‘Kittyhawk Down’ by Garry Disher

Posted on October 5, 2016 | 1 comment

disher

2003, 288 P.

Is a steady diet of Wallander, Scott and Bailey, The Bridge and -sheesh- even Midsomer Murders softening me up for detective murder mysteries?  Stranger things may have happened.  Whatever: I found myself quite engrossed in this  Australian crime story chosen by someone in my face-to-face book group.

As with the above-mentioned television crime series, this book is just as much about the interactions and messy personal lives of the police investigators as it is about the crime. Although the book is subtitled ” A Detective Inspector Challis murder mystery”, Detective Inspector Hal Challis is only one of an ensemble of police characters.  There’s Detective Sergeant Ellen Destry, whose 17 year old daughter  is recovering after almost falling victim to a rapist and serial killer in an earlier book. There’s the sleazy Constable John Tankard who hits on his female colleagues and who doesn’t seem far removed from the criminals he is chasing. Detective Constable Scobie Sutton bores everyone rigid yabbering on about his daughter, while Constable Pam Murphy has waded in over her head financially.

In many ways this book is a snapshot of the paradoxes of the Mornington Peninsula in Victoria.  There’s the affluent and often absent population up in the forested mountainside (think Red Hill) and the financially straitened underclass in ‘Waterloo’ (Hastings, perhaps? It overlooks Phillip Island, but it felt more like Rosebud to me). An immigration detention centre has opened up nearby, and the reactions of inhabitants remind me that we haven’t moved far in the 13 years since this book was published.  There’s drugs, crime and unsavoury connections among the underclass where boyfriends and broken families criss-cross each other. As the police note in one of their briefings, criminals often announce themselves through their defiance of small things like parking in the disabled bay. Rings true to me.

Disher’s chapters are only short and they rotate in their attention from one police officer to another.  Too much, perhaps, and there does not seem to be one main character in the book which feels as if it’s leaving itself open as the springboard for another book in the series.

But- and this is important- I actually knew who’d done it in the end, even though not all the ends were tied up.  And, as someone who’s not normally a fan of crime fiction, that’s a good thing!

Sourced from CAE bookgroups

My rating: 8/10

 

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Posted in Book reviews, The ladies who say ooooh

‘Of Ashes and Rivers that Run to the Sea’ by Marie Munkara

Posted on October 3, 2016 | 11 comments

munkara2

2016, 274 p.

For me, the day that then-Prime Minister Kevin Rudd apologized to the Stolen Generations is a day lodged in my memory, along with moon walks, assassinations, bushfires and planes crashing into buildings. I was on a train to Bendigo for a history conference, and it seemed rather appropriate to sit with other historians, heads bent over a small transistor radio, listening to Rudd give a historic speech that was much better than I expected it to be.  But although as white Australians the speech may have made us feel a bit better about ourselves, it was always an apology to indigenous Australians.  They sat in the parliament and on the lawns outside, many in tears.  This was their apology. As a white Australian, I know the policies and justifications that led to the removal of indigenous children from their parents, but I can only imagine, incompletely, the emotional toll of this government-encouraged policy.

Marie Munkara’s book takes us into the heart of it because the author is one of those stolen children.  Born on the banks of the Mainoru River in Arnhem Land in  the Northern Territory, she was taken from her mother at three years of age. Her white foster father sexually abused her for years, and her white foster mother was bitter and harsh. Nothing was said about her birth family, although her religious family did meet with other families who had likewise adopted Aboriginal children under the aegis of the Catholic Church. Twenty-eight years later she found a baptismal certificate, and after some enquiries, she found out that her mother was still alive and that she had siblings at Nguiu on Bathurst Island.  Within weeks, she was aboard a plane to meet her family.  It is a troubled, awkward reunion.  Months after returning for a second stay, she confronts her birth mother:

‘Did you want me to come and stay here with you?’ I say petulantly. ‘You’re always so grumpy.’

‘You nebber ask me,’ she says tetchily like I’ve struck a raw nerve.

And mummy is right, I didn’t ask her. And I have never asked her about how she felt about her three-year-old child being taken from her life and a twenty-eight-year-old stranger waltzing back into it again.  I assumed that we would take up where we left off but I realise now that the years have been too long and the differences between us too many for that to occur. (p 232)

Certainly Munkara crashes back into her family’s life full of justifiable anger at her foster-parents.  But her perspective on her new family is steeped in urban, white values. She is appalled by the squalor, poverty and community violence and frightened by the snakes, rogue cattle, crocodiles and lice.  Repulsed by the barely-cooked meat served up to her, she decides to become a vegetarian: an urban affectation not easily catered for in a remote area. She is torn between judgment and an aching need to be accepted and folded back into her family.

If you’ve read Munkara’s Every Secret Thing (my review here) you’ll recognize the humour in this book with it’s ‘up-yours’ insouciance.  Many of the book’s small chapters are short vignettes where Munkara tells of meeting family members, nights at the alcohol-sodden club house, hunting trips and bush-bashing in completely unroadworthy cars.  Much of the time the humour is at her own expense.

The narrative voice is simple and feels to me as if it belongs to a younger writer. Munkara is fifty-six, but sounds almost adolescent.  This is not high literature by any means.

The crispy sauvignon blanc that I had bought to help pass the time left a subtle lingering citrus taste on my palate… (p. 4)

Nonetheless, particularly in the last forty pages of the book, there is an honesty and poignancy that transcends the rather pedestrian prose.

…there’s a little piece of something in my heart that no one can reach because it lives deep down inside me. I think this family wants to take the something out of my heart and make me black, just like the other family wanted to tame me and make me white.  I know that nobody is interested in the parts of me that don’t concern them.  The white parents aren’t interested in the pre-assimilation black bits because they wanted a white girl with black skin. And my real family don’t want to know about the post-assimilation white bits because they think I’m a black girl with a white heart. I know that I’ve disappointed them all. The anger from the white parents.  The pitiful looks from the black. The fretful and all-consuming silences from them both.  I wish I could open the doors to my mind and let them in, so they could see the world from my eyes and forgive me for not being able to fit their expectations. (p. 234)

Despite the raucous auntys and cousins surrounding her in her black family and the sterile figures in her white family, this is a lonely journey with higher emotional stakes than, say, Sally Morgan in My Place.  Its authenticity transcends its unsophisticated prose and structure. I haven’t read a book quite like it.

Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library

My rating: 7/10

I have posted this review to the Australian Women Writers Challenge website. aww2016

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Posted in Australian Women Writers Challenge 2016, Book reviews

This Week in Port Phillip 1841: 26-30 September

Posted on October 2, 2016 | 1 comment

Census results

Given that in September 2016 we’ve had the census uppermost in our thoughts, you might be interested in the results of the 1841 census. Mind you, the Port Phillip Gazette scoffed at the figures recorded for Melbourne, boldly declaring that:

If [the figures] are all as incorrect as Melbourne, this document is sheer humbug [PPG 29/9/41 p.3]

LOCATION MALE INHABITANTS FEMALE INHABITANTS GENERAL TOTALS NUMBER OF HOUSES
Melbourne 2676 1803  4479 769
Geelong  304  150   454  70
Total Melb & Geelong  4933 839
Rest of NSW 48,584 4052

What would they say on ‘Gruen’?

‘Gruen’ is a weekly ABC program that dissects advertising and marketing, and the angles and techniques used to persuade consumers.  I wonder what they’d think of these advertisements?

The first, for the grocery store Albion House, places itself as on the side of the embattled settler while at the same time trying to entice him into buying:

ALBION HOUSE. AN ESSENTIAL PUBLIC GOOD. The depressed state of the times, the stagnant state of commerce, the scarcity of cash, the great reduction in wages, the number of persons thrown upon our shores sixteen thousand miles from their friends and native homes, having no employment and but little cash in their possession, have long cried aloud for a reduction in the high prices of the necessaries of life; indeed it is whispered in the cottage, it is muttered in the cheerless unfurnished cot, “Give us cheaper food; let us have a reduction in the prices of the measures of life, or we starve!” Their demands are satisfied, their cries are heard, and they have now an opportunity of procuring not only the necessaries of life, but also many little comforts that have existed only in desire without the means of procuring them, because of the highness of prices.  C. S. BARRETT & CO having recently taken those extensive premises lately occupied by Mr Empson, draper, Collins-street, which they have opened with a very large stock of grocery, tea and provisions of every description, direct from England; and, that the public may not be deceived, they have named in The Albion House, where the above named articles may be purchased at prices astonishingly below anything as yet submitted to the inhabitants of Melbourne. [PP Gazette 29/9/16 p.1]

Or how about this advertisement for a laundry service? Mangling…a ‘beautiful science’ no less!

IMPORTANT TO FAMILIES. W. Herbert begs to acquaint the inhabitants of Melbourne and the surrounding district that he has opened those premises lately occupied by Mr Melbourne, Hairdresser, Little Flinders-street and invites the attention of the public to the circumstance that he, with Mrs H and female servants, intend Washing, Mangling &c for those families who will honour him with their patronage; and having brought a Patent Mangle with him, will be able to accomplish this beautiful science in first-rate style.  W. H. is aware of the scarcity of money, and therefore will work for the lowest figure; but he must have cash, as nothing else will keep the Mangle going: a man has been engaged for the express purpose of keeping it in constant motion; and as steady women are engaged for the washing department, W. H trusts he will have a share of patronage for so novel a business or profession.  The prices will be as follows:

Washing and Ironing per doz….4/6

Mangling per ditto…………….0/6

Mrs Herbert has female servants that may be hired by the hour or day to wash and clean as charwomen.  [PPG 29/9/16 p.2]

A new variation on the ‘dogs-as-nuisance’ theme

dogs

Detail from Liardet’s picture of the Lamb Inn, Collin’s street. Note the dogs.  Source: SLV

The Port Phillip newspapers have had plenty to say in their columns about the nuisance posed to the inhabitants of Melbourne by stray dogs. But even the attempts to curb the numbers of dogs by offering a bounty seems to have backfired:

PUBLIC NUISANCE.  We have to call the attention of [Police Magistrate] Major St John to the disgraceful conduct of the constables in leaving the carcasses of the dogs they have killed for the sake of their tails, putrefying on the sides of the street.  We would suggest that in order to abate the evil, the reward given for the tails of unregistered dogs shall not be issued in any case, unless the claimant can show that the carcasses of the animals have been disposed of in such a manner as to prevent the possibility of their becoming a public nuisance. [Port Phillip Patriot 30/9/41 p.2]

Family Jars

The Police Intelligence columns are the gift that keeps on giving. Obviously the whole family, including the women, got into this one:

FAMILY JARS. Peter Connell was charged with cracking the head of Stephen Moore with a ginger beer bottle. From what could be gathered from the statement of Connoll, whose head was bound in a Turkey red handkerchief, it appeared that on Saturday, about half-past one o’clock, he was requested by Moore, who is a neighbour, to remove a water cask then reclining against a fence near his door.This being complied with, Connell’s servant pulled down some of the fencing, and made a thoroughfare through the premises; to this he objected whereupon Mrs C. came out and emphatically laid down the law on the case; this was rebutted by Mrs M., who declared that a free passage and female rights were her motto, and on that she would stand. Connell and Moore then came upon the ground, and issue was quickly joined, and scuffling, thrashing and the cracking with the ginger beer bottle followed.[(PP Gazette 29/9/41 p3]

 The ‘Scrutator’ letter

On 29 September George Arden, the young editor of the Port Phillip Gazette published a letter which criticized Judge Willis , supposedly penned by ‘Scrutator’.  After starting with a complaint about Judge Willis’s ban on raffles, the letter moved onto a wide-ranging attack on Willis’ fitness as a judge. The authorship of the letter was never questioned but Arden’s role as editor in publishing it certainly was, suggesting that Arden himself probably wrote the letter (as did most of the other editors when wanting to stir the pot a bit). In fact, as we’ll see as time goes on, Willis’ heavy-handed response to press criticism was to be one of the loudest complaints against him, both by Melbourne inhabitants and eventually, by the government as well.  So, because this letter was so important for Judge Willis’ career and for the public debate for the next six months or so, I’ll transcribe it in full (but I give you permission to skip reading it and just jump down to my comments below!):

TO THE EDITOR OF THE GAZETTE: SIR- In consequence of some sensible remarks which appeared in your last paper, as to the impropriety of Judge Willis directing the Crown Prosecutor to take steps to prevent raffles, I beg to direct your attention to a habit of His Honor’s which is not only unbecoming in a Judge, but which has done much injury, and the baneful consequences of which will extend more widely over the colony, unless at once stopped by the interposition of an independent press: I allude to His Honor’s practice of giving his opinion and directing the proceedings, not only in matters collateral, but even in those totally unconnected, with the question he is called upon to decide.  To one who has attended the English courts of justice, and observed the scrupulous caution with which the judges therein refrain from allusions to all portions of a case except that immediately at issue, and even then declining to make any remarks upon- not to say decide- any point to which their attention has not been directed by full an deliberate discussion, Judge Willis’s conduct is in most startling contrast.  No opportunity escapes him for scattering his dicts, for stating what he conceives to be the law and merits of every subject, no matter how extraneous to that under consideration, if it happens to strike his fertile fancy.  Who has not censured the un-called for stigmas he carelessly heaps on the conduct and character of Magistrates, Barristers, Attorneys, Witnesses, Suitors, or any one whose name may have been unfortunately mentioned in his court? the praise he never awards, except to those who flatter and cringe to him, is nearly as disgusting as the unmeasured censure he so copiously visits on the other wretched individuals who are dragged beneath the outpourings of his bilious temperament; and should he ever find a dearth of legitimate victims, Simpsons, Carringtons, Editors &c with what a master hand, supported by what ancient authorities, will he summon from the peaceful repose of a newspaper advertisement a Cunningham or a McNall, …entire horses, donkeys, raffles, and gambling. But, Sir, what is equally to be lamented, though not so generally known, is his practice of advising upon titles to land, the validity of grants from the crown- stating that deeds are inoperative, conditions not being complied with- that the land fund having been applied to immigration, and not to the consolidated fund, all the Governor’s conveyances are illegal, and even if they were not, lands sold before the Governor has dated his grant can never pass the property to the purchased; in fact, whether in or out of court, the sole result of his unfortunate temper and his distorted judgment is raising disputes and fomenting instead of suppressing litigation. Is this a fit or proper person to fill the highest judicial chair in the province? Judge he is not, nor ever will be, being in every case so much a creature of deluding impulse.  To those who are so connected with him as to be obliged to bear the burthen of his acquaintance, the endless disparaging terms in which he speaks of his late brother Judges, the gentlemen of the bar, and all with whom he came in contact in Sydney; the egotism and vanity which actuate his very look and expression, have demonstrated that the fountain of his acts is drawn not from the pure sources of liberal learning and enlightened knowledge, but the sterile rock of ignorance and self conceit; coupling these with his penurious miserly habits (for never was he, whom from his position and salary should be an example of liberality, known to see a friend within his poverty-stricken doors) is he, I would ask a proper person to have been sent to a young colony as its Judge? Yet, Sir, Some hope remains that this paralyzing member of an otherwise healthy community may ere long be removed, under the [indistinct] fearless catchcry of an independent press. I have the honour to be Sir &c &c &c. SCRUTATOR. [PPG 29/9/41 P.3

In transcribing this letter,I’m struck anew by how barbed it is, even for the time. Even though the three Port Phillip newspapers were published legitimately and regularly, they were a mixture between, using the example of 20th century Melbourne, the Herald Sun and Truth magazine, or to bring us into the 21st century, very similar to the internet’s mixture of hard news and utter scurrility.  Judges were criticized in the press (it seems to me, more than today but I’m not sure) but then, as now, it would have been a dangerous undertaking, particularly in a district that had only one judge.

Looking at the letter, ‘Scrutator’ starts off by criticizing Willis for making extraneous commentary from the bench, asserting that the judges in England did not do so.  That’s not true: the judge’s speech at the opening of term was a time-honoured occasion for moral commentary, usually about the evils of alcohol and godlessness (but gambling could conceivably fit under such a tirade). That said, Willis used the opportunity to make such commentary excessively. ‘Scrutator’ then makes criticisms that were to be echoed two years later when the whole Willis thing blew up. Willis’ attacks on magistrates, barristers and individuals like Simpson and Carrington were all listed as reasons for his dismissal and ended up being aired in the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in Whitehall.  Even Houndsfoot the stallion and Montezuma the donkey get a look in!

More pointed, though, is ‘Scrutator’s’ report of Willis’ private conversation, and here we get into murky territory.  Arden was most certainly not part of Willis’ social or conversational circle- so who was telling him all this?  And the content of this reported conversation at a time when the property bubble was just about to pop was incendiary, then as a final kick to the shins was a dig about Willis’ dearth of friends and lack of gentlemanly sociability.

How’s the weather?

This week the weather was more settled, with light winds generally and bright and clear after 24th September.  The 28th and 29th were the warmest days of the month, with a top temperature for September of 76F (24.4 C) and a low for the week of 45 (7.2C)

 

 

 

 

 

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Posted in This Week in Port Phillip District 1841, Uncategorized

Movie: Girl Asleep

Posted on October 1, 2016 | Leave a comment

I wanted to like this Australian movie but – oh dear- there’s 1 hour and 17 minutes of my (not inexhaustible) life wasted.  A mixture of ‘Where the Wild Things Are’ and ‘Heathers’, ‘Grease’ and every other teen movie you’ve ever seen, it was derivative and wallowing in 1970s kitsch nostalgia.  The red-headed boy from ‘Upper Middle Bogan’ (Harrison Feldman) played exactly the same character here; Bethany Whitmore was quite good as 15 year old Greta but overall it just left me cold.  Very disappointing.

Two stars from me, David.

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Posted in Movies

This Week in Port Phillip 1841: 17-25 September 1841

Posted on September 29, 2016 | 3 comments

Census tales

The 2106 Australian census is just finishing up here in Australia, and an ill-starred census it has been with website difficulties, inadequate phone assistance and a general loss of goodwill all round. The 1841 census was conducted in March 1841 after quite a bit of judicial bickering over the propriety of asking about convict origins which I wrote about here. The census was compiled in person by an appointed collector. On September 21 the Port Phillip Herald published an article purporting to be from ‘Pencilling in the Bush’ by a Collector of the Census 17 March 1841′.  I can find no record in Trove of this publication, but the Sydney Gazette also published a column on 25 November 1841 in its Port Phillip section, claiming to be from the same publication.

The book, if indeed there ever was one, seems to be a compilation of humorous ‘tales from the trenches’ of a census collector charged with collecting census information in the Port Phillip district.  It’s quite odd reading with our 21st century what passed as humour in 1841.

Here’s the Port Phillip Herald extract. It picks up on the common trope of Irish-bashing that often runs through the Port Phillip Herald columns, reflecting not only the English/Scots prejudice against the Irish generally, but an anxiety about the influx of Irish immigrants into New South Wales in particular.

ANOTHER STRAY LEAF:

“Good morning ma’am! who is the proprietor of this establishment?” I said to a fat, fair and jolly-looking woman into whose domicile on the River ___ I was just intruding myself. “Musha the top’of the mornin to ye sir, but ye’re early afut this blessed and holy mornin’,” said she- “Not very early ma’am- It is the fittest time for travelling now the weather is so hot- Pray ma’am, who is the proprietor here?” “Musha sure I wouldn’t be after telling you a lie this blessed day; and the throoth I couldn’t tell you; so I couldn’t, but it’s not me or mine that’s the owner, nor Therry either, so it isn’t- Surra long we’re here, neather of us- only three months or there- we came in the Andrew Mackey (Andromache), so we did.” Here were no less than half-a dozen points of voluntary information for me, yet not one of them even remotely directed to my simple enquiry. “You came from Ireland Ma’am?” “Augh aye- I did, I did, sure enough come from it, and its sorry am I for it, so I am.” “Which are you sorry for ma’am?- being Irish, or leaving Ireland?” “Neither o’them,” she replied “only to be stuck up in a sentry-box like this on the blessed Patrick’s own day when – augh! but there’s no use talking so there isn’t.  May be ye’d like a dhrop o’tay sir- surra better I have to give ye or I’d be shame-faced to offer it this holy mornin, so I would.” “Tea is a very good beverage ma’am, this weather.” “Musha throth an its a poor baveritch for a day like this- It’s not that ye’d be drowing you shamrock in it ye were in sweet Loughrea this mornin.” “Is your husband at home, ma’am?” “Faith he isn’t an he’ll have more luck than his over if ever he see’t again, so he will – at home!– Musha!” “What’s his name, ma’am?” “Therry’s his name sir, – Therry Connor.” “How many children have you?” “Fourteen sir- six at home and eight here- three boys and three girls and two childer,” (Eh? Malthus.)  “Well ma’am, who is the owner of this place?” “Sorry know I know, they say it’s come into other hands now- the master’s not well at all, at all, and more’s the pity. Terry says he’s laid up in the Rules in Melbourne, but myself doesn’t undertand the diases o’ this country much yet. Is the Rules a taking disease sir?” “It is indeed ma’am.” “Is it like a favor sir or the molera corbis? God save us!” “It is not like either ma’am, particularly the first. It’s a contraction of the movements, caused by a vacuum in the chest”- Can I see your husband ma’am?” “Sure enough you can sir- step this way if you please,- look over the ‘tother end o’ the stockyard younder, dye’ see the boy with the white jacket?” “Yes!” “Well that’s not him- now dye’ see the t’other boy with the red waistcoat?” “Yes.” “Well that’s not him neather, so it isn’t.” “Well, but which is he ma’am?” “Augh its yerself that’s in a hurry now- have ye any business with Terry Connor?” There was a look of severe apprehension with this enquiry that showed me the poor woman was afraid of the papers I held in my hand- I replied “yes ma’am but no private or unpleasant business; I am collecting the census- the population of the district- and in the master’s absence I require some person in the place to sign a paper, that’s all.” “Augh, sure an if that be all,” she said, “I’ll bring Therry to you in a wink;” in saying so she disappeared, and Therry soon made his appearance, which was a remarkably fine specimen of the peasantry. Moreover, Therry was a sensible, intelligent man.  He comprehended the matter at once, gave me all the information I desired, and ample directions for the accuracy of my movements, concluding with a hope that the collection of the census would have a tendency to promote the public good. “After all the good that can be said of it,” said Therry, “it is no place for a man of a family– there is no way here of getting the childer educated- for my own part I would rather live on potatoes and buttermilk and have my childer at school than all the tay and mutton we can make use of.” This afforded another proof of one national characteristic of the Irish Peasantry, an indelible anxiety to give their children education.  (PPH 21/9/41)

The extract from the Sydney Gazette of 25 November 1841 purports to come from the same publication. A warning-  its language about a practical joke based on racial views of aborigines does not sit well today.

A Stray Leaf.-From ” Pencillings in the Bush, October, 1 Oil.”-In one of my rambles between Melbourne and Mount Macedon, I called at a settlement on the ___  Creek, to procure a drink. Here I observed a number of persons around a man, poking his naked back and target in what I conceived to be a very unprofessional manner. The person on whom they were operating, or the pokes, appeared to have been wounded behind by small shot, for he was bleeding rather copiously. As I could perceive that the bystanders wore struggling to suppress their laughter. I had the curiosity to make some enquiry as to what had happened, and the thing was so farcical, though nearly spoiled by a dash of the tragic, that I thought it worth taking a note of. after my departure.

It was this, two female servants at the station had got permission to take a walk-it being Sunday-and a resident at the station took it into his head to disguise himself in tin old rug and a piece of crape over his head and face in order to give the girls a fright by personifying a blackfellow. Well, he sallied forth, and about half a mile from tho station he made his appearance with a spear on his shoulder. The girls, who, it appears, began to think of  “Home, sweet home,” fled onwards ; but Blackey, like an able general, intercepted their retreat,jabbering and figuring like an ouraug outang- The fears of the terror-struck damsels were unutterable.’ In this dilemma then Don Quixote made his appearance in the shape of a man servant, at the station, with a dog ; and he,not knowing the prank, ran up to the release of the paralyzed handmaidens whom he found quailing very successfully. The blackfellow flings his spear at the true knight ; and just at this moment the proprietor comes up with a gun, and seeing blackey in attitude, and the girls with their drapery tucked up in front, churning their flight through the long grass, he fires his piece bung at Snow-ball, who had not seen him approaching. Luckily it was but small shot, and a happy distance but it had effected a neat carification in the reverse of the man’s countenance,and then they were poking and jerking at hi.with pins and needles as if they were stitching an oppossum cloak.

I thought of the old song –

At this disaster

Up came the master,

And gave the hero such a cursed crack :

Ob murdher o murdher !-.

It went no further

Like  a flitch of bacon, boy, they left his back.  [Sydney Gazette 25/11/41]

More cricket

The cricketers seem to have got their act together.

CRICKET- The fine weather having now set in, the lovers of cricket may be seen practising nearly every day.  We have been requested to state that the afternoons of Tuesdays and Saturdays have been fixed upon for regular practice.  The club will be regularly organized in the early part of next month, when the principal players are expected in town to attend the first of the Melbourne Assembly Balls. (PPH 21/9/41)

Bonjon

Given that this blog is dedicated, both through its title and its impetus, to John Walpole Willis, the resident judge of Port Phillip it would be remiss of me to let this September date pass without mentioning the Bon Jon case, which could have been the most important case in Judge Willis’ career.  I did write a paper about it in the ANZLHS e-journal (which has since been swallowed by the internet), and I recently gave a similar paper at the conference to accompany the launch of the Judging for the People book, for which I wrote the first chapter.

During this week in 1841 the case of R v Bonjon came before Judge Willis.

Put simply, Judge Willis’ opening speech before the Bonjon case was a foretaste of the Mabo judgement 150 odd years later.  The case involved a young man, Bonjon who was at the time working as the ‘boy’ accompanying Crown Land Commisioner Foster Fyans. He was accused of the inter-tribal murder of another indigenous man in a dispute over a woman, in a manifestation of the long-standing emnity between the Wada.wurr.ang/balug tribe (to which Bonjon belonged) and the Gulidjan tribe of the murdered man. Bonjon moved in that liminal space between his own tribe and attachment to a white official, and the murder took place outside a tent occupied by Bonjon, the victim and two white men.  When the case came before Judge Willis, he started off with a very long address where he raised the question of whether he, as a British judge, had jurisdiction over a murder that had taken place under indigenous law. He pointed out that the Aborigines, as the native sovereigns of the soil  had neither been conquered nor acquiesced; that a treaty should have been made with them, and that they had their own law.

So why don’t we all know about this? Why did it take the law 150 years to come to the same conclusion? Mainly because the case collapsed and so this ‘address’ never got to be an actual ‘decision’. The  Sydney Judges dismissed its significance, even though some ten years earlier the previous Chief Justice had been moving in the same direction. The Sydney newspapers didn’t pick it up, and it didn’t get written up in the early summaries of colonial cases.

And, complex man that he was, it’s not possible to paint Judge Willis as a before-his-time Aboriginal activist either.  There are other times when his court was actively hostile to indigenous interests, most particularly over the right of access for aboriginal people over leased landholdings. Nor is it impossible that this was another maneuver in Willis’ ongoing dispute with the Sydney judges.  Nonetheless, this was an important case both for Willis personally and in the annals of European-Indigenous relations in Port Phillip as well.

And the weather?

There was a heavy gale on the 19th and 20th with rain and hail, and it was cloudy up to the 24th. The highest temperature was a balmy 72 (22C) and the lowest a bracing 37 (2.7C)

 

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Posted in Aborigines in Port Phillip

‘No One Writes to the Colonel’ by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Posted on September 27, 2016 | 1 comment

noonewritestothecolonel

1961, 68 p.

This is the second book examined in the online Coursera course I’m following on the works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez.  I say ‘following’ because I’m reading the books in English and rather slowly translating (sort of) the Spanish video transcripts on the site.  Responding to the forums in Spanish is completely beyond me.

The elderly Colonel lives with his unnamed wife in a small isolated village on a river. Each Friday the Colonel goes to wait on the delivery of mail from the riverboat, waiting for news of the pension he was promised in return for his leadership in the War of the Thousand Days.  He has been waiting fifteen years, and he and his wife are being submerged by a grinding poverty. Too proud to admit their poverty, he scrapes out the rust from the coffee can and adds it to the coffee, and his wife, more practical than he, badgers him to sell the clock, or the rooster.  But the rooster is not just a rooster: it is a fighting cock that belonged to their now-deceased son.

The village is unnamed and there is no specified time, although the filtering through of news of the Suez Canal places it in the late 1950s. The sense of menace builds up quietly as you become aware of the curfew and the  circumscribed communications.  It emerges most  starkly one Friday when the Colonel decided not to wait for the mail, but to go to the cock-fight instead.  There he encounters the man who shot his son.  It is his dignity and sense of hierarchy that emboldens him to disregard the gun pointed at him and to leave untouched.

The story is very much one of waiting and of time stretching out without end- similar to Waiting for Godot. I had been lulled into its somnolent rhythm and was quite surprised by the abrupt ending- an ending that leaves me rather nonplussed, I must admit.

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‘The Heart Goes Last’ by Margaret Atwood

Posted on September 26, 2016 | 3 comments

atwood_heartgoes

2015, 306 p.

I’m really not quite sure what to make of Margaret Atwood’s recent book The Heart Goes Last. It fits into the ‘dystopian fiction’ genre that she explored in The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake which, although set in a recognizable but off-kilter future, explored human themes as well as sociological and ecological ones as well.  The Heart Goes Last  seemed to start in a similar vein, but became almost a futuristic farce as she piled one scenario onto another until the whole edifice threatened to fall down.

It all started recognizably enough. Stan and Charmain (we never learn their surname) were living in their car, having lost their home and well-paid jobs in what we would recognize as the 2007 global financial crisis. Living in their cramped car, tired, smelly, and frightened of marauding gangs, they jump at the chance to join the Positron Project which offers them a stable job and a fully-furnished house in the town of Consilience – half of the time.  The other half of the time they are prisoners in the Positron jail, a large prison complex that is the major economic driver of Consilience. Not that Sam and Charmain are criminals, and nor are most of the people in the jail.  The real criminals had been gradually weeded out earlier. What was more important than guilt or innocence was that they were consumers of prison services, and you don’t need to be a prisoner to do that.  So that the facilities are fully utilized, their house is occupied by their ‘alternate’ couple who have signed up for the same deal, shifting in and out of the house/prison arrangement.  So far so good, as far as I am concerned: there’s whole country-town economies in Australia based around jails and detention centres.  It is when both Charmain and Stan, independently, become infatuated with their alternates, that things become more complicated.

While taking her turn in prison, Charmain’s job involves the dispatch of bound and drugged prisoners, which she does with as much gentleness as she can without thinking too deeply about what she’s doing.  Stan is charged with looking after the Positron Project poultry farms, turning a blind eye to the men who pay to have sex with the chickens.  ‘What???’ I think, as Atwood lays down one of her farce cards.  Positron runs many enterprises out of its prison complex, including the manufacture of sex-bots, made to look as authentic as possible- evoking shades of the ‘synths’ in the recent television program Humans;  or built as Elvis or Marilyn Monroe look-alikes. But Positron goes further, pioneering surgery on living women to wipe their memories and ‘imprinting’ them onto their purchasing lovers, much as baby chickens are said to be imprinted, ensuring that they are completely loyal and acquiescent lovers.  ‘What???’ I think, as Atwood lays down yet another farce card.

I guess that this was my problem with this book. I’d go along quite happily, and then Atwood would just put one more element into the scenario, tipping it over into parody. Apparently it was written as an online serial, and perhaps that accounts for the feeling I had that Atwood was just playing with the reader, escalating the implausibility and adding yet another thing. Perhaps the need to keep stacking on the shocks is one of the perils of the serial genre.  To have a faceless corporate conglomerate leveraging the prison system for profit, and it becoming an end in itself, would have been enough for me.  I didn’t need the sex-bots, the sexual imprinting and the kinky sex as well.

My ranking: 7/10

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This Week in Port Phillip 1841: 9-16 September 1841

Posted on September 25, 2016 | Leave a comment

Once the worst of winter had been left behind, thoughts turned to CRICKET! Of course, there was no VFL footy to fill in September, so let the cricket season begin!

The season has now set in for cricket playing, and we are right glad to see that the Melbournites are bestirring themselves to carry on the game with something like spirit.  The tradesmen, we learn, are about forming a cricket club; and we learn, also, that the members of the Melbourne and Port Phillip Clubs are about establishing another. This is as it should be: the two clubs will, we hope, have several matches during the season and may the best men win, say we.  We would strongly recommend these clubs to the attention of our fellow-colonists, as cricket is not only the very best description of gymnastic exercise, but even in a moral point of view it has its pleasures, by carrying the mind back the “the days of former years” in “merry England” and by “the association of ideas” bringing before us the companions of our youth, in whose society our cares were forgotten and our joys increased.  His Honor Mr La Trobe is known to be passionately fond of cricket, and we feel confident (as ‘a Batsman’ remarks in another column) that he will willingly follow in the footsteps of Sir Richard Bourke, and set apart a portion of land in the immediate vicinity of the town as a cricket-ground. A deputation should wait on him for that purpose immediately.” (PPH 10/9/41 p.2)

The aforementioned ‘a Batsman’ (who may well have been one of the writers of the Port Phillip Herald themselves) wrote in a letter to the Editor:

SIR- As I have with much pleasure observed that you take considerable interest in Cricket, and as the season for its practice is approaching I trust I need make no apology for affording, through the medium of your columns, a few remarks with may prove acceptable to all who feel anxious to see this manly, healthy and truly British game fairly established amongst us.  I would suggest to the gentlemen of the town and district the propriety of forming a Club, who should establish regular days for play, and who should make the laws of the Mary-le-Bone Club their guide, and adhere to them strictly at practice, as well as when playing matches.  The necessity of strict attention to the laws, even at ordinary practice, must be apparent to all who know any thing of the game.

In the event of the establishment of such a Club, I should hope that our much respected Superintendent might be induced to follow the example of Sir Richard Bourke, who appropriated a piece of ground in the town of Sydney for the use of players, and might ultimately patronize an institution formed for the encouragement of this noble game.

The want of public amusements has long been felt and acknowledged, and I feel assured that an attempt by the gentlemen of Melbourne to establish a manly and rational recreation, will be imitated by the humbler classes of the community, and will have the effect of enrolling amongst it supporters many who would otherwise have wasted their health and means in less legitimate sources of enjoyment.  I have the honour to be, Sir, your obedient servant, ‘A Batsman’.  (PPH 10 Sept p.3)

Edmund Finn, writing as ‘Garryowen’ tells us that the first informal cricket match took place on 22 November 1838 on the flat land at the foot of Batman’s Hill (i.e. roughly where Southern Cross Railway Station is now).  Following this match a number of the gentlemen from the Melbourne Club decided to form a club, with a subscription of one guinea which served well to keep the riff-raff out. Familiar names emerge here: A. Powlett, George Brunswick Smyth, William Meek, William Ryrie and William Highett and Peter Snodgrass.  An opposing club, the Melbourne Union Cricket Club was formed from men involved in retail lines of business and tradesmen and on 12 January 1839 the Gentlemen of the District took on the Tradesmen of the Town and were soundly beaten.  A second series in March 1839 pitted the Marrieds against the Bachelors.

These murmurings in September were to bear fruit on 1 November 1841 when the Melbourne Cricket Club was formed at the Exchange Hotel. In case I overlook it in November,  this club had a rather illustrious committee of management, chaired by  F.A Powlett as President,Henry F. Gurner as secretary and George Cavenagh the editor of the Port Phillip Herald (who always gave racing and cricket generous attention in his newspaper columns) as secretary. The committee included, among others, D.S. Campbell and Redmond Barry. They continued to play on the flat below Batman’s Hill until they took over a “more commodious and convenient” spot on the south of the Yarra, between the river and Emerald Hill (i.e. South Melbourne) [Garryowen p. 737-9].

Not completely the dog’s fault

Richard Broome, in his book Aboriginal Victorians, reminds us that indigenous people were a common sight in Melbourne during these first years of settlement.  The Port Phillip Herald of 10 September carried a report about a bulldog attacking a group of Aboriginal people in Flinder’s Lane- and, while reporting on the injuries sustained by a young indigenous woman, the article reveals quite a bit of sympathy for the dog:

FEROCIOUS BULL DOG: On Monday last a number of the natives, who daily throng the town, were congregated in Flinder’s-lane.  Unfortunately for humanity, a large and ferocious bull dog, excited by their yells, made a rush at them.  One of the Aborigines, a woman of about 20 years of age, was very seriously injured: her face, throat, neck and limbs being dreadfully lacerated: and it is more than likely that she would not have excaped with life had it not been for the timely and energetic assistance rendered by District Constable O’Neil who was passing at the moment.  The unfortunate woman was immediately conveyed to the hospital, where her wounds were dressed, and every assistance afforded her.  The bull dog was a splendid animal of the kind, and very large. (PPH 10/9/41 p. 2)

Wanted

I’ve been fascinated by an advertisement that appeared in several consecutive editions of the Port Phillip Herald:

WANTED: a Female Kangaroo.  Apply at the Herald office

A pet perhaps? Or did the advertiser have plans to send the kangaroo back ‘home’ as a curiosity – dead or alive?

How’s the weather?

Windy, it seems.  On 14 September the Port Phillip Herald reported that

The equinoctial gales have set in this season much earlier than usual.  On Saturday night, the storm was so severe that several large trees were blown down and the William lying in Hobson’s Bay drifted from her anchorage, but, we are glad to state, suffered no damage.  The gale was only partial not have extended even so far as Heidelberg but was in some places the severest felt for the past two years. (PPH p. 2)

The official weather report for 8th-14 September described it as

Fine, agreeable weather with light winds 8th, 9th, 10th, strong winds and gales with cloudy and rainy weather afterwards.

The top temperature for the period was 64 degrees (17.7), and the lowest 35 degrees (1.6- that’s cold for September), with the coldest day of the month falling on 13 September.

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‘Mothering Sunday’ by Graham Swift

Posted on September 22, 2016 | 1 comment

swift

2016, 132 p.

This small novella by Graham Swift is an exemplar of the genre, written by a master.  Swift takes a small image and spins it into something tight and intricate, but with threads that could lead into something larger.  In this case, the image is a woman lying naked among the tangled sheets in a sun-filled room in an empty house.

Her lover Paul has just stood up from the bed, and he looks back at her as he dresses.  It is 1924, Mothering Sunday.  In the drab and aching days after WWI, Paul is the only remaining son of the Sheringham family, with his two older brothers killed in the war. Jane is an orphan, a housemaid in a neighbouring house. Their relationship is an illicit secret, impossible to bring into the open.

For those few gentry families still clinging to a vanishing world of big houses and servants, Mothering Sunday is always an inconvenience. Their hired help are given the whole day off to visit their own mothers, leaving their employers to make their own arrangements. But, as an orphan, Jane has no mother to visit and so she has the whole day to herself- or so she thought.  Paul has other ideas.

This book is only 132 pages in length, and it is just right.  The language is explicit and fruity, but the narrative voice wistful and melancholy.  Swift foreshadows the ending right from the start, and the tension in moving towards that ending is so painful that I wouldn’t have wanted it to go for another page longer. It was so beautifully written, however, than I wouldn’t wish for a single page less, either.

Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library

My rating: 9/10

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‘In the Darkroom’ by Susan Faludi

Posted on September 19, 2016 | 2 comments

faludi

2016, 417p

As it happens I found myself reading, almost end-to-end, two memoirs written by daughters about their fathers.  Both fathers experienced World War II and both daughters, in their own ways, were affected at second-generation remove, by their fathers’ responses to the war.  Much as I enjoyed Magda Szubanski’s book, Reckoning,  I did find myself thinking once I started Susan Faludi’s book “now this woman can write!”  As authors, they’re not really comparable. Szubanski writes from the heart, where Faludi writes from the head, and Faludi’s skill in crafting her story is that of the polemicist as well as the story-teller.

Faludi’s father only really came back into her life in 2004 after decades of estrangement. As she says in her opening paragraph:

In the summer of 2004 I set out to investigate someone I scarcely knew, my father,  The project began with a grievance, the grievance of a daughter whose parent had absconded from her life.  I was in pursuit of a scofflaw, an artful dodger who had skipped out on so many things- obligation, affection, culpability, contrition. I was preparing an indictment, amassing discovery for a trial.  But somewhere along the line, the prosecutor became a witness. (p.1)

In the summer of 2004 she received an email from her father telling her that “I have had enough of impersonating a macho aggressive man that I have never been inside” and that he had had gender reassignment surgery. Now, instead of Stefan (or, when he was in America, Steven) he was now Stefanie. It was the first email she had received from her father in years. He had left the family while she was a teenager in 1977, and had returned to his birthplace Hungary after the fall of communism in 1989. “You said you were going to write my life story, and you never did” he taunted her. “It could be like Hans Christian Andersen,” he later told her, “When Andersen wrote a fairy tale, everything he put in it was real, but he surrounded it with fantasy.” (p. 21, p.1).

Faludi has not indulged the fantasy, but she has surrounded her father’s story with an extended reflection on identity: personal, gendered, racial and national. She is well placed as a feminist theorist to analyze the permutations of gender in her father’s  hyper-feminized Stefanie identity, and there is a rather creepy hint that her father was flaunting and almost flirting with his daughter. Her father is Jewish but during WWII, he refused to identify as such, and slipped across racial boundaries to pose as an Arrow Cross partisan, thereby rescuing his parents as his final act of filial responsibility to parents he resented and then rejected. She reflects on her father’s assertion of a latent female identity, and draws parallels with the recent reassertion of Magyar identity at a national level since the fall of Communism.  These observations and questions are framed at a theoretical level, and although the book does not have notes or footnotes, they draw on the writings and interviews with theorists, historians and medical and psychological practitioners, as well as other people who have undergone gender reassignment.

She describes her father as a ‘shape shifter’ and it is not lost on her that, as a photographer employed to touch-up photographs in pre-Photoshop days of the mid-twentieth century, her father has always played with ‘erasure and exposure'(p.35).  He shows her photographs where he has photoshopped his own features onto women’s bodies; he tells half-truths and he affects a vacuous neutrality as he distances himself from his own history.  I am reminded of the loss experienced by people who were close to the pre-operative person undergoing gender reassignment, as in the recent film and book The Danish Girl that I have reviewed previously.

As she points out Magyar (the Hungarian language) does not have gendered pronouns, and her father had always mixed them up in English. Faludi follows the practice of referring  to her father each time she mention him first as ‘my father’ and then ‘she’. It’s a bit disorienting at first, but it keeps you, like Faludi herself, constantly aware of this duality.

When reviewing Szubanski’s book, I mentioned my own sense of guilty complicity in the author’s minute scrutiny of her parent.  I didn’t feel the same way in this book.  Perhaps the historical, political, psychological and sociological theorizing with which Faludi laces the book removes it from the emotional to the intellectual realm, or perhaps it’s that Stefanie has clearly co-operated with, and even goaded, her daughter to write it.  In her preface, Faludi braced herself for her father’s response to the news that she had completed her first draft, assuming that

My father, who had made a career in commercial photography out of altering images and devoted a lifetime to self-alteration, would hate, I assumed, being depicted warts and all.

His response?

“I’m glad. You know more about my life than I do”.

Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library

Read because: Book review in newspaper

My rating: 9/10

 

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