The Resident Judge of Port Phillip

History Extra The Bloomsbury Group: everything you wanted to know. Good heavens, this was released in January! The Bloomsbury Group started as an ‘at home’ at 46 Gordon Square Bloomsbury, amongst people who wanted to live differently. Vanessa (Bell) and Virginia (Woolf) Stephen were at the heart of it. They then moved to Kensington, and young men from Cambridge would come for cocoa after 10.00 p.m. The group included Lytton Strachey, Toby Stephen, Duncan Grant (with the beautiful voice, who nearly everyone was in love with at some stage), J. Maynard Keynes, Clive Bell, Saxon Sydney-Turner, Roger Fry. Leonard Woolf differed from the rest in that he did not come from a privileged background. The group moved from the sitting room into public debate, although they did not share a unified political position. There were all sorts of triangles, especially revolving around the homosexual Duncan Grant, who nonetheless had a child with Vanessa Bell. The group, most definitely an elite, nonetheless moved into the centre of English life in the fields of economics, literature and art.

You’re Dead to Me (BBC) Simón Bolívar I’ve been interested in Simón Bolívar for some time, and so I was interested in this rather irreverent podcast featuring Dr Francisco Eissa-Barroso and comedian Katie Green, who really knew more about Latin American history than she let on. Simón Bolívar, or ‘The Liberator’ as he was known, was responsible for the overthrowing of Spanish colonialism in six countries, but he himself distrusted democracy. He was born in Venezuela to a very rich plantation-owning family. In 1799 he joined the militia, went to Madrid and married a woman who died of yellow fever soon after they returned to Venezuela. He visited post-Revolutionary Paris where he was both impressed and repelled by Napoleon, and he committed himself to independence from Spain. His first attempt was when Caracas declared itself independent from Spain in an attempt to avoid being taken over by Napoleonic France. Along with Miranda, who he had met in exile in London, he headed a rebellion, but an ill-timed earthquake seemed to be God’s punishment and the rebellion collapsed, Miranda fled and Bolívar was captured. His second attempt was a three month campaign, marked by atrocities on both sides, but after making himself dictator (in the Roman sense of a dictator for emergency times), he was overthrown in a counter-revolution. He was almost killed by an assassin, but the assassin killed the wrong man. and Bolívar then decided on a third attempt, planning to attack New Granada instead and invade Caracas from there. He was successful, and Peru and Bolivia became independent nations too. He drafted the Bolivian Constitution, which had some liberal elements but some pretty illiberal ones too- like being able to name his successor. He met Manuela, whom he loved but did not marry because he had sworn not to remarry after the death of his first wife. Manuela saved him from a second assassination attempt. But by 1830 everything was falling apart, the various nations seceded and went their own way, and he died. Nonetheless, he has been used as a unifying political myth, especially by Chavez.

The Rest is History Luther: The Man Who Changed the World (Part I) is the first of a five part series. Obviously Tom and Dominic are becoming fans of the long-form podcast over several episodes. But let’s face it: Luther did shake things up. But would there have been a Reformation even if there were no Martin Luther? Luther himself was born in an outpost of religious thought, the son of a pugilistic, upwardly-mobile ex-miner from a smelting plant. Martin was the pious, educated eldest son growing up in apocalyptic times, with Islam on the march. He was a brilliant student, but there was nothing to suggest the influence he would have later on. The First Reformation had occurred in the 11th century when the medieval church divided the world into two realms: the early and the Church. The clergy became professional Christians, Latin was introduced into the mass, and the scheme of indulgences was established. Huss, a precursor to Luther, had proclaimed that the Bible was the ultimate source of authority, and ended up arrested and burned in 1414.

Usually on the second Saturday of every month, I go to the cinema with my Unitarian Universalist fellowship. But this month, there weren’t any movies that seemed appealing showing at the right time, so I decided to go to a concert where one of my Unitarian friends and her husband were singing. The group is called ‘All of Us’, conducted by Stephen Sharpe and they were excellent.

The program ‘Homegrown’ reflected the fact that all of the pieces that they performed were written either by locals, choir members or friends. People are just so talented: I’m in awe of them. There were two beautiful, and complementary songs about war. In the first, ‘One of Us’ conductor Stephen Sharpe took Paul Keating and Don Watson’s words at the funeral service for the Unknown Soldier . The second, with words and music by Bruce Watson, was called ‘The War Without a Name’ and it marked the loss of life in the Frontier Wars that it has taken us so long to recognize as a war, instead of anodyne phrases like ‘dispersal’ and ‘clearing the area’. There was a song that paid tribute to the joy of owning 72 Derwent pencils as a child (I only ever had 36), and another that captured so well the ‘Ennui’ of lockdown. Bruce Watson’s other song ‘Love is’ took the words of Corinthians 13, and it was beautifully rendered by the choristers each taking a stanza in turn. The concert was beautifully accompanied by cello, violin, guitar and piano.

The concert was held at Montsalvat, the artists’ colony out at Eltham, and it felt very special to have all the composers either up there performing on the stage, or else in the audience. It was really good- and even better knowing that it was so local. What riches our community holds!

History Listen (ABC) Section 71 The Hindmarsh Island Bridge Affair Part 2 Times changed. Robert Tickner lost his seat in the 1996 election, and John Howard was now Prime Minister, voted in promising “bucketloads of extinguishment” of Native Title. In December 1996 the Hindmarsh Island Bridge Bill before Parliament specifically ruled out Doreen Kartinyeri’s cultural heritage challenge to the Hindmarsh Island Bridge proposal. The May 1998 case before the High Court challenged the power of the Federal Government to make laws using the ‘race powers’ of the Constitution against Aboriginal People. Kartinyeri’s case was not successful, with a 5-1 judgment against her. The developers of the bridge, the Chapmans, claimed $20 million compensation, and it went back to court. This time, in 2001, Justice John von Doussa of the Federal Court rejected the claims for malfeasance and was not satisfied that the restricted women’s knowledge was fabricated or that it was not part of genuine Aboriginal tradition. Since then, the panic among miners and pastoralists over Native Title has abated (although not gone away completely). In 2002 bones were found on Hindmarsh Island and a formal apology was issued by the local Alexandrina council. The bridge is still there.

Emperors of Rome Episode CIX Saturnalia. In Roman mythology, Saturn was the father of Jupiter, and he ceded his power to him. Saturnalia marked the end of the sowing time, before winter set in and was celebrated around 17 December, but the length of the celebration varied. Nonetheless, it was the longest festival that the Romans celebrated. It’s hard to tell exactly what they did as part of the celebrations. Fifth century sources tell us that there was a sacrifice at the Temple of Saturn, but other than that, it’s hard to work out. There may have been an element of topsy-turviness, with masters serving their servants- or maybe not.

History Hack and Little Atoms. I have just finished reading Sarah Churchwell’s The Wrath to Come (my review here) and so I though that I’d listen to a couple of podcasts interviews with the author. In the The History Hack podcast the author points out that Mitchell’s grandmother had seen the burning of Atlanta, and that Mitchell grew up with these stories, supplemented by a reading diet of plantation romances. GWTW is the ultimate rich-poor-rich again Cinderella story valorizing survival and resilience, with a strong female anti-hero. The Little Atoms episode covered much of the same territory, and she explains about the Lost Cause, and emphasizes that the book and the film is revisionist history.

Three Million BBC Episode 3: The F-word What really struck me about this episode is how closely it reflects what is going on in Gaza today. As with the Israeli/Western governments today, there was a real squeamishness about the word ‘famine’, and the British Government was using its wartime censorship powers to censor the letters passing between Indian soldiers and their families. In the end, even the British censor (based in India) felt very uncomfortable about the suppression of knowledge of the famine. Aware that the optics of people dying in the streets of Calcutta could be used for propaganda purposes by the Germans and Japanese, the Bengal Vagrancy Act was passed in July 1943 to get the bodies off the street. Stevens, a British journalist and editor of the English language Statesman newspaper in Calcutta, knew that any text would be censored, but he realized that there was a loophole which would allow photographs to escape censorship. So he sent out a team of photographers, and the following week was emboldened to write an editorial condemning the lack of action. By October, it was being raised in Parliament, and the BBC was drawn into conflict with the government over the “India Food Question” (they still couldn’t say ‘famine’). Then a book called ‘Hungry Bengal’ was published which showed sketches of starving Indians. Of course, it was banned, but there is one copy in the British Library and here a starving man actually gets a name. Three million didn’t.

Things Fell Apart Episode 7 You’ll Own Nothing and You’ll Be Happy The theory of ‘The Great Reset’ which has been protested by people caught up in the sovereign citizen movement was centred on the idea that the World Economic Forum had plans for a radical reordering of society, expunging private property and restricting people’s movement to a small geographical area. It drew on several individually innocuous proposals: a suggestion of bus lanes; a business of ‘sleep pods’, and especially a thought experiment piece presented to the World Economic Forum speculating on the implications of products being turned into services (I guess, in the way that DVDs and CDs which we used to own are now streaming services). These ideas became weaponized, and their proponents demonized in a way that they never anticipated.

I’m trying to resist the temptation to think that this book was written to order: ” This’ll attract sales -how about a book about aging women that book groups can discuss!?” It certainly felt as if it were aimed at an educated, older female audience of readers. Aging, women’s friendships, betrayal… all set in a beachside setting over the Christmas weekend on the central coast of NSW.

Jude, Wendy and Adele, all in their seventies, have been going to Silvie’s beachside house for Christmas for years, and they head there again. But this time it is different: Silvie has died, and they have come to clean out the house for sale. The 1970s house has seen better days despite its ocean views, with its creaking inclinator (i.e. lift) obviating the need to scramble up the steep cliffside driveway, and it is full of the greasy, musty, scurf and accumulated detritus of a long residence. Jude, successful restaurant manager, has arrived to work; widowed public intellectual Wendy has brought her sick, old, mangy dog Finn, and washed-up actress Adele has come as an escape from her female partner who has been quite insistent that their relationship is at an end. They are all well aware that this phase of their life and friendship has come to an end.

They have been friends for over forty years, and I guess that in that time you could accumulate a long list of slights and peeves. They are judgmental of each other and hold secrets and deceptions from each other. Jude is the long-term mistress of the married Daniel, with whom she spends a week a year at the beach-house after the other women have gone home. Rather implausibly, these long-term friends have never met Daniel, although they are aware of his existence. Wendy is in the final stages of her academic career, but she feels that she still has one final book in her. She had two children, now adults, with her husband Lance, and after his death her friend Sylvie brought her the puppy Finn, who by now is a blind, deaf, incontinent and confused dog, who should have been put down long before. Adele has not worked for some time, but still dresses in skin-tight tops to reveal her cleavage and takes pride in her athleticism. However, years of sporadic theatre work have left her financially distressed and she has not worked in a long time, even though some other actresses her age have continued to do so.

The story is set over just a couple of days, and it felt rather like a play. I read this immediately after reading Demon Copperhead, which was such an exhilarating experience that this felt particularly jejune in comparison. It was a particularly ‘interior’ book, with lots of backstory and cogitation, revolving around relationships and choices and responses to aging and loss. She did capture the setting well: I could ‘see’ the house, and even the characters, in my mind’s eye, and there was a veracity in the complexity and ambivalence in their relationship together. I was surprised that Wood herself is ‘only’ 58 because she wrote well about aging women’s bodies and the indignities that they subject us to. But I can’t help feeling that she was writing to a particular audience- me- and perhaps the stereotypes she held up were just a little bit too close to home.

My rating: 7/10

Read because: CAE bookgroup