‘Zarafa’ by Michael Allin

1998, 202p

I seem to be tapping into other peoples’ obsessions at the moment (the philosophers in Richard Holmes’ Age of Wonder and the fictional counting-obsessive in Addition), and this book is certainly the fruit of a long-term obsession.  In this case, the object of fastidious attention is the giraffe donated to the King of France, Charles X,  by Muhammad Ali, the pasha of Egypt in the mid 1820s.   The author, Michael Allin, gives her the Arabic name ‘Zafara’ and in this book he traces her journey from her original capture in Sudan,  across to Khartoum strapped onto the back of a camel (I’m finding it quite hard to imagine this), then down (up?) the Nile to Alexandria, where she embarked a ship to Marseilles.  On arrival at Marseilles, it was decided that after a winter lay-over, she would walk the 900 km to Paris.  Her trip, which took 41 days, excited keen interest in the crowds that greeted her at each stop and indeed, the whole of France was convulsed with ‘giraffe-mania’.   She took up residence in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, where she lived for another 18 years.  Her stuffed corpse now rests at the museum at La Rochelle where it is too fragile to shift further.

You might wonder how 200 pages can be devoted to a giraffe going for a long walk, but the book covers far more than this.  We look at the use of exotic animals by the Romans, the effect of the Enlightenment on the flowering of scientific knowledge, and the fascination with Egyptology.  The narrative lingers with the savants who stayed behind in Egypt after the defeated Napoleon sneaked back to France. It  emphasises the deep effect of the Egyptian experience on these intellectuals once they returned to post-Napoleonic France, often deeply imbued with a love of Egyptian culture and continued admiration of Napoleon in a changed political climate.  It links the gift of the giraffe with European diplomacy at the time, with the Pasha of Egypt hoping to distract and soften French and British anger over Egypt’s intervention in the Greek War of Independence.

This book is a real work of love and is beautifully presented with small pages with generously spaced print and many pictures.  When the author finally finds the stuffed Zarafa beside the staircase in the French museum, you feel a rush of affection for her and want to cheer the author and slap him on the back for his dedication to his obsession.

More on the Burchett boys

I recently wrote about the three Burchett brothers who arrived in Port Phillip in the late 1830s/early 40s- Charles Gowland Burchett (1817-1856), Henry Burchett (1820-1872), Frederick Burchett (1824-1861) and Alfred Burchett (1831-1888).

I came across a reference to the Burchetts in William Westgarth’s  Personal Recollections of Early Melbourne and Victoria in his chapter on Early Western Victoria:

Thence I reached “Burchetts’ of the Emus” less finished, indeed, but hardly less attractive. They were business clients of my pleasant old friend Charles Barnes, whose name I gave as my pass, with, however, but little need in those open-door days.  This was a sheep station, as it was a drier locality, the other stations having been more suited for cattle.  We sat joyously chatting in the bright midwinter sunshine.  The air was redolent of humour, for which the Burchetts had a name.  One of them was rather deaf– indeed very deaf, but when he did pick up the current subject, he seldom failed to contribute good sauce.  With regret I remounted next morning, for with business finished in this direction, I was resolved to push on to the Glenelg, as I wished to see through Victoria westwards while I had the opportunity.  So I turned my steed north for the Wannon.

The reference to ‘The Emus’  and the deafness of one of the brothers confused me, and I assumed that they might be different Burchetts. But I’ve also been reading George Augustus Robinson’s journals, and found that on his Western Victoria travels, he also came across some Burchetts.   The editor, Ian Clark, identified them as “my” Burchetts.

A few miles from Gray’s came to another branch creek of the Hopkins on which was a sheep station of Burchett’s.  From this station proceeded to Burchett’s head station.  There are three brothers of the Burchetts’ they are from Kentish Town, London and the eldest is well informed.  They had on a curious costume: common floss jackets much too large for their little persons.  Two of the brothers are deaf.  There is also a Mr Bayley, an elderly person in partnership with them.  They have cattle and sheep.  It was raining when we arrived.  A youth, the youngest of all the Burchetts came out of the hut.  We asked the time; he said half past four by the appearance of the sun.  We judged it later and asked him how he knew.  He said, by the cattle coming home; they were to come home at four and they had just arrived. I asked a woman at one other hut and she said between five and six; she was correct.  The elder brother gave us directions to Muston’s to which station we were anxious to get this evening. He said if we kept the bank of the creek we were upon it would bring us to Muston’s.  I asked Burchett if he had been troubled by the blacks.  Said no, but he had heard that the natives had been at Kemp’s.  (The Journal of George Augustus Robinson, Volume Two: 1 October 1840-31 August 1841, p. 125, 3 April 1841).

There’s the same reference to deafness- although Robinson says that two of the brothers are deaf.  Well,  according to Google Maps, Penhurst and Mt Rouse (where I know that the Burchetts settled) are  about 50ks from the Hopkins River, so I assume that it’s the same group.   They sound a hospitable bunch.

‘The Age of Wonder’ by Richard Holmes

The front cover of Richard Holmes’ book The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science shows the beautiful painting ‘A Philosopher giving that Lecture on the Orrery in which a Lamp is put in place of the Sun‘ by Joseph Wright of Derby, 1766.   Quite apart from the impact of the lighting, the expressions on the faces and the spread of generations depicted, the title of the painting is important- a philosopher- and in Richard Holmes’ book we explore the shift from ‘philosopher’ to ’scientist’ in the nineteenth century.  The term ’scientist’ itself is of fairly recent origin, coined as part of this transition between 1830-1834, and initially rejected because of its analogy with ‘atheist’ but rapidly taken up in common usage.

Holmes argues that the bifurcation between science and romanticism took place only  in the mid 19th century, and was preceded by a period in which what we now call ’science’ was part of a broader fascination with theology, poetry, painting and literature.   In this multiple biography, not unlike Jenny Uglow’s  The Lunar Men (which I’m also looking forward to reading), Holmes uses Sir Joseph Banks as a type of bookend to encapsulate a number of other interwoven biographies.  The book opens with Joseph Banks in the South Seas, the young, libertine ethnographer who literally ‘goes native’  during his voyage of exploration and closes with his death in London, the bedrock of the Royal Society and a one-man communication hub between the  ‘philosophers’  he championed and mentored across the globe.   Between these bookends are other biographies: particularly those of William and Caroline Hershel the astronomers and Humphrey Davy the chemist and inventor, who each have two distinct chapters, as if Holmes himself is orbiting them.  Mungo Park the African explorer is here too, reaching into the darkness and emptiness of Africa as it was known then;  as are the balloonists in England and France who had the first glimpse of the earth from on high, just as momentous and re-orienting as the photographs of the earth taken from space 150 years later.  This is not just a ‘great man’ approach: there is also the more troubling diversion into the experiments into galvanism (news of which travelled all the way to Port Phillip) and attempts to create life itself as displayed in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

These ‘philosophers’ were not set apart from artists and poets: instead they were friends with them, and in many cases were themselves poets and writers- especially Humphrey Davy who, for me, is the luminous presence of the book.  His incorporation of women philosopher/scientists – Caroline Hershel, the indefatigable assistant to her brother and astronomer in her own right, Mary Shelley and Mary Somerville – does not feel forced, while acknowledging the societal structures that privileged their male colleagues.

Holmes is a wonderful biographer.  His footnotes at the end of the book are spare but painstaking, reflecting the depth of archival research he has undertaken.  They are supplemented by the occasional note at the bottom of the page, denoted by a trefoil, that provides glimpses of the biographer at work and in thought.  His note, for example, attached to a glancing reference to a ribbon that Davy enclosed in a letter:

In 1795 Pitt had levied a tax on hair powder, to help raise funds for military campaigns abroad.  The ribbon fell out of Beddoe’s letter as I unfolded it in the Truro archive, and I let out a republican whoop! that almost led to my ejection. (p. 252)

This is not just a series of scientific biographies: it is an argument about Romanticism and science, and the nature of human intellect and endeavour.  It is a deeply rewarding read.

‘One Day in July: Experiencing 7/7′ by John Tulloch

2006, 223 p.

Today is the fourth anniversary of the London bombings.   A memorial has been unveiled in Hyde Park this year, and I have no doubt that every passenger on the Underground today will think of the bombings, even if just to push the whole idea away as too terrifying to contemplate (or maybe I’m projecting my own claustrophobia here.)

John Tulloch, an Australian academic, became one of the ‘iconic’ images of the bombing as he was led from Edgware Road, a bandage wrapped around his head, with eyes darting sideways. His studies specialized in the media and risk, and he brings this perspective to his experience of the bombings.  This is more than a survivor story- although he writes graphically and minutely of the bombing and its aftermath- but the real strength of his telling is the intelligence and insight he brings to the experience and its portrayal in the media, theatre and literature.  Here he is able to step away and analyse the intent and techniques in the narrative as it is portrayed through different media.  He puts his politics upfront: he is vehemently anti-Blair, anti-Bush (and anti-Howard); he is convinced of the relationship between our involvement in Iraq and the bombings and clear eyed about our own complicity in allowing the war to continue.  Ironically, he found himself used as a political image to further Britain’s involvement, rather than to question it.

John Tulloch is obviously a sharp and rather irascible ‘older’ academic, and he puts his wisdom, experience and deep knowledge to its best use by adding shades of complexity, contingency and nuance to events that are too easily depicted in only black and white language- something that I’m pleased to see our Federal Government is moving towards consciously expunging from the political lexicon.

‘Addition’ by Toni Jordan

Grace Lisa Vandenburg is an unemployed teacher on sick leave after a breakdown triggered by a young boy’s accident in the schoolyard.  But Grace’s problems lie deeper than this: she counts obsessively and incessantly, as a way of trying to control her world and all around her.  Into this ordered and tense life comes Seamus, who is attracted to her humour and quickness, and steers her towards therapy and medication as a way of overcoming her obsessiveness.  We lose our perky, wisecracking, passionate and controlled narrator as the medication submerges her into a slow, passive inertia. Will she lose the medication or lose or her man? Or both?

This is all the stuff of good chick-lit, in this case bolstered by clever use of narrative to reveal the personality change that Grace undergoes as a result of her medication.  In this regard, it reminded me of Daniel Keye’s short story Flowers for Algernon, which was picked up as the film ‘Charly’.  I think that this use of narrative voice to denote change is one of the real strengths of the book, along with a main character who is not just sassy but also sees the world quite differently.  The book also introduced me to Nikola Tesla, a Croatian engineer who was likewise driven by the need to count, but for him it ended in madness.  The book explores the often narrow line between habit and obsession;  routine and ritual; self control and control of others; passivity and strength; eccentricity and madness.  In these regards, it steps out of the chicklit genre into something more complex.

But Toni Jordan has not been served well by her publishers, methinks.  There are several versions of the front cover, and none really does justice to a book that is more than just chick-lit.

Here’s the American version.  Who the hell is Emily Giffen? Thank you Wikipedia-  Emily Giffen is obviously the Queen of Chicklit. Her insightful blurb  calls it “A delight”. I hope that no-one offered their first-born child in exchange for such a glowing endorsement.  I wonder if her books are so nuanced?  And in case you think it’s a primary school textbook- a not unreasonable assumption really-  the cover helpfully labels it as ‘A novel’.

The English version has a little pun – “A comedy that counts”.  The lemon tart is nice and cheerful- but surely it should be a flourless orange cake sprinkled with poppy seeds- if you’ve read the book, you’ll know why.

There’s a second UK cover that sticks with the pun on counting: this time “Some people count more than others”.

One of the covers available in Australia resembles this British one, but with a sassier girl who looks more like a model and less like a schoolgirl.  The blurb cites The Age’s recommendation:  “A winning love story”.

Then finally, there’s one that perhaps gets closer to the tone of the book.  Sigrid Thornton (much loved of Sea Change) endorses it as “A stylish, witty and moving love story”.   But as the Resident Husband commented “Since when has Sigrid Thornton been a book reviewer?”  Maybe I should keep an eye on my toothbrush, lest it also get up to shenanigans.

There is a happy ending in this feel-good, romantic fiction book, and it’s good fun, engaging and heartwarming.  I gobbled it up, and shut the book with a smile.  I think we can all do with a bit of this, in small doses.  And, of course, only as part of a well-rounded reading diet.

The boys go to Port Phillip

As part of examining Judge Willis’ interaction with Port Phillip society, I’ve read folder after folder of official correspondence, column after column of newspapers, memoirs  and several diaries.  But one thing that I have barely dipped into is personal correspondence.  So it was armed with a few names that I headed into the State Library yesterday- off to read the correspondence of the Burchett brothers who arrived from 1839 onwards to their family ‘back home’, and a thesis based on the correspondence of  Alexander F. Mollison who visited Melbourne in its earliest days, then settled in the Port Phillip district from about 1837.

The survival of any cache of correspondence is  a mixture of luck, diligence, intent and circumstance.  There are those rare individuals who keep copies of all correspondence both sent and received, but it’s more likely that an archive of correspondence is likely to be largely one-sided, usually consisting of  letters received, with the letters sent reflected only obliquely.  The preservation of letters within a family depends largely on the importance placed on them by the recipient, and the custodians to whom they pass when the recipient dies.  Then there is another  step between private ownership and their availability to a wider public through a museum (where they can linger undiscovered and uncatalogued for years) or publication.

Moreover, the practice of mail correspondence between New South Wales and the metropole,  particularly during the 1840s, reflected the realities of a 4-6 month time lag with a swag of letters arriving in one dispatch, or likewise, no mail appearing at all.  No doubt the receipt of letters would trigger off a frenzy of response, with the minutae of day-to-day life telescoped into a potted narrative that would reassure loved ones who were totally unfamiliar with the sights, smells and local personalities on the other side of the world.  On both sides, the pictured recipients would be kept in a mental time-warp that kept them as they were when last seen, with shared acquaintances and memories given more prominence than perhaps they merited. I tend to think of this correspondence as similar to the word-processed  Christmas updates we all started to include in our Christmas cards a few years ago,  up until they fell out of favour for being homogenized, impersonalized and too cheery and cheesy.  (Mind you, I enjoy receiving them and still do send them- cheesy and impersonalized though they may be).

So, with these constraints in mind, how likely is it that any of this correspondence would mention Judge Willis?  I guess that it depends on how personally involved the writer was with the agitation to either remove or support him, which in turn might reflect the political engagement and interests of the intended recipient of the letter.  How much of any politics would filter through, say, into the Christmas Update we might send today?  I suspect that 2001 Christmas Updates reflected the shock of September 11;  we may have written to overseas correspondents about a change in government.  But, unless personally involved, it’s not likely that day-to-day politics is likely to find its way into correspondence intended for an overseas readership, even in our connected, globalized world, and probably even less so from 1843 New South Wales.

The Burchett Brothers

And so to the Burchett letters.  The copy of the letters I saw had been typewritten and photographed.  Now, there’s nothing quite like the pleasure of the looped, cursive script, the browning ink and the texture of the paper of the original.  But I’ve been there, and done that, and there’s also nothing quite like the regularity and ease of a typewritten transcript!!  They were catalogued under “Burchett family”, and the collection includes letters written by Charles Gowland Burchett (1817-1856), Henry Burchett (1820-1872), Frederick Burchett (1824-1861) and Alfred Burchett (1831-1888).   The boys arrived out here over a period of time, with the 22 year old Charles and 19 year old Henry arriving first in 1839, followed by their younger brother Frederick, aged 16, the following year.   I’m not sure when Alfred arrived.   There were obviously other children still left at home- Henry’s letters in particular are full of high-spirited and affection  in-jokes with his younger siblings.   All the same, it must have been hard to have your three eldest boys heading off across the globe at such young ages.

Charles, in particular, seems to have been of a slightly more political bent than his brothers.  In his letter to his father on 12 June 1841 he writes about a meeting to petition the Home Government for separation from New SouthWales, and mentions the Resident Judge obliquely in reference to Sydney’s neglect of Port Phillip- a comment by then obsolete given that Judge Willis had by that time arrived in Melbourne.

Even in Sydney they know little of us.  Fancy the wilful blindness of a tardy determination to allow us the services of a Supreme Judge three times in two years.

This was to be his only mention of Judge Willis.  He goes on:

The principal evidence of the moral advance of this place may be enumerated as follows- a Society lately formed ont he plan of the “Highland Agricultural Society” for the promotion of Agriculture, Horticulture and Breeding, William Mackenzie Esq, the son of a Scottish Baronet is the Chairman.  Two or three hundred chapels; the church, however, on account of its ambitious pretensions, is at a standstill for want of funds, a considerable part of the edifice completed evidently exhibits the intention of the Trustees to make it a handsome structure- it is of stone.  And last, but not least, the Mechanics Institution.  Among the lectures at this last has been one “On the Influence of the Press in disseminating knowledge” by George Arden, the Editor of the Port Phillip Gazette.  This said G. A. (the Boy Editor, as he is called) I have known since my arrival here; he gave a splended speech at the meeting.

The boys established a run called ‘The Gums’  near Mt Rouse in the Western District.  In a letter dated 1 Oct  1841,  Frederick was not pleased by the news that Charles Sievewright was to establish the Western District  Aboriginal Protectorate nearby:

There is a rumour that a Black protector is coming to take up his station at Mt Rouse, with his tail of 4 or 500 blacks, if he does we shall have to keep a sharp lookout, as the gentleman of his suits have been playing up a hurricane (colonial phrase) down below, and they are not very remarkable for their honesty

Five days later his brother Henry added:

How little do the good people at home, who are instigators of benevolent systems of civilization understand the character of these barbarous cannibals.

The financial depression of the early 1840s hit the Burchett boys badly, and Frederick returned home, followed by Charles who arrived back in England  on the Glenbervie on November 24 1843.  They obviously did not stay: Frederick returned to Van Diemens Land in March 1844 and the others must have returned at some stage too.  Charles died in 1856 at their property St Germain’s (near Echuca); Henry died in 1872 at “Albert Road, Regent Park” (not sure where); Frederick died in 1861 in Melbourne, and Alfred in 1888 at St Kilda.

Alexander Mollison

And so on to the second batch of letters from Alexander Mollison, this time as part of a thesis written by Marie Hyde who transcribed and annotated the letters as part of a Bachelor of Letters degree in 1988.  Alexander Fullerton Mollison (1805-55) has a higher profile that the Burchett brothers with a shared entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography with his brother William Thomas.

Alexander arrived in Sydney in 1834 at the older age of 29, and did not ever marry.  After an exploratory trip to Port Phillip in 1836, he overlanded down from his property at Uriani (near present day Canberra) with his flock of 5000 sheep, 634 cattle, 28 bullocks and 22 horses, to establish Colliban Station, near Malmsbury.  He was joined by his brothers Patrick, who was based in Sydney, another brother Crawford, and William aged 22, who arrived in 1838 who joined Alexander at Colliban.   A fifth brother, James, aspired to be an artist and several of Alexander’s letters warn him specifically not to come to the colonies, as there were few prospects for artists here.   Two sisters were left at home: Jane, to whom many of the letters are addressed and for whom Alexander obviously had a great affection, and Elizabeth.  Again, I find myself thinking about the parents left back in England with their daughters, with the ‘boys’ of the family so far away.

The early letters reflect Alexander’s interest in the  zoological and botanical sciences- and I assume that sister Jane shared this interest too.  Although he didn’t send her actual specimens- as Judge Willis was wont to do with patrons he wanted particularly to impress- he did write long descriptions of rainbows he noticed at sea and his first sighting of a platypus.  Zoe Laidlaw, in her book Colonial Connections 1815-45:  Patronage, the Information Revolution and Colonial Government, highlights the importance of scientific networks, and the overlap between amateur colonial naturalists and visiting scientific professionals.  It also evokes for me the burgeoning interest in science more generally reflected in another book I’m reading at the moment- Richard Holmes’ The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science.  It seems that Alexander was very much a man of his times.

As Hyde points out, the shipboard voyage

had positive benefits as an interlude between the old world and the new in helping to establish that network of connections with the well off and influential that would serve him well in years to come.(p. 5)

He travelled with the Rusden family, little realizing that the 12 year old son George would later become Clerk of the Executive Council and a member of the National Board of Education.   He became friends with Charles Nicholson, who was later become Sir Charles Nicholson,  statesman, landowner and businessman.

In an odd conjunction, he wrote to his father that Henry Burchett (of the letters above) had arrived at the station to learn sheep farming before striking out on his own.  The Burchett letters also resonate when the Aboriginal Protector Parker took up land on the Loddon to establish a Protectorate.  Unlike the Burchetts, Parker willingly gave up land for the Aboriginal station, and assisted Parker in running it.

Alexander obviously spent some time in Melbourne where he mixed with the other ‘respectable’ pastoralists.  On 26 December 1839, he wrote to his sister Jane about the Melbourne Club:

I do not remember having told you about the Club House in Melbourne. The Inns were found to be so dirty and disordered that several respectable settlers and townsmen formed a club about 18 months ago.  William and I are members.  There are now eighty permanent members.  The house affords twelve bedrooms, a dining room, drawing room, library and smoking room or dvan.  The bedrooms are rather small but exceedingly comfortable and well-kept.  Each member is allowed to occupy a bedroom one week and then must make way for another if required…The yearly subscription is five pounds and the charges are the same as at the inns.

His respectability gave him access to the political sphere.  Soon after La Trobes arrival in Melbourne,  Alexander and his brother Crawford called on him.  To his father, Alexander wrote:

Mr La Trobe arrived at Melbourne some weeks ago.  He told me that he had been introduced to you.  I called once at his offices with Crawford but came away as soon as our business was finished, as Mr La Trobe seemed to be very much occupied.  He is so far in public favor here and seems to be candid, sincere and unostentatious.

He also met with Governor Gipps when he visited Melbourne, and was one of the five men deputized to make a welcoming address to him.  In October 1841 Alexander wrote to his father:

We have had great doings this past week in honour of Governor Sir George Gipps’ first visit to this district, but I have not time to relate them.  I may however say that I was one of a deputation to draw up and present an address and also the president of a public dinner of one hundred and fifty people.  Sir George is frank, clever, and a ready and pleasing speaker.  I was introduced to him during my late short visit to Sydney.

When his friend Charles Nicholson put himself up for election as the Port Phillip member for the first District Council, Mollison seconded his nomination.   Nicholson was elected the representative for Port Phillip on the part-elected Legislative Council in 1843, served as Speaker in 1846 and twice more before the granting of responsible government.  Mollison was one of the inaugural members of the Melbourne branch of the Australian Immigration Society in 1840 (Garryowen p. 492); he addressed a meeting against the resumption of transportation (Garryowen p. 524); he presided over a Squatters Meeting in June 1844 and a committee member of the Separation Association (Garryowen p 907).  He was made a Justice of the Peace.

It’s not surprising, then, that Mollison does mention Judge Willis’ suspension, albeit briefly, with the terse comment that “he certainly deserved it”.  Mollison does not seem to have been particularly heavily involved in the movement against him, however, declining to sign the anti-Willis petitions.  Both Alexander and his brother William did , however, sign a letter in support of Lonsdale who was under attack by Judge Willis, and another letter on 14th June 1843 directly before Judge Willis’ amoval complaining about aspersions raised in the court in relation to the magistracy generally.

The sheer distance between the colonies and the family at home was reinforced for me by the report of Patrick’s illness in Sydney.  Charles Nicholson notified Alexander that Patrick was gravely ill, and within days Alexander was writing a second letter to say that he had died.  In his will, Patrick left his colonial assets to his sister Jane and Alexander, although they did not cover his debts.  Jane had obviously advanced money to Patrick, and Alexander later made an investment of Jane’s money in land on the portion bounded by Highett, Lennox and Erin Streets, Richmond.   Davidoff and Hall’s book Family Fortunes notes that the daughters of a family often made their inheritance available to their brothers for investment, in return for a roof over their head and keep.

Although he suffered financially during the Depression, he did not go under, which is a testimony to his good management and frugality.  By 1845 he was writing “I now begin to feel that my home is here.”  He did return to London in 1850, where he stayed for 8 1/2 years.  A photograph held by the State Library of Victoria taken in London during this time, describes him as

Seated, wearing three-piece suit with fringed black and white paisley patterned tie (probably a scarf). He has a full brown and gingerish beard speckled with grey, and wears a light coloured top hat with a very high crown.

He returned briefly to Victoria, then went again to England where he lived for another 13 years.  After the death of his beloved sister Jane, he and his remaining sister Elizabeth returned to Victoria in 1873.  They settled together, unmarried brother and sister, until he died after years of ill-health in 1885.

References:

Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780-1850

Edmund Finn (Garryowen) The Chronicles of Early Melbourne

Richard Holmes The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science

Marie Hyde Letters from Port Phillip:  the letters of Alexander Mollison 1833-1859 (thesis)

Zoe Laidlaw Colonial Connections 1815-1845: Patronage, the Information Revolution and Colonial Government

A. G. L. Shaw A History of the Port Phillip District

‘Family Fortunes’ by Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall

Some time ago, I read Michael Roe’s ‘Quest for Authority in Eastern Australia’.  Roe argued that the tenor of Australian society appeared to be set on a paternalistic, conservative path dominated by a landed elite who had been dealt with generously in the carve up of land and authority in the former  penal colony.  By the 1820s, however, a diversion from this path occurred with the influx of mainly British settlers who were shaped by what Roe called  ‘moral enlightenment’,  a philosophy drawing on 18th century thought, combining Romantic, utilitarian, Protestant and liberal values.  He did not claim that this was an intrinsically Australian characteristic- instead it was a ‘transplanted species’, drawn from similar currents in Britain at the time.

As I wrote in my post on Roe’s book, I was nudged into reading it by a friend’s dissatisfaction with the sterility and abstraction of his argument, which was largely a roll-call of local colonial male-dominated politics, with no ‘real’ people.  This didn’t trouble me so much, but I found myself wanting to dig back even further into the mental baggage of new settlers- where did this ‘moral enlightenment’ come from?  This led to me onto reading Davidoff and Hall’s ‘Family Fortunes’- a book that seems to have been cited everywhere!- a sure sign of the ‘landmark’ and ’seminal’ text!

The full title of the book is ‘Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780-1850′.  Its time-frame is important for considering early Australian society- every white settler carried with them the sensibilities of their home society, not necessarily replicated in the new society, but present nonetheless.    The authors argue that the middle class mentality of the early 19th century (later overwhelmed by the dominance of later Victorian bombast) was centred in the religious revivals of the late 18th century, manifested through the non-conformist and  evangelical Anglican middle class families that prospered in the early years of the Industrial Revolution.  They based their argument on the study of four locations: Birmingham and its satellite suburb Edgbaston; the market town of Colchester, and the villages of Witham in Essex, and Suffolk.  Their book is studded with people, met again and again, who exemplify the embeddedness of religion in family, business and public life: here are the fleshed-out personalities so absent in Roe’s book.

They draw an interesting distinction between adult converts in the religious evangelical fervour of the 1780s and 90s, and their own children, born as natives into evangelical Christian families.  Many of my Port Phillip pioneers are here among this group: particularly those public men who expressed their respectability and masculinity through the Debating Society, the balls, the subscriptions and churches in the new town of Melbourne.

The full title of the book emphasizes family and the role of both men and women in the economic milieu of middle-class English society.  They argue that during the first half of the 19th century, middle-class women were removed from the ‘establishment’ that supported the family- in terms of both role and location.  They moved to less visible, ‘back of house’ roles within the family business and the enterprise itself became town-based, while the family shifted to outlying satellite housing suburbs.  Male and female roles became increasingly separated into public and private spheres, that varied during the life cycle, with women’s contribution to the family capital and success increasingly sidelined.

I find myself thinking of Port Phillip’s development, starting with a blank slate as it were.  In the earliest days, housing and enterprises were intermingled- Georgiana McCrae and her family started off in Argyle Cottage in Little Lonsdale Street West, and many public men lived ‘in town’ as well as having other properties further out.  As part of the 1840s land boom, suburbs like East Melbourne, Fitzroy and Brighton were being subdivided and sold as residential property. Yet among the ‘public’ families, however, in a social and economic sense the  separate spheres seems to have been established almost from the start- although this would no doubt be less true amongst smaller trading and shop-keeping enterprises.  I’m also very much aware of the phenomenon of brothers emigrating together and business partners becoming -in laws: that web of family connections that was elastic enough to stretch across the globe, and yet was still stitched closely together where it caught at the extremities.

‘Family Fortunes’ is exhaustive (and exhausting!) in the sheer weight of evidence drawn from a variety of sources including diaries, letters, hymns, memoirs, family and local histories, minutes, business documents, wills and tracts- this is a BIG, important history drawn from small, domestic, often ephemeral, lived-in documentation.

‘Modern Interiors’ by Andrea Goldsmith

1991, 242p.

This is Andrea Goldsmith’s second book, and one that I hadn’t heard of before.  I read it for my C.A.E. bookgroup – a night of wine, laughter, affection amongst the women my daughter has dubbed “The Ladies Who Say Oooooh” (because apparently we work ourselves up into a chorus of  ‘oooooh’ at some stage during the night. I’m not sure if this is a compliment or not).

The book’s main character, Phillipa Finemore, is a wealthy widow whose adult children expect her to share the family money with them and subside into a well-heeled widow’s existence as their mother and grandmother.  Instead she sells the big family home, shifts into a terrace house in Carlton, starts a charitable foundation, travels with her deceased husband’s lover and secretary, and befriends a Jewish bookstore owner and then a 25 year old university student.

The goodies and baddies are stereotyped and one-dimensional.  There’s the grasping daughter and embezzling son-in-law; the insipid and incompetent son, and the good gay son who gets on well with his mother.  There are overdrawn parodies of the self-aggrandizing business school and a grasping evangelical preacher and his young wholesome wife.  The slabs of Goldsmith’s own opinions about the perils of family and the commodification of university education, voiced through the characters, became laboured too.

In spite of all this, though, I enjoyed reading the book.  It was almost Anne Tyler-ish in places, and although very wordy, captured emotions and descriptions well.  I felt glee at the come-uppance of such unpleasant people, so I must have been engaged with this book in spite of myself.

‘Talking Books: Novel History’

I found a terrific site called ‘Backdoor Broadcasting Company’, which contains a number of free podcasts from seminars, many of which seem to have been held in London.

The ‘Talking Books: Novel History’ seminar was held at Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at the University College, London on 6th June 2009 and what a delight to hear something so current! What wonderful times we live in – I could barely be back here in Melbourne writing this now if I’d actually attended it!  The seminar was introduced by the historian Joanna Bourke who started with a quote from Sir Leslie Stephen that historical novels were either pure cram or pure fiction.  The question is, however, how can historical novelists and the historical profession more generally attempt to remain true to the core, brittle narratives and images emanating from a complex and perplexing past?  She introduced Hilary Mantel and Sarah Dunant, both of whom have recent historical fiction releases.  Hilary Mantel writes about real characters: Sarah Dunant’s characters are composites, but both approaches rely on archival research to flesh out their characters.  The best historical novelists, Bourke said,  like Mantel and Dunant can teach historians that there can be a different kind of fidelity to individuals in history, one that acknowledges the power of motives over the power of institutions, and the role of contingency as well as causality.

Hilary Mantel’s academic background is in law, not history.  Her historical fiction draws on authentic characters- her most recent book Wolf Hall centres on Thomas Cromwell; her Place of Greater Safety (which was released in  1992  but written much earlier) presents different revolutionary characters as a collage throughout the French Revolution:  Camille Desmoulins, Danton and Robespierre.  She dislikes, but grudgingly accepts the term ‘historical fiction’ because it raises expectations that its practitioners will have something in common.  She sees her writing more as contemporary thinking about past events; she writes about real people who happen to be dead.  Historical fiction, she says, is a way of re-creating what has slipped from the historical record and of seeing justice done by giving a voice to the voiceless, and representing the mis-represented.  Her work emphasizes the role of chance and contingency, where historians are more often wedded to causal links.  What she writes of could be true: she excludes impossibilities and refuses to rearrange history to suit the dramatic process.

Sarah Dunant, on the other hand, was trained as an historian at Oxford University some 30 years ago, where she was discouraged from making up what we didn’t know.  She was taught the grand narrative of big events, prior to the changes of historiography beginning with Christopher Hill that raised questions about women, the poor, the other.  This more recent historiography gives rise to the potential for a new sort of historical novel.  Her characters did not actually exist: they are composites, based on deep secondary research which has delved deeply into the primary sources.  As an historian, it is the fidelity of this research that gives her confidence to develop her characters, using her sources as a pointillist painter might in representing a larger painting.

The two historical novelists were followed by John Sutherland, the Lord Northcliffe Professor Emeritus at UCL, author of a number of works on fiction, the fiction industry and best-sellers.  In contrast to the earlier speakers, he questioned whether fiction could recover the past, and claimed that fiction dies if you overload it with too much material (something I tend to agree with).  Good historical fiction, he says, defines our relationship with the past- it tells us about where we are.

I’ve been grappling with the perils and pleasures of historical fiction for some time- some of the posts on this blog reflect this :  the 21st sensibility and unwise (and modified)  claims to better understanding debated with Kate Grenville’s The Secret River; the right to traduce a reputation of a true-life individual while disavowing a work as ‘historical’ in Richard Flanagan’s Wanting; the ‘flim-flam’ of biography in Louis Nowra’s Ice;  the hedgehogs and foxes suggested to Isaiah Berlin by Tolstoy’s War and Peace; the deceptive selectivity of Nicholas Baker’s Human Smoke;  the distinction between ‘voice’ and ‘ventriloquism’ in Rose Tremain’s Restoration.    I keep reading historical fiction because I enjoy it, but every time I’m drawn back to the questions of technique that keep arising and that I never can quite answer.

‘Colonial Improver: Edward Deas Thomson’ by S. G. Foster

Once you’ve got some little way into your research, it’s quite amusing to look back at the things that puzzled or amazed you right at the beginning.  For me, it was coming across so many letters addressed to ‘E. Deas Thomson’.  Who WAS this man, I wondered, who seemed to write with such authority on so many topics- and why had I never heard of him?

Edward Deas Thomson was originally appointed clerk to the Legislative and Executive Councils under Governor Darling in 1829, then went on to serve as  Colonial Secretary for Governors  Bourke, Gipps, Fitzroy and Denison between 1837-1856.   The term ‘Colonial Secretary’ is a little confusing, as it was used both  for the Secretary of State for War and the Colonies in London (e.g. Marquess of Normanby,  Lord John Russell, Lord Stanley during Judge Willis’ time in NSW) as well as for the chief adviser and second administrator to the Governor here in the colonies.  In my focus on the empire-wide peregrinations of colonial civil servants and judges as they crisscrossed between Upper and Lower Canada, Newfoundland, Cape Colony, the West Indies, New Zealand, Australia, Sierra Leone etc., I have tended to forget that their mobility was supported by an ongoing administrative structure that remained more or less stable, despite the comings and goings of Governors.   This was the case with E. Deas Thomson who served under four governors, of varying political stances and administrative habits.

E. Deas Thomson was born in Edinburgh in 1800 to a family with naval and merchant connections.  His father was  the sometime accountant-general of the Navy, and family drew heavily on the patronage of Sir Charles Middleton (Baron Barham) , First Lord of the Admiralty, and his family after Sir Charles’ death.    His mother was from South Carolina, where Thomson’s father had worked as a plantation agent for his uncle.  After marriage, the couple moved back to Scotland but Deas Thomson’s mother seems to have not settled well and returned alone to South Carolina after suffering a period of paranoia, leaving the 5 year old Edward with his father.  Edward was educated at Harrow, then spent two years in France,  returning to London for a period before travelling to America, then Canada after attending  to business arising from his mother’s death in 1826-7.  The French and American connections, though not necessarily out of the ordinary, do suggest a broader experience than many other civil servants may have been exposed to.

Through his contacts with Sir Charles Middleton’s family, he appealed to Huskisson, then Secretary of State for War and the Colonies for a position in the colonial civil service.  At first he was offered the position of registrar of the Orphan Chambers in Demarara, then a second offer of Clerk of the Council of New South Wales, which he accepted, despite the lower salary, on account of the healthier climate.  This consciousness of the tropical climate, and its deleterious effects, is an ongoing theme in the English imagination of Empire.

He came to his position as Clerk of the Councils via a circuitous route.  The previous incumbent, Henry Grattan Douglass had been removed from the position, and Darling tried to replace him with his own brother-in-law Henry Durmaresq. However the appointment was vetoed by the Colonial Office after complaints of nepotism and Darling was warned against the appointment to public office of  ‘any relative or near connection’.  The position was then open for Thomson’s appointment.

Thomson was not particularly impressed with the drought-striken New South Wales during his first year in 1829, but his perceptions improved as the drought lifted and his friendship with Governor Darling developed.     He maintained a good relationship with Darling’s replacement, Richard Bourke ,and dined frequently with him, despite differences in political stance.  He married Bourke’s daughter Anna, which then placed him in a similar position to his predecessor Dumaresque when Bourke recommended Thomson (his son-in-law) as a replacement Colonial Secretary in place of Alexander Macleay- an erstwhile friend whose nephew ended up marrying Thomson’s own daughter in 1857- ah, the tangled intermarriages amongst colonial ‘gentry’ family!

Despite Bourke’s qualms about nepotism, the appointment went ahead, and as it was, Thomson remained Colonial Secretary for twenty years, long outlasting his father-in-law’s stay in New South Wales.   As such, he acted as confidant, advisor and spokesmen for the succession of governors.  His role changed after the 1842 Constitution introduced a partially-elected Legislative Council, and again with 1856 responsible government when, relucant to engage with electoral politics, he became a life appointee of the Legislative Council where he came to be aligned with the conservative element.

My own awareness of E. Deas Thomson, however, arises from his position as medium between Governor Gipps (the governor in charge during Judge Willis’ time in Port Phillip) and official and individuals in the community at large.   The protocols of communication were an important means of control:  individuals and government officials were instructed to direct all communication with the governor through his Colonial Secretary, and all communication with the Secretary of State in the Colonial Office in London also had to be channelled through Governor Gipps in Sydney (and hence, his Colonial Secretary E. Deas Thomson).   Certainly individuals could, and did, circumvent this process by writing directly to the undersecretary at the Colonial Office , but by Judge Willis’ time this practice, overtly encouraged by Undersecretary Robert Hay in the mid 1820s, had been regularized by the new undersecretary  Sir James Stephen.   Likewise,  there was an off-record back channel of communication within the colonies as well:  Gipps wrote personally to Superintendant La Trobe, and Thomson himself maintained long-standing communications with Denison in Van Diemen’s Land who was later to become Governor of New South Wales.   Indeed,  Thomson became increasingly critical of Governor Gipps’ carelessness in communications with local politicians,  and his inability to recognize when to speak and when to remain silent.  At the same time, leading members of the community recognized that it was better to sound out Thomson before approaching the Governor directly. (Foster, p. 62).

E. Deas Thomson himself has been cast as ‘conservative’ in his politics, particularly when he became a political actor in his own right after representative and then responsible government was granted to the colonies.  Certainly he came to be  seen to represent the interests of the squatters,  and expressed wariness and distaste for universal suffrage and wanted the constitutional backstop of a conservative upper chamber on a restricted franchise.  However, other aspects of his politics are less clear-cut.  He was a lifelong Free Trader, right from his time back in Scotland where he attended lectures by J. R. McCulloch.   He supported the idea of ‘improvement’- a theme picked up on in Foster’s title to his book- through schooling, universities, postal communications, railways, and his involvement in a range of benevolent societies and educational instutions including the Australian Museum and Sydney University.

The lives of E. Deas Thomson’s surviving children illustrate major themes in Thomson’s own life.  His eldest son suffered an ‘unstated ailment’ and could not hold down a job and drew on large sums of his father’s money- shades, perhaps, of Thomson’s mother’s ‘instability’; or maybe just colonial waywardness??? A second son became heavily involved in the Church of England and the temperance movement- the ultimate ‘improvement’ activity.  His three daughters’ marriages are a microcosm of empire: one married a nephew of Thomson’s own predecessor as Colonial Secretary, Alexander Macley; another married a member of the Indian civil service, and the other married a naval officer.

Thomson’s own early career demonstrates once again the importance of patronage in embarking on a colonial role.   Patronage seemed to make the world go round, but it’s easy to overlook its infantalizaing aspects.  Thomson’s own father, dismissed from his position as accountant-general in the Navy by the incoming Whig Government, turned his attention to a rich widow.  To his son he wrote:

The party I have had in view and still have, if it can be accomplished is a Mrs C a person about 50, being neither (of course) young nor handsome but with more good temper than falls to the lot of most people in life- She is the widow of an army surgeon who has been dead about 7 years- Her father left her about 15,000 pounds which has not been decreased but rather added to… Lord and Lady [B]arham approve the Match  & have visited & paid the necessary attention (quoted Foster p. 36)

Shades of Lady Catherine de Bourgh in Pride and Prejudice??  I suspect, but am not certain, that by now the Barham influence rested with 1st Earl of Gainsborough- or perhaps Lord and Lady Barham are a different branch of the family?  Ah, it’s hard to shake my 21st century perception that there’s something rather demeaning in all this deferral.

Foster paints a picture in this biography of a public servant who was not just a cipher for the Governor but who had influence in his own right.  He was in the mould of 19th century gentlemen improvers: he was concerned to ‘maintain balance’ between the forces in society, and he embraced technology, communications and education as a way of improving society.  His efficiency as public servant and administrator in many ways blunted the calls for responsible government: had the position of Colonial Secretary been filled by someone less capable, there would possibly have been more political agitation for constitutional change, much earlier.

References:

S. G. Foster Colonial Improver: Edward Deas Thomson, Carlton Vic. Melbourne University Press, 1978