Ships and Whales

Posted on December 22, 2008 | Leave a comment

Every edition of the Port Phillip Herald has a “Shipping Intelligence” column on Page 2.   We have to remember that Port Phillip was literally a “port” city, and the comings and goings of shipping was the communication thread to the rest of the world.

flagstaff_gardens

As it happens, I was in the Flagstaff Gardens on the weekend on an absolutely beautiful Melbourne afternoon.  I walked up to the top of the hill and even today you can see right across to the water, in between in the high-rise buildings.  I tried to imagine all the other people who must have walked up this same hill, straining their eyes to see the boats making their way up to Port Melbourne.  A flagstaff on the top of the hill, visible from the village down by the river below, notified of the progress of ships making their way up the bay.

The Shipping Intelligence for 15 July 1842 had no arrivals (which is a bit unusual), but three boats were listed for clearing out.

CLEARED OUT

July 12. Sally Ann, schooner, for Portland Bay and Port Fairy.  Passengers, Messrs Cameron, Phillips and Barnet; ten in the steerage.

14 Ellen and Elizabeth, schooner, for Launceston

14 Corsair, steamer, for Launceston. Passengers, Mrs Doddery, Mr and Mrs Lamb, Miss Gavon, Major Fraser, Messrs. Thompson, and Hill.

The steamers in particular are frequent visitors, plying back and forth across the Victorian coast (Portland and Port Fairy) and across to Launceston or Hobart in Tasmania (then known as Van Diemens Land), as well as up and down from Sydney.  Not a lot of privacy here- everyone knew where you were off to- unless, of course you were steerage. I wonder who these passengers were, going to Launceston. Did they already live there, I wonder?

SAILED

On Tuesday (12th) Adelaide for Hobart Town

On Wednesday (13th) for Portland.

To be honest, I’m not really sure at what point it was considered that a ship had finally ‘sailed’.  Perhaps when it had cleared the Heads at Port Phillip (a fairly treacherous stretch of water that separates the bay from Bass Strait)? There’s always a gap of at least a day- sometimes several- between ‘clearing out’ and ‘sailing’. Often ships had to wait some time to broach the Heads:  the  second shipload from the David Collins expedition down at Sorrento in 1803 had to wait weeks until the conditions were right to get through the Heads and sail on to Van Diemens Land.

EXPORTS

July 12- Sally Ann for Portland Bay and Port Fairy- 9 chests tea, 5 half chests ditto, 4 quarter casks wine, 1 bale slops, 12 cases gin, 16 bags flour, 7 bags bran, 2 cheeses, 1 box, 1 paper parcel, 12 casks porter, 17 bags oats, 16 bags potatoes, 2 tins turps., 1 barrel oatmeal, 1 ditto cheese, 7 cases slops, 10 bags sugar, 1 case split peas, 1 ditto pearl barley, 1 ditto rice, 1 ditto turpentine, 1 ditto oateal, 1 trunk apparel, 7 cases, a press and types, 1 case drugs, 9 cases geneva, 1 chest apparel, 2 trunks ditto, 1 can oil, 2 cans, 3 kegs, 1 case, 1 scraper, 1 keg tobacco, 1 case soap, 1 bag salt, 1 cask whisky, 2 cases glass, 1 keg, 1 case, 1 cask.  For Port Fairy: 4 bags flour, 1 bag sugar, 1 bag potatoes, 3 cans turps.

14- Ellen & Elizabeth, for Launceston- 7 bales wool

16 – Corsair- for Launceston- 310 sheep, 1 bale slops.

We’re seeing the internal economy at work here.  Many of these goods would have arrived earlier either direct to Port Phillip, or by steamer down from Sydney, or across from Van Diemen’s Land- especially things like sugar, tobacco and alcohol (of which there seems to be a great abundance).  The Port Phillip merchants would then forward them on to the smaller ports.  I’m a bit surprised by the sheep going to Launceston, given that during the early Port Phillip years, the sheep were coming from Van Diemens Land.  Perhaps someone bought up big at one of the auction sales.

Actually, this Shipping Intelligence is pretty boring because there’s no international shipping. When a ship comes bearing imports from overseas, the person who ordered the goods it is named, then the goods are listed.  Again- not a lot of privacy.

The real reason I’m writing up this one comes in the SYDNEY SHIPPING section!

ARRIVED- June 30 Rebecca Sims, from South Sea Fisheries

The Lord Saumarez was to have sailed from Sydney for Port Phillip on the 3rd inst.

The American whaler Rebecca Sims, of New Bedford, has been very fortunate, having in 24 months procured 1600  barrels sperm and 300 barrels black oil; but hs been obliged to put into this port in consequence of having lost her rudder and false keel in a severe squall, and for the purpose of having which replaced, she will have to hove down.  She reports of having spoken the following vessels:- October 1, 1841, the Ofley, of London, off Ocean Island, with 900 barrels sperm, out 25 months.  Oct 4, the Onyx of London, six weeks from Sydney, with 100 barrels of sperm oil.  November 22, the Caernarvon of Sydney, with 500 barrells, and a whale alongside, out 36 months (since which she has put into Hobart Town, discharged her cargo, and refreshed).  January 22, 1842, the American ship Francis Hussey, with 750 barrels sperm, out 17 months.  The Rebecca Sims touched at Rotumah, on the 8th February, where she found the American barque, Fortune, with 350 barrels sperm oil, out 17 months; the barque Louisa, Wright of London, with 40 barrels; and the Mary, of London, with 200 barrels, out 9 months.  She afterwards touched at Chatham Island, where she found the Gem, of Sydney, a total wreck, having ran ashone.  Heard of the American ship Franklin being at Chatham Island 22nd May, with 2300 barrels black oil, 10 months out; and of the American ship Chariot also being there,  April 20th, with 1400 barrels sperm; also of the American ship Omega, Captain Gardner, cruising off Chatham Island, 1st June with 1600 barrels sperm oil. Spoke the schooner Kitty, from Chatham Island, bound to Port Nicholson on the 25th May, having lost her anchor and part of the chain inthe same squall that she sustained the damage which caused her to put into this port.

The Victoria is at present refitting off the Commercial Wharf, and is about to proceed to Manilla to be sold; if not purchased there, she will proceed to China.  Her owners are fitting her out in a superior style, and we understand she will carry eight or ten brass guns.- Australasian Chronicle, July 2.

One of the problems of a catch phrase like Geoffrey Blainey’s ‘Tyranny of Distance’ is that it can obscure just how connected Australian ports and ships were into the seafaring, whaling and maritime culture.  The Shipping Intelligence often carries reports of which ships “spoke” to other ships, conveying news of yet other ships that they had each spoken to, wrecks, rough journeys etc.

Here, too, we’re seeing the internationalized  whaling oceans around Australia and New Zealand, with English and American ships, as well as Australian ones.  I can’t really find any hard and fast figures of how many barrels of oil the ‘average’ whale provides (after all, what’s an ‘average’ whale?).  I have figures from the 1900s that had 18, 660 barrels from 559 whales (about 33 barrels per whale); a figure of 60 barrels from the ‘right’ whale ( I’ve seen that they produced the ‘black’ oil, but then another website said that black oil came from the Arctic White Whale); and Save the Whales gave a figure of 47.6 barrels from a sperm whale.

No matter how much oil the whale produced, a load of 1600 barrels is pretty impressive, as is the amount of time that these ships stayed out at sea- up to three years!  But seeing the way that these ships communicated with each other, within the whaling fraternity it wasn’t a matter of sailing off into the wild blue yonder, even though it must have felt that way for the families left at home (shades of Ahab’s wife here).  The seas had their own communications channels.

Whalers had been plying the Victorian coastline since the very early 1800s, and the first temporary settlements were seasonal whaling stations.  It was generally believed that whalers often took Aboriginal women (especially those from Van Diemen’s land) as virtual slaves, but recent work by historians like Lynette Russell suggests that the women brought important survival skills to the whalers, and acted with more agency than previously thought.  (I suspect that this link takes you to a paid site, so I don’t know if you want to follow it).

Then that last little section reminds us that there was an important Asian trade going on between the colonial ports there as well.  There was a Chinese war going on at the time, hence the brass guns, I guess.

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Posted in Port Phillip history

‘Men and Women of Port Phillip’ by Martin Sullivan

Posted on December 19, 2008 | 2 comments

Reading this book evoked memories of undergraduate history out at La Trobe in the mid-70s:  sitting around the Agora drinking bad coffee from yellow and orange plastic handled mugs; peering through the smoky fug in tutorials held in the tutor’s own room; posters of  Splitz Enz playing on campus;  the sweet waft of marijuana; the opening up of the world in those halcyon Whitlamesque days.

When I see that Martin Sullivan submitted his  Ph D. thesis “Class and Society in the Port Phillip District” to Monash University in 1978, then I realize where all these 30 year old reminiscences are coming from.  The thesis, and this book that no doubt sprang from it in 1985, are all imbued with the language and frameworks of Marxist historiography that look rather – well-  strident, earnest and  somewhat dated today.   In fact, I was a little surprised by the late-ish publication date of this book (1985) because it had the fingerprints of the 1970s all over it.

Which is not to say that it’s not a useful book- on the contrary.  I’m finding myself frustrated that it is so difficult to ‘hear’ the people of Port Phillip who were not middle-class and socially and visible on the one hand, or thrown up from the stews of criminality into the courts on the other hand.  Surely there’s another group of people here.  I think of the school children who marched in the public parade for the laying of the foundation stone to the Supreme Court- who were their parents who no doubt craned their necks to see their children as they marched past?  Who were the people who mobbed around the first public hangings up on the hill above Lonsdale Street? It appears that it was a heterogenous group- who were they?

Sullivan has used much the same sources I have: court reports, newspapers, government dispatches, Garryowen and other contemporary writers.    His focus is different to mine, and he has struggled with it. He wants to draw out  his working-class men and women of Port Phillip from the vignettes of the middle class, public actors that I’m finding myself working with, but they are such shadowy figures that they are easily overshadowed and  don’t ever emerge fully.  So they remain fuzzy, largely unnamed (except for those who turn up in the courts) and largely undifferentiated from the group.

He argues that a capitalist, market-based system was not necessarily found in Port Phillip from its inception, but that it quickly developed once propertyless, wage-earning immigrants and former convicts came to the colony.  Classes emerged fairly quickly, whereby capitalists and wage earners lived out their lives in different ways according to their relationship to the means of production.   However, although the capitalists tried to control the law and the state, they never had complete control over them, or indeed over the labouring population which was, from the start, ungovernable and obstinate.   In this regard- and I don’t know how Martin Sullivan would feel about this- the book leans towards John Hirst’s view of the subversion of authority right from the inception of the colony.   He points out that after 1844 there was a more concerted and political program of protest, rather than the undirected dissatisfaction of  individual men and women previously. It also confirms the feeling that I have that there was a general heightening of the political climate around the mid 1840s, even before the Gold Rush.

This book felt a bit unbalanced in its structure. There is barely an introduction as such, as the book launches straight into an examination of the course of events that led to its settlement by the Port Phillip Association, and its relationship to a market economy.  This is followed by a 73 page chapter about the formation of a labour market, then a shorter 40 page chapter about convicts in Port Phillip which could have easily been a second chapter.  Chapter 4 is another long one- 86 pages, followed by a 26 page chapter on the stuctures of dominance, then a rather thin two page conclusion.  I felt as if the book was lumpy, and that it didn’t draw me along with a clear argument.  I don’t need each chapter to be a homogenized length, but the book felt as if it lacked unity.

Nonetheless, by consciously looking beyond the more easily-accessed public, middle-class realm, he has set himself an ambitious target: I know because I’m puddling around in the same sources as he did.   Those more sweeping “people’s history”-type books have the advantage of a larger timespan to draw and extrapolate from.  It’s much harder to start at the origins of a settlement, as he does, and know that you end up ten years later with a system that has been almost- not quite, but almost- undetectable in its emergence.   We’re only looking at a small society, for a small slice of time- why is it so hard to see it happening?

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Posted in Book reviews, Port Phillip history

‘Family and Social Network’ by Elizabeth Bott

Posted on December 18, 2008 | Leave a comment
bott

Elizabeth Bott Spillius

The historian I admire most, Inga Clendinnen,  once said that

“history requires no special training other than curiosity, sharp wits and scrupulous attention to detail- plus a determination to honour the mysteriousness of the people you are studying”

I like that.  I particularly draw comfort from the worthiness of curiosity, and claim ‘curiosity immunity’ when I am being particularly observant (i.e. nosy) about other people around me.  And I think that ‘Family and Social Network’ by Elizabeth Bott satisfied my [prurient? scholarly?] curiosity about family interactions and networks with the wider community.

The book itself was written in the 1950s and has now taken on a historical edge that it certainly didn’t at the time.  It describes a team-based study undertaken by an anthropologist and psychologist and a team of researchers who aimed to interview twenty ‘ordinary’ families with young children.

It was refreshingly honest about the methodological problems they faced: making contact with their 20 families;  reconciling the different disciplinary perspectives of the two lead researchers;  resolving issues about researcher role and the formality and comparability of the research process.   You don’t often read an admission that methodology that

The anthropological method basically consists of messing about with a lot of variables and bits of information in a condition of acute uncertainty, in the hope that eventually one will see relationships one had not thought of before (p309)

Only one of the case studies was written up in great detail, but it was a fascinating one of a working class family with very strong family roots in a particular street in London.  The wife did not work, and saw her mother on a daily basis, and was thoroughly enmeshed in her kin relationships in a way that her husband was not.  The husband and wife had completely different networks, with no joint friendships or social activities.  This was contrasted with a middle class, more mobile family with weaker kin ties and shared friendship patterns.

In the acknowledgments Bott quoted Dr John Bowlby as remarking “It has the merit of being obvious once one has thought of it.  One wonders why one hadn’t…”, and this is very much true of this book too.  For  instance, she observes (and I find myself thinking I knew that… without actually knowing it) that there are ‘connecting’ people in families who bring together other more separated family members; that if there are two or three generations of mothers living in the same place in the same time, a matrilinear stress is more common; that friendships (especially friendships of men) are ‘trimmed” when a couple marries so that they can be joint friendships; that intense identity-forming friends tend to be absent after marriage so that they do not threaten conjugal loyalty and new friendships tend to be join and diminished in identity.  All the stuff of a million soap operas and novels.

At the end of the 2nd edition of the book is a lengthy chapter called ‘Reconsiderations’ where she returns, decades later, to the original study.  She talks about how her categories and opinions have been challenged, changed or firmed, and the relationship of later research to her original work.

At one level, the book seems far removed from Port Phillip in the 1840s but it’s stimulated my awareness of the effects of migration on kin and friendship networks, and how this might be described.

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Posted in Book reviews

The rehabilitation of Ben Cousins

Posted on December 16, 2008 | Leave a comment

cousins

So, Ben Cousins is to be a Tiger now.

I bet you thought that I couldn’t make a link between a footballer and the Resident Judge of Port Phillip, but of course I can.  The original Resident Judge John Walpole Willis was in Melbourne too early to witness the ‘invention’ of Australian Rules football by Tom Wills in 1858.  Ironically Wills ended up suiciding in Heidelberg, which was where Judge Willis had lived some 37 years earlier.  There was another Thomas Wills who lived in the Heidelberg vicinity, down by the Yarra River, while Judge Willis was in Port Phillip, so it’s all rather confusing.

There was speculation that Ben Cousins would be drafted by St Kilda, my favourite team, but it did not eventuate.  I was pleased. To be honest, St Kilda has a lurid enough history of bad boys and there is no need to perpetuate it with Ben Cousins who is described as a ‘recovering drug addict’.  For me, the final straw was when he shaved his head and waxed all his body hair to avoid a drug test in November this year.  This is not the act of a recovered drug addict who desperately wants to play.  It smacked of arrogance and a misplaced sense of invincibility.

So, Richmond has taken him on instead.  Fair enough: their decision.  But I was interested in the front page article in today’s Age that examined the public rehabilitation process that has been set into train, largely driven by his manager Ricky Nixon.  Mention was made of ex-Richmond player and acclaimed coach Kevin Sheedy‘s influence, and more interestingly for me, that of football commentator Gerard Healy.

[Club President Gary] March says Kevin Sheedy’s role in bringing Cousins to Tigerland has been exaggerated at the Richmond end, but that the influence of another Cousins’ supporter Brownlow medallist and media commentator Gerard Healy, has been understated.  Healy is a mentor to Cousins and was one of the five people Nixon had engaged to protect and advise him in the event that he was drafted by the Saints.

Healy’s major role was not simply to lobby Richmond and the league, but to turn the tide of public opinion through his media outlets, especially 3 AW’s ‘Sports Tonight’ which became command centre of a shameless “Give Ben a Fair Go” campaign.  (Age, December 17 2008)

Ah, that’s right, ‘engage’ (i.e. pay) the media to smooth the path.  And when Gerard Healy gets behind a young player next season, shall we assume that he has been ‘engaged’ to promote him, too?  He’s a radio announcer: should he, like fellow radio announcers Alan Jones and John Laws be required to disclose the players that he has been ‘engaged’ to support?

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Posted in Current events, Life in Melbourne

The Drunken Nurse

Posted on December 16, 2008 | Leave a comment

saireygamp

The Port Phillip papers are certainly full of drunkards.  Judge Willis himself has plenty to say about the perils of alcohol, and the Police Court is dominated by brawls and crimes connected with alcohol.  But I was particularly taken with this  Sairey Gamp character from the Port Phillip Herald 1 July 1842.

AN AFFECTIONATE WIFE.  For several months past, a man of the name of Henry Hayward a much valued servant of the firm of Campbell & Woolley, had been seriously ill, so much so that it was thought advisable by his medical attendant, Dr Campbell, to send for his wife to take charge of him, who, at the time, was following her occupation of monthly nurse in the family of his Honor Mr La Trobe.  This woman had hitherto been engaged as a nurse in some of the most respectable families- Captain Lonsdale’s, and many others.  The poor sufferer, whom we personally knew as an excellent and faithful servant, was at this time in a most precarious state, being attacked with that frightful disease, dysentry, and although a strong robust man, was evidently sinking fast: the attention of his wife, of course, became necessary, and his Honor the Superintendent being apprised of the circumstance, forthwith sent her to her husband, and himself kindly called to see how the sufferer was doing.  At this stage of the disease the doctor was sanguine of success; but to his extreme mortification he found on each visit that the wife, who had hitherto been supported by the first people in the colony in her vocation as nurse, was a confirmed drunkard; and that she was in the habit of not only getting beastly intoxicated and lying on the bed of her suffering husband, but made it a practice to drink the port wine and brandy, which the medical attendant had ordered for his patient, and thus leave the poor sufferer without succour.  Enraged at this atrocious conduct, Dr Campbell, at his own expense, engaged a respectable woman as nurse, to see that his orders were attended to, and that the wretched wife should not ill use her husband, which he had been informed she was in the habit of doing.  The nurse was unremitting in her attentions, but was frequently obliged to flee the house in consequence of the violent and drunken conduct of the dying man’s wife.  Often has Dr Campbell called upon his patient and seen the wife in a state of intoxication, lying almost senseless beside her husband! and often has he endeavoured, by every means in his power, to prevent such heartless conduct; but his exertions were all in vain; the poor man still lingered on, and the depraved wife pursued her unnatural conduct till the sufferer died! and this took place but a few days ago.  We have been particular in mentioning these circumstances to prevent ladies being imposed upon by such a wretch as the wife of Henry Hayward- a woman who has hitherto gained her living in the first circles as  “a monthly nurse” but who ought, in our opinion to be publicly and soundly whipped through the town for her fiendish conduct to her departed, and as far as she is concerned, her murdered husband.  We have the authority of the doctor for stating that had the wife performed her duty properly the deceased would in all probability have recovered!

There’s not many references in the papers of the time to women working- although how much work Mrs Hayward would gain after this exposure is doubtful! I was intrigued to find out what a “monthly nurse” was,  wondering if it was a nurse engaged for “that time of the month” but instead, it seems that a monthly nurse was a kind of mothercraft nurse who would move in after the baby’s delivery to care for the mother and baby for a month after confinement.  There’s a fascinating article called “The Remembrances of a Monthly Nurse”  in Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country (1836)that manages to combine celebrity gossip with a quite affecting account of the birth of a baby with cleft lip and palate, all from the perspective of the monthly nurse.

I had seen advertisements placed in the Port Phillip Herald by doctors calling for wet nurses, but this was the first mention of a monthly nurse that I had seen.  It appears that she gained her work largely through word of mouth between the “first families” of the colony.  The reference to His Honor Mr La Trobe, the superintendent of Port Phillip, relates to the birth of his daughter Eleanor Sophia La Trobe born 30 March 1842.  It seems, therefore, that Mrs Hayward was still with the La Trobes longer than the usual month, but as Georgiana McCrae noted, her friend Mrs La Trobe was often in poor health, and the La Trobes would have been first among first families!

I wonder how this marriage between the employee of Campbell and Woolley, a prominent mercantile firm in Port Phillip at the time, and a monthly nurse would play out.  No doubt she would be absent from home for extended periods of time. There’s no mention of other family.

It’s hard to tell what the actual outrage is here.  Was it her drunkenness- taking the port wine and brandy meant for her husband, leading no less to her “murdering” him by not doing her “duty” for him?  Was it her slatternly behaviour, lolling around the bed drunk with the dying man?  Was it her violence to the respectable nurse paid for out of Dr Campbell’s own pocket? Or was it, perhaps, the scandal and trickery by which this drunkard had worked her way into the  domestic households of respectable families, placing them all unknowingly in peril?  Whatever- publicly and soundly whip the woman around the streets- that’ll teach her!

References

Dianne Reilly La Trobe: The Making of a Governor

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Posted in Port Phillip history, Women in Port Phillip

Hans Heysen exhibition, Adelaide

Posted on December 15, 2008 | Leave a comment

heysen2

As an Australian of a certain age, I am well familiar with the typical Hans Heysen painting of gum trees that seemed to adorn every school corridor during the 1960s and 70s.  I wonder if the Education Department had/has  a warehouse with hackneyed Australian paintings- rows of faded “Shearing the Lambs”, a couple of hundred doleful Dobels and forests of Heysen gum trees.

I’ve been over in Adelaide the last week for the Australian and New Zealand Legal History Society conference.  I intentionally arrived one day early to check out the galleries and museum before the conference began.  I approached the Heysen exhibition with some trepidation, wondering if it would be gum tree after gum tree.

I was pleasantly surprised.  I hadn’t realized how much acclaim Heysen received at the time, winning scholarships and prizes overseas, and following that well-worn path to French art-school.  I particularly liked this painting of turkey bums- a painting which he noted for its complex structure with the movement of the turkeys through the saplings.

heysen

It was interesting to see the way that he had to recalibrate his eye for landscape once he went into the Flinders Ranges which were so different from the Adelaide hills and Hahndorf where he made his reputation.

The exhibition will be travelling to different locations in regional galleries next year.  It’s well worth a look, if nothing else to challenge your weariness over yet another Heysen gum tree.

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Posted in Current events

‘Dancing in the Dark’ by Caryl Phillips

Posted on December 14, 2008 | 1 comment

dancingdark

2005, 214 p

W. C. Field described Bert Williams, the real-life subject of this novel, as “the funniest man I ever saw, and the saddest man I ever knew”, and this paradox is just one of many in this book.  Bert Williams was a light-skinned West Indian but adopted as his stage persona a black-faced “coon” character.  He consciously adopted this stage identity as he applied his cork makeup, and scrupulously removed both after the performance: something that his fellow negro performers could not do.  Despite the increasing discomfort of his colleagues with his depiction of a shuffling, feebleminded “coon” , he responded to the acclaim of white audiences by continuing to play the character, eventually as the only “blackface” amongst Ziegfield’s Follies.  And yet, his act raised the profile of Negro performers, heading Booker T. Washington to note that “He has done more for our race than I have.  He has smiled his way into people’s hearts, I have been obliged to fight my way”.  And yet, this “smile” is so ambiguous and shallow: white audiences boycotted his attempts to move beyond the “nigger” stereotype, and he was trapped into continuing to play the character in order to maintain his popularity.

This book is told from multiple points of view, particularly from the middle of the book onwards.  I’m not sure if this narrative style was as prominent at the start, but I certainly noticed it as the book went on, and it seemed to mirror the increasing disintegration of his inner personality, marriage and stage success as it was perceived more and more by others.  The narrative is interspersed with film scripts, newspaper reports etc (that I assume are fictional, but I wouldn’t know) in a sort of papier-mache, constructed effect that emphasizes the emptiness of the man underneath.

The tone of the book is fairly simple and direct.  It raises big issues, though, about race, identity, performance and popular acclaim through the story of one man.

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Posted in Book reviews

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A job in Higher Education?

Posted on December 7, 2008 | Leave a comment

I always have a little browse through the Higher Education columns of the Career insert of The Age.  In an earlier life, I have worked in educational design at university and TAFE level, and I like to just keep my eye on what’s around.

Ah, here’s a job for a Senior Educator.

img432

Senior Educator in hairdressing???  Not instructor, mind, but educator…

And the school of Hair Beauty and FLORISTRY??

Carmen Miranda, maybe.

carmen_miranda

Or perhaps a little topiary?

topiary

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Posted in Things that make me laugh

‘Rock and Roll Nerd’

Posted on December 7, 2008 | 4 comments

My niece Louise sometimes commented that when she was performing on stage, she could look down and see her poppa’s bald pate reflecting the footlights and a steadily widening smile crossing his face as he sat a little taller in his seat, bursting with pride.  That’s all she could see- the forehead and the teeth.

minchin

I thought of that today, as I sat watching the documentary ‘Rock and Roll Nerd’ grinning away in a kind of maternal pride (even though I do not know the man) and with my eyes welling with tears at his vulnerability, resilience, humanity and the mixture of unfairness, joy,  hard work, exhilaration, edginess and yes, dagginess, of his life.

I’ve always liked Tim Minchin (who physically bears ABSOLUTELY no resemblance to the other Tim Minchin I know).  Ever since I first saw him on The Sideshow, (was it?) I was blown away by his intelligence, talent and outrageousness, even though I’m old enough truly to be his mother.

This is a great documentary- very human and very affirming.  Go see it.

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Posted in Life in Melbourne

‘American Journeys’ by Don Watson

Posted on December 5, 2008 | 3 comments

images

2008,  326 p.

I haven’t been to America.  And I don’t normally read travel books.

That said, Don Watson’s American Journeys strikes me as a rather unusual specimen of the genre.  It starts off conventionally enough, with a map of America with snail trails all over it, zigzagging right across the country.  It’s only when you embark on the book that you realise that these are indeed, journeyS plural, undertaken just for the pleasure of seeing what’s there, and that the experience of travel- i.e. moving from point A to point B- is just as important as the final destination.

This feeling of disembodiment- moving across- the continent is reinforced further by the blandness of the table of contents- just Chapter 1, Chapter 2 etc.  It’s really quite hard to locate favourite sections again in this book- it all just flows past.

Nonetheless, there are some truly memorable chapters- the New Orleans chapter in particular is damned good reportage- and indeed, as I flip through the book, I find good segments throughout that I had enjoyed but passed on over without them really making a strong impression on me. Is this shallowness intentional?

But there’s also a repetition about the book.  Again, I can’t work out if this is a weakness, or whether it’s a commentary on the nature of America itself.  Fast food strips, the shambolic nature of privatized public transport with Amtrak, the narrow fundamentalism, the puffed-up boasting, the distance…all these themes crop up again and again, right across his journey.  But then I think about how few concepts one really takes from a book when the last page is turned, (maybe four at best??) and if leaving with a multi-stranded memory of a book is a sign of success, then this book succeeds admirably.

Most of all, this book gave me a more nuanced understanding of American freedom, although I probably still don’t ‘get’ it.  In the past, I have bristled at the smugness and selfishness of George W. Bush’s ‘fridom’ that was so disrespectful of that of other nations.   Don Watson explains it much better than I could paraphrase, so I’ll let him do it:

Freedom is such an old chestnut of American rhetoric that it does not impress outsiders as perhaps it should.  The more the president speaks of it, the less meaning it registers.  When he says ‘Our enemies hate us for our freedoms’ we cringe, even though we know that, down the years, Americans have died in tens of thousands for the cause. In any case, we think, it’s less for the freedoms that they hate you, and more for the influence you exercise. ‘Our enemies hate us for our power, our hegemony’ would be a truer statement, and little would be lost by stating it in these terms.

And yet, when one travels in America, the chestnut sheds at least some of its shell. You come to see that, to Americans, freedom means something that we incurable collectivists do not quite understand; and that they know freedom in ways that we do not.  Freedom is the country’s sacred state.  Freedom is what must be protected.  All over, they will tell you what is wrong with America, but freedom is the one thing they think right.  And whatever the insults to my social democratic senses,  that is what I find irresistable about the place- the almost guilty, adolescent feeling that in this place a person can do what he wants…

If I am American, I am as free as a person can be.  If I am free, I can do- or dream of doing- all the things that it is in my nature to do or to dream; no other place on earth need interest me.  So long as I am guaranteed this freedom, I will forgive the things my country does that are not in my nature or my dreams.  I will be ‘spared the care of thinking about them’.  That is, of course, unless my country or some other place threatens freedom.  (. 325)

The blurb on the back of my book quotes Watson saying “Love and loathing come and go in about the same proportion”, and he conveys this ambivalence so well.

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