workers’ Union, and here he found his métier. His nephew’s biographer noticed Will Reece signing up shearers, shed-hands, miners, labourers and roadmen across the state, including in mining centres on the west coast. New heavy-industry projects provided fresh fields for the AWU, and there was Will Reece, visiting the new carbide factory at Electrona in the south and the hydroelectricity works at Waddamana in the central highlands. With regular reports (this one is typical) he made himself well-known to the readers of the AWU’s national paper, the Australian Worker.

But the 1930s brought reversals. In 1931, more than a quarter of Tasmanian trade unionists were unemployed because of the depression. All the Reece men let their union membership lapse. Will Reece returned to manual labour and in 1934, aged sixty-two, was severely injured in an explosives accident while quarrying for gravel. He sustained burns to his face and temporarily lost his sight. In 1935 his wife Catherine died suddenly, leaving him with a clutch of children and teenagers.

In 1939 Will’s fifty-year commitment to the labour cause was celebrated at a special meeting of the New Norfolk branch of the Labor Party. Local MP Jack Dwyer spoke Reece’s work to “uplift” the condition of the masses. Many of the privileges now enjoyed by the workers were due to his efforts, Dwyer noted, and the party was much indebted to him.

At about that time Will’s nephew Eric was embarking on his own (in his case spectacularly successful) political career. After failed attempts in 1940 and 1943, Eric was elected Labor member of the state House of Assembly in November 1946. He was in office as premier between 1958 and 1969, and again from 1972 to 1975, and was federal president of the Labor Party between 1952 and 1955.

His formative years had been similar to his uncle’s: he’d worked in mines and on farms from his early teens — joined the AWU at fifteen — spent most of the 1930s depression unemployed — got a job at the Mount Lyell copper mine in 1934 — was appointed organiser for the AWU there in 1935. Strangely, there does not seem to have been a strong association between uncle and nephew. In his 1946 letter to Ben Chifley, Will could have mentioned Eric as a promising youngster to keep an eye on, but he does not.

Still, Will and Eric Reece — and Ben Chifley as well, of course — were haunted by memories of hardship, and all strove for the same things: economic growth, full employment, increased standards of living, and social welfare for those who needed it.

There was nothing in Eric Reece’s makeup to prepare him for the social upheavals and cultural shifts of the 1960s and 1970s. He had grown up believing that the state’s natural resources — its water, timber and minerals — were there to be used for the common good. Famously, he rode roughshod over opposition to the hydroelectric scheme in southwest Tasmania that was to flood Lake Pedder in 1972–73.

Where some people wept at Pedder’s beauty, Eric Reece was belligerent and autocratic. In 1966 he taunted his opponents with the remark that Tasmania’s southwest contained only “a few badgers, kangaroos, wallabies, and some wildflowers that can be seen anywhere.” (Badgers? Did he mean wombats?) Tough old trade unionists like Reece knew what destitution looked like and were lit with a determination to do more than just overcome personal hardship; they were committed to structural reforms to improve the lives of all working people.

By this time, however, there had begun a great grinding of gears in progressive politics as young, idealistic, tertiary-educated people drifted away from Labor to the green movement. While this also happened elsewhere, perhaps the grinding came earlier in Tasmania.

Will Reece didn’t live to see any of this. Perhaps, as promised, he made it to Hobart in September 1946 to hear Ben Chifley’s two-hour campaign speech given to a capacity crowd at the town hall. “The whole country is prosperous,” Chifley declared that night. “That is the first ideal we have, and we go to the people on that record.”

Labor’s election loss in 1949 and Chifley’s death in 1951 must have saddened Reece. He died in 1953, with his boots on (so to speak) I hope, and his certainties still intact. •

The post Ben Chifley’s pipe appeared first on Inside Story.

The prime minister was to put the potato in his pocket, specifically in his left pocket if he was right-handed. In “a few weaks time” it will get a bit soft, Curtin was told. Take no notice of that but leave it there and it will flatten out “like a half crown” and then go “has hard as a pice of wood.” After three years it will “whear away to nothing.” And then the prime minister should repeat the process. “While you carrie a Potato in your pocket you will never suffer with any Pains.” Frith himself had been doing so for the previous twenty-seven years, he said, and suffered no akes or Pains.

The prime minister’s private secretary wrote to Mr Frith acknowledging with thanks — but no further comment — the arrival of the package. Frith’s letter was carefully filed with hundreds of other personal and official representations under “Correspondence F” for the year 1942.

In 2017, while I was working at the National Archives of Australia, a colleague of mine stumbled with delighted amazement upon the Frith correspondence. John Curtin was a popular prime minister, yes, but to send a potato as a gift? There were peals of laughter in the office that day, let me say, at the thought of a potato-induced protuberance in the prime ministerial pocket.

When one of us finally got around to doing some actual research, we discovered that carrying a potato in one’s pocket was a Victorian-era cure for rheumatism. Exactly how it was thought to work is unclear — folk remedies and superstitions do not admit of much close investigation anyway — but it was commonly believed that the potato had to have been stolen for it to work. (Frith makes no mention of this in his letter to Curtin.) The Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford University includes a number of withered therapeutic potatoes — here’s one — among its holdings of folkloric material.

So, would Curtin have given the potato cure a try? Could a potato have been a silent witness at the next war cabinet meeting, in Canberra on 21 September 1942? I suspect not. Curtin’s health was poor, but rheumatism is not known to have been one of his afflictions. If he knew about Mr Frith’s gift — and his staff may well have thought he would enjoy the diversion — Curtin may simply have kept it in his pocket until he could hand it to domestic staff at the Lodge for use in the kitchen. Nothing was allowed to go to waste in those austere times.

Surprised to learn that folklore and superstition still lingered in 1940s Australia, I wondered if Frith’s offering to Curtin was considered odd at the time. As it turns out, yes, just a little. In late 1942 and early 1943, several major newspapers ran stories poking gentle fun at the weird and wonderful letters and packages Curtin often received. Each of these pieces — here’s one — was essentially the same, and probably drew on a compilation of letters (writers’ names withheld) offered to the press by Curtin’s indefatigable press secretary, Don Rodgers. His aim, I imagine, was to rub some edges off his boss’s rather stern public image.

Christians sent religious tracts, widows sent wedding rings (goodness!), a lot of people sent money (which went straight to Treasury), inventors sent war-winning suggestions, and one woman sent a cushion embroidered “God Bless Our Prime Minister.” The public was entertained with excerpts from letters to Curtin from various charmers and crackpots, among whom Mr Frith comes off as comparatively sane. Who knows if a copy of any of these ever reached him at Wattle Flat?

Years later, Frith’s words still come back to astonish me yet again with their specificity and conviction. Tempting though it is to dismiss him as a bit of a weirdo, it’s good to remember that few of us are completely rational all the time. Even though the evidence for its efficacy is slender I keep a bottle of echinacea on hand for when I feel a cold coming on. Which of us has not done something similar? A well-known chain of Australian discount chemists devotes several aisles in its enormous stores to complementary medicines and dietary supplements, and people obviously buy them. If we laugh at Mr W. Frith of Wattle Flat via Bathurst, we also laugh at ourselves.

The other reason I often think of Mr Frith is that he reminds me of when I first met the peasant Bodo during my undergraduate days. I still have my copy of Eileen Power’s wonderful book Medieval People, which was first published in 1924 and went through many subsequent editions. Power chose six people and wrote a chapter on each to personify ordinary life in the Middle Ages. Bodo is the first. He was a peasant living in the early ninth century on an estate attached to an abbey near Paris, owned by the emperor Charlemagne. Because of Charlemagne’s close interest in how his lands were managed, the records are extremely rich.

Power discovered Bodo, his wife Ermentrude and their three children, Wido, Gerbert and Hildegard in the abbot’s estate book. With enormous skill and imagination she presents them to us as living, breathing people. We learn of a typical day in their lives by watching Bodo as he sets out on a frosty morning with his ox for a day’s ploughing, little Wido coming along to help. Ermentrude’s morning was spent at the big house, where she had to pay the chicken rent (a fat pullet and five eggs), and her afternoon at home weaving cloth. Power goes further, boldly proposing not just what her people did but how they thought and felt about it. Bodo wasn’t happy on that cold morning, having to plough the abbot’s fields when his own were crying out for attention, but he sang lustily to cheer himself and Wido.

We learn that Bodo and Ermentrude spent Sundays and saints’ days singing and dancing to ribald pagan songs, a practice that greatly annoyed church authorities. Frankish Christians such as Bodo still clung to much earlier rites and superstitions, but these the church wisely left alone. Charms were said over sick cattle and incantations over fields to make them fertile. The cure for a stitch in one’s side, or any bad pain, was to lay a hot piece of metal next to it and say a charm to draw out the nine little worms that were eating one’s bones and flesh. (The sensation of the hot metal probably distracted the mind from the stitch, thus making this cure a mite more rational than Frith’s potato remedy.)

If Eileen Power speculated beyond the evidence in conjuring up the inner lives of her medieval people, her thorough immersion in a broad range of sources enabled her to, as she put it, “make the past live for the general reader.” She was a pioneering social historian and for her book’s epigraph she quotes a famous verse in the book of Ecclesiasticus: “Let us now praise famous men and our fathers that begat us.” The problem for many of her fellow historians, she said, was that they had forgotten the fathers that begat us. Her aim was to recognise the “unnamed, undistinguished mass of people, now sleeping in unknown graves,” upon whose slow toil “was built up the prosperity of the world.”

John Curtin is absolutely one of those famous men, and William Frith one of the toilers. What can be learned about him? If I have my genealogical research correct — and there is some ambiguity in the records — William Thomas Frith was born in the small town of Hartley, in central west New South Wales, in 1869, the son of British migrant parents. His father Oscar was a labourer who, in 1882, appeared before a magistrate for failing to send thirteen-year-old William to school. Probably the boy’s labour was needed at home. I have not discovered any evidence that it was a large family, but not all parents bothered to register the births of their children then.

Frith’s story can be told only through snippets; in fact we probably know less about him than we do about peasant Bodo. The Friths were living in the Carcoar region in 1904 when Oscar and William were charged with assault; William was found guilty but the case against Oscar was dismissed. In 1907 Oscar, aged sixty-six and still working, was seriously injured and nearly lost an ear when his horse and cart toppled over an embankment. The first world war offered an escape (of sorts) for rural families living on the edge of poverty but not so much for the Friths. William was too old to enlist, although his younger brother John did scrape in at age forty-four, in 1915. He was returned to Australia medically unfit in 1917.

By 1930 their parents had died and the brothers were living in Wattle Flat, a village thirty-two kilometres north of Bathurst. This, of course, is the famous region of New South Wales where gold had been discovered in 1851, and Wattle Flat apparently once boasted a population of 20,000. A small renewal of mining activity during the Depression might explain why the Friths were living there, listed as miners (“fossickers” might be more accurate) on the electoral roll. John gave up eventually and “went on the track,” but William stayed.

He was apparently unmarried and had no evident involvement in any church, sporting club, trade union, friendly society or any other of those organisations that were the glue that held society together in those times. In 1935 the National Advocate, Bathurst’s main newspaper, noted that Mr W. Frith of Wattle Flat had been admitted to hospital for “medical attention” (for something beyond the powers of a potato, we assume), suggesting that he did have some standing in the community, but in general he appears to have been a loner.

He must have been paying attention to what was going on in the world, however, or he would not have written to John Curtin. The National Advocate was a left-leaning newspaper (it had future prime minister Ben Chifley on its board of directors) and would have been his main source of news. In its pages Frith could have learned of the Japanese entry into the war in December 1941, its aggression in the Pacific in 1942 and the gravity of Australia’s position as a consequence. He could have read Curtin’s exhortations to his people to expect that each and every Australian would have to make sacrifices. The paper covered Curtin’s appeal to the United States for support and his declarations about the need to reorganise labour and industry, introduce rationing and raise funds through war loans. The Advocate supported Curtin throughout. He was one of the “greatest leaders in Australian history,” the paper claimed.

Historians have noted how Curtin’s background as a journalist helped him craft the messages he needed to gain the nation’s support for the unprecedented interventions in social and economic life necessary to win the war. In this he was assisted by press secretary Don Rodgers, but Curtin already had a natural ease with journalists and was frank and informal with them in his twice-daily briefings. He also spoke directly to millions of people in his frequent radio broadcasts, and by adopting a plain and direct style of address came across as a hardworking, humble and honest man.

Not everyone could have afforded a wireless I suppose. I wonder if William Frith had one in Wattle Flat, or could have joined a neighbour to listen in. If so, back in November 1941, shortly after Curtin became prime minister, Frith might have heard Curtin proclaim that:

This Australia is a land of cities and golden plains, of great rivers and vast spaces. It is a land in which countless thousands of plain, ordinary men and women have toiled long, mostly for little reward; who sacrificed and who built our heritage. If this heritage was worth their lives to build, it is worth ours to preserve.

It’s almost as if whoever wrote the broadcast script (Curtin? Rodgers?) had read and remembered Eileen Power’s Bodo and Ermentrude, those slow toilers who built the prosperity of the world. In any case, rhetoric of that kind was exactly what was needed to inspire people like William Frith, whose family had indeed toiled long for little reward. He may have felt (yes, I am speculating beyond the evidence) that now, at last, there was a place for them in the national story.

The effect of that could have been profound, certainly enough for Frith to decide eventually to devise something out of his own small means, in the form of a curative potato, as an offering back to Curtin. And quite possibly he also gave something that Curtin would have valued much more: his vote. In the federal election of August 1943, Curtin’s Labor government defeated the Country–United Australia Party coalition by a landslide. It remains one of the greatest victories in Labor history.

History, as Eileen Power said, is largely made up of Bodos. •

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Within three minutes of posting, two members of the group had commented on top of each other to say the photo was taken at the corner of Liverpool and Elizabeth Streets, Hobart, looking up what is now Elizabeth Mall towards the GPO clock tower on the left. That’s how quick and attentive people are in groups like this. And they were correct, I know the place perfectly well. I don’t live there anymore, but this is my home city.

Old photographs are posted in this group several times a day and each attracts many comments, and sometimes dozens. This is just one local history group among countless others on Facebook and other social media platforms. Nostalgia is the main theme, certainly, but with every post, comment and share, memories are stimulated and connections with place and community are enacted.

Recollections are often detailed and intricate. Concerning the date of the rainy-day photograph someone suggested the women’s coats indicate late 1950s. “A bit earlier I think,” came a swift reply. “By the mid–late 1950s hemlines had risen a few inches to a bit below the knee. I remember them well from my teenage dressmaking days!”

Others leapt in to name the make of the cars, the consensus being that the one in the foreground is an Austin A40 Devon, although a few people suggested a Hillman Minx. “I immediately could smell the upholstery,” said one. “Go Dad!”

Still others noticed the banks. People love to reminisce about banks. “What happened to the beautiful old bank on the corner?” someone asked. It’s still there, came a reply, now a branch of the National Australia Bank, but the clock has been removed recently, they thought, having not displayed the correct time for a while.

The Hobart Savings Bank on the extreme right of the image has been pulled down and replaced with what one commenter described as a “modern monstrosity.” Someone else claimed to still have a pink bankbook from there with a few pounds in the account, but: “I suppose the government has pinched that.” This person remembered being interviewed by the manager there for a home loan, $20,000 over twenty-five years at 6 per cent. “Real service back then by real people, all those tellers. We have lost so much.”

By this time I was thoroughly engrossed in the world of this photograph. I sent it to my two brothers. Yes, that’s an Austin A40, said Paul, and the car with the smashed-up grille in the centre of the photograph is a Chevrolet (“1939 I think”). He noticed the traffic lights, which I had missed, and how all the pedestrians are wearing titfers. Hats, that is. (I had to look that up.)

Mark remembered the Kodak store still trading in the 1970s. “Mind you, I remember when Hobart had half-a-dozen good photo/camera stores,” he added. As a keen photographer himself, he appreciated the mood and story in the photograph. It’s harder than it looks to take pictures that do that.

For me the main feature is the GPO clock. Our grandfather worked in that building, and I picture him glancing out the window at that very moment, hoping the rain might have eased in time for his bus ride home.

I like to know the origins of things, so I sought out the photograph’s descriptive information at the State Library of Tasmania. It does have a fairly precise date, May 1953. (So, the Facebook commenter knowledgeable about 1950s hemlines was right.) It is one of a series of about 12,000 images made between 1951 and 1973 by the Tasmanian Education Department. Hats off to the library staff for their work to preserve and digitise this series; it’s magnificent.

The photos cover a wide range of subjects other than schools and education, suggesting that the department’s photographers could be called on for a variety of assignments. Our rainy-day photograph shows that they might also fill the end of a roll on the way back to the office with whatever took their fancy.

Mark is right, it’s the mood of the photograph that is captivating. Wet streets are eternally interesting for photographers and artists, and this unknown photographer appears to have sheltered under an awning and brought the shutter down just as everyone is too busy getting out of the rain to notice or care.

See how they have caught the Chevrolet’s crumpled grille just as it swung around the corner towards us? This car has had a bingle, as my father would say, the sort of thing that could occur on any wet day. Central Hobart was not built for cars, and yet in these postwar years a lot more people could afford them. The result: frustration.

Then there’s the woman on the right who draws our gaze as she walks briskly away from us into the frame. With her reflection shimmering up from the pavement, she turns provincial Hobart into a scene John le Carré could have conceived. The cut of her coat is pure 1950s. Clothes rationing is out, Christian Dior’s New Look is in, and this woman can afford the latest modes.

Other women appear to be making do with their older things. The woman with the basket crossing the street, head down against the rain: she could have been wearing that severe jacket and skirt since the 1930s. She’d be about our grandmother’s age, I should think, part of a generation for whom frugality was a necessity and later a habit.

The more I look at the photograph, the deeper I fall into a liminal state between connection and disconnection. I know this place, and yet I don’t. I belong and yet I don’t. I think it’s the raindrops bouncing up off the road that gives the image its perpetual drama. Where is all that water going to go? In Hobart, it goes into the Hobart Rivulet.

Autumn is when the rivulet is most prone to flooding. In June 1954, thirteen months after our photograph was taken, flash floods forced several feet of water into the basement of O’Conor’s shoe shop. You can see the shop sign in the photograph. Staff working there to save the stock might have drowned if the floor-level windows had given way. There had been bad floods in 1923 and 1947, but the 1954 floods were said to be the worst in a hundred years.

The rivulet emerges on the slopes of kunanyi/Mount Wellington and runs through present-day Fern Tree and South Hobart. Reaching the city, it ducks underground and up again a few times before disappearing for a kilometre or so directly under the CBD. (In 2016 the rivulet wall was breached during building works, causing more than $15 million in damage to the Myer department store and several retailers in the adjacent Cat and Fiddle Arcade.) Then it comes up for air for a short stretch parallel to lower Collins Street, disappears, and finally meets the River Derwent at an outlet north of Macquarie Point.

For thousands of years First Nations Tasmanians moving seasonally through the Hobart region would have understood the rivulet’s seasons and moods, and how it connected with other natural watercourses to support animal and birdlife. Then, in February 1804, lieutenant-governor David Collins decided that this was the ideal place to establish a settlement. The “Run of clear fresh Water” he found there played a large part in his decision. Efforts the previous year at Risdon Cove, on the eastern side of the Derwent, had faltered partly for lack of reliable clean water.

Collins understood the need to protect the rivulet, and within weeks had issued instructions to the settlers not to pollute it or destroy the “underwood” close to its banks. By 1805 a footbridge had been built across it connecting a bush track leading north, which later became Elizabeth Street. This bridge was replaced in 1816 by a brick structure named Wellington Bridge after the famous duke. Today it is covered over by Elizabeth Street but a small void protected by a grille affords the curious shopper a reminder of Hobart’s earliest days.

The first European settlers quickly learned that although the rivulet could sink to a trickle in the summer, heavy rain or snowfall on the mountain could turn it into a torrent. And this was even before the town authorities decided to alter its course for the first time, in 1825, with what was known as the “New Cut” along a section of lower Collins Street.

The New Cut diverted the rivulet towards another creek and sent both of them away from their natural bed, which had been under the present site of the City Hall. Their confluence had formed a silty beach prone to flooding, and the diversion was designed to facilitate land reclamation in support of burgeoning waterfront industries.

Early maps of Hobart — this one for instance — show how the rivulet once pursued its own gentle course from the mountain to the river, and how ruthless was the grid of streets imposed on top of it. Over time the rivulet has been diverted, dammed and forced through numerous pipes, tunnels and culverts: controlled and exploited, in other words, for the settlers’ convenience.

David Collins’s instructions to protect the rivulet were ignored, and by the mid 1820s it had become polluted by refuse from humans, animals, tanneries and distilleries. Outbreaks of disease were inevitable. In 1828 the town sheriff reported that the rivulet had become a “receptacle for all the filth and impurity of the town.”

The strip along lower Collins Street was the worst, and just as likely to flood as before. It has never been a pretty part of town, as you can see. In high school I had to catch a bus along here and my moody teenaged thoughts were not enhanced by having to stare at a tired old watercourse while I waited. Residential housing had all gone by then and I didn’t know that these streets used to be known unofficially as “Wapping,” after the working-class waterfront area of London. For a hundred years or more, the people of Hobart’s Wapping suffered the most from flooding and pollution, as the poorest people often do.

Efforts over many decades to improve the supply and quality of Hobart’s water finally culminated in 1895 with the completion of two major reservoirs at the Waterworks Reserve above South Hobart, with a combined capacity of 500 million litres. They still supply Hobart’s drinking water.

The rivulet can still rise up in anger. Calamitous flooding in 1960 led to new control measures, but in 2018 the section along lower Collins Street once again turned into a seething and very dangerous torrent. A group of urban geographers noted then that the problem (not unique to Hobart) is that urban planning measures have become disconnected from nature and overlook the ecological functions of watercourses. Built-up areas deprive a city of green spaces that act like natural sponges. It’s hard to apply water-sensitive planning principles to a city already built.

At the end of my meditation on the photograph taken in Hobart in 1953 I returned to the original question: where does all that water go? How do we prevent our cities from becoming alienated from their natural environmental features? The upper reaches of the rivulet are better managed now, but the challenges are real. Still, the open waterway is fouled by rubbish and other pollutants, some from the South Hobart tip.

If you have fifty-three minutes to spare, spend them with Pete Walsh, the Platypus Guardian. Pete, who first sought solace at the rivulet after a serious medical diagnosis, was drawn there to reconnect with something he thought he was losing. Sitting on the bank one day he was astonished when a platypus emerged from the water and zoomed up to him, wiggling her bill as if she had something to say. He realised that a fragile population of platypuses was still managing — against all odds — to call the Hobart Rivulet home.

The more Pete visited the rivulet the more often he saw this zooming platypus, so he named her Zoom. That profound moment of connection inspired in Pete a passion to do what he could to preserve a habitat for these ancient animals, and a whole community of supporters has since joined him. If Zoom has a message, it must surely be to ask us to tread more lightly on this earth. •

The post A rainy day in Hobart appeared first on Inside Story.

Be assured that I’m not going to be sifting through your rubbish on bin night. In my day job as a social history curator I interpret historical material for display in exhibitions, and in that work the context and significance of objects is critical. In my downtime, though, I grub for the bits of history left behind in charity shops, collectables shops and markets. I’m not a collector; I just like being in the presence of old stuff.

Fine antique shops bore me because everything in them has already been assessed for its market value. All is tidily identified, with no space for adventure or mystery. I’m drawn to the places where I can be unsettled by orphaned artefacts and random associations. In charity and collectables shops it’s up to the customers to establish significance, and they’ll do this through Google searching of course, but also by drawing on their own imagination and memories.

“Oh, my mum used to have one of those!” is a commonly overheard remark, referring perhaps to vintage Tupperware or a Corningware casserole dish. I once spotted a glass jug exactly the same as the one my mother used for mint sauce, but I didn’t buy it, because really, it was rather ugly. Maybe she thought so too, but it was what she had.

Whether or not someone will buy other people’s discarded stuff depends entirely on how they reimagine its use and reinvest it with new meaning. Inversion of value is something that the French writer Raymond Queneau had great fun with in his 1967 poem “The Bin-Men Go on Strike”:

it’s strike day for the bin-men
it’s a lucky day for us
we can play ragpicker or peddler
junk dealer who knows even antiquarian
there’s a little bit of everything…

A little bit of everything. I like that. It’s a tough call, Queneau goes on, between the “eyeless armless noseless doll” or the tin of sardines “that lost all its sardines on the way” or the “can of French peas that lost all its French peas on the way,” all of it “yawn[ing] in the midday sun… ripe for the picking.” Suddenly you see a work of art abandoned by some “ignorant philistine”: the Mona Lisa is it? Or The Night Watch, the Venus de Milo or The Raft of the Medusa?

Carol Rumens chose “The Bin-Men Go on Strike” for her poem of the week earlier this year in the Guardian. She suggests that Queneau conjures “art from soiled fragmented images” and, in so doing, simultaneously goes in the opposite direction and reduces art back to rubbish. Who gets to declare what is art and what is not art? And so, I thought when I read the poem, who gets to declare what is history and what not? Anyone. Feeling superfluous is very freeing.

On a trip to Melbourne in June this year I was happily playing this game in my head in the Chapel Street Bazaar — one of the largest second-hand markets I’ve ever seen — when I was brought up short by a commemorative plate, one of those limited-edition ceramic pieces that people collect for display on shelf or wall.

After blinking at it for a few seconds I realised it depicts a moment shortly after the arrival of the First Fleet at Sydney Cove in 1788. A couple of ships lie at anchor, a Union Jack has been hoisted, and convicts and marines are busy rowing barrels of supplies to a small jetty. Someone has pitched a tent, and already a few trees have been felled to create a clearing.

It was priced at $95. Gingerly I picked it up and turned it over. The painting was titled “Ships of the First Fleet, Sydney Cove” and had been commissioned by Westminster Australia (a company specialising in commemorative ceramics, I later learned) for a limited firing to mark the Australian bicentenary in 1988. The original work was painted by maritime artist Ian Hansen.

Immediately I was taken back to the raucous year-long “celebration of a nation” that was 1988. Most particularly I remember the promotional jingle that planted a twelve-month earworm in all our heads:

Come on give us a hand,
Let’s make it grand!
Let’s make it great in ’88,
Come on give us a hand!

“The road to the Bicentenary was certainly a winding and treacherous one,” notes Frank Bongiorno in The Eighties: The Decade That Transformed Australia (2017). His remark makes me wish I had been paying more attention to the swirl of entangled ideologies going on at the time, but, living in Hobart and wrapped up in my own life, I wasn’t.

The First Fleet re-enactment did penetrate my world, mainly because the “tall ships,” as everyone called them, visited Hobart in early January 1988 for a race to Sydney ahead of the spectacular re-enactment event on the harbour on 26 January. Also on that day in Sydney a protest was attended by more than 40,000 Indigenous Australians and supporters from across the country. I don’t have Indigenous heritage and I confess it barely registered with me.

Mostly I recall a lot of people running about in period costume and the myriad television specials, concerts, books and so on. The official bicentennial logo — a map of Australia in green and gold diagonal stripes — was impossible to ignore. It was on everything from caps to coffee mugs to commemorative coins.

I thought it would be on the back of this plate too, but no, this was an unofficial production. I put it back on its little stand. It all seems such a long time ago now. Gradually I started to notice the clutter of other things on the same shelf. A matching hen and rooster in ceramic. A glazed figurine of a cat. A couple of lamps. A decanter and glasses. A bunch of artificial tulips in a vase. A stack of video cassettes topped by a biscuity-looking bust of the Madonna and child.

Tucked in next to the plate was a ceramic bell labelled “4 generations souvenir bell $45,” featuring an illustration of four generations of the royal family: the Queen, Prince Charles, Prince William and Prince George. The illustration was obviously taken from a photograph of Prince George’s christening in 2013, and I discovered later that it was posed to match a photograph taken in 1894 of the christening of the future Edward VIII. In that photo, Queen Victoria is seated holding the baby prince while the child’s grandfather and father (later Edward VII and George V) stand behind. In each photo the elderly female monarch is flanked by three future English kings. Extraordinary when you think about it.

Here then, in this crazy jumble of stuff, was a glorious freewheeling rejection of the power of professional museums to control the language of acquisition and display; a laugh-out-loud moment for a curator on a day off. This is what I turn up for in collectables shops.

The centrepiece was the commemorative plate, innocently inviting the viewer to remember the earliest days of white settlement on this continent. The flag seen on the right had been hoisted at an informal ceremony on 26 January 1788 at which Captain Arthur Phillip, having decided that this was the best place to establish the colony, had gathered a small party of officers and others to drink to the success of the new colony and the health of their king, His Majesty George III.

And there, depicted on that other useless ceramic thing — the bell — are George’s smiling descendants. There’s his little namesake, who will one day (presumably) be crowned George VII. The god they all worship makes an appearance too, on that altar of video cassettes, also as a babe in arms.

A little bit of everything, at the heart of which was a yawning absence. “Ships of the First Fleet, Sydney Cove” doesn’t depict a single Indigenous person — not one of the Eora people who had cared for that coast for tens of thousands of years before Phillip’s men planted the Union Jack there.

There is nothing to suggest the complex meeting of two vastly different cultures, none of what Inga Clendinnen, in Dancing with Strangers (2003), called “hugger-mugger accidents, casual misreadings, and unthinking responses to the abrasions inevitable during close encounters of the cultural kind.” Certainly there is no hint of violent dispossession. This was a 1988 view of 1788, and all the manufacturer wanted was to make money by producing something that people would be happy to display in their living rooms.

Actually — and this is no surprise in a collectables shop — I was surrounded by numerous examples of complex cultures and histories reduced to toy-like simplicity for domestic consumption. Walking about with fresh eyes I noticed a moustached Mexican doll in a sombrero, several black baby dolls (one of them ludicrously dressed in a grass skirt), some “golliwogs,” some “African” masks and a couple of very choice examples of “Aboriginalia.”

It’s within the collectables market, in bricks and mortar and on online, that we find the best kitsch, and a lot of it is genuinely good fun. It makes us smile, and sometimes generates fresh inspiration for artists and other creatives. But look again at what lurks. While these objects tell us little about the cultures their makers sought to represent, they tell us a great deal about ourselves. Our ignorance, our insularity and casual racism take artefactual form and, over time, fall to the bottom to form a giant, heaving slurry of stuff that we often just don’t know what to do with.

“You’re not going to buy it are you?” my son Harry queried when I told him about the commemorative plate that evening. Of course not, I said, although the thought had crossed my mind. But to do so would enhance the market for this kind of thing, and would, I thought, make me complicit in the artefact’s reductive re-enactment of the past. To own it would be to accept its message. For the price of $95 I would be rejecting Clendinnen’s warning that the people of the past are more than “just ourselves tricked out in fancy dress.”

So I walked away. Yet the plain truth of it is that I’d be embarrassed to own the plate myself and I’m hoping that a public museum somewhere has acquired one so that I can shuffle responsibility from the personal to the collective. I did some searching through various online collection databases but had no success with this particular item, although that’s not to say it’s not there somewhere.

But the 1988 bicentenary seems to be fairly well represented in public collections generally, which is heartening. It shows that, after all, there is a role for publicly funded museums (and libraries and archives) to preserve evidence that disturbs and unsettles our comfortable views of ourselves and our history. It is a job too important to be left to chance. At some point, bin-men and curators all need to get back to work.

Post-referendum we are likely to be feeling more than unsettled. What does the future hold? Australia Day 2024 is not that far away. •

The post You’re not going to buy it are you? appeared first on Inside Story.

Embarrassed by her escape, William decided to pay Bee a weekly allowance in the hope she would keep as far away from him and the family as possible. This she mostly did, but she was unable to curb her disruptive and sometimes violent public behaviour. She was constantly being arrested, charged and fined, and was jailed when she could not pay the fines; many times she was forced back into asylums. This was the pattern for almost the rest of the life of the woman widely known as  a Sydney bohemian.

During and after the second world war Sydney’s acute housing shortage forced Bee to sleep rough. It is a common myth that she chose homelessness. “No one chooses to be homeless,” notes Rose Ellis, in Bee Miles, the first major biography of her subject. When Bee could no longer afford to rent a room but her allowance meant the city’s social services couldn’t help her, she declared herself a “tenant of the city.” Writes Ellis: Sydney’s “public heart became home, its streets and steps her bed.”

Bee would wake at 5am, hook her blankets to her belt and make her way from wherever she had been sleeping to Mason’s Café in Elizabeth Street, opposite Central Station. She breakfasted there on steak and eggs every morning for nearly twenty years. Afterwards she would go to Dobson’s Turkish Bathhouse where she was given a regular free timeslot to have a bath and wash her hair and clothes. The myth says that Bee was “dirty,” but it wasn’t so. She loved a long, hot bath.

Bee’s working day as a “roving reciter” (Ellis’s words) then began. Passing a delicatessen where she received a free bottle of milk and a barrow where she received a piece of fruit, she would catch a bus from Eddy Avenue to some destination, Watson’s Bay perhaps, where she would offer recitals of poetry and prose for money. Her rates varied from sixpence to three shillings, and Shakespeare was her favourite. To advertise this service she wore a sandwich board.

Back in the city she would perform through the afternoon at a regular spot, such as the steps at the Mitchell Library where there was a regular flow of students. She used to enjoy visits to its reading room until she was banned for smoking. She might end her day with a visit to a friend, not that she had many, or a bookshop or cinema. She dined at 5pm, always curried tongue and peas, and chose her place to sleep for the night, which could be a cave at Rushcutters Bay, under a shed in the Domain, on the steps of St James church opposite Hyde Park Barracks, or in the bandstand at Belmore Park.

After years of being moved on and jumped on, having her blankets and shoes kicked away, and sometimes even being urinated on by the police, Bee finally accepted refuge from Father John Hope (uncle of Manning Clark), rector of Christ Church St Laurence. She slept on the floor of the laundry in the clergy house.

Bee Miles was always on the move. She loved speed — and risk.  As a young woman she became known as “mad Bee Miles” for jumping on and off moving trains on her way from the family home in Wahroonga to the University of Sydney. Her university career lasted only a year and it was said (another myth, of course) that her mind was “turned” by too much study.

She would cling to the bumper bars or footboards of cars, or climb right into a car or taxi and order the driver to drive on. She refused to pay on public transport and conductors learned that it was often wiser not to demand a fare, fearful of the scenes she could cause. Some of her most violent confrontations came when taxi drivers, judging her dishevelled appearance, refused to take her as a paying customer. She suffered several serious assaults this way, the driver-perpetrators never charged.

Prodigiously researched (it began as a PhD), Ellis’s life of Bee Miles unfolds elegantly, uninterrupted by personal perspectives or anecdotes of Ellis’s own. She shares nothing about the relationship she must have developed with her subject (surely every biographer has one). If she essayed a night sleeping in the bandstand in Belmore Park, she doesn’t say. She’s not that kind of biographer.

Her book begins serenely enough. We discover a small girl seated at a piano in a room with a vaulted ceiling and long stained-glass windows overlooking a sprawling garden. The girl is Beatrice Miles and she is practising under the careful but kindly gaze of her grandmother, Ellen Cordner-Miles, a celebrated contralto in Sydney in the 1870s. The afternoon light fades but the girl plays on in the otherwise silent house.

Ellen’s son William Miles, Bee’s father, had taken on various family business enterprises and of these Peapes & Co., a men’s clothing store in George Street, was the most successful. William and his wife Maria had five children. Bee (she insisted on “Bee” and not “Bea”) was born in 1902.

William was a man of contradictions, as famous for his business acumen as for his political radicalism. A devotee of the rationalist and free-thought movements, he raised his children as atheists and taught them the rationalist dictum to reject all forms of “arbitrary” authority. During the first world war he took to a speaker’s box on the Domain to rail against the proposed introduction of conscription, and he instructed his three daughters to wear “No” badges at their school, Abbotsleigh College. Bee relished the ensuing controversy, though her sisters did not.

William might have encouraged Bee’s agile mind but he didn’t expect her to reject his own authority. Her adolescent years were torrid. “Family friction is a battle fought daily,” Ellis observes. “Superficial wounds heal quickly in readiness for the next confrontation. But parental rejection leaves scars that are deep and enduring.”

Fifty years later Bee recalled that her father loved her until she reached the age of fourteen, after which he hated her, angered by her “wilful” nature and jealous of her superior intellect. And yet she also claimed that her mother became jealous of the close relationship between father and daughter, which was more than close, Bee said, it was incestuous. Bee believed that William feared that his wife would go to the police or tell a doctor.

Further trouble came when, at seventeen, Bee contracted encephalitis lethargica, known as “sleeping sickness.” She was with her mother buying gloves at Farmer’s department store one day when she fell asleep at the counter and could not be woken. She had fallen victim to a pandemic, brought to Australia by a returning Anzac, that caused 500,000 deaths in Europe and Australia.

Encephalitis lethargica mainly targeted young people, leaving survivors like Bee with lifelong side effects. Unusually, she escaped the Parkinsonism that afflicted other sufferers, but sensitivity to light (in later years she often wore a sunshade), obesity (she put on weight massively in her forties) and, most significantly, her exhibitionism and her addiction to movement: all were probably the after-effects of encephalitis lethargica.

Here then is the “untold story” of the title of this book, and an ah ha! moment for readers who have heard of or still remember Bee Miles. Ellis treats the subject of Bee’s illness very carefully. Early on she gives enough information about the disease and its effects for the reader to carry forward into the rest of the book because it explains so much about Bee.

But encephalitis lethargica was not the only thing to shape Bee. What with adolescent trauma and her own questing mind, she may never have settled for the life of a North Shore lady anyway. Ellis wants us to know about the joys and freedoms Bee experienced, as well as the pain and loneliness.

By the time she returns to Bee’s illness in the penultimate chapter of the book I was ready and eager to know more. Bee became ill in 1920 and nearly died. Ellis has worked through thirty-six years’ worth of Bee’s medical case notes and finds that although encephalitis lethargica was mentioned many times, specifically or in passing, her doctors condemned Bee through the lens of their own morality. She was “wilful,” “restless,” “impulsive,” “childish,” “arrogant,” “impudent” and “tearful.”

All of this, as well as her attention-seeking behaviour and love of speed and movement, was consistent with well-documented observations of post-encephalitis syndrome. But no one fully explored the link, even though the syndrome was being identified in Australian medical literature at the time. Doctors chose instead to believe her father, who may also have been her abuser, who claimed that Bee had always been “wilful” and lacked “respect for authority” — even though he himself had actively taught her to reject arbitrary authority.

Was Bee herself aware of the probable impact of her illness? Apparently so. In front of a magistrate in 1932 she shouted at her solicitor to “shut up” when he alluded to the effects of sleeping sickness. Many of us would find relief in a formal diagnosis (“at least I’m not actually mad”), but Bee never did. Refusing to be labelled, she rationalised her behaviour into her own view of herself.

She built this view through her public performances and the many press interviews she gave over four decades. She also wrote prolifically and longed to be published. Some of her short travelogues did appear in regional newspapers, but her longer work, including accounts of her incarceration in the 1920s and the massive journeys she made to northern Australia in the 1930s, never found a publisher. Ellis quotes Bee’s own words extensively, however, and thus ensures that she can be known on her own terms and not just as the construct of a male gaze captured in court records and medical case notes.

At sixty-two, after a life of fiercely resisting authority and convention, Bee finally accepted a place in a Catholic-run nursing home, where she died in 1973. A journalist for the Daily Telegraph who visited her in her cave near Rushcutters Bay in 1948 had listed Bee’s fifteen “rules for living.” They included avoiding covetousness, being content with what you have, singing when you are happy, sleeping when it’s dark, and living “toughly, dangerously, excitingly, exhilaratingly and simply.” •

Bee Miles: Australia’s Famous Bohemian Rebel, and the Untold Story Behind the Legend
By Rose Ellis | Allen & Unwin | $34.99 | 336 pages

The post Living toughly appeared first on Inside Story.

But while others were revelling in their favourite memories of Edna Everage, Les Patterson or Barry McKenzie, I took myself off in a different, quieter direction: to 36 Gallipoli Crescent, in fact, a street fictitiously located in the real Melbourne suburb of Glen Iris. This was the home of Sandy Stone, the most subtly drawn of all Humphries’s characters. I had no strife finding a “pozzie for the vehicle,” as Sandy often said of his own parking misadventures, because comparatively few people remember this boring old beggar (a polite euphemism for bugger in Sandy’s day).

Humphries, born in 1934, grew up in nearby Camberwell, where his father became a prosperous master builder. Eric Humphries built three houses for his family in Christowel Street, numbers 30, 38 and 36; the last was where they settled for good in 1937. Sandy and Beryl Stone’s imaginary house at 36 Gallipoli Crescent was built on these memories, although whether the style was mock Tudor, mock Elizabethan, neo-Georgian, Spanish mission or Californian bungalow Sandy doesn’t say. Eric Humphries could build them all. There was a driveway for the vehicle, a shady porch, and a tradesman’s hatch at the side. Sandy and Beryl called it “Kia Ora,” a Māori phrase for “hello.”

The Stones’ life together began just as the Depression was easing. On Sunday afternoons, while Kia Ora was being built, they would come and sit on the joists with a thermos and a pile of Australian Home Beautifuls. It’s never clear what sort of job Sandy had, but the couple were comfortably off and could afford the sorts of conveniences much prized by Humphries’s desperately aspirational parents. They had an electric refrigerator instead of an ice box, an electric stove and oven instead of an Early Kooka, and an indoor toilet instead of an outdoor dunny covered in morning glory.

In Sandy and Beryl’s garden there were “rhodies” and “hyderanges” (rhododendrons and hydrangeas), a silver birch and maybe a “jaca” (jacaranda), but probably no roses (Humphries’s mother thought them “a bit old-fashioned”) and certainly no shaggy eucalypts. Eucalypts, as well as paling fences, chicken coops and any structure with a corrugated iron roof, were considered emblems of the working-class existence Humphries’s parents had managed to escape. After their wedding, Eric and Louisa Humphries had moved from the less respectable suburb of Thornbury, but, as it turned out, only a bluestone lane separated the houses in Christowel Street from a remnant pocket of poverty in old Camberwell.

“We stared at each other sometimes, the poor and I,” Humphries later remembered, he on a ladder propped against the back fence, the poor children, with their bloodied knees and runny noses, staring back from their derelict backyards.

The Sandy Stone monologues were written either for sound recordings or as the “adagio act” in Humphries’s live touring shows. He published the collected scripts in 1990 under the title The Life and Death of Sandy Stone, edited by his friend Collin O’Brien. A television series of the same name was broadcast that year by the ABC, recorded in front of a studio audience whom Sandy addresses from his patterned velvet armchair. He is always styled as a middle-aged-to-elderly man, in a dressing gown and slippers, cradling a hot water bottle.

Often Sandy pauses an anecdote to note with deep approval that someone was a “Returned Man,” once a common term for someone who had fought abroad in one or both of the world wars. There was his friend Pat Hennessy, who’d recently had occasion to bury his wife and who was so lost without her that in three years he’d not cleaned the S-bend in his toilet. He was a returned man. So was their local postie, and so was the specialist who broke the news to Sandy and Beryl that they could never have children. As for the vestryman up at Holy Trinity church whose son was a hippie: although not actually a returned man, he was “one of the nicest people you could ever wish to meet.”

My parents and I never missed an episode of the ABC series and my father delighted to imitate the exact note of serene reverence in Sandy’s voice when referring to a “returned man.” Dad’s father George really had been a returned man, a quiet sort of chappie, Sandy would have said, and to look at George nobody would have thought he’d been a prankster and a scallywag before enlistment. But after service on Gallipoli and Pozières he returned silent and deeply introverted, happy to accept an office job and a peaceful life in the suburbs. But he did retain the impish sense of humour that has become a family trait, hence my father’s rich appreciation of Sandy Stone.

With Barry Humphries’s death I thought back to those evenings in front of the telly with my parents and became curious about Sandy’s actual returned status. I found it surprisingly ambiguous. Sandy is a regular at his local RSL, and when he needs to have a surgical operation — a “little op” — he is entitled to have it done at “the Repat,” which as his Melbourne audiences would have known was the Repatriation General Hospital in Heidelberg. (The general term “repatriation” has fallen into disuse but was once a uniquely Australian descriptor for the return of Australian men and women after war service, and their further support through pensions and benefits.)

Sandy has obviously served in some capacity, but what? He first appeared in 1958 in a sound recording, “Days of the Week,” written as the B-side for a 45rpm record. (Mrs Everage took the A-side.) Also in 1958 Humphries published a short story entitled “Sandy Stone’s Big Week” in the Canberra student magazine Prometheus. Nothing happens in Sandy’s “big week.” A pot-bellied Sandy is discovered in his garden in the early evening watering his shrubs. As the light dims, all that is visible of him is his white shirt “and the white arc of water from his garden hose.” Called inside by Beryl, he goes in, switches on the wireless, seats himself in the patterned velvet armchair, rolls a cigarette (later he is a non-smoker) and thinks about the events of the coming week. The highlight will be an RSL meeting on the Friday night at Gallipoli Hall. That’s it.

Nothing much ever does happen to this emasculated Anzac. He makes a trip back to Gallipoli in 1968 with a group of cobbers and a Turkish guide (who spoke “perfect Australian”) and writes a painfully dull letter from the “Istanbul Hilton” to Beryl about the few hours they’d spent stumbling around the peninsula getting souvenir snaps. Perhaps this monologue was prompted by historian Ken Inglis’s reports for the Canberra Times of the 1965 RSL pilgrimage to Gallipoli, but Humphries ultimately rejected the idea of making Sandy a first world war man, and this piece, “Anzac Sandy,” was never performed.

Instead, the second world war became Sandy’s war, although, as Humphries himself admitted, Sandy’s military status was still nebulous. The development of the character coincided with growing scepticism among some Australians, bordering on hostility, towards all things Anzac in the 1960s, but Humphries avoided using Sandy as a vehicle for the kind of biting critique that Alan Seymour explored in his play The One Day of the Year, first performed in 1958. Nor was Sandy a violent, war-damaged tyrant like the father in George Johnston’s My Brother Jack (1964). And again, Humphries was uninterested in the public debate over the system of repatriation that was satirised in John Whiting’s polemical novel Be in It, Mate! (1969).

Sandy was never about any of that. The point of Sandy was to be boring. His creator’s declared aim was to see how far he could bore audiences before they rose up in revolt. Acknowledging the influence of Samuel Beckett and the avant-garde art movement known as Dadaism, with its explorations of nonsense and irrationality, Humphries wanted not to please his audiences but to provoke and shock. Gradually he alighted on the idea of boredom as the way to do it and, turning inwards, found all the material he needed within the suburban wasteland, as he saw it, of his youth.

Hence Sandy’s maddening, circumlocutory monologues punctuated by pointless pauses, digressions and repetitions. His attention will get snagged on a point of inconsequential detail and audiences watch, transfixed, as he struggles to free himself. This, for instance, from “Shades of Sandy” (1981):

Little Gwennie’s husband, Jack, went to his Reward about two years ago. Yes, it would be two years since Jack went to his Reward. It would be a good two years. It would be all of a good two years.

Also in that monologue is Sandy’s immortal critique of the domestic pop-up toaster, specifically the Morphy Richards model that threw Beryl across the room one day when she tried to dig a crumpet out with a fork. No matter the brand of toaster, the crumpet is never taken into account. “You slip one in and half an hour later, if you are lucky, it glides to the surface, as white as a lily.” But sometimes the opposite happens:

Flames leap out of the toaster. You’ve got to bash it underneath with a broomstick, and then you’re on the kitchen floor trying to find it, and over the sink, scraping off the black fur till there’s nothing left but a couple of crumpet holes. A black crumpet hole is no use to man nor beast.

There is a little knob on the side of the toaster, Sandy continues, to indicate light to dark. Easy to miss. Beryl missed it for years and then, when she found it, she couldn’t leave it alone. But the interesting thing, he concludes, is that “it’s not connected to anything” (Sandy’s emphasis). “It’s got a mind of its own.”

Ruminating in 1990 on the origins of Sandy, Humphries recalled how, after having dropped out of university, he succumbed to parental pressure and took a “real” job in the city with the EMI record label. On his morning commute, always running late, he often met his neighbour Mr Whittle, a childless man of his parents’ age who would invariably greet young Barry with “a polite and old-fashioned little squeeze” of his grey trilby hat. For Humphries, this man came to epitomise not just his parents’ generation, but “Respectability Itself”: punctuality, industry, courtesy, thrift, temperance, niceness. “I despised him.”

In 1956, desperate to escape, Humphries got married and snatched an acting job in Sydney. He was unhappy there too, especially in the depressing old boarding house near Centennial Park where he and his wife Brenda were staying. Breakfast was had in a shared kitchen with other tenants, mostly aged and itinerant men, all lonely. Walking along Bondi Beach one blustery winter’s afternoon, Humphries encountered a wiry old fellow of about sixty-five with thin sandy hair, finely capillaried cheeks, a two-tone cardigan and “freckled, marsupial paws.” When Humphries asked the time, he was told: “Approximately in the vicinity of half past five.”

In that moment, he had the last pieces in place to create Sandy Stone, including the sibilant “S’s” caused by ill-fitting dentures, and the thin, dry voice Humphries recognised as “the antithesis of the rugged Australian stereotype.”

What unified these men in Humphries’s mind, I think, was not their ex-digger status but his perception of them as lonely, ageing men. Confused and anxious about his future, perhaps his greatest fear was that he would end up like them. True, Mr Whittle did wear a returned serviceman’s badge on his lapel, but Humphries was careful not to overplay that. Sandy could not be a war bore because he would have had to bore audiences on subjects about which Humphries knew little.

Instead, Humphries turned to a subject on which he was an expert, life in the Australian suburbs. To express his rage and frustration at the tedium imposed upon him in his youth, he needed a technique that would be, he said, “monumentally, grindingly prosaic.”

The most interesting occurrence in Sandy’s life is his death, which occurs in his sleep while Beryl is absent on the Women’s Weekly World Discovery Tour that she had been hankering to do for years. Death frees him to return as a ghost.

He enjoys watching his own funeral and the wake afterwards back at Kia Ora. He watches as Beryl puts the house up for sale and disposes of his effects, assisted by their neighbour Clarrie Lockwood from 43 Gallipoli Crescent. Clarrie heaves Sandy’s armchair into his Vanguard ute along with various other bygones of Sandy and Beryl’s life together, and takes them to the Holy Trinity opportunity shop. It is obvious to everyone except Sandy that Beryl is more gleeful than grief-stricken, and after the house sells she moves to Queensland, where she and Clarrie later marry.

Kia Ora is bought by Mr and Mrs Cosmopolis, “a delightful multicultural ethnic minority Greek couple,” who are expecting a baby. Mrs Cosmopolis notices Sandy’s armchair in the op shop and buys it, and so, in Sandy’s final monologue, “Sandy Comes Home” (1985), we find him back at 36 Gallipoli Crescent, still in his old armchair, watching his house being renovated.

This monologue cracks open the racism that Sandy has been putting down in layers since the 1930s, when fruit and vegetables were delivered to Kia Ora through the tradesman’s hatch by the “yellow hand” of the “little smiling Chinaman,” Charlie O’Hoy. Sandy could bestow a tolerant glow over Charlie, and the Greek couple who operated the local fish and chip shop, and even the Angelo brothers, Italians who as terrazzo specialists did most of the porches in the street.

But when in 1938 an “Israelite” couple named Eckstein moved into the first block of flats in Glen Iris: they were the “thin end of the wedge” as far as Sandy was concerned. They opened the floodgates and then it was “Come One, Come All.”

The Stubbings’ beautiful home at number 52, for instance, was bought recently and remodelled by a Vietnamese couple called Ng. That’s their name, Sandy tells us, incredulous, and “you could smell their cooking on the bowling green.” Number 37, the home of Vi and Alan Chapman, was bought by Bruno Agostino and his family of eleven.

Once they moved in, that once-lovely home was swarming with dagos night and day. Talk about build. They built on the back, they built on the front, they built on the left, they built on the right… they built a balustrade right across the front of the home, with fountains and statues and lions everywhere. It was like a cement safari.

The Agostinos dug up all of Vi’s “magnificent” garden, including the pin oak Vi bought as a seedling years before from the Methodist Church fete. It resisted the bulldozer for the best part of a day, until the “Eye-ties” got a block and tackle to it and finally it came down “with a groan you could hear up and down the crescent.”

Only as they chopped it up did the Agostinos discover a bit of rotten wood nailed on to one of the branches, which was all that was left of the treehouse little Neil Chapman had played in before the war.

Of course, little Neil was beheaded in Borneo. Some Jap with a sword said “Neil!” [kneel] and he did, and that was that. It’s terrible to think that your destiny can be in your own name.

Sandy gives no pause here, but rambles on remorselessly as he always does, leaving audiences, I’m sure, wide-eyed and silent. The monologue ends with Mrs Cosmopolis bustling in to clear away the last of the things that Beryl hadn’t bothered with, including Beryl and Sandy’s wedding photo and a lock of his mother’s hair, which he’d been keeping in a cigarette tin.

“Sandy Comes Home” appears to be the last Sandy monologue Humphries wrote, and was the longest. By then audiences had been allowed to develop a certain affectionate sympathy for Sandy, which made his racism even more shocking. Humphries always enjoyed the deep hush that greeted Sandy’s anti-Semitism. “Perhaps,” he mused in 1990, “we had not until then fully apprehended that we, who had invented Niceness, could also be very nicely anti-Semitic. It was a salutary discovery.”

Sandy’s ex-service status was just a device to tie him to the past and associate him with the most conservative element in Australia at the time, the RSL. The young Barry Humphries had spotted a much older man — his neighbour Mr Whittle — and despised him for his “respectability.” For comedic purposes he was uninterested in the idea that people of Mr Whittle’s generation had lived through and suffered much. But after two economic depressions (1890s and 1930s), two world wars and a cold war, small wonder that they took refuge in suburban routine and hard-won material comforts.

Humphries himself became rusted on to his long-held desire to shock, and over many years must have developed an ability to avert his gaze from the real pain he could inflict. His transphobic comments in 2016 seem to bear this out.

A word about Mr Whittle. Kenneth Roy Whittle was born in 1897, trained as a surveyor and became a public servant. He and his wife Alice moved into 42 Christowel Street, Camberwell in the early 1930s. He was not an ex-serviceman; there is no evidence he enlisted or attempted to enlist in either world war. Nor were the Whittles childless. Their only child, June Elizabeth, died in 1933, aged two, the year before Barry was born. Had she lived they might have been playmates. •

The post What did you do in the war, Sandy? appeared first on Inside Story.

The exercise was presumably designed to make Canberrans feel good about the controversial $550 million project. Cranes hovering overhead and massive earthworks front and rear will invite many uneasy glances at a building that has nestled for decades at the foot of Mount Ainslie as if it grew of its own accord out of the ancient earth.

Of course it did not. As Michael McKernan showed in his history of the memorial, Here Is Their Spirit (1991), between the official announcement of the site in 1923 and the opening of the building by prime minister John Curtin in 1941, hurdles and setbacks tested the faith of its most ardent supporters. Even in 1941, the building was incomplete: the exhibition galleries were opened to the public but the grounds and commemorative areas, including the Roll of Honour and the Hall of Memory, took several more decades to finish.

All those struggles might be forgotten, but the project was once regarded with such trepidation by federal authorities that it was held to a budget — £250,000 — that was manifestly inadequate even for the modest, restrained building that Charles Bean, one of the memorial’s founders, had dreamed of. He had imagined a memorial on a hilltop: “still, beautiful, gleaming white and silent.”

Politicians, though, were more interested in memorials in their local districts than a national memorial most of their constituents would never see. After a vexed and abortive architectural competition, a design for the national memorial was agreed upon in 1929, but with the onset of the Depression the project had to be shelved. Finally, in February 1934, the building contract was awarded to Simmie & Co., a firm that built many of Canberra’s early public and commercial buildings.

It’s long been a fancy of mine that the land itself tried to reject the building being raised upon it, calling up malevolent spirits to cast spells over it. For starters, the winter of 1934 was the wettest then on record. Next, the foundations took much longer to excavate than expected because the trial holes dug during the tender period had not revealed how hard and rocky the site really was. Quizzed over delays in the project, Simmie’s principals complained that they had been “grossly misled” in this regard.

The building was declared weathertight and ready for occupation in November 1935, but after all that effort the result — a long, low construction of garish red bricks from the local brickworks — was embarrassingly basic. The beautiful Hawkesbury sandstone cladding that lends so much quiet beauty to the building had not yet been applied, and influential observers complained it looked “squat” and “prison-like.” Building plans were hastily altered to raise the height of the walls, and later the dome, causing more headaches for Simmie.

Despite these inauspicious circumstances, a doughty bunch of about twenty-five staff began preparing to move themselves and their families from Melbourne to the infant capital, along with 770 tons of objects, paintings, photographs, books, archival records and stores. These had been stored and exhibited in leased premises in Sydney and Melbourne.

Staff arrived in November 1935. While deputy director Tasman (Tas) Heyes moved into a house provided in Forrest, south of the Molonglo river, director John Treloar made what he called a “private arrangement.” After several previous stints living in Canberra, his wife Clarissa had refused to move this time and remained in Melbourne with their four school-age children. Treloar set himself up in the memorial with his suitcases, a wardrobe and a single stretcher. He was not a man with elaborate personal wants; as a staff clerk on Gallipoli in 1915 Treloar had slept and worked in the same dugout and took advantage of the short commute to work punishing hours. This he now proceeded to do again. Although not a cold or humourless man, austerity suited him.

It had been a wet weekend, and from his house in Forrest late on that Sunday afternoon, 12 January 1936, Tas Heyes was keeping an uneasy eye on the sky. In those near-treeless days you could see far across Canberra, and it was obvious that a storm was gathering over Mount Ainslie. He and Treloar had inspected the memorial building on the previous Friday evening after heavy rain and found water seeping in through an unfaced brick wall on the lower-ground floor where the library would be. Cases of collection material stood nearby, ready for shelving. The water seepage had not been serious then, but now, when Heyes found that the storm had blotted out all sight of the memorial from his home, he got into his car.

In January 1936, just as everyone was settling in, those evil spirits decided as a final gesture to turn on one of Canberra’s cataclysmic summer storms. Today, staff in Canberra’s cultural institutions fully comprehend the power of these events, but in 1936 the memorial’s building was piteously vulnerable and the newly arrived Melburnians quite innocent of the harsh extremes and occasional violence of the weather on the high plains south of the Brindabellas.

John Treloar was already there, of course, along with two watchmen, Thomas Aldridge and George Wells, at their change of shift. Mount Ainslie was the centre of a terrific cloudburst, and from its slopes torrents of water were descending. The stormwater drain on its lower slopes had overflowed and water was washing silt and debris down to Ainslie, Reid and Braddon, and becoming trapped in the excavation around the memorial. The building’s lower-ground floor was below the watercourse and water was advancing into the building, sweeping down passages and up to the cases containing precious war records.

Another war: the AWM’s first director, John Treloar, shown here shortly before his secondment to the military in 1941. Ted Cranstone/Australian War Memorial

Many of the cases were raised from the floor on timber baulks, but this precaution had ceased when the building had been declared weathertight, and now several hundred cases were in immediate danger. The three men on site needed help, but none of the staff at that time had home telephones, so Aldridge drove off to gather them from their homes, leaving Treloar and Wells to scavenge timber to make platforms for the cases.

Scarcely had they begun this task when Aldridge returned, having abandoned his car where it had become bogged even before he got out of the grounds. By now, more water was sweeping into the building across a landing that had been built at a rear entrance to help bring in large objects. Treloar and Aldridge tried to dig a ditch to divert the water, but, as Treloar later reported, “the rocky ground defied the shovels which were the only tools we had.” They tried to wreck the landing but it was too well built.

Leaving his men to struggle with the records cases, Treloar phoned the fire brigade and was told that the chief fire officer could send men to pump water out of the building but only if it reached six inches, and they could not help move records or exhibits. Soon after, the telephone service broke down, leaving the three drenched and desperate men isolated. At this point, Tas Heyes finally made it through.

It was growing dark and the building in its primitive state had hardly any lights. Water was washing under doors and through unfinished sections of the roof. The waste pipes of wash basins and drinking fountains, as Treloar said later, “threw into the air jets of water several feet high.” Water was about to enter the room where the works of art were stored. It was impossible to move the cases in time, and improvised squeegees proved to be hopeless. Using chisels and their bare hands, Treloar and his staff tore up the floorboards at the entrance to the room, and the water, which was now creeping around the edges of the art cases, escaped beneath the building. Heyes set out in his car in another attempt to round up more staff to help; by 8pm about a dozen men were on the site and a few oil lamps had been obtained.

The worst was over. Manholes over drains were opened and water swept into them. Staff continued to clear the building of as much water as was possible, working in the dark with only improvised tools. By 1am Treloar decided to suspend work. The men were exhausted and most had been wet through for hours.

Treloar later told a colleague that the suit he had been wearing that day was ruined, a rare reference to himself and his personal comfort. Where he slept for the rest of that night isn’t known, but Heyes, a friend and colleague for many years, probably took him back to his house. Forrest had received no more than an ordinary shower of rain.

The next day the Canberra Times carried long reports of the flood. Six inches (more than 150 millimetres) of rain had fallen on Civic and the inner north in ninety-five minutes. The paper had rarely had such a dramatic local event to cover.

The memorial’s misfortunes were ignored at first in favour of the dramatic rescue of motorists stranded on Constitution Avenue, the many roads that were scoured or washed away, the five feet of water in the basement of Beauchamp House (a hotel in Acton), the “pitiful” state of Miss Mabbott’s frock shop in Civic, and the washed-out gardens and drowned chickens in Ainslie. These local calamities mattered more than what had happened at the memorial, of which the paper finally gave a brief report the next day. Few people really knew what went on in this strange new building anyway.

Monday 13 January at the memorial was a heavy, depressing day of mopping up, opening hundreds of cases and separating the wet from the dry. Two to three inches of water had entered the building. Some 2648 books were damaged and 719 had to be rebound. Among the most valuable was a large collection of histories of first world war German military units, which Treloar described to a newspaper reporter as “irreplaceable.” More than 700 cases of archival records were damaged, as were 10,327 photographic negatives. Thankfully paintings had been stored on their edges in crates so that only the frames were soiled, but 389 were damaged and 300 had to be remounted.

In the end, the damage was not so bad. The museum objects, stored on the upper floor, were untouched. Some of the damaged records were duplicates and, as Treloar reassured his board of management, water-stained books would not be less valuable as records, and the pictures when remounted would be “as attractive as formerly.”

Prints existed of some of the negatives, and the emulsified surfaces of the negatives had fortunately been fitted with cover glasses to protect them. Most of the records cases had been stored on timber two or three inches above the floor, although Treloar bitterly regretted his decision to abandon this practice shortly before the flood.

The salvage operation was instructive and useful in many ways. Treloar was enormously capable, but he liked to consult experts and tried to keep himself abreast of practices in museums, galleries and libraries in Australia and overseas. Here was a chance to call in some help and renew important associations. Leslie Bowles, a sculptor who often worked with the memorial, travelled from Melbourne to advise on the treatment of some battlefield models affected by the flood. Although Kodak and the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research were contacted for advice on the treatment of the negatives, Treloar soon turned to an expert from the Photographic Branch of the Department of Commerce in Melbourne.

The paper items needed the most treatment. A hot-air blower was obtained for the soaked documents, and eight local teenage girls arrived with their mothers’ electric irons on the Thursday after the flood. Treloar had been advised that the best way to fully dry and flatten the documents, newspapers and pages of books was to iron them, presumably with a piece of cloth over the paper. This was to be the job for the next few weeks for Enid, Ivy, Agnes, Betty, Jean, Thelma, Stella and Gwen.

The eight had been recruited through the Canberra YWCA, whose secretary had had many applications for the curious engagement. They were paid under the award for government-employed servants and laundresses, but surely never was a laundress entrusted with such a strange and delicate task. How anxiously Treloar must have watched them go about their work.

Some of the damp documents were part of the memorial’s collection of unit war diaries — not soldiers’ private diaries (although the memorial had a fine collection of those as well) but official records kept by each military unit. For Treloar, they were probably the most important part of the collection and he knew them intimately. They were mostly created on the battlefront, and it would have been agonising to imagine them engulfed by muddy water in the very building created to house and protect them.

Support and commiserations poured in. Arthur Bazley, assistant to official historian Charles Bean, phoned Treloar from Sydney to offer any help he could, using his Sydney contacts. Bean, on holiday in Austinmer, wrote to Treloar that he and Heyes “must have this comfort, that you know that all concerned are so aware of your carefulness and forethought, that their only feeling will be one of sympathy.” Federal interior minister Thomas Paterson, who had responsibility for the memorial, telephoned to find Treloar still lamenting the cases stacked directly on the floor; “an officer could not expect to be a prophet” was his kindly advice to the director.

After all the years of work and worry, Treloar was not present at the opening of the memorial on Armistice Day, 1941. He was in uniform again, based in Cairo managing the collecting effort for yet another war, leaving Tas Heyes to organise the ceremony.

The first Anzac Day at the memorial was held in 1942, the national ceremony having previously been held at Parliament House. With so many Australians fighting abroad and with the enemy at the nation’s doorstep, Anzac Day in the nation’s capital had never been so sombre (and wouldn’t be again until 2020, when Covid-19 restrictions forced the cancellation of traditional commemorations).

No veterans’ march was held that year, and Anzac Day sports were cancelled. The Canberra Times editorialised that the day found Australia a “battle station.” Anzacs “now stood guard on their own land” and any honour owed them was never so much due as on that day. It was to be a day “not of works but abiding faith.”

At the memorial a twenty-minute ceremony held in the commemorative courtyard was attended by a mere 600 people. Around them were bare walls: no Roll of Honour yet, and an empty Hall of Memorial. A single aircraft flew low overhead. Weatherwise, the morning was cool and overcast but there was no rain. •

The post Rock, water, paper appeared first on Inside Story.

To research and write queer history before living memory — without oral testimony, that is — is to enter a much darker place. The last man to hang for sodomy in the British Empire was in Tasmania in 1867, and in 1997 Tasmania became the last Australian jurisdiction to decriminalise male homosexuality. Relationships and life choices that are criminalised, stigmatised and pathologised are unlikely to leave much of an imprint on the public record, and surviving historical evidence is often patchy, obscure and cloaked in euphemism.

In 1990 I wrote an honours thesis in the history department of the University of Tasmania on the Tasmanian writer Roy Bridges. It wasn’t a piece of literary criticism, for that would have been a short thesis indeed. Most of Bridges’s thirty-six novels were adventure stories for boys or middle-brow historical romances and melodramas dealing with the early days of Tasmania and Victoria. Frequently he was inspired by stories his mother, Laura Wood, told of her family history on their farm near Sorell, east of Hobart, going back to the earliest days of white settlement.

Bridges was Tasmania’s most prolific novelist, successful and admired in his time, but his reputation didn’t outlast his death in 1952. I wasn’t interested in the quality of his writing so much as his interpretation of Tasmanian colonial history, and how his own deep connection with the island was refracted through his works of fiction and memoir.

Born in Hobart in 1885, Bridges started publishing in 1909, and at first wrote prolifically for the gutsy little New South Wales Bookstall Company. Time and again he sold his copyright for fifty pounds per novel, whenever he was hard up (“which was often,” he once observed), grateful for the support the Bookstall gave to new Australian writers.

In his mature period his novels were published in London by Hutchinson or Hodder and Stoughton, but during and after the second world war his output declined. The gratifying success of That Yesterday Was Home (1948) eased his final years. Part history, part family history and part memoir, the book is a passionately expressed meditation on memory and connection with place. He died in 1952.

Roy Bridges in 1937. Inscription reads, “To my friends at Robertson & Mullins. Roy Bridges. 1937.” State Library of Victoria

By the time I started work on Bridges he was remembered mainly by enthusiasts interested in the literary culture of Tasmania. As a thesis project, though, he was perfect. No one else was claiming him, and significant collections of his papers were held in libraries in Hobart, Melbourne and Canberra. Methodologically I had Bridges’s memoir as a guide, which, unreliable as any memoir always is — and I knew this — was at least a place to begin.

I bought a 1:25,000 map of the Sorell district and pinned it to my wall in the history department. I drove out to meet Bridges’s nephew and his family, who were still working the property that Bridges had named “Woods” after his mother’s family.

The town of Sorell has always been a stopping point for travellers from Hobart heading either to the east coast or to the convict ruins at Port Arthur. To get there you must first drive across Frederick Henry Bay via the Sorell causeway at Pittwater. “All my life,” Bridges wrote in 1948, “Frederick Henry Bay has sounded through my mind and imagination. Like drums… or like cannonade in storm, or in the frozen stillness of winter’s nights.”

Every time I drive across the Sorell causeway I think of him, and did so again one brilliant day in February this year while heading up to Bicheno on holiday. With the sun sparkling off the bay I shouldn’t have been brooding on old stories, but suddenly I knew that the time was right to tackle again a biographical dilemma I had evaded, all those years ago.

The few others who have written about Bridges have struggled to understand the source of the loneliness and sorrow which, towards the end, amounted to torment. His journalist friend C.E. (Ted) Sayers first met Bridges in 1922 and remembered him as a haunted, “tense little man,” a chain smoker, embarrassed in the company of women, who had allowed a streak of morbidity and violence to enter his fiction. I developed my own suspicions about this haunting, and in my thesis in 1990 I speculated, briefly and carefully (because this was Tasmania), that Roy Bridges had been a closeted and deeply repressed gay man.

I wouldn’t have thought of this except for a conversation I had with the one friend of Bridges I could still find, a well-known local historian named Basil Rait. I visited the elderly Mr Rait in a tumbledown house in north Hobart somewhere near Trinity Church. Just as I was deciding that his recollections weren’t going to be particularly useful, he astounded me with the remark that one day, Roy Bridges had been seen emerging from the Imperial Hotel on Collins Street in central Hobart, and that the Imperial was a known place for homosexual men to congregate.

When did this occur? And did Rait see this himself? I was too amazed — and too timid, I think — to ask enough questions and, rookie historian that I was, I did not record the conversation. Why was Rait so frank, and what did he think I would do with his information? Perhaps I’d gained his trust because I had arrived without a tape recorder. I don’t know.

But I did consider his revelation very carefully. The once-elegant Imperial was rather seedy by then, which seemed to lend plausibility to what Rait had said. I had gay friends and I asked if anyone knew anything about the Imperial’s reputation. No one did.

Unable to verify Rait’s assertion, I turned to the textual sources. Although I was aware of the danger of reading too much into odd snippets of evidence that might have signified nothing, I was also unwilling to ignore what I had been told, which, if true, might explain everything. To speculate about Bridges’s sexuality in the thesis, or not: my thesis supervisor left it up to me. On an early draft I can see in his handwriting: “You decide.”

Royal Tasman (Roy) Bridges came from a family of prosperous wicker manufacturers and retailers. His father Samuel and uncle James ran Bridges Brothers, in Elizabeth Street, Hobart, which had been founded in 1857 by their father, Samuel senior. After graduating with an arts degree from the University of Tasmania, Bridges joined the Tasmanian News as a cadet in December 1904. Journalism was his career for most of the next twenty-five years. He accepted a job with the Hobart Mercury in 1907 but soon became disaffected by poorly paid sixteen-hour days on what his memoir described as a “rotten sweat-rag” and headed for Sydney.

He got a job immediately on the Australian Star under its editor, Ralph Asher. Sydney was a relief from Hobart’s “superficial puritanism, social restrictions and moral repressions of human nature,” but in 1909 the chance of a job on the Age lured him to Melbourne, where he settled in happily for a decade. Then, between 1919 and 1935, when he retired permanently to the farm near Sorell, he switched between freelance writing and journalism, mostly with the Age but also, briefly and unhappily, with the Melbourne Herald in 1927.

A shy man, Bridges did love the companionship of other journalists. Keith Murdoch, future father of Rupert, was one of his early friends on the Age, although they didn’t remain close. There was Neville Ussher, of the Argus and the Age, who died during the first world war and whose photograph Bridges kept close to him for the rest of his life. And then there was Phillip Schuler, son of Frederick Schuler, editor of the Age.

High-spirited, charming, handsome: Phillip Schuler’s nickname was “Peter” because of his Peter Pan personality. Friendship “blossomed” during a bushwalk on a “golden August Sunday at Oakleigh,” then only sparsely settled, and after that the two young men spent many weekends together. They read the same books, roistered in restaurants and theatres, and tried their own hands at writing plays.

On a walking holiday in Tasmania in 1911 the two men tramped from Kangaroo Point (Bellerive, on the eastern side of the Derwent) down to Droughty Point, “the way of many of my boyhood days.” They climbed Mount Wellington to the pinnacle and spent two nights at the Springs Hotel, part way up the mountain (sadly burned to the ground in the 1967 bushfires). From an upper window they watched the “glory of the sunrise,” looking across to Sorell and Frederick Henry Bay. In 1948 Bridges wrote:

The beauty and wonder of the island rolled on me, possessed me, and possesses me yet. We were talking and talking — life, Australia, journalism, literature; always we planned; always we hoped. We were worshipping life, the island, the sun.

If you are thinking what I think you are thinking, then no. Schuler returned Bridges’s friendship, but as his biographer has made clear, Schuler was thoroughly heterosexual and Bridges knew it. This could have been one of those passionate platonic friendships between men, but in 1990 I thought, and I still think, that Bridges was absolutely in love with Schuler.

After brilliant success as the Age’s correspondent during the Gallipoli campaign in 1915, Schuler enlisted for active service but was killed in northern France in June 1917. His last letter to Bridges ended: “Keep remembering.” Schuler’s photograph was another that Bridges cherished always, and indeed he had it reproduced in his 1948 memoir, but Bridges himself was no Peter Pan. He had to carry on facing the disappointments that life inevitably brings, and he was not stoic. In his fifties, living with his sister Hilda back at Woods, he felt the loneliness deeply and became a demanding, querulous, self-pitying man who drank too much.

He did still have many friends though, and in 1938 he began corresponding with Ted Turner, an amateur painter whom he met through their membership of a Melbourne literary society known as the Bread and Cheese Club. Bridges was only a distant member because he rarely left Tasmania by then, but he took a fancy to Turner and found great entertainment in the younger man’s letters, which reminded him of his own Bohemian days in Melbourne. Bridges heaped affection and confidences on Turner, requested a photograph and was delighted with it. He was cross if Turner delayed writing and begged him to visit Tasmania (“Ted old son… I wish I had your friendship — near me!”), but Turner never did.

The two men met only once, in April 1940 when Bridges made the trip to Melbourne, but Bridges went home hungover and with a bout of influenza. He admitted to Turner that the trip had been “a series of indiscretions.” What exactly that meant I couldn’t tell, and their correspondence declined later that year.

Did I indulge in absurd speculation in my thesis about domineering mothers and emasculated fathers? No, but it was impossible to ignore the breakdown of the marriage of Samuel and Laura Bridges, Roy’s parents, in 1907 when Roy was twenty-two. Samuel was pleasure-loving and extravagant, and eventually the house in north Hobart where Roy and his sisters were brought up had to be sold. Of Laura, Samuel apparently said that she “may as well” live with Roy because “it’s plain she’ll never be happy without him.”

Laura managed the household while Hilda became her brother’s amanuensis, writing or typing all his novels from his rapidly scrawled sheets. Roy supported them all financially, although Hilda earned an income as a musician and fiction writer. Only now does it occur to me that there might have been an understanding among the three of them, tacit one would think, that Roy would never marry. Before Laura died in 1925 she begged Hilda, “Whatever happens, look after Roy,” which Hilda did. She never married.

Hilda Bridges, probably in the 1910s. State Library of Victoria

Did I mine Bridges’s writings for autobiographical clues to his sexuality? Yes, for no one warned me against mistaking writers for their characters, and anyway there was so much material to work with. Convicts, bushrangers, and the endeavours of the early colonists to establish a free and democratic society on Van Diemen’s Land: Bridges wrote obsessively on these themes for years.

Novel after novel, especially in his mature period, features a misaligned relationship between a beautiful, passionate woman and an unsuitable man. A son of the relationship will turn up as a convict in Tasmania, and the plot revolves around whether the mother’s folly can be forgiven and her son redeemed by love. Bridges despised hypocrisy and religious intolerance, and his clergyman characters are tormented by unsuitable desires and undone by having to preach Christianity to convicts who are not inherently evil but victims of an unjust society.

Symbolic of society’s condemnation of a convict were the physical scars left by flogging, for which Bridges seemed to have a horrified fascination. In his final novel, The League of the Lord (1950), the Reverend Howard France sits in his study in Sorell picturing an illicit meeting between a beautiful young local girl and her convict lover, which he knew was occurring at that moment. France is jealous of them both. “[Joan’s] eyes are deep blue… her mouth is red, her hands long and white… exquisite…” Further down the page France imagines the couple being caught, which would mean the triangles for young Martin: the “hiss and crack of the lash across strong young shoulders… red weals… red flesh… red running… red.”

Martin is deeply ashamed of being a convict and struggles to accept the love offered by his (free) family in Tasmania. He recalls his journey there on a transport ship, hoarded below decks with hundreds of other convicts:

The faces, the eyes, the voices, the hands; the loathsome, pawing, feeling, gliding, gripping hands… the squeaking laughter in the obscene dark… the foul perverted horde that [had] been men and boys… the brooding, breeding evil, the bestiality, lifelong contamination, incurable, malignant, cancerous.

I underlined this passage in my copy of The League of the Lord but didn’t know how to use it. Now I see it two ways. It could simply be an evocation of Marcus Clarke–inspired Tasmanian gothic. Or it could be evidence that Bridges’s many convict characters are studies of profound shame, self-hatred and alienation. In this reading, those convict characters were versions of himself, their alienation his own, and homosexuality his source of shame. Either interpretation is possible.

Roy and Hilda Bridges’s return to Woods in 1935 fulfilled a promise Bridges had made to their uncle, Valentine Wood, who’d died in 1930, to take on the old place. He knew that Woods meant more to him than Melbourne: “that I was of this land; that it was stronger than I, and that when it willed it would call me back.” Still, brother and sister missed Melbourne terribly, even though overstrain and a nervous dread of noisy neighbours had driven Roy to the brink of a breakdown.

It might have been in these years that the Imperial Hotel incident occurred. Did it? Bridges disliked Hobart, but if it was casual sex he needed, where else could he go? And yet, if the Imperial was a known place for gay men to meet, the police would surely have been there too. Put that way, the incident seems unlikely.

Bridges’s heart condition worsened in the late 1940s and he had a chronic smoker’s cough. He refused to go to Hobart for tests and hated doctors visiting from Sorell. One doctor threatened to have him certified to get him to hospital. “He implied my not liking women about me in such treatment was an abnormality,” Bridges grumbled to a friend. The burden of his care fell as usual on Hilda. Eventually he had to be rushed to hospital in Hobart anyway, and he died there in March 1952 aged sixty-six. Hilda stayed on at Woods for many years until she moved to a Hobart nursing home, where she died in 1971.

I never spoke with Bridges’s family about his possible homosexuality because I was relying on them for recollections and photographs. I drove out to Woods for a final polite visit to give them a copy of the thesis, and after that, unsurprisingly, I never heard from them again.

My research had not included any reading on the ethics of biography so instead I learned it the hard way. I’d gained the trust of my subject’s family only to betray that trust in the end. However, this time — for this essay — I contacted a relative a generation younger and did have an open conversation. There is nothing new to say except that Bridges left a complex personal legacy that is still being felt.

Some people blame homosexuality among male convicts for the long shadow of repression and homophobia in Tasmania that delayed gay law reform until 1997. Perhaps. Such a thing would be hard to prove, and in any case, what is “proof”? What constitutes “evidence” of a queer life? When found, how do we assess its significance? The thing is to not shrink from the task, because with patience and honesty we might still open up some of these painful histories to the light. •

The post Lifting the shadow appeared first on Inside Story.

Perhaps it’s understandable: this is a Sydney story, and I live in Canberra. In Sydney his memory seems to be still strong — although, since Stace died in 1967 — fewer people will remember having discovered an “Eternity” inscribed by the man himself in his famous elaborate copperplate. It would be even rarer to find someone who actually glimpsed him at work in the pre-dawn, head bowed, kneeling to leave his one-word message in chalk or crayon.

I became curious about Stace during trips to Sydney in the 1990s, when a highlight was to call in at the Remo store in Darlinghurst to browse all manner of cool stuff you probably didn’t need but was fun to own, including t-shirts, prints and other merch emblazoned with Stace’s “Eternity” in a design by artist Martin Sharp.

Sharp had been incorporating Stace’s “Eternity” into his work for years, and a five-metre rendition on canvas adorned Remo’s Crown Street window — stopping traffic, according to proprietor Remo Giuffré. From beyond the grave, Stace was very good to Remo. “We were never ones to miss a good merchandising opportunity,” he recalled.

Arthur Stace posing for photographer Trevor Dallen on 3 July 1963. Sydney Morning Herald 

Stace’s fame peaked in the 1990s, but Sydney had always been fascinated by him. From the 1930s onwards the discovery of an “Eternity” on pavement or wall was a unique and unifying experience for Sydney residents. Graffiti was still uncommon, and the letters were so perfectly formed, the meaning so tantalising. Who was this Eternity man? No one knew.

By the 1950s there were so many rumours, so much press speculation, and increasing numbers of false claims by impostors that in 1956 Stace allowed his identity to be revealed. By 1965 he estimated he had written “Eternity” 500,000 times all over Sydney.

Stace’s story, as he told it, was that he was born into poverty. His parents, two brothers and two sisters (actually he had three sisters) were all alcoholics, he said, and he himself was a drifter, a petty criminal and an alcoholic for decades before he converted to Christianity. That happened after he joined, by chance, a service in August 1930 at St Barnabas’s Anglican Church, Broadway, on the promise of tea and cake afterwards. The preacher was the Reverend R.B.S. Hammond, famous in Sydney as a “mender of broken men” — men like Arthur Stace who believed themselves beyond help. Years later Stace was fond of saying that he went in for rock cake and came out with “the Rock of Ages.”

He gave up alcohol and was befriended by Hammond, who gave him a job at the Hammond Hotel, a hostel he ran in Chippendale. Stace worked in its emergency depot helping men in need of a wash and a shave, or repairs to their clothes and boots.

Spiritually, though, Stace was more drawn to the services at the Burton Street Tabernacle, a Baptist church in Darlinghurst. There, in 1932, he heard a sermon by a famous evangelical preacher of the day, John Ridley. “Eternity! Eternity!” Ridley cried. “I wish I could sound, or shout, that word to everyone in the streets of Sydney. Eternity! You have got to meet it. Where will you spend eternity?”

Stace was profoundly moved. Leaving the church, he discovered a piece of chalk in his pocket and bent down and wrote “Eternity” there and then on the ground. He joined the community at Burton Street, and that was the beginning of his new life as a reformed alcoholic and self-described “missioner” seeking to convert others.

Arthur Stace (seated) as emergency depot manager at the Hammond Hotel in the 1930s. Courtesy of HammondCare

When an energetic new pastor, Lisle Thompson, arrived at Burton Street in 1951 the two men immediately became friends. One day, after an outdoor service, Thompson spotted Stace at work with his chalk: “So you’re Mr Eternity, Arthur,” he queried. “Guilty, your honour” was the reply. Thompson wanted to share Stace’s story and eventually he persuaded Stace that an account of his conversion, written as a “tract,” would be a good evangelistic tool, an exemplar for others. Titled The Crooked Made Straight, Thompson’s eight-page account briefly noted that Stace was the Eternity man. “This one-word sermon has challenged thousands and thousands,” he added.

The tract circulating quietly among churches was not enough for Thompson, and finally Stace let him take “Mr Eternity” to the press. The scoop went to Tom Farrell at the Daily Telegraph and the story covered six columns in the Sunday edition on 24 June 1956. The mystery was solved, and overnight Arthur Stace, living modestly in Pyrmont with his wife Pearl (they met through church activities and married in 1942), became one of Sydney’s most famous citizens.

In the ensuing years Stace was happy to grant a further press interview now and then. In 1965, two years before his death, he told a journalist that he had tried a few different slogans — “Obey God” for instance — but that “I think eternity gets the message across, makes people stop and think.” It certainly did, but what Stace might not have realised was that with increasing material prosperity, secularism and multiculturalism in Australia, younger people were becoming baffled.

Martin Sharp first spotted an “Eternity” in 1953 when he was just eleven, and was captivated. “What does it mean? Why is it there? Who wrote it?” He didn’t learn the full story of Arthur Stace until 1983 when he was given a copy of Keith Dunstan’s book Ratbags, published in 1979. Along with Percy Grainger, Barry Humphries, Frank Thring and others of that ilk, Arthur Stace was one of Dunstan’s “ratbags.”

In 1958 journalist Gavin Souter had compared Stace to bohemian rebel Bea Miles and other Sydney “characters,” including a man who sat perfectly still on a bench in Hyde Park with an open packet of peanuts in his lap, covered head to foot in pigeons. In 2001 Peter Carey declared that Sydney didn’t love Stace because he was “saved” but because he was “a drunk, a ratbag, an outcast… a slave to no one on this earth.” Clive James in 2003 simply called him a “lonely madman.”

Christians, on the other hand, had little difficulty in interpreting Stace’s message the way he meant it — that there is a life after this one and we need to be prepared for it. For them there was nothing peculiar about a devout Christian wanting to spread such a message. In 1994 the Reverend Bernard Judd, an Anglican rector and long-time friend of Stace, declared emphatically in a filmed interview that Arthur was not a fanatic, not obsessed, and rejected the association with Sydney’s eccentrics. Stace was “a thoroughgoing reasonable rational Christian.”

When a full biography of Stace, Mr Eternity: The Story of Arthur Stace, appeared in 2017 it was published by the Bible Society. The avowedly Christian co-authors, Roy Williams and Elizabeth Meyers (the latter a daughter of Stace’s friend Lisle Thompson), reiterated Judd’s assessment to again counter the idea that Stace was a “weirdo,” or mentally ill. He was unusual, they conceded, but that could be said of any “prodigious achiever” in human history.

Poet Douglas Stewart could embrace the sublime and transcendent in Stace while avoiding the preachy context, and in so doing helped propel Stace’s work into our modern, secular age. The oft-quoted first stanza of his poem “Arthur Stace,” first published in 1969, runs thus:

That shy mysterious poet Arthur Stace
Whose work was just one single mighty word
Walked in the utmost depths of time and space
And there his word was spoken and he heard
Eternity, Eternity, it banged him like a bell
Dulcet from heaven sounding, sombre from hell.

Stewart’s poem helped inspire Lawrence Johnston’s documentary film Eternity in 1994. Parts of the poem are read during the film, and its beautiful cinematography encompassed a similar sense of light, shadow and mystery. The soundtrack was adapted from Ross Edwards’s haunting orchestral work Symphony Da pacem Domine.

Like Stewart, Johnston wanted to explore Stace’s part in the biography of Sydney, and black-and-white recreations feature an actor (Les Foxcroft) as a silent, lonely, Stace-figure in an overcoat and felt hat, head bowed, walking, kneeling and chalking. An assembly of people, including Bernard Judd, Martin Sharp and artist George Gittoes, describe how Stace had inspired or influenced them.

Gittoes was one of few to have witnessed Stace at work. He had been staring idly into a shop window early one morning in 1964 when he became aware of the image of a man reflected from across the street. As he watched, silently, unwilling to interrupt, the man knelt “almost as if in prayer” and wrote something on the ground. Gittoes had never heard of Arthur Stace then and thought that “Eternity” had been written just for him. As a fifteen-year-old boy “looking for signs,” he said, that one word seemed to be “like a whole book of words,” and the experience had remained “like a tattoo on [his] soul” ever since.

There was something else that struck the artist’s eye, and he remembered it even after thirty years: Stace’s shoes were too big. As the man knelt, Gittoes could see clearly into the gap between his sock and his shoe.

I too am fascinated by this detail. Everyone remembers Stace as a carefully dressed man, always in a suit, tie and felt hat, and an overcoat for winter. The few photographs of him attest to this. But Gittoes noticed that his shoes were much too big, clearly not originally his own. This could have been because as a small man, only five foot three, Stace had trouble finding shoes to fit. Or because even in the relative comfort of his later years Stace was still too frugal to buy new shoes. Whatever the case, my imagination gets to work in that gap between the actual man and how he presented himself to the world.

Stace’s adeptness at controlling his own story for public consumption leads me to wonder: what was in the gap? What would drive someone to write “Eternity” on the footpath every day for thirty-seven years? Half a million times. Was Stace “unusual”? Obviously. A “madman”? Unhelpful. “Obsessed”? Yes, I think so.

Stace was always a poor man, but the dimensions and impact of that poverty have until recently been under-appreciated. The trauma that would afflict his life began even before he was born. His biographers have shown that his mother, Laura Lewis, had two children with an unknown father, or fathers, while she was a teenager living at home with her parents in Windsor, New South Wales. The first baby died, and the second, Clara, born in 1876, nearly did too.

One day Laura left the three-month-old with her own mother, Margaret Lewis, while she visited a neighbour. Ten minutes later Laura was called home to find Clara pitifully unwell. Margaret claimed to have given her granddaughter a drink of tea, but a doctor was called and, as he later testified, found the baby suffering from “gastric irritation of the stomach and bowels,” retching and crying incessantly. Soon it was discovered that what Margaret had actually given Clara was carbolic acid, a common disinfectant. A local chemist confirmed that he had sold it, diluted in oil, to Laura during her pregnancy to treat an abscess.

Remarkably, Clara survived, and although Margaret appeared before a magistrate, a murder charge seems to have been dropped. Why? If Margaret had been making a sudden wild attempt to eliminate an unwanted mouth to feed, there seems to have been insufficient evidence for a conviction, but Stace’s biographers, Williams and Meyers, offer the simple conclusion that it was a genuine accident in a chaotic household.

Four years later, in 1880, Margaret’s husband John was imprisoned for assaulting her, and on his release in 1882 immediately sought her out and assaulted her again. Evidence suggests that the whole family lived in fear of this man. Laura escaped to Sydney with Clara but found no real refuge there. She took up with William Stace, an Englishman from a modestly prosperous background, and together they had six children; Arthur was the second youngest, born in 1885.

But William was feckless and, in the deepening depression of the 1890s, could not hold down a job. The family moved frequently among Sydney’s cramped inner-city suburbs, sliding into poverty. By 1892 they were accepting charity, and in November William Stace deserted the family, leaving Laura destitute. Her only option was the Benevolent Society Asylum, a huge institution located near where Central Station is today. After a Christmas spent within those grim walls, Arthur, his older brother William and younger brother Samuel were fostered. Arthur was seven.

Williams and Meyers mention that later in life Arthur would not speak of his time in foster care. The years he blanked out were spent with a family in Goulburn. Later he was placed with families in Wollongong, and as a teenager he found employment in the coalmines there. (With his first pay, he said, he bought a drink: the first step towards decades of alcohol addiction.)

The Stace family was scattered. William and Laura reconciled, but their lives were marred by alcohol and violence, and all their children were fostered or left of their own accord. By the time Arthur returned to Sydney in about 1905, when he was twenty, William had become a chronic and violent alcoholic, and Laura appears to have taken to prostitution. William died in the Parramatta Hospital for the Insane in November 1908, aged about fifty-two. Laura died of cancer in 1912.

Considering all this, the gaps and inconsistencies in Stace’s account of his life are unsurprising. I think he exaggerated his and his family’s criminal associations a little, probably to make his conversion in 1930 seem more powerful. Especially interesting is his claim that as a child he had very little schooling, and that he couldn’t account for his ability to write “Eternity,” and only that word, in perfect copperplate.

Although he implies it was done by some kind of divine guidance, there is ample evidence that he could write quite well and had obviously received some primary education. When Stace said he couldn’t write, the deprivation he was describing was perhaps not education — it was love.

The gap between the shoe and the sock turns out to be vast. It’s not just the gap between Stace the man and what he said about himself, but the gap between the historical sources (newly digitised, many of them) and how we interpret those sources in our own times.

In fact, the gap is so vast I hesitate to approach it because I respect Stace’s telling us only what he wanted us to know. But also, he invited us to wonder, as he wondered, about unfathomable existences beyond our small selves: he walked in the “utmost depths of time and space,” as Douglas Stewart put it.

So let me suggest that what was in that gap was intergenerational poverty, violence, substance abuse and trauma. The twin pillars of Stace’s trauma may have been, first, the poisoning of his half-sister Clara in 1876, and later, his separation from his parents and siblings when he was seven.

What happened on that day in Windsor in 1876? There was baby Clara, “retching and crying.” There was the shock, the panic, the tears and outrage, and the smell of carbolic around Clara’s mouth. All the witnesses would have had their versions of events, but only the baby’s grandmother really knew, and how could Margaret have explained her actions if she herself was a victim of earlier circumstances impossible to describe? How did Laura cope with the memory of that day, and how could she establish a future for herself and her children? Whom could she trust? Not William Stace, as it turned out.

Arthur’s early childhood memories were of sleeping on bags under the house when his parents were “on the drink,” and having to steal milk from verandas and food from bakers’ carts and shops. Fostering might have given him and his brothers proper beds, food and clothing, but at the cost of everything and everyone they had ever known.

Did they know what had happened in Windsor? From under the house they might have picked up bits of it from abusive arguments between their parents, or perhaps it was never mentioned. Either way, spoken of or not, the story was surely always there, impossible to un-remember.

Our increasing knowledge of trauma and its effects on mind and body may offer new insights into Stace’s behaviour as an adult. For years, both before and after his identity as “Mr Eternity” became known, he told his story many times in Protestant services and prayer meetings: how he had been brought up in a “vile” environment, how he had lived a “slothful drunken life,” going from job to job, jail to jail, and how finally, at his lowest point, he had been “plucked from the fires of hell” at St Barnabas’s when “the spirit of the living God” entered his life.

Conversion gave Stace not just a community to belong to — probably for the first time ever — but an audience for his story. It was common in Baptist services for people to give “testimony” by describing their lives before and after conversion, and so here was an accepted language and a template for Stace to craft a narrative of his own. He could stand outside his story and gain comforting distance from it, always with a group of the faithful to take it and hold it for him without judgement.

So then, those half-million eternities could have been another form of repetitious behaviour, born of trauma. His message could have been not only a one-word sermon or a one-word poem, but a one-word trauma narrative. Mightily told, over and over. In those daily pre-dawn excursions around Sydney, the act of kneeling to write “Eternity” every few hundred yards might have put Stace into a meditative state that kept him separated from his past, eternally in the present. Hoping, with his chalk-dry fingers, to convert his suffering into something redemptive for other people. •

The post Arthur Stace’s single mighty word appeared first on Inside Story.

The corner room is John Macarthur’s bedroom at Elizabeth Farm, Parramatta, and John is seriously unwell. His wife Elizabeth believes he “labours under a partial derangement of mind.” She and the family have feared for some time, she writes to their eldest son Edward in England, that John’s “mighty mind would break down, and give way.”

It does. In April the family decides John must be forcibly moved to their other property, at Camden, where they hope the change will improve his state of mind. And so, struggling and shouting, he is driven away to be cared for by his sons James and William.

In our bright day, this image of John Macarthur in humiliating vulnerability might surprise many readers of Alan Atkinson’s new biography of the couple, Elizabeth and John: The Macarthurs of Elizabeth Farm. Our prevailing impression of that colonial figure, Atkinson notes, is of a “strange genius,” a “ruthless bully” and “a colonial monster,” a man novelist Kate Grenville recently characterised as having no redeeming features other than his ambition and his skill with “bullying, flattery and fibs.”

In those years, the early 1830s, John had “all the symptoms of bipolar affective disorder,” says Atkinson. It would have made no difference if Elizabeth had accompanied him to Camden — the feelings of others had become a “blank” to him — so she stayed at Elizabeth Farm in the house they had built for themselves in 1793. There, she shut herself off with her misery, knowing that John never asked after her. He died at Camden in April 1834. He and Elizabeth, married for forty-five years, had both turned sixty-seven that year.

John Macarthur is remembered today as an instigator of the “rum rebellion” of 1808 and, as the “father of the Australian fleece,” producer of the sheep on the backs of which Australia’s prosperity is said to have ridden. Elizabeth was his loyal helpmeet and the able manager of the family interests during John’s two long absences from New South Wales, from 1801 to 1805 and 1809 to 1817.

Atkinson begins his biography by tackling accepted views of Elizabeth and John head-on, beginning with the earliest publications about the couple and noting especially Malcolm Ellis’s 1955 biography of John, which he admires for the grasp Ellis had of the characters of his two protagonists. Historians of the 1960s were more sceptical of the Macarthurs’ achievements, and John emerges from Margaret Steven’s 1967 entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography as an “emotional cripple” (Atkinson’s term), unable to sustain personal relationships. This, he contends, is patently untrue.

Atkinson wants to take us back to the beginning, to start the enquiry afresh, to tackle the surviving evidence with an open mind, “searching for a deeper and more complex humanity.” The internet is his friend here, not just for the new evidence that allows him to efficiently piece together kinship and social networks around the family, but because it enables a better understanding of how people in the past spoke and thought.

Atkinson often mentions the books Elizabeth and John read — Coriolanus was John’s favourite Shakespeare play — and has been able to match phrases in published books, recently digitised, with their letters. Now we can imagine lives from within (his emphasis): what it was like to live in a faraway time “as a thinking, feeling being.” A theme to which he returns repeatedly is that Elizabeth and John were natives of the late-eighteenth-century European Enlightenment, beneficiaries in particular of the “new skill” of introspection, looking inward and thinking about thinking about oneself.

Elizabeth’s and John’s thoughts were formed by writing. They and their children were all prolific letter writers and, when separated, as they so often were (their son John left for England aged seven and Elizabeth never saw him again), wrote to one another constantly. The family papers were transferred to the Public (now State) Library of New South Wales in 1940 and 1957. In this “forest of voices” as he calls it, Atkinson has been travelling for fifty years.

Atkinson unfolds his view of John’s character slowly, guarded in his judgements and avoiding unnecessary drama. (His treatment of Governor William Bligh’s downfall in 1808 is so laconic I found myself flipping back and forth in those chapters, wondering if this really was the most sensational event in Australian colonial history.)

Little is known about John Macarthur’s mother Catherine, and Atkinson is careful to note where he is speculating. In assessing the mark she left on his character, Atkinson suggests that the success of John’s partnership with his powerfully self-reliant wife Elizabeth would have been impossible without a mother just as strong.

Political economy was John’s great interest all his life. This new “science,” Atkinson explains, explored the interweaving of material welfare and human welfare, and how “men of capital” might secure the happiness of mankind. He learned it during a boyhood at Plymouth Dock (now Devonport) near Plymouth on the Devon–Cornwall border, where his father was a linen draper. The shifting, opportunistic economy of the shipbuilding town, a “hurried and hybrid” place, taught him much about money: that its value was contingent on how it was moved around via human connections, often through conversation, the shake of a hand or “the measured dance of a pen nib.”

One of John’s early experiments was taking up the job of the colony’s inspector of public works in 1793. Freehold grants of land were made to groups of men in the NSW Corps, not just officers like him but also soldiers, to work to feed themselves under their own arrangements of trust, effort and risk. The scheme failed, Macarthur resigned in 1796, and Governor Hunter wrote that he was “restless, arrogant and overbearing.”

John had more success on his own property, but there he worked in harmony with his wife. Elizabeth too was a keen observer of interconnecting patterns and systems. Ever curious, she began studying algebra, astronomy and, especially, botany. Atkinson ventures that it might have been Elizabeth who first thought of keeping — and breeding — sheep for their wool as well as their meat. She was interested by the way hair could change to wool from one generation to the next.

It might have been Elizabeth who prepared eight samples of fleece to send to London in 1801 for expert assessment, annotated to show how the fleeces changed across the generations. The finest of these samples were judged by English experts to be among the best they had seen. But it was John who, in London, took advantage of scarcity of homegrown wool to gain support for expanded production in New South Wales. The result transformed their lives.

Atkinson tackles questions he believes his predecessor Malcolm Ellis shied away from. John was a born “planner and organiser,” according to Ellis, and Elizabeth could translate John’s views and intentions from the “visionary to the practicable.” But what exactly did that mean? With Atkinson’s analysis of the various intellectual influences on the Macarthurs — he discusses prominent writers and thinkers, and how their ideas spread, in considerable detail — his answer is that there developed at Elizabeth Farm a “shifting pattern of need, obligations, questions and answers, mutual adjustment and shared understanding.”

John, Atkinson concedes, was bold, self-dramatising, supremely self-confident, clever, dogmatic and conceited. Did this make him a “monster”? No. Always reaching for a bigger stage on which to develop his ideas and plans, though, he had less capacity for happiness than Elizabeth.

After only nine months in New South Wales Elizabeth wrote that since she had “powers of reason and reflection” she had never been more “sincerely happy” than at that time. The concept of happiness was a little different then, Atkinson shows, and for Elizabeth it meant a satisfaction that she was able to make the most of what God had given her. Her curiosity and sense of adventure were amply gratified. She loved walking in the Australian “forest” and was happiest with her children, her work and her garden at Elizabeth Farm, which she greatly preferred to Sydney.

Elizabeth and John is preceded by two pages of endorsements by eleven leading Australian historians. The book is a stunning achievement… a magisterial work… enthralling and powerful… amazing… breathtaking…

Not that I’m arguing, but I am struck by the fancy that these historians are forming a protective cordon around Atkinson’s book against another incursion by novelist Kate Grenville. Grenville received huge media attention in 2020 with the fictional notion that “Elizabeth Macarthur” had left a sealed box at Elizabeth Farm containing her long-hidden memoirs, which had miraculously ended up in the hands of “Kate Grenville,” who transcribed and edited them under the title A Room Made of Leaves.

Until then, we are told, Elizabeth has been an “enigma,” known only for a few unrevealing letters, a half-finished shipboard journal and a lot of “dull correspondence” with her adult children. The blurb on the back cover calls it a shockingly frank memoir of Elizabeth’s marriage to a “ruthless bully.”

I tried to read A Room Made of Leaves shortly after it came out but gave up when I found the character of Elizabeth simply didn’t grip my imagination. I didn’t care what happened to her and that, in a novel, is fatal. Atkinson dismisses the novel with the curt remark that it is “cut loose from evidential moorings.” Grenville later published an edited selection of Elizabeth’s real letters, so she clearly believes there is value in them.

And yet — did Elizabeth feel constrained from expressing her feelings in her letters, given that they were probably shared around among family and friends? Atkinson doesn’t say. If the Macarthurs were skilled at introspection, what then was their idea of privacy? Did Elizabeth expect to have an outlet for her innermost thoughts?

In some respects Grenville’s and Atkinson’s books are not so different. Both authors endeavour to give us access to the minds of their characters. Atkinson uses some of the skill of a novelist in shaping his narrative into forty-six short, carefully paced chapters, which helps to make a 500-page book (including notes and bibliography) accessible for a general reader. The beautiful cover design features Pierre-Joseph Redouté’s depiction of a flowering plant, an Amaryllis Josephine. The Macarthurs grew one at Elizabeth Farm. A colleague passing my desk picked up the book thinking it was a novel.

As with a novel, I found myself wondering what the characters were doing while I was away from the book. In odd moments, making a sandwich, or in the car waiting for the lights to change, I thought about Elizabeth and her eight fleece samples. I pictured the diamond ring John bought her in Paris, and longed to listen in to her talk with her daughter Elizabeth as they walked around their garden together.

I greatly enjoyed reading about this younger Elizabeth Macarthur, who was born in 1792. Although her health was poor as a child (she may have had polio), she gradually took on much of the household management at Elizabeth Farm, especially the garden, where she showed real talent as a botanist and horticulturalist. Deeply loved by both her parents — her father missed her terribly during his second sojourn abroad — young Elizabeth had suitors but never married. She died suddenly in 1842, aged fifty.

“She was a clever woman, well worth knowing better,” Atkinson observes. I would rather hear more about her from Atkinson than from anyone else. •

Elizabeth and John: The Macarthurs of Elizabeth Farm
By Alan Atkinson | NewSouth | $39.00 | 500 pages

The post The Macarthurs from inside out appeared first on Inside Story.

Undistinguished on the outside, the interior is a palace of dreams for collectors and retro lovers. Furniture, porcelain, ceramics, glassware, jewellery, ornaments, mechanical components, photographs, lamps, clocks, books, radios, tools, baubles, knickknacks and gimcracks beyond description.

My brother came away with a late-1950s Philips three-speaker valve radio in a cabinet of hand-crafted Italian walnut veneer. Worth a fortune when new, he told me, bought by the sort of people who kit themselves out with elaborate home theatre systems today.

I love to fossick but I rarely buy anything because it’s usually enough just to be surrounded by old stuff. But I stopped in front of a small wooden box full of postcards; anything with old handwriting always catches my eye. I glanced at a few. In September 1915 Auntie Daisy received birthday love from Bert and Dave. Bernard from Mangana wrote an undated card to his friend Gilbert in St Mary’s: “Have not heard from one another for a long time. How do you like your bicycle ride to school?” Fanny wrote to her Auntie Lily thanking her for the nice photo she’d sent of the twins, adding that Mother was too busy to write but would as soon as she had time.

Here was no cache of love letters or the correspondence of some august family, just snippets from the vanished lives of ordinary people.

How much for the lot? I hoped for a discount, but instead, while I browsed the jewellery and tried not to hover, the shopkeeper counted them out carefully into bundles of fifty. There were 180 altogether, and at $2 each that was $360, more than I could afford. I took fifty. I asked her to hand me any bundle but to include a couple of cards that had particularly caught my eye. Other than that, my selection was entirely random.

Most postcard collectors collect for the illustration on the front and for the age, rarity and physical condition of the cards. Messages written on the back are of minor interest unless they help date the card. Stamps and postmarks help.

On that basis I should be feeling glum about the value of my little collection. A few are postcards sent from holiday destinations and might catch the eye of a collector, but most are greeting cards carrying illustrations of flowers, birds, cute puppies or idealised rural scenes. Most are undated but the designs suggest a decade or so either side of the first world war. Stamps have usually been torn off and some had different prices pencilled on them. Clearly, many in my set have already filtered in and out of other postcard collections.

Here were fifty uncherished leavings from lives long ended, of only minor interest to collectors and, as I have every reason to know in a thirty-year career as a historian and curator, even less to museums, libraries or archives. Context is everything. Without that, items like these carry little obvious research or evidentiary value.

So why bother? There are plenty more practical things upon which to drop $100. But fate had chucked these $2.00 memories my way and was challenging me to make something of them. For someone in my line of work, this feels deliciously transgressive. Can I coax any historical narratives out of material as meagre as this? I selected four for deeper investigation.

I started with the easiest, a postcard that had been sent to a Tasmanian solider fighting in the first world war. Unlike all the others in my set it came encapsulated in a mylar sleeve. Mylar is clear polyester film widely used by libraries and serious collectors because it is inert and will not chemically react with the material preserved in it. Obviously a collector had already noticed that an Anzac association enhances the item’s significance. (Isn’t that always the way with anything Anzacy?)

The card is dated July 1918, and reads: “Dear Fred, with hearty good wishes for a happy birthday, from your old friend, Joy.” Joy had followed the correct procedure for addressing mail to soldiers by including his service number, rank, and military unit: “No. 6373 Pte Fred Zantuck, 12th Battalion, Australian Imperial Force, Abroad.”

Old friends: Joy’s July 1918 postcard to Fred Zantuck.

This was enough information for the postcard to find its way to Private Zantuck and yet it never had a stamp, so it must have been included with a letter or parcel. This makes sense. The cost to post letters to soldiers was a shilling for every half-ounce (fifteen grams) or fraction thereof. Why spend a shilling to send a single postcard?

Thanks to Joy’s care with the address, it took me very little time to discover basic details of Zantuck’s service, and his life afterwards. Frederick Zantuck enlisted in 1916 and returned in 1919. His cousin Vernon Zantuck also served and returned. The Zantucks were a large family of German stock who had long Anglicised their name from Zantuch, and Fred’s and Vernon’s fathers had been farming in Tasmania near Colebrook for many years. There are Zantucks still living in the district.

Fred was wounded twice in 1918 by gunshot — the first time on the side of his head and the second in the chest — but on his return to Australia a medical board found he had no disability. In August 1919 he married Irene Kay of Launceston, and in 1920 they took up a soldier settlement block on land apparently surrendered by his father. He died in 1964, having farmed at Colebrook all his life save for those few years at the war. The couple appear to have had only one child, Vanda, born in 1920. Irene died in 1984.

All of these threads can be unravelled by following the clues on the postcard sent to Fred by his “old friend” Joy. But what of Joy herself? Fred cared enough to bring her card all the way home to Tasmania and keep it, but was she a school chum, a girlfriend, or a friend of one of Fred’s four sisters? Without a surname she is impossible to trace, and that is so often the way. Men who march off to war leave a far deeper imprint on the historical record than do the women they leave behind.

Next out of my three turned out not to be a postcard, but a photographic print. It is a black-and-white studio shot of a little blonde boy aged about three, seated, and dressed in shorts and knitted jumper. By his clothes I would say this was 1920s or 1930s, long past the Victorian era when small boys wore dresses.

This gorgeous little cherub is smiling slightly away from the camera but his open hands are extended towards it as if he is offering something to the viewer. His hands are also blurred: obviously the shutter fell while he was still moving. Perhaps this gesture was a convention in the photography of children at the time, but I have not seen it before.

Carefully preserved: Ernest A. Winter’s portrait of an unknown child.

On the back is no name or date, just a simple inscription in black ink: “To Dear Grand-Father, with love.” Grandfather appears to have cherished the boy’s offering because the print is in excellent condition, as if kept carefully for years in an album.

If there is no clue as to the boy’s identity, there is another path to follow. A photographer’s impression is visible in the bottom right corner of the print, and back home in Canberra with a magnifying glass and strong light, I could read it. “Ernest A. Winter, Tasma Studio.”

In no time I discovered that Ernest Albert Winter had operated a photography studio in Cattley Street in Burnie, on the state’s northwest coast. The business was advertised in the local press from 1911 until at least the mid 1950s, when it was being operated by Winter’s sons.

Winter owned the prominent building and lived upstairs. In addition to studio photography, he developed film for the public, carried Kodak supplies, and sold souvenir booklets of his own views of beauty spots around Burnie and the coast. He was secretary of the Burnie Tourist and Improvement Association and served on the local council.

I enjoyed getting to know Mr Winter, but none of it helps with the story of the little boy other than that he probably lived in the Burnie region and that his parents could afford a studio photograph of him. It was a small shock find it tossed in with a pile of postcards in a collectables shop in 2022. How could the memory of this adorable child have been discarded like that? And yet how easily it can happen. It might only take a generation or two for people to forget the names and faces of their forebears.

Finally, there is a pair of cards written from Nellie to Dora. From them we get a  vivid glimpse of Nellie’s life, but blink and you miss it.

Nellie didn’t date her cards and they didn’t go through the post. One was a Christmas card published by G. Giovanardi, a postcard importer and publisher in Sydney before the first world war. Nellie wishes Dora a happy Christmas and New Year and hopes to hear from her soon. “We went to the South beach on Wednesday and had great fun. I had two swims.” Nellie is busy getting ready for Christmas and will be glad when it’s all over. “Now Dora,” she teases, “I hope you don’t eat too much pudding that day.” And she concludes, “I must now get to work again. Ta ta. Best love to all from Nellie. XXXX.”

Long journey: one of Nellie’s postcards to Dora.

Nellie covers the other card entirely with writing. Although she still enjoys making a satisfying curl on the capital letter D for Dora, she is not cheerful and excited now, she is agitated. She begins by apologising for not having answered Dora’s letter earlier but, she says, it was received with letters to Trissie while Trissie was staying with a friend, and Trissie — whoever she was — said nothing about it when she came home. Nellie had only discovered Dora’s letter that evening and it had been written the previous September. By then it was January, and Nellie had been wondering why Dora had not been writing.

“No Dora,” she continues, “Olive does not write to me now. She did not answer my letter of about 12 months ago.” Nor had Allen answered the card and letter she’d sent him the Christmas before last. “I thought you must all have been sick of me.” Still, Nellie rattles on. She is just back from short stay with Edith. Tom left that morning for Sydney, for good he says. Ella and Jean are returning to Kin after a month’s visit “down here.” She concludes by promising to write again and asks Dora to write soon too.

Fortunately, amidst all that chatter there is one contextual clue: Kin Kin is a small town in southern Queensland, northwest of Noosa. Obviously Nellie lives further south, close to the beach according to her other card. After a bit of online mucking about I established that in 1912, a couple named Charles and Ella Ferris married and settled in the Kin Kin area and that in 1934, Jean Ferris, presumably their daughter, was living with them. So, mother and daughter must have been the “Ella and Jean” who had come south to visit Nellie.

Such were the little comings and goings of Nellie’s life. Poor Nellie. Trissie carelessly (or deliberately?) failed to pass on Dora’s letter, and Dora didn’t bother to write again. Other friends have stopped writing. And just that day, Tom (a brother?) has left home, possibly for good. I’m embarrassed to have stumbled into this seemingly lonely woman’s life but fascinated as well. To try to restore lost connections, to weave scraps and fragments together into a narrative, to restore meaning: I can’t help myself, can’t not do it.

I wonder: was Nellie a spinster, one of those women we assume were washed up after the first world war with no one to marry? I recall reading somewhere that in demographic terms, the “man shortage” of the 1920s was a myth, but the loss of even a few men in a small community might have been enough to desolate the futures of the women who might have married them.

Was Nellie a frightful gossip, and would that explain why people avoided her? Perhaps. I do think she was one of life’s doormats. Look at the verse printed on one of the cards. Entitled “Gratitude,” it reads:

Fancy you thinking of poor little me
I feel just as happy as can be
To known your thoughts
Sometimes wander my way
And I hope that our friendship
Will last dear for aye.

Would Hallmark publish a card like that today? Of course not. We live in a different age, one that elevates personal growth and self-esteem because, as the L’Oréal ads tell us, “you’re worth it!” If self-pity is your issue, talk to your therapist.

Pleasingly, Dora, the recipient of Nellie’s cards and perhaps others (I chewed my lip at the thought that I’d left some behind in Oatlands) did keep them. Somehow the cards made the journey to Tasmania, brought by Dora or someone associated with her, and were preserved, or at least not thrown out, until years later when someone bundled up the cards with other unwanted stuff for a secondhand dealer to pick through. Finally, someone — me — bought them and read them and wondered what had happened to Nellie, Dora and their circle all those years ago.

I love these quiet mysteries, and history beyond the walls museums and libraries. When someone finds newspaper underneath their old kitchen linoleum, they keep it and marvel at how life was “back then.” Old bricks with makers’ marks are a great find, as is a shoe discovered in the walls of an old house, left by a builder as a lucky charm. Detectorists who find old war medals will take to the internet to find the descendants and return the medals because it feels like the respectful thing to do. Scraps of old letters used as templates in a patchwork quilt make us yearn to piece them together. Secondhand booksellers sometimes collect and share the forgotten notes and scraps they find left in books.

A Latin phrase expresses it perfectly. Ubi sunt qui ante nos fuerunt: “Where are those who were before us?” Ah, Nellie, what happened to you? •

The post Memories, $2 each appeared first on Inside Story.

I grew up in Hobart, but I had never been to this part of Tasmania before. Liffey is a very beautiful place, not a town but a cluster of small farms following the valley of the Liffey River. The cemetery is clearly marked on the map, but on the ground a cemetery without a church is an easy thing to miss. Suddenly, a glimpse of white showed above the tall yellow grass — white where there shouldn’t have been any white. We pulled over.

The cemetery’s double iron gates have crosses worked into them, signalling that this is consecrated ground. A lichen-encrusted sign tells us that the Mountain Vale Methodist Church occupied the site from 1867 until 1952. Behind us was Mountain Vale Hill, and across some green paddocks to the west, rearing up grimly on the other side of the Liffey River, were the densely forested Cluan Tiers.

We stomped through a patch of long grass and Scotch thistles, where the church must have stood, and past the remnants of a paling fence. The white headstone we’d seen from the road turned out to belong to Bertram Henry Saunders, who died in 1906 aged nineteen, and his sister Lily, who died in 1910 aged twenty-eight. Inscribed on their headstone is a pair of clasped hands surrounded by leaves and flowers. We could only see about twenty marked graves, none more recent than the 1930s. All were humbler than the tall marble headstone dedicated to young Bertram and Lily Saunders reaching out above the grass to beg passers-by that they not be forgotten.

Saunders. I knew the name. I’d been researching the impact of the first world war in this district and I knew that five men named Saunders had enlisted from around here, and that they feature on local war memorials. Bertram and Lily must have been from that family.

War memorials were why we had come. I had written an article about memorial tree-plantings in Tasmania’s northern midlands. Our visit to Liffey was to take some photographs of trees planted in 2015 at the old Liffey school to replace those planted in 1918 in honour of the men from Liffey who had volunteered for war. That done, we’d be on our way. We were snatching a few days’ holiday over Easter and would be spending that night in Longford.

But you can’t stand in an old cemetery, as we were doing, and not wonder about the entire history of the place and the people, and whether, after all, war was the defining event in their lives. I could see by the dates that these must have been some of the first white settler families in this district. Some had sent grandsons and sons to the war; others — whose names I did not recognise from local war memorials — had obviously not.

Anzac has narrowed our focus too much. It reduces our questions to those that treat the war as an inevitability. But it was not inevitable for Bertram and Lily, who died before 1914. These young people died quite innocent of one of the twentieth century’s great tragedies. The war, so soon to grind itself into Australia’s national psyche, never happened for them.

Glancing up and around, I had an uneasy sense that there were stories folded into those hills that it might not be my business to pry into. And yet I was so desperately curious about these people I would gladly have got down on my knees, right there and then, and scraped though thistles and bare earth if only that would reveal their lives to me. It wouldn’t, of course. I would have to wait until I got home to Canberra to dig into the traditional historical record.

But the experience of being in a place allows us to shift our gaze. What else happened here? How did the land and environment shape people’s ambitions, work and family life? Investigating this might produce histories that don’t sit comfortably with one another.

Victoria Falls, one of the four waterfalls on the Liffey River, c. 1940–50. State Library of Tasmania

The headwaters of the Liffey River gather in Tasmania’s Great Western Tiers and take a wild course through rainforest before plunging down four magnificent cascades known collectively as the Liffey Falls. The river is close to the boundaries of three nations of Tasmanian Aboriginal people, and several clans within these nations made seasonal journeys through the area. The Pallittorre clan of the North nation was based at Quamby Bluff, not far from Liffey Falls.

On 24 June 1827 a group of Pallittorre people camped between the Liffey Falls (then known as Laycock Falls) and Quamby Bluff, a prominent nearby mountain peak. They woke late in the evening to the barking of their dogs. Their fires had revealed their location to five white settlers — two soldiers, a police constable and two stockmen — intent upon reprisal for the murder the previous day of a white stockman, William Knight. The settlers fired on the Pallittorre people as they ran into the bush.

Depositions given the following week in Launceston by two of the settlers stated that only one round was fired on the Aboriginal people (many more on their dogs) and that one person had been wounded. But the Hobart Colonial Times reported — almost gleefully — that up to sixty Aboriginal people had been “killed and wounded.” Historians who have studied the incident accept that a massacre took place, with more killings on both sides in the ensuing days, part of what historian Lyndall Ryan has called an “eighteen-day killing spree” in June 1827.

The Pallittorre survivors may have been too frightened to return to the killing sites to observe funerary customs over the dead. Their normal practice was to cremate bodies, but fires would have given away their location. Without these rites, the spirits of the dead would never rest. In later years, stockmen and timber cutters passing through might have heard stories about the killing of the “Blacks,” might even have found a few bones here and there. Today, no memorials mark the sites near Liffey where the Pallittorre people died.

By the 1860s land outside Tasmania’s central midland corridor had been opened up for closer settlement. In Liffey, one of the first white arrivals was James Green, and it was he who donated a sliver of land for the building of the Methodist church in 1867, naming it Mountain Vale after his own property. Timber for the church was cut at his steam sawmill. The structure was so austere you might almost mistake it for a barn, not a church. A flourishing community grew up around it, and every year, for many years, Green gave his workers a day off so that they and their families could celebrate the founding of the church.

Mountain Vale Methodist Church, date unknown. Churches of Tasmania

Most of the blocks sold or leased in Liffey were just a few hundred acres each, and located in difficult country. Fertile certainly, but densely timbered, wet, very cold in winter, and remote from markets for the settlers’ produce. Clearing enough land to establish a viable farm could take a lifetime, but landholders were at least entitled to vote in local and colonial elections, which gave them some say in the sort of society they wanted to live in.

Until then much of the colony’s best land had been granted to free immigrants with plenty of capital who had used convict labour to establish vast pastoral estates. But now, new generations of settlers were pushing into “new” country and helping to level out old social inequalities.

The Saunders family were among that cohort. There were two couples: Caroline and John Saunders, and Maria and William Saunders. Caroline and Maria were sisters, and their husbands were probably cousins. Such couplings were not uncommon. Caroline and Maria’s parents, Jane and John Jones, had taken up land in Liffey in 1863. John was killed by a falling tree while he was building a house for his young family.

Caroline and John Saunders married in 1881 and had ten children. Eventually they did well enough to build a six-room farmhouse, quite fine for Liffey then, which they called Silverburn, but like many bush families they probably started out in a simple timber hut. With too many people living in unsanitary conditions, disease was common. Rose, their third-born, died of typhoid in 1884 at just ten months. She was probably buried in the Mountain Vale cemetery under a simple wooden cross, but if so, the grave marker is long gone.

Bertram and Lily at least survived to adulthood. I don’t know what carried them off, Bertram in 1906 and Lily in 1910. Tuberculosis perhaps. By then, the Saunders parents could afford an elaborately carved headstone for them. Unusually for a woman of twenty-eight, Lily was unmarried.

War came. Caroline and John still had four sons, and all enlisted. Leslie and Colin had moved to Queensland and were living in Gordonvale, a sugar-growing town near Cairns, when they signed up in August 1914, only weeks after war was declared. Both were at the Gallipoli landing on 25 April 1915. Colin went missing that day, but his death was only confirmed for his parents eighteen months later. Leslie survived Gallipoli but was killed in France in August 1916. Neither man’s remains were ever found; they are commemorated on memorials at Lone Pine, on Gallipoli, and at Villers-Bretonneux.

Their younger brother, Alan, enlisted from Tasmania in March 1915 and managed to have himself transferred to the same battalion as his brothers, presumably to be closer to them. After a few months on Gallipoli he joined the fighting in France. After Leslie’s death, Alan requested and was granted a compassionate discharge from the army on the grounds that his parents had lost two sons and were partly dependent on him as the only son left. He arrived home in Liffey in November 1916.

But here’s the twist. Alan had not told the truth. He was not in fact the last surviving brother in the family because all along, his oldest brother, Walter, had been living in Bracknell with his wife and four children. Walter did eventually enlist, in late 1917. He made it to France just before the armistice, when it was too late for him to see much action, and returned to Tasmania unscathed in October 1919. He took up a soldier-settlement block near Longford, and had four more children.

You can learn a lot from archival records and local newspapers. That’s how I put this story together. But there are limits. Often you can uncover “what happened” — or some of it — but not “why.” The emotional coherence that once held people’s decisions together is lost.

For instance, Leslie and Colin had left Tasmania before the war to strike out in Queensland. Why? Was there a family argument? Perhaps they were looking for work, which is why most young people leave Tasmania, but perhaps they just wanted to get out of this remote, tight-knit community where everyone seemed to be related to everyone else. But why go so far, to a place so different?

Young Alan seemed a troubled soul. He rushed to the war when, at age twenty, he still needed parental permission to enlist, but after his brothers died he lied his way out of the army to get back home again. Did his family connive at this? Given how long it took for letters to travel between continents, I would say not.

Clearly this was a family in acute emotional distress. How did Alan explain his return? What was said around the kitchen table at Silverburn in late 1916? None of us can suggest Alan was a coward. We weren’t there. But the fact that no one in authority checked his story (for instance, by requesting information from the local police) suggests that Alan may not have been an effective soldier, and that the army was willing to quietly let him go. Did his older brother Walter know of Alan’s duplicity? If so, it must have placed Walter in a most dreadful position. Perhaps — here’s a thought — the decision to volunteer for the war was more agonising for Walter than his actual experience.

The postwar years brought fresh worry for Caroline and John. In 1921 their oldest daughter, Beryl, died, leaving her own three children to Caroline and John to care for. Alan married and had a daughter but in the mid 1920s he and his family moved to Queensland, to Gordonvale, where his brothers had lived before the war. He died there in 1930, of war-related illness according to his family. He was thirty-five.

Caroline Saunders died in 1926 aged sixty-two. When John died in 1937, aged seventy-nine, he had been predeceased by seven of his ten children. The three who were left buried their parents next to their sister Beryl under a single, unadorned headstone at Mountain Vale, and added the names of their solider brothers — Leslie, Colin and Alan — who had died “For King and Country.” Thus were these adventurous, impetuous boys brought home to rest with their family.

Social historians of the first world war invariably point out that bereavement in war — the scale of it, the shock of it, and the fact that relatives could not be present at the death or bury their dead with traditional rites — was not the same as in peacetime. It isn’t natural that adult children should die before their parents. All true. And yet if we go back before 1914 we discover that many people were already in mourning when the war broke out. Each of my two Saunders couples in Liffey lost three children before 1914, and that can hardly have been a unique experience.

Maria and William Saunders married in 1886 and also established a farm in Liffey, and had eleven children. In 1901, diphtheria broke out among children in Liffey. This bacterial infection, transmitted by coughing and sneezing, was made worse in small houses where children shared cots and beds. It attacks the respiratory system; if unchecked, a toxin creates a thick grey film in the nose and throat. Many victims who die are unable to breathe.

In the space of a week, Maria and William watched three of their children die in this way: Stanley, aged nineteen months; Horace, thirteen years; and finally baby Grace, only a few months old. All three received separate funerals at Mountain Vale. Three times a procession set out from the Saunders’ house to travel a few kilometres on foot, surrounded by forest, behind a horse-drawn hearse to the little wooden church at Mountain Vale. Nothing marks their graves now.

Not surprisingly, Maria and William sold up and moved. They had more children, and were living in Hadspen, near Launceston, when war came. They had lost two sons who might have volunteered for the war, but still had three eligible sons, Harold (known as Errol) and twins Lawrence and Clarence. These young men would have had plenty of friends who rushed to the colours — including their own Saunders cousins — and yet they hesitated.

Many did. In Tasmania the enlistment rate among eligible men was 37.8 per cent. Pragmatically, men weighed up their various duties and obligations, calculated the pay and allowances made to soldiers and their families, and decided not to go. Others attempted to enlist but were rejected on medical and other grounds. But that left huge numbers who never went near a recruiting depot.

Tasmania voted twice in favour of conscription, in the plebiscites of 1916 and 1917, but the debate was bitterly divisive. For those who stayed home it must have taken a particular sort of courage to accept that their lot would be to plant potatoes, mend fences and get the harvest in; that they would be shooting rabbits and possums, not the beastly Hun.

Under the weight of all this, only Lawrence went. He enlisted in October 1916 and served on the Western Front until he was killed in action in Belgium in February 1918. He is buried in a cemetery near Ypres. Clarence, his twin brother, stayed home, married and had a family, and lived a long and outwardly uneventful life. There are tales aplenty of twins who enlisted, fought and died together, but these two didn’t. How did they decide who would stay and who would go? Could it possibly have come down to the toss of a coin?

The more we attempt to dwell inside the lives of people in the past, especially ordinary people who leave little trace of themselves in the historical record, the more questions we uncover that elude easy answers. So be it. My stories from Liffey are fragmented and unresolved. But small stories inspired by encounters with local places often ask us to reconsider broader national narratives: Anzac, or something else that we cherish. They nibble away at accepted versions of history and propose new relationships between apparently disparate experiences.

Who is a hero and who is a coward? Who is remembered and who is forgotten? How is the memory of the dead to be preserved? That man with a gun — that man with a spear — is he a patriot or is he a criminal? These binary questions are probably not useful. What is important is that we are attentive to whatever unquiet stories the land might reveal. •

The author would like to acknowledge the assistance of historian Dr Shayne Breen in the preparation of this article.

The post Unquiet stories from Liffey appeared first on Inside Story.

The poem reminds me of country drives. You stop for a break, and on the way back to the car you glance across at the town’s war memorial and frown, wondering if you should pause. If someone had the decency to put a memorial there — no, if someone had the decency to volunteer for war in the first place — the least you can do is spend five minutes having a look.

You wander over to read the names inlaid, and marvel at the men, obviously from the same family, who all joined up, quite possibly breaking their parents’ hearts. You circle the memorial respectfully so as not to neglect names from later conflicts, or the names of the occasional Boer war man or army nurse. But the wind whips up and you go back to the car. Doors shut, you turn up the music and get on your way.

A curious traveller might pull out their phone. Many websites are now dedicated to Australian war memorials and monuments, putting biographical flesh on the names they list. A few taps will bring you the service record of every Australian enlistee in both world wars, kept in the National Archives of Australia.

Twenty-three years after Page’s poem came the pivotal academic work on war memorials, historian Ken Inglis’s masterly Sacred Places: War Memorials in the Australian Landscape (written with Jan Brazier). Despite those earlier fears, interest in Anzac, and in the history of the first world war especially, has not withered. Quite the contrary: our last man might have long passed away, but his memory is kept alive by many, many commemorative shillings.

“Every town has one…” Yes, so it feels, as if small-town and suburban memorials have always dotted the Australian landscape. And yet there must have been a time during and after the first world war when no town had one, when no names were inlaid. What did families do when they began, painfully, to accept that the empty place at the dinner table would never be filled? How would the memory of their son or husband be kept alive not just for now, but for the future?

Historians have written extensively about mourning and commemorative practices in Australia during and after the first world war, and about whether and how they brought consolation to the bereaved. These are not new questions, and indeed they were not in the front of my mind when I came across a photograph of a woman named Fanny Cooper in the Australian War Memorial’s collection. This studio photo with her son Louis was taken in Launceston shortly after he enlisted in October 1916.

Fanny Cooper with her son, Private Louis Cooper, in late 1916. Australian War Memorial

It was the image of Fanny that gave me pause. I wondered instantly who this beautiful, sad-eyed woman could possibly be. She seemed old enough to be Louis’s grandmother rather than his mother. Patient resignation is written on her face, as if she has known tragedy and is steeling herself for more. And it came. Louis served on the Western Front with the 12th Battalion, Australian Imperial Force, but in July 1918 he died of broncho-pneumonia in a military hospital in England. Such is the ready availability of records these days that it took very little effort to establish these facts. The lad in the photograph did not come home. What then of his mother?

The Coopers lived in Longford, a small town about a twenty-minute drive south of Launceston. The family made no special mark on history and apparently left no personal letters or diaries in public archives or libraries. But the National Archives holds Louis’s pay file and service records, and in these I found a few letters from Fanny to military authorities seeking information about this and that. Not much, and little to tell me about her life or character.

Now fully immersed in this story, I kept digging and turned, inevitably, to local newspapers. The Launceston papers, the Examiner and the Daily Telegraph, routinely covered events in this and other northern districts. For decades historians have been using local papers to recover myriad small but telling details of people’s lives, but digitised newspapers now make this astoundingly quick. They open new paths for searching across places and associations with church, school, sport, leisure and work. This is how I recovered the Cooper family’s war story.

Fanny was the daughter of Isaiah Briggs, a saddler by trade and stalwart of Longford’s Methodist church, and his wife, Maria. One of Fanny’s sisters married the brother of Walter Lee, a Longford man from a Methodist family that ran a business making agricultural implements. Lee rose to prominence as a Tasmanian parliamentarian and, as Sir Walter Lee, was three-time premier of the state. Fanny married William Cooper, a painter and decorator, in 1880. Large families were still common then; Fanny was one of ten children, and she and William had six sons and five daughters. All eleven survived infancy, but their daughter Elsie died of typhoid in 1904, aged seventeen, and in 1910 two of their grandsons died in a horrific fire, aged just six and four.

Louis was the only one of Fanny’s sons to enlist, but by the time he did, seven of her nephews had enlisted and three had died. It is no wonder that, by then, Fanny looked all of her fifty-seven years.

The Coopers were at their property at Liffey when the dreaded telegram arrived in July 1918 announcing Louis’s death. For some years the family had divided their time between Longford and Liffey. The Liffey River drains the cliffs of Tasmania’s Great Western Tiers and meets the Meander river near Carrick. It is an area of wild beauty, known today for its protected wilderness areas and especially for the famous Liffey Falls. In the Coopers’ time, families ran small  farms in the valley, grew vegetables and fruit, and trapped rabbits and marsupials for their fur.

The Cooper property appears to have been a mixture of farm and orchard, and provided extra income and employment for the Cooper sons beyond the family painting and decorating business in Longford. The Coopers sent Louis and perhaps some of their youngest children to the school at Liffey, but although there is a Baptist church there the Coopers worshipped at the Methodist church in nearby Bracknell, where William was a lay preacher.

A path towards acceptance? The former Liffey state school, site of an early honour board and tree-planting. Edward Condé

Among the first things William and Fanny did after hurrying back to Longford was place an “In Memoriam” notice for Louis in the Daily Telegraph headed “Duty nobly done.” A few weeks later, at Bracknell on 16 August 1918, a memorial tree-planting was held at the recreation ground. Premier Sir Walter Lee attended the event along with local councillors and clergy, and addressed the crowd. His wife, Margaret, planted the first tree in honour of Colin Saunders, killed at the landing on Gallipoli, who was the district’s first soldier to die. The relatives of twelve other soldiers then planted trees, the last one being for Louis Cooper. He had not been dead a month at that point. His parents must still have been reeling.

This was several years — many years, in some cases — before permanent war memorials were established in Australian towns and cities. Ken Inglis has noted that expenditure on lavish monuments was discouraged during the war because all fundraising was directed to the war effort. Afterwards, local communities took so long to raise the money and settle upon the form and the site for their memorials that it was too late, Inglis thought, for them to serve as sites of immediate healing or consolation for many bereaved relatives. Anzac and Remembrance Day observances were still only in a formative state.

In the meantime, families needed something, somewhere to go, something to do, beyond their private grieving. This is what a funeral is for, after all. The Coopers and 60,000 other families had no body to bury or funeral to arrange, and no one knew when or how permanent memorials would be established. In the meantime, tree-plantings must have been a response to a hunger for ritual.

In Tasmania in the spring of 1918, with the war still going on, public tree-plantings were occurring all over the state — in fifty towns, according to one estimate. The trees were usually planted along major roads as “soldiers’ avenues.” They drew on a longer-standing practice: community tree-plantings as civic beautification projects had been a feature of Empire Day celebrations each 24 May, possibly based on an American tradition known as Arbor Day. Australia’s nationwide tree-planting movement — both to encourage enlistment and to mark the sacrifice of men of the district who had volunteered and died — began in 1916, promoted by returned soldiers’ associations and state recruiting committees. A major memorial avenue of 520 trees was established on Hobart’s Queen’s Domain in 1918 and 1919. These were planted solely for the dead, but in some towns there were plantings for all known volunteers.

Not a huge amount of money or coordination was required to clear and prepare land to establish soldiers’ avenues, and councils or local committees raised the funds to cover the costs of trees, tree guards and name plates or boards. Although they were usually secular affairs, a local clergyman would typically make a speech, and there would be hymns. “O God, Our Help in Ages Past” was the most popular, and the assembled crowds would salute the flag and sing the national anthem.

Tree-plantings didn’t have to be gloomy. The town of Cressy, about ten kilometres south of Longford, was described as “en fête” for the planting of its sixty trees, and the ceremony at Exton featured games and races for the children. People were often encouraged to support the latest national war loan, and a word of thanks would be put in for the Red Cross. Families gathered for photographs. Children might help plant the trees, although surely no one in these rural towns minded getting a bit of dirt on their knees. Proceedings invariably concluded with an afternoon tea provided by a committee of local women.

About 150 trees were planted along several of Longford’s major streets on 24 August 1918, a few weeks after the event at Bracknell. Premier Lee was again in attendance. He paid tribute to the bereaved parents of the district and declared his belief that trees were a much better way of “keeping green” the memory of those who had enlisted than the “rearing of a marble monument,” because the trees “would grow and live for many years.” The names were too numerous to be noted by the local press, but it seems likely that Louis Cooper was among those memorialised. Anyone who had “a boy at the front” could plant a tree as long as they promised to look after it.

Less than a month later, in the grounds of the Liffey state school on 15 September 1918, the Coopers had another tree-planting to attend. Basil Archer — a member of the Longford Municipal Council, Methodist lay preacher, and scion of one of northern Tasmania’s wealthy landowning families — did the honours this time. Again, the first tree was dedicated to Colin Saunders. (Five Saunders men — four brothers and a cousin — had enlisted and three had died, a fact that was probably the stuff of legend in the district.) A tree was planted for Louis Cooper.

As years passed, though, most soldiers’ avenues, even the large one in Hobart, fell into disrepair. Relatives who had tended to “their boy’s” tree, who had gathered there to spend a moment remembering or even have a picnic, gradually moved away or died. Councils ceased to pay attention. Trees died or were cut down to make way for other developments. Guards and name boards were lost. Memories were not “kept green.” Rather than being “inlaid,” the names were usually painted, impermanently, on timber.

At some point Longford’s council removed the name boards for refurbishment, after which they were forgotten and finally disposed of, apparently with no record kept. Were it not for newspaper reports, the existence of many soldiers’ avenues would be almost impossible to trace. In 2015 the little community in Liffey replanted their commemorative trees on the site of the old ones, and marked each with a new metal plate. Likewise, volunteers in Hobart have restored the soldiers’ avenue and launched a website explaining the history of this and other Tasmanian avenues. It keeps the memory digital.

Tree-plantings were one form of community response to the loss of sons and husbands. Honour boards were another, and here again we benefit from the efforts of volunteers in recent times to locate and digitally document artefacts scattered across sometimes obscure places.

Honour boards were unveiled in churches, schools, workplaces and community halls: hundreds in Tasmania, thousands across the country. Most consisted of lists of names painted onto a timber plaque, or “tablet” as they were sometimes called, perhaps embellished with elaborate carvings. Some were merely painted or printed on paper and framed. As with soldiers’ avenues, the same names would be repeated in different places, or sometimes omitted entirely for reasons impossible to recover now. No official coordination was undertaken, and few precedents or traditions existed. People just did what they felt was right.

Louis Cooper is named on a large, printed honour board dedicated to hundreds of men of the Longford district, which includes enlistments as well as deaths. It looks like a commercial effort by a publishing company, and evidently someone who was not local has gathered the names because all five of the Saunders men are erroneously called Sanders.

The same mistake was not made on the honour board for fifteen men from Liffey state school (now a community hall), which includes the Saunders men as well as Louis Cooper. A more elaborate board dedicated to “the mothers in sympathy and in memory of those sons from Longford who fell during the Great War” was unveiled in Longford in 1920. Twenty-six men are named, including Louis and two cousins, Guy Briggs and Charles Lee. Curiously, Louis was not included on the Bracknell town honour board even though his parents planted a tree for him there.

He is named on the honour board unveiled at the Mountain Vale Methodist church, however. A settlement principally based on sawmilling grew up in this area south of Liffey towards Blackwood Creek in the 1860s. The church served as a school building as well. Although the village was in decline by the early twentieth century, fifteen volunteers, including Louis Cooper, are recorded on the honour board. Six had died. The church has been dismantled and the honour roll is now kept at the Liffey Baptist Church.

Back in Longford, in May 1922, a memorial window was unveiled at the Methodist church, commemorating the loss of Louis Cooper and six other men from the parish. After the hymns and addresses, the assembled stood in silent prayer as Basil Archer drew aside the Union Jack to reveal the window. Its central feature is a crusader in armour with sword and crown, surrounded by the words “Faithful unto Death” and “I Have Fought the Good Fight.”

Longford’s permanent memorial was finally unveiled in Victoria Park, in the centre of town, in August 1922. It is a black granite obelisk with fifty-three names inlaid, including Louis Cooper’s. By then his name had been honoured with three tree-plantings, three honour boards and a church window, meaning that the Coopers had put his name forward for commemorative projects no fewer than eight times in four years. I have no doubt they and their family attended every single planting and unveiling.

We can read accounts of all these events, but we can only imagine the social interactions: the greetings among neighbours and extended kin, the consoling hand on a shoulder, the stories told in odd moments between formalities. Ageing parents listen eagerly to men who had been to the war and come back, keen for anything that could help them understand how their son had died. Over cups of tea, they might grumble about how slow military authorities were to pass on information but also share some of their son’s letters and mementos, perhaps even a pocket diary sent home with his last effects. Clergymen murmur words of consolation. Young men who had not volunteered stand apart talking among themselves. Children dodge about, gobbling cake while trying to look solemn.

Community events like this gave the bereaved a space within which to renew social connections and compose a story of the war that they could live with. They would see roughly the same people and hear the same speeches from the same local worthies at events held sometimes only weeks apart. The very repetition might have been comforting. Everyone had heard all the rhetoric before, of course, but that didn’t matter. Seeing their boy’s name listed in public among the others was what mattered. If that helped to define and externalise their loss, a path towards acceptance might just have been possible.

Fanny Cooper would have known that Louis might not come back. Other women in her community, including her own sisters, had already been bereaved by the time mother and son posed for their photograph in a studio in Launceston in late 1916, he in his newly issued uniform and she in her best dress. How could any parent live with that awful uncertainty? That is the mystery preserved in the photograph; that is what draws our eyes to hers. •

The post The names inlaid appeared first on Inside Story.

The telegram had been sent on 9 October 1917 to the Reverend George Cranston, the minister at the Presbyterian church in Campbell Street, Balmain. It was his job to break the news of Eric’s death to the Garriock family. He probably delayed his call until the late afternoon when Thomas would be home from work and his wife Ann, Eric’s mother, would not be alone. So: a house, a doorstep, a nervous clergyman with a duty to perform.

As he stood there he might have smelled dinner cooking and heard the Garriock daughters chatting as they helped their mother. The oldest girl Ora had married in 1917, but Agnes, Annie and Robina were still at home. Their father was perhaps sitting in the corner with the evening paper. People often dreaded the sight of a clergyman in their street, and Reverend Cranston might already have been seen walking up Duke Place. Whose turn was it this time?

While life had carried on as usual at Duke Place, Eric had been dead for three weeks. He had given “Presby” as his religion when he enlisted, so it was up to Cranston to offer any comfort the family would accept. Breaking the news to nonbelievers, a clergyman could find himself back on the street in no time. But George Cranston and Thomas Garriock were fellow Scots, and perhaps this was enough to give Cranston entry to the household even if the Garriocks were not regular churchgoers.

It might also have helped that Cranston was a former army chaplain who had served sixteen months overseas in Egypt and France. Faced with the Garriocks’ pleading eyes he wouldn’t have needed to rely on empty platitudes: he would have ministered to many dying men, buried them, and written letters home to their families.

What most people wanted was the truth, however brutal. How did my son die? Where is he buried? Who was with him at the end? Cranston had no more information for the Garriocks that day than was in the telegram, but he would at least have been able to respond with something authentic from his own experience. Then, after leaving the telegram with the family, he would have walked back to the manse and to his wife, Marion. “Don’t hold dinner,” he’d probably said on the way out. “I don’t know how long I’ll be.”

What happened next? At this distance it is near impossible to know how grief played out in the lives of the Garriocks, and how long was the shadow it cast. This was not a well-off family with the leisure to preserve their feelings in letters and diaries. So, let’s come at it from another angle.

What happened to the telegram? Such a flimsy piece of paper for the weight of news it carried. Was it abandoned on the kitchen table? Did it flutter to the floor? Or did the family pore over it, searching for answers? Tens of thousands of similar messages were delivered all over the country between 1915 and 1918. What did people do with them? Is it something you would throw out, like a gas bill? How could you, with the words “killed in action” next to your son’s name?

In 1987, seventy years after this telegram was received, it was donated to the Australian War Memorial. If you order it up to the reading room today you are presented with a carefully preserved piece of paper in an acid-free cardboard folder. In researching this essay I found about ten official first world war telegrams like this at the AWM, and all came as part of small collections donated by families. Typically these collections might include some letters and cards home from the soldier, condolence letters after his death, commemorative memorabilia, information about his burial, a notebook or pocket diary, photographs and newspaper clippings. What families donate varies according to time and circumstances, and as a researcher in the reading room you never know quite what you will get.

A weight of news: the telegram that brought word of Eric Garriock’s death. Australian War Memorial

Still, I was taken aback when I opened the folder to find just this solitary piece of paper. I was tempted to shake the folder in case something else dropped out. But is this record any less weighted with meaning than those more elaborate collections? I took a second look. The telegram has been folded and looks as if it was carried around for a long time, resulting in tears along the creases and one of the folded surfaces becoming more rubbed than the others. Perhaps someone carried it in a wallet; Thomas probably, not Ann, because women carried purses in those days. Was that a strange thing to do? Who can say?

In pencil on the back of the telegram these words have been written in a small neat hand:

Dock Rs 1^st 2 of storey house past Bay St

Directions to some waterfront location? Not the Garriocks’ own house, for there is no Bay Street in the area. Perhaps Thomas made the jotting himself when he needed to note something down and the telegram was all he had.

I wanted more context. I pulled up Eric’s war service record, which is held by the National Archives of Australia and viewable online. He died in one of the battles of 1917 known collectively as the Third Battle of Ypres. I was interested in any evidence of how his family dealt with news of his death and noticed that, unusually, no personal items were returned to them. A deceased soldier’s kit was always examined and anything not issued by the AIF was sent to his family, who were always anxious to receive anything, however trivial, as mementos. Soldiers couldn’t carry or store much stuff, but most had something: a wallet, a Bible, a few photographs, perhaps a pocket diary. But Eric’s service record notes that when he died he had no personal effects at all.

Still, as next of kin Thomas Garriock was issued with Eric’s service medals and the commemorative bronze plaque and scroll sent to all families of the British Empire war dead. Also standard was a photograph of the soldier’s grave, if there was one (some soldiers’ remains were never found). These photographs showed the temporary grave, usually marked by a simple wooden cross, preceding a soldier’s final interment, and were mounted in cardboard folders with the precise location of the grave given. Relatives could draw comfort from this information even though few could ever expect to visit the grave.

A photo was sent to Thomas by defence authorities in May 1920 and he replied to say how pleased he was, but he apologised that he could not afford to “improve” the grave. By that he probably meant that he would not be able to pay for an inscription when his son’s remains were permanently marked under a headstone. All headstones included the soldier’s name, military unit and date of death, but anything else had to be paid for by the family. The cost was thruppence ha’penny per letter for a maximum of sixty-six letters including spaces. Historian Colin Bale has estimated that the cost of a full inscription would be about a quarter of a basic adult weekly wage. At least a third of Australian identified graves have no personal inscription.

Thomas was so troubled about his inability to pay for an inscription that he wrote in 1922, unprompted, to apologise again. He had been invalided after an accident in 1917, he explained, and when his wife Ann died in 1921 the twelve-shilling weekly pension paid to her as a dependent of Eric’s was stopped. Thomas was living near Gloucester in northern New South Wales by then and relied on “the daughters” for everything he received. “I hope the country won’t forget the Boys who gave their lives for their King and Country,” he wrote. Maybe that was the inscription he’d have chosen: “For King and Country.”

Eric’s final resting place is in the Birr Cross Roads Cemetery, three kilometres east of Ypres, Belgium. Thomas Garriock died in 1946.

With archives, abundance is always regarded as a virtue. Breadth, depth, richness, variety: that’s what we want, and get, in the great deposits of personal records. The papers of John Monash, probably Australia’s most famous soldier, occupy sixty metres of shelving at the National Library of Australia and another six metres at the Australian War Memorial. Four major biographies have been written from them. In fact biographers’ careers can be built on access to rich deposits like these: subject, biographer and the holding institution can bask in a mutual glow of prestige and influence.

But fat biographies lull us into false expectations. What is actually held in archives and museums represents the merest fraction of the material evidence created in a society at any given time. Novelist Hilary Mantel expresses it best. History, she says, is “what’s left in the sieve when the centuries have run through it — a few stones, scraps of writing, scraps of cloth.”

How then do we grapple with scarcity, not abundance? We must begin with an awareness that many processes and circumstances are at play in the creation of records and their preservation as archives. Our man Eric Garriock probably did write at least a few letters or cards home to his family and it’s obvious from his enlistment papers that he could write — but these have not come to light, and nor has the photograph of his grave that we know existed. If he had a studio photograph taken in uniform before he left Australia, as many excited young enlistees did, it has not been donated to a public collection and nor have his service medals and the memorial plaque and scroll issued to his next of kin in the 1920s.

And the telegram? It has little obvious evidential value. By the time it was donated to the memorial in 1987, the memorial had long since collected the details of all the Australian first world war dead for its Roll of Honour in Canberra, so the telegram added nothing to the existing public record.

The file documenting the Garriock acquisition by the memorial is slender. It shows that the donor was a Mrs W. Bentley of Punchbowl, New South Wales. The only other item in the deposit is a piece of souvenir embroidery from Egypt with “From Eric to Agnes” inscribed in stitches. Such souvenirs were cheap to personalise and Eric obviously sent one home to his sister while he trained with his unit at a camp near Cairo in early 1916.

“Souvenir of Egypt 1916”: the embroidered greeting Eric sent to his sister Agnes in 1916. Australian War Memorial

The file contains no correspondence from Mrs Bentley to tell us about the Garriock family. Who was she? Electoral records show that Agnes Garriock, Eric’s sister, remained unmarried and lived in Punchbowl for many years, so Mrs Bentley may have been a younger friend who, on Agnes’s death in 1970, received some of her possessions. But while she cared enough to offer the telegram and the embroidery to the AWM, she may have known very little about them. No story — no anecdotes about Agnes or her long-dead brother — came with the donation when it was transferred to the memorial. Too many years had passed. There was nothing left to say. The emotion of that frightful moment in 1917 on the doorstep at the little house in Duke Place had all been spent.

The embroidery does yield a story of its own, though. It has been mounted on a stiff brown backing, and over many years light has faded the dyes in the base fabric, turning red into pink and blue to pale grey. You can see the original colours around the edges where the mount has crumbled and flaked away. This deterioration would have been arrested once the object was placed in museum storage. So? Agnes Garriock had it on the wall in her house for so many years it almost fell apart in front of her eyes.

They that are left grow old, and so does the material evidence of their loves and sorrows.

For Reverend Cranston, the Garriock telegram would have been one of dozens he had to deliver after his return from his own overseas service in March 1917. It was part of any parish priest or clergyman’s duties. Policy on this appears to have been formulated around the time the nation began to brace itself for the first casualties from the Dardanelles (Gallipoli). On 29 April 1915, defence minister George Pearce told the Senate that relatives of soldiers reported missing or killed would receive the news via a telegram delivered by a clergyman of the soldier’s denomination. (In the 1911 census less than 1 per cent of the Australian population had declared themselves non-Christian.) The names of the dead would then appear in the official casualty lists published in newspapers. Pearce’s announcement was reported in the press the next day.

In Britain and Germany, by contrast, messenger boys delivered the telegram, a terrible burden to place on the shoulders of boys aged not even eighteen. Many of them probably handed over the piece of paper and rode off on their bicycles as fast as they could.

The system in Australia was more humane, but there were still flaws. Sometimes the clergyman couldn’t break the news because the family was not living at the given address. In 1916 this was reportedly happening in about one in ten cases, which is why Base Records, the office set up in Melbourne by the defence department to handle soldiers’ records and coordinate casualty notifications, constantly pleaded with people to keep their addresses up to date. The ultimate horror was that families would read about a death in the newspaper, which did sometimes happen. Clergymen were required to notify authorities when they had delivered the message to each family so that the names could then go forward for publication, but there were a few who replied immediately only to discover that the telegram was undeliverable.

Behind all the procedures for keeping relatives informed was a continuous flow of information between Melbourne and locations overseas: Cairo and Alexandria in Egypt, Rouen in France, and of course London, where the AIF had its administrative headquarters. Nevertheless, information on the fate of a soldier could often be slow and vague, especially early in the war. Months often passed before the deaths of soldiers previously reported missing could be confirmed, and the Red Cross set up its own private enquiry service to assist relatives despairing at the lack of information from official channels.

In deciding to use clergymen to deliver the worst news to relatives, the government relied on the cooperation of churches, and for the most part got it. But people’s new dread of noticing a clergyman in their street impeded clergymen’s normal parish visiting. Before long, many began to regard the whole business as a terrible ordeal. Michael McKernan, one of the few Australian historians to have studied this aspect of home front history, corresponded with the son of a wartime clergyman who told him that his father had found the work “extremely distressing” and “never forgot how it hurt.”

The personal service records for all members of the AIF are held by the National Archives of Australia.  On them are copies of telegrams to families notifying them that their soldier had been reported wounded or sick, but rarely do we find telegrams for the missing or dead. For years I wondered how the system had worked. Clergymen broke the news, yes, but how did they know who had died, and where to call?

In 2019 I found the procedure described in an obscure defence department report published in 1917. A telegram was sent by Base Records in Melbourne to the military district in which the soldier had enlisted (the 2nd, in Eric’s case, which was New South Wales), and the commandant then authorised a telegram to the relevant clergyman. Back at Base Records, a small note was made on the soldier’s file that the necessary action had been taken. So, on Eric’s file we read: “Oct 8 1917 MC2 advised killed in action 15/9/17.” But you must be very sharp-eyed to notice it.

All of the military districts were state-based and they must have liaised with all archdioceses (and equivalents) to keep a record of the names and locations of priests and clergymen in all Christian denominations in their state, backed up by a substantial recordkeeping sub-structure of ledgers, indexes and correspondence. I have found no trace of any of it, at least not at the National Archives. Relevant records might still exist in church archives, or evidence in clergymen’s private papers or in local histories, but they would be scattered across the country. But even fragmentary records might expand our knowledge of how priests and clergymen became home front foot soldiers for the state during the first world war.

The urge to make a story out of these slivers and fragments is irresistible. I keep probing the Garriock story from different angles, searching, as novelists and biographers do, for hints and different perspectives to fill gaps and absences. I want to give Eric Garriock’s life some meaning apart from the fact of his early death. When it was founded in the 1920s and 1930s the Australian War Memorial was a national repudiation of meaninglessness: what parent can accept that their child has died without a reason? That is why it built its collections with such relentless determination in those early years, and why the quiet simplicity of the building in Canberra was so important. There had to be solace somewhere, surely?

But no mountain of paper or pile of stones will bring back the dead. The Garriock telegram confronts us with the terrible mystery of death. He breathed, and then he didn’t. He is not coming home. •

The post The telegram appeared first on Inside Story.

The story in outline is that in 1942 Bean accepted an invitation from prime minister John Curtin to chair a committee of government officials to be known as the War Archives Committee, later the Commonwealth Archives Committee. This was an interim committee whose purpose was to make recommendations to government and oversee the beginnings of an “archives system” for Commonwealth records. The committee was to prepare the way for a permanent organisation, whose exact nature took some years to determine.

The first step was an Archives Division, established in 1952, within the Commonwealth National Library. Once staff were appointed, the scope of the division’s work expanded rapidly. Independence from the library was achieved in 1961 when the Commonwealth Archives Office came into being. By then, the Archives Committee had wound up its affairs. Bean had resigned in 1959 as the committee was winding up; his work with the committee was his last act of public service before ill health forced him to retire to a more peaceful life with his wife Ethel at Collaroy, on Sydney’s northern beaches.

To be clear, Bean was not a “founder” of what we now call the National Archives of Australia. The Archives’ origins, like those of the Commonwealth whose records it preserves, emerged from peaceful (if passionate) advocacy, discussion and debate among many people. The history is not a dramatic one — no one is known to have died in its service, as has happened at the Memorial for instance, and no cult has grown around its leaders, as it has with the directors, collectors and benefactors of the National Library and many state libraries and museums.

Founding fathers are useful in binding an organisation together in common purpose, and “ancestor worship” is common in many of the cultural, educational and scientific organisations founded in Australia at the turn of the twentieth century. The great immunologist Sir Frank Macfarlane Burnet was director of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research from 1944 to 1965. Long after his death many felt that his symbolic significance continued and his ghost still haunted the institute; indeed, to those within its distinctive scientific subculture and “life world,” the institute is Macfarlane Burnet.

In a similar manner, it could be said that the Australian War Memorial is Charles Bean; or almost. Undoubtedly his was the guiding vision in its evolving complexity as a memorial, museum, library, gallery and archives. His words have long been quoted on the walls of its Orientation Gallery. The Memorial’s historians and curators constantly use his histories, and a building and research fellowship are named after him. His name and image are all through the Great War collections, his personal records were among the first to be described and digitised, and his books are always sold in the shop.

What of the Archives? Today, it tends to hang the founder hat on its first archivist, Ian Maclean, who was appointed to the Archives Division in 1944, naming a research award and a meeting room in its Mitchell repository after him. Maclean is undoubtedly an important figure in the development of the archives profession in Australia and at the Archives, but he was not the first Commonwealth archivist, as the Archives has sometimes said. That honour goes to John Treloar, who was appointed as officer-in-charge of the Australian War Records Section in May 1917.

Within the Archives, Charles Bean’s relationship is not unknown, but it has never much penetrated the organisation’s sense of its history. Perhaps Bean is too closely associated with the Australian War Memorial and with war history to be entirely welcome. Perhaps founding fathers can’t be shared around. Or perhaps the Archives prefers to associate itself with peacetime Australia in a bid to distinguish its aims, its collection, its activities and its brand from the Memorial.

Many earlier attempts had been made to ensure the preservation of Commonwealth records. Archivist Michael Piggott has analysed initiatives that gathered strength in the 1920s and 1930s, beginning with the laying of a foundation stone in 1920 for a “Capitol” building. The building was designed by Walter Burley Griffin for receptions and ceremonies or “for archives commemorating Australian achievements.” But it was never built. Over the ensuing decades, various parties — notably the National Library under its Chief Librarian, Kenneth Binns — brought pressure to bear to build a national archives.

Binns’s unavailing efforts through senior levels of government lasted until “the breakthrough,” as Piggott calls it, came on 3 June 1942, when Binns, H.S. Temby, a senior official of the prime minister’s department, and Prime Minister Curtin attended a meeting of the Commonwealth Literary Fund. A discussion outside this meeting finally convinced Curtin to act. (It is extraordinary that at the height of the crisis of 1942, just two days after the Japanese submarine attack on Sydney Harbour, the prime minister should be discussing literary grants and pensions.)

Exactly what was said is unknown, but influence may have come from another direction as well, via Frederick Shedden, the most powerful Commonwealth public servant at this time. Shedden, as secretary of the Department of Defence, secretary of the War Cabinet, and secretary to the Advisory War Council, was a dedicated record-keeper. The historian David Horner has shown that cabinet record-keeping had been haphazard until Shedden instituted new procedures for preparing agenda papers and minutes. He became known for the highly efficient filing system he devised. “Documentation, thy name is Shedden,” Robert Menzies once said of him.

After Labor came to power in October 1941, Shedden became the prime adviser to John Curtin and an ever-present support. Horner believes the War Archives Committee was established essentially to house war cabinet records. Shedden’s views on the need for good record-keeping to support stable government in a time of war likely carried more weight than the more distant pleadings of Kenneth Binns at the National Library.

In any case, once the decision was made, Curtin lost little time in contacting Charles Bean, writing to him on 19 June to lay out the archives scheme. Binns probably put Bean’s name forward as a possible chair. Bean, of course, had been a guiding figure in the collection and preservation of records from the Great War, and had used archival records extensively in the writing and editing of the Official History of Australia’s part in the Great War. That history had been hampered by poor availability of departmental records and Binns knew that Bean had been using channels of his own to press for better custody of these records in the new war.

Today, the establishment of a new government committee would begin with carefully worded terms of reference and a reporting framework. Not so with this committee in 1942: Curtin’s proposal was loosely worded. The committee would investigate the matter of “collecting and preserving important documents and records created by departments and wartime authorities.” It would lay down “broad principles, which departments should be requested to observe, and to maintain a general supervision over the work.” It would meet in Canberra.

Although barely clear of the final editing of his last volume of the Official History, Bean accepted. His only proviso was to add John Treloar to the proposed list of committee members from the prime minister’s, attorney-general’s and external affairs departments, and the National Library.

With a secretariat at the prime minister’s department, the War Archives Committee met for the first time in July 1942, less than a month after Curtin’s invitation to Bean. The committee circulated a questionnaire to all departments asking about their record-keeping practices. Bean himself visited and interviewed department heads in Melbourne and Canberra. (Unfortunately, no record of these interviews appears to have survived, so we don’t know if Shedden at Defence had used the occasion to give Bean his views on good practices.)

In December 1942, the committee reported back to Curtin. It recommended that its work be expanded to encompass “all records and documents bearing upon the development of the life of Australia.” Hence, although known as the War Archives Committee, it was already taking responsibility for all Commonwealth records. In June 1946 this was formalised when the War Archives Committee became the Commonwealth Archives Committee.

Between 1942 and 1959, when the committee began to wind up its affairs, much was achieved. It met thirty-eight times, first in West Block (two minutes’ walk from the National Archives’ current location in East Block). Its reporting was intermittent at the start, but between 1952 and 1958 it published six regular reports. The committee was relatively independent at first, but began to liaise with other authorities after the war, including the Public Service Board and the state archives authorities, to establish the infrastructure of a national archives system.

Disposal schedules were devised and promulgated. Accommodation for records of permanent value was established in the mainland capitals. And so began the work of arranging and describing records going back to 1901. Departmental records managers attended training programs in records and archives management. The question of Commonwealth archives legislation was discussed and a bill drafted, but it was shelved. A reference service was established to answer questions from researchers and from departments needing access to older records that had already been transferred.

The committee’s membership expanded to include representatives from more departments, and historian Manning Clark was appointed as an associate member in 1952 to advise on access to records. Clark’s rising prominence, marked by the publication in 1950 of his Select Documents in Australian History, may have prompted his appointment. It is intriguing to imagine Charles Bean and Manning Clark — two great historians of different generations with such different temperaments — sitting at the same committee table. Clark, though, appears to have had limited influence.

The association with the office of the prime minister was important throughout. Bean played up the prime ministerial connection in 1947 when he published an article in the premier Australian history journal Historical Studies under the title “Australia’s Federal Archives: John Curtin’s Initiative.” He described the committee’s first five years’ work, and credits Curtin with taking the initial step to prevent the loss of administrative records that occurred after the Great War. The committee always reported to the prime minister and copies of its reports were sent to him personally, generally with a covering letter signed by Bean. During the Menzies years, Bean often received a thoughtful reply signed by Menzies.

Bean’s contributions and his skill as a committee man were critical in dealing with vexing issues. Kenneth Binns had for years campaigned for the establishment of a Commonwealth archives within his library, but Bean had to balance this against other factors. The Memorial had been acquiring Commonwealth combat-related records since before the end of the Great War and from 1920 had the authority to acquire the war-related records of civilian departments, including Defence. For practical reasons it had not pressed these latter claims, but it had not surrendered them either. Now the heads of those agencies — Binns and Treloar — sat at the same committee table. Bean may have owed his appointment as chairman to Binns, but he was a long-time member of the board of management of the Australian War Memorial as well, and had its best interests to defend.

It made sense to take advantage of the expertise that both bodies had in managing government records. So, as an interim measure, they were made provisional “archives authorities.” The Memorial was the authority for the departments covering defence, army, navy, air, repatriation, information and home security, and the War Service Home Commission. The National Library got the records of all other Commonwealth departments. The division related to both past and future records. In 1944 both institutions appointed “archives officers” to establish policy and liaise with their respective departments. Axel Lodewyckx (Manning Clark’s brother-in-law, incidentally) was appointed to the Memorial in July 1944, and Ian Maclean to the Library in October 1944. Both had previously served in the army and were university graduates. Neither had any archives training, though Lodewyckx had been a librarian in Melbourne.

Treloar for the Memorial and Binns for the Library were not personal rivals particularly, but neither was especially happy with the dual archives authority arrangement. Both worried that their institutions would lose out to a permanent, separate national archives, and so it turned out. The Memorial lost its status as an archives authority in 1952. The organisation was too beset with other problems — such as the need to complete its building in Canberra, and to process its other collections — to be able to sustain the work. Bean could see this and said so to Treloar, but his old friend and colleague refused to agree.

It was a tense time in the long relationship between the two men, with Treloar bewildered when Bean withdrew his support for the Memorial as an archives authority. Only Treloar’s sudden death in early 1952 cleared the way for the Memorial to accept reality and step aside. It became a records custodian only, with no authority for policy or records management, and its reach was restricted to combat records.

In his personal papers, some handwritten notes in Bean’s increasingly shaky handwriting show him drafting recommendations to this effect. The field was left clear for the National Library. Ian Maclean, the Library’s archives officer, became chief archivist of a newly strengthened Archives Division. The Commonwealth Archives Committee shifted there, administratively and physically, with Maclean as its executive officer.

Bean, although aged seventy-two in 1951, was still capable of comprehending innovation and change in archive practices, a field that was not his own but over which he had much responsibility. In Britain that year he met the great English archivist Sir Hilary Jenkinson, author of the text that had been setting standards for archival practice in the English-speaking world for several decades. Archives was emerging as a discipline separate from history; the archivist, Jenkinson insisted, is not and ought not to be a historian. Archivists would need some knowledge of history and may be personally interested in it, but their duty is to the archives, independent of any research use to which the archives might be put.

Then, in 1954, a leading American archivist, Theodore Roosevelt Schellenberg, visited Australia as a Fulbright scholar. Bean met him at a critical time and Schellenberg was drawn into the especially vexed question of library control of archives. A government enquiry — known as the Paton Committee, after its chair, G.W. Paton — was investigating the role of the National Library, which could not sustain all the functions and purposes it had taken on. The question was whether the Library should keep its responsibility as an archives authority. Should the Archives Division become independent?

No, it should not, argued Harold White, a passionate defender of the Library’s interests who had replaced Kenneth Binns as national librarian in 1947. Yes, it should, suggested the visiting expert, Schellenberg, since this conformed with the practice in the United States and Britain. The Commonwealth Archives Committee listened carefully to arguments on all sides, and decided that the Archives Division should be a separate agency of government. This was what the Paton Committee recommended and, in 1961, this is what happened.

Through all of these developments, how are we to understand the personal contribution Bean made? Within the span of Bean’s chairing of the Archives Committee, much change occurred. On the one hand there was separation of archives from history as a discipline, and on the other, their separation from libraries as organisational structures. Bean met the two great English-speaking archivists of his day and absorbed and channelled their ideas. And yet clearly he was acting through a committee which, as the years passed, found its work and influence subsumed into a network of other agencies and individuals.

So what exactly was Bean’s personal contribution to the development of a national archives? Typically, Bean claimed no glory for himself. However, when he resigned from the Archives Committee in September 1959, he wrote to prime minister Robert Menzies mentioning two “impressions” he had gained from his nearly seventeen years. First, he was pleased that Australian archivists were ensuring that government agencies were now doing the “preparatory work while… records are still in the making.” He added that several “leading archivists in both America and England” (Schellenberg and Jenkinson, surely) had stated that this put Australia ahead of procedures there. And, second, he mentioned that he favoured the separation of the Archives Division from the National Library. That too, as we have seen, was achieved in 1961. These principles — that government archives should be separated from libraries, and that good-record keeping practices at the point of creation would ensure useful records as archives later on — underpin the work of the National Archives today.

But what of Bean himself as a leader? Paul Hasluck — journalist, historian and public servant — sat with Bean on the Archives Committee from 1942 until 1949 before he went into politics. Many years later, in 1983, Hasluck suggested in a letter to Bean’s first biographer, Dudley McCarthy, that Bean had misinterpreted the Archives Committee and his role on it. Its members, he said, saw it as an interdepartmental committee, subordinate to the different ministers whose portfolios they represented. Bean did not see it that way. He felt a personal responsibility to the prime minister and ignored the role of the prime minister’s department. Hasluck disagreed with McCarthy’s judgement that, more than anyone else, Bean had created the Commonwealth Archives, instead believing that Bean had actually delayed its creation and brought confusion to its initial arrangements.

Against this, the acting secretary of the prime minister’s department in 1949 remarked to the prime minister that Bean’s work was of great value. The success of the archives scheme depended almost solely on the cooperation of Commonwealth departments, he said, and Dr Bean’s independence and prestige had contributed largely to the satisfactory progress so far. Bean’s status as an outsider was beneficial, apparently.

Nevertheless, there is scant record of Bean’s dealings with heads of agencies and Hasluck’s judgement does ring true to an extent. In Melbourne and increasingly in Canberra, a group of powerful, elite public servants — “mandarins” — was emerging. Younger than Bean, and often from quite modest backgrounds, they were university trained in the social sciences and economics rather than classics. As the architects of a government more active and expansionist than before, and of a public service building its capacity for policy development, they found new areas of social and economic management. Many rose to prominence during the war running the major departments and their careers continued well into the 1960s. H.C. Coombs, Roland Wilson and Frederick Shedden were among them. Bean does not seem to belong in this world. Hasluck thought that Bean’s experience of life was on “a narrow face” and he had the skill of an observer and reporter rather than a commander. If true, this may have limited Bean’s capacity for networking at the highest level, and for unifying support across government for good record-keeping and archives practices.

It should be said that all government archival authorities struggle at times with the challenges of unifying support across departments, and in Bean’s time there was no record-keeping or archives professions to speak of. And yet the committee under his guidance established the fundamental principle that good archives only emerge if good records are created in the first place. Moreover, Bean acknowledged that the postwar record-keeping environment was much more complex than it had ever been before. At Federation, there had been only seven Commonwealth departments; by 1945 there were twenty-seven ministries as well as a plethora of boards and commissions set up to meet the exigencies of war. Departments shifted locations often and suffered constant staff and space shortages. The Archives Division was working quietly on a way to describe this unstable record-keeping environment. The system it eventually implemented was a huge advance in archival arrangement and description that created a distinctively Australian contribution to modern archival practice.

We can observe its emergence in an appendix to the fifth annual report of the Commonwealth Archives Committee in 1956. A test case was presented, probably written by Ian Maclean, which described the transfer to archives of 200 feet of records in 1952. The records were originally created in 1901 and had been used by five departments — prime minister’s, external affairs, home and territories, home affairs and the interior. Twenty more functions of government were administered using these records. Three registration systems had been devised to control them. How do you arrange and describe records like these, archivists wondered? By date of creation? By department? Which department?

These problems in archives management were the result of rapid administrative change within the Australian government, especially since the second world war. Bean alluded to them in his 1947 piece for Historical Studies. He did not tackle them himself but he knew they mattered. The expanded Archives Division under Ian Maclean employed a new generation of professional staff, and Maclean, with his colleagues Peter Scott and Keith Penny, built the solution — the Commonwealth Records Series system — to replace the old record group system. The series became the primary unit of description, not the agency. The series could be physically stored anywhere, and its administrative context recorded on paper. The series system brilliantly addresses the complex environments of modern government record-keeping.

Archivists working at the Commonwealth Archives Office, as it was known after 1961, continued to refine the series system and it gradually benefitted from the introduction of automated processes. We take it for granted today. Anyone who has used Commonwealth records has used the series system, probably without knowing it. It is in the DNA of the National Archives. Peter Scott was credited with the breakthrough insights for the system but he was not alone; he built on the work of colleagues and predecessors.

Bean surely deserves honour for laying the foundations that made Scott’s pioneering work possible. The National Archives missed the era of the “great man” or the “founding father.” The issues, interests and problems were and are too complex for one person. It is the series system, and not any one personality, which provides the faith and vision to bind the organisation together.

If there are ghosts walking through the database at night checking that all series registrations are clear and accurate — and I wish there were because perhaps they could help out — Charles Bean is not among them. I doubt he would be disappointed that his own role in the history of the organisation is not well-known. He didn’t personally identify with the work or the institution. He knew that the Archives would always be bigger than one person, one dream or idea. It survives by accepting and nurturing the contributions and ideas of many. ⦁

This is an extract from Charles Bean: Man, Myth, Legacy, edited by Peter Stanley (UNSW Press).

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