Monthly Archives: October 2014

Stopping to smell the roses

Posted on October 30, 2014 | 5 comments

From my study window, I can see everyone who walks along our street [cue maniacal laughter].  The room has an L-shaped window, so I can watch walkers as they pass several houses either side of me.  Unfortunately for my thesis writing, I seem to spend an inordinate amount of time looking out the window.

I’ve just seen a young man walking past the house across the road.  It has a white picket fence, behind which is a beautiful array of old, multicoloured roses.

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He stopped, put his bag down, and smelled the roses.  Then he picked up his bag and kept going.

Somehow I don’t think that anyone will ever stop to enjoy a pebble garden with cordylines.

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Posted in Heidelberg, Life in Melbourne, Macleod

‘The Many-Coloured Land: Return to Ireland’ by Christopher Koch

Posted on October 30, 2014 | 9 comments

koch

2002, 244p.

How have I read the hundreds (probably thousands?) of books that I have without encountering Christopher Koch before?  I’ve been aware of the name on Miles Franklin lists (he won it twice) and I’d heard of the film The Year of Living Dangerously, which was based on his book.  But I’ve never read any of his work up until now.

The Many-Coloured Land is part memoir/part travel narrative/part history.  Koch grew up in Tasmania, but his awareness of his background centred mainly on his German heritage – reinforced, no doubt, by questions about his surname- and his Anglo-Irish background that had been thoroughly researched by a genealogy-obsessed uncle.  Suppressed within his family history was another great-great grandmother, Margaret O’Meara, a convict  from Tipperary.  His two Irish great-great grandmothers arrived in Van Diemens Land within five years of each other, in very different circumstances- Margaret O’Meara and Jane Devereaux- one convict, one free; one Protestant, one Catholic; one a servant girl, the other the daughter of decayed aristocracy.  The older Koch became, the more he was drawn to the story of Margaret O’Meara, and this book is, in part, the story of his pilgrimage to a ‘home’ land that he only really acknowledged in later life.

I put ‘home’ in inverted commas intentionally, because Koch is never anything but Tasmanian.  The opening chapters of the book are located in Tasmania and chronicle his growing awareness of his family, and particularly Irish, heritage.  It was in his description of Oyster Bay near Swansea, a childhood holiday spot, that won me over.  I’ve sat on the dunes of the beach myself in a pink-infused sunset, with a warm breeze riffling over the grass at my back, the waves shushing onto the shore, and as I read this description I felt as if Koch had been leafing through my own memories:

Coswell (his holiday cottage) was set on gently-rising ground a few hundred yards from … a beach, looking out over white-gold paddocks and long, drystone walls to the blue expanse of Great Oyster Bay. The paddocks’ open spaces were dotted with a few long gum trees, and dark little Oyster Bay pines grew in the hollows.  The beach was usually deserted, except for Coswell’s few guests.  A creek flowed into the sea there, with a rickety jetty and diving board; an old wooden dinghy lay near the marram grass on a dune, and had lain there for as long as I could remember.  At each end of the beach were great, smooth rocks of pinkish granite; beyond them, to the north, more white beaches could be seen, with a few tiny dots that were people, and occasional beached dinghies.  Set with tall towers of spume, these long, far beaches curved off into mauve and white distances whose features grew tiny and illusory, faint as a distant music: a region beyond Swansea and the common world; perhaps beyond the real world together. (p. 48)

Koch visited Dublin as a young man in 1956 and remembered it as a dismal, grey, sad place.  Returning in 2000 with his friend, the folk-singer Brian, he finds another Ireland.  Ireland has changed- it was at the peak of its Celtic Tiger power of the new millennium- but so had he.  He is unsettled by the brash, surface-level confidence of the new Ireland and it is only when he moves away from Dublin that he finds the layered Ireland that he seeks.

Nothing much happens in this book.  They go from one B&B to another; they drink the night away in the fug of cigarette smoke with the beat of Irish folk music thrumming at their feet; they stand on coastlines; they survey landscapes.  Koch finds the derelict Big House of his ancestor Jane Devereaux and is drawn to the story of the  Young Irelanders who ended up as aristocratic convicts in VDL.  Because all this research re-emerged in  Koch’s fiction work Out of Ireland, which deals with the Young Irelanders,  it reminded me a bit of Kate Grenville’s Searching for the Secret River, without the methodological angst.

There’s an unintended poignancy about this book, because we know, as Koch couldn’t when he wrote it, just how brittle and insubstantial that Celtic Tiger economy was to be.   There’s another poignancy too, in my realization that this writer that I’ve never read  passed away last year, and that all his deep inhalation of life, people and surroundings is at an end.

As a reader, I have little red flags that pop up when authors do particular things. I must confess that when the book started with family history, I inwardly groaned. Family history, while fascinating to the descendant, can be rather eye-glazing for other people, unless it’s contextualized and the author has convinced you that it’s going to be worth your while.  Nor do I enjoy descriptions of food, and I don’t really care what people look like.  This book violated all of these no-go zones at times.  Nonetheless,  I really enjoyed it. It’s a beautifully written plaiting-together of historic research, family history, travel narrative and memoir.  And I’m going to track down his other books as well.

My rating: 8.5/10 (although I know that others haven’t been quite so fulsome in their praise)

Read because: it was a bookgroup choice with The Ladies Who Say Ooooh

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Posted in Book reviews, The ladies who say ooooh

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ANZAC Peace Coalition Forum: From Invasion to Federation

Posted on October 27, 2014 | 2 comments

Last Monday 20 October I attended a panel forum presented by the ANZAC Peace Coalition Forum, the first of four that will be conducted over the next year. This first one dealt with the era from Invasion to Federation; the next one planned for March 2015 will look at Federation to 1920; another in August will cover  1920s-60 and in October from the 1960s into the future.  Judging from the first session, the series has certainly got off to a good start.

PeaceConference

Given the time span delineated in this first forum, I expected Henry Reynolds to speak on the frontier wars between settlers and indigenous people, but he didn’t.  Instead, he spoke on the work he is currently undertaking on the Boer War (1899-1902), which coincided with Federation.  His presentation focussed on the Federation celebrations held in Sydney during the first weeks of  January 1901.

Australia had a great deal to celebrate. Along with New Zealand, it had the highest per capita income and better distributed housing and education than anywhere else in the world. It had strong institutions, a burgeoning labour movement that was represented at the political level, and a constitution adopted by referendum twice. It was one of the most advanced democracies in the world.  And yet, it was as if they (we?) didn’t know how to celebrate political achievements.

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Instead, the celebration was trumped by the military.  The Australian colonial troopers were engaged in the Boer War, the newspapers were full of military news, and when the returned soldiers marched in the Federation parades, it became a celebration of military might rather than political achievement.  The mother country had sent out a large contingent of  grandly decked-out imperial troops in what Reynolds suggests was a deliberate statement.  There was an emphasis on the glamour of war, empire and aristocracy, and the largest cheers were for Lord Hopetoun, the Governor-General.  Even then, there was the anxious pride that we be seen to be ‘punching above our weight’- an ongoing trope of insecurity that we’ve heard voiced again recently.  The newly federated Australia gambled on the permanent continuation of the empire, but it was an empire in decline.  We were a nation defined by race and culture rather than continent.  The sad reality is that India was always more important than Australia.

Reynolds was followed by Anna Clark from UTS who has been working for several years on the process of history-making, particularly in schools. Her interest is “historical inheritance”: not just what we produce, but what we consume.  History is to the nation, she says, as memory is to the individual.  The histories we create are inherently selective, speaking to the concerns of the current generation.

She spoke of her own family history, which she had understood to be that of an honorable pioneering family.  It was only when she realized that a massacre of an aboriginal woman and children on the O’Connell plains occured on her family’s property, that she came to question this family ‘truth’. Five men were charged for the massacre, and all were acquitted. This was her family.

Forgetting and the deliberate withholding of history is never benign, even though it may driven by motives of ‘protecting’ the family.  Especially in light of the recent recommendations about curriculum that call for “imparting historical knowledge and understanding central to the discipline instead of expecting children to be historiographers”, there is a danger that we will forget that histories are always constructed, subjective and incomplete.

Then, Tony Moore from Monash spoke about his recent publication ‘Death or Liberty’ (review to follow when I finish reading it!), which will form the basis of an ABC documentary next year.

deathorliberty

The European historian George Rude estimated that there were 3000 political prisoners sent out to the Australian colonies, and Moore’s work examines these discontents of Empire who are often revered in their source countries but largely unknown here in Australia.  He emphasized the transnational radical scene of which they were a part, with an emphasis on the Scottish martyrs, which is appropriate given that the forum was being held in the Melbourne Unitarian Church (Thomas Fyshe Palmer, one of the martyrs, was a Unitarian minister).  Some of these political prisoners returned home, published and even became public or political figures in their home countries which had earlier sent them to the 19 century equivalent of Guantanamo Bay.  Some chose to stay in Australia.  The post-federation national focus has blinded us to the internationalism of these political figures.

Finally Clare Land spoke about solidarity between aboriginal and non-aboriginal people in the indigenous struggle in pre-Federation Victoria.  She focussed on two people: Ann Bon, a critic and then member of the Board for the Protection of Aborigines, and John Green, the manager at Coranderrk mission at Healesville.  She questioned what it meant (and means today) to be an ally of the Aboriginal people of south-eastern Australia.  Always it is about land, but also constitutional reform (the referendum then, the Recognize campaign today).

The question-and-answer session that closed the evening was interesting. It is a sobering thought that Australia will be spending $325 million on the commemoration of the centenary of Gallipoli.  That’s two hundred times what the UK is spending and twenty times the expenditure of New Zealand on the same event.   Henry Reynolds left us with the observation that perhaps the ease of returning Australian troops to Iraq today has been made easier by this well-funded, twenty-year campaign to glorify war. (Again, I urge you to read his recent article ‘Militarism Marches On’ available here).  This ANZAC Peace Coalition Forum, and the ones to follow, is just one step in countering this expensive, swaggering campaign.

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Posted in ANZAC, Conferences, Peace, What I've been listening to

Facing up to it

Posted on October 25, 2014 | 4 comments

My heart has been gladdened by the words of two honest, wise women this week.

The first is Wendy Harmer, comedian and journalist who was featured this week on Julia Zemiro’s ‘Home Delivery’.  It’s available on iview until 24th December 2014.  In ‘Home Delivery’, comedian Julia Zemiro drives around with fellow comedians and media personalities, revisiting childhood places and reminiscing and reflecting on what has made them the person they are. Wendy Harmer, like me, is a ‘woman of a certain age’ and, like me,  has a cleft lip and palate.  She has appeared on Australian Story in the past, talking about the experience of growing up with a cleft and her career as a stand-up comedian- surely one of the most naked,  ‘look at me’ and razor-edge occupations there could be.  In this episode, there she is, being driven to the Last Laugh theatre in Collingwood where she made her stand-up comedy debut and Selby and Upwey in the Dandenongs, where she spent some of her childhood.

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The second is the writer Paddy O’Reilly’s  whose article  What it feels like to always be stared at by strangers appeared last week. Paddy O’Reilly who has gathered acclaim over recent years for her books The Colour of Rust and The Wonders, suffers from Graves Disease, and before she had surgery on her eyes, it made her look as if she was staring at people, who often stared at her.   “Yep, female Marty Feldman” she would joke pre-emptively, using humour, as she says “as the refuge of humiliation as well as of adversity”.

There is a particular pain that comes with looking and sounding different.  It’s completely intractable, no matter how many people assure you that they didn’t even notice.  In the very core of you, you don’t believe them.  It’s right there, as a little jab that can dart out to prick you with each new person you meet. Sometimes.  You think that you have it under control but it bursts out when there’s the look that lingers just a second too long , or the hot burning stare that you’re aware of, off to your side or behind you that, perversely, makes you feel shame.  It’s worse as a child because children don’t filter it, but it’s still there even in middle age.  It’s there when you hear yourself on tape, or as I’ve experienced just recently, in podcasts talking about a topic I know well, with work I’m proud of.  It gives extra power to that little gremlin of self-doubt that I know everyone carries around.  For us, no matter how good we might feel in that new outfit, or with that good haircut or how happy we might feel in our expertise and knowledge, that too-long look somehow makes it all fall away.  Not always, but sometimes.

And so, I knew the layers of pain that would have built up when Wendy Harmer spoke about shifting from school to school because her father was a school teacher.  A new start each time, but yes, a new scab to be picked off as well. And I know what her memory of pashing with boys up on the railway bridge would have meant.  And what her father meant when he praised her diction after her first television performance. I know her feeling of gratitude for husband and children, and the silent rage inside that dammit, I shouldn’t have to feel grateful.

In her article, Paddy O’Reilly quotes an American comedian, David Roche, who has a severe facial disfigurement from a facial tumour.  Everyone stares, she says:

… that accidental, snagged way we do when we see something different. It’s hard-wired into us to stare at novelty. Novelty stimulates the brain and the dopamine rushes in, causing pleasure. Yet we’ve been told since we were children that it is wrong to stare, so as adults we pull our gaze away, feigning nonchalance or indifference.

This initial stare is beyond our control. David Roche, an American comedian with a severe facial disfigurement, says that the first stare is not the time of hatred or prejudice or judgment. It’s about getting used to difference. The second look is what counts – what we choose to do once our initial curiosity has been satisfied.

That second look- what a powerful idea, and one that had never occurred to me before.  I wish I could go back and tell seven-year old me about it.

Thank you, my courageous, honest ladies.  I’ve hesitated about posting this –why???– but you’ve been brave, and I want to be too.

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Posted in Things I've seen recently

‘The Whitlam Mob’ by Mungo MacCallum

Posted on October 21, 2014 | 3 comments

maccallum

2014, 234 p

I didn’t vote for Gough Whitlam in December 1972. I was seventeen, and far too young to vote in those days when the voting age was 21. But if I’d been able to vote for Gough, I would have. The exhilaration, the vision, the feeling of shucking off the grey dust coat of  a seemingly-unending Liberal government  has never left me really, and I’ve never in my life been able to countenance the thought of voting for a Liberal government. There have been individuals in the Liberal party  I could have voted for (Fred Chaney, Petro Georgiou; dare I say Malcolm Turnbull?) but never the party as a whole.

Mungo MacCullum’s book ‘The Whitlam Mob’ makes no pretence at being balanced. Mungo was/is a Labor man in the press gallery and this book is written with nostalgia, affection and loyalty. He is a comic writer, always on the lookout for the quick laugh and the quirky detail. Let’s face it- he’s a gossip and here he’s regaling us with yarns.

The book is written in two fairly evenly weighted parts: The Whitlam Mob and the The Other Mob. Each of the vignettes is fairly short, with the longest chapter devoted to Gough (19 pages) but everybody else despatched with ten pages or less (and as little as two!)

The first thing that struck me about this book was that there is only one woman: Margaret. I think of the Whitlam years as a watershed for women in Australia but when I check Whitlam’s three ministries (counting the first one which comprised just Whitlam and Lance Barnard), there were no women ministers at all.

The second thing that came through was that many of these men had been waiting decades to form government and many of them were old when they got there. Many of them had lived through World War I, the Depression and were WWII veterans; they had endured The Split that had formed the DLP; they had a history of years and years of Opposition. Clyde Cameron, for instance, held the parliamentary record for thirty one years in the House of Representatives, twenty eight of them spent on the Opposition benches.

Reading through this book, I realized that I have many misconceptions about that government over forty years ago (remember, I was only seventeen). The changes wrought by the ALP were (and still are) so BIG, both conceptually and in terms of political courage, that I forgot that Gough was from the Right of the party. I’d not particularly been aware of the struggle between the Left and the Right in the party. I’d forgotten that Jim Cairns had actually been seen as a potential Prime Minister. And looking back, the idea of two men (the duumvirate) forming the whole ministry, as Whitlam and Barnard did between 5-19 December 1972, seems unthinkable today.

I had forgotten how dysfunctional the Liberals were, even though the whole of my VCE Social Studies (i.e. politics) year in 1973 was spent preparing for the absolutely inevitable question on the end-of-year exam “Did the ALP win the 1972 election or the Coalition lose it?” or some variation thereof. What a spiteful man Menzies was. Apparently, one of the first things that Whitlam did on gaining office was to write to Robert Menzies:

It was a courteous, even flattering letter: Whitlam said that Menzies might be surprised to learn how much the Labor leader had always admired him, not only for his mastery of parliament and politics, but also for his resilience in coming back from defeat to shape the Liberal Party into a modern and dynamic force.  This, said Whitlam, was an example he had always held in front of him during his own long battles within the ALP.

Regrettably, Menzies’ reply was terse and dismissive: the Labor Party advocated socialist policies, which were wrong for Australia, always had been and always would be, and that was all that needed to be said. (p. 127)

I wish that there were pictures in this book because, quite frankly, I can’t remember some of the people he writes about. Most of the Whitlam Mob I can remember, although I don’t have a mental picture of Don Willesee. But for the Other Mob: Bill Wentworth, David Fairbairn, Magnus Cormack, Michael Hodgman- nothing.   When I think of Lance Barnard, I think of a grey hat- in fact, I think of hats for many of these men, because they were of the black-and-white generation that wore hats, no matter how much I want to drag them into the bright, full-colour and shiny ‘It’s Time’ frame.

Particularly for the Whitlam Mob entries, there are many times when MacCallum uses the adjective ‘complex’, but his sketches of the Other Mob are more one-dimensional. I don’t know if this reflects the subject, the author, or his access to them- probably a combination of all three. There are many ‘what-ifs’ and good ideas bungled amongst the short Labor grip on power. The Khemlani loans affair, for example- the stuff of pure farce, and yet what vision.

On this day, when I learn of Gough’s demise, I think of myself as very much a product of the changes wrought by the Whitlam government and the vision of a society that it promoted.  Thank you, Comrade.

 

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Posted in Book reviews, Politics

Our very own new grassy knoll

Posted on October 20, 2014 | 5 comments

There’s an art installation on the steps leading up the State Library.  You might think of it as a garden, but it’s not.  (Click on the photos to embiggen)

Good old Sir Redmond is surrounded by shrubbery
There are different sorts of grass
The grasses are arranged on the steps leading up to the front of the library
A tram rattles past

Created by Linda Tegg and titled ‘Grasslands’, it is

a living installation that gathers over 10,000 indigenous plants.  This organic composition aims to recreate the vast grass plains that stretched over this site before the State Library of Victoria was established in the mid nineteenth century…. The result is a transformation of history and nature by artistic imagination, inviting us to visualize the layers of memory and place.

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It’s a good place for it.  I think of the grass outside the State Library as being the real heart of Melbourne.  As soon as the sun’s out, there we are, stretched out on the lawn with our shoes off, wriggling our toes.  The former City Square on the corner of Swanston and Collins opposite the Town Hall is now a gritty unpleasant desert since they sold half of it off and covered the rest with granitic sand.  And don’t get me started on Fed Square that alternates between icy blasts and baking heat.  I’m horrified that there could even be any consideration of letting high-rise buildings block the State Library forecourt: a planning restriction that we were told was sacrosanct (huh!). Just like the overshadowing of the south bank of the Yarra, which it seems is another no-go zone that becoming somehow negotiable.

Back to Grasslands.  It’s not intended to be a permanent installation. When you look at it closely, the grasses are still in their containers, laid out in pallets directly onto the concrete.

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It’s only intended to be there for six weeks.

There’s a fantastic little timelapse video of it being installed.  Watch it- it’s good! And just as I said, you can see people coming to sit and lie on the grass either side of the installation.

http://media.theage.com.au/news/national-news/timelapse-grasslands-by-linda-tegg-5868696.html

Having read Bill Gammage’s The Biggest Estate on Earth, I’m seeing my city differently.  A good history does that.  Gammage takes seriously the writings of early settlers when they described the land around them.

Here’s John Helder Wedge, Letter to Mr Frankland on settlement at Port Phillip, VDL Magazine, 1835 :

The country between the rivers [Maribyrnong and Yarra] extending to the north forty or fifty miles, and to the east about twenty-five miles… is undulating and intersected with valleys; and is moderately wooded, especially to the east and north-east; to the north there are open plains… The surface is everywhere thickly covered with grass, intermixed with rib-grass and other herbs. (cited in Presland, p. 27)

Or here’s the gardener James Flemming, who along with Acting-Lieutenant Charles Robbins and Charles Grimes the acting-surveyor-general sailed to Port Phillip in January 1803, prior to the Collins settlement at Sorrento.  They sailed right round the bay- the first of the British visitors to do so.

4th February 1803. Started at six and came to the branch we passed before [junction of Maribyrnong and Yarra] at the entrance the land swampy; a few miles up found it excellent water, where we saw a little hill [Batman’s Hill] and landed… went on the hill, where we saw the lagoon seen from the hill where we first landed.  It is a large swamp between two rivers; fine grass, fit to mow; not a bush in it [West Melbourne Swamp].  The soil is black rich earth about six to ten inches deep, when it is very hard and stiff. About two miles further went on shore again, the land much better and timber larger. (cited in Presland p. 13)

Although, then there’s George Arden’s report from his Latest Information with Regard to Australia Felix, the first book published in Melbourne.  He claims to be an eyewitness

When the writer first saw this settlement (Melbourne) in January 1838, a few months after its authorized establishment, it presented more the appearance of the villages he had seen in the interior of India; a nucleus of huts embowered in forest foilage and peering at itself in the river stream that laved the thresholds of its tenements, than any collection of buildings formed by European hands. (p. 68)

Hmmm. Don’t know quite what to do with that description.

And finally, good old Edmund Finn (writing under the pen-name ‘Garryowen’). Linda Tegg used this quotation on her explanatory panel:

From the spot whereon Melbourne was afterwards built to the Saltwater River confluence, the Yarra Yarra flowed through low, marshy flats, densely garbed with ti-tree, reeds, sedge and scrub.  Large trees, like lines of foliaged sentinels, guarded both sides, and their branches protruded so far riverwise as to more than half shadow the stream… As for herbage, it luxuriated everywhere, and two persons still living, who walked through un-streeted Melbourne in 1836, have informed me that in the places now known as Collins, Bourke, Elizabeth and Swanston Streets, they waded through grass as green as a leek and nearly breast high (Garryowen, Chronicles of Early Melbourne p. 497)

References:

Garryowen (E. Finn), The Chronicles of Early Melbourne, vols 1-2 (Melb, 1888)

T. O’Callaghan, ‘Fictitious History’, Victorian Historical Magazine, vol 11, no 1, Mar 1926, pp 6-37  (accessible through the SLV site)

Gary Presland Aboriginal Melbourne: The Lost Land of the Kulin People, 2001

A.G.L. Shaw A History of the Port Phillip District: Victoria Before Separation, 2003

 

 

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Posted in Current events, Life in Melbourne, Melbourne history, Port Phillip history

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Peace in Australia: the untold story

Posted on October 15, 2014 | Leave a comment

PeaceConference

I’m going.

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Posted in Australian history

‘Broken Nation’ by Joan Beaumont

Posted on October 14, 2014 | 7 comments

beaumont

2013, 655 p.

For someone who intended to eschew much of the hype about the centenary of WWI, I seem to have indulged rather more than I anticipated.  I attended the RHSV Victorians and the Home Front conference, I read The Kayles of Bushy Lodge (largely because it was written by a woman about the homefront during WWI) and I watched and very much enjoyed The War That Changed Us.   I was aware that Joan Beaumont’s Broken Nation had been well received, but what probably tipped me into reading it was Marilyn Lake’s comment in her ABR review  that

If you read only one book about Australia’s experience of World War I, as the deluge of commemorative publications marking the outbreak of the war becomes a veritable tsunami, make it Broken Nation, an account that joins the history of the war to the home front, and that details the barbarism of the battlefields as well as the desolation, despair, and bitter divisions that devastated the communities left behind.

I agree with Lake’s recommendation; I admire the book for its breadth but…oh, it was relentless reading.

In her opening paragraph Beaumont asks ‘why this book?’ given the already voluminous literature on Australian military history, especially in this centenary year. Her answer is this:

It has been written to provide what is still lacking in the literature: a comprehensive history of Australians at war in the period 1914-19 that integrates battles, the home front, diplomacy and memory. (p.xv)

It achieves this completely.  The book is structured into  six very long chapters, one for each year of the war.  Within these chapters, Beaumont moves chronologically month by month, crossing back and forth between battle, homefront,  diplomacy.  Even within these themes, she shuttles between battle as strategy and battle as lived experience by the men who were there; homefront in a political sense, homefront in a social sense; domestic politics and diplomatic politics on an international stage.

But for me, the battle scenes dominated and they dragged, particularly during the longest chapter ‘1917: The worst year’.  It took me some time to get into the mindset where a death and an injury were both counted as a ‘casualty’ without distinguishing between the two, because the effect of both was the loss of a soldier who could fight then and there.  I found myself inwardly groaning as I turned  page after page to see yet another map with arrows showing lines of attack.  There’s 36 maps in the book as a whole, (16 of them in the 1917 chapter) spread across battlefields at Gallipoli, the Western front and the Middle East, reinforcing the inexorable to-ing and fro-ing year after year.  The battle scenes are interspersed with diaries and letters from the men,  and visceral descriptions of sights, sounds and smells, but for me they were deadened by the weight of strategy and the stilted, chest-puffing language of military commendations.  Charles Bean has a lot to answer for.

But she also  moves away from the noise and shouting to consider  the process by which these sites have been memorialized.  She notes that many of the battles that the soldiers at the time chose to have memorialized through statues are not the ones that are uppermost in national memory today. For example, the 5th division, when asked in 1919 where it wanted the memorial celebrating its wartime achievements to be located chose not Fromelles, but Polygon Wood.  Our emphasis on Fromelles springs from the 1990s and the combined interventions of Prime Minister John Howard’s overseas war-memorial construction scheme and the archaeological persistence of retired schoolteacher Lambis Englezos.  This is true of many of the battles: what we have been moulded to memorialize, is not necessarily what the soldiers themselves wanted to remember and honour.

Even though the military sections weighed heavily with me, she does interweave it with the homefront and the broader diplomatic scene.  Her analysis of the homefront includes the political wranglings with Billy Hughes and conscription, and the effects on the economy and political life of the crackdown on unions and the War Precautions Act.  I’ve imbued the Labor Party lore of Billy Hughes ‘the rat’ but I hadn’t realized how much I dislike him on the broader international stage as well.  I enjoyed the final 1919 chapter very much, and its emphasis on the diplomatic tradeoffs at the end of the war.

Quite apart from the experience of reading the book, which I found draining, Beaumont makes some important points to counterbalance the type of history that is warping our present day politics and being pushed so insistently in this year of commemoration  as demonstrated in Henry Reynold’s recent excellent article Militarization Marches On.  She is at pains to point out that in many of the battles that we have appropriated to our national memory, Australians were not the only troops there.  We were part of the ‘colonial’ forces, for Britain to do with as she pleased, without consultation.

The title of the book is ‘Broken Nation’ which echoes Bill Gammage’s book The Broken Years.  She kicks back against the idea that Australia was ‘made’ through WWI. Instead, she argues, Australia – the Australia the soldiers sailed away from- was broken by WWI.  Not only was there the disproportionate loss of life, and the burden of injured soldiers, but there was “the less quantifiable embittering of public life” (p. 549).  The conscription debates had polarized Australia, and the rift did not heal easily. The war gave rise to xenophobia and insularity and fear of left-wing radicalism. It became an inward-looking society, focused on grief and the rancour of the war years. (p. 551)

The book started with a prologue that spoke of  Beaumont’s own great-uncle, Joe Russell.  He reappears once or twice during the book.  Other individuals pop up from time to time- Archie Barwick, Pompey Elliot- familiar names from the recent documentary The War That Changed Us.  I must confess that I preferred the grounded, person-based approach in the television documentary to Beaumont’s soaring birds-eye history.  But the reality is that we probably need both.  And in this book, the birds-eye history is in very good, sure hands indeed.

awwbadge_2014I’ve posted this review in the Australian Women Writers Challenge

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Posted in ANZAC, Australian history, Book reviews

‘The Lie’ by Hesh Kestin

Posted on October 9, 2014 | Leave a comment

the-lie-hesh-kestin

2014,  229 p.

I don’t normally read thrillers.  I don’t really like the genre, but I did read this book, largely on the basis of a brief review in The Age.  I still don’t like thrillers.

The book is set in Israel, which is what attracted me. Dahlia Barr (even the name annoys me) is a successful Israeli human rights lawyer, the daughter of an even more strident peace activist mother.  She is approached by the Israeli government to become a Special Advisor for Extraordinary Measures, overseeing the application of torture during interrogation.  Rather implausibly, the government figures that if a human rights lawyer gives the go-ahead, then it must be alright. Even more implausibly, she accepts the job, thinking that she could make a difference.

This resolution is soon put to the test when her own son, an IDF soldier, is kidnapped by Hezbollah, along with a Bedouin Arab who as a citizen of Israel, also serves in the IDF.  In a scenario that has become all too familiar in recent weeks, the two boys are tortured and video-taped to pressure the Israeli government into swapping the boys for the recently-arrested Edward Al-Masri, a Canadian professor returning to Israel.  He was apprehended at customs with a large wad of money, and is the first ‘enhanced interrogation’ case that Dahlia is called upon to oversee.  Her amazement on finding that he is, in fact, a childhood friend turns to resentment and flintiness when she learns that he may have information about the whereabouts of her abducted son.

Like many thrillers, this book is structured with a series of short chapters- in some cases, only a paragraph in length, each on a separate page. The action swings cinematically from scene to scene.  There’s a heavy reliance on conversation for characterization, supplemented in Dahlia’s case by a rather clumsy italicized internal dialogue.   Details in the plot are quite technical in places for verisimilitude, which means that they need to be explained in layman’s terms later.    No, I really don’t like thrillers much.

What I did like was the complication of Israeli identity and the setting. There is a twist at the end, which does give the book more depth, although even I guessed it before it was revealed (which, believe me, is a worry).

I don’t often review books that I’ve read from genres that I generally avoid, because (as you can see) most of my responses are to the genre, rather than the book itself. If, however, you do like thrillers, here’s a shout-out to a thriller set in Melbourne –Fire Damage– written by my friend Richard, available on Kindle.

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Posted in Book reviews

Looking back at a historian looking forward

Posted on October 7, 2014 | 2 comments

I had reason today to winkle out a reference drawing parallels between convictism and slavery.  It wasn’t difficult: several historians have written on the topic, and one of them was K. M. Dallas.

The name sounded familiar.  Then I remembered that  in The Tyranny of Distance Geoffrey Blainey had cited a lecture given to “a small, sceptical audience in Hobart in 1952”  by K. M. Dallas that “brilliantly probed” the mystery of why England decided to send convicts to the other side of the world. Dallas argued that Botany Bay had been intended as a maritime base for four promising trades: tea from China  via the Cape of Good Hope (thereby avoiding the pirate-infested straits near Sumatra); otter pelts from north-west America; whaling in the Indian and South Pacific Oceans, and a bit of quiet dabbling in smuggling and privateering in the Spanish trade that linked the Phillipines, Mexico and South America.  A fifth potential prize might have been the disruption of the Dutch monopoly of trade in the East Indies.   It’s an argument that appeals to me in its scope, and certainly Geoffrey Blainey took it up in his widely-published book.

So, having remembered who K. M. Dallas was,  I looked more closely at the article I downloaded today “Slavery in Australia – convicts, emigrants, Aborigines” from 1968.  It, too, is a wide-ranging article that explores different aspects of forced labour across the British Empire: the hulks moored in the Thames and sent to Bermuda to provide labour for naval improvements; pauper emigration to Canada, Newfoundland and New South Wales, and the forced labour of Aboriginal women by sealers (a view challenged recently by Lynette Russell- my review here) and Aboriginal men under a scheme of pastoral employment bounty.  It struck me that this is transnational history, decades before its time.

So who was K. M. Dallas?  His ADB entry tells me that his name was Kenneth McKenzie Dallas, and that he was born in Tasmania in 1902.  He became a teacher and taught in one-teacher schools while studying a commerce degree. He became a tutor for the Workers Educational Association, which was at that time associated with the University of Tasmania.  His ADB entry notes that

Dallas embodied the ideal WEA type: while of an intellectual cast, he focused on the action of social and economic forces. His discourse was always positive and informed, often enthralling, sometimes overbearing.

Always leftish in his politics, he moved further left with the burgeoning of fascism. His historical prescience deserted him in 1937 when he conducted the opening meeting at the New Norfolk Workers Educational Association.   There’s an article titled ‘Is War Coming? Not Inevitable says K. M. Dallas‘ in the Hobart Mercury of 23 June 1937

Mr. Dallas said that he was not sufficiently pessimistic to feel that another world war was inevitable. Imperialism had undergone a great change in the past 50 years. He felt that the Imperialistic spirit was passing, and that war would pass with it.

Among the forces making for war at present was the assumption that war was inevitable. There were also the war objectives of the Fascist Powers, which were backed by official announcements. Against the forces of war were the development of an organised will to peace, and the building up of peace as a political policy. People would enter the next war with their eyes open. He believed that, even assuming that the German and Italian Governments provoked war, they were not in a position to go to war at present. From the material point of view, those nations likely to provoke war were least equipped for that purpose, and in the circumstances he felt that a world war was most unlikely.

How tragically wrong he was.  He joined the Royal Australian Navy, saw action in the Mediterranean and took part in the first wave at Normandy.  On his return to Australia, he resumed his academic career as a lecturer in economics, encouraging and forming friendships with socially conscious undergraduates including Polish migrants and Asian students.   He was a member of the Australasian Book Society, and he enjoyed European films (surely a rarified taste in 1950s & 60s Tasmania?). He supported the Labor club at the university and the Australian Peace Council, but despite an adverse ASIO assessment  that refused him a passport (quickly overturned by Menzies), he was not a member of the Communist Party.

However, this did not prevent an exchange of letters in July-August 1950  in the Tasmanian Mercury where, after a funeral,  he was publicly challenged by a ‘Lesley Murdoch’ to declare whether he was a communist or not.  The resultant kerfuffle (here , here , here  and here) was prodded along by Dallas’ rather provocatively timed letter to the editor about the Korean War.  The interchange carried out in the columns of the Tasmanian Mercury reminds us of the perils of politically contentious views in a small community, even in the days of a less ubiquitous social media.

Unlike many other academics, he did not support Sydney Sparkes Orr, the professor of philosophy, when he was dismissed from the University of Tasmania.  This stance isolated him from many of his colleagues, but perhaps time has vindicated him in this too, with the publication of Cassandra Pybus’ Gross Moral Turpitude in 1999

I’m a bit put off by the description of him as “overbearing”, but I think that he wouldn’t be out of place at a history conference today.  Transnationalism, networks, environmentalism (he wrote a book on water)- he’d have plenty to say. Certainly, his ideas are interesting, and must have come (literally) from left field fifty years ago.

References:

[You may need to login to  a State or university library to access the articles]

Dallas, K. M. The first settlement in Australia considered in relation to sea-power in world politics [online]. Papers and Proceedings: Tasmanian Historical Research Association No. 3, 1952: 4-12.

Dallas, K. M. Slavery in Australia – convicts, emigrants, Aborigines [online]. Papers and Proceedings: Tasmanian Historical Research Association , Vol. 16, No. 2, Sept 1968: 61-76.

Dallas, K. M. The Origins of White Australia The Australian Quarterly  Vol 27, No 1 (March 1955) 43-55

Geoffrey Blainey The Tyranny of Distance  Sydney, Macmillan, 2001 p. 23-4

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Posted in Historians