I enjoy reading essays and articles, and so I’ve decided to write about them on my blog. Apart from the fact that they interest me, one of my criteria for selection is that they are available online or through a State Library library card.
Available online at: George Orwell: Such, Such Were the Joys published in Partisan Review Sept-October 1952.
I became aware of this essay through a Guardian article by Zoe Williams commenting on British broadcaster Kirstie Allsopp’s social media post about allowing her 15-year old son to go Interrailing in Europe by himself. Being on the other side of the world, I am of course unaware of the debate and the personalities and their social class, but I was attracted to Williams’ reflection on the child-rearing habits of “the posh” and her reference to George Orwell’s essay. I started reading it, and was transfixed by the honesty of Orwell’s essay, the bleakness of the boarding-school experience he describes, and the links Orwell draws between power, resistance and the British class system.
St Cyprian’s School was founded in 1899 on the Muscular Christianity principles of ‘character development’. As a prep school, its reputation rested on its success in getting its students into public schools like Eton and Harrow. It provided scholarships for ‘deserving cases’ which is how Orwell got to attend, and was never allowed to forget that his parents couldn’t afford such an education. And what an education it was: bullying, cramming to pass the entrance exams, corporal punishment, obsession over ‘beastliness’ (masturbation) and the minute gradations of class of which all students were acutely aware. The British Boarding School story is familiar to Australians of my age through the books we read as children, and books and films like Tom Brown’s Schooldays but Orwell’s first-person, perceptive account is compelling reading.
Orwell was aware that his account was too libelous to be published while the people he describes were still alive, particularly the headmistress Mrs Wilkes (whom the students called ‘Mum’ as a contraction of ‘Ma’am’ rather than any sense of affection). As a result, the essay was not published until 1952 some five years after it was thought to be written, and then only in America with the name of the school changed: it was not published in UK until 1968. Of course, old boys leapt to St Cyprian’s defence, rebutting Orwell’s portrayal.
You can see a photograph of St Cyprian’s as Orwell knew it, before it burned down in 1939 here.
This film was shown as part of the Spanish Film Festival, and it made it into the theatres afterwards, as the most popular films from the language festivals tend to do. The frame story is a woman looking to find out what happened to her great-grandfather during and after the Spanish Civil War, which takes her to the disinterment of many bodies (on both sides) of people who died during the war, a process that continues today. The film then flashes back to a small village in 1935, and Antoni Benaiges, an idealistic and innovative teacher who takes over the school and introduces new methods (most particularly the Freinet method- a forerunner of whole language?). His teaching and relationship with the children provoke the ire of the local Catholic priest and his supporters in the village. You can pick up most of the plot from the trailer, and you can probably imagine the ending.
It’s a beautiful, sad film and the actor playing the teacher (Enric Auquer) is just lovely. It is based on a true story, and in the closing shots of the film you see real objects that miraculously survived – most particularly a notebook called ‘The Sea, as seen by some children who have never seen it‘ created and handprinted by the children themselves.
In the Shadows of Utopia. My son has been raving about this podcast for ages, and now I know why. It’s excellent. I didn’t particularly want to listen to another genocide podcast, and I find it frustrating that books on Cambodia seem to concentrate on either the Angkor period, or else Pol Pot as if nothing else happened between those two events. Looking through the list of episodes, it seems that my yearning for the ‘in-between’ might be met, even though the emphasis of the project as a whole might be on the 20th century. The first episode Introducing the Cambodian Nightmare starts by asking you to imagine how you would cope with the expulsion from Phnom Penh on 17 April 1975, then backtracks to 1969 and the Vietnam War. He starts with Sihanouk, who was playing both sides a bit until he was voted out in 1970 and replaced by the fervently U.S. Lon Nol who was rewarded when US were pumping $1million per day into Cambodia. But then Nixon decided to withdraw U.S. troops from Vietnam and encourage the ‘Vietnamization’ of the fighting. But the U.S. had been secretly bombing Cambodia for years, trying to get rid of the ‘sanctuaries’ where the Viet Cong could slip across the border, move south, then go back into South Vietnam. By 1973 all U.S. troops had withdrawn, and by 1975 the U.S. withdrew completely. Lon Nol fled with millions of dollars, and the fighting came to Phnom Penh. On 17 April 1975 first the Chief Monk got onto the radio and told people to calm down, then the chief of Kymer Republic army told them to lay down their arms. The Kymer Rouge troops were at first greeted as liberators, then that afternoon they evacuated Phnom Penh, ostensibly for three days, because they said that the U.S. was going to bomb them. Then followed almost four years of the Kymer Rouge nightmare until the Vietnamese Army took Phnom Penh in January 1970. Photographer Ho Van Tay was the first to see the Tuol Svay Prey High School, and to document the horror. This is an imaginative, well-told, and wide-ranging episode. I’m impressed.
The Rest is History Lord Byron: Death of a Vampire (Episode 4) Back into European exile, Byron revisited the sites he had previously visited when writing Child Harolde, comparing his current situation with Napoleon. In May 1816 he met up with Shelley and stepsisters Mary Godwin and Claire Claremont, who was pregnant with Byron’s child. They spent the summer together in Geneva where the bad weather caused by the eruption of Krakatoa forced them inside to tell vampire and horror stories- hence Frankenstein. Even though Byron had claimed that he wanted nothing to do with Claremont’s baby, when it was born it was agreed that the parents would have shared custody but Bryon was still moving around. In Ravenna he fell in love with a 19 year old married woman Theresa. He was becoming increasingly involved in British and Italian politics, and ended up getting expelled from Tuscany. Shelley drowned, and the circle of radicals broke up. By now Byron was getting bored, and became obsessed with Greece again. Greece was a cause celebre amongst many British intellectuals and society people, and he became a type of Ambassador, raising money for the cause. He went to Missalongi to raise the profile of the war, but fell ill there and died.
Embedded (NPR) This was an interesting experience. Tested is a six-part series looking at the history of sex testing in sports over the past 100 years. This controversial topic raised its head again in the recent Olympic boxing match, but this podcast series had been completed before then. As part of my own echo-chamber of media, I usually only listen to podcasts that are slightly left-leaning and which I’m generally in agreement with. However, with my somewhat ‘TERF’y views, I found this series rather challenging. (Not that I support J.R. Rowling’s very spiky and unnecessarily hostile response to the boxing match, either). Certainly the presenter of this podcast opposes to testing and hormonal management (she would call it manipulation) and it shows in her questions and approach. When women were first permitted to compete in the Olympic Games in 1928, it was feared that competitive sport would make them ‘unwomanly’, and that strenuous exercise would make you a man. The first transgender athlete was the Czech runner Zdeněk Koubek, who transitioned from female to male, prompting the issuing of a rule permitting physical examination of athletes, which by 1966 resulted in the mandatory inspection of all female athletes. In 1968 genetic testing was introduced, and tested female athletes were issued with a card testifying that they were women. By 2011 the testing focus shifted to hyperandrogenism and testosterone levels, and individual sports issued their own guidelines. In the case of athletics, the permitted testosterone level has been progressively reduced. The series focuses on two athletes: Namibian runner Christine Mboma, who took hormone drugs to reduce her testosterone level, and who has struggled to achieve her earlier results, and Kenyan sprinter Maximila Imali who refused to take drugs or undergo surgery to meet the testosterone criteria. Instead, she has taken up her cause in the courts, but a delay in the findings meant that she could not compete in the Paris Olympic Games. The issue has bounced back and forth in the courts, with competing medical claims, and accusations of Western racism against the global South (especially Africa runners) and denial of human rights. The last episode raises a number of possible scenarios for women’s sport: to continue testing; to have a special category; and to have no testing at all. I know that the last option fills me with trepidation. Interesting, but I found it a rather challenging listen.
Emperors of Rome Episode CCXXII A Stolen Election (The Catiline Conspiracy III) In 64BCE Catiline fronted up for his third attempt to be elected Consul, and he lost yet again. Catiline was angry, but he decided to run the following year at the 63BCE elections. He ran on a plank of debt cancellation, which would have been very convenient for him, as he was heavily indebted, and he was supported by quite a few other people who had run up large debts as well. By this time, Cicero was firmly in the Optimate political grouping, even though he was strictly speaking a ‘new man’, and Catiline was in the Populares (even though he had long aristocratic family ties). He lost yet again, and by now he was broke and a social outcast. The other accusations of a ‘conspiracy’ earlier on are a bit dodgy, but this is really into conspiracy territory now as there were accusations of women riling up the slaves to rebel. Although Catiline might have been the spark, there was general discontent building up over many years since the Gracchi tried to implement land reform 60 years earlier. Perhaps now was the time!
Being Roman (BBC)Death on the Nile In this episode, historian Mary Beard takes us on Emperor Hadrian’s trip down the Nile to see the ‘singing’ Colossus of Memnon (actually, it was a statue of a Pharoah but somehow the legend had changed to link it with Greek and Roman mythology). Hadrian was an inveterate traveller, accompanied by about 5000 other people. On the way, Hadrian’s young male lover Antinous drowned in the Nile (did he jump, was he pushed, or was he just making a spectacle of himself?). Heartbroken, Hadrian continued on his journey, and the poet Julia Balbilla (a friend of Hadrian’s wife) had poetry inscribed on the bottom of the Colossus, praising Hadrian and his wife.
It’s strange that this book is at the same both aposite and urgent on the one hand, and rather overtaken by events on the other. It was written in 2023, before October 7 at a time of blithe confidence on the part of the Israeli government that Palestine had been ‘contained’ and when, Loewenstein would argue, it benefited Israel to have a proving ground for their technologies of surveillance and repression. I’m not sure that it’s still the case now. The supremacy of these technologies was found lacking on October 7, when men on motorbikes proved the vulnerabilities in high-tech solutions, and although the Israeli response demonstrates the sophistication of their weapons, the outcomes are just as blunt and primitive as war has ever been over centuries.
In this book Loewenstein argues that:
Israel is still often framed as a thriving if beleaguerered democracy and a key ally in the battle against extremism. Its status as a leading defense exporter is legendary, willing to militarily assist, arm, or train the majority of nations on earth…. Israel has perfected and led the “global pacification industry”, a term coined by Israeli-American writer and academic Jeff Halper in his book Waragainst the People: Israel, the Palestinians and Global Pacification. He explains that the occupation is not a financial burden on the state but the exact opposite, both in terms of Palestine being an invaluable testing ground for new equipment on behalf of a global military hegemon serving other militaries across the globe (p. 206, 207)
He argues that Palestine has acted as a type of laboratory in which technologies and strategies can be ‘tried out’ on a subject population and then exported to other countries. Missile technology, facial recognition surveillance, software infiltration, concrete walls, drones – all have been tested on Gaza and the West Bank and their “success” has bolstered the Israeli arms industry. Israeli ubiquity across the whole arms manufacturing chain means that even countries wishing to distance themselves from it are implicated by the inclusion of small components in their technology purchases, as the Australian government tried to claim . The ‘War on Terror’ turbo-charged Western anxieties about terrorism, softening resistance amongst governments and their electors to surveillance and border militarization technologies that would have been rejected in the past. At the same time, Israel has been willing to sell their technology to any government that wished to purchase it, with no questions asked about the purpose to which it would be deployed.
The book ranges widely over different governments and regimes in order to bolster its argument. I found myself rather confused by the chapter titles, which seemed to signpost a progression of the argument, but which bore little relation to the material in the chapter. There are seven chapters:
Selling Weapons to Anybody Who Wants Them
September 11 Was Good for Business
Preventing an Outbreak of Peace
Selling Israel Occupation to the World
The Enduring Appeal of Israeli Domination
Israeli Mass Surveillance in the Brain of Your Phone
Social Media Companies Don’t Like Palestinians.
Of these chapters, Chapters 1, 2 4 and 5 were all variations on the same theme: that Israel could boast of the success of its military industry through its deployment against Palestinians, and it was prepared to sell it to anyone who wanted it. He draws on evidence from all over the world, but all to the same end. Chapters 6 and 7 were probably the most closely related to their titles, where he describes Israeli software development and its influence over social media companies to shut down Palestinian voices. I think that Chapter 3 ‘Preventing an Outbreak of Peace’ is probably the most pertinent to recent events as we see the implacability of the right wing of the Israeli government against any form of ceasefire, and Loewenstein’s book has caused me to see that there is an economic, as well as political, impetus for this. But the actual chapter 3 in his book said nothing about Palestine or peace, instead it was just a repetition of the preceding chapters, using other countries as examples.
There was one insight in particular that I took from the book. I had often wondered why far-right demonstrations in recent years have featured Israeli flags. Loewenstein argues that this is not through any affinity with Israel or Judaism – in fact, the opposite- but because Israel is a prime example of an ethnostate which has succeeded in emasculating a minority (or so they thought) through technology, brute force and surveillance without attracting world censure. And this is the methodology and example that Israel is exporting to dictators throughout the world.
So, an interesting book, exhaustively researched and exhausting to read, that was let down by a structure that promised a more nuanced argument than it delivered.
The Rest is History Byron: Dangerous Liaisons (Part 3) By now, Byron had developed his celebrity image- pale, sickly, bulimic and romantic- and given that women were falling over themselves to be with him, he had to suppress his homosexual tendencies. My God, what a mess. There was the androgynous Lady Caroline Lamb, the wife of the man who would later become Lord Melbourne, who became obsessed with him. On the suggestion of her mother-in-law Lady Melbourne aka The Spider, Byron had an on-and-off relationship with the mathematician Annabella Milbanke but, on the side, he was having an affair with his half-sister Augusta. This is all sick, and cruel and when he finally, resentfully, marries Annabella, he has not given up Augusta. Indeed, when Annabella falls pregnant, he names the girl Augusta, although Annabella herself always referred to her as Ada. (In fact, she became Ada Lovelace the mathematician). Eventually Annabella leaves him, but Caroline Lamb is on the rampage again, this time spreading rumours about incest and sodomy. Even though both were true to a certain extent, Byron agreed to flee England again to avoid the scandal.
Emperors of RomeEpisode CCXXI – An Entire Farrago (The Catiline Conspiracy II) Some people call the Catiline Conspiracy the ‘second Catiline Conspiracy’. So what was the first conspiracy? Maybe it didn’t even happen and we’re not even sure if Catiline was involved in it anyway. The main source for the ‘first’ conspiracy is Sallust, who wrote it as a flashback when the real Catiline Conspiracy occurred. It seemed to have just fizzled out, as a form of proto-conspiracy. The REAL Catiline Conspiracy, which occured in 63 BC was when Catiline wanted another tilt at being consul, after being thwarted last time. Cicero got the backing of the Optimates compared with Catiline who was seen as a Populare, most of whom he had bribed. But was this really a conspiracy if it happened before the election was even held? Was it just part of Catiline’s pre-election schtick? In his speeches to the men he hoped would support him, he went on about lost liberties and Making Rome Great Again (all sounds very familiar). The whole thing might just be a Sallust invention.
The Documentary (BBC)Assignment: A Slogan and a Land. This is the two-part podcast that I vowed to listen to after hearing the presenter interviewed. He starts off on the banks of the River Jordan, heading for the Sea, which is only 80 km away crossing Israeli settlements and Palestinian villages. Although he intended walking, he soon found that he had to have drivers (one Jewish, one Palestinian) that he alternated between, depending on the nature of the village he was driving through. Quite apart from settlements, the use of animals (sheep, goats) etc and carving out land for nature reserves are all compromising Palestinian land. At the same time there is a demographic battle going on with settler and orthodox Jewish families having many children, as do many Palestinian families. Many of his interviewees are hard-line on both sides. I found myself becoming particularly incensed by the Israeli settler who jeered that the Palestinians didn’t even know how to farm, because the green parts are all Israeli, and the arid parts all Palestinian – with no acknowledgement of the settler water policies that are leading to desertification of Palestinian land. In the second episode, he is more than half-way, and he comes across less strident opinions, with more intermingling of Jewish and Palestinian people, although on the Jewish side October 7 has changed everything. There has been an economic impact on the Palestinian people as well, with wide-scale sacking of Palestinian employees in the wake of the attack. Very interesting and well worth listening to.
History ExtraKindness and Hostility: refugees in wartime Britain. There’s certainly plenty of hostility coming out of peacetime Britain at the moment. Hostility towards refugees in Britain was fairly low-key until the Russian pogroms in 1905 saw an influx of Jewish refugees. Prior to WW2 and Kindertransport notwithstanding, there was a general reluctance to take Jewish refugees from Austria and Germany, largely because there was a fear that huge numbers of Eastern European Jews would follow suit. The Evian Conference of 1938 was a form of refugee ‘green-washing’ with Palestine and the US not even included as options. There was Arab resistance to large-scale emigration, so the UK didn’t push the matter. Until a change in attitude in 1941, there was internment of Jewish refugees during WW2, (even though they were refugees because of Hitler), because of fears that many Jewish refugees working as domestic servants would be ‘spies in the kitchen’. After the war, the British government accepted Polish refugees, but refugees heading for Palestine were intercepted by the British navy and interned until Israel was created and large-scale Jewish emigration began.
I am so behind in posting about my listening! Not that anyone really cares, but I like to keep a record of what I’ve listened to so that I can go back and find things if I need them.
Sudan: All the news is full of Gaza and Ukraine, but I’ve been aware of Sudan bubbling away in the corner. I did listen to a few podcasts about Sudan last year, but I decided to catch up. Sudan’s Forgotten War (23 April 2024) takes up the most recent news. The long history of the Sudan conflict is that when Sudan achieved independence in 1956, the government was composed of northern and eastern elites and the military. This caused huge resentment elsewhere, and so the government turned to the Arab Janjaweed militia to suppress rebellion by amalgamating the army with Hemedti’s forces to become the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). But when Omar Al-Bashir was toppled as part of the washup from the Arab Spring, the military (SAF) would not cede power and the partnership between the armed forces and the RSF collapsed in 2023. Outside forces are involved: the RSF gets support from the United Arab Republic in troops and gold. The Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) gain support from Egypt, Saudi Arabia and perhaps Iran, as part of a long game. We are currently at a stalemate, with neither side able to defeat the other, and no wish for peace. There is no clear David and Goliath- instead it is a falling out between two powerful militarized bodies. There is no single front line, and neither side will allow humanitarian aid to get through.
I followed this with Nesrine Malik’s ‘All that we had is gone’: my lament for war-torn Khartoum’ which was nominated for a 2024 European Press Prize and you can read it here . It was actually from 2023, and it captures the grief that followed the conflict that came to Khartoum, which had previously been fairly immune from violence. It’s a beautiful piece of work.
The Global Story (BBC)The Most Contested Land in World? Admittedly, I did listen to this in the middle of the night, but it’s one of the best podcasts I’ve heard about ‘from the river to the sea’, and the multiple meanings that it holds for both Israelis and Palestinians. BBC Current Affairs journalist Tin Whewell talks about his journey from the River Jordan to the Meditteranean Sea- such a small piece of land and so much bloodshed. Actually, I think there’s a two-parter on BBC Assignment about the trip itself. I might listen to them as well.
Background Briefing. Notorious 8 My Friend the Cop Killer. I heard some of this while I was in the car, so I listened to the rest on podcast. It’s the background story of Nathaniel Train, one of the three Wieambilla conspiracy-theorists who killed two policemen and their neighbour. It’s presented by a journalist who was a schoolmate of Nathaniel, and it goes through the family rift between Gavin and Nathaniel and their parents, and the COVID vaccine mandate that seemed to have pushed them over the edge. But really, it’s pretty tabloid and sensationalist, and not really worth of Background Briefing.
History Hit Harris vs Trump: How We Got Here. As the name suggests, History Hit usually deals with things that have already happened, but in this case Dan Snow is inviting his guest, Ben Rhodes, (a Former Deputy National Security Advisor for Obama and host of Pod Save the World,) to take a first draft of history about the Harris vs. Trump election. Rhodes points out that the ‘strongman’ is a part of a global trend of backlash to globalization: someone who will tell you who you are and who to blame. He regrets that perhaps Barack Obama should have been a bit more of a strong-man. Presidents need to narrate what is happening, and Joe Biden didn’t do that. He suggests that the US looking for its identity, and that now the enemy is each other.
This is a strange book in that, by the end of it, you have experienced a nuanced and sad story and yet the first-person narrator didn’t actually tell you. The narrator in this case is sixteen-year-old Nomi Nickel, who lives in East Town, a small Mennonite town in Manitoba. On the first page she tells us that both her mother and her sister have disappeared, and that she is living with her father, Ray, who is engulfed by grief at the loss of his wife. The Mennonite church and her uncle Hans, whom she nicknames ‘The Mouth’ are dominant in the town, with the school, the local doctor and the school counsellor all members of the church. Nomi and her generation are the first Mennonite cohort to grow up with English as their first language: her parents and their generation continue to speak in low German. The community world view is shaped by their heritage, and the story of Menno Simons who formed his group out of the Anabaptists during the sixteenth century, leading to waves of emigration out of Europe to countries more accepting of their religion. East Town is a tourist attraction to American and Canadian travellers, and the Mennonite community plays along with its ‘living’ Heritage museum. Yet despite the town’s apparent devoutness, the teenagers in East Town are unruly and out of control, with alcohol, drug use and premarital and underage sex all rampant. Nomi is too, just like her older sister Tash was, and her father Ray is powerless to rein her in.
At first I thought that this was going to be a mystery: what did happen to Nomi’s mother Trudie, who left suddenly and taking nothing with her? It is only gradually that we learn the back-story of Nomi’s family, with her sister Tash’s rejection by the church and her father once she escapes the community with her boyfriend. We see Nomi embark on a similar trajectory, with her father making a surprising sacrifice at the end which leaves options open for Nomi to chart her own course.
The structure of the book is intriguing. It is only at the end that we realize that the narrative is a school assignment, written for her cantankerous English teacher Mr Quiring, with whom she clashes frequently. We gradually learn that Mr Quiring has had more of an effect on Nomi’s family situation than she realizes.
I chose this book for our bookgroup read, but it wasn’t actually the book I meant to choose! I had intended to suggest Women Talking, also by Miriam Toews, but we enjoyed this book nonetheless.
The Rest is HistoryLord Byron: Scandal, Sex and Celebrity Part 2 Byron’s first big hit was “Childe Harolde’s Pilgrimage” which is in effect an autobiographical account of his travels during the Napoleonic War in Europe. He had first proposed writing a research project called “Sodomy Simplified” but he was talked out of it- good advice, I reckon. He escaped into the gay underworld, and sailed to Greece which was then under Turkish occupation, then on to Albania where he was fascinated by Ali Pasha. He saw himself as a future saviour of Athens, where Elgin was busy collecting his marbles. At the time, Athens was in ruins, and only 10,000 people lived there. Elgin’s plan at first was to make casts of the sculptures in order to conserve them, but once he’d had the scaffolding built etc, he decided to take them. No one objected. It took Elgin 10 years to remove them, and Byron’s friend Hobhouse saw it as an act of rescue. Byron, however, was outraged and mocked Elgin – he’d be horrified to think that they were still in the British Museum today! He finally returned home to England at the age of 23. His mother and several friends had died in the meantime, and he was restless.
Emperors of Rome. I haven’t listened to this for ages. I’m never going to catch up on all the episodes I’ve missed, so I’ll just catch their most recent series of podcasts on the Catiline conspiracy. It seems an apposite time to think about conspiracies, because our world is full of them today. Episode CCXX: A Disordered Mind, the Catiline Conspiracy I starts by pointing out that our sources for the Catiline Conspiracy mainly spring from the pen of Cicero, his enemy and Sallust who wrote twenty years after the event. Catiline was from a very patrician and aristocratic family, but they weren’t particularly wealthy. He had grown up during the Social Wars and the Sulla/Marius civil war, and there are suggestions that he and his family benefitted from the property confiscations that took part as part of these. But that wasn’t the worst thing he was accused of: instead there were a string of putative murders of two brothers-in-law and his son, accusations of incest with the daughter of his mistress, marrying for looks instead of money and having sex with a vestal virgin. In the end, the only one he faced court for was on a charge of extortion, and he bribed his way out of it. It’s interesting though- in 65BC Cicero actually contemplated being on his defence team, so even though he ended up Catiline’s sworn enemy, it wasn’t black and white at the time.
Rear Vision(ABC)U.S. Presidential Elections: Are They Democratic? This was actually broadcast on 4 February 2024, but it seemed to be pretty relevant at the moment, too. The Electoral College, devised in 1787 was intended to replicate Congress in terms of state representation, as a way of getting all the states on board. ( I’ve never heard it mentioned, but ‘colleges’ were in use in British Guiana in the early 1800s as well, drawing on a Dutch model, even though British Guiana was by then a British colony.) The Electoral College in US was not democratic, because it could over-ride the elections of its representatives if they were deemed unsuitable. In the 1960s there were calls for more representation, so conventions and caucuses became more important. Caucuses are party-controlled events, but the Constitution did not foresee the involvement of parties at all. The primaries are run by the parties in conjunction with the state government, and delegates are only bound in the first round of voting. You can see where Trump was getting his wriggle-room last election- and scope for him to do the same thing again.
The Rest is HistoryLord Byron: Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know (Part 1) I don’t think I’ve read any Byron at all but I know who he is. It’s the 200th anniversary of his death this year. He was the first international celebrity- when he died in Greece during the War of Independence, they rather facetiously liken him to the idea of Taylor Swift dying in Ukraine. He had an influence on later writers: the Brontes (Heathcliff, Rochester), vampires, Dorian Grey. Byron himself had a club foot (talipes). He was born to a mother who had married for the second time, and his step-father went through all the family money, and even though he inherited a castle at the age of 10, it was a ruin. He was brought up by his Calvinistic nursemaid, who sexually abused him (so much for the Calvinism). He was sent to Harrow where he was bullied, then he went to Cambridge. Then he lost weight and became handsome. He was attracted to boys rather than men, and is often the way, became aggressively heterosexual when he left Cambridge. As a lord, he was entitled to sit in the House of Lords. He had Whig sympathies but did not align himself with them, and so he delayed giving his maiden speech and was politically inactive. Impatient with such passivity, he decided to travel to the East.
99% InvisibleFact-Checking the Supreme Court An anti-gun group Moms Demand Action found that when the Supreme Court had knocked back a concealed-carry law because there was no pre-1900 precedent, there was in fact an 1892 precedent, in amongst the archives of a small Orange County courthouse. Their archival detective work didn’t change anything, but it does raise the question: who fact-checks the Supreme Court? This episode goes through the changes in legal thinking from Oliver Wendell Holmes who encouraged judges to draw on their experience; to Louis Brandeis who introduced the idea of facts, through to legal realism and the rise of the ‘amicus brief’. The current Supreme Court of America is wedded to the idea of “history and tradition” (which they seem to have thrown out the window when considering Presidential immunity) but what if the history and tradition is wrong? Really interesting.
If too many Australians thought that The Voice was too hard, then Truth Telling is going to be even harder. Cassandra Pybus’ book A Very Secret Trade: The Dark Story of Gentlemen Collectors in Tasmania confronts the clandestine trade in Tasmanian indigenous remains head-on: something we’ve all long known about but somehow tucked away back of mind. In a way, we’ve been softened up for the truths in this book by Marc Fennell’s podcast and TV series ‘Things the British Stole’. But in this book, the blame is not easily sheeted off to ‘the British’. Certainly, the governors and many of the civil servants in Van Diemen’s Land in the 1840s and ’50s were sojourners, returning back ‘home’ to England once they had attained their long-sought pensions. But collecting institutions like museums and universities were founded here as permanent institutions, and they need to own their histories of acquisition, obfuscation and refusal.
It was Zoe Laidlaw’s early book Colonial Connections 1815-45: patronage, the information revolution and colonial government (2005) that first opened my eyes to the connection between patronage, colonial careers and collecting. It underpinned the webs of influence that stretched from wealthy gentlemen collectors back in Britain, who could pull their parliamentary and civil service strings, across the ocean to civil servants in the colonies on a couple of hundred pounds a year. Once here, those local civil servants could pull on their own (rather more threadbare) strings to source animal and human remains which could be forwarded back ‘home’ to keep the connection strong. The gentlemen patrons back ‘home’ competed amongst themselves over the size of their personal collections and the prestige of the institutions with which they associated themselves, so there was always a market for curiosities, and especially those curiosities which were perceived to be on the road to extinction.
I hadn’t realized, though, that once the local functionary was in the colonies, he (and it was almost always ‘he’) deliberately petitioned and importuned for postings that made it possible to source such objects for his patrons. Pybus introduces us to doctors and surgeons (many of them), constables, merchants, Superintendents and magistrates, surveyors and artists, clergymen and librarians who were part of this network. Most disturbingly, some of them – especially those charged with the ‘care’ of this ‘dying’ race- deliberately maneuvered their positions so that they were untrammeled in finding, digging up and shipping human remains. And so many remains, often innocuously labeled as ‘specimens’ flowed across the ocean into private and institutional collections.
As a historian, Pybus has to work with silences and euphemisms. Clearly all these people realized the sensitivities of the indigenous people over the treatment of their people after their death, and so no-one actually wrote definitively about what they were doing. Many of the disinterments took place in isolated places or under the veil of darkness, and permission was neither given nor sought. Thus, the documentary record from the Tasmanian end is largely silent but at the receiving end, accession files, private correspondence and wills reveal the flood of ‘objects’ that made their way across to British and European patrons and institutions. They were being shipped overseas at scale, under the anodyne label of ‘specimens’.
Both through her own personal connection, and in keeping with her earlier book Truganini (my review here), Pybus focusses particularly on the islands north and east of Tasmania and the nearby mainland coastal areas, and the remaining people of the different nations on Van Diemen’s Land who were shipped between Wybalenna (Flinders Island) and Oyster Cove. They are so few that they can be named, and she does so in her Appendix 2. I’ve read quite a bit about George Augustus Robinson, the ‘Protector’ but I was unaware of his upwards change of fortunes once he returned ‘home’, where a lucrative marriage gave him all the property and status that he ever yearned for. He barely needed the dozen or so skulls that he carried in his luggage home, sourced from the First People who died under his ‘care’ at Wybalenna.
Lady Jane Franklin, too, is cast in a different light by her cultivation of collectors in her circle of friends, particularly young and handsome ones. Her expeditions across rugged terrain take on a new meaning when you realize the collecting intentions of the gentlemen accompanying her. The sheer number of surgeons and doctors in Pybus’ Appendix 1 of ‘The Worshipful Society of Body-Snatchers’ is chilling.
Pybus closes her book with Truganini, the so-called “last Tasmanian Aborigine” who, in floods of tears, had begged a minister whom she trusted that when she died, her body be burnt and the ashes thrown into the deepest part of the D’Entrecasteaux Channel. It took a hundred years for her wishes to be complied with. Copies and casts of her articulated skeleton were on display until 1969, and may even still be on display somewhere in the world as part of the inter-museum trade in objects. The push-back to the idea of repatriation and burial from the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery is instructive, as they garnered support from various professors of Anthropology and Anatomy, all of whom agreed that it would be a crime against humanity to comply with her wishes, even though Truganini’s remains had barely been properly studied at all in the 100 years of institutional custodianship.
This is a very personal book for Pybus too. It is beautifully written, and her use of ‘I’ is measured but always warranted. She grew up overlooking the D’Entrecasteux Channel, and although oblivious to it as a child, gradually came to understand her forebears’ connection with Oyster Cove. She had always thought of them as altruistic, but as she came to realize the web of patronage and obligation that touched her family too, she began to question this. I’m reminded of David Marr’s stance on ancestral guilt (see here) but I think that Pybus – who shares their name in a way that David Marr does not with the ancestors he writes about- cannot distance herself so easily. Her love of Tasmania, and especially the eastern coast bursts through her beautiful descriptions, and her own sense of country gives her an added feeling of indebtedness and complicity in the dispossession of the First People who were there before her. She had resisted for many years the ‘thorny’ word “genocide” but admits that “after years of research into the hidden corners of the history of my beautiful island home, I find the fact of it inescapable.” (p. 256) The rapid commodification of the remains of indigenous people, the ransacking of burial grounds, and the trade to collectors and museums world-wide with the added marketing-edge of “last of” and “extinct” certainly makes the word hard to avoid.
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 