Monthly Archives: October 2023

Like the rest of the world, I am horrified by the violence in the Gaza Strip and Israel at the moment. There will be children going to bed terrified tonight. The children of Syria have been going to sleep to the sounds of war for the past ten years. A recent initiative funded by UNHCR, Babyshop,Spiritune, and Anghami has taken neuroscience and music psychology to create a lullaby. It has a tempo which can be speeded up or slowed down, depending on the child’s level of alertness; it has a limited number of notes, and it picks up on Arabic tonal structures. It is played on Syrian radio stations at 8.00 p.m. and cars with speakers mounted on the roof drive slowly through the streets, playing the lullaby.

Reflecting History So after my little sojourn to the early episodes of this podcast to catch up on the Social Wars, here I am back again at Episode 60: The Fall of the Roman Republic Part VI-Death by a Thousand Cuts, the final one in this series. With the conflict between Pompey and Julius Caesar, politics was now a zero-sum game. Both men felt that they were saving the republic, and for both men their claims to legitimacy were a bit dodgy. In 49 BC Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon while Pompey’s armies were all far away, and declared himself Dictator. However, he offered pardons and leniency, and when Pompey’s head was brought to him, Caesar mourned his death. He then went on a tour of the Mediterranean as a bit of a victory lap and to reinforce his power. He undertook lots of reforms, and provided lots of public works and public games, in effect making himself indispensible to the Republic without actually having a lot of public support. Perhaps he was angling to become King?? This is what was behind his assassination by Brutus. In the wake of his death, the deputies became more important. Mark Antony (milking the occasion for all it was worth) read Caesar’s will publicly, which named Octavian as his heir. Tension emerged between Mark Antony and Octavian, and Brutus and Cassius were off raising money as well, without authority. Octavian went to the Senate to obtain sanction to defeat Mark Antony which he did. Having defeated Mark Antony, they joined together to outlaw Brutus and Cassius, leading to the second triumvirate formed by Octavian, Mark Anhony and Lepidus (one of Caesar’s generals). Out came the proscription lists again, leading to the deaths of prominent people like Cicero, 300 senators and 2000 equestrians. They divided up the empire with Mark Anhony controlling Gaul and the East, Lepidus controlling Africa for a while (until he was demoted) and Octavian controlling the rest. That left Mark Anhony and Octavian circling each other. There was criticism of Mark Anhony’s relationship with Cleopatra, and Octavian issued the Oath of All Italy to everyone in Italy, Gaul, Spain and Sardinia. He presented his scheme for an imperial system to the Senate… and that’s the end of the Republic.

History Extra Chaos and Violence in Country Houses. I’m a bit of a sucker for Country Houses and the whole concept of the Big House surrounded by bucolic countryside. American historian Stephanie Barczewski, who has written previously on the way that Empire affected the Country house, has published a new book called How the Country House Became English (Reaktion Books, 2023) which looks at how the Country House has changed over time, reflecting changes in English/British history. Country houses were destroyed as part of the violence of the Reformation and the Civil War, but when the French Revolution broke out, there was a fashion for ‘peaceful’ Palladian houses as a way of distancing from and expressing disdain for the excesses of the French Revolution. Empire influenced their architecture and objects, and led to the escape of exotic animals from their gardens- there were even wallabies on the Isle of Man! Post-war taxation changes saw many country houses moving from private to public or institutional hands. Interest in them has increased since the 1979s when their displays began emphasizing the servants (a huge labour cohort), capturing the interest of family historians whose forebears were far more likely to be servants than owners. Very interesting- I’m tempted by the book!

The Rest is History I’ve only read one Harry Potter book – and that was in Spanish- but that didn’t stop me enjoying The Real Harry Potter: Magic, Empire and Beastly Bullies. Dominic Sandbrook, one of the presenters of this series, is well placed to talk about Britain’s popular culture and its effect on the rest of the world, as he is the author of The Great British Dream Factory . He and Tom Holland talk about the influence of Tom Brown’s School Days from the 1850s, which in effect constructed the template for public school fiction and its particular form of Britishness (i.e. public school in that anyone can go there if they can pay the fees – so, it’s a ‘private’ school here in Australia). They talk about the influence of sport, fagging, headmasters, trains, ‘houses’ and hierarchy. Of course, the big difference was that Hogwarts had girls. I’m looking forward to the next episode.

Emperors of Rome I’ve forgotten where I was up to, so I just scrolled through until I found something republicanny as I’m still puddling around in the late Republic. There I found Episode CXXVIII (128) Cornelia Mother of the Gracchi (Is ‘Gracchi’ plural of Gracchus?) It was common for Roman women to be known by their father’s name, but Cornelia was known at the Mother of Tiberius and Gaius, the radical Tribunes of the People who tried to introduce land reform into Roman society and were assassinated for their troubles. Mind you, she was the daughter of Scipio Africanus, who defeated Hannibal, so it wasn’t as if she was ashamed of her father. She came from an elite family, and was very highly educated. She had 12 children, only three of whom survived to adulthood and when she was widowed, she never remarried which gave her special status and a degree of autonomy that married women didn’t have. We don’t really know a lot about her, and what we do know is filtered through responses to her sons, but there might have been a statue erected to her, and some of her writings were reported (although they are a bit dodgy because they are critical of her sons, so they might be fakes created by her sons’ enemies).

It’s funny how particular crimes permeate your consciousness of growing up in a particular place and time. I suspect that every child growing up during the 1960s was touched in some way by the disappearance of the Beaumont children, and I know that the disappearance of Eloise Worledge in the 1970s made me frightened to sleep beside the window when it was open on an airless hot summer night, as windows always were before the days of airconditioning. (Apparently later research found that the small hole in the flywire screen in her room had nothing to do with her abduction. All that worry for nothing.)

For Robert Drewe, growing up in Perth during the early 1960s, the crime that shaped his consciousness was the multiple murders committed by Eric Edgar Cooke, who was eventually hanged at Fremantle jail in October 1964. His family had shifted to Perth from Melbourne when Robert was six, on account of his father’s promotion at Dunlop Rubber, one of those 1960s brands embedded in Australian consciousness through tyres, tennis balls and Dunlopillo pillows and mattresses. His father was a Dunlop Man, who had married ‘a girl in the office’, and just like expatriates, the staff who had transferred from ‘over east’ formed a male-dominated Dunlop Family who met socially in the smaller white-collar social world of Perth.

Written from a child’s-eye point of view, both his parents were opaque to him. His father, Royce, ever the company man is depicted as a strict, slightly menacing, emotionally distant philanderer who leaned more towards his daughter than his sons. His mother, who he names ‘Dorothy’ when she was in ‘company wife’ mode, or ‘Dot’ when she was relaxed and truly herself, is a more complex character. She was never completely happy in Perth and maintained her family links with Melbourne independently of her husband and children. As Robert grows older, and his life trajectory branches out in ways that his mother disapproves of, we see the judgmental and rigid ‘Dorothy’ at work. The family splinters, under varying degrees of guilt and self-centredness.

Running alongside this memoir of family life is the story of Eric Edgar Cooke, a serial murderer who lurked around the well-to-do streets in which the Drewe family lived. A small man, often overlooked because of his cleft lip and palate, he lived on the edges of society, rebuffed by girls, married with seven children, an itinerant labourer. His life brushed up against Robert Drewe’s life in multiple ways, perhaps coincidentally or perhaps as a characteristic of life in a relatively small city. Cooke worked for Dunlop, he visited the Drewe household as part of his work, one of his victims was known to Robert Drewe, and one of Cooke’s murder implements belonged to a friend of Robert’s. There are faces at the window that may, or may not, have been Eric Cooke; he walked the streets of Dalkieth and Peppermint Grove. Later, the journalist Drewe attends the committal and murder trials that end in Cooke’s execution.

The memoir is interrupted by three independent chapters ‘Saturday Night Boy I, II and III’ which give us a glimpse of Eric Cooke. These are beautifully written, and while not exactly sympathetic and silent on his motivation, do try to explain Cooke’s life from the outside. The famed ‘light’ of Western Australian sunshine is juxtaposed against the darkness in which Cooke operated. There is a sense of menace that bubbles underneath. On driving home from being fingerprinted, as many Perth men were in the dogged search for the ‘Night Caller’, Robert’s father begins to sing the Bing Crosby song:

Where the blue of the night

Meets the gold of the sky

Someone waits for me.

Preface

He falls silent when both father and son realize the menace implicit in the words.

So, too, the image of the shark net which gives the book its title. Drewe was always frightened by sharks, and wished that the Perth beaches had been netted as some eastern beaches were:

I favoured the idea of shark nets…It wasn’t just that the nets trapped sharks, but they prevented them setting up a habitat. Intruders were kept out. A shark never got to feel at home and establish territory. I liked the certainty of nets. If our beaches were netted I knew I’d be a more confident person, happier and calmer. Then again, I might lose the shark-attack scoop of my life

p.299-300

This tension between looking for death and peril, and the desire to avoid it, runs throughout the book. He does, indeed, miss a journalistic scoop involving a friend, but it is because he is looking for sharks and not at what is directly around him. The idea that danger is amongst us, and not netted off, permeates the book.

This is a beautifully crafted memoir, with its juxtaposition of memoir and true crime, which avoids both sentimentality and prurience. It reminded me, in a way, of George Johnson’s My Brother Jack. It has the feel of being the first in a series of memoir, but as far as I know Drewe has never continued with a second book. Instead, it is a slice of life from the late 50s/early 60s rendered faithfully and lovingly but always with a sense that the sunshine and heat is coexisting with darkness and danger. Excellent.

My rating: 9/10

Read because: CAE bookgroup. I had read it back in 2002 and was impressed with it then, too.

Finally, I have actually read the book that Kate chose as part of the Six Degrees of Separation meme for this month. The idea of Six Degrees of Separation is that Kate chooses the starting book, and then you nominate six books that are linked in some way to that title.

In fact, I just didn’t read the starting book I Capture the Castle (1949) just once: I read it many, many times as a teenager. In my family, we didn’t tend to buy books, even though I was an inveterate reader, and so I borrowed this book from Banyule High School library over and over and over again. Strangely, I can’t remember if this was the cover or not, but it looks vaguely familiar.

In keeping with the retro nature of the starting book, I’ve tried to show the book covers as I remember them. I read many of these books before I started blogging, so there’s only one link to my review.

I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith (who also wrote One Hundred and One Dalmations) was about two sisters, and is told from the perspective of the younger sister, Cassandra. It reminded me of Ian McEwan’s Atonement. In both cases the narrator is a young aspiring author living in a ‘big house’, who is romanticizing her older sister’s love life.

Another book about sisters, of course, is Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women – another book that I just loved as an adolescent. Part of me still wants to be Jo March, writing books in my attic, even though I am now probably older than Aunt March!

My love for Little Women meant that I just loved Geraldine Brooks’ March as well, where she writes herself into the character of Mr March, the absent father who is off as a chaplain in the American Civil War. Brooks takes a much loved story, but she makes it her own, spiking it up with Marmee’s perspectives as well.

It was probably Little Women that spurred my love for American Civil War books as well. I really enjoyed Alan Gurganus’ Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All which, set in the present (it was written in 1989) was presented as the memoirs of an old lady who at the age of 15 married a much older Confederate veteran in 1900.

In fact, so much did I enjoy it that I purchased Alan Gurganus’ Plays Well With Others, which wasn’t about the civil war at all. Instead, it was about AIDS cutting a swathe through the artists and writers in New York during the 1980s.

Tuberculosis was another disease which cut down young people in their prime. Say No to Death by Dymphna Cusack is the story of two sisters (sisters again!) in post-war Sydney when Jan contracts TB. It was a contemporary book when it was written (1951) but now it’s a fascinating slice of social history and critique. My review is here.

My Six Degrees this month has taken me back to older books that I read ages ago, but obviously they made enough of an impression to spring to mind again now. Where did I Capture the Castle take you?