Teredo – worms shall devour them

Places matter to people.  In my suburb, one of our best-loved places is the Shorncliffe pier.  Throughout the day, it is a place for tai chi and joggers, crab pots and fishing.  In the early evening, it is full of friendly walkers, with or without dogs.  People sprinkle the ashes of those they love from its railings, or use it as a backdrop for wedding photos.  It was recently used in a UK television ad available on YouTube here.

They used to say that Sandgate is 12 miles from Brisbane – or 13 at low tide.  It is a long way out to deep water, so early settlers could not get their goods – or themselves – from ship to shore without wading.  As the community grew, in 1865 they made plans ‘for the construction of a PIER or LANDING STAGE at Sandgate’.  This pier opened to the public in 1872.

From the start, the pier had a dual purpose, as a commercial landing stage, but also as a popular promenade.  Piers were a part of the tradition of beach ‘watering places’, growing popular amongst all classes by the mid-19^th century.  They were destinations for city day-trippers who came by railway to enjoy a day at the beach, perhaps swimming, but probably just strolling along the waterfront, and enjoying the concerts, food outlets, Punch and Judy shows and other commercial activities that took place on and around a pier.

Our pier followed the social model of British piers such as the West Pier at Brighton (1866) and the Cleveden Pier on the Severn (1869), both built at much the same time.  People came by coach, and then by rail (1882) to enjoy a day at the beach.  But while the British piers were mainly built of iron, wood was much cheaper in Brisbane, so our pier is wooden.

A few weeks ago, council inspectors found marine borers in its timber pilings and the pier has been closed until further notice.  Since then there have been petitions and a rally, a local newspaper campaign and a lot of promises.  A local election next Saturday has raised the temperature.

The Titanic’s Menus and what they can tell us

A menu from the first class service on the last luncheon of the Titanic’s maiden voyage has just been sold at auction for £76,000 [$A117,000].  This menu’s high value lies in its link to the Titanic, of course, especially in this centenary year.  But menus in any case make great collectors’ items.  They have an intrinsic fascination – I challenge anyone to read one without choosing which dishes they would order! – and they can tell us a lot about the time and place they come from.

The story of the Titanic is closely associated with issues of class, so it’s interesting to compare what the other passengers were eating, in Second Class:

and in Third Class:

In both cases the food is plain, and the choices are fewer, but the food was still cooked and served to the passengers, and came with a printed menu.  It’s a far cry from the 19^th century immigrant ships when steerage passengers were responsible for their own cooking.  Even the Third Class menu seems adequate (though we can’t know how generous the serves were), providing a hot midday meal called Dinner followed by Tea of soup, cold cuts and bread and butter.  Class determined not just what you ate – but when you ate it, and what you called it.

Ever since I went out to a posh French restaurant with a new boyfriend and ordered brains (cervelles) when I thought I was ordering prawns (crevettes), I’ve been deeply wary of menus, which often seem full of traps for the unwary.

Menus are notoriously hard to read, their descriptions hedged about by conventions as rigid, and as silly, as a Masonic handshake.  A l’Argenteuil means ‘with asparagus’, because this area on the Seine, downstream from Paris, supplied asparagus to the capital.  Anything Parmentier means ‘with potato’, because Antoine-Augustin Parmentier promoted potatoes as a food for the poor in 18^th century France.  And so on.

But even now that I know the difference between a salad Lyonnaise (bacon, croutons and egg) and Niçoise (tuna and green beans), the ambiguities remain.  The Titanic’s menu is fairly straightforward, but what is Chicken à la Maryland?

My first experience of Chicken Maryland goes back nearly 50 years, when my mother took us out to celebrate my exam results.  That dish consisted of a chicken leg and thigh, served with a banana and tinned pineapple rings, all of them deep-fried in a crisp orange batter.  I thought it the height of sophistication – but I suspect it was a million miles from the Titanic’s dish – or from Baltimore, for that matter.

Menus are a valuable source of information, but they need careful interpretation.  The Miss Frank E. Buttolph American Menu Collection, 1851-1930 is currently being digitized by the New York Public Library.  But digitizing isn’t enough.  Partly because menus are so decorative, partly because the names of dishes are so tricky, the library has recruited an army of volunteers to transcribe the menus and classify them, dish by dish.

Menus can tell us a lot about class and society, but they can also be used as a tool to understand environmental change. The History of Marine Animal Populations (HMAP) is a collaborative project using historical data to look at changes in fish stocks.

Both menus and recipe books are important sources of information – but menus have the advantage that they include prices.  In the US, for instance, lobsters used to be eaten by servants, but as supply fell during the 20^th century, their price rose and they became a luxury item.  This is currently being traced through menus.

It will be interesting to see what comes out of this project.  As readers of my blog already know, I’m very interested in seeing the ways that historical data can be used to help us understand our changing environment.  Reading and interpreting menus offer another way to look at the past.  Let’s hope the scientists can use the information on declining fish stocks well – or we may all be heading for another iceberg as we dance the night away.

What’s on the Menu? News, histories and culinary findings from NYPL’s collaborative menu transcription project

This time last year:
To Err is Human; to pick up errors is human too, 2 April 2011
Sandgate, in a good pair of boots, 6 April 2011

Poor Toulouse

Poor Toulouse.  It’s probably wrong to be more affected by a tragedy that happens in a place you know – but it’s human nature too.

I know Toulouse.  I lived there for a month 10 years ago, while my husband was working at the university, and fell in love with the city.  So the last few days of violence have felt very close, and very sad.  Angry young men exist everywhere, and no doubt what occurred in Toulouse could happen anywhere, but Toulouse has a long history of religious and ethnic violence – as well as a long history of culture and toleration.

Political map of Languedoc on the eve of the Albigensian Crusade, under the rule of the House of Toulouse (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In the middle ages, the issue was heretics.  The Cathars, made famous by Dan Brown’s dreadful novel, may have been heretical Christians, or perhaps belonged to another religion entirely.  It’s hard to know now, since all we know comes from hostile sources.  Whatever they actually were, they had a widespread presence in and about Toulouse, where the religious tolerance of the Counts of Toulouse protected them from the wrath of the Catholic Church.

Then at the beginning of the 13^th century, the French king and his warriors from the north launched a crusade against them – the Albigensian Crusade, named after the town of Albi, just down the road from Toulouse.

Today the bishop’s palace at Albi has been converted into the Musee Toulouse-Lautrec.  It contains the greatest collection of his art works, left to his mother after his premature death – so not including his more raunchy efforts, such as his delicate pastel depiction of a prostitute giving a blowjob, in the Foundation Bemberg in the Hôtel d’Assézat in Toulouse.

But I digress…

Toulouse was the capital of an independent County, and the cultural capital of the area known as Languedoc.  In the dialects of Paris and the north, the word for ‘yes’ was oïl (close in pronunciation to our ‘aye’) and later oui; in the south, the word was oc – hence Langue d’oc, the language/tongue of oc.  In Occitan, the city’s name is Tolosa.

Technically, a Crusade refers to a military expedition backed by the Papacy, and fought for religious objectives, but this, like other medieval Crusades, soon became a war of territorial conquest as well.  When Raymond VI, Count of Toulouse, refused to attack the Cathars within his territory, Pope Innocent III excommunicated him, and gave the French king a pretext to invade his territory. The Albigensian Crusade (1209-29) brought northerners down to impose their rule: the French king and his feudal lords, the Catholic Church and the Inquisition.

Cathars expelled from Carcassonne, 1209

But shorn of its status as an independent city-state, Toulouse survived and thrived. The Garonne River flows west to the Atlantic at Bordeaux, while traditional trade routes link it to Provençe.  In the 1680s, Louis XIV oversaw the building of the Canal du Midi through Toulouse, a canal that joins the Garonne to the Mediterranean Sea – and links cassoulet with the red wines of Bordeaux.

Toulouse controlled the woad trade, too.  The blue dye was used throughout Europe to dye cloth – or to paint the blue cloak of the Virgin Mary.   The French term for woad is ‘pastel’, and the colour is ‘bleu de pastel’.  Drawing pastels, on the other hand, are ‘pastels secs’.  That great master of pastels, Toulouse Lautrec, came from the region.  His aristocratic family (full name Toulouse-Lautrec-Monfa) were remote descendants of the Counts of Toulouse.

Today Toulouse is a great metropolis, the city of Airbus and other high-tech industries, and the largest French university town outside Paris.  It remains a long way from Paris, though, a place with its own traditions, dating back to when it was the capital of the Visigothic Kingdom of Tolosa, in the 6^th century.

I lived in Toulouse in early 2001.  The following September 9, fanatics highjacked 4 aeroplanes – and highjacked our history for a decade.  10 days later, on 21 September, an explosion ripped through Toulouse, destroying much of the south side of the city.  Our university friend was sitting in a seminar 4 kilometres from the explosion, and watched appalled as the shockwave opened up a brick wall in the seminar room.  29 people were killed that day, and about 35,000 homes were damaged, but in the aftermath of 9/11, Toulouse’s 2001 tragedy was largely overlooked, once terrorism was ruled out.  (It turned out to be an accident in a fertilizer plant.)

Now, 10 years later, there is another tragedy in Toulouse.  Even as a historian, I find violence very hard to comprehend, especially violence against children, but all the three great monotheisms – Judaism, Christianity, and Islam – have been violently intolerant towards each other at one time or another.

In 1209, the invading Catholic troops laid siege to the little town of Béziers to the east of Toulouse.  When the town eventually fell, the troops were ordered to kill everyone inside, men, women and children.  One puzzled knight asked the Papal Legate, Abbott Arnaud-Amaury, head of the Cistercian Order, how could they tell the Catholics and Cathars apart?  He was told:

Kill them all, God will know His own.

See Norman Davies, Vanished Kingdoms: The History of Half-Forgotten Europe (2011), for a chapter on the Visigothic Kingdom of Tolosa.

This time last year:
Timezones, 24 March 2011

Fast Foods

Last Wednesday marked the beginning of Lent, the 40-day fasting period that leads up to Easter.

Fasting can take many forms.   Muslims fast during the holy month of Ramadan by abstaining from all food and drink during daylight hours; Christians fast by abstaining from particular foodstuffs – definitely meat, sometimes other animal products such as dairy products and eggs.  The rest of us may use Lent as the occasion for a detox of some sort, giving up wine or tobacco or chocolate.

There is a spiritual dimension to going without, but the Lenten fast was once also a grim reality in temperate Europe, coming at the end of winter when food stocks were exhausted and the first fruits of the new year were yet to ripen.

We get a hint of the deep history of feast and famine that goes with an agricultural lifestyle in the way that our bodies deal with Vitamin D.  We can make Vitamin D by the action of sunlight on our skin.  In cold northern climates, where the sun is weak, people evolved to have fairer skin that could absorb more sunlight.

March, Peasants sowing fields, from The Duc de Berry's Book of Hours.

Since Neolithic times, people worked in the fields through spring and summer.  When food was plentiful, they ate well, put on weight, and stored Vitamin D in their fat. In autumn people brought in the harvest, killed their livestock, ate what they could and preserved the rest, but as the days grew cold and dark, their food supplies began to dry up.  During the hungry months of winter, they lost weight, and their fat stores released some of the summer’s reserve of Vitamin D.

Nowadays, with no winter food shortages, the fat we lay down stays on our hips forever – more’s the pity.  But our fatty tissues still absorb the fat-soluble vitamin, leaving obese people with depleted levels of Vitamin D in accessible form.

This seasonal starvation at the end of winter in northern latitudes must have existed long before the Christian introduction of Lent, but Lenten fasting fits very nicely into the pattern.  By the end of winter, most animals had been killed except for the breeding stock, so no meat was available.  Pregnant animals had yet to drop their calves, lambs or kids, so there was no milk, and broody hens similarly had to raise their chicks. Only fish was in plentiful supply, as the ice on rivers and ponds melted, and fishermen could venture out to sea again after the winter storms.

Rules about Lenten foods vary from place to place, and from one denomination to another.  Protestants sometimes abandoned fasting altogether – the Swiss reformer Zwingli proudly celebrated the beginning of Lent by eating sausages with his congregation – but in general, fish can be eaten on fast days in Catholic Europe, though Orthodox Christians take a stricter line on all animal foods.

Once you introduce rules about fasting, though, somebody will always find a loophole.  The most obvious loophole is that it is hardly a mortification of the (human) flesh to gorge on fish and seafood, and there are plenty of examples of the rich Lenten menus served in wealthy households.  St Patrick’s Day falls within Lent, and was celebrated with appropriate foods such as this ‘Patrick’s pot’ recorded by the Irish diarist Humphrey O’Sullivan in 1829:

A jolly group of us drank our ‘Patrick’s Pot’ at the parish priest’s… We had for dinner fresh cod’s head, salt ling softened by steeping, smoke-dried salmon and fresh trout, with fragrant cheese and green cabbage.  We had sherry and port wine, whiskey and punch enough.

Other loopholes arose when Christianity moved beyond the northern hemisphere.  The Spanish who settled in South America encountered many foods that had no part in the European diet, so they sometimes had trouble working out whether they fitted into the ‘feast’ or ‘fasting’ category.  Chocolate, for instance, was a sacred food for the Aztecs.  Was it therefore wrong for Christians to eat it?

Fish?

And what about the animals they encountered in this new world?  Throughout South America, people eat guinea pigs, which are rodents, and clearly a form of meat.  But the largest rodent of all is the capybara.  At some time in the 16^th century, the Spanish colonists applied to the Pope for a ruling on what South American animals they could eat on fast days.  They provided him with a description of this semi-aquatic animal.  Maybe they fudged the description just a little, because the Vatican decided to define the capybara as a fish.  It is still a popular treat during Holy Week.

In the Southern hemisphere, in any case, since Lent wasn’t observed during the hungriest time of the year, the logical connection between the Christian fast and the seasonal shortages of late winter was broken.

Nowadays, with fish stocks falling all round the world, it makes little sense to eat fish as a form of denial.  Giving up wine or chocolate, or taking a ‘digital Sabbath’ when the computer stays off, may be a more sensible spiritual exercise.

This time last year:
Carnival: A Moveable Feast, 27 February 2011

The Value of Manuscripts

It happens rarely – but it does happen.  People steal manuscripts, autographs, stamps, seals, maps and illustrations from libraries.  Last July, Barry Landau, author of The President’s Table: Two Hundred Years of Dining and Diplomacy (2007), was caught with an accomplice, Jason Savedoff, stealing documents from the Maryland Historical Society.  Since then, police have found about 10,000 documents in their apartment.

‘I cannot believe it,’ Lynn von Furstenberg, the second wife of Prince Egon von Furstenberg and a close friend of Landau’s for many years, told The Daily Beast. ‘The things I’ve been reading about him in the press are not the Barry I know. He’s just this gregarious, sweet, sensitive human being.’

Well yes, maybe.  On Amazon, Landau is described as a ‘historian’ – but as those of us in the profession well know, anyone can call themselves a historian.  There’s no quality control outside the university system, and since non-academic historians do a lot of important work, I don’t really want any – but sometimes someone goes rogue.

Working in archives, in major libraries, or small institutions such as the Maryland Historical Society, historians often have access to very valuable items – and for some people the temptation can be overwhelming.  I remember hearing many years ago about a university lecturer who was caught stealing 19^th century stamped envelopes from the British Library.  He collected stamps, so knew what items to look for.  He came from a ‘good’ background and the whole affair was hushed up – so successfully that he got a Chair at an Australian university that undoubtedly knew nothing about his background.

Every library has a security problem, and as the value of items rises, the chance rises that rare books will be pilfered for their maps and pictures, or autograph letters and envelopes will disappear out the door, concealed in folders of notes.

Libraries fight back, of course.  At the British Library, and similar libraries, you can only take things into the reading rooms inside clear plastic bags, and most repository libraries have metal detectors, though security people are mainly concerned with keeping dangerous items out, rather than keeping precious items in.

In manuscript rooms, security is higher still.  I remember visiting Southampton University library to read a section of Lord Shaftesbury’s diary.  Before they handed me the volume, they weighed it, and weighed it again when I returned it.  Apparently this is standard procedure in manuscript libraries, but most do it out of sight of the readers.  Southampton decided that doing it publically was a more effective deterrent.  (In case you are thinking of replacing a few pages of A4 in the folio, it is very hard to get the substitute weight exactly right.)

Fencing these thefts is relatively easy with EBay and the like.  Many of these thieves are not interested in the money though, or not just the money.  Like the stamp collector in the British Library, often they are collectors who see the concrete objects in front of them, and recognize their intrinsic value.  Where we historians tend to see only the words on the page, they see the page itself.

Meanwhile the relationship between philately and history cuts both ways.  Many years ago, I spent a lot of time working on the letters of Florence Nightingale in the British Library.  I’m not sure when, and how, these letters arrived in the library, but before they did, somebody tore off the stamps, no doubt so that some child could stick them in a stamp album.  Where the stamp was on an envelope, this didn’t matter a great deal (though it would to someone wanting to know when and where they were posted), but many letters were folded and sealed, with the address and stamp intrinsic to the letter.  When the stamp was torn away, it left a gap in the letter itself.

On the other hand, many letters only survive because of the enthusiasm of stamp collectors.  In 2006 the Mitchell Library in Sydney bought 10 letters written in Australia by ‘David’ in 1920, and posted to Mrs Dudley Ward in England.  A Canadian philatelist bought them, presumably because of their high value Australian stamps, but they hadn’t been read and their significance wasn’t recognized, until someone recognized the name ‘Dudley Ward’.   In 1920, the Prince of Wales, Edward Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David – known to his family and friends as David – visited Australia, from where he sent passionate letters to his mistress, Winifred (Freda) Dudley Ward, the wife of a British MP.  Freda never spoke of her long affair with the Prince, and who knows how those letters came to be in Canada, but without a stamp collector, they might have disappeared long ago.

For historians like me, the words on the page are what matters, not the page itself.  I’ve no desire to collect stamps or autographs or old maps, but I recognize that some people do, so it is wonderful when honest collectors make their collections available digitally – as here and here, for instance.

Meanwhile I’m happy to read digitized versions of documents when they are available.  Though I am sad that this will make visits to overseas libraries less necessary in the future, it certainly makes research a lot cheaper and more accessible.

I still can’t make my mind up about one thing.  Since we know that an illicit market for valuable items exists, and since libraries and archives hold such tempting collections of these items, should they judiciously sell off some of their originals?  Every historical instinct screams NO, but perhaps releasing lots of copies of Florence Nightingale’s signature on to the market would depress its value, and make theft less likely.  Your thoughts?

This time last year:
White Collar Work: doing the laundry, 10 February 2011

Law and History

Last December I spent 2 days at the conference of the Australian and New Zealand Law and History Society which was jointly run by the University of Queensland and Griffith University.

It is tempting to compare the Law and History conference with the Australian and New Zealand History of Medicine conference held here last July, which I wrote about here.

Both conferences brought together professional doctors/lawyers with an interest in history, and academic historians.  Both involved a loyal cohort of Society members who attend every conference and know each other well, and a floating body of people, like me, who might go if the conference is held locally, but won’t normally following the caravan from place to place, across the Nullarbor or the Tasman.

There were differences, too.  At the most basic, the Law and History conference was smaller, more tightly knit, and half the price of admission.  In Australia, conferences in Brisbane in winter will always attract a few folk flying in, in search of a warm, tax-deductable holiday.  The History of Medicine conference was even called the Winter Sunshine Conference!  Whereas a conference in hot and muggy Brisbane in mid-December only appeals to the hard core and the conscientious.

There were too many parallel sessions for me to get more than a taste of what people are currently talking about in legal history, except that I suspect that Michel Foucault is finally on the way out.  There were some wonderful stories, of course.  Court cases lay out the brutal reality of murder, divorce, domestic violence, transgressive sex, official and unofficial corruption and everything else in juicy detail.

The question is, how do we move beyond the good yarn to shape these stories into something of wider significance?  One speaker suggested that lawyers use history to bring society into their legal arguments, while historians use law as a key to understanding society.  In any case, the partnership seems to work.

One plenary presentation was about AUSLII.  The Australasian Legal Information Institute is a basic tool for all Australian and New Zealand lawyers, bringing together (as of 6 February 2012) 487 databases from all Australasian jurisdictions.  It gets about 700,000 hits per day, and now has its own free iPhone and iPad App.  Most users are lawyers, but because it is integrated with so many historical databases, it is a valuable tool for historians, too.  (Though sadly, the App only goes back to 1993).  The service is free, because about 300 contributors pay the $A1m it takes to run it every year.

In 1996, Bruce Kercher at Macquarie University began gathering court records for New South Wales, using newspaper reports and other sources typed by volunteers.  16 years later, the project continues, but digitising technology means that much more can be included, and integrated for easy (well, relatively easy!) searching.  Acts and treaties are included as well as court records.

AUSLII is linked to the Commonwealth equivalent, CommonLII, which contains complete court cases (inasmuch as this is possible) from 1220-1873, and in turn, these are linked to WorldLII.  It is a scarily complete collection of legal material, and I don’t pretend to have got my head around it all.  I will also freely admit that I prefer to go into the Macquarie project through its original portal here. But it does suggest how much material is out there, if we only know where to look.

The ANZLHS conference went for 2 days.  Going through my notes now, nearly 2 months later, one pattern certainly emerges: 2 days of conference papers is about all I can take before my brain begins to fry.  As Exhibit A, I offer my jottings from the last afternoon of the conference.  Oh dear!

See Bruce Kercher, Recovering and Reporting Australia’s Early Colonial Case Law: The Macquarie Project, Law and History Review, 2000.
http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/lhr/18.3/resources.html

A year ago:
Crane Brinton, Egypt and the Anatomy of Revolution, 2 February 2011
Chinese New Year – and the Cantonese Speaking Bushranger, 4 February 2011
The Age of Anecdotage, 6 February 2011

Images of Cinderella

Footage of Julia Gillard in Canberra being dragged by a security detachment to a waiting car went viral yesterday.  At one stage, she was running neck and neck for top viewing on the BBC website with George Clooney.

There will be an investigation, endless analysis and blame – but the image of the stumbling PM was probably more striking than anything that may follow.  And the image reminded me of another picture, in grainy black and white, of another woman dragged across the bitumen by solid men without necks, and losing a shoe in the process – Evdokia Petrova, nearly 60 years ago.

Evdokia Petrova was the wife of Vladimir Petrov, a diplomat in the Soviet embassy in Canberra.  In April 1954, he defected to Australia, promising to provide information about a spy ring within the Embassy.   It was the height of the Cold War, and the defection caused a hell of a political storm both in Australia and in the West in general.  Various figures in the Labor Party were (probably unfairly) implicated, and the ALP lost the next election (and every subsequent one until 1972).

People have debated ever since just what was going on – but Vladimir Petrov seems to have been lured by money and prostitutes, as well as fear that with the death of Stalin and the disgrace of Beria, his future in Moscow was looking bleak.  He certainly didn’t discuss his plans with his wife, an MVD officer.

Meanwhile, as the drama unfolded in Canberra, Evdokia was whisked away by KGB agents who planned to take her back to Moscow.  A crowd gathered at Sydney airport to demonstrate against her removal.  They broke through the police cordons and tried to ‘save her’.  In the chaos, she lost a shoe before she was bundled on to the plane.

Vladimir Petrov; Evdokia at Sydney airport - and her shoe

The images of Evdokia Petrova being dragged across the tarmac to a plane, apparently by goons in overcoats, remain stunning.

But in 1954, an international flight needed to refuel in Darwin before flying on to Asia.  During the flight, on instructions by radio from the Prime Minister, an air hostess asked Evdokia whether she wanted to defect. She was ambivalent, but when the plane arrived in Darwin, after speaking to her husband, she agreed to do so.  The Petrovs lived for the rest of their lives in Melbourne, under assumed names.  Evdokia died in 2002, 11 years after her husband, how happily – who knows?

Poster for an exhibition on the Petrov Affair at the Museum of Australian Democracy, 2003

There is absolutely nothing to link these two events – except for those strikingly similar images of 2 smallish women, neatly dressed in skirt and jacket and high heels, being roughly dragged along by big men too busy ‘protecting’ them to treat them with dignity.

And a question: Why, after nearly 60 years, do we women still hobble ourselves in high heels?

See the exhibition on The Petrov Affair here

My post from 28 January 2011: Groundhog Day

Oscar Ameringer and the Life and Deeds of Uncle Sam

Politics is the gentle art of getting votes from the poor and campaign funds from the rich by promising to protect each from the other.

We seem to be going through a phase of extreme cynicism about politics and politicians, so I’d like to introduce a delightful author and, by all accounts, a very nice man.

Oscar Ameringer was born in a small town in Bavaria in 1870, and brought up in a conservative Lutheran household.  He had a talent for painting and music.  His father was a master craftsman, and young Oscar learned furniture making from him, but in the 1880s, industrial production was taking over traditional craftsmanship.

One after the other, guild masters gave up the ghost [and] were sucked into factories… I never minded learning the furniture trade… There is something fascinatingly creative about helping a dead piece of wood evolve into a thing of beauty and service to man.  But young as I was, I foresaw the end of the golden age of handicraft.

Oscar left for America 8 months before his 16^th birthday – to seek his fortune, but also to avoid call up for military service.

He arrived at a time of bitter industrial disputes, in which recent immigrants were often used as strikebreakers.  He joined the Cincinnati branch of the Knights of Labor – though he had to lie about his age – and marched in their May Day parade.  Soon he had a reputation as an agitator and found it hard to get work, but meanwhile he discovered the local library, where he taught himself English, and developed a deep love of history.  He made a reasonable living for a few years painting portraits and selling humorous pieces to the local papers – and, if his memoirs are anything to go by, chatting up the ladies.

When his mother begged him to come home to see his family once again, he arrived home with 5000 marks in his pockets, a prosperous prodigal son.  For the next 5 years, he studied art at the Royal Academy in Munich, where the leading industries were ‘beer, art and education, and the chief of these was beer.’  But along with the beer, he also absorbed the politics of late 19^th century Germany: ‘my mind had been opened.  The removal of the junk pounded into my young head by school and church had provided the blessed vacuum in which any new idea found welcome and lodging’.  A friend from the industrial city of Dresden introduced him to the ideas of the Social-Democratic movement.

Ameringer returned to America in 1897, bringing his socialist, pacifist ideas with him.  He never made it as a portrait painter, but he became an advocate for socialist causes, a labour organizer, and a journalist.  He settled in Oklahoma and edited various papers: The Oklahoma Leader, The American Guardian, Labor World.  He waged war against the Ku Klux Klan in Oklahoma, and stood up for the rights of sharecroppers.

In 1932, he wrote a ‘Testimony on Unemployment’ which is scarily resonant today, with its talk of people threatened by foreclosure, unable to meet mortgage payments, and resentful of Washington.

They say the only thing you do in Washington is to take money from the pockets of the poor and put it into the pockets of the rich.  They say that this Government is a conspiracy against the common people to enrich the already rich.

But above all, Ameringer was funny.  Life and Deeds of Uncle Sam: A little History for Big Children (1909) sold over half a million copies, and his autobiography, If You Don’t Weaken (1940) is a joy to read.  It’s available on Google Books here.  His views on politics are thoughtful, cynical, gentle and astute, and he doesn’t take himself too seriously.

In those Munich years most of us stood politically more or less to the left of center.  That is, we were forward-looking.  A rather amusing term, “forward-looking,” because virtually all the forward-lookers I have met since then have been so busy looking backward that they couldn’t even see what was taking place under their very noses.  Anarchists look back to Bakunin and Kropotkin.  Socialists look back to Marx and Engels.  Single-taxers look back to Henry George.  Progressive Republicans look back to Abraham Lincoln, Progressive Democrats to Jefferson and Jackson.  Progressive lawyers quote Blackstone while progressive parsons and rabbis vainly try to forget Moses and Genesis.

Nuff said.

Australian Whalers in Japan

I hate the thought of whaling, and I would love to see Japan stop killing whales in the Southern Ocean – but I can’t help feeling that the actions of Sea Shepherd are counterproductive.  ‘The insufferable in pursuit of the intractable in pursuit of the inedible’, as a letter writer in the Australian put it.

Maybe I’d feel differently if their efforts were directed to saving blue fin tuna, which really are being hunted to extinction by the Japanese, but the long line fishermen are more elusive, the photos aren’t as bloody, and we humans seem to get sentimental only over mammals.

When I recently had a piece about boat people published on The Drum, many of the comments asked, more or less politely, what’s the point of drawing a comparison with what happened in the past?  Well, apart from providing the odd good story or two, one reason why I firmly believe that historical comparisons are worth making is that history reminds us that attitudes change, and may make us a little less sanctimonious.

In 1850, the Australian colonists were enthusiastic whalers.  I’ve talked about this before [here and here].  Hobart was a centre of the whaling trade, and Charles Seal one of the most successful whaling entrepreneurs.

Whales follow a dependable migratory path, which makes whaling (and harassing whalers) a highly predictable pursuit.  Southern whales breed in the tropics during June/July, then migrate south to the Antarctic to feed on krill, and are at their fattest (and most valuable) during the late southern summer.   Whales in the northern hemisphere follow a similar migration to the Arctic during the northern summer.   They very seldom cross the equator, so each hemisphere has a separate population of most species of baleen whale.

In May 1850, one of Charles Seal’s whaling ships, the Eamont, was hunting for whales to the east of Hokkaido when it was caught in a typhoon. On 22 May, the ship ran aground near the coastal town of Akkeshi.  All 32 men escaped in the boats, but they were marooned in a strange land, unable to communicate with the local population.

Katsushika Hokusai, Whaling scene on the coast of Goto, c. 1830, from Wikipedia

Three years later, in 1853, the American Commodore Matthew Perry sailed into Tokyo Harbour and demanded that the Japanese open up to foreign trade, but in 1850 Captain Lovett and his crew had none of the clout of an American gunboat.  And the people of Akkeshi were equally perplexed, for trading with foreigners was still strictly forbidden.

According to the Maitland Mercury (22 March 1851),

a number of Japanese seized on them and kept them in a house strictly guarded, at a small town about six miles from the wreck. They, however, treated them well, though they were closely confined…

Meanwhile the locals in Akkeshi sent word of their arrival to the authorities.  On 12 September, the Shogun sent 2 junks to collect the crew and take them to Nagasaki, the only port where legitimate trade between Japanese and foreigners could take place.  The Eamont’s crew remained sealed below decks until they arrived, when the Japanese handed them over to Dutch traders.  They eventually got home via Batavia (Jakarta) in early 1851.

As in the case of the eco-warriors who have just been rescued/removed from the Nisshan Maru, they seem to have been a tiresome and expensive nuisance to the Japanese, but they were treated humanely.

Four years later, following Commodore Perry’s return to Tokyo in 1854, Japan changed direction, abandoned its isolation, and began the complete overhaul of its administration known as the Meiji Restoration.

Perhaps we might see a similar overhaul of Japan’s ‘Cetacean Research’ in a few years too.  Perhaps.

But people, and nations, don’t like being pushed around by high-minded busybodies.  Within two generations of Perry’s visit, Japanese ultra-nationalism was on the rise, and we all know where that led.  I doubt if Sea Shepherd will have such an effect, but I’m sure they cause a lot of otherwise indifferent Japanese to defend their right to continue whaling in the Southern Ocean.

Meanwhile Akkeshi and Clarence, opposite Hobart on the Derwent estuary, are now twin cities, and a sign has been erected overlooking the bay where the Eamont’s ill-fated voyage ended:

On the 16th April the third year of Kaei (1850), a whaling ship, the Eamont registered in Hobart, in the  State of Tasmania, Australia, was wrecked about 2km off-shore from this beach. The crew of 32 were rescued safely by the people and repatriated to the Tokugawa Shogunate. This historical fact led to the establishment on February 9, 1982 of a Sister City relationship between the Town of Akkeshi and the Municipality of Clarence, which is part of Greater Hobart. Erected by Akkeshi Town and Koala Club.

The Great Unwashed

Confession time.  I do not now, nor have I ever worn deodorant.  I’ve always disliked its smell, and the vague rumours that its aluminium content might be unhealthy.  And I don’t use antiperspirant, since it seems perverse to do so in our hot climate, where sweat serves the serious purpose of keeping our bodies cool.

Lifebuoy Soap advertisement 1902, from Wikipedia.

I’m lucky.  I live in a society with ample hot water, and I can bathe or shower daily – twice a day in hot weather – and wear fresh clothing every day.  This seems quite adequate – or at least, my nearest and dearest have yet to tell me otherwise.

But I never knew before that my personal habits made me un-Australian.

In this morning’s Australian, the opposition citizenship spokeswoman Teresa Gambaro has called for mandatory ‘cultural awareness training’ for immigrants, so that they can learn how to fit into Australian culture on issues such as health, hygiene and lifestyle.  “Without trying to be offensive, we are talking about hygiene and what is an acceptable norm in this country when you are working closely with other co-workers,” Ms Gambaro told The Australian.  She said practices such as wearing deodorant … were “about teaching what are norms in Australia… You hear reports of people using public transport (without deodorant) and I think Australian residents are guilty of this too,” she said.

I’d raise my arm to this too – but then again, perhaps I’d better not.

Like ‘in my humble opinion’, which is never humble, so ‘without trying to be offensive’ nearly always gives offence – much more, probably, than merely standing beside a smelly body on the train.

Concerns about ‘the Great Unwashed’ get raised in every society in every age.  Sometimes this is just code for the hoi polloi – the riff raff of society.  But when it does relate to matters of cleanliness, as it clearly does in Teresa Gambaro’s statement, we are faced with the fact that every society has different ideas about what constitutes cleanliness – and whether or not it is next to godliness.

In some times and places quite the opposite has been true.  Under some circumstances medieval Christians positively delighted in filth. The Archbishop Thomas á Becket wore a hair shirt swarming with vermin, which much impressed the monks who examined his corpse after he was murdered in Canterbury Cathedral in 1170.  The vermin probably gave him a leg up to early sainthood.

Okay, we’ve come a long way since the 12^th century, but even in the 19^th century, people like my immigrant ancestors were advised to pack enough clothes for the voyage so that they could change their underwear once a week.  It makes me scratchy just to think of it.

The issue is access to enough fresh hot water.  It wasn’t available on an immigrant ship, just as it’s not available to the homeless today, which is why charities that deal with homelessness spend a lot of time and money on providing showers and shampoo and laundry facilities, without which people remain isolated and unemployable.   But the issue is access, not education.

We tend to assume that the road to cleanliness has always been onwards and upwards, since the technology of hot and cold running water has made washing so much easier.  But it’s not necessarily so.

Wherever they went, the Romans introduced public baths that would not be matched in most of Europe for a thousand years.  The real inheritors of the Roman system of baths were the Arabs and then the Turks.  Muslims and Jews had a much better record of general cleanliness than Christians, who often tended, as in the case of St Thomas, to gloat over grime.

When the Spanish Christians conquered the Moorish kingdom of Granada in 1492, one of their first acts was to shut down the bathhouses because they might be used for seditious gatherings.  Since the Christians didn’t often bathe, they had no idea what a privation this might be to people who did.

Europeans only gradually started to keep clean.  To people’s amazement, in the late 16th century Queen Elizabeth I took a bath regularly, once a month, ‘whether she need it or not’.

Mahomed's Baths, Brighton, c. 1826, British Library

The habit of cleanliness, like so much else during the British Empire, was largely imported from the non-European world.  The Bengali entrepreneur Shekh Din Muhammad introduced shampoo – a Hindi word – when he set up a ‘shampooing bath’ in fashionable Brighton in 1814.  Turkish baths became popular during the Victorian era, but few working class homes had a dedicated bathroom before the Second World War.  Australians used to joke about the English keeping their coal in the bath, but bathrooms were pretty primitive here, too.

Edgar Degas, The Bath, c. 1887, from Wikipedia. Degas's nudes look fabulous, but their baths look horribly inadequate and uncomfortable!

There are still differences between us in the way we keep clean.  Woman are more likely to bathe than men, who prefer to shower – and who stand facing the shower nozzle, while women stand with their backs to the water flow (or so I have read.  Who on earth collects these statistics? And how can they possibly know for sure?)

Class plays a role too.  White-collar workers tend to shower before they go to work, while manual workers, for obvious reasons, are more likely to wash at the end of the working day.  But we are still taught to respect ‘honest sweat’ – though fewer and fewer of us raise any.

Raising hackles is much easier.

Note: Teresa Gambaro has since issued an apology here.