Vanity Publishing

In the last few days, Australia’s richest person, Gina Rinehart, has increased her share holding in Fairfax Media to just under 15 percent.  She has already bought a share of Channel 10, and it is widely suggested that she hopes to use her newpaper and television interests to help shape the political debate in such areas as mining policy, taxation and climate change.  Another mining magnate, Clive Palmer, has also mused – perhaps not very seriously – about buying into newspapers, or starting up a new one of his own.

Ever since the first barbarian employed the first bard to sing his praises, there has been a link between media and politics, but the link has shifted lately.  People like Silvio Berlusconi – or Donald Trump? – made their fortunes from the media first, then used these millions to carve out a place in politics.

In the age of the internet, though, the old media no longer generates a fortune, so that for Gina Rinehart or Clive Palmer, dabbling in newspapers has become a rich person’s hobby.  To these noisy miners (thank you, Annabel Crabb), it’s pin money anyway, and it comes with the glittering prospect of having a significant influence on the public debate.

It’s not a new idea either.

The Times (originally the Daily Universal Register) was founded in 1785.  At the time, a particularly juicy divorce scandal was all over the newspapers.  A rich heiress, Lady Strathmore, was trying to divorce her fortune-hunting second husband, Andrew Bowes, for adultery, cruelty, kidnapping, imprisonment.  You name it, he had done it, and it was all over the popular press.

Public opinion was very much with the Countess, so Bowes set out on a propaganda war against his wife.  He paid a cartoonist to sketch her in pornographic poses (in one image she is suckling cats while her child weeps for her attention), and in 1787 he bought shares in The Times.  Miraculously, the newspaper began publishing articles in favour of ‘the taming of bad wives’.  Lady Strathmore eventually won the case, though her reputation was by then in ribbons, partly thanks to The Times.  Through Elizabeth Bowes Lyon, the Queen is her direct descendant.

In 1821, there was another even more juicy scandal, when George IV tried to divorce Queen Caroline for adultery.  George’s numerous adulteries were well known, so again, public sympathy was with the wife.  In response, the king’s supporters set up a new newspaper, John Bull, to put his side, with a tame editor who was the brother of George’s personal chaplain.

Newspapers in early Australia could be similarly compromised by the interests of their owners.  In 1839, the Catholic Archbishop John Polding decided to start a newspaper to defend the Catholic interest in New South Wales.  The Australasian Chronicle was a general paper, but with a solid Catholic agenda.  Its first editor, William Duncan, was a young Catholic schoolteacher recruited by Polding from Aberdeen.

William Duncan

The main shareholders were a group of Catholic businessmen.  Newspapers at the time were rarely profitable.  There were at least a dozen competing for sales and advertising in Sydney during the 1840s, so none of these businessmen can have expected to make a profit from their investment.   But they did like to interfere occasionally in editorial policy.

Finally Duncan had had enough.  According to his unpublished Autobiography, in the Mitchell Library, he resigned from the Chronicle at the end of 1842, when one of the businessmen ordered him to fudge the Ship News.

Shipping lists appeared in every newspaper then.  They reported shipping movements, in and out of the port, lists of passengers, and details of cargoes.  They are a boon to genealogists today – and in 1842, they set prices for imports.  Duncan’s unnamed merchant knew that the China fleet was due soon – and that once it arrived, the price of his stockpile of old tea would be in free fall.  Would Duncan hold back news of the first ship’s arrival for another few days?

Duncan wouldn’t.  Either he or the shareholder would have to go – and finding another editor was much easier than finding another financial backer for the paper.

Duncan tried unsuccessfully to start another newspaper, went bankrupt, and eventually came to Brisbane as Collector of Customs.  He became an important public intellectual in the Moreton Bay settlement.

But he never forgot that anonymous capitalist who had forced him out of the editorship of the Chronicle, and his outrage at his lack of editorial independence.

Fortunately that sort of distortion of the truth in the interest of a shareholder could never happen today.

Note: The story of Lady Strathmore is told in Wendy Moore, Wedlock: How Georgian Britain’s Worst Husband met his Match (2009)

My posts from this time 2011 (when I clearly must have been hyperactive!):
Carmine at the End of the World, 29 January 2011
The Blood Libel – and Sarah Palin, 31 January 2011
Heroes and Helicopters, 1 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

Charles Dickens and Australia

Abel Magwitch, from Wikipedia

Two hundred years ago this year, Charles Dickens was born in Portsmouth on 7 February.  As a result, we are about to be drowned in Dickensiana.  So I thought I’d get in early by looking at one common element in many of Dickens’ novels, his use of Australia as a plot device.

After a grim beginning working in a factory sticking on labels, Dickens started work as a reporter at the age of 16 in 1828.  He taught himself shorthand, giving him an edge in reporting parliamentary debates and court cases – all grist for the mill in his later novels.  His first book, Sketches by Boz, came out in 1836 – and he was on his way.

Like most Englishmen of his time, Dickens began with only a rudimentary knowledge of Australia, but when did that ever stop a novelist?  For most people, Australia was best known as the place where convicts were sent – and in his early novels he transports his baddies there: John Edmunds from Pickwick Papers (1836-7), Mr Squeers from Nicholas Nickleby (1838-9), and Uriah Heep in David Copperfield (1849-50) – who probably avoided transportation, since the last transport ship to Van Diemen’s Land sailed in 1851.

Fagin goes to the gallows in Oliver Twist (1837), but he is modelled on a real life character, Ikey Solomon, who ended his life in Van Diemen’s Land.  Solomon’s real story is far more fascinating than that of Fagin, the cardboard cut-out Jew.  The novelist Bryce Courtenay tells it in The Potato Factory (1995).

By the time Dickens wrote Great Expectations (1861), he created a convict, Abel Magwitch, who is a much more complex character than his early efforts.  Peter Carey has re-written the story as literary fiction in Jack Maggs (1997).

At first Dickens only saw Australia as a place of transportation, but by the 1840s, free emigration to the Australian colonies was becoming important.  This sparked Dickens’ interest.  He supported a number of emigration schemes, including the Family Colonization Loan Society, started by Caroline Chisholm.

In David Copperfield (1849-50), Dickens sends an absolute torrent of redundant characters – the Micawbers, Mr Peggotty and Little Em’ly, Mrs Gummidge – to New South Wales at the end of the book, and just to round things off nicely, he then has Mr. Peggotty return, 10 years later, to tell David just how successful they have all been.  Mr Micawber has become a magistrate!  Mrs Gummidge received an offer of marriage!! Martha has married a farm labourer, and they now live happily on their own land, 400 miles from the nearest settlement.

And Em’ly?  Well, the great thing about migration was that the past could be forgotten, and even a fallen woman could re-establish herself.  As Mr. Peggotty said as they left: ‘No one can’t reproach my darling in Australia.’

In 1851, gold was discovered in Australia, reinforcing the message of David Copperfield that emigration was a Good Thing.  Two of Dickens’ own sons, Alfred and Edward, migrated to Australia during the 1860s, perhaps influenced by their father’s optimism.  Both had their ups and downs – but at least they got away from their workaholic father and could put their parents’ scandalous marriage breakdown behind them.

Alfred Ducote, E-migration, or a Flight of Fair Game

But what was the impact in Australia of Dickens’ emigration myth making?  Little Em’ly’s redemption made a good story – but it must have made things very much worse for many women who migrated to Australia during the following years.  Colonists were always wary of single women who travelled alone, outside the family group.  At best they were husband hunters; at worst, they must have something to hide.  Mr. Peggotty was wrong; colonists were more than eager to reproach young women who might have a tarnished history.

As was often the case, Dickens tried to have it both ways.  He supported the Family Colonization Society, and encouraged both Caroline Chisholm and Angela Burdett-Coutts, another advocate of female emigration.  But he also mercilessly lampooned Chisholm as Mrs Jellyby in Bleak House (1852-3), the philanthropist forever in pursuit of good causes, but without any time to care for her own family.  A bit like Charles Dickens himself, really.

When the Boat People were Welcome

The problem of unauthorised boat arrivals on the north coast of Australia shows no sign of going away any time soon, despite all the good will – and more particularly the bad will – of politicians and the public.

Yet the subject of a permeable frontier in the north is hardly new.  The poor Indonesian fishermen who today transport cargoes of desperate people to our shores are the 21^st century descendents of the poor fishermen who sailed south to the lands they called Marege [Arnhem Land] and Kayu Jawa [Kimberley] in the 18^th and 19^th centuries to harvest shark fin and sea slugs [bêche de mer or trepang] for the Chinese market.  The sailing season is similar, with most boats arriving before and after the summer cyclone season – though one difference is that, in these days of diesel motors, they are no longer dependent on the monsoons to propel their boats.

The other difference is that once, these visitors were enthusiastically welcomed by the British settlers in northern Australia.

Historians usually refer to these fishermen as Makassans, after the Sulawesi trading port of Makassar, now Udjung Pandang, where they sold their catch to the Makassan traders who exported their products to China.  Then, as now, the fishermen took the risks, while the rewards went to the middlemen and investors further up the food chain.

Aboriginal image of a Malay Prau (1948) in National Museum of Australia

The Makassan trade goes back at least to the early 18^th century.  In 1803, Matthew Flinders came across 6 ships somewhere near Nhulunbuy, on the Gove Peninsula, part of a fleet of about 60 in northern waters that year.  The ships Flinders saw carried about 20-25 men each, so perhaps 2000 fishermen made the trip that year.  Flinders called them Malays, for they spoke a Malay dialect, and they were Moslems, expressing horror of the pigs the Investigator carried, though ‘they had no objection to port wine, and even requested a bottle to carry away with them.’

They fished on Ashmore Reef too, another destination of today’s people smugglers.  According to Flinders (1814):

The natives of Macassar have been long accustomed to fish for trepang … upon a dry shoal lying to the south of Rottee; but about twenty years ago, one of their prows was driven by the northwest monsoon to the coast of New Holland, and finding the trepang to be abundant, they afterwards returned; and have continued to fish there since that time.

At this time, there was no united state of Indonesia, but rather a number of independent states, increasingly encroached upon by Dutch and British interests.  By the early 1820s, the Dutch gave up their claims to New Holland in favour of expanding eastwards from their settlement in Java towards Makassar, while the British concentrated on expansion in Australia.  They also established Singapore in 1819 to the north of Java, to compete with pre-existing trading centres such as Makassar.  Needless to say, no local people were consulted in reaching this arrangement.

Singapore was an immediate success.  So in 1824 the British decided to try to develop ‘another Singapore’ in northern Australia – another multi-lingual, multi-ethnic port that would tap into existing trade routes between Makassar and northern Australia.

In 1824, the British created a settlement on Melville Island, later moved to the mainland on the Cobourg Peninsula at Raffles Bay.  The Malay fishermen gradually began to come here to trade during the fishing season, enthusiastically encouraged by the commandant, Collet Barker.  When 5 boats arrived in 1829, he plied the fishermen with pumpkins, rockmelons and wine, but found them very abstemious.  One boy would ‘eat nothing with us though evidently very hungry.’  His clumsy efforts at hospitality were unsuccessful because it was Ramadan.

In all, 34 boats with more than 1000 men called at Raffles Bay that year, and the future of the new venture looked promising: ‘They said that … if a permanent settlement were here, where they were sure of a market, that things would be brought to exchange for others they wished to purchase of us.’

Then bingo, the British government changed tack.  In August 1829, orders arrived from Britain telling Collett to close the settlement and move the operation to Albany, far to the south.  Disappointed but obedient, he obeyed, and when the Makassan fishermen arrived at the end of 1829, they found the settlement and its gardens abandoned, no market and nothing to trade.  A loss for the fishermen, and a lost opportunity for Australia.

New Victoria, Port Essington, from Atlas Pittoresque (1846) sketched during Dumont d'Urville's visit

A final attempt to establish a multicultural trading post came in 1838, when Port Essington was established, again on the Cobourg Peninsula.  ‘It lies in the track of the Malay fleet that annually visits the northern coasts,’ wrote the Presbyterian clergyman Dr. Lang.  He hoped that it would become ‘a favourite and extensive emporium of trade for the eastern world’.

Some Makassan traders did come to Port Essington, but the settlement never really took off, partly through bad luck – a cyclone perhaps the size of Cyclone Tracy hit the settlement in 1841. The other change was the decline of the port of Makassar.  Dutch control brought more taxes, while the rise of Singapore shifted trade routes northwards.  The trepang fisheries went into decline, and the sailors found what work they could elsewhere – just as they do today.

In 1849 the settlement of Port Essington was abandoned – and their water buffalo, imported from Timor at great cost when the settlement began, were left behind to turn feral and invade the Kakadu wetlands.  Yet another testimony to the problem of governments that keep changing their minds.

Marion Diamond, ‘Another Singapore?’, in Martin Crotty and David Roberts (eds), The Great Mistakes of Australian History (2006)

Peter Boomgaard, David Henley and Manon Osseweijer (eds), Muddied Waters: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Management of Forests and Fisheries in Island Southeast Asia (2005)

Update: A shorter version of this post was published on the ABC’s The Drum on 9 January 2012.

The President and the Barmaid

And I spent my soul in kisses, crushed upon your scarlet mouth,

Oh! My red-lipped, sun-browned sweetheart, dark-eyed daughter of the south.

With all the kissing and cuddling that’s been going on lately between Barack Obama and Julia Gillard, maybe it’s time to quote the words of another American President with a thing for Australian women.

I have heard several times in the last week that until LBJ came to Harold Holt’s funeral in 1967, no American President had visited Australia.  The truth is, Australia is a long way from the rest of the world.  Henry Kissinger is supposed to have said (though I can’t find hard evidence) that he had never visited Australia, because he had never been on the way to Antarctica.  So it is not surprising that world leaders didn’t visit Australia before the era of fast air travel.  Nowadays, of course, they all find an excuse to come, especially during the northern winter.

But in fact, one American President spent a considerable time in Australia and left his mark on it.

Hoover stamp, 1965, from Wikimedia

Herbert Hoover arrived in Kalgoorlie as a young geologist straight out of Stanford University, in 1897.  Hoover worked for a British mining company, Bewick, Moreing & Co, who sent him to the Western Australian goldfields as a manager.  Kalgoorlie was a rough mining town – some would say it still is.  Because of its isolation, miners needed long pockets, so most mining was in the hands of companies with capital, rather than individuals.

One of Hoover’s jobs was to scout out new prospects for his employers.  One likely investment was a small gold mine in the desert begun by 3 Welshmen.  They had acquired a mining licence for the site, but didn’t have enough capital to develop the mine.  He persuaded Bewick, Moreing & Co to buy the mine and put him in charge.  Sons of Gwalia (Latin for Wales) became one of Australia’s most lucrative gold mines.

Sons of Gwalia Mine, Mount Leonora, c. 1921

The 1890s was a depressed decade, and Hoover ran a tough management regime.  He cut wages and increased hours.  He also raised ethnic tensions in the workforce by employing immigrant Italians – ‘the rivalry between them and the [other] workers is no small benefit’, he wrote, because it made united action more difficult.  This was a very American tactic, not often used in Australia.

During his years in Kalgoorlie, Hoover allegedly wrote a poem to a Kalgoorlie barmaid.  The Australian Dictionary of Biography doubts the story, and so does William J. Coughlin (2000).  Such a shame – the poem is quite gloriously awful, but apparently can’t be traced any earlier than 1933.

Hoover worked in Western Australia for 2 years, then returned to America to marry Lou Henry, who also graduated in geology from Stanford, in 1899.  They left the next day for China, where Hoover continued to work for Bewick, Moreing & Co, travelling widely, but based in Tianjin.  He visited the company’s Australian mines again in 1905.

Barack Obama’s visit to Australia, and his speech to the Australian Parliament, were all about America’s attitude to China today.  [see Rory Medcalf, ‘Buildup Down Under’, in Foreign Policy, 17 November 2011]

Obama is one of the first American Presidents with an Asia-Pacific background: he was born in Hawaii and spent part of his childhood in Indonesia.  But in fact he follows in the footsteps of Herbert Hoover, who went to university in San Francisco, and spent years working in Australia and China.  Hoover and his wife learned Mandarin while living in China, and apparently used it as their private language in the White House, to keep their conversations secret from the servants.

Unfortunately, Hoover’s name is now ineradicably associated with the onset of the 1929 depression.  Let’s hope, for all our sakes, that’s not the case for Barack Obama.  Obama apparently speaks Indonesian, too.  I’m not sure, though, that our very own Daughter of Gwalia speaks Welsh – let alone Mandarin.

Note: I’ve written before about Australia’s relations with China and America – here.

William J. Coughlin, ‘Into the Outback: How the young Herbert Hoover made his name – and fortune – in Australia’, Stanford Magazine, 2000.