Victorian Historical Journal
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VICTORIAN HISTORICAL JOURNAL VOLUME 86, NUMBER 2, DECEMBER 2015 ROYAL HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF VICTORIA VICTORIAN HISTORICAL JOURNAL ROYAL HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF VICTORIA The Royal Historical Society of Victoria is a community organisation comprising people from many fields committed to collecting, researching and sharing an understanding of the history of Victoria. The Victorian Historical Journal is a fully refereed journal dedicated to Australian, and especially Victorian, history produced twice yearly by the Publications Committee, Royal Historical Society of Victoria. PUBLICATIONS COMMITTEE Richard Broome (Convenor) Marilyn Bowler (Editor, Victorian Historical Journal) Chips Sowerwine (Editor, History News) John Rickard (Review Co-editor) Peter Yule (Review Co-editor) Jill Barnard Marie Clark Mimi Colligan Don Garden (President, RHSV) Don Gibb Richard Morton Kate Prinsley Judith Smart Carole Woods BECOME A MEMBER Membership of the Royal Historical Society of Victoria is open. All those with an interest in history are welcome to join. Subscriptions can be purchased at: Royal Historical Society of Victoria 239 A’Beckett Street Melbourne, Victoria 3000, Australia Telephone: 03 9326 9288 Email: [email protected] www.historyvictoria.org.au Journals are also available for purchase online: www.historyvictoria.org.au/publications/victorian-historical-journal VICTORIAN HISTORICAL JOURNAL ISSUE 284 VOLUME 86, NUMBER 2 DECEMBER 2015 Royal Historical Society of Victoria Victorian Historical Journal Published by the Royal Historical Society of Victoria 239 A’Beckett Street Melbourne, Victoria 3000, Australia Telephone: 03 9326 9288 Fax: 03 9326 9477 Email: [email protected] www.historyvictoria.org.au Copyright © the authors and the Royal Historical Society of Victoria 2015 All material appearing in this publication is copyright and cannot be reproduced without the written permission of the publisher and the relevant author. Honorary Editor: Marilyn Bowler Review Editors: John Rickard, Peter Yule Design: Janet Boschen, Boschen Design Desktop Production: John Gillespie, Kiplings Business Communications Printer: BPA Print Group Print Post Approved: PP349181/00159 ISSN 1030 7710 The Royal Historical Society of Victoria acknowledges the support of the Victorian Government though Creative Victoria—Department of Economic Development, Jobs, Transport and Resources. Publication of this edition of the Victorian Historical Journal is made possible with the assistance of the ANZAC Centenary Community Grants, Department of Veteran Affairs. Front cover: Open-air classrooms at Fintona, ca 1915. (Courtesy of Fintona Archives.) VICTORIAN HISTORICAL JOURNAL VOLUME 86, NUMBER 2 DECEMBER 2015 ARTICLES Introduction 225 Marilyn Bowler Vale: John D. Adams 229 Victorians Abroad: The Ferguson Family’s Sojourn in 230 Argentina 1904–1907 Damian Veltri Victoria’s Yellow Stain: The Fleet of Floating Prisons 250 Roland Wettenhall British Migrant Settlers on a Failing Soldier Settlement Estate 277 Mary West William Hughston 1867–1930: His Life and Legacy 299 Elizabeth Roberts and Mary Lush Pop Goes the Rhino: Hotham and the Toorak House Furniture 321 Robert La Nauze ‘Why can’t I have my baby tomorrow?’: A Legislative 336 Periodisation of Intercountry Adoption in Victoria and Australia from the Early 1970s to the Present Kay Dreyfus, Marian Quartly and Denise Cuthbert HISTORICAL NOTE A Letter Home to Scotland from Warrenheip in April 1857: 363 Insights into Life in a Railway Survey Camp Ian Clark and Beth Kicinski v Victorian Historical Journal, Volume 86, Number 2, December 2015 REVIEWS Australian Settler Colonialism and the Cummeragunja 381 Aboriginal Station: Redrawing Boundaries. By Fiona Davis. Richard Broome Australian Football: The People’s Game 1958–2058. By Stephen Alomes. 383 Marie Clark Burke & Wills: The Scientific Legacy of the Victorian Exploring Expedition. 385 Edited by EB Joyce & DA McCann. Don Garden The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka. By Clare Wright. 387 Dorothy Wickham A Funny Course for a Woman. By Rosemary Balmford. 390 Kim Rubenstein, prepared with the assistance of Marina Loane The Audacious Adventures of Dr Louis Lawrence Smith 1830–1910. 393 By John Poynter. Graeme Davison David Syme: Man of the Age. By Elizabeth Morrison. 395 John Waugh Making Melbourne’s Monuments: The Sculpture of Paul Montford. 397 By Catherine Moriarty. Kristin Otto The Surprise Rival: A History of the Education Faculty Monash 401 University 1964–2014. By Alan Gregory. Luke Savage Notes on Contributors 402 About the Royal Historical Society of Victoria 405 Guidelines for Contributors 406 vi Victorian Historical Journal, Volume 86, Number 2, December 2015 Introduction Marilyn Bowler Since becoming editor of the Victorian Historical Journal, I have often wondered not just why people study history, but how and why historians choose the subjects that they research. Sometimes the answer is obvious: people living in a community, who are interested in history, become interested in their community’s history. As editor, I believe that one of the roles of the journal is to publish articles and historical notes from community historians, as well as those from professional or academic researchers. But what causes professional and academic historians to choose their areas of research? To find out, I emailed our Publications Committee members and asked them what prompted their research choices. Sometimes it seems pure serendipity leads to a lifelong interest. After completing a mature age Honours degree at Monash University, Mimi Colligan was offered work as a research assistant in its English Department and as a research assistant with the Australian Dictionary of Biography: ‘So, theatre and musical biography became topics for many articles, and two books’. For Carole Woods, it was a personal loss. The early death of her father caused her to move from European to local history. At the suggestion of Dr Geoffrey Serle at Monash University, she completed her honours thesis on village settlement in Victoria during the 1890s with a focus on the Dandenongs. Carole found consolation in the Dandenongs where her aunt had taken her horse-riding as a child. Since then, she has always been involved with community history. Postgraduates beginning Masters degrees or doctorates are often advised by their supervisors that they need to choose a topic that interests them or they will not be able to keep pursuing their studies for the three plus years that it takes to complete their degree. Richard Broome, the convenor of the RHSV’s Publications Committee, suggested that research questions almost inevitably come out of the researcher’s own experience. ‘I grew up in the last gasp of the sectarian era, hearing things from my elders and knowing that education, friendships and marriages were shaped by the sectarian divide. At undergraduate level, I read how 225 Catholicism shaped the ALP, and Protestants, the conservatives. But I had cousins who were Catholic from a “mixed marriage” as it was called and who I played with and loved. So at university I wanted to find what underpinned these feelings.’ Don Garden, the RHSV president, concurs with Broome that research interests develop from personal experience and personal concerns. Garden evolved into a historian of the environment and climate, because of his emerging environmental awareness and concern. ‘In the 1980s, my attention was drawn to such campaigns as the Little Desert, Lake Pedder, Gordon below Franklin, and Daintree. I began to look into the history of European influence on the Australian environment, and then discovered that, in the United States, and to a much lesser extent in Britain and Europe, there was a sub-discipline called environmental history. When I joined the University of Melbourne History Department in the early 1990s, I was able to start an undergraduate subject in Australian Environmental Hi s t or y.’ Research itself can lead to other research: While browsing the Sydney Morning Herald, Richard Broome read an earlier article full of clerical outrage against a ‘carnival of Savagery’. This was about protests against the world heavyweight title fight in Sydney in 1908, between the white champion Tommy Burns and Jack Johnson, the African-American champion. The colour line in boxing was being broken. ‘It became my first post-thesis project—Johnson won—and led onto others. In short, the topics came out of my own experience and were driven by a buzzing in my head. What underpinned anti-Catholicism? What happened when sport and race mixed? You need that buzzing to get you going and to sustain the hard slog through the research.’ For Garden, too, one research area led into another. ‘A decade or so later, I transferred to History and Philosophy of Science where I expanded the range of environmental subjects I was teaching, including into Pacific environmental history. The interest in the Pacific stemmed from having been commissioned by a US publishing house to write an environmental history of Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific. Once that was completed, and as I was increasingly conscious of the importance of climate in history and the future, I undertook a study of 19th-century El Nino events in Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific.’ As a young history and geography teacher, Don Gibb continued to study additional history subjects at university. Eventually he returned to university to undertake a Master’s degree 226 Victorian Historical Journal, Volume 86, Number 2, December 2015 based on the history of Sandringham,