I am appalled that it is April already, and as it’s the first Saturday it’s time for Six Degrees of Separation Day. This meme, hosted by Kate at BooksAreMyFavouriteandBest involves starting off with one title, then linking six other books as they spring to mind. Kate usually chooses the starting book, but this month we were invited to start with “a travel book”.
Well, as it turns out, I have just this week returned from travel, having visited my son and his family in Cambodia. This has been my second trip there, and I enjoyed reading Norman Lewis’ book A Dragon Apparent: Travels in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam (my review here). It was written in 1951 and in parts is racist and stereotyping. So why would I want to read it? Mainly for its descriptions of landscape, the feeling of menace as he aligns himself with the French in an increasingly hostile environment, and the elegiac nostalgia for a lost time and lost culture, given all that was about to happen to these three countries in the following thirty years.
Graham Greene once said that Norman Lewis “is one of the best writers, not of any particular decade, but of our century”. High praise indeed. It is said that Lewis’ book inspired Greene to travel to Vietnam to write The Quiet American which I read before I started blogging. Both books share a reserved, observational tone.
The Quiet American in Greene’s book was Alden Pyle, a CIA agent, posted to Vietnam during the Cold War. Here in Australia we had our own secret agents and Cold War conspiracies, and these are fictionalized in Andrew Croome’s Document Z(my review here).
The unfictionalized version is explored in Robert Manne’s The Petrov Affair (again, read before I started blogging). I can’t imagine that anyone could add any more to Manne’s account.
The Petrov Affair fed right into Robert Menzies’ unexpected victory over the Labor Party at the 1954 election. Judith Brett’s Menzies’ Forgotten People describes Menzies’ capture of the ‘middling type’ in Australia through his radio broadcasts and projection of a fatherly-type of Prime Minister that John Howard worked hard to emulate. I would hope that we’ve grown up enough not to need Daddy anymore.
‘Doc’ Evatt was leader of the Opposition Labor Party in 1954, and he appeared as attorney for his staff members when the Petrov Affair culminated in the Royal Commission on Espionage . Gideon Haigh’s The Brilliant Boy explores Evatt’s career as historian, attorney, politician, Chief Justice and President of the UN General Assembly (my review here).
A later Governor-General who immersed himself in Evatt’s historical writing was Sir John Kerr, whose career has been criticized strongly by Jenny Hocking in The Dismissal Dossier (my review here). Hocking has been pursuing the correspondence between Kerr and the Palace for many years – the historian as heroine!
I seem to have immersed myself in politics here, which seems an odd tangent from a travel book!
Any travel book written in 1951 will have aged, and this book is no exception. Indeed, the author Norman Lewis was well-aware that he was writing in the midst of history, noting in his preface that the stalemate in Indo-China had broken after four years, and that as the proofs of his book were being corrected in January 1951, the Viet-Minh were closing in on Hanoi.
It seems certain that before the book appears further important changes will have taken place.
He wasn’t wrong. One of the poignancies of this book is our knowledge, seventy years on, that the world he describes here was about to be obliterated. In the preface to the 1982 version of his book, Lewis writes:
…the greatest holocaust ever to be visited on the East…consumed not only the present, but the past; an obliteration of cultures and values as much as physical things. From the ashes that remained no phoenix would ever rise. Not enough survive even to recreate the memory of what the world had lost.
1982 preface
This meandering book is the story of Lewis’ travels through Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. By 1951, France had offered independence to its former colonies, but although nominally independent, France still controlled foreign policy, and the French army was stationed throughout. Lewis was not there under the aegis of any press company, and after consulting with the French authorities, he was reliant on their goodwill to enable him to hitch rides under French protection across the three countries. The French Army at the time was at war with the Viet Minh, and so his whole narrative is permeated by a sense of oppression and coercion.
As a British writer, he has internalized much of the colonizers’ racism that sees people as a certain ‘type’. He spends considerable time with different tribes, the Mois, the Meos and the Rhades,distinguishing them from other tribal groups, and there is an elegiac sense that these groups will not survive. He is particularly critical of missionaries and their blithe confidence that they are doing good, and he castigates the planters and their cosy relationship with the French occupiers.
He is reliant on the army to get him from one place to another and he speaks only French and English. There is a lot of waiting around, angling for his next ride. As a result, he interacts mainly with French administrators and residents and those local officials that the French government have been willing to leave in place. He gains access to high places, but always with the permission and imprimatur of the French colonizers. It was almost with surprise that he found a young Cambodian boy who could speak “passable” French, which enabled him to understand more of a local dance performance than he would otherwise. It was only in the last chapter that he gains access to the Viet Minh, through the agency of Dinh, who he met in a doctor’s waiting room. Here he witnesses the influence of China and the Soviet Union in supporting the independence struggle against the French.
It is very much a book of its time in its Eurocentric classifications and descriptions of people and groups. For example, here’s his description of Dinh, his contact with the Viet Minh:
He introduced himself as Dinh- an assumed name, he assured me with a wry smile. I was interested to notice, in support of a theory I was beginning to form, that for a Vietnamese he was very ‘unmongolian’ in appearnce. He was thin-lipped and cadaverous and there was an unusual narrowness across the cheekbones. If not a Frenchman he could certainly have passed for a Slav. There had been many Caucasian characteristics about the other Vietnamese intellectually and revolutionaries I had met, and I was wondering whether whatever physical mutation it was that produced this decrease in mongolian peculiarities encouraged at the same time the emergence of certain well-known Western traits, such as a restless aggressiveness, an impatience with mere contemplation, and a taste for action.
Ch. 20
So what was the appeal for me in reading this racist, 70 year old text? For me, it was his descriptions of landscape. Take, for example, his description of Ta Phrom temple in Siem Reap:
Ta Prohm is an arrested cataclysm. In its invasion, the forest has not broken through it, but poured over the top, and the many courtyards have become cavities and holes in the forest’s false bottom. In places the cloisters are quite dark, where the windows have been covered with subsidences of earth, humus and trees. Otherwise they are illuminated with an aquarium light, filtered through screens of roots and green lianas.
Entering the courtyards, one comes into a new kind of vegetable world; not the one of branches and leaves with which one is familiar, but that of roots. Ta Prohm is an exhibition of the mysterious subterranean life of plants, of which it offers an infinite variety of cross-sections. Huge trees have seeded themselves on the roots of the squat towers and their soaring trunks are obscured from sight; but here one can study in comfort the drama of those secret and conspiratorial activities that labour to support their titanic growth.
Down, then, come the roots, pale, swelling and muscular. There is a grossness in the sight; a recollection of sagging ropes of lava, a parody of the bulging limbs of circus freaks, shamefully revealed. The approach is exploratory. The roots follow the outlines of the masonry; duplicating pilasters and pillars; never seeking to bridge a gap and always preserving a smooth living contact with the stone surfaces; burlesquing in their ropy bulk the architectural [motifs] which they cover. It is only long after the hold has been secured that the deadly wrestling bout begins. As the roots swell their grip contracts. Whole blocks of masonry are torn out, and brandished in mid-air. A section of wall is cracked, disjoint/ed and held in suspension like a gibbeted corpse; prevented by the roots’ embrace from disintegration. There are roots which appear suddenly, bursting through the flagstones to wander twenty yards like huge boa constrictors, before plunging through the upended stones to earth again.
Ch. 15
Absolutely brilliant writing. I found myself rethinking my perceptions -“grossness”- yes, that was the unease that I felt while I was there. Even though many of the villages and landscapes he describes may have disappeared, there is enough remaining that you think “Ah, yes, that’s how it was!” Although I’m not a great aficionado of travel narratives, I think that this is what good travel writing does best: it puts on paper something that you felt, or detected, and it captures it, just right, in words that you wish you thought of yourself.
If nothing else, having to prepare talks for my Unitarian fellowship makes me read things I might not have read otherwise. On Doubt, by journalist Leigh Sales is part of the ‘On…’ series published by Hachette, and like the other books in the series, it is only short: in this case only 128 pages.
As a journalist, Sales has had plenty of experience with politicians who come onto her program, pumped up full of talking points and bombast. Her exploration of ‘doubt’ is largely through a political lens, but in Part I she starts by talking personally about her own curiosity and rebelliousness as a child. She rarely accepted anything as a given, and although converting to evangelical Christianity as a teenager, she soon rejected the ‘truths’ of religion that had to be accepted on faith, as well.
In Part 2 she turns to politics, struck by the certainty of Sarah Palin who boasted that she “didn’t blink” when asked to be George W. Bush’s vice president, despite her complete lack of experience. She notes that much of our media today is comprised of commentary rather than research or reporting, marked by point-scoring and moral certitude. This is most manifest in the US television that we receive here in Australia but she reports a similar unedifying spectacle between Gerard Henderson from the Sydney Institute and Robert Manne, who often writes for the Schwartz stable of publications. In the part of the book that was most useful to me, she quotes Pierre Abelard from the 11th century who wrote that the path to truth lies in the systematic application of doubt, and that those who have sought the truth begin from a premise of doubt, not certainty.
However, the expression of self-doubt is not seen as a virtue in politics. She was stunned when former Treasurer Wayne Swan revealed that he (and he assumed, most other people) had times of self-doubt. She compares this with George W. Bush who relied on his gut-feelings, bolstered by his religious faith, to the extent that even the people who surrounded him became uneasy. She talks about gut-feeling, citing Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink which asserts that people who are expert in their field (and that’s probably a very important qualification) use ‘thin slicing’ to instantly identify patterns in current situations, enabling them to make decision in the blink of an eye. But she also recognizes ‘the yips’ that assail someone who is very competent when they start to overthink something that they are already expert in- like playing the piano (for her maybe! Oh, to be good enough to get the yips!)
In Part IV she talk about people like her father, who leave nothing to chance, citing his mantra “Preparation and planning prevent piss-poor performance”. While bridling against the certainty and inflexibility that this approach guarantees, she observes that her own “what if” thinking, shot through with doubt, can lead to anxiety and a lack of all-consuming passion.
She finishes off in Part V with a post-script written in 2017, eight years after the original book. In those eight years, she suggests, we have become accustomed to distortion through social media, and we accept with equanimity the shrugs of corporate bosses and the misrepresentations of politicians. While refusing to divulge her own political leanings, she decries the idea of ‘balance’ which gives equal time to both sides.
As you can see, this book is a bit of a grab-bag of observations, not all of which are closely tied to the theme of ‘doubt’. It could almost do with another post-script, given the rise of deep fakes and AI which frighten me for the way that they undercut even what we have seen (or think we have seen). However, it’s an easy enough read- not unlike a long-form article that remains at a largely surface level and with its main interest in the political realm.
My rating: 6.5/10
Sourced from: borrowed e-book from Yarra Plenty Regional Library.
Emperors of RomeEpisode CV Spartacus the Gladiator. Did you know that I have never watched ‘Spartacus’? He led a rebellion in 73BCE and it took three years for the republic to finally crush it. At first the Romans just saw it as a petty rebellion, but over time they realized that they had to take it more seriously. There had been previous slave wars in Sicily on the large estates during 2BCE but Spartacus’ rebellion took place on the mainland of Italy. Spartacus was from Thrace, and he had previously served as a soldier with the Romans, but he ended up as a prisoner (because of desertion?). He was sent to the Gladiator School in Capua. His uprising had initial success, and originally grew to between 70,000 and 120,000 slaves. There were two other leaders of the rebellion, but you don’t hear much about them.
History ExtraFrom Russia to Texas: the Search for a Jewish Homeland. We’re watching the search for a Jewish homeland (or rather, the assertion of a Jewish homeland) playing out on our screens night after night. At the turn of the 20th century, millions of European Jews were seeking an escape from antisemitic persecution, especially from Russia, where they were restricted to the Pale of Settlement. The idea of Zionism had arisen a few years previously, and there was a flood of emigration to New York, where there were no immigration quotas, and over a million Jews had congregated in the Lower East Side. Things were getting desperate and when Uganda offered a homeland, the Jewish community was split between those who wanted Palestine-or-nothing, and those who saw Uganda as a short term fix. Actually, it wasn’t even Uganda, it was Kenya, which shows how nebulous the thinking was. Australia was approached too, but it rejected the proposal. Galveston had recently been devastated by a huge storm, and when it was suggested that Jewish people could immigrate there, the idea was attractive because so many other people had left town.
The Rest is HistoryEpisode 420 Britain in the 1970s: Thatcher Enters the Ring is the final episode in this 4 part series. Five days before the October 1974 election there was a bomb blast in a Guilford pub. People felt impotent to stop the IRA bombing, even though there were arrests (which ended up being the wrong people arrested anyway). Ted Heath, the Tory opposition leader, presented himself as the leader of a unity government, supported by the very visible Margaret Thatcher, and promised to cap the interest rate on loans at 9.5% (a very un-Torylike action). Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe travelled on the hustings by hovercraft, and when it sank, it seems a metaphor for the country. It rained all the time, and people were sick of these Heath/Wilson electoral contests- this was the fourth time they went head to head. The Daily Mail did a special on Wilson’s finances, digging up the dirt on school fees and Swiss bank accounts, but they didn’t publish, preferring to leave it hanging over his head. Wilson ended up with a 3 seat majority. Then 5 weeks after the election there was another bombing, this time in Birmingham, and again they arrested the wrong people. Heath refused to give up the leadership of the Conservatives, even though he had lost four times in a row. Another Conservative, Keith Joseph decided to challenge, but after a disastrous speech in Birmingham, he stepped back from the leadership challenge and Margaret Thatcher stepped forward. And literally, the rest is history.
The Daily A Journey through Putin’s Russia This was recorded on the day that Russians went to the polls, but everyone knows what the result is going to be. Even though the West expected Putin to suffer from the deaths in the Ukraine war, and the economic sanctions that were imposed as part of the West’s response, he has a 86% approval rating and 75% of people think that Russia is heading in the right direction- his highest number ever. His generous compensation payments to the families of impoverished Russian men who volunteer for the Army mean that even bereaved families support Putin, seeing it as a war against the West.
I’m often rather amused by (dismissive of?) a memoir written by someone under 40. However, in this case Amy Thunig has packed a lot of living into her forty-odd years. She is obviously of a different generation to me: I had never heard of her, despite contributions to Buzzfeed,Sydney Review of Books, IndigenousX, The Guardian, Junkee and a lively online presence. She is a Gomeroi/Gamilaroi/Kamilaroi woman, writer and academic and this book is a series of essays on her life.
In her prologue she writes:
I often wonder about timelines and the way a Eurocentric view positions time as linear but as Indigenous peoples we are raised to understand time as circular. Within a circular understanding of life: time, energy and generations coexist. Coexistence with and within Country on lands, within waterways, and skies. Our accountability and obligations are therefore to our ancestors, and our descendants, as well as to ourselves….I do not know the simple way of saying that child-me could see and feel future-me, that our coexistance within circular time meant we conversed and encouraged one another, and as we are one and the same, I knew where I would land even though I could not see how I would journey there. Exchanges of energy and love, across time spent in the locations, encouraged by ancestors.
p.2
This circularity is reflected in her writing, which consists of a large number (28) small-ish chapters of about 4-8 pages, usually introduced by a current-day, or at least a future-me, reflection, before launching back into memoir. This gave the book the feeling of being a series of essays or writing exercises, although perhaps she does not yet have enough distance to impose onto this writing a broader, overarching theme.
It must be that future-me that brought the child Amy through a childhood and adolescence in 1980s Australia that would have defeated many other children. She was the second of four children, and both her parents struggled with drug addiction, and her father spent some time in jail. The family shifted several times although her grandparents, particularly her Pop, remained points of continuity in her life. Despite some appalling instances of racism and classism by teachers, she did well in school and maintained the appearances of an engaged after-school life of dancing, school performances and after-school jobs despite a chaotic and violent home life and poverty. This culminated in being kicked out of home in late secondary school and couch-surfing while continuing to attend classes. She did well, and attended university, moving through undergraduate, graduate and finally PhD level but always aware of the precariousness of the image she was adopting, drawing comfort from other indigenous academics in the academy.
She proudly proclaims her indigenous heritage in the reflections that launch each chapter, as she returns to, and draws strength from Country. She speaks of the influence of her ancestors, and her present-day passages mention the aunties and elders who surround her. However, the discrimination and cruelty that she experiences as a child is not voiced as racism, even though racism underlies it. As a daughter she feels the stigma attached to her parents’ drug-addiction and imprisonment, which applies to all children in similar circumstances (although the high representation of indigenous people in prison means that this would be a more common experience for indigenous children). She speaks often of the influence of her grandparents, but support from her broader extended family seems to be absent, especially when she is homeless. There does not seem to be any involvement at all of formal indigenous organizations. She is largely silent about the political aspects of her aboriginal identity, even though it clearly fundamental to her experience and story.
In one of the last chapters of the book she writes:
The journey of reconnecting with my parents was a slow and clumsy one. It began with a desire to have them there for big moments- I missed them. It involved the realisation that while they had struggles, and sometimes those struggles had hurt me, unlike other people I met when away from them, they never sought to hurt me… Reconnecting with my parents, and understanding them, were two unrelated journeys. I didn’t understand my parents, even when I started to reconnect with them. You don’t have to understand fully to begin to accept in part, and I continued to be deeply resentful for many years, believing that they actively, consciously chose drugs over me. That it was a binary and I was the lesser option.
p. 249
It was only when she was given a synthetic heroin painkiller in hospital in her twenties that she realized that using brought a sense of silence.
That was when I began to understand that the nothingness is the bliss. My parents have experienced high levels of trauma- generational and individual- and all without the supports needed to actively heal…They weren’t choosing heroin over me; they were choosing quiet over the overwhelming noise. It was then that I moved towards understanding, and my resentment began to ease a little.
p.250
Personally, I don’t know if I could overcome my resentment and I wish that she had explored this in more detail. Perhaps her adult relationship with her parents is still a work in progress, and too close to be written about yet. But to even reach this point of understanding and reconnection suggests that she is ready to write this memoir, despite still being relatively young.
My rating: 8/10
Read because: I read a review in the Saturday Paper
I Was a Teenage FundamentalistEpisode 94 What About Certainty? with Bernard Warnick is a recent episode of this ex-vangelical podcast, no longer coyly presented by B. and T. but by Brian and Troy, who left their evangelical megachurches when they were aged in their 30s and 40s. Bernard Warnick is a retired Family Court judge, and his book that he is talking about in this episode (Illusions of Certainty: thoughts about thinking) is not about religion at all. Instead it’s about Warnick’s observations on logic and thinking, drawing on neurobiology and cognitive science. Why do we crave certainty? he asks. It’s an emotional, rather than an intellectual need, driven by subjectivity. In a post-modern world there are many truths, but he argues that we can have firm values, but you need to teach yourself and rely on yourself which requires discipline and wisdom.
The Rest is History Episode 419 Britain in 1974: Countdown to a Coup (Pt 3) So there’s Harold Wilson, Prime Minister after an election that he didn’t expect to win. He was ill, tired, drinking too much and in thrall to his private secretary and ‘political wife’ Marcia Williams (shades of Peta Credlin, anyone?) He settled with the miners, which solved the immediate problem but which led to the idealistic ‘Social Contract’ which saw 30% wage increases further fueling the cost of living. There was new spending, and new taxes on the rich (83% at the top tier, with a 98% tax on investments.) The talk in the gentlemen’s clubs was of a military overthrow and ‘getting rid of’ (i.e. killing) Marcia Williams. Wilson was accused of being a KGB agent, and there was certainly precedent for military intervention in Allende’s Chile and in Northern Ireland. The army had already been intervening in British strikes, stepping in to replace striking fire, ambulance and rubbish collection workers. On 18 September 1974 Harold Wilson called another election.
History HitHistory of Gulags After the recent death of Alexei Navalny, this podcast featuring Alexander Watson, Professor of History at Goldsmiths, University of London, looks into the history of Gulags in Russia. The first mention of ‘exile’ in Russia was in 1649 under the Tsars, where revolutionaries were sent to Siberia, but here isolation and distance were left to do the job. In 1917 the Bolsheviks set up camps, and the first labour camp was set up in the 1920s. A labour camp was expected to be profitable and was governed by the inmates themselves (as distinct from German ‘extermination’ camps). Nonetheless, there was a huge death rate, estimated at being about 1/4 which is similar to the Nazi labour camps. ‘Gulag’ is actually a Soviet acronym from the 1930s. They were at their highest peak in the early 1950s when they numbered 2.5 million, and the Secret Police were involved. Many prisoners were set free under Kruschev but the structures remained. During the 1960s and 1970s the emphasis changed to psychiatric hospitals in order to achieve the same effect. Now ‘law’ is used as the enforcing mechanism.
Emperors of Rome I must have forgotten to note this one- and it was a good one too! Episode CII Clodia notes that, like other women, Clodia was only mentioned tangentially in the sources. She lived in the late republic, around the 1st Century CE. Her father was a consul, and an Optimati but she and her brother opposed their father’s politics and aligned themselves more to the Populari. In 59BCE her very conservative husband died, leaving her a widow- a position that gave women more autonomy than they had when they were married. Her name was brought into a murder trial, and Cicero acting as defence for Callus, the accused, dragged Clodia’s name into the court. She was a witness against Callus and in defending his client, Cicero suggested that she had poisoned her husband. This was payback, because Cicero hated Clodia’s brother because he had been responsible for Cicero being sent into exile. However, she survived the scandal of the courtcase, and became a businesswoman. Go Clodia.
This book won the 2020 Dorothy Hewett award for an unpublished manuscript, and as a first book, I suspect that it has a strong autobiographical element. It has a double narrative of mother and daughter, retelling the same events from their own perspective. Taresai, a Sudanese woman, has emigrated to Australia with her husband and four children, while her eldest daughter Akita is forced to take over the care of her younger siblings as it is expected an eldest daughter will do. Ironically, Taresai herself was placed in a similar situation with her siblings back in Sudan, where her education was sacrificed for that of her younger sisters, still a source of festering resentment between Taresai and the other women in her family.
To the extent that there is a ‘typical’ migrant story, this is it, but told from the “other side”. Many of the tropes are here: the shift from Sydney down to Corio, a working class suburb of regional Victorian city Geelong; the father who cannot cope with the loss of status and returns ‘home’ to Sudan; the older brother who becomes enmeshed in drug addiction, crime and mental illness; the studious daughter burdened with domestic duties and academic expectations that her family does not have the financial or intellectual capital to support; chain migration of mothers, aunts and cousins; the shared multigenerational households and the clash between traditional upbringing and the perceived ‘slackness’ of Australian parenting.
The alternating structure between mother and daughter leads to a ‘bittyness’ in the narrative, presenting it as a series of episodes told in short chapters. While I find long chapters somewhat oppressive (as in, for example, Christos Tsiolkas’ The In-Between) short chapters seem to me to be a bit of a cop-out for the writer, enabling them to avoid the responsibility for carrying the narrative. Nor am I sure that the narrative voices of the two women are clearly enough defined, a viewpoint with which Lisa at ANZLitLovers differs (see her review here), seeing the question of voice as being more as one of register. I’m not convinced: I too often had to flip back a couple of pages to see who I was reading. At times the writing in both Taresai’s and Akita’s sections is quite beautiful, and psychologically perceptive; at other times it is a bit thin and marred by small errors which should have been picked up before publication.
I was puzzled by the title Hopeless Kingdom, because the ending certainly doesn’t reflect that, with Taresei reaching a point of equanimity, and Akita breaking free. The book was short-listed for the Miles Franklin, and it certainly does present first-generation Australian experience “in any of its phases”. It is a good exploration of belonging and not belonging, mother and daughter relationships, and the migrant experience. Akec isn’t the first first-generation Australian writer to gain acclaim with her debut work – I’m thinking particularly of Alice Pung- and I’m interested to see if her next novel takes her beyond autobiographical writing.
In 2015, Graeme Davison published Lost Relations, (my review here) where this acclaimed academic historian succumbed to his family’s entreaties and waded into the waters of family history to research his mother’s family. It was not without a bit of heartburn and defensiveness, but in telling his mother’s family’s story, he also gave us a reflection on family history itself, its emotional resonances and limitations, and the wider context into which the story of individuals must be placed.
In this more recent book, he turns instead to his father’s family. He writes:
When I published ‘Lost Relations’, a history of my mother’s family, some readers asked why I wrote so little about my father. As I grew up, he discouraged interest in his family’s past, not because it was scandalous- although, as I later learned, there were buried sorrows unknown to me and perhaps to him- but because it was, at least in his eyes, so recent and undistinguished.
p. 2
Later in his life, his father changed his mind, joined the local historical society, and wrote a brief account of his life. Davison changed his mind too, although in his case his interest was piqued by a 200 year old grandfather clock that had been willed to his father by his aunt, and eventually came to him. It couldn’t have gone to a better member of the family: Davison had always loved time-telling and clockwork and indeed, in 1993 had written The Unforgiving Minute, a history of time-telling in Australia. This clock becomes a sort of talisman in this book, marking not just the generations of family that it had passed through, but also marks the changing of attitudes to work, leisure and godliness over time. There is a danger in writing a family history that, to misquote Toynbee, it just becomes one damn generation after the other, but having a concrete object like a clock serves as both metaphor and sticky-tape, connecting albeit tenuously, generations and relationships. The clock is woven into an anecdote told to Davison by his Uncle Frank, who told of visiting his Great Grandfather Thomas Davison in 1929. When the clock chimed, Thomas lift one finger and said “listen to our ancestors”.
Davison, as you will see in my review of Lost Relations, reflected deeply and at length on the nature of family vs. academic history. He has no need to do so again. He pushes the family history boundaries harder in this book, starting in the Scottish borderlands and following the story through to his own career as historian in the academy. By tracing back beyond 1750 he needs to leave behind the genealogists’ stepping stones of formal written records, and turns to tribal and kinship memories- something that required him to bring “my scepticism as well as my romanticism along for the ride” (p. 26) He could only deduce from generalized knowledge of practices of the time and documented histories of the Davisons/Davysouns/Davysons who may or may not be direct descendants. He dips into the soup of DNA testing, and is disillusioned by the suppositions and guesswork it evokes without documentary evidence. He finds a few facts, but has to resort to questions and hypotheses as the family moves back and forth across the Scotland/England border, in a
journey that would take his descendants, step by step, from a small port town to an industrial village, to a factory suburb and finally to an industrial metropolis. Eventually, a century later, they would journey to the other side of the world…Each step was a one-off response to the map of opportunity at the time, but seen over the longue durée the moves fall onto a pattern that suggests the operation of powerful unseen forces… At each step along the journey, they became a little more accustomed to the ideas and values that prepared them for the next. Many factors, invisible to us, probably influenced their outlook, including religious and political ones
p.70-71
Through the “miracle of digitisation” of the British Library’s newspaper archive, he finds his great-great-grandfather addressing a temperance meeting in a speech that could just as easily have been given by his own grandfather and father, lifelong teetotallers. The family line shifts to Birmingham, the workshop of the world, and involvement in a more active political role through workers’ societies, and then a minor manager role in a tinplate company.
It was his grandfather, John Potter Davison, who in 1912, at the age of forty-three, closed his business, said goodbye to his parents and siblings, and embarked for Australia with his wife and four children, with only twenty pounds in his pocket. He was a Methodist, a denomination that encouraged migration, and in Australia he joined other members of the Islington Chapel who had emigrated earlier. They settled in Scotia Street Ascot Vale, along with other Methodist immigrants. Still in the western suburbs, Davison’s father lived with his family in a rented four-roomed cottage in Athol Street Moonie Ponds. The young men of the family moved into apprenticeships as printers and plumbers, joined the Scouting movement and were involved in the church. As the Depression hit, the family purchased a timber cottage in Washington Street, ten minutes’ walk from Essendon station and joined the North Essendon Methodist Church. It was here that Davison’s parents Vic and Emma met, thus joining this story with that he has already told in Lost Relations. He was born a little over nine months later “born into the luckiest and most consequential generation in the history of the planet.” (p 189)
At this point Davison moves into his own memoir, starting with his childhood home at 16 Banchory Street Essendon, purchased by his parents in 1939. He attended government schools in Aberfeldie and Essendon and in 1958 took up a studentship, with its stipend that made studentships particularly attractive to lower middle class parents whose families had no experience of university. He attended the University of Melbourne and gravitated towards the Student Christian Movement. He was one of the founders of The Melbourne Historical Journal, undertook his honours dissertation, and found himself as one of a small number of secondary teaching students released from their bond by the Education Department to become university teachers. He applied for scholarships in England, and found himself on a boat bound for England, in effect, completing the circumnavigation that his family started. The shift into memoir runs the risk of many professional memoirs that become a roll call of acquaintances’ names, and a travelogue – and although I’m interested in historians’ biographies and intellectual influences, I wonder how many other readers would be.
As well as covering a much wider 400-year timespan, this is a far more personal book than Lost Relations, and in many ways it is a more conventional genealogy-method book than the earlier one. Both books expand the circumstances of his particular ancestors into a wider context, and it is interesting that religion plays such a strong part in both strands of his family history given that it is often rather peripheral to Australian experience. He finds continuities, too, with the traditional of skilled manual work, and the moderate Labor or centrist politics. Of course, there is a limit to the interest that one might have in another person’s ancestors (and, it would seem, no limit at all for one’s own family, for some family historians). And as with Lost Relations, this is a stellar example of a master historian telling family history but drawing on much more than just documents and lineages. He finishes his book as he started it, with the clock that has accompanied his family story, joking about his own family’s eye-rolling when he, too, intoned “listen to our ancestors” on hearing the clock. Davison’s ancestors have clearly spoken to him, and through these two books we eavesdrop on the conversation.
The Rest is History Episode 418 Britain in 1974: The Election Crisis (Part II) In February 1974 a bus carrying servicemen was bombed, killing 12 people. This was the first IRA bombing on British soil, and during 1974 there was an IRA bombing every week in Britain. The Labour Party was disarray, led by Harold Wilson, the brilliant, suburban, Scoutmaster and said to be the Queen’s favourite PM. Although he had led the Labour Party to victory in 1964, ten years later he was tired and over it all. He was surrounded by strong characters in their own right: Tony Benn who wanted to nationalize everything and the rude and bullying Dennis Healey. Jeremy Thorpe, the pro-European leader of the Liberals was a cad, but the Liberals saw themselves as ‘nice’. Then there was the Tory Enoch Powell with his ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, which ended up in him being sacked from the Conservative Party and now off the leash. Labour was not expected to win, but the result was that the Tories and Labour were the same, and the Liberals won 19%. The first-past-the-post system yielded 301 seats to Labour, 297 to the Tories and 14 seats to the Liberals. The Liberals refused to enter into a coalition with the Tories, which meant that Wilson became Prime Minister of a minority government.
Things Fell Apart. Episode 4 Spicy Brando tells the story of Brandon Caserta (not sure of the spelling) who as a troubled young man found himself attracted to Jordan Peterson’s ’12 Rules for Life’ which led him into involvement with militia groups and preppers, particularly when the state of Michigan imposed strict lockdown measures. His involvement with the Wolverine Watchmen found him arrested by the FBI in October 2020 over the group’s plan to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. Although Brandon himself was found not-guilty, the ringleaders were found guilty. However, Jon Ronson (and the court case) raises questions over just how serious all this trash-talk was, and whether the Wolverine Watchmen were a white supremacist group, as they had been portrayed.
Emperors of Rome Episode CIV Slavery Slavery was central to Rome’s economy and power. At first, slaves were taken in conquest and then any children born to a slave woman became a slave. There were slave markets in Rome and the owners could do anything they wanted to their slave. Historian Keith Hopkins has estimated that 25% of the population was enslaved, making Rome a ‘slave society’. It was normal for even modest households to have one or two slaves. Slaves played a variety of roles: educated slaves would act as secretaries, agricultural slaves worked on the estates, others worked on construction especially of public buildings, and the worst of all was to work in mining. With such a high proportion of the population being enslaved, there was always fear of rebellion, so slave catchers were numerous. A slave collar has been found, with a ‘note’ attached given their name and that of their owner, and instructions on how to return the absconded slave. Manumission was not uncommon . When set free, former slaves became citizens with most (but not all) the rights of a Roman citizen. When freed, they would have three names, one of which was their former owner’s. There was the potential for social mobility, but Augustus passed laws against cohabitation between a free woman and a slave. Some have said that Christianity put an end to slavery, although Rhiannon Evans notes that the Apostle Paul sent an escaped slave back to his owner. It was more that slavery become economically unviable in the later Roman Empire.
The Daily Stoic. Heather Cox Richardson on What History Teaches us about Fighting the Dark Energy of the Human Soul I’ve been listening to Heather Cox Richardson since lockdown days but I was a bit surprised to see her pop up here on the Daily Stoic. I’m not really sure that she was as much into the idea of the “dark energy of the soul” as the presenter was, but what she did talk about was that in replacing one story in history, it needs to be replaced by another story. It can be the story of a group, or of an idea. Really, they’re just chatting away. Nonetheless, it was interesting to hear her talking about history in a forum that is not devoted to history.
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 