Category Archives: Australian history

2012, 236 p & notes

I must admit that I don’t very often come away from the ANZLHS Law and History Conference rushing  to my library website to look up a book.  I did, however,  with this book last December only to find that it already had multiple reservations.  I put a hold on it in December and finally received it in May.  Perhaps they should buy another copy….

You’ve probably seen or hear of Mark Tedeschi  QC, even if you don’t know you have.  He’s the NSW Senior Crown Prosecutor, and he has been involved in a slew of important and famous criminal trials: Ivan Milat’s Backpacker Murder; the trial of the men who murdered the heart surgeon Victor Chang;  the trial following the assassination of politician John Newman; the Gordon Wood case over the death of Caroline Byrne at The Gap; and Counsel assisting the Coroner in the 2007 trial into the killing of the Balibo Five.  It was in his role as Senior Crown Prosecutor that he addressed a gathering of former and present Crown Prosecutors gathered at NSW Parliament House in 2005 to celebrate the 175^th anniversary of the appointment of the first Crown Prosecutor,  Frederick Garling, in 1830.At that presentation he listed a number of extraordinary, complex and bizarre trials, and first on his list was that of Eugenia Falleni. In the introduction to this book he writes:

In the intervening years, I have come to consider that the trial of Eugenia Falleni in 1920 should be viewed as the single most important criminal trial of those 175 years.  Its prominence is not because of any  lasting effect that the trial had on the law or the administration of criminal justice, but rather because of the multitude of legal and social issues that Eugenia’s life and trial throw up for us to consider, so that we can use them as a yardstick to ask ourselves what we have learned and how far we have progressed since then.” P. 228

So who was Eugenia Falleni?  I’m wary of spoilers, so I’ll cite from the publicity on the back cover.

Eugenia Falleni was a woman, who in the 1920s was charged with the murder of her wife.  She had lived in Australia for twenty two years as a man and during that time married twice.  Three years after the mysterious disappearance of Annie, her first wife, Eugenia was arrested and charged with her murder.  This is the story of one of the most extraordinary criminal trials in legal history anywhere in the world.  The book traces Eugenia’s history: from her early years in New Zealand, to her brutal treatment aboard a merchant ship and then her life in Sydney, living as Harry Crawford- exploring how Harry managed to convince two wives that he was a man, culminating with Annie’s death, the police investigation, Harry’s second marriage to Lizzie, and then arrest for Annie’s murder three years after she had disappeared.

The book is written in three parts.  The first, ‘The Search for Love’ takes us up to the trial.  Many chapters start with a paragraph identifying the year and listing a number of events that occurred that year.  It reminded me a bit of the technique in the film Same Time Next Year where each new encounter was separated from the last by a film clip of significant events.  So, in this book Chapter 5 is set in 1913, marked by Roland Garros’s flight from France to Tunisia, Emily Pankhurst’s jail sentence and the commencement of work on Canberra.  It’s rather repetitive and overt, but on the other hand I could actually name the years in which events took place instead of just having a vague idea after a single date is given at the start of the book , then not mentioned again.

The book is written using fictional techniques, but it is not fiction.  There are conversations in the book, and frequent internal dialogues where the author suggests the thoughts of various characters.  Despite the spoiler on the back cover, there is little foreshadowing of events that will unfurl during the story.

In his introduction, Tedeschi  signals how he is going to deal with his sources.  He writes:

The historical facts of Eugenia Fallini’s story that I have related in this book, including quotations from newspaper reports and evidence from her trial, are based upon contemporary public records, press reports, court transcripts and other written accounts, as well as subsequent recollections of people who had direct contact with the main personalities.  I could have provided footnotes or endnotes for the historical facts, but I believe that including numbered notes in a text creates a visual and psychological hurdle for the reader to overcome.  For this reason, I have instead included a bibliography at the end of the book and I have only inserted numbered endnotes in the text  where they are essential for an explanation.  Where I have referred to personal thoughts and emotions, these are generally inferred by me from the background factual circumstances in which they occurred.  Most conversations are taken from police statements or evidence given in the committal proceedings and the trial.  In those two instances (in chapters 1 and 8) where, in the absence of established facts, I have engaged in conjecture about significant events, I have clearly indicated that this is the case and stated the basis for my supposition. P. xiv.

I didn’t find this particularly satisfactory.  The bibliography at the end of the book is divided into legal documents, newspaper articles, obituaries and family histories, and secondary sources.  The legal documents, which are probably the most important, include the transcript of the trial, the judge’s trial notes, the register of post mortem examinations , NSW female penitentiary records and a police statement.  Yet in the text itself, there is no indication which document a particular fact draws upon and thus no way of the reader weighing the authority and interests that the statement reflected.  The footnotes are more like explanatory notes e.g. conversion of imperial measures into decimal, biographical details of minor characters, or references to tangential legal cases.  Occasionally, though, there are footnotes directly related to the narrative.

He makes many assumptions about his characters’ state of mind without indicating the basis for his reconstruction .  For example:

 Over the long weekend, Harry languished in his kitchen over a bottle of whisky, agonising about what would become of Annie’s fourteen-year old son, and indeed himself, without Annie.  When the boy returned from his long-weekend holiday at Collaroy with the Bone family, how was he to break the terrible news to him that his mother had gone off without telling him or even leaving a note, leaving him with his stepfather? He felt great sorrow for this boy who had lost his father when he was very young and who now faced being informed that his mother was gone.  P 66

There is no indication of the evidence he used for deducing Harry’s feelings about his stepson, or whether this ‘terrible news’ of Annie’s desertion  was clearly thought through rather than an excuse conjured up on the spot. We do not know whether this reflects Eugenia (Harry’s) own confession, the step-son’s testimony, or Tedeschi’s assumptions- and surely that matters.

In his introduction, he particularly signposted Chapter 8 as a section where he was creating his own explanation.  I cannot fault the care with which he does so in the opening paragraphs of that chapter:

There were only two people who knew exactly what happened next in the clearing at the Lane Cover River Park: Harry Crawford and his wife, Annie.  Neither of them was in a position afterwards to give an account, for reasons that will become apparent.  What follows is therefore a possible version of events, re-created by the author, that is entirely consistent with all the known facts that later emerged, but interpreted with the benefit of today’s superior knowledge in the forensic sciences and unimpeded by the considerable prejudice that existed at the time for someone in Harry Crawford’s predicament  (p.55)

What follows is a narrative that is highly sympathetic to Harry Crawford (Eugenia).  It is very much the sort of legal narrative that a defence counsel could create, but it is oddly placed in Part I, which is a straight chronological account.  The author gives no indication of the evidence from which he has drawn up the scenario, and once created, it skews the rest of the narrative.    What would I have done, were I writing this book?  I think I might have created this narrative, and then immediately created a counter-narrative.  Perhaps I would have put it in Part II where Tedeschi writes as a lawyer, or perhaps at the end of the book.  I would certainly, at least identified the sources for my explanation here, if not elsewhere.  This chapter has no notes at all.

It is in Part II of the book  (“Legal  Proceedings”) that Tedeschi really hits his straps.  Using his legal knowledge, he examines the investigation and trial from beginning to end, noting discrepancies and anomalies and distinguishing changes in the law from the early 20^th century to today. He notes flaws in the Crown’s case and is particularly scathing of Harry’s defence lawyer.  You’re very much aware of the lawyer at work here.  He creates a long list of fifteen alternative questions that the defence layer could have but did not ask, and embroiders the narrative with the rhetorical flourishes that a lawyer in full flight might use: for example,  a succession of paragraphs that each end with the sentence “it has not always been so” or in another section listing things that the defence lawyer could have done “but would he do so?”  Whatever my misgivings about the first part of the book, only a barrister could write this second section.

Part III, “Incarceration and Release” examines Eugenia’s life after she has been released from prison. Here he quotes more directly from medical reports, oral histories and newspaper articles, and I felt as if I was on surer evidentiary ground.  It is only a short section and rather sad.  He concludes with a retrospective that reviews the trial from a 21^st century perspective.  It’s an interesting chapter.  Finally, there is an appendix that follows up on the main characters and what happened to them later, and the places and institutions in which events occurred.  I’m not really sure that it was necessary as an appendix because the story stood well on its own two feet.

The book addresses the issue of sex and gender directly.  It’s a fairly human response, I suppose, for us to wonder “But surely his wives would have known that she wasn’t a man?!” and Tedeschi goes into quite a bit of detail about the object coyly referred to in the court cases as “the article”.

I found myself returning again and again to the police photograph of Harry on the front cover.  It was taken immediately after his arrest.  Not only had he been charged with the murder of his first wife, but his second wife now knew about his false identity.  He was afraid that he would be placed in a male prison with his identity as man/woman common knowledge.  There’s cockiness and yet sorrow in his face, and he had every reason to be fearful.

It’s a compelling story and, quite apart from the narrative itself, this book has raised so many methodological questions for me that I want to read more. How would a journalist deal with the story, or an historian?  Tedeschi acknowledges his debt to Suzanne Falkiner’s book, and I know that the historian Ruth Ford has written about her as well.  I haven’t finished with this story yet.

2012, 351 p

Thanks to the vagaries of the hold system at my library, I read this book shortly after reading Melissa Bellanta’s book Larrikins: A History.  As with Bellanta’s book, this one too was adorned with the label on the spine describing it as ‘Travel and Culture’, and both books explored in different but complementary ways the appropriation of the term ‘larrikin’.  Bellanta’s book is much more accessible and person-based than this one, which is based on the author’s doctoral research, more heavily freighted with theory and hence requires more concentration.  But it’s worth it.

Moore looks at bohemianism as a mindset and abstract phenomenon, and locates its starting point with Henri Murger’s 1851 book Scenes de la View de Boheme ,  based on the author’s own lost youth amongst the  unconventional and impoverished aspiring writes, painters, poets and philosophers of the Latin Quarter of Paris.

Moore commences his study of Australian Bohemianism with Marcus Clarke, who is better known today for his book For the Term of his Natural Life than for his voluminous press writings or lifestyle.  Clarke adopted the stance of the urban flaneur, strolling observing and reporting about town, playing the dandy, joining mock clubs and,  descending into ‘lower bohemia’ for brief excursions. Clarke preferred the city to the bush, but this was reversed by the ‘bush bards and artist heroes’- the Heidelberg School of Artists, Lawson, Dennis, Lindsay et al- who identified with and drew upon the culture of both town and country workers. Here is the crossover with Bellanta’s work where Lawson and Dennis romanticized and sentimentalized the urban, delinquent larrikin culture, and identified themselves as having a softer, cosier ‘larrikin streak’.  Moore explores the overlap between bohemianism and radical politics at the turn of the twentieth century, a theme picked up again in his analysis of the Cold War anarchists of the Sydney Push, and its mainstreaming with the victory of the Whitlam government.  Yet interweaving, and sometimes challenging, this more ‘intellectual’ political seriousness was the carnivalesque, performance aspect of Bohemia, present from the start but most notable during the 1920s Jazz age and again in the expression and resistance to the modernist avant-gardes like the Angry Penguins.

The book is arranged chronologically, and switches its focus mainly between Sydney and Melbourne, and particular suburbs and places within these cities- Darlinghurst,  King’s Cross, Fitzroy, Eltham, my own Heidelberg.  Structurally, the chapters take in 20 or 30 year thematic bites, with single chapters devoted to the 1920s and the 1950s. However, the period of the 1960s to 1980s is treated to three chapters, where he discusses the commodification of bohemianism, the politics leading up to Whitlam, and the capture and contribution of bohemians in the exploration and dissemination of the “Australian identity”.  The book closes with a chapter dealing with 1980-2012 which argues the continuation of the bohemian tradition through the counter-culture, punk and pomo.

His focus is mainly on artists and writers (journalists rather more than novelists) and I found myself wondering about earlier musicians and theatrical performers, although these do get a look in with Dulcie Deamer in the 1920s and even more so from 1970s on.  There is a huge cast of characters here- the index really doesn’t do it justice- but at times this felt a little like a roll-call.

He argues that the connections, transmissions and patterns of living implicit in Bohemianism are often invisible to the historical actors themselves, but apparent to the historian who takes a long term perspective (p. 344).  Indeed, bohemianism often manifests as a conscious push against what immediately came before it, and conversely, bohemians tend to see themselves in retrospect  as the last ‘authentic’ bohemians.

It was common for Australian bohemian artists and writers, once established and grown older, to recycle the bohemianism of their youth as nostalgia in memoirs, journalism, exhibitions, television documentaries and even semi-autobiographical films.  Across the generations they close down the possibility of tradition by denying the credentials and credibility of young artists who came after them. (p. 345)

Although I am in no sense WHATEVER a bohemian, perhaps I too am doing this because I found the last chapter of this book the least satisfying and often found myself thinking “But they’re not real Bohemians!” In this regard,  Moore was right, I think, to separate out his analysis of the 1960s-80s to explore the commodification of bohemianism because I think that it marked a qualitative change from the ongoing ambivalence that had always existed between rebellion and the need to earn money to eat.  Hence, I found myself puzzling over some of the current mass-media ‘personalities’ he included within the bohemian tradition- the Masters Apprentices, The Chaser, Midnight Oil- and distrusting somewhat his inclusion of his own contribution to bohemia.  Was the last chapter perhaps more a manifesto, a claim for a stake in the bohemian paddock, rather than a historical analysis?  Perhaps it’s just that I feel uncomfortable having my own present historicized?

Just an aside- a fascinating interview with Dulcie Deamer (complete with cupid’s bow lips) from the 1960s here.  In fact the whole collection of You Tube videos Stations of the X is engrossing.

2012, 191 p & notes

For some reason my local library has taken to sticking little labels on the spines of its books denoting ‘biography’ ‘crime’ ‘Australian’ etc. Even though this book is titled Larrikins: A History, the library-gods have decreed that this book is ‘Travel and Culture’.  At first this seemed to me to be rather inappropriate, but on reflection, it is a journey into the subculture of the Australian larrikin between 1870 and 1930, framed very much in a current commentary.  This presentism may do the book a disservice ten or so years down the track however, when I hope that Corey Worthington (who?) has shrivelled back into  irrelevance and that Steve Irwin is just an embarrassing jingoistic memory. Bellanta starts and finishes her book with these men, along with the Beaconsfield miners and Bob Hawke, who are affectionately viewed as ‘a bit of a larrikin’, a good bloke, who cuts through the bullsh*t, and doesn’t stand on ceremony.  She reminds us of Kevin’s Rudd’s cringe-inducing attempt to be a larrikin with his ‘fair shake of the sauce-bottle’ (although I note that the ANU Word Watch gives this mangled expression a shred of credibility) and even ropes the Bundy Bear into the larrikin camp.

But, she argues, although there might be a feel-good factor about larrikins today, when the term first emerged around 1870, it was a term of abuse for shiftless, marginal, disaffected teenaged boys and girls – and certainly no Prime Minister would be falling over himself to be labelled a ‘larrikin’ then.  The origin of the term ‘larrikin’ is not clear-cut, but  the whole larrikin milieu was heavily influenced by English slang and the stage depictions of cockney characters who circulated as part of the empire-wide theatrical circuit of the mid-to-late nineteenth century.  In fact, many aspects of the larrikin phenomenon in its original form were moulded by what we would now call the media: the ‘Today/Tonight’-like feature articles on larrikin gangs in the press and in more ‘respectable’ publications like Blackwood’s Magazine,  the geographical nomenclature given to larrikin gangs like the ‘Gipps Street Push’ or the ‘Haymarket bummers’  in the crime reports, and the music-hall burlesque tradition.  But make no mistake, these larrikins were hooligans and thugs: they were involved in rape, bashings, theft, anti-Chinese riots as well.  They were mixed-sex groups, with girls or ‘donahs’ fronting the courts as well.  Their faces stare out from the mug shots that stud the book: young, defiant, with the odd hint of a shared street identity in their haircuts and clothes.

However, at the turn of the century and in the shadow of WWI both the larrikin phenomenon and its depiction changed.  Several factors were at play. European battlefields winnowed the ranks of these young men; there was a change in the retail sector that removed the  itinerant trade from the streets, and the rise of football, especially in inner-city Melbourne, both channelled and was an outlet for larrikin behaviour.  The burnishing of the Anzac legend incorporated a soft-focus version of larrikinism, and the swell of nationalist literature in the 1890s and early 20th century brought a tamed, more affectionate depiction of loveable larrikins like the Sentimental Bloke and Stiffy and Mo.  Larrikinism and organized crime were two completely different phenomena, and there gradually came to be increased tolerance for larrikinism in a world that had seen worse things.

The book is prefaced by three reproduction maps of the ‘larrikin belts’ of Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane.  It is a paradox of this early larrikinism that it was strongly geographically based, often honing in on a particular street, a particular building, and yet the phenomenon itself spanned urban environments across colonies, and even spanned metropole and periphery.  In many ways the crime reports and mug shots are interchangeable: you’d be hardpressed to distinguish a Melbourne larrikin from a Brisbane one.

The frequent references to current events (Cronulla, hoodies) kept the tone of the book light, without detracting from the nuance of her analysis.  I must confess to being a bit disconcerted by her paragraph structure  that has a foreshadowing final sentence leading into the next paragraph- probably a grammar lesson well learnt- but I found myself re-reading thinking “hold on, do I know about this person?” until realizing that all would be revealed in the next paragraph.  It’s a stylistic choice, I suppose, but one that tricked me again and again.

Although the meaning of ‘larrikin’ might have changed from its nineteenth century usage, the fond, chuckling, good-guy version is likely to be with us for some time, especially at times of high public sentimentality.  As for that other, darker, more dangerous meaning which has never really completely disappeared-  the ugly, thuggish one-  no doubt new labels will be found for that too.