Monthly Archives: May 2018

2017, 327 p.

Most Victorian country towns and suburbs that had access to a river with a floodplain  tended, at one stage or another, to have a Chinese market garden.  Not just in Victoria either-  there were Chinese market gardens right along the eastern coast of Australia, in Western Australia too, and in New Zealand. They’re largely forgotten now, as most had disappeared by World War II.  However, for about 50 years between about 1880 and 1930 the Chinese market gardens fulfilled an important role in providing fresh vegetables to urban markets.

Joanna Boileau’s book takes a transnational approach, locating these gardeners not just in sites across Australia and New Zealand, but back in China as well. The majority of Chinese immigrants to Australia and the Pacific from the mid19th century onwards came from a restricted area of Southern China, the Pearl River Delta region of Guandong Province.  There, a highly developed agricultural economy had reached the limits of its cultivable land in 1850, leading to mass emigration where single men travelled overseas to earn money to send home to their families. They had little capital, and indeed indebted themselves to family and labour agents in order to make the journey, but they took with them their labour and agricultural skills.

In Australia, the dominance of large scale pastoralism and agriculture for export or mixed farming meant that small scale, intensive market gardening as the sole source of income was considered of low status.  This opened up an economic niche that Chinese labourers filled, lured by the gold rush, but aware of the high prices for vegetables.  They also started up businesses in laundries and furniture making, but discriminatory legislation introduced in Victoria to curtail Chinese business opportunities left them few options other than market gardening and restaurants.

The gardens were run by profit-sharing syndicates of almost exclusively single men. They tended to live beside the gardens in small sheds in poor conditions, where they were often robbed. With time, these syndicates integrated the various occupations involved in food supply: gardening, hawking, running fruit and vegetable stores, and the wholesale fruit and vegetable distribution network.  Between 1910-1920 in Victoria, they attained a virtual monopoly of the business at the time.

But they worked hard. The Chinese market garden was highly labour intensive.  The soil was prepared, straight furrows were dug, seedlings were transplanted from their own seeds, they were watered by bucket over the shoulders two rows at a time, hoed, harvested, and prepared for sale. They were manured with fermented human excrement and urine, that was collected in large stone urns. This technique was admired by some, and abhorred by others.  Unlike European market gardeners, who tended to plant whole paddocks with the one crop, they mixed together different vegetables with differing harvesting times.  They dealt with plants individually, rather than as a bulk crop. Their intent was to have a steady supply of produce, cropped and earning monetary return as soon as possible.

However,  the number of Chinese market gardens began declining after 1910 and by WWII most of them had disappeared. With the enforcement of the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901, there was not a steady influx of new generations, and so the existing market gardeners became older and older. New Italian, Greek and Maltese arrivals were moving into market gardening from the 1920s and 1930s e.g. at Werribee in Victoria, and landowners now subdivided their land instead of leasing it for market gardening.

I suspect that this book has probably emerged from a PhD thesis, with its rather theoretical opening chapter that deals with diaspora, technology transfer, material culture studies and transnationalism. The book covers the eastern states of Australia, and New Zealand, so it really provides a good survey of Chinese market gardening. I found her account of the relationship between Chinese and Maori gardeners fascinating, and it marked a real difference between Australia and New Zealand in terms of the relationship between indigenous people and the Chinese.  Despite the broad scope of its analysis, she also identified individual market gardeners by name, something that the housewives on their back doorstep could do too, because of their familiarity with these men who called weekly with their vegetables.  The subject matter of this book may be rather specialized, but it reads very easily and really fleshes out with individuals a stereotype that has largely disappeared.

Sourced from: State Library of Victoria e-book (did you know that you can borrow them at home?)

Read because: We’re including Chinese Market Gardens in an upcoming display at Heidelberg Historical Society

I’ve added this book to the Australian Women Writers Challenge database.

2009, 240 p

What an unexpected delight! I borrowed this book when I was working on Catherine Helen Spence a few months back, because I wanted to read Susan Magarey’s chapter about Spence’s domestic life.  In addition to Margarey’s chapter,  I found a collection of fascinating essays written by academics who worked alongside or as graduate students of ANU historian Francis Barrymore (F.B) Smith, a historian of whom I’d largely been unaware, I thought.

Smith, who was born in Hughesdale, was a history of British and Australian history: indeed, he believed that Australian history should be studied as part of the British world. His own publications straddled both British and Australian contexts on themes of political action,  freethought religion, medicine and public health. These interests can be seen in the chapters of this book, which arose from a festschrift by his former students and colleagues to which he reluctantly agreed.  He died in 2015 and one of his former students and one of the editors of this collection, Graeme Davison, wrote this obituary. Several of the essays allude to his grumpiness and scepticism but also to his enthusiasm and encouragement.  Without fail, each of the chapters testifies to his contribution to the intellectual development of the various authors.  And what a list of authors! At the back of the book are listed the PhD students he supervised including  among many others, Graeme Davison, David Walker, Janet McCalman, Susan Magarey (nee Eade), Joy Damousi, Frank Bongiorno, Michael Roberts, Craig Wilcox, Malcolm Wood, Janet Doust and Barbara Dawson, nearly all of whom I have read at some stage and many of whom have appeared in this blog.

So- what of the chapters? Graeme Davison’s chapter looks at James Kay, whom I didn’t recognize until I remembered  Kay-Shuttleworth  the public health reformer (who I must confess I thought were two separate people). His chapter ‘Sociology and Self-Knowledge’ combines an analysis of Kay’s reform work alongside his love interest in Helen Kennedy, the daughter of one of his most influential patrons.  It is followed by Michael Roberts’ chapter ‘Politics and Public Health in the Age of Palmerston’ which explores political action and reform and the role of research and philanthropy. I really enjoyed Alex Tyrell’s chapter ‘A ‘Cold Water Bubble’? The Mid-Nineteenth Century British Water Cure and its Adherents’ which examines hydropathy, the cold water treatment, and its relationship with mysticism, quackery, alternative medicine and public health. Joanna Burke, from Birkbeck College UCL, author of An Intimate History of Killing, presents ‘The Malingers’ Craft: Mind Over Body in Twentieth Century Britain and America’ which takes as its launching point Edward Casey, a young Cockney soldier who, once caught up in WWI, feigned mental illness to avoid battle. The chapter goes on to consider the development of  psychology during wartime.

Geoffrey Best moves to a more autobiographical approach in his chapter ‘Education, Empire and Class: Growing Up in a New London Suburb in the 1930s’, reflecting on his own childhood in Osterley, a ‘middle-classes’ suburb.  This chapter ends where the next one begins, when Pat Jalland complicates the ‘stiff-upper-lip’ response to the Blitz in her chapter ‘The Peoples War: Death in the Blitz’.  By taking several biographical accounts of the grief and emotional shut-down that followed the sustained bombing, she compares this with the present-day emotional response to public tragedy.

The chapters then shift geographically from Britain to Australia – or, as is made clear in Phillipa Mein Smith’s chapter Australasia – incorporating New Zealand and Australia.  Her chapter ‘Retracing Australia: The History of a British Idea’ roves across public health, military and trade in looking sideways between Australia and New Zealand. It seems a particularly relevant chapter given New Zealand’s only-slightly-tongue-in-cheek campaign to ensure that they are not dropped off the map, starring Prime Minister Jacinda Adern.

I just loved Janet McCalman’s chapter ‘To Die without Friends: Solitaries, Drifters and Failures in a New World Society’ which examined demographic and epidemiological data that arose from the charity files of the Lying In Hospital in Melbourne, tracing the health and life outcomes of babies born in straitened circumstances from 1857-1900 up to the end of the open period for death certificates in 1985. As she points out, the information provided in Victoria’s very detailed death certificates required the presence of an informant who knew the names and birthplaces of family members in the past. For men and women estranged from their families, or at the end of a life of marginality and mobility, it is likely that this information remained unknown. She also, in half a page, proposes a pithy analysis of the trajectory of the ‘underclass’ cohort from the gold rushes through to the 1950s.

Then there’s Magarey’s excellent chapter on ‘The Private Life of  Catherine Helen Spence 1825-1910’ which had drawn me to the book in the first place, followed by the only chapter that actually speaks about F.B. Smith as a historian.  Written by military historian Peter Edwards, ‘A Tangle of Decency and Folly, Courage and Chicanery but above All, Waste’: The Case of Agent Orange and Australia’s Vietnam Veterans’ describes Smith’s own work as a historian in contributing a chapter to the official history of the Vietnam War. Smith reviewed the evidence arising from various commissions and enquiries into the effect of Agent Orange and, despite his own sympathies and convictions about war, concluded that Agent Orange was not the cause of veterans’ suffering – a conclusion, reached also by others, but completely imbued with politics.

And it was reading this last chapter that I remembered that I had read F. B. Smith after all. Last year I read his small booklet on the conscription debates in 1916 and 1917. It was barely more than a pamphlet, aimed at school students (in fact, I’m sure that I used it back in 1972 when I did HSC) but it combined policy, political and moral questions succinctly.  Ah- so it was that F. B. Smith!

Looking back at these various chapters, each self-contained and accessible, written by top-notch historians, they are all a reflection of Smith’s own work and influence. They also demonstrate the ripple effect of research: that others pick up one academic’s ideas and interests and make them their own, adding to and deepening the conversation and taking it forward.

Sourced from: La Trobe University Library

2015, 309 p.

I’m such a hypocrite. “Never let the facts get in the way of a good story!” I say, when I’m spinning up some dross into narrative gold. But “Fidelity!” I demand when I’m reading an imagined biography – not necessarily fidelity to the facts, mind you,  but faithfulness to the time, dialogue and worldview of the characters.

In this case, Eleanor Limprecht has allowed the facts to get in the way of a damned good story by very conscientiously citing verbatim a letter from the Long Bay Women’s Reformatory as the frontispiece to her book.  I didn’t realize it at the time, but once I reached that point in the narrative, the suspense that she had sustained so well about her character’s fate broke down and I wished that I hadn’t read the frontispiece.  But other than this, I think that Limprecht has pulled off the feat of combining research into a real character with a fictionalized narrative that is true to the evidence.

Rebecca Sinclair, as you can tell from the title and front cover, ended up an inmate of the Long Bay Women’s prison. She had a hard childhood and adolescence, working as an outworker seamstress alongside her mother in the inner suburbs of Sydney in the 1880s. Largely to escape this straitened life, she married Don, who is largely under the control of his mother, and is a liar and wastrel.  In Limprecht’s telling, it is largely because of Don’s influence that Rebecca ended up in jail. I’ll leave her to explain how and why.

The story is told in the present tense, a tense which (as I have said often before) I find uncomfortable to read (and even though I’m using it myself as I write this!) There are some infelicities in the dialogue which at times sounds too late 20th century, but by tethering her book in authentic legal documents, she doesn’t stray too far.  Her depiction of Rebecca Sinclair is fleshed-out and human, and if at times the research bones become apparent, Limprecht’s character is convincing enough to stay in your mind after you’ve finished the book.

Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library

My rating: 8/10

I have included this for the Australian Women Writers Challenge 2018.

2017, 485 p.

Back in the early 1970s, at the age of 18,  I went to Japan with a Rotary group.  It was a very wholesome tour, but I do recall seeing two things which perplexed me at the time, but I understand better now. They were both in the same building, as I recall: a largish building, similar to an RSL. There was a large, dimly lit bar, with drunken men in white shirts and ties, crooning along off-key to an instrumental soundtrack that I now recognize as karaoke. At the time- and indeed now over forty years later – I couldn’t work out why male office workers (and they were entirely male) would want to make a fool of themselves in this way.  On another floor was what I was told was a pachinko parlour, likewise windowless and dimly lit except for the carnival lights around the pachinko machines. I couldn’t really make sense of the machines, which seemed like a mixture of pokie and pinball machine.  But when I saw the title of this book, I knew exactly what  pachinko was.

I came to read the book solely on the say-so of Whispering Gums Sue’s reading group  who selected this book as one of their favourites for the year. When I put it on hold at the library late last year , I found that almost eighty people were ahead of me.  Three months later I picked it up, read the back blurbs and my heart sank.  “Oh no!” I thought as memories of Falling Leaves and Amy Tan sprang to mind, dreading another three-generation Asian family saga mired in the author’s own autobiography that ends up in America with a self-entitled middle-class, middle-aged woman alternately intrigued and repelled by the lives of her grandmother and mother.

But I need not have worried. In her acknowledgments at the back of the book, the author notes that the story originated in a lecture she heard about Koreans in Japan, where a boy bullied by his classmates in his year book, jumped from a building and died. Fascinated by the failure of Japanese-born Koreans to be recognized as Japanese, and the scant prospect of this changing in the future, she researched further and conducted interviews.  These people may be historical victims, she conceded, “but when I met them in person, none of them were as simple as that”.  I think that the origins of this book in historical situation, rather than genealogy, is what lifts it right out of the pack of Amy-Tam-clones.

The book is divided into three parts: ‘Gohyang/Hometown 1910-1933’, ‘Motherland 1939-1962’ and ‘Pachinko 1962-1989’. Within these parts, the narrative is told chronologically, with jumps of perhaps three or four years, shifting between Korea, which Sunja leaves permanently, and Nagano, Osaka, Yokohama and Tokyo in Japan where she raises her family.  The story starts in 1910, the year of Japan’s annexation of Korea, when Hoonie, a good man hampered by his cleft palate and club foot, marries a poor young rural girl, Yangjin.  They have a single surviving daughter, Sunja.  When Sunja falls pregnant to a married man, Hansu, her situation is relieved by another good man,  the Christian preacher Isak, who marries her and takes her to live with his childless brother Yoseb and sister-in-law Kyunhee in Japan.  Sunja’s first-born son, Noa, grows up believing that Isak is his father, while his real father, Hansu, by now a gangland leader, is an ever-present, watching presence.

The tumultuous events of the second half of the twentieth century (comfort women, Japan during WWII, the communists in North Korea, the US involvement in the Korean war, the American acceptance of Christianized South Koreans as immigrants) all occur off-stage. They are not unimportant, because they form the background to the family’s situation as ongoing outsiders, too frightened to return to the silence of North Korea, accruing wealth and remaining distrusted by the Japanese. The pachinko industry is mired in the Korean underworld, but it lures the family as the only means of progress when education – held up as the path of responsibility – has its limitations. The pachinko game stands as a metaphor for life, where the game is tweaked and manipulated, but it draws its players on for just one more play, in the hope that this time, there will be a win. Life, like a pachinko game, “looked fixed but … also left room for randomness and hope.”

I really enjoyed this book.  It’s long, and not for nothing does Lee cite Dickens in her epigram to Part 1 of the book (“Home is a name, a word, it is a strong one; stronger than magician ever spoke, or spirit answered to, in strongest conjuration”). The book evoked Dickens in its sweep and length, and I found it entirely engrossing, luxuriating in a whole Easter Sunday to sit and finish it in one big gulp.

Source: Yarra Plenty Regional Library (e-vent-ually)

Read because: Sue’s book group enjoyed it

My rating: 9/10