Being RomanSoldiering for Softies Well, obviously not ALL Roman Soldiers were of chiselled jaws and flinty demeanour. In this episode, Mary Beard introduces us to Claudius Terentianus, who spends most of his letters moaning to his father, and asking for the most basic of equipment from sandals to swords. After a lifetime spent complaining, he eventually moves up the ranks a bit and ends up being able to retire quite comfortably.
History Extra. Native Americans: A History of Power and Survival. I’ve been listening to The Rest is History, where they are looking at Custer, Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, so I thought I’d catch up on this more generalized history of Native Americans. I’ve always been mystified by the way that indigenous/European relations in Australia draw on ‘black’ language and politics of African Americans, when Native American/settler relations are far more relevant. This episode features Kathleen Duval, whose book Native Nations just won the Cundill Prize, a Canadian award for the “best history writing in English”. Her book looks at 1000 years of Native American history, starting in the year 1000 when Native American society was at the height of its organization, and comparable to cities in Europe at the time. The Medieval Warm Period made urbanization possible, and when it ended, people left the cities by preference. Native American nations were marked by trade, reciprocity and consensus decision making in confederencies that ebbed and flowed. The second part of her book goes from 1750 onwards. Spanish and Dutch colonization hadn’t changed the power balance, but this was to change from this point on. Part III looks at rebirth into nations. It sounds good.
Dan Snow’s History Hit The British Agent Who Tried to Kill Lenin tells the story of Robert Bruce Lockhart, a British diplomat, spy, and propagandist. He was born into a wealth Scots family and intended to go to Malaysia to work in the rubber industry, but was waylaid by scandal (I didn’t note what the scandal actually was!). He was restless and proudly Scottish. He ended up in Russia during WWI where he was an astute observer and politically agnostic. He became a “British Agent”, not an official position, but a conduit to the British government and their man on the spot. He was tasked with getting the Russian government back into the war after the Communist takeover and withdrawal in a plot by France, English and the US to use disaffected Latvians to overthrow the Bolsheviks. He was arrested and imprisoned by the Checka when he was betrayed by Latvian plants, but he was released under a prisoner exchange. He continued to hang around the Foreign Office where he worked as a Rogue Agent.
In 2021 Theodore Ell won the ABR Calibre Prize for his essay ‘Facades of Lebanon’ which described the Lebanese revolution and the Beirut port explosion. (I must admit that this essay probably languishes in the towering pile of journals that I haven’t got round to reading yet.) The explosion, caused by a stockpile of nearly 3000 tonnes of ammonium nitrate, dominates his essay which was written in 2020, as part of his way of processing what had happened. As he says:
I wrote an essay ‘Facades of Lebanon’ with the aim of making sense of the abstractions behind the port explosion at the level of personal feeling. If people were to know what the Lebanese knew and what Lebanon had brought me to know, they needed to know what the explosion felt like. They needed an invasion of violence, debris and deafening noise through the window, just as the Lebanese themselves so often had been invaded, over their rooftops and fields as much as over their doorsteps. (p. xix)
But this book, written in the wake of the critical acclaim for the essay, and with more distance of time, deals more with what happened in the periods before and after the explosion. The book is in five parts, and the explosion is just one of these parts. It is the story of the two-and-a-bit years between the end of 2018 and the beginning of 2021 that the author spent in Beirut as the partner of an Australian Embassy official- a time in which Beirut roiled under street protests as part of the thowra (i.e. revolution) which was eventually put down by Hezbollah (or as he writes it ‘Hizballah’) and the COVID lockdowns, during a time of economic collapse exacerbated by government corruption, which in turn laid the conditions for the Beirut port explosion that changed his life.
As the partner of an Embassy employee, he was not allowed to undertake paid employment and so he spent quite a bit of time walking the city, venturing further afield with his wife Caitlyn on weekends, doing odd job volunteer work where he could find it, and writing. As is often the case with Embassy staff, their social circle mainly revolved around other Western diplomatic and aid workers, with most of his contact with local Beirut residents through observation on his travels, and amongst taxi drivers, shopkeepers and businesses catering for young Western expatriates.
Much of this book resonated with me, having spent time with my son and daughter-in-law in both Kenya and Cambodia where they, too, live as expatriates, albeit living (as do Ells and his wife) outside an expatriate enclave. Their description of the succession of new expatriate arrivals and the development, and then breaking apart, of friendships makes sense to me, as does the distance between the expatriate community and local workers in the diplomatic and aid milieu. How clearly I identified with his frustration with learning Arabic which, despite learning basic Spanish and Portuguese, “awed [him] with its complexity” and with which he failed utterly – a feeling I often have when trying to learn Kymer.
The book is divided into five parts, with short unnumbered chapters in each part. Part One ‘Partitions’ explores the 1926 constitution, adopted under French tutelage, which ossified the sectarian divides by designating certain political posts for particular religious and ethnic groups. This arrangement embedded power in the majority Christian group at the time, but given that there hasn’t been another census since 1932, that demographic scenario has been superseded without any corresponding political adjustment. Part Two ‘Phoenicia’ is more travel-based, as he explores regions further afield, and the sway of the historical ‘Phoenician’ culture as part of Lebanese identity. Part Three ‘Thowra’ is his report of the huge protests that brought Beirut citizens out into Martyr’s Square, demanding an end to the corruption that immobilized Lebanese politics, leaving it impotent to deal with the economic collapse. Part Four ‘Shuttered’ describes the effect of the COVID lockdown which Hizbollah and the government leveraged to quell the protests, dwarfed by the Beirut port explosion during which, living in an apartment that directly overlooked the port, they were lucky to survive. There’s some really evocative writing here of the sheer power of the explosion, and its physical and psychic effects. He is clearly suffering PTSD, while Caitlin throws herself into Embassy Emergency Mode. The final Part Five ‘Closing’ deals with the months when they are waiting to return to Australia, which is limiting inbound flights because of COVID. They return to living in West Beirut, where they had first lived when they arrived, imbued with a sense of grief for what had been lost, fearful of Israeli invasion, and yet acutely aware that, as Australian citizens, they can leave, and although able to appreciate the citizens’ fears, they are not their fears.
This is beautifully written, with a fantastic, clear map that lets you locate yourself in the city and in Lebanon more generally. There is a very good glossary at the back for Arab terms he uses frequently, and the whole book supports the unfamiliar reader better than many other books that I have read recently. He integrates travel description, history, political analysis and personal response in what he hopes is a ‘tapestry’ rather than a ‘tableau’ of landscape with figures.
This is a great book. I devoured it on the plane over to Cambodia, and finished it the next day. I can’t wait for the kids to read it- and you should too.
History ExtraImperial Spectacle: Inside Britain’s 1924 ‘Empire Exhibition’. In this episode Matthew Parker takes us to the Empire Exhibition at Wembley Park. The 200 acre site was ten times the size of the exhibition at the Crystal Palace in 1851, and it included the Wembley Stadium, which still stands. It was opened in April 1924 by King George V on radio, and he was heard by 10 million listeners worldwide. Held after World War I, it was an expression of gratitude for the Empire’s contribution to the war effort. Europe and the banking system was in tatters, and it was hoped that the Empire, at that time at its territorial height, could replace it. With the rise of fascism in Europe, the Exhibition tried to engage the working class, but there was a rather patronizing snobbery when describing the appeal of trashy exhibitions to them. Even then there seemed something rather old-fashioned about the Exhibition with its ‘living exhibits’ of exotic races. It closed in October 1924 but re-opened the following summer, running from May 1925 through to September.
7.00 a.m. White Australians of a progressive bent are challenged by Alice Springs. The footage from a few months back of young kids rioting and trying to break into heavily reinforced hotel doors was confronting, and the Country-Liberal Party’s recent election victory in the Northern Territory with an openly ‘tough on crime’ policy, knowing full well that it will fall mainly on indigenous kids, raises many reservations. Yorta Yorta journalist Daniel James has a three-part series on 7.00 a.m. Episode 1: This is Alice Springs: Children of the Intervention takes up back to the Howard government Intervention, which is widely blamed by First Nations people today for being the root cause of the problems today. Is it? I don’t know, but it’s repeated again and again here, and I have to take it at face value. Episode 2: This is Alice Springs: The Coppers Race relations and the futility and delay of looking to white systems of justice came to the fore with the police shooting of Warlpiri teenager Kumanjayi Walker. Zachary Rolfe was acquitted, and the coronial inquest continues at the end of November this year. Episode 3: This is Alice Springs: Mparntwe picks up after the Country-Liberal Party victory, when many people in Alice Springs are packing up and leaving town (I can’t help thinking that this is the purpose of the CLP policy). Daniel James interviews one of the locals who is staying to teach kids to be ringers on cattle stations ( and here I found myself thinking of Ann McGrath’s Born in the Cattle). But even this example is not quite what it seems. An interesting, thought-provoking series.
The Rest is History Ep. 450 Custer’s Last Stand: Death in the Black Hills (Part 5) Once again, I’ll use the podcast’s description of the episode: “In the wake of the barbaric Washita River massacre, George Custer found himself drifting; addicted to gambling, at odds with his wife, and failing in his efforts to take advantage of the American gold rush in New York. Finally, Custer was sent to Kentucky to suppress the terrible post war fighting there, but again found himself alienated from many of his companions by his controversial views on Reconstruction. Restless and dissatisfied, the chance for danger and action finally came Custer’s way, thanks to the ambitions of the Northern Pacific Railway. With plans to build it right across Lakota territory, the venture was intended to and would fatally threaten their way of life, by spelling the death of the bison. With this threat on the horizon, the mighty Lakota war leaders, Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse lead violent raids against the survey party sent to prospect the land, hampering and halting their efforts. So it was that in 1873 another expedition was sent, and with it went George Custer, bringing him into contact for the first time with the two mighty warriors who would shape his destiny. A fearful, bloody game of cat and mouse would ensue, culminating in an epic confrontation…” They point out that the Black Hills were considered “unceded Indian Territory”, a rather ambiguous status, but they were not traditional, sacred lands as we understanding Indigenous Country here in Australia. Rumours about gold finds also increased the population pressure.
First Saturday is Six Degrees Day, so once again I refer you to Kate’s page at BooksAreMyFavouriteandBest where she hosts this meme. It involves Kate choosing a starting book – in this case Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo and then you finding six other books that spring to mind. You can conceptually leap from one title to another, or you might have six books all joined thematically- it’s up to you.
I rarely have read the starting book, and this month is no exception. I haven’t read any Sally Rooney at all. So where to go? Well, ‘Intermezzo’ has a double z in it, and I’m rather fond of double-z because I have one in my surname. So… books with double z it is! The zz might be in the title, or in the author’s name.
Lizzie Siddal: The Tragedy of a Pre-Raphaelite Supermodel by Lucinda Hawksley. You’ve probably seen Lizzie Siddal because appears in many of the pre-Raphaelite paintings: thin, pale with long red hair. Working as a shop assistant in a hat shop, she was brought into the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a group of seven students who criticized the teaching of art in art schools, harking back to the rich colours and animated subject matter of Botticelli and other early Italian artists. She fell in love with Dante Rossetti, one of the original Brotherhood, but he had affairs with many other women and she became addicted to laudanum. This is a non-fiction book, written by historian Lucinda Hawsley, (Charles Dickens’ great great great grand-daughter), who often appears in British documentaries, especially about Victorian England. My review here.
The Nun of Monzaby Mario Mazzucchelli I read this back in 2001, so I can’t remember all that much about it. It’s popular history, and it tells the story of Sister Virginia de Leyva, a nun in a convent in Spanish-controlled Milan in the 17th century. She has an 11-year affair with Gian Paolo Osio, the local rake. The one thing that stays with me (as a claustrophobe) is the horror of being ‘walled up’ as punishment for the affair.
The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard. It’s only her double z that gets her onto this list, because I really didn’t think much of this book at all, even won the Miles Franklin and the National Book Award for Fiction in 2004, and was short-listed for the Orange Prize. It’s set in post WWII Asia, and it captures the stiffness of colonial pretension but it was wordy and complex and I didn’t like it one bit. You can read my review here (if I haven’t already put you off)
Harlem Nights: the Secret History of Australia’s Jazz Age by Deirdre O’Connell On the 19th January 1928, the SS Sierra drew into Circular Quay. On board were seventeen members of the Colored Idea, an all-black Jazz revue comprising dancers, comedians, vocalists and musicians. They were deported from Australia less than three months later. Harlem Nights is the story of the Sydney and Melbourne legs of the Colored Idea’s Australian tour, but it is much more than that. It is the story of the international rise of African-American jazz; White Australia ; anxieties over the rise of the ‘girl’; media and celebrity; right-wing politics, and police corruption. It’s written by an academic historian, and it’s much more than just the story of a tour. You can read my review here.
Martin Chuzzlewit by Charles Dickens Another read from 2001. This is typical Dickens, with its tangled plot, a perceptive and satirical social and political eye, wonderful memorable characters who have become the stuff of English language itself (Sairy Gamp; Pecksniff) and a happy ending extolling the virtues of goodness and families. It was laugh-out-loud funny in places, and he really does get stuck into America and Americans.
The Hiding Place by Tezza Azzopardi. Two z’s is good; four is better. I read this about twenty years ago too. Despite the author’s z-laden name, it is actually set in Wales and it’s reminiscent of Angela’s Ashes in its depiction of poverty and childhood unhappiness. It was a Booker Prize finalist.
I’m quietly relieved that it’s only six degrees of separation, because I had come to the end of my list of books with zz. I hope I haven’t zzzz-d you to sleep!
As my son could no doubt tell you, I have a bad habit of leaving journals and magazine unread and wrapped up in their plastic for months…well, years… but with the US election bearing down on us next week, I thought that I’d better read Don Watson’s most recent Quarterly Essay before it was completely out of date.
Don Watson has been writing about America for some time, and he wrote his Quarterly Essay 63 ‘The Enemy Within’ in 2016, deploring the prospect of a Trump victory the first time around. In fact, how ironic that Trump is using the phrase ‘The Enemy Within’ during this campaign to describe the people he will target after becoming president.
In this most recent Quarterly Essay he adopts a similar methodology to the one he used in his earlier essay, and in his book American Journeys where he travels to American cities to talk with voters of both Republican and Democratic persuasions. In Enemy Within he focussed on Wisconsin, and in this most recent iteration he focusses on Detroit and Kalamazoo. The essay is dated 23 August, and the narrative moves as events unfold, including the assassination attempt and Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the candidacy, opening the way for Kamala Harris. Just as in his earlier essay, he has nothing but contempt for Trump, but recognizes that people’s motivations for supporting him have to be at least acknowledged.
Could there possibly be anything left to say about Trump? Probably not, at this stage of the game although events continue to highlight some of the points that he makes in this essay, most of which have been also made by other people. Most particularly, he talks about Trump’s connection with wrestling:
Trump has turned Republican politics, and therefore much of American politics, into the wildly adversarial and addictive world of TV wrestling, an entertainment he used to make money and forge his public persona…TV wrestling involves a lot of boasting, posturing and abusing, as well as body slamming. The wrestlers are real, but not real…. Fans enter the world of TV wrestling as they enter any other fiction, knowing it’s make-believe but open to its seduction. They boo and hiss and shout, much as kids used to at Punch and Judy shows, much as we all do during elections. By making politics like TV wrestling, Trump created a fictional setting for his fictions. He can be as abusive and as untruthful as he likes. In a fictional world, to lie and keep on lying is a requirement…You can sound demented, might even be demented; the more demented you are the more you blend with the environment. (p. 4)
When I saw Trump at Madison Square, with the audience brandishing their signs behind him on cue, it certainly evoked a wrestling match. Not just the presence of Hulk Hogan on stage with him, but also the booing and braying of an audience looking for goodies and baddies and enjoying the ‘show’. Don Watson is not the only person to note the Trump/wrestling connection, but it certainly sprang to mind after reading his essay so recently.
It’s rather discouraging to think that by the time the next Quarterly Essay hits the shelves, with the correspondence responding to this essay, we’ll know the outcome. For better or worse.
Shell GameThis is a six-part series hosted by journalist Evan Ratliff, although you’re never really sure whether you’re listening to HIM or not. He created a voice clone using AI which pretty much sounds like him, except for the long pauses between utterances: something that I’m sure will be overcome in the future. He has great fun trying it out on cold-callers until he starts to feel a bit guilty, given that it’s someone’s job, so he then turns to scammers without any feelings of guilt. Ironically, the scammers are happy to play along because they’re just paid to keep people on the line. The rise of therapy-language (“thank you for reaching out” etc) makes it fairly easy to give the appearance of sincerity, and he tries it out with AI-generated therapists, and then with a ‘real’ therapist through Better Help. But even though he’s having fun with all this, even he draws the line with using his voice clone with his father who is battling cancer. Ironically, his father embraces the whole idea of a voice clone and embarks on some cloning of his own. Shell Game was named one of the the best podcasts of 2024 by New York Magazine, and it’s good.
In the Shadows of Utopia From Cambodge to Kampuchea I’m really enjoying this series, but the length of episodes is becoming ridiculous. This one went for 2 hrs and 45 minutes. It covers the period 1930 – 1945 and I learned just so much. After 75 years of French rule, there was little appetite in Cambodia to rebel against the French (unlike in Vietnam). In Vietnam Ho Chi Minh was part of Comintern, itself under Russian influence, but rather resentful that he was forced to call his party the Indo-Chinese Communist Party, even though there was virtually no activity anywhere other than Vietnam. Indo-China generally was affected by both the Japanese expansionism and the fall of the French government to become the Nazi-endorsed Vichy Government. In both Vichy France and in Cambodia itself, there was a harking back to the glories of the past: in France it was Joan of Arc, and in Cambodia it was Angkor. After yet another Thai/Cambodian war, where territory was lost once again, Japan stepped in and gave both Battambang and Siem Reap back to the Thai government (but not Angkor itself). In 1941 King Monivon lay dying at Bokor Hill Station (which I didn’t get round to seeing- but next time!), humiliated by the loss of his territory, and on his death, the French chose his grandson, Nordom Sihanouk to be King. He was only 19 years old and a bit of a playboy. Meanwhile, in 1936 the first Khmer-language newspaper started, edited by Son Ngoc Thanh. It increasingly took a pro-Japanese and anti-colonial line. In 1942 the French tried to impose the Gregorian calendar and a romanized alphabet (Oh! if only they had succeeded!!) and this led to strong resistance from the Monks. On 20 July 1942 the newspaper led a protest of perhaps 1000-2000 people, of whom about half were monks. The editor was arrested, along with 200 other people, including members of the Indo-Chinese community party. The editor Thanh escaped jail, but his letters reveal his naivete and lack of meaningful support for an uprising against the French, looking to Japan as the saviour of the “yellow nations”. The US bombed Phnom Penh as the war turned against the Japanese. In response, the Japanese began training local militias and they interned French officials (a bit of a surprise because these were Vichy French officials). Sihanouk declared independence at the request of the Japanese. Six weeks later, Thanh returned and was made foreign minister, and later Prime Minister after the defeat of the Japanese. There was strong distrust between Thanh and Sihanouk, and by now the French were talking about coming back. Thanh was arrested, and Sihanouk welcomed the French back. There was now a split between those nationalists who saw their future allied with Vietnam, and others who were keen to claim Khmer identity.
Meanwhile, in Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh declared Vietnamese independence. The Indo-Chinese Communist Party embedded itself within the peasantry, who were suffering from a Japanese-induced famine. The Viet Minh arose after a series of brutal repressions, and soon after the Japanese defeat, Ho Chi Minh declared independence from the Japanese, hoping that the Allies wouldn’t oppose it. But the French are coming back.
Phew- a lot there! While I was in Phnom Penh I saw where the director of the National Museum died at the hands of Japanese interrogators, and I just assumed that the Japanese had taken over as part of their sweep down through Asia. It had never occurred to me that Cambodia would welcome the Japanese, as a way of freeing themselves from the French.
As I remember, it was in about Grade 5 that we “did” Australian history – the first taste of ‘aborigines, explorers, gold and Eureka’- and we used a plastic template to draw Australia. Poor old Tasmania didn’t even get a look-in, but I was also disconcerted by the borders of Victoria, which started with off the solid line of the Murray River before trailing off into dotted lines, like the other state boundaries. Not that the dotted lines were any use: they were impossible to fit a pencil point into, anyway, but they did give a visual sense of state borders. (And emphasized the importance of water compared to boundaries, even though that water might disappear completely from time to time).
Australians are not unaware of surveyors in their history. Travelling around South Eastern Australia, one often encounters the ‘Major Mitchell Trail’, or markers of the trail of Hume and Hovell, more often described as ‘explorers’ but at early stages of Australia’s colonization, the distinction was perhaps less clear cut. Many Australians are aware of Goyder’s Line that separates arable from drought land in South Australia, and the final proclamation of the Black-Allan line in 2006, more than 130 years after it was surveyed, brought the names of surveyors Alexander Black and Alexander Allan to (somewhat) public notice. But I must confess that I had never heard of Thomas Scott Townsend, the subject of this biography, although his name was given to the second-highest mountain in Australia and Townsend Corner marks where that solid line dissolved onto dots on my plastic school template. The author of this book, Peter Crowley, felt that Townsend had been short-changed:
As far as I am aware, this is the first biography dedicated to Townsend, a man who was the pre-eminent field surveyor of the south-east during the squatter age…I felt for Townsend and his family and wanted to restore his memory to the place it deserved. His triumphs and his travails were of compelling human interest, a tale of suffering and sacrifice endured in service to the public, and they were always going to be the backbone of this narrative. (p.18)
Narratively, Crowley gets you in from the outset. He starts with a suicide in 1869, more than twenty years after most of the action in this story, when the reclusive and belligerent Townsend kills himself by cutting his own throat. What could have led to this “pre-eminent field surveyor” taking his own life?
Thomas Scott Townsend was born in England in 1812. He, along with his parents and 10 siblings, lived at Woodend House in Buckingham Shire. His older brother Joseph was apprenticed to a land surveyor and then began his own surveying business, and it was later noted by Major Thomas Mitchell, the explorer and Surveyor General of New South Wales that Thomas Townsend had been “bred in a surveyor’s office in England”. Thomas had arrived in NSW at the age of 17, and after being unable to find employment, was the recipient of a recommendation to the Surveyor-General from the MP for Oxfordshire, generated no doubt as part of the lobbying and patronage network which underpinned colonial mobility around the empire. He was initially appointed as a draftsman in a temporary capacity in 1831, but remained an employee of the survey department for over 20 years. Those same patronage networks, deployed to the advantage of other new arrivals, were to stall his progress up the career ladder when other aspirants were appointed over him on the basis of similar recommendations from ‘home’. He had to wait under 1845 to be promoted to the position of ‘surveyor’ and the highest position he reached was Acting Deputy Surveyor General of New South Wales.
In these twenty years he was appointed to various projects: laying out towns in Albury, Geelong, Eden; acting as Surveyor-in-Charge of the Port Phillip District; surveying coasts in Gippsland and the South Coast; ascertaining the source of the Murray River; and traversing the Main Range of the Snowy Mountains, making an ascent of the then-unnamed Mt Kosciuszko. Even though the Surveyor-General, Major (Sir) Thomas Mitchell, was able to inveigle long periods of leave for himself to return ‘home’, it seemed that each time the opportunity for a voyage or desired excursion arose, the government found Townsend indispensable and directed him to another suddenly-urgent project. Located far from Sydney and beyond the reach of official orders, he devised his own surveying activities as well, using the time when snow and floodwaters made surveying impossible to go back over areas that had been surveyed in haste earlier. He was ridden hard by the government, but he was a self-driven man as well : perhaps there is a streak of madness in all explorers and surveyors? He was not the first man to enter these areas – he found that squatters had preceded him nearly everywhere he went, following generations-old indigenous paths to find open pastures – but the methodical, documented act of surveying was a form of exploration in its own right.
Surveying involved long periods living in tents in the bush, unless the territory was so impenetrable that supplies had to be left with the oxen and horses so that the surveying party could move unencumbered, sleeping in the open at night – surely a daunting prospect in south-east Gippsland and in the Great Dividing Range. Surveyors used the ‘chain and compass’ method, using a Gunter’s chain to measure distance and taking bearings and angles with a compass. Sometimes they had access to a circumferentor, a compass mounted on a tripod with a sighting arm, or later a theodolite to measure angles. They recorded information in field books, from which they later plotted their data onto maps. At this stage they did not use contour lines, but instead depicted ridges, spurs and valleys by parallel lines known as hachures. Thus, those early maps look quite different to the contour maps we are accustomed to today, and certainly they have their own beauty.
Townsend was instructed to record the indigenous names for the geographical features he surveyed, even though those other names were later overlaid by British names awarded as an act of homage to patrons at ‘home’. Crowley emphasizes throughout the presence of indigenous clans and nations across the whole area that Townsend surveyed. Indigenous guides could easily be procured from squatting stations, and Charley Tarra (or Tara) was a member of several surveying parties. Crowley notes the massacres associated with various squatters, although he does not interrogate the role of the surveyor in a political and legal sense. Certainly guns and violence led to appropriation of the land on-the-spot by the squatters, but it was the legal act of survey and resultant gazetting that imposed British title and sovereignty over Aboriginal land.
Townsend’s work was directly impacted by colonial politics. When he first arrived, the NSW government had already lost control of the squatters outside the Nineteen Counties, and pastoralists were moving into the Port Phillip district from across Bass Strait. When he arrived in Port Phillip as Surveyor-in-Charge, there was already a large backlog of work awaiting him, which only increased further with the influx of population during the gold rush. With the cessation of transportation, the source of cheap surveying teams dried up, and it became difficult to find men prepared to face the isolation and sheer hard work of the task. Squatting regulations introduced a degree of urgency into surveying work, with the imperative to mark out town reservations close to water supplies, to avoid them being swallowed up into large estates. Separation in 1851 brought politics into surveying, with suggestions of a border on the Murrumbidgee which would have placed the Riverina and the later Canberra district within Victoria. Townsend had his own opinion about where the boundary should be, suggesting that instead of rivers being used (which can, after all, expand and shrink depending on climate), mountain ridges and port access should guide the decision.
Crowley depicts well the arduousness of surveying work. It seems that Townsend suffered more from the heat of surveying the Murrumbidgee than he did the snowdrifts and dankness of the south-east. Men could get lost just when stopping aside to relieve themselves; sometimes ticket-of-leave and convict team members were unruly or absconded; and the sad death of Major Mitchell’s son 18 year old son Murray, who accompanied Townsend on his survey of the lower Snowy River, highlighted the isolation and dearth of medical assistance out on the field.
The isolation, the incessant work and the rootlessness of surveying work over such a long period of work did not augur well for a desk-bound job in Sydney once Townsend finally achieved the promotion he craved. In fact, he was quite clear with the governor that he felt that he still needed to be in the field to ensure the accuracy of the surveys conducted by men under his supervision. He married, but seemed unsettled and increasingly paranoid about his wife’s fidelity and sure that he was being ‘watched’. Many people were concerned about him, and felt that a trip back ‘home’, which had been postponed for so many years might alleviate his mental distress. This was not to be… and here we are back at the start of the story, with Townsend’s suicide. I had felt at the start of the book that Crowley had laboured the ‘ignored hero’ point a bit, but by the end, I no longer felt that way. Townsend has been overlooked. Strezlecki has garnered most of the praise for his exploration of the Great Dividing Range, and Alexanders Black and Allen received acknowledgement for tracing the Murray River that Townsend had surveyed twenty years earlier.
Crowley tells the story well, interweaving the biographical with the historical. He draws on official correspondence between Townsend and his colleagues and superiors, Colonial Office files with and about Townsend (which reflect the usual aggrieved tone of correspondents and pompous tone of Colonial Office officials), Townsend’s maps and drawings, and in quite a coup, family correspondence that fills in the last years of Townsend’s life. At times, particularly at the start of the book, I felt that he was distracted by the weeds a bit, giving more context and background information than was necessary. The book does not have an index, which would have been appreciated, but the old fashioned chapter summaries at the start of each chapter helped you to locate information. There was a single list of footnotes that spanned across all chapters. The book did seem to take an inordinately long time to get started, with a note about measurements, geographical notes about what constituted the Great Dividing Range, or the Murray River, a cast of characters, a timeline, acknowledgments and an introduction- all before we get to chapter one. Much of this could have gone at the end of the book.
The one thing that I cannot understand, however, is the dearth of clear, modern maps in this book. With the National Library of Australia as publisher, use of historic maps and documents is to be expected but they were virtually illegible once reduced in size and rendered into grayscale. For much of the book I had no idea where Townsend was or where he was going and no sense of distance or remoteness. This was a book that cried out for a visual representation of land: something to which Townsend devoted his whole life.
But these are quibbles about decisions that may well have been beyond the author’s control. Crowley captures well the incessant demands of the work, the beauty and intimidation of the lands he was surveying, and Townsend’s inexorable spiral into mania. It is both a very human story, and yet one placed within the vastness of unsurveyed territory. Townsend may have had to have wait more than 150 years for his biographer, but with Crowley’s book he receives the recognition earned and withheld for so many years.
Sourced from: review copy from Scott Eathorne, Quickmark Media
I was in Cambodia, and I wanted to read something Cambodian, but most of the fiction involved the Khmer Rouge period written by people who have escaped to Western countries. This book falls into this category too, although it is slightly different in that the narrator, Mae Bunseng Taing, is of Chinese ethnicity, living in Cambodia. I was interested to know what difference that would make. Unusually, all of Mae’s siblings survived, which is not true of many Cambodian families.
Mae was a teenager and living a fairly affluent life with his entrepreneurial family when the Khmer Rouge marched into Phnom Penh. As with other stories I have read, there was the utter bewilderment as Phnom Penh was completely emptied of people, urged (forced) to leave on the pretext that the Americans would bomb the city. He and his family were forced into the provinces to undertake agricultural work- a far cry from their trading activities in Phnom Penh previously. The family was split up as siblings were sent to different agricultural projects and communities, while his elderly and ill father was left behind in a village. They had secreted away some jewellery, so they were not completely penniless, but under the surveillance of soldiers and ‘Angkar’ operatives, they were only safe if they could merge in amongst other people. The book gives a good glimpse into the ideology that the Khmer Rouge were imposing on their countrymen, who were reduced to a form of slavery.
He finally decided to escape into the jungle, and survived several heart-stopping confrontations. With the defeat of the Khmer Rouge, he decided to cross back over into Thailand and look for his family amongst the refugee camps there. But there had been a change in Thai government policy, and now refugees were being returned to Cambodia, taken into the jungle, and left to find their own way through the explosive-laced jungles at Preah Vihear. It was an inhumane form of mine-clearing, using desperate refugees who were left screaming alone in the jungles, limbs missing, after standing on mines. Mae was, in many ways, in more danger now than he had been under the Khmer Rouge.
This, then, was a second form of Killing Fields. I found myself feeling ashamed at the kindness and the prejudice and indifference that these refugees faced, all too aware that our refugee policy some fifty years later has elements of both. The story was written down by Mae’s son James, who makes an unheralded and abrupt appearance during the narrative, and clearly Mae found his way to a Western country to start a new life.
There is a film by James Taing that you can see on You Tube here. (If you can stand the incongruent ads)
I’ve read Big House mysteries; I’ve read Outback Solitary Aussie Bloke mysteries; I’ve read London-based mysteries. But I don’t think that I’ve ever read an Upper Canada mystery before, especially one set in 1867 which is relatively familiar territory for me because my Judge Willis (the real Resident Judge of this blog) served there in the late 1820s. It is rather strange -and rather amazing, given how vividly she writes- that the author Stef Penney has never visited Canada. The snow and isolation and colonial machinations that she describes in this book all spring from her desk research alone.
Set in the last days of the fur trade, Mrs Ross, a local resident, discovers a brutal murder in the small hut occupied by Laurent Jammet, a French trapper. Suspicion falls on her adopted 17 year-old son, Francis, who was friends with the trapper, and his disappearance from the village only heightens speculation that he is the killer. Donald Moody, an accountant with the Hudson Bay Company, is sent out to investigate the murder, along with Mackinley, the sarcastic and bullying Company Factor from Fort Edgar. They are accompanied by Jacob, Moody’s self-appointed native American protector. They arrest half-Indian William Parker, who was apprehended searching Jammet’s hut after the murder. After Parker is ‘roughed up’ by Mackinley and Scott, the wealthy storekeeper in whose shed Parker is confined, Parker and Mrs Ross go off in search of Francis. There is someone else who is eager to search Jammet’s hut as well: Thomas Sturrock, who believes that a bone tablet which may be of archeological significance is in Jammet’s possession. He has been to the small settlement of Dove River before, having been there years earlier in search of the twon local Seton girls, who disappeared in the forest, never to be found.
And so, we have various people all heading off into the frozen wastes: Francis in search of the man he thinks is the murderer; followed by Mrs Ross and William Parker who are in search of Francis; and then Mackinley and the love-sick Moody who are in search of William Parker. The only nearby settlement is a Lutheran Norwegian community in Himmelvanger, and they take in all of these groups as they stumble in from the snow and icy marshland. Attention then turns to the nearby Hanover House, the company Trading Post, administered by James Stewart. As in the best Mystery Novel tradition, there are many red-herrings and subplots.
The book starts with Mrs Ross’ first person account, and it alternates with other present-tense chapters told by an omnipotent writer, who knows all the characters’ thoughts and backstories. There are rather a lot of characters, and because the book is written in very short chapters without chapter numbers, I found myself getting a bit lost with all the Mr. This and Mr. Thats.
I’m rather mystified by the title, though. There are certainly wolves in this story, surrounding the various groups as they trudge through the snow, and the colonists are all frightened of them. They keep their distance though, and the closest they come is when they sniff around one of the tents at night, breathing over the sleepers and leaving paw-prints. The wolves are certainly less violent than the trappers.
Most impressive of all, though, is Penney’s depiction of the bitter cold and isolation. The landscape, along with the short chapters, makes it a very filmic novel and I wasn’t surprised to find out that she is, in fact, a screenwriter. The book won a Costa Book of the Year in 2007
Emperors of Rome PodcastEpisode CCXXVII – The Catiline Comparison (The Catiline Conspiracy VIII) Matt and Rhiannon have studiously avoided making comparisons between Catiline and Donald Trump, but in this episode they give in to the obvious temptation. They are joined by Professor Nick Bisley (Dean of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, La Trobe University)- keeping it in the La Trobe family! They agree that there are surface similarities: a rich guy pretending to be a saviour of the poor; a macho male harking back to a golden age, and refusal to accept the results of an election. But there are so many differences too, and there is a limit to how far the parallels reach.
The Rest is HistoryCuster vs Crazy Horse: Rise of Sitting Bull (Part 4) From Tom and Dominic’s summary (better than I could ever do) “Following the bloody Fetterman Fight, which saw the Lakota warlord Crazy Horse and his warriors ambush and massacre American troops, the American public was left stunned, its government and civilian population hungry for revenge. In the wake of this a new treaty was signed, further restricting the Lakota Sioux’s freedoms, but nevertheless signed by their political leader, Red Cloud. Still, many would not be constrained to reservations, and instead sought war. Chief amongst them was Sitting Bull, a legendary, mythologised figure of the Great American Plains and the Wild West – the embodiment of a vanished age. Born into the Lakota Sioux, and a world of shifting allegiances, violent initiation rituals, and intransigent spiritualities, as a young man Sitting Bull’s herculean destiny was sung to him by an eagle. The career that followed in his war against the U.S. government would exceed even the greatest of epics. By 1860 he was paramount leader of the Sioux Nation, when news reached him of the imminent arrival of a survey party, lead by none other than George Armstrong Custer…”
History Extra: Communism: everything you wanted to know. I’ve been getting a really good analysis of communism in its different manifestations in my Shadows of Utopia podcasts, but I thought that I’d listen to this as well. It features Danny Bird, Staff Writer at BBC History Magazine. He points out that Communism is a point in time, reached by different ideologies. It was Lenin who introduced the idea of a ‘vanguard’, and between 1919 and 1943 Comintern with its branches in different countries had a world-wide revolutionary purpose. Just as each communism is different, so too each anti-communism is different too. Stalinism was a product of Stalin’s own paranoia, but as the only successful Communist party at the time, it dominated and dictated Comintern. In a way, the Spanish Civil War operated as a release valve for Communists who were becoming uneasy about Stalin’s communism.
The Turbulent World with James M. Dorsey. I heard James M. Dorsey being interviewed somewhere (Global Roaming, perhaps?) and I thought that he sounded interesting. He is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, co-director of the University of Würzburg’s Institute for Fan Culture, and co-host of the New Books in Middle Eastern Studies podcast. His podcast is mainly about Middle East affairs. His podcasts are of varying lengths, and they’re interesting. Israel’s Reputational Self-Immolation was just one of the podcasts that I listened to here.
Well, Marx and Engels died without ever seeing Communism in practice. Everybody thought that, if there was to be a revolution, then it would be in industrialized Germany, which was just hanging on in the war. But canny Germany sent all the Communists off to Russia instead (hence the fantastic book To the Finland Station) hoping that they would destabilize Russia instead. After all, 1905 had been a dress-rehearsal for revolution, and now in 1917 there were two October revolutions (old calendar). The first was the revolt that led to the Tsar’s abdication and the second was the call for Peace, Land and Bread. Lenin took charge on October 5 and stormed the Winter Palace. Lachlan suggests the metaphor of nuclear energy: it was as if Marx and Engels split the atom, but as if Lenin drew up plans for the nuclear power plant.
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 