Being RomanSoldiering for Softies Well, obviously not ALL Roman Soldiers were of chiselled jaws and flinty demeanour. In this episode, Mary Beard introduces us to Claudius Terentianus, who spends most of his letters moaning to his father, and asking for the most basic of equipment from sandals to swords. After a lifetime spent complaining, he eventually moves up the ranks a bit and ends up being able to retire quite comfortably.
History Extra. Native Americans: A History of Power and Survival. I’ve been listening to The Rest is History, where they are looking at Custer, Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, so I thought I’d catch up on this more generalized history of Native Americans. I’ve always been mystified by the way that indigenous/European relations in Australia draw on ‘black’ language and politics of African Americans, when Native American/settler relations are far more relevant. This episode features Kathleen Duval, whose book Native Nations just won the Cundill Prize, a Canadian award for the “best history writing in English”. Her book looks at 1000 years of Native American history, starting in the year 1000 when Native American society was at the height of its organization, and comparable to cities in Europe at the time. The Medieval Warm Period made urbanization possible, and when it ended, people left the cities by preference. Native American nations were marked by trade, reciprocity and consensus decision making in confederencies that ebbed and flowed. The second part of her book goes from 1750 onwards. Spanish and Dutch colonization hadn’t changed the power balance, but this was to change from this point on. Part III looks at rebirth into nations. It sounds good.
Dan Snow’s History Hit The British Agent Who Tried to Kill Lenin tells the story of Robert Bruce Lockhart, a British diplomat, spy, and propagandist. He was born into a wealth Scots family and intended to go to Malaysia to work in the rubber industry, but was waylaid by scandal (I didn’t note what the scandal actually was!). He was restless and proudly Scottish. He ended up in Russia during WWI where he was an astute observer and politically agnostic. He became a “British Agent”, not an official position, but a conduit to the British government and their man on the spot. He was tasked with getting the Russian government back into the war after the Communist takeover and withdrawal in a plot by France, English and the US to use disaffected Latvians to overthrow the Bolsheviks. He was arrested and imprisoned by the Checka when he was betrayed by Latvian plants, but he was released under a prisoner exchange. He continued to hang around the Foreign Office where he worked as a Rogue Agent.
History ExtraImperial Spectacle: Inside Britain’s 1924 ‘Empire Exhibition’. In this episode Matthew Parker takes us to the Empire Exhibition at Wembley Park. The 200 acre site was ten times the size of the exhibition at the Crystal Palace in 1851, and it included the Wembley Stadium, which still stands. It was opened in April 1924 by King George V on radio, and he was heard by 10 million listeners worldwide. Held after World War I, it was an expression of gratitude for the Empire’s contribution to the war effort. Europe and the banking system was in tatters, and it was hoped that the Empire, at that time at its territorial height, could replace it. With the rise of fascism in Europe, the Exhibition tried to engage the working class, but there was a rather patronizing snobbery when describing the appeal of trashy exhibitions to them. Even then there seemed something rather old-fashioned about the Exhibition with its ‘living exhibits’ of exotic races. It closed in October 1924 but re-opened the following summer, running from May 1925 through to September.
7.00 a.m. White Australians of a progressive bent are challenged by Alice Springs. The footage from a few months back of young kids rioting and trying to break into heavily reinforced hotel doors was confronting, and the Country-Liberal Party’s recent election victory in the Northern Territory with an openly ‘tough on crime’ policy, knowing full well that it will fall mainly on indigenous kids, raises many reservations. Yorta Yorta journalist Daniel James has a three-part series on 7.00 a.m. Episode 1: This is Alice Springs: Children of the Intervention takes up back to the Howard government Intervention, which is widely blamed by First Nations people today for being the root cause of the problems today. Is it? I don’t know, but it’s repeated again and again here, and I have to take it at face value. Episode 2: This is Alice Springs: The Coppers Race relations and the futility and delay of looking to white systems of justice came to the fore with the police shooting of Warlpiri teenager Kumanjayi Walker. Zachary Rolfe was acquitted, and the coronial inquest continues at the end of November this year. Episode 3: This is Alice Springs: Mparntwe picks up after the Country-Liberal Party victory, when many people in Alice Springs are packing up and leaving town (I can’t help thinking that this is the purpose of the CLP policy). Daniel James interviews one of the locals who is staying to teach kids to be ringers on cattle stations ( and here I found myself thinking of Ann McGrath’s Born in the Cattle). But even this example is not quite what it seems. An interesting, thought-provoking series.
The Rest is History Ep. 450 Custer’s Last Stand: Death in the Black Hills (Part 5) Once again, I’ll use the podcast’s description of the episode: “In the wake of the barbaric Washita River massacre, George Custer found himself drifting; addicted to gambling, at odds with his wife, and failing in his efforts to take advantage of the American gold rush in New York. Finally, Custer was sent to Kentucky to suppress the terrible post war fighting there, but again found himself alienated from many of his companions by his controversial views on Reconstruction. Restless and dissatisfied, the chance for danger and action finally came Custer’s way, thanks to the ambitions of the Northern Pacific Railway. With plans to build it right across Lakota territory, the venture was intended to and would fatally threaten their way of life, by spelling the death of the bison. With this threat on the horizon, the mighty Lakota war leaders, Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse lead violent raids against the survey party sent to prospect the land, hampering and halting their efforts. So it was that in 1873 another expedition was sent, and with it went George Custer, bringing him into contact for the first time with the two mighty warriors who would shape his destiny. A fearful, bloody game of cat and mouse would ensue, culminating in an epic confrontation…” They point out that the Black Hills were considered “unceded Indian Territory”, a rather ambiguous status, but they were not traditional, sacred lands as we understanding Indigenous Country here in Australia. Rumours about gold finds also increased the population pressure.
Shell GameThis is a six-part series hosted by journalist Evan Ratliff, although you’re never really sure whether you’re listening to HIM or not. He created a voice clone using AI which pretty much sounds like him, except for the long pauses between utterances: something that I’m sure will be overcome in the future. He has great fun trying it out on cold-callers until he starts to feel a bit guilty, given that it’s someone’s job, so he then turns to scammers without any feelings of guilt. Ironically, the scammers are happy to play along because they’re just paid to keep people on the line. The rise of therapy-language (“thank you for reaching out” etc) makes it fairly easy to give the appearance of sincerity, and he tries it out with AI-generated therapists, and then with a ‘real’ therapist through Better Help. But even though he’s having fun with all this, even he draws the line with using his voice clone with his father who is battling cancer. Ironically, his father embraces the whole idea of a voice clone and embarks on some cloning of his own. Shell Game was named one of the the best podcasts of 2024 by New York Magazine, and it’s good.
In the Shadows of Utopia From Cambodge to Kampuchea I’m really enjoying this series, but the length of episodes is becoming ridiculous. This one went for 2 hrs and 45 minutes. It covers the period 1930 – 1945 and I learned just so much. After 75 years of French rule, there was little appetite in Cambodia to rebel against the French (unlike in Vietnam). In Vietnam Ho Chi Minh was part of Comintern, itself under Russian influence, but rather resentful that he was forced to call his party the Indo-Chinese Communist Party, even though there was virtually no activity anywhere other than Vietnam. Indo-China generally was affected by both the Japanese expansionism and the fall of the French government to become the Nazi-endorsed Vichy Government. In both Vichy France and in Cambodia itself, there was a harking back to the glories of the past: in France it was Joan of Arc, and in Cambodia it was Angkor. After yet another Thai/Cambodian war, where territory was lost once again, Japan stepped in and gave both Battambang and Siem Reap back to the Thai government (but not Angkor itself). In 1941 King Monivon lay dying at Bokor Hill Station (which I didn’t get round to seeing- but next time!), humiliated by the loss of his territory, and on his death, the French chose his grandson, Nordom Sihanouk to be King. He was only 19 years old and a bit of a playboy. Meanwhile, in 1936 the first Khmer-language newspaper started, edited by Son Ngoc Thanh. It increasingly took a pro-Japanese and anti-colonial line. In 1942 the French tried to impose the Gregorian calendar and a romanized alphabet (Oh! if only they had succeeded!!) and this led to strong resistance from the Monks. On 20 July 1942 the newspaper led a protest of perhaps 1000-2000 people, of whom about half were monks. The editor was arrested, along with 200 other people, including members of the Indo-Chinese community party. The editor Thanh escaped jail, but his letters reveal his naivete and lack of meaningful support for an uprising against the French, looking to Japan as the saviour of the “yellow nations”. The US bombed Phnom Penh as the war turned against the Japanese. In response, the Japanese began training local militias and they interned French officials (a bit of a surprise because these were Vichy French officials). Sihanouk declared independence at the request of the Japanese. Six weeks later, Thanh returned and was made foreign minister, and later Prime Minister after the defeat of the Japanese. There was strong distrust between Thanh and Sihanouk, and by now the French were talking about coming back. Thanh was arrested, and Sihanouk welcomed the French back. There was now a split between those nationalists who saw their future allied with Vietnam, and others who were keen to claim Khmer identity.
Meanwhile, in Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh declared Vietnamese independence. The Indo-Chinese Communist Party embedded itself within the peasantry, who were suffering from a Japanese-induced famine. The Viet Minh arose after a series of brutal repressions, and soon after the Japanese defeat, Ho Chi Minh declared independence from the Japanese, hoping that the Allies wouldn’t oppose it. But the French are coming back.
Phew- a lot there! While I was in Phnom Penh I saw where the director of the National Museum died at the hands of Japanese interrogators, and I just assumed that the Japanese had taken over as part of their sweep down through Asia. It had never occurred to me that Cambodia would welcome the Japanese, as a way of freeing themselves from the French.
As I remember, it was in about Grade 5 that we “did” Australian history – the first taste of ‘aborigines, explorers, gold and Eureka’- and we used a plastic template to draw Australia. Poor old Tasmania didn’t even get a look-in, but I was also disconcerted by the borders of Victoria, which started with off the solid line of the Murray River before trailing off into dotted lines, like the other state boundaries. Not that the dotted lines were any use: they were impossible to fit a pencil point into, anyway, but they did give a visual sense of state borders. (And emphasized the importance of water compared to boundaries, even though that water might disappear completely from time to time).
Australians are not unaware of surveyors in their history. Travelling around South Eastern Australia, one often encounters the ‘Major Mitchell Trail’, or markers of the trail of Hume and Hovell, more often described as ‘explorers’ but at early stages of Australia’s colonization, the distinction was perhaps less clear cut. Many Australians are aware of Goyder’s Line that separates arable from drought land in South Australia, and the final proclamation of the Black-Allan line in 2006, more than 130 years after it was surveyed, brought the names of surveyors Alexander Black and Alexander Allan to (somewhat) public notice. But I must confess that I had never heard of Thomas Scott Townsend, the subject of this biography, although his name was given to the second-highest mountain in Australia and Townsend Corner marks where that solid line dissolved onto dots on my plastic school template. The author of this book, Peter Crowley, felt that Townsend had been short-changed:
As far as I am aware, this is the first biography dedicated to Townsend, a man who was the pre-eminent field surveyor of the south-east during the squatter age…I felt for Townsend and his family and wanted to restore his memory to the place it deserved. His triumphs and his travails were of compelling human interest, a tale of suffering and sacrifice endured in service to the public, and they were always going to be the backbone of this narrative. (p.18)
Narratively, Crowley gets you in from the outset. He starts with a suicide in 1869, more than twenty years after most of the action in this story, when the reclusive and belligerent Townsend kills himself by cutting his own throat. What could have led to this “pre-eminent field surveyor” taking his own life?
Thomas Scott Townsend was born in England in 1812. He, along with his parents and 10 siblings, lived at Woodend House in Buckingham Shire. His older brother Joseph was apprenticed to a land surveyor and then began his own surveying business, and it was later noted by Major Thomas Mitchell, the explorer and Surveyor General of New South Wales that Thomas Townsend had been “bred in a surveyor’s office in England”. Thomas had arrived in NSW at the age of 17, and after being unable to find employment, was the recipient of a recommendation to the Surveyor-General from the MP for Oxfordshire, generated no doubt as part of the lobbying and patronage network which underpinned colonial mobility around the empire. He was initially appointed as a draftsman in a temporary capacity in 1831, but remained an employee of the survey department for over 20 years. Those same patronage networks, deployed to the advantage of other new arrivals, were to stall his progress up the career ladder when other aspirants were appointed over him on the basis of similar recommendations from ‘home’. He had to wait under 1845 to be promoted to the position of ‘surveyor’ and the highest position he reached was Acting Deputy Surveyor General of New South Wales.
In these twenty years he was appointed to various projects: laying out towns in Albury, Geelong, Eden; acting as Surveyor-in-Charge of the Port Phillip District; surveying coasts in Gippsland and the South Coast; ascertaining the source of the Murray River; and traversing the Main Range of the Snowy Mountains, making an ascent of the then-unnamed Mt Kosciuszko. Even though the Surveyor-General, Major (Sir) Thomas Mitchell, was able to inveigle long periods of leave for himself to return ‘home’, it seemed that each time the opportunity for a voyage or desired excursion arose, the government found Townsend indispensable and directed him to another suddenly-urgent project. Located far from Sydney and beyond the reach of official orders, he devised his own surveying activities as well, using the time when snow and floodwaters made surveying impossible to go back over areas that had been surveyed in haste earlier. He was ridden hard by the government, but he was a self-driven man as well : perhaps there is a streak of madness in all explorers and surveyors? He was not the first man to enter these areas – he found that squatters had preceded him nearly everywhere he went, following generations-old indigenous paths to find open pastures – but the methodical, documented act of surveying was a form of exploration in its own right.
Surveying involved long periods living in tents in the bush, unless the territory was so impenetrable that supplies had to be left with the oxen and horses so that the surveying party could move unencumbered, sleeping in the open at night – surely a daunting prospect in south-east Gippsland and in the Great Dividing Range. Surveyors used the ‘chain and compass’ method, using a Gunter’s chain to measure distance and taking bearings and angles with a compass. Sometimes they had access to a circumferentor, a compass mounted on a tripod with a sighting arm, or later a theodolite to measure angles. They recorded information in field books, from which they later plotted their data onto maps. At this stage they did not use contour lines, but instead depicted ridges, spurs and valleys by parallel lines known as hachures. Thus, those early maps look quite different to the contour maps we are accustomed to today, and certainly they have their own beauty.
Townsend was instructed to record the indigenous names for the geographical features he surveyed, even though those other names were later overlaid by British names awarded as an act of homage to patrons at ‘home’. Crowley emphasizes throughout the presence of indigenous clans and nations across the whole area that Townsend surveyed. Indigenous guides could easily be procured from squatting stations, and Charley Tarra (or Tara) was a member of several surveying parties. Crowley notes the massacres associated with various squatters, although he does not interrogate the role of the surveyor in a political and legal sense. Certainly guns and violence led to appropriation of the land on-the-spot by the squatters, but it was the legal act of survey and resultant gazetting that imposed British title and sovereignty over Aboriginal land.
Townsend’s work was directly impacted by colonial politics. When he first arrived, the NSW government had already lost control of the squatters outside the Nineteen Counties, and pastoralists were moving into the Port Phillip district from across Bass Strait. When he arrived in Port Phillip as Surveyor-in-Charge, there was already a large backlog of work awaiting him, which only increased further with the influx of population during the gold rush. With the cessation of transportation, the source of cheap surveying teams dried up, and it became difficult to find men prepared to face the isolation and sheer hard work of the task. Squatting regulations introduced a degree of urgency into surveying work, with the imperative to mark out town reservations close to water supplies, to avoid them being swallowed up into large estates. Separation in 1851 brought politics into surveying, with suggestions of a border on the Murrumbidgee which would have placed the Riverina and the later Canberra district within Victoria. Townsend had his own opinion about where the boundary should be, suggesting that instead of rivers being used (which can, after all, expand and shrink depending on climate), mountain ridges and port access should guide the decision.
Crowley depicts well the arduousness of surveying work. It seems that Townsend suffered more from the heat of surveying the Murrumbidgee than he did the snowdrifts and dankness of the south-east. Men could get lost just when stopping aside to relieve themselves; sometimes ticket-of-leave and convict team members were unruly or absconded; and the sad death of Major Mitchell’s son 18 year old son Murray, who accompanied Townsend on his survey of the lower Snowy River, highlighted the isolation and dearth of medical assistance out on the field.
The isolation, the incessant work and the rootlessness of surveying work over such a long period of work did not augur well for a desk-bound job in Sydney once Townsend finally achieved the promotion he craved. In fact, he was quite clear with the governor that he felt that he still needed to be in the field to ensure the accuracy of the surveys conducted by men under his supervision. He married, but seemed unsettled and increasingly paranoid about his wife’s fidelity and sure that he was being ‘watched’. Many people were concerned about him, and felt that a trip back ‘home’, which had been postponed for so many years might alleviate his mental distress. This was not to be… and here we are back at the start of the story, with Townsend’s suicide. I had felt at the start of the book that Crowley had laboured the ‘ignored hero’ point a bit, but by the end, I no longer felt that way. Townsend has been overlooked. Strezlecki has garnered most of the praise for his exploration of the Great Dividing Range, and Alexanders Black and Allen received acknowledgement for tracing the Murray River that Townsend had surveyed twenty years earlier.
Crowley tells the story well, interweaving the biographical with the historical. He draws on official correspondence between Townsend and his colleagues and superiors, Colonial Office files with and about Townsend (which reflect the usual aggrieved tone of correspondents and pompous tone of Colonial Office officials), Townsend’s maps and drawings, and in quite a coup, family correspondence that fills in the last years of Townsend’s life. At times, particularly at the start of the book, I felt that he was distracted by the weeds a bit, giving more context and background information than was necessary. The book does not have an index, which would have been appreciated, but the old fashioned chapter summaries at the start of each chapter helped you to locate information. There was a single list of footnotes that spanned across all chapters. The book did seem to take an inordinately long time to get started, with a note about measurements, geographical notes about what constituted the Great Dividing Range, or the Murray River, a cast of characters, a timeline, acknowledgments and an introduction- all before we get to chapter one. Much of this could have gone at the end of the book.
The one thing that I cannot understand, however, is the dearth of clear, modern maps in this book. With the National Library of Australia as publisher, use of historic maps and documents is to be expected but they were virtually illegible once reduced in size and rendered into grayscale. For much of the book I had no idea where Townsend was or where he was going and no sense of distance or remoteness. This was a book that cried out for a visual representation of land: something to which Townsend devoted his whole life.
But these are quibbles about decisions that may well have been beyond the author’s control. Crowley captures well the incessant demands of the work, the beauty and intimidation of the lands he was surveying, and Townsend’s inexorable spiral into mania. It is both a very human story, and yet one placed within the vastness of unsurveyed territory. Townsend may have had to have wait more than 150 years for his biographer, but with Crowley’s book he receives the recognition earned and withheld for so many years.
Sourced from: review copy from Scott Eathorne, Quickmark Media
I was in Cambodia, and I wanted to read something Cambodian, but most of the fiction involved the Khmer Rouge period written by people who have escaped to Western countries. This book falls into this category too, although it is slightly different in that the narrator, Mae Bunseng Taing, is of Chinese ethnicity, living in Cambodia. I was interested to know what difference that would make. Unusually, all of Mae’s siblings survived, which is not true of many Cambodian families.
Mae was a teenager and living a fairly affluent life with his entrepreneurial family when the Khmer Rouge marched into Phnom Penh. As with other stories I have read, there was the utter bewilderment as Phnom Penh was completely emptied of people, urged (forced) to leave on the pretext that the Americans would bomb the city. He and his family were forced into the provinces to undertake agricultural work- a far cry from their trading activities in Phnom Penh previously. The family was split up as siblings were sent to different agricultural projects and communities, while his elderly and ill father was left behind in a village. They had secreted away some jewellery, so they were not completely penniless, but under the surveillance of soldiers and ‘Angkar’ operatives, they were only safe if they could merge in amongst other people. The book gives a good glimpse into the ideology that the Khmer Rouge were imposing on their countrymen, who were reduced to a form of slavery.
He finally decided to escape into the jungle, and survived several heart-stopping confrontations. With the defeat of the Khmer Rouge, he decided to cross back over into Thailand and look for his family amongst the refugee camps there. But there had been a change in Thai government policy, and now refugees were being returned to Cambodia, taken into the jungle, and left to find their own way through the explosive-laced jungles at Preah Vihear. It was an inhumane form of mine-clearing, using desperate refugees who were left screaming alone in the jungles, limbs missing, after standing on mines. Mae was, in many ways, in more danger now than he had been under the Khmer Rouge.
This, then, was a second form of Killing Fields. I found myself feeling ashamed at the kindness and the prejudice and indifference that these refugees faced, all too aware that our refugee policy some fifty years later has elements of both. The story was written down by Mae’s son James, who makes an unheralded and abrupt appearance during the narrative, and clearly Mae found his way to a Western country to start a new life.
There is a film by James Taing that you can see on You Tube here. (If you can stand the incongruent ads)
In the Shadows of Utopia I was in Cambodia for most of this time, so I immersed myself in Lachlan Peters’ In the Shadows of Utopia podcasts. I didn’t really listen to much else. These episodes are LONG (over two hours) and very detailed. Episode 7 The French Protectorate ( I really wish he’d keep his naming conventions regular: it’s also called Khmer Nationalist and French Rule) deals with the years 1880 – 1938. At first, the French treated Indo-China in a fairly hands-off way but in 1885 the French Government insisted on a new treaty which abolished slavery and tried to disrupt the patronage networks that governed Khmer society. However, after rebellions, these reforms were not carried out, although French interests became uppermost. World War I had little effect in Cambodia, especially compared with Vietnam and the rural ‘old people’ lifestyle remained largely unchanged. In fact, when May Ebihara undertook her ethnographic study of a Khmer village in 1959-1960, published as Svay: A Khmer Village in Cambodia, her research was the first and only study of traditional Khmer life. The nuclear family was the basic unit, there was little mobility and a distrust of strangers. From the 1930s on, Phnom Penh began growing and we had the stirrings of an urban nationalism, spurred by the Buddhist Institute, the introduction of secondary education and the first newspapers.
Episode 8: An Introduction to Communism Part I goes right back to Marx and Engels, starting with Engels and his investigation into the condition of the working class (even though his family were capitalists). Engels and Marx saw all history and activity about the economic struggle, and capitalism would be the second last stage before the final, inevitable clash between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. At first there was great excitement over the 1848 revolutions that gripped Europe, but they were not led by the working-class, but by liberals and nationalists. Marx blamed the petit-bourgeoisie, and he had to wait until the 1871 Paris Commune as perhaps a better, if short-lived, example of Revolution. Meanwhile, we had the rise of a united Germany as a sign of things to come, but in the end it was backward Russia where first revolution took place. If you’re a bit foggy about Marx and Engels, this is a good place to start.
Background Briefing . Kidnapping the Gods Part II. This is the second and final part of this Background Briefing episode. This episode takes us to the involvement of several ‘art collectors’ including Douglas Snelling, who became an unofficial Australian consul to Cambodia and managed to ‘collect’ many artefacts that he sold in New York. Then we have Alex Biancardi in NSW, whose Egyptian father was also a collector. The Art Gallery of NSW offered to store his huge collection at no cost (probably with the expectation that they might access some of it). He may have been in contact with the notorious ‘collector’ Douglas Latchford. The episode shows the messy links between looters, ‘collectors’ and galleries and museums.
The Rest is HistoryCuster vs Crazy Horse: Horse-Lords of the Plain (Episode 3) The lifestyle of the Native American had changed immeasurably. In 1492, when Columbus arrived, it was thought that there were 3-4 million (and maybe as many as 8-9 million) Native Americans. By 1796 this number had halved. No tribes were on their ancestral lands: they had all been shifted around. In effect, it was a clash between emigrants. The Lakota had been shifted to the plains from their ancestral lands and were a warlike people. There are no photos of Crazy Horse (which was the name he took from his father). He was a medicine man i.e. he had a spirit animal, and had visions. He was a careful fighter- unlike Custer.
The Rest is Politics (US edition) with Katty Kay and Anthony Scaramucci is one of my regular listens, but I don’t record it because it’s usually too topical, and their commentary will be overtaken by other things. But they have recently had a four part series (only three have been released so far). on How Trump Won the White House. It starts with him winning the Republican nomination after years of bragging about (threatening) to run for President, when no-one took him seriously. The second episode (Did Obama create Trump?) looks at Obama’s ridiculing of Trump at the Press dinner, and speculate about whether this goaded him into finally running for president. The third episode (Collusion Collapse and Chaos) traces through the crazy 2016 election campaign, and the way that the momentum shifted between the Access Hollywood tapes and the accusations of Russian collusion that threatened Trump’s campaign to the ‘basket of deplorables’ and FBI Clinton emails that brought Hilary’s campaign undone. I guess I’m waiting for the last episode.
Emperors of Rome Episode CCXXVI – The Reputation of Catiline (The Catiline Conspiracy VII) At first, Catiline was seen as a by-word for ‘conspiracy’ but over time writers have softened their view of him, often reflecting the political events of the time. In Medieval times, he was re-cast as a Robin Hood type figure, and the Renaissance had a more sympathetic view of him. He was picked up in French Literature, with Voltaire and Alexandre Dumas wrote plays about him, as did Ibsen. The recent, widely panned film Megalopolis uses the names of the protagonists of the Catiline Conspiracy in a film set in an imagined modern United States. I haven’t seen it
Conversations (ABC)My brother’s death- writing the story of a family’s grief and loss. At the Ivanhoe Reading Circle, we always start our meetings with people talking about books they have read recently. A couple of people mentioned Gideon Haigh’s new book My Brother Jaz, a small volume that was written in a frenzy of writing after years of avoiding writing about the death of his brother. The book is less than one hundred pages, and the people reporting on it said that you could get as much from listening to this ‘Conversations’ interview as you would from reading the book. It was very good, although a little distant and rehearsed, which is understandable having written about it.
This book is both companion and expansion of Barbara Minchinton’s The Women of Little Lon (my review here) which looked at the sex work industry in nineteenth century Melbourne. Madame Brussels is one of the brothel keepers that Minchin described in the earlier book as part of the ecology and economy of Melbourne’s brothel precinct, but here she deals with Madame Brussels as biography, rather than one name among others.
Madame Brussels is probably the best known of Melbourne’s ‘flash madams’, now immortalized with her own lane and roof-top bar. She was certainly well known in the late 19th century, too, through her political and policing contacts that largely shielded her from prosecution, court appearances and notoriety. Caroline Hodgson nee Lohmar was born in Germany, married in UK and arrived in Melbourne with her husband ‘Stud’ Hodgson in 1871, shortly after her marriage. She rode the exhilaration of the ‘Marvellous Melbourne’ land boom, suffered the 1890s recession, and was increasingly hemmed in by the ever-tightening moral strictures of the early 20th century.
Soon after her arrival in Melbourne her husband left her to work as a policeman ‘up-country’, returning twenty years later in the depth of the 1890s depression in poor health. Left in a strange city as a deserted wife, she opened a boarding house in Lonsdale Street and gradually began accumulating property adjoining her original purchase, later purchasing property in South Melbourne, Middle Park and Beaconsfield Parade in St Kilda. She presided over her brothels, but there is no evidence that she worked as a sex worker herself. Her brothel attracted politicians and magistrates and there were rumours that Alfred Plumpton, then music critic for The Age and composer, was her lover. Although she appeared in court several times, she was always well represented and almost magically the magistrate’s bench filled up with worthy JPs who were not otherwise active in the courts (but may well have been active in her brothel). She remarried after her first husband’s death, but this marriage to fellow-German Jacob Pohl was no more successful than her first, as he soon left her to live in South Africa for several years. After a couple of years’ absence from the brothel scene, she started up again but times and politics had changed.
In the years preceding the turn of the century she became increasingly name-checked by moral reformers, particularly Henry Varley, and became a regular object of scandal in John Norton’s Truth newspaper (which had plenty of the former, and little of the latter, despite the name). In April 1907, after appearing in court charged under new laws with “owing and operating a disorderly house”, she closed her brothel in Lonsdale Street, and died soon after in 1908. Despite an extravagant funeral, she had little to show for the wealth which had passed through her hands.
As might be expected of a notorious entrepreneur, the sources for her life are skewed by real estate transaction documents and court appearances reported breathlessly by the newspapers. There is a genealogical record, although it is patchy: for example, it is not clear whether her ‘adopted’ daughter Irene was actually her own daughter. There are the annual ‘in memoriam’ notices that she placed in the newspapers after her first husband’s death, as was the practice in the early 20th century. But in terms of letters, diaries etc, there is nothing.
In an afterword Phillip Bentley, who is credited as co-author writes:
…we have remained resolute our desire for all conjecture to have a basis in fact and so have resisted the temptation to speculate on how she overcame her early education towards ‘moral earnestness, humility, self-sacrifice and obedience to authority’ in order to become Melbourne’s most famous brothel madam of the nineteenth century (p. 253)
I’m not absolutely convinced that the authors fulfilled this resolution. There are many times that they raise questions which they leave hanging in the absence of evidence, but the questions are raised nonetheless, couched in “may” and “could” statements. The chapter ‘A Curious Gentlemen’s Club’ I found particularly unconvincing, where the question of flagellation is raised, largely on the basis of her first husband’s uncle’s involvement in the ‘Cannibal Club’ and the presence in Melbourne of journalist George Augustus Sala, who was said to have coined the phrase ‘Marvellous Melbourne’ as well as being the anonymous author of flagellation pornography. As the final paragraph of the ten-page chapter says:
In all the records and writings and newspaper reports examined to date there is no suggestion that Caroline’s establishments offered anything other than ordinary common-or-garden variety male-female sex. There are no wild rumours, no snide passing remarks from journalists or parliamentarians under privilege, in fact no hints at all of anything alone the lines of the ‘fladge brothels’ in London. That does not mean it was not happening of course: it means that if it was, we simply can’t see it. (p. 82)
Likewise the chapter where they raise the question of whether her first husband Stud was homosexual raises the question but then admits “There is no way we can know for certain whether Stud was gay” (p.140). I’m not sure that raising questions, identifying parallels and possible networks is sufficiently rigorous, although surely a temptation when writing a life of such notoriety which provided relatively barren and biassed documentary evidence.
This book stands on its own two feet, but I think that I appreciated it more for having previously read The Women of Little Lon, a book which has firmer evidentiary foundations than this one. But I guess that’s part of the challenge of biography: finding the individual person while confronting the dearth of evidence. Even Phillip Bentley admits that perhaps they have not unpacked her personality as much as they would have liked (p. 253), but certainly the authors have succeeded in bringing out the person behind the name now adopted by popular culture with such glee.
Dan Snow’s History HitThe Warsaw Uprising. It’s the 80th anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising, which I have always had confused in my mind with the Warsaw Ghetto. This episode features Clare Mulley, the author of Agent Zo: The Untold Story of Fearless WW2 Resistance Fighter Elzbieta Zawacka. To be honest, I’d never heard of Agent Zo. She was born in German-occupied Poland, and was 11 years old at the end of WWI. Once WWII began, she was involved in active service with the Polish Home Army from the start, a resistance force of 400,000 to 500,000 people. The Polish government and army escaped and set up a government-in-exile, and never conceded defeat. From 1942 she used her German language skills and appearance to bring information into Berlin, and in 1943 was sent to Britain with microfilm. She brought parachutists back to Poland to join the uprising, which started on 1 August with an outbreak of brutal street fighting. Hitler was furious and ordered that every Pole be shot. Meanwhile, with Stalin advancing from the east (he had changed sides by now), the Russian government stepped back and let the battle continue, as it was in their interests for the Polish nationalists to be wiped out. The Warsaw Uprising continued for two months, and Warsaw was completely destroyed. Agent Zo was arrested and imprisoned in 1951, long after WW2 had finished. She died in 2009.
In the Shadows of UtopiaBecoming Cambodia Pt 2: Cambodia after Angkor This episode deals with the increasing European influence in Cambodia, and the shift from a subsistence economy to a trade economy. Longvec (or Lovec) was the capital for 50 years until it was conquered by the Thai. A multitude of foreign traders moved into the area, including Portuguese and Spanish traders who were competing with each other. The first phase of trading involved the extraction of gold and silver (and the spreading of religion in return), but the second phase involved Dutch trading for goods, rather than mere extraction. In 1594 the Thais threatened again so the King looked to the Spanish in the Phillipines for support. By the time his envoy returned, the Siamese had invaded and the King fled. When the Thais were distracted by conflict with Burma, the King took Lovec back again. The Spanish envoys decided to support the King in exile, and were promised that they were free to spread Christianity. By the time the envoys arrived in Laos to liberate the King, he was already dead, so they brought his son back again, only for the son and the envoys to be killed. Meanwhile Pierre De Behaine, a French missionary stationed in Vietnam where there was north/south tribal conflict, went back to Spain and organized the Treaty of Versailles – no,not that one- this one was in 1787 between the French King Louis XVI and the Vietnamese lord Nguyễn Ánh, the future Emperor Gia Long. Not a good time to be ratifying treaties, and when the French government fell through with its promises of aid, Pierre brought mercenaries and modern warfare methods. In 1801 Nguyễn proclaimed himself emperor of North and South Vietnam. Meanwhile, the Vietnamese and Thai governments both kept fighting to-and-fro over Cambodia. There was 40 years of Vietnam influence, then the Thais installed a pro-Thai King who gave away land around Angkor to a warlord, which was strongly resented. In the 1820s there was a new Vietnamese emperor who very anti-Catholic.
Episode 6 The Dawn of French Indochina This episode deals with the years 1789 – 1887. He starts off this episode with an engaging story of two little village boys growing up under the French protectorate. It’s only after you’ve been listening for a while that you realize that he’s talking about the man who became Pol Pot, and suddenly the story doesn’t seem quite so engaging any more. In telling the story of how the French came to dominate French Indo-China, he draws on three longer themes. The first is the French Revolution, which embodied nationalism as a source of power. When Napoleon III wanted to regain the empire that had been lost after Waterloo, he seized on the persecution of French missionaries in the 1850s as a cause to justify colonialism. The second factor was the unification of Vietnam, which had previously been split between clans in north and south Vietnam. This strengthening of Vietnam meant that Cambodia was being tussled over between two stronger countries: Vietnam on one side and Thailand on the other. The Cambodian king, crowned under Thai influence, started to look for a third power that he could turn to. Finally, we had the French naturalist Henri Mouhot who toured Siam, Cambodia and Laos and saw the potential for growing cotton, to fill a possible market failure with the American Civil War, and a way of competing with Great Britain’s imperial power. He also uncovered Angkor Wat during his travels. France invaded Vietnam by the end of the 19th century, as an opportunity to access Chinese trade, under the excuse that they were protecting French Missionaries from mistreatment. But the French didn’t need to invade Cambodia; King Norodom welcomed its presence.
Background Briefing. Kidnapping the Gods Part 1. Over this week, I was in Phnom Penh and visited the Cambodian National Museum, where they had a display about looted artefacts that had recently been returned to Cambodia. This two-part Background Briefing program looks at the Australian collection of Khmer artefacts purchased, of all places, from David Jones department store in Sydney, which had a special section for fine arts. Although the director of the gallery, Robert Haines, seemed completely above-board, he sourced his artefacts through a Bangkok dealer called Peng Seng who also worked for Douglas Latchford, an infamous dealer in Khmer looted goods.
Revisionist History This episode The IT Revolution creeped me out a bit and made me angry. It’s sponsored by T-mobile for Business, so it’s no surprise that his guests, two Chief Information Offices for different enterprises (one a hospital, the other a farm-machinery franchise network) talked positively about the changes that will come about from 5G. The hospital CIO lost me when she kept insisting that patients were consumers and customers, and that they all want access and self-service. Having just tried to make an appointment for a screening test and the insistence that I create a 15 character password, I was in little mood for self-service. She lauded the idea of Artificial Intelligence listening in on a consultation between specialist and patient (oops, consumer) and automatically scheduling your follow up appointments for you. Now that’s powerlessness- not only are you a cog in their machine, but it’s not even a human controlling it! Grump.
History Extra Love and Marriage in Austen’s Era This episode features Rory Muir is the author of Love and Marriage in the Age of Jane Austen (Yale University Press, 2024). He points out that there was often a large age gap between men and women when they married (largely because men had to work to get the money in order to get married) and 12-25% of English people did not marry at all. The slur of “old maid” only applied to poor people: wealthy single people had a rich, good life. Weddings were always held in the Anglican church for legal recognition, and usually before 12.00 noon followed by a wedding breakfast. It was possible to obtain a licence from the Archbishop of Canterbury that would allow you to marry at any time of the day, in whatever place. It was necessary to be 21 years old and have parents’ permission to marry, after the Banns had been read, so this caused a surge of elopements, particularly to Gretna Green over the order, where women of 12-14 years could be married. Honeymoons were usually held at a house of a friend, and it was common for a parent or friend to accompany the honeymooning couple. If the marriage was unhappy, there were few legal protections. There were only a total of 100-odd divorces in the fifty years between 1750-1800. Couples could separate, but not re-marry.
Dan Snow’s History HitThe City of Alexandria Well blow me down, the city of Alexandria is in Egypt! I always thought it was in Greece! It was founded by Alexander the Great, and it was a planned city, complete with a sewerage system and uninhabited space, located as a key node for the Eastern/Mediterranean trade. It was said to be the first city to reach a population of a million, and was known as a liberal, multicultural city, the site of the Lighthouse of Pharos and the Library of Alexandria. With the rise of Christianity and then the Islamic conquest of Egypt, it became less tolerant. The Muslims feared attack by water, so they shifted their capital inland but Alexandria remained unique in that it was IN Egypt, but not seen AS Egypt. (So perhaps me not knowing that it was in Egypt isn’t such a sin after all). Episode features Islam Issa, Professor of English at Birmingham City University and author of ‘Alexandria: The City that Changed the World’.
The Rest is History Britain in 1974: State of Emergency (Part 1) Dominic Sandbrook, one of the presenters of this podcast, has written several books about 20th century Britain, so this series of four episodes on Britain in 1974 is right up his alley. 1974 has been claimed as the worst year in post-War British history with the collapse of the social-democratic consensus, retreat from empire (albeit without any serious consequences), deindustrialization and inflation. After the failure of the Wilson Labor government, Tory Prime Minister Edward Heath took over. Despite being a Tory, he was from a humble background, but he himself was spoiled as a child and socially insecure, having adopted a patrician accent to hide his background. He was seen as a modernizer, in the mould of Kennedy. But he faced strikes, most particularly by the miners, who had not struck since 1926. In 1973 the Heath government adopted “Stage 3” which involved limiting pay increases unless a threshold for inflation was reached, in which case wages would go up automatically. They thought the threshold would never be reached, but it was with the OPEC Oil embargo. So for the fifth time in 3 years, the government declared a state of emergency when the coal miners went on strike, imposing a 3 day working week, no heating, no television after 10.30. Much as occurred with COVID recently, the government was blamed for the measures they took. Then the IRA bombings started on the mainland. The leader of the union movement offered Heath a ‘once-off’ offer that any rise granted to the miners would not extend to other workers (I don’t know how he could promise that) but Heath refused. Eventually he called an election at the end of February 1974.
The DailyEl Salvador Decimated Gangs. But at What Cost? I’ve been horrified by the photographs of shaved, skinny, humiliated prisoners and overcrowded prisons in El Salvador, but many people in El Salvador embrace these policies for the success they have brought in eliminating the gangs that made the country unliveable. In this episode, even a mother whose son was -it seems- arrested while innocent and held incommunicado for two years still accepts that her son’s life is the cost for peace in the country. There’s a series about Bukule on Radio Ambulante that I must listen to one of these days (it’s not exactly relaxing listening to a podcast in Spanish!)
Being Roman (BBC)Rome’s Got Talent This time Mary Beard takes us to a tombstone, set high up on a wall bordering a busy street. It’s a tombstone- well, a replica really- for 11 year old Sulpicius Maximus who died soon after appearing at the Roman games of 94AD in a poetry competition in front of Emperor Domitian and 7000 other people. His parents had been slaves, and Sulpicius knew that education was his ticket to social mobility. Apparently the poem that he made up on the spot (the rules of the competition) seemed to draw on a legend from the past, but perhaps it had a message for his parents (i.e. “back off, Mum and Dad”) to which his parents were completely oblivious. The original tombstone, which today stands in a museum in a disused powerstation had been incorporated into the city walls, and was only re-discovered when the Italian Nationalists blew the walls apart in 1870, revealing the pieces of the tombstone.
Sometimes you just have to shut a book when you reach the end and say “Wow!” That’s what I did when I finished reading Alison Bashford’s An Intimate History of Evolution, a dual biography of Thomas Henry (T. H.) Huxley and his grandson Julian Huxley that also drew in all the ‘little’ Huxleys as well. Not that there was anything ‘little’ about this family: it lay at the heart of 19th and 20th century British intellectual life, with links that extended to other illustrious families of science and letters like the Arnolds, Darwins, Galton and Wells.
While family biographies are nothing new, Bashford shapes her approach through two particular Huxley family members: T. H. Huxley (often known as ‘Darwin’s bulldog’) born 1825, and his grandson Julian, born 1887. This jump between generations, largely skipping the intervening generation, breaks up the linear progression of the narrative:
The younger man constantly fashioned himself after his Victorian grandfather, pursuing those signature Huxley knowledge-quests, some profound, others simply grandiose. They were both remarkable and both, on occasion, tortured. Writing these natural scientists together permits a kind of time-lapse over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, precisely because they were so similar. We might even think of them as one very long-lived man, 1825-1975, whose vital dates bookended the colossal shifts in world history from the age of sail to the space age; from colonial wars to world wars to the Cold War; from a time when the Earth was 6,000 years old according to Genesis, to a time when it was 4.5 billion years old, according to rock samples returned from the Apollo missions.
p. xxiii
T. H. Huxley was born into an “educated but struggling and socially declining” family (p.xxx) and had only two years of formal education before being thrown on his own resources as an autodidact. He was apprenticed to anatomists in the family, but did not complete his medical degree. He joined the navy and was made Assistant Surgeon on H.M.S. Rattlesnake, which embarked on a voyage of discovery and collection in Australia and New Zealand. (Actually, there are several references to Australia in this very English biography- perhaps reflecting Alison Bashford’s current position at UNSW). His work on jellyfish and other marine creatures gained him admission to the Royal Society but despite the acclaim he received for this work, he still had to fight for his position as professor of paleontology and natural history at the Royal School of Mines. His grandson, Julian, had a much easier path. His father, Leonard, had benefitted from the upward social and financial mobility of his father, and so Julian attended Eton and then Baillol College at Oxford from 1906. He, too, studied marine life, but he made his scientific name in his study of grebes (birds). He was invited to set up a Department of Biology at Rice University before World War I intervened, and he later moved to Kings College London as Professor of Zoology. He resigned this position to work with H.G. Wells and his son on a book The Science of Life before travelling to East Africa to continue his ornithological work . He returned to London to take up a position running the London Zoo in 1935, followed by a role in the creation of UNESCO and the WWF. He was a fore-runner to David Attenborough in popularizing the natural sciences and conservation through radio and television broadcasts and documentaries.
But both men’s work was broader than this. Their shared interest in evolution, albeit separated by the discoveries in the decades between their work, involved them in the intense debates of their times. Darwin’s theory of evolution (which T. H. Huxley was not initially convinced by, despite later becoming one of its major exponents) led to explorations and assertions about Homo Sapiens, anthropology, political biology and finally led to eugenics, of which Julian was a leading figure although distancing himself from its use in Nazism. Julian looked forward to transhumanism: a landscape that we have yet to traverse.
Both men were interested in the psychic and spiritual realm, particularly in later life. T. H. Huxley coined the religious term ‘agnostic’, meaning a humble ignorance and openness to further knowledge rather than its more hard-edged nature today. He approached the Bible as a historical document, and during his life wrote as much on Biblical themes (albeit critically) as he did on some of his natural science interests. He enjoyed jousting on religious matters with his sister-in-law, Mary Augusta Ward nee Arnold, who as well as writing rather dire ‘improving’ literature and being active in the anti-suffrage movement, was also a strong supporter of women’s education and settlement houses as part of the social reformist movement. His grandson Julian also developed an interest in neo-romanticism and was attracted to the ideas of the Jesuit priest Teilhard de Chardin with whom he shared a quest towards cosmic unification.
But both men shared the family inheritance of mental illness, in particular an immobilizing depression which saw Julian committed to psychiatric hospitals at various times during his life. This combination of family brilliance and family mental illness is perhaps what gives the title – An IntimateHistory of Evolution its unusual adjective. Here the theory of inheritance becomes personal.
The structure of the book reflects Bashford’s rejection of a single line of chronological narrative. The book is divided into four parts thematically: Genealogies; Animals; Humans and Spirits, and although dealing first with T.H. and then Julian in each of these themes, the timeline and focus does jump from one man to the other. Nor does the book focus on them alone: the women of the family, particularly T. H.’s wife Henrietta, Mary Augusta Ward, Julia Arnold are also referenced throughout. Other Huxleys especially Julian’s brother Aldous, and the religious writer Francis Huxley are also present. Bashford captures well the network of knowledge and intellectual influence which shaped, and in which the whole family moved.
Bashford’s own grasp of T. H. and Julian Huxley’s work is impressive. As a historian of science, she traces the contours of their scientific work, making it intelligible – and even, when you’re reading about jellyfish, interesting. She is just as comfortable teasing out their philosophical and religious work, which does become rather esoteric at its edges. It is not a particularly easy read, although I made it harder for myself by stopping for about a fortnight to read other things. But she is talking about big ideas – indeed, the biggest of ideas- and as a reader you have to work as well. She is writing about a family who were a tour de force in their intellectual milieu, and this book is Bashford’s own tour de force of biography, science, philosophy and history as well. Brilliant
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 