The Resident Judge of Port Phillip

History Extra An Obscenity Trial That Shocked Victorian Britain tells the story of Annie Besant and her friend and partner-in-crime Charles Bradlaugh who published a book Fruits of Philosophy by American writer Charles Knowlton about conception and contraception. Annie Besant had married a minister at the age of 18, but the marriage was unhappy and she left him. Her husband retained custody of one of her two children. She became a needleworker and went to Bethnal Green where she met Charles Bradlaugh, a dissenting minister. He was 40 and she was 26. In 1876 he encouraged her to speak publicly about contraception (something that women rarely did) to the National Secular Society. When the bookseller of Fruits of Philosophy was arrested and fined, she wanted to be arrested for publishing it as well, as a test case. She represented herself in a highly publicized case. The jury found the book obscene, but Besant and Bradlaugh were found not guilty. Meanwhile, her former husband sued for custody of her other child. She was involved with the Fabians, Home Rule and she championed the cause of the Match Girls. She went to India and became involved in Theosophy, which led her to renounce her books, smashing the plates so that they couldn’t be republished. Given that US politicians are invoking the Comstock Act of 1873 to prevent the sale of abortion drugs today, it’s a throw-back to the days when selling and publishing information about contraception was illegal.

Lives Less Ordinary (BBC) My Grandmother Walked the Rabbit Proof Fence Australians are familiar with the story of the young indigenous girls who walked the Rabbit Proof fence after being stolen from their families, but I’m not sure how widely their story spread internationally. So it’s important that the BBC has picked up this story. What I didn’t realize is that -shamefully- the story spread across three generations, right up to recent events. Doris Pilkington, who wrote the book (which I reviewed here) has now died, and the story is being taken up by Maria Pilkington, her daughter, who herself had to resist attempts to have her own child taken from her. A sobering corrective to the idea that all this was long ago and long past.

The Rest is History. Episode 432 Titanic: The Survivors (Part 6). And so I finally come to the end of this 6-part series- surely the longest that Tom and Dominic have done so far. They talk about the aftermath of the sinking and the rescue by the Cunard ship ‘Carpathian’. They point out that gender was more important than class: 74% of women and 52.3% of children survived, but only 20% of men survived. They suggest that the death rate was so high in second class because of the values of deference and not wanting to make a fuss. At first the London newspapers said that few had died. The port cities of Southampton and Liverpool were particularly affected because so many of the crew came from those cities. People wanted someone to blame, and Ismay was the man, as was reflected in James Cameron’s film, but as a later inquiry headed by Lord Mersey found, the Titanic adhered to what was “standard practice” at the time. But very soon the sinking was cast in a proud, jingoistic, heroic mode. Many suffered from survivors’ guilt. The first film was made just four weeks after the sinking, starring an actress who had actually been on the boat. The 1955 book A Night to Remember by Walter Lord was written from interviews, but Lord didn’t actually take notes. Then of course there is the James Cameron film, which has immortalized the sinking for a new generation. The sinking took place two years before WWI, and has come to represent a cliched metaphor of gathering disaster. The Bishop of Winchester blamed greed and capitalism, and Winston Churchill used it as an excuse to have a slap at lady teachers (of all people). A good series.

Being Roman (BBC) Episode 5 Battling Bureaucrats tells the story of Apolinarius of Panopolis who is an obsequious, pedantic middle-ranking bureaucrat in Egypt, who is freaking out because Emperor Diocletian is going to visit, and nothing is ready. He wrote 12 letters over two weeks in which he threatened, cajoled and upbraided traders and other bureaucrats, but he was essentially impotent as everyone was covering their own arse. One of the demands he was making was for marble columns from Aswan and he did manage to get those. They were used in constructing baths, but they ended up in a church where they stand today.

I Was a Teenage Fundamentalist Episode 97 What about Progressive Christianity? I must say, that when I was an evangelical Christian about 40 years ago, I didn’t ever have a problem with Christianity and Progressivism. I think that it says more about modern evangelical Christianity than it does about me, that there could even be a tension between the two. In this episode, Brian and Troy talk with Rev. Tim Costello, someone I generally admire for his work on refugees and gambling. In the introduction Brian and Troy give a trigger warning for how much Christianity is going to follow: I bet that Tim Costello hadn’t been introduced with a trigger warning before! I do find his frequent declarations that “I believe in Jesus” rather strident, given the general progressiveness of the rest of the podcasts- what does that mean? Resurrection? Salvation? etc.

Three Million Episode 2: The Cigarette Tin When the Japanese invaded Calcutta (I didn’t know they did!), people fled their lands and crowded into the cities. Because the British government was requisitioning supplies, the price of rice rocketed. Amartya Sen, one of the interviewees, who lived a comfortable middle class childhood, speaks of his mother allowing him to give half a cigarette tin of rice to people in his immediate neighbourhood who asked for it. The British Government refused to free up ships as a mere ‘goodwill gesture’ and merchants were buying up rice and stockpiling it. It was a class-based famine.

The Rest is History Episode 431: Titanic: Nightmare at Midnight (Part 5) The two hours and 40 minutes that it took the Titanic to sink makes it seem like a performance to us. Survivors mention the crunch (like running over gravel) as it hit the iceberg, then silence. People were paralyzed by deference, inertia and compliance. CQD (‘All stations help’), the emergency code, was sent out (SOS had been introduced 4 years earlier but was not in widespread use). All the crew knew that there was a lifeboat deficiency of about 1000 (it would have been almost 2000 if the Titanic was at full capacity). There was a fear of panic but also reluctance to face the 11-storey drop down to the water. The code was ‘women and children first’ but what did that mean? No men until all the women were off? Or let women and children fill up the lifeboat, then men could go on? The instructions were interpreted differently on one side of the ship to the other, so your survival depended on which side you went to. The gates blocking Third Class were opened after 45 minutes but there was a 3rd class reluctance to leave their baggage (their sole possessions) and it was very, very cold. Sir Cosmo Duff-Gordon and his wife survived in Lifeboat 1 which had only 12 occupants out of a capacity of 40 and were treated with obloquy for the rest of their lives. Isodor Strauss and his wife Ida, two of the few Jewish passengers and co-owners of Macy’s department store, chose to stay because, as a man, Isodor was refused a place on the lifeboat. J. Bruce Ismay, the chairman and managing director of White Star Line also survived when he got onto a spare lifeboat. Most of those who died did so because of the cold, rather than drowning. The survivors recalled hearing the clamour of voices, then a roar as the Titanic sank.

Very Short Introductions Podcast Abolitionism Abolitionism? Is that an American thing? This podcast, of very poor acoustic quality, is presented by Richard Newman, who has written on American Abolitionism, and is very US-centric. He sounds almost surprised by the fact that there was a continuous wave of activism through from the 1770s to the late 19th century on both sides of the Atlantic, and that it worked globally and tactically through petitions and courtcases. He notes the diversity among abolitionists, who worked as politicians, ministers, photographers, writers, men and women, black and white. He notes that African Americans were particularly important in the formation of the first Pennyslvania Abolition Society in 1775, and in Britain. He emphasizes the importance of the slave revolt in Saint-Domingue (Haiti) in 1793 which led to the end of French slavery, and attracted the attention of the whole world.

History Hit Episode 1424 Pontius Pilate features Helen Bond. She discusses the portrayal of Pilate in the canonical bibles, the apocryphal books of the Bible, and through secular writing at the time. In 6CE Judea came under direct Roman rule, and the first governors appointed were prefects, as was Pilate. The early Christian writers, who had the problem of squaring the Messiah with a crucified criminal, portrayed the Jewish leaders as responsible. Mark (the earliest of the gospels) speaks of the trade-off with Barabbas – is that plausible? Matthew depicts Pilate washing his hands, and Herod Antipas, another high-status man involved in his trial. John goes off on an esoteric frolic of his own. The Romans were mainly based at Caesaria Maritima, on the coast, and they were not a big presence in Jerusalem, where they knew they were not welcome. The Apocryphal gospels have The Acts of Pilate (or Gospel of Nicodemus) but they are generally viewed as being spurious. Among the non-biblical sources, Philo of Alexandria is contemptuous of Pilate, while Josephus is writing after the Jewish-Roman War and is looking for insensitivities amongst the prefects to explain the war. He notes times when Pilate backed down over Jewish demands, and generally sees him as mediocre. In the Coptic Ethiopic tradition, Pilate is a saint because he converted to Christianity. There are other stories about Pilate’s supposed suicide, and the idea that he was buried in a lake in Lucerne because evil spirits followed him. What we do know is that Pilate was in Judea for about 10 years (a relatively long posting) and that he really existed.

The History Listen Section 71: The Hindmarsh Island Bridge Affair (Part 1) is part of a series where they look at important High Court decisions in Australia’s history. I was listening to this while driving the car, and I became so enraged that I nearly drove off the road. What a lack of respect, bad faith, and arrogance was shown by conservative politicians as this matter became a harbinger of the culture wars that have paralyzed our politics since. And it has given me a new respect for Robert Tickner. I’ve been looking for Margaret Simons’ book The Meeting of the Waters, but I can’t find it anywhere. I’m looking forward to hearing Part II.

Three Million (BBC) This five-part series by the BBC looks at the Bengal famine. Episode 1 War contextualizes the Bengal famine within World War II. India (which at this time had not been divided into India and Pakistan) was still the jewel of the British Empire and to be defended at all costs. Fear of Japanese invasion prompted a policy of ‘denial’ whereby the British government took over increased control of food, transport etc in Bengal. They confiscated not only food for the Imperial troops, but also confiscated the boats, for fear that if the Japanese invaded, they would use them. In this way, the British Government provoked artificial scarcity. The British Government kept a tight grip on India, and they had as many men policing Bengali society as they did actually fighting the Japanese. On 16 October 1942 a cyclone destroyed the crops. Governor-General and Viceroy in India, Victor Hope the 2nd Marquess of Linlithgow raised the alarm in Whitehall but was ignored. By 1943 the dead bodies were mounting up in Calcutta.

The Rest is History Titanic: The Iceberg Strikes Episode 4 First and second class were not full because of cancellations, and even third class was not full. It contained British and Irish immigrants, and a group Scandinavian migrants who would end up in Fargo, and in Willa Cather novels. There were few Jews, because White Star discouraged them. There were also Croats on board because there had been Ottoman pogroms against Maronite Christians. Even third class, with its 2- and 4-berth cabins was far better than other ships. The ship was equipped with a Marconi radio which was a novel feature at the time, and they were very busy as people amused themselves sending messages. As a result, the over-worked radio officers did receive messages from other ships warning them of ice, but the messages were received piecemeal. It was established procedure not to reduce speed in ice fields. There was a flat sea, so there were no troughs in the wave from which an iceberg could be glimpsed. It was also a very clear night, and the iceberg was black. When they did hit the iceberg, they though that they had just scraped it.

Emperors of Rome. Yes, I’m still listening to this podcast because there are many episodes that I had missed. Chapter CVIII A Lesson in Latin II. If I weren’t already trying to explode my brain learning both Spanish and Khmer at the same time, I’d think about learning Latin. In this episode, Dr Rhiannon Evans talks about Latin and answers questions that had been sent in about the language. She notes that there were other Italian languages but Latin became the most dominant when the Romans began conquering the country. Latin absorbed influences from Greek, which was already a written language, and other vocabulary too including Italian, Carthaginian and Etruscan words. Because it wasn’t written down, we’re not sure what the Latin spoken in the streets was like, and we don’t know how literate people were. We can look at graffiti, which displays a fairly phonetic approach, and also poetry which gives a hint of how things were pronounced in maintaining rhyme and rhythm.

Global Roaming (ABC). In this episode A Palestinian State. Now? Hamish Macdonald and Geraldine Doogue sit down with Tirana Hassan, the recently appointed Australian head of Human Rights Watch. The title of the episode is rather misleading, because she doesn’t just talk about Palestine, but human rights law more generally. She is very cut-and-dried about human rights law, and I feel rather naively dismissive of political considerations. While it is good to see such moral clarity, it is rather unrealistic in today’s messy world.