Tag Archives: Australian history

‘Lost Relations: Fortunes of my family in Australia’s Golden Age” by Graeme Davison

Posted on November 16, 2015 | 6 comments

davidson

2015, 288 p.

“How to produce a good family history?” asks fellow-historian John Hirst in his blurb for this book. His answer: “Get a master historian to write about his own.”  Hirst is right.  Davison is a master historian and this book is far more than a family history.

Graeme Davison, who is most familiar to me with his Rise and Fall of Marvellous Melbourne and The Use and Abuse of Australian History, has not been (and still is?) not completely comfortable with family history as a pursuit.

For most of my life I have avoided family history.  The crowds of chattering genealogists in public libraries and archives are one of the daily hazards of the academic researcher. I have written critically about the perils of ‘speed-relating’, the craze for online genealogy, and the business activities of Ancestry.com and other commercial genealogical websites… Only as I grew older and my parents passed on did I begin to recognize how much of my life had been shaped by family tradition and expectation, not to mention genetics; although even now, when temptations to reminiscence and nostalgia grow stronger, I resist them, conscious of their distortions.  In the end, however, encouraged by my family, I succumbed to the appeal of family history, not only because I wanted to better understand who I am, but also in order to think more concretely about the relationship between the familial and the communal pasts. And ‘doing’ my own family’s history, or a part of it at any rate, seemed the best way to tackle it  (p. xiii)

He doesn’t leave behind his identity as professional historian in doing so, though.  He starts his book in Hampshire, with the railway carving its way past the Hewett family’s village, and finds himself wondering what the Hewetts thought about it- and the historian in him makes its presence felt:

As an academic historian I would not even attempt to answer the question: it is too conjectural.  I would be better off examining the opinions of people who actually wrote them down. But the people who wrote things down are not the people whose feelings I want to know. Ancestry inspires the assumption that our forebears, being our own flesh and blood, are somehow more accessible, as well as more important, to us than other dead people… However, our distant forebears were not people just like us in period costumes…The idea that we can actually put ourselves in the shoes of our forebears is a harmless enough delusion, but a delusion nonetheless. [However] By reconstructing the situations they faced, taking account of the beliefs and attitudes of the time, comparing their situation with that of others, we can begin to understand their actions, even if we cannot enter their minds or hearts. This is what historians call the discipline of historical context.  It begins by treating our own forebears not as special but as ordinary people of their time, and it ends- I would argue- not by enhancing family pride but by expanding our common humanity. (p. 18-19)

Unlike Nick Brodie’s Kin, (my review here) which makes the rather large claim of being “The Real People’s History of Australia”, Davison’s book works on a more modest canvas. He focusses on “Australia’s Golden Age” and those members of his family who emigrated to Australia in the years surrounding the gold rush. He stops his account at his father, who did not emigrate until 1911.  Like a spider weaving a web, he tethers the thread in England- in Hampshire, in London and the journey of the Culloden to Port Phillip-  and stretches it to the gold fields of Castlemaine, strings it across the seaside town of Williamstown on Hobson’s Bay,to  the small cottages of Richmond and eventually to the middle-class prosperity of suburban Essendon.

He notes that

Family historians rely largely on sources created by the state, or earlier by the church. Our narratives are hung on the skeleton created by legally defined events-  births, marriages, deaths, bequests, leases, taxes, property transactions, crimes, censuses and the like. But little of what matters most in our lives is captured by such documents. If we are lucky, a few old letters… or bits of oral testimony…are left to reconstruct the most intimate, precious, fragile, irreducibly personal part of our lives from the outside in, relying on materials that are cold, standardised and impersonal.  Like the prophet, the family historian sometimes seems to inhabit a valley of dry bones, inert and meaningless until they are clothed with flesh and the spirit is somehow breathed into them (p.100)

Davison does breathe life into them, not from filling them from imagination (as a novelist might) or by speculation (which a less disciplined historian might do) but by bringing to the endeavour what historian Keith Hancock called ‘span’- that big picture perception that makes sense of the small.  I learned a great deal from this book, particularly in terms of push-factors, both in the United Kingdom and within Australia itself, that prompted the geographical shifts revealed by those dusty dry documents.  As it happened, his family history provided a rich case study for the effect of religion on individuals and families, not just as an entry in a document but as lived experience.

Davison is a much older and more experienced historian than Brodie, and he does not feel the same urge to slash at the historians who surround him.  In this regard, this is a much gentler and more mature history than Brodie’s, told with humility and grace.

Does the world need a deluge of  autobiographical, family-based histories, written by historians? I’m not sure that it does, and perhaps this will be a passing phase. Nonetheless, I suspect that Davison’s book will survive when the genealogical juggernaut moves on.

6 Comments

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged

‘Restless Men: Masculinity and Robinson Crusoe 1788-1840’ by Karen Downing

Posted on February 16, 2015 | 7 comments

downing_restlessmen

Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, 175 p & notes

ISBN9781137348944 (hbk.)

Allow me to rave. I’ve just finished reading Karen Downing’ book, Restless Men and I’m in awe of its breadth, intellectual complexity and insight that has made me look again at the writings of the immigrating men who came to Australia’s shores.  I always think that’s a good sign in a history: you re-read documents and stories that you’ve encountered before with new eyes, and find yourself giving a little nod in acknowledgment to the historian as you do, wishing that you could nudge her and say “Look- there’s another example!”

History is full of restless men. Constantly active, averse to being settled, they have been explorers, traders, pirates, crusaders and invaders, the forgers of empires that have come and gone across time, heroes and villains.  Such men- if not the drivers of history, at least its colour and movement- have been so ubiquitous that constant activity seems to be part of the essential character of men themselves.  Fiction, too, is full of restless men. From the ancient Greek hero Odysseus to the crew of the Starship Enterprise, imagined men have been forced, coerced and have chosen to leave home in the name of patriotism, protection, profit and pleasure.  The most enduring of these literary figures is the protagonist of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, first published in 1719. (p. 1)

Again and again, Downing finds examples of young (and not so young) men braving the seas to the colonies who identify with Robinson Crusoe, a book that they had read in their childhood which had become a wider part of the contemporary consciousness of the 19th century.  Wild escaped convicts (think William Buckley) were dubbed real-life Robinson Crusoes,  William Joyce, a young mechanical engineer fired up by the letters he had received from Port Phillip from his brother declared in his memoirs that “I felt I was going to be a sort of Robinson Crusoe” (and so he brought a huge amount of luggage out with him lest he run out!); explorers called themselves Robinson Crusoe.   Defoe’s book itself did not make men restless, but it captured the tension in men’s lives of the time between material circumstance and dreams, traditions and adventures, wildness and domestication.

In structuring her book, Downing deliberately eschews a straight cause-effect relationship, and a similarly simplistic here-to-there trajectory.   Nor is she treading a well-worn path: her book is an exploration of masculinity that doesn’t engage in the question of separate spheres, or the construction of male identity vis-a-vis women.   Instead, she focusses on the ideas of manliness between men.

Chapter 1 Confined by the Gout- Perceptions of Men’s Physical Health describes the perception that civilization and industrialization were seen as a threat to men’s bodies, with the health-giving colonies often seen as a panacea.   Chapter 2 The Ecstasies and Transports of the Soul- Emotional Journeys of Self-Discovery turns to men’s letters, journals and memoirs to capture the tropes of fiction (and especially Robinson Crusoe) in describing the emotion of leaving home.

Chapter 3 My Head Filled Early with Rambling Thoughts- Raising Boys and Making Men examines the theories of boy-raising current at the time. She looks particularly at the literature they imbibed as part of their education that valourized restlessness at the same time as driving them into conformity. Chapter 4 Satisfied with Nothing But Going to Sea- Seafaring Lives and Island Hopes examines a response to this restlessness through seafaring in empire, focussing particularly on island experiences and the Bounty mutineers in particular.

Chapter 5 To Think that This Was All My Own- Land, Independence and Emigration grounds (literally) this restlessness into the promises held out for land, adventure and independence by the emigration literature and colonization proposals of the early 19th century.  Chapter 6 The Middle Station of Life- the Anxieties of Social Mobility  explores the uneasiness between the dreams held out to restless men and the confining, restricting effect of the brittle distinctions of rank and order that were replicated in the colonies.  In Chapter 7 A Surprising Change of Circumstances – Men’s Ambivalent Relationship with Authority this ambivalence is extended into an examination of the debates about crime and punishment and loss of autonomy- a particularly loaded debate in an ex-penal colony. Chapter 8 The Centre of All My Enterprises- the Paradox of Families explores the paradox that many of these restless men were, like Robinson Crusoe, torn between wanting to establish and maintain a family as much as they wanted to escape familial obligations.

As you can see, this book traverses unusual and unexpected territory.  There are themes that run across it as well – adventure, land, independence- with their different and contested meanings.  It ranges broadly across a wealth of writing, and while limiting her view to the Australian colonies, her argument works for the other settler colonies as well.

Early Port Phillip teemed with these restless men and I’ve met them during my own work on Judge Willis– the young Burchett boys, some of the financial adventurers among the Twelve Apostles, and a whole host of the first generations of Port Phillip arrivals.  They brought their restlessness with them, and it affected the nature of a new colonial society. At the same time, I’ve taken her argument and held it against the mobility of the colonial civil servant, and found it a useful counterpoint.

This is an academic text but I’m regretful that the expense of this book means that only those with university library borrowing rights are likely to read it: even the Kindle edition is prohibitive- how can that be?  It’s a shame, because it’s an enjoyable read in its own right.

aww-badge-2015-200x300I’ve reviewed this book as part of the 2015 Australian Women Writers Challenge under the history/biography/memoir category.

7 Comments

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged , , , ,

‘The Biggest Estate on Earth’ by Bill Gammage

Posted on September 5, 2014 | 9 comments

gammage

Bill Gammage, The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines made Australia

384 p. 2011

I was aware, while reading this book, that I was reading what could turn out to be one of the really big books in Australian history: a book that changes the received understanding of Australian settlement,eventually rippling out beyond historians to politicians and the media to finally become part of the way we see ourselves and our country.  Maybe.

Gammage’s argument is that, instead of being marginal hunter-gatherers, ‘people’- for that is the terminology he has chosen to distinguish aborigines from ‘newcomers’- farmed prior to 1788.  They were not farmers, which is a lifestyle; but they did farm – the activity of tending and shaping landscape.  They developed what he calls a ‘template’ of landscape, a mosaic comprising open pasture with few trees,  strips of scrub and stubby trees, other plains, then clearly delineated forest.  It was a landscape ideally suited to the growing of tubers and providing both shelter and feed to encourage the presence of kangaroos and animals suitable for hunting. Instead of being forced to keep moving because they were on the verge of starvation,  people were well-supplied with food through this manipulation of their environment.  They moved across country as part of tending it, shifting and imposing the  template, created through careful burning, onto new land at will. They were well aware of species that tolerated or encouraged fire.

It is an argument that forces us to change our view of the landscape around us.  The bushland that we prize as ‘native’ landscape is often not that at all- instead it is product of neglect as the custodians of the country could no longer farm it.   The plains of green ‘pick’ were engulfed by scrub, and forests left unburned exploded into huge conflagrations that were not seen under the care of ‘the people’.

He mounts his argument through repetition, almost to the point of overload.  He draws on the writings of early settlers and explorers who again, again and again, observed and documented the same thing:

The country consisted of open forest, which, growing gradually thinner, at length left intervals of open-plain…Penetrating next through a narrow strip of casuarinae scrub, we found the remains of native huts; and beyond this scrub, we crossed a beautiful plain, covered with shining verdure, and ornamented with trees, which, although ‘dropt in nature’s careless haste’, gave the country the appearance of an extensive park.  We next entered a brush of the acacia pendula, which grew higher and more abundant than I had seen it elsewhere  (Major Mitchell, NSW, cited on p. 219)

And Gammage repeats their descriptions too- twenty, thirty, fifty, more-  explorers and settlers, repeating ‘parkland’ and ‘plains’ again and again.  He is at pains to emphasize that this occurred across the breadth of Australia as he draws together descriptions from each state, identified in brackets. The open spaces were covered in kangaroo grass, a summer-flowering grass that turned tan-coloured in summer, and their horses sank into the soft, flour-like soil.

Gammage reinforces these descriptions with photographs and paintings.  I had always assumed that the similarity of early paintings reflected a shared English sensibility that superimposed an English aesthetic of parkland onto an Australian landscape.  But when you couple these paintings which again and again depicted open grassland fringed with forest, with written testimony that again and again described exactly the same thing,  the supposition that they were blinded by European sensibility becomes shaky.  The blindness is ours.

If you’re not convinced by the descriptions and the paintings, he then moves from one capital city to another, drawing on the same descriptions  that sprang from their earliest newcomer settlers, reinforcing that he is not just talking about one corner of Australia, but the continent as a whole.

I had been anticipating reading this book for some time.  Many people speak of Gammage’s book The Broken Years in glowing terms, and his contribution to documentaries (e.g. The War that Changed Us that is screening on ABC1 now) and public discourse more generally has always been sensitive, articulate and insightful.  This book was awarded the Prime Ministers Literary Prize for Australian History in 2012, and Victorian, ACT, and Queensland awards. Yet I found myself disconcerted by the abrupt and utilitarian tone of the opening chapters.  Chapter 2, ‘Canvas of a Continent’ is replete with colour photographs and landscapes and paintings, but the text reads like a series of separate, lengthy captions. Chapter 3 ‘The nature of Australia’  is divided up into a number of subheadings, enumerating 5 changes, followed by 8 notes.  It felt a bit like reading a speaker’s notes.

But these two chapters are followed in Chapter 4 ‘Heaven on Earth’ and Chapter 5 ‘Country’ by one of the clearest explications of the Dreamtime and its connection with action in relation to land that I have ever read. He made intelligible to me the connection between spiritual and ecological activity on the land, highlighting even more starkly the insult on so many levels that settler activity inflicted on  Aboriginal reality.

Gammage’s beautiful, clear writing seemed to be ribboned with utilitarian, ‘hard’ writing, not unlike the ecological template that he was describing!  I think that I only really grasped what he was doing in the writing of this book when I read Appendix 1.  There he explained that he had been invited by the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies of the University of Tasmania to speak on 1788 land management.  As it transpired, the invitation lapsed.  This book seems to be to be the response he would have given to the scientists with whom he hoped to speak.   In many ways, I feel as if he is not writing for historians, but for scientists.  His footnotes- so beloved by historians- are stripped back and unwieldy, as they give author and page only, requiring a further search within the bibliography. Sometimes the original date of the quote – an important detail in this case- is obscured in the publication date of recent editions .  The footnotes corroborate, rather than carry on a conversation. The dotpoints and headings are part of constructing an argument on scientific terms, and a perusal of his truly extensive bibliography shows his immersion in not only historical, but also scientific, archaelogical and ecological literature.

I read this book after reading Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu, and I wondered when reading that book how it compared with Gammage’s.   Although there is some cross-over between the two books, Pascoe’s describes people much more, and their economic practices across a range of activities- fishing, , food storage, shelter, etc.   Gammage’s book, I think, focusses more on manipulation of the landscape.  Pascoe’s has the emotion of political action: Gammage’s is more dispassionate.  Gammage has the academic clout of a long and distinguished career in academe: Pascoe speaks as a Bunurong/Tasmanian indigenous man.  Pascoe reports on the academic debates from the side: Gammage is there, (especially in the Appendix) right in the midst of that academic skirmishing.

Taken together, the two books challenge our conceptions of ‘hunter/gatherer’ and what ‘native bushland’ looks like.  This in turn has implications for our responses to fire and how to act ecologically.  Most importantly, it throws up a direct challenge to the idea of ‘terra nullius,’ not in a legal sense this time, but in a practical and environmental one, by completely reshaping our idea of pre-1788.  It doesn’t fit neatly into a “defining moments” view of history at all  and it should give the lie completely to our Prime Minister’s view that Australia was “um, scarcely settled” prior to white settlement.  That’s what a big history can do.

 

 

 

 

9 Comments

Posted in Australian history, Book reviews

Tagged , , , ,

‘Roving Mariners’ by Lynette Russell

Posted on September 17, 2013 | 12 comments

rovingmariners

Roving Mariners: Australian Aboriginal Whalers and Sealers in the Southern Ocean 1790-1870

2012,  140 p & notes

There are two decenterings that this book demands of its readers.  The first is encapsulated by a map that looks something like this:

great_circle_SM3GSJ

It’s a map showing the great circle route of the southern ocean.  Dotted around and radiating out from the centre of the circle are the islands of the southern ocean: the larger land masses of  Antarctica, Australia, New Zealand,  and although you can’t see it here, Macquarie Island, Pitcairn Island,, Kerguelen, Chatham Island, Tahiti, Society Islands,  Solomon Islands, Falkland Islands, South Georgia.  It’s a view that challenges our land-mass bias by emphasizing the ocean and the space, and the relative proximity of small islands flung into the centre of the Indian, Pacific and Atlantic Oceans.

The second decentering reflects the focus on whaling and sealing in this book right up to 1870.  We’re often told that whaling and sealing were primitive, increasingly marginal endeavours which were eclipsed by the pastoral industry and then the gold rushes that super-charged the Australian economy in the 1830s, 40s and 50s.  It’s odd: I’ve been reading through 1840s newspapers for years now seeing mainly sheep, sheep, sheep but after reading this book suddenly I saw references to whaling all over the place- not long articles mind you, but the steady ongoing enumeration of whaling ships in the shipping news and, I must admit, the frequent presence of whalers and sealers in the criminal news.

Lynette Russell is the director of the Monash Indigneous centre at Monash University, and is herself of Tasmanian Aboriginal descent. Her own personal engagement with the history of whaling and sealing was prompted by a discussion she had with an elderly distant cousin who, like her, acknowledged descent from both Aboriginal and European ancestors.  He explained that his great-great-grandparents had been sealers, she a Tasmanian Aboriginal woman and he a British seaman.  When she sympathized with the virtual slavery in which Tasmanian Aboriginal women were kept, he pulled her up.  They were both sealers, he said, rather than a sealer and his ‘woman’ (p. 22).  This set her off to explore in a more nuanced way the complexity of the Southern Australian sealing industry.

In regard to her own Aboriginal identity, Russell embraces notions of undecidability and uncertainty:

As such, I emphatically state that I am neither one thing nor another.  Though I recognize that for many (perhaps most) people the desire to acknowledge one identity over all others is paramount.  For me, the binaries of Indigenous- non-Indigenous or native-newcomer- binaries that, despite their obvious artificiality, continue to be widely used- are meaningless; such simplifications hamper our understanding of the past. (p. 21)

This personal stance is reflected in the history that she writes in this book.

One of my key desires is to create a more complex and less linear narrative than has been previously produced for southern Australia.  One of the complexities I wish to develop concerns the question of the boundaries surrounding who was categorized as native, who was not, and who was described as newcomer…. I believe that these categories were not stable, and during the sealing and whaling period they were perhaps in a greater state of flux than they were either before or afterward. (p. 13)

The whaling and sealing industries of the Southern Oceans were always ethnically diverse with a strong representation of ‘coloured seamen’: African and Native Americans, Native Canadians, Pacific Islanders, Maori and Aborigines. Her sources are the archival records of the maritime industry including  logs, ships’ records, diaries, journals, visual materials including photographs and European artifacts.  After trawling through the sources, she concluded that there was ultimately a paucity of information about the ‘coloured seamen’ that she wished to write about.  This, she says, enabled space for her to imagine their lives and labours and to be “intentionally creative” (p. 16).  She plunged herself into the experience of whaling and sealing:  standing on the deck of a ship in the midst of a pod of sperm wales; standing on Kangaroo Island amongst a colony of noisy, smelly fur seals.

I must admit that there is much in her upfront description of her political stance and methodology that discomfits me (and I should imagine that within Indigenous politics, some would be even more uncomfortable), but I found little  in the text itself that unsettled me.   Instead, I sensed that she had read widely and imaginatively and that there was a strong tethering in verifiable, if diverse, sources (with one major exception where I felt that her creative imagination was straining the evidence too much).  She is very much present in the text. Her argument is strenuous and well argued, and it has the effect of challenging easy assumptions.

She focusses in particular on two men: Tommy Chaseland, and William Lanne.  Thomas Chaseland was born illegitimately to an Aboriginal woman and a white emancipist father.    He was sent to work in the shipping yards of the Hawkesbury River and signed on to the Jupiter. After a succession of stints on various whaling ships, he settled in New Zealand where he became the husband of a high-ranking Maori woman and made his home on the isolated Codfish and Stewart Islands before moving to the Fiordlands west of Stewart Island where he and his wife worked on a whaling station.

William Lanne, often incorrectly described as ‘the last Tasmanian Aboriginal male’  is more widely known, largely in terms of the outrageously disrespectful treatment of his body after his death.  Russell examines Lanne as one of three  Tasmanian Aboriginal men who pursued their luck at sea alongside Captain Henry Whalley and Walter George Arthur.  The details of what happened after his death almost obscure the life that he lived, but Russell attempts to reconstruct it.

Reconstruction of a life becomes even more difficult when she turns her attention to Tasmanian Aboriginal women.  Here she follows two other historians, Rebe Taylor who examined Kangaroo Island and Lyndall Ryan who focussed on Bass Strait and Tasmania.  She acknowledges her debt to this work, and tries to take it further by endeavouring to bring the wives and women from the shadows of the narrative.  It is a difficult task that involves reading against the sources, many of which were written by the missionaries who tried unsuccessfully to get the women to leave the islands.  She is extremely careful in her discussion of freedom, action and choices and her caution in the text behooves us to read closely and to attend to her hesitations and qualifications.

This is a beautifully written and nuanced  reflective history. It is at the same time easy to read and yet requires much of the reader as well in terms of weighing the argument and her use of sources.

A review of the book is available on H-Net.

awwbadge_2013I am posting this review to the Australian Women Writer’s Challenge under the History/Biography/Memoir section.

12 Comments

Posted in Australian history, Australian Women Writers Challenge 2013, Book reviews

Tagged , ,

‘Redmond Barry: An Anglo-Irish Australian’ by Ann Galbally

Posted on February 4, 2009 | 3 comments

barry3

1995, 228 p.

As a Melburnian, it’s difficult to get past the image of Redmond Barry as a strong, imperious philanthropist.  He is still very much a visible presence:  a large statue of him rears up in front of the State Library (one of his projects); his name adorns prominent buildings at the University of Melbourne (another of his projects), and of course his reputation has been forever intertwined with that of Ned Kelly, whom he sentenced to death.  This is the stuff of myth-making: the pompous Supreme Court judge cursed by the fearless bushranger “I will see you there when I go” (or words to that effect), only to die 12 days later of “congestion of the lungs and a carbuncle in the neck”.  [ Can you die of carbuncle? Dear Lord, if I should die, please let it NOT be of a carbuncle!]

Ann Galbally’s biography covers, of course, his whole life but my interest is mainly on his early years in Port Phillip and his relationship with Judge Willis.  Barry was born into the Anglo-Irish ascendancy.  The peace that followed the Napoleonic Wars cruelled his chances for a military career, so he entered the law instead only to find the Bar crowded with other young men who had made the same vocational choice.   When his father died in 1838, he emigrated to Sydney where there was less competition.

barry4

On the journey out, he embarked on a relationship with a Mrs Scott- and worse still, continued it when he reached Sydney.  News of the affair reached the ears of Governor Gipps, and he was awarded few government briefs as a result.  He continued to suffer from disapprobation even after leaving Sydney for the small town of Melbourne because, although he socialized and got on well with Superintendent La Trobe, the more prominent legal positions were in the gift of Gipps rather than La Trobe.   His unorthodox relationships with married women seem to be an ongoing theme: in 1846 he took up with a Mrs Louisa Barrow, with whom he had four children, in a  public, lifelong relationship that was never regularized by marriage.

Barry was only 26 when he arrived in Melbourne, and Galbally paints an engaging picture of Barry socializing with the other predominantly-Irish members of the Bar:  his good friends Sewell, Foster and Stawell and fellow Trinity-college and King’s Inn  graduates Brewster and Croke.  Although a member of the Melbourne Club and welcomed to all the vice-regal social occasions, he had little capital behind him and thus was not caught up in the land speculation of the early 1840s and  “perhaps for this reason his managed to maintain civilized relations with Willis for longer than most of the legal fraternity” (Galbally p. 49).

Not that Barry found Willis easy.  His diary records a succession of entries where he “argued with Willis“, “fought with Willis” or had a “blow-up with Willis who threatened to suspend me“.  He greeted the news of Willis’ suspension with relief  “Supreme Court Willis suspended + removed, Te Deum Laudamus” (24 June 1843).

In spite of this, Barry did not seem to have been exposed to the same personal insults or attacks that other barristers and officers of the court suffered.  Willis seemed to greet his appointment as the Commissioner for the Court of Requests in January 1843 with genuine approval, and at times their sparring in court (complete with historical allusions and Latin jests)  seemed to be equally relished by them both.   Although Barry had a reputation as a bit of a dandy who wore an old-fashioned Beau Brummel style suit, obviously Judge Willis did not take exception to this as much as he did the trimmed moustaches of Edward Sewell, Barry’s friend and erstwhile housemate.

barry1

Unlike Judge Willis, Barry was noted for his “dignified deportment and invincible politeness” (Garryowen p. 867). Galbally captures this quality well.   Against such a man, Willis’ own failings of temper and demeanour would have been even more marked.

References

Ann Galbally  Redmond Barry: An Anglo-Irish Australian

Barry, Sir Redmond, Australian Dictionary of Biography (online)

3 Comments

Posted in Australian Women's Writing, Book reviews, Colonial biography, Judge Willis, Melbourne history, New Year, Port Phillip history

Tagged , , , ,

An economic downturn 1840s style

Posted on October 11, 2008 | Leave a comment

What strange times we live in.  Each night, the news bulletin starts off with the financial report, extending over about ten minutes, then briefly the “other” news, then a return to the usual financial report, sport and weather.  Each morning I unwrap the paper and marvel at the increasing size of the headlines reporting on the latest falls on the Australian Stock Exchange, or Wall Street, or the FTSE,  or the Hang Seng.  How do I even know about such entities?  I think it’s probably indicative of the recent financial bubble that we’ve all been caught up in over the past 10 years,  that even before this crisis, every news bulletin has  the financial report as a staple item each night- I really don’t particularly remember it having such prominence, say, twenty years ago.  Ah, but we’re all investors now-unwittingly and sometimes unwillingly through our compulsory superannuation, and cajoled to “unlock the equity in your home” by drawing back on our mortgages to spend on the sharemarket.

And of course, it’s all on such a global scale.  There’s no shutdown period at all on a sharemarket somewhere- Australia wakes up and looks at what America has done overnight, responds by a rise or a fall on the ASX, the day moves on, that night the UK market responds, the US market responds to that, and it all goes around again.  There’s no sigh of relief of “thank God that’s finished”- although at least the weekend allows a global breather, until the whole merry-go-round starts again on Monday.

Our whole system is predicated on credit in a way that is largely unconscious and invisible to us.  With just-in-time manufacturing, there are no storehouses any more of goods waiting to be sold- instead the credit system balloons forward to buy in a consignment as it is needed right now, retracts when it’s sold only to balloon out again to replenish the shelves next week.  We’re bombarded with “buy now, no deposit!!” advertising; we’re asked as a matter of course for every transaction with a swipe card “will that be on credit?”

And so, conscious of all this, I’ve been thinking about the recession (depression?) in the early 1840s in Port Phillip, and the way it impinged on the worldview of people there at the time.  I surmise that, like me, their understanding at the time was incomplete:no doubt more so, given the four-month delay in any information from Britain compared to our instantaneous communications now, and the dependent state of a colonial economy within the Empire as a whole. What they understood of the financial situation was filtered through the newspapers, gossip, and lived economy of their own experience.

Contemplation of this- and I’m doing quite a bit of reading on this which I shall, dear reader, share with you- is not completely irrelevant to my Judge Willis thesis work.  As sole Resident Judge, he heard all of the civil cases that came to the Supreme Court; he oversaw (but was not directly involved in) the Insolvency Court, and his own propensity to “sift to the bottom of things” characterized his approach to the bankruptcy cases that crossed his bench.  I feel sure that the general ‘anxiety’ and ‘excitement’ of Port Phillip reflected both the economic and political currents of the day, and directly fed into his dismissal.

So how did the Port Phillip communications of the day portray the financial crisis?  Newspapers had always carried a column showing the price of goods on the local market -wheat,  bread, spirits, sperm candles, parsnips etc. (The parsnips have particularly taken my attention because at my local supermarket they have been $5.95 per kilo for the last few months.  For bloody parsnips!!!!! Fine words may butter no parsnips, but obviously $5.95 a kilo will!)  The shipping reports were often followed by correspondence from the wool agents in London, reporting on the wool sales- generally chiding the Australian suppliers for lack of quality, and sighing at the dearth of buyers.

Much of a four-page Port Phillip newspaper of the 1840s was devoted to Court reports, and as the judicial system expanded in Port Phillip, so did the scope for court reporting- the Supreme Court, the Insolvency Court, the Police Bench, Quarter Sessions, the Court of Requests.  The tales of drunkenness and violence that ran through these courts were increasingly supplemented by stories of insolvency, defections from debt, unemployed immigrants, forced sales etc. as we move from 1841 into 1842.

And increasingly as we move from late 1841 into 1842 there are also  the required advertisements of bankruptcy posted in the newspaper, notifying of the first, second or third creditors’ meeting of one bankrupt after another.  By April 1842 (which is where I’m up to at the moment), the Port Phillip Herald regularly published a table of insolvent debtors, their assets and liabilities, and the dates of their scheduled meetings with creditors.  Real estate advertisements spruiked  “we’re at the bottom of the market- so buy now!!” . Occasionally there would be a high-profile insolvency case that demonized a particular individual, surely read  and gossiped about with a sense of schadenfreude by the subscribers to the newspaper.

And all of this occurred within the bullishness and heightened expectations of people who thought they were coming to “Australia Felix” to make their fortunes!

Leave a comment

Posted in 1840s depression Port Phillip, Current events, Judge Willis, Life in Melbourne, Port Phillip history

Tagged , , , ,

‘An Unruly Child’ by Bruce Kercher

Posted on September 23, 2008 | Leave a comment

1995, 205p.

Lest you think I do absolutely no work on my thesis at all, last night I finished reading Bruce Kercher’s ‘An Unruly Child’. The  blurb on the back of the book describes it as “a provocative re-examination of our legal history, appearing at a time when Australians are reconsidering both their past and their future”.

Kercher’s intent is to critique the official view as taught to law students that Australian law is English law with minor adaptations to meet local circumstances.  His book examines the contest over the nature of the law in Australia, the struggle between local and imperial officials, and between popular ideas and the official law. Kercher probably leans towards John Hirst’s view that right from its inception, the NSW colony developed practices that subverted imperial intentions for a purely penal society.  He argues that particularly between the introduction of the Supreme Court in the 1823 NSW Act, (and even more in the 1828 Australian Courts Act),  and the mid-19th century, there was a period in which colonial law officers were authorized and even encouraged to consider the applicability of English law to local conditions, and to modify it where necessary.  More liberal judges embraced this opportunity: more conservative judges resisted it.   At the same time, colonists themselves subverted legislation that hampered them- for example, squatters in the Legislative Council protected their privilege and opportunities for expansion through the Squatting Acts; they insisted on Bushranger Acts that have some parallels with anti-terror legislation today, and in some regards  e.g. insolvency legislation, Australian colonial legislation predated changes made in later decades to English law.

John Walpole Willis is mentioned in this book, but is given less consideration than Montagu in Van Diemens Land and in particular Boothby in South Australia- the two other “bad boy” Australian colonial judges.  Possibly Montagu’s actions were more overtly intransigent or complicated by financial scandal, while Boothby in the 1860s was an anachronism in post-responsible-government times.  As with so much with Willis, I’m still not absolutely sure that he fits entirely into a ‘conservative’ pigeon-hole.  But as Kercher points out, conservative and liberal legal beliefs  could have ironic  consequences.  For example, the ‘liberal’ Francis Forbes quelled his misgivings over the highly repressive bushranger legislation because he strongly supported local law making powers, while the ‘conservative’ William Burton imposed the death sentence on white attackers at the Myall Creek massacre in a radical letter-of-the-law interpretation that outraged white settlers.  As Kercher notes “Liberalism and conservatism did not always have predictable results” (p.107).

Leave a comment

Posted in Book reviews, History, Judge Willis

Tagged , , ,