Author Archives: residentjudge

‘Collected Stories’ by Carol Shields

Posted on May 16, 2011 | 1 comment

2004 (posthumously), 593 p.

For someone who doesn’t like short stories, I seem to be reading quite a few of them lately.  This book is actually an omnibus edition of three short story collections: Various Miracles, The Orange Fish, and Dressing up for the Carnival.

I’ve read several Carol Shields books- The Stone Diaries, Larry’s Party, Unless and her biography of Jane Austen.  Sadly, she died  in 2003.   These short stories draw on the same wellspring as her longer works,  capturing the broad sweep of individual lives through the almost pointillist rendering of small details.

The stories I most enjoyed here were about the act of writing, and biography in particular. ‘Mrs Turner Cutting the Grass’ is about an ordinary woman, living an unexceptional life, oblivious that she was the butt of a satirical poem that cemented the academic reputation of a professor of literature. Another story ‘Edith-Esther’ is about a writer resisting the shaping of her life-story by her biographer.

But there are stories about other things as well- several stories about mortality (made more poignant by the author’s early death from cancer), and a sad story, ‘Fragility’ about grieving parents looking for a new house after their disabled adult son has died.  The stories are not always told by a female narrator, but the narrative voice is similar across them- an educated, mature, self-deprecating, sensitive voice- someone you’d want to spend time with.

I loved these stories.  She has a way of capturing a shard of reality, and she can sweep across years and decades effortlessly.  She’s such a skilled, human writer.

Rating: 8.5/10

Read because: I’ve enjoyed her longer works; she’s Canadian and I’m on a Canadian reading kick at the moment, and I’m sometimes too tired to read anything too heavy at night.

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Posted in Book reviews

Age in the colonies

Posted on May 13, 2011 | 2 comments

Just tootling around the ‘net, as one does, I found a review of a book that sounds fascinating- Aging by the Book: The Emergence of Mid-Life in Victorian Britain by Kay Heath.  The review is  well worth reading, and you’ll find it at the Rorotoko site.

2009, 262 p.

Here’s the blurb for the book from the publisher’s website, which also includes a download of the first chapter:

Aging by the Book offers an innovative look at the ways in which middle age, which for centuries had been considered the prime of life, was transformed during the Victorian era into a period of decline. Single women were nearing middle age at thirty, and mothers in their forties were expected to become sexless; meanwhile, fortyish men anguished over whether their “time for love had gone by.” Looking at well-known novels of the period, as well as advertisements, cartoons, and medical and advice manuals, Kay Heath uncovers how this ideology of decline permeated a changing culture. Aging by the Book unmasks and confronts midlife anxiety by examining its origins, demonstrating that our current negative attitude toward midlife springs from Victorian roots, and arguing that only when we understand the culturally constructed nature of age can we expose its ubiquitous and stealthy influence.

One of the things that struck me when looking at Port Phillip was how young people were.  At one level, this seems reasonable: the trip from the United Kingdom (which is where many immigrants came from) was formidable, although some older people did broach it.   Sydney and Van Diemen’s land, as the older settlements,  had seen the elapse of generations by the time of Port Phillip’s establishment in the 1830s, and many of these second and third generation settlers crossed the strait or came down from Sydney to a ‘new’ settlement that did not have  tainted connotations and which offered a new frontier and opportunities.

In Port Phillip itself, people commented about the youth of the population at the time.  E. M. Curr wrote:

Perhaps the first thing one noticed was the almost total absence of women from the streets, as well as the paucity of old men.  In those days anyone over thirty was spoken of as old So-and-so ( E. M. Curr, Recollections of Squatting in Victoria)

The figures (flawed as they may be) of the 1841 Census for the Port Phillip District bear him out:

AGE MALE FEMALE
Under 2 305 340
2 and under 7 479 425
7 and under 14 395 395
14 and under 21 561 384
21 and under 45 6045 1824
45 and under 60 442 86
Over 60 47 6

Source:  HCCDA Historical Census and Colonial Data Archive

There’s that huge imbalance of men between the ages of 21-45, many of whom arrived by themselves or with their brothers and they so quickly take their place in Port Phillip society.  Redmond Barry was 26 when he arrived; the newspaper editor George Arden was about 21 when he confronted Judge Willis.  Peter Snodgrass, another young man about town who also fell under Willis’ notice was 24.

Paul de Serville in his book Port Phillip Gentlemen  likens polite society prior to the 1842 depression to

…an unreformed public school before the tone had been elevated by a middle-class Arnold.  Visitors and new arrivals were at once struck by the youth of the colonists (p.37)

I haven’t, as yet, noticed the same phenomenon in Upper Canada where, so far at least, it seems that there is more emphasis on family migration.  Something to bear in mind perhaps.

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Posted in Port Phillip history

‘Stopping All Stations’ by Rick Anderson

Posted on May 9, 2011 | 7 comments

2010, 155 p plus 59 pages fascinating notes!

I have some news for you next time you’re sitting on the Eastern Freeway with a long ribbon of red brake lights ahead of you.  Or perhaps if you’re stopping and starting, stopping and starting behind one of those grey and orange Smart Buses travelling -why! from Altona to Mordialloc- shucks, the journey only takes four hours.  And here’s the news- Melbourne almost had the makings of an inner circle railway that would delivered efficient east-west rail travel – and we ditched it!

I like trains, actually.  I live close to a station and on quiet nights if the wind is blowing the right direction, you can even hear the beep of the train doors closing and the station announcements.  I’ve always enjoyed looking at the inner-city backyards as you speed over Collingwood and Richmond on the limited express between Jolimont and Clifton Hill. They’ve changed over the decades: the outside dunnies have all disappeared and backyard living-room extensions leave just a small courtyard with enough room for an outdoor dining table and that’s it.

Stopping All Stations is a history of Melbourne’s trains, written by a suburban train driver.  He starts with the early private railways of the 1850s, bubbling along with the riches of gold-rush Melbourne.  There’s a string of acronyms here: The Melbourne and Hobson’s Bay Railway (MHBR) , our first, that ran to Sandridge (Port Melbourne) which had been so inconveniently distant from the settlement on the Yarra;  the Melbourne, Mt Alexander and Murray River Railway Company (MMA&MRR) that never really got off the ground;  the Geelong and Melbourne Railway Company (G&MR) that only lasted four years before being taken over; the Melbourne and Suburban Railway (M&SR)  that operated between Flinders St and Cremorne.  After myriad re-combinations of their acronyms, they, along with later railways to St Kilda and Brighton, and Essendon had all been swallowed up by the  Victorian Railways  by the early 1880s..

The book is subtitled (rather clumsily) “Melbourne’s unfinished transport work/opportunities lost” and this was the most fascinating part for me- the little railways and circuits that emerged and then disappeared.  There was the Outer Circle Railway that in 1892 ran between Fairfield Park and Oakleigh (map here) and an Inner Circle that existed between  1901-1942, on paper at least, that connected Rushall, North Fitzroy, North Carlton and Royal Park.

You can just detect the remnants of these lines at Fairfield, near the paper mills; and along the bike track in North Fitzroy.

Closer to home, there’s the Mont Park rail spur that connected to Macleod station, battling manfully up the hill to what is now a new housing estate. Lost opportunities indeed- LaTrobe University, which opened within a year or two of the Mont Park spur closing, would have provided the patronage that the small line lacked. Our three 1960s universities- Melbourne, Monash and La Trobe, have all been poorly served by train services, and I note that there are plans for a Melbourne University station under yet another grand transport scheme that will probably never see the light of day.

One of the real joys of this book are the little hand-drawn maps that show these now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t lines.  There’s a terrific graphic of the boa-constrictor nature of Victoria Railways as it swallowed up smaller private lines, and the text is sprinkled with the author’s own paintings of trains, signals and stations.  The book is a real labour of love, and Melburnians- even those not enamoured of trains per se- can find plenty to regret when considering the public transport that could have been.

I bet you thought that I couldn’t find a connection between Judge Willis and Melbourne’s train system which, after all, was not even thought of until some ten years after he left.  But in the spirit of Six Degrees of Separation between Judge Willis and the Railways,  the house that Willis leased while in Melbourne (which, incidentally was next door to my childhood home- hence my initial interest in him)was owned by Malcolm Macleod.  Macleod provided land to the railways on condition that the station was named after him- hence Macleod station.

Read because: I wanted to learn more about the Mont Park spur line. And because I really do like trains.

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Posted in Book reviews, Life in Melbourne, Six degrees of separation between Judge Willis and ...

‘Time’s long ruin: a novel’ by Stephen Orr

Posted on May 4, 2011 | Leave a comment

2010, 422 p

It seems to me that most recently-published Australian fiction books  hover around the 300 page mark, and it’s relatively rare to have a book that extends over the 400 page range.  So, at 422 pages, Time’s Long Ruin  is a lengthy book,  reflecting the title that is drawn from one of the three lengthy epigraphs on the opening pages.  As a book, it felt long too.  Part I, which was 179 pages in length, functioned to set the scene and introduce the main characters.  Part II at 243 pages traced the slow-motion disappearance of the children at the centre of the narrative, then the long unspooling of a fruitless  investigation and the unresolved grief of family and friends- a grief, anxiety and perplexity that still lurks behind parenting and child crimes today.

The plot is loosely based on the Beaumont children who disappeared in 1967 but the author relocated the timing to the early 1960s instead.  Given that the author himself was born in 1967, the rendering of 1960s Adelaide is drawn from research rather than memory, which is quite an achievement in itself.  Much of the book has the elegiac feel of a wistful memoir, with details and sensations piled on heavily- a little too heavily, I think, because it felt at times like a lengthy oral history.  There is an element of slippage in the narrator: at first it is an adult Henry, still living in his family home many years later looking back on his childhood, but then the ‘memoir’ voice morphs into the child’s eye view of  Henry, the nine-year old next door neighbour of the Riley children who disappeared.  This child’s-eye view of suburbia and the tapestry of local shopkeepers, teachers, doctors and neighbours is both perceptive and oblivious at the same time.

Perhaps the fact that the author himself is younger than the events he is describing accounts for a major infelicity that troubled me in the book.  The minute, step-by-step description of the children’s trip to the beach by train suggests that neighbours and incidental witnesses noticed the children heading off to the beach, as if there were something unusual or incongruous about it.  I’m not sure that there was.  A group of three children, especially, would have the run of the neighbourhood, and a train-line was just an extension of that neighbourhood.  I’m sure that the parents of the real-life missing  children blamed themselves and each other afterward, and I think that the blood every parent of a child of the 60s- of which I am one- ran cold at the Beaumont case (and still does). But  at Beaumont-time and even after,  children continued to roam the streets in little groups, returning home only when the street lights came on,  going from one friend’s house to another, catching buses and trains with little parental oversight- I know, because we did.  There was nothing so unusual in the latitude given to the fictional Riley children.

The author is quite clear, even by the subtitle of the book that it is fiction, and by warping the time-frame in the way he has, he gives himself licence to evoke other Adelaide-based mysteries and insecurities as well-  the Somerton Man case of 1949 (which I’d never heard of- I thought that Taman Shud were a band !) and hints of the Snowtown murders of the 1990s by placing one of the main characters there at the time of the children’s disappearance.  In this regard, I felt as if my Adelaide-buttons were being pressed to trigger my knee-jerk reactions to Adelaide mythology-  disappearances, dead bodies, and Don Bradman.  It seems a little too easy to do.

In the lengthy second half, the author of course is faced with the dilemma that having based his plot so closely on the Beaumont children, of course there could be no resolution.  Much of the narrative in Part II involves disclaimers “I couldn’t know, but I imagine that it went like this….”. Combined with the long scene-setting in Part I, this contributes to a nebulousness about the whole endeavour, which is offset to some extent by the meticulous detailing of place and milieu.

The book was long-listed for the 2011 Miles Franklin Prize but did not make the cut into the very short short-list.  I think that this is appropriate on both levels- it does deserve recognition as a careful depiction of Australian life, but I’m not sure that it is the highest expression of this.

Some other reviews of this book include Deborah Orr’s review in Transnational Literature, a review by Liz Ellison at Culture and the Media, David Whish-Wilson and Lisa at ANZLitLovers.


Rating: 7/10

Read because: it was long-listed for the 2011 Miles Franklin.

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Posted in Australian literature, Book reviews, Miles Franklin Award 2011

‘Postcards from Surfers’ by Helen Garner

Posted on May 1, 2011 | 2 comments

1985,  106 p.

I don’t really know how to review a book of short stories.  I find myself making several assumptions.  I assume that it is a selection from a corpus of work developed over a period of time:  it is common to find that several stories in a collection have appeared in other compilations previously.  I assume that someone–  author? editor?- had a vision for a book of short stories as a self-contained piece of work.  I assume that one story was accepted as ‘right’ but another put aside for now, and  that the ordering of the stories was a conscious and carefully thought out decision.  There’s an arbitrariness about the whole process  that makes it hard to think about a book of short stories as a single object: would it be any less satisfactory if one of the stories had been omitted? would it be a different entity with one of the stories that was rejected  included instead?  For me, even the act of reading a collection of stories differs from my normal reading habit.  I prefer to read them just one at a time, but often they’re so short that I find myself thinking “Well, what now?” Sometimes I cram in another one straight away (which I don’t like doing), or else turn afterwards to another full-length book that I might have on the go at the same time.  When I come to write about them here, I’m not sure how to proceed- do I treat them individually (which might become rather tedious and might place a heavier burden on a few pages of writing than it can support)? Do I just hold onto the one or two that stay with me even without opening the covers again? Or do I embrace it instead as a collection without peering too closely at the component parts?

I’ll go with the memorable stories, without looking at the book again.  The first one, which gives the collection its title fitted in neatly with another book I’d read recently- Life in Seven Mistakes.  It is uncanny how often one book seems to ‘speak’ to another.  This short story is located in Surfers Paradise too, but the narrator is more mature and thus easier to spend time with, and Garner adeptly uses the device of postcards written over a period of time to quickly shape the contours of a larger plot that stretched over a longer expanse of time.  Good, sharp, clever writing.

Her story ‘Little Helen’s Sunday Afternoon’ captures a child’s perspective well, and evoked for me those visits to my mother’s friend’s houses, where there were other barely-known children and mutual wariness and showing-off.  In ‘All Those Bloody Young Catholics’ she nails the drawl, condescension and prejudices of the slightly-tipsy narrator of some thirty years ago when sexism and sectarianism were threaded unselfconsciously and largely unchallenged through overheard conversations.  In ‘Did He Pay?’ she describes vividly the washed-up, unattached old rock-star, indulged by friends and committed to no-one.

I’ve always seen Helen Garner as a perceptive observer, who has gone to places that I never dared, several years ahead of me.  There’s an innate authenticity in what she describes, and I can see why so much of her more recent work straddles the conjunction of non-fiction/reportage/fiction.  As a Melburnian, I love the very local context of her narratives, although she ventures overseas, particularly to France, in these stories as well.  It’s like looking through someone else’s eyes at the things, people and situations that surround you, and thinking “Yep, she’s got it!”

It’s interesting that this book has had so many lives.  My copy is an early 1986, and there is a 1992 one as well; it was republished in 2008 as one of Penguin’s Modern Classics with the cover above, and most recently it has appeared as one of the orange-and-white retro (and cheap!) Popular Penguin reprints.

Rating: 8/10??

Reason read:  Australian Literature Group (Yahoo Groups)


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Posted in Australian literature, Australian Women's Writing, Book reviews

How I work with my material- Access

Posted on April 27, 2011 | 3 comments

Big disclaimer upfront: my knowledge of Access is minuscule.  I bumble around and am fully aware that there are probably a million things that I could do with it, but can’t be bothered learning.   They speak of “just-in-time” learning- well, as far as Access is concerned, I have “just enough” knowledge for it to do what I need.

The British Empire, bless its cotton socks, was very good at one thing (at least) and that is information control.  Let’s imagine a letter written in Port Phillip about some little brouhaha that Willis might be involved in.  It would  go to Superintendant La Trobe as inward correspondence; he would make some comments on it in a covering letter and send it to Gipps in Sydney as outward correspondence; it would arrive there as Gipps’ inward correspondence and then he would make further comments in another covering letter and send it all to the Colonial Office as a Governor’s outward despatch.  It would arrive in London some 5-8 months later, be minuted by various public servants as it moved from desk to desk in the Colonial Office, making its way to the Secretary of State for the Colonies, then the reply would move back in the following direction.  All of this would be numbered, and entered in inward- and outward- correspondence letter books.

Beautiful though this system might be, it does mean that a single letter might appear multiple times in LaTrobe’s, Gipps’ or the Secretary of State’s archives, and may appear yet again in collections of correspondence bundled up for a special report.  Likewise for my Canadian material,  I’m working from a single archive divided up into separate files in my computer, and thus of no use to anyone else but me in finding where it is in my own records.  But each document also has its own numbering used in other archives and microfilms- and this is the information that is important for footnotes.  What I needed was a way of identifying an item and noting all the different numberings it might have in the major archives that I am working in.

So I have developed a very basic database that shows the date of the correspondence, the names of sender and recipients, enough identifying information for me to know what it’s about, where it is in my own computer files and then the number it has in the major collections used by researchers generally that I would record in a footnote.

I stop at three locations- there are no doubt more, but this is probably enough.  The majority of entries relate to correspondence, but I also put newspaper articles in as well.   When I view it as a table, it runs chronologically.

I feel a little sheepish admitting to such a paltry database.  It is an idiosyncratic little thing, of minimal use to anyone else, but invaluable for me- and that’s probably the most important thing. No doubt others would say “But why don’t you use ——- instead?” and they’d probably be right.  I think, though, at some stage you need to stop shopping around for the perfect program, and just sit down and start putting some data into it and using the damned thing.  When I reach its limitations and become frustrated, then I’ll either learn the extra functions I need within the program, or  look for something else.  In the meantime, this works okay for me and I’m just getting on with it.

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Posted in History writing

‘The Sitters’ by Alex Miller

Posted on April 23, 2011 | 3 comments

1995, 131 p.

The Sitters is only a small book- 131 pages- and as with other Alex Miller books, its simplicity is deceptive.  Its narrator is an elderly, somewhat self-deprecating and yet emotionally frozen painter who has not been able to return to his painting after achieving success with an earlier portrait The Tan Family.  I felt as if I had met this character before in other of Miller’s works – the voice is similar to that in Lovesong and Miller has written about painting before in Prochownic’s Dream.

The narrator paints only portraits of other people, never his own family,  but

… a portrait’s always a portrait of the artist.  Except that nothing’s ever as simple as aphorisms.  Whenever we’re tempted to try them on, we discover that their general truths never quite fit our particular realities.  All the untidy bits are left hanging out, the important bits, the inexplicable stuff that nothing resolves, and we discover again that those explanations don’t help because they don’t belong to our present reality but belong to something in the language, to that other dimension.  The cover- up.  (p.71)

Language and silence are brought up against each other again and again in this small work.  Early on, the narrator comments

There are things that are impossible to express with words.  Language employed to express emotion is a perversion.  The records of commerce is the only honest use of written language.  The rest is a cover-up.  It’s not words that shape our intuitions.  It’s not in what we say but in what we leave unsaid that we reveal the shape of our deepest motives. In the places between the words.  In the tacit and the implicit. In the silence beyond words.  That’s where we hid our truth.  Behind the endless buzzing of language.  The sovereignty of silence is its ambiguity.  Silence is a power greater than speech. (p.16)

Spoiler alert:

Presence is brought up against absence as well.  The painter meets, fleetingly an expatriate academic, Jessica Keal,  who has returned to Canberra on a fellowship, and he is instantly attracted to her.  After a commission to paint a series of sketches of women, including her, he asks if he can paint her portrait- not just one, but many studies of her, over an extended period of time.  Yet when he does paint his first portrait of her, he finds that he leaves her out of the painting: the room, the bed, the furnishings are there, but she is absent.  He does not need his subject to be present, and when she is, he doesn’t necessarily paint her.  He had earlier in his career painted a close, recently deceased friend as a corpse, just died, and years later he will paint Jessica again, rubbing her chest in heart-pain. Some years earlier he had painted the back view of his agent.  His agent perceived this painting as a joke, which on one level it was, but it also revealed something about our narrator as painter.In a portrait-sitting, he is painting from life, but the life is not necessarily present in that moment.

He has never painted his family: indeed, he lives in a vacuum with his memories of his family intentionally suppressed, and his relationship with his son detached and observational.  He lets us know early in the book that he has distorted and embellished his memories of his father as some type of artistic mentor and influence.  He has extended his memory of a single pre-WWII day painting outdoors with his father into a golden-tinged lifetime of paternal artistic inspiration, and this benign memory has been overshadowed by the words and actions of the bitter, damaged man who returned from World War II.  His sister, from whom he had become estranged through inattention rather than intention, had written to him that she’d come to see one of his art shows but left without speaking to him, not wishing to intrude.  She had since died, and it was in painting The Tan Family, the painting that brought him the greatest praise, that he painted his grief for her, even though he didn’t recognize that.

The book is titled The Sitters (plural) and although ostensibly it is a slight story about an elderly painter and a younger female sitter, the ghosts of his childhood are sitting, too.  There are multiple sitters, not just one, and he is painting them present from their absence.

The book makes much of silence, but there’s much in it about language.  The sentences are short and pared-back, and although his narrator professes to eschew words, there is a joy in them as well.  The description of his sister as “ungainly, angular, gangly, ugly” betrays a joy in the sound and shape of words.  It is a reflection on the act of representation and capturing the essence, whether it be through words or through art.

This is a carefully crafted little book with nothing superfluous.  There are no chapters and the reader has to work a bit in following its leaps back and forward.   It sustains a sexual tension well, but is tinged with regret and vulnerability as well.  It was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin in 1996 (a year with a majority of female authors, by the way); pipped by Christopher Koch’s 450 page Highways to a War.  You’d be hard-pressed to find two more dissimilar books.

8.5/10

Read because:  David recommended it.

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Posted in Australian literature, Book reviews

‘Bereft’ by Chris Womersley

Posted on April 20, 2011 | 6 comments

2010,  264 p.

There are eras in Australian history which, in my imagination are flooded with light- the gold rushes is one; the time around Federation is another- when Australia seemed open to opportunities, hungry for change and with the future opening up before it.  Then there are other low, muted,  hold-your-breath times, and I think that immediately after World I would have been such a time.  So much death and absence, felt so keenly at the intimate and everyday level and yet played out so far away: men returning broken, damaged and strangers to themselves, and the incomplete, unresolved grief about those men who failed to return.  Then, overlaying all this is another winnowing as the Spanish flu sweeps the country, as if Death has been brought home from across the sea.

Bereft is set in this time.   Quinn Walker returns from the front to his childhood town, Flint, in western New South Wales.  There is no homecoming celebration: instead he skulks in the bush, too frightened to appear in public.  Ten years earlier he had fled when his sister was found raped and stabbed, and he was accused of the crime that his father and uncle swore to avenge.  Watching his house from a distance, he realizes that his mother is very ill, probably with influenza, and that his father, frightened of catching it too, spends little time at the home, sitting on the verandah outside his dying wife’s window.  And so he is emboldened to approach the house when his father is not there, and his mother, not sure whether he is a hallucination or not, speaks with him.  She has lost everyone- her husband to bitterness and the quest for revenge, her daughter to the slaying, her eldest son to Queensland.  Quinn had just disappeared, confirming the rumours of his guilt and then was reported dead from the front- but now her younger son returns.  There is the word ‘orphan’  for a child who has lost its parents, she says, but no word for a parent who has lost her children. Or, thinks Quinn, for a brother who has lost his sister.  They are all just bereft.

He is being watched while he hides out in the bush.  Sadie Fox, a dishevelled, fey little orphan knows many dark things, and Quinn does not know quite what to make of her- changeling? spirit? urchin? hallucination?  In the face of so much bloodshed and pain, the line between life and death seems tenuous.  It is a time when clairvoyants feed on unresolved grief, and when many people are open to spiritualism.  Quinn’s own experience of the mud and the gas of the Front leaches into his present, and his own long absence from his home town means that his own identity is a vacuum.

Although Womersley has worked very hard in embedding the narrative within a particular time, I can see why this book has been described as ‘rural gothic’,  along with other Australian novels that span right up to the 1970s and 80s- think Craig Silvey’s Jasper Jones,  Elizabeth Jolley’s The Well and Sonya Hartnett’s Surrender.   I do wonder, though, if the easy interchangeability of this book with others set some 70 years later suggests that (a) country life and country people do not change at all, and/or  (b) that he hasn’t quite captured early twentieth century relationships and interactions very clearly.  Did people speak, move and interact in a qualitatively different way in 1919 compared with 1969?  I’m not sure.

I can see continuities, too, with his first book The Low Road, in that they are both stories of escape and hiding.  In both of them there is a sense of pursuit.

Bereft is one of the three books that have made the cut as the short-list for the Miles Franklin prize. All up, Bereft is  a book that weaves many strands- historical fiction, a type of crime fiction, the supernatural, and small-town claustrophobia- and it does it well.  So far for me, though, That Deadman Dance is the front-runner- although my record in picking the Miles Franklin winner is, so far, abysmal! I was right but disgruntled in 2009 and wrong and outraged in 2010.

7.5/10  (I think I prefer scoring out of 10)

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Posted in Australian literature, Book reviews, Miles Franklin Award 2011

Those Mild Colonial Boys of the Law

Posted on April 18, 2011 | 1 comment

Two young men, both working in the law, in two British settler colonies in different hemispheres, both diarists.

Mary Larratt Smith Young Mr Smith in Upper Canada, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1980, 184 p. & notes.


J.M. Bennett (ed) Callaghan’s Diary: The 1840s Sydney Diary of Thomas Callaghan B. A. of the King’s Inns, Dublin, Barrister-at-Law, Sydney, Francis Forbes Society for Australian Legal History,2005. Available here.

Young Mr Smith in Upper Canada- what a terrific title!  It has echoes of “Mr Smith goes to Washington” and I was hoping that it might be an impassioned expose of Upper Canadian life, albeit a decade or two after the time I’m interested in, but no such luck.

Instead “Young Mr Smith” was Larratt William Violett Smith, who went to Upper Canada in 1833 with his family as a twelve year old boy and pretty much stayed there.  His diaries, transcribed and annotated here by his grand-daughter, cover the years 1839 (when he was aged eighteen) up to 1858 and aged thirty eight.  The author and granddaughter, Mary Larratt Smith, who shares half his name- has (or rather had- surely she’s not still alive?) one clear memory of her grandfather when she was taken to see him in the summer of 1905 when her grandfather was 85 and she was not quite three.  He lived in a large, early Victorian house called Summer Hill in what is now the Summerhill area of Toronto, with its own eponymous subway station.  It took her about ten years to transcribe his journals and a small collection of letters which now rest in the Canadian History Department of the Metropolitan Toronto Library.  The author/editor has embedded the journal entries and letters into her own explanatory narrative, and her occasional references to ‘my grandfather’ remind you that she has an emotional stake in this work.  I did find it annoying that the journal entries were not typographically marked out from her own surrounding material.  There was an italicized date at the start of the extract, but then she would sometimes slip between Larratt Smith’s words and her own with no clear visual marker of the difference.  The letters, at least, were presented in a smaller font, and much more clearly distinguished.

In 1833, “Young Mr Smith’s” father, Captain Larratt Hillary Smith from Devonshire, took advantage of the land grants offered to veteran law officers, and took up a large tract of land at Oro in Simcoe County.  He undertook the 38 day journey with his wife and four children, arriving in York where they stayed long enough to enroll Larratt and his younger brother George as boarders at Upper Canada College, before shifting the rest of the family to take up their primitive farm some distance away.  The farm land was stony and unproductive, the family was unhappy, and after four years the family moved closer to Twickenham Farm, closer to Toronto, leaving the Oro property behind.

Larratt and his brother continued at Upper Canada college. After serving as a  17-year old Lieutenant in the Home District militia during the 1837 Rebellion, Larratt then went to England. His Uncle George, with no sons of his own, had proposed training his nephew in the wine business with a view to eventually making him his heir.   But Larratt didn’t like it, returned to Canada, and his brother George went in his stead- probably not a good move as brother George ended up a very wealthy man.  Larratt decided to go into the law instead, and so he was articled to William Henry Draper, the solicitor general, and lived in Toronto as a young man-around-town.

And here we find him, attending the various balls in Toronto, hooning around climbing greasy poles and chasing pigs at the ‘Olympic Games” celebrated in Toronto in June 1843, stealing cats, shooting, singing, acting.  There are many similarities with small colonial life in Australia- assemblies, debating club, church etc. He lived in what sounded like a 19th-century share house with other young lads his own age, and had to shift lodgings several times.  Although he lived and worked as an independent young man in Toronto, his connections with his family at Twickenham Farm were strong. His father would often come into town and Larratt would often visit them and stay several days with them on holidays.

The journal entries are fairly short (although no doubt they would have appeared longer written in long hand)  with rather a preoccupation with the weather- although from what I read of Upper Canadian winters, who wouldn’t be obsessed with it.  [I’m slightly- very slightly- regretful (for about two seconds)  that we won’t be visiting there during the depths of winter as I just can’t imagine what such cold weather would be like.] He is interested in several girls, but eventually his attentions focus on Eliza Thom whom he marries on 23rd December 1845 on a day that was 18 degrees below zero at 7.a.m., and “a very fine day”.  There are not many intensely personal entries in his diary, and when they do occur, it is at a time of great distress: the loss of their first baby at four weeks from whooping cough, and six years later the death of Eliza herself.  The cause is not specified, but she died from what started as a cold a week earlier.  His two children are sent to live with their maternal grandmother, his own family having returned to England some years earlier.

In the second half of the book, Smith’s grand-daughter editor is able to supplement the fairly terse entries with a number of personal letters, and here Larratt Smith comes over as much more affable.  It’s in the letters, though, that you glimpse the Victorian attitudes towards marriage, sociability and money coming through in a letter to his father, when he is considering the idea of looking around for a second wife, three years after Eliza’s death:

I must have a house of my own before long.  I miss my boys dreadfully.  At the same time I have made up my mind (unless a pretty face makes a fool of me) that my better half that is to be ‘must bring some grist to the Mill.’  Now don’t imagine that I crave Fortune’s arrivistes, for I detest the species, & I could not marry the richest woman in the world if I could not win her affect, but I feel that the chain once broken is not the same, & that, bringing as much love as one can, there may be other qualifications not wholly to be disregarded.

Larratt Smith did remarry, a girl called Mary Elizabeth Smith, 18 years his junior and they went on to have eleven children together.  Larratt Smith paddled around in the shallows of political and legal life.  He was certainly known to many of the figures that I’ve been reading about- the Robinsons, the Jarvises, the Baldwins and the Boultons- although in many cases they were the sons of the men who were there when Judge Willis was in Upper Canada.

Although his parents had returned to England from their sojourn in Upper Canada, the family connections remained strong.  His father came over for a surprise visit- Larratt Smith had not received the letter telling him of his imminent arrival- and his sister came over to join him.  Larratt himself traveled home for a while, and there was much talk, at least, of visiting.

__________________________________

BUT This was not the case for a second Mild Colonial Boy of the Law, Thomas Callaghan   who arrived in Sydney in 1840. You can see a picture of him here.

His father had died when he was young, and although his mother managed to give her children a good education, she had had to flee to France to escape her creditors.  Thomas found himself at the age of 22 to be a briefless barrister in Dublin with bleak prospects.  In order to distance himself from his mother’s disgrace, and in hopes of “eventually securing my own fortune and acquiring wealth” young Thomas left Ireland  for Sydney.  He arrived without family and friends and established himself amongst the expatriate Irish legal community in Sydney.   His Catholicism brought him into contact with Roger Therry and John Herbert Plunkett in particular as prominent Catholic lawyers, but he also made contacts amongst the Supreme Court judges as well. Chief Justice Dowling turned up on his doorstep one morning, and, in what seems to be forming into a pattern, Judge Stephen as well:

I lay down on the bed, when a knock came to the door and Judge Stephen stood before it.  I was quite in undress, however he came in and stayed with me for some time. He is a man of quick and intelligent mind, but of a delicate and nervous frame.  He is a gentleman and rather unaffected, though having a very good opinion of himself. (10/3/1844).

In rather more decorous circumstances, he also came into contact with William A’Beckett and Richard Windeyer who assisted him in his career. He struggled to find his feet at first, and kept body and soul together by court reporting, which he did not enjoy.

How long am I to continue this work? To sit all day in a nasty court, side beside the greatest vagabonds under Heaven! Polluted by this contact and sickened by their breath, while I am performing an office of comparatively low and laborious drudgery.  This have I done for nearly six weeks and I know not how long I may have to continue it.  (24/6/41)

His contacts pulled on their strings of influence, but he had to wait several years until eventually being appointed a Commissioner in the Court of Claims, and then acting Crown Prosecutor.  Once promoted to Crown Prosecutor, his diaries trail away.

Callaghan’s journals, which apparently were penned in execrable handwriting, have been recently released with a introduction by J. M. Bennett.  Bennett provides a sound introduction, but then leaves us in Callaghan’s very capable hands.

This book is a terrific resource, not just as a window onto Sydney itself, but more particularly onto the legal community at the time. Callaghan himself has been likened to Samuel Pepys, and although this volume is only 196 pages compared with Pepys’ weighty tomes, I can see the likeness. Like Pepys, he is full of gossip and observation about the people he meets, inconsistent in his friendships, sociable and waspish at times. He is at times downcast about his decision to come to Sydney

I am beginning to think that I have been sadly mistaken in my plans for happiness here.  I have come to a barren soil, to a dreary land, to a wide country: I thought I was coming to a fine colony where wealth abounded, and where I should in a short time realize a fortune that would fit me for enjoying every comfort.  But now I find that I am in a poor, petty, profligate place where I may live perhaps by my own labour, but where I can scarecely hope ever to realize an ample fortune without resorting to all the vicissitudes of gambling in land an in similar speculations.  Here everything is extravagantly dear and every item is extravagantly expensive so that little can be saved of what is hardly earned.  The country in itself has no charms for me and its present people have few traits after my heart.   I am alone here and I doubt very much whether I could ever think of now staying or settling here. (27/11/41)

But he did: he married in 1848, had two sons and a daughter and developed a lucrative private practice and ended up a judge of the Quarter Sessions. He died prematurely at the age of 48 after being kicked in the head by a horse that he had just bought.  But let’s not end so gloomily.  He was a generous, if fitful, journal-writer, berating himself as many do for his inconstancy in writing:

September 2, 1843.  My last entry of June the 20th! This is improving in regularity with a vengeance!

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How I work with my material- NVivo

Posted on April 15, 2011 | 7 comments

What’s NVivo? you may ask.  It’s a qualitative data analysis software program that I use to keep control of the data that I’m gathering as part of my research.  You can read more about NVivo here. 

I first came across NVivo in its earlier incarnation as NUD*IST, which was a much more playful and memorable name.  I am still using NVivo 7 because my clapped-out old laptop here wouldn’t download NVivo 8, and now I see that there is an NVivo 9.  Fortunately I use mine under my university’s site licence (I think that it’s very expensive) and for now the older versions are still available.

NVivo (or NUD*IST in its earlier life) was developed originally by Lyn Richards, a sociologist at La Trobe University, and it reflects many of the time-honoured ways that academics work with data anyway-  identifying major themes and points (which often found their way onto index cards); highlighting themes in a particular document with different coloured pens, cutting up documents to group all the themes together etc.  NVivo does much the same thing, digitally.  And because every project is different, and because people work differently, no two NVivo outcomes would be the same.

First you need to put a document into NVivo.   This isn’t a problem for me as I type up notes on the computer as I go.  Here’s a shot of all the documents or ‘sources’ that I have about Judge Willis in Melbourne.  Some of them are full transcribed documents, others are my notes.  If I have the document in hard copy or saved as a PDF elsewhere, I might save it as a ‘proxy document’ with a very stripped down content skeleton, with the expectation that I can go back and look at the full document easily.

When you have a document you identify the themes in it.  You call these themes ‘nodes’, and it’s just like tagging, or using a different coloured highlighter pen for each theme.  You develop the themes as you go along.

So, in the picture about, I might be reading Paul de Serville’s ‘Port Phillip Gentlemen’, and I might notice that a paragraph is about ‘authority’ or ‘class’ or ‘gentlemanly expectations’.  I would highlight the paragraph and select the node on the left hand side, or create a new node if it was something that I hadn’t come across before.

This means that you develop a long list of nodes that you’ve identified across all your documents.  You can group related concepts into ‘tree nodes’ or just leave them alphabetical as shown below.  Because you have developed the nodes yourself, you get to know what is there and move around it quite quickly.  When you’re working with a particular document it  also collects the nodes that you’re working on as you go along into a drop-down menu, and as they tend to recur, it means that you’re working with a smaller set. But here is my master list as of today of the Port Phillip nodes I’d developed. If I worked on a new document tomorrow and identified new nodes, they would be added to the list.

So if you want to find, for example, all the documents that you had tagged as being ‘beliefs about convicts’, then you can bring them all up onto the one page.

If you click on the underlined hyperlink, it takes you to the source document where you coded it in NVivo.  It’s better not to code great slabs of material; just enough for you to get the gist and then go back to the source document for the surrounding material.  The real advantage of this is that it means that you don’t forget about material that you read years earlier, especially once it mounts up.  It also brings together the primary and secondary material again when the tendency is to develop the tunnel vision of “now I’m working on letters”, forgetting about the insights you’d discovered in secondary sources. You can write ‘memos’, which are your own reflections on a particular point, which can also be coded and thrown into the pot as well.

You can also go back to a particular document (or ‘source’) and at a glance see the themes that you’d identified in it. For example, here’s my screen for Paul de Serville’s ‘Port Phillip Gentlemen’. At p.128 I’d found information about ‘the nature of Port Phillip society’, ‘party split’ ‘Kerr’ and ‘Fawkner’ and coded that paragraph accordingly.

It is intended that you develop the nodes as you go along which means that at some stage they become big, baggy unwieldy monsters.  At this stage you need to think- do I need to split this concept into smaller nodes? Or alternatively, you find that you’ve made several nodes that are really talking about the same thing-  are they really separate concepts? would I lose some particular quality of the concept if I combined two similar nodes?

It does also mean that sometimes documents you read earlier in your research have concepts that were not apparent to you at the time, but that’s true of research generally.  At least with a digitized program like this, you’re likely to come across the documents again under a different code and can go back and add extra codes as you go.  It’s intended that it keeps growing and changing.  For me, it’s certainly more dynamic than having notes filed in hard copy in folders where you forget you’d ever even seen the document at all.  It also means that my own fleeting reflections in ‘memos’ are brought back to life again.

As I said, I’m using an old version and I note that NVivo 9 has fixed up one of the real bug-bears – being able to see the codes while you’re actually coding- which for some reason you could no longer do, even though very early versions of the program did have this feature.  It would be worth getting NVivo 9 for this feature alone- in fact, it may even prompt me into splashing out for a new computer.  It also claims that you can use PDFs but I’m not sure- earlier versions claimed this too but it only worked for OCR’d or text-based PDFs – not image based PDFs which it inevitably seemed mine were.  I usually just save the PDF on the computer and make a proxy document (i.e. a dot point summary)- it’s too time consuming mucking around with it.

The drawbacks?  The major one is the fear that the whole system is going to crash and that you’ll lose everything.  Also, there is the limitation that you can only get out of it what you put into it-  it takes discipline and routine.  I type up my notes, save them,  print it off  (yes, I do keep hard copy- 2 sheets to a page), put it into Endnote, put it into NVivo, code it,  tick on the top of the hard copy that it has been endnoted and N-Vivo’d and then file it  in a ring folder alphabetically by author. The folders on my bookshelves are multiplying alarmingly.   It also has to be an ongoing process-  I have to be prepared to go back and fix up the deficiencies in the coding when I happen upon a document that I’d read early on, and sometimes this is a bit distracting. But this is the price of keeping it current.  I do have parallel systems: I also tag in Endnote and, to a lesser extent Zotero, which I use for  internet-based material and somewhat less methodically.

And the advantages?  Particularly with my family history of Alzheimer’s, I’m frightened of losing track of all this!  I think that any researcher has this fear, Alzheimers or not.  I’m relatively confident that I can put my hands on the main documents fairly easily.  When I’m working at a conceptual level, it’s easy to grab together all the examples of a phenomenon e.g. ‘loyalty’, and tease it out further because it’s all in one place.  Because primary and secondary sources are intermingled, then I  can find concrete examples relatively easily.  I’m very well aware that I only use it in a rudimentary fashion and that I could probably do other things with it, but I haven’t got time to learn them, and it works just fine for me.

Of course, it doesn’t always work, as this sad experience shows.  I still haven’t found the damned document that I was looking for, and I still don’t know whether it ever existed or whether I read into the document something that really wasn’t there.  In the end, I wrote around it and found other evidence that was good enough-  but I still live in hope that one day I’ll stumble across it again.

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