Pauline Hanson and Alpacas

My sister lives outside Pomona, a small township in the Sunshine Coast hinterland. One Saturday, nearly 20 years ago, we decided to go to the agricultural show together in the neighbouring town of Cooroy.

I love agricultural shows – not the big commercial jobs like the Ekka or the Royal Easter, full of overpriced rides and rip-off show bags – but the small local affairs. These used to be a staple of every small town, with the CWA selling tea and sandwiches, reps demonstrating new harvesters and post-hole diggers, and competitions for the best cakes and fat lambs.

They are now a dying breed, like the fat lambs. Tastes have changed, from cake stalls to sausage sizzles, and farmers buy their agricultural machinery after doing their research on the web. (Or they do in South East Queensland – my sister has the NBN, whereas I’m still waiting for it here on the outskirts of Brisbane.)

In 1998, Cooroy teetered on the edge of the new economy. Since then the butter factory has reopened as an Arts Space, the timber mill has closed, but there’s a new microbrewery. The area is full of refugees from high house prices, not just in Brisbane, but from Sydney and Melbourne as well, and telecommuters in the knowledge economy are thick on the ground. People from the other, older economy have been left behind. Within an hour’s drive of Noosa are some of the poorest postcodes in Queensland.

The Cooroy Show should have rung clearer bells, though at the time I just found it curious that, amongst the cakes and cultivators, 2 groups stood out: there were several booths advertising the One Nation Party, which was just gearing up for the Queensland election, and there were alpacas wherever you looked. Both were attracting queues.

I’ve always associated Pauline Hanson with alpacas ever since: the short curly topknot, the stiff neck and square jaw, fiercely defensive of the group they are protecting, the tendency to spit…. And then there are those cute alpacas.

The people in the queues at Cooroy in the late 1990s were at the end of their tether, their way of life under threat from economic changes they could not control. Dairying was failing, the timber industry too, the market for canned pineapples and vegetables had shrunk. At the same time, big producers were taking over strawberries and tomatoes, with the capital to install hothouses and hydroponics. (James Ashby was spokesman for one of these new strawberry farms, at Beerwah, when its hydroponics system was mysteriously poisoned.)

Suri alpacas, from Wikipedia

The salesmen with their alpacas appealed to desperate people. Australians have always had a tendency to seize on new agricultural fads in their never-ending ‘search for a staple’, the Next Big Thing, ever since John Macarthur imported merino sheep in a ship he renamed the Argo in honour of the Golden Fleece. Some of these products, like merinos, took off. Most become at best a niche market, some disappear entirely. Remember when jojoba beans were a Thing?

The first alpacas were imported into Australia in 1858. A few years earlier, the NSW Governor and the businessman Thomas Mort decided that alpacas might be the New Big Thing. They asked Charles Ledger, an Englishman who bred alpacas in Peru, to import some of the animals and he finally arrived in Sydney with a group of South American shepherds and a flock of over 200 alpacas, llamas and vicunas, after a hair-raising journey (for men and beasts alike) from Peru to Bolivia to Argentina to Chile and finally across the Pacific to NSW.

Unfortunately by the time he arrived, the Government had changed and nobody was interested in alpacas any longer. Henry Parkes took his daughter Clarinda to see some of them at the Sydney Domain.

At Cooroy the slick alpaca salesmen didn’t talk about wool or meat – or even the alpaca’s potential value as a guardian animal amongst a herd of sheep. They talked about how valuable they were as breeding animals, because after buying high, next year the farmer could sell on their offspring for equally high prices. It was all a bit like a pyramid scheme – but for desperate people the promise of breeding alpacas represented the last throw of the dice.

At the One Nation booths there were also slick salesmen. Those people filling in forms and paying their money thought they were signing up as members of the new political party – it later turned out they were just ‘supporters’, with no input into party policy, and in 2002 the party was deregistered for not having the necessary 500 members.

Like alpacas, though, the One Nation Party represented a last throw of the dice. A few years later, their neighbours in Fairfax elected a noisy, plausible businessman, Donald-Trump-lite Clive Palmer.

In The Saturday Paper [paid link] yesterday, Karen Middleton has a fascinating article about ‘One Nation’s business model’. She quotes a number of disaffected ex-PHON party members from Western Australia. ‘It’s not a political party’, said a former president of the WA branch, Lyn Vickery. ‘Most political parties under the electoral act are supposed to be incorporated associations. That’s what the electoral commission prefers. This is in fact a business. And in fact it’s a pyramid business, much like Amway.’

The trouble with pyramid schemes is that they depend on growth. Without constantly expanding, they invariably collapse. A pity most of them aren’t as cute as alpacas.

One degree of separation: Roger Rogerson and me

Rogerson was finally found guilty today, so I’m reblogging this from 2014 (even though nobody will remember the significance of the last line, which refers to Frances Abbott’s scholarship).

Historians are Past Caring

Yesterday, a 73-year-old former policeman with a bad hip was arrested and charged with the murder of a young drug dealer. Roger Rogerson has a long history of brushes with the law, and he has spent some years in prison, but the New South Wales courts have never yet succeeded in nailing him for murder.

The Sydney Morning Herald this morning describes Roger Rogerson as ‘the state’s most notorious former cop’. Perhaps a part of his notoriety always lay in his memorable name. A dodgy cop with an unmemorable moniker like – say – Terry Lewis might not enter the popular consciousness in the same way.

I know nothing personally about Roger Rogerson’s career, but in a funny sort of way, I’ve known about him for much of my life, because he and my husband went to school together, first at Bankstown Primary School, and later at Homebush Boys High.

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Money Matters

The other day I saw one of Australia’s most famous coins for the first time, Governor Macquarie’s Holey Dollar, on display at a Brisbane Money Expo for numismatists.

The story is well known. In 1813, faced with a serious shortage of circulating coins, Governor Macquarie imported 40,000 Spanish silver dollars, which were then a common currency across the Pacific and East Asia. When they arrived, Macquarie oversaw their conversion into 2 coins, by punching out the centre, and gave them the arbitrary value of 5 shillings for the large outer ring, and 1 shilling and 3 pence (1/3d, or one-and-threepence) for the central ‘dump’.

I know all that already – I’ve written about the holey dollar before, here – but as I don’t approach these things from the perspective of a numismatist, there’s a lot I didn’t know.

For a start, Macquarie was a godsend to later collectors, because he didn’t care where his 40,000 coins came from, so there are holey dollars based on Spanish dollars from mints in Mexico, Peru, Bolivia, Spain, Guatemala, Chile and Colombia. Nor did he care about how old they were, so there are coins with dates ranging from the 1750s (Ferdinand VI) to the recent past (1810, from the Lima Mint).

Some coins are much rarer than others, and the Dump is rarer than the Holey Dollar. That’s not really surprising. Large denomination coins tend to be hoarded, while small denominations are more likely to stay in circulation, get more worn as a result, and are lost more easily.

Two of the specimens on display at the Expo had the name T KNIGHT stamped across the surface. Apparently this name pops up from time to time on colonial coinage – and nobody has discovered who he was. I made a brief search of Trove in search of him, but it yielded nothing – the name is too common, and the word ‘Knight’ appears in too many other contexts.

My guess is that T Knight used the coins as tokens of some kind, perhaps a pastoralist who paid his workers in tokens for the company store, though why he would use real coins in this way is puzzling, especially since defacing coinage was a serious crime – treason.

I am not now, nor ever have been, a collector. I have no desire to own these coins, or any of the other objects that were on display, I just love them for the stories they tell. Apart from Macquarie’s defaced currency (it’s not treason if you do it to your enemy’s currency) there were plenty of other stories too.

Coins have often been used for propaganda purposes, and there was a coin struck by Charles I during the siege of Newark in the English Civil War in 1646. There were even older Dutch coins found on the Abrolhos Islands off the West Australian coast that come from the Batavia shipwreck.

My favourite was a Spanish silver dollar with a faint etching of Chinese characters – the chop mark of the official at Canton [Guangzhou] who checked that the coin contained the full weight of silver before it was accepted, probably in payment for tea. This practice was known to Europeans by its Indian term, ‘shroffing’, and a neighbouring coin bore a shroff mark. I’ve written about the practice here.

While I am not a collector, I’m always fascinated by collectors’ deep knowledge of their subject. Philatelists have helped me several times over the years, and perhaps we historians need to talk to numismatists more often as well. One of the bit-players in my biography of Walter Davidson, his brother-in-law, Gilbert Farquhar Mathison, worked at the Royal Mint during the 1840s. He seems to have been quite senior, and was involved in the developing science of metallurgy. He travelled to France at one stage to study new methods of assaying gold coins.

After writing a travel book as a young man, he slips off the radar, and I can find almost nothing about his years at the Royal Mint. He’s not in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, for instance. After visiting the Money Expo, however, it occurs to me that I may be looking for knowledge of him in the wrong places.

Gilbert Farquhar Mathison, Narrative of a visit to Brazil, Chile, Peru, and the Sandwich Islands during the years 1821 and 1822 (1825) is online here

Educating the mob

Who pays for education? Private or public, secular or religious? Should it be funded by federal or state governments? We’ve been here many times before.

There are so many aspects to this debate, but one that gets forgotten now, when Australians are all – or are alleged to be – functionally literate, is the basic relationship between education and democracy. When everyone gets to vote, then everyone needs to be able to read and write, and compulsory education came close on the heels of manhood suffrage.

In small towns and tribes, people can choose their leaders by direct personal experience. It worked in Athens, or the Italian city-states, which is why rhetoric was once such an important university subject, and why I find the American process of town hall rallies and caucuses so fascinating, even though most of the candidates seem to have lost their voices by now.

Once the community grows too large for public speeches, though, we rely on gossip and hearsay – or on newspapers – to choose our politicians. This basic link isn’t as important these days, when radio and TV mean that voters can decide about their politicians by listening to or watching them. There is a functioning democracy in India, where illiteracy remains a problem, but radios and mobile phones are everywhere.

Once, though, literacy was essential if democracy was to work, so when most white working men got the vote (roughly from 1858 in New South Wales and Victoria, the 1860s in the United States, 1867 in Britain) it became important that they learned to make an educated decision on how to use it. Or, as one conservative politician put it at the time, ‘We must educate our masters’*.

Carlo Pellegrini, ‘Robert Lowe’, in Vanity Fair, 27 February 1869

Robert Lowe led opposition to the Second Reform Bill in the British Parliament. In 1866, Lowe and his associates defeated the bill, but the following year the Conservative Party led by Benjamin Disraeli passed a modified Reform Act that gave the vote to most male heads of households.

Once that battle was lost, though, Lowe threw himself into the business of bringing schooling to the masses. He wasn’t worried about an agile workforce, or training the rising generation to adapt to new technologies, or the economic advantages of more STEM-trained graduates. He just thought that voters needed sufficient education to make up their minds for themselves without being swayed by demagogues. By 1870, all children had to attend school until the age of 10.

Robert Lowe reached his conservative political position in reaction to his experiences as a young man in Australia during the 1840s. He arrived in New South Wales in 1842, planning to make money in the colony as a lawyer, so that he could later fund a comfortable retirement back in England. His need was more urgent than most, though, for his doctors had warned him (wrongly, as it turned out) that he might go blind within a few years.

Robert Lowe was an albino. Portraits show a very fair man, with pale eyes squinting in the light. After grey old England, the harsh bright light of Sydney must have been a misery to him. With the rough charm of people who wouldn’t know political correctness if they tripped over it, the colonists called him ‘Pink-eyed Bob’.

Lowe was well connected and well educated, at Winchester and Oxford, and he arrived in New South Wales with letters of introduction to Governor Gipps. The Governor quickly nominated him to the newly formed Legislative Council, expecting him to back him, but Lowe soon went feral. There was constant argument between Gipps and the squatters during the early 1840s, and Lowe took their side. He also started an opposition newspaper, The Atlas, to pursue his vendetta against the Governor.

Then, in 1848, after nearly 10 years without convicts being sent to New South Wales, the British government decided to send another boatload of convicts on the Hashemy to test the water. The pastoralists liked the idea of cheap labour, but everyone else was furious. The respectable middle class were appalled at the prospect, just when they were putting ‘the convict stain’ behind them, while the working class were horrified that they might have to compete for jobs with an unfree labour force.

The result was that when the Hashemy arrived at Circular Quay in early 1849, a demonstration – or a riot, depending on your point of view – was there to meet it. The Sydney Morning Herald says there were four or five thousand protestors there. The Hashemy was initially unable to unload its cargo of convicts, who were eventually re-directed to Moreton Bay instead. Robert Lowe addressed the crowd from the back of a horse-drawn omnibus:

Let them send across the Pacific their emphatic declaration that they would not be slaves – that they would be free. Let them exercise the right that every English subject had – to assert his freedom. (Cheers.) He could see from that meeting the time was not far distant when they would assert their freedom not by words alone. As in America, oppression was the parent of independence, so would it be in this colony. The tea which the Americans flung into the water rather than pay the tax upon it, was not the cause of the revolt of the American States; it was the unrighteousness of the tax – it was the degradation of submission to an unrighteous demand. And so sure as the seed will grow into the plant, and the plant to the tree, in all times, and in all nations, so will injustice and tyranny ripen into rebellion, and rebellion into independence. (Immense cheering.) [Sydney Morning Herald, 12 June 1849] 

It was stirring – and faintly seditious – stuff. Without a megaphone, most people probably couldn’t hear him anyway, but his distinctive appearance meant that he stood out, and the presence of Robert Lowe, MLC, was a bit of a coup for the organizers.

But Lowe seems to have panicked after his experience of getting up close and personal with the hoi polloi. Mobs aren’t rational, even (perhaps especially) when they think their cause is just. The reality of popular democracy unnerved him. A few months later, Lowe and his wife returned to England, with a comfortable fortune from his years as a colonial lawyer. He took a job as leader writer for The Times, and entered Parliament.

As he grew older, he grew more conservative, even reactionary, opposing any change that might give more political power to the working class – the same people who had cheered him on at Circular Quay, and had threatened violence to the convicts aboard the Hashemy. His suspicion of the mob must have been reinforced when he was stoned by drunken workers during a political rally in 1857, and ended up with a broken skull.

Robert Lowe was on the wrong side of history. During the 1850s, members of the Anti-Transportation League like Henry Parkes were elected to the New South Wales Legislative Assembly, and brought in universal male suffrage by 1858. In Britain, the Second Reform Act passed in 1867, and male householders gained the vote.

But Lowe was also on the right side of history when he threw his weight behind a universal system of compulsory education. As we again debate the costs and benefits of education, to the country and the individual, it’s worth remembering how basic it is to a functioning democracy. Otherwise decisions are made on the basis of emotion or brute force, and politics becomes the plaything of populists.

*According to Parry, Lowe’s exact words were: ‘I believe it will be absolutely necessary that you should prevail on our future masters to learn their letters’ (Hansard 3, 188, 15 July 1867, col. 1549)

References:
Ruth Knight, Illiberal Liberal: Robert Lowe in New South Wales, 1842-1850 (1966)
Jonathan Parry, ‘Lowe, Robert, Viscount Sherbrooke (1811–1892)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, May 2011 [http://www.oxforddnb.com.ezproxy.library.uq.edu.au/view/article/17088, accessed 7 April 2016]
The Atlas has not yet been digitised on Trove, and unless the National Library of Australia receives more money, it may never be – #FundTrove

Correction: Lisa Hill’s comment below sent me back to look further at this event. The Hashemy convicts were sent on to Moreton Bay, not Port Phillip, as I initially had said. I’ve corrected the post accordingly. According to Douglas Wilkie, ‘The Convict ship Hashemy at Port Phillip: a Case Study in Historical Error’, Victorian Historical Journal,  2014 – here – historians have been getting muddled up about this affair ever since the 1850s.

Political Partners

Niki Savva’s new book, The Road to Ruin, has just been released and is all over the news this morning. It deals with the close relationship between the former Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, and his chief of staff Peta Credlin. ‘Uniquely close’ is the term used – but was it? PM Chifley’s relationship with his personal assistant was pretty close too, while Elizabeth Chifley was sidelined in Bathurst.

Historians are Past Caring

In June 1951, Ben Chifley, the former Labor Prime Minister and now Leader of the Opposition, had a massive heart attack in his rooms at the Hotel Kurrajong.  The Hotel Kurrajong was essentially an up-market boarding house, built at a time when Canberra was still a country town without many places for its floating population of politicians and public servants to stay.  Chifley was moved to Canberra Hospital, but died later that night.  He was 65.

L. F. (Fin) Crisp was the professor of political science at Canberra University College.  He was working on The Australian Federal Labour Party, 1901-1951 (1955), and was fascinated by the story of Chifley, self-educated and rising from extreme poverty in the 1890s to become an engine driver, then a union leader, and finally Prime Minister.  Crisp was already gathering materials for Ben Chifley: a biography (1961).

Crisp knew that a lot of papers dealing…

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A Treasure Trove of Newspapers

When I was a child growing up during the 1950s and 60s, a stamp, a phone call, and a newspaper all cost about the same. A local letter was four pence for so many years that the stamp is very common, and despised by collectors accordingly.

A local newspaper was about 6d, and a phone call much the same – though long distance calls cost much more. Then, during the inflation of the 1970s, these prices started to diverge. Phone calls got cheaper, thanks to new technology which cut out the cost of labour, while postage kept pace with inflation, thanks to innovations like post codes that made postal workers more efficient.

But the price of newspapers went through the roof. Newspapers depend on labour at every stage of production, and the arrival of a new, quality newspaper, The Australian, [ha!] in 1964, raised the bar for good, and therefore well-paid, journalists. Besides, newspapers rely on a non-renewable resource – wood pulp – which until appallingly recently was sourced from old growth forests.

Since then, of course, the internet has come along to change our ways of communicating, but the relative prices of phone calls, postage and newspapers were already diverging long before. I first used email in 1988, and surfed my first web in 1993 – but only because I had access to these systems through the university. It took another decade before these activities were commonplace in the wider community.

A hundred years of habit meant that most middle class suburban households still had a paper delivered until relatively recently, but not now, and people seem to have stopped writing letters altogether. Meanwhile the mobile phone is ubiquitous – and cheaper still, there’s Skype. What will we historians be doing in a hundred years?

Letters and newspapers were never cheap. We rarely think about the cost or means of distribution of private letters, concentrating on their content instead, but of course posting a letter always involved a cost, both in time and money. Jane Austen’s heroines are always absenting themselves from the action because they ‘have some letters to write’, and the physical effort of writing long, newsy letters must have consumed a good deal of time. Writing paper was expensive, quill pens needed constant mending, and then there was the cost of postage. Before the penny post (1840) postage was calculated on distance, so Emma Woodhouse’s letters from Highbury to London cost much less than my Walter Davidson’s letters from London to his brother-in-law William Leslie outside Aberdeen. That, in turn, was a trivial cost compared with the letters his nephew Patrick Leslie sent them from New South Wales.

Newspapers were expensive too. The first Australian newspaper, the Sydney Gazette, began in 1803 on a hand press brought out from England. It came out once a week, occasionally vanishing for months at a time when the supply of newsprint ran out. When the editor, ex-convict George Howe, was supplied with poor quality paper, the ink ran, and for weeks or months the print would be blurred.

By the 1830s, newspapers were proliferating. They seem to have reached a peak about 1843, around the time of the first election for the Legislative Council, when I once counted about a dozen papers in Sydney. Each of these papers had private backers and a political agenda – narrowcasting is not new – and most were ephemeral.

It’s often hard to work out how much these newspapers cost, because they were sold on subscription, usually 3 months ahead, rather than over the counter. It’s hard to know how widely they were read, because then as now, newspapers had a vested interest in exaggerating their circulation figures so they could charge more for advertising. On the other hand, many readers often seized a chance to read them for free in pubs and clubs, just as today we check out the papers at a coffee shop. They weren’t cheap, and only rarely made a profit. Shadowy proprietors lurked in the background, propping them up for political purposes, while the editor made his money from advertising and other printing jobs.

As a historian, the public newspaper and the private letter are my bread and butter. Which brings me to Trove Newspapers, the jewel in the crown – jam in the sandwich? – for all Australian researchers.

Trove runs out of the National Library of Australia. For years now, it has been digitizing Australian newspapers and making them freely available in searchable form online. Many countries are similarly digitizing newspapers, but not many are free. Trove has also introduced a unique feature that makes researching with Trove a cooperative effort. Anyone can register with Trove, and once registered we can contribute by correcting text, and leaving searchable hashtags – for personal use, or for others who come along later. It is a system based on trust and cooperation, and the sense of shared community, and it has worked very well. (For those who haven’t tried it, correcting text is also a strangely soothing addiction.)

Newspapers today may be entering a death spiral of rising prices and falling circulation, but we rely on newspapers from the past all the time. Now Trove is under threat, because the Federal Government has cut the National Library’s funding. In response a Twitter campaign began last week, under the hashtag #fundTrove, and directed at the Minister responsible, Senator Mitch Fifield. In 140 words or less, people told their stories about the ways in which they use Trove, and the stories they have found. The campaign has flushed out so many researchers, from family historians to PhD students to best selling writers. Some of my favourite stories come from people who are using Trove in innovative ways, such as Jodi Frawley’s investigation of Aboriginal fish traps, and the former range of endangered animals like the Murray perch.

Then there is the story of how a boy in South Africa received a 3D-printed prosthetic hand based on a design mentioned in an Adelaide newspaper in 1844. My own example was a tiny advertisement I found in the pages of the Sydney Gazette from 1808, from the important early colonial artist John Lewin, seeking carmine paint.

Digital projects are taking place all over the world, transforming the way we do history – but only a few of them are free. Trove and New Zealand’s Papers Past are amongst those that are – for now. Yes, there is a cost in making this material available, but the benefits are huge, not just for Australians, but for our place in the world. Whatever happened to soft diplomacy?

#fundTrove

Update: In the comments, someone asked the following:

‘In the novels I read rich men are always offering to ‘frank’ the letters of their impoverished wards. Do you think the frank-er was running an account with the mail service, or he’d prepaid?’

There may be examples of pre-paid postage (there are a couple of philatelists who follow this blog who will know much more than I do), but before the penny post, it was one of the perks of being in Parliament. Members of both House of Lords and House of Commons had the privilege of free postage – and it had become a convention that they would also frank the letters of their friends and relatives (as well as impoverished wards).

It seems to have been an absolute rort. WSD used to get his cousin, an MP, to frank blank sheets of paper to lay in a supply of free letters for future use, and MPs made useful company directors because they cut down the cost of postage.

2015 in review

Happy New Year everyone!

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2015 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 33,000 times in 2015. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 12 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

Chin Chin!

Chin Chin: Anglo-Chinese. A phrase of salutation. Also used as a drinking toast Oxford English Dictionary

This is a time for feasting, whether it’s the traditional Christmas dinner that only makes sense in the wintry northern hemisphere at this time of year, or cherries, mango and prawns in our summer heat. Whatever our local traditions, eating together is a sign of friendship. The word ‘companion’, like the French copain, has at its root the word pain, bread, so companions were originally the people we broke bread with. Friendship through food – an excellent idea, but occasionally it involves difficulties when there are serious cultural misunderstandings.

On 2 November 1838 Captain Laplace and the officers of the French exploration frigate Artémise were invited to a grand banquet in Canton [now Guangdong], by Minqua, a senior member of the Hong, or merchant organisation, that controlled trade in Canton. Minqua dealt in particular with French traders, but the invitations went out more widely, and the trader and diarist William Prinsep has given a memorable account of what must have been a memorable occasion:

‘We assembled at about 4 P.M. – a large party. There were seven square tables placed in a semicircle fronting an arcade of three arches at the windowed end of the hall. On the first side of each table hung a crimson drapery embroidered with gold in a dragon pattern. On each of the other sides were two of the party seated, the master of the feast in the centre. In the centre of each table stood a pyramidal kind of dumb waiter turning on a pivot & bearing on shelves down each side small porcelain cups vases & other vessels with the required condiments for a good dinner with a cup of soy at the apex.

‘I kept my eye upon Minqua the host to know how to make the most of the good things before me. For instance, the first thing handed round to each person was a cup with a porcelain spoon of birds’ nest soup. It was pure gluten without any flavour whatever. I noticed that he first put in a little soy, then a little sugar, salt & chilli pepper & some spice. The tables were being constantly turned to supply the condiment required.

‘Now there were 60 different things served to each person ending with the never omitted cup of rice, water & all in most elegant porcelain cups, saucers, bowls, little platters, perfectly clean & brought in on pretty lacquered trays & all like clock work and without any noise or confusion, and some idea may be formed of what the kitchen & pantry must have been like & how organised.

‘I must add that every now & then were carried round Porcelain kettles of hot samshee [Shaoxing] the sour medicine kind of wine of the country. It was poured into little cups with deep rims underneath acting as handle. When challenged you drank it standing & with both hands presented the empty face of the cup to the party you drank with to show you had swallowed all, and with a Chin Chin [ts’ing ts’ing] sat down again. The host kept the kettle going in the liveliest manner among the sailors, & I confess it was lucky that it [i.e. the wine] was hot otherwise it would have been too sour to be palatable.

‘My impression is that as all the dishes seemed to have been prepared with a kind of oil, this hot sour wine seemed to neutralize the effect of the greasiness; – I tasted (for there were too many to eat) of as many as I could for curiosity sake, & I found many of them very nice, especially delicate little legs & wings of poultry & game in a kind of fritter – delicate little bones doubtless of rabbits and puppies, perhaps of frogs or rats were so tinted as to look tempting, and please the taste.

‘Everything except the liquids had of course to be eat[en] with chopsticks, but I had learnt to handle them exactly – Not so an unfortunate officer of the frigate in full uniform sitting near to me whose white trousers bore unmistakable marks of his want of experience in lifting the greasy morceaux to his lips. He swore heartily at the best bits always escaping him.

‘Another man at my table lifted from his cup a thing prepared in sugar which created consternation all around “Mais Mon Dieu qu’est ce que c’est que ça?” [‘My God, what have we got here?’] exclaims the alarmed eater for there was no doubt of its being a preserved centipede. I thought this was carrying the joke against us too far, and I appealed to Dent who sat at the chief table. Up jumped Minqua himself who ran to our table to explain “But number one Good – number one!” meaning that nothing possibly could be better, but remarking nothing but disgust in each of our faces, he seized the chopsticks, balanced the sweet creature at least 4 inches in length & slowly swallowed it, patting his stomach with extreme satisfaction.

‘But the action had quite a different effect upon most of us. The Frenchman who had held it up & was nearest to the Mandarin was compelled to run to the open window when he poured forth his objections in a most undeniable manner – but he was not the only unfortunate at my table. The Doctor of the frigate turning to me to remark upon the peculiarity of the taste of the oil & in the cooking, and doubting what it could be, was quickly assured by me that I knew that which was much used was Castor oil which grew in all their gardens. He turned deadly pale declaring that all his life he had avoided this oil with a hatred never to be conquered. A minute after, his head was also out of the window with a piteous moan. The dinner was an uproarious one from the astonishment & laughter which these many little incidents caused.

‘While dinner was going on, there were jugglers & dancers of a mild kind alternatively exhibiting their performances in the vacant space of the hall between the tables & the three alcoves. When the coup de grace, alas, the rice water had gone round, Minqua rose with his guests & stretched themselves in this same vacant place calling for his pipe & inviting others to smoke. I remarked a peculiarity about his pipe which had a largish bowl of silver in which a servant placed some loose shreds of tobacco which on the light being applied to it was commenced with one long inhale. A quantity of fine scented smoke seemed to come out of the Mandarin’s mouth, nostrils, ears & eyes so completely was he surrounded with smoke.

‘It seemed quite to satisfy him for he handed his pipe to his servant & clapped his hands as the signal for us all to take our seats again, which we had no sooner done than enter the whole cortege of servants & the entire 60 dishes had to be handed round again. The Chinese Gentlemen began again seriously, but it was too much for the Europeans, and Minqua finding that no one partook of the dishes, clapped his hands again & in came 3 tables ornamented with embroidered draperies like our own. One was placed in each alcove & there followed immediately 3 large dishes carried by 2 men each in uniforms. Then entered a cook to each dish in a splendid costume armed with large knives & forks with which they at once attacked the three large joints of Beef, Mutton and Pork.

‘The sailors at one table exclaimed with an oath that now they saw something like a dinner & turned to with much vigour to satisfy appetites which had not been appeased by the many little entremets. But there were many like myself who after so many tastings were quite unable to partake of these grands pieces de resistance which were cooked to perfection.

‘In time however there was an end to this as well as to wine drinking – the evening had drawn on to dark. The whole side of the chamber behind us seemed to open by the removal of shutters & screens & we looked into a Court in the middle of which was exhibited a whole course of miniature fireworks of the most elegant kind, of many colours & contrivances quite Chinese which is as much as to say totally different from anything we had ever seen before.

‘The party broke up at their termination & we were saluted at the door by the most effective feu de joie it was possible to conceive. Conceive the whole Prussian army firing with exact precision one after the other, but this could only be accomplished by the Chinese method. At the door of the Hong two very high poles had been planted & to the very top of each had been hoisted a string of Chinese crackers which are small joints of Bamboo connected by a quick match & strung together by tens of thousands….

‘Every one suffered from the effects of the party and I never was so ill as I was all that night & next day.’

Chin chin, everyone. Enjoy the festive season – and keep clear of centipedes.

Reference: Memoir of William Prinsep, in Prinsep Papers, MSS Eur D1160/3, India Office Records. Transcribed from the original handwritten diary. I have adjusted the punctuation where needed for greater clarity.

Medieval Power at the Queensland Museum

The Queensland Museum has just opened a new exhibition on Medieval Power. It runs until 10 April 2016. As the museum trumpets in its promo, it will be ‘the first museum in the world and the only one in Australia and New Zealand to host this incredible new exhibition curated by the British Museum.’

So – is it incredible? I’m not so sure. The exhibition contains a great many wonderful pieces. Not surprisingly, given how far they have come from one side of the world to the other, most of them are small. That’s not in itself a problem, though it does mean that the exhibits need time – and in my case reading glasses – to absorb their detail properly.

Given the problems of transportation, it was generous of the British Museum to send some fragile items, such as embroidered cloth or leather. There’s a leather shoe dredged from the muddy Thames that looks as if it could have hidden in the back of my wardrobe until recently. The cuts along the toes are so fresh that I’m sure a leather worker could recreate the design without much difficulty.

The caption says it dated from 1400-1500, but was it dated on the basis of style or some sort of chemical analysis? Carbon dating or DNA analysis would have been impossible with all that mud. I wanted to know more about that shoe, but there’s no catalogue to satisfy my curiosity – and what does it have to do with Power, the alleged theme of the exhibition?

In this exhibition, Power covers the authority of the church (papal rings, objects of devotion), the state (numerous seals, the Lewis chess set king) and the military force of the knights behind that (helmets, horse gear). Beyond that, there’s a miscellany of the stuff of ordinary life – knives and spoons, a saltcellar, items of adornment. I fell deeply in love with a small bone pin with the head and horn of a unicorn.

Unicorn pin from British Museum, Museum no 1932,0307.5

There’s also a rudimentary attempt to illustrate towns and trade, and one of the final cabinets contains a number of seals and other objects associated Jewish or Muslim minorities.

The objects are lovely, intriguing, engaging. Most of the people around me seemed perfectly happy with what was on display, though none of their comments seemed to go much beyond the ‘Wow, isn’t that old!’ school of history. It is the school holidays, after all.

So why did I come away from this exhibition feeling vaguely frustrated, and regretting that I had splashed out on a season ticket?

For a start, there’s no catalogue. I’m not sure who curated this exhibition, but my guess is that most of the decisions about selection were made in London, not Brisbane, especially as the exhibition is going on to other places after this. So why is there no catalogue to cover the entire tour? A search of ‘unicorn pin’ on the British Museum’s Collection online was easy – but I’ve got Buckley’s chance of finding the shoe. Similarly, there’s a nice quiet place within the exhibition where a lot of interesting books are laid out to read – but none of them are available at the bookshop.

According to the British Museum website, this travelling exhibition is called Medieval Europe: AD 400-1500 but somewhere between London and Brisbane, the title changed to Medieval Power: Symbols and Splendour. My hunch is that some publicist thought this title would appeal more to the Game of Thrones generation, but it’s a pity, because in the conversion, the chronology – and therefore causation – have been lost. A thousand years of the ebb and flow of European history have been mashed together into a largely undifferentiated ‘Middle Ages’, sometimes within the same display cabinet.

There’s another problem with the theme of Power. It leaves women out of the discussion, even when the objects themselves do not. The King in the Lewis chess set is described in terms of his sword and throne, the symbols of his royal power. But there is no comparable discussion of the Queen who sits beside him, from another walrus ivory chess set.

Walrus ivory Queen chess piece, German, 14C-15C British Museum no. 1856,0612.3

In the end, I was glad to have the season ticket because I went back at the end of the week, just to check if my original impressions were unfair. I don’t think they are, although on a second viewing the logic of the themes became a bit clearer. But I’m still disappointed. Don’t get me wrong – the exhibition is definitely worth a visit, maybe more than one, but go on a day that won’t be crowded so that you can take you your time over the smaller exhibits – and reading glasses. And don’t, like me, walk out expecting to pick up that fascinating book on medieval jewelry when you reach the bookshop. It won’t be there.

Update: Here is a very different report on the exhibition, this time from a physicist.

Changing Times on Norfolk Island

It’s crunch time for Norfolk Island. Next year the island will lose its independent status as a self-governing Australian territory, and there’s a lot of local anxiety about what comes next. I’ve recently come back from a week on Norfolk Island, a group-painting trip that was a lot of fun, and this was my first chance to see this beautiful speck in the South Pacific.

‘Lone Pine, Norfolk Island’

Norfolk Island has a rich and strange history. It has been settled four times: once by Polynesians, twice by convicts and their guards, and once by the current inhabitants, who are descendants of the Bounty mutineers.

The Polynesians arrived about 1400, probably from the Kermadec Islands, perhaps following the migratory shearwaters (mutton birds) that used to fly due west from the Kermadecs to breed on Norfolk Island. Archaeologists have discovered obsidian tools at a dig site close to the convict ruins, but eventually the Polynesians left. Nobody knows why. They left behind banana trees and a vegetarian Polynesian rat, Rattus exulans.

Cook discovered and named Norfolk Island on his second voyage on Resolution in 1774. He managed to land briefly and reported on the pine trees and flax on the island. The French explorer La Perouse had less success. He sailed around the island in January 1788 in search of a safe landing spot, but eventually gave up and sailed away, commenting that the place was fit only for ‘angels and eagles’.

Only a few weeks later, in March 1788, a small group of marines and convicts from the First Fleet landed on Norfolk Island, partly to deter the French (since they knew that La Perouse was sniffing around) and partly because tall trees and flax were valuable resources for a maritime nation, always on the lookout for new sources of masts and canvas. Unfortunately for the Royal Navy, the pines that dominate Norfolk Island are less sturdy than they appear, snapping easily at a weak spot where the branches meet the trunk – so, no masts.

In the early years, the settlement around Kingston (named after the first commandant, Phillip Gidley King) supplied grain to the mainland. This settlement lasted until the mainland didn’t need Norfolk Island’s crops any more, and the residents were moved to New Norfolk in Tasmania. The last settlers left in 1813.

The second convict settlement began in 1825. Like the Moreton Bay settlement at Brisbane, which dates from the same period, this was a place to send convicts who had offended a second time. Like Brisbane, it was brutal. I went on a tour of the convict sites, and our guide described an archaeological dig done some time back, which took samples from one of the underground pits where recalcitrant convicts were confined as further punishment. According to him (and I have no verification, I’m afraid) chemical analysis of the walls and floor show a layer of blood, followed by a layer of whitewash, then more blood, more whitewash….

When convict transportation finally ended in 1852, this settlement was abandoned too, and the final residents transferred to Tasmania in 1856 [see Mr. Baskerville’s comment below].

Meanwhile, far to the east of Norfolk Island, in 1789 the Bounty mutineers, with a number of Tahitian men and women, settled on Pitcairn Island. One of their first acts was to burn the Bounty – allegedly so that it couldn’t be seen by anyone searching for the mutineers, but also making it impossible for any of the party to change their mind and try to leave.

The first years were brutal and bloody – Lord of the Flies, with added sex and racism – and by 1800, only two men survived of the original mutineers, John Adams and Ned Young, together with most of the Tahitian women. By then there were 19 mixed race children, carrying the names of Adams, Young and the other mutineers: Christian, Quintall, Nobbs, and so on.

Life settled down. The last mutineer, John Adams, died in 1829, and any fear of British retribution ended. The population grew, and the island – only 2 miles across – was unable to support them all. In 1856 they petitioned the British government to find them a new home.

Coincidentally, Norfolk Island had just been abandoned – so the British government offered them the island. Most of the Pitcairn Islanders moved to Norfolk Island, and they have been there ever since. They inherited the abandoned roads, mills and dams of the convict settlement, and drew lots for the houses. They reused some of the dressed stone, but most of the convict settlement remains intact.

The New South Wales Government gave each family 50 acres of land, but otherwise left them largely to themselves. The same names recur, in the graveyard, but also in the phone book – Quintall, Adams, Christian, Nobbs. After federation in 1901, Norfolk Island became an Australian territory [See Jack McClintock’s comment below], with its own stamps (as in Pitcairn, stamp collectors have been an invaluable source of revenue) but an Australian administrator and Australian currency.

In 1979 the Fraser Government gave Norfolk Island self-government, but at the end of 2015, that changes. The current Administrator of Norfolk Island, Gary Hardgrave, was a minister in the Howard Government who lost his seat in 2007. Tony Abbott appointed him with a brief to oversee the end of self-government and bring the island under Australian law.

At present, Norfolk Islanders pay no income tax, just a 12% GST, and the island is flat stony cold broke. There is no Medicare, no social security, and the infrastructure is decaying – the potholes in the roads need to be seen to be believed. And the population is falling, as children go to the mainland for further education and work.

Tourism is the only real source of income, but this is down as Australians travel further afield. Cruise tourism throughout the Pacific is up – but cruise ships face the same problem that faced La Perouse, and led to the wreck of the Sirius in 1790. Norfolk Island has no harbour, and no safe landing place for ocean-going ships. Supplies (or tourists) have to be transshipped into small lighters, which is slow and expensive and potentially dangerous in rough conditions.

Each hand is named, and represents an objector to the end of self-government on Norfolk Island.

Not surprisingly, the decision to end self-government is controversial. One local told me that some shops won’t serve the Hardgraves, and she had seen people smear the Administrator’s car with cow pats (cows have right of way on the roads). The locals have a history of mutiny, after all. Yet it is hard to see any alternative.

When self-government ends, Norfolk Island will have the status of a local government authority. The residents will pay Australian taxes, but get access to Australian welfare. They have been promised investment in infrastructure – perhaps even the longed for deep-water jetty that might transform their economy. Fixing the potholes would be a start.

With self-government, the role of the Administrator will change, but not disappear. The Administrator has often been a superannuated politician, and it is easy to see why someone might be pleased to take the gig.

Government House, Norfolk Island, first built 1829

Norfolk Island itself is quite achingly beautiful. It has a tight-knit community that is appealingly old fashioned, socially conservative, religious and royalist. The position of Administrator comes with a quite wonderful Government House, within a short walk of the beach at Emily Bay. The surf can be rough, but there’s good windsurfing nearby. The hills are steep, but a really dedicated cyclist would enjoy the challenge.

Update: As a friend points out, Norfolk Island got self-government in 1979 during the Fraser Government – Hawke didn’t come to power until 1983. Now corrected.
The Legislative Assembly has already been abolished (but not as yet Norfolk Island’s duty free status!). An elected Regional Council will be introduced in July 2016. More information available here.

See also Mr Baskerville’s comments below.