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A READER’S SHELF

Compiled by

J. L. HERRERA

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To the Memory of

Michele Turner Oral historian, writer, activist, special person

And with Special Thanks to

Bronwen Meredith, Madge Portwin, Ken Herrera, Penny Parish, Joyce Keam, David Goodrick and Rob Rands

Introduction

It took nearly five years to be borne in on me that publishers simply weren’t very interested in my views on books. Strictly speaking, there is no reason why they should be. Suburban housewives occasionally acquire a moment of fame—but very rarely for their views on books. I wrote A Writer’s Calendar principally for my mother—though, sadly, she died only days before the bound manuscript reached her—and A Book Circle began as the overflow from the first book. But this book, though it too is partly overflow, is simply a labour of love, a place to let off steam, pages to explore ideas ... It is mine and if anyone else should wish to browse in it, then they must excuse a certain degree of self-indulgence. Along the way I have come upon various bits of information which would have fitted nicely into the earlier books; such as Vance Palmer’s memories of meeting the notorious Frank Harris or this little bit on how Brian O’Nolan came to use the name Myles na Gopaleen, ‘O’Nolan borrowed the name from a character in Gerald Griffin’s novel, The Collegians (1829). It means Myles of the ponies’. But it is rather like writing a biography; at some point you have to say ‘finis’ even though new and fascinating information is almost certainly still out there for the collecting.

For Pleasant Hours.

J. L. Herrera 2001

5

A WRITER’S SHELF

January 1st: Ouida Joe Orton * * * * * Isn’t it funny how Ouida pops up in all sorts of places? ‘Now “New Woman” fiction—that term was invented by the popular novelist “Ouida” in the 1890s—looked at the way women, offered greater independence by improving educational and work opportunities, changing mores and better birth control began, in life and fiction too, to claim more control of their lives and aspirations.’ (Malcolm Bradbury in The Modern British Novel) And Anne Haverty says in Constance Markievicz, ‘A book she read aroused rather anguished reflections on love and its elusiveness. This was Ariadne by Ouida, the pen- name of novelist Marie Louise de la Ramee, the popular and rather risqué novelist. Maria Bashkirtseff had also read Ariadne and was no less unsettled by it: ‘It is ... in the highest degree sensational—the agitation it caused me three or four years ago. It treats of art and love and the scene is set in Rome.’ Constance, who, like Bashkirtseff, had a sense of destiny and wanted to be an artist, was just as susceptible to the theme of Ariadne which concerns the fate of a young sculptor, Gioja. Gioja has been brought up on Homer and Virgil and lives for art alone until she meets Hilarion the capricious and sublime poet for whom she dies. Constance wrote: I have read Ariadne and loved it, unnatural and overstrained it may be, but there is a spark somewhere, the indescribable touch that carries one away and makes one believe in love—real true love—God is love and I do not know Him.’ It was not only women who used hyperbole in their descriptions; ‘Morrison of Peking’ (Dr George Morrison) called her that “eccentric egotist of genius”. Ouida’s dry wit pops up here and there. ‘Cant, naked, is honoured throughout England, cant, clothed in gold, is a king in England never resisted’ and ‘The longest absence is less perilous to love than the terrible trials of incessant proximity’. She was perhaps thinking of her good friends Isabel and Richard Burton when she wrote of absence. And yet Ouida herself remains largely hidden and her own books, including Ariadne, are now extremely difficult to find. The best I could do was her 1867 novel Under Two Flags ... * * * * * Many fascinating characters touch the lives of the famous British explorers; touch, and then somehow disappear again as though they cannot be given the space they deserve, perhaps lest they absorb a little lustre from those famed figures. There is for instance Sidi Bombay, the ex-slave from Zanzibar who went exploring with Burton and Speke and also, briefly, with Livingstone and Stanley, and of whom William Harrison in his novelised Burton and Speke says, “He became the only man in the nineteenth century to cross Africa from both south to north and east to west.” The first game warden of Kruger National Park, Harry Wolhuter, wrote of coming upon the ruins of a well-built old stone house said to have been the home of one João Albassini; in trying to find out more he came upon Colonel Stevenson-Hamilton’s book The Low Veld: Its Wild Life and Its People and its tantalisingly brief statement: “Few white men have led a more remarkable existence in Africa, and a full account of his life and history, should it ever become available for publication, would be of great interest.” Alas, I could find no more … And there is the Emin Pasha, not a Turk as the name might suggest, but the governor 6 of a province in the southern Sudan, whose life and fate became important to both Stanley and the British Government. Adam Hochschild says the “beleaguered pasha was a slight, short German Jew, originally named Eduard Schnitzer … a physician by training, the pasha was a brilliant linguist and an eccentric; besides trying to govern his province, heal the sick, and hold out against the Mahdist rebels, he was painstakingly gathering specimens of plant and animal life and assembling a collection of stuffed birds for the British Museum.” Judith Listowel in The other Livingstone chronicles the lives of some of the men who either preceded Livingstone or helped him in some other way. Cotton Oswell and Mungo Murray accompanied Livingstone on his first major travels and their knowledge of the countryside and organisational abilities were of immense help to Livingstone, but Tim Jeal in his biography of Livingstone says of them, “Oswell was no mindless young man with a private fortune and little else. He was exceptionally generous, modest and completely lacking in personal ambition. The last two qualities provide the key to the success of his relationship with Livingstone, who had already proved himself incapable of suffering any European whose views conflicted with his own. Livingstone liked to get his full measure of praise for what he did, and Oswell conveniently never saw fit to press his own claims. Oswell’s companion, Mungo Murray, who also came on the 1849 journey to Lake Ngami, was a man of similar character, who preferred doing things to talking about them afterwards.” Hungarian explorer László Magyar had also visited much of the country that Livingstone made his own explorational fiefdom; but he was even less able to press for any share of the glory, being remote from the scientific figures of his own country and even further from Livingstone’s lionisers in London. (Though as Magyar’s descendants still live in Angola it might be said that he belonged more truly to Africa than Livingstone ever could.) Then there were the Portuguese such as Silva Porto and, particularly, Candido Cardoso. Basil Davidson says of Silva Porto that three Zanzibari traders turned up in Benguela in Angola in 1852 which was a “signal for a greatly renewed Portuguese interest in establishing a trans-African trading route between Angola and Mozambique. Silva Porto was sent off to pioneer the trail. He got no further than the Zambesi, although that was no mean feat.” Cardoso nursed Livingstone back to health, he provided generous hospitality to not only Livingstone but all his porters for months on end, and for his pains, Livingstone’s “violent criticisms of the Portuguese were to lose him the support of people who could have helped him; his disgraceful treatment of Cardoso was not only to hurt a friend, but one who was in a position to advise and to explain the difficulties against which the missionaries would have to battle.” Livingstone said of the Portuguese, “The Portuguese cultivate skin diseases and drunkenness more than horseflesh and are asses themselves.” He was critical of their involvement in the slave trade but carefully avoided recognising that his own ignorant forced entry into African kingdoms that had kept the slavers out opened the door to slavery; he also avoided mentioning his own willingness to accept the hospitality of slave traders such as Muhamid bin Gharib. Livingstone was a brave man and an exceptionally obstinate one. His obsession with being the first European to see certain key landmarks may have grown out of a sense of inferiority rooted in his poverty-stricken childhood but it also lead him to do almost anything to avoid recognising that other Europeans might have preceded him. Listowel concludes with a letter sent to her in 1973: “It is obvious that prior to Livingstone the Shire river and Lake Maravi were frequently visited by the Portuguese. Candido da Costa Cardoso was one of these travellers, who became famous because of Livingstone’s ingratitude. Had the Doctor been honest about the information he had received from 7

Cardoso, he would have been a great explorer.” * * * * * While David Livingstone was in my thoughts I came across an old book called The Livingstone of South America by the Rev. R. J. Hunt. Who, I wondered, was ‘The Livingstone’? He turned out to be a Scottish missionary called Wilfrid Barbrooke Grubb who, under the auspices of the South American Missionary Society, worked first on Keppel Island in the Falklands, arriving in 1886, then in the Gran Chaco region of Paraguay almost up until his death in 1930. In the words of those times, ‘What those pioneers of health and light sought was to give these tortuous and primitive minds an understanding of their own wiser and more kindly ones.’ And ‘During the long period, commencing more than forty years ago, when Barbrooke Grubb at first alone penetrated the unknown swamps and forests of the Chaco, little reached the outer world of the events that befell this little band of missionaries engaged in forming Indian settlements and establishing contact with other tribes from the rivers Bermejo and Pilcomayo to the Upper Paraguay river and the confines of the Bolivian uplands.’ Undoubtedly he had the same depth of faith and curiosity that drove David Livingstone, he was tough and brave, he believed firmly in communal self-reliance and worked to make the newly-settled tribes self-supporting; he also firmly carried those Victorian values that came to be seen, sometimes with sorry results, as synonymous with Christian values. But he left his wife and children at home for much of the time so his story lacks the human interest angle. And his personality was not the obstinate, driven, charismatic personality of David Livingstone. Perhaps, for the sake of the people of the Gran Chaco, that was just as well. But the claim in the book’s title comes across as a trifle over-blown. * * * * * Judith Listowel also mentions Richard Burton, though only tangentially; “he must also have known of Livingstone’s shabby treatment of László Magyar; this may be the reason why he sent the Hungarian explorer money which, unfortunately, only arrived after the latter’s death. The best proof that Burton was greatly interested in Magyar is that in 1893, when Isabel Burton compiled a list of her husband’s unpublished works, the second “quite complete” one was Ladislas Magyar’s African Travels (p. 454, vol. 2 of Sir Richard Francis Burton by Isabel Burton). It may have been a translation of the German version of Magyar’s Travels in Southern Africa, but in view of Burton’s intellectual curiosity and thoroughness, there must have been comments, footnotes, and probably a challenging introduction. Burton’s diaries must also have contained information about Magyar’s last seven years, of which we know very little as the two chests containing his own papers were said to have been burnt “with all their contents” when the man in whose safekeeping they were placed, lost his house in a fire. For reasons best known to herself, Isabel Burton felt differently about her husband’s unpublished works than about his diaries. Instead of burning them, this is what she planned: “The Uniform Library will bring out a cheap edition for the people first of all of his hitherto published works, to which will be gradually added his unpublished works as fast as they can be produced that the British public may be made familiar with all that he has written.” (Ibid., p. 455.) I had hoped to give this book greater interest by including in it the comments of Sir Richard Burton on László Magyar. All Richard Burton’s biographers, and M.N. Penzer, the author of a bibliography of his works as well as works about him, say that Burton’s books on László Magyar had been lost. However as Isabel Burton stated in her biography of her husband that she wished it to be published, I felt it was worth looking into. Leslie Blanche, in her essay on Isabel Burton — in her book The Wilder Shores of Love — said that her papers had been deposited at the Kensington High street and the 8

Campden Hill Public Libraries. I learnt from the first that their Burton papers had been transferred to the Richmond Public Library, and those from the second to the Royal Anthropological Institute. Thanks to the Assistant Librarian of the Richmond Public Library, I found out that Quentin Keynes had bought some Burton MS’s, and that an American collector, whose name he did not remember, had also acquired some. Mr Keynes told me that the MS I was interested in indeed existed, and had been auctioned at Sotheby’s in 1963: Bertram Rota had bid for it on behalf of an American client, Mr Edwards H. Metcalf. It was easy to ascertain from the Sotheby catalogue that on April 9, 1963, the manuscript was sold under the title: Ladislaus Magyar: his residence in South Africa. From the German of Prof. Johann Hunfalvy, by Richard F. Burton. With remarks by Clements R. Markham. It had formed lot 548, fetched £240, and consisted of 1336 leaves. I wrote to Mr Metcalf, pointing out that his MS was not an original work of Richard Burton, but a translation from a German translation of Ladislas Magyar’s own book, which I repeatedly quote in this book. Moreover the title page is inaccurate textually as well as mis-stating that the author is Professor Hunfalvy, who merely edited Magyar’s original Hungarian work. There may be an introduction by Burton, and certainly comments and footnotes, which I am sure are very interesting. It is regrettable that I could not go to California to see the work. Only one more question remained unanswered: where had this MS been from 1896 (when Lady Burton died) until April 9, 1963, when it was auctioned at Sotheby’s? Through a mutual friend I obtained the address of John Arundell, the present owner of Wardour Castle, which in Isabel Burton’s day belonged to her cousin, the then Lord Arundell of Wardour. Lady Burton had left all her papers to Lord Arundell. Mr John Arundell, who inherited Wardour, brought them with all the other family papers to his new home when Wardour became a school. As for the Ladislaus Magyar manuscript, “I decided,” he told me, “to sell it as it was not strictly a family paper.” ” * * * * * Isabel Burton has been castigated for destroying the manuscript her husband was working on at the time of his death, The Scented Garden of the Cheikh Nefzaoui, along with his notes and journals. At first I assumed this was her Victorian sensibilities at work; after all, Burton said ‘It will be a marvellous repertory of Eastern wisdom; how Eunuchs are made, and are married; what they do in marriage; female circumcision, the Fellahs copulating with crocodiles, etc.’ But Isabel had lived in Brazil, Damascus and Trieste, Cairo and India, with him. She had seen many strange things. She had read and re-read every one of his books. It was not her sensibilities but the sensibilities of the society she had come home to after Burton’s death in Trieste. She understood very well that a posthumous publication would ‘set’ him forever in the public mind and she understood what the Mrs Grundys of Victoria’s England—she described Mrs Grundy as ‘an objectionable old person who talked hashed Bible with a nasal twang and rubbed her hands complacently’—would make of The Scented Garden. She wanted Richard Burton to be remembered in his entirety; great traveller and explorer, the extraordinary linguist who was said to speak 40 languages and dialects, the Master Sufi, the expert on Dervishism, one of only two Europeans to have entered Mecca, the writer of 43 books of travel and translator of nearly 30, the dedicated and incorruptible Consul ... for him to be reduced in posterity to the man who had set society by the ears with one last pornographic work ... she had to save his reputation. She wrote bitterly, when she found herself at the middle of a storm of vituperation and criticism, ‘It makes me sick to hear all this anxiety of the Press and the Literary world lest they should miss a word he ever wrote. When he came back in 1882 after being sent to look for Palmer he had a good deal of information to give, and he could not get a magazine or paper to take his most valuable article till it was quite stale. We used to boil over with 9 rage when his books or articles were rejected ... And now, because a few chapters which were of no particular value to the world have been burnt the whole country’s literary minds are full of bitter plaint because anything has perished which came from the translator of the Arabian Nights.’ Burton had left it to her. It was hers to do what she wanted. And by burning it she did herself out of the 6,000 guineas she had been offered for it. With no pension, she faced old age with little material security. It cannot have been an easy decision, no matter what her reasons ... But I wonder if so much was really lost. It becomes easy to believe that what people leave is somehow of greater value than what they had already published. Burton had already written and translated widely; his books, articles and reports had already touched on most of his areas of interest. Would The Scented Garden have opened new Aladdin’s caves or would it largely have been a rehash of other material? By the time Burton began putting it all together he was in poor health and facing the knowledge that there would be no more exploration or adventure; the book would have to make up for this loss and it is not surprising that he convinced himself that this would be his best book. Isabel read every word he put down. Did she decide that it was self-indulgent, vague, obscure, lacking in the qualities of the works he had written or translated earlier in life? Burton was not a great writer or translator; his work is very variable, some of it enduring, shrewd, and with powerful insights, some of it best forgotten. As William Atkinson’s says of one of Burton’s translations: ‘Few writers illustrate better than Camoens (Camões) the essential dilemma that confronts the translator in every age. Loyalty to one’s author is one thing, loyalty to one’s public is another, and the greater the gulf between author and public the greater the conflict. That Camoens has something to say to twentieth-century England as well as to sixteenth-century Portugal will scarcely be denied; but what he has to say can doubtfully be the same in both cases, while of the impossibility of saying it in the same way there can be no doubt whatever. As much has been made abundantly, if unwittingly, clear by the half-dozen and more who have already attempted the task, from Fanshawe in 1655 to Burton in 1870. They have essayed it in the same ottava rima that Camoens took over from Ariosto, in rhyming couplets, in blank verse, in the Spenserian stanza, always in verse. Within this initial fidelity, however relative, to the form of the original, only Mickle (1776) is bold to bear the interests of his prospective readers equally and always in view. It is an over-boldness. Interpreting The Lusiads as ‘the epic poem of the birth of commerce, and, in a particular manner, the epic poem of whatever country has the control and possession of the commerce of India’, he virtually takes it over as something thrown in with that empire of the East to which England had in his day succeeded, and thinks nothing of interpolating a 300-line naval engagement of his own imagining or of cutting by two-thirds Camoens’ moving peroration. Others, if not always proof against what Burton called ‘the prurience of respectability’, eschewed Mickle’s temptation by seeking deliberately to give a tone of antiquity to their versions. Here Burton himself went to the extreme, and the result is a classic example of how an exclusive fidelity to one’s author may defeat the whole purpose of translation. His object was to provide such a poem as Camoens might have written had he been born instead an Englishmen, although the attempt to write Elizabethan English in the nineteenth century already overlooked the detail that no readers of that age had survived. Nor was this all, for in a vain effort to convey further the impression of sixteenth-century Portuguese he clogged his style with hyperbation, syncope, apocope, aphaeresis, diaresis, paragoge. The interests of the modern English reader were nowhere consulted, and the upshot was as could have been foreseen: his version, the most ambitious of all and the most firmly rooted in scholarship, fell from the press still-born, unreadable.’ 1010

But the curious thing I have since discovered (in A Rage to Live by Mary S. Lovell) was that Burton had already brought out a version of The Scented Garden translated from an incomplete French version; the one which was burnt was his translation from a fuller, but still incomplete, version in its original Arabic. The putative reading public lost only a couple of chapters and, possibly, a greater degree of authenticity. And whatever Isabel Burton did, she was going to be pilloried; if she edited, she would be accused of cutting, if she didn’t edit she ran the risk of producing a chaotic unreadable mess. If she didn’t cut she ran the risk of prosecution under the Obscene Publications Act. If she did cut she would be accused of removing the ‘best bits’; even if she put everything away with the requirement that it not be published for a hundred years, she would have exchanged the problems of what to do about the sexual details with even more knotty problems of cultural and religious sensitivities. As Isabel was by then seriously ill with ovarian cancer the uproar from ill-informed and sometimes salacious people must have been unbearable. Even so, that vague sense of regret lingers ... * * * * * Ouida was born Marie Louise de la Ramée in 1839 in Bury St Edmonds and began her writing career sending ‘high society’ stories to Bentley’s Miscellany. It was an extremely prolific career, producing forty-three books of fiction, fact (including biography), collections of short stories, even a popular children’s book A Dog of Flanders. The theme of ‘high society’ partly reflected her own snobbery, she was every inch a social climber, but she had also discovered very early in her writing life what was guaranteed to sell and keep on selling. She was strongly opposed to other people following her up the ladder but, strangely, in those things where she followed her instinct rather than her image, she could work with passionate intensity, such as in the struggle against vivisection. And there is no doubt that she was both popular and very readable then, and even now I found I could read her with enjoyment. There is pace and style and she was able to infuse her writing with passion. Though in Under Two Flags I found myself wondering if it was her passion or Sir Richard Burton’s passion she was giving words to—or had long friendship blurred the boundaries? She has her Arabs in North Africa say with bitterness, ‘To rifle a caravan is a crime, though to steal a continent is glory.’ It has the feeling of something heard and jotted down for later use. Her narrative voice takes the story forward. ‘The Arabs had cruel years to avenge—years of a loathed tyranny, years of starvation and oppression, years of constant flight southward, with no choice but submission or death. They had deadly memories to wash out—memories of brethren who had been killed like carrion by the invaders’ shot and steel; of nomadic freedom begrudged and crushed by civilization; of young children murdered in the darkness of the caverns, with the sulphurous smoke choking the innocent throats that had only breathed the golden air of a few summers; of women, well beloved, torn from them in the hot flames of burning tents and outraged before their eyes with insult whose end was a bayonet—thrust into their breasts—breasts whose sin was fidelity to the vanquished. They had vengeance to do that made every stroke seem righteous and holy in their sight; that nerved each of their bare and sinewy arms as with the strength of a thousand limbs. Right—so barren, so hopeless, so unavailing—had long been with them. Now to it was added at last the power of might; and they exercised the power with the savage ruthlessness of the desert. They closed in on every side; wheeling their swift coursers hither and thither; striking with lance and blade; hemming in, beyond escape, the doomed fragment of the Frankish squadron till there remained of them but one small nucleus, driven close together, rather as infantry will form than as cavalry usually does—a ring of horsemen, of which every one had his face to the foe, a solid circle curiously wedged one against the other, with the bodies of chargers and of men deep around them, and with the ground soaked with blood till the sand was one red morass.’ Thus France fought and 1111 finally won Algeria, with help, in this case, from the English hero. Lesley Blanch writes: ‘ ‘I have often wondered,’ wrote Ouida, the eccentric woman novelist, in her memorial essay, ‘where Burton got his Oriental physiognomy, his un- English accent, his wonderfully picturesque and Asiatic appearance ... He had a dramatic and imposing presence: the disfigurement of modern attire could not destroy the distinction, and the Oriental cast of his appearance and his features.’ ’ And: ‘Ouida, who came to know them (Richard and Isabel) well, and who, for all her hyperbole as a novelist, was a remarkably shrewd woman, described Burton as looking like Othello and living like the Three Musketeers. At her celebrated Langham Hotel soirées, where she queened it over London’s most distinguished men, Isabel Burton was the only woman guest. Isabel and Ouida had certain interests in common: kindness to dumb animals, strong cigars, and a conviction that Burton was a demigod.’ ‘Ouida opined that Isabel could never have shared Richard, even with his child, she was too possessively in love. But Burton, says Ouida, regretted their childless state.’ ‘ ‘If only I could save Dick’s soul!’ she (Isabel) would cry, and I could not persuade her that his soul, if he had one, did not want her help. Women have such strange illusions as to what they believe to be their charge d’âmes.’ Thus Ouida, trenchant in her opinions, but a staunch friend to both of the Burtons. ‘To women,’ she wrote, ‘Burton had one unpardonable fault: he loved his wife. He would have been a happier and a greater man if he had had no wife—but his love for her was extreme: it was a source of weakness as most warm emotions are in the lives of strong men. Their marriage was romantic and clandestine; a love-marriage in the most absolute sense of the words, not wise on either side, but on each impassioned ... Throughout the chief part of their lives he was implicitly obeyed by her, but during the close of his, ill-health made him more helpless, and compelled him to rely on her in all things, and then the religious ogre raised its head and claimed its prey.’ Blanch says, ‘Perhaps more than anyone else, Ouida pierced the mystery of Burton’s personality, and saw, behind the mask, the face, and behind it all, again, the soul of this strange man.’ But was Ouida also in love with Burton, perhaps in different ways and loving different qualities? She spoke of ‘his genius, his force, his wonderful originality. His masterful powers,’ she said, ‘were tied up like great dogs in their kennels, and became savage as the dogs become.’ She never forgave Isabel for burning his last book and his notes and journals; not because she cared about the Victorian public but probably because she cared, in a more detached and objective sense, about his reputation and posterity in a way that the grieving widow, so close to him, so deeply immersed in a pious Catholicism, so harried by family and in-laws, and so pressured by people who either wanted to suppress his last works or couldn’t wait to grasp every last pornographic detail, could not. And if Sir Richard Burton inspired some of Ouida’s writing then I suspect that Ouida in turn helped inspire the fascination with sheiks and deserts and coursers which found its popular apogee in the best-selling book and box-office smash of E. M. Hull’s The Sheik in the 20th century and which owed nothing to Burton’s scientific curiosity and everything to romantic fantasy. * * * * * January 2nd: Isaac Asimov January 3rd: J. R. Tolkien Robert Lacey January 4th: Jacob Grimm January 5th: Umberto Eco Friedrich Dürrenmatt January 6th: Kahlil Gibran E. L. Doctorow 1212

January 7th: Lolo Houbein January 8th: Wilkie Collins January 9th: Robert Drewe Karel Capek January 10th: Philip Levine Alexei Tolstoy January 11th: Alan Paton January 12th: Dorothy Wall January 13th: Edmund White Horatio Alger January 14th: Hugh Lofting Yukio Mishima January 15th: Martin Luther King Judge Christmas Humphreys Molière January 16th: Robert Service Eleanor Marx * * * * * Robert Stewart in Sam Steele: Lion of the Frontier writes, ‘If Dangerous Dan McGrew had really lived in Dawson City instead of only in Robert Service’s celebrated poem, he might have been sued for alienation of affections. Certainly he would never have shot it out with the dog-dirty miner over the favours of the lady that’s known as Lou, because neither he nor his adversary would have been permitted to carry a gun. If he had tried to do so, the Mounted Police would have taken the weapon away from him. If he had resisted or armed himself a second time, he would have been in for one of the most dreaded experiences Dawson had to offer: an appearance in court in front of Sam Steele. ‘In Dawson’s heyday, the boys really did whoop it up in places like the Malamute Saloon, and ladies like Lou were a conspicuous part of the scenery. Miners fresh from the creeks did stumble out of the night, which all too often was fifty below. There was a real- life piano player called the Rag Time Kid and potential Dangerous Dans by the dozen. Holdup men, crooked gamblers, gun-slingers, and con artists—they had all come itching for action in the last great gold rush town. ‘But this was no Dodge City or Tombstone or Deadwood. This was not their town; it was Sam Steele’s. And because it was his town, it was peaceful by any standards. “I am glad to report that in proportion to the population, crime is not very prevalent and in fact the crime sheets of the Yukon Territory would compare favourably with those of any part of the British Empire,” he wrote at the end of that year of years in the Yukon, 1895.’ ‘Christopher Reed said of him, ‘Whatever he said went. His large presence, his big gruff voice, his dominant personality, his sense of honour, fair play and justice, and a little twinkle in his eye showing his sense of humour, made him ‘It’ with a large capital I.’ ‘And when it came time for him to leave the Yukon, ‘The “King of the Klondike,” Big Alex McDonald had been chosen to deliver the parting address and present Steele with a poke of gold nuggets collected from the miners and merchants. All Dawson held its breath as the two men came together on the dock. At that sentimental moment Big Alex’s powers of speech failed him. He thrust the bag of gold at Steele. “Here Sam—here y’are. Poke for you. Goodbye.” ’ * * * * * Other writers immortalised Canada’s wild north but in varying ways. Jack London set his most famous animal stories here. In The Call of the Wild he writes, ‘That winter, at Dawson, Buck performed another exploit, not so heroic, perhaps, but one that put his name many notches higher on the totem pole of Alaskan fame. This exploit was particularly gratifying to the three men; for they stood in need of the outfit which it furnished, and were 1313 enabled to make a long-desired trip into the Virgin East, where miners had not yet appeared. It was brought about by a conversation in the Eldorado Saloon, in which men waxed boastful of their favourite dogs. Buck, because of his record, was the target for these men, and Thornton was driven stoutly to defend him. At the end of half an hour one man stated that his dog could start a sled with five hundred pounds and walk off with it; a second bragged six hundred for his dog; and a third seven hundred. “Pooh! Pooh!” said John Thornton. “Buck can start a thousand pounds.”’ And in White Fang he writes: ‘When the steamboat arrived at Dawson, White Fang went ashore. But he still lived a public life, in a cage, surrounded by curious men. He was exhibited as ‘the Fighting Wolf’, and men paid fifty cents in gold dust to see him. He was given no rest. Did he lie down to sleep, he was stirred up by a sharp stick, so that the audience might get its money’s worth. In order to make the exhibition interesting, he was kept in a rage most of the time. But worse than all this was the atmosphere in which he lived. He was regarded as the most fearful of wild beasts, and this was borne in to him through the bars of the cage. Every word, every cautious action, on the part of the men, impressed upon him his own terrible ferocity. It was so much added fuel to the flame of his fierceness. There could be but one result, and that was that his ferocity fed upon itself and increased. It was another instance of the plasticity of his clay, of his capacity for being moulded by the pressure of environment. In addition to being exhibited, he was a professional fighting animal. At irregular intervals, whenever a fight could be arranged, he was taken out of his cage and led off into the woods a few miles from town. Usually this occurred at night, so as to avoid interference from the mounted police of the Territory. After a few hours of waiting, when daylight had come, the audience and the dog with which he was to fight arrived. In this manner it came about that he fought all sizes and breeds of dogs. It was a savage land, the men were savage, and the fights were usually to the death.’ * * * * * Grey Owl is now seen as an imposter; the man who claimed to have a Scottish father and an Apache mother apparently had no Indian blood. But it raises questions about identity, acceptance, a sense of belonging. In The Men of the Last Frontier, published in 1931, he writes, ‘Longfellow surely grasped the true spirit of the wilderness when he wrote Hiawatha, and shows a knowledge of Indian life and customs that is uncommon. So much is this recognized among Indians that, at this late day, and since many years, the poem has been perpetuated by them in the form of a yearly play, held in its natural setting of woods and waters at a place called Desbarato on Lake Huron, where, these people claim, Longfellow spent a long time gathering his material, living amongst them meanwhile. There are some hundred performers, amongst whom no article of white man’s clothing, and no word of English, is permitted during the week of the celebration. Their rendering of the Indian Songs is worth going far to hear. These are the Garden River Ojibways and Algonquins; I have hunted a good deal with these people in the Mississanga River country, and once on an occasion when I assisted in promoting a tribal celebration at Biscotasing, Ontario, a number of them travelled nearly two hundred miles by canoe to take part in it.’ ... ‘Back in 1876 when the combined forces of the Sioux, the Cheyennes, and the Pawnees defeated General Custer in the ill-advised fiasco which resulted in the demolition of his entire command, the wiser chiefs, having formed by that time a pretty fair idea of the methods of reprisal likely to be handed out, advised the departure from that place of the warriors involved. Their scheme of holding Custer as a hostage against retaliation by the whites had been thwarted by that General blowing out his brains on the field of battle: a historical fact, long known only to the Indians themselves. And so, like guilty children who have only too successfully opposed the authority of their elders, they fled before the expected retribution to Canada. 1414

They had learned the bitter lesson that although a battle won by the white man’s soldiers was considered a victory, a combat in which the Indians prevailed was termed a massacre. Their chiefs were hanged for participation in honest battle, whilst atrocities committed by the troops, such as took place at Klamath Lake and Wounded Knee, went unpunished. It speaks well for the policy of the Canadian Government towards Indians that these people saw Canada in the light of a sanctuary. As a result of the just and considerate treatment of the tribes coming under British control the Canadian frontier was, with the exception of the abortive Riel Rebellion, singularly free from the brutalities, the injustice, the massacres, and the prolonged wars that so characterized the settling of the Western United States. But all that is over now. The Indian is an outcast in his native land, and the Indian population on both sides of the line is at peace for always, if a condition of gradual wasting away and disintegration can be so called. A moiety have adopted the white man’s ways, not always with success and mostly with the attendant degeneracy and lowering of national integrity; although individuals, even so, have risen to remarkable heights. No longer do they produce great war chiefs, such as Tecumseh, Crowfoot, Dull Knife, and a hundred others, the necessity for them having long passed, but of the larger number in the Canadian Expeditionary Force, more than one received a commission, several were N.C.O.’s, and as snipers many distinguished themselves, one, to my personal knowledge, winning the V.C. Lately in the United States a man of Indian blood, Curtis by name, came close to the Presidential chair, and Pauline Johnstone, or Tekahionwake to give her her tribal name, is Canada’s foremost poetess. Dr. Orokonatika became head of the Foresters, next to the Masons the most powerful organized society in Canada; there is an Indian artist of note, and Buffalo-Child Long-Lance is by no means the only Indian author. These are of course outstanding examples and, considering the small number of the race yet remaining, compare well numerically with the white man’s achievements; for these people, and some others not mentioned, must be taken seriously, and not at all in the spirit of the old gentleman who once visited a college maintained for the education of Indians. On his tour of inspection he came across a young tribesman who was working away at a carpenter’s bench. Astonished at the sight of an Indian engaged in such an occupation, he stared for a time and at length exclaimed: “This is extraordinary; are you an Indian?” The young man admitted he was. “And are you civilized?” continued the old gentleman. “No,” replied the Indian, “are you?” Another incident of the kind occurred at an exhibition where a Sioux chieftain, attired in the regalia to which his rank entitled him, was displaying some specimens of the handiwork of his tribe. He had much impressed those visitors who had come in contact with him by his quiet and gentlemanly bearing, and one of these, a lady of authentic Puritan ancestry, remarked patronizingly: “An Indian warrior; how antique.” And the Indian looked at her steadily and replied: “Yes madam, ‘antique’ is correct. As residents of this country our people have at least the merit of antiquity.” Grey Owl says simply that he “cast in my lot” with the tribes; regardless of what ran in his vein, his books show clearly which ‘side’ he was always on. * * * * * There is a tendency for Canadians to believe they’re getting questions of Indigenous Rights right; we are inclined to look there and wonder why we’re making such heavy weather. But after reading Farley Mowat’s book A Desperate People I found myself re- thinking some assumptions; it is a chronicle of racism, bureaucratic inertia, folly, ignorance and the deliberate implementation of policies which brought about the cruel 1515 deaths of dozens of Ihalmiut families in the far north-west of Canada, the Barrenlands, from starvation. It is one of the most anguishing books I have ever read. Mowat’s life and writings are vaguely reminiscent of Ion Idriess; a fascination with remote places and peoples, the tough life, survival under extreme conditions. But Mowat is the better writer, vigorous, lively and economical in his prose, but more importantly his humour is more varied, and he brings both greater empathy and a greater willingness to step on toes. The powers-that-be in Idriess’s world were people to look up to and respect, they couldn’t really be getting things, such as their policies in regard to the land and the indigenous people, very wrong. The most he permits himself is a swipe at those people down south who don’t really understand what life is like up north. Mowat is not constrained by this kind of discreet kow-towing. He also is a better writer on the landscape. Idriess went bush to find subjects to write about; Mowat was also in search of material but all his writing gives the feeling that the landscape, no matter how bleak and barren, was calling to him. The Australian Government felt a modest glow of achievement as Idriess brought to life certain ‘great men’; a friend just told me that the US Government banned Mowat from entering the country in the McCarthy era as being ‘un-American’ and said he thought the ban was still in place ... in fact, I discovered, Mowat wrote his book My Discovery of America (1985) about the United States’ refusal of his application to cross the border to attend a conference. In The Alban Quest he is willing to challenge orthodox assumptions, suggesting that Pictish people reached Canada well before the Vikings … and in A Whale for the Killing he took on the much harder challenge of criticising and setting himself at odds with the people in Newfoundland he regarded as friends; it must also have been an agonizing book to write … ‘and then I heard the voice of the Fin Whale for the fourth time … and the last. It was the same muffled disembodied and unearthly sound, seeming to come from an immense distance: out of the sea, out of the rocks around us, out of the air itself. It was a deep vibration, low-pitched and throbbing, moaning beneath the wail of the wind in the cliffs of Richards Head. It was the most desolate cry that I have ever heard.’ In The Snow Walker Mowat answers that curious question about Eskimos and snow. ‘The snow people know snow as they know themselves. In these days our scientists are busy studying the fifth elemental, not so much out of scientific curiosity but because we are anxious to hasten the rape of the north or fear we may have to fight wars in the lands of snow. With vast expenditure of time and money, the scientists have begun to separate the innumerable varieties of snow and to give them names. They could have saved themselves the trouble. Eskimos have more than a hundred compound words to express different varieties and conditions of snow.’ In ‘The White Canoe’ he writes of an Inuit man caught between two cultures and unwilling to accept the ways of his dead father, Kakut. ‘Then it was as if I became two persons. I was a man of my people, but standing beside me was another self. It was a very strange thing that happened. One of my beings was calm, feeling no fear, and this was one who had come back to his own place. The other was panic-stricken, mouthing the prayers he had been taught by the priest. I was two beings who struggled against each other; and it was the man of the people who won. He felt such a contempt for that other that he flung him away, and he vanished into the cold ice-mist that swirled over the lake. Then I was alone and I looked about me at the world that had harbored my people since time before memory, and I was content to be there even though I believed the waters must soon make an end of us all. I thought of Kakut, and inside myself I asked him to take me back.’ * * * * * Robert Service no doubt has gone down in history as the man who wrote ‘The 1616

Shooting of Dan McGrew’, his rousing ballad set in the Malamute Saloon in Dawson. But Service was born in Preston in England and went to school in Glasgow, the same school as James Herriot. He emigrated to Canada as a young man and got various jobs, and eventually, in 1905, became a teller in a bank which sent him first to Whitehorse, then to Dawson in the Yukon. Dawson, 530 kms north of Whitehorse was still in its first flush of youth and life. It was named for G. M. Dawson who was director of the Geological Survey of Canada, surveyor of the 49th parallel, co-author of Descriptive Sketches of the Physical Geography and Geology of the Dominion of Canada (1884) and leader of an exploratory expedition into the Yukon in 1887. By 1898 Dawson had 16,000 inhabitants and was a bustling gold- rush town. By 1966 when the last gold dredge ceased work the population had dropped to 1,000. Service had already started writing poetry but now his career took off. His first collection Songs of a Sourdough was a best-seller and within four years he was making enough from his poetry to give up his tellering. He was in the Balkans in WWI and wrote Ballads of a Red Cross Man; he continued to write both poetry and prose to the end of his life but never again quite captured the public that his poems of the remote goldrush towns and times had so entranced. Yet before I’d even heard of Dan McGrew I was attracted to Robert Service through a little piece that I felt seemed to catch something of the essence of my grandfather: There’s a race of men that don’t fit in, A race that can’t stay still; So they break the hearts of kith and kin, And they roam the world at will. They range the field and they rove the flood, And they climb the mountains crest; Theirs is the curse of the gipsy blood, And they don’t know how to rest.

If they just went straight they might go far; They are strong and brave and true; But they’re always tired of the things that are, And they want the strange and new. They say “Could I find my proper groove What a deep mark I could make!” So they chop and change and each fresh move Is only a fresh mistake. * * * * * January 17th: Anton Chekhov Benjamin Franklin * * * * * Benjamin Franklin was born in Boston in 1706, the youngest of a family of seventeen, and says of his education: “My elder brothers were all put apprentices to different trades. I was put to the grammar-school at eight years of age, my father intending to devote me, as the tithe of his sons, to the service of the Church. My early readiness in learning to read (which must have been very early, as I do not remember when I could not read), and the opinion of all his friends, that I should certainly make a good scholar, encouraged him in this purpose of his. My uncle Benjamin, too, approved of it, and proposed to give me all his short-hand volumes of sermons, I suppose as a stock to set up with, if I would learn his character. I continued, however, at the grammar-school not quite one year, though in that time I had risen gradually from the middle of the class of that year to be the head of it, and farther was removed into the next class above it, in order to go 1717 with that into the third at the end of the year. But my father, in the meantime, from a view of the expense of a college education, which having so large a family he could not well afford, and the mean living many so educated were afterwards able to obtain—reasons that he gave to his friends in my hearing—altered his first intention, took me from the grammar-school, and sent me to a school for writing and arithmetic, kept by a then famous man, Mr. George Brownell, very successful in his profession generally, and that by mild, encouraging methods. Under him I acquired fair writing pretty soon, but I failed in the arithmetic, and made no progress in it. At ten years old I was taken home to assist my father in his business, which was that of a tallow-chandler and sope-boiler; a business he was not bred to, but had assumed on his arrival in New England, and on finding his dying trade would not maintain his family, being in little request. Accordingly, I was employed in cutting wick for the candles, filling the dipping mold and the molds for cast candles, attending the shop, going of errands, etc. I disliked the trade, and had a strong inclination for the sea, but my father declared against it; however, living near the water, I was much in and about it, learnt early to swim well, and to manage boats; and when in a boat or canoe with other boys, I was commonly allowed top govern, especially in any case of difficulty; and upon other occasions I was generally a leader among the boys, and sometimes led them into scraps ... ” * * * * * ‘We are in pain to make them Scholars, but not Men! To talk, rather than to know, which is true Canting.’ The first Thing obvious to Children is what is sensible; and that we make no Part of their rudiments. We press their memory too soon, and puzzle, strain, and load them with Words and Rules; to know Grammar and Rhetorick, and a strange Tongue or two, that it is ten to one may never be useful to them; Leaving their natural Genius to Mechanical and Physical, or natural Knowledge uncultivated and neglected; which would be of exceeding Use and Pleasure to them through the whole Course of their Life. To be sure, Languages are not to be despised or neglected. But Things are still to be preferred. Children had rather be making of Tools and Instruments of Play; Shaping, Drawing, Framing, and Building, &c. than getting some Rules of Propriety of Speech by Heart; And those also would follow with more Judgment, and less Trouble and Time. It were Happy if we studied Nature more in natural Things; and acted according to Nature; whose rules are few, plain and most reasonable. Let us begin where she begins, go her Pace, and close always where she ends, and we cannot miss of being good Naturalists. The Creation would not be longer a Riddle to us: The Heavens, Earth, and Waters, with their respective, various and numerous Inhabitants: Their Productions, Natures, Seasons, Sympathies and Antipathies; their Use, Benefit and Pleasure, would be better understood by us: And an eternal Wisdom, Power, Majesty, and Goodness, very conspicuous to us, thro’ those sensible and passing Forms: The World wearing the Mark of its Maker, whose Stamp is everywhere visible, and the Characters very legible to the Children of Wisdom. And it would go a great way to caution and direct People in their Use of the World, that they were better studied and known in the Creation of it. For how could Man find the Confidence to abuse it, while they should see the Great Creator stare them in the Face, in all and every part thereof?’ (William Penn, Some Fruits of Solitude) * William Barclay noted that in the middle of the 19th century the British government was spending more on the Royal stables and kennels than its total expenditure on educating 1818 its children. And ‘In 1899 the amount of public money spent per head on secondary education was only three farthings in England, as compared with one shilling and a penny three farthings in Switzerland.’ (Bernard Allen’s Sir Robert Morant) * ‘Fifty years ago, no country in the world had 10 per cent of its teenage population in school.’ (Everett Reimer, School is Dead) * ‘The wounds of school can be healed at home, but the wounds of home are too deep for any school to reach.’ (Harold Loukes, Friends and their Children) * ‘We seem to have forgotten that, at the base, schooling is simply a set of planned experiences that have been institutionalized.’ (Michael Huberman, UNESCO) * ‘We might do better to let children play at violence than to require grown men to work at it, in deadly earnest.’ (Paul Adams, The Infant, the Family and Society) * ‘It was, when I thought about it, a remarkable phenomenon. How was it that hundreds of thousands of mothers, apparently normal, could simply abandon all loving and disciplining and company of their little children, sometimes almost from birth, to the absolute care of other women, total strangers, nearly always uneducated, about whose characters they must usually have had no real idea at all? It was a practice, as far as I knew, unparalleled on such a vast scale in any other culture which had ever existed.’ (The Rise and Fall of the British Nanny, Jonathon Gathorne-Hardy) * ‘When life becomes intolerable to children, they fade. They do not necessarily fall ill, or die, but fade in other ways: they create chaos, throw tantrums, provoke disharmony, divide their families, become loners, fail in school, truant, steal, lie, dabble in alcohol and drugs, and finally run away. ... It is a mistake to assume that if children run away from home, the reasons are always dramatic ones: that they are invariably abused, beaten or neglected, or—the most common misapprehension of all—that if they turn to prostitution or criminality, they are merely reflecting parental examples or following a pattern. The truth is that although the decision to run away (and stay away) almost invariably grows out of long-term conflict with parents or parent-substitutes, these conflicts are by no means necessarily caused by cruelty or neglect. In fact, only a small percentage of the parents involved appear to be in any way asocial. Indeed, many of the parents might be considered too respectable, even too caring. And the children, far from being limited in either intelligence or sensitivity, are apt to be over-imaginative, of above intelligence, hypersensitive, shy and insecure. The child who runs away and stays away is invariably crying out for love.’ (Gitta Sereny, The Invisible Children) * * * * * ‘a study of children in Boston and India revealed, surprisingly, that most reading- retarded first grade children read rows of colors and pictures of familiar objects as quickly as children who were excellent readers. The more sluggish naming speed occurred only when they were reading letters. These children did not have a general intellectual deficit; rather their lack of familiarity with print prevented them from reading the letters quickly.’ (Jerome Kagan, Three Seductive Ideas) * ‘Some children are very backward in a love of reading, which may mean merely that 1919 their own vivid imagination is enough for them, and that they tell themselves stories far more brilliant and congenial than any ever written or printed. Other children fall victim to the magic words, and love Hiawatha or the Psalms; whilst a third class care only for stories about little boys called Bobby or little girls called Marjery.’ (Christine Hardyment, Dream Babies) * ‘There are seldom books of any sort lying around in this school, and I constantly wonder why schools are so parsimonious in the provision of books, when they spend large sums on laboratory equipment; furthermore books are often too carefully guarded. I like my books clean; but I would prefer them to be dirty and read, than neatly displayed on the shelves with the pages uncut. Books are ‘the precious life-blood of a master spirit’; but need they be embalmed in a guarded, and sometimes even locked, library? Accessibility to books is essential if reading is to be encouraged and to occupy its rightful place in the curriculum; and both the initial expenditure and the depreciation should be greater than they often are.’ (Themes in life and literature, Robert S. Fowler) * * * * * It was said that Elizabeth I spoke nine languages—English, Welsh, Cornish, Gaelic, Irish, Latin, French, Spanish and Italian—but this kind of ability is neither the preserve of the wealthy nor the educated; Mark Mazower writes, ‘the dock workers of Ottoman Selanik (Salonika) routinely spoke six or seven languages; the city included some 70,000 Jews as well as Greeks, Armenians, Turks, Albanians and Bulgarians.’ * ‘Sound symbolism hardly ever results in the independent creation of identical words in two languages, Bim-Bam says the German for the sound of a bell; we respond with ding- dong. A German cock says Kikeriki; his English cousin cocka-doodle-doo. No comparison could restore from these words an original from which they are both descended.’ (L. R. Palmer, An Introduction to Modern Linguistics.) A Portuguese bell says Tlão-tlão, while an English chicken says cheep-cheep and a Spanish one says pio-pio, and The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics says, ‘Americans teach their children that dogs say “Bow, wow” or “Arf, arf” or “woof,” but the French say their dogs say “Ouah, ouah.” In English, pigs are said to say “oink, oink” (though every adult knows better), while in Flemish they say “gron, gron”—’ * ‘Neill had himself cherished a resentment against his own repressive Scottish education: he had come to abominate the Classics, suspecting anyone who had any liking for them and used to strop his razor on a leather-bound family Bible, not altogether from thriftiness. As he wrote in 1937 in his book, That Dreadful School, he wished to make Summerhill fit the children and not the children the school. He was a kindly and generous man and gave everyone at Summerhill equal rights, no matter what age they might be.’ A. S. Neill wrote in his book Summerhill, ‘I hold that the aim of life is to find happiness, which means to find interest. Education should be a preparation for life’ and ‘All crimes, all hatreds, all wars can be reduced to unhappiness.’ * ‘Growing is not the easy, plain-sailing business that it is commonly supposed to be: it is hard work—harder than any but a growing boy can understand; it requires attention, and you are not strong enough to attend to your bodily growth, and to your lessons too. Besides, Latin and Greek are great humbug; the more people know of them the more odious they generally are; the nice people who you delight in either never knew any at all or forgot what they had learned as soon as they could; they never turned to the classics after they were no longer forced to read them; therefore they are nonsense, all very well in their own time and country, but out of place here. Never learn anything until you find you 2020 have been made uncomfortable for a good long while by not knowing it; when you find that you have occasion for this or that knowledge or foresee that you will have occasion for it shortly, the sooner you learn it the better, but till then spend your time in growing bone and muscle; these will be much more useful to you than Latin and Greek, nor will you ever be able to make them if you do not do so now, whereas Latin and Greek can be acquired at any time by those who want them.’ (Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh) * ‘The social decision to allocate educational resources preferably to those citizens who have outgrown the extraordinary learning capacity of their first four years and have not arrived at the height of their self-motivated learning will, in retrospect, probably appear bizarre.’ (Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society) * ‘School?’ he said; ‘yes, what do you mean by that word? I don’t see how it can have anything to do with children. We talk, indeed, of a school of herring, and a school of painting, and in the former sense, we might talk of a school of children—but otherwise,’ said he, laughing, ‘I must own myself beaten.’ Hang it! thought I, I can’t open my mouth without digging up some new complexity. I wouldn’t try to set my friend right in his etymology; and I thought I had best say nothing about the boy-farms which I had been used to call schools, as I saw pretty clearly that they had disappeared; and so I said after a little fumbling, ‘I was using the word in the sense of a system of education.’ ‘Education?’ said he meditatively, ‘I know enough Latin to know that the word must come from educere, to lead out; and I have heard it used; but I have never met anybody who could give me a clear explanation of what it means.’ You may imagine how my new friends fell in my esteem when I heard this frank avowal; and I said, rather contemptuously, ‘Well, education means a system of teaching young people.’ ‘Why not old people also?’ said he with a twinkle in his eye. ‘But,’ he went on, ‘I can assure you our children learn, whether they go through a “system of teaching” or not. Why, you will not find one of these children about here, boy or girl, who cannot swim, and every one of them has been used to tumbling about the little forest ponies—there’s one of them now! They all of them know how to cook; the bigger lads can mow; many can thatch and do odd jobs at carpentering; or they know how to keep shop. I can tell you they know plenty of things.’ ‘Yes, but their mental education, the teaching of their minds,’ said I, kindly translating my phrase. ‘Guest,’ said he, ‘perhaps you have not learned to do these things I have been speaking about; and if that’s the case, don’t run away with the idea that it doesn’t take some skill to do them, and doesn’t give plenty of work for one’s mind: you would change your opinion if you saw a Dorsetshire lad thatching, for instance. But, however, I understand you to be speaking of book-learning; and as to that, it is a simple affair. Most children, seeing books lying about, manage to read by the time they are four years old; though I am told it has not always been so.’ (News from Nowhere, William Morris) * ‘The art systems of the past have been devised by philosophers who looked upon human beings as obstructions. They have tried to educate boy’s minds before they had any. How much better it would be in these early years to teach children to use their hands in the rational service of mankind ... I have seen only one such school in the United States, and this was in Philadelphia and was founded by my friend Mr. Leyland. I stopped there 2121 yesterday and have brought some of the work here this afternoon to show you. Here are two discs of beaten brass; the designs on them are beautiful, the workmanship is simple, and the entire result is satisfactory. The work was done by a little boy twelve years old. This is a wooden bowl decorated by a little girl of thirteen. The design is lovely and the colouring delicate and pretty. Here you see a piece of beautiful wood carving accomplished by a boy of nine. In such work as this, children learn sincerity in art.’ (Oscar Wilde) * ‘And a woman who held a babe against her bosom said, Speak to us of Children. And he said: Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. They come through you but not from you, And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts, For they have their own thoughts. You may house their bodies but not their souls, For their souls dwell in the house of to-morrow, Which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams. You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you. For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday. You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.

The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far. Let your bending in the Archer’s hand be for gladness; For even as he loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.’ (Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet) * * * * * In his Autobiography Franklin writes, “In 1732 I first publish’d my Almanack, under the name of Richard Saunders; it was continu’d by me about twenty-five years, commonly call’d Poor Richard’s Almanac. I endeavor’d to make it both entertaining and useful, and it accordingly came to be in such demand, that I reap’d considerable profit from it, vending annually near ten thousand. And observing that it was generally read, scarce any neighborhood in the province being without it, I consider’d it as a proper vehicle for conveying instruction among the common people, who bought scarcely any other books; I therfore filled all the little spaces that occurr’d between the remarkable days in the calendar with proverbial sentences, chiefly such as inculcated industry and frugality, as the means of procuring wealth, and thereby securing virtue; it being more difficult for a man in want, to act always honestly, as, to use here one of those proverbs, it is hard for an empty sack to stand upright.” Of his newspaper, the Pennsylvania Gazette, he writes, “In the conduct of my newspaper, I carefully excluded all libelling and personal abuse, which is of late years become so disgraceful to our country. Whenever I was solicited to insert anything of that kind, and the writers pleaded, as they generally did, the liberty of the press, and that a newspaper was like a stage-coach, in which any one who would pay had a right to a place, my answer was that I would print the piece separately if desired, and the author might have as many copies as he pleased to distribute himself, but that I would not take upon me to spread his detraction; and that, having contracted with my subscribers to furnish them with what might be either useful or entertaining, I could not fill their papers with private altercation, in which they had no concern, without doing them manifest injustice.” 2222

Franklin was apprenticed to a printer, but went on to write and edit, to found a library, a university, a hospital, as well as the American Philosophical Society, to encourage Thomas Paine to come to America, to promote paper money and the Union of States and the paving of Philadelphia’s streets, to advance the understanding of electricity and invent the Franklin stove, to learn French, Italian, Spanish and Latin, and gain the degree of D.C.L. from Oxford, and finally to become President of Pennsylvania. Not bad for a lad who had two years of formal schooling. But the question is: did his lack of schooling help by retaining his freshness of outlook and curiosity about the world, or would more schooling have helped him achieve more and perhaps achieve it more easily? * * * * * January 18th: Jon Stallworthy January 19th: Edgar Allan Poe January 20th: Nancy Kress Euclides da Cunha Robert Butler Ernesto Cardenal January 21st: Friedrich Karl von Savigny John Chaney January 22nd: Beatrice Webb August Strindberg * * * * * “It ought never to be forgott, what our ingenious Countrey-Man Sir Christopher Wrenn proposed to the Silke-Stocking-Weavers of London, viz. a way to weave seven pair or nine paire of stockings at once (it must be an odd Number). He demanded four hundred pounds for its Invention: but the weavers refused it, because they were poor: and besides, they sayd, it would spoile their Trade; perhaps they did not consider the Proverb, That Light Gaines, with quick returnes, make heavy Purses. Sir Christopher was so noble, seeing they would not adventure so much money, he breakes the Modell of the Engine all to pieces, before their faces.” (Aubrey’s Brief Lives) Anthony Wood, writing of the regular depressions in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, says, “The violence of these economic oscillations pointed to the great paradox of the modern industrial world—that the more the inventiveness of the human mind opened up the resources which might raise the general standard of living, the more the life of the ordinary individual was placed at the mercy of economic forces that he did not understand and could not control.” Keith Windschuttle in his 1979 book Unemployment wrote, “One white-collar employment agency estimates that the first generation of word processors had displaced 20,000 typists in Sydney alone.” He also wrote the introduction for Michele Turner’s book, Stuck: Unemployed people talk to Michele Turner, in which he says, “Those of us who have pointed out that, since 1979, the total number of Australians out of work at the start of the year has regularly exceeded the total of 480,000 unemployed in the Great Depression of the 1930s, have met with perplexed rejoinders. The ‘real measure’, we are told, is not the total but the percentage—in 1932 some 29 per cent of the workforce was unemployed compared to 6 — 7 per cent recorded by the official figures in recent times. Those whose interest in unemployment is simply its value as a ‘very useful indicator’ of economic performance will see the percentages recorded recently as cause for only a little concern. But from the perspective of the number of individual lives afflicted, the recent totals demand that we recognize unemployment for the social crisis that it is.” He goes on to say, “In the 1950s and 1960s, many young people who joined organizations as office and factory juniors and apprentices could look forward to long-term 2323 career prospects. They were learning the business or the trade from the ground up and, if they kept at it, were reasonably assured of promotion to higher ranks. The growth that has occurred in teenage employment in recent years has been confined largely to the retail/wholesale trade and in the fast-food industry. These jobs have been characterized by low pay and casual, part-time employment. When the youth concerned reach ages when they are eligible for pay rises, they are automatically dismissed. In other words, they are dead-end, ephemeral jobs suitable perhaps for earning pocket money while at school, but no substitute for the long-term prospects and training that once was part of teenage employment.” He wrote that 19 years ago. Every so often I go back and read Michele’s preface to Stuck for the courage, compassion, concern, willingness to take risks to bring out the truth of a situation, and the sheer inspiration it contains. She wrote in 1982, “Once you have direct contact with unemployed people, it is clear that being jobless is a miserable experience which has very negative effects on a person’s life, and that it is an economic problem which should not be blamed on its victims. My frustration grew. One day as I complained, a friend suggested publishing a series of interviews with unemployed people. Every time I was asked that awful question (‘Do they really want to work?’), I became more determined to try the idea. I wasted time making submissions for funds to relevant bodies, but because I hadn’t done anything like it before, I wasn’t a sure bet. I had some savings, so I decided to go ahead anyway. My first problem was how to contact people. The one place the unemployed did go was to their local CES office. My best chance to get people’s candid feelings without time for apprehension on their part was to interview them on the spot. At first I thought of a caravan, but my old VW would never have pulled one. Then, through a friend, I heard of a 1964 white Morris truck which had been used to cart rubbish and was a bit of a mess. But it was an ideal size, somewhere between a bread van and a removal truck. Kids from one of the CYSS projects I’d been working with helped search through wreckers’ yards for parts. A backyard mechanic fixed the engine while we painted and carpeted the inside. When finished, it was like a small living room with cream walls, tan carpet and armchairs with bright cushions. The recording equipment was set up to run from the truck battery, and I got picnic set apparatus to make tea and coffee. There were a lot of other things to buy: tapes, special recording equipment, a decent typewriter, a secondhand transcriber and loads of paper. After all this hectic preparation, terror set in. Why would people want to bother talking to me? Surely they’d tell me to mind my own business. They didn’t. Possibly being small, female and nervous helped. No-one was rude. People were interested in what I was doing and keen to help. The only drawbacks were mechanical breakdowns, the cold and having to move the truck often to avoid getting parking tickets. So for four months I drove around and interviewed nearly two hundred people in Victoria, usually one in the morning and one in the afternoon. The truck and I visited a suburb or general area for no more than two or three days, because I was trying to meet a wide cross-section of people and didn’t want to attract the merely curious. I stood outside the CES office and introduced myself to people as they left, explained what I was doing and invited them for coffee. I also met some people in CYSS groups. The interviews were conducted as normal conversations. I didn’t have a set of prepared questions, although I did have in mind broad areas of information to cover. Some people spoke for hours, others only half an hour. Usually I didn’t have to ask questions. I turned the recorder on and off and dispensed tea or coffee and biscuits, and listened. Meeting these people was the most intense work I had ever done. The level of emotional openness and trust they showed me was very moving. Their courage and spirit, often in awful situations, was amazing. Their confidence that what I was doing might help 2424 to change things has sustained me through long, weary nights of editing.” Blaming the victims is still alive and well. They don’t try, they’re not well enough educated, they can’t read and write, they don’t present well ... it’s not hard to find ways to criticise the unemployed. As the mother of a son who was unemployed for 14 months after he left school (a son who came in the top forty in the state at Matriculation, who turned up at interviews neat and clean and tidy, who sent out a proper CV and literate letter with every application) I simply don’t believe that these are any more than excuses. The bottom line is that there aren’t enough jobs for everyone who wants to work. There are two basic reasons, I believe: our attitude to work and our attitude to money. Technology has been removing jobs since antiquity when wheels and pulleys began to reduce the need for human muscles. This process has suddenly accelerated in the last 2 centuries. Automation, machines, computers, robots—all have been lauded and promoted. They will standardise production, decrease costs, work untiringly round the clock, increase profits, reduce the need for human beings to do soul-destroying boring dirty dull dangerous work ... all that. But there has also been the stream of thinking that machines would enable people to become more truly human, to have the leisure to develop a range of talents, to create and enjoy culture, to devote more time to personal and social relationships, to enjoy their children more, to gain more profound understanding through their spiritual beliefs and practices, their friendships, their study, their travel, their hobbies. Automation, quite simply, would deepen and enhance human society. A factory which employed 24 can now with automation employ 4. Those 20 will now have the leisure to develop other aspects of their lives while the 4 will have more interesting lives than simply working a production line. We-e-ll ... perhaps ... L. Landon Goodman writing in Man and Automation in 1957 said, “In all consideration of redundancy the individual man must be studied—it is the individual man that matters. Industry, and commerce only exist for the individual man. The individual makes the family and the family makes the nation ... What conviction is there, and thus what point is there, in saying that in the long run all technological change is for the good of mankind, if in the short run the individual is not considered, for in the long run he will be dead? Any technological advance, if it is progress at all, should be able to pay its own way not just in writing off machinery and plant but in giving proper recognition to human costs. Thus short term aspects must be predominant in considering matters of redundancy; men must be seen as individuals and representatives of families.” Almost every time I pick up a newspaper there’s a report on X number of people made redundant in a company or industry. But what is their fate? Do they all find other jobs? What kind of anxiety, trauma, dislocation and economic insecurity occurs in their lives and the lives of their families? Is anybody following up those redundancy reports? We are told that it is high wages that reduces profits, lays off workers, and sends companies offshore. It would be hard to find lower wages than in Indonesia where women make shoes that retail at up to $120 a pair, yet get paid less than $1 a day; now we are told that Indonesia has 20 million unemployed, and rising. How low, then, must wages go before they result in full employment? And now we are being told that the burden of our ageing population on the younger employed taxpayer will become overwhelming in the next few decades. The assumption being it is taxes people pay which are the sole means of providing everything from pensions and concessions to free medical care for the elderly. This assumes the elderly don’t pay any form of tax; it implies that the elderly are incapable of working beyond a statutory age of retirement (which is getting younger and younger while people live longer and longer; so that now people made redundant at 50 may spend the next 40 years of their lives unemployed, unwanted and presumed to be an economic burden); and it assumes that machines do not pay tax. That factory that put off 20 people so as to increase profits now 2525 provides the personal income tax from 4 people. So how much tax is the machinery that does the work of 20 people paying? The equivalent of 20 personal income taxpayers? Presumably not—or we wouldn’t constantly be warned of a coming tax crunch. In fact, not only do the machines not pay the equivalent, they have reductions, such as a depreciation component, built in. Workers as they age cannot be written off as depreciation. Machines, quite simply, raise profits and reduce tax. Is it any wonder that a consumption rather than an earning tax has become so attractive to governments? * * * * * ‘What today stands for work, namely, wage labor, was a badge of misery all through the Middle Ages. It stood in clear opposition to at least three other types of toil: the activities of the household by which most people subsisted, quite marginal to any money economy; the trades of people who made shoes, barbered or cut stones; the various forms of beggary by which people lived on what others shared with them. In principle, medieval society provided a berth for everyone whom it recognized as a member — its structural design excluded unemployment and destitution. When one engaged in wage labor, not occasionally as a member of a household but as a regular means of support, he clearly signaled to the community that he, like a widow or an orphan, had no berth, no household, and so stood in need of public assistance. ... Until the late twelfth century, the term poverty designated primarily a realistic detachment from transitory things. The need to live by wage labor was the sign for the down and out, for those too wretched to be simply added to that huge medieval crowd of cripples, exiles, pilgrims, madmen, friars, ambulants, homeless that made up the world of the poor. The dependence on wage labor was the recognition that the worker did not have a home where he could contribute within the household. The right to beggary was a normative issue, but never the right to work. ... The abhorrence of wage labor still fits the outlook which might be shared by today’s world majority. ... But for most people in Europe and the West, wage labor went through the looking glass between the seventeenth and nineteenth century. Instead of being proof of destitution, wages came to be perceived as a proof of usefulness. Rather than being a supplement to subsistent existence, wages came to be viewed — by those who paid them — as the natural source of livelihood for a population. These populations had been excluded from the means of subsistence by progressive forms of enclosures. ... Until the mid-eighteenth century, French poorhouses were run on the medieval Christian assumption that forced labor was a punishment for sin or crime. In protestant Europe and in some Italian cities which were industrialized early, that view had been abandoned a century earlier. The pioneering policies and equipment in Dutch Calvinist or North German workhouses clearly show this. They were organized and equipped for the cure of laziness and for the development of the will to do work as assigned. These workhouses were designed and built to transform useless beggars into useful workers. As such, they were the reverse of medieval alms-giving agencies. Set up to receive beggars caught by the police, these institutions softened them up for treatment by a few days of no food and carefully planned ration of daily lashes. Then, treatment with work at the treadmill or at the rasp followed until the transformation of the inmate into a useful worker was diagnosed. ... The destitute of the eighteenth century, by this date generally labelled as the ‘poor’, violently resisted such efforts to qualify them for work. They sheltered and defended those whom the police tried to classify as ‘beggars’ and whom the government tried to cure of social uselessness in order to protect the unobtrusive poor from such vagrants. Even the harshest governments seemed unsuccessful in their forays. The crowd remained ungovernable. The Prussian Secretary of the Interior, in 1747, threatens severe punishment to anyone who interferes with the poverty-police: ... from morning till night, we try to have this police cruise through our streets to stop beggary ... but as soon as soldiers, commoners or the crowd notice the arrest of a beggar to 2626 bring him to the poorhouse, they riot, beat up our officers sometimes hurting them grievously and liberate the beggar. It has become almost impossible to get the poverty- police to take to the street ... Seven more analogous decrees were issued during the following thirty years. All through the eighteenth and well into the nineteenth century, the project of Economic Alchemy produced no echo from below. The plebeians rioted. They rioted for just grain prices, they rioted against the export of grain from their regions, they rioted to protect prisoners of debt and felt protected whenever the law seemed not to coincide with their tradition of natural justice. The proto-industrial plebeian crowd defended its ‘moral economy’ as Thompson has called it. And they rioted against the attacks on this economy’s social foundation: against the enclosure of sheep and now against the enclosure of beggars. And in these riots, the crowd was led, more often than not, by its women. How did this rioting proto-industrial crowd, defending its right to subsistence turn into a striking labor force, defending ‘rights’ to wages? What was the social device that did the job, where the new poor laws and workhouses had failed? It was the economic division of labor into a productive and a non-productive kind, pioneered and first enforced through the domestic enclosure of women. An unprecedented economic division of the sexes, an unprecedented economic conception of the family, an unprecedented antagonism between the domestic and public spheres made wage work into a necessary adjunct of life. All this was accomplished by making working men into the wardens of their domestic women, one on one, and making this guardianship into a burdensome duty. The enclosure of women succeeded where the enclosure of sheep and beggars had failed.’ (Shadow Work by Ivan Illich) * * * * * “What is the meaning of democracy, freedom, human dignity, standard of living, self-realisation, fulfilment? Is it a matter of goods, or of people? Of course it is a matter of people. But people can be themselves only in small comprehensive groups. Therefore we must learn to think in terms of an articulated structure that can cope with a multiplicity of small-scale units. If economic thinking cannot grasp this it is useless. If it cannot get beyond its vast abstractions, the national income, the rate of growth, capital/output ratio, input-output analysis, labour mobility, capital accumulation; if it cannot get beyond all this and make contact with the human realities of poverty, frustration, alienation, despair, breakdown, crime, escapism, stress, congestion, ugliness, and spiritual death, then let us scrap economics and start afresh.” (Small is Beautiful by C. B. Schumacher) * * * * * Robert Goodman in The Luck Business writes, “Today’s shift from the work ethic to enterprises like gambling is an historical irony. Ascetic puritans, who were outraged in no small part by the extent of popular gambling in England, fled to the New World with their Calvinist reverence for hard work and self-discipline. While the dream of getting ahead through work is an ideology deeply rooted in American culture, its persuasive power ultimately depends on real rewards—that is, the work ethic can only work so long as it leads to a decent life or, at the very least, to the real possibility that life will improve.” As manufacturing jobs declined, companies moved ‘offshore’, union membership dropped, real wages declined and casual, temporary, low-paid service industry jobs began to be seen as the way of the future (except for the CEOs in the ‘big end’ of town), in other words, “When conventional forms of work and savings are no longer able to deliver the goods, unconventional ways of making money look much more attractive. During the 1970s and 1980s, Americans would be offered more and easier ways to take chances with their money through stocks, real estate, collectibles, and lottery tickets. And in the 1990s, more and more state governments would encourage them to gamble at casinos and 2727 electronic gambling machines.” This would require speculation to become more easily financed (through such avenues as credit cards and ATMs), for easier access to betting (such as phone betting), through the proliferation of poker machines in neighbourhood venues such as pubs and clubs, through on-line share-trading and ‘virtual’ gambling and so on. But the “broad shift in the American economy toward popular speculation is directing increasing amounts of human and financial resources into unproductive activities. By inflating the value of already existing assets and products, speculation increases the dollar value of something without actually increasing its ability to add to a community’s or a nation’s wealth.” So, “Investment patterns are distorted by this chase for easy profits. Finance capital that might have been used to expand productive enterprises gets tied up in underused projects. Over time, even more capital is siphoned away from productive projects in order to service the debt on unproductive ones. As real estate developers, for example, go bankrupt or take losses on their failed speculative projects, the government is deprived of tax money, workers are left with fewer jobs, and the public is left to live with more abandoned and vacant buildings. At the same time, the environment is needlessly exploited, as land, building materials, fuel, and human resources are squandered. And in some cases, already difficult social problems are made worse. The conversion of low-rent apartments into high-priced condominiums in the 1970s and 1980s, for example, forced many people into more deteriorated housing or onto the streets.” The push to legalise gambling was underpinned by the idea that if people were going to gamble then why should the crooks get all the profits, but people had to seek out such ventures and they had to make the big decision: would they take the risk of being caught along with the risk of losing. “Legalised gambling ... seizes on the public desire to get ahead through enterprises of chance in a world where work no longer seems reliable.” But as Tim Costello and Royce Millar point out in Wanna Bet there is still a tough double-whammy: gambling, particularly the pokies, is most heavily promoted in areas of low income and high unemployment—eg. “In Victoria, research by the City of Maribyrnong found an inverse relationship between income levels and the density of poker machines across Melbourne. That is, the wealthiest suburbs had the fewest machines and spent much less on pokies per capita. The poorest areas had the most machines and spent more on pokies per capita. Maribyrnong, with the lowest socio-economic ranking in Melbourne, spends seven times more on poker machines than the highest-ranking municipality, Booroonara”—and—“Gambling tax is unquestionably regressive in nature. Unlike income tax that increases in percentage as incomes rise, gambling tax is flat; it is the same percentage for all gamblers, irrespective of their income. Tim has often noted that gambling is celebrated as an expression of egalitarianism when in fact it works to the contrary. The poor pay more, much more.” The constant hype—‘You can be a winner’ ‘When will your lucky number come up’ ‘You have to be in it to win it’—hides the simple fact that with gambling Robin Hood takes from the poor to pay the rich. The explosion of technology and the loss of jobs encourages gambling, for the hoped-for quick fix, but also out of boredom, as something definite to do, even as an alternative way of trying to pay the bills ... but it is not technology’s fault, it is simply the fact that modern technology which increasingly only requires people as consumers has been grafted on to older ideas about money and work. Marx wrote “It has been objected that upon the abolition of private property all work will cease, and universal laziness will overtake us” but this has been displaced by “if you don’t work you don’t get paid”. Yet the majority of work carried out in our society, from the home to the school canteen, from churches to Girl Guides, from political party branches to pensioners’ outings, from amateur theatre to amateur sport, from fundraising for everything from warm winter clothes for street kids to medical research into leukaemia, is done without pay. 2828

The distinctions made between work and non-work based on whether people receive a wage or salary are meaningless in terms of the actual work done. If some people are paid for the work they do, some people are not paid for the work they do, and some do work for the money they receive because they can’t find work, then surely it makes more sense to break the nexus between work and money and develop a differing nexus, one in which the state pays all people to survive without classifying them as workers, unemployed, pensioners, students, housewives, etc, and in return expects them to do some kind of work for the safety, well-being, intelligence, happiness and prosperity of society. * * * * * Beatrice and Sidney Webb left an enduring legacy from their joint partnership: their founding of The London School of Economics, and the New Statesman; their constant nurturing of the Fabian Society; their work to organise and invigorate the Labour Party; and their joint authorship of a mass of seminal works on the development of local authority in Britain, mainly contained in their books: The History of Liquor Licensing in England (1903), London Education (1904), The Parish and the County (1906), The Manor and the Borough (2 books 1908), The State and the Doctor (1910), English Poor Law Policy (1910), The Prevention of Destitution (1911), Grants in Aid (1911), The Story of the King’s Highway (1913), Statutory Authorities for Special Purposes (1922), English Prisons under Local Government (1922), English Poor Law History: The Old Poor Law (1927), and English Poor Law History: The Last Hundred Years (1929). Beatrice also looked upon their partnership with wry and loving humour saying that they belonged to “the B’s of the world”, the B’s being “bourgeois, bureaucratic, and benevolent”; and that “Old people often fall in love in extraordinary and ridiculous ways— with their chauffeurs for example; we felt it more dignified to have fallen in love with Soviet Communism”, and “We are both of us second-rate minds; but we are curiously combined”. But Beatrice led an interesting and curious life long before she met Sidney. Coming from a well-to-do industrialist family in the north of England she set out to learn something of how the poorer sections of the community lived, first by calling herself Miss Jones and doing some farm work, then as a rent-collector in London, then by her involvement with her cousin Charles Booth and his massive Inquiry into the Life and Labour of the People of London which began in 1886. Margaret Cole in her biography of Beatrice says, “There is no space here to describe the Booth Inquiry, which by incontrovertible and inescapable facts taught complacent Londoners of the comfortable classes so much about the misery and degradation which formed the ground floor and the basement of their own prosperity”; not only did the interviewers need to learn the art of interviewing, the need to try to work without preconceptions, to develop sampling methods; in other words, long before opinion polls and commissions and enquiries became a ‘science’ in the twentieth century, this enquiry was developing practical basic methods. Beatrice herself got work as a ‘plain trouser hand’ to experience sweat-shop work, and distilled her experience into her articles ‘Dock Life in the East End of London’ (1887), ‘The Tailoring Trade of East London’ (1888), ‘Pages from a Workgirl’s Diary’ and ‘The Lords’ Committee on the Sweating System’ (1890) and in 1891 she brought out her first full-length book The Co-operative Movement in Great Britain. It seems strange that no one had thought of writing a book on what, in fits and starts, in successes and failures, had become an increasingly important part of the 19th century landscape. She gives much of the founding credit to Robert Owen, describing him as “apprenticed early to a retail shopkeeper, at nineteen years of age he had saved sufficient to start as a small master in the Manchester machine-making and cotton-spinning trade. Quickly realizing that the “new industry” required large masses of capital, he abandoned the nominal independence of a small master to become the manager of a large factory; from the position of manager in one firm he became managing partner in another, until he 2929 succeeded to the absolute control of the large spinning-mill at New Lanark. It was here he tried his first experiments in practical economics. He raised the wages of his workers, reduced the hours of labour from seventeen to ten a day, prohibited the employment of children under ten years of age. He provided free education, free amusements, cheap provisions, good cottages for his workpeople and their families. At first his fellow- manufacturers watched with contemptuous amazement the deeds of this Don Quixote of the cotton trade; his partners sought separation from this crack-brained philanthropist intent on personal ruin. He answered these theoretical objections to the Socialist programme—good wages, short hours, free instruction, and free amusement—by showing, in the course of four years, a profit of £160,000, besides paying 5 per cent on capital employed and raising the selling value of the factory 50 per cent.” ... “It is to Robert Owen we owe the idea of a factory act. In 1816, he pressed on the consideration of a Committee of the Commons a Bill limiting the hours of all factory labour to ten and a half a day, forbidding the employment of children under ten years of age, and instituting a half-time system for those under twelve. It is needless to say the committee rejected this drastic measure. But largely owing to his ardent advocacy, a Factory Act was passed in 1818, which, though practically ineffectual, served as a lever for future agitation and as a useful precedent for more stringent regulation. It was Robert Owen who proposed a national system of free and compulsory education and the establishment of free libraries; it was he who suggested to provincial authorities that they should undertake the housing of the poor; it was he who advocated municipal or county organization of labour. In truth, Robert Owen was the father of English Socialism—not the Socialism of foreign manufacture which cries for an Utopia of anarchy to be brought about by a murderous revolution, but the distinctively English Socialism, the Socialism which discovers itself in works and not in words, the Socialism that has silently embodied itself in the Factory Acts, the Truck Acts, Employers’ Liability Acts, Public Health Acts, Artisans’ Dwelling Acts, Education Acts—in all that mass of beneficial legislation forcing the individual into the service, and under the protection of the State.” But Robert Owen did not get far in his attempts to change government policies or the methods used in the factories, so he turned to “establishing communities of voluntary associates, who would accept his views and practise his doctrines. It was in this attempt that he became the founder of the Co-operative movement.” ... and “men of the calibre of Lovett, Hetherington, Watson (the leaders of the Chartist movement), of Charles Howarth and William Cooper (the originators of the modern Co-operative movement), drew their inspiration direct from Robert Owen, and acknowledged it.” “This two separate and important branches of social reform—the socialistic legislation of the last fifty years on the one hand, and the Co-operative movement on the other—sprang out of the teaching of Robert Owen—the apostle of a “new System of Society”.” Although she came at the movement from various angles, production, distribution, selling, etc, (and many and various are the co-operatives she lists in her appendix: Kettering Manufacturing Boot and Shoe, Coventry Watch Makers, London Bookbinders, Dudley Nailmakers, Brighton Artizans, Bromsgrove Nail-forgers, Scotch Tweed, Co- operative Builders (Brixton), and Walsall Padlock-makers) she devoted the bulk of her work to the co-operative shop. Several of her conclusions still seem interesting; it was not shops in competition which provided the best and cheapest outcomes but rather that the individual shop be run by a vigorously involved and democratic group; that co-op shops brought about better quality goods and produce because the same people were buying the goods as were consuming them; and “The preposterous salaries given by upper-class shareholders to upper-class officials—the £2,000 to £5,000 a year have been replaced by modest incomes of £200 to £400, and apparently without detriment to skill or integrity—” 3030

Out of this work came her idea that she also needed to do a history and report on Trade Unionism and she began collecting facts and figures for this. In the course of her work she met Sidney in 1890 and married him in 1892, something which saw her given the cold-shoulder by a number of friends and relatives. Their joint The History of Trade Unionism came out in 1894, and its companion volume Industrial Democracy in 1897. But it is curious to wonder what Beatrice might have done had she not hitched her star to Sidney and in effect drowned her individuality in the partnership. She produced My Apprenticeship, her diary from her early years, and her 1895 State Regulation of Women’s Labour but did not really do any separate work until she sat on the Poor Law Commission nearly ten years later. She saw very clearly that though her joint recommendations in the Minority Report she and several other dissenting voices produced (such as old age pensions, a limited form of health and compensation insurance, a minimum wage, etc) had value the Commission needed to look at the underlying causes of poverty and ill-health if the recommendations were not to be used as band-aid solutions. In some ways her own gifts, clear insights, a plain but very readable writing style, an ability to get along with a wide range of people and draw them out, an interest in young people, as well as a useful income, added to the strength of their partnership but also were lost in Sidney’s political ambitions. And Co-operatives? When I was young we sent our milk to a Co-operative cheese factory and did our main shopping at a Co-operative store. But the big companies moved in and the small co-operatives fell by the wayside. Big department stores and supermarkets were seductive with their apparent ease of shopping and variety of goods but they put people out of work, they took money out of the community, and they undermined the viability and vigour of small country towns. The Co-operative Movement was a self-help movement in the 19th century; maybe it will be reinvigorated as a self-help movement in the 21st century. * * * * * January 23rd: Derek Walcott Subhas Chandra Bose January 24th: Edith Wharton January 25th: Robert Burns January 26th: Ruby Langford Ginibi January 27th: Lewis Carroll January 28th: Tim Flannery José Martí January 29th: Thomas Paine Vicente Blasco Ibáñez Germaine Greer Emanuel Swedenborg Romain Rolland January 30th: Barbara Tuchman Penelope Nelson January 31st: Kenzaburo Oe Thomas Merton February 1st: Muriel Spark February 2nd: James Joyce February 3rd: Simone Weil February 4th: Sue Townsend Rosa Parks George Ernest Morrison February 5th: Susan Hill February 6th: Pramoedya Ananta Toer 3131

February 7th: Charles Dickens Lady Winifred Fortescue Frederick Douglass February 8th: Martin Flanagan Elizabeth Bishop John Grisham Kate Chopin February 9th: Alice Walker * * * * * Harold Bloom’s very large book The Western Canon reads as both a labour of love and a polemic against all those who would seek to diminish, change or make his canon more inclusive—and I suspect he relished their views for the wonderful excuse they gave him to write his book. It is a very readable book though not perhaps saying much that is new about any of his twenty-six chosen writers. At the end he gives his list of the other books he includes in his Canon; he includes Luis Camões but not Gil Vicente, he puts in the Brothers Grimm but not Hans Christian Andersen. He includes the Mahabharata and the Ramayana epics as ‘should read’. By all means, but I’m not sure that they should be subsumed into a book called The Western Canon. Our museums are full of cultural appropriations, on the grounds of ‘must see’, (I remember the hurt caused by an exhibition at the Australian Museum in Sydney in 1993 which included sacred objects stolen from East Timor and West Papua, objects which should never have been put on public display, and to add insult the exhibition was named ‘Beyond the Java Sea: Art of Indonesia’s Outer Islands’—which was a reminder that the attitudes which put Aboriginal skeletons on public display last century are still alive and kicking) but I do not think a respected academic should be seeming to endorse the process. And are Elinor Wylie or Robinson Jeffers, George Farquhar or Christopher Smart or John Marston or Sir George Etherege really more important than his apparent bête noir, Alice Walker? Tolstoy’s misogynism is apparently an understandable, even amusing, foible in a great man; Alice Walker’s criticism of men seems to preclude her from any serious contention. He engages with the question of why we need great literature which has almost become a ‘motherhood question’—of course, you will say indignantly, we need great literature, any nong can see that! Yet, strangely, given the importance of mothers, great literature very seldom deals with them, fathers largely have the field to themselves. (Children hadn’t been invented.) And this, I think, is the nub of the problem: it is not that the Canon is predominantly by Dead White European Males (the imagination can surmount this limitation) but that it is mainly about Dead White European Males. Bloom reiterates the universality of Shakespeare’s themes and values, perhaps best seen by the ease with which Shakespeare “travels”. But this travel is a fairly recent phenomenon. So might it have more to do with the Westernisation of the world than the universality of Shakespeare’s themes? He uses jealousy frequently as a plot device but in non-material societies where marriages were arranged, material goods shared, and the good of the family and clan well-being were always put before personal inclination, his plots would have seemed not only inexplicable but downright silly. Not that we read Shakespeare for his plots particularly—but imagine 17th century Aborigines watching, bemused, Much Ado About Nothing, A Winter’s Tale, or Othello—and being told these were universal themes. Would Lear have made different choices about the carve-up of his kingdom if the prosperity and happiness of his subjects had been of importance to him? Of course in many societies, where land was the indivisible possession of the tribe, such a carve-up itself would have been inexplicable. Lear, when set against the intricate means by which a tribe was connected to land in Australia, seems extraordinarily blunt and brutal; and more so 3232 after reading this from Diane Bell’s Daughters of the Dreaming—“In the Arandic system of land tenure, people as a group are associated with a parcel of land: the relationship is then marked with a suffix which encloses the nature of the affiliation. For mother’s country altyerre (dreaming) is affixed to the name of the country and the spiritual nature of the relation is underscored. This then becomes the name of the persons who call the country “mother”. For father’s country one affixed arenye (associated with) and this term becomes the name of the people who call that country “father” ... This mode of mapping people directly onto country is one of the differences between the Warlpiri and Aranda systems of land tenure and is indicative of the tight nature of the relationship of people to land and land to people in Aranda territory. In the Warlpiri system of land tenure, the link between the role and relationship of a person to country is stressed in the use of kin-based terms to denote the nature of the affiliation to land. Kirda (father’s side, father’s father’s country) is one of the Warlpiri terms for father and kirdu the term for woman’s child ... Both Kaytej and Warlpiri state that according to the law a person is kirda for one’s father’s and father’s father’s country, while one is kurdungurlu for the country of one’s mother and mother’s father ... As kirda, a woman holds certain knowledge which is encoded in myths, designs, songs, gestures and various ritual objects. These validate her rights in the country. She must perform certain rituals to uphold that trust and to transmit the knowledge. This can be achieved only with the co-operation of the kurdungurlu (child from mother’s side) for the country for which she is Kiorda. As kurdungurlu are responsible for the safety of the ritual objects, for the correct performance of rituals, for the singing and painting up, it is the kurdungurlu who “wakes up” the kirda, who opens the dancing ground and who “lifts up” the country. Kurdungurlu participate in rituals for the maintenance of country and are custodians to the dreaming knowledge” and so on, with intricate and important variations from tribe to tribe—the universality of Lear therefore must become the universality of loss. Would Hamlet have got things into perspective if someone had reminded him that little children were dying of cold in his kingdom? (‘The Little Match Girl’ was not a 19th century aberration.) Would Desdemona and Othello, grappling with the question of whether they should allow their children to be bused to schools in white suburbs or stay in underfunded, understaffed schools in their black suburb, have had time to worry about a mislaid hanky? (Given the behaviour of many Royals, Shakespeare probably had it right but that isn’t necessarily the perspective many of us read from. And curiously Shakespeare seems to have lived an equally disengaged life; neither his family nor the social, political and religious turmoil around him seems to have engaged his attention; only his economic affairs seem to have stirred him into litigation which is certainly a form of involvement in life. Don Taylor draws on an essay by E. A. Honigman to remind us “that both Shakespeares, father and son, were well-known moneylenders, that the successful player- poet carried on his money lending and land speculation throughout his theatre career, and was known as a hard man from whom no financial favours could be expected”.) So does Shakespeare travel more and more easily because he is so magnificently irrelevant to the concerns—global warming, poverty, pollution, overcrowding, toxic wastes, corruption, depletion of resources et al—that worry and preoccupy many of us? Or does he travel simply because such travel was preceded by several centuries of Western colonisation—and communality, sharing, and a spiritual rather than a material approach to life has been thoroughly destroyed? ‘Escapist literature’ tends to be used as a pejorative. But all literature is escapist; it is the act of reading which is the primary means of escape. It is not for nothing we talk of ‘burying your head in a book’. Literature is escapist simply because it is literature; to be read, it needs to engage our full attention. That we need escape in reasonable doses for the 3333 sake of our mental health is nothing to be ashamed of; an unremitting diet of worry, concern and social or political engagement makes people, I am convinced, less able to deal with problems. And literature may well be one of the best and healthiest means of escape our society provides. But that is not the same as saying we need literature. People, asked what books changed their lives, helped them through their worst times, often mention great religious literature, but they equally often mention very modest books of little literary merit but which provided a moment of comfort, hope, advice, challenge, just when it was needed. Their vital quality was their timeliness. Bloom seems to have a particular axe to grind with Alice Walker. But I suspect for many women, and particularly Black women, struggling with racism, poverty, violence, worries over their children’s futures, her key qualities are her relevance to their lives and her timeliness. I am not black, but I can appreciate the great sense of relief in coming upon a book which treats women as more complex than the traditional images of mother, lover, whore, virago, or angel; as ordinary people facing the great mass of problems and delights the world throws up. Where in ‘great’ literature is there a Black woman as the central character? As long as Black women go on facing the same problems and denigrations, then I suspect Alice Walker will go on being timely. Whether her writing also contains qualities that posterity will judge as timeless is up to posterity. I am sure many of Shakespeare’s contemporaries would be amused, amazed even, to learn that he had survived and grown in stature while they had been forgotten or relegated to footnotes or specialist publications with miniscule readerships. Posterity cannot deal with manuscripts that are lost or suppressed beyond redemption; it cannot tell us what Marlowe, Keats, Shelley, the Brontës and many others, would have done if granted longer lives. But posterity, though influenced by fads and fashions, is a reasonable judge. Shakespeare doesn’t need Harold Bloom (as I write this my 18-year-old son is off at a rehearsal of The Taming of the Shrew) but Harold Bloom, for his own career and sense of worth, may need Shakespeare. I cannot say. So if ‘great’ literature neither answers our immediate needs nor makes us better people what need then does it meet? It tends to be about great passions, life tends to be about petty passions coming at us from all sides. But I like to read about great passions, even if I cannot share them; that sense of grandeur is important. When I read books in which the writer doesn’t seem to have written up to his or her potential, where the reader is in some way being written down to, I feel as though I am not being respected. The best writing, in history-through-history, down each generation, is an endorsement of our self-worth, our self-respect. It is a reminder that we deserve the best that human imagination, human ingenuity, human genius can produce; just as in oral societies the best-told and most intriguing stories are the ones to survive, while people continue to strive to produce the best sculpture, the most beautiful gardens ... to be the best parents they can ... Great literature enhances the worth of society and helps to set at bay the sense that mass-production, the multinational corporation using the cheapest labour, the expendibility inherent in unemployment, undermines our uniqueness as individuals. We tend to respond to everything from mass-produced chairs, china and footwear in much the same way; we each respond to Shakespeare or Emily Dickinson in ways that are unique to our characters, our life-experiences, our cultures, our religions. Yet it is important that Harold Bloom and his fellow academics remember that they are up in ivory towers, very privileged towers; the walls may gleam with the beautiful patina of age, loving hands may rub them to a brilliant glow—but they are still ivory towers. * * * * * I have just been reading David Williamson’s play called ‘Dead White Males’ which 3434 grew out of the debate that Harold Bloom addresses. I do not pretend to understand post- structuralism, post-modernism, de-construction and the whole caboodle—but then I do not understand Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, a fact which does not invalidate the theory or the debate. In fact when I sat down to think about the debate on the “canon”, “genius”, “intrinsic worth”, “universal values” etc etc (sitting down is not essential) it seemed to me that the surprising thing is how long it has taken for the academic world to get around to the debate. When I was young it was still assumed that by and large children would follow the religious and political paths of their parents—and when they didn’t, as increasingly they didn’t—oh, the panic! the breast-beating! where did we go wrong as parents! what will the neighbours think! Settled “truths” became unsettled “truths”; and whether they were religious, economic, political or scientific—someone was always in the wings waiting to leap out and challenge. (Geography departments were riven by the Plate Theory just as much as churches were riven by decisions to scrap Latin or allow female clergy; dietary wisdom in one age becomes dietary unwisdom in the next—) I think this is one reason why the sixties were such a worrying time to be a parent and such an exciting time to grow up in. I remember saying to a friend that I was glad I had grown up in the sixties and she said, “Oh yes, it was very exciting, wasn’t it!” No one was especially questioning the value of Shakespeare; not surprising really because Shakespeare isn’t seen particularly as an “ideas” writer. Two books that I found fascinating then were Alexandra David-Neel’s Magic and Mystery in Tibet and Carlos Castaneda’s Teachings of Don Juan: The Yaqui Way of Knowledge. It wasn’t that I wanted to go to Tibet or New Mexico; it wasn’t that I was inordinately attracted to Buddhism or Shamanism ... it was rather that wonderful sense of doors opening, of things glimpsed behind the settled, fairly mundane world I had grown up in. Closed doors and cosy rooms and large family Christmases give a sense of comfort and security to life—but a life without the insecurity and discomfort of new ideas, new ways of looking at things, is in some way lacking. (I know that the sense of threat in change is seen as the underlying motivation for the rise of ultra-conservative politics but the change in this case is the change that has overtaken the world in the sense of the concentration of massive power and wealth in corporate hands, making cheaper clothes in China and cheaper pork everywhere except on Australian farms, is hardly about the excitement of ideas—) The massive sales and readership of New Age books are a reminder of this thirst for ideas that enrich people’s lives; whether they find it is another question but undoubtedly there are nuggets there to be mined. Equally, some people find inspiration and new ways of looking at the world on mountain peaks, under microscopes, through telescopes ... some people find it in anthropology, language, books, films, dialogue, meditation ... And along the way we must challenge Shakespeare and his place in the canon; if he is merely a Settled Truth, a Comfort Zone, Inherited Wisdom, Unchallenged Genius, then he runs the same risks as Flat Earthers, Alchemists, and Economic Rationalists. * * * * * ‘The names for things and operations smuggle in connotations of good and bad—a noun tends to carry with it a kind of invisible adjective, a verb an invisible adverb.’ Kenneth Burke in Permanence and Change. * * * * * I am very grateful to Harold Bloom. Without him, I might not have got round to reading—and enjoying—Alice Walker. But then anyone who calls a book Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful is likely to catch my eye sooner or later. The title for her book of poems comes from Lame Deer Seeker of Visions; “We had no word for the strange animal we got from the white man—the horse. So we called it 3535 sunka wakan, “holy dog.” For bringing us the horse we could almost forgive you for bringing us whiskey. Horses make a landscape look more beautiful.” Possessing the Secret of Joy (which is a lovely name for a sad book) is a reminder that she is continually willing to tackle tough subjects, in this case female genital mutilation, which do not lend themselves easily to the novel form. (Years earlier, when Elspeth Huxley attempted to bring out a novel dealing with clitoridectomy, Red Strangers, her publisher, Macmillan, refused to take the book as female genital mutilation ‘had no place in a novel’; she changed publishers.) The Third Life of Grange Copeland was also a title that jumped off the shelf and into my book-bag, even though I liked it less. (She has some lovely titles: By the Light of My Father’s Smile, The Temple of My Familiar—) Her essays and short pieces, too, are timely and very readable. In In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens she writes, “Recently, I read at a college and was asked by one of the audience what I considered the major difference between the literature written by black and by white Americans. I had not spent a lot of time considering this question, since it is not the difference betweent them that interests me, but, rather, the way black writers and white writers seem to me to be writing one immense story—the same story, for the most part—with different parts of this immense story coming from a multitude of different perspectives. Until this is generally recognized, literature will always be broken into bits, black and white, and there will always be questions, wanting neat answers, such as this.” Alice Walker grew up in a poor share-cropping family in Georgia, the eighth and youngest child, and went on to win a Pulitzer Prize in 1983 for The Color Purple. But she was unhappy with Steven Spielberg’s film of the novel; I’m not surprised: the culture gap between him and his subject matter was too great, the book and its style is too quirky and eccentric to translate to the mainstreaming tendencies of film, and it is a book of silences as much as it is a book of talk and action. * * * * * February 10th: Boris Pasternak Paul Hamlyn February 11th: Sidney Sheldon Roy Fuller February 12th: Charles Darwin Judy Blume George Meredith February 13th: Elaine Pagels February 14th: Harry Wolhuter February 15th: Bruce Dawe February 16th: Richard Ford G. M. Trevelyan February 17th: Margaret Truman February 18th: Len Deighton Nikos Kazantzakis February 19th: Amy Tan February 20th: Richard Matheson February 21st: W. H. Auden Jilly Cooper Anaïs Nin February 22nd: James Russell Lowell Edna St. Vincent Millay February 23rd: Eithne Strong William Shirer February 24th: David Williamson February 25th: Anthony Burgess 3636

Sylvia Brooke February 26th: Christopher Marlowe (chr) Rudolf Ullstein February 27th: Lawrence Durrell Ralph Nader February 28th: Michel de Montaigne Stephen Spender February 29th: Howard Nemerov March 1st: Judith Rossner March 2nd: Tom Wolfe Dr Seuss March 3rd: Edward Thomas March 4th: Alan Sillitoe March 5th: Richard Hughes * * * * * Richard Hughes has the rare distinction of being turned into a character by two different writers, John Le Carré and Ian Fleming. Norman MacSwan says of him, “Le Carré, whose books such as The Spy Who Came in From The Cold rivalled Ian Fleming’s for excellence and popularity at one time used Hughes as his model for a character in The Honourable Schoolboy. He called him ‘Craw’. Hughes referred to it good humouredly as ‘another piece of lampoonery, but if I sued he might tell the truth about me, just as Ian Fleming threatened to do if I moaned too much about Dikko Henderson.’ So how did they use him? Ian Fleming dedicates You Only Live Twice to Hughes but it is probably stretching a point to call him a character. As Dikko Henderson he is the catalyst or perhaps only the mouthpiece for the West in Japan, to advise Bond on everything he needs to know: ‘Dikko Henderson had warned him that geisha parties were more or less the equivalent, for a foreigner, of trying to entertain a lot of unknown children in a nursery with a strict governess, the Madame, looking on.’ ‘Since Bond had arrived in Japan he had assiduously practised sitting in the lotus position. Dikko Henderson had advised it.’ ‘Richard Lovelace Henderson, of Her Majesty’s Australian Diplomatic Corps, looked belligerently round the small crowded bar in a by-street off the Ginza and said out of the corner of his large and usually cheerful mouth that was now turned down in bitterness and anger, ‘You stupid pommy bastard, we’ve been miked! That bludger Tanaka’s miked us! Here, under the table! See the little wire down the leg?’ And when he’s not advising Bond he gets to shoot his mouth off. ‘Don’t talk to me about the aborigines! What in hell do you think you know about the aborigines? Do you know that in my country there’s a move afoot, not afoot, at full gallop, to give the aborigines the vote? You pommy poofter. You give me any more of that liberal crap and I’ll have your balls for a bow tie.’ And finally Bond gets his mission underway and we don’t get to see or hear from Dikko Henderson again. He’s done his duty. Le Carré is completely upfront in The Honourable Schoolboy: ‘Last there is the great Dick Hughes, whose outward character and mannerisms I have shamelessly exaggerated for the part of old Craw. Some people, once met, simply elbow their way into a novel and sit there till the writer finds them a place. Dick is one. I am only sorry I could not obey his urgent exhortation to libel him to the hilt. My cruellest efforts could not prevail against the affectionate nature of the original.’ And within the book ‘mottled old Craw the Australian’ is sketched in vividly, ‘In their tireless pursuit of legends about one another, old Craw was their Ancient Mariner. 3737

Craw had shaken more sand out of his shorts, they told each other, than most of them would ever walk over; and they were right. In Shanghai, where his career had started, he had been teaboy and city editor to the only English-speaking journal in the port. Since then, he had covered the Communists against Chiang Kai-Shek and Chiang against the Japanese and the Americans against practically everyone. Craw gave them a sense of history in this rootless place. His style of speech, which at typhoon times even the hardiest might pardonably find irksome, was a genuine hangover from the Thirties, when Australia provided the bulk of journalists in the Orient; and the Vatican, for some reason, the jargon of their companionship.’ Of course, Hughes really started out in Sydney under the gaze, benevolent or otherwise, of Frank Packer but having read a bit about the real Richard Hughes never spoiled his fictional counterpart for me. Macswan goes on, “Hughes acknowledged the literary likeness but shied away from Le Carré’s portrayal of his counterpart’s involvement in espionage. ‘Craw’s grossly improper undercover association with MI6—or is it SIS?—is something of course completely beyond my ken.’ He went on piously: ‘Also Craw works ten times as hard and far more effectively than I do. And I must insist that he drinks ten times as much as I, and takes far more interest in ladies than I do.’ “When Le Carré’s bestseller appeared, Hughes was standing one day at the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondents’ Club urinal, with its unrivalled view over the harbour to Kowloon and the mountains sprawling over its skyline. He was joined by a newly arrived American correspondent who had just read The Honourable Schoolboy. He knew Hughes only slightly. He was struck, he said, by the author’s portrayal of Hughes on similar lines to Ian Fleming’s earlier lampooning of him in You Only Live Twice. ‘How come,’ he asked, ‘these two guys draw you as a spy?’ Hughes raised his free hand and gave the puzzled newcomer his episcopal blessing. ‘I admit it, my son,’ he said, ‘but I adjure you to treat this piddling admission as being under the seal of the confessional.’” But what of Fleming’s most famous creation? Debonair Yugoslav agent Dusko Popov wrote in Spy/Counterspy, “I’m told that Ian Fleming said he based his character James Bond to some degree on me and my experiences. As for me, I rather doubt that a Bond in the flesh would have survived more than forty-eight hours as an espionage agent. Fleming and I did rub shoulders in Lisbon, and a few weeks before I took the clipper for the States he did follow me about. Perhaps he developed what happened that night into a Bond adventure. When the Germans got a signal from Tate that he had received the twenty thousand pounds from Mr Sand, true to their word, they handed me the equivalent in dollars minus a fair commission. A few intermediaries in the Abwehr assuredly greased their own palms in the transaction, but who cared? Supposedly, I was to transfer the money — approximately eighty thousand dollars — to Sand’s account in New York. Actually I was to hand it over to MI6, but since the transaction took place in the evening, I was stuck with the money until I could make the necessary contact and arrangements the following day. Probably Ian Fleming got wind of the deal. I came down from my apartment to the lobby of the Palacio Hotel, the packets of bills in the breast pocket of my evening jacket. I preferred to carry the money with me rather than call attention to it by depositing it in the hotel safe. I noticed Fleming in the lobby but thought nothing more about it. Then I went to a café for a drink before dinner, and there was Fleming skulking about outside. At dinner he appeared in the same restaurant. My senses were aroused, and I noticed that he followed me thereafter as I walked in deliberately leisurely fashion through the gardens leading to the Casino. To have a Naval Intelligence man on my tail at this point was amusing because I knew it was the money, not me, that he was safeguarding. Besides, I was reasonably sure Fleming was operating on his own without instructions. British Intelligence had enough confidence to entrust me with eighty thousand dollars. The secrets I carried in my head 3838 were worth much more. We strolled through the halls of the Casino, my shadow and I, observing the play at the different tables. I paused at a baccarat table. A favourite bête noire of mine was playing there; an insignificant-looking but wealthy Lithuanian named Bloch, who attempted to compensate for his tiny stature by arrogant play. When holding the bank he would never set a limit, as was customary. Instead, he’d announce haughtily, ‘Banque ouverte’, meaning the other players could bet as much as they wished. It was ostentatious and annoying, and not to me alone. Others had remarked the same thing. I don’t know what devil was behind me, perhaps Fleming or the knowledge that he was there, but when Bloch announced ‘Banque ouverte,’ and the croupier said, ‘Les Messiers debouts peuvent jouer,’ in my coolest manner I announced, ‘Fifty thousand dollars.’ Dipping my hand into my breast pocket I extracted the sheaf of bills and started counting the sum out on the green felt covering of the table. Even for the Estoril Casino in the fever of the war, it was a lot of money. The chatter stopped. Somehow the wager communicated itself to the other tables in the room, and all became silent. I glanced at Fleming. His face turned bile green. Obviously the Lithuanian didn’t have that sort of money on him. He squirmed in his chair in embarrassment. ‘I suppose,’ I addressed the chief croupier, ‘that the Casino is backing this man’s bet, since you didn’t object to his “Banque ouverte”.’ ‘The Casino never backs any player’s stake, sir,’ the croupier answered as I knew he would. Pretending irritation, I swept the money off the table and, putting it back in my pocket, said, ‘I trust you’ll call this to the attention of the management and that in the future such irresponsible play will be prohibited. It is a disgrace and an annoyance to serious players.’ Fleming was recouping his sang-froid. He now had a smile on his face. I’m sure he had seen through and was appreciating my comedy. And the Lithuanian was cured. Friends told me that he never again pronounced the words ‘Banque ouverte’ in the Estoril Casino.” Popov is the man who warned the United States in August 1941 about the method and likelihood of a Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. He writes, “I never did get an answer to the enigma of Pearl Harbor. Over the years, I have studied the question, tried to draw conclusions, heard all sorts of speculation and conjectures. There have been official inquiries and courts martial, but nowhere have I ever read or heard mention of the documented evidence I brought to the United States of the Japanese plans to attack Pearl Harbor. “For my own intellectual curiosity, if nothing else, I’ve had to draw conclusions. For a while, there was what I believe to be a canard circulating that President Roosevelt deliberately allowed the attack to take place so as to draw the United States into the war. This rumour was based on the disclosure that there had been some other evidence that the Japanese were planning an attack. The other evidence, however, was not specific at all and merely tended to bolster a possibility that everyone knew existed. I have had to discount the Roosevelt theory on the basis of pure logic. Granted even that Roosevelt might have welcomed an attack as a means of coercing the American people to unity in a war he was sure must come sooner or later, he still could have accomplished the same result by alerting his armed forces to the eventuality. Short of capitulation to the Japanese demands, there was no possibility of stopping their aggression. So attack they would. And the United States armed forces could have been waiting for them. The reaction of the American people would have been the same. They were attacked: they would defend themselves. There was no need to have a defeat to accomplish this. No need to sacrifice the American Pacific fleet and thousands of soldiers, sailors, and civilians on 7 December. No need to have placed the Japanese in a position to conquer half of the Pacific. Not in the wildest 3939 fantasy would this be indicated. Nor could a man in Roosevelt’s position ever consider such an action. Not the day but the man would go down in infamy.” He assumes that the problem lay with J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI, who had failed to pass the information on. Yet even this does not explain why American planes, ships, personnel, fuel and equipment, were simply there, out in mid-Pacific, all together, apparently without protection, plans, or any attempt at dispersal or camouflage ... literally a sitting duck of a naval base ... were the American commanders just so extraordinarily confident that they saw no need for even the most modest of precautions? * * * * * Dick Hughes had a larger-than-life fore-runner, Australian journalist George Ernest Morrison. Cyril Pearl in Morrison of Peking writes, ‘One of the main streets in Peking used to be called “Morrison Street”. Today it is called “Former Morrison Street”. It was named for an adventurous Australian who went to Peking in 1897 as correspondent for The Times of London. He became a world authority on China, played a gallant part in the defence of the legations during the Boxer rising, and in 1912 became political adviser to Yuan Shih-k’ai, first president of the Chinese Republic. Because Yuan’s memory is execrated by contemporary Chinese historians Morrison Street has received its discreditable prefix, and Morrison’s name is otherwise forgotten. But China never had a more ardent or more disinterested champion than this incorruptible Australian.’ Morrison sailed in the Pacific to see ‘blackbirding’ at first hand, he walked alone across Australia from north to south, he was jingoistic, imperialistic, hypochondriacal, chaotic in affairs of the heart, blunt and critical. He also acquired a knowledge of China of great breadth and depth. And was he perhaps a spy for the West? No. But then he didn’t need to be. His knowledge, which he made available not only to The Times but to anyone who would listen, vastly exceeded anything Britain’s infant espionage service ever acquired. So did Fleming and le Carré believe that if you really want to know what’s going on you simply make friends with the most experienced newspaper reporter you can find? * * * * * ‘In April, Nanking, the capital city of Chiang Kai-shek’s Government, had surrendered; in May it was Shanghai; and now, in October, the news had just come that Mao was in control of Canton. It would obviously only be a very short time before our province changed over. It was impossible to continue very much longer as we were. At one time the rise and success of Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang had seemed to hold out hope of a better future for China and the end of divisions; but two world wars, the upsurge of personal ambition, the continuing conflict between his forces and those of the growing Communist group had led to economic and moral disaster. Chiang had lost his great opportunity by yielding to the pull of family, throwing in his lot with the influential bankers and big business men, instead of with the great mass of the people, who were peasants struggling against poverty. While the few had become richer, the many had become poorer and poorer, and more desperate daily. The horror and fear of the years of inflation were making a deep mark. Most officials had already given up any pretence of keeping the governmental machinery working, and were solely concerned with how they themselves could keep alive. It was commonly remarked that there were four classes of officials: those who had been most successful in appropriating public funds who had already followed their wealth to Switzerland or the United States; the second class who were making their way to Hong Kong; the third who had to be content with Taiwan; while the rest were too poor, and perhaps too honest, so that they were condemned to remain where they were.’ (I Stayed in China, William Sewell) * * * * * There have essentially been three Taiwans; what I might call Aboriginal Taiwan, Colonial Taiwan and Capitalist Taiwan. 4040

The Aboriginal peoples of Taiwan, the Ami, Atayal, Bunun, Paiwan, Puyuma, Rukai, Saisiyat, Tsao and Yami, are struggling to survive in modern Taiwan, both ethnically and culturally. They are believed to have arrived from South-East Asia some 10,000 years ago and to be related to the Malay peoples of the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia. But the jury is still out on exactly where they came from and whether they all came from the same area. They survived and adapted through the ad hoc centuries of ‘colonialism’; not least because no country ever managed to totally colonise Taiwan. It is not known when the first Chinese settlers arrived on the island but there was a fairly constant trickle, occasionally rising to a wave, then declining again. The waves constituted Chinese fleeing persecution on the mainland, Chinese sent to subdue and take control of Taiwan, and Chinese pirates and freebooters. In 1593 Japan tried to colonise the island with small results. The Portuguese were the first Europeans to see the island (and named it Formosa), but it was the Dutch and Spanish who set up trading stations. In 1684 the Manchu dynasty officially annexed the island. European ships were occasionally shipwrecked on the coasts and their sailors killed or imprisoned but “Whenever the Western powers sued the court of Beijing to intervene in such incidents, they discovered that Beijing had little real authority over island affairs, and even less interest.” In the 19th century both Britain and the USA considered annexing Taiwan but it was Japan who acquired it as a colony after defeating China in 1895 (the Chinese Dowager Empress had spent the Naval budget on a Summer Palace); Japanese colonialism brought roads, bridges, schools, hospitals and more but their oppressive rule made them increasingly hated. Yet right through into the 20th century the Aboriginal tribes had been able to cope with the changes and influxes, to adapt and maintain much of their land, customs, beliefs and numbers. But the arrival of the defeated Chiang Kai-shek and his troops and followers in 1949 changed Taiwan from an unimportant backwater to a modern industrial society. It also changed the lives of the Aboriginal people, killing them, rounding them up, confining them to reserves, placing intense pressures on them to assimilate into Chinese society. It was a change so massive that 10,000 years of survival and resistance and adaptation may be all that history will grant. * * * * * March 6th: Gabriel Garcia Márquez March 7th: Piers Paul Read March 8th: Kenneth Grahame March 9th: Paul Wilson March 10th: David Rabe Fanny Trollope March 11th: Torquato Tasso March 12th: Kylie Tenant March 13th: Kofi Awoonor March 14th: Maxim Gorky March 15th: Ben Okri Lady Gregory March 16th: Sully Prudhomme March 17th: Penelope Lively March 18th: Wilfrid Owen Edgar Cayce March 19th: David Livingstone Hans Küng Sir Richard Burton March 20th: David Malouf 4141

March 21st: Margaret Mahy Ved Mehta March 22nd: Rosie Scott March 23rd: Ama Ata Aidoo March 24th: Olive Schreiner David Irving Richard Wurmbrand March 25th Anne Brontë March 26th: Erica Jong March 27th: Kenneth Slessor * * * * * There is Kenneth Slessor on food: ‘As for the food, it has been said that the postwar influx of Europeans has widened our taste and improved our cooking. This strikes me as boloney in the full sense of the Bologna sausage. It is true that King’s Cross is crowded today with restaurants and cafés of a dozen nationalities — Dutch, Hungarian, German, Russian, Indian, Italian, Swedish, Indonesian and others — but this is no evidence of better food. Since the only two great cuisines of the world are French and Chinese, both of which flourished superbly in Sydney before the war, the new tides of Slavs and Balts and middle or southern Europeans have merely imposed the exigencies of their sparse national larders on the Australian menu. They have contributed a number of sausages as well as a number of ways of disguising veal. But anybody who believes they have improved Australian eating is clearly ignorant of the state of Sydney’s restaurants in the first quarter of the century. The claim is preposterous to anyone who remembers the glories of Monsieur Lievain’s Paris House, Stewart Dawson’s Ambassadors, the first Romano’s, Pearson’s fish-café and Watson’s Paragon, the Cavalier in King Street, the Cafe Francais in George Street, Petty’s Hotel and a dozen more dining-rooms, all now vanished. I find little compensation today in walking through King’s Cross and looking at the spaghetti-bars, the hamburger-counters and the lines of electrically “barbecued” chickens rotating in their glass coffins.’ And then there is Tobias Smollett on food: ‘If I would drink water, I must quaff the maukish contents of an open aqueduct, exposed to all manner of defilement; or swallow that which comes from the river Thames, impregnated with all the filth of London and Westminster—Human excrement is the least offensive part of the concrete, which is composed of all the drugs, minerals, and poisons, used in mechanics and manufacture, enriched with the putrifying carcasses of beasts and men; and mixed with all the scourings of all the wash-tubs, kennels, and common sewers, within the bills of mortality. This is the agreeable potation, extolled by the Londoners, as the finest water in the universe—As to the intoxicating potion, sold for wine, it is a vile, unpalatable, and pernicious sophistication, balder-dashed with cyder, corn-spirit, and the juice of sloes. In an action at law, laid against a carman for having staved a cask of port, it appeared from the evidence of the cooper that there were not above five gallons of real wine in the whole pipe, which held above a hundred, and even that had been brewed and adulterated by the merchant at Oporto. The bread I eat in London, is a deleterious paste, mixed up with chalk, alum, and bone-ashes; insipid to the taste, and destructive to the constitution. The good people are not ignorant of this adulteration; but they prefer it to wholsome bread, because it is whiter than the meal of corn: thus they sacrifice their taste and their health, and the lives of their tender infants, to a most absurd gratification of a mis-judging eye; and the miller, or the baker, is obliged to poison them and their families, in order to live by his profession. The same monstrous depravity appears in their veal, which is bleached by repeated bleedings, and other villainous arts, till there is not a drop of juice left in the body, and the poor animal is paralytic before it dies; so void of all taste, nourishment, and savour, that a 4242 man might dine as comfortably on a white fricasee of kid-skin gloves, or chip hats from Leghorn. As they have discharged the natural colour from their bread, their butchers-meat, and poultry, their cutlets, ragouts, fricasees and sauces of all kinds; so they insist upon having the complexion of their pot-herbs mended, even at the hazard of their lives. Perhaps, you will hardly believe they can be so mad as to boil their greens with brass half-pence in order to improve their colour; and yet nothing is more true—Indeed, without this improvement in the colour, they have no personal merit. They are produced in an artificial soil, and taste of nothing but the dunghills, from whence they spring. My cabbage, cauliflower, and ’sparagus in the country, are as much superior in flavour to those that are sold in Covent- Garden, as my heath-mutton is to that of St. James’s-market; which, in fact, is neither lamb nor mutton, but something betwixt the two, gorged in the rank fens of Lincoln and Essex, pale, coarse, and frowzy—As for the pork, it is an abominable carnivorous animal, fed with horse-flesh and distillers grains; and the poultry is all rotten, in consequence of a fever, occasioned by the infamous practice of sewing up the gut, that they may be the sooner fattened in coops, in consequence of this cruel retention. Of the fish, I need say nothing in this hot weather, but that it comes sixty, seventy, fourscore, and a hundred miles by land-carriage; a circumstance sufficient without any comment, to turn a Dutchman’s stomach, even if his nose was not saluted in every alley with the sweet flavour of fresh mackerel, selling by retail—This is not the season for oysters; nevertheless, it may not be amiss to mention, that the right Colchester are kept in slime-pits, occasionally overflowed by the sea; and that the green colour, so much admired by the voluptuaries of this metropolis, is occasioned by the vitriolic scum, which rises on the surface of the stagnant and stinking water—Our rabbits are bred and fed in the poulterer’s cellar, where they have neither air nor exercise, consequently they must be firm in flesh, and delicious in flavour; and there is no game to be had for love or money. It must be owned, the Covent-garden affords some good fruit; which, however, is always engrossed by a few individuals of over-grown fortune, at an exorbitant price; so that little else than the refuse of the market falls to the share of the community; and that is distributed by such filthy hands, as I cannot look at without loathing. It was but yesterday that I saw a dirty barrow-bunter in the street, cleaning her dusty fruit with her own spittle; and who knows but some fine lady of St. James’s parish might admit into her delicate mouth those very cherries, which had been rolled and moistened between the filthy, and perhaps ulcerated chops of a St. Giles’s huckster—I need not dwell upon the pallid, contanimated mash, which they call strawberries; soiled and tossed by greasy paws through twenty baskets crusted with dirt; and then presented with the worst milk, thickened with the worst flour, into a bad likeness of cream: but the milk itself should not pass unanalysed, the produce of faded cabbage-leaves and sour draft, lowered with hot water, frothed with bruised snails, carried through the streets in open pails, exposed to foul rinsings, discharged from doors and windows, spittle, snot, and tobacco-quids from foot- passengers, over-flowings from mud-carts, spatterings from coach-wheels, dirt and trash chucked into it by roguish boys for the joke’s sake, the spewings of infants, which have slabbered in the tin-measure, which thrown back in that condition among the milk, for the benefit of the next customer; and, finally, the vermin that drops from the rags of the nasty drab that vends this precious mixture, under the respectable denomination of milk-maid. I shall conclude this catalogue of London dainties, with that table-beer, guiltless of hops and malt, vapid and nauseous; much fitter to facilitate the operation of a vomit, than to quench thirst and promote digestion; the tallowy rancid mass, called butter, manufactured with candle-grease and kitchen-stuff; and their fresh eggs, imported from France and Scotland.—’ Pulitzer Prize winning author, Upton Sinclair, in his famous novel of the stock-yards and killing rooms of the Chicago meat packers, The Jungle, was later to say that he had 4343 aimed for the heart of America— ‘There were the men in the pickle-rooms, for instance, where old Antanas had gotten his death; scarce a one of these had not some spot of horror on his person. Let a man so much as scrape his finger pushing a truck in the pickle-rooms, and he might have a sore that would put him out of the world; all the joints in his fingers might be eaten by the acid, one by one. Of the butchers and floorsmen, the beef-boners and trimmers, and all those who used knives, you could scarcely find a person who had the use of his thumb; time and time again the base of it had been slashed, till it was a mere lump of flesh against which the man pressed the knife to hold it. The hands of these men would be criss-crossed with cuts, until you could no longer pretend to count them or to trace them. They would have no nails,—they had worn them off pulling hides; their knuckles were swollen so that their fingers spread out like a fan. There were men who worked in the cooking-rooms, in the midst of steam and sickening odors, by artificial light; in these rooms the germs of tuberculosis might live for two years, but the supply was renewed every hour. There were the beef-luggers, who carried two-hundred-pound quarters into the refrigerator-cars; a fearful kind of work, that began at four o’clock in the morning and that wore out the most powerful men in a few years. There were those who worked in the chilling-rooms, and whose special disease was rheumatism; the time-limit that a man could work in the chilling-rooms was said to be five years. There were the wool-pluckers, whose hands went to pieces even sooner than the hands of the pickle-men; for the pelts of the sheep had to be painted with acid to loosen the wool, and then the pluckers had to pull out this wool with their bare hands, till the acid had eaten their fingers off. There were those who made the tins for the canned-meat; and their hands, too, were a maze of cuts, and each cut represented a chance for blood poisoning. Some worked at the stamping-machines, and it was very seldom that one could work long there at the pace that was set, and not give out and forget himself, and have a part of his hand chopped off. There were the “hoisters,” as they were called, whose task it was to press the lever which lifted the dead cattle off the floor. They ran along upon a rafter, peering down through the damp and the steam; and as old Durham’s architects had not built the killing-room for the convenience of the hoisters, at every few feet they would have to stoop under a beam, say four feet above the one they ran on; which got them into the habit of stooping, so that in a few years they would be walking like chimpanzees. Worst of any, however, were the fertilizer-men, and those who served in the cooking-rooms. These people could not be shown to the visitor,—for the odor of a fertilizer-man would scare any ordinary visitor at a hundred yards, and as for the other men, who worked in tank-rooms full of steam, and in some of which there were open vats near the level of the floor, their peculiar trouble was that they fell into the vats; and when they were fished out, there was never enough of them left to be worth exhibiting,— sometimes they would be overlooked for days, till all but the bones of them had gone out to the world as Durham’s Pure Leaf Lard!’ —and instead he hit the American people in the stomach— ‘For it was the custom, as they found, whenever meat was so spoiled that it could not be used for anything else, either to can it or else to chop it up into sausage. With what had been told them by Jonas, who had worked in the pickle-rooms, they could now study the whole of the spoiled-meat industry on the inside, and read a new and grim meaning into that old Packingtown jest,—that they use everything of the pig except the squeal. Jonas had told them how the meat that was taken out of pickle would often be found sour, and how they would rub it up with soda to take away the smell, and sell it to be eaten on the free-lunch counters; also of all the miracles of chemistry which they performed, giving to any sort of meat, fresh or salted, whole or chopped, any color and any flavor and any odor they chose. In the pickling of hams they had an ingenious apparatus, by which they saved time and increased the capacity of the plant—a machine consisting of a hollow needle attached to a pump; by plunging this needle into the meat and working with his 4444 foot, a man could fill a ham with pickle in a few seconds. And yet, in spite of this, there would be hams found spoiled, some of them with an odor so bad that a man could hardly bear to be in the room with them. To pump into these the packers had a second and much stronger pickle which destroyed the odor—a process known to the workers as “giving them thirty per cent.” Also, after the hams had been smoked, there would be found some that had gone to the bad. Formerly these had been sold as “Number Three Grade,” but later on some ingenious person had hit upon a new device, and now they would extract the bone, about which the bad part generally lay, and insert in the hole a white-hot iron. After this invention there was no longer Number One, Two, and Three Grade—there was only Number One Grade. The packers were always originating such schemes—they had what they called “boneless hams,” which were all the odds and ends of pork stuffed into casings; and “California hams,” which were the shoulders, with big knuckle-joints, and nearly all the meat cut out; and fancy “skinned hams,” which were made of the oldest hogs, whose skins were so heavy and coarse that no one would buy them—that is, until they had been cooked and chopped fine and labelled “head cheese”! It was only when the whole ham was spoiled that it came into the department of Elzbieta. Cut up by the two-thousand-revolutions-a-minute flyers, and mixed with half a ton of other meat, no odor that ever was in a ham could make any difference. There was never the least attention paid to what was cut up for sausage; there would come all the way back from Europe old sausage that had been rejected, and that was mouldy and white—it would be dosed with borax and glycerine, and dumped into the hoppers, and made over again for home consumption. There would be meat that had tumbled out on the floor, in the dirt and sawdust, where the workers had tramped and spit uncounted billions of consumption germs. There would be meat stored in great piles in rooms; and the water from leaky roofs would drip over it, and thousands of rats would race about on it. It was too dark in these storage places to see well, but a man could run his hand over these piles of meat and sweep off handfuls of the dried dung of rats. These rats were nuisances, and the packers would put poisoned bread out for them; they would die, and then rats, bread, and meat would go into the hoppers together. This is no fairy story and no joke; the meat would be shovelled into carts, and the man who did the shovelling would not trouble to lift out a rat even when he saw one—there were things that went into the sausage in comparison with which a poisoned rat was a tidbit. There was no place for the men to wash their hands before they ate their dinner, and so they made a practice of washing them in the water that was to be ladled into the sausage. There were the butt-ends of smoked meat, and the scraps of corned beef, and all the odds and ends of the waste of the plants, that would be dumped into old barrels in the cellar and left there. Under the system of rigid economy which the packers enforced, there were some jobs that it only paid to do once in a long time, and among these was the cleaning out of the waste-barrels. Every spring they did it; and in the barrels would be dirt and rust and old nails and stale water—and cart load after cart load of it would be taken up and dumped into the hoppers with fresh meat, and sent out to the public’s breakfast. Some of it they would make into “smoked” sausage—but as the smoking took time, and was therefore expensive, they would call upon their chemistry department, and preserve it with borax and color it with gelatine to make it brown. All of their sausage came out of the same bowl, but when they came to wrap it they would stamp some of it “special,” and for this they would charge two cents more a pound.’ His book lead to outrage, “an investigation of the yards was instituted by the US government”, and Congress hastened to pass both a Pure Food and Drug Act and a Meat Inspection Act in 1906. * * * * * March 28th: Mario Vargas Llosa Nelson Algren March 29th: Ernst Jünger 4545

March 30th: Anna Sewell March 31st: Marge Piercy Sigurdur Magnusson April 1st: Edgar Wallace April 2nd: Hans Christian Andersen Peter Haining April 3rd: Reginald Hill April 4th: Mrs Oliphant April 5th: Robert Bloch April 6th: Furnley Maurice April 7th: William Wordsworth April 8th: Ursula Curtiss April 9th: Lord David Cecil Hugh Gaitskell April 10th: Joseph Pulitzer Paul Theroux April 11th: June Gibbons Jennifer Gibbons Cyril Pearl * * * * * In The Dunera Scandal Cyril Pearl tells the story of the British Government’s disastrously ham-handed attempt to solve the issue of German refugees in Britain in the early stages of WWII. As Hitler tore into France, the media (not to mention the Government and some of the people) in the UK was infected by a frenzy of spy mania. Fifth columnists were found in Jewish refugees, in German families who had lived in the country for generations; men and boys were rounded up and interned. As Dr J. J. Mallon, warden of Toynbee Hall in the East End of London wrote: ‘It is hard to write with composure about the present treatment of friendly aliens in East London. How can one explain or excuse the internment of elderly men, many of them invalids, who have lived here blamelessly for 40 or 50 years? Men who have not been away from London for 20 years; men who have occupied a single residence for half a century; men who are ailing or who have ailing wives; obscure and helpless men about whom the synagogue and their neighbours know all that can be known; men of whom it is not even pretended that there is any suspicion, are being interned or have been interned in scores.’ Some of these men were forced on board the Dunera, destination Australia, with only a few personal possessions and in some cases without even being able to tell their families what was happening. 2,542 German and Austrian internees (a few being POWs but most refugees) were taken on board, along with crew and guards, so that the ship was overloaded by around 1,000 passengers. The voyage was marked not only by appalling overcrowding but by abuse, looting, sickness, the inability to learn what was happening in the world or to send any messages to family. The men arrived in Australia, underfed, filthy, lousy, (they had not been able to change their clothes for 8 weeks) and minus most of their personal possessions—and found themselves described as Nazis. Their misery was not yet ended. They were sent to a spartan barbed-wire camp at Hay in western NSW. When it was finally decided that they could leave the camp to contribute to the war effort, highly qualified doctors, scientists, university lecturers, chemists, actors, singers, writers and other professional men found themselves picking fruit, unloading freight, and digging ditches. And when the vexed question finally came up—should they be deported at war’s end or allowed to stay in Australia—the debate brought out all those now hoary claims; they would take jobs and businesses and university places and economic opportunities from Australians ... The Dunera brought to Australia, among those hastily rounded-up and forcibly- 4646 embarked internees, a number of remarkable men; remarkable for both their lack of rancour and for their future careers. One of them was Franz Stampfl. Roger Bannister in First Four Minutes writes: ‘I decided to travel up to Oxford alone because I wanted to think quietly. I took an early train deliberately, opened a carriage door, and, quite by chance, there was Franz Stampfl inside. I was delighted to see him, as a friend with the sort of attractive cheerful personality I badly needed at that moment. Through Chris Brasher, Franz had been in touch with my training programme, and his hints were always valuable. I would have liked his advice and help at this moment, but could not bring myself to ask him. It was as if now, at the end of my running career, I was being forced to admit that coaches were necessary after all, and that I had been wrong to think that the athlete could be sufficient unto himself. In my mind there lurked the memory of an earlier occasion when I had visited a coach. He had expounded his views on my running and suggested a whole series of changes. The following week I read a newspaper article he wrote about my plans, claiming to be my adviser for the 1952 Olympics. This experience made me inclined to move slowly. But Franz is not like this. He has no wish to turn the athlete into a machine working at his dictation. We shared a common view of athletics as a means of “recreation” of each individual, as a result of the liberation and expression of the latent power within him. Franz is an artist who can see beauty in human struggle and achievement. ... The things a man does by himself, he does best. Franz Stampfl’s greatness as a coach rests on his adaptability and patience. He watches and waits for the moment when the athlete really needs him. Franz once told me of setting a group of young boys the task of traversing a beam suspended above the floor. Some swung along with their hands, some walked upright, some crawled, but none of them fell off. In each method there was some peculiar grace derived from the boy’s inventiveness. It would have been possible to show them how to cross the beam correctly. Some would have managed it easily, others would have stifled their natural inclination to do it differently, and might have come to grief. I think it is the duty of the coach to encourage resource and initiative in each one of us. We do not want to become identical human beings, the servants of a new totalitarianism. We seek individual freedom in a world that of necessity imposes more and more restrictions. The less we can find freedom in our work the more we shall need to find freedom in the games we play. The aim of the athletic coach should not merely be to help his pupil to achieve a set performance in his event, to throw the discus 150 feet or to run a mile in 4 min. 10 sec. It should also be to show how, through experiencing the stress imposed by his event, he can understand and master his own personality.” Stampfl went on to become a well-known athletics coach in Australia. Another was Richard Ullman who in his life and writings, such as Tolerance and the Intolerable, struggled with the questions of good and evil that had seen him pressed aboard the ship as an enemy alien and which set him down in the dust and heat of a tin hut at Hay while the world was convulsed. Pearl says of him, ‘Dr Richard Ullman, a saintly poet, philosopher, humanist and tireless worker for international understanding, was born in Franfurt-am-Main in 1904 and brought up as a Lutheran, though he had some Jewish ancestry. He took his PhD at Frankfurt University and from 1927 to 1930 conducted a German language school in Serres, Greece. Returning to Germany, he was arrested and sent to Buchenwald concentration camp, from which he was rescued by the Society of Friends. He reached England as a refugee shortly before the outbreak of war and was later interned on the Isle of Man. After his return to England he joined the Society of Friends and, until his death in 1963, worked in adult education at Woodbrooke and in various 4747

Quaker activities, writing, lecturing and preaching the gospel of peace and tolerance. Among his writings were German Parliaments with Sir Stephen King-Hall (1954), Friends and Truth (1956), Between God and History (1959) and the Swarthmore Lecture for 1961, Tolerance and the Intolerable. Pelz described him with “his face gleaming with perspiration ... his sad eyes, puzzled, sarcastic, mischieviously naive, looked out of a pasty, undefined face through dark-rimmed glasses”, as he discoursed on Hölderlin, Eichendorff, Mörike, Heine, Lenau, Storm and Droste-Hülshoff, in the mess-hut, “surrounded by the stale memories of disembodied food and the buzz and bump of insects on the window panes.”’ Ullman wrote of the camp— They walk about and talk and play They even smile and laugh and sing But in their voices sounds a ring As from an organ far away.

It is a tune abrupt and strange And by their laughter sadly torn It tells of gardens long forlorn Through which their yearning spirits range ... But the internees were not totally forgotten. They received some letters and parcels from sympathetic Australians, including several Quakers. The Britannica Yearbook said of him “On August 8 (1963) the Society suffered a severe loss through the death of Richard K. Ullmann, who had been outstanding in Quaker work in many parts of the world, especially in eastern Europe.” And another was a good friend of mine, Edward Pape. I am sorry I didn’t connect him to the Dunera while he was still alive but I must admit I had always sought out his memories of travelling in South America as a young man. In an article in the Toowoomba Chronicle Lin Boyle interviewed him and wrote, “His years on the South American continent were brought about by chance. He explains: “My doctor father, who was 66 when I was born, died when I was six, and there was no money to continue my education beyond matriculation. An anthropologist who was a family friend took me to Peru with him in 1922.” They went over the Andes and into the remote Peruvian jungle by rail, car and foot, to a little hut beside a tributary of the Amazon river. They were surveying for mainly geological exploration, although their work also extended into ethnology, zoology and botany. Their contact with the outside world was provided by a monthly steam launch, which passed down river from Iquitos, taking mail to Lima. The chance passing of an oil company’s launch took them upriver into eastern Peru, drawing maps until 1926, when Edward returned home and attended Berlin University studying geography, geology and Spanish. In 1929 he returned to South America, working for a company that owned land “the size of Switzerland” in southern Brazil. “I was employed as a surveyor, but really I was there to protect their diamond rights in the river. I was advised to get a gun of my own, as my predecessor had been shot! “The divers who were bringing up the diamond-bearing gravel were pocketting most of the gems themselves so the company went broke. I went to a small German colony at Castro and taught in the school for six months,” he remembers. In 1932, he joined another oil company and spent five years mapping and surveying near the Bolivian border. Having met and married his English first wife, Edward returned to England with her in 1937. When the Second World War broke out, he was at first declared a “friendly alien”, but when hostilities began in earnest he was interned. 4848

His wife and their son, Manuel, were in Derbyshire where she nursed until dying in a bicycle accident. Her sister took Manuel in, and father and son were not to be re-united until he was 17 and came to Australia. Along with mostly Jewish refugees, Edward was deported to Australia on the Dunera, sailing under the guardianship of soldiers fresh from the Belgian and Dunkirk battlefields and meting out harsh discipline to their German charges. Despite the unhappiness of this period of his life, Edward wrote his first manuscript on evidence for the existence of God during his internment at Hay and Tatura, in Victoria. He was released in 1943 and worked for the State Forestry Commission. From 1950 until retiring in 1967 he worked for various authorities on the design and construction of roads, spending the last ten years in Darwin. In 1960 his long-held admiration for Mahatma Gandhi, which had begun his interest in the Hindu religion, took him on a visit to India. “I stood where he was killed and where his body was burned. But the experience sobered me too: it showed me so many of India’s weaknesses,” he says. His second wife, Erna, died in Toowoomba and Edward moved to Crow’s Nest for his last few years, and at the age of 95 married a long-time friend, Maud Dunlea, who was in her late eighties. They had a short but happy time together before Edward died. His writing was modest, yet beautiful in a simple and religious way. * * * * * Cyril Pearl has been described as a “larrikin” but I think this is a description he would have disliked. He himself said of “larrikinism”: ‘The popular instinct which found estimable qualities in Ned Kelly also found them in the larrikin. In the ’nineties, when Norton and his colleagues were most vociferous, larrikinism was the spirit of the age. It was an organic part of Australian life, so much so that though the larrikin as a social and sartorial type, with his round soft hat, his blatant neckwear, his tight-fitting bell-bottomed trousers, his high, cut-under heels, has disappeared, many of his characteristics—cheeky aggressiveness, contempt for authority, strident masculinity—are still ingredients of the Australian make-up. ‘The larrikin was a coward and a brute. He hunted in packs. His weapons were the boot, the broken tumbler, the butt of the bottle, the chunk of blue metal. His diversions, when he was not making war on rival pushes or dancing with his donah, were bar- wrecking, window-smashing, breaking up a picnic-party, or giving a policeman “Bondi”— an expression that derived from a particularly exuberant larrikin demonstration that took place in Bondi, N.S.W. in the nineties. But he was a product of the acute social inequality, the class bitterness and the frustration of his times, and it is not surprising that he had his sympathisers and his apologists.’ But certainly he came within a strong newspaper tradition of thumbing his nose at the ‘establishment’. (He began on the Star in Melbourne and later moved to the Sunday Telegraph in Sydney, then a stint on the Sunday Mirror.) And in his books he was drawn to the odd and the rebellious. He may have been best known in his own lifetime (he died in 1987) for The Girl with the Swansdown Seat but the bulk of his writing shows his interest in those who didn’t do as they were told, those who were on the outside, those who were trying to shove their way in, and those who ran foul of governments and popular prejudices; Brilliant Dan Deniehy, Rebel Down Under, The Three Lives of Gavan Duffy, Wild Men of Sydney and The Dunera Scandal. He said of himself, ‘I think, like many Australians of my generation, I was influenced by Mencken as a satirist, by Bertrand Russell as a thinker, by Herbert Asbury as a social historian (non-academic and therefore readable). I think Australia needs a Mencken today, as much as America needed one in the 1920s. This doesn’t mean, of course, that I am trying to be one. But I have certainly been influenced by Mencken’s passion for clarity, and long ago I took Walter Savage Landor’s precept to heart—I hope 4949 with some effect: “Keep always to the point, or with an eye upon it, and instead of saying things to make people stare and wonder, say what will withhold them from wondering and staring.” Russell’s simple prose has also influenced me—I hope. Asbury first made me realize how social history had been ignored in Australia and neglected in England.’ * * * * * April 12th: Scott Turow April 13th: Samuel Beckett Seamus Heaney April 14th: Erich Von Daeniken Frank Serpico April 15th: Jeffrey Archer April 16th: Marion Halligan April 17th: Isak Dinesen April 18th: Henry Clarence Kendall April 19th: José Echegaray April 20th: Adolf Hitler * * * * * In the year that Adolf Hitler was born, Robert Browning lay dying. It is easy to forget that Adolf Hitler spent his formative childhood years in the 19th rather than the 20th century, in a country marked and formed by the Habsburg dynasty and Habsburg ambitions, Habsburg greed, Habsburg decadence, and Habsburg failure. Beneath the bright glitter of the rich and powerful was a tawdry hypocritical divided and unequal society. It was the depressing underbelly of this society that Hitler experienced as a young man. (It is interesting to see more attention being paid to this aspect; I have just been reading Hitler in Vienna by J. Sydney Jones and Brigitte Hamann’s Hitler’s Vienna … ) I was pondering on this since reading Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners. The book is an impressive study of the history of anti-semitism in Germany and, to a lesser extent, in Central Europe as a whole. Yet it left as many questions as it answered. And is anti-semitism a large enough grab-bag for all the inferiorities and poverties and damages done by class and background? Goldhagen suggests that men given orders to kill civilians did have the freedom to say no but I don’t think that is totally correct. I have heard that at least 20 men were court- martialled for refusing to obey such orders. The man ordered to ‘create’ the incident to be used to justify the invasion of Poland managed to evade his orders by pleading ill-health but he was demoted and given an unpleasant posting; all the men ordered to kill civilians in the camps had that Sword of Damocles, the Russian Front, hanging over them. In the camps they had a degree of comfort in their quarters and more importantly, elderly Jewish women did not shoot back, Russian soldiers did. Put like that, it is understandable that many young men did not see the rights of civilians as having any relevance in their lives— or if they did, it was probably not so difficult to bludgeon all but the most tenacious conscience into submission. I wonder what decision we, having the choice between Stalingrad and Treblinka, would take? More profoundly, it was not the SS that formed and moulded the thinking of the young men given the orders; it was the Hitler Jugend. A whole range of analytical skills are increasingly being brought to bear on the subject of killing in war or under cover of war, and the key point is not how many deaths any one person was responsible for but the first killing, what happened, what was the response of the person, of the commander, of peers. It is the first killing that, in a sense, breaks the profound cultural and moral taboo on which most societies depend for their safe conduct. Psychologists refer to “transference of oppression”; the most ardent killers are often those at the bottom of the pecking order, men who have been repeatedly bullied and put 5050 upon and who have deep-seated inferiorities, angers, frustrations. By deliberately placing another group below them and giving them freedom to “transfer oppression” can bring a great flood of bottled-up violence to the surface; and by moving that opportunity for violence away from the ‘home front’ where parents, siblings, friends, clergy, teachers, neighbours, girlfriends and wives might have exerted some influence, even if only a passive influence, removes the normal restraints of society. Two things I think have not been given sufficient study. When One Nation burst on the scene in Australia there was an almost hysterical response, the media devoting pages and pages, political commentators, students, disaffected voters, concerned Aboriginal and Asian community leaders and so on, all speaking out for or against. The situation was constantly ratchetted up, week by week, till it was almost impossible to have an ordinary conversation without One Nation intruding in some way. Then the elections were over, the situation was ratchetted down, people had space to breathe, to get the situation in perspective, to look more coolly and calmly at exactly what was being said, done, promised, threatened ... but once Hitler had control over both the political process and the media there was no ratchetting down. (Of course it does not even require the involvement of politics, let alone a totalitarian system; Kathryn Lyon in Witch Hunt: A True Story of Social Hysteria and Abused Justice chronicles the way a small community in the United States was damaged and abused by the police, the legal system and the child protection services. Well documented cases of mass hysteria have occurred in the largest states to the smallest, from modern technologically-sophisticated societies to tiny Pacific atolls.) The hysteria, the threats, the propaganda, the lies and misinformation came full on, week after week, month after month, year after year. Intelligent informed people, along with unintelligent uninformed people, were affected. Non-Jews took on board ideas and beliefs that, had they had the space and calm to step back, would have been seen for the nonsense they were. Jews were influenced by the ever-rising pressures to believe things that common sense might have laughed out of court if there’d been a chance to ratchet down the machine. And societies, our own included, tend to hold naive and trusting beliefs about the checks and balances built in to their systems. The independence of the judiciary, the separation of church and state, the autonomy of regional and local governments, the subservience of the military to the political process, the fairness of the electoral system, the opposition of a strong union movement, the compassion and care of the churches—these are just some of the things citizens put their faith in. When they are found to be deficient, as in Chile in 1973, it is often too late. So how can a people know that the checks and balances built into their society will function under great pressure? Like test-crashing a car to see if the driver and passengers will stay safe, how can we ‘test-crash’ a nation to see if all our checks and balances will function under extreme duress? But the underlying problem Goldhagen doesn’t really take on board is: if anti- semitism in Germany was so bad why did so many Jews stay? (Andre Biss in A Million Jews to Save says “I would like to stress that I do not attribute to anti-semitism the importance now given it to explain the history of our times, as is the case in Germany. I consider anti-semitism more as the symptom of a widespread disease — racial intolerance for any minority.” Might it be argued that Britain and France turned their intolerance outward, to their colonies, while Germany, Austria, and Hungary, turned theirs inward, on to their Jewish and Gypsy populations?) The worse you make the situation look, the more pressing this question becomes. I think an important answer is that despite the presence of discrimination Germany had also provided increasing commercial, cultural, professional, educational, academic, and life- style opportunities for its Jewish communities. Many hundreds of thousands of Germans emigrated in the late 19th century. They went to Canada, the USA, South Africa, Tanganyika, South West Africa, Australia, Argentina, Chile, Paraguay and elsewhere. 5151

Some, such as the Mennonites and Hutterites, went for religious reasons but most left simply because of poverty. The potato blight which devastated Ireland also brought chaos, hunger and a massive increase in emigration, both to the cities and abroad, in rural Germany; an emigration that reached massive proportions in the second half of the nineteenth century. In the United States alone, Bill Bryson says, “At the turn of the century, New York had more speakers of German than anywhere in the world except Vienna and Berlin ... In 1890 the United States had 800 German newspapers and as late as the outbreak of World War I Baltimore alone had fourteen elementary schools teaching in German only”. But only a very small number were Jewish. The Jewish communities were predominantly urban, middle class, better educated and with more opportunities in Germany; they could look round and see many people, despite the presence of anti- semitism, who were much worse off. Jewish men had the vote long before German women. The German working class tended to work and live in conditions worse than those of many Jewish families. German peasants with their relentless seven-day-a-week slog in all weathers were obviously much worse off. Is there a rule-of-thumb by which we can predict which oppressive societies will produce floods of refugees and which won’t? Kosova’s Albanians had a sympathetic border; Germany’s Jews in the 1930s had 9 borders, of varying sympathy and stonewalling, to choose from. The roads and tracks of Africa are frequently awash with refugees, particularly women and children. Yet Africa has been marked by far fewer deaths than Europe in the 20th century. Is this because it has had fewer tyrants, fewer colonial and civil wars? Well, hardly. Has it had less access to sophisticated modern weaponry? Not really—and we have seen the havoc that machetes and spades can cause in a remarkably short space of time. Are Africans just naturally more peaceful than Europeans? Well, possibly. Are they less ambitious and more willing to play out their dreams of grandeur on smaller scales? Perhaps. But Africa has several nations with the potential to rival Hitler’s Germany in size and ambition. Are they more generous in their acceptance of refugees? The figures would seem to bear this out. But there is one aspect that perhaps hasn’t been given sufficient study. Africa’s women. Certainly there were people on Germany’s roads in the 1930s but they were tramps, unemployed men, Gypsies, not respectable Jewish matrons. I was recently reading Ilse Karger’s Living Adventurously. She came from an upper middle class Jewish family of ‘free-thinkers’. Yet, when she left Germany in 1935 to escort a group of Jewish children to the United States it was without her father’s permission and indeed directly against his wishes. Perhaps if more women had defied their men, their sense of social position, had put aside everything and walked to the borders, pushing little handcarts with babies, the history of Europe in the 20th century might’ve been changed. So why are African women different? They tend to leave sooner; not always soon enough, but sooner than Western women facing similar problems. They tend to go to the borders, not to embassies. They simply set out for borders, not even knowing how far or whether they will make it, whether they will be allowed across and whether they will find food and safety on the other side. In some cases they do not even know what country lies across the border. They tend to own nothing that is not portable. Their most precious possessions, their children, food, a few clothes, some agricultural implements, saucepans, can be carried on their heads, on their backs, in their arms. They are less inhibited by position, by the way they will be seen, by notions of self and social standing and class. They don’t always survive, they are often weary, sad, in poor health, yet in large 5252 numbers they survive and with their survival their families, their languages, their cultures, their religions, survive. * * * * * With all that is said and written about race, racism, racial discrimination, and so on, I must admit I had the idea the concept was as old as literature, perhaps as old as the origins of the species. So I was surprised to read in Keith McConnochie’s Realities of Race that “The earliest recorded use of the term ‘race’ (probably derived from the Latin ratio; order or radis; root) appears in the 16th century, although John Foxe uses the term in a very specialised sense in his Book of Martyrs, 1570; ‘This was the outward race and stock of Abraham’. Ashley Montagu records the first use of the term in a modern sense in Wynne’s History of the Gwyder Family (1600) in which the author refers to ‘Llewellyn ap Griffith, last Prince of Wales of the British race’. However, this use doesn’t refer to the physical characteristics which the term has commonly been used in conjunction with. The first person to use ‘race’ with this connotation appears to have been Oliver Goldsmith in his The Natural History of Animals (1774) in which he comments, ‘The second great variety in the human species seems to be that of the Tartar race’. This use of ‘race’ was certainly well established by the end of the 18th century and understandably coincided with the development of scientific interest in classifying and ordering natural phenomena.” Linnaeus, for instance, divided homo sapiens into 4 categories (Europeans, Africans, Asiatics, and American Indians), Blumenbach into 5 (Caucasian, Negro, Mongol, Malayan and Indian). Basic starting-points fell into 2 categories: that of the monogenists who believed that all people developed from a single source, and the polygenists who believed there had been a number of acts of creation which had developed the different races. Darwin seemed to put paid to the second position—except by a few people who are regarded, much as Flat Earthers are regarded, as cranks and idiots. And yet, no one has come up with evidence so absolute that it cannot be refuted, to prove the single origin theory. It remains based largely on the age of a couple of skulls, a handful of teeth, and a few human or proto-human bones found in Africa. This is slim evidence to underpin a huge body of assumptions. Assumptions have been on my mind since reading Björn Kurtén’s book Dance of the Tiger in which he suggests that Neanderthals were pale-skinned because of living at high latitudes for a longer period than any other group and Cro-Magnons were darker-skinned, having arrived more recently in Europe from either India or North Africa. This is the opposite of their depiction in most books yet it makes sense. Colour is directly related to climate not to brain size, intelligence, height, weight, inventiveness, language or any other specific attribute. Yet the evidence suggests the acquisition of lighter skins is a very slow process; Aborigines in Tasmania despite living for 30,000 to 40,000 years at much higher latitudes than the people of Arnham Land were not appreciably lighter. There either had to be other pressures at work on the human body or the Neanderthals had arrived in Europe very much earlier than usually accepted. When I was at primary school it was common to suggest we were all related because we all came from Adam and Eve. I can still remember my sheer sense of horror and disbelief when I was about nine or ten and someone, I have no memory who, said Germany started both World Wars. It seemed unbelievable to me that in a world with hundreds of different countries one country should have done such an unbelievably terrible thing not once but twice. This mattered terribly to me because nearly half my schoolmates were of German origin. How was I going to face them knowing this unbelievably terrible thing about Germany? It seems extraordinary to me now that I thought none of them would know and that I must therefore keep this awful knowledge to myself. I took refuge in the idea of Adam and Eve as our common parents; it diffused this terrible guilt they might be expected to feel not only over me but over all humankind. Since then I’ve come first to a disbelief in Adam and Eve then to a belief that this myth has 5353 been responsible for a great deal of suffering and discrimination against women (and a kind of ambivalence about the value of knowledge). And yet, when I needed a kind of comfort, its sense of a shared human origin was a help. So to reject now the absolute assumption of a single origin for the species and say perhaps that is not so is a rejection of a certain kind of comfort; yet if a profound and long-accepted myth is rejectable then I see no reason why pseudo-scientific assumptions should not also be rejected, or accepted provisionally, until we have proof of the same power with which most of us have used archeology, paleontology, carbon-dating and a host of other scientific tools to reject Adam and Eve and the idea of a specific act of Creation. * * * * * John Hetherington in Forty-Two Faces wrote, ‘Australians interested in military history had a standing lament in World War II. ‘Australia will never,’ they used to say, ‘find another Charlie Bean to write the history of this war!’ Time proved them wrong. C.E.W. Bean’s official history of Australia’s part in World War I is a formidable work, but it is not superior to Gavin Long’s history of Australia’s part in World War II. Neither Bean’s nor Long’s history is perfect, in the sense that nobody finds fault with it; no work of military history ever has or ever will be perfect in that sense.’ But Australian writing on the First World War set a benchmark; not from a literary point of view but from the point of clarity and breadth. Germany brought out Der Weltkreig 1914-18 in 14 volumes, as its official history, between 1925 and 1944 Britain produced 16 volumes, Canada, one. C.E.W. Bean set a standard which has been hard to follow but writers such as Dr John Laffin (who visited “all 758 cemetries in France and Belgium where Australians are buried”) have produced a similarly large body of military history. So I was interested in Laffin’s assertion: “Students of Hitler’s life have made far too little of the traumatic effect of frontline warfare on his mind. Despite his failings, however extreme he became, whatever the depth of evil in his soul, the man was a brave soldier, a genuine infantry veteran of an appalling war. He had seen horrors that turned some other soldiers mad and like other veterans of all the races involved in the war he wanted something to come out of the carnage and the waste, something to show that it had not all happened in vain.” (Sebastian Haffner in The Meaning of Hitler says “Strange though it might sound, his front-line experience was probably his only education.”) I agree. Peter Charlton in Pozieres 1916 records a letter written home by an Australian, Lt ‘Alec’ Raws, “from the battlefields of the Great Push with thousands of shellings passing in a tornado overhead and thousands of unburied dead around me. It seems easy to say that, but you who have not seen it can hardly conceive the awfulness of it all ... One feels on a battlefield such as this that one can never survive, or that if the body holds the brain must go forever. For the horrors one sees and the never-ending shock of the shells is more than can be borne. Hell must be a home to it. The Gallipoli veterans say that the Peninsula was a picnic to this push ... My battalion (23rd) has been in it for eight days and one-third of it is left—and all shattered at that. And they’re sticking it still, incomparable heroes all. We are lousy, stinking, ragged, unshaven, sleepless. Even when we’re back a bit, we can’t sleep, for our own guns. I have one puttee, a dead man’s helmet, another dead man’s gas protector, a dead man’s bayonet. My tunic is rotten with other men’s blood and partly spattered with a comrade’s brains. It is horrible, but why should you people at home not know?” This was Hitler’s life for more than 4 years except for the ‘relief’ of twice being hospitalised after gas had affected him. And what were the German people told about real conditions and real setbacks? Their censorship was much stricter than that imposed on Australian servicemen. The answer would appear to be “Not much”. So what else did Hitler learn from his experience as a soldier? Gentle philosopher, John MacMurray, may be at the other end of the spectrum in terms of how he lived his life 5454 but he writes frankly of the sense of comradeship in the trenches of WWI and his sense of disgust and disillusionment when he was home on sick leave and listened to the complaining, the outright black marketeering, the misuse of ordinary men’s courage and sacrifice. On leave after a year and a quarter in France he says, “I was shocked by the change in their attitude of mind. I felt as though an evil spirit had entered into them, a spirit of malice and hatred. Before twenty-four hours had passed I wanted to get back to the trenches, where for all the misery and destruction, the spiritual atmosphere was relatively clean.” He writes of war, “It could stop things—like the plans of the Kaiser—but it could construct nothing. I knew enough of history to realize that the great forward steps in human progress had in most cases been the results of warfare—but not the intended results; and the major result of the war in which I fought was wholly unintended—the setting up of Communism in Russia.” He felt, not that he had been ‘stabbed in the back’ nor that one specific segment of the population was to blame, but rather that organised religion had failed society. In 1916 he was asked to preach “in khaki” to a church in London and he urged people to prepare themselves for the task of reconciliation when war ended. But the “congregation took it badly; I could feel a cold hostility menacing me; and no one spoke to me when the service was over. It was after this service that I decided, on Christian grounds, that I should never, when the war was over, remain or become a member of any Christian Church. I kept to this resolve all my life as a university teacher.” Only in retirement did he feel able to return to organised religion. Hitler, too, had no time for organised religion. Walter Schellenberg says of him: “Hitler did not believe in a personal god. He believed only in the bond of blood between succeeding generations and in a vague conception of fate or providence. Nor did he believe in a life after death. In this connection he often quoted a sentence from the Edda, that remarkable collection of ancient Icelandic literature, which to him represented the profoundest Nordic wisdom: ‘All things will pass away, nothing will remain but death and the glory of deeds.’ ” But what perhaps has not been sufficiently studied is that hundreds of thousands of men felt similarly disenchanted. And as the war gradually moved into the background of people’s lives these disillusioned men moved into positions of greater responsibility and power. Morality and ethical beliefs were no longer seen as something absolutely fundamental to the way people lived their lives. No. They were what the victors said they were. They were what the powerful could impose on the powerless. It was a dangerous belief and the failures of the 1920s were basically failures of morality. I am sure it was a lesson not lost on Hitler. And his skilful manipulation of the German churches showed his contempt for organised religion at every step. The question is not: why did the German churches not speak out against Hitler? The question is why did the European churches and, to a smaller extent, its synagogues and mosques, go to War in 1914 with such joy? As Michael McKernan in his chapter ‘A holy war?’ in The Australian People and the Great War says bluntly, “The people had reason to feel disappointed in their clergy.” The other day I was chatting with someone who said one of the largest problems facing the world was de-mobbed soldiers. No society has ever yet got this right. Young men enter the military before they’ve acquired other skills, including inter-personal skills; they’re slotted in at the lowest end where they’re then bullied and brutalised, where they do the ‘dirty work’ but have no control over aims or strategies; they learn that the only power they have is over civilians and prisoners where the possession of a gun can gain them basic booty, can boost their self-esteem when they see people running away from them; after months, years, even decades, when they know nothing but war and atrocity they are finally told the war is over and they can get on with ‘life’. What life? Life has been war, not peace. If they are in a reasonably well off society they may be offered technical and professional courses, ‘soldier settlements’ (with their many economic and environmental shortcomings their only plus was perhaps that they provided a social mileiu 5555 in which men and families with similar experiences and problems could meet and mix), they may be de-briefed and counselled. They may be given a pension and prosthetics. But de-mobbed soldiers are dangerous. Dangerous to themselves. It wasn’t on the Burma Railroad that men suicided; it was when those men came home. Dangerous to their families, communities and colleagues. The mass shootings carried out by Vietnam Veterans in the USA should not come as a surprise. And dangerous to the nation, to the world. The roll-call is a grim one. Look at the 20th century’s strong men. From generals and ex-generals to sergeants, corporals and ex-corporals. Hitler, Goring, Mussolini, Franco, Tojo, Stalin, Idi Amin, Pinochet, Suharto, Ne-Win, Galtieri, Stroessner, Marcos, Pétain, Mobutu, Bokassa ... those who weren’t, such as Lenin and Salazar, are the exception rather than the rule. “The military is good for young men!” So goes the cry every so often. “Teaches them discipline.” Maybe. It teaches them a lot of other things as well. There are varying ways of re-incorporating de-mobbed soldiers. All of them have deficiencies. I am pleased the international community is at last looking at the issue as a global issue. But like most problems would it not be better if we did more to reduce the likelihood of men ending up as “Profession: De-mobbed Soldier”? * * * * * L. C. B. Seaman in From Vienna to Versailles offers a provocative view, “The myth of swift, world-defying success was the more compelling because it was their only myth. It was the only German history there was. Into the history of every other nation had been written the record of defeats as well as victories, of hesitancy as well as adventurousness, of disasters as well as triumphs. This was true even of the history of Prussia, as Bismarck never forgot; but it was not true of Bismarck’s Reich. Its history was only of success and therefore its national character could think only in terms of success, achieved easily and swiftly by an irresistible display of force, sometimes by the mere threat of force. ... the historical tradition of the Reich knew no principle other than that of the exercise of power for its own sake. The very phrases Weltpolitik and Flottenpolitik reveal in their purposelessness that the Reich had no aim but to be powerful for the sake of being powerful. To have an aim implies a readiness not merely to take action but also to limit action to what is essential to the achievement of the aim. To have a principle necessarily involves the exercise of restraint whenever action threatens to contradict the principle. Thus, all the other powers could point to specific ambitions which they would like to satisfy. France could point to Alsace-Lorraine; Russia could point to Constantinople; England to the defence of the seas and her empire; Austria-Hungary to the destruction of Serbia. But nothing could satisfy the Germans, because they had no aims to satisfy; and nothing could satisfy the principles Germany stood for, since Germany did not stand for any. Thus diplomacy could not settle Germany’s problems, because there were no problems that could be solved. There was only blind incoherent force, with which nobody could negotiate because it had no co-ordinating brain or directing intelligence.” Lord Frederic Hamilton in Vanished Pomps of Yesterday puts this in lay terms: “In the seven years between 1864 and 1871 Prussia had waged three successful campaigns. The first, in conjunction with Austria, against unhappy little Denmark in 1864; then followed, in 1866, the “Seven Weeks’ War,” in which Austria was speedily brought to her knees by the crushing defeat of Königgrätz or Sadowa, as it is variously called, by which Prussia not only wrested the hegemony of the German Confederation from her hundred- year-old rival, but definitely excluded Austria from the Confederation itself. The Hohenzollerns had at length supplanted the proud House of Hapsburg. Prussia had further virtually conquered France in the first six weeks of the 1870 campaign, and on the conclusion of peace found herself the richer by Alsace, half of Lorraine, and the gigantic war indemnity wrung from France. As a climax the King of Prussia had, with the consent 5656 of the feudatory princes, been proclaimed German Emperor at Versailles on January 18, 1871, for the astute Bismarck had realized how impossible it would be to induce the feudatory Kings and princes to acquiesce in the title “Emperor of Germany” for the Prussian King, much as he wished for it. “Deutscher Kaiser,” yes: “Kaiser von Deutschland,” no; for the latter title placed them in the implied position of vassals. The new Emperor was nominally only primus inter pares; he was not to be over-lord. Theoretically the crown of Charlemagne was revived, but the result was that henceforth Prussia would dominate Germany. This was a sufficient rise for the little State which had started so modestly in the sandy Mark of Brandenburg (the “sand-box,” as South Germans contemptuously termed it) in the fifteenth century. To understand the mentality of Prussians, one must realize that Prussia is the only country that always makes war pay. She had risen with marvellous rapidity from her humble beginnings entirely by the power of the sword. Every campaign had increased her territory, her wealth, and her influence, and the entire energies of the Hohenzollern dynasty had been centred on increasing the might of her army. The Teutonic Knights had wrested East Prussia from the Wends by the power of the sword only. They had converted the Wends to Christianity by annihilating most of them, and the Prussians inherited the traditions of the Teutonic Knights. Napoleon, it is true, had crushed Prussia at Jena, but the latter half of the nineteenth century was one uninterrupted triumphal progress for her. No wonder then that every Prussian looked upon warfare as a business proposition, and an exceedingly paying one at that. Everything about them had been carefully arranged to foster the same idea. All the monuments in the Berlin streets were to military heroes. The marble groups on the Schloss-Brücke represented episodes in the life of a warrior. The very songs taught the children in the schools were all militarist in tone: “The Good Comrade,” “The Soldier,” “The Young Recruit,” “The Prayer during Battle,” all familiar to every German child. When William II, ex-Emperor, found the stately “White Hall” of the Palace insufficiently gorgeous to accord with his megalomania, he called in the architect Ihne, and gave directions for a new frieze round the hall representing “victorious warfare fostering art, science, trade, and industry.” I imagine that William in his Dutch retreat may occasionally reflect on the consequences of warfare when it is not victorious. Trained in such an atmosphere from their childhood, drinking in militarism with their earliest breath, can it be wondered at that Prussians worshipped brute- force and brute-force alone?” It is a curious question: are we most in danger from the countries that have always won their wars or always lost their wars—but less so from the nations and peoples whose national myths equally contain mess and muddle and defeat and disaster as well as moments of triumph and victory? Or is it perceptions rather than facts which are the danger? Or the way the facts are used? Or … * * * * * The Archduke who went to Sarajevo and precipitated WWI had a strange private life, a life that might have precipitated war even if there had been no young Serbian nationalist waiting for him. I came across these two stories in Tales of Castles in the Kingdom of Bohemia by Edveard Petiska: The Archduke and Dragons The time of legends is not over. Stories come into being even in modern times. The name of that best known lord of Konopiste, Archduke Francis Ferdinand d’Este, is often spoken in psychiatric contexts. Especially his sinister passion is mentioned—his passion for killing. He killed thousands and thousands of animals when out hunting, not for the joy of the hunt. He dealt out death for the delight of killing. He was not a huntsman, even his contemporaries thought of him as a butcher. Like many of the Habsburgs he was pathologically cruel—when he flew into a rage 5757 he did not hesitate to raise a whip or a sword against those around him ... The collection of St. Georges that this “high-born butcher” accumulated at Konopiste castle became renowned and outlived him. The people of his time could not understand why the archduke collected so passionately every kind of representation of St. George fighting the dragon. Banners, gravestones, coins, pipes ... everything that bore a picture of St. George was sent to Konopiste to swell the strange collection of this eccentric magnate. But the archduke did not collect his Georges and dragons without reason. He had a great dream. He had heard that the English King George collected images of his namesake and patron saint. He was determined that not the King of England but he would have the biggest collection of St. Georges in the world. And so ever more hundred and hundreds of objects with the motif of the dragon- killer found their way to Konopiste castle. The archduke spent huge sums of money on this collection, which contained works of art besides worthless trash ... he ordered more and still more objects to be sent to the castle. It seemed he was interested in nothing but their number. A crazy dream ... One day the archduke would invite the English king to shoot partridges at Konopiste, and that day the English king would be astounded when he saw that it was not he who had the biggest collection of St. Georges in the world, but d’Este. They never met at Konopiste. The archduke was shot and the English king entered the war against the Austrian empire. Only the collection of St. Georges remained in memory of a conceited longing ... The archduke amassed thousands of dragons—and he did not realize that people carry the worst dragons in their hearts, a great evil that may sometimes be invisible even to themselves. Knowing how to drive out the dragon from one’s own heart is a great art.

The Birth of War Wars arise from small causes that build up into big reasons. It is hard to say what the real reason was for this or that war. The First World War, that brought misery to Europe for four years, also had many reasons. But two places that contributed towards it are known. The first of them, Sarajevo, is known even to schoolchildren, the second is known to few people. In Sarajevo the successor to the Austro-Hungarian throne, Lord of Konopiste, Archduke Francis Ferdinand d’Este, was killed. This assassination is considered to be the excuse for the beginning of the First World War. Yet this beginning also had its beginning ... On 12th June 1914 the German emperor came to Konopiste castle to agree on an alliance of war with the archduke. The archduke’s wife was a Czech countess, Sofie Chotek. He had married her after a long romantic relationship, when he had to struggle with the Austrian court. He had his own way, instead of a royal bride he married the woman he wanted ... but he had to pay for it. He remained successor to the throne even after his wedding, but it was a morganatic marriage, and the children of his marriage with the Czech countess would have had no claim to rule the Austrian empire. And the German emperor, who lusted for war, made use of just this fact: he promised to see that the archduke’s children should gain the right of inheritance ... even that they should win still other thrones, those that he would conquer in war. 5858

The archduke was willing to be persuaded. Perhaps there had never before been more secret negotiations in the whole of Austria than those between the archduke and the emperor in Konopiste, negotiations held behind the Austrian ruler’s back. He did not agree with the German plans for a European war. The archduke knew that he would have to wait till the old Austrian emperor died, and then he would become emperor ... He knew that the emperor had no love for him, and that if the emperor’s only son, Prince Rudolph, did not commit suicide, the Austrian emperor would never agree to see the archduke on the throne ... The castle was extremely well guarded during these supersecret talks ... The doors were lined with big mattresses, so that not a single sentence should go further than to the ears of the two who were discussing ways and means. So anxious were they that those sentences should be secret. Evil always has to be kept the most secret. The archduke heeded no warnings and went to Sarajevo, where both he and his wife were assassinated. But the plan that he and the German emperor had thought up went into effect without him ... Years passed ... The war that was planned here had broken out, brought endless suffering, caused unimaginable damage and ended. Those who had caused it had lost their power, respect, their lives ... Indeed the Austrian empire, one of the mightiest in Europe, came to an end in this war. All that remained were stories ... A story about the castle where two people agreed on a great evil, two people decided on the misery and suffering of whole nations ... How many millions of people died, were wounded, broken-hearted, because of the sentences that two men exchanged in the rooms of a Czech castle. They supposed they had the fate of the world in their hands. While not even their own fate was within their power. * * * * * Whilst the question of material damage, and culpability, to Belgium in WWI is a resolvable question, the less tangible question of the abuse of its people remains a hot potato. Susan Brownmiller in Against Our Will deals with it in some detail. ‘When the Germans invaded Belgium in August, 1914, rape was suddenly catapulted into prominence as the international metaphor of Belgian humiliation. This unprecedented attention had little to do with an understanding of the rights of women. It had a lot to do with the evolution of a new form of battle—the scientific use of propaganda. We are indebted for our most complete and factual knowledge of rape in World War I to the distinguished British historian Arnold Joseph Toynbee, who was a young Thucydides scholar at Oxford when the war broke out. Toynbee published two small volumes in 1917, one devoted to the early months of the war in Belgium and a second to the war in France. Both books were basically compendiums of German Army atrocities, gathered by Allied commissions of investigation and cross-checked against available German documents. As Toynbee and his contemporaries saw it, the German General Staff deliberately mounted a campaign of terror in the first three months of the war. From Liège to Louvain, as Toynbee wrote it, the German Army cut a swath of horror. Houses were burned, villages were plundered, civilians were bayonetted, and women were raped. “A number of women” were raped at Tremeloo. At Rotselaer “a girl who was raped by five Germans went out of her mind.” In Capelle-au-Bois a woman told how “the German soldiers had held her down by force while other soldiers had violated her 5959 daughter successively in an adjoining room.” At Corbeek-Loo “a girl of sixteen was violated by six soldiers and bayonetted in five places for offering resistance.” An eyewitness who survived the siege of Louvain reported, “The women and children were separated ... Some German soldiers came up to me sniggering and said that all the women were going to be raped ... They explained themselves by gestures.” That was a sample of August in Belgium. The pattern held for September in France. Jouy-sur-Morin: “Two Germans came into a house carrying looted bottles of champagne, and violated a girl of eighteen—the mother was kept off with the bayonet by each soldier in turn.” Le Ferte-Gaucher: “The Germans broke into a house and violated a woman in the presence of her four-year-old child.” Amillis: “They violated a woman, attacking her with bayonets drawn and revolver in hand.” Beton-Bazoches: “They violated a woman ... with her child three years old in the room.” Sancy-les-Provins: “A woman whose husband was with the colours and who was alone in the house with four children was violated by a German cyclist quartered on her for the night.” On the road from Fosse to Vitrival, an eyewitness recounted, “A soldier approached one of the women, intending to violate her, and she pushed him away. He at once struck the woman in the breast with his bayonet. I saw her fall.” Château-Thierry ... Charmel ... Gerbeviller ... a tale of rape in each town. The terror continued in northern France through the month of October, broken briefly by the Battle of the Marne. It was the same story in Flanders and along the Franco-Belgian border. A British professor of constitutional law named J.H.Morgan examined the sworn statements of thirty women who were raped at Bailleul during eight days of occupation. Because he was a cautious lawyer he also demanded and received their medical certificates of injury. Professor Morgan later published his findings. Outrages upon the honour of women by German soldiers have been so frequent that it is impossible to escape the conviction that they have been condoned and indeed encouraged by German officers ... At least five officers were guilty of such offences, and where the officers set the example the men followed ... In one case, the facts of which are proved by evidence that would satisfy any court of law, a young girl of nineteen was violated by one officer while the other held her mother by the throat and pointed a revolver, after which the two officers exchanged their respective roles. The officers and soldiers usually hunted in couples, either entering the houses under pretense of seeking billets or forcing the doors by open violence. Frequently the victims were beaten and kicked, and invariably threatened with a loaded revolver. Nieppe ... Laventie ... Lorgies ... Armentières ... Estaires ... Toward the end of 1914 the strategy of warfare underwent a revolutionary change. Historians agree that war was “modernized”: stationary trenches, barbed wire, machine guns, gas and gas masks replaced the concept of the maneuvering, marching army. From the best information available it appears that the incidence of rape and other weapons of terror employed by the German Army dramatically dropped off at approximately the same moment in time. Interestingly, the young Arnold Toynbee was at great pains in 1917 to deny that the two events were related. He was convinced that the German Army abandoned rape and other terror tactics independent of their adoption of stationary trench warfare, and that the commission of atrocities on a grand scale during the first three months of the war was deliberate in its limits. This has not been due to the immobility of the fronts (he argued), for although it is certainly true that the Germans have been unable to overrun fresh territories on the west, they have carried out greater invasions than ever in Russia and the Balkans, which have not been marked by outrages of the same specific kind. This seems to show that the systematic warfare against the civilian population in the campaigns of 1914 was the result of policy, deliberately tried and deliberately given up. This hypothesis would account for 6060 the peculiar features in the German Army’s conduct … The imposition of a Machiavellian scheme on German Army rape is tantalizing, but I fear when Toynbee wrote these sentences he was serving the cause of propaganda more than the cause of history. It is logical to believe that rape may have been a deliberate tactic of the German Army during the first few months of the war, or if not deliberate, certainly not discouraged, but it seems more rational to conclude that the opportunity to rape was effectively cut down by the new system of stationary trench warfare, the frequency curtailed by military stalemate, and the horror of it superseded by the staggering loss of life as the war went on. After the first three months of the war, the Allied countries no longer bothered to tally rape reports or tried to verify the rumors. There was no need. The war had given birth to a new and highly effective tool of battle: the scientific use of international propaganda. The German Army may have temporarily seized the military initiative, but in the vivid war of propaganda it was the Allied nations that swarmed the field and moved decisively. In the hands of skilled Allied manipulators, rape was successfully launched in world opinion, almost overnight, as a characteristic German crime, evidence of the “depraved Boche” penchant for warfare by atrocity. Never before in history had rape in war—the privilege of territorial conquest— boomeranged quite so spectacularly. Neutral America was the chief target of the propaganda technicians from both sides of the fence, but the unimaginative German never stood a chance. “The Rape of the Hun” became an instant byword in this country. It came to symbolize the criminal violation of innocent Belgium. It dramatized the plight of La Belle France. It charged up national patriotism and spurred the drive for Liberty Loans by adding needed authenticity to the manufactured persona of an unprincipled barbarian with pointed helmet and syphilitic lust who gleefully destroyed cathedrals, set fire to libraries, and hacked and maimed and spitted babies on the tip of his bayonet. As propaganda, rape was remarkably effective, more effective than the original German terror. It helped to lay the emotional groundwork that led us into the war. In his 1927 study, Propaganda Techniques in the World War, the pioneer work in propaganda analysis, Harold D. Lasswell wrote, “A handy rule for arousing hate is, if at first they do not enrage, use an atrocity.” As for the propaganda value of rape, Lasswell speculated, “These stories yield a crop of indignation against the fiendish perpetrators ... and satisfy certain powerful, hidden impulses. A young woman. ravished by the enemy, yields a secret satisfaction to a host of vicarious ravishers on the other side of the border.” Lasswell’s Freudian analysis is a revealing glimpse of the male mentality. (It could hardly apply to the reactions of women.) It is even more revealing when we realize that he wrote those lines to leave the reader with doubt as to whether or not women actually were raped in any great number in Belgium and France. His next and final words on the subject were “Hence, perhaps, the popularity and ubiquity of such stories.” But Lasswell’s theory certainly does apply to the lustful rape-mongering prose that was cheerily ground out by Allied propaganda mills once they moved into full swing. German Atrocities: Their Nature and Philosophy by one Newell Dwight Hillis, a volume that was simultaneously published in Great Britain, the United States and Canada in 1918, is a vintage example. The author, a popular Brooklyn clergyman in his day, lovingly built his own amazing construct as to why German soldiers committed rape. None of it had anything to do with hostility toward women, naturally. Should the average American return home at night to find that his wife and children had been massacred and mutilated in his absence, he would not go to the office on the following morning ... and weeks would pass before he could steel his hand to the accustomed task. Now the German war staff fully realized the true value of the atrocity as a military instrument. Their soldiers ran no risk in ... raping young girls, but they hoped that when the news of their crimes reached the armed opponent, the atrocity committed 6161 upon his wife or child would break his nerve and leave him helpless to fight. The Reverend Hillis reported the desperate cry of a French soldier: “The Germans have been in my land for a year ... My little house is gone, and gone my little shop! My wife is still a young woman! My little girl—she is just a little, little girl! Why, I never thought of her as a woman! And now our priest writes me that my young wife and my little girl will have babes in two months by these brutes!” After which the author intoned, Such devastations of the soul are why there must be no inconclusive peace. Unconditional surrender is the only word. ... After reading this kind of emotional propaganda it might be said quite seriously that the raped women of France and Belgium, by the way in which their violation was cleverly turned to Allied advantage, played a real role in the ultimate defense of their countries. But if a reader believes that this unusual contribution far beyond the line of duty has been duly recognized in history, please be disabused of that notion. There was one further way to play with rape in World War I, and of course that happened, too. The final step was to deny that rape occurred at all. When the war was over, a wholly predictable reaction set in. Scholars of the newly refined art of propaganda set about to unravel its mysteries by trying to separate fact from fiction. It was inevitable that a deep bias against women (particularly against women who say they have been raped) would show in their endeavor. There had been some gross lies in the manufacturing of Allied propaganda and these were readily brought to light by the experts. Among the most famous of the fabricated wartime stories was the tale of German soldiers who spitefully cut the hands off Belgian children to render them unfit for fighting when they grew up. A few widely circulated atrocity photographs were shown to have been lifted from other theaters of war. Some German Army excesses were indisputable, even if they had been blown out of proportion for propaganda purposes. Yes, the cathedral at Rheims had been burned, and yes, the library at Louvain had truly been vandalized. But what about the rape of all those women? The crime that is by reputation “the easiest to charge and the hardest to prove” has traditionally been the easiest to disprove as well. The rational experts found it laughably easy to debunk accounts of rape, and laughably was the way they did it.’ Rape has been part of every military campaign, ancient and modern. Those who laugh it off as exaggerated or even as not happening at all in Belgium and France have some explaining to do. History is not on their side. * * * * * To carry out a campaign of genocide in a dictatorship is reasonably simple; to carry out such a campaign in a dictatorship and under cover of war is much easier; but what about carrying out genocidal policies in a democracy with, moreover, a free press and a range of legal, social and religious institutions committed, in theory at least, to a view of life which is humane, decent and free. Considerable subtlety is obviously required. I would also suggest that a range of strategies need to be in place and they need to be carried forward with considerable flexibility, discretion and patience. A few suggestions: 1. You diffuse responsibility for any actions, and inactions, between state and federal governments; you further diffuse responsibility within the states through a variety of departments and agencies and farm out some responsibilities to churches, pastoral companies, charities and quangos. You make sure there is no one source of overall information, accountability or fiduciary responsibility. Differing systems of accounting and data collecting can be used and different designations are helpful. 2. You do not take a census within the sub-group to be removed. You might even write it specifically into your Constitution that “natives shall not be counted”. There is no one collection of births, deaths and general population figures. A decline is less noticeable if there are no benchmarks and constant talk of a ‘dying race’ cannot be questioned, even 6262 as it convinces the nation of its inevitability. 3. You move people on to Reserves and Missions; you move people between Reserves and Missions, sometimes as many as six times in their lives. Moves do not have to be explained or justified and can be carried out with only sufficient time given to pack a bag and get to the bus or train. Family groups can be broken up. People of different clans and tribes and language-groups can be herded into close proximity and any subsequent problems can be blamed on their lack of civilization. 4. You co-opt the media so that official stories of “decline” or “assimilation” are vague. Unofficial stories can be presented in any negative form, can be filled with racial slurs, and can use unchecked slander, abuse or villification. It is permitted to refer to the sub-group as “lazy”, “dirty”, “stupid”, “cowardly”, “unpatriotic”, “superstitious”, ‘treacherous”, “dishonest” and “unreliable”. 5. You prepare the ground from childhood up by sanctioning school text-books that praise “discoveries”, “explorations” and the courage of the dominant group in adverse and dangerous circumstances. The sub-group is either not mentioned at all, or is presented as “savage” or “hostile” or if mentioned in a slightly better light is presented as “Charley”, “Jacky” or perhaps only “friendly natives”; no suggestion of identity, tribal background or ultimate fate is given and the means to learn such things is avoided by an almost total lack of checkable information. Their knowledge, usefulness or abilities are glossed over or not mentioned. Definitive information is given on the death of the “last” member of the sub- group, undermining the ability of any remaining relatives to claim their identity. Books for older readers imply the disappearance of tribes occurred without any action being taken by the dominant group. 6. You foster such a sense of shame that anyone who knows or believes they might have an ancestor from the sub-group will hide the fact or give themselves a different origin. The name and the background of the ancestor will be glossed over, spelled wrongly, left blank, expunged or forgotten, and stories will focus on ancestors from the dominant group. 7. You will follow Field-Marshall Wilhelm Keitel’s admirable advice to promulgate a “Nacht und Nebel” or “Night and Fog” policy (simply adapting his advice “Effective and lasting intimidation can only be achieved whether by capital punishment or by means which leave the relatives and the population in the dark about the fate of the culprit”); people’s sense of themselves is best undermined by the removal of family members and the provision of nothing but blank indifference to all requests for information and help. You will add in the bizarre twist that should any of these “Night and Fog” people ever manage to reunite you will have ensured that they no longer have the means for the most basic communication: a shared language. 8. You guard against the development of a mixed raced group which might become identifiable in its own right and might bridge this legal, cultural, social and political gap (might even demand the right to vote!) by focussing most energy in to the areas required to break up such relationships—by arbitrary hiring and firing, by moving people between stations, reserves and missions, and particularly by removing the children of such liaisons so that they are both denied knowledge of dominant group paternity, access to dominant group rights, and knowledge of origins and identity. 9. You encourage the regular removal of children throughout the country, though without any central coordinating body that might ever be held accountable. Children can be taken at any age, without explanation, without preparation, without justification, without disclosing their place of detention and without the requirement to look into their actual family situation, health status, or provision of any statistics to prove neglect or abuse. 10. Children may be moved between a number of institutions and foster homes in the course of their childhood. There is no requirement that siblings or related children be kept 6363 together. Names can be arbitrarily changed without the permission of parents or children. Children are not required to be educated to any particular standard or trained in any particular skill. They can be sent out to employers before the age of twelve and no further responsibility for their moral and material welfare need be taken. No records need be made of their origin, family, place of birth, or movement between places of incarceration. Any records kept should eventually be destroyed. No requirement exists to provide children with any information about family or place of origin when they leave the place of incarceration. 11. All those involved in the arbitrary removal of children are to be given benign designations such as “Welfare” or “Protection”; all such actions are to be presented as positive proof of a government commitment to “Advancement”, “Assimilation” and “Progress”. No legal liability should exist for physical or mental harm occurring during the removal, transporting or incarceration process. No further contact between children and family members is to be permitted in the best interests of the children’s adaptation to dominant group culture, language, religion and social mores. 12. The group has no precise status in law and such limited general rights as may be postulated, such as habeus corpus, can be removed by practical considerations, such as lack of money, lack of space, lack of trained personnel, (and no reasonable person would suggest that being chained to a log constitutes imprisonment anyway). No interpreters need be provided and it does not matter if the defendant does not understand a word of his trial; no knowledge of the legal system under which the trial is held need be given; no information on legal rights need be provided. No witnesses need be called (see above for practical considerations); nor will financial help to mount a defence or translate documents be provided. Members of the sub-group are limited in the accusations they can bring against members of the dominant group. They are provided with no means of access to family support throughout remand, trial, or imprisonment. Should they prove unable to cope with confinement in small spaces and take their own lives it is nobody’s fault but their own and shows a lack of “moral fibre”. 13. They should be blamed for their own health problems. Ignorance, abysmal hygiene, lack of maternal feelings, carelessness, neglect, superstition and stupidity are to blame, not inadequate diets and overcrowding on reserves and missions, not the spread of diseases to which they can have no practical immunity, not the wearing of cast-off or unsuitable clothing, not the lack of bedding, toilets, fresh water, not the confinement to small worm-infested areas, prohibitions on hunting and fishing, or the lack of medical care. When they attend clinics or hospitals they are invariably left to last, regardless of the seriousness of their illness or accident. They are treated with such indifference, fastidious dislike, or criticism, that they only come with the greatest reluctance, leaving many lesser illnesses and wounds to fester and debilitate. 14. Anyone attempting to draw attention to the situation—let alone change anything!—or even provide basic information on political or legal rights, health care or educational possibilities, or even to talk as equals, is either denied access to reserves and government documents, or can be undermined and marginalised by the use of descriptions such as “communist agitator”, “left-wing ratbag”, “dangerous eccentric”, “do-gooder”, “bleeding heart liberal” ... or by a simple statement that they were acting under a misapprehension, didn’t have access to the full facts (which no one was going to provide anyway even if “full facts” might ever have been collected and collated), saw an unrepresentative group, only spoke to troublemakers, did not spend sufficient time there (their length of access being determined by government officers) to develop a realistic perspective, deliberately distorted facts provided by government and other workers with years of experience ... etc ... 15. Although massacres in remote areas are still permissible, and will receive no more than a slap on the wrist, if brought to trial at all, different strategies make better 6464 sense. Very high infant and child mortality rates diminish the problem at one end, (and can be blamed on the woeful care provided by mothers); short lives, permanently malnourished, lived in chronic ill-health, assist in the continued high level of stillbirths and sickly infants, and death will come 20, 30 or even 40 years before death in the dominant group. Deliberate removal of people to infertile areas, where numbers will soon remove any possibility of fresh meat from hunting, siting of settlements in unhealthy low-lying brackish areas, dependence on government funding, irregular supplies, poor transport, all will combine to keep fresh foods out of the sub-group’s diet. (And if any questions are asked it will be pointed out that they do not seem to like eating fresh fruits and vegetables.) 16. The right of government departments to intrude in every aspect of the sub- group’s life, including the most private and intimate, should be retained. This can include the right to veto marriages, removal of the rights to procreate by setting up separate dormitories and living areas for men and women, boys and girls, even if necessary locking such areas at night, deliberate break-up of families by removal of husbands, fathers or children from the family unit, denial of the right to own anything which might give a sense of purpose, self-worth or identity. Living quarters belong to government or church bodies, the land ditto, people can be removed from areas where they have established food gardens, orchards, or livestock operations without compensation or recognition of their efforts, rights to own pets, boats, vehicles, radios, books, furniture or other belongings are limited or non-existent. Belongings may be marked in such a way that people are constantly reminded that these things are the property of the government and any damage or loss may result in their removal or deductions being made from wages or provisions. Bank accounts cannot be used except with the express permission of a member of the dominant group and only “pocket money” may be withdrawn. Accounts cannot be transferred, opened or closed except with that express permission. No information will be provided to the account owner as to the amount of savings achieved. Workers can legally be paid in goods, including tobacco, cast-off clothing, or defective supplies. Where wages are paid they can be less than a half or even a third of dominant group wages. Where living quarters and food are provided they can be assessed at a worth that removes all requirement to pay wages. Wages can be tied to purchases, at high prices, at reserve or station shops and canteens. Wages can be garnisheed by government departments to cover the costs of administering the overseeing, forced travel, and collection of government information on the sub-group. Savings can be removed without permission and diverted to general government revenue so as to provide services to the dominant group—while the fecklessness, laziness and ignorance of the sub-group is to be blamed for their lack of access to equivalent services. 16. Should anyone from outside the region, state or nation raise questions a variety of useful responses are to hand: a) This is an internal affair and not your business. b) Your record is so poor that it might be wise for you to clean up your own backyard before daring to criticise anyone else. c) A deluge of statistics, all pointing to improved child health, better nutrition, improved education, a growing number of schools etc, can be provided. Added to glowing talk of “assimilation” the fact that sub-group statistics are either not included or have been averaged out into meaninglessness may be missed. d) Mention is made of the profound difficulties incumbent upon dedicated dominant group workers to bring a nomadic, naked, stone age sub-group to full participation in the benefits of dominant group civiliation, society, comfort, and well-being, in only a couple of generations. Where else in the world have such immense strides been taken in such a short length of time. Where else has such a group been able to simply disappear into the dominant group without tension, trouble or notice. Their disappearance around the country is a reminder of the speed and ease with which the dominant group is absorbing them, and 6565 the kind of welcome they are receiving. e) If all else fails, a carefully organised visit to a sub-group Home will be arranged. Here children sing “God Save the King” lustily and are later seen playing happily with a newly-provided cricket bat and ball. No mention need be made of threats to the children to ensure they “smile for the visitor”; anything from “naughty children go to hell” to promises of “the stick” to “you won’t get any dinner if I see—” 17. Families are forcibly removed from ancestral lands, and denied access to sacred places, clean waterholes are befouled, barbed wire fences are run through initiation grounds, the removal of younger men and women disrupts ceremonies and the passing on of language, culture and spiritual beliefs; damage to land, totem animals, songlines and other aspects of physical and cultural health is constant, legal, and irremediable, and complaints are “a lot of nonsense”. Religious beliefs are denigrated, links to family, clan and land, so vital for mental and physical health and a sense of identity, are deliberately broken. Talk of belonging to the land is treated as superstitious nonsense. 18. That the sub-group has moved from being 100% of the population to less than 1% in only a hundred years is seen as a matter for congratulation rather than dismay. And when, “after all we’ve done for them”, these people, beaten and undermined at every turn, give up hope in their future and belief in themselves—well, we always knew these people do not have what it takes to make their way in a modern, democratic, progressive young country with opportunities for everyone “willing to put their back into it” ... Pity, but there it is. * * * * * I came upon this bit about my uncle in Air War Against Germany & Italy 1939 - 1943 by John Herington: “The other missing pilots were Cameron and Flying Officer Jones who were both recaptured by the enemy and taken to Tripoli. Twice before Cameron had managed to rejoin the squadron after being shot down, but although he and Jones escaped from Tripoli on 17th January and began to walk eastwards they were eventually betrayed by Arabs on the 22nd, recaptured, and finally imprisoned in Italy. Much later, in September 1943, Jones escaped from a train in northern Italy, made his own way into Switzerland and finally, in July 1944, crossed into France to join the French forces of the Interior. About the same date, when, after the capitulation of Italy, prisoners of war were being transferred to Germany, Cameron also jumped from a prisoners’ train, but was again apprehended after one day in hiding.” Most escapes, or attempted escapes, are like that: jumping from trains, cutting through fences, leaping from prison vans, dressing up in some one else’s clothes, there is something spontaneous and ad hoc about most of them. But, in the same week, I was reading Airey Neave’s They Have Their Exits and it occurred to me that ‘escape’ stories, like castaway/desert island stories, are a little genre all their own, regardless of whether they are fiction, non-fiction, or something in-between. And no matter how pedantic the writing they have their own in-built excitement. Will the escaper escape? But Neave, after his escape from Colditz in Germany with Dutchman Toni Luteyn, came back to Germany after the war as one of the British team to the Nuremberg Trials where he served a copy of the Indictment on General-Fieldmarshal Keitel, Chief of the High Command of the German Armed Forces, member of the Council of Ministers for the Defence of the Reich. He writes, “Keitel never tried to escape from Nuremberg, for escape is not only a technique but a philosophy. The real escaper is more than a man equipped with compass, maps, papers, disguise and a plan. He has an inner confidence, a serenity of spirit which make him a Pilgrim. For Keitel there was no Promised Land to seek.” * * * * * That Hitler milked the Treaty of Versailles for all it was worth is well attested and Versailles is still seen as the major factor in the rise of Nazism; eg. “The Nazis thrived due to the viciousness of the World War One peace terms.” (The New Internationalist Jan/Feb 6666

1999) or “But if the Great War was a tragedy, the Treaty of Versailles was a travesty.” (Hall of Mirrors David Sinclair). But what precisely was in the Treaty and how does it compare with other Treaties of that era? Its predecessor, of course, signed in that same place was the Treaty which ended Germany’s war with France in 1871 and gave it the territory of Alsace-Lorranie. Then, “Under the peace terms dictated by Germany at Versailles in 1871 France had suffered amputation, indemnity and occupation. Even a triumphal march by the German Army down the Champs Elysées was among the terms imposed.” Barbara Tuchman goes on to say, “They insisted and convinced the Emperor that the border provinces with Metz, Strasbourg and the crest of the Vosges must be sliced off in order to put France geographically forever on the defensive. They added a crushing indemnity of five billion francs intended to hobble France for a generation and lodged an army of occupation until it should be paid. With one enormous effort the French raised and paid off the sum within three years and their recovery began.” William Clarke says of it, “Baron Alphonse de Rothschild, faced with a blustering Bismarck after France’s disastrous defeat in 1871 and his demand for a huge indemnity to Prussia of 5,000 million francs, against the threat of Prussian troops remaining on French soil until it was paid, raised the staggering sum in the international markets in less than two years, to the deep disappointment of the Prussian leader.” This worked out at 9% of France’s net national product in the first year and 16% in the second. This Treaty, too, cast a long shadow. Peter Ackerman and Jack Duvall in A Force More Powerful write of WWI, “Beyond the appalling losses sustained by the armies who fought it, the war that was called the Great War had ravaged some of France’s most productive lands. The nation’s northernmost areas were virtually leveled. When German generals still had high hopes of winning the war, they planned to annex the northern coal fields of France and seize Belgian mines. When it became clear that Germany would be defeated, General Eric Ludendorff ordered the mines blown up and flooded out. The only purpose: to cripple their rival’s industry. Six months after the Armistice, French senator Paul Doumer had described the obliterated territory as “a desert, a zone of death, assassination and devastation. There are corpses of horses and corpses of trees covering the corpses of men.” Before the war it had had some of the best cropland and most efficient manufacturing capacity in the country. Now it was clear that France itself could never recuperate until the northern lands were up and running again. One man with a personal sense of the north’s agony was Raymond Poincaré, who had served as French premier during the war. He was from Lorraine, a region between France and Germany whose resources had made it a prize traded by a millennium of alternating invaders. When France was crushed by Prussia in 1870, Poincaré, only ten years old at the time, saw German troops on his native streets—an occupation that lasted until French war indemnities were paid. The premier would often justify his intractable position toward Germany by noting that “the Germans stayed in France until 1873 and were paid before evacuating our territory.” When Germany invaded neutral Belgium in August 1914 and occupied Brussels on the 20th, “the German flag was raised on the Town Hall, the clocks were put on German time, and an indemnity of 50,000,000 francs (£2,500,000) on the capital and 450,000,000 francs (£22,500,000) on the province of Brabant was imposed, payable within ten days.” In that same month, Germany was already drawing up the terms it would impose, so sure was it of success. These would include “abolition of neutral states at Germany’s borders, the end of England’s ‘intolerable hegemony’ in world affairs and the breaking up of the Russian colossus.” In Europe “Some states would be under German ‘guidance’, others, such as Poland and the Baltic group annexed from Russia, would be under German sovereignty for ‘all time’, with possible representation but no voting power in the 6767

Reichstag.” Germany would also “retain military control” over Belgium “and over the French coast from Dunkirk down to and including Boulogne and Calais. Germany would also acquire the Briey-Longwy iron basin and Belfort in Upper Alsace which she had failed to take in 1870. She would also take the French and Belgian colonies in Africa.” And “In reparations the vanquished nations were to pay at least ten billion marks for direct war costs, plus enough more to provide veterans’ funds, public housing, gifts to generals and statesmen and pay off Germany’s national debt, thus obviating taxes on the German people for years to come.” Was Versailles a fair recompense for France, the country which had suffered the most widespread damage to its towns, villages, farms, industries, infrastructure and environment? (Not forgetting, of course, the Belgian losses including the deliberate destruction in Louvain of its priceless libraries of medieval manuscripts.) And apart from the destruction, there were unofficial indemnities imposed by way of looting and ransoms such as the following report, “La Gorgue, Estaires, and Laventie were still inhabited, but all frequently shelled. They had been looted by the Germans in 1914, and the Maire of Estaires had been shot for failing to produce the demanded ransom.” (Frank L. Watson in True World War I Stories.) How many other towns saw public and private possessions carried away and how might we determine their value? It is perhaps worth remembering that Versailles was the only imposition on Germany. Whereas the ongoing damage to France and Belgium through unstable farmland, upset ecology, unexploded bombs and grenades, loss of old-growth forests (and their wildlife), loss of tourist potential by the loss of the charming little villages and historic buildings of northern France and Belgium (and their replacement with hurried concrete and brick blocks to house returning refugees), are losses which unoccupied Germany did not have to face every day. (And we should not forget the generosity of France’s allies in helping it rebuild—for example, children in Victoria saved their hard-earned pennies to rebuild the school in Villers-Bretonneux—a generosity which found no place in Germany.) Was Versailles a fair recompense to the nations robbed of their young men and left with the medical care for hundreds of thousands? How do you determine compensation for the loss of life? Insurance companies try to determine the value of everything—from the loss of a leg to the loss of earning capacity to the loss of a reputation—but is this a realistic benchmark to apply to losses in war-time? (In 1980 Britain was still paying for the care of 70,000 WWI veterans.) Was Versailles right to place war guilt squarely on Germany’s shoulders? The Austrian quarrel with Serbia was only one of many tensions between the two nations. It would’ve remained a localised Balkan problem if Germany had treated it as Austria’s quarrel. The ramshackle decadent quarrelling chaotic militarily-mediocre Austro- Hungarian empire was in no fit state to go to war with any country larger than Serbia. But Germany was chafing and champing at the bit, eager to flex its worldly muscles, keen to make up for a slow start in the race for colonies, infected by militarism and bombast, certain that an effete France would fall as quickly as it had in 1871 ... whether the total burden of war guilt should’ve been placed on Germany remains debatable. But war Germany wanted and war Germany got. It is ironic that Britain and France had presented the Kaiser as the personification of evil throughout the war but refused to have him sign on Germany’s behalf; instead he went off to comfortable ‘retirement’ in Holland and the moderates such as Prince Max of Baden and Friedrich Ebert (who could not conceivably be held responsible for launching the invasion of Belgium and France) were required to take up this burden; a burden which always deadened the efforts they and their successors made to create a working democracy in Germany. The Kaiser was safe in his peaceful exile in Holland because the Dutch were too afraid of their large German neighbour to hand him over to the British or French for 6868 possible trial as a war criminal. Various ideas were canvassed, including the Napoleon-on- St-Helena solution, but Dutch intransigence, German threats, and possibly a reluctance on Britain’s part to put the King’s cousin on trial, all left him unmolested in his secure haven. In the 1930s he finally came out and admitted publicly that it had been a mistake to mobilise the troops and a mistake to invade Belgium (‘Anyone who steals land he wasn’t born on is doomed’ 1938)—by which time such an admission had little meaning. If he had had the courage to come out and say in 1918 “I take full responsibility as Emperor and Supreme Commander. Any war guilt must primarily be mine. I deeply regret the suffering I helped impose on Europe” it would almost certainly have taken the heat out of the war guilt debate. But he stayed silent. Yet I am still not convinced that the economic burden of Versailles was unendurable. After all Germany had forced Russia to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in 1917 which “required Russia to renounce sovereignty in favour of Germany and Austria-Hungary over Russian Poland, Lithuania, Courland, Livonia, Estonia, and the Islands of the Moon Sound. To Turkey she had to cede Ardahan, Kars, and Batum. In addition she was forced to recognise the independence of Finland, the Ukraine, and Georgia, and to agree to reparation payments to the amount of 6,000 million marks in goods, bonds, and gold, on which she actually paid installments totaling 120 million gold roubles (£12,000,000). Russia lost 34% of her population, 32% of her agricultural land, 85% of her beet-sugar land, 54% of her industrial undertakings, and 89% of her coal mines. European Russia was dismembered; she was cut off from the Black Sea and very nearly from the Baltic also.” Part of this indemnity was £160 million in gold which then passed from Germany to France but it had come, metaphorically if not literally, out of the mouths of the starving Russian masses. As Michael Pearson in The Sealed Train points out, “Under a supplementary agreement to the Brest-Litovsk Treaty in August 1918, the new Soviet Government paid the Germans 120,000,000 gold rubles” or more than 240,000,000 marks. The pain to Germany was real but has it been over-stated? It was rather the short-cuts which Germany took to pay off the indemnity which proved so disastrous. The hyper-inflation of the early 1920s was a deliberate program to pay without pain. And throughout the ’20s the amount flowing into Germany in loans, mainly from the USA, exceeded the amount going out in war debts. “Between 1919 and 1932 Germany paid altogether 19.1 billion goldmarks in reparations, in the same period she received 27 billion goldmarks in net capital inflows, mainly from private investors, which were never repaid as a result of her defaults in 1923 and 1932.” When President Hoover set a moratorium on German payments he was acting in the belief that it was Versailles that was causing German banks to fail. Instead it did nothing to halt the tide of bankruptcy sweeping Germany because the problem was the type of loans Germany had been receiving (short-term loans) and the way they had, often, been spent, not on productive investment and development but rather on superficial projects or undeniable waste. When Hoover made the moratorium permanent it is debatable how many ordinary Germans were aware that they were no longer paying reparations. Certainly to read the way Hitler interpreted Versailles is to believe that France and its allies were still bleeding Germany dry. (Strangely, the most important Nazi throughout this period is arguably Hjalmar Schacht who as Director of the Reichsbank deliberately undermined Minister of Finance, Hilferding. Goronwy Rees in The Great Slump writes of Schacht’s “relentless animosity” and “Throughout 1929, Schacht used every means in his power to thwart the policies of the Reich government, both by the support he gave to Hugenberg’s and Hitler’s campaign against the Young Plan, and by restricting credits to the Ministry of Finance. When Popitz, State Secretary of the Ministry of Finance, approached Dillon, Red & Co. for a temporary loan, Schacht issued a statement denouncing the government for wastefulness and financial irresponsibility. The Americans, alarmed, inquired whether the Reichsbank had any 6969 objections to the proposed loan, Schacht replied in terms so violent that Popitz, who deeply resented Schacht’s blackmailing of the government, resigned, and his resignation was followed by that of Hilferding himself, who was unwilling to allow responsibility for the failure of the loan to fall on his subordinate.” Escaping POW, Richard Pape, recaught by the Germans in Holland in WW2 wrote, “I was told of Britain’s meekness when she nodded to the German’s repudiation of the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. I was asked to explain why the Bank of England issued huge sums of capital to a former enemy when Britain must have known that such money would never be repaid. ‘Please tell me,’ inquired the German, ‘why did your country act so detrimentally to her prestige?’” The image of Britain and France, tough when a degree of reconciliation might have blunted and undermined resentment, and weak when a degree of firmness might have undermined, underfunded and slowed German rearmament, hovers. But German toughness towards a beaten Russia also hovered as a reminder that Britain and France could expect no compassion—had the war gone in Germany’s favour. Schacht made sure that Nazism had the money it needed to succeed; he also made sure that the Weimar Republic’s monetary policies failed. Yet he walked away from Nuremberg a free man. We still fail to see that those who fund oppression and terror are as responsible as those who wield the weapons on the streets. Yet, as Niall Ferguson in The Pity of War, writes, ‘In reality, the peace terms were not unprecedented in their harshness and the German hyperinflation was mainly due to the irresponsible fiscal and monetary policies adopted by the Germans themselves. They thought they could win the peace by economic means. In British minds they did. The Germans were also more successful than any other country in defaulting on their debts, including the reparations demanded from them by the Allies. However, this victory was pyrrhic: it was won by democratic politicians at the expense of democracy and their own power.’ Germany’s loss of its colonies was a blow to its pride but it cannot be said that it was a major economic loss to see its territories handed out to Japan, Australia, Britain, France, Belgium and South Africa. The people on whom the change fell most heavily were the colonial people who were not consulted and from arbitrarily been forced to learn German and accommodate themselves to German demands were suddenly and equally arbitrarily forced to learn Japanese, French, or English and adapt to different demands. Versailles was not the only treaty to end what, in effect, was a swag of conflicts. For instance there was the Treaty of Trianon (between Hungary and the West) which, arguably, was much tougher given that Hungary had the least input into the decision to go to war, requiring that Hungary lose around two-thirds of its territory and two-thirds of its population (Germany lost around 10% of its area, much of this the recently acquired territories of Alsace-Lorraine and Schleswig-Holstein) and the Treaty of Sevres with Turkey which required Turkey to divest itself of its Middle Eastern and North African empire, and to give independence to Armenia and autonomy to Kurdistan. These last two requirements it successfully evaded; if ongoing resentment can be regarded as success. To look at the agreements that end wars is vital, but what about the agreements that are brushed aside in the lead-up to wars? Francis Anthony Boyle wrote, “What if Germany had not objected to the principle of obligatory arbitration at the First Hague Peace Conference, or to the conclusion of a multilateral obligatory arbitration treaty at the Second? What if the Latin American states had not opposed the formation of the Court of Arbitral Justice at the Second Hague Peace Conference over the issue of its composition, which did not impede adoption of the plan for the International Prize Court? What if the House of Lords had not rejected the Declaration of London and the International Prize Court in 1911? What if the nations of the world had proceeded on schedule in 1913 to 7070 enter into preliminary preparations for the convocation of the Third Hague Peace Conference in 1915? Would there have been a First World War in 1914 if any one or more of these international legal positivist developments had occurred prior thereto?” The real damage of Versailles, I think, was 1) that it was partly motivated by revenge; an understandable emotion but one which should have no place in international agreements, 2) that the people most responsible for the war, including Kaiser Wilhelm and General Ludendorff, were never brought to account, and 3) that the people on whom the burden fell most heavily had no real idea what they were paying for; cocooned by strict censorship and an absence of as-it-happens media they had no picture of the carnage except in statistical and human terms. Before Versailles was signed, every adult German could have been taken on a bus tour of the battle sectors or made to sit through detailed film footage of the destruction ... and, come to think of it, bus tours through the minefields of Cambodia and Angola should be de rigueur for every manufacturer of landmines ... and every company still making napalm should be required to visit their victims ... and so on ... The degree of mildness that Germany experienced after WW2, the Marshall Plan, the continued employment of ex-Nazis, help with re-establishing lives and livelihoods, is praised, perhaps rightly so, but unlike the specific requirements and time-frame contained in Versailles Germany has faced an on-going drain as a result of legal cases. I came upon a recent newspaper article by Paul Lloyd which notes “So, 56 years after the end of World War II, compensation claims are still coming, helped by the opening up of the Eastern Bloc of Europe. German industry has collectively announced it has raised nearly US$2.5 billion to start compensating former slave workers (but the money will not be released until lawsuits pending in the US have been dismissed, and that is not happening). As Benjamin Franklin once observed: “Wars are not paid for in wartime; the bill comes later.” The bill for Germany, postwar, included paying out more than US $60 billion towards the establishment of Israel. … Even as death rapidly claims the people directly involved, the demands for compensation seem ever-expanding … ” Tough medicine though Versailles was, the refusal to swallow it did Germany more harm than if it had accepted that bitter pill … * * * * * Although war novels such as All Quiet on the Western Front have worn better, the most famous novel of WWI during the war was surely The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse by Spanish novelist, Vicente Blanco Ibáñez, which came out in its original Spanish (Los cuatro jinetes del Apocalipsis) in 1916 and in English translation in 1918 and was eventually turned into the film which rocketted Rudolf Valentino to stardom. The story revolves around Julio Desnoyers, the son of a Frenchman who migrated to Argentina in the 19th century and made his fortune by marrying the daughter of a wealthy landowner. The other daughter has married a German immigrant, Karl Hartrott, and both families look to Europe, for “America is not the land of the learned” for culture, social advancement, a sense of heritage, and in the case of the Hartrotts, military careers. For young Julio, handsome, rich, a dilettante in search of love and adventure, Paris in 1914 is the place to be. Paris is wild about the tango but it is also a place of rumours, apprehension, hoarding and, eventually, war fever. Julio sees his lover, Marguerite, leave Paris to become a nurse and he, as a citizen of neutral Argentina, is embarrassed by his continuing carefree life. “Now they have invented a word for the stay-at-homes, calling them Les Embusqués, the hidden ones …. I am sick and tired of the ironical looks shot at me wherever I go; it makes me wild to be taken for an Embusqué.” So the reader knows that sooner or later Julio will find a way to join up and head for the war. But the book, unlike ‘war books’ of the time is not predominantly about life in the 7171 trenches but rather about the fate of a family divided by the war, the French and German branches uneasy, quarrelsome, afraid for each other’s sons, caught up in the fierce propaganda war—and about the fate of the civilian refugees that wash to and fro across the country, the victims of the four dread Horsemen. ‘They had fled blindly, pursued by fire and shot, as crazed with terror as the people of the middle ages trying not to be ridden down by the hordes of galloping Huns and Mongols. And this flight had been across the country in its loveliest festal array, in the most productive of months, when the earth was bristling with ears of grain, when the August sky was most brilliant, and when the birds were greeting the opulent harvest with their glad songs’ … and when Sr Desnoyers travels to visit his son at the Front, ‘Graveyard odours were all along the road’ … Ibáñez was born in Valencia in 1867 and was sent to prison at the age of 18 for writing an anti-monarchical poem. He founded the republican journal El Pueblo in 1891 and became a prolific novelist, writing half-a-dozen novels in ten years, and being elected to parliament in 1901. He was returned seven times but finally went into permanent exile in France in 1923 rather than accept the military dictatorship of Primo de Rivera. His heart and his sympathy were very much with France. He has a carpenter speaking to Julio in Paris: “We are going to make war on War … We are going to fight so that this war will be the last … We are going to fight for the future; we are going to die in order that our grandchildren may not have to endure a similar calamity. If the enemy triumphs, the war-habit will triumph, and conquest will be the only means of growth. First they will overcome Europe, then the rest of the world. Later on, those who have been pillaged will rise up in their wrath. More wars! … We do not want conquests. We desire to regain Alsace and Lorraine, for their inhabitants wish to return to us … and nothing more. We shall not imitate the enemy, appropriating territory and jeopardizing the peace of the world. We had enough of that with Napoleon; we must not repeat that experience.” And a Russian is used to describe Germany’s religious attitudes to the war: “Where is the Christianity of modern Germany? … There is far more genuine Christian spirit in the fraternal laity of the French Republic, defender of the weak, than in the religiosity of the conservative Junkers, Germany has made a god in her own image, believing that she adores it, but in reality adoring her own image. The German God is a reflex of the German State which considers war as the first activity of a nation and the noblest of occupations. Other Christian peoples, when they have to go to war, feel the contradiction that exists between their conduct and the teachings of the Gospel, and excuse themselves by showing the cruel necessity which impels them. Germany declares that war is acceptable to God. I have heard German sermons proving that Jesus was in favour of Militarism. “Teutonic pride, the conviction that its race is providentially destined to dominate the world, brings into working unity their Protestants, Catholics and Jews. “Far above their differences of dogma is that God of the State which is German—the Warrior God to whom (Kaiser) William is probably referring to as ‘my worthy Ally.’ Religions always tend toward universality. Their aim is to place humanity in relationship with God, and to sustain these relations among mankind. Prussia has retrograded to barbarism, creating for its personal use a second Jehovah, a divinity hostile to the greater part of the human race who makes his own the grudges and ambitions of the German people.” Tchernoff then explained in his own way the creation of this Teutonic God, ambitious, cruel and vengeful. … Pride of race, impelling them to war, had revived these dead divinities. The God of the Gospel was now adorned by the Germans with lance and shield like the old Teutonic god who was a military chief. “Christianity in Berlin wears helmet and riding boots. God at this moment is seeing Himself the same as Otto, Fritz, and Franz, in order to punish the enemies of His chosen 7272 people. That the Lord has commanded, ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ and His Son has said to the world, ‘Blessed are the peacemakers,’ no longer matters. Christianity, according to its German priests of all creeds, can only influence the individual betterment of mankind, and should not mix itself in affairs of state. The Prussian God of the State is ‘the old German God,’ the lineal descendant of the ferocious Germanic mythology, a mixture of divinities hungry for war.” In the silence of the avenue, the Russian evoked the ruddy figures of the implacable gods, that were going to awake that night upon hearing the hum of arms and smelling the acrid odour of blood. Thor, the brutal god with the little head, was stretching his biceps and clutching the hammer that crushed cities. Wotan was sharpening his lance which had the lightning for its handle, the thunder for its blade. Odin, the one-eyed, was gaping with gluttony on the mountain-tops, awaiting the dead warriors that would crowd around his throne. The dishevelled Valkyries, fat and perspiring, were beginning to gallop from cloud to cloud, hallooing to humanity that they might carry off the corpses doubled like saddle bags, over the haunches of their flying nags. “German religiosity,” continued the Russian, “is the disavowal of Christianity. In its eyes, men are no longer equal before God. Their God is interested only in the strong, and favours them with his support so that they may dare anything. Those born weak must either submit or disappear.” … To present a German point of view elsewhere, Ibáñez uses Julio’s oldest cousin, Professor von Hartrott. It gives the book a curiously prophetic air. But even before he reaches France Julio has this conversation with the war-mongering German captain of the liner on which he is sailing: “Look here, Captain,” he said in a conciliatory tone, “what you say lacks logic. How could war possibly be acceptable to industrial Germany? Every moment its business is increasing, every month it conquers a new market and every year its commercial balance soars upwards in unheard of proportions. Sixty years ago, it had to man its boats with Berlin hack drivers arrested by the police. Now its commercial fleets and war vessels cross all oceans, and there is no port where the German merchant marine does not occupy the greatest part of the docks. It would only be necessary to continue living in this way, to put yourselves beyond the exigencies of war! Twenty years more of peace and the Germans would be lords of the world’s commerce conquering England, the former mistress of the seas, in a bloodless struggle. And are they going to risk all this— like a gambler who stakes his entire fortune on a single card—in a struggle that might result unfavourably?” … On the future: ‘The family afflictions were aggravating the ferocity of Professor Julius von Hartrott. He was calculating in a book he was writing, the hundreds of thousands of millions that Germany must exact after her triumph and the various nations that she would have to annex to the Fatherland.’ On the past: “If they again should tread these stones! … Before, they were simple- minded folk, stunned by their rapid good-fortune, who passed through here like a farmer through a salon. They were content with money for the pocket and two provinces which should perpetuate the memory of their victory…. But now it will not be the soldiers only who will march against Paris. At the tail of the armies will come the maddened canteen- keepers, the Herr Professors, carrying at their side the little keg of wine with the powder which crazes the barbarian, the wine of Kultur. And in the vans will come also an enormous load of scientific savagery, a new philosophy which glorifies Force as a principle and sanctifier of everything, denies liberty, suppresses the weak and places the entire world under the charge of a minority chosen by God, just because it possesses the surest and most rapid methods of slaughter. Humanity may well tremble for the future if again the tramp of boots following a march of Wagner or any other Kapellmeister resounds under this archway.” And on race and the war: “Why store up so much power and maintain it without 7373 employment? … The empire of the world belongs to the German people. The historians and philosophers of Treitschke, were taking it upon themselves to frame the rights that would justify this universal domination. And Lamprecht, the psychological historian, like the other professors, was launching the belief in the absolute superiority of the Germanic race. It was just that it should rule the world, since it only had the power to do so. This “telurian germanization” was to be of immense benefit to mankind. The earth was going to be happy under the dictatorship of a people born for mastery. The German state, “tentacular potency,” would eclipse with its glory the most imposing empire of the past and present. Gott mit uns! “Who will be able to deny, as my master says, that there exists a Christian German God, the ‘Great Ally,’ who is showing himself to our enemies, the foreigners, as a strong and jealous divinity?” … The Kaiser, he believes is much too kind. As was Bismarck. “We need the colonies of the others, even though Bismarck, through an error of his stubborn old age, exacted nothing at the time of universal distribution, letting England and France get possession of the best lands. We must control all countries that have Germanic blood and have been civilized by our forebears.” Hartrott enumerated these countries. Holland and Belgium were German. France, through the Franks, was one-third Teutonic blood. Italy (he hesitated but mentioned) … nevertheless, the Longobards and other races coming from the North. Spain and Portugal had been populated by the ruddy Goth and also belonged to the dominant race. And since the majority of the nations of America were of Spanish and Portuguese origin, they should also be included in this recovery. “It is a little premature to think of these last nations just yet … but some day the hour of justice will sound. After our continental triumph, we shall have time to think of their fate….North America also should receive our civilizing influence, for millions of Germans are living there who have created its greatness.” “We have no illusions,” sighed the professor, with lofty sadness. “We have no friends. All look upon us with jealousy, as dangerous beings, because we are the most intelligent, the most active, and have proved ourselves superior to all others…. But since they no longer love us, let them fear us! As my friend Mann says, although Kultur is the spiritual organization of the world, it does not exclude bloody savagery when that becomes necessary. Kultur sanctifies the demon within us, and is above morality, reason and science. We are going to impose Kultur by force of the cannon.” (I couldn’t help thinking back on the frequent assertion ‘how could a nation which produced Beethoven and Bach produce Hitler and Himmler, etc’ … and found myself wondering if it was precisely because it had produced Beethoven and Bach that it produced the Nazis?) He also finds room in his spiel on superiority for the role of cunning. “Our government undoubtedly wishes that the others should declare the war. The rôle of outraged dignity is always the most pleasing one and justifies all ulterior resolutions, however extreme they may seem. There are some of our people who are living comfortably and do not desire war. It is expedient to make them believe that those who impose it upon us are our enemies so that they may feel the necessity of defending themselves. Only superior minds reach the conviction of the great advancement that can be accomplished by the sword alone, and that war, as our great Treitschke says, is the highest form of progress.” He wants the immediate declaration of War before France and Britain have time to prepare. “We are not making war in order to punish the Serbian regicides, nor to free the Poles, nor the other peoples oppressed by Russia, stopping there in admiration of our disinterested magnanimity. We wish to wage it because we are the first people of the earth and should extend our activity over the entire planet. Germany’s hour has sounded. We are 7474 going to take our place as the powerful Mistress of the World, the place which Spain occupied in former centuries, afterwards France and England to-day. What those people accomplished in a struggle of many years we are going to bring about in four months. The storm-flag of the Empire is now going to wave over nations and oceans; the sun is going to shine on a great slaughter … ” And the perfect state he has in mind? ‘The nations would then be so organized that each individual would give the maximum of service to society. Humanity, banded in regiments for every class of production, obeying a superior officer, like machines contributing the greatest possible output of labour—there you have the perfect state!’ But the war brings nothing but horror to both the Desnoyers and Hartrott families. The Four Horsemen leave them scattered and broken. * * * * * Will Browning be remembered for his rollicking version of ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’—And the muttering grew to a grumbling; And the grumbling grew to a mighty rumbling; And out of the houses the rats came tumbling; Great rats, small rats, lean rats, brawny rats, Brown rats, black rats, grey rats, tawny rats, Grave old plodders, gay young friskers, Fathers, mothers, uncles, cousins, Cocking tails, and pricking whiskers, Families by tens and dozens; Brothers, sisters, husbands, wives— Followed the Piper for their lives. —long after his more serious poems have been forgotten? The real Hameln is a city near Hanover and the story is thought to draw on memories of the Children’s Crusade in the 13th century, of which Bradley Steffens writes, ‘Less than one-third of the more than fifty thousand children who had joined the Children’s Crusade ever returned home. At least ten thousand died.’ Such a massive disaster must have resonated in folklore, if not in official histories, down through the centuries. But after reading E. P. Evans’ curious book The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals: The Lost History of Europe’s Animal Trials I began to see the rats differently. Evans was a 19th century American writer and Sanskrit scholar who also wrote Animal Symbolism in Ecclesiastical Architecture and Evolutionary Ethics and Animal Psychology. Animals were not only imprisoned, tortured and ‘tried’ in civil courts, they were cursed and excommunicated by the Catholic Church. Wild animals, birds and insects, (including everything from weevils, flies, storks, field-mice, and rats, up to bears and wolves) as well as domestic animals (the most likely to go on trial for homicide and infanticide was the pig) found themselves indicted, exiled, hanged … I’m sure Ambrose Bierce had just been reading Evans when he wrote: ‘In our day the accused is usually a human being, or a socialist, but in medieval times, animals, fishes, reptiles and insects were brought to trial. A beast that had taken human life, or practiced sorcery, was duly arrested, tried and, if condemned, put to death by the public executioner. Insects ravaging grain fields, orchards or vineyards were cited to appeal by counsel before a civil tribunal, and after testimony, argument and condemnation, if they continued in contumaciam the matter was taken to a high ecclestiatical court, where they were solemnly excommunicated and anathematized. In a street of Toldeo, some pigs that had wickedly run between the viceroy‘s legs, upsetting him, were arrested on a warrant, tried and punished. In Naples an ass was condemned to be burned at the stake, but the sentence appears not to have been executed. D’Addioso relates from the court records many trials of pigs, bulls, horses, cocks, dogs, goats, etc., greatly, it is believed, to the betterment of their conduct and morals. In 1451 a suit was brought against the leeches infesting some ponds 7575 about Berne, and the Bishop of Lausanne, instructed by the faculty of Heidelberg University, directed that some of ‘the aquatic worms’ be brought before the local magistracy. This was done and the leeches, both present and absent, were ordered to leave the places that they had infested within three days on pain of incurring ‘the malediction of God.’ In the voluminous records of this cause célèbre nothing is found to show whether the offenders braved the punishment or departed forthwith out of that inhospitable jurisdiction.’ So I wonder if the rats which plagued Hameln were a failed prosecution or a failed defence? But I liked Walter Starkie’s version best, I think. ‘I often used to tell my children at home the story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, but I was quite unprepared to meet him in the middle of Transylvania ... I saw a very strange fellow walking in front of me with a springing step. He was dark-complexioned and wore a coat of many colours such as Gypsies were traditionally supposed to wear. He had a flute in his hand and as he walked he played a little rhythmic tune which fascinated me. I could not help stepping out in time to the tune. It drove me frantic, that tune: I felt it sink into my inner being and willy-nilly I had to follow the little man. On and on I went, and on and on he played. I could not catch up on him in spite of all my exertions. I was weary and faint of breath and my body wanted to rest, but my legs seemed to be filled with diabolical energy, for they sprang on after the piper. At last towards sunset he sat on a stone and beckoned to me. He put up the accursed flute in his pocket and so I was able to approach. PIPER: “Where are you going, wanderer? I see by your fiddle you are a player, but your fair hair does not betoken you a Gypsy.” MYSELF: “No, I am no gypsy, but only a simple traveller who is wandering towards Sibiu, the city of the Saxons.” PIPER: “And I am leading you there, for that city is mine and owes its origins to me.” MYSELF: “How so, Sir Piper? I was told that Hermannstadt was founded by the poor baron Hermann, the courtier of fair Gisela, the German princess, who became the bride of Stephen I, the Magyar King, and Hermann brought all his family from Nuremberg to make a Saxon-land in this country.” PIPER: “Ah, that is where you are wrong, O scraper of catgut: it was I who brought the fair-haired Saxons in the year 1284, and I’ll tell you my story. My race came into Europe in the dim ages and worked in bronze: they were soothsayers, magicians, and they could weave magic spells by their music, for they could store up sounds and use them as charms to bring the rain or thunder or the wind. They could let loose in the world melodies that made the sons of men distraught with madness. Of such a race called the race of Rom was I born, and I was given by my father a magic flute which responded to the traditional rhythms of our race and also many charms to work upon the foolish people of the West, so sluggish in their understanding. I became a rat-catcher, for in those days the plague of rats was the scourge of Europe and whenever I appeared the people hailed me as a deliverer. In 1284 I reached the town of Hameln in Hanover and I offered to rid it of its vermin. The Mayor and Town Council jumped in eagerness to greet me and I was feasted royally. My flute was not laggard, I assure you, and hey presto, a mighty rustling was heard on all sides. In the distance a dark mass advanced after me—a crawling, squeaking mass of rats and mice. Out of the houses they came in tens of thousands hypnotised by my queer little rat tune. On I led them in tune to the music until we arrived at the banks of the River Weser. Then when I entered the water, lo, all the vermin plunged into their watery grave before I finished my tune. It was then time to collect the money for my labours, but alas, the Mayor and his Council, now that the plague was gone, tried to treat me as the busnó always treats the Gypsy. No bargain is valid with a son of Romany who is more fitted to be a serf than a freeman. When I play my music, then the Gentile follows me and puts his arm 7676 about me as though he was my blood-brother: it is then that I drink the rich Tokay at his expense and finger the heavy gold coins in his purse. But when I stop my playing he turns and curses me as a ragged Gypsy. However, we Gypsies, though we turn a smiling face to the white man, yet mutter under our breath curses in our own language. And the vengeance of a Gypsy is the most deadly in the world, for we stick at nothing. I retired from Hameln to meditate my plans. On the 26th June, the day of St. John, I reappeared in Hameln and started to play the strange tune on my pipe. Lo and behold, the little children of the town heard my tune and came toddling towards me. On they came in hundreds, down the stairs, out the doors, from the palaces as well as the hovels. No force in the world could restrain them, for I was playing my most deadly tune of all, the tune that Orpheus played when he led the distraught women and animals after him in mad race. Fathers and mothers tried to prevent them, nurses clasped them to their bosoms, but all to no purpose. Every moment my band grew as I piped away. I led them in an unending dance to a hill outside the town. Now this hill was a magic one and we Gypsies have always had the key to its subterranean caverns. It opened, and after I had disappeared with my band it closed again. Not a child was left, and I can laugh at the scared, tragic faces of the Mayor and all the citizens of yon town. But no, I forgot, there was one child who did not follow me. He was a little boy who must have sprung from Gypsy parents, for he was not bowled over by my tricks. He felt cold and went back to his home. But mark me, sir, I had no intention of killing those children: we Gypsies love our children more deeply than any of you Gentiles, and when we steal a little Christian child it is for bacht or luck, and we look on it with awe because baptism has given it a higher magic than ours. I disappeared with my band and drew them along countless subterranean passages until finally I reached Transylvania, the land that has been settled by our roving bands, and there in a cave in the north-east, called Almescher Hohle, I brought them all up to the light of day. And now in a trice many years had passed: they had become grown men and women. They settled together and made themselves into a kingdom separated from the other races. They are fair-haired and blue- eyed in contrast to the dark Magyar and Roumanian. Their folk-lore is foreign and they keep still the practices of their old home on the banks of the Weser. And to-day as formerly, my Gypsy brethren have more power over those slow-thinking folk than over any Roumanian or Magyar. We cheat them in our sleep and run when the man of the house orders us away with oaths, but we see out of the corner of our eye the mistress beckoning to us at the back door, for she wants the lines on her hands read.” It was dusk when the Pied Piper finished his story, and without a word of warning he began to disappear slowly: his coat of many colours faded to a shimmering white and all that was left for a time was his queer, sardonic smile.’ And was Browning really looking into the past—or was he foretelling the future? What brought the youth of Germany to follow that strange ill-dressed uncouth outsider called Adolf Hitler? It was not that he was young when he sent out his siren call. He was old enough by then to be the father of many of the youths who followed. But the young people who rejected the cautious small-minded pessimistic ways of their own fathers flocked to this outsider who said ‘follow me, I will lead you into the land where the streets are paved with gold, where the greater reich will find you a place, a moment of power ... ’ Or, more precisely, “I am beginning with the young. We older ones are used up ... We are rotten to the marrow. We have no unrestrained instincts left. We are cowardly and sentimental. We are bearing the burden of a humiliating past, and have in our blood the dull recollection of serfdom and servility. But my magnificent youngsters! Are there finer ones anywhere in the world? Look at these young men and boys. What material! With them I can make a new world.” Is it any wonder so many children followed him? And yet, as Edgar Snow pointed out in Red Star over China in the 1930s: ‘Threats of Japanese conquest had provoked great demonstrations of the people, especially among the enraged youth. A few months earlier I had stood under the bullet-pitted Tartar Wall and 7777 seen 10,000 students gather defiant of the gendarmes’ clubbings to shout in a mighty chorus: ‘Resist Japan! Reject the demands of Japanese imperialism for the separation of North China from the South!’ and ‘Cease civil war! Cooperate with the Communists to resist Japan! Save China!’ and William Lederer wrote in A Nation of Sheep in 1961, ‘Old men are perhaps the most polished diplomats, but youth changes the world. It was students who finally got rid of the oppressive Syngman Rhee in Korea. In harried and corrupt Cuba, men in their early twenties (many of whom our diplomats didn’t know existed) formed the backbone of the revolution that defeated Batista. When Vice-President Nixon was stoned and spat on in South America, the stones and spittle came from the hands and mouths of angry college men. In Japan, students fighting for what they thought was democracy sparked the riots which prevented President Eisenhower from visiting Tokyo. Turkey’s corrupt prime minister, supported by American diplomacy and money, finally was ousted by teenagers. The successful revolt in Indonesia was led by youths not long out of school. The fact that almost all of America’s political setbacks throughout the world in recent times has largely been influenced by the wrath and energy of students, brings one to an unavoidable conclusion: United States officials pay too much attention to the old, the status-quo leaders of foreign countries; and they are ill-informed and disinterested about what the younger generation is dreaming and doing.’ There is still significant truth in that 40 years later. The Army, the industrialists, the Junkers, came to Hitler’s party eventually. But did they come because the youth of Germany had already come in such massive numbers? Gerhard Rempel in Hitler’s Children points out that 82% of German boys and girls between the ages of 10 and 18 belonged to the Hitler Youth. Many came willingly, others were bribed, bullied and coerced; in 1936 membership of the Jugend became compulsory and it developed its close links with the SS. Parents who objected to the forcible enrolment of their children were over-ruled and sometimes threatened and beaten up. Parents, families, nations, churches, cultures—all believe in moulding children. But the “Nazi movement could not have expanded or kept its youthful character without SS terrorism and without the HJ becoming an important element in the movement before the assumption of power. As a mass organization, incorporating nearly the entire younger generation in the twelve years that followed, the HJ sustained the movement’s vitality.” Yet the Jugend had within it both the seeds of obsolescence and atrophy—and of revolution. What to do with millions of children, fit, healthy, outdoor-loving, hard- working, brainwashed into obeying without question and believing in the sacredness of “blood and soil”. They could be fed into the Army, into the Militias, into the SS, and the other groups that Nazism spawned but they had not been trained for anything; nor had they been exposed to culture beyond a superficial gloss; nor had they been encouraged to show initiative or think for themselves. They had been pressured into moving away from organised religion, family life, further education, urban pursuits. Yet the HJ “was more than an incongruous and amusing Kinderkorps infatuated with a newfangled Siegfried, who, in the end, turned out to be a tragicomic reincarnation of the Pied Piper of Hamelin.” The children of Germany had become a vast battalion of unquestioning mass to be moved around on paper, moved to fill the gaps on maps, to fight for Hitler when their fathers fell. They were a generation of children robbed of their childhoods because “the house that Hitler built with the optimism and energy of the young, and the discipline and coercion of those who prefer force over persuasion, was rotten to the core. It collapsed not only because military defeat brought it down, but because its foundation was unsound and the premises that inspired the architects were false and inhumane.” I believe in self-discipline; I start to worry when old men send out the siren call “More discipline!” * * * * * 7878

April 21st: Charlotte Brontë April 22nd: Henry Fielding April 23rd: George Steiner William Shakespeare * * * * * Almost every one seems to have an opinion on Shakespeare. Sometimes they sound like throwaway lines—Dorothy Richardson’s “There was no reality in any of Shakespeare’s women. They please men because they show women as men see them. Shakespeare’s plays are ‘universal’ because they are about the things that everybody knows and hands about, and they do not trouble anybody. They make every one feel wise” or Arthur Quiller Couch, “Shakespeare’s first task as an artist was to distract attention from the monstrosities and absurdities of the plot. We know for a fact that he worked upon old plays, old chronicles, other men’s romances” or George II’s “Who is this Pope that I hear so much about? I cannot discover what is his merit. Why will not my subjects write in prose? I hear a great deal, too, of Shakespeare, but I cannot read him, he is such a bombast fellow” or Matthew Parris in Scorn with Added Vitriol “Scorn tells us much— unwittingly—about the tastes and prejudices of the scorner. Shakespeare’s real horror was of grossness. He hated urine, foul odours and uncleanness. Unlike many others, he rarely attacks women, but can be coldly, horribly dismissive of them. I have become convinced that Shakespeare was a fastidious gay man.” He is not alone in seeing Shakespeare as homosexual and I am half-inclined to agree. This view also seems to underwrite the very interesting and believable explanation in Simon Callow’s Being an Actor, “Michael Kustow phoned me one spring day. He’d just come across a new order for Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Would I like to read some of them with another actor as a Platform Performance? Sure, I said, and put the phone down. A couple of minutes later, I phoned back and said surely just one actor would be better, as they’re all in Shakespeare’s voice. He agreed. Two minutes later, I was on the line again. ‘If we’re to test the order,’ I said, ‘we have to do them all, don’t we?’ Again he agreed, and we were on. I’d had far too little contact with Shakespeare, and even less with poetry. Time to take the bull by the horns. To be candid, I barely knew the Sonnets: only the two most famous — ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’ and ‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments’ — and the first lines of a few others. I had no idea of the riches buried in that little volume, because, like most poeple who try to read them, I’d been daunted by the sheer number of poems in one form, and by the cryptic nature of many lines. It was this that John Padel’s new sequence rectified. His theory was complex, almost fantastic, yet oddly credible; but the new sequence was nothing short of a revelation, an emotional journey of the most harrowing kind, touching in its course the boundaries of madness. It seemed to me the most graphic account of amour fou I’d ever read, an account, not of sexual passion or deep symbiotic intimacy, but of idolizing, self-denigrating enslavement to one who embodies everything one feels oneself not to be; Aschenbach’s emotion for Tadziu, mine for Jonathan A., and countless others. Not only had I been there before, I was there at that moment. Poor Shakespeare! Poor me! For the first time, I began to have a sense of who Shakespeare might actually be. Read in Padel’s order, the Sonnets are the unmistakeable record of lived experience. Even when one struggles through the Quarto edition, the sense of overwhelming passion leaps out from the page, and there is a curious impression of a submerged drama, with three distinct characters: the writer, his mistress and a young man (W.H.). Padel’s theory brings the drama to the front of the stage. In doing so, he throws a bright light on Shakespeare’s personality and his nature as an artist. There are two strands to the theory. One is numerological, dividing the sequence into groups of four or three, which then form larger groups within the whole collection. It 7979 seems highly feasible that Shakespeare, with his sense of harmony and balance, might be drawn towards such structures; numerological considerations were in any case a common Elizabethan preoccupation. Padel’s order has its own mathematical beauty — seventeen sonnets for W.H.’s seventeenth birthday; eighteen groups of four for the eighteenth, and so on — but the real excitement is the inner emotional sequence that it reveals. It was now possible to read at least one hundred and twenty of the sonnets consecutively and with cumulative effect; especially in the light of part two of Padel’s work, the background. This was his story: Shakespeare had been commissioned by Mary Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, to write seventeen sonnets for the seventeenth birthday of her son William. The boy was of an ascetic disposition, showing no interest in love, sex, or, above all, marriage. His father the Earl was chronically ill. If he died before William attained his majority unmarried, the Queen would appoint a guardian, who could prove unscrupulous. It was a matter of some urgency, therefore, that he marry. Hence the Sonnets, whose theme was to be the importance of marriage. After inviting him to her country estate, Wilton House, and encouraging him to improvise some sonnets as a kind of audition, Mary Herbert duly commissioned Shakespeare, handing him a miniature of the lad to work from. The first seventeen sonnets are on the appropriate themes of procreation, preservation of the line and renewal. A surprising warmth enters into the urgings — at one point the poet urges the young man to marry ‘for love of me’: an unknown writer, executing a commission. Apparently the sonnets worked the trick, because William agreed to come to London to meet a prospective bride. While there he met Shakespeare for the first time. Together they went to the studio of a painter (Hilliard?). Four sonnets, teasing and slightly bawdy —

But since she pricked thee out for women’s pleasure, Mine be thy love and thy love’s use their treasure

— but also surprisingly personal —

But when in thee time’s furrows I behold, Then look I death my days should expiate

— celebrate the visit, all centred on painterly images. Some kind of arrangement was reached vis-à-vis the potential fiancée, but then W.H. asserted his independence and broke it off. Mary Herbert was back to square one. Now she decided that before she could even think about marriage, she needed to get the boy interested in sex. To that end, she promised him that he could live, on his own, in the Pembrokes’ London home, Baynard’s Castle, hoping that in the big city his fancies would surely turn to love. To expedite the process, she turned again to Shakespeare. As a member of a notoriously immoral profession, he would undoubtedly know a thousand means of initiation. Her request found Shakespeare in a curious emotional state. He had become increasingly preoccupied with thoughts of the boy — the boy he’d only met once. His beauty, his remoteness, his nobility began to coalesce into an image of perfection. Shakespeare was thirty-three, prematurely balding, a member of a despised profession, and a bereaved father — his son Hamnet had died two years before. His sense of mortality was acute; also his sense of social unworthiness. The young aristocrat seemed in possession of everything that Shakespeare wanted and would never have. His feelings for the boy — that is to say, the boy that he was now inventing, because he knew nothing of him beyond report, a miniature, and a brief meeting — included paternal ones, wishing to protect the golden youth from the ravages of time and society, and a kind of transference, loving in the boy the him that never was, loving W.H. perhaps as he himself longed to have been loved. So Mary Herbert’s new approach to Shakespeare — asking him in effect to arrange 8080 for the boy’s sexual initiation — was peculiarly distressing. Torn in many directions, his response was oblique. A ploy of the Elizabethan theatre may have come to mind whereby actors would nudge the boy players into heterosexuality by sending them on errands to their mistresses, who would introduce them to sexual delight. Shakespeare’s variation on this was to write a series of poems to his mistress — the famous ‘dark lady’ — celebrating the ecstatic delights of their shared bed. These sonnets W.H. would deliver to her. Conscious no doubt of what he might be doing to his own emotions, he withdrew to Stratford, sending the mistress-sonnets in groups of three, each covered, as it were, by another group, related in imagery, to W.H. himself. These ‘covering’ sonnets form a great arc of 72 (18 x 4) which is the very heart of the whole collection — a delineation of the terrible progress of Eros, from confidence and exultation, through melancholy, doubt, betrayal, forgiveness, awareness of rejection, desperation, self-annihilation, to final withdrawal. The rejection was both personal and professional, because now W.H., gaining confidence and suddenly aware of his power as a patron, began to surround himself with a coterie of rival poets, who, at his regular salons, flattered him with sycophantic verses. Shakespeare sat mutely through these sessions until at the end he produced twelve sparring sonnets, a proud statement of integrity. But he refused to compete with the florid effusions of Chapman and the rest of the group, and finally, riven with pain, he severed the connection which had brought him ever-increasing anguish. The envoi, a kind of ghostly epilogue to the whole sequence, comes from the pen of a man who has passed through the extremes of feeling and has been drained to the dregs of his being. Every April for eight years afterwards, Shakespeare sent William Herbert four sonnets. The depth of his feelings made it impossible for him simply to walk away. But these sonnets are of an entirely different character to the cauterizing set of seventy-two. These are poems from one equal to another — not social equals to be sure, but equal in love. The disparity between W.S.’s feelings for W.H. and those he got in return had disappeared, a firm, if sometimes threatened, friendship taking its place. The poems come out of the full life of a leading dramatist and actor, while the earlier sonnets inhabit a hysterical world of their own. In these poems, too, the great theme of the whole collection becomes more and more clearly voiced. No longer is it Shakespeare and William Herbert who stand at the centre of the stage, but The Poet and Time, engaged in desperate war. The last sonnet of all hurls defiance — No! Time, thou shalt not boast that I do change and ends — This do I vow, and this shall ever be — I will be true despite thy scythe and thee Neither Kustow nor I were in any position to assess the academic soundness of Padel’s work. We were agreed, however, that the re-ordering made a radical difference poetically and emotionally, and that the story Padel told was fascinating. As we worked on it, we became more and more convinced of its truth. My identification with Shakespeare’s emotional experience was total. It seemed to be my life he was writing down. The psychological realism was shocking and sometimes overwhelming. Time and again, I wept as I read, and so did Kustow. The combination in Shakespeare of the singer and the sufferer, the wordman of genius plus the unerring follower-through of emotional truth, is to be found at its most intense in the Sonnets. Sometimes it seemed to us that the man himself was present. Certainly, I felt that I knew him; and I knew what he was, in the root of his being; he was an actor. A dramatist, too, of course, but what is a dramatist but someone who plays all the parts, makes up all the words, and writes them down. ... Suddenly the Droeshut portrait of Shakespeare made sense. That neurasthenic washed-out creature with his all-seeing eyes was merely a channel in which the world around was converted into metaphor, action and character. I imagine him barely having a life, as such. He was never off-duty. Speaking to people, he must have struggled not to 8181 start imitating their accent, twisting his features into their face. And that’s what it’s like to be an actor. He must have wondered who he was, must have been in a state of continuous ontological flux. He must have sometimes needed to hold on to the table to avoid falling down. Hence his quest for aristocratic patronage, for property, for a coat of arms; in a word, for stability. And of order followed by the struggle for its re-establishment, whether in government or marriage. His world-view is essentially that of a structure in immanent danger of breakdown, just as his personality must have been. The vividness of his account of breakdown, whether in King Lear or the Sonnets, suggests close personal acquaintance with it.’ * * * * * If Elizabeth I had ruled for five years like her half-brother Edward VI or her half- sister Mary we probably would not remember her. She would be one of those footnote monarchs. But she was granted the one thing that eluded most of her Tudor relatives, and indeed many of her subjects: Age. We do not remember the Elizabethan Age for its development of parliamentary democracy, for its great scientific, medical, or technological breakthroughs; we do not remember it for its improvements in the lives of women, children, the elderly, the poor. Elizabeth had little grasp of economics (and most of her advisers not much more) and it is debatable how much she understood of the social needs and changes of her kingdom. She had no answers but more repression for Ireland and her decision to pass her crown to James VI of Scotland, thus combining the thrones, brought tragedy to Scotland. And as Joel Hurstfield says, “nothing should obscure the fact that the Elizabethan government was a persecuting and intolerant government.” Torture, imprisonment without trial and the chopping-block remained active ingredients of government policy. But age gave her a chance to develop perspective and hindsight on the past, to see clearly the strengths and weaknesses (and prejudices) of those who advised her, and to draw lessons from both her own reign and earlier reigns. She disliked being pushed to make decisions and she lived long enough to realise that not making decisions could be as effective as making them, sometimes more so. But I wonder if we’ve ever given enough attention to the lessons she drew from the reigns of Edward and of Mary. In her early years she may have been too close to them as people but as time went on she could see clearly what they achieved or didn’t achieve, and why. Edward VI has been described by G. R. Elton as “probably the most ardent lay protestant in England.” He took his father’s break with Rome and put his heart, in the few years given him as King, into the development of a liturgy for the new faith. The Church of England owes both its Book of Common Prayer and the start of a new hymnal tradition to him. These drew heavily on Catholic ritual and style but they belonged, firmly, to England. Mary tried to turn back the clock and re-establish Roman Catholicism as the state religion; she also tried to hang on to the fading remnants of England’s possessions in France, possessions that had brought little but misery to the French who lived in them, and misery to the English soldiers and taxpayers charged with retaining them. Elton says of Mary, “Yet Mary herself is often regarded as the most attractive of the Tudors. She was personally gentle and inclined to mercy, though her history—in the vicious attack on her mother, her own bastardisation, the treatment of her religion and her person by her father and brother—ought to have turned her into a fearsome instrument of hatred and vengeance. She was also sensible and generous—altogether of a better character than was common in her family.” Elizabeth saw very clearly that Catholicism, unable to fully reassert itself with Royal encouragement, was not going to do so without. If there was a threat to the Church of England it would come from Puritanism. This allowed her to make compromises and step back from the ferment of religious strugglings. Apart from her 8282 ad hoc decisions in relation to religious practices, even her willingness to employ Catholics in several important positions, her real means of taking the heat out of religious conflict was to encourage other interests, particularly the arts—literature, painting, music, architecture, sculpture, education, and crafts—but also less attractive pursuits such as bear- baiting and wild beast shows. Perhaps encouragement is too strong a word. Elizabeth never lead from the front; rather she nudged here, let her name be used as patron there, gave a gracious assent somewhere else ... And she saw very clearly what Mary had to discover the hard way. France, even the last small slice around Calais, was lost. It was time for England to begin to follow in Spain’s footsteps (or in its sea-wake) and put out into the Atlantic. But she had the advantage that she could see it not as regret and failure but as a positive release from the shackles of the past. It didn’t release her from entanglement in the power struggles of Continental Europe but it provided an important alternative and the energy it released in curiosity and discovery, in impudence and confidence, flowed through into other areas. Discovery and adventure fertilised the imagination and enlarged the canvas. Elizabeth was immensely the more fortunate for following Edward and Mary. * * * * * Ray Bryant in Warriors of the Dragon Gold asks about ‘The Mystery Lady of the Bayeux Tapestry’: “Why did Earl Harold and Duke William, at the height of their urgent preparations to take over the English Kingdom, take considerable time off to journey all the way to Brittany on a costly campaign, ostensibly to put down a rather unimportant Count in an unimportant province? Why, at around the same time, was a northern English nobleman called Gospatrick Uhtredsson murdered at the court of Edward the Confessor, apparently on the orders of Queen Edith? Why is there just one year’s records missing from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles so meticulously compiled for centuries? That year is the very year in which Harold made his historic journey to meet William—1064. But the most intriguing question of all, who is the mysterious Lady Aelfgifu, who makes a sudden appearance in the Bayeux Tapestry, then vanishes again just as quickly? She appears, just at the point where Harold and William meet for the first time in Normandy. In the panel on the left William is seated in his court, as visitor Harold seems to be telling him of something interesting at another place. In the margin below in the only point in the entire tapestry margins where such symbols appear in the place of animals or rural scenes there is depicted a naked man (a hint at some obscenity?) putting an axe into or taking it out of a box, certainly a symbol of treachery. Now, in the centre panel, there emerges for the one and only time in the tapestry the lady Aelfgifu. In England, Aelfgifu is both a proper name and a title for a queen. This Aelfgifu is shown being fondled by a monk, secretly perhaps because he is apparently reaching through a window or a doorway. In the margin below there is again a nude man, in a lewd pose, again suggesting scandal. The unfinished caption over this panel says only: ‘Where a certain cleric and Aelfgifu ... ’ No explanation of who the cleric is, what they are doing, where they are or what significance they have in the otherwise perfectly chronicled story—it is simply broken off there, and the pair are never mentioned again. Then why does Harold seem to be pointing them out to William? Whatever the reason, in the next panel on the right, William and Harold set out with a great band of William’s soldiers to Brittany ... Merely to deal with little Count Conan, as an amusing diversion for guest Harold? Or for some other sinister purpose lost to historical 8383 record—something to do with Aelfgifu and a certain cleric? It is as though an innocent tapestry worker had started to include Aelfgifu in her rightful place in the tapestry text, and then someone in authority happened along and said: ‘Oh no, no more mention of Aelfgifu. Now that William the Conqueror is King, there will be no more talk of Aelfgifu and her kind.’ In the nine centuries since the tapestry was woven, historians have failed to identify Aelfgifu. Many have thus dismissed her as unimportant, others have offered explanations that were not too serious—” Lanto Synge in Antique Needlework deals with the tapestry. Though there is no mention of the lady Aelfgifu, it is an interesting overview. “By far the most remarkable embroidery of the early Middle Ages to have survived is the so-called Bayeux ‘Tapestry’. Though not of outstanding workmanship, its historical nature and charm make it justly famous. Two hundred and thirty feet (70 m) long, by about twenty inches (50 cm) high, it consists of a long narrative wall hanging made up of joined parts, probably separately worked by professional teams. Narrative historical hangings were very much part of the tradition of European needlework but no others have survived. Old texts give us some insight such as the Scandinavian Völsunga Saga which includes a description of Brynhild in her bower at Hlymdale: ‘overlaying cloth with gold, and sewing therein the great deeds which Sigmund had wrought, the slaying of the Worm, and the taking of the wealth of him, and the death of Regin withal’. The relatively simple needlework of the Bayeux Tapestry is in coloured wools of eight shades: blues, greens, yellow and terracotta red. The hanging is representative of ecclesiastical and non-ecclesiastical decorations of the period and has probably survived due to the fact that no gold was employed but only simple materials. Others of finer workmanship and precious materials are known to have existed. An account by Baudri, Abbot of Bourgueil, described, for example, a much more elaborate ‘tapestry’ telling the same story, hung around an alcove as bed hangings for Adela, daughter of William the Conqueror: A wonderful tapestry goes around the lady’s bed, which joins three things in material and novel skill. For the hand of craftsmen hath done the work so finely that you would scarcely believe that to exist which you know does exist. Threads of gold come first, silver threads come next, the third set of threads were always of silk. Skilful care had made the threads of gold and silver so fine that I believe that nothing could have been thinner ... Jewels with red marking were shining amidst the work, and pearls of no small price. In fine so great was the glitter and beauty of the tapestry that you might say it surpassed the rays of Phoebus. Almost a hundred years earlier, it was recorded that Aethelflæd embroidered the deeds of her husband Britnoth on a hanging which she gave to the Abbey of Ely, probably shortly after his death in 991. The Bayeux Tapestry was made between the time of these two others, in about 1070, to commemorate the Norman Conquest of Britain and, specifically, the Battle of Hastings. It was probably commissioned by Odo, Bishop of Bayeux, the powerful half-brother of William the Conqueror, for the new cathedral dedicated in 1077, or for use in a castle. The workmanship appears to be English and the lively design was probably drawn out by an illuminator of manuscripts, perhaps at Canterbury; conventions of manuscripts illustration are reflected in border patterns and a diagrammatic portrayal of architecture. Apart from these aspects, there is an extraordinary wealth of detail displaying the genius of an observant and knowledgeable man. A Latin text describes the action, and from a Norman point of view tells the history of the invasion, Harold’s defeat, and his death at the Battle of Hastings. The tale lays unexpected emphasis on Harold’s visit to Normandy and his swearing allegiance to Duke William as heir to the English throne, which is strange since 8484

Harold was a natural enemy of the French. Concisely, the story related by the embroidery is as follows. Edward the Confessor briefs Harold who is then seen setting out for France with falcon and hounds. He prays at a church at Bosham and sails off for France. On arrival he is immediately arrested and taken prisoner. He is taken to Duke William of Normandy and the two are seen together in the latter’s palace. They go on an expedition to Brittany where Harold rescues two soldiers from quicksand. They engage in the siege of Dinant and defeat Conan. Harold is honoured by William in a ceremony, ranking between knighthood and enrolment as a supporter of William, and subsequently they go to Bayeux where Harold makes an oath of allegiance to William. Harold returns to England and reports at Westminster to Edward who is on his deathbed. We then see the King’s funeral procession. Harold is crowned forthwith as his successor and is told of a comet. In Normandy William holds a council, prepares to sail for England and sets out in splendid boats. He hurries to Hastings where various domestic arrangements are made, and a feast and council are held. Harold and William prepare for and lead their armies to battle and they attack each other ferociously. Harold’s brothers are killed and also many men and horses. Bishop Odo is seen cheering on his troops. Harold is wounded in the eye and finally the English are seen fleeing. A small part is probably missing at the end but in all an extraordinary cross-section of life is portrayed. Some 600 figures are shown and many more animals, birds and fishes. Members of the two ruling households are depicted with interesting views of buildings including the Palace and Abbey at Westminster. The needlework serves as a document for social historians as it records many kinds of clothing for battle, peace-time, and church use, as well as activities such as farming, hunting, shipbuilding, cooking and the appearance of Halley’s comet. The drawing and stitching convey extraordinary liveliness and variety of movement, and though restored at least twice, the needlework is in very good condition.” The fascinating thing about needlework in these centuries was that it was admired and promoted; it was both practical and one of the arts, it was neither the preserve of men nor women but rather an activity in which skilled designers and craftspeople worked at every level from the simplest cottage making domestic furnishings and clothes to the most highly professional teams turning out magnificent pieces of both an ecclesiastical and a secular nature. The Reformation turned attention away from magnificent decorations and vestments in the Churches to needlework as an underpinning to the glory of the Monarchy. And the Elizabethan Age was the high point for this kind of magnificence. Synge says, “Tudor and Elizabethan portraits indeed show magnificent stitchery which has never since been equalled on costume. Precision work and attention to detail contributed to a jewel-like style, displaying a superb, shimmering richness. Very ornate mixtures of patterns were embroidered on every available space, frequently high-lighted with jewels. Even underwear was finely embroidered and the overall costume effect was augmented by accessories, including lace ruffs, feathers in hats, rosettes on shoes, and often a fine lawn or gauze veil worn over embroidered garments. Monarchs naturally had to outshine their courtiers. In 1517 it was recorded that almost 459 ounces of fine gold and 850 pearls were removed from the robes of Henry VIII for re-use. When Elizabeth I died at the age of 70 she left over a thousand dresses heavy with bullion, jewels and gimps. Mary Queen of Scots’ inventories are full of interesting detailed lists of her embroidered clothing ... ” “The portraits of Queen Elizabeth I which are in the National Portrait Gallery at Hardwick Hall and at Hatfield House show her dressed in magnificently embroidered costumes. Each was a kind of political poster, designed to impress and to convey qualities of the Queen’s official character. The dresses are respectively decorated with foliate arabesques in gold thread, flower slips, a combination of flowers, sea creatures and birds, and a collection of emblems. The last of these dresses, in the ‘rainbow’ portrait at Hatfield, 8585 was probably conceived as an idealised, symbolic costume and never existed, but the eyes, ears, serpent and rainbow represented vigilance and sympathy, and these emblems are typical, though extreme examples, of the thinking behind embroidered messages. Symbols such as a rainbow for peace, a compass for constancy and a garland or olive branch for victory were immediately recognisable, while others were tentatively suggestive of equivocal characteristics. Elizabeth’s portrait painters were required to paint her in flattering terms for propaganda purposes, but on the whole artists portrayed the wonders of their sitters’ costumes with great accuracy.” The significance and meaning of the symbols used have tended to get lost not least because embroidery has been seen purely as a woman’s work and a woman’s vanity. For instance the recent introduction of the potato plant was celebrated in embroidered costume whereas it was largely ignored in painting. “Raspberries were occasionally embroidered, and strawberries often. Desdemona’s problematical handkerchief was ‘spotted with strawberries’—these were the wild variety, a symbol of purity.” Elizabeth I, along with Mary Queen of Scots, Bess of Hardwick, and most of the Court ladies were notable needlewomen. They both made and were given great quantities of intricately designed small items, gloves, purses, scarves, even book-bindings, as well as wonderful narrative bed-hangings, carpets, and screens. To understand their world by limiting our enquiry only to its writings, artworks or music, is to miss some of its fascination and meaning. And along with its magnificence in the decorative arts is also the fact that its people preferred to work together. Elizabeth I did not sew alone in her room any more than her painters painted alone in garrets or her playwrights wrote alone in dingy bed-rooms. It was an age of remarkable ‘togetherness’. So how often was Shakespeare alone and if he was rarely alone how much of his writing incorporated the ideas, the suggestions, the sayings, the familiarities, the personalities, and the criticisms of his friends and fellow actors? * * * * * April 24th: Eric Bogosian Jean-Marc Itard Jaroslav Hasek Sue Grafton April 25th: Walter de la Mare Frederick Morgan April 26th: Morris West April 27th: Helen Hodgman April 28th: Terry Pratchett Harper Lee April 29th: Jill Paton Walsh Rod McKuen April 30th: Paul Jennings May 1st: Giovanni Guareschi May 2nd: Alan Marshall Florence Stawell May 3rd: Norman Thelwell Niccolò Machiavelli Mikhail Bulgakov May 4th: William Prescott Graham Swift May 5th: Karl Marx May 6th: Rabindranath Tagore Rodolfo Alfonzo Raffaelo Pierre Filibert Guglielmi di Valentina d’Antonguolla 8686

* * * * * Mr Guglielmi had a best-seller with his book Day Dreams; I expect my grandmothers sighed over its pages (if they could afford a copy and were not prejudiced against his dark Latin looks). Certainly many women did. You don’t think you’ve ever heard of the man? No, probably not. He has gone down in history as Rudolf Valentino. Legion are the stars who have taken advantage of a high profile to bring out a recording, a painting, run for public office, promote a charity ... but books are good old standbys. And then there are the people who wrote about their lives or interests—how did David Livingstone feel when his Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa became a best seller? Disraeli did well with his sentimental novels and Churchill even better with his voluminous history sets, while Queen Victoria was proud of her success with her Leaves from a Journal of our Life in the Highlands. Hitler cracked the whip to turn Mein Kampf into a best-seller. Mao-Tse-Tung wrote some genuinely attractive poetry. And then there’s the best known poet of the late twentieth century, Andrzej Jawien ... ‘excuse me butting in but I would like to just mention that I haven’t heard of him, are you sure you mean the late twentieth century? I wonder if he could have been before my time.’ ‘Andrzej Jawien’ is in fact better known as Pope John Paul II. * * * * * May 7th: Peter Carey May 8th: Thomas Pynchon May 9th: J. M. Barrie May 10th: Barbara Taylor Bradford May 11th: Stanley Elkin May 12th: Edward Lear Vilis Lacis May 13th: Daphne du Maurier May 14th: Richard Deacon Richard Estes May 15th: Xavier Herbert May 16th: Studs Terkel Adrienne Rich H. E. Bates May 17th: Dorothy Richardson May 18th: Bertrand Russell Omar Khayyam Pope John Paul II May 19th: Malcolm X Lorraine Hansberry Jim Lehrer May 20th: Margery Allingham May 21st: James Plunkett Peter Hurkos Francis Marion Beynon May 22nd: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Peter Mathiessen May 23rd: Margaret Wise Brown May 24th: Mary Grant Bruce May 25th: Margaret Forster Robert Ludlum Lord Beaverbrook May 26th: Michael Benedikt May 27th: Herman Wouk 8787

Tony Hillerman Julia Ward Howe Arnold Bennett May 28th: Patrick White May 29th: G. K. Chesterton T. H. White Pamela Hansford Johnson * * * * * At first glance G. K. Chesterton seems an odd choice to introduce a segment on sport. At 6 foot 2 inches and 20 stone (127 kgs) a gentle and rather breathless game of golf would surely have been his limit. But in his short essay ‘Patriotism and Sport’ he provides some down-to-earth good sense. “It was absurd to say that Waterloo was won on Eton cricket-fields. But it might have been fairly said that Waterloo was won on the village green, where clumsy boys played a very clumsy cricket. In a word, it was the average of the nation that was strong, and athletic glories do not indicate much about the average of a nation. Waterloo was not won by good cricket-players. But Waterloo was won by bad cricket-players, by a mass of men who had some minimum of athletic instincts and habits. It is a good sign in a nation when such things are done badly. It shows that all the people are doing them. And it is a bad sign in a nation when such things are done very well, for it shows that only a few experts and eccentrics are doing them, and that the nation is merely looking on. Suppose that whenever we heard of walking in England it always meant walking forty-five miles a day without fatigue. We should be perfectly certain that only a few men were walking at all, and that all the other British subjects were being wheeled about in bath-chairs. But if when we hear of walking it means slow walking, painful walking, and frequent fatigue, then we know that the mass of the nation is walking. ... The difficulty is therefore that the actual raising of the standard of athletics has probably been bad for national athleticism. Instead of the tournament being a healty mêlée into which any ordinary man would rush and take his chance, it has become a fenced and guarded tilting- yard for the collision of particular champions against whom no ordinary man would pit himself or even be permitted to pit himself. If Waterloo was won on Eton cricket-fields it was because Eton cricket was probably much more careless then than it is now. As long as the game was a game, everybody wanted to join in it. When it becomes an art, every one wants to look at it.” * * * * * When it was suggested that fox-hunting should be outlawed in Britain it suddenly became an integral part of country life, something so interminably and profoundly English that to talk of doing away with it was akin to knocking down Westminster Abbey. But as R. E. Williams in A Century of Punch noted “Let’s face it, despite its early radicalism, PUNCH found much of its humour in snobbishness and class consciousness, and it is a humour that does not carry well over a century. Servant girls were flayed for their stupidity, ignorance and presumption, and flunkeys, more understandably, for their idleness and their aping of their masters. A casual student of the old PUNCH pictures might justifiably have thought that Britain was one large hunting field, judging by the number of jokes on the subject that appeared.” Which is curious. More people undoubtedly went to the races ... and horseracing lends itself to the comic pen equally well; so was it the pretensions of the newly rich and rising middle class, the factory-owners who aspired to the manor, the city professionals who purchased ‘a place in the country’, which encouraged the growth of this particular vein of humour? Chesterton points out, “The English caricaturists always assumed that a Frenchman could not ride to hounds or enjoy English hunting. It did not seem to occur to them that all the people who founded English hunting were Frenchmen. All the Kings and nobles who originally rode to hounds spoke French. Large numbers of those Englishmen who still ride 8888 to hounds have French names.” In fact, fox-hunting is even less an English ‘heritage’ than this would suggest. G. M. Trevelyan points out that up until the Civil War the nobles and the gentry hunted deer. If foxes were a nuisance, farmers simply dug them out of their earths and killed them in any way they could. But the Civil War broke down the deer parks, killed and ate and dispersed the deer herds. For sport, the upper classes turned predominantly to coursing hares with packs of harriers; it was not until well into the nineteenth century that fox-hunting overtook hare-chasing in popularity. The ‘romance’ of the foxhunt with all its colour and tradition is a very recent phenomenon. The mass of the population was more likely to have gone to bear-, badger- or bull- baiting, cock-fighting, or to watch a couple of local pugilists slog it out if they wanted to enjoy some blood and violence. But except for boxing, those other sports have been outlawed and no one seems to be calling for their reinstatement or referring to them as ‘romantic’ or ‘colourful’. Macdonald Hastings in his notes to his mystery Cork in the Doghouse writes: “The first serious attempt to put an end to the ancient English pastime of bull-baiting was made at the end of the eighteenth century. In 1802, Sir William Pultenay introduced a Bill into Parliament ‘with the object’, as he said, ‘of promoting humanity’. His object wasn’t acceptable to the majority of the House of Commons. On the contrary, Sir William was accused of promoting ‘a conspiracy of Jacobins and Methodists to make life dull and to bring to an end constitutional government’. His chief opponent — Mr William Windham — declared his conviction that, if the Bills were passed into law, the pluck of the English nation would certainly decrease, and the breed of bulldog, since the days of Augustus the symbol of the national character, would become extinct. Mr Canning concurred and added that, in his view, it was no concern of the legislature anyhow. The Bill was defeated by thirteen votes. As a comment on the outlook of the times it is revealing to consider the pastime which occasioned the debate. For baiting, the bull was tethered to a stake with a rope (about 15 feet long) attached to a collar; or, more often, to the roots of the horns. The ‘bullot’ — the impresario and generally the owner of the bull — then invited the crowd to enter their dogs (one or several at a time) for a ‘run’. For this privilege, he charged a fee of about sixpence or a shilling. The aim of the dog was to fasten the bull by the nostrils. The aim of the bull, or rather what was expected of him by ‘the fancy’, was to slide one of his horns beneath the belly of his adversary and ‘hike’ the dog into the air. When the dog was released, the bull at once put himself into an attitude of defence. He lowered his horns, placed his feet close together, and, so it is said, pawed the ground to make a hole in which to bury his tender nose. The dog, creeping close to the ground to avoid a toss, worked for an opening. If he crawled a foot too near, the bull was waiting — straining on the rope, his horns stroking the grass — to hook his enemy into the arms of his owner. If the bull missed his stroke or raised his head for an instant from the ground, the dog was poised to spring and snap iron jaws on his opponent’s muzzle. When the bait was going on, the owners of the dogs yelled encouragement. The ‘bullot’, by shouting ‘halloo’ as the dog approached and goading his wretched charge with a stick (or worse), acted as a kind of second to the bull. To save the ‘hiked’ dogs from serious injury, the seconds either offered their backs as a cushion or presented a long, smooth pole slantwise, on which to receive the falling dog in such a way as to permit him sliding to the ground gently. In the Birmingham area — where fighting-dog sports were always more popular and where they have died harder than in any other part of the country — the ironworkers had a way of their own. They used to catch the dogs in their leather aprons. The bull, in spite of the fact that he was tethered and usually had the rims of his horns tipped with buttons to prevent him goring his opponent, seems to have had the 8989 advantage over the dog. Bets were often laid that a dog wouldn’t pin a bull’s nose in an hour’s fighting. The bull-baiters weren’t content to leave it at that. Often the bull was baited for days on end till his whole muzzle and neck was a bloody mass of pulped flesh. Bulls, weak with worrying, would be livened up with whips and fireworks. Salt and pepper were thrown on their wounds and, on one hellish occasion, boiling water was poured into a bull’s ears. These atrocities — I have spared you the more ingenious of them — were usually practised when one of the dogs had succeeded in fastening on to the bull’s muzzle. At first, the bull roared and raged, bellowed and bounded, but the dog, with the eye teeth of his undershut jaw pinned firmly in the flesh, held on. In minutes, perhaps hours, a good dog would bring the strongest bull to a complete standstill. The courage and tenacity of the old bulldogs was extraordinary. At a bull-baiting in the north of England, a man for a small wager cut off the feet of his dog, one by one, while it was holding a bull. And it is recorded that a butcher, in order to sell his bulldog puppies, cut the bitch (then very old and almost toothless) in several pieces with a billhook while the head still pinned the bull. On the strength of the performance he was able to sell the puppies for £5 apiece. A bulldog, like a bull terrier, would never relinquish his hold willingly. Usually the owner had to force open his dog’s jaws with a lever. And, sometimes, the dog was only parted from the bull by the piece of flesh tearing away in his teeth. It is pleasant to be able to record that, on occasion, the bull would be able to break loose from its tormentors. Then a shout would go up: ‘A lane! A lane!’ and the crowd would split to make a passage for the bull to go through. The fact that when this happened many people were killed through being gored by the bull or trampled on by the crowd would have seemed in itself a good reason for putting an end to the pastime. But not a bit of it. ‘If heads are occasionally broken in these contests,’ said a contemporary M.P., ‘that’s the lower classes’ own affair.’ As a typical example of the sort of incident that enlivened the bull-bait, the story is told of a dog named ‘Teazer’ of Wednesbury, who was backed for a five-pound wager to pin a bull’s nose within an hour in the bull-ring at Sedgley. ‘Teazer’ won the wager for his backers but, holding on to his victim, so infuriated the bull that he broke loose and ran as far as Coseley. The dog hung on until, the flesh of the bull’s nostrils breaking away, he was trampled to death. The wretched bull was then turned back by the yelling rabble, and eventually sank exhausted in the porch of Sedgley Church, where he was beaten to death by the cudgels of the crowd. If some of the things I have written here have shocked you (and I haven’t told you half the horrors I could tell you), mark the fact that bull-baiting, after two different Parliaments had refused to interfere with it, wasn’t prohibited by law until 1835. The last bait appears to have been held at Derby over twenty years later. Prior to that, bull-baiting — and its kindred sports of bear-baiting, cock-fighting, dog-fighting, and the rest — were tolerated not because people were deliberately bestial, but because it never even occurred to them to consider the feelings of animals at all. Your Georgian ancestors might well have been shocked to know that a descendant of theirs would view the whipping of a blinded bear, for instance, as not the most reputable or diverting way of passing a dull afternoon. And the greatest achievement of Victoria’s reign was not the dawn of modern industry, but the discovery of a strange new feeling in the human heart called humanity.” * * * * * Genesis suggests that God looked upon the created world, its birds and beasts, flowers and trees, and ‘found it good’ but from thereon it was mostly down for the unfortunate animals which came into the orbit of the Bible’s notable figures. ‘David captured seventeen hundred of his horsemen and twenty thousand of his foot 9090 soldiers. He kept enough horses for a hundred chariots and crippled all the rest.’ 2 Samuel 8. 4 ‘So he (Samson) went and caught three hundred foxes. Two by two, he tied their tails together and put torches in the knots. Then he set fire to the torches and turned the foxes loose in the Philistine cornfields.’ Judges 15. 4. It is a pity we can’t turn to the Bible for wisdom and understanding about our relations with the non-human world. Instead, we must look elsewhere.

I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contained, I stand and look at them long and long.

They do not sweat and whine about their condition, They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins, They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God, Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things, Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago, Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth. (Walt Whitman) ’Twould ring the bells of Heaven, The wildest peal for years, If parson lost his senses And people came to theirs, And he and they together Knelt down with angry prayers For tamed and shabby tigers And dancing dogs and bears, And wretched, blind pit ponies, And little hunted hares. (Ralph Hodgson) * * * * * BECKETT, SAMUEL BARCLAY, who died in Paris on December 22, 1989, aged 83, had two first-class games for Dublin University against Northamptonshire in 1925 and 1926, scoring 35 runs in his four innings and conceding 64 runs without taking a wicket. A left-hand opening batsman, possessing what he himself called a gritty defence, and a useful left-arm medium-pace bowler, he had enjoyed a distinguished all-round sporting as well as academic record at Portora Royal School, near Enniskillen, and maintained his interest in games while at Trinity College, Dublin. Indeed Beckett, whose novels and plays established him as one of the important literary figures of the twentieth century, bringing him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969, never lost his affection for and interest in cricket. Wisden Cricketers’Almanack 1990. * * * * * “The blame goes to the misguided introducer of a non-native species into our ecosystem—in this case, a Fifth Avenue resident named Eugene Schieffelin. He thought it would be a nice idea to have all the birds ever mentioned by Shakespeare available for viewing in the park outside his window. In 1890 and 1891 he shipped in a total of 100 starlings from Europe. Within a half century the starling population of the United States had burgeoned to more than 200 million!” (Red-Tails in Love by Marie Winn) 9191

“Although inland Australia has never been exactly verdant, much of the marginal land once experienced periods of relative lushness, sometimes lasting years, occasionally lasting decades, and it enjoyed a natural resilience that let it spring back after droughts. Then in 1859 a man named Thomas Austin, a landowner in Winchelsea, Victoria, a little south of where I was now, made a big mistake. He imported twenty-four wild rabbits from England and released them into the bush for sport. It is hardly a novel observation that rabbits breed with a certain keenness. Within a couple of years they had entirely overrun Austin’s property and were spreading into neighbouring districts. Fifty million years of isolation had left Australia without a single predator or parasite able even to recognize rabbits, much less dine off them, and so they proliferated amazingly. ... By 1880, two million acres of Victoria had been picked clean. Soon they were pushing into South Australia and New South Wales, advancing over the landscape at a rate of seventy-five miles per year ...... And all so some clown could have something to pot at from his veranda.” (Down Under by Bill Bryson) “How foxes moved over the rest of Australia (from imports into Melbourne and Adelaide) is a blank. There are dates recording where they were first seen at some places but there is no evidence to show whether they spread of their own accord or were let go ... However, in 1886 they were at Bendigo and in 1893 the shires of Euroa, Benalla, and Shepparton had a bounty on foxes’ heads. Foxes had been newly reported at Bundalong on the Murray ten miles east of Yarrawonga ... In 1903 they were declared noxious at Armidale. Five hundred miles in ten years is a feasible distance even if they had to walk it ... By then (1911) they were in southern Queensland and doing well ... They ranged from the McPherson Ranges and the Albert River in the south to the Burnett at Bundaberg on the coast and west to Charleville. In 1920 one was seen at Longreach ... In Western Australia foxes were west of the deserts at Sandstone, 250 miles north-west of Kalgoorlie, by 1917. They took another seventeen years to reach the far south-west and Derby, in the north. From Derby they spread into the Kimberleys. The first scalps were taken in the east and north Kimberleys in 1943 ... In The Incredible Year, A.H. Chisholm recorded a ship- board conversation with Walter Hawker, a grazier from the one-sheep-to-twenty-acres country in South Australia. In 1937 his men had killed six hundred foxes in twelve weeks.” (They All Ran Wild by Eric Rolls) Arthur Upfield wrote in his novel Breakaway House, ‘Later, Tremayne watched these two’ (the two Aborigines, ‘Miss Hazit’ and ‘Ned’) ‘at work fox hunting. In other parts of the world foxes are hunted with expensive hounds by people mounted on more expensive hacks. In other parts of Australia men go to enormous labour in laying poisoned baits and setting traps. These two Aborigines, ignorant of foxes and their habits until quite recent years, revealed a cunning cleverness truly surprising. Miss Hazit softly circled the burrow, marked amid the white quartz chips by the brown earth of the excavations below, and expertly examined the “run-outs” for tracks, finally silently indicating a particular hole. Twenty odd yards from this hole Ned squatted down, made sure the double-barrelled gun was fully cocked, and waited immobile after waving to Tremayne, still near the fire, to sit down. Miss Hazit then brought her head close to the mouth of the hole and coughed loudly several times. Continuing to cough louder at short intervals, she walked back to Tremayne, shuffling her feet as she went. Nothing happened. Ned, seated like a carved Buddha, rested his cheek against the gun-stock. Miss Hazit then proceeded to throw quartz chips much like a boy skimming a stone over water, each piece of quartz bounding from the burrow to fall some distance beyond. A fox leisurely appeared out of the hole selected by Miss Hazit, the strange sounds 9292 having mastered its curiosity. Blinded by the sunlight, it sat down blinking its eyes, waiting for them to become accustomed to the light in order to ascertain just what caused these most curious noises. And then a second fox appeared. The standing Miss Hazit presently was seen by the first fox which rose on all feet ready to dash below, but Ned fired twice rapidly and the two foxes fell dead.’ * * * * * “I’m going home” said the Minister. “He’s going home” cheeped the Sparrow, “Home” squeaked the Starling, “Home” cracked the Gorse, “Home” blinked the Capeweed, “Home” said the Prickly Pear, “Home” barked the Fox. “How nice” said they all, “Let’s go with him.” Thus Paul L. Grano in ‘Prime Minister to go Home (News Heading)’—and pigs might fly. Though, in actual fact, I have never believed the story of the Gadarene swine in the Bible; even if they did run down the hill into the river it’s very unlikely they all drowned. Pigs can swim. “One sow was especially interesting. She swam across the lake every night, broke into a potato field at a certain place and then swam back again. Of course it made me keen to get to know this animal better. So I took my place on the shore of the lake. As usual, the old “aunt” appeared at midnight for her supper. I shot her as she swam in the lake, and she would have drowned if I had not at the last moment seized her by the leg.” (Baron Manfred von Richthofen) “It was told us in childhood that pigs cannot swim; I have known one to leap overboard, swim five hundred yards to shore, and return to the house of his original owner.” (Robert Louis Stevenson) * * * * * ‘Red Fox, I say, while my small prompter’s mind is elsewhere, is one of the two finest wild animal stories ever written in English. Few readers of natural history would disagree with me, I believe, when I say that Tarka the Otter by Henry Williamson is the other. If Tarka (to which I am devoted) is the greater book, the more poetic book and the more ecstatic book, one must also grant at once that the setting is in England, that man enters and exits from the tale at will, that man and dogs are Tarka’s constant threat. Red Fox himself, on the other hand, roams through a sparsely settled backwoods country. Man has but small relation even to a few of the chapters. It is purely fox that we are following in his natural wild state—his life as it relates to other wild life, from bear and porcupine to owl and grouse and mouse and weasel. Birds and animals, just as they are: no foolish nicknames. A skunk is called a skunk, a rabbit is a rabbit, a lynx is a lynx.’ (David McCord introducing Red Fox by Charles Roberts) * * * * * ‘NOT THE WOMAN’S PLACE’ Time was when there were but few forms of healthy, normal enjoyment to which these words, pregnant of prunes, prisms, and prisons, did not apply. Regarding the matter dispassionately, by the light of literature as well as that of social history, it would seem that the sole places on God’s pleasant earth to which this warning placard was not affixed were those wherein The Woman was occupied with her dealings with the other sex; directly, as in the ball-room, or indirectly, as in the nursery. The indoor traditions of the harem governed the diversions and relaxations of the early Victorian ladies. The few exceptions 9393 proved—to quote for the thousandth time the age-worn aphorism—a rule that did not indeed need any proving, being unquestioned. Let us consider, for example, the matter of Hunting, with which I propose more especially to deal. There was in England, in the eighteenth century, a Marchioness of Salisbury, who kept and followed the Hertfordshire Hounds; in Ireland, at about the same period, there was a Countess of Bandon of high renown as a rider. In literature there was ‘Diana Vernon’, who is spoken of with awe as having ‘guided her horse with the most admirable address and presence of mind’, and even ‘cleared an obstruction composed of forest timber at a flying leap’. Later, Surtees, and Whyte Melville, and John Leech evolved between them a few beings who qualified their prowess in floating over five-barred gates by suitable attacks of faintness during emotional crises; but these were all exceptions. In other sports—shooting, rowing, boat-sailing—the rule required no proving, which was fortunate, as I think there were no exceptions. In art, a tepid water-colour or so was tolerated; elegant volumes of ‘Keepsakes’ received the overflowings of the feminine literary fount in contributions that ran smoothly in the twin channels of knightly heroism and female fidelity, varied perhaps by a dirge for a departed ring-dove or a sob for a faded rosebud. Even in philanthropy, in whose domain the conventional Ministering Angel might have been assigned a place, ‘The Woman’ was assured that she had none. I have been privileged to meet one of Miss Florence Nightingale’s contemporaries and acquaintances, an old lady of over ninety, with whom to speak was as though one had leaped backwards through the rushing years and landed in a peaceful backwater of earliest Victorian times. ‘Florence Nightingale?’ said this little old lady, buried in a big chair, looking like a tiny, shrivelled white mouse with bright blue eyes and grey mittens. ‘Ah! yes, I knew her well. A beautiful woman, my dear; but she had that curious fancy for washing dirty men!’—which, no doubt, expressed a very general view of the life-work of the Lady with the Lamp. Probably when the history is written of how The Woman’s Place in the world came to include ‘All out-doors’ (as they say in America), as well as what has been called in Ireland, ‘the work that is within’, it will be acknowledged that sport, Lawn Tennis, Bicycling, and Hunting, played quite as potent a part as education in the emancipation that has culminated in the Representation of the People Bill. The playing-fields of Eton did not as surely win Waterloo as the hunting-fields and lawn-tennis grounds of the kingdom won the vote for women.” (Somerville & Ross) * * * * * May 30th: Julian Symons Countee Cullen May 31st: Judith Wright Helen Waddell June 1st: John Masefield Pat Boone António Feijó June 2nd: Thomas Hardy Marquis de Sade Carol Shields June 3rd: Vivian Smith Larry McMurtry Cicero Flinders Petrie June 4th: Thomas R. Kelly Mabel Lucie Attwell 9494

John Orr * * * * * Do you have a list of ‘must read’ books? I must admit I am not quite that organised but every so often, usually if it turns up on a stall or I find myself face to face with it on a library shelf or at a friend’s house, I think, ‘Oh yes, there’s such-and-such, I’ve been meaning to read it, now’s my chance’ ... the other day I picked up Thomas Kelly’s famous little book A Testament of Devotion ... and the feeling came to me, ‘I’ve left it too late for it to have the impact other people say it had on them’. I’d read quotes from it, even chapters, in other contexts. But by the time I came to the book itself perhaps I’d read too much ‘Quaker writing’ for it to make an impression. In fact, the most intriguing bit in it was the poem he quotes in his 1938 essay, ‘The Eternal Now and Social Concern’; it is a poem called ‘To Tears’ by Kagawa ... Ah tears! Unbidden tears! Familiar friends since childhood’s lonely years, Long separated we, Why do ye come again to dwell with me? At midnight, dawn, midday Ye come; nor wait your coming nor delay; Nay fearless, with what scorn Ye picture China by my brothers torn. Your scorn I must accept, But I’m no coward; pray heed ere more ye’ve wept; I love Japan so fair, And China too; this war I cannot bear. “Is there no other way?” Thus do I search my spirit all the day Nor ever reach a goal; I live, but only as a phantom soul. Like Christ who bore our sins upon the Cross, I, too, must bear my country’s sins and dross; Land of my love! Thy sins are grievous to be borne, My head hangs low upon my form forlorn. Ah tears! Unbidden tears! Long separated we, Alas! has come another day When ye must dwell with me. But who was Kagawa, I wondered, and where and when was he writing. Born in Kobe in 1888, he became a Christian as a teenager and with a scholarship went to the Presbyterian College in Tokyo; he contracted tuberculosis and, in what seems the worst treatment possible, he went to live in the dismal slums of Shinkawa. In his fourteen-year-long residence, he became a writer and outspoken social activist. His book The Psychology of Poverty helped to arouse the Government to the conditions in the slums. In 1916 he went to the United States to study at Princeton for two years. On his return home he helped to organise a Labor Federation and a Farmers’ Union. He saw that there was a political dimension to the issues needing to be tackled and his politicisation saw him arrested and imprisoned during the rice riots of 1919 and during the shipyard strikes of 1921. But he was instrumental in expanding the right to vote and in removing some of the restrictions on Trade Unionism. The great earthquake of 1923 saw him actively involved in running the massive relief effort needed and in reorganising the Bureau of Social Welfare to cope with such needs. He became a committed supporter of the Cooperative Movement, something which had been in modest existence in Japan since the beginning of the century, but he brought to 9595 it much needed vitality and organisation, “founding schools, hospitals, and churches, remaking the credit-union movement, and spreading the Christian ideals of fellowship and service.” He promoted the idea of cooperatives as a foundation for world peace. Peace was his most urgent concern in the 1930s and he went to jail in 1940 for “violating the military code”; he maintained his anti-war activities in Japan throughout WW2, and worked to democratise Japan in the aftermath. He died in 1960, having written 134 books and pamphlets with such inspiring titles as Love, the Law of Life, Brotherhood Economics, Christ and Japan and Before the Dawn. Introducing Kagawa’s book The Practising Christian Hugh Martin writes, ‘He has been called the Japanese Saint Francis and he has earned the name.’ Another inspiring Asian writer deeply concerned about the militarisation of Japan was Rabindranath Tagore. Rajendra Verma in his biography of Tagore writes: ‘So determined was Tagore’s opposition to cults of power that he did not hesitate to join issue even with Mahatma Gandhi if he sensed some unwitting use of power psychology. His angry retort to the Japanese poet Yone Noguchi, on the question of Japanese attack on China, is a classic of lofty contempt of fascist onslaughts on helpless countries. Noguchi had asked Tagore to persuade the Chinese to believe that the Japanese attack was, in fact, a kind of chastisement which China should accept. He built the vision of a United Asia by saying: “The war was the inevitable means, terrible though it is, for establishing a new world over in the Asiatic continent.” Tagore replied: “You are building your conception of an Asia which would be raised on a tower of skulls; I have as you rightly pointed out, believed in the message of Asia, but I never dreamt that this message could be identified with deeds which brought exaltation to the heart of Tamerlane at his terrible efficiency in manslaughter. “I speak with sorrow for your people; your letter has hurt me to the depth of my being. I know that one day, the disillusionment of your people will be complete, and through laborious centuries, they will have to clear the debris of their civilisation wrought to ruin by their own warlords run amok. They will realize that the aggressive war on China is insignificant as compared to the destruction of the inner spirit of chivalry of Japan which is proceeding with a ferocious severity. “If you can convince the Chinese that your armies are bombing their cities and rendering their women and children homeless beggars—those of them that are not transformed into ‘mutilated mudfish’—to borrow one of your phrases—you can convince these victims that they are only being subjected to a benevolent treatment which will in the end ‘save’ the nation, it will no longer be necessary for you to convince us of your country’s noble intentions. “Your righteous indignation against the ‘polluted people’ who are burning their own cities and art treasures ... to malign your soldiers reminds me of Napoleon’s wrath when he marched into a deserted Moscow and watched its palaces in flames. “I should have expected from you, who are a poet, at least that much of imagination to feel to what inhuman despair a people must be reduced, to willingly burn their own handiwork of years, indeed, centuries of labour. And, even as a good nationalist, do you seriously believe that the mountain of bleeding corpses and the wilderness of bombed and burnt cities that is everyday widening between your two countries, is making it easier for your two peoples to stretch your hands in a clasp of everlasting goodwill? “Wishing your people whom I love, not success but remorse.” * * * * * There are writers who flit by, gravely, as shadows in other people’s work; some like Kagawa are not hard to find, once I make the effort. Others seem determined to remain in the shadows. Of course, it is really the writers of biographies, encyclopedias and the like 9696 who keep them there. But their obscurity seems to throw long shadows over their writing as well. One who has always come into this category, for me at least, others may study him in depth in Literature Departments although I doubt it, is A. S. J. Tessimond. His little poem ‘Cats No Less Liquid Than Their Shadows’ was in our poetry book when I was at school though we never actually studied it, our teacher preferring to make us learn by heart things such as Masefield’s ‘Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack—’, possibly because Masefield was Poet Laureate at the time. I think I would have liked poetry more if we’d studied cats. I’ve always had an affection for the poem, probably because I was ‘always’ rescuing cats, not only from fates worse than death but probably from themselves also. I rescued a small white kitten from a culvert when I was riding home from school on my pony; someone had dumped it there and it was wet and starving. Another one I ‘collected’ was part of a litter of a cat gone feral; it was quite a business catching him and carrying him, spitting and clawing. I think my mother began to be afraid of what I might next bring home— Tessimond (1902-1962) was born in Birkenhead, educated at Charterhouse and Liverpool University, and brought out three volumes of poems in his lifetime, The Walls of Glass, Voices in a Giant City and Selection. Oh, and the ASJ stands for Arthur Seymour John. And yet the curious thing is that Tessimond if he is remembered at all (and Philip Hobsbaum in Tradition & Experiment in English Poetry calls him ‘a neglected poet of the time’) is remembered as part of a 1920s-30s British group of poets who concentrated on machines, automation, urbanisation, the idea of Man as Machine ... strange then, that his poem most likely to be remembered begins: Cats, no less liquid than their shadows, Offer no angles to the wind. They slip, diminished, neat, through loopholes Less than themselves; will not be pinned

* * * * * A Testament of Devotion is a Thing I Felt I Must Read. But there is also an unsuspected fascination in Things I Never Thought to Read. Valerie Parv in The Art of Romance Writing says: ‘Every month I buy at least two magazines outside my normal interest range, everything from Playboy to Agricultural Digest and pop-rock magazines. Apart from widening your view of the world, these spark ideas outside your own range of experiences. An article about a farm secretary who divided her time among several outback properties inspired the idea for the heroine in Man Shy. I wrote to the woman interviewed in the article asking for further information. But for that issue of Farm Journal, I would not have known such a profession existed. Reading someone’s sweatshirt at an exercise class gave me the idea for A Fair Exchange. Until then I had no idea that thousands of Australian farmers go to work on foreign farms every year while their foreign counterparts come to Australia to work and learn. A writer must be a sponge, soaking up ideas at every opportunity.’ * * * * * June 5th: P’u Sung-Ling Ken Follett Mrs Aenas Gunn * * * * * Several of us share a copy of Land Rights News and when the July 1999 issue got round to me I was intrigued by this little news item: “The Elsey cattle station near Katherine in the NT, immortalised in the Australian “classic” We of the Never Never by Jeannie Gunn, would be a perfect location for a national event to recognise the importance 9797 of Aboriginal land rights. Northern Land Council chairman Galarrwuy Yunupingu said that the official hand over of the property to its rightful owners would be an ideal opportunity for all Australians, indigenous and non-indigenous, to come together to celebrate Australia’s “united” history. “The symbolism is perfect,” Mr Yunupingu said. “It is the coming together of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal history. “It is a story of coexistence and reconciliation, with non-Aboriginal law recognising Aboriginal law and Aboriginal Australians sharing their country with non-Aboriginal Australians.” Land ownership is a theme that weaves its way through this country’s entire history, Mr Yunupingu said. This hand over would illustrate a positive step forward in the on-going story. “Elsey Station has meant a lot to the Mangarrayi people and this hand over would be the final piece of the jigsaw for this particular piece of land,” he said. “At long last, Elsey Station would be returned to its rightful owners and Aboriginal people want all Australians to join in the celebration.” We of the Never Never was written by Jeannie Gunn following her time on Elsey cattle station at the turn of the century. ... The lease for Elsey station is currently owned by Aboriginal people who manage and run the property. The traditional owners lodged their claim over the land in 1991 under the Land Rights Act. As his final major action before his retirement, former Land Commissioner Justice Gray in 1997 recommended to the Federal Aboriginal Affairs Minister, Senator Herron that the land claim be granted. “What we need now is an official handing over of the land—and a celebration by all Australia,” Mr Yunupingu said. “What better way could there be to walk together into the 21st century.” And just to up-date you—a little piece in the December issue, “The traditional owners of Elsey, the people from the Mangarrayi and Yangmau language groups, along with station manager Max Gorringe, are happy with progress since they took over full ownership of their country.” The piece notes that Elsey is 5,345 sq. kms (1.3 million acres) and currently is running 8,000 head of cattle, with the hope of eventually running 25,000 head, and that 34 kms of fencing had been erected in 2000. “ “Cattle prices have been right up,” Max said at the end of the final muster on the property for the year.” Mrs Gunn wasn’t in the vanguard of Aboriginal rights and reconciliation but I think she would get the same pleasure I did from those two little snippets of news. * * * * * June 6th: Julia O’Faolain Virginia Andrews June 7th: Louise Erdrich June 8th: Gwen Harwood Charles Reade June 9th: Patricia Cornwell June 10th Maurice Sendak June 11th: Ben Jonson Yasunari Kawabata June 12th: Charles Kingsley Anne Frank June 13th: W. B. Yeats Augusto Roa Bastos Fanny Burney 9898

Fernando Pessoa June 14th: John Wideman June 15th: Amy Clampitt June 16th: Joyce Carol Oates June 17th: Kerry Greenwood Henry Lawson June 18th: Robyn Archer June 19th: Tobias Wolff Salman Rushdie Blaise Pascal James I of England/VI of Scotland * * * * * People, perhaps from time immemorial, have poked fun at committees— ‘A committee is a thing that takes a week to do what one good man can do in an hour’ (Elbert Hubbard) ‘A committee is a group that keeps the minutes and loses the hours’ (Milton Berle) ‘A committee is a gathering of important people who singly can do nothing but together can decide that nothing can be done’ (Rufus M. Jones) ‘Definition of a Committee: The unwilling picked from the unfit to do the unnecessary’ (Anon) ‘No park has a statue dedicated to a committee’ (H. Jackson Brown Jr.) ‘Never let a committee do any drafting,’ one chairman told me. ‘Get one man to write it, and have it most beautifully typed—if it all looks neat and virginal no one will feel like ravishing it. Not in front of the committee anyway.’ (Katharine Whitehorn) —yet some of the most profoundly important decisions have been made by committees. Take for instance the committee which decided what would go in, and what would be excluded, from the Old Testament (First Covenant or Kiswe Ha-Kodesh), and the committee that did the same for the New Testament (Second Covenant). Wouldn’t you have loved to be a fly on the wall, not only to hear what they had to say about their choices but also what they knew about the writing of all the material under consideration. And then there was the committee which translated what is probably the most famous Bible of all, the King James Version. Strictly speaking, there were six committees, each comprising eight experts, to tackle the translation and they could draw on previous translations; they did not have to ‘reinvent the wheel’. Certainly a variety of their choices of words and descriptions have been questioned—‘virgin’, we are told, should simply be ‘young woman’, ‘mansions’ is better translated as ‘inns’ or ‘lodging houses’, ‘Satan’ originally meant only ‘slanderer’, Joseph’s famous coat of many colours is correctly translated as ‘a long, sleeved robe’, the ‘Red Sea’ as ‘Sea of Reeds’—and in a book apparently written by a committee called Witchcraft & Magic it says, ‘The Bible even describes several encounters with witches, notably that between Saul and the witch of Endor. It also condemns them in texts that were used by medieval inquisitors to justify their own orgies of torture and burning when bringing supposed witches to trial. And wrongly, too, as it happens, since as early as 1584, Reginald Scot, in Discovery of Witchcraft, had pointed out that the most famous anti-witch text of all, ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,’ properly translates as ‘Thou shalt not suffer poisoners to live.’ Antonia Fraser in King James writes “To these early years belong what many think the chef d’oeuvre of King James’s work in England, the commissioning of that translation of the Bible sometimes known by his name. The Authorised Version of the Bible was the direct result of James’s inquisitive mind, his perpetual interest in the relation of expression to the meaning of things (which might perhaps in the twentieth century have led him philosophically towards logical positivism). As early as 1601, with that pedagogic if not 9999 academic streak of his, he had urged a new translation on the Kirk. When the matter was raised at the Hampton Court conference, the King responded eagerly: ‘I could never yet see a Bible well-translated.’ When it came to the method employed for the new translation, James’s own suggestion at Hampton Court was, broadly speaking, adopted. The translation was to be made by the most learned linguists in the universities, reviewed by the bishops and other learned churchmen, and then presented to the Privy Council, and finally ratified by the royal authority. It is evident that James’s prime motive in his instructions and the care he took in his consultative work, was that the Bible should be easily understood by the ordinary people of the day. For the new Bible was above all an ornament to the English language, over ninety per cent of the words being of English derivation. ... As a creative artist, James was less successful than as a committee chairman. The revising of the Psalms into a new metrical version he undertook himself. But the King was called to sing Psalms with the angels, as Bishop Williams expressed it felicitiously, before the work was finished. When they appeared in 1631, the Psalms had been supplemented by a great deal of work by Sir William Alexander.” * * * * * I was recently reading a very interesting book called The Jesus Papyrus by Carsten Peter Thiede and Matthew D’Ancona. They suggest that the piece of papyrus containing a scrap from St Matthew’s Gospel, found in upper Egypt in 1901 by an obscure Anglican clergyman, the Rev. Charles Bonsfield Huleatt, and now lodged in Magdalen College, Oxford, shows that this Gospel was written before AD 70 and may prove that St Matthew’s Gospel was the first. It is generally believed that St Mark’s Gospel came first and the others all drew to some extent on his. Equally importantly, no Gospel has been dated before AD 70. Naturally I went back and read Matthew. And I noticed a fascinating thing which had never occurred to me before. In fact I noticed two fascinating things. Matthew’s Gospel contains the most fantastical aspects of Jesus’ life. The Virgin Birth, the Star of Bethlehem, the Men from the East, Herod’s destruction of the little boys ... and it also contains the most laconic down-to-earth descriptions of his life and travels with Jesus ... and in between it contains numerous parables, anecdotes and descriptions of great immediacy and vividness. It as though he wrote the laconic account of his life in these years, interspersing it with things he had either taken down in shorthand at the time (he, of all the disciples, must have been the most literate) or which had remained clear and dramatic in his memory. But then, knowing the society in which he lived, with its love of the fantastical, the miraculous, the magical, he knew his readers, those who had no personal memory of Jesus, would be more likely to believe if his account also contained these magical elements. He naturally drew on the myths, folktales, prophecies and pseudo- histories he was familiar with. He placed his precious stones, large and small, in a finely- wrought golden setting. The second thing is the sheer extent of Jesus’ healing ministry. ‘And Jesus went round about in all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, and preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing all disease and all sickness which were among the people.’ (4.23) ‘And our Lord went among the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues, and preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing every sickness and every disease.’ (9.35) ‘And the men of that place had knowledge of him, and sent to their country, and brought unto him all that were very sick; and besought him that they might only touch the hem of his garment; and as many as touched were made whole.’ (14. 35-36) ‘And great multitudes came near unto him, having with them the lame, the blind, the maimed, the dumb, and many others, and cast them down at his feet; and he healed them;’ (15.30) ‘he departed from Galilee, and came to the borders of Judaea beyond Jordan; and great multitudes followed him, and he healed them.’ (19.1-2) 100100

We cannot know quite what was meant by ‘great multitudes’ (twenty? two hundred? two thousand?) yet I cannot help wondering why something which was such an integral part of Jesus’ ministry and preaching has been so overlooked … * * * * * James was a keen if modestly talented writer. His books were Essayes of a Prentise in the Divine Art of Poesie (1584), His Majesties Poeticall Exercises at Vacant Houres (1591), Daemonologie (1597), Trew Law of Free Monarchies (1598), Basilikon Doron (1598), Counterblaste to Tobacco (1604), Book of Sports (1618), and Meditations on St Matthew (1620). His opposition to tobacco smoking and his belief that people had a right to enjoy themselves on a Sunday after church were sensible and forward-looking, as was his patronage of some of the most famous of writers including John Donne and, of course, Shakespeare who wrote most of his great tragedies in James’s reign, but it is his book on witchcraft which remains his best-known work, if not perhaps the one he would most like to be remembered for. David Pickering in the Dictionary of Withcraft writes that James “despite his reputation for learning and open-mindedness, is remembered as one of the prime movers behind the instigation of the witch-hunting hysteria that swept England and Scotland in the seventeenth century. In 1597, indeed, he published a classic tract stressing the need for vigilance against witchcraft, and this work was considered by many to bestow the royal seal of approval on those who believed in the systematic persecution of witches in their midst. James became convinced of the reality of withcraft as a young man, probably while wintering with his bride-to-be in Denmark. Here he came into contact with many notable European intellectuals, who happened at that time to be much distracted by the perceived threat of witchcraft and were actively developing the theory that the whole of the civilised world was being invaded by Satan’s hordes. Shortly after his return home, the King’s anxiety about this threat seemed to him to be confirmed when, at Holyrood Palace in 1591, he personally interviewed Agnes Sampson and other suspects in the infamous case of the North Berwick Witches. Under torture, which was witnessed by the King in person, Sampson confessed her guilt and also (perhaps conveniently for James) implicated the King’s ambitious cousin, Francis, Earl of Bothwell, as the leader of a coven who had plotted against the throne. James let it be known that he was especially alarmed by Sampson’s claims that she and her accomplices had plotted to murder him when he sailed off to visit his intended wife, Anne of Denmark. According to Sampson’s confession, the witches had taken to the waters of the Forth in magic sieves when the King set sail for Scandinavia and had thrown a cat, tied up with parts of a dead corpse, into the sea to raise a storm. The fleet had indeed encountered bad weather and one ship had gone down, although it was not the vessel on which the King was travelling. When this plot had failed, the witches had fashioned a waxen image of James, identifying it as the King as they passed it from one to another prior to roasting it over a fire. James listened carefully to the testimony of Sampson and the others and expressed doubts about the truth of much of it. Ultimately he lost patience with them and called them all ‘extreme liars’, but he changed his tune very quickly when Sampson reportedly whispered in his ear the exact words that James and his new bride had exchanged in private on their wedding night. The startled James, who admitted that ‘all the devils in hell could not have discovered the same’, had no option now but to accept Sampson’s culpability and to support the guilty verdict that was brought against her (she was subsequently executed at Haddington). When another of the accused, Barbara Napier, was acquitted because she was pregnant, James — in what was called the ‘Tolbooth Speech’ — accused the judges of ‘an assize of error’: 101101

For witchcraft, which is a thing grown very common amongst us, I know it to be a most abominable sin, and I have been occupied these three quarters of this year for the sifting out of them that are guilty herein. We are taught by the laws both of God and men that this sin is most odious. And by God’s law punishable by death. By man’s law it is called maleficium or veneficium, an ill deed or a poisonable deed, and punishable likewise by death. The thing that moved (the judges) to find as they did, was because they had no testimony but of witches; which they thought not sufficient. By the civil law I know that such infamous persons are not received for witnesses, but in matters of heresy and lesae majestatis. For on other matters it is not thought meet yet in these matters of witchcraft good reason that such be admitted. First none honest can know these matters. Second, because they will not accuse themselves. Thirdly, because no act which is done by them can be seen. Further, I call them witches which do renounce God and yield themselves wholly to the Devil; but when they have done, then I account them not as witches, and so their testimony sufficient. The judges were obliged to apologise for their leniency (although Napier seems to have survived). Bothwell was obliged to go into exile and ceased to be a serious challenge to the throne. Politically motivated though it might have been, James’s interest in the trial of Sampson and other members of her coven prompted him to record his thoughts on the subject in his Daemonologie, which was published in the form of a lengthy dialogue in 1597, the same year as the mass trial of the Aberdeen witches. This tract was written partly in response to Reginald Scot’s sceptical Discoverie of Witchcraft of 1584 and supported, on the whole, the idea that witchcraft was a real threat. James did, however, question the validity of some theories about the powers and practices of practitioners of the black arts and warned against accepting accusations without corroborating evidence, as well as discounting the existence of werewolves. On the other hand, he supported the practice of swimming and the searching out of the devil’s mark to confirm guilt. The book, republished south of the border in 1604, found a ready audience throughout the kingdom. All copies of Scot’s book, meanwhile, were destroyed in 1603 by royal command. In the first year of James’s reign in England he pushed through a new Witchcraft Act which was much sterner in character than the previous Act of 1563, increasing penalties and consequently intensifying the witch-hunting mania. In line with Continental practice, courts now looked for suggestions that the accused had made a pact with the Devil, rather than concentrating upon evidence of actual maleficia. In James’s defence, his reservations about the quality of the evidence in many cases became well known and undoubtedly curbed some of the judicial excesses that might otherwise have occurred. On several occasions, indeed, he went out of his way to make public criticisms of judges who failed to question adequately wild accusations that relied upon hearsay alone. In 1616 James demonstrated his cautious approach to evidence in specific cases when he interviewed a thirteen-year-old boy, John Smith, who was at the centre of a trial at the Leicestershire Assizes. Nine witches had already been hanged for causing the lad to suffer fits, and another six were awaiting examination on the same charges. James questioned the boy and decided he was faking his evidence: the Archbishop of Canterbury agreed, and finally the boy confessed. James delivered a stiff rebuke to the judges — Sir Randolph Crew and Sir Humphrey Winch — who had sent nine innocent women to their deaths, and demanded that in the future judges assess evidence much more stringently. The case of the Bilson Boy in 1620, which resulted in the acquittal of the accused after the boy concerned similarly admitted he had made up the allegations, strengthened James in his scepticism. It is unlikely that James ceased to believe entirely in the principle of witchcraft, but 102102 certainly towards the end of his life he retreated from many of the conclusions he had drawn in his famous book. In the last nine years of his reign only five people are recorded as having been executed for witchcraft. None the less, passages from James’s Daemonologie continued to be widely quoted in courts as justification for the prosecution of accused witches, and the 1604 Act that he sponsored remained on the statute books until 1736. The circumstances of James I’s early death are shrouded in mystery and some contemporaries detected a further link between the monarch and witchcraft, alleging that Dr Lamb, associate of the Duke of Buckingham, had used magic to poison the King. Lamb himself was subsequently hunted down by the London mob and stoned to death in Cheapside amid accusations that he was a wizard. His assistant, Anne Bodenham, stood trial as a witch, accused of supplying poisons, and was hanged.” * * * * * June 20th: Dorothy Simpson June 21st: Ian McEwan June 22nd: Hillary Waugh Anne Morrow Lindbergh June 23rd: Winifred Holtby Jean Anouilh June 24th: Lawrence Block June 25th: George Orwell June 26th: Colin Wilson June 27th: Helen Keller June 28th: Luigi Pirandello June 29th: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry June 30th: Czeslaw Milosz John Gay July 1st: Dorothea MacKellar July 2nd: Herman Hesse July 3rd: Franz Kafka July 4th: Neil Simon July 5th: George Borrow July 6th: Ana Teresa Torres Peter Singer July 7th: Robert Heinlein * * * * * Robert Heinlein wrote a piece with the fascinating title ‘Methusaleh’s Children’; there is actually no guarantee that someone called Methusaleh ever lived but the question of great old age has always fascinated; how to achieve it, whether it is worth achieving, whether there is a specific ageing mechanism (or as we would say ‘ageing gene’) or whether our bodies simply obey the laws of all matter and must change and decay. The Bible suddenly leaps into a list of these ancients: Adam who was 130 when Seth arrived, and died at 930. Seth who was 105 when Enosh arrived, and died at 912. Enosh who was 90 when Kenan arrived, and died at 905. Kenan who was 70 when Mahalalel arrived, and died at 910. Mahalalel who was 65 when Jared arrived, and died at 895. Jared who was 162 when Enoch arrived, and died at 962. Enoch who was 65 when Methusaleh arrived, and died at 365. Methusaleh who was 187 when Lamech arrived, and died at 969. Lamech who was 182 when Noah arrived, and died at 777. Noah was 500 when Shem, Ham and Japheth arrived, and died at 950. 103103

We don’t get told the ages of the women, except for the story of Sarah which appears to meet the need of suggesting the women too were ancient when their sons were born. Then age ceases to matter. We rarely get told the ages of kings and other important people living in the times when records had begun to be kept. So what needs do these great ages meet? For the Israelites, surrounded by people who seemingly had achieved much more, in Babylon, in Egypt, the Phoenician cities on the coast, if they were to claim fatherhood of the human race they needed to be able to push their genealogies beyond anything claimed, or even possible, for their neighbours. They could insert hundreds, possibly even thousands of generations, but a much simpler way would be to stretch the ages of their patriarchs. Just ten men lived a combined total of 9,575 years. And even taken from one significant son to the next we get a total of 1,556 years, adequate to push back beyond the likely claims of neighbouring peoples. By the time that Methusaleh was thinking of giving up the ghost he would likely have been surrounded by thousands of descendants, rather wearying, and needing some explaining away. Something which Noah and his Ark did very decisively, though the implication that most of the ‘wicked people’ needing to be destroyed were the children of their own ancestors was neatly sidestepped by the writer of Genesis. George Bernard Shaw did a series of five plays he called Back to Methusaleh which suggest he wasn’t enthusiastic about the possibilities inherent in great age. The words he gives to Cain ‘Why not live bravely, and die early and make room for others?’ strike a more positive chord than those who cling to life. Karel Capek in The Makropoulos Affair of 1923 “poses the question whether the indefinite continuance of life is an unalloyed good.” And Aldous Huxley came at the subject in his last book After Many A Summer. He had written of playing God at the beginning of life in Brave New World; towards the end of his life, he toyed with the question of extending life. A young Englishman, Jeremy Pordage, is visiting California to do some family research. He becomes caught up in the question of postponed death, California-style. ‘On the scientific front, the news is that we’re all perceptibly nearer to living as long as crocodiles. At the time of writing, I haven’t decided whether I really want to live as long as a crocodile.’ Or so he writes home. And the question gives Aldous Huxley good reasons to delve into a variety of related themes; good and evil, time and eternity ... Mark Twain wrote, I think very wisely, “Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life is, knows how deep a debt of gratitude we owe to Adam, the first great benefactor of our race. He brought death into the world.” Every creature dies, death is inbuilt, but only with human beings was death connected with sin. Or perhaps, more specifically, only in Judaism was sin tied to sorrow and death ... and this connection flowed through into Christianity ... And this was a question that exercised Jonathon Swift when he wrote of the Struldbruggs who lived in the land of Luggnagg. When they reached eighty years of age they were regarded as legally dead and their heirs would inherit even though they continued to live on, because the “Immortals would in time become Proprietors of the whole Nation, and engross the Civil Power; which, for want of Abilities to manage, must end in the Ruin of the Publick”. Sandra Coney in The Menopause Industry writes, “The mid-life woman now has her very own disease—oestrogen deficiency syndrome—specific to her sex and time of life. Medicine has determined that in her normal state, the mid-life woman is sick. The idea of normal ageing has been collapsed into a definition of pathology. The menopause is no longer simply the end of periods, or a life stage, but has been constructed as an illness that no woman can escape. She will suffer from this from the moment her ovaries start to falter until she dies—a period of at least half her lifetime. In the eyes of the medical industry, this has raised her status enormously. She is now diagnosable and treatable, and in vast 104104 numbers. Women are living longer. A third of women will live well into their eighties. The potential this provides for various interested parties is limitless.” And that is surely the curious question, for women, about the constant quest to live longer. Menstruation that goes on for four hundred years? Four hundred years of worrying about contraception and babies? It doesn’t bear thinking upon. * * * * * July 8th: Dave Margoshes Charlotte Perkins Gilman July 9th: Barbara Cartland July 10th: Larry Adler Toyohiko Kagawa July 11th: Thomas Bowdler Harold Bloom * * * * * Bowdlerism is a pejorative word yet I think this does Thomas and his sister an injustice. I came upon a little booklet called The Real McCoy by Eileen Hellicar on the ‘People behind the names you thought were fiction’ and she writes, “The term bowdlerise, meaning to expurgate, or purify a book by removing offensive words or passages, comes from the name of Thomas Bowdler, a pious English doctor who cleaned up Shakespeare’s plays so that he could read them to his family. Dr Bowdler considered that Shakespeare’s language contained ‘many words and expressions which are of so indecent a nature as to render it highly desirable that they should be erased’. So erase them he did, and in 1818 he published his edited version. This new edition of Shakespeare was severely attacked in a review in the literary magazine British Critic, to which Bowdler published a long reply defending his principles. But literary criticism did not stop the sale of the new work. Within five years four editions had been published and more followed during the Victorian era. Encouraged by his success with Shakespeare, Bowdler set about purifying Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Besides being a physician and man of letters, Bowdler was a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and a philanthropist. When John Howard, the prison reformer, died in 1790 Bowdler carried on his work and visited prisons throughout the country. He was also an active member of the Proclamation Society, which was formed in 1787 to enforce a royal proclamation against impiety and vice. After Bowdler’s death in 1825 his place as watchdog for purity was taken by his nephew Thomas, who said that it was the ‘peculiar happiness’ of his uncle to have purified both Shakespeare and Gibbon so that they would no longer ‘raise a blush on the cheek of modest innocence nor plant a pang in the heart of the devout Christian.’ ” She doesn’t mention that Thomas and his sister (so far I have found her called Isobel, Henrietta and Harriet!) were partners in this major enterprise but it is a reminder that they did their work well before Victorian attitudes cast their long shadow and greatly extended the definition of impiety and vice. Personally I think the Bowdlers did Shakespeare a service. By bringing him down from heavy old tomes in high adult shelves and putting him in the hands of children they created a new generation to whom Shakespeare was accessible, readable, and safe. It must have created readers who went on in adulthood to read the unexpurgated versions, who went to performances, who remembered and used quotes and phrases and ideas embedded in childhood. The Bowdlers had a great respect for Shakespeare—they dedicated their Family Shakespeare to Mrs Elizabeth Montagu who had brought out her Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespeare in 1769; she was a generous and intelligent woman who provided money, friendship and encouragement to many struggling writers and was 105105 described by Fanny Burney as “brilliant in diamonds, solid in judgement, and critical in talk”—and they believed the indelicacies in his works were the result of him living in a more rumbustuous and foul-mouthed age. Their work was a labour of love, not the kind of adaption and cutting that comes from a publisher saying to an editor “here, cut 20,000 words out of this and it might be suitable for our Young Readers’ Series—” And I wonder why we take in our stride the constant adaptions, expurgations, shortenings, re-writings, re-tellings, of almost everything, for every reason under the sun, from the cost of paper to the ease of production, and yet we are ever-inclined to throw up our hands in horror if someone adapts or expurgates or shortens on the grounds of purity? Why are mercenary reasons for cutting and changing and shortening seen as better than moral reasons? * * * * * One curious thing about adolescence that went unnoticed, at least by me, until my second son was a teenager is the importance of a shared love for a book, a writer, a film, a cartoonist, something that provides a kind of shorthand that can be thrown across the gap that widens between parent and teenager. My mother and I did not get along when I was in my late teens—but we did have a shared love. Somerville and Ross. And it could be brought into otherwise fraught situations. We could both quote all sorts of odd and quirky little bits. It never occurred to me how helpful this could be. All through my first son Patrick’s adolescence I sometimes had the feeling we lived on different planets. I’m sorry now that this little bit of insight never struck me. But with Ken I shared a love for James Herriot—and he talked me into watching Doctor Who which also became a shared affection. I’m sure it made a difference. * * * * * ‘Coronation Street was created by Tony Warren. Star Trek was created by Gene Roddenbery. Dad’s Army was created by Jimmy Perry and David Croft. The provenance of each of these three television series—in their own way among the most popular ever to reach the screen—is certain and unchallenged, the names of their prime movers plainly and proudly stated in their on-screen credits. Throughout its history, Doctor Who bore no such credit. Always seen as the brainchild of an ever-changing committee of early 1960s BBC staff members and freelances, it has seemed impossible to lay the honour, or indeed the blame, for the creation of this slice of hectic nonsense at the door of any single individual. But then perhaps it’s just that no one has really searched in the right place. If you look past the devisers of the trimmings and the gimmicks, the TARDIS and the title, it becomes clear that Doctor Who does have an unsung creator, and it is well past time he received the recognition he deserves. It was a man called Cecil Edwin Webber who was charged with coming up with the central character, along with a basic framework to direct the stories. He wrote, “A frail old man lost in time and space. They give him this name because they don’t know who he is. He seems not to remember where he has come from; he is suspicious and capable of sudden malignancy ... he has a machine which enables them to travel together through time, through space, and through matter ... He remains a mystery.” The TARDIS was to be “some common object in the street” and “inside a marvellous contrivance of quivering electronics.” And his companion “eager for life, lower than middle class” with a “neutral accent”. “We are not writing science fiction” was his position. “We shall provide scientific explanations too, sometimes, but we shall not bend over backwards to do so, if we decide to achieve credibility by other means. Neither are we writing fantasy: the events have got to be credible to our three ordinary people who are our main characters ... I think the writer’s safeguard here will be if he remembers that he is writing for an audience aged fourteen ... the most difficult, critical, even sophisticated, audience there is for TV. In brief, 106106 avoid the limitations of any label and use the best in any style or category as it suits us, so long as it works in our medium.” (Doctor Who from A to Z by Gary Gillatt) * * * * * July 12th: Pablo Neruda July 13th: John Clare Wole Soyinka Archie Weller Isaac Babel * * * * * I was in the library the other day and picked up a book with the intriguing title The Killing of History by Keith Windschuttle. Though I haven’t been in any History Departments to see if there is blood on the floor, I must admit my impression was quite the opposite; going by bookshop shelves and new library acquisitions, history, both popular and academic, has never been more saleable, readable, and available. His thesis is that the introduction of the theories of French academics and writers such as Michel Foucalt, Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes and the belief that there is no absolute historic ‘fact’ but only a variety of historic ‘fictions’ has undermined, damaged, trivialised, and generally played havoc with the discipline of History as we have known it. By incorporating History into Cultural Studies, Media Studies, etc, everything has become relative and there are no longer ‘truths’ which careful research and rigorous scholarship can unearth, order, and present. Undoubtedly the broadening of the field, the incorporation of all kinds of post- modern and other theories, has led to moments of silliness, obscurity, impenetrable jargon, sloppy scholarship, and speculative ideas not necessarily backed up by indisputable facts. But I’m not sure that that’s altogether a bad thing. My own memories of doing History at school is of bored students, bored teachers, bored textbook writers ... in fact the image of History as a safe, easy, but dull subject in which a few giants and a lot of hacks had told us everything we might ever want to know on most subjects of historical relevance and historical interest was killing History by the sheer weight of boredom. Almost anything to bring in debate, controversy, acrimony, and widely differing ideas and interpretations, was probably welcome and healthy. The reason history was on my mind that day, I think, was that I’d just picked out G. M. Trevelyan’s English Social History. This first came out in 1942. Trevelyan writes, “Social history might be defined negatively as the history of a people with the politics left out. It is perhaps difficult to leave out the politics from the history of any people, particularly the English people. But as so many history books have consisted of political annals with little reference to their social environment, a reversal of that method may have its uses to redress the balance. During my own lifetime a third very flourishing sort of history has come into existence, the economic, which greatly assists the serious study of social history. For the social scene grows out of economic conditions, to much the same extent that political events in their turn grow out of social conditions. Without social history, economic history is barren and political history is unintelligible.” Since then, there has been tremendous excitement generated by the growing number of histories by women, about women, of the colonised rather than the colonisers; oral histories, local histories, survivor testimonies; the books which cross traditional boundaries between biography, memoir, even seemingly unrelated treatises on things like botany and birth-control, even categories like Historical Romance; the sense of reclaiming little incidents and intriguing events and mysteries and relationships that weren’t perhaps thought ‘big’ enough for History. (Like the best-selling narrative histories such as Dava Sobel’s Longitude.) I felt this was a possibility undermining Windschuttle’s arguments— that the worst of the ‘new’ histories were being driven by the same widening of the field as 107107 the best of the ‘new’ histories; that they are both part of the same intricate process. But I suppose my own views about ‘history’ are influenced, on the one hand, by the fact that I am, almost every day, at the National Trust House, Runnymede. This is the kind of ‘hands on’ imaginative history which perhaps falls between fact-and-document-driven history and theory-and-discourse-driven history and which, I’m sure, has helped promote the current popularity of a wide range of history books. Here there is the (mild) tug-of-war between keeping the house as a record of a moment-in-history and as a record of people’s- changing-lives. The second has predominated (the house was lived in until 1965) and has helped foster the feeling of a place as people lived in it with changing needs and tastes. Here, too, are the differing ways in which the guides ‘present’ the house, sometimes drawing most attention to the families or the servants that lived in the house, sometimes to the construction and decoration of the house, sometimes to the things in the house. Here, too, are all the ways in which people respond to an historic place, the questions they ask, the things that most interest them (and they almost invariably are intrigued by the gadgets nineteenth century people used to make every-day life more comfortable, to reduce work— everything from butter-churns to storage-bins to the bottle jack to the bell-pulls) ... and the moments when people’s views of the past take a sudden shift. For instance, we do not usually take into account how much darker houses were. After sunset, with the heavy wooden shutters closed and only candles to light the rooms, people moved and ate and worked and relaxed in a world with flickering points of light and dark corners. Did the arrival of bright reliable lighting subtly change people’s attitudes not only to beliefs in ghosts and their ilk but to broader ideas of good and evil ... Then there is what I might call inter-active history. These days people can put out requests on the internet for obscure scraps of information and correspond directly with people who own ‘little bits of history’; history is no longer the sole province of those who have easy access to reference libraries, collections of various kinds, museums and universities, but is becoming the province of people who are simply interested and who may have an intriguing flash of light to throw on some particular question. After all, people who publish in History Departments are driven by needs other than what I, and other ordinary people, want and perhaps need to know. For example, I recently realised that there is no book, in English, covering WW2 in East Timor. Now, such a book would seem to meet a need. But is there none because no one in a History Department has seen his or her career enhanced by such a book? Or because publishers are interested in yet another book on Napoleon or Hitler but aren’t interested in something which would cover largely virgin territory? And when someone does write a book which looks at the spectrum of involvement—Australian, Dutch, Japanese, American, British, Portuguese, Chinese, and Timorese—I think it is extremely likely that it will not be done by an historian. So is it possible to kill history when historians are not necessarily bringing forth live progeny? * * * * * William Sessions wrote, “It is known that George Fox was born in July 1624 and that his birth was duly entered in the Parish Register at Fenny Drayton, but the exact day is not known. The reason for this is that about one hundred years after, the Sexton’s wife was making jam. She could not find any paper for the tops of her jars and thought no-one would bother about entries of a century ago, so she tore out some of the older pages of the Parish Register. Thus, the exact date of George Fox’s birth was lost in the process of jam making.” The trouble with historians is that they do not make sufficient allowance for jam- making when they burble on about ‘facts’ and ‘truths’ ... so why is George Fox now claimed for July 13th? Well, you see I have claimed him as a ‘non-fact’, a possible ‘untruth’ and a shared birthday ... The reason I had picked up Trevelyan that day was to check his paragraph, which 108108 turns up in varying contexts, “The finer essence of George Fox’s queer teaching, common to the excited revivalists who were his first disciples, and to the ‘quiet’ Friends of later times, was surely this—that Christian qualities matter much more than Christian dogmas. To maintain the Christian quality in the world of business and of domestic life, and to maintain it without pretension or hypocrisy was the great achievement of these extraordinary people. England may well be proud of having produced and perpetuated them. The Puritan pot had boiled over, with much heat and fury; when it had cooled and been poured away, this precious sediment was left at the bottom” to see what his original context was. (Usually, it is just the last sentence or two which is quoted.) In fact, it is a little misleading these days. The largest groups of Friends in the world now are in the USA and Kenya, not in the UK. (The total number of Friends worldwide is around 400,000; I came upon a 1958 total of 194,028 Friends worldwide.) Handed on businesses, like handed on faiths, have always presented problems and forced many square pegs into round holes. Many Quaker companies were run by men like the father in Mrs Craik’s John Halifax, Gentleman; honest and decent enough but totally lacking in imagination, empathy and vision. Others, such as the Cadbury family, faced the problem of success: if they made money, their children failed to understand the true nature of simplicity. If they put the money back into the business it tended to make even more money and grow too big for the family to control. The Cadbury family partially solved this problem by putting money into the workers’ estate at Bourneville with its comfortable cottages, homes for the elderly, parks, gardens and playgrounds; by buying a newspaper The Daily News to present other aspects of the Boer War apart from the jingoistic empire- building stance of the mainstream media, and later by setting up a charitable trust. But it still wasn’t the answer and the company eventually passed out of Quaker hands. And the question still provokes disagreement: where did George Fox draw his main inspiration from? English histories are predominantly written by English people, Catholic histories are predominantly written by Catholics, Quaker histories are predominantly written by Quakers. A degree of partisanship is almost always present. I doubt there is any such thing as a ‘neutral’ or ‘value-free’ history. Even so, the debate on sources and influences within this limitation is interesting and much Quaker ink has been splattered trying to definitively answer the question: from where did George Fox draw his initial ideas? There are six main ideas on offer. 1. Rufus M. Jones in his Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries suggests that Continental mystics and theologians such as Jacob Boehme, Hans Denck, Sebastian Franck, Caspar Schwenckfeld, Sebastion Castellio, Valentine Weigal and Dirck Coornhert and the Dutch Collegiants were an important influence. He writes, “ ... I announced the preparation of a volume to be devoted mainly to Jacob Boehme and his influence. I soon found, however, as my work of research proceeded, that Boehme was no isolated prophet who discovered in solitude a fresh way of approach to the supreme problems of the soul. I came upon very clear evidence that he was an organic part of a far-reaching and significant historical movement—a movement which consciously aimed, throughout its long period of travail, to carry the Reformation to its legitimate terminus, the restoration of apostolic Christianity ... I have had two purposes in view in these studies. One purpose was the tracing of a religious movement, profoundly interesting in itself, as a great side current of the Reformation. The other purpose was the discovery of the background and environment of seventeenth century Quakerism.” 2. His view has been somewhat discredited by the simple question: how would George Fox as a simple Leicestershire shoemaker and shepherd have gained access to these strains of thought. Instead the focus has been mainly on the differing streams of English and Scottish Puritan thinking, Presbyterian, Independent, Baptist, etc. Fox’s upbringing was in the Independent stream and his own writings which tend to suggest a 109109 fairly radical rejection of the teachings of his local church can only partly be accepted as he wrote very little about his family’s ideas except that they were upright and decent people and that an ancestor of his mother’s had been burnt at the stake in Queen Mary’s reign. To what extent they incorporated family history and ideas from stories told round the hearth is impossible to say. And as A. G. Dickens has pointed out in The English Reformation, the Lollards were by no means a spent force; rather they had been driven deep underground, fractured, left leaderless, in the Tudor era—but not destroyed. “They preserved, though often in crude and mutilated form, the image of a personal, scriptural, non-sacramental, non-hierarchic and lay-dominated religion. For good or ill, these emphases were prophetic.” And it was in the remoter country districts that their ideas survived best. 3. But Henri Van Atten puts considerable emphasis on the rise of a huge variety of supposedly heretical sects. He notes the rise of nearly 200 in England alone. (Ephraim Pagit in 1645 devoted a book Heresiography to them, as did Thomas Edwards in his 1646 book Gangroena.) Familists, Brownists, Adamites, Arminians, Libertins, Ranters, Anti Scriptarians, the Family of Love, Anabaptists, .... many of them were ephemeral and except for those such as the Brownists who became the Congregationalists, most have been forgotten. But they provided a mood, an attitude, a milieu which encouraged questioning of the established religions and greater freedom of thought. Equally, the spread of Bibles in English into the hands of more and more people encouraged reading, thought, and new interpretations. 4. It was said that if the Bible were to be lost then it could be re-written from George Fox’s memory. He both interpreted the Bible in what are at times idiosyncratic ways (and we are not always absolutely sure which Bible he took his arguments from) and specifically gave primacy to inward revelation over Scriptural teachings. But he travelled everywhere with a Bible and it was probably the only book he owned in his early manhood. 5. Modern Friends seem to shy away from his own statement that he clearly heard a voice saying “There is one, even Jesus Christ, that can speak to thy condition.” Joan of Arc, Florence Nightingale, George Fox, yes, but ... In actual fact, I have no difficulty in accepting his repeated statements about hearing voices and having vivid dreams that told him where to go and what to do at times. We may debate uneasily on conditions such as schizophrenia, wonder whether he was suffering from lack of food, lack of sleep, or had been eating mouldy rye, but this misses the point that he believed absolutely that Jesus had spoken to him at the moment when he felt his greatest sense of despair and confusion, and his subsequent actions were based on that belief. Where he came to differ from other mystics and visionaries was in his view that the understandings gained in silence and solitude must be tested in the corporate gathering of like-minded seekers. 6. As a teenager he was apprenticed to a local tanner and shoemaker who also kept sheep out on the hills. Fox spent considerable time alone with himself, the sheep, the sky and landscape—and his burning questions. The value of solitude in those great leaps of the imagination experienced by people such as the Gautama Buddha and Sir Isaac Newton should not be underestimated. But I don’t think Rufus Jones’ thesis should be completely set aside. As Trevelyan points out, it was the wool trade, both internally and with the Continent, especially Holland, which kept rural England vibrant. Richard Vann points out that one of the most important avenues for the dissemination of Quaker ideas through England then overseas, particularly via Amsterdam, was through the wool merchants. I like the idea of these commercial travellers being the means by which remarkably subversive ideas were carried to and fro, hither and yon. So I can’t help wondering how many other fascinating historical questions are likewise buried in controversy, confusion, or are essentially unresolvable simply because 110110 we cannot enter the mindset of people faced with a question which we would pose differently and to which we would bring vastly different intellectual and emotional baggage. Windschuttle seems to believe that the study of ephemera, such as posters, flyers, brochures, tracts, is not really what serious history is about and the people doing it are subverting the discipline. But what if we had the ephemera of the first 30 to 40 years before the Gospels were written? Those letters, notes, poems and doggerel to promote dissemination and memory, decrees, laws, criticisms ... would we see the Gospels as being the distillation of all these floating ‘bits’ or would we see the ideas, sayings and interpretations gradually moving in importantly different directions before they were written down in their final form? Quaker books came 20, 30, 40 years down the track. George Fox’s Journals, Robert Barclay’s Apology, William Penn’s books such as No Cross, No Crown ... these came years after. But in the first years a wealth of letters, minutes, tracts, pamphlets circulated— Luella M. Wright, in The Literary Life of the Early Friends 1650-1725, says that in the 7 decades after 1653 440 Quaker propagandists produced 2,678 separate titles varying in length from folio volumes of 1,000 pages to single broadsheets; there were 23 ‘publications’ in 1653, 43 in 1654, 70 in 1655, there were “468 before the Restoration” and by 1725 between 2,500,000 and 4,000,000 copies of tracts are estimated to have come into circulation. Given the difficulties Quakers faced in getting material printed this is an extraordinary achievement—arguing, disagreeing, quoting, seeking, reinforcing; everything from what weight should be given to Bible teachings, how children should be disciplined, what was meant by direct experience and how it could be achieved, recording miracles, refuting the idea that women had no souls, supporting people in their suffering, helping people in prison ... And these leaflets though often poorly written, repetitive, chaotic, tolerant or confronting, are still essential to the understanding of how a movement, harried and hunted for its heretical views, worked through the tumultuous wealth of experience brought to it and distilled what it believed to have eternal and universal value. Out of this ephemera can be seen something of the uniqueness of George Fox and his often difficult relations with the world and his followers. His uniqueness, I think, lay in the way an uneducated man could bring together what I see as three of the most important strands in human life and give them enduring life. I would describe them as: 1. giving equal weight to the experience of the individual soul in relation to the collective soul. The received wisdom down through the ages is vitally important but it should never swamp the possibility of new and profound insight. Equally, personal insight needs to be weighed against collective insight. What Geoffrey Hubbard calls ‘a protection against wild enthusiasms and personal whims masquerading as the will of God’. To say as the Bible suggests as personal revelation that God would smite this people and that people and wipe them off the face of the earth must be guarded against by asking simple questions about the worth of other lives and other revelations. 2. giving equal support for each person, regardless of sex, age, class or creed. The support for Women’s Meetings was actively and passively opposed by a number of Quaker men but always had Fox’s firm support and these Meetings were instrumental in increasing literacy, numeracy and public-speaking skills among Quaker women. His belief that shops and businesses should charge an honest and a set price so that “children could be sent” was motivated by the belief that barter disadvantaged the very poor, the young, and the uneducated. The set price gradually spread, today we accept it as natural. But his egalitarian and essentially classless views were what brought him to prison most often. He refused to use titles, he refused to remove his hat when facing someone of a higher social class, he refused to swear allegiance to the ruler. Today, these are treated by comfortable middle-class Quakers as, largely, amusing or even annoying foibles. But we have not achieved equality. Maybe it is time to give more weight to those things which accept each 111111 person’s life equally. 3. the belief that human life is more important than the religious, economic, diplomatic and political reasons which have sent kings, popes, rulers, chiefs, nations, to war within and without. His famous statement “We utterly deny all outward wars and strife and fightings with outward weapons, for any end or under any pretence whatsoever … and we do certainly know, and so testify to the world, that the spirit of Christ, which leads us into all Truth, will never move us to fight and war against any man with outward weapons, neither for the kingdom of Christ, nor for the kingdoms of this world” was put forward at the time when Charles II was trying to link Friends with the militant Fifth Monarchy Men, a radical political sect, an alleged link which saw nearly 5,000 Friends imprisoned. Fox himself went to prison 8 times, he was beaten up, thrown over fences, knocked unconscious, physically and verbally abused, but never retaliated. He was a big burly countryman who habitually carried a stick to help him in his long walking. The temptation to hit back at his tormentors must’ve been overwhelming at times. John Lampen says “George Fox stood out as a striking and unexpected figure. He was then twenty-five, burly, strong, long-haired (in contrast to the Puritan fashion), peasant-featured, astute. He came from the back of beyond, the village of Fenny Drayton in Leicestershire, where he had been working for a man who kept sheep and dealt in wool and hides; his teaching sometimes draws on his experiences as a shepherd. His handwriting was laboured, his spelling eccentric even for those days, and most of his later writing was dictated to others. He left home and job when he was nineteen, and began to travel from place to place, seeking a religious teacher who could give him some assurance of truth. But he found none till, in 1647, at the deepest point of his disillusionment with all human instructors he records that he heard a voice say to him: ‘There is One, even Jesus Christ, that can speak to thy condition’. This crowned his religious sensitivity with a certainty that seldom left him.” I once came upon the question in a whodunnit: If you could go back in history who would you most like to hear? Since then I have put that question to various people. They sometimes say “couldn’t I have three choices?” “Of course! As many as you like.” Who am I to be mingy? I think I would like to go back and hear my grandmother who died when I was six and of whom I have almost no memory. But I think I would also like to hear George Fox. People sometimes say to this, Oh, but all that ranting and rabble-rousing! Even so ... * * * * * When Humphrey McQueen wrote Suspect History he used that remarkably unimportant question: had Professor Manning Clark, or had he not, been seen wearing an Order of Lenin badge? The question made headlines yet no one, it seemed, had asked the simple question: had Manning Clark been awarded the Order of Lenin? I found Suspect History very entertaining yet it is a kind of cautionary tale. On how many issues has there been a tremendous beat-up, reputations damaged, doubts sowed, before the most basic questions have been asked, let alone answered honestly. And one of the most basic tools in this kind of beat-up is the quote out of context or the half-quote, the one which appears to say one thing then demolishes it in the next (unquoted) line. This, I admit, is a difficult area. How much should be quoted, what is allowable in seeking out the pith of a long and perhaps obscure passage, what can be done to catch the reader’s eye, where should a quote be ended? Sometimes I feel I’ve quoted too much and lost the point of the segment, sometimes too little and its original usage is unclear—but there is rarely an exact moment when I can be sure I’ve got it just right. McQueen writes, ‘To quote is neither to read nor to comprehend. The historical profession’s disdain for the linguistic turn in the humanities is not just a sensible refusal to submit to an infinite regress of subjectivities. As often, that reaction indicates an incapacity to think beyond the surface. Methodology in a history degree teaches the apprentice to 112112 transcribe accurately, to recognise the bias of an author, to attend to social contexts. There, insight ceases. Tone of voice, punctuation, literary devices are outside the repertoire of the historian as trained copyist. To explore the texture of a speech for its rhetoric is left for a literary critic. Historians are still to catch up with the techniques of biblical criticism from early last century. The need is not to become postmodernist, but to absorb William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity, published in 1930.’ I haven’t read the Seven Types but one type which has flourished and which gets served up in all sorts of strange guises is surely the term ‘political correctness’. I may be a slow learner, in fact I must be, because I still haven’t quite cottoned on to what is meant by this term, perhaps because things which I would once simply have regarded as the struggle to be courteous and just in dealings with other human beings have now been subsumed, perhaps because people drag it out in such widely differing contexts that it is hard to pin down what exactly they mean, intend to mean, hope to mean, might mean but— For instance, I have lost track of the times I have heard people explain away the rise of Pauline Hanson by saying that people had gone overboard with ‘political correctness’ and she, therefore, was the corrective. I am quite willing to bow to others’ superior insight into Pauline Hanson’s motivations. But an aunt of mine joined One Nation, not because she had ever used or in any way felt threatened by ‘political correctness’; in fact I’ve never heard her use the term in any context. Her reason for joining went much deeper. The gerrymander in Queensland went to the heart of people’s disaffection. Safe seats meant the National Party was sure of winning so could, and did, put up very low calibre candidates. Safe seats meant the ALP was sure of losing so also put up very low calibre candidates. The country electorates lost out both ways. There was no vigorous debate on issues, no discussion of ideas, almost no opportunities or venues by which the status quo could be analysed let alone challenged. The National Party, safe in the country, sought to extend its power base into Brisbane and other city electorates and put the bulk of election funding and effort into less safe seats. The ALP to hang on to such seats gave them the bulk of its attention and looked to marginal National seats in the coastal areas. The Democrats, Liberals and Greens looked to build their bases in Brisbane and put very little effort into safe National seats. The long- term nature of such safe National seats encouraged a kind of corruption in which National Party politicians and back-room people believed they had a mandate to dip their little hands, here, there, to be less than accountable both in money matters and in matters of information and representation. My aunt, brought up as a National supporter (as were my parents, both of whom were for a time ‘paid-up members of the Party’; doesn’t it sound sinister), rightly understanding that the Party wasn’t listening and didn’t particularly care (which should not detract from the most dedicated and decent of National Party MPs who drowned under the weight of ineptitude and inefficiency by the many), began looking for someone who might be listening. Whenever mining interests clashed with pastoral or farming interests (as at Mary Kathleen) mining interests tended to win out, where agri-business clashed with farmers, farmers lost (as in the closure of so many co-op institutions), where big farmers are at odds with small farmers—surprise, surprise—big farmers tend to win. My regret was that the groups who most need each other, small farmers/rural workers/small town businesses and Aboriginal communities, were discouraged, divided and encouraged to see each other as ‘the enemy’. Yet a survey in the Northern Territory pointed out that the big pastoral and mining interests don’t buy their supplies in small country towns, they ship in bulk supplies from the cities and even from overseas; it is Aboriginal consumers who keep many small towns alive. And in the next 50 years the rural Aboriginal population seems likely to grow while the rural non-Aboriginal population seems likely to continue to fall. If I aspired to represent a country electorate I know where I’d be putting my energies and it certainly wouldn’t be into attracting yet another foreign-owned mine with a possible 20 113113 year life-span and some toxic waste leftovers as a happy memory of its existence, or yet another Hong Kong- or London-owned pastoral company hoping to flog the land and reinvest elsewhere, leaving salt and dust as its happy memory. My aunt went along to the Confederate Action Party, then to another small rightwing party, both of which faded under leadership and other problems. One Nation came along. She was still looking. She joined. She liked the energy and enthusiasm. And, rightly or wrongly, she believed she had at last found a party which would at least take notice of some country concerns. I don’t think she is unique in this and I don’t think it has anything to do with ‘political correctness’ or the rise thereof in rural Queensland. But underneath the stagnation and corruption fostered by the long-term use of the gerrymander is a deeper problem. When I was about fifteen I went out West with my father when he went to look after his brother-in-law’s property, Murweh, south of Charleville, for a short time. While he was there, he came across several drovers passing through who had helped themselves to several of his brother-in-law’s sheep. If it’d been left up to him I suspect he would not have done anything—he was after all an Irishman—but he liked his brother-in-law and felt himself to be in a position of trust so he took the matter to the police at Wyandra and, some months later, he was required to return to Charleville for the court case. The drovers never disputed that they’d helped themselves to some fresh mutton. But the jury found them not guilty of putting someone else’s sheep in their tucker-bags. It was not that my uncle was disliked, in fact he was a very nice person, kind and cheerful, but when it came down to the clash of pastoralist and drover, the jury, made up of townspeople, came down squarely on the drovers’ side. The differing attitudes, priorities, and ideas which exist in the country—between large and small farmers, leaseholders, freeholders, hobby-farmers, small businesses, itinerant workers such as shearers and fruit- pickers, unemployed school-leavers, professional people such as teachers and clergy, tourists and tourist-operators, railway and council workers, Aboriginal groups, large and small—have all been flattened out and lost under the safe seat syndrome. There are a lot of disaffected people and the electoral system does not provide the means by which they can give voice to that disaffection. One Nation caught some of the disaffection but it cannot represent, or even hope to represent, the variety contained in that disaffection any more than the National Party could. Scapegoats come in handy but only for a very limited period; they either sink under the weight and die or get angry and remember they’ve got horns. The Hare-Clark system is far from perfect, and is not immune from tinkering, but it does enable the electorate to make more voices heard. It is being subverted by the cries for ‘majority’ government, ‘stable’ government. One of the lessons from Queensland I think is: if the electoral system is not created, developed, enhanced and nuanced towards the goal of giving every one the right to be heard, you get One Nations down the track. It is not the outcome of elections which matter most but how people perceive the process by which they make their wishes known. Mature, decent, intelligent, caring people can make whatever composition of parliament the voters put in, work well for the voters. Politicians who believe they can’t do this and therefore the electoral system must be bludgeoned back into 2-track-conformity so as to keep the views of as many people as possible unrepresented don’t deserve to be there in the first place. So how will history, for instance, present the brief phenomenon of Pauline Hanson? McQueen writes, “To make matters more turbulent, academic historians accept that we do not expect to resolve many of the big questions but only to contribute to a debate which will go on forever. Details will be tidied up, but the meaning of those facts will be open to dispute. To many outside the profession, this axiom is as threatening as the most offensive piece of rewriting. The public expects historians to supply facts, but we cannot agree on 114114 what a fact is, let alone what the facts were. History as a continuing dialogue between scholars appears a cop-out, or worse.” * * * * * Manning Clark was accused of being, in his teaching role, an ‘agent of influence’. The question of what is an ‘agent of influence’ (a parent perhaps; should we deny people of extreme views the right to become parents?) led me on to thinking about how we influence, or don’t influence, other people. Is it what we say. Is it what we do. Or is it what we are as a total person. If the latter then to tease out the strands is probably beyond the time and space constraints of any newspaper article. In 1995 the Hobart East Timor Committee was invited to present a paper to a conference in Melbourne. As secretary the preparation fell to me. But what could we say— bearing in mind that there were no Timorese then living in Hobart and as the Australian group furthest from Timor we tended to be least well-informed—that the other groups couldn’t say better? ‘Activism Australian Style’ Thank you very much for inviting us to be here today and to present this paper. We count it as a great honour. We would like to talk briefly not on doing things as activists but on being things as activists—because the underlying attitudes and characteristics we bring, as Australians, to our support for East Timor can be a help but equally it can hinder our effectiveness. We have divided the talk up into fairly short segments so that at the end of each you might like to make comments or suggestions. And we hope that you will forgive us for saying ‘Timorese’ rather than ‘you’ because we could not know beforehand to what extent the audience would be non-Timorese. SELF-DETERMINATION We would like to begin by reminding all of us that self-determination is a right which is not dependent on how much a people has suffered nor whether a situation is described as a tragedy nor whether human rights abuses are involved. It doesn’t require people to demonstrate their courage or their tenacity. It does not require them to have a party political system in place nor does it require a knowledge of or an experience of elections nor does it require any political stance to be taken. It does not require a people to demonstrate their maturity—if indeed there could ever be a yardstick for a people’s maturity. As Alfred Russel Wallace visiting the Dayaks in Borneo last century wrote, “To my mind the question of good or bad, fit or not fit for self-government, is not the point. It is a question of fundamental justice, and the just is always the expedient as well as the right.” Self-determination is not dependent on whose propaganda is most convincing, nor does it depend on who can curry favour with influential people and influential nations. It is not dependent on the amount or bias of media coverage nor is it dependent on a ‘slush fund’ for influencing and paying diplomats at the United Nations. It is a simply the right “of all peoples”. But more specifically for East Timor it can be taken as the right set out in Article 5 of the 1960 Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples which says, ‘Immediate steps shall be taken, in trust and non-self-governing territories or all other territories which have not attained independence, to transfer all powers to the peoples of those territories, without any conditions or any distinction as to race, creed or colour, in order to enable them to enjoy complete independence and freedom.’ This is both a legal and a human right. Yet, so often, when we come to send our letters to politicians and when our politicians themselves speak out it is almost invariably set out in terms of human rights abuses rather than the denial of self-determination. This is damaging because it tends to make East Timor simply one of a list of countries in which human rights abuses are occurring. It is ineffective because it does not require 115115 governments to take a specific action let alone a fundamental change in government policy. And it is increasingly ineffective because of the degree of over-load which good- hearted people in the community tend to experience as they watch Bosnia, Rwanda, and so on. But we go on couching East Timor in terms of human rights abuses because of our underlying unease as Australians because of our failure to promote, support and uphold the right to self-determination of Aboriginal Australians. When Australia became independent, Aboriginal people were not recognised as citizens and did not have the right to vote. Seeing East Timor as an important human rights issue enables us to avoid this issue or to present East Timor as Human Rights and Australia as Land Rights rather than presenting them both as Self-Determination. We may avoid the issue on the legitimate grounds that we can’t do everything and people are dying every week in East Timor. We may belong to Aboriginal Support Groups and feel that we are therefore doing the right thing as Australians. We may say that we owe a great obligation to East Timor dating from WW2, which of course we do, but it implies that we owe nothing to Aboriginal people at home. Aboriginal servicemen were involved in both World Wars and got a rotten deal afterwards in terms of recognition and access to land and it wasn’t till the 1980s that many Aboriginal support personnel received the pay they were entitled to. Both issues are about more than human rights, more than the right to land. They are about human dignity, human freedom, and the right to self-determination. So self- determination must remain an integral part of all our letters, all our speaking engagements, all our briefing papers and information sheets. The challenge to every Australian activist is how to tackle the question of self-determination within Australia as well. And the clearer we understand our own failures and limitations as Australians, the more clearly and honestly we will be able to speak out on Australia’s obligations to East Timor. CONFIDENCE In the late 70s and early 80s those who spoke out in support of Indonesia spoke with tremendous confidence. East Timor was a lost issue. Just look at the facts. One hundred and eighty million Indonesians with Western military, economic, political and diplomatic support. Half a million East Timorese with the support of a few Third World countries like Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau. It was obvious that East Timor must bow to the inevitable. Regardless of the facts these people used or even if they had no relevant facts at all, their confidence was immensely damaging. It didn’t matter whether they agreed with what Indonesia was doing or whether they thought it was a tragedy they were still arguing that East Timor was a hopeless cause. It became almost perverse to argue that East Timor could survive, could achieve self-determination, could become independent. People speaking out on East Timor were urged to turn their energies to other worthwhile and winnable causes such as the Anti-Apartheid movement or anti-nuclear issues—or even to join the Australian Labor Party! But we can learn a lesson from that certainty. People are not necessarily swayed by the careful collection of facts or the thoughtful presentation of information. How we present our information is just as important as the information itself. The confidence with which we assert that East Timor will achieve self-determination, that East Timor will be free, is a vitally important ingredient in all our speaking, in all our lobbying and campaigning. We all share this confidence but sometimes in our care to present the facts it doesn’t come through. We collate and cross-check our facts about tortures and detentions and deaths but we do not present these firmly enough as the symptoms of what’s wrong, that the cure is decolonization and self-determination, and that we believe absolutely that this is achievable. THE Li’L BATTLER Australians still parade their national belief that they support the underdog, the li’l 116116 battler, but we are notable for sympathy without practical support. People, including most politicians, got on the South African band-wagon in droves when it became clear that white minority rule had a Use-By-Date. Whatever we say about the li’l battlers we are mainly interested in the li’l battlers who show every sign of winning through and ceasing to be li’l battlers altogether. The nations who supported the ANC when it was banned in South Africa were primarily the nations which bordered South Africa and which were most vulnerable to retaliation. They were predomiantly poor nations and most of them depended on South African railways to get their goods out. They were also nations plagued by drought and internal conflicts, often fomented by South Africa. They had a lot to lose but they still found the courage to speak out against apartheid. Regardless of what we say, we aren’t very courageous in speaking up and we first look to see whether we might lose out economically. Yet looked at calmly and pragmatically—what can Indonesia do if we bring government policy into line with that of other Western nations and withdraw recognition of Indonesian sovereignty over East Timor? What do we stand to lose? Not much. The irony of our position is that the Australian Government stands to lose more from Australian companies which might sue if any tender agreements in the Timor Gap area were called into doubt. But the underlying problem is our deep-seated insecurity. We are followers, not leaders. We followed Britain’s lead, then we followed the lead of the United States. And both Britain and the United States have been conspicuous for their lack of leadership on the East Timor issue. Lord Avebury once said that if only Australia would take the lead on East Timor then Britain and the European Community would follow us. But we are afraid to take on such a role. We have obligations according to the U.N. declarations we have signed but these obligations are neither sufficiently well-understood nor sufficiently powerful in themselves to push us into a position of moral leadership—and in the absence of Western pressure successive Australian governments have followed what appears to be the strongest leadership on the question of East Timor—that of Indonesia. Over the years Indonesia has given out a variety of reasons for being in Timor, for keeping the country closed, for preventing communications, for acting as it has acted— ‘They are our brothers’, ‘They are all Communists’, ‘They were neglected by the Portuguese’, ‘There is no international airport’, ‘We haven’t had time to develop the country yet’—and regardless of the reason offered it has always found uncritical acceptance within Australia. It is the mark of a vacillating and ethically unsure people. JUDGEMENT Despite all that is said and written about the growth of reason and logic in Western societies over the last couple of centuries, rigorous scholarship and questioning and careful research have always been lacking as a resource for ordinary Australians to draw upon. Embarrassing are the mistakes and inaccuracies put out by those we have looked to for leadership—highly-paid public servants, highly-paid academics, highly-paid military personnel. Much of the material made available to concerned Australians over the years is an appeal to our emotions or, worse still, an appeal to our sense of apathy and complacency. Joh Bjelke-Petersen was just doing it more openly when he constantly told his constituents, ‘Don’t you worry about that’. We are told confidently that Australia will be a safer place if we provide military aid and training to the Indonesian Army. We are provided with no facts and figures to back up this assertion. We are given no explanation as to how or why Australia will be safer. We are urged all the time, in fact, to be passive, to be accepting. That we might be training, as the Adelaide Advertiser once put it, the tigers to jump over the fence—well, ‘Don’t you worry about that’. We are confused—or so we are frequently told—about our identity, our place in the world. And this confusion is often played upon. If we belong in Asia—then why should we 117117 begin by upsetting all our Asian neighbours over a little thing like East Timor. But rigorous ethical and legal debate and understanding would make us better neighbours no matter where we see our future. Good neighbours aren’t neighbours who look the other way. They are the ones who understand the implications and ramifications of our actions and our positions and are willing to risk highly-paid public service jobs, university tenures, military advancement, to lead ordinary Australians into a clearer understanding of our political, legal, moral and military mistakes. There is a hunger for information in the community. People do not want to be part of Asia on Paul Keating’s terms. They want information that would enable them to make their own careful appraisal of the future and what they want from it. If Australian business dealings in Indonesia require us to turn a blind eye to Indonesian behaviour in East Timor then the community has an absolute right to know exactly what those business dealings are, who they are with, what they involve—and exactly how they are connected with our obligations towards East Timor. The information providers in Australian society are allowed to get away with sloppy, incompetent, distorted and incomplete provision of information on every aspect of East Timor and our responsibilities as a neighbour. Over and over again we find people have only the vaguest understanding of what the Australian government is doing and why, what it is saying at the U.N., and what our history of engagement with East Timor has been. The dilemma for support groups is do we spend more time on education and less time on lobbying, fund-raising and support work? Some years ago Ralph Nader was invited to a major Native American congress held in the United States but bringing together indigenous people from throughout North and South America. The Elders devoted the first day of the Congress to religious activities, prayer, and the sharing of spiritual beliefs. The media lost interest and failed to attend on the second day when the Congress got down to practical business in regard to fundamental needs and how to achieve them. Nader criticised the Congress organisers for not providing the media with the basic information they sought on the first day. The Elders responded that the media had had three centuries in which to educate itself about basic Indian history and needs and that what people believe is as important as what people need. They believed that the creation of a sense of unity through spiritual sharing should take precedence. The Australian media and, beyond it, the Australian reading public have had decades to inform themselves about East Timor. If we wish as Australians to be good regional neighbours, to interact in a positive and sympathetic way with our region then we have an active role to play in informing ourselves, not to sit back and wait to be spoon-fed with easily digested pap. The Eisenhower government in the United States gave a medal to President Jiménez in Venezuela for creating ‘stability’ and being a good friend to American business. After he was driven out of his country, Washington learned that one of his nastier habits was to make his political opponents walk barefoot on razor blades. But the American people were never told. They could only wonder why the Venezuelans cried ‘Yankee, Go Home!’ and threw tomatoes at the American presidents who went to South America. WHITE AUSTRALIA Regardless of how unsure we may feel in the world, or perhaps because of that unsureness, we have clung to the unexamined belief that we know what’s best for other people, especially people who are not white and dinky-di beach-loving Aussies. At its most obvious this has resulted in generations of white Australians dictating to and patronising black Australians in the complacent certainty that we knew what was best for them—and if they would only put their minds to it they would see how much better our ways of doing things were. We also found, happily, that we knew what was best for new arrivals from the Mediterranean and Eastern Europe and in fact anyone coming who didn’t quite ‘speaka-de- English’. This flows over, though we may be very reluctant to admit it, into the way we 118118 relate to the Timorese community and Timorese decision-making. We feel that as we naturally understand better the Australian media, Australian politics, Australian attitudes and ways of doing things, we must deluge the Timorese community with advice, ideas, suggestions, campaign strategies, even demands. We take it upon ourselves to feel we know best how tours should be arranged, who should be spoken to, which groups are most likely to empathise, how to rally, when to march, which politicians are best value. We are, quite simply, wonderful when it comes to telling other people what to do. But are we good listeners? Do we respect Timorese ideas when we don’t see them as being immediately useful or effective? Do we provide the help that’s asked for instead of what we feel is needed? Do we try to mould Timorese political thinking? Do we press our views on what constitutes peace and how it might be achieved? Do we make sure that our views on the future are the ones most likely to be received in the media, to be printed in booklet form, to be heard on the radio, to be offered to influential groups? Most Australians cringe when they watch the video clip of Gough Whitlam hectoring the United Nations to take East Timor off its agenda. But although we believe the only people with the right to ask for East Timor to be taken off are the East Timorese, we often act like mini-Whitlams. We are more subtle, of course, but we are still usurping in hundreds of small ways the rights which belong to the East Timorese people. This is a very important point. We say that we wish to see a free and fair referendum in East Timor and we certainly would not wish to interfere in that act in the way that Indonesia interfered in the 1969 so-called Act of Free Choice in West Papua. But we need to respect the process of self-determination as well and it is in this that we are guilty of all kinds of small intrusions. If we consistently talk, for example, of autonomy in East Timor people here naturally begin to believe that it is autonomy the Timorese people are asking for. Our role is the vital one of pressuring the Australian and Indonesian governments to provide the respect and the freedom for that process to proceed and succeed. We must never forget that we are support and lobby groups not advisory groups. LOVE YE ONE ANOTHER Love, naturally, rarely gets spoken of when activists get together. We are too busy planning campaigns. But underneath what we do is a strength we can all draw upon. Thornton Wilder once said that the bridge between the World of the Dead and the World of the Living is love. We might say that the bridge between the Timorese community and the Australian community, between activists in Tasmania and Western Australia, between Australian supporters and Irish supporters is the kindness, the shared beliefs, the understanding, the friendship, the interest, even the anger and the despair we feel at times. It doesn’t need to be brought out and minuted or debated. But it is an intangible, invisible but immensely powerful resource. It can help heal divisions, bring people together, give courage and confidence and inspiration, involve new people, enable difficult things to get done, enhance the future, make the impossible possible. It is always there. It is our secret weapon, if you like—that we all believe passionately in what we work for, that we all care deeply for one another. * * * * * David Cannadine has written a very readable biography G.M. Trevelyan: A Life in History. Here is the man, patrician, wealthy, land-owning, related to some of the most prominent political and intellectual families in England, rather distant in his personal relations (though having Mrs Humphrey Ward as his mother-in-law would not have been a pushover), a deep lover of the countryside which led him into practical support for the National Trust, the Youth Hostels Association, and even to the point of buying several Lake District farms and giving them to the Trust, a believer in the heroic element and the ‘great sweep’ in history, an early Liberal who gradually became a Conservative but 119119 retained a degree of warmth and concern for people everywhere, the man who rejected the German idea that history is ‘science’ in favour of his own view that it was art and narrative founded on careful research, imaginative understanding and good writing, the historian of England par excellence but who retained throughout his life his profound admiration for Garibaldi ... and here is the man to whom I will give the last word: “We historians are fallible folk, and must be charitable to one another.” * * * * * July 14th: F. R. Leavis Northrop Frye July 15th: Jacques Derrida Gavin Maxwell Clement Clarke Moore July 16th: Christopher Koch Kathleen Norris July 17th: Christina Stead July 18th: Nelson Mandela Clifford Odets July 19th: Gottfried Keller July 20th: Louisa Anne Meredith July 21st: A. D. Hope Marshall McLuhan * * * * * I came upon this little snippet in Margaret Morey’s The Manse Folk of Kirklands about the family of poet A. D. Hope. His father, the Rev. Percival Hope arrived at the already venerable manse at Kirklands in the Tasmanian Midlands to take up the position of Presbyterian minister in 1910 bringing 3-year-old Alec, 2-year-old Margaret, and a horse called Poplar. Alec Hope said of his father: “Father’s father had been a bootmaker from Ulster who settled in St. Mary’s near Penrith, N.S.W. Father learned bootmaking and all his life did his own cobbling and repairs. At an early age he was apprenticed to a baker and pastry-cook, but did not finish his “time”. He resolved to be a Presbyterian minister and so first went back to school and finished his education and by means of scholarships, entered the ministry.” Here “My father ran his own small flock of sheep and milked his own cows and his neighbours cultivated his oats, cut his paddocks and built his haystacks for him. Mowing was still done with scythes and I remember being allowed to mow with the men and the refreshment of strong, cold black tea drunk from bottles and passed from hand to hand.” ... “The house had a view over the charming valley and the river to the Western Tiers, dropping off to the west in even fainter shades of blue. The house was set in a large garden, surrounded by trees which included three magnificent poplars of what seem to me in retrospect, enormous height and dazzling glory when they turned golden in autumn. From a small boy’s point of view they were more estimable because they could be climbed up to a part in the stems where I established a nest which was peculiarly mine ... Kirklands ... was still the place I dreamed of in my sleep, though now nothing but the feeling of the place remains: the actual landscape has little to do with the one I now see in dreams. It is still a place towards which I recognise a strong and vivid emotional tie and would willingly return to live there one day if it were possible, as of course it is not. It is still as it then was the house of the minister of the parish.” * * * * * July 22nd: Stephen Benét S. E. Hinton William Archibald Spooner 120120

July 23rd: Raymond Chandler July 24th: Jean Webster July 25th: Elias Canetti July 26th: George Bernard Shaw July 27th: Hilaire Belloc July 28th: Beatrix Potter July 29th: Eyvind Johnson Stanley Kunitz Booth Tarkington July 30th: William Howard Gass July 31st: Alexander Vlad Faye Moskowitz August 1st: Julie Bovasso Julio Herrera y Reissig August 2nd: Isabel Allende * * * * * Have you ever noticed how successful writers can get away with things that unsuccessful writers can’t? If Isabel Allende writes a best seller and says her writing comes from the womb, not the head, it is taken seriously. If I manage to get 2nd prize at the Kingaroy Eisteddfod and say my story came from the womb—well, it merely sounds pretentious and silly. If Bryce Courtenay says what hard yakka it is to write a best seller like The Potato Factory he is taken seriously. If I say it’s hard yakka to write a book that’s been turned down by 30 publishers, people quite rightly point out that no one is making me do it. If Sylvia Plath, despite her cult status, spent years struggling with writer’s block, she has the sympathy of many women. If I whinge about writer’s block, the family is likely to say, “Well, can you sew this tear in my trousers seeing that you’re not doing any writing today.” Fair enough. If you write because you like writing, not because you’ve got contracts to fill and publishers to please, then why should you seek sympathy any more than you would seek sympathy for a dropped stitch in the jumper you’re knitting yourself? Yet a whole writing ‘industry’ has grown up to suggest what an agonisingly difficult, heart-wrenching and risky process writing is. Writers seem constantly to be seeking sympathy. True, the pay is abysmal. But then cleaning people’s houses is also very poorly paid and hasn’t a lot of job-satisfaction attached to it. If you ask for the dole you may be required to take a job at the local abattoir instead—or starve. But writers have a choice. And the job is clean. You can listen to beautiful music rather than the ear-shattering shriek of machinery. If you’re hungry or thirsty or need to go to the toilet—well, the choice is yours, it’s not like the infamous call centre that said people had to wear pads rather than miss a few minutes work to go to the toilet. The hours are flexible. If it’s an absolutely miserable day you can wrap yourself up in a nice rug, put a hot water bottle at your feet, and gloves on your hands. Not like my sister-in-law whose work takes her constantly in and out of the cold room at a bacon factory. But still we draw on sympathy-provoking attitudes. “Look at me, I’m sacrificing all for my art”. “Poor little me, I haven’t had a holiday in years”. “When I delve down into my deepest places in search of good writing, I’m risking my very sanity.” I think good writers need bad writers, just as good marathon runners need bad marathon runners, not only as a benchmark of excellence but to create a culture in which running or writing is done by a great many people who won’t do it well but will enjoy the doing of it at any level. Professional writers need enthusiastic and dedicated readers. But I think they also need a culture of enthusiastic and dedicated amateur writers. 121121

The patronising attitude towards the older women who turn up in their thousands to literary festivals, the dismissive attitude to the thousands of would-be-novelists who flood the publishers’ slush piles, the holier-than-thou attitude of those who make money to those who don’t, is, to say the least, short-sighted. I have done my share of grumbling. I hate to admit it. But writing is a joy, a catharsis, a therapy, an insight, a deepening sense of self, an exhilaration. Crown me with a heavy frying-pan if you hear me grumbling. And while I’m in this particular mood—have you noticed what short memories some writers have? Or is it that they experienced life very differently? This came to me while I was reading a Stephanie Dowrick and since then I’ve noticed how almost every modern writer who writes a love story set forty, fifty, sixty years or more ago has their heroine leap into bed with someone. The pre-marital chastity that was so much a part of my parents’ and grandparents’ world doesn’t get a look in. Why? Because we have forgotten how women who didn’t comply with the mores of the day were treated, the disownment, the pressure to give up their children, the hateful “well, get her off to the church before it starts to show”, the denial of the right to be married in white, the contempt many men displayed towards the women who gave in to their importuning ... or is it that the need to have sex in every book over-rides ‘the way it was’? Along with changing mores and ideas and beliefs is another question that often gets overlooked: when certain inventions and products became available. The date when something was invented in Chicago is very different to the date it became readily available in Outback Australia. Novels which have people ‘going to the frig’ or using the telephone long before such items would have been commercially available in the place the story is set may not spoil the plot or characters, but it can leave the reader with the vague feeling that the writer didn’t really care about the reader. I have sometimes thought a book would be useful showing 1) the date of the first successful trial of a new product, 2) the date it first went on sale in London, 3) the date it first went on sale in Sydney, and 4) the date it first went on sale in Charleville or Wagga Wagga. I’ve also noticed this problem when it comes to writing that something was flowering; our jacaranda in Queensland came into bloom in late November, the one across the road from me in Hobart doesn’t burst forth until January. Easy to overlook these differences ... And how does one write from the womb, is it like ‘opening a vein and bleeding all over the typewriter’ except that it is maternal feeling, maternal love, which spreads agonisingly in every direction? * * * * * August 3rd: Diane Wakoski August 4th: Henry Savery Walter Pater August 5th: Conrad Aiken August 6th: Rolf Boldrewood August 7th: Dornford Yates August 8th: Sara Teasdale August 9th: John Dryden Philip Larkin P. L. Travers August 10th: Laurence Binyon António Gonçalves Dias August 11th: Enid Blyton Alex Haley * * * * * 122122

I am of the opinion that the hardest book to do well is the family history. People don’t provide information when asked (then they complain when the book comes out and their branch of the family is under-represented), the information they provide is incorrect and people later write to complain, or they get names and dates mixed up and throw everything into disorder ... and so on ... I wonder if Alex Haley had this problem when he sat down to write Roots? It was a well-deserved best-seller, readable, exciting, moving. But he told us right up-front that he found his family roots in the West African nation of The Gambia. This was a calculated gamble. Would readers keep reading, knowing that his quest had been successful and the family history uncovered? I must admit to a small twinge of disappointment. It is the search rather than the history that draws people to the family histories of strangers. The constant question, will they be able to follow the journey back in time, will they find their ancestors, and if they find them who will their ancestors be. He placed his emphasis on the experience of capture, transport, and slavery. Essentially it is a book about the experience of slavery and winning through to a better life, rather than a family history. He understood his readership. Slavery yes, but the American psyche seeks out books about winners. Perhaps this is why his book was so praised and so widely bought. A college-educated successful Afro-American winner beats hand down Alice Walker’s Afro-American ‘losers’ in The Color Purple ... * * * * * When I came upon Douglas Stewart’s radio play ‘The Fire on the Snow’ which begins with the simple but powerful announcement—‘Captain Scott’s Antarctic expedition landed in McMurdo Sound on the Antarctic Continent on 4th January 1911. The march to the Pole, with dogs, ponies and motor sledges for transporting supplies, began from their base camp at Cape Evans on 1st November 1911. The time of the play is from 4th January 1912, when the last supporting party returned, to 29th March 1912, when Scott’s diary ceases. After living on the ice for five months, marching 800 miles to the Pole and about 600 miles of the return journey, Scott, Wilson and Bowers perished in their tent; they were exhausted and short of food and a blizzard which raged four days prevented them from marching to their “One Ton Camp”, eleven miles away, where there was food and fuel that might have saved them”—it suddenly struck me how effective as a dramatic tool the choice and use of dates can be. Take for instance—“At 1 p.m. on Sunday, August 26, 1883, a date forever memorable in the long and fearful story of man’s struggle with nature, Krakatoa hoisted her battle flag and gave warning that the preliminary sparring was over. The decks were cleared for action. The glove was down in the ring. ... Hundreds of thousands of people watched or heard Krakatoa’s grand opening. Days and weeks later, a handful of stunned survivors told their stories of the catastrophe that struck Java and Sumatra. They were incoherent and confused. No one human being saw the whole disaster. The Straits were blacked out for three days. No mortal eye saw what happened on Krakatoa. The island was engulfed in smoke and flame. Only years later were geologists able to reconstruct the course of events”—from Krakatoa by Rupert Furneaux. It gives me a kind of awful frisson up the spine. I’ve always found volcanoes both terrifying and fascinating. I used to read and re-read the chapters in books like Explosion Island and Danger Patrol where the sleeping mountain suddenly comes to life, and the film version of Journey to the Centre of the Earth kept me awake at nights. Or: “Then befell, on a Sunday morning when the churches were crowded for All Saints’ Day masses, the Lisbon earthquake of 1 November 1755. The dimensions of the calamity shocked all Europe. In less than fifteen minutes two-thirds of the city collapsed in ruins, a tidal wave inundated the low-lying districts, and by evening a hundred conflagrations had taken possession of what remained. Churches had caved in on top of their congregations; the magnificent patriarch’s palace and forty-two great houses of the 123123 nobility, thirty monastries and a score of convents, many large public buildings, and countless private houses were reduced to rubble. Estimates of the dead ranged from 6,000 to 80,000. Panic, soon degenerating into anarchy, gripped the living.” (William C. Atkinson in A History of Spain and Portugal) But of course, and fortunately, there are inspiring dates too. “Alf travelled down to Yorkshire with his meagre belongings, arriving in Thirsk on 18 July 1940, and took up residence in one of the upstairs rooms at 23 Kirkgate. After spending a few days travelling round the practice with Donald and Eric Parker to acquaint himself with the area, he signed his contract as a salaried partner on 24 July, and began work two days later. As he set off on his rounds on that July day, little did he know that, many years later, he would turn Donald Sinclair’s business at 23 Kirkgate into the most famous veterinary practice in the world.” (The Real James Herriot, by Jim Wight) And: On Good Friday, 1986, Governor Toney Anaya proclaimed New Mexico to be a “State of Sanctuary”, Jim Corbett writes in The Sanctuary Church. I find myself thinking that if New Mexico can open its doors, the hearts and minds of its people, to desperate people fleeing torture and conflict in Central America then why can not we be equally generous? Dates were on my mind as I browsed through some old Britannica Yearbooks from the 1960s; those forgotten dates that marked the end or the beginning of an era, dates that brought with them hope or regret. Just a sample: 14/10/65. King Mohammad Zahir Shah opened Afghanistan’s first democratically elected parliament in Kabul. 1/11/65. Norman K. Morrison, a Quaker, burned himself to death in front of the Pentagon as a protest against U.S. policy in Vietnam. 15/12/65. Prince Tungi succeeded to the throne of Tonga on the death of his mother, Queen Salote. 16/1/62. Netherlands Navy announced in Hollandia, New Guinea, that two Indonesian torpedo boats had been damaged (1 sank) in Dutch territorial waters off the southern coast of New Guinea. 9/9/62. Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq reported asking U.S. aid, but U.S. officials ruled out interference in Iraq’s internal affairs. 8/11/64. Argentina and Chile signed an agreement to submit their Andean border disputes to Queen Elizabeth II’s arbitration. 28/5/69. Inept supervision of crews completing work at opposite ends of a new nuclear submarine was blamed by a U.S. House Armed Services Committee panel for the sinking of the ship in 35 ft. of water. And a quick flip back to 1965. 2/6/65. First contingent of Australian troops arrived in South Vietnam. 17/2/65. The Gambia, the last British colony in West Africa, became an independent member of the Commonwealth with David. K. Jawara as prime minister. * * * * * Radio plays began to be written in the 1920s to take advantage of the popular new medium. In Australia the ABC set up its drama department in 1936. The medium developed new writers, new techniques, new actors/readers, new audiences. It also encouraged greater emphasis on voice development as well as some delightfully inventive techniques to represent sound. Recordings of all kinds of commonly-used sounds, such as thunder and crowds, were made but I love the idea of a ship striking an iceberg being represented by a knife slowly cutting through a cabbage … The ABC Children’s Hour was preceded by the BBC Children’s Hour. Simon Appleyard in The Storytellers writes, “If you are old enough to recall the BBC Children’s Hour broadcasts any time from the mid-Thirties up to the darkest days of the last world war there will be at least one segment in that most enjoyable programme that still clings to memory ... “Out with Romany”, which invited young listeners to accompany a mellow- voiced gypsy of that name, and his dog, Rag, on weekly journeys of adventure into the countryside.” Strangely enough, Romany was a Methodist minister, the Rev. George 124124

Bramwell Evans. His mother Tilly Smith was a Gypsy and he called one of his children Romany June. In 1921 he attended a horse fair at Appleby and persuaded a Gypsy to sell him a caravan, a ‘vardo’ in Romany, which he spoke. He paid £75 for the caravan, hired a horse, and drove it home to the Methodist manse at Carlyle. Of course he wouldn’t be allowed out in a horse-drawn vehicle so casually these days even if he was willing to brave the thundering pantechnicons. The caravan and the needs of city children who rarely got to enjoy the wildflowers and birds and animals of the countryside gave him the idea for his programme. And the caravan is said to be still on display at the Public Library at Wilmslow in Cheshire. Many and various are the people who remember with nostalgia the ABC Argonauts’ Club. I’m not one of them. I must admit I much preferred to listen to Batman, Superman, Biggles, Hop Harrigan, Tarzan, Yes What, and their ilk on commercial radio—and there is an enduring connection with sticky paspalum. We used to sit the little portable radio at the bottom of our rather unkempt bit of garden to listen. But for everyone who remembers Mac and Jimmy and Sue and The Melody Man and all, here is Mac writing in the first Children’s Hour Annual: “The Children’s Hour is on the air from five o’clock till five minutes to six each afternoon from Monday to Friday and from half past five till six o’clock on Saturday and Sunday. The times are a little different in South and Western Australia and Papua-New Guinea. That is to say it is on the air for five and a half hours each week. That is a great deal of air time and the organisation and presentation involve a great many people. Would you be interested to learn something of what has happened behind the scenes before you turn the dial of your radio at home and listen to the Children’s Hour?—If you do! In the hope that some of you might say, ‘Yes’—here goes. First of all, of course, there are the people you will hear on the air; the personalities who are in the studio every afternoon, Sue, Gina, Jimmy, John, Peter, Barbara, and myself. We meet in the studio after lunch everyday sometimes a very early lunch, and work right through till we have the session ready. Apart from rehearsing the various items for the day the session must be very carefully timed; if we were to run over time we would be cut off the air to make way for the next unit to be presented. Nothing sounds worse than a presentation that is cut off before it is finished. Besides ourselves there are the various experts who come, one each day, from Monday to Thursday. Tom the Naturalist on Monday, Phidias, our art expert, on Tuesday, Argus who guides all our young writers, on Wednesday, and the Melody Man on Thursday. Apart from the talks they give each week these highly qualified men devote a great deal of time to going through hundreds of nature study specimens, paintings, drawings, essays, book reviews, stories, plays, poems and musical compositions, all sent in to the Argonauts’ Club by enthusiasts for the various arts. Each day we start the Children’s Hour by singing two or three songs. That means an accompanist has to be with us; sometimes Cecil Fraser is on his own, sometimes Ross McKendrick brings along his piano-accordian as well, and sometimes, when Cecil can’t come, Anne plays for us. On Tuesday Harold Williams, our “Orpheus” in the Argonauts’ Club, sings for us, and he bring his own accompanist. Others who appear regularly are Alex Walker the Birdman and Thales our expert on developments in science in relation to space. Then there are the actors and actresses who bring our serials to life. Of course, the serials have to be written first, but before we turn to script writing, let’s mention others in the studio, whose voices you do not hear. The producer who is in overall control of the whole Children’s Hour in the studio; the technical staff who are responsible for the complicated equipment; the effects operators who supply anything in the way of noise, from an elephant with bronchitis to a pillar box being furious. Then there is quite a large office staff whose duties are many and varied. Mails come 125125 in throughout the day and have to be sorted and delivered to the persons concerned; scripts have to be typed and checked for errors; new Argonauts have to be enrolled; marks have to be entered and kept up to date on each Argonaut’s personal file; bookings of studios and artists keep the telephones going all day long; correspondence has to be dealt with. And that is not all by any means. Three very important units in the A.B.C. are the Music Library, Record Library and Reference Library; and the Children’s Hour makes constant use of all three. In the course of a week we have a good many visitors, many of them people who have ideas for material to go on the air; you would be surprised if you could hear some of the odd ideas that are put up to us. Now a word about script-writing. Every script submitted must, of course, be read. And there are many of them. With some it is soon clear that they are not up to standard or that the subject matter would not be suitable. What we like, in case any of you ever think to try your hand at writing a serial story for us, is a synopsis of the whole story, and the shorter the synopsis the better. To keep two serials on the air most of the year means that we must have a constant supply of suitable stories submitted. Script reading is an important job with us and the trained reader learns to sort the good from the not-so-good fairly quickly. Amongst authors and authoresses who write for us regularly or from time to time are Ruth Park (The Muddleheaded Wombat, Punch and Judy and Mokey), Irene Shackcloth (Muddles of Mugwumpia), Joy Hollyer, William Starling, Richard Didsbury, G.K. Saunders and Denys Burrows. This does not mean that we are not always on the look out for new authors with new ideas; we are. Apart from those who come to the Children’s Hour regularly there are those who come as guest speakers to my sports corner; I call it mine because the running of it is my responsibility. Since it has been on the air we have had as guests, to mention a few of the names you will all know: Geoff Brown, Harry Hopman, John Treloar (an ex-Argonaut), “Mac” Hughes (another), Marlene Mathews, Murray Rose, Lorraine Crapp, Mervyn Wood, Ivan Lund, Ian Craig, Alan Davidson, Colin Cowdrey. Some of our scripts demand a good deal of research on the part of the writer—our Sunday plays telling the story of people who have played an important part in Australia’s history, our unusual series, such as “Do You Know Why?”, “When They Were Children”, and “Field and Farm”. And I could go on for a long time yet, telling you of many other essential activities, without which the Children’s Hour could not be put on the air. Maybe I have said enough already to make you begin to realise what a tremendous amount of preliminary planning and work go into the presentation of just one unit in all the A.B.C.’s many programmes. It makes you think, doesn’t it?” * * * * * Arnold Wesker wrote a play called Roots. The Bryant family is, seemingly, deeply rooted in the Norfolk countryside; passive, accepting, almost serf-like in their attitude to events and people. A family that is “closed to new ideas but open to new gimmicks”, a family mildly afraid of the rush of twentieth century life. In a way, it was an odd subject for Wesker to choose. The child of Russian and Hungarian refugee parents he was cosmopolitan and without any roots in the English countryside. But he was sympathetic to the way that outside events can impinge on unprepared people and throw into bleak relief their vulnerability. Roots is the second book of a trilogy with this underlying theme. And, at the heart of his work is the idea that what should be a strength to be gained from their essential rootedness isn’t really there. Beatie Bryant says: ‘What do you mean, what am I on about? I’m talking! Listen to me! I’m tellin’ you that the world’s bin growing for two thousand years and we hevn’t 126126 noticed it. I’m telling you that we don’t know what we are or where we come from. I’m telling you something’s cut us off from the beginning. I’m telling you we’ve got no roots. Blimey Joe! We’ve all got large allotments, we all grow things around us so we should know about roots. You know how to keep your flowers alive don’t you Mother? Jimmy — you know how to keep the roots of your veges strong and healthy. It’s not only the corn that need strong roots, you know, it’s us too. But what’ve we got? Go on, tell me, what’ve we got? We don’t know where we push up from and we don’t bother neither.’ The roots that place and family and class appear to give are unsteady and unstable, Wesker is saying. But this family is unable to find the stability that only the deepest roots of heart and mind and soul can offer because they simply have no profound beliefs—just the touching hope that life will treat them kindly and the hurricane pace of modern life will pass them by. * * * * * August 12th: Robert Southey August 13th: Rhyll McMaster August 14th: Danielle Steel August 15th: Garry Disher T. E. Lawrence Napoleon Bonaparte August 16th: Georgette Heyer August 17th: V. S. Naipaul Gene Stratton Porter August 18th: Nettie Palmer Alain Robbe-Grillet * * * * * Australia has been lucky to have some wonderful ‘nursing mothers’ at crucial times in our history. J. F. Archibald and A. G. Stephens, however, nurtured their infants on vinegar and dry biscuits, or as Vance Palmer once said of A. G. Stephens he ‘could damp down the pretensions of most writers by a judicious application of cold water’. Vance and Nettie Palmer were more in the nature of milk and sherry in their constant encouragement and belief in Australian writers and the development of an Australian literature. Flora Eldershaw once said of Vance ‘We broke through the scrub, our first books under our arms, and there was Vance Palmer ahead of us’. He may have been ahead but he and Nettie were always right there, their home hospitably open, their time and encouragement and advice always available to other writers. To read their many articles and letters which frequently glow with warmth and enthusiasm for the work of their contemporaries, is to regret not knowing them. Nettie’s work especially, when compared with some of the reviews and put-downs I have read of contemporary writers, is generous, readable, well-researched, clear and almost invariably interesting. Of course, there were fierce reviews then as always—witness the woman who wrote to Martin Boyd to say ‘Your book had such malicious reviews that I was sure it must be good, and I bought it’—but I doubt that Nettie wrote any of them; she bemoaned the smallness of Australia’s publishing opportunities but always seemed to seek out the positive things that could be said, in honesty, about any new work. * * * * * The Palmers settled just outside Melbourne and this inspired Nettie to research and write about the history of the area around their home and to record this interesting story: “the reddish soil of the Emerald slopes was too rich to be left long untouched by a generation looking hungrily for cultivable land near the city. It caught the experienced eye of a robust young Swede who was working at a nursery in town and spending his weekends searching for a suitable place to make a home. Carl Axel Nobelius had been born in Sweden in 1850, one of a peasant family settled 127127 in Skane, the flat, fertile southernmost edge of Scandinavia. The name Nobelius had been taken from Nobbelov, a village in that part of the country, but when one of the family enlisted in the Army he had to drop his last three letters, Latin names having then upper- class connotations and being frowned upon in the ranks. This was Immanuel Nobel, father of Alfred, the explosives king and founder of the Nobel Prize. At the time young Carl arrived in Australia, there was a disaster in Sydney that had to do indirectly with his famous cousin. This was the explosion in 1866, of two cases of nitro-glycerine in a Sydney warehouse—an explosion that completely obliterated the building as well as many adjacent dwellings and caused an undetermined number of deaths. It was literally a shot heard round the world, for there had been widespread rumours about this marvellous new explosive that was going to displace gunpowder and perhaps prove terrible enough in its destructive power to put an end to war. The Sydney explosion was soon followed by others in different countries; a general panic led to restrictions being placed on the transport of this dangerous substance. But the story of nitro-glycerine’s transformation into dynamite and gelignite has more to do with Alfred Nobel than with his green-thumbed relative. For the young immigrant’s gift was making things grow. As a lad he had been trained as a nurseryman, and when he reached Melbourne in the late sixties he soon found employment in the nurseries of South Yarra and Toorak. There he had made friends with other young men who were to play a great part in the agriculture and horticulture of Victoria—men like Cheeseman, George Rimington and the Brunnings—all day-labourers then, but all ambitious to have places of their own. Nobelius found that the red soils of the Dandenongs were specially suited for making good rooting-systems in fruit-trees. After some experiment he took up a large area of land in Emerald, on the northern slope facing Warburton. It was heavily-timbered, but he set to work clearing it, patch by patch. No real settlement at Emerald yet existed; there were no roads, only rough bush- tracks, and no direct link with Melbourne. For some time Nobelius continued his work in the city nurseries, taking the train to Narre Warren late on Friday. It was a sixteen-mile tramp over the flats and up the uncleared hills to his new holding, but he was young, vigorous, and of indominatable will. Gradually the hillsides were cleared and burned off, and by 1880 he could make his home there and open up a nursery. At first it was a matter of rearing seedling fruit-trees for known customers, but he was led into experimenting with European trees that gave good shade in summer. Part of his place was turned into an acclimatisation garden, a sort of laboratory. In the hot little townships growing up in the north, there was need for trees of leafy foliage that would absorb the dust. To the shire councils of such places came circulars from the nursery at Emerald, telling what could be supplied in the way of ‘ornamental’ trees that would give shade in summer, let the sun through in winter’. Nettie Palmer goes on to describe his nursery as ‘the finest of its kind’ in Australia and that several decades later he could advertise ‘a million trees for sale’. He became an international figure in the trade and was soon selling trees as far afield as India and Brazil. * * * * * It is almost de rigueur to talk about the cultural cringe when we go back to the era of the Palmers—but one day it struck me that the cringe went beyond books and culture. What about our Great Crime Cringe? We’re far more likely to have heard of Crippen, Seddon, Armstrong, Florence Maybrick, Christie, et al—and yet, Australia has one of the most extraordinary arsenic poisoning cases to be found anywhere ... but how many Australians have heard of the case of Captain George Dean, which began on 19 March, 1895, the charge being “That he did, on the 2nd March 1895, feloniously cause poison to be taken by his wife, Mary Dean, with intent to murder her.” There were so many twists and turns to the case I’m not sure I can do it justice but, 121288 with apologies aforehand to Frank Clune and Cyril Pearl, I’ll try. (There are any number of versions; I just happen to have these two on my bookshelf and they are both quite thorough.) George Dean was the captain of a Sydney Harbour ferry, the Possum, and was seen as “young, handsome, affable, courteous, intelligent and efficient”. His young wife had given birth to a baby boy, their first child, two months before she noticed her glass of lemon syrup tasted bitter. The things which tasted bitter rapidly multiplied, tea, porter, cocoa, the medicine her husband got for her. She became very ill. Her husband had attempted to ban her mother, Mrs Seymour, from the house but as he did night shift work and as the young Mrs Dean no doubt sought her mother’s advice on coping with her first baby, Mrs Seymour still came regularly to the house and she seems to have been the more active in trying to find what was making her daughter ill. Both their neighbours, Mr and Mrs Gail, and the nearby shopkeeper, Mrs Adey (or Adye), were drawn into the confusion. Mary Dean seems to have been unwilling to have the syrup analysed (and after all young brides are rarely willing to believe their new husband is trying to poison them) but the drink when taken to a Dr Newmarch was discovered to contain both arsenic and strychnine. That it hadn’t killed the young woman seems extraordinary but the intention may have been to make her ill for some time before she actually died. The case came to the Magistrates Court where George Dean’s lawyer Dick Meagher, known for his sarcasm, his invective and his political ambitions, took apart the uneducated and unsophisticated young wife just recovering from the effects of poisoning. Her mother, more worldy-wise but no better educated, didn’t fare much better. Both got confused, contradicted themselves, and made a poor showing. Dick Meagher took the position that either Mary Dean had taken the poison herself or her mother had administered it in the hope of framing George Dean whom she had come to dislike intensely. But George Dean was committed for trial and Dick Meagher employed a local ‘Mr Fixit’ Dan Green to do some digging into the background of all the witnesses. Mrs Seymour, he found, had been to prison on a charge of receiving stolen goods and had a convict background; her long- estranged husband was prepared to claim that she had tried to poison him also but his convict background undermined his credibility; Mary Dean, Green implied, though only on the vaguest hearsay, had been a prostitute before her marriage. Mr Gail was a bigamist and Meagher managed to have him charged as such just before he was due to appear as a witness in the Dean trial, though the case was eventually dropped when it was shown to be a technical infringement only. Public opinion was running strongly in Dean’s favour but the trial judge, Judge Windeyer, was a tough man, a ‘hanging judge’, and whatever he thought of the huge mass of confused and confusing evidence that saw the light of day in his courtroom he seems never to have doubted Dean’s guilt. But the jury could not agree. Windeyer intervened, it was later revealed because a child of the jury foreman had just died and he did not want to have to lock the jury up over the weekend. But seven minutes after he suggested, though not quite in these words, that they find Dean guilty and make a recommendation for mercy, the jury returned with just that verdict. Far from mercy, Windeyer then sentenced Dean to death. There was a well-orchestrated public outcry. A George Dean Defence Committee was set up, petitions circulated, thousands were turned away from “Monster Public Meetings” held in halls all over Sydney and in country towns, even a popular ballad did the rounds, a Royal Commission was called for and a Royal Pardon was demanded. Regardless of the evidence presented there were certainly some irregularities in the Judge’s conduct. John Norton in the Truth described the jury as “jelly-brained idiots, a mixture of vacillation, timidity and grovel”; in an interview printed in the Sydney Morning Herald the jury foreman said their request for mercy was motivated by Dean’s bravery in saving 129129 several ferry passengers from drowning, not from doubts about his guilt. Clune writes: “To understand how completely Meagher hoodwinked the public and the press, it is instructive to look through the newspaper files of the period, preserved at the Mitchell Library in Sydney. Leading articles, the correspondence-columns, and lengthy reports of speeches at “Monster Public Meetings” all vibrate with indignation against Judge Windeyer and the jury for finding George Dean guilty.” Did Paddy Crick have private doubts? At any event he suggested to his partner Dick Meagher that he go to Darlinghurst Gaol and tell George Dean the police had now found where he’d bought his poisons and see how Dean reacted. He wanted to be certain that Dean was innocent before he pressed for a Royal Commission. Meagher saw this as unnecessary (he hoped to ride into Parliament on the wave of popular opinion, the shining knight who had defended, almost without charge, an innocent man) but on the 5 April 1895 he went round to the gaol. When he returned he told Crick he was certain Dean was innocent. The wheels were set in motion. Premier George Reid announced the Commission on 30 April, to be headed by Sir Julian Salomons QC. After sitting for 39 days and hearing 113 witnesses, the Royal Commission recommended Dean receive a Royal Pardon. On the 28 June he was discreetly smuggled out the back door of Darlinghurst Gaol. Mrs Dean and Mrs Seymour left the North Sydney house and moved in with a friend in Surry Hills, where they could barely appear in public without being jeered, booed, or called “poisoners”; but George Dean went back to work as the hero of the day. He was promoted to the captaincy of a larger ferry, the Wallaby, and the Daily Telegraph said “He has been moved up marsupially”. Charles Burnham’s song ‘George Dean’s Return to Life’ was highly popular. On the 16 July the Daily Telegraph returned to the Dean case writing “Mr Meagher’s failure to expose the weak case against George Dean put the country to the expense of a Royal Commission”; a statement which prompted the strangest twist in a puzzling case: Dick Meagher went to see the Mr Pilcher QC, who had defended Dean at the Royal Commission, to ask for advice on whether he could sue the newspaper for libel. Pilcher was out, so Meagher consulted Sir Julian Salomons instead, and told him that far from being convinced of George Dean’s innocence he was sure he was guilty. When he’d told Dean that the police had found where he’d got his poison (three chemists who had supplied medicines to the Dean family had been asked this question and replied in the negative; the fourth, Mr Richard Smith, had not been questioned) he’d turned pale and nearly fainted. Mr Smith had supplied Dean with arsenic. Dean said he wanted it to make a cement to repair a bicycle tube. Smith had given him a small amount and as it wasn’t a sale hadn’t bothered to put it in his Poisons Book. It later transpired that Dean had stolen the strychnine from a neighbour’s shed; the neighbour having acquired it to poison a dog. Sir Julian was placed in an invidious position. As this was a professional consultation he was ethically bound to keep it confidential. But after wrestling with the question for a week he finally broke his silence and mentioned it to several colleagues and finally to the Chief Justice, Sir Frederick Darley, and the Attorney-General, the Hon. Jack Want. He justified his breach of confidence by telling parliament: “I came to the conclusion that no person—be he client or solicitor—can make any man by an unsought confidence a co- conspirator with him in a felonious silence and make him a depository of other men’s infamies.” Now it was Paddy Crick who found himself in an invidious position and his angry denials in parliament drip with hurt vanity and anti-Semitism: “It is marvellous that for over two months this wily Jew has kept this supposed secret sleeping in his bosom, and it comes to light only when there is a motion on the business-paper to criticize Judge Windeyer! Why did this cunning little Jew never speak to me about this matter? I am the senior partner of the firm concerned. His office is next door to mine. I am the man who 130130 moved for a Royal Commission … Now he says that his conscience—a Jew’s conscience—has pricked him to confide in the Government, revealing to them a professional secret, concerning my partner, but he never breathed a word of it to me, though he is supposed to be a friend of mine, and has known me for twelve years … You are asked to believe that my partner entrusted a secret to this little £.s.d. Hebrew that he would not entrust to me!” Clearly, this was both pride and disbelief speaking in the invective of the day. (The Attorney-General was later to describe Meagher as a “rat in a corner” and other choice phrases.) And the question remains. Did Salomons believe that Crick had conspired with Meagher to keep Dean’s guilt hidden? Meagher now made things worse by claiming that Dean was innocent and that he had never said he was guilty to Salomons. Sir Julian refuted this claim by the simple expedient of releasing the name of the chemist who had supplied the arsenic, information he said had been supplied to him by Meagher. When Meagher finally admitted that he had always known Dean was guilty Paddy Crick made a public apology in parliament to Sir Julian and handed in Meagher’s resignation from his newly-won seat. But why had Meagher lied to his older and wiser legal partner? Why had he instead chosen to confide in Salomons? Was it his own conscience bothering him? Did he feel Salomons had more experience than Crick? Did he want it on record that Dean was guilty—in case the ferry captain now succeeded in killing his young wife? Was he drunk? Was it his vanity? Possibly. Meagher was bitterly opposed to Salomons who was a free- trader, he himself being a protectionist, and it may be that he got enjoyment out of putting Salomons in an invidious position. But Dean had received a Royal Pardon. Could he be retried for the same offence? He had made a statutory declaration denying any confession of guilt and denying that he had ever acquired poison. He could be tried for perjury. But it was a knotty legal problem. Did the Royal Pardon cover all his statements during and after his trial? Did he ‘conspire’ with his solicitor? The police laid charges, not only against Dean and Meagher, but also against Crick and Dan Green (who initially could not be found but gave himself up to police some days later, saying he had been in a “sequestered spot”) and a Mrs Jane Reynolds who was charged with giving perjured evidence as to the character of Mrs Seymour and Mrs Dean in return for £50. Crick, Green, and Reynolds were acquitted. Meagher was struck off the roll of legal practitioners though this did not stop his political career and he became the first Labour Lord Mayor of Sydney. George Dean was sentenced to 14 years and after his release in 1907 lived quietly in Sydney until his death. Mrs Dean, Mrs Seymour and the Gails returned to the obscurity from which they had been painfully catapulted, Mrs Dean divorcing Dean in 1896 and marrying a Mr Benjamin Bridges four years later. Mrs Adey, called to both the original trial and the Royal Commission as a witness, became deeply disturbed when sub-poenaed yet again for Dean’s re-trial and committed suicide by jumping into the well behind her shop the day before the trial was due to begin. This remains a mystery. Did she believe, when George Dean was initially exonerated that it must have been her fault the lemon syrup was contaminated? In the days before refrigerators and pure food acts, shopkeepers must have faced frequent complaints but not usually court cases of such complexity and publicity … Justice Windeyer retired from the Bench and became Chancellor of the University of Sydney, dying en route to take up a brief stint on the Bench in Newfoundland several years later. Paddy Crick became NSW’s Postmaster-General and continued his roller-coaster career in parliament. Sir Julian and the other high-profile legal figures continued their careers. Dick Meagher struggled for reinstatement as a solicitor for the rest of his life; though he never succeeded this did not seem to damage his political career. But then, many Sydneysiders enjoyed his larrikin qualities, his larger-than-life personality, his colourful oratory, and his generosity, even if they had doubts about his honesty. 131131

But no one ever answered the question: why did George Dean attempt to murder his wife? Did he hope to throw suspicion on to his mother-in-law so as to remove both her and her daughter from his life? Although Dean’s name was linked to a mysterious Miss C—, neither the press nor the public ever discovered whether there was any substance to this rumour; possibly because they preferred to believe Dean innocent rather than the instigator of a sordid little spot of adultery. Both Pearl and Clune draw attention to serious instability in the Dean family. His father, a police constable, had shot himself. Though his mother remarried, she too apparently came from a family with mental problems. Was Dean afraid that his son might inherit the family ‘madness’. It seems more likely that Dean had managed quite well as an unimpeded bachelor living a pleasant life but, faced with the disruption and stress of a new-born and crying baby, he began to experience the mental illness which had dogged both sides of his family. We shall probably never know the truth of what went through George Dean’s mind as he handed his young wife those fateful concoctions. But—Mrs Maybrick, Madeleine Smith, unfortunate, unimportant, move over! The nineteenth century can do better than your sorry little dramas. * * * * * It is perhaps right and proper that it was Vance Palmer who wrote a biography of A. G. Stephens—but A. G. Stephens was an even more entertaining writer on himself and his opinions than Palmer could ever be; Vance Palmer was in some ways too kind, too detached, too cautious a writer to grip the reader in the way that Stephens could. It is the down-to-earth good sense of Stephens which I find so refreshing—“The grotesque English prejudice against things Australian, founded on no better reason than that they are unlike English things, still remains to vitiate the local sense of local beauty; but every year is teaching us wisdom ... It will be the fault of the writers, not of the land, if Australian literature does not by-and-by become memorable.” But to develop this literature required outlets and decent payments. Leon Cantrell writing of the exchanges between Lawson and Stephens says “they both recognized the difficulties under which the writer in Australia had to labour. Lawson, naturally enough, saw it largely in terms of bread and butter. To Stephens, it was a question of educating both authors and readers into an awareness of the nature of literature and of literary achievement. Both men saw the Australian situation as their greatest stumbling block; but whereas to Lawson this was a crying shame, to Stephens it was a fact of life.” Nettie would have taken Lawson’s side, I think; “We know many writers whose publishers say, ‘Don’t give us more than one book a year’ and yet never think of paying them enough, for that book, to enable them to live a year. £35 for a novel or a book of literary criticism! It’s a cruel game … ” Stephens’ father was the editor of The Chronicle in Toowoomba and he was the first student at the Toowoomba Grammar School. (My grandmother later bought the school’s first piano, I suppose they were getting something better, and although it was just a tinkly old upright—what my brother calls ‘a nice piece of furniture’—I always liked it because it had sconces for candles; I liked to imagine ladies in lovely satins and laces sitting at it ... it never occurred to me that its players had really been grubby little boys ... but now I like the thought that A. G. Stephens may have played those same keys ... ) A. G. Stephens has been described as “impercipient, heavy-handed, commonplace”; he undoubtedly gave wrong advice at times, intruded too heavily with his red pencil, wrote contracts that were markedly in his favour (such as his dealings with John Shaw Nielsen)—but equally Australian literature is immeasurably richer for the talent he discovered and nurtured. My mother had a story about a man who sent a manuscript to the Bulletin’s famous Red Page, saying with mock-modesty that as he had many irons in the fire he did not mind whether the Bulletin published it or not. The Red Page came back with the very public comment: “Suggest remove irons, insert manuscript.” I do not know if this was during the 132132 time when A. G. Stephens presided over the Red Page, or later. A. G. Stephens died on the 2nd May, 1933, and Nettie Palmer gave him this as her unofficial ‘obituary’: ‘A little paragraph in the paper announces that A.G. Stephens has died. Inevitably his name was spelt wrongly. It is one of the ironies of his obscure, significant life that he was known, when he was known at all, by his initials, or as The Bookfellow. All evening, I have been remembering my first meeting with him, in 1918. An exhilarating afternoon in early summer, the exhilaration not merely a matter of weather. The war was over, V. (Vance) would be coming back, life was opening up again. In the garden at Killenna the children and I were playing under the flowering gum when Hugh McCrae appeared, with his usual boisterous gaiety; he had with him some of his family and A.G. Stephens, who was on a visit to Melbourne. A downright, hearty man, not stout, but rather like that mature sea-captain of Conrad’s who seemed ‘extremely full of healthy organs.’ A man who hadn’t time to be anything but healthy. One noted that he was bald, his short, neat beard white. But these were not limitations—impossible to imagine him otherwise. The silver beard belonged to his remarkably fresh colouring; his baldness made a dome for his fine, candid eyes— childlike eyes, someone has said, but belonging to a child whose eagerness never let up. No one could believe, looking at his face, that he was pursued by petty financial worries. He was hoping to revive the Bookfellow soon; that was the chief reason for his Melbourne visit. Much of its space, he hinted, would be devoted to Shaw Neilson. The reception given to ‘Heart of Spring,’ which he had managed to publish—expensively for himself—a year before, made him feel that Neilson whom he had had to carry on his hands for so long was now able to walk alone—or to fly on his Pegasus. A.G.’s interest in our poets was directed chiefly on the makers of lyrics, and of these he put Neilson first. ‘He beats the lot of you,’ he had said to V. a few years before, showing him the prepared manuscript and wondering when it could be published. He admired McCrae consistently, but I think associated him rather closely with Norman Lindsay, the same thermometer for both rising and falling in his mind. It was interesting to see him in the garden watching the children—McCrae’s and ours—as if they were new creations to him; yet he was the father of quite a long family. McCrae, of course, was acting the playboy. Stephens enjoyed his grace and fantastic gusto, and responded to it. Afterwards, in my little study, crowded as it was with books mostly concerned with my pupils at the time, he asked for French poetry. I had a rather trifling Verlaine selection, containing nothing new to him, and a few studies of Verlaine in German and Italian. He was attracted by a Versailles book (Cité des Eaux, by Henri de Régnier), mainly sonnets, but with a few lyrics added. What caught him was an impression of a young girl asleep: Elle n’a, pour sa tête, Autre couronne Que ses deux bras entrelacés ... And then out it came, the word of comment, the final accolade of the Bookfellow as critic: ‘Ah, that is sung, not merely said.’ It was this criterion, applied always, that made him draw away from O’Dowd, whom at first he published and praised on the Red Page, producing ‘Dawnward?’ as one of the Bulletin booklets. Not that O’Dowd had become less musical with the years; the harsh, stabbing quatrains of his early work had been followed by ‘The Bush,’ with its own organ- music. But by the time ‘The Bush’ appeared, Stephens had dedicated himself wholly to Neilson whose song was delicate, Neilson whom he himself had trained to make the most of his lyrical talent. So when he caught sight of Shirlow’s etching of O’Dowd on my wall, he turned away to another wall, where there was a photograph of Joseph Furphy. Yes, he had seen the new issue of ‘Such is Life’ eighteen months before. It hadn’t sold three 133133 hundred copies for the Bulletin when he had published it in 1903—but he had known what he was doing. In fact, he had known what he was doing all through. For all his humour, he never made jokes about his own judgment. There were so many ways of being hopelessly wrong—he had found the only way of being right. I remember keeping myself from reminding him that, long before, young Frank Wilmot, finding his verse consistently refused by the Bookfellow, had invented the pen-name Furnley Maurice, purely ad rem, and had been accepted as a new poet. Stephens, when he discovered his identity, never forgave him. Yet the episode gave Wilmot himself opportunities of being magnanimous in ways the tyrant would never know. He was continually acknowledging his boyhood’s debt to the Red Page, and recommending people to read the Bookfellow. On the whole the air, when A.G.S. was speaking, was full of possible lightnings, yet with gracious gleams of wit and learning, too. Most of the contacts I had with him afterwards were by letter, but his letters always kept the sound of his voice, as when arguing some literary point: ‘You don’t agree? Wait till V. comes back and some day we’ll go into it hammer and tongs (tongs are married).’ He wrote as he spoke—briskly, musically, magisterially—yet with a charming note of play. When his little book on Chris Brennan appeared lately, it ended with a gentle memorial to bookfellowship, the last pages strewing gumleaves one after another in farewell, to Brennan, to Dowell O’Reilly ... Now let one leaf more fall, with Stephens’ name on it. Let it be aromatic, broad, and well- shaped. He should have died hereafter.’ * * * * * Vivian Smith in collecting up quantities of Nettie Palmer’s work also praises the journal in which many of her early reviews appeared. ‘When the history of modern Australian newspapers and journals is written, a special place will have to be found for the Illustrated Tasmanian Mail. In the 1920s this weekly carried syndicated articles on folk music by Bela Bartok; on the latest developments in French painting by Van Dongen; Karel Capek wrote on cinema and drama. There were interviews with Epstein; and notices of the music of Ravel, Debussy, Elgar, and Hindemith, as well as articles such as ‘The Philosophy of Norman Lindsay’ which appeared on 28 May 1930. This is a brief cross-section of some of the items that appeared in this alert and curiously cosmopolitan journal. Nettie Palmer’s contributions to it began on 29 July 1927 and became a weekly, then later a fortnightly item until April 1933. Altogether Nettie Palmer published in five-and-a-half years 212 articles of an average of fifteen hundred words each in the Illustrated Tasmanian Mail, and this was only part of her total output in those years which also included the writing of Henry Bournes Higgins: A Memoir and the editing of the influential An Australian Story Book (1928) as well as many journalistic items elsewhere. The series, headed Readers and Writers, A New Literary Causerie (the initial subtitle with especial reference to Australian Writers was omitted after 7 September 1927), began as a form of high literary gossip, aimed at stimulating the circulation of opinion. There are notes on Katharine Susannah Prichard, G.B. Shaw, George Gordon McCrae, the award of the Nobel Prize to Pirandello; Ring Lardner and Chester Cobb are discussed together; there is a plea for the preservation of letters ‘not only Wentworth’s, Higinbotham’s, Kendall’s, but the correspondence of interesting, unknown people that might have helped to fill in the background of an earlier day’. The comments, while generally conversational and informative, manage to link criticism with interpretations, as when Nettie Palmer says Theodore Dreiser ‘is never a master of actual words’, or in commenting on Trollope’s assessment of the Australian character: ‘(Trollope) ... leaves out the most important of all, which is a slow delicacy in perception and response, and seems the peculiar possession of those bred in the bush’—a point she neatly illustrates by reference to Lawson’s ‘Telling Mrs Baker’. 134134

By November 1927, when Nettie Palmer has already written something of interest about a number of Australian writers from Barbara Baynton to Henry Handel Richardson, from Furphy to Lawson, the nature of the causerie is changing; article-length appreciations begin to appear. The first, on Peacock, is followed by ‘The Reputation of John Shaw Neilson’, and this conscious but flexible and unstrained merging of overseas and Australian writers characterises the series as a whole and Nettie Palmer’s literary discussion at its best. She brings the same quality of attention to bear on R.D. FitzGerald’s To Meet the Sun, or the poems of Henry Tate, as on Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, or Osbert Sitwell’s England Reclaimed. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that no important English or American writer and certainly no significant Australian writer between 1927 and 1933 failed to get a mention in her columns. It is her achievement that within the limits of weekly and fortnightly literary journalism, and working largely within what is now called the belletristic tradition, she was able to produce much relevant criticism and lively, alert comment, the best of which retains permanent value.’ * * * * * August 20th: Emily Brontë Robert Seton-Watson August 21st: Mudrooroo Narogin August 22nd: E. Annie Proulx Dorothy Parker August 23rd: Edgar Lee Masters August 24th: A. S. Byatt Jorge Luis Borges August 25th: Frederick Forsyth Allan Pinkerton August 26th: Eleanor Dark Guillaume Apollinaire August 27th: Jeanette Winterson Ira Levin August 28th: A. G. Stephens August 29th: Maurice Maeterlinck * * * * * ‘Belgium is hardly a country pre-eminent on the international literary scene. Apart from Simenon and possibly Maurice Maeterlinck, author of The Blue Bird and Nobel Prize winner for literature in the earlier years of this century, the best-known Belgian literary figure is probably the fictitious one of Hercule Poirot, Agatha Christie’s moustachioed and idiosyncratic detective.’ (The Mystery of Georges Simenon, Fenton Bresler) * * * * * The NSW Parliament, to its credit, passed a resolution in 1998 stating: That, whereas 24 April 1997 marks the occasion of the eighty-second anniversary of the commemoration of the genocide of the Armenians by the then Ottoman Government between 1915-1922, this House: (a) joins the members of the New South Wales Armenian community in honouring the memory of the 1.5 million men, women and children who fell victim to the first genocide to the twentieth century; (b) condemns the genocide of the Armenians and all other acts of genocide committed during our century as the ultimate act of racial, religious and cultural intolerance; (c) recognises the importance of remembering and learning from such dark chapters in human history to ensure that such crimes against humanity are not allowed to be 135135 repeated; (d) condemns and prevents all attempts to use the passage of time to deny or distort the historical truth of the genocide of the Armenians and other acts of genocide committed during this century; (e) designates 24 April in every year hereafter throughout New South Wales as a day of remembrance of the 1.5 million Armenians who fell victim to the first genocide of this century; and (f) calls on the Commonwealth Government to officially condemn the genocide of the Armenians and any attempt to deny such crimes against humanity. Turkey, at the time, made no effort to hide its genocidal intentions. As James Moore writes in Gurdjieff: The Anatomy of a Myth: ‘As the Russian columns, breaking out from the railhead at Sari Kamish, surprisingly fought their way into eastern Turkey in early 1915, the retreating Turks embarked on the genocide of their Armenian subjects. They felt it superfluous even to code the instructions; Talaat Pasha, the Interior Minister, explicitly telegraphed the Governor of Aleppo: The Government has decided to exterminate all the Armenians living in Turkey ... Without pity for women, children and invalids, however tragic the methods of extermination may be, without heeding any scruples of conscience, their existence must be terminated.’ But after reading the NSW Resolution out to the Quaker Peace and Justice Committee, (we plan to plant a memorial tree) one member, Peter Jones, said, “Of course, this wasn’t the twentieth century’s first attempt at extermination. The German attempt to wipe out the Herero people of Namibia was.” In 1904 General von Trotha set out the ‘Vernichtungsbefehl’ or ‘Extermination Order’ for German South West Africa. Randolph Vigne in A dwelling place of our own writes, ‘After the genocidal end of the German-Herero war of 1904, and the subsequent crushing of the Nama who had also risen, a period of appalling cruelties followed, as the defeated Namibians became chattels of the German settlers and also the objects of their hatred and desire for revenge. A British Government Blue Book (Cd. 9146) published in 1918 has recorded these atrocities forever. In this “Report on the Natives of South West Africa and their Treatment by Germany” and in the court records from which many of the cases of cruelty were taken, is to be seen the final result of a colonial situation, built up, as Leutwein had realised at the very start, in order to transfer to the German settlers the land, wealth and power and to oblige the Namibians to accept these losses, or their only alternative—death. The impact of German colonialism outside should be noted. The other colonial powers did not upbraid the Germans for the horrors of the 1904 war. The only colonial powers of whom the British and French disapproved were Portugal and Belgium. The Portuguese were despised for their preparedness to intermarry with their subjects and for their inefficient failure to exploit their African colonies to the full. The Belgians were arraigned for exploiting theirs too much: their blood-stained “red rubber” activities in the Congo shocked European consciences. Yet, the Germans, though latecomers, were welcome in the colonial camp. It was not until the end of the First World War that the Blue Book exposed the appalling human conditions in Namibia, and then less for the benefits of the Namibians than as a preparation for the transfer of the territory to the control of a British Dominion, the Union of South Africa.’ Of the other German colonies in Africa, Cameroon was divided between Britain and France as was Togoland, Tanganyika went to Britain, and what became the republics of Rwanda and Burundi went to Belgium. But beyond the German horrors in Namibia (in which around 80% of the Herero people were exterminated) was a much larger and on-going genocide: the horrors of King 136136

Leopold’s Congo. Adam Hochschild in King Leopold’s Ghost writes: “On November 15, 1884, representatives of the powers of Europe assembled at a large, horseshoe-shaped table overlooking the garden of Bismarck’s yellow-brick official residence on the Wilhelmstrasse. The ministers and plenipotentiaries in formal attire who took their seats beneath the room’s vaulted ceiling and sparkling chandelier included counts, barons, colonels, and a vizier from the Ottoman Empire. Bismarck, wearing scarlet court dress, welcomed them in French, the diplomatic lingua franca, and seated before a large map of Africa, the delegates got to work ... Even though the entity officially recognized by the Berlin Conference and various governments had been the International African Association or the International Association of the Congo (or, in the case of the befuddled U.S. State Department both), Leopold decided on yet another change of name. The pretense that there was a philanthropic “Association” involved in the Congo was allowed to evaporate. All that remained unchanged was the blue flag with the gold star. By royal decree, on May 29, 1885, the king named his new, privately controlled country the État Indépendant du Congo, the Congo Free State. Soon there was a national anthem, “Towards the Future.” At last, at age fifty, Leopold had the colony he had long dreamed of.” Colin Legum in Congo Disaster writes, “It is easy to see Leopold, clad in his augustan Benevolence, dedicating himself to the interests of the exotic Immensity of Congolese, as he stood before a distinguished international audience in 1876: ‘The slave trade which still exists over a large part of the African continent, is a plague spot that every friend of civilization would desire to see disappear. The horror of that traffic, the thousands of victims massacred each year ... the still greater number of perfectly innocent beings who, brutally reduced to captivity, are condemned en masse to forced labour ... makes our epoch blush ... ’ This was the king who soon afterwards was himself to introduce forced labour on a scale unknown in modern times until the advent of Hitler. Under his rule thousands of victims were to be massacred every year.” The nations which came to Berlin were: Germany, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Spain, USA, France, Britain, Italy, Holland, Portugal, Russia, Sweden and Norway, and Turkey. But as the British representative, Sir Edward Malet pointed out, “The natives are not represented at this conference ... nevertheless the decision of this body will be of the gravest importance to them.” Needless to say, he did nothing to redress this situation. Was it genocide? Hochschild says, “although the killing in the Congo was of genocidal proportions it was not, strictly speaking, a genocide. The Congo State was not deliberately trying to eliminate one particular ethnic group from the face of the Earth. Instead, like the slave dealers who raided Africa for centuries before them, Leopold’s men were looking for labor. If, in the course of their finding and using that labor, millions of people died, that to them was incidental. Few officials kept statistics about something they considered so negligible as African lives. And so estimating the number of casualties today requires considerable historical detective work.” Sir Roger Casement thought 2 to 3 million had died. Mark Twain thought at least 5 million. In 1919 Belgium estimated that the population had “been reduced by half.” But—“Half of what? Only in the 1920s were the first attempts made at a territory- wide census. In 1924 the population was reckoned at ten million, a figure confirmed by later counts. This would mean, according to the estimates, that during the Leopold period and its immediate aftermath the population of the territory dropped by approximately ten million people.” (My emphasis.) * * * * * Various people spoke out: Sir Roger Casement, American Presbyterian missionaries, both black and white, Joseph Conrad, and some journalists. But the oppressed people of the Congo finally found the man who would raise their cause in Europe with the vigour, 137137 the passion, and the determination it needed. Strangely enough he was an ordinary shipping clerk, called E. D. Morel, working for the Elder Dempster Line which had the monopoly on Belgium’s ‘trade’ with the Congo. He wrote, “Of the imports going to the Congo something like 80% consisted of articles which were remote from trade purposes. Yet the Congo was exporting increasing quantities of rubber and ivory for which, on the face of the import statistics, the natives were getting nothing or next to nothing. How, then, was this rubber and ivory being acquired? Certainly not by commercial dealing. Nothing was going in to pay for what was coming out.” The articles going in were overwhelmingly guns and ammunition. “These figures told their own story … Forced labour of a terrible and continuous kind could alone explain such unheard-of profits … forced labour in which the Congo Government was the immediate beneficiary; forced labour directed by the closest associates of the King himself … I was giddy and appalled at the cumulative significance of my discoveries. It must be bad enough to stumble upon a murder. I had stumbled upon a secret society of murderers with a King for a croniman.” Hochschild says, “With this brilliant flash of recognition by an obscure shipping- company official, King Leopold II acquired his most formidable enemy.” And, “Seldom has one human being—impassioned, eloquent, blessed with brilliant organizing skills and nearly superhuman energy—managed almost single-handedly to put one subject on the world’s front pages for more than a decade.” He was offered bribes and threats to keep quiet. Instead he left the shipping line (which was a very brave move for a young married man with five children and little financial backing) and started a newspaper, the West African Mail, wrote books, collected reports and photographs, addressed public meetings, and at the urging of Sir Roger Casement founded the Congo Reform Association, of which Legum says, “The Congo Reform Association—under the scourging leadership of E.D. Morel, the author of Red Rubber which exposed Leopold’s methods—led the nation to protest.” Morel wrote in Africa and the Peace of Europe, “But the Congo enterprise remained throughout personal and not national in complexion. Sections of the upper and middle class secured handsome returns; contractors did a flourishing business for a time; much wealth accrued to Antwerp in particular. Never was wealth so demonstrably the produce of systematized evil-doing. There were none of the intermediate stages which confuse issues and defy detection by the difficulty of tracing cause and effect. In this case cause and effect were separated only by the extortion of the raw material from the natives accompanied by wholesale massacre and by every species of bestial outrage which diseased minds could invent, the unloading of that raw material upon the Antwerp quays, and the disposal of it on the market ... The Belgian people thus became de facto although not de jure identified with a system of colonial government recalling, but surpassing, the worst example of medieval history. To a people wholly ignorant of the problems incidental to the government of coloured races, the African was represented as a brute beast with no rights in his soil, in his labour, or in his person. And this pestilent doctrine was popularized by a mechanism of financial, political, and Press corruption which for comprehensiveness has seldom been equalled, and which bit deep into the national life of Belgium. It was a double wrong; upon the people of the Congo, and upon the people of Belgium.” The outcry over the way that the rubber was being produced led to King Leopold passing his private fiefdom into the control of the Belgian Government. But this was not the end of the suffering of the people of the Congo. Legum writes, “Thus, early in 1909, E.D. Morel raised important questions in a memorandum sent to the British Government on behalf of the Congo Reform Association. He pointed out that the colony was already then saddled with an annual debt charge of £236,654. The Belgian Government, as one of its first acts in taking over the colony from Leopold, raised a loan of £1,340,671, to be serviced and repaid by the Congo itself. It was 138138 to be spent, interalia, for the following purposes: Various enterprises connected in part with organizing the Belgian occupation of the Katanga ...... …………………………...£958,182. Purchase of a battery for the Fort below Boma; purchase of artillery, arms, and ammunition ...... …………....£80,000. Subsidy to King Leopold ...... ………...... £132,000. Morel’s petition complained that Belgium also expected the natives to pay £8,944 for the upkeep of a Museum at Tenvuren in Belgium, and £2,740 for the upkeep of the Colonial Institute. The Colonial Minister’s budgetary estimates for 1910 required that the natives of the colony also find the following sums: Annuity to Prince Albert until he succeeeds to the Belgian throne ....£4,800. Annuity to Princess Clementine until she marries ...... £3,000. Annuities to the former officials of the Crown domain ...... £2,400. Annuities to the congregation of the missionaries of Scheert ...... £2,600. Upkeep of tropical greenhouses and colonial collections at Laeken in Belgium ...... …...... £16,000. In The Future of the Congo Morel wrote, ‘I would merely observe that the Belgian government, alone among the governments of Christendom, claims the right to govern a tropical dependency in Africa by means of enormous taxes wrung from its inhabitants, and by the issue of loans the interest upon which it expects its African subjects to pay; and caps this claim by demanding of these same African subjects that they shall provide subsidies for the Belgian heir apparent and his sister, for ex-officials, for missionary, medical, and philanthropic institutions in Belgium; that they shall provide for the upkeep of museums, institutes, and tropical green-houses in Belgium, and that they shall even pay the salaries of the governing body of the Congo in Brussels, and the cost of newspapers and periodicals presumably intended for the edification of the members of that body ... ’ The British Government had no objection to buying ‘red rubber’ from the Congo, it also had no objection to excoriating the Belgian Government. Morel received considerable support in high places—until World War One. It would be understandable if Morel refused military service because he had had a gut-full of Belgium but in this, as in his previous work on behalf of the Congo, he was driven by a higher-minded belief in humanity. He refused to serve because he believed the war was wrong. His years of hard work had been devoted to saving and bettering lives. But the British Government wasn’t having any of this ‘sanctity of life’ rubbish. Morel was sentenced to six months hard labour in Pentonville Prison on the strange charge of ‘sending antiwar literature to neutral countries’. * * * * * ‘It is not always possible to deduce from documents, or even from contemporary gossip, the immense part played by human vanity in international affairs.’ (The Congress of Vienna, Harold Nicolson) But is vanity, ambition, greed, egocentricity, self-indulgence—ie. personal characteristics—sufficient explanation for the horror visited on the Congolese tribes in the name and at the instigation of King Leopold II? While I was pondering this question I came upon a book called OTA BENGA: The Pygmy in the Zoo: One Man’s Degradation in Turn-of-the-Century America by Phillips Verner Bradford and Harvey Blume. They explain Leopold’s acquisition of the Congo thus: ‘Europeans came, then, to deliver Africans from Tippu Tip and to gather around the flag of Leopold II, the Belgian king who succeeded the Arabs in the interior. In 1885, the Berlin Conference, chaired by Otto von Bismarck, made Leopold the ruler of the newly created Congo Free State, a territory within central Africa roughly eighty times the size of Belgium. By awarding this territory to Leopold, the European powers achieved a number 139139 of aims at once. They satisfied Leopold II’s colonial ambitions at no cost and a good deal of benefit to themselves. The lust for colonies ran in the family. Leopold I had once attempted to buy Texas. His son, even before becoming King in 1865, had made the acquisition of a colony the central goal of his career. Giving the Congo to Leopold II—as if it was theirs to give— was convenient to all the major powers. It allowed Germany to thwart France, France to thwart Germany, and England to forestall them both. It was true that Portugal could present a claim to central Africa dating back to the fifteenth century, when it had introduced Christianity to the King of the Congo and then stole his population out from under him. But Portugal could safely be ignored. What was important was that the major powers keep each other out of central Africa. Neutralization of interests was preferable to war. Leopold, then, ruler of a small, utterly vulnerable country, was perfectly positioned to emerge as a deliverer. And it was Leopold personally, rather than the Belgian nation, who was put in charge of the Congo Free State, as the Belgian parliament and people wanted to stay clear of colonies, great power politics, and the shifting sands of ententes, alliances, and accords. This unusual arrangement made him the greatest single landholder on the face of the earth. The only checks on his power were expressed in the agreements reached at Berlin. The Berlin Act bound Leopold “to watch over the preservation of the native tribes, and to care for the improvement of the conditions of their moral and material well-being, and to help in suppressing slavery, and especially the Slave Trade.” He was also to lend special co-operation to “Christian missionaries, scientists, and explorers” who might assist in “instructing the natives and bringing home to them the blessings of civilisation.” The rest of the agreement laid out, at greater length and in finer detail, Leopold’s responsibilities to England, France, Germany, and the ten other signatories of the Berlin Act. The king was to put no obstacles in the way of free trade with inhabitants of his colony; all the signatory powers were to have the same rights of access as he himself enjoyed. The Berlin and the subsequent Brussels Conference may have taxed delegates with the “hard work,” as one complained, of “dinners, receptions and balls,” but the dancing, dining, and feasting was towards a worthy cause. The conference had, in one fell swoop, kept the great powers from each other’s throats, satisfied the dictates of conscience, and opened a vast new area to commercial exploitation. In the long run, of course, it all depended on King Leopold being as good as his word, which in 1885, there was no reason to doubt. He was, it seemed, a perfect sovereign of the Congo. He was an amateur geographer in his own right who had convened conferences of geographers. In 1879, at his own expense, he had contracted with H.M. Stanley for the explorer to chart central Africa and lay the foundations for his colony. Stanley’s journey on behalf of Leopold did more than open new paths and decrease the sum total of white space on the map of central Africa. It left Leopold’s regime with a name. All members of the Free State, from the king himself down to his armies, his tax collectors, and his merchants, were known in the Congo as if they were part of a single entity, or members of a tribe. This tribe was called, after Stanley, the Bula Mutadi, the Smashers of Rocks.’ It encapsulates all the deficiencies that allowed the tragedy of the Congo to happen. There were no checks or balances on Leopold. The Belgian Parliament asked for no reports, did no investigations, sent no delegations. The European Powers were not going to look too closely at what he was up to; didn’t they have their own horrors to hide and wasn’t Leopold, related to most of the Royal Houses of Europe, ‘one of us’. There have been other men granted territory equally casually—William Penn and Pennsylvania, and the White Rajahs of Sarawak, come to mind—but they had neither the position nor the 140140 power of Leopold. Leopold coming late to the scramble for colonies compressed his exploitation and oppression into a much shorter span; other colonising powers spread their miseries over centuries. Leopold committing himself to the suppression of the Slave Trade exchanged it for an equally horrifying system of forced labour, unpaid and horribly punished, but labouring did not carry the same connotations as slaving. Bradford and Blume write, ‘If Edmund Morel can be credited with leading the twentieth century’s first international protest movement, then King Leopold should be acknowledged for assembling its first modern public relations apparatus, with a secret payroll and branch offices in most Western countries.’ Sherlock Holmes’ creator, Conan Doyle described the Congo as “the greatest crime in all history, the greater for having been carried out under an odious pretence of philanthropy.” And Leopold did manage to fool decent compassionate people; some believed that the horrors being carried out in the Congo were the result of maverick officials and that the King was being kept in the dark, others believed that the King must know and therefore claims of horrors must be false or vastly exaggerated because this humane and decent King couldn’t be party to torture and murder. The King undoubtedly knew. It was his demands that the Congo should yield up ever-increasing revenues that lead to the ever-increasing miseries, starvation, mutilation and trauma that decimated whole tribes. It was his decision to use ex-slavers in his enforcement of his demands that helped give the Force Publique its reputation for unbridled brutality. And it was his decision to use and surround himself with men like Stanley, with their own inferiority complexes, who created the strange and disastrous two-faced nature of Leopold’s Congo. Stanley in Leopold’s Royal presence was a sycophantic yes-man; Stanley speaking to the European reporters was a tough American hero; Stanley in the Congo was a cruel and embittered man who went armed and saw nothing wrong in mowing down hundreds of people with a Maxim gun. Those who struggled to bring out the truth had to struggle with this kind of schizophrenic attitude where it was never clear exactly where the truth resided—and the remoteness of the Congo, the racism embedded in the European and American perceptions, the belief that Belgium as a small modestly-prosperous, democratic nation would not be a party to torture and murder, and the success of Leopold’s presentation of himself and his aims to Christianise and civilise a backward people, all contributed to the difficulties experienced in bringing home the horror. Morel, Doyle, Twain, Casement, Conrad, Sheppard and others gradually changed perceptions. ‘The New York investors, on the other hand, didn’t want red rubber. If they were going to work with Leopold he was going to have to cut back on the bleeding and the mutilation of his laborers. They wanted to share in the king’s wealth, not his infamy.’ Leopold passed, or more precisely sold, his colony to the nation. But the flow of wealth into the country had helped to corrupt the power structures which might have righted many wrongs. The public colony was only marginally better than the private colony had been. Belgium had only the one colony (until Versailles) and it became a byword for maladministration, cruelty and exploitation. It was a terrible legacy to place on the Belgian people but an infinitely far more terrible one for the Congolese. And what of Ota Benga, the young pygmy who was brought to the United States and placed on show, first in the St Louis World’s Fair in 1904, then in the Bronx Zoo in 1906. He found himself caught between two worlds, without the money to go home, but without family or tribe in the USA. He comes across as tough, good-humoured, brave, shrewd but essentially lonely. There was no one who could truly understand him or how he felt. Eventually he reached Lynchburg in Virginia where he stayed at a Baptist Seminary and was befriended by a mulatto family, the Spencers. But on March 20, 1916, ‘He had hidden a revolver he had stolen earlier that day. In March’s afternoon shadows he retrieved it from under the hay in the carriage house and, 141141 still singing, turned the gun upon his heart and fired. Next day, Chauncey asked his mother why. Anne had been thinking of a story she knew, The Story of Bras-Coupé by George Cable. It told of a dying slave who is asked by a priest where he thought he was going after death. The slave answers not to heaven, as expected, but whispers instead: With an ecstatic, upward smile ... “To—Africa”—and was gone. Anne Spencer told her ten-year-old boy Ota Benga had sent his spirit back to Africa.’ His body lies in an unmarked grave in Lynchburg. * * * * * Germany and Belgium came to blows in Africa when Germany fired on a Belgian vessel on Lake Tanganyika. The colonies of the two European nations bordered the lake; the Belgian Congo on the west, German East Africa on the east. Belgium was reluctant to use the Force Publique to retaliate. The Force was needed to suppress the ever-present possibility of rebellion in the Congo. But Britain came to the rescue and Belgian honour was restored. Belgium then sought to push into German territory, not least because of the German invasion of Belgium. Byron Farwell in The Great War in Africa writes: ‘Britain had been a guarantor of Belgian sovereignty and had declared war when Germany invaded the country, but in Africa, where they were rivals for power and influence, there was considerable ill-feeling between Belgium and Britain. Spicer-Simon’s claim that the Belgians failed to cooperate with him was readily believed in London because distrust of Belgium was so pervasive in British government circles. Many Belgians believed that Britain wanted to take from them the mineral-rich Katanga region of the Congo. The British felt that the Belgians wanted to grab even more territory and that they already exercised too much influence in Central Africa. When the Belgians wanted to build the Katanga Railway, they claimed that the British were obstructive, as indeed they seem to have been. Britain forbade the export of rails to Katanga, claiming that they were strategic materials, and she blocked the Belgians using their sterling balance to buy rails in the United States [Eventually the Belgians took the rails from German East Africa’s Central Railway and bought rolling stock from the Rhodesian Railways.] The absence of good relations between the two governments was also evident in the relations between the men on the spot in Africa. In Elizabethville the attorney general, Martin Ruthen, the unofficial leader of the Belgian community, was outspoken in his anti- British and anti-American sentiments. Most of the many Europeans and Americans in Katanga worked for the Union Miniére or the railway, and they were widely regarded by the Belgians as troublemakers, union organizers, and corrupters of the work ethic in honest Belgian workers. There was, in fact, almost a private war between the Belgians and the Anglo-American communities in Katanga. With each side suspicious of the other’s war aims, it was with difficulty that cooperation for a joint invasion effort and a drive on Tabora was agreed upon.’ Hochschild writes, ‘Forced labour became particularly brutal during the First World War … Like the other Allied powers, Belgium had its eye on getting part of Germany’s slice of the African cake in the postwar division of the spoils. Enormous numbers of Congolese were conscripted as soldiers or porters. In 1916, by colonial officials’ count, one area in the eastern Congo with a population of 83,518 adult men, supplied more than three million man-days of porterage during the year; 1359 of these porters were worked to death or died of disease.’ The Germans were driven from their colony and it became part of the post-war spoils being divided up with the areas of Rwanda and Burundi going to Belgium and the part which later became Tanzania going to Britain. * * * * * 142142

The fictional Belgian, Hercule Poirot, goes on, inexhaustibly. But what of those real Belgians, Maeterlinck and Simenon? Has their work lasted? Maeterlinck’s dramas have been described as ‘the outstanding works of the Symbolist theatre’ and his plays, Pelléas et Mélisande (1892, later turned into an opera by Claude Debussy), and L’Oiseau bleu (1908), along with his philosophical and natural history books, The Life of the Bee (1901), and The Intelligence of Flowers (1907), gained him the Nobel Prize in 1911. He also wrote about the First World War in Le Bourgmestre de Stilmonde in 1918, and The Life of the White Ant (1927) in which he wrote of termitaries “The most remarkable of such edifices, to be found only in Australia, belong to the Compass, Magnetic or Meridian Termite, so called because its dwellings always face exactly north and south”. (South African naturalist, Eugène Marais, claimed that Maeterlinck had plagiarised his papers published on the white ant which he later put together as The Soul of the White Ant—but as he couldn’t afford to mount a legal challenge the claim remains untested.) But has Maeterlinck lasted? I came upon the suggestion that ten of Simenon’s dozens of detective novels would last. I’m not sure of the nature and significance of that 10. Certainly I still enjoy re-reading much of Simenon (not least for the delicious sense of food that permeates them) but they are being pushed into unnoticed places on whodunnit shelves and they don’t appear to be getting re-printed, at least not in English. So I wonder if the fact that both Maeterlinck and Simenon lived and worked in France and wrote in French has worked against them in the posterity stakes? Neither truly Belgian, nor truly French, and never fully claimed ... their exile did not hurt their reputation when it came to Joyce or Beckett but the relationship between France and Ireland is less fraught than the relationship between France and Belgium and the relationship between the French language and the struggle between French and Flemish for readers in Belgium ... or is it more to do with the past and nostalgia ... or ... * * * * * August 30th: Mary Shelley August 31st: William Saroyan September 1st: Arthur Upfield Sir Roger Casement September 2nd: D. K. Broster September 3rd: Alison Lurie September 4th: Mary Renault September 5th: Arthur Koestler September 6th: Elizabeth Ferrars September 7th: C. J. Dennis September 8th: Siegfried Sassoon September 9th: Carl Sagan September 10th: Mary Oliver George Douglas Johnson September 11th: O. Henry D. H. Lawrence * * * * * When Lady Chatterley’s Lover went on trial it was seen as a case of censorship gone mad. In fact it is rather hard to see why the British Government chose this book. After all, it had recently been on trial in the USA and acquitted and an expurgated version was readily available; well, the complete version was also available, it just required a little more ingenuity to obtain. (When a member of the Reform Club, back in the 1930s, complained about censorship in his efforts to obtain several books from Paris he received 64 letters giving advice on ways to circumvent the restrictions.) And far more dubious books had been published, collected and read in Britain than 143143 dreary old Lady Chatterley; take, for example, the British Museum’s acceptance of the bequest by Henry Ashbee of his 15,299 items of pornographic material willed to them in 1900! Ashbee’s collection was said to be second only in importance to that collected by Sir Richard Monckton Milnes who ‘owned what was probably the largest collection of erotica ever assembled by a private collector or for that matter ever likely to be; he employed agents on the Continent who were always on the lookout for “curious” books and pictures to enrich his library.’ Clearly a lot of dubious stuff passed unmolested through British Customs … Other books had gone on trial with varying results. As C..H. Rolph says, “Among them were Julia (Werner Laurie), The Philanderer (Secker & Warburg), September in Quinze (Hutchinson), and The Image and the Search (Heinemann). A fifth book joined these a little later in the year: The Man in Control (Arthur Barker) was, quite inexplicably, sent to the Director of Public Prosecutions from a private source. Werner Laurie pleaded guilty, to save time and money. Hutchinson were tried by jury, found guilty, and fined. Secker & Warburg and Arthur Barker were tried by jury and acquitted outright. Heinemann were acquitted by order of the Judge after two juries had failed to agree on a verdict.” But, curiously, if it is freedom of speech that is the principle the literary world would like to see upheld rather than the fame of the author or the literary excellence of the work which is the deciding factor, then it must be asked why these books did not get the support from the literary, academic, and civil libertarian worlds that was there in such abundance for Lady Chatterley. And although the jury heard endless witnesses spouting on the literary quality of Lady Chatterley the trial never truly engaged with the two key questions: was the book obscene and could it deprave and corrupt? It is hard really to see how any jury could resolve a question which continues to divide the ‘experts’. Sir Harold Scott, who was Commissioner 1945-1953, writes in Scotland Yard: ‘Among the most ominous of post-war symptoms was the steady rise in crimes committed by young people, and particularly by boys of sixteen and seventeen — the children of the war years. A very few of these were crimes with violence which naturally attracted much public attention. Many reasons are given for young men taking to crime of this violent kind. I myself am sceptical about the alleged influence of ‘thriller’ books and films. The normal boy likes excitement as my generation used to enjoy its penny dreadfuls, but I doubt if he often copies deliberately what he reads or sees on the films. He may imitate the externals: the swaggering walk and the boastful methods of the fictional gangster, but this influence does not go deeper than our imitations of Red Indians and pirates. Many of the boys who get into serious trouble would, I think, have been in trouble anyway, whether they had read books and seen films or not. The common denominator in many of the cases is a broken home. There is nothing stable in the lives of these children, they are early at war with society, and they try to make a world for themselves in substitution for the normal secure life which a child should lead. Although their home circumstances differed, both Harry Jenkins, of the d’Antiquis case, and Christopher Craig, who shot P.C. Miles at Croydon, had elder brothers already engaged in violent crime. If one member of a family goes wrong, others almost certainly follow, and studies of juvenile delinquency show that the influence of an elder brother is the strongest that can be felt.’ Colin Wilson in A Plague of Murder wrote of Ian Brady, ‘The years of his late teens, when he read Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Sade, and Mein Kampf, were a period of intellectual ferment in which he seems to have begun to perceive the outline of his ‘real identity’. The influence of Mein Kampf can hardly be underestimated. Even its title—my struggle—helps to explain the profound influence it still exercises among youthful right-wingers who 144144 would indignantly reject the label of ‘Nazi thugs’. To these enthusiasts, it is a kind of archetypal Hollywood success story, the autobiography of an ‘outsider’ with all the cards stacked against him, who somehow succeeded in imposing his own vision on the world. And certainly, it is as impossible to deny Hitler’s intelligence as to deny Brady’s. Moreover, with his admiration of Goethe, Beethoven, Nietzsche, Wagner, it is also impossible to deny that he must be described as an ‘idealist’. The fly in the ointment is, of course, the racism. Any normally intelligent person knows that is is impossible to generalize about any racial group. Yet Hitler’s ‘conspiracy’ theory about Zionism and Marxism looks plausible because there is undoubtedly an element of truth in it. Swallow that particular gnat, and you are ready to swallow the camel of antisemitism and black inferiority.’ ‘The violence of it,’ Angus MacVicar wrote of a story he’d heard told when he was young, ‘and the apparent callousness of the narrator, may be compared with some offerings by today’s cinema and television. Had it a bad effect on our tender minds? I shivered when I heard it, but at the same time a thought was planted in my ethical garden. ‘Bad men aye come tae a bad end.’ In modern films and plays this proposition is sometimes overlooked and violence presented simply for the sake of violence, with evil remaining unpunished. Is this the inartistic factor which renders the portrayal of violence dangerous to young viewers? Maybe so. In real life violence is always punished, either physically or spiritually. Has there ever existed an evil man who was happy?’ D. J. Cole & P. R. Acland wrote in The Detective and the Doctor, ‘For the second time within a year David Cole watched a young man, attracted by pornography, sentenced for murdering an innocent housewife going about her normal affairs. How he wished some of those who refused to recognize the effect of such material on young minds could have witnessed what he had seen.’ Susan Brownmiller in Against Our Will wrote, ‘those who call for a curtailment of scenes of violence in movies and on television in the name of sensitivity, good taste and what’s best for our children are not accused of being pro-censorship or against freedom of speech. Similarly, minority group organizations, black, Hispanic, Japanese, Italian, Italian, Jewish, or American Indian, that campaign against ethnic slurs and demeaning portrayals in movies, on television shows and in commercials are perceived as waging a just political fight, for if a minority group claims to be offended by a specific portrayal, be it Little Black Sambo or the Frito Bandido, and relates it to a history of ridicule and oppression, few liberals would dare to trot out a Constitutional argument in theoretical opposition, not if they wish to maintain their liberal credentials. Yet when it comes to the treatment of women, the liberal consciousness remains fiercely obdurate, refusing to be budged, for the sin of appearing square or prissy in the age of the so-called sexual revolution has become the worst offense of all.’ (I have no objection to being called square and prissy and I will say I object to people using four-letter-words at me without so much as an indication or understanding that I might feel my ‘language space’ being invaded; this Mellors does with impunity in Lady Chatterley; it is noticeable that he does not encourage the women in his life to regard themselves as having the same freedom.) But there are in effect three categories that come under pornography: sex, sex with violence, and violence. And they have different effects. Lady Chatterley just manages to squeeze into the first category. The trial concentrated on two aspects: the use of four-letter-words and their possible negative impact; and the impact of a book that promotes adultery. But if the book is subversive, dangerous even, (and I doubt that it is) then it is for a quite different reason. It has been said that if Lawrence had left out the love scenes between Lady Chatterley and the gamekeeper, Mellors, no one would read the book. But in fact the whole book is about sex. Its message is the danger of denial. Lady Chatterley leading a life 145145 without sex with her paralysed husband looks in the mirror; ‘Her body was going meaningless, going dull and opaque, so much insignificant substance. It made her feel immensely depressed and hopeless. What hope was there? She was old, old at twenty- seven, with no gleam and sparkle in the flesh. Old through neglect and denial, yes denial.’ It is this idea that everyone—regardless of their age, the laws of their society, their personal appearance, hygiene, personality, regardless of the pervailing morality—has a right to sex. And if they don’t get it they will be physically and mentally undermined. Lawrence, overtly and subtly, throughout the novel sets up this juxtaposition. The people without are pointless, superficial, unalive, lacking in reality, prey to a sense of nothingness in their lives. The people with it (or with a good memory of it or a good possibility of it in the future) are alive, cheerful, vigorous, normal. Even the chooks are drawn in on the side of the ‘with it’ group. Fair enough. But it is only a small leap between believing that you need sex, that you have a right to sex, and that you have a right to take sex if it is not forthcoming in a voluntary package. The literary world was astonished by the decision to prosecute. But I have never heard it said that Penguin Books was astonished. In fact they seem to have been remarkably well prepared. Why did they reportedly print more copies of LCL than any other of Lawrence’s books? As soon as the verdict was handed down in a blaze of publicity Penguin had their copies ready to hit the bookshops. Not only did LCL sell like hot cakes but she carried all Lawrence’s lesser-known titles along with her and Penguin then topped it off with their popular account of the trial by C. R. Rolph. I think Sir William Lane had, at the very least, some prior knowlege. There are curiosities too in the original banning in the late 1920’s. The image of Lawrence living in Mussolini’s Italy and railing at Philistine Britain for one; and his curious reluctance to do anything to support his book. Certainly he was in poor health but not so poor that he could not continue to travel and write. Radclyffe Hall came out swinging in support of her banned Well of Loneliness but her aggressive eccentricity may not have done her book any service. A pale frail ageing Lawrence on the other hand might have done a lot to suggest that Lady Chatterley was unlikely to subvert or undermine Britain. Sympathy for a sick man might have flowed through into sympathy for a sick man’s book. Radclyffe Hall cared passionately about her book and its right to be published and sold and read. Lawrence gave the impression of preferring to rail feebly at bourgeois morality while leaving his publishers to fight (or not fight) for his book as they saw fit. * * * * * Kenneth Slessor put down his ‘Ten Commandments for the Censor’ in 1921: 1. No actor or actress to wear indecent, suggestive or insufficient dress. 2. No embraces overstepping the limits of affection or ordinary propriety. 3. No nude figures. 4. No suggestive positions. 5. No scenes which might be offensive to the religion of any class or the community. 6. No scenes which might prove morally harmful to the young. 7. No scenes which might be subversive of morality or virtue. 8. No scenes which might seem to encourage breaches of the law or perpetrations of crime. 9. No scenes of brutal cruelty or violence. 10. No scenes from which the inference could be drawn that offences against those laws or recognised social codes which govern the relations of the sexes in married and single life are to be treated lightly.” Legally speaking, censorship only refers to what governments do. What individuals, committees, churches, or businesses do is choice, discrimination, even villification—but not censorship. But as it has been accepted in the wider sense I will say Everyone Censors. 146146

It begins with me. What will I write, what will I say to so-and-so, will I say anything at all ... perhaps it would upset him/her/them if I said what I really think ... and so on. We excuse ourselves. Do I really want to hear the plain truth about myself as seen by everyone else I come in contact with. Probably not. And when it comes to writing—if I write this will it undermine my chance to get published, will it upset an editor, will it sound pedantic, dull, nit-picking, will it open me to a libel case, is it good writing, etc. The book goes off. An assistant may pass it on to a reader or may simply decide the house list is full, there’s no room for more novels, poetry doesn’t sell, typewritten manuscripts are to be returned or go to the bottom of the pile, etc. The reader is in the middle of a marriage break-up and can’t bear to read a story containing a happy marriage—or is so miserable he/she can’t bear any more misery and turns down a story about a miserable marriage. The editor feels that India/sport/Antarctica/keeping Dalmations is flavour-of-the-month and turns down a delightful travel book about New Zealand. The publisher is strongly Liberal in tendency and knocks back a behind-the- scenes look at Ben Chifley’s office. And so it goes. We like to think that manuscripts get knocked back solely on their merits. They aren’t good enough, they aren’t interesting enough, they aren’t relevant enough, they aren’t commercial enough. But of the hundreds of thousands of manuscripts that get knocked back every year can we honestly say that other, more dubious, aspects aren’t at work? And books are bought largely on their descriptions, their covers, their hype, the reputation of their authors, not by their contents. So libraries choose mainly from catalogues (and by reader’s request). They choose one book over another—for budgetary reasons (three books might be purchaseable for the price of one major book—so which will be most in demand, most suitable to the library’s size and situation and clientele?) for reasons that have to do with library position, library demand, library requests, what’s already on the shelves in that particular area/genre etc, or even the particular quirks of the buyer. Books come off library shelves for reasons of lack of space, lack of demand, out-of- date material, complaints by readers, damage to the book, etc. Someone involved with a small community library dependent on donated books told me how good it feels when new donations come in and old books can go on to the Sale trolley. It has very little to do with content and a lot to do with the simple enjoyment of holding a bright newly-published book. More importantly perhaps, libraries have to decide what is their main purpose as they make their choices. When classics are taken off the shelf there is often an outcry. Why? These are the easiest books to buy (and often the cheapest given that no royalties usually have to be paid). It is expensive short-shelf-life books or out-of-print books that I seek in libraries. I either can’t afford to buy these, can’t justify the expense, or can’t find them to buy in the first place. Whereas classics and popular novels fill the op-shops, market stalls, pile up at fêtes ... Censorship begins in the mind. Maybe it turns into words, maybe words turn into actions. But there are things we don’t say, things we don’t do, things we only think. Does this kind of censorship matter? I think so. The tone of our minds filled with said and unsaid thoughts influences our lives. When the anchorites sat in the desert fighting their lustful thoughts they found their minds constantly filling with more lustful thoughts to be fought. The fight was never-ending and it made their lives pointless in the end. They weren’t living life. They were fighting thoughts. But should we have public censorship? Even allowing for the fact that photocopiers, cameras, videotapes, the internet, are rendering traditional forms of censorship obsolete, should we seek to censor people’s words? We do it all the time. We don’t like it when the government seeks to restrict our access to sex and violence, we demand that the government does something if it involves race or gender or children. We demand unlimited freedom. We find the unlimited freedom of others repugnant. 147147

* * * * * ‘Having completed the book, I tried to get it published, but every one to whom I offered it refused even to look at the manuscript on the ground that no Colonial could write anything worth reading. They gave no reason for this extraordinary opinion, but it was sufficient for them, and they laughed to scorn the idea that any good could come out of Nazareth—i.e., the Colonies. The story thus being boycotted on all hands, I determined to publish it myself, and accordingly an edition of, I think, some five thousand copies was brought out at my own cost. Contrary to the expectations of the publishers, and I must add to my own, the whole edition went off in three weeks, and the public demanded a second.’ (The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, Fergus Hume)

‘It was the last Sunday of November 1958, and the occasion of my call, and the reason why it can be placed so precisely today, was a small notice in the Sunday Telegraph which read: “on legal advice, the proposed serialisation of Cyril Pearl’s book ‘Wild Men of Sydney,’ which was to appear in the Sunday Telegraph will not be published ... ” Only the day before, the paper’s stable mate, the Daily Telegraph had boasted of its scoop and had told its readers that “the Government has been accused of rushing through the new Defamation Bill to stop its sale ... but you read in the Sunday Telegraph tomorrow.” As a journalist, I had wanted to know what could make a big newspaper organisation change from defiance to retraction so quickly. Hence my call. The author of the book, was the last man who could enlighten me. A good deal had happened around the Wild Men of Sydney in the previous five weeks, and this was only one more incident, taking place in exalted quarters, which was inexplicable to him and everyone else. A series of remarkable coincidences had begun late in October, when the Caucus of the Labour Party, which then governed New South Wales, met and authorised the Attorney-General, Mr. R.R. Downing, M.L.C., to prepare a draft Bill on defamation. A day later, the Premier, Mr. J..J. Cahill, confirmed this to newspaper reporters, explaining that the Government had received a number of letters on the subject. Mr. Cahill said that he had never heard about the book Wild Men of Sydney, but he agreed that the new Bill would be so drafted that a living person could sue an author or publisher for defamation of a dead member of his family, and that in this way New South Wales would come into line with the laws of Queensland, Western Australia and Tasmania. ... The critics of the Bill were quick to point out that this idea had been considered and rejected in the United Kingdom. Earl Attlee described the plan afoot in Sydney as “an extremely retrograde measure”. He was joined in this opinion by Lord Birkett, the jurist, Mr. A.J.P. Taylor, the historian, and Lord Boothby. The Royal Australian Historical Society met in Sydney and sent a protest to the Government, expressing its fear that a false picture of the past would be presented because of the N.S.W. historian’s reluctance to risk infringing a new law; and that publishers, printers and booksellers would refuse to handle the results of some historical research. ... When the debate opened in the two Houses of Parliament in the last week of November, the Opposition introduced yet another theme. The Defamation Bill, drafted in a matter of four weeks after its authorisation by the Labor Party Caucus, was introduced into the Legislative Assembly by Mr. W.F. Sheahan acting for the Attorney-General, who sat in the Legislative Council. For the Opposition, Mr. B.C. Doig, the Liberal member for Burwood, rushed into the fray with a motion that the legislation be deferred for six months. Mr. Doig explained that rumours were circulating that the Government proposed to introduce a law similar to those of Queensland, Tasmania and Western Australia to ensure that Wild Men of Sydney would not be sold in New South Wales, and that in return the Government would get favourable publicity in the Daily Mirror and Sunday Mirror.” Letters were released between the lawyers for the Norton family (“Our clients understand that this book is in the nature of a biography of the late John Norton, and its 148148 treatment of the subject is believed to be such as to be likely to bring the late John Norton into great discredit”) and the publisher W.H. Allen (“As reputable publishers, we would not knowingly associate our imprint with a book dealing with defamatory material, and as is our custom with books dealing with contemporary or recently deceased figures, we take all necessary precautions including advice from leading counsel”) but “In spite of the release of the letters, and in spite of yet more eloquent pleas against the Bill in Parliament, the proposals became law. No action, however, was taken against Cyril Pearl. Before the end of November, Mr. Ezra Norton had informed the Sydney Stock Exchange that he was seriously considering the sale of his interests in Truth and Sportsman Ltd., and at the turn of the year, control of the Daily Mirror passed into other hands. The allegations of Liberal and Country parliamentarians that Mr. Norton would be supporting the Labor Government at the next elections cannot therefore be tested against the course of events. On the other hand, the specific denials of Labor ministers that they were aware of the existence of Wild Men of Sydney, accepted in good faith, do not rule out a connection between the legislation and Mr. Ezra Norton’s concern with the book. A Government, a political party or a public service has many members. The letters Mr. Cahill said he had received on the subject of defamation have not been produced in public nor have the minutes of the Caucus meeting at which the Labor Party instructed the Government to prepare a Bill. These are the documents a historian would want to see before arriving at a final judgement. The Defamation Act remains on the New South Wales statute books. It is a standing invitation to someone—anyone—to take action in the courts if his ancestors happen to be of sufficient note to attract the attentions of a historian. It is also true that, short of publication in printed form, the mere production of a manuscript to a research student at a library comes under the Act, and action could be taken against a library allowing a reader to see matter which could be actionable. This is not a distant conjecture. The caution exercised by librarians since the late fifties in New South Wales itself constitutes an obstacle to investigation and the sooner the Bill of 1958 is removed from the books and the parallel laws in other states repealed, the better for a country which wants to look at itself with sardonic detachment.” (George Munster’s Introduction to Wild Men of Sydney)

“I have always believed in free speech, refusing to take legal action against fellow writers no matter what the provocation. Ironically, the same rights have not been extended to me. On advice, some sections of this memoir have been cut.” (Penny Dreadful by Penelope Nelson)

“In the 1940s, two of my books, Winter of Artifice and Under a Glass Bell, were rejected by American publishers. Winter of Artifice had been published in France, in English, and had been praised by Rebecca West, Henry Miller, Lawrence Durrell, Kay Boyle, and Stuart Gilbert. Both books were considered uncommercial. I want writers to know where they stand in relation to such verdicts from commercial publishers, and to offer a solution which is still effective today. I am thinking of writers who are the equivalent of researchers in science, whose appeal does not elicit immediate gain. I did not accept the verdict and decided to print my own books. For seventy-five dollars I bought a second-hand press. It was foot-powered like the old sewing machines, and one had to press the treadle very hard to develop sufficient power to turn the wheel. Frances Steloff, who owned the Gotham Book Mart in New York loaned me one hundred dollars for the enterprise, and Thurema Sokol loaned me another hundred. I bought type for a hundred dollars, used orange crates for shelves, and bought paper remnants, which is like buying remnants of material to make a dress. Some of this paper was quite beautiful, left over from de luxe editions. A friend, Gonzalo More, helped me. 149149

He had a gift for designing books. I learned to set type and he ran the machine. We learned printing from library books, which gave rise to comical accidents. For example, the book said, “oil the rollers,” so we oiled the entire rollers including the rubber part, and wondered why we could not print for a week. James Cooney of Phoenix magazine, gave us helpful technical advice. Our lack of knowledge of printed English also led to such errors as my own (now-famous) word separation in Winter of Artifice: “lo-ve.” But more important than anything else, setting each letter by hand taught me economy of style. After living with a page for a whole day, I could detect the superfluous words. At the end of each line I thought, is this word, is this phrase, absolutely necessary? It was hard work, patient work, to typeset prose, to lock the tray, to carry the heavy load tray to the machine, to run the machine itself, which had to be inked by hand, to set the copper plates (for the illustrations) on inch-thick wood supports in order to print them. Printing copper plates meant inking each plate separately, cleaning it after one printing, and starting the process over again. It took me months to typeset Under a Glass Bell and Winter of Artifice. Then there were the printed pages to be placed between blotters and later cut, gathered into signatures and put together for the binder. Then the type had to be redistributed in the boxes. We had problems finding a bookbinder willing to take on such small editions and to accept the unconventional shape of the books. Frances Steloff agreed to distribute them and gave me an autograph party at the Gotham Book Mart. The completed books were beautiful and have now become collector’s items. The first printing of Winter of Artifice was three hundred copies, and one publisher I met at a party exclaimed: “I don’t know how you managed to become so well known with only three hundred books.” Under a Glass Bell was given to Edmund Wilson by Frances Steloff. He reviewed it favourably in the New Yorker, and immediately all the publishers were ready to reprint both books in commercial editions. ... Someone thought I should send the story of the press to the Reader’s Digest. The Digest’s response was that if I had to print the books myself, they must be bad. Many people still believe that, and for many years there was a suspicion that my difficulties with publishers indicated a doubtful quality in my work. A year before the publication of the diary, a Harvard student wrote in the Harvard Advocate that the silence of critics and the indifference of commercial publishers must necessarily mean the work was flawed. ... The universal quality in good writing, which publishers claim to recognize, is impossible to define. My books, which were not supposed to have this universal quality, were nevertheless bought and read by all kinds of people. Today, instead of feeling embittered by the opposition of publishers, I am happy they opposed me, for the press gave me independence and confidence.” (‘The Story of My Printing Press’ by Anaïs Nin)

“Many novelists have caused scandals or uproars by dragging out into the light of day various aspects of life which the conventional morality of the period or strong vested interests wanted to keep hidden away. Zola, Flaubert, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence spring to mind as writers in whom the artistic urge for new ways of expression was linked with the need to deal with new and forbidden material. On a lower artistic level we meet writers like Upton Sinclair who used the novel form for a vigorous exposure of bad social conditions. But no novel has had such a violent and tempestuous career, at every moment of its writing, printing, and initial publication, as Frank Hardy’s Power Without Glory. Hardy’s book was an epical representation of a whole phase of Australian social and political history, done from the angle of the forces behind the scenes. In treating those 150150 forces he could not but find himself up against very powerful interests, especially as he came to the conclusion that the man on whom he must concentrate was a ruler in the sporting world, with a strong underground organisation as well as his obvious empire, whom it was highly dangerous to challenge. Not that Hardy began his book with any simple idea of exposing an individual. He was interested only in the person in question, John Wren, because he felt him to be typical of the corruptions he wanted to explore; and though, as he went on, he found himself fascinated by the problem of Wren, his rise to control of the sporting world and his political role, he always sought to generalise his material, to see Wren as both a remarkable and subtle character and as an emblem of Australian political development at a crucial phase. However, the way in which he felt his purpose to be tied up with the revelation of Wren as man and as social portent was shown by the fact that he could not even disguise his protagonist with a quite different sounding name, but called him West. We can see that the kind of book Hardy was driven to write was largely determined by his own experiences. He was born into a working-class family in Victoria, Australia, where his father moved from place to place, working in milk and butter factories. His own youth was spent in the depressed Thirties, with all sorts and shifts and struggles necessary for the family to survive. The sort of world in which he grew up in depicted in his book of short stories, Legends from Benson’s Valley, which excellently evokes the devious dodges and conflicts of the time—but does so in something of traditional Australian style, with the easy flow of the folk-yarn in pub or round campfire, whereas in Power Without Glory he breaks new ground in both material and method. Hardy thus grew up with his nose close to the grindstone of harsh economic realities, with a keen mind that wanted to understand what it was all about and why things happened the way they did. He did not however for some time foresee a literary career for himself.” It was his time in the Army in the Northern Territory in WW2 that got him writing with greater confidence, and “As soon as he was discharged, he set to work collecting material for the novel. His great interest in the sporting world, its seamy side as well as its public events, made the theme of Wren of special fascination to him. He knew something of his general reputation and the way he had risen in the world through illegal betting- establishments which the police had failed to shut down. Australian journalism had long been more akin to American than to English in its readiness to dare libel actions and pillory persons which for one reason or another could be held up to ridicule or denunciation. I recall John Dalley, when editing the Sydney Bulletin in the early 1920s, saying to me that he took the line there were certain persons who had gone so far in making themselves public enemies that considerations of libel did not apply to them; and John Norton in Truth had shown in a style of ferocious alliteration how far such an attitude could be carried. The Lone Hand Magazine, a periodical of high standing, had published about 1910 an outspoken essay on “John Wren and his Ruffians”, with remarks like the following, “His near and dear blood relation, who makes himself useful about the place, is one among many of Wren’s bodyguards who have been flogged or sentenced to death, or both.” (The near relation was Wren’s brother, Arthur, about whom Hardy later dug out much information.) We see then that Hardy was intent on following up a national tradition of journalistic audacity, though he wanted to produce a work which rose far above any level of journalistic muck-raking and succeeded in marrying a strong social purpose to a high artistic aim. He began, in his own words, copying out in his notebooks “extracts from Hansard, from old newspapers and magazines, from Royal Commission Reports, from documents in Melbourne and Sydney libraries,” gathering “material about the bank crash in the 1890s, the growth of the City of Melbourne, changes in fashion, raids on the Collingwood Tote, Federation, the war between Wren and the police and wowsers, population figures, relevant sporting events, the deportation of Father Jerger, the Conscription Referenda of 151151

1916-17, the life stories and personalities of various politicians, criminals and others, the political ramifications of the Catholic Church hierarchy, the Mungana scandal, the police strike, the depression, the Unemployed Workers’ Movement, the rise of the Santamaria secret ‘Movement’, and a hundred and one other subjects.” He soon compiled a list of useful contacts, people who had lived near the Collingwood Tote (the illegal betting establishment on which Wren first built himself up), enemies of the Wren machine in the political, sporting and business spheres, associates of Wren who had been cast off, and, in a few cases, even members of the Wren machines and friends of the Wren family. “One contact led to another like an endless chain. Every piece of information had to be checked, verified and put into place in a card system of events covering sixty years.” A first rate piece of prolonged detective work was the first necessity of the novel. Sometimes, as always happens with a man who never lets up on an inquiry, he had his moments of luck. He spent much time searching for a man who was said to have been cheated out of a big business by Wren; then one day in a Melbourne train he began talking with a fat jovial fellow about the Caulfield Cup, deliberately naming a favourite named Anstey after a well-known Labour politician. “Anstey won’t win,” declared the fat man. “No horse John Wren named after a victim of his ever did any good.” In a few minutes Hardy discovered that the man was the business-man he had been long chasing after. By the time they reached Sydney he had learned a great deal more about Wren. He joined in the fight which the trotting men were carrying on against Wren’s control; took part in running the trotting paper The Beam; and thus gained further valuable contacts and inside information. He followed the Wren trail into the boxing and wrestling worlds, and then into the big political scandals of the earlier 20th century, such as that of the Mungana Mining Leases. All the while he was extremely hard-up. He had married and there were two children to look after. Obsessed with the sporting world, he himself gambled, lost and won, won and lost; and all the while he was afraid that Wren and his very widespread organisation would find out what he was doing. If his intentions were guessed, he was liable to come up against all forms of intimidation and violence.” Gradually the book was pulled together. He drew on Elizabeth Bowen’s Notes on Writing a Novel and Stefan Zweig’s Balzac for inspiration and ideas on how to put his material into book form. Into the book went real people such as Tom Mann and Billy Hughes, characters based on real people, such as the central West-Wren, Thurgood- Theodore, and Archbishop Malone-Mannix, and fictitious people needed to fill out and carry the story along. But how was he to get the finished book published and distributed? “No publisher would dream of touching such a thing; no printer would dare to print it if he knew what he was handling. The moment that its existence and whereabouts were known to the Wren machine, there would be swift and drastic action against it. The book had inevitably grown to considerable proportions; it amounted to over 700 pages when it did at last get into print. Hardy had no money to finance it in any way. Then the sporting world which he both hated and loved came for once to his rescue. He won £200 on a trotting bet. He sounded a few printers and decided to use an old family- firm. Some of the book was set. All the while he was afraid that the firm would realise what dynamite they were playing with, and he did not dare to provoke questions by asking for credit. His £200 was soon used up on hired metal and type-setting. He found another firm ready to do some composing. His next step was to find a firm that would do the actual printing. The plan was to save money by printing 32 pages at a time, returning the metal, and then ordering some more. He tried a few printers, but realised that he would never find one to do the job. The only course was to buy a machine. He found one advertised for £1,800, which the owner said would have to be left in the works for some six months till a new machine arrived. As Hardy had nowhere to take the thing, that proviso suited him. Borrowing £500, he paid £400 on deposit and used the other £100 for more setting. Still afraid of his secret leaking 152152 out, he started work with a more experienced friend, printing during the Christmas holidays. Then they went on for some three months, always on the guard against snoopers. The works foreman was impressed by their tidiness—they took care never to leave a single spoiled sheet anywhere about. Hardy was kept busy, printing, writing and revising, lugging type about, arguing about payments and raising more loans. The printed sheets were piling up steadily; but so far no thought had been given to the problems of folding, sewing, binding. Wearing a new suit that he had won at the trots, he interviewed a firm and arranged about the folding. Now the workers began reading the sheets and there was excited talk; the management, uneasy, stopped work. By this time Hardy owed about £2,000. He found another firm; but in his haste, as he was transferring the sheets, the badly tied bundles fell into the gutter or blew away. Bystanders and a policeman helped, but many sheets were in a bad condition. Later, only 7,200 out of 8,000 could be assembled. Demands for money increased. At last a binder (who later turned out to be incompetent and bankrupt) was found. Friends folded the remainder of the sheets by hand. And, at last, despite all the difficulties, in August 1950, Hardy was able to hold a completed copy of the book in his hands.” But now distribution was the next hurdle. Hardy put great effort into discreetly promoting the book. The whole thing began to seem a pointless exercise. But all his hard work was worthwhile, the book began to gain wider circulation, and suddenly it just took off. A second printing of 16,000 was begun but the problem of getting it printed remained—and he ended up doing it by night shift. Detectives called. His wife was questioned. Yet curiously Wren had laid no charge of libel. Instead it was Mrs Wren ... “The tactics of his opponents in thus concentrating on Mrs Wren and ignoring what was said of Wren were in the end to prove Hardy’s salvation. A prolonged legal battle began, and everything seemed set for a long prison sentence. After strenuous debates the Crown took over the prosecution and Hardy was brought before Judge and Jury at the Supreme Court of Victoria on a charge of Criminal Libel, in which evidence could be called as in any criminal trial to prove the accused’s guilt and the penalty was likely to be a long period in jail. For nine months the hard-fought hearings went on. A Defend-Hardy Committee had been set up ... ” The problem for the Prosecution was that for Mrs Wren to claim she had been libelled was that she could only have been libelled if she was shown to be the wife of the fictitious West and West could only be shown to be Wren if all the nefarious activities chronicled in the book could be laid at the feet of the real-life Wren; “rigged pigeon-races, bribery of the police, rigged sports-results of all sorts, corrupt political activities, the murder of a detective and two other murders”, a shocking litany of unprosecuted wrong- doing. So “If the prosecution insisted that Mrs. Wren could be recognised because West was recognisably Wren, why had no charges been taken out against Hardy for libel of Wren? Close pressed, the main witness for the prosecution had to answer, “In this case, yes,” to the question, “Do you still say that an allegation of adultery is a grosser libel than an allegation of murder, cheating, fraud, and the other matters?” So Hardy won the case and, not surprisingly, had a best-seller on his hands. (Jack Lindsay’s introduction to Frank Hardy’s Power Without Glory.)

“For anybody who wondered if the media’s ‘All-Monica-All-the-Time’ fixation would have to do is glance at this past year’s Censored list. It’s brimming over with uncovered crucial stories which have devastating implications for the world’s future health and well-being. I had a very difficult time this year narrowing the list down to the 10 most important. They were all important. Many of them shared an underlying story: The disturbing consequences of the rise of a global economy. It’s distressing that at the very time the world is going global, the media have narrowed their sights to an Oval Office 153153 broom closet.” (Susan Faludi in Censored 1999—The News that Didn’t Make the News; The Year’s Top 25 Censored Stories. Peter Phillips and Project Censored.)

“Not only individuals but also organisations are notorious for protecting themselves against challenge. I was once directed by the Chief of Staff of the Army to prepare an analysis of the psychological causes of the My Lai atrocities and their subsequent cover- up, with recommendations for research that might prevent such behaviour in the future. The recommendations were disapproved by the Army General Staff on the basis that the research recommended could not be kept secret. ‘The existence of such research might open us up to further challenge. The President and the Army don’t need more challenges at this time,’ I was told. Thus an analysis of the reason for an incident that was covered up was itself covered up.” (M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Travelled)

When Noam Chomsky upheld the right of Robert Faurisson to produce a book he personally found unpleasant “This defense of freedom of speech unleashed a series of vitriolic diatribes against Chomsky, many of them hysterical in tone. Even some of his supporters were alienated by the upsurge of hostility, and feared that he had seriously damaged his own position.” (Chomsky—Ideas & Ideals by Neil Smith)

“Now that I was in Australia, the important thing was to get my story out to the world and fast. I was under no illusions that I was any more safe here than elsewhere. At any moment, at any time of the day, and in any place, I could suddenly be killed.” The book that placed Ari Ben-Menashe in danger of his life was Profits of War, a book about the international arms trade. * * * * * G. K. Chesterton, writing of George Bernard Shaw’s troubles with Mrs. Warren’s Profession, says, “The censor of Plays is a small and accidental eighteenth-century official. Like nearly all the powers which Englishmen now respect as ancient and rooted, he is very recent. Novels and newspapers still talk of the English aristocracy that came over with William the Conqueror. Little of our effective oligarchy is as old as the Reformation; and none of it came over with William the Conqueror. Some of the older English landlords came over with William of Orange; the rest have come by ordinary alien immigration. In the same way we always talk of the Victorian woman (with her smelling-salts and sentiment) as the old-fashioned woman. But she really was a quite new-fashioned woman; she considered herself, and was, an advance in delicacy and civilisation upon the coarse and candid Elizabethan woman to whom we are now returning. We are never oppressed by old things; it is recent things that can really oppress. And in accordance with this principle modern England has accepted, as if it were a part of perennial morality, a tenth-rate job of Walpole’s worst days called the Censorship of the Drama. Just as they have supposed the eighteenth-century parvenus to date from Hastings, just as they have supposed the eighteenth-century ladies to date from Eve, so they have supposed the eighteenth-century Censorship to date from Sinai. The origin of the thing was in truth purely political. Its first and principal achievement was to prevent Fielding from writing plays; not at all because the plays were coarse, but because they criticised the Government. Fielding was a free writer; but they did not resent his sexual freedom; the Censor would not have objected if he had torn away the most intimate curtains of decency or rent the last rag from private life. What the Censor disliked was his rending the curtain from public life. There is still much of that spirit in our country; there are no affairs which men seek so much to cover up as public affairs. But the thing was done somewhat more boldly and baldly in Walpole’s day; 154154 and the Censorship of plays has its origin, not merely in tyranny, but in a quite trifling and temporary and partisan piece of tyranny; a thing in its nature far more ephemeral, far less essential, than Ship Money. Perhaps its brightest moment was when the office of censor was held by that filthy writer, Colman the younger; and when he gravely refused to license a work by the author of Our Village. Few funnier notions can ever have actually been facts than this notion that the restraint and chastity of George Colman saved the English public from the eroticism and obscenity of Miss Mitford. Such was the play; and such was the power that stopped the play. A private man wrote it; another private man forbade it; nor was there any difference between Mr. Shaw’s authority and Mr. Redford’s, except that Mr. Shaw did defend his action on public grounds and Mr. Redford did not. The dramatist had simply been suppressed by a despot; and what was worse (because it was modern) by a silent and evasive despot; a despot in hiding. People talk about the pride of tyrants; but we at the present day suffer from the modesty of tyrants; from the shyness and the shrinking secrecy of the strong. Shaw’s preface to Mrs. Warren’s Profession was far more fit to be called a public document than the slovenly refusal of the individual official; it had more exactness, more universal application, more authority. Shaw on Redford was far more national and responsible than Redford on Shaw. The dramatist found in the quarrel one of the important occasions of his life, because the crisis called out something in him which is in many ways his highest quality … righteous indignation. As a mere matter of the art of controversy of course he carried the war into the enemy’s camp at once. He did not linger over loose excuses for licence; he declared once that the Censor was licentious, while he, Bernard Shaw, was clean. He did not discuss where a Censorship ought to make the drama moral. He declared that it made the drama immoral. With a fine strategic audacity he attacked the Censor quite as much for what he permitted as for what he prevented. He charged him with encouraging all plays that attracted men to vice and only stopping those which discouraged them from it. Nor was this attitude by any means an idle paradox. Many plays appear (as Shaw pointed out) in which the prostitute and the procuress are practically obvious, and in which they are represented as revelling in beautiful surroundings and basking in brilliant popularity. The crime of Shaw was not that he introduced the Gaiety Girl; that had been done, with little enough decorum, in a hundred musical comedies. The crime of Shaw was that he introduced the Gaiety Girl, but did not represent her life as all gaiety. The pleasures of vice were already flaunted before the playgoers. It was the perils of vice that were carefully concealed from them. The gay adventures, the gorgeous dresses, the champagne and oysters, the diamonds and motor-cars, dramatists were allowed to drag all these dazzling temptations before any silly housemaid in the gallery who was grumbling at her wages. But they were not allowed to warn her of the vulgarity and the nausea, the dreary deceptions and the blasting diseases of that life. Mrs. Warren’s Profession was not up to a sufficient standard of immorality; it was not spicy enough to pass the Censor. The acceptable and the accepted plays were those which made the fall of a woman fashionable and fascinating; for all the world as if the Censor’s profession were the same as Mrs. Warren’s profession.” * * * * * It is strange really that some of the most fierce debates on ‘censorship’ revolve around what should go in school libraries and as set texts. Yet should the parents who object to a written text place restrictions on their children’s television viewing, what videos are borrowed, what computer games are played, we see them as being responsible. We don’t ask what they are saying no to. We simply accept that parents know best their children’s level of maturity, the kind of moral development they are seeking, the degree of social and sexual awareness, the general tone of the family, and so on. Of course parents are often confused, irrational, swayed by peer pressure, received opinions, children’s importunities (“everyone else is watching Terminator II, why can’t I?”); it’s part of 155155 parenting. But parents are seen as having both rights and responsibilities. Yet as soon as a parent objects to a text, the cry seems to go up “That’s censorship!” School librarians are also swayed by all kinds of pressures. They have a limited budget. They must choose one book over another. The tendency to choose books which children will most likely borrow makes sense. School libraries are about making a pleasant environment in which children will choose and read books as much as they are about research, knowledge and education. But given that choices must be made and that parents and school boards and teachers are all working to slightly different agendas there will always be disagreement over what goes on school library shelves. I think that disagreement is good. Non-disagreement suggests an apathy and lack of care over what children are reading. Set texts are more problematical. Adults are not forced to read novels, children are. And the maturity and background of young readers varies. A book with sophisticated sexual references or scenes of graphic violence may be deeply disturbing to one reader and ho-hum to another. But we must have set texts, teachers and examiners cry. How else can we set a benchmark, let alone frame our examination papers. But education is not about the convenience of teachers and examiners. A. S. Neill said the school must fit the child, not the child be made to fit the school. But we don’t need to go that far, only to make sure that students always have a range of texts to choose from. But I wonder if the sometimes chaotic responses of parents to books foisted on their children are symptoms of a deeper concern: the immense pressures to homogenise children. It begins in babyhood. Your child isn’t walking, talking, teething yet? Dear me. Not potty-trained? Aren’t you being a bit lax? Not off to play-group? kindy? And then of course there’s the set age to start school. Not just start but wear a uniform like everyone else, have the same kind of bag, the same sort of lunchbox ... we wonder why teenagers are so sensitive to peer pressure but we have been undermining their uniqueness since the day they were born, to be truly one’s self involves an immense amount of un-learning ... “You haven’t read Mark Twain, Robert Cormier, Roald Dahl, Paul Jennings? You been on another planet or something?” * * * * * There has been a muted uproar when it came to putting J. K. Rowlings’ Harry Potter books in school libraries. Now, I think there are practical reasons why Harry Potter may be turned down by school librarians; not least its size and cost, but the real question seems to be the worry about children being attracted to the occult. This worry has largely been dismissed out of hand. But should it be? On the one hand children accept a raft of stories featuring witches and warlocks, wizards and a whole range of such figures, without apparent harm and indeed without taking any of it seriously. To deny Harry Potter and accept thousands of books of the Meg & Mog variety smacks of unfair discrimination (I won’t say censorship because schools are obviously not denying their students the right to buy, own, or read the book). But as I researched for a novel called The Imps of Tantallon along the roughly- mapped-out theme that though parents and others worry about their children experimenting with sex and drugs at secondary schools (drugs weren’t really an issue as the story was set in the 1960s) it never seems to occur to them to worry about their offspring playing with the occult, I could not help developing a faint but growing concern. Book after book stressed that almost every well-documented case of possession began with a casual dabbling: the real life case of possession that sparked the movie The Exorcist began with a boy playing with an ouija board, the girls at Salem had been playing at crystal-gazing, and so it went, with many lower-profile cases ... and I think the issue was as much the intent to explore as much as the actual means they chose ... But there are important differences between books such as Meg & Mog or more sophisticated stories such as Roald Dahl’s The Witches, and the Harry Potter books. In the 156156 former, the witches clearly do not belong in the real world, their magic is of the magic- wand-fait-accompli variety, nor has the writer been at pains to give them ‘real lives’, nor to encourage their young readers to identify with them; equally the books are short, readable in a few hours at most. The Harry Potter books are a world to immerse children for days, even weeks; the magic is spelled out with care and method, and, most importantly, young readers are encouraged to identify with Harry, to see him as a ‘real boy’. I think it very unlikely that young Harry Potter fans will go on to become Aleister Crowleys. But the very things which help make the Harry Potter books so popular are also the things which encourage a faint sense of unease. If librarians feel sufficiently uneasy that they prefer to spend scarce library funds on other authors then I believe their decisions should be respected rather than condemned. And if the reason school libraries are buying the Harry Potter books is because they’ve been told these books get problem readers reading then I suspect they’ve been conned. Harry Potter belongs in the Enid Blyton tradition and the older school story genre, with a touch of Mary Poppins and a flash of Tolkien, and like Enid Blyton’s Famous Five and books such as The Rub-a-Dub Mystery Harry Potter is relentlessly middle-class England. Nothing wrong with that—except that problem readers in late primary school tend to be boys and more particularly boys from non-English-speaking backgrounds and/or boys from difficult socio-economic backgrounds. If I was a school librarian I would be looking for the best cartoon books I could find and the best Australian adventure stories with boys and girls from a variety of backgrounds as the leaders and the heroes … * * * * * Gordon Hawkins wrote in Australia’s Censorship Crisis (edited by Max Harris and Geoffrey Dutton), “In my opinion Lady Chatterley’s Lover is a bad novel and an extremely boring one. And it was encouraging to read recently that a similar view is held by the eminent literary critic F.R. Leavis, to whom contemporary recognition of D.H. Lawrence’s genius is largely due. It is perhaps of no great significance that this also happens to be the opinion of my eldest daughter, who read it a couple of years ago at the age of sixteen. She survived the experience without apparent moral dissolution, but she was bored. The Trial of Lady Chatterley on the other hand is far from boring. It is an account of Regina v. Penguin Books Ltd, the proceedings of the English prosecution in 1960 of the publishers for the publication of a paper-back edition of the unexpurgated Lady Chatterley’s Lover. An edited transcript of the trial with a commentary, it belongs in the first class of this literary genre by virtue of the fact that the editorial work has been done with wit and discretion; and the appearance for the defence of such distinguished literary persons as E.M. Forster and Rebecca West helps to make the book a fascinating as well as an historic document.” Lawrence’s novel was on the list of books gazetted as prohibited imports. The book of the trial was not. Hawkins wrote to the Minister, Senator Henty, asking for the full list but received nothing in reply. However when he brought a copy into Australia from New Zealand it was seized by Customs. He was given a receipt but no joy. He wrote a letter of complaint to the NSW Collector of Customs pointing out that the book of the trial could not be regarded by any stretch of the imagination as pornographic and had not appeared on any gazetted list. Two weeks later he received a formal Notice of Seizure and the news that his complaint had been forwarded to Canberra. He replied, ‘claiming’ the book as, under Section 205 of the Customs Act, it was necessary to do this within a month of seizure or the book “shall be deemed to be condemned and may be sold by the Collector”. He then received a document saying “NOW TAKE NOTICE that ... you are hereby required to enter action against me for the recovery of the said publication, AND FURTHER TAKE NOTICE that if you do not within four months—”, well, the book would be condemned. He could now spend large amounts of money trying to recover a book which had cost 157157 him seven shillings and sixpence. While he debated this question, he received a reply to his first letter of complaint. The Trial of Lady Chatterley was prohibited under Regulation 4A but was not on the gazetted list because “it was not considered to be a work of literary or artistic merit” and that the published list of prohibited books included “works of some literary merit”. He could not receive his own copy back but “an application on behalf of the library of the University of Sydney to import a copy of the work would receive consideration.” Four months after his original letter to Senator Henty he received a reply saying it was impossible to provide a list of books deemed to be prohibited imports. But he could write to the Collector of Customs asking about any particular book not appearing on the list to see about importation. Hawkins writes, “The only trouble with this advice, though no doubt it was well meant, is that as the list of prohibited works not included in the gazetted list is apparently a closely guarded secret one has no means of telling which books it would be necessary to obtain information about. The only definite known criteria appears to be that they should be works of no literary merit whatever, and I’m not interested in importing books in that category” and so the question remains: on what grounds was The Trial of Lady Chatterley banned? No one knows. And the final bizarre twist to this saga? While a copy of the book could not be brought into Australia, copies of the record of the trial were readily on sale in Sydney in a two-volume-set by Nonesuch Records using the voices of such luminaries as Lord Birkett ... and speaking those dreaded four-letter- words with “emphatic deliberation” ... * * * * * Posterity has been kinder, I think, to Lawrence than his contemporaries were. Robert Graves and Alan Hodge in The Long Weekend say: ‘Lawrence preached the Sun as a procreative deity; urged women that happiness for them lay only in yielding submissively to the dark sexual urge of strong-loined men; and mixed up for himself a confused private religion of the theosophical incoherences of Madame Blavatsky, the yoga writings of an obscure prophet named Pryse, the philosophical view of Heraclitus, Bacon and Bergson that all is flux, Jeans’ interpretation of Einstein, the anthropology of Sir James Fraser (whose Golden Bough was a key book of the period) and other, Mexican legend, and the whole literature of Freudian, Jungian and Adlerian psychology. Lawrence was without either Huxley’s wit or Joyce’s playboy humour: he lived an anguished, bathetic life, and had a huge, anguished, bathetic following. His nearest approach to happiness was when in his last days at Taos, New Mexico, he bought a cow called Susan and used to milk her with mystic devotion. ‘The queer cowy mystery of her is her changeless cowy desirableness.’ He died in 1930, and a lesser Lawrence legend started when several of his friends wrote biographies of him, each contradicting the other.” The added irony must surely be the peculiar ambivalence Lawrence seemed to feel towards his readers. Introducing his Fantasia of the Unconscious he wrote, ‘The present book is a continuation from ‘Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious’. The generality of readers had better just leave it alone. The generality of critics likewise. I really don’t want to convince anybody. It is quite in opposition to my whole nature. I don’t intend my books for the generality of readers. I count it a mistake of our mistaken democracy that every man who can read print is allowed to believe that he can read all that is printed. I count it a misfortune that serious books are exposed in the public market, like slaves exposed naked for sale.’ ... ‘As for the limited few, in whom one must perforce find an answerer, I may as well say straight off that I stick to the solar plexus. That statement alone, I hope, will thin their numbers considerably.’ ...... ‘If my reader finds this bosh and abracadbra, all right for him. Only I have no more regard for his little crowings on his own little dunghill.’ ... 158158

* * * * * September 12th: Michael Ondaatje Michael Dransfield Louis MacNeice September 13th: Roald Dahl Sherwood Anderson September 14th: Norman Talbot Kate Millett Mario Benedetti September 15th: Agatha Christie Sara Henderson September 16th: Francis Parkman * * * * * If you read L. M. Montgomery when you were young you may remember Miss Cornelia in Anne’s House of Dreams complaining about a book Gilbert has lent her. ‘“Speaking of heresy, reminds me, doctor—I’ve brought back that book you lent me—that Natural Law in the Spiritual World—I didn’t read more’n a third of it. I can read sense, and I can read nonsense, but that book is neither the one nor the other.” “It is considered rather heretical in some quarters,” admitted Gilbert, “but I told you that before you took it, Miss Cornelia.” “Oh, I wouldn’t have minded its being heretical. I can stand wickedness, but I can’t stand foolishness,” said Miss Cornelia calmly, and with the air of having said the last thing there was to say about Natural Law.’ I just assumed that this was a title Montgomery had made up as part of her story. But many years later I discovered it was a real book, written by Henry Drummond and published in 1883; it was also the inspiration for Rufus Jones to write his Social Law in the Spiritual World. Whereas, when it came to Emily in Emily Climbs entering a poetry competition for which the prize was a “set of Parkman” I assumed that this meant a set of pens. When I was young a Parker fountain pen was the popular response to a student passing an exam, either a pen or a watch, and I simply assumed that Australian students aimed for a Parker and Canadian students aimed for a Parkman! Years later I discovered Parkman was the pre-eminent historian of 19th century America. So did this mean that Emily vied for a set of his books that dealt with Canadian history or for his entire set of published works? It is a curious thing but I often come upon characters in novels reading Jung. Does this mean that great numbers of people read Jung, does it mean great numbers feel they should read Jung, or do authors use it to suggest these aren’t any common or garden characters but intelligent, educated, cosmopolitan people? I much prefer characters not to be reading something timeless—eg Shakespeare or Cervantes—but something which, although ephemeral, sets them firmly in a time and place. When Sybil in ‘Fawlty Towers’ is reading Harold Robbins’ Never Love a Stranger it sets the episode at the time he was a publishing phenomenon. A couple of months ago someone gave me a bag of books to sell for charity. ‘Oh, goody,’ I thought, and began to unpack the bag. A Harold Robbins, another Harold Robbins—and another and another—the bag contained nothing but! I put the twenty or so books on a stall but only managed to sell a couple. The fashion had passed. And I like those little asides that tell us what books were in a particular library—eg. in John Camp’s history of Holloway Gaol is the intriguing information that “The books provided according to H. Mayhew and John Binny, who visited Holloway soon after its opening, included such inapposite titles as Life in New Zealand and Summer Days in the Antarctic!”—or the precious books that people scrounge in life-threatening situations such as Desmond Jackson in What Price Surrender? when as a POW in Thailand in WW2 he 159159 speaks of the popularity of a copy of Wisden’s Cricketers’ Almanac (1939), and T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom and his own precious copies of Green Rushes and Captain Blood .... When I set out on the ill-fated vessel ‘O Arbiru’ (which later sank with the tragic loss of 23 lives in 1973) I was given seven paperbacks, one ostensibly for each day of the voyage between Dili and Singapore, but the only one I remember now is Richard Mason’s The World of Suzy Wong. The voyage took eight days so I read Suzy twice. Perhaps that’s why I still have a vague affection for the book. * * * * * Garry Wills writes, ‘The collapse of old archival bastions also meant the loss of patronage by them, which made their custodians’ use of the documents tendentious. Support for research had to be found in new places. Britain’s nineteenth-century scientists, for instance, did not come from the classically orientated universities (Oxford and Cambridge): “With a few exceptions they had not been educated in the English universities but in their Scottish counterparts or in London medical schools, the civil service, the military, or in provincial dissenting communities.” In certain new areas, private resources seemed needed to push forward the new work—as when Heinrich Schliemann put up his own fortune to explore Mycenaean sites. In history, access to Archives often required the money and connections of gentleman researchers, producing the paradox that a professional discipline was first being explored by amateurs (who were ahead of their university contemporaries in their conceptions and techniques). Acton was the very embodiment of this type (and he would set the professional standards when he founded the Cambridge Modern History), but there were others with his aim—though few with his rigorous intelligence. In England, for instance, there were George Grote, James Mill, Thomas Carlyle, Thomas Macaulay and his nephew George Trevelyan, W.E.H. Lecky, and J.A. Froude. Similar types could be observed in America—William H. Prescott, Francis Parkman, George Bancroft, Henry Cabot Lodge, Theodore Roosevelt, and Henry Adams. These men were, in effect, their own patrons, subsidizing their own research, declaring that history was no longer the province of institutions impervious to outside scrutiny or committed to official versions of the past.’ It was a step forward but it still excluded women who were kept out of the universities, banned from church libraries, and usually lacked the means to subsidise research. * * * * * So what exactly was a “set of Parkman”? Francis Parkman (1823-1893) went to Harvard to study law but found his metier as historian, linguist, traveller, writer; he is also described as hypochondriacal and neurotic in some reference works but it is not clear whether this had any bearing on his choice of subjects or his writing. His book of his own travels, The Oregon Trail: Sketches of Prairie and Rocky- Mountain Life, brought him fame and he followed this with History of the Conspiracy of Pontiac. Then he set to work to define and record the arrival and subsequent history of English and French colonisation in North America in his 7 volume history; France and England in North America. This was made up of Pioneers of France in the New World, The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century, La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West, Count Frontenac and New France Under Louis XIV, Montcalm and Wolfe, The Old Régime in Canada, and A Half-Century of Conflict. It is these works which I assume made up a “set of Parkman” but although he was a very readable historian it does seem rather heavy-going as a prize for a sixteen-year-old. * * * * * September 17th: William Carlos Williams Agostinho Neto 160160

September 18th: Dr Johnson September 19th: William Golding September 20th: Ion L. Idriess Stephen King Upton Sinclair * * * * * Beverley Eley in her biography of Ion ‘Jack’ Idriess writes, “The most intriguing of all the people at Broken Hill for Jack and his mates were the Afghans, some of whom had brought their personal vendettas all the way from India along with their camels. Jack knew the ’Ghans well for he met them often when travelling with Walter, or he would visit their camps outside Broken Hill. There he and his friends would wait to see the long lines of camels and the bearded men coming in, or watch them dissolve into the heat haze as they plodded out into the desert heading for ‘the Darling, Milparinka, Mount Brown, White Cliffs, Wilcannia, the Cooper, Birdsville, Beourie, the Lake Eyre sandhills, to distant stations in south western Queensland and the frontier stations on the edge of the Simpson desert and across the wastes towards Mount Hopeless.’ The strong personalities of the bushy-whiskered, turbaned Afghans fascinated him. There was Roda Singh who went ‘looking for blood’ when in the grip of the grog. Jack had witnessed Roda’s turbaned companions lash him down to stakes driven into the ground, where they would leave him to broil in the sun and be gnawed by flies and bitten by ants until his fury died. Then there was Cabal the Strong striding ahead of his team, his voluminous trousers like balloons filled with wind; Abdul Kader, ‘heading his heavily laden team under the great arc of the sky towards the pine-clad hills of the South Australian border’, and the great Bejah Deverish, a piercing-eyed Afghan dressed in his many folded turban, long garishly decorated jacket, long baggy white trousers, striding out of the mirage ahead of his tall camels. Bejah Deverish was a romantic figure who had played a key role in the opening up of the famous Birdsville Track. He had pioneered track after track and helped the settlers to carve stations far out where wheeled teams could not go. He had saved numerous lives and had been the guide of the Calvert Expedition—Bejah Deverish was the local hero. And there were the leaders: the fierce-eyed Mahomet Ali with the black beard, Abdul Khan and Genghis Khan, Abdul Futabulla and old Valait Sah, the broken-nosed priest who brought Walter a length of emerald green silk to wrap around the Holy Koran on which the ’Ghans took the oath at the Broken Hill Court House.’ * * * * * In a sense, Ion Idriess and Alan Marshall mined the same land but took very different nuggets from it. Idriess was always looking for the big subject, the heroic figure, the larger-than-life character, people like Lasseter and John Flynn, while Marshall was always open to the small story, the anecdote of a battler, the little ephemeral tidbit. Idriess was always looking for the subject that would carry a book, Marshall only wanted to carry a page, even a par. Idriess predominantly focussed on people; everything was grist to Marshall’s mill, a building, a tree, a vehicle, a person, a place. Idriess wanted his heroes to be remembered, Marshall knew it was very unlikely anyone would bother to remember ‘Rattly Bob’ or the girl who came to have her fortune told at a country show. They both chronicled a world that has gone but they chronicled very different things. This thought came to me after reading Marshall’s little piece ‘The Clearing Sale’. ‘Outback pubs and towns flourished when teamsters were on the roads and the Cobb & Co’s coaches went bumping up the main street. Then the cars came speeding through, ignoring the little towns and passing till they reached some busy centre two hundred miles away. Hotels along the road were deserted. The little towns dwindled to a few houses and a flock of goats.’ ... ‘Thirty years ago Angledool had three hotels, a fruit shop, bakery, butchery, three 161161 general stores, post office, police station, school, hospital, recreation hall, billiard saloon and a resident doctor. There were quite a number of private houses and many families were reared there.’ ‘Bit by bit the little towns were sold up and sold off. It was the change from the horse-drawn vehicle that could only handle twenty to thirty miles a day to the motor car that could make short work of a hundred miles and more that sounded the death knell. There simply weren’t enough people needing to stop for the night, to buy a meal, a drink, a bed, fodder and stabling.’ ‘And Angledool’s fate is typical of many more little places that all played an important part in the back country of New South Wales. Today they are almost forgotten.’ Marshall was writing about Angledool in 1951. He says, ‘We can’t imagine life without a motor car. They are necessary today. But we paid a big price for them.’ And even when he and Idriess looked at the same subject they came at it in different ways. Idriess was interested in the Caledon Bay massacre, at the manhunt, at the personalities of the police involved, at what was said and done in Darwin, the ‘big picture’; Marshall was interested in the man at the centre of it. He wrote in the 1970s: ‘It’s forty years since I wrote about Wongu, and nobody would print a word of it. I’ve had so many things knocked back for so many reasons, I can’t recall now whether Wongu would have had me gaoled as an accessory after the fact, or just the usual panic about libel; we’ve got marvellous libel laws in this country; you can hush up anything. Wongu was a chief in the Caledon Bay district. They were the wildest blacks in Arnhem Land, the last to submit — an awful lot of men were speared round there. There was a great manhunt on because Wongu had killed seven Japanese. The Japanese pearling luggers used to come close in to get the native girls; sometimes they just grabbed them, sometimes they swopped bags of rice. Now the trouble was the Government patrol boat: if the Japs spotted it coming they simply dropped the girls overboard and the sharks got rid of the evidence quick. And by the way, don’t think it was only the Japs that did it; not by a long chalk. Now Wongu had lost two of his wives this way, and his sons had lost wives too. So one night they crept up to the trepang hut where the Japanese used to smoke their bêche- de-mer and they speared the lot of them; and the manhunt was on. They sent in a very clever experienced policeman — we’ll call him X — I reckon that’s safest even today, God damn them. A native told me all this story by the way. So X caught a young gin and handcuffed her to his wrist all the time, in case of attack, and at night he made her lie on top of him. But after a week the natives tracked him; the girl knew when to move and they speared him to death; they cut his arm off to free the girl. So there was a bigger row than ever; and next time they got a fellow — we’ll call him Y — he lived on an island in the Gulf; and he did the trick. He caught Wongu. I interviewed this fellow later and he told me it had been easy. He was well known as a lifelong friend of the aborigines; they trusted him, and so did Wongu. He met Wongu as an old friend, told him nothing would happen to him if he gave himself up, it just had to be a tribal ceremony in the white man’s way, and Wongu could go straight home afterwards. So Wongu went with him, and was tried, and sentenced to death. Later this was changed to life imprisonment, and I reckon that’s worse than death for an aborigine. But then the war came, and the Japs started bombing. Somebody remembered that Wongu had killed seven Japs, so they brought him out of gaol and he was decorated as a hero — then they let him walk home, right across Arnhem Land, to join his own people again. Many a time I’ve wondered what Wongu made of the white man and his ways. I wrote the story but as I said nobody would touch it with a bargepole. X and Y were both 162162 highly respected members of society, for one thing.’ Ion Idriess put parts of this story into Man Tracks and Outlaws of the Leopolds but he was constrained by a different problem: he could write with varying degrees of sympathy for Aboriginal people but ‘the white man invariably knew best’; whenever the two clashed, Idriess came down on the white side. In this case he took his information from police sources. The speared man was Constable McColl (X), the man condemned for the spearing was Tuckiar, and he was tracked down by Mounted Constables Morey, Hall and Mahoney, and tried by Judge Wells. None of the accused spoke English and no proper translation was provided. The man who ‘captured’ Wongu was almost certainly the Rev. Warren (Y) of the Groote Eylandt Mission. Judge Wells sentenced both Tuckiar and Wongu to death; both were reprieved. And the whole miserable business need never have happened. Vic Hall in Outback Policeman says simply, ‘Why the Government did not ask the Japanese authorities to tell their people to keep away from this coast, no one knew.’ * * * * * I don’t know if it’s really true that there were more ‘characters’ around years ago, whether the radio and television and newspaper have helped to flatten out the idiosyncrasies and oddities of people. But I rather liked the sound of the eccentric Mr Back who, back in the 1920s, used the pen-name Australianus and the address The Poet’s Corner, Mullumbimby, and proposed a competition for which the prize would be the equivalent of $500 and each contestant would write: 1) 20 poems of 500 lines each (each in a different measure or stanza) 2) one book of prose of 300 pages 3) 5000 maxims, mottoes and proverbs 4) one dramatic play 5) 10 songs 6) invent 50 stanzas 7) add 50 words to the language used. Unfortunately no one took him up on the challenge. * * * * * Michael Cannon in Life in the Country says, ‘Drought-resistant buffel grass, introduced accidentally from India in 1870 by Afghan camel drivers, thrived in the northern cattle country and provided valuable reserves in dry periods’. Tom Cole in Hell West and Crooked also refers to the Afghans and to camels: ‘The camels interested me. Though I had never previously had anything to do with them, I had seen them from time to time passing through Lake Nash; usually a string of about thirty came through on their way from the Hatches Creek wolfram mines. They were always in the charge of Afghans, who apparently owned them. Being familiar with pack horse loads, what a camel could carry never ceased to amaze me. Bulls could comfortably carry half a ton and go a week without water. They had made an invaluable contribution to the development of the Australian interior and had been used extensively in the construction of the Overland Telegraph Line. I am sure it would never have been completed in the time had camels not been available. Sir Thomas Elder, who possessed that rare combination of wealth and foresight, was the first to recognise their potential, having tremendous holdings in the more arid parts of South Australia. In January 1866 Sir Thomas imported 124 camels, which were unloaded at Port Augusta. And though it is generally believed he was the first person to introduce them there is a curious story of the very first camel to reach our shores. This first fleeter of the camel world arrived at Port Adelaide in October 1840, and was the sole survivor of several that came from, of all places, the Canary Islands. One wonders what purpose camels had in the scheme of things on that remote subtropical 163163 island. However, in the fullness of time it came to a sheep station called Penwortham, near Clare, owned by two brothers named Horrocks. The Horrocks were interested in some largely unknown country that lay to the west of Lake Torrens, and an expedition led by John Horrocks left in July 1846. The party consisted of six men, a number of horses and the camel. One day Horrocks decided to shoot a bird, probably for the pot, and taking the gun from the pack of the kneeling camel was in the process of loading it when the animal started to rise, causing the gun to discharge. It blew off two of Horrocks’ fingers and knocked out some teeth, presumably from the recoil. The wounded man was taken back to Penwortham. Septicaemia probably set in, because a few weeks later he died. Before passing away he instructed that the unfortunate camel be shot. It is not recorded if the two of them were burned together in a form of suttee but I often thought it would be an appropriate end to the story.’ And Bill Harney wrote in Life Among the Aborigines, ‘Leaving the cattle-station on the windy plain, I went down to the river seven miles away and camped that night with some Afghan friends of mine who owned the local store. Who, among the bushmen, has not heard of Adraman Khan and his mate Melang, old camel-men from the mountains near Kabul? They are dead now, and the store pulled down, but it was ever a pleasure to walk into their store, sit down at their table and, over a drink of tea, hear their talk about the past when they were camel-men working for Abdul Wade, the great camel-owner of bygone days. Old Andraman was getting up in years and, as he suffered with some sort of cramp, was always talking of going back to his country and rejuvenating himself at a famous muddy stream said to have healing properties. These two were full of information about events from the past, and many were the old-time remedies that Melang had picked up when he was a soldier in the British Army at Hong Kong. He showed his discharge, an “honourable” one of fifty years ago, and I was filled with admiration for this great old man, who was said to have been a great worker in his day.’ * * * * * September 21st: John Laffin Marsha Norman September 22nd: Murray Bail September 23rd: Alan Villiers Gary Crew September 24th: F. Scott Fitzgerald September 25th: Aram Saroyan September 26th: Minette Walters September 27th: John Marsden Gillian Linscott September 28th: Ellis Peters September 29th: Cassandra Pybus September 30th: Ida West Geoffrey Robertson Laura Esquivel * * * * * Years ago I remember being in a group where someone asked “Have you ever met a famous person?” ‘Met’, of course, is not as inclusive as ‘know’. Even so, I racked my brains to very little effect; finally coming up with Amalia Rodrigues. I met her very briefly on a beach in Dili in 1972. As no one else there had heard of her, it went over with a kind of ‘ho hum, next please’ … Have I met a famous person since then? Well, yes. Aunty Ida West. Everyone, excuse the generalisation, in Tasmania has heard of Ida, matriarch and elder of the Aboriginal Community and wonderful old woman. Ida turns 82 this year. She 164164 wrote of her growing up on Cape Barron Island in Pride Against Prejudice; Reminiscences of a Tasmanian Aborigine. The book is ‘oral’, chatty, warm and kind, though Ida says of her decision to write it, even though she felt she had no writing skills, ‘One night while watching television I saw a Legal Aid person for my people talking to someone about what the Europeans did to Aborigines, cutting their heads off and so on. He pulled out a drawer filled with Aboriginal heads all shapes and sizes, and the sight of the skulls started to turn my stomach. The second drawer was full also. By the third drawer I felt faint. The Legal Aid person said, ‘Would you like to have your grandfather’s head in there?’ So I got back to the book and kept writing.’ One of the most exciting things to happen in Australia over perhaps the last 30 years has been the surge in Aboriginal writing. There has also been the surge in non-Aboriginal writing on Aboriginal issues which, arguably, is quite different to earlier non-Aboriginal writing which was at worst racist and at best patronising. A key aspect to this new non- Aboriginal writing, I think, is respect for Aboriginal bush skills, Aboriginal spiritual beliefs and the complexities and richness of Aboriginal languages. I found things like Robert Dixon’s writings on his efforts to record and develop dictionaries for Cape York languages and Jean Harkins’ work to record the subtle and intricate ways in which Central Australian languages infiltrate and change the ways English is spoken, (Bridging Two Worlds: Aboriginal English and Cross-Cultural Understanding) gripping even though I have absolutely no language skills. Years ago I was given a T-shirt which says ‘yolnunydja dhäruk dhuwala latju’ (bilingual is beautiful). I am not bilingual; even so I believe we should be providing the funding, the support and the respect for Aboriginal languages to be able to stand alongside English, not be hived off into places where, if they are seen at all, they are seen only as quaint and fading remnants. * * * * * In The Book of Heroic Failures Stephen Pile tells the delightful story of what he calls the Worst Phrasebook. “Pedro Carolino is one of the all-time greats. In 1883 he wrote an English-Portuguese phrasebook despite having little or no command of the English language. His greatly recommended book The New Guide of the Conversation in Portuguese and English has now been reprinted under the title English As She is Spoke. After a brief dedication: ‘We expect then, who the little book (for the care what we wrote him, and for her typographical correction) that may be worth the acceptation of the studious persons, and especially of the youth, at which we dedicate him particularly’. Carolino kicks off with some ‘Familiar phrases’ which the Portuguese holiday- maker might find useful. Among these are Dress your hairs This hat go well Undress you to Exculpate me by your brother’s She make the prude Do you cut the hairs? He has tost his all good He then moves on to ‘Familiar Dialogues’ which include ‘For to wish the good morning’, and ‘For to visit a sick’. Dialogue 18 — ‘For to ride a horse’ — begins: ‘Here is a horse who have bad looks. Give me another. I will not that. He not sall know to march, he is pursy, he is foundered. Don’t you are ashamed to give me a jade as like? he is undshoed, he is with nails up’. In the section on ‘Anecdotes’ Carolino offers the following guaranteed to enthrall any listener: ‘One eyed was laied against a man which had good eyes that he saw better than him. 165165

The party was accepted. I had gain, over said the one-eyed; why I se you two eyes, and you not look me who one’. It is difficult to top that, but Carolino manages in a useful section of ‘Idiotisms and proverbs’. These include: Nothing some money, nothing of Swiss He eat to coaches A take is better than two you shall have The stone as roll not heap up not foam and the well-known expression The dog than bark not bite Carolino’s particular genius was aided by the fact that he did not possess an English- Portuguese Dictionary. However, he did possess Portuguese-French and French-English dictionaries through both of which he dragged his original expressions. The results yield language of originality and great beauty. Is there anything in conventional English which could equal the vividness of ‘To craunch a marmoset’?” * * * * * Sometimes there is a sufficiently large pool of speakers to impose their own style and idiosyncrasies upon English; American-English and Indian-English leap to mind. Unfortunately Aboriginal speakers remain in the limbo area of not being able to mould English to their needs and nature, yet are still criticised for not speaking it with the ‘fluency’ and correctness of white Australians. If the English had arrived 200 years earlier, long before the English language had been captured and straight-jacketted by pedantic and narrow-minded bullies perhaps the richness and variety of Aboriginal languages would’ve been able to permeate more easily. Shakespeare writes with an abandon, not for him ‘correct spelling’, not for him any worry over dangling participles or double negatives or mixed metaphors or split infinitives, but rather a great grand all inclusive idea of English as something to be pushed and pummelled, spread and grafted, moulded and mined, blown-up and exploded, divided and drained. Can’t think how to spell such-and-such? Why not put it down as it comes. Need a word to express a precise gradation of thought? Grasp and malleate, graft and groliate. And while he’s at it, there are all the other languages swirling round him that might be able to be harnessed to his needs, a spot of Cornish, an expletive in Manx, a simile in Gaelic ... there they all are for the taking ... Bill Bryson in Mother Tongue writes: ‘Consider the curiously persistent notion that sentences should not end with a preposition. The source of this stricture, and several other equally dubious ones, was one Robert Lowth, an eighteenth century clergyman and amateur grammarian whose A Short Introduction to English Grammar, published in 1762, enjoyed a long and distressingly influential life both in his native England and abroad. It is to Lowth we can trace many a pedant’s most treasured notions: the belief that you must say different from rather than different to or different than, the idea that two negatives make a positive, the rule that you must not say ‘the heaviest of the two objects’, but rather ‘the heavier’, the distinction between shall and will, and the clearly nonsensical belief that between can apply only to two things and among to more than two. (By this reasoning, it would not be possible to say that Paris is between London, Berlin, and Madrid, but rather than it is among them, which would impart a quite different sense.) Perhaps the most remarkable and curiously enduring of Lowth’s many beliefs was the conviction that sentences ought not to end with a preposition. But even he was not didactic about it. He recognized that ending a sentence with a preposition was idiomatic and common in both speech and informal writing. He suggested only that he thought it generally better and more graceful, not crucial, to place the preposition before its relative ‘in solemn and elevated’ writing. Within a hundred years this had been converted from a piece of questionable advice into an immutable rule.’ 166166

* * * * * Languages tend to take over the words of other languages as needed to describe a new product or idea. An English Lorry simply became Lori in Malay. A French Fête simply became an English Fête and an English weekend became ‘le weekend’ in French. But Pidgin went down a different road. A piano did not cross over and stay a name, instead it became a description of function. It became “Bigfala bokis blong waetman, tut blong em sam I blak sam I waet; taem yu kilim emi singaot” or “big European box with some white teeth and some black teeth, when you strike it, it cries out”. Long before pianos reached remote parts of Melanesia and the Pacific people knew what to expect. It has its own richness and humour. Take for example: “Nambawan pikinini blong Missis Kwin” for the Queen’s first-born. It also brings the high-blown down to earth. There are various forms of Pidgin. Tok Pisin (PNG), Bislama (Vanuatu), Pijin (the Solomons), all mutually intelligible. And there are great books in Pidgin. The Bible of course. And Shakespeare. I would love to hear the great speeches—the Sermon on the Mount, Mark Anthony, Shylock—in Pidgin. They would lose in grandeur and gain in earthy humour, I suspect. * * * * * What was lost when Aboriginal languages were lost? We are reminded of the loss every time we come upon the doubts that surround our place names— ‘Canberra, from nganbirra, a meeting place. In 1826 Joshua Moore wrote to the Colonial Secretary advising that the land which he intended purchasing was at Canberry, and the deed was issued to him at this place. Other conjectures are that the name comes from kaamberra, and that this or nganbirra means a woman’s breasts.’ (Aboriginal Place Names by A.W. Reed) —and yet we shrug off the loss. It doesn’t matter. We’re too busy. We’re too ready to take the quick fix. Canberra means a ‘meeting place’. Oh, does it? Well, that’s very appropriate. Moving on now— But more so perhaps than any other land on earth Australia is both land and language, they were linked and interwoven rather than imposed. The destruction of the languages was the destruction of the people was the destruction of a sense of place, a sense of spirit. Language grew to meet the needs of the land and the people were changed by the land just as their language was changed ... I happened to pick up The Merriam-Webster Thesaurus in an op-shop. ‘aboriginal’ see ‘native’—and it gives for ‘related words’: primeval, primitive, primordial, pristine, barbarian, barbaric, barbarous, savage—and for ‘contrasted words’: advanced, progressive, civilized, cultured, sequent, successive. Excuse me, but who is setting the agenda here ... * * * * * October 1st: Christine Pullein-Thompson Diana Pullein-Thompson * * * * * Every so often I come upon an article about ‘literary families’ but they tend to interpret ‘literary family’ very narrowly. They are the Amises or Bradburys in the UK or the Boyds or Lindsays in Australia or perhaps sisters, Margaret Drabble and A. S. Byatt. But out there are interesting families who wrote books. Take for instance children’s writer, George Macdonald and his grandson Philip Macdonald who wrote good mysteries; or E. C. Bentley of Clerihew and Trent’s Last Case fame and his son, Nicholas Bentley, who also wrote competent mysteries, or D. E. Stevenson, first cousin once removed to Robert Louis Stevenson, who wrote pleasant novels such as Miss Bun the Baker’s Daughter. There is, too, the ultimate non-writer, Percy Florence Shelley, who had the author of Frankenstein for a mother, the author of ‘To a Skylark’ for a father, the author of Vindication of the Rights of Women for a grandmother and the author of Caleb Williams 167167 for a grandfather. Far from being overwhelmed by this pedigree he calmly and happily went out and lived his own life as gentleman and yachtsman. And then there are the Pullein-Thompsons. In their combined autobiography Fair Girls and Grey Horses (and I think it’s the first such memoir I’ve ever read where the writing was shared between three siblings) they tell how, with playwright Denis Cannan for an older brother and mystery writer Joanna Cannan for their mother, the three girls decided to go their own way and flood the world with ‘pony books’. It is a curious thing. Many nations have ‘horse books’ (the Silver Brumby and Black Stallion series leap to mind) but the ‘pony book’ seems peculiarly English. I wonder why. * * * * * One day I happened to mention the word ‘self-esteem’ to someone I know. She immediately said, “That’s a word I hate. Self-esteem. Everybody seems to be using it these days.” Now, self-esteem doesn’t bother me but a word that constantly crops up and which does bother me is ‘role-model’. What do people mean by it, what do they actually take from a role-model, what do they expect from a role-model, and why are they always saying so-an’-so would be a good model for someone else, never themselves, usually a young person or persons. As a teenager, if someone of fifty had told me that a sporting star or musician would be a good role-model I’m sure I would have made a point of disliking that particular person. But apart from the fact that teenagers tend to avoid the things adults tell them will be good for them a role-model has to be relevant to how you see your own life and aspirations—and even beyond that it must be something about that life rather than its achievements which strikes a chord. Now I had a role-model when I was about twelve. Her name was Pat Smythe. She became a champion showjump rider and eventually rode for Britain in competitions around the world. She was an inspiration not only to me but to many other women who loved horses and who took to showjumping with enthusiasm. I knew a woman who named two of her horses after Pat Smythe’s champion mounts, Prince Hal and Tosca. But showjumping, like many other horse sports did not immediately open its doors to women, they had to beat down that particular door just as they had to beat down doors barring them from many other professions, sports, and hobbies. (For instance, I came upon this little snippet in Maurice Cavanough’s and Meurig Davies’ history of the Melbourne Cup: “According to the record books, A.W. McDonald trained Catalogue for his Cup win, but in fact that honour should go to McDonald’s wife. In New Zealand Mrs McDonald was Catalogue’s registered trainer, but Victoria’s racing laws did not grant licences to women trainers and McDonald had to act as his wife’s deputy in Melbourne”. ) Pat Landsberg in his book Foxhunter writes, “After this preliminary pipe opener then came the National Horse Show in New York at Madison Square Garden. There were eighteen competitors, all of whom Foxhunter withered with his speed and flexibility at the jumps with the exception of a horse from Mexico ridden by Lieutenant Valdes. For the jumpoff, the course was shortened and Foxhunter was awarded the event after consultation of the clock had been necessary. Monty was employed to some purpose at this meeting, finishing third in the Pennsylvania National Trophy event which was won by the same Lieutenant Valdes on Arete. Lieutenant Valdes—Lieutenant Eva Valdes—thus became the first woman rider to win an international military event in the show and at the same time moved into the privileged class of women who had beaten Colonel Llewellyn. ... Monty was again to find the ability of Lieutenant Valdes’ mount just a shade too much for him in the ‘Fault and Out’ competition in which he finished third. It is well to remember that these were not classified as International events for under International rules no woman was at that time allowed to represent her country in an official Nations Cup; a rule that has since been relaxed to the particular joy of Miss Pat Smythe.” 168168

I was not a good rider, I was too timid, but I admired Pat Smythe tremendously, her riding style, her way of living her life, her calm sense of organisation, her way of training and travelling with her horses. Though she wrote several children’s books, such as Jacqueline Rides for a Fall, it was her non-fiction books about her life and home and horses that I loved. Her non-fiction books were about the riding life. Her children’s books fitted uneasily between the adventure and pony genre. And I think this is the key difference between ‘horse books’ and ‘pony books’; horse books are primarily adventure books, books about horses, books about excitement and danger; pony books are, at heart, about learning to ride better. * * * * * The question of children and work exercises the minds of educators. And yet children have always worked, on farms, in family shops and businesses. It is not precisely the fact of work that should exercise us but rather the type of work, its possible dangers, the hours worked, its possible interference with school, whether children are being exploited by being unpaid or underpaid, whether the work involves physical or sexual abuse, exposure to toxic materials, and so on. As a child we all worked on the farm, bringing in the cows, collecting eggs, helping with the washing-up and other household chores, picking, husking and shelling corn, collecting wood-chips for the heater, cocking and loading hay, and so on. When I was very young we still milked by hand and we children were expected to milk one cow each morning and afternoon. Although there were times when we would rather be playing I don’t think any of us felt especially hard-done-by because our cousins, schoolfriends, and classmates faced similar toil. We were paid 6d. a week which was always called ‘wages’ rather than ‘pocket money’. When I was young I was very fond of the Ruby Ferguson books. I remember my mother asking me what I’d like for some special occasion, a birthday perhaps, and I said “A Stable for Jill” to which my mother quipped, “I don’t think I can manage to bring home a stable” and I replied in that haughty voice children put on when faced with apparent adult ignorance, “It’s a book.” But re-reading A Stable for Jill made me think about children and work. Jill, who is about twelve, makes friends in the summer holidays and together the children set up a hacking stable. “The stable was now doing very well, and we had paid ourselves back what we originally put into it and could pay the corn-merchant’s bill and regular expenses like shoeing. We had started a new idea for very small children who could have half an hour on Dot for 2/-, being led round the paddock by Mike, and some children came every day for this with their Mummies or Nannies. Of course the stable was by now not a game but jolly hard work. Every day we had four horses to feed and groom, to say nothing of mucking out and keeping the stables clean and cleaning all the tack. We started work at eight every morning, after the boys had mucked out, and we were busy until about five. Wet days were our despair, because really keen riders went out in all weathers and brought the horses back wet and splashed, and if you know anything worse than being confronted by one or two really messed-up ponies when you want your tea, I’d like to know what it is! But of course that is all part of keeping a stable, and to be absolutely frank and honest I was beginning to cool off a bit from the idea of having a stable of my own for ever and ever.” * * * * * It is not given to everyone to have a poem written about them but I am one of the lucky ones. My mother wrote this and called it ‘First Love’. Slender maiden, gallant-hearted, Heedless, eager, just fifteen, 169169

Did you drink some golden evening, From the Fountain Hippocrene? Maybe, in some other lifetime, (Long before the fairy tales) Pegasus himself you guided Down Olympian bridle trails. Did Old Cheiron leave his scholars (Sons of gods, and heroes’ sons) To instruct a gentler pupil Than those mighty-muscled ones? Ox-eyed Hera, queen of heaven, Might to you have thrown the reins, From her chariot alighting On the war-wracked Trojan plains. Or, perhaps, when the Valkyrie Thundered down the northern sky You within their ranks were riding, Echoing their battle cry! Somewhere, sometime, dear my daughter, Star or goddess shaped your course, Started this preoccupation— This obsession with the horse. Horses, horses, horses, horses! Chestnut, creamy, brown or grey— What’s it matter breed or colour? And are horses anyway. Friends for every time and season, How they answer every call. Lively playmates; patient toilers; Staunchest comrades, most of all. First love, last love. Life’s before you; Other loves may come and go; This alone is yours forever. First love, last love; even so. * * * * * Black Beauty remains the world’s most famous story ‘told’ by a horse. But one day I came upon Karel Capek’s delightful version of the world through a cat’s eyes: This is my Man. I’m not afraid of him. He is very powerful, for he eats a lot; he is All-eating. What are you eating? Give me some! He is not beautiful, because he has no fur. Not having sufficient saliva he has to wash himself with water. He miaows with a gruff voice, and much too often. Sometimes he purrs in his sleep. Open the door for me. I don’t know why he became the Master; he must have eaten something magnificent. He doesn’t mess up my rooms. He takes into his paw a black sharp claw and uses it to engrave white leaves. He can’t play in any other way. He sleeps at night instead of in the day, he can’t see in the dark, he has no delights. He never thinks of the blood, never dreams of the hunt and of the fray, never does he sing with love. Often during the night when I hear magic and mysterious voices, when I see how everything is becoming alive with the darkness, HE sits at the table with bowed head and 170170 all the time, he scratches with the black claw at the white leaves. You mustn’t believe that I care about you. I only hear the soft rustling of your claw. Sometimes the rustling stops, the poor dull head doesn’t know now any more how to play, and then I feel sorry for him, and I deign to approach and miaow softly in sweet and tantalizing discord. Then my Man lifts me up and buries his warm face in my fur. Just then, for a second a flash of a higher existence awakens in him, and he sighs with bliss and purrs something which is almost understandable. But you mustn’t believe that I care about you. You have warmed me, and now again I shall go and listen to the dark voices.’ * * * * * October 2nd: Graham Greene October 3rd: Gore Vidal October 4th: Anne Rice October 5th: Vaclav Hável October 6th: Melvyn Bragg October 7th: Thomas Kenneally October 8th: John Cowper Powys October 9th: Belva Plain October 10th: Harold Pinter October 11th: François Mauriac October 12th: James McAuley George Cable Magnus Magnusson Eugenio Montale Aleister Crowley * * * * * Jack the Ripper has spawned millions of words, thousands of newspaper articles, hundreds of books. He is an aristocrat, a poor immigrant, he is a she, he is a conspiracy, he is English, American, Polish, Russian, Asian, he is a Freemason, a Golden Dawn member, he is Jewish, Catholic, politically-motivated, mentally-ill, anti-woman, against prostitution, he is a butcher, a doctor, a medical student, a hired killer ... etc etc ... So are there any facts which can be placed, with confidence, on paper? I think so. 1. The police investigation into the Whitechapel murders was officially closed in 1892 and the files were to remain closed for 100 years. Why? There is no statute of limitation on murder. Even if a suspect died or left the country that could not be deemed sufficient to close the entire investigation. Secrets of state are closed for 50 and sometimes 100 years but not murder investigations unless they impinge on secrets of state. (In fact the files were opened to researchers 20 years before their due date of expiry; many listed items were found to be missing.) 2. The murder victims accepted by the police as the victims of the same killer or killers were: Mary Ann Nichols ... 31 August 1888 Annie Chapman ...... 8 September 1888 Elizabeth Stride ...... 30 September 1888 Catherine Eddowes ... 30 September 1888 Mary Jane Kelly ..... 9 November 1888 There are no indisputable facts to link all 5 women to the same perpetrator. 3. The women’s post mortem reports give the following details on their deaths and mutilations: Mary Ann Nichols: throat cut—abdomen opened—minor genital mutilation Annie Chapman: throat cut—abdomen opened—genital mutilation—womb & intestines placed removed & taken 171171

over one shoulder from crime scene Elizabeth Stride: throat cut Catherine Eddowes: throat cut—abdomen opened—womb & 1 kidney & intestines placed removed & taken over one shoulder from crime scene ears, nose & eyelids mutilated Mary Jane Kelly: throat cut—abdomen opened & body—heart, lungs & breasts parts removed & completely or placed round the body partially removed ears, nose, eyebrows, cheeks & lips mutilated No body parts were removed from the first, third and (possibly) fifth crime scene (There is disagreement as to whether Mary Kelly’s heart was or was not removed from the crime scene) Only the cutting of their throats is common to all 5 crimes. Throat-cutting has been a feature of many murders both before and since, and doesn’t rule out copy-cat killings. 4. There is no evidence to link the Jack the Ripper letters to the crimes and the letters display no knowledge that could only have been known to the killer. The letters had an impact on both public and police: a) they involved considerable police time in their investigation b) they promoted the idea that a lone male was responsible d) they increased the fear level in the East End, making it even less likely that people would come to the aid of a victim d) they promoted the idea that it was hatred of prostitutes which motivated the crimes 5. All the women had what is politely termed an alcohol problem. All had been drinking heavily on the night of their deaths. Their bodies were not tested for alcohol or drug consumption. So it is not clear what ability they might have had to struggle, scream, or run at the time of their deaths. 6. All the women have been termed prostitutes and were engaged as such on the night of their deaths but all had sought and sometimes took other work. None have been linked to a brothel or a pimp. 7. Although the bodies were found over quite a wide area all 5 women lodged within a 200 metre radius of each other. No evidence has been brought forward proving that they knew each other. Two of them are said to have drunk at the same pub, two of them had lodged in the same house and at least four in the same street, women working the streets frequently knew, at least by sight, the other women on their ‘patch’. But such connections remain circumstantial. 8. A huge variety of ‘eye-witness’ reports were collected. There appears to have been little cross-checking or correlation. Most of the ‘eye-witnesses’ were never placed under oath. The stated times between sightings and estimated deaths are variable and unreliable. Most ‘eye-witnesses’ did not have watches and depended on hearing church clocks chime. These could only have provided accurate times when chiming the hour. (A number of ‘sightings’ were only of a man’s, and sometimes, possibly, a woman’s back.) The only common denominator is that they all refer to a man of average height, wearing respectable but not extravagant dark clothes, and with a moustache. Several of the ‘sightings’ refer to another man standing in the background. The second man also fits the common denominator description. 9. There were serious irregularities at every step of the police and coronial investigations and serious irregularities in the collecting and keeping of files. Although crime scene and autopsy techniques were poor in 1888 by our standards there had been a concerted effort to train and improve the professionalism of the CID and many of the irregularities go beyond what was acceptable even then. Some of the irregularities include: 172172

a. Two of the bodies had been washed before the police surgeon saw them. b. The Police Commissioner ordered graffiti found at the fourth crime scene removed before it could be photographed. c. The Coronial Inquest on the 5th victim was held outside its legal jurisdiction d. Large amounts of material have gone missing from the police files. I could not get a precise account of the damage—some books referring to ‘files missing’, others being more specific, eg. File No A49301 having only 33 out of 51 registered items remaining; the other items marked ‘missing’ or ‘destroyed’—possibly because the disappearances of material have been ongoing. The overall impression is that well over half the amount originally filed has been destroyed, lost, or removed. e. Mary Kelly was killed in the early hours of the 9th yet police did not enter the crime scene until 1.30 pm by which time blood had dried, rigor mortis had set in, and the fire in the grate, apparently lit to destroy the dead women’s clothes and belongings, had burnt itself out. 10. The first four murders occurred on the streets; only Mary Kelly was killed indoors. Why? a) was she killed by a different person to the others? b) was this because it was very cold on the streets by November? c) was there less chance of the killer being caught in the act? d) did the killer believe Mary Kelly had something incriminating in her room? Mary Kelly was the most extravagantly mutilated. Why? a) was this related to the greater security of a locked room killing? b) was the killer increasingly ‘out of control’? c) was this to throw doubts on her identity? d) was she the ‘ring-leader’ in anything, eg. a pathetic little extortion attempt relating to her knowledge of events in Cleveland Street? e) were the mutilations designed to send a message to anyone who might conceivably have any information relevant to any of the killings? That silence was wiser than honesty? 11. Doubts have been expressed about a) the lack of blood at the crime scenes, and b) the lack of noise. Given the poor quality of crime scene detection and forensic skills, the first query must remain unanswered. We do not even know whether the ground, walls or gutters were damp at the time of the 4 deaths which occurred on the streets. The second is more puzzling. These were incredibly prolonged and messy murders committed on women used to dealing with vicious or depraved clients. Was a vehicle used in any of the crimes? A covered vehicle, a cab or a chaise of some kind, would muffle sounds, hide the crime, and a carriage lamp would provide sufficient light. I doubt if a car stopping in my street would wake me at night; there was no reason for local people to take notice of the wagons, carts or cabs passing. By 4 am carters and waggoners would be starting their new day. There are two problems with this possibility: a) an open cart would only require one person but to drive and murder at the same time would require great skill and dexterity. A covered vehicle, so suitable in other ways, would require the involvement of at least 2 people. b) the police never questioned the drivers of horse-drawn traffic in the area. We simply don’t know what was passing, whether anyone was seen unloading a ‘package’, whether anyone was seen carrying something over one shoulder, whether a strange vehicle was spotted in the vicinity. 12. Sexual psychopathology takes many bizarre forms. It is very difficult to state definitely that the killings were the work of a serial sex killer (and there is disagreement as to the precise meaning of ‘sex killer’). The image in dozens of novels is of a man out-of- control, killing at closer and closer intervals, in greater and greater frenzy—until he finally implodes and is caught. But the Ripper killings raise a number of questions. a) The genital and breast mutilations were a minor part of the damage done. The removal of the womb in 3 cases suggests a preoccupation with pregnancy, motherhood or 173173 illegitimacy (or even a religious fixation with Mary’s womb) rather than sex. b) No semen was found outside the bodies (though the investigations were deeply flawed) and it is not clear whether there was semen inside or how long it had been there. The police accepted that sex had not taken place. c) Three of the killings were reportedly carried out in virtual pitch-dark. The killer could not have seen his victims’ expressions nor could he have seen what he was doing. (An experienced surgeon could have worked by feel, though surgeons even in well-lit operating theatres often cut and nicked themselves—but it is hard to identify a likely sexual thrill from working in the dark and solely by feel.) d) It is accepted that the women were strangled before having their throats cut. The thrill many killers find in hearing their victims beg for mercy or scream would have been absent. They must have been killed very soon after meeting to allow time for the elaborate mutilations. e) Sex killers either hide their bodies or take care that they will be well away from the scene by the time the bodies are found, sometimes even developing alibis with wives or family. No attempt of any kind was made to hide any of the bodies. (There is some mystery over the locking of the door at the scene of the 5th killing. Mary Kelly had reportedly lost her key and unbolted her door by reaching in through a broken window- pane; the police reportedly found that her door rather than being bolted had been locked with a key. Even so, her mutilated body was clearly visible through the window.) g) Serial killers often operate over long periods of time, the killings well spaced. The ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ killed 13 women in 6 years. (He also focussed on prostitutes but certainly went to some effort to hide his victims.) Ted Bundy killed at least 3 dozen in 6 years; both men undoubtedly would have continued had arrest not intervened. Whereas the Ripper started suddenly, operated over 69 days, and stopped equally suddenly. h) Even if the killer had managed to wipe or wash himself soon after, the smell of blood, faeces, urine and digestive contents, would have lingered very strongly; this may have been a sexual turn on but it seems unlikely. 12. Detective Inspector Frederick Abberline was in charge of both the Ripper investigations and the Cleveland Street Homosexual Brothel case in 1889. Both cases were ordered closed. The Brothel case after a hurried and perfunctory trial resulted in a 9 month sentence for the ‘Rev.’ G. D. Veck for ‘procuring’, and a 4 month sentence for Henry Newlove as a male prostitute; in a later trial a 1 year sentence for libel was placed on Ernest Parke when he tried to report the case in the North London Press. (George Bernard Shaw wrote his leaders for him, without charge, while he was in prison but does not appear to have written about the case that took him to prison.) While police had the place under surveillance the proprietor packed up his furniture, fittings and sundry belongings and departed without hindrance for France. Though legal extradition from France was possible no action was ever taken. Nor were any of the clients ever charged even though sodomy was, at that time, a crime met by a long sentence upon conviction. 13. Catherine Eddowes having been married to a John Kelly referred to herself as Kate Kelly. Strangely she had given the name Mary Ann Kelly when taken into Bishopsgate Police Station for being drunk and disorderly on the night of her death. When released from custody at 1 am she stated she was going home but less than three-quarters of an hour later she was found dead and seriously mutilated in Mitre Square, in the opposite direction to her lodging. The claim that Kate Kelly was killed by mistake for Mary Kelly is unproven. But if true (her usage of a similar name is assumed to be because of her drunken state; curiously ‘Mary Ann’ was a slang term for a ‘rent boy’) it would suggest these were not random killings of anonymous prostitutes, that the women’s names and identities played a part in their deaths. Only Kate Kelly and Mary Kelly had their faces mutilated. The longest gap in the killings was between the death of Kate Kelly and Mary Kelly. The gaps were 8 days, 174174

21 days, about 2 hours, and 40 days. This gap may be unimportant, it may be because the killer or killers were in police custody, in hospital, or otherwise unavailable; it may also be because it was not until the inquest or even her funeral on 8th October that it was clear the wrong person had been killed. The killing of two women by the name of Kelly suggests an anti-Irish motive but there is no other evidence to support this. 13. Mary Kelly had worked for a time at the tobacconist’s at 22 Cleveland Street. The homosexual brothel was opposite at 19 Cleveland Street. Among the known ‘clients’ were Lord Arthur Somerset, the Prince of Wales’ Equerry, and Lord Euston. The claim that Queen Victoria’s grandson, Prince Albert Victor (‘Eddy’) was also a customer is possible but not supported by hard evidence. For some years, the list of visitors to the brothel and the times of their ‘appointments’, was reportedly kept by a prostitute called Emily Baker. The police confiscated this book and it then ‘disappeared’ but Emily Baker would have known many of the customers even without the list. Yet she was never called as a witness, nor do we know anything of her background, whether she had friends in Cleveland St, where she lived and where she worked as a prostitute, whether she knew Mary Kelly. It would be strange indeed if she had never crossed the road to the shop while Mary Kelly was working there. 14. Although Mary Kelly was the most drastically mutilated, the police file on her is the smallest, her inquest was moved out of its correct jurisdiction, and it was the shortest inquest with no post mortem evidence provided except that her throat had been cut. No witnesses were called. Was it moved because the Coroner for the first three inquests, Wynne Baxter, insisted on detailed information being provided to the jury or because he had already built up a large amount of knowledge with which to cross-check all police and public statements? 15. All possible perpetrators have long since gone beyond earthly justice. None of the material I have ever read positing one likely perpetrator over another seems sufficient even to get to first base with a Director of Public Prosecutions. Perhaps Patricia Cornwell with exclusive access to the much mutilated ‘Ripper’ files will come up with new ideas, new answers, but I am not hopeful. And the key questions remain. The State is a continuous entity and still accountable. Two cover-ups occurred and there is a strong possibility that they are linked. So who, within the State, ordered the murder investigation and the brothel investigation closed and for what reason? * * * * * Why is there a continuing belief that there was a Royal connection to the murder? When I mentioned my reading to a friend she said, “Oh yes, that’s the business that had something to do with the Royal Family, isn’t it?” But did it have anything to do with the Royal Family? Is there any evidence in the nature of facts rather than speculation? 1. Queen Victoria wrote to Lord Salisbury after the death of Mary Ann Nichols, “You promised me when the first murder took place to consult your colleagues about it.” I had read a book of Queen Vctoria’s letters without coming upon any interest in domestic crime but the Queen was a voluminous letter-writer so this proved nothing. And it is her reference to ‘first murder’ that is so odd. Was she clairvoyant? Did it refer to a Fenian ‘outrage’, an anarchist killer, something on the Continent, in the Colonies, even an execution? And why should she want the Prime Minister to consult his colleagues rather than the police? 2. Lord Salisbury was Prime Minister between 1886 and 1892. He had the power to authorise increased police activities and funding. He also had the power to close the investigation down. Barbara Tuchman says of him “Believing that “rank, without the power of which it was originally the symbol, was a sham,” he was determined, while he lived and governed England, to resist further attacks on the power of that class of which rank was still the visible symbol” and “What reverence he felt for anyone was directed not 175175 down but up—to the monarchy. He revered Queen Victoria”. (Lord Randolph Churchill said “I have the Crown of England in my pocket”; he was referring to his collection of compromising letters written by Edward VII when Prince of Wales but Queen Victoria probably felt she had Lord Salisbury in her pocket when it came to the issues that most affected her family.) When uninspiring old soldier Sir Claude MacDonald was given the important post of British Minister to the Manchu Court in Peking (Beijing) questions were asked. ‘Don’t you know?’ reportedly said Sir Thomas Sanderson to Admiral Bruce, ‘I thought everyone knew that Salisbury believes MacDonald has in his possession evidence to prove that Lord Salisbury and Jack the Ripper are the same person.’ Salisbury seems an unlikely candidate for the Ripper, not least from a physical point of view, but he was almost certainly the person who closed the investigation down. 3. When Queen Victoria came to the Throne her mother, the Duchess of Kent, wrote to her that she must have absolutely nothing to do with any of her many illegitimate cousins. ‘I never did, neither will I now associate Victoria in any way with the illegitimate members of the Royal family.’ She began her reign by hounding her Lady-in-waiting into having a virginity test; far from being pregnant the unfortunate woman was probably suffering from cancer of the liver and died soon afterwards. Queen Victoria certainly wasn’t out on the streets of the East End doing anything (she avoided her subjects with almost pathological distaste) but she set a tone for her reign which was prudish, prurient, and which had the effect of driving all but respectable married manifestations of sex ‘underground’. The women who could not achieve the domestic ideal were forced out to the periphery of society where they were denied support, help, or protection from exploitation and violence. 4. The Queen’s male relatives were noted for their extravagant and libertine lifestyles. George IV went through mistresses like a hot knife through butter. He paid £5,000 in blackmail to Mrs Robinson to get his indiscreet letters back, he paid a thousand guineas to get rid of another mistress, Anna Maria Crouch, he bribed Lady Jersey to go away to France for a while, and threatened suicide as a way of bullying Mrs Fitzherbert into marrying him in an Anglican service then publicly repudiated her and the marriage in the hope of getting parliament to pay his debts; it is not known how many children he sired, nor what all their fates were. His brother William IV caught syphilis and fathered an unwanted son before he met Mrs Jordan with whom he had 10 children. Despite these children, Mrs Jordan died cast-off, penniless, and alone in France. When her daughter Fanny sought to publish her Authentic Menoir of Mrs. Jordan it was suppressed, apparently on orders from the Royal Family. Claire Tomalin writes, ‘When The Life and Times of William IV was published in two volumes in 1884, Dora Jordan’s name had disappeared, her twenty-year presence and ten children reduced to half a sentence: the King had ‘formed a connection with a well-known actress … there is no need to do more than to chronicle the fact, as the subject is a distasteful one’. She also notes of the younger brothers, ‘Prince Ernest (later Duke of Cumberland) lived a generally profligate life, and had one known illegitimate son, FitzErnest; he was also suspected of making incestuous advances to one of his sisters. Prince Augustus made an illegal marriage in Rome, and fathered two children of uncertain status.’ If anything the previous generation was even worse. George IV’s wife, Caroline, publicly stated that she was neither wife nor Queen as George was already legally married to Mrs Fitzherbert and his father, George III, had been legally married to Hannah Lightfoot when he married Charlotte thus making George and his brothers (including Victoria’s father, the Duke of Kent) illegitimate. In fact, no one knows the truth about George and Hannah Lightfoot; reports as to whether she was taken away by a ‘coach and four’ just before or just after marrying a grocer, Isaac Axford, are confusing. Certainly Hannah, the daughter of a London linendraper, lived and died in mystery, but it is known that she had children. Charles Greville wrote of the Royal Family 176176 in 1829, “Good God, what a set they are ... the three kingdoms cannot furnish such a brood, so many and so bad, rogues, blackguards, fools and whores.” Two of George III’s brothers are also said to have made secret marriages, so that legitimate and illegitimate families (or vice versa) existed, the one publicly fêted and dowered, the other often reduced to a hidden, shamed, and poverty-stricken existence ... Victoria’s son, the Prince of Wales, was notorious for his affairs and ended up in court as a witness in a sordid case involving alleged cheating at cards. (One of his possible mistresses, Lady Mordaunt, is also alleged to have been forcibly confined in an asylum; though there is doubt as to whether she was ever a mistress and it seems possible she was suffering from post-natal depression; even so, an asylum seems a drastic solution to her misery.) Her grandson, the Duke of Clarence, Prince ‘Eddy’, is also alleged to have visited a male brothel and to have had an affair with a Scottish shop-girl called Annie Crook who produced a daughter, Alice, on 18th April, 1885. (The brothel was at 19 Cleveland St, the shop at 22 Cleveland St, and Annie lived at 6 Cleveland St.) Eddy’s brother, later George V, also had several mistresses, one of whom he reportedly shared with his brother. Theo Aronson writes, “The uncovering of a homosexual brothel in London’s Cleveland Street led, in turn, to an extraordinary cover-up on the part of the government; a cover-up which is explicable only in the light of the Prince’s involvement in the scandal.” Clearly, Royal males were not noted for their concern for their large numbers of illegitimate offspring but I’m inclined to think the public would have regarded yet another ‘by-blow’ as less shocking than the public charge of sodomy. Scandals of course did not cease with the arrival of the 20th century; no one seemed bothered when Princess Elizabeth married a man with several high-ranking Nazis in his family but there was an outcry when it was found in the 1980s that no less than five close female relatives of the Queen Mother had been confined in asylums; it was not, I think, that people cared about these unknown relatives but rather that they saw the Queen Mother (who has a reputation for living ‘high on the hog’) as having the wealth and influence to provide the best care possible for her less fortunate family members. None of them had been incarcerated because they were violent but presumably their oddness was an embarrassment to the Royal Family. It was also a reminder that the Royal Establishment no longer had the power it enjoyed in the 19th century to suppress, evade, lie to, insult, bankrupt, buy off, cast off, exile, confine or ruin those who sought to embarrass it. 5. Eddy died of pneumonia on 14th January 1892. He was due to marry Princess May of Teck on the 27th February. People did frequently die of pneumonia in the pre- antibiotic era. Eddy was a young man in the prime of life, reasonably fit, well-nourished, and with access to the best medical care, but pneumonia is still not improbable. The rumours that it was not a natural death came from a) its remarkable convenience, grave doubts had been cast on Eddy’s suitablility as eventual King because of his limited intelligence and his increasing deafness (his learning difficulties may have been related to his deafness). Once married and with children, to remove him from his place as second-in- line to the Throne, after his father, would be fraught with difficulties and bad publicity. And b) claims that his hands turned black. This seems an unlikely symptom for pneumonia. I couldn’t help remembering the horrible case in East Timor in the late 1980s when up to 200 children had this strange symptom and died, after being given cough medicine, deliberately or accidentally contaminated with rat posion. But Prince Eddy’s ‘black hands’ are allegation not fact. It is also claimed that he was being treated for gonorrhea at the time; medical mistake or malpractice is not impossible. 6. After their deaths, the private papers of Edward VII, his wife Alexandra, and his son, Prince Eddy, were all destroyed. Why? Edward had certainly led a rather dissipated life but his dissipations were largely public knowledge. Was there something which never came out? Alexandra was very deaf, very unpunctual, and her English no doubt led to occasional howlers, but she 177177 had led a kind and virtuous life. What could possibly need to be hidden? Prince Eddy seems to have sown his share of ‘wild oats’ but they were surely not so terrible that they could not be forgiven a young man. Or were his papers destroyed because his younger brother ‘took over’ and married his putative bride, Princess May, who thus became Queen Mary. 7. Annie Crook arranged for Mary Kelly to act as nursemaid to her baby daughter in 1885. It is unclear whether Kelly knew any details of the baby’s paternity; and what Mary Kelly believed about its paternity may be more important than the facts. Mary Kelly went to France with the baby in 1885 but soon returned home. The baby reportedly remained in France for several years. Annie was in and out of hospitals and workhouses from 1886 till she died in 1920. It is not clear what was the matter with her (she suffered from epilepsy but this doesn’t seem sufficient explanation) or how she managed to be taken by a hospital without money to pay (a shopgirl’s pay would have been hard-pressed to cover baby clothes, baby care including a nurse-maid, her own food and rent, and a hospital bed) for it or a signed chit by a Hospital Visitor to provide her with a free bed. It is also unclear how she passed between 4 different Hospitals and 5 different Workhouses without first proving her indigence, her local residence, and therefore her right to such care as the workhouse could provide. Workhouses were devoted to keeping people out. Strangely, mentally-ill people confined in a Workhouse did not come under the protection and documentation of the Lunacy Commissioner. Annie Crook was mentaly ill when she died but despite her history of institutionalisation her illness seems never to have been either diagnosed or treated. But Annie Crook remains irrelevant to the Royal Family unless it can be proved that Prince Eddy fathered her baby or she knew that the Prince was a customer at the Cleveland Street brothel and had passed that information on to Mary Kelly. Only two facts exist that might link her to the Royal Family: a) Annie’s daughter, Alice, suffered from otosclerosis, the congenital deafness which Princess Alexandra had passed to her son, Prince Eddy; b) Annie’s daughter, Alice, was given a gift by Princess Alexandra. Otosclerosis is not common but neither is it so rare that its inheritance proves anything. Royal ladies gave out gifts, this largesse may be significant but is not proof of a special relationship. But Annie’s daughter has descendants in Britain. This long-standing claim to connection with the Royal Family could be put to rest by the simple expedient of one of the Royal Family and one of Annie’s descendants providing DNA samples. Prince Phillip provided a sample to prove whether or not Anna Anderson was the youngest daughter of Tsar Nicholas. But that test provided no threat to the British Throne. It didn’t matter to Buckingham Palace if Anna was herself or Anastasia. Annie is a different case. Would the Royal Family be willing to take the admittedly very small but still devastating risk of finding they are related to Alice? Because if they should find they are related it would bring Jack the Ripper disturbingly close to the British Throne. * * * * * The possibility of a Freemason connection with the Ripper killings is another claim that wanders in and out of the literature. I felt my knowledge was too meagre—‘funny handshakes’, the evergreen claim of Masonic influence in British police forces, the Irish girl who became a Freemason, charitable donations, a symbolic connection with Jerusalem, lodges of monumental solidity and architectural dullness—to determine whether the claims presented had any meat in them, so I went to get some material from the library. I borrowed 3 books: Darkness Visible by Walton Hannah (about a potential conflict between Anglican and Freemason beliefs and rituals), Inside the Brotherhood by Martin Short (about the influence of Freemasonry on 20th century British society) and Born in Blood by John J. Robinson (about the possible origins of Freemasonry). So are there any facts from the crimes which can suggest a realistic link? The claims 178178 made are a) the killings use the initiation threat in Freemason rituals, b) all metal was removed from the bodies of the victims, c) one victim was laid out in Mitre Square, d) the graffiti removed from the Mitre Squre crime scene suggested a Freemason connection, e) aprons were a feature of several crime scenes. Taken separately: a) The initiation ritual for the aspiring Freemason does threaten him with having his throat cut, being disembowelled, his heart cut out, and body parts thrown over one shoulder, if he reveals any Freemason secrets. All the women had their throats cut, three were largely disembowelled and body parts thrown over one shoulder, and one also had her heart cut out. Does this suggest that the killer either was or had been a Mason? At that time it was very much a middle to upper-class fraternity. Poor immigrant butchers, Cockney coal-heavers and cab-drivers, and certainly no women could walk through the hallowed portals of the nearest Lodge, and the secrecy surrounding Freemason ritual meant that the initiation rites were not common knowledge. So if the killer was middle to upper- class then there was about one chance in twenty that he was or had been a Mason. But this, even if we discount coincidence, is still a lot of men. b) Although aspiring Freemasons are supposed to remove all metal before undergoing initiation, the only connection is the claim that Annie Chapman’s brass rings were missing from her fingers. We don’t know for certain whether the killer removed them, a passer-by stole them, she had pawned them, lost them, given them away, or they were wrenched off in a scuffle. There is disagreement about the claim they were laid out on the ground by her feet. c) Catherine Eddowes was found lying in Mitre Square. This may have been chance, convenience, or simply that it provided the darkest and most secluded corner in the neighbourhood. d) the graffiti found in Mitre Square said: The Juwes are The men that Will not be Blamed for nothing’. It has been claimed that it said Juewes, Jewes, or Juives. The Police Commissioner, Sir Charles Warren, publicly took it as a misspelling for Jews and ordered it removed so as not to inflame anti-Jewish feeling (already running high because several suspects were Jews). As the Commissioner had done nothing in the previous month to damp down anti- Jewish feeling this sudden excess of concern is surprising. And the graffiti could have been covered for the hour or so before it would be light enough for the police photographer to take a picture. (How the Commissioner came to be on the spot so soon after the body’s finding suggests an excess of zeal not borne out by his usual response to murder investigations, a particular significance in the death of Kate Kelly/Eddowes, or possibly the desire to be on the spot to do any covering up needing to be done; something he managed very effectively when he removed the most obvious clue.) The word Juwes in Masonic ritual refers to the 3 mythical killers of the mythical founder of Freemasonry. But the failure to photograph the words, check the handwriting, test for chalk residues, or question neighbours as to whether they’d seen any writing on the wall in the preceding days, means that it remains unclear whether the graffiti and the crime are connected. But Sir Charles Warren as a long time Freemason would immediately have seen a significance in Juwes that had nothing to do with misspelling Jews. e) Although aprons are a central feature of masonic regalia, the apron connections are very vague. A man nicknamed Leather Apron was among the first suspects, an apron was found lying at one crime scene, and a piece of Catherine Eddowes’ apron was cut off and found tossed away, soiled with blood and faeces. The police accepted that the first two 179179 connections were irrelevant to the crimes and that the killer had used a piece of his victim’s apron to wipe his hands. All these assumptions were quite likely correct and the aprons, like the clay pipes mentioned at the scene of three of the killings, had no symbolic importance. Clearly none of the women were in a position to reveal masonic ritual. They were not killed because of any connection to Freemasonry. If the Masonic features of several of the crime scenes are more than coincidence then it seems more likely that the killer was sending a message to the police and politicians: ‘I’m a Brother, investigate by all means, but don’t come too close to the truth’. The Police Commissioner was a Mason, as was the police surgeon, Dr Bagster Phillips. The Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, was a Mason. The Queen had always been surrounded by Masons—her father, her uncles, her grandfather, her doctor, her son, her grandson. (Lord Euston and Sir Arthur Somerset were also Masons.) But it is what the police saw and did and thought and reported when they arrived on the scene which is of initial importance. Martin Short in Inside the Brotherhood says “Since the Metropolitan Police was founded in 1829 there have been two complete reorganizations of its detective department. Both were provoked by massive corruption scandals leading to criminal trials exactly one hundred years apart, in 1877 and 1977. In each scandal Freemasonry played a dominant role.” The detective service was expanded and made more professional but the central problem (apart from the inherent problem of human greed) was not tackled; police could continue being Freemasons and need not make their membership known. So we do not know how many of the men who worked on the Ripper investigations were or had been Masons. Clearly police do not become Masons because they are corrupt, nor do they become corrupt because they are Masons. But there are several problems in combined membership: 1. The obsessive secrecy in Masonic membership and ritual (and much more so in the 19th century) could encourage secrecy in other areas of life and work. 2. The concept of mutual aid to a fellow Mason, and the idea of Masonic loyalty transcending other loyalties, could come into play in a situation where the victims had no importance and few rights. 3. Once police stepped inside the jealously-guarded confines of their Lodge they were effectively hidden from all prying eyes. They could not be seen or overheard by the press, colleagues, or the public. 4. Freemasonry was a powerful male-only club. For men with a misogynist bent male-only could easily become anti-female. The victims of the Ripper were not only all female but poor, ill-educated, transient, living an ‘immoral’ life and without friends or influence in any of the places where it mattered. The case which brought the detectives down in 1877 was a Turf scandal. So I was intrigued to read in Cavanough and Davies The Melbourne Cup about 1875 ‘A section of the press made allegations that a freemasonry existed between several jockeys and bookmakers’ and ‘In 1882, the V.R.C. Committee set about restoring the public confidence in racing, which had been shaken by the malpractices rife in the seventies.’ This is not to suggest that jockeys were likely to be Freemasons. Rather that the corruption that undermined racing and gambling in the wider sense at this time was not confined to Australia. But in the process of appearing to clean it up with licensing, regulations, fees, bans, etc, the smaller people tended to be pushed aside. Racing had been the preserve of the wealthy and important; smaller people, a larrikin element, had begun to elbow their way in; now, they were going to be squeezed out again. This process was going on in a wider sense, the struggle of working men to form unions, the struggle of farmers to improve their position through forming co-ops, the developing struggle for women’s 180180 suffrage, property rights for married women and so on. And on the other side the resistance of those with power. But did any of this have any connection to Freemasonry—apart from the fact that many of those with power just happened to be freemasons? In 1865 a group of Freemasons came together in the USA to form the Ku Klux Klan as a way of keeping newly-emancipated Negroes out of any hope of achieving a place in society. Freemasonry itself claims that all men, regardless of colour, etc, are brothers. But theory and practice are not necessarily the same thing. A strange document turned up in Russia at about this time, calling itself The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The jury is still out on the authorship and intention of this document (and forgery is misleading in that it implies a ‘pure’ original or an authorised version) but it appears to have originated in France. I came upon a suggestion that its contents and language show more connection to Scottish Rite Freemasonry than to Jewish thought and writing of the time. Scottish Rite Freemasonry permeated both French and American lodges. Though Freemasonry repudiates any connection with the Orange Orders in Northern Ireland there are many similarities and much shared membership. It is not unknown for ‘respectable’ organisations to spawn violent offspring to do their dirty work, and to which all linkage can be repudiated. In the 19th century, Freemasonry had achieved a behind-the-scenes role of power and influence greater than it had ever had before and arguably greater than it has ever had since. Kings and presidents, princes and prime ministers, lords, bishops, governors, commissioners, judges, directors—an unprecedented roll call of Establishment power. The Catholic Church stood officially opposed to its members joining, though many did. (Other smaller groups, such as Quakers, did not join but they can be disregarded.) For ambitious men, joining was one of the most important steps they could take. So were the Protocols a blueprint for Jews plotting world domination or—a blueprint for Freemasons plotting world domination? Were the Protocols used to whip up anti-Jewish feeling precisely because, like the newly-emacipated American slaves, European Jews had either achieved emancipation or as in Poland and Russia were struggling to achieve it. They were not a threat to Freemasonry but did certain powerful Freemasons see them as a threat to the established political, economic, and social order? Lord Salisbury had opposed a broadening of the male franchise; he certainly wasn’t going to support women’s rights. Parliament had defeated Irish Home Rule. Poor working class people had been violently dispersed in the ‘Bloody Sunday’ crackdown of 1887, and would be again in the great Dock Strike of 1889. Boer farmers were soon going to be put in their place. (It might be argued that in the places where Freemasonry had become entrenched at the highest levels of power, such as in Australia and New Zealand, the concepts of mutual aid and loyalty to fellow Masons actually aided the peaceful transition from British colony to British dominion.) Is any of this relevant to the Ripper murders? Without knowing the identity of the perpetrator/s it is impossible to say but probably not. Yet it may well be relevant to the decision to close down the investigation less than 4 years after the horrific killing of Mary Kelly. Frederick Forsyth writes in Icon, “Non-elected power in a democracy therefore lies in the ability to influence the elected machine. This may be achieved by the mobilization of public opinion, campaigns in the media, persistent lobbying or straight financial contributions. But in its purest form such influence may simply be quiet advice to the holders of elected office from a source of unchallenged experience, integrity and wisdom. It is called ‘the quiet word’.” He wasn’t writing about Freemasons but I can’t help thinking that someone, wise or not, gave ‘the quiet word’ and the police investigation was quietly closed. So can any of this be used to advance the search for facts? I must admit I found myself constantly coming back to two questions. 181181

1. Did the statement ‘The Juwes are/The men who/Will not/be Blamed/for nothing’ have a significance that might throw light on the case? The two emphasized words within the lines—Juwes, Blamed—stand out. Was this intentional? The Juwes were said to be three apprentices in Freemason lore who were blamed for murder and allegedly had their throats cut and their intestines thrown over one shoulder. Was the emphasis on three a reminder that three men were involved, separately, or as a working group. Or did it mean that only three of the murders were linked? Did it refer to three men in the higher echelons of the investigation. Was it more symbolic and referred to Police, Courts, and Government. Was it a reminder that in this case the Freemason connection should over-ride other considerations. Was it being suggested that Kate Kelly had dared challenge the power of Freemasons (if she was killed in mistake for Mary Kelly this possibility, with the body placed in Mitre Square and the words written on the wall, takes on greater significance). Or was it simply a strange coincidence that someone had written those words on a wall? 2. And Mary Kelly. If she was always the key victim then it may be that some or all of the other women were trial victims, that they were killed to obscure the importance of Mary Kelly—if she’d been the only victim but killed with such ferocity would more searching questions have been asked, the apparently random killing of prostitutes over the previous two months had dulled any sense that their identities mattered—that Kate Kelly at least may have been killed in mistake for her (the claim, if true, that Kate was in possession of a pawn ticket in the name of MJ Kelly at the time of her death would lend some credence), that she was known to meet with the other women, that she had asked them to share her attempt to gain hush money from someone (there is no evidence to support this idea but she had been well-placed to see or hear something embarrassing to the Royal Establishment, so if she did send a letter or claim to have evidence then I suspect she, like the Tasmanian Aborigines incarcerated on Flinders Island who sent their touching petition to Queen Victoria in 1847—and got no answer—might also have written either to Queen Victoria or the Prince of Wales), that she was believed to have evidence, or even that as a heavy drinker, she and possibly all the other women could not be trusted to be discreet. Strangest of all is the claim that on the 8th November, Sir Charles Warren on his last day in the office of Police Commissioner, authorised the preparation of a poster calling for information on the death of Mary Kelly—even though Mary Kelly was not yet dead. Was such a poster prepared? Is it still in existence? Was the young Irishwoman from Limerick killed simply because an unknown man hated prostitutes—or was she killed because she knew something which someone preferred to keep private. We shall probably never know. * * * * * A friend and I exchange funny books—you know, she lends me Robert Morley, I lend her Punch, she lends me Spleen wtih Added Vitriol, I lend her A Leg at Each Corner, etc—and she happened to lend me Sue Townsend’s book The Queen and I, in which the Monarch is deposed and the Royals go to live on a Council estate, needless to say only one Royal manages to really rise above the situation, at the same time as I was reading The Forgotten Monarchy of Scotland by Prince Michael of Albany. The Prince is hardly an unbiased source on the question of whether or not Scotland should bring back the Stuarts as he is the prime contender for King of Scotland in such an eventuality. But I found myself wondering: Should Scotland bring back the Monarchy? Of course this is a question for the Scots and I haven’t heard any discussion on the topic—but beneath it is a deeper question: Are there benefits in having a Monarch? 1. Now that people are clear about Succession (each new baby carefully listed in its degree in line) and the Monarch has become a figurehead with parliament doing the governing (though the Monarch does retain quite wide discretionary powers), there is still an important sense of continuity. Past and present are linked through the institution of the 182182

Monarchy. This in places where the parliamentary process is in difficulties can have value. The Monarchy in Thailand provides a sense of stability in an unstable democracy. In places with a strong parliamentary tradition it is of small benefit. In Nepal it has arguably proved to be a source of instability. 2. The pomp and pagaentry surrounding the Monarch can bring in tourist dollars. Royal weddings in tough times take people’s minds off their problems, the Monarchy can add colour and tradition to otherwise dull occasions. I’m not sure how well this argument holds up. I’ve never met anyone who went to England (or Spain or Denmark etc) with the sole purpose of seeing the Monarch. I suspect people who’re going to London for a week go along to Trooping the Colour if it’s on during their chosen week. Cold hungry miserable people came out to see (the later) George VI get married and there was little complaint about his £15,000 pay rise at a time of widespread poverty. (“When Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon is married on April 26, she will have one of the most sumptuous wardrobes in the world, as well as a wealth of priceless jewels and enough furniture and gifts to fill a dozen homes”; not bad for the wife of a second son.) But a golden carriage passing puts precious little food on the table. Times, though, are a-changing. I notice that people are now more likely to complain. When Princess Anne gained a massive pay rise at the time of her marriage, from £15,000 to £35,000 per year, there was sharp criticism. 3. An experienced monarch becomes deeply knowledgeable on world affairs and consitutional law. But it is debatable whether a Monarch brings the professional rigour of an experienced constitutional lawyer. The Queen for instance has ruled through 9 Australian Prime Ministers (and lived through a dozen); she has a continuity of knowledge and insight but it is debatable how useful this is to us. 4. A Monarchy by being non-political, non-partisan, and beyond class could be a healing resource, bringing people together in a divided society. In practice, this is rarely so. The Monarch by reason of wealth and privilege tends to identify with the people at the top of the heap; the Monarch by depending on tradition and the status quo for continued existence tends to side with the forces of conservatism in society; the Monarch by being head of the established church is limited as a bridging link in time of religious division and conflict. The Queen is heir to her ancestor’s policies on Ireland; this has been of precious little benefit to the people of Ireland. The Queen is heir to her great-great-great-great- grandfather’s decision to dispossess the indigenous peoples of Australia. I am still waiting to hear her apologise for his actions. 5. The media likes to tell us how hard-working certain Royals are; one doing around 500 functions per year. Of course politicians, clergy, and a variety of ordinary people attend functions, make speeches, open shows, run canteens, run committees, decorate halls, teach classes, cook for this, that and the other thing, provide prizes, draw up media releases, take on dangerous jobs like volunteer fire-fighting or surf life-saving ... etc etc ... and many not only don’t get paid anything, don’t have secretaries to write speeches, chauffeurs to deliver them to the venue, and ladies-in-waiting, maids, valets, and other flunkeys to make sure they don’t have to iron their own clothes, or do their own hair, along with having to find their own transport, pay their own way in, provide prizes and supper ... The Royals do get paid, do have chauffeurs, secretaries, press agents, valets, and all the rest of it for what would be called voluntary work when done by the hoi-polloi ... Of course the Royals find themselves at dull, tiring, and uncomfortable functions but they can at least console themselves that they are being very well paid for their time; it is not something they have squeezed in after a full days’ work at the office or factory, and in between picking the children up and managing to get the shopping done. 6. The Monarch creates links with other nations. When Edward VII died “nine Sovereigns rode in the procession, every one of whom was related to King Edward. King George V was his son, the Kaiser his nephew, King George I of Greece and King Frederick VIII of Denmark were brothers-in-law, King Haakon of Norway a son-in-law, 183183

King Manuel II of Portugal, King Ferdinand of Bulgaria and King Albert I of the Belgians were Coburg cousins of varying degrees of remoteness, and King Alfonso XIII of Spain had married his niece, Princess Ena.” All nicely together when it was tax-payer funded pomp and ceremony but when put to the test, the House of Coburg proved itself both unable and unwilling to do anything at all to prevent their subjects being slaughtered in their millions. I can think of no action taken by any Royal to bring the family together and take genuine and courageous risks for a negotiated peace. It was attrition, death and extraordinary courage in the trenches, not attrition, death and extraordinary courage in the House of Coburg which brought the war to an uneasy end. Monarchy failed its most profoundly important test. 7. The Monarch is a part of history. So, of course, was the rack and the thumbscrew, the stake and the Tower, certain little items certain little Monarchs used with vigour. But the creation of parliamentary democracy interweaving with the democratisation of the monarchy is full of useful lessons. The carrying cry, “If it aint broke, don’t fix it”, didn’t strike me as very apt—I hope the people charged with maintaining public transport in Australia won’t take it more closely to their hearts than they already have—and the real issue that ran behind the campaign is, I think, not whether the House of Windsor is of use to Australia but whether we want to cut our remaining official links to Britain, the campaign was more about a sense of vulnerability and loss in an increasingly Asian- focussed nation. The campaign on both sides was marked by a failure to address the real issues: a) do we see a republic offering benefits that a monarchy can’t? b) do we see our head of state as being responsible to the people or to parliament? c) does the monarchy lead to a higher moral, intellectual, ethical or creative tone in society? d) can the monarchy enhance unity in difficult social, economic, or diplomatic situations? e) parliament ideally works towards a more compassionate and fairer society, does the monarch do likewise though in different ways? Personally, I’m not sure that the Monarchy really comes through this test with flying colours. But if people like having a monarch I have no objection. (And it employs all those Ladies-in-Waiting, Gentlemen of the Bedchamber, Keeper of the Royal Corgis and whatnot.) I suspect the real problem is not the real or imagined benefits people see flowing from the Monarchy but simply that almost anything strikes people as being better than endless recycled old pollies as President. * * * * * Virginia Cowles in Edward VII and his Circle writes of the growing unpopularity of Queen Victoria. “The Civil List provided her with a large sum of money to maintain the splendour of the throne, to entertain distinguished visitors, in short to act the part of monarch, and she was not using it as intended.” The newspapers grumbled, a pamphlet circulated titled What Does She Do With It? Gladstone said, ‘A meaner cause for the decay of thrones cannot be conceived’ and Lord Halifax wrote, ‘the mass of the people expect a King or a Queen to look and play the part. They want to see a Crown and a Sceptre and all that sort of thing. They want the gilding for their money. It is not wise to let them think that for all the Queen apparently to them does, there is more than paid and that they could so without a sovereign who lives at Osborne and Balmoral as any private lady might do ...’ Cowles writes, “The reason for the increased agitation on the part of the Queen’s advisers, was the fact that in 1871 a Republican Movement had begun to take shape. This alarming development had been nourished by events across the Channel. When the Prussians had conquered France in 1870 the Emperor Napoleon III had toppled from his throne and the Third Republic had been established. England felt the repercussions. The disgruntled eagerly lined up behind the new, 184184 exciting banner. The Movement attracted the same paradoxical assortment of idealists and malcontents, of rebels and prigs, of pacifists and revolutionaries, which was to distinguish Britain’s left-wing parties for many generations to come. Some of these ‘republicans’ talked about better working conditions for the poor; some about fewer privileges for the rich; some about the independence of Ireland; others about the immorality of the Prince of Wales; still others about the theoretical advantages of Republicanism. The Movement was far from unified in its methods of attack, and the public figures who supported it were almost as diverse. These were Sir Charles Dilke, a Liberal M.P., Joseph Chamberlain, a Radical Birmingham politician, George Odger, leader of the Trade Union Junta and known as ‘the communist cobbler’; there was Professor Fawcett, a blind lecturer at Cambridge, Charles Bradlaugh, an atheist and radical, and Swinburne, the poet. Needless to say these warriors did not always see eye to eye. On April 16, 1871 the Government permitted a Republican demonstration in Hyde Park, but on this occasion the extreme wing of the movement had taken control, for the speakers, mostly artisans and shopkeepers with socialist sympathies, spoke contemptuously of their moral liberal- minded colleagues as ‘tuppenny lecturers’. The Times described the affair as a ‘signal failure’ with the audience ‘making sport of the proceedings from beginning to end’. The crowd, it continued, was made up of three classes, ‘the roughs, domestic servants, and the trading classes; but the roughs only manifested a desire to obtain a close acquaintance with the red Republicans, and they effected their purpose by climbing up trees which they broke in a shameful manner, and where they kept up continuous sport, while the other classes stood for a time afar off ... ’ Nevertheless Republican Clubs were springing up in London, Birmingham, Aberdeen, Cardiff, Plymouth and many other towns. In the House of Commons Dilke attacked the expenditure of the Civil List and 53 M.P.s voted for a reduction in the annual allowance of £15,000 granted to Queen Victoria’s youngest son, Prince Arthur. Sir Charles carried his campaign to the hustings. In a famous speech at Newcastle on November 6 he criticised the organisation of the monarchy declaring that many of the posts connected with it were extravagant, unnecessary and utterly archaic. In the course of his speech he stated: ‘It is said that some day a commonwealth will be our government. Now, history and experience show that you cannot have a republic unless you possess at the same time the republican virtues. But you answer: Have we not public spirit? Have we not the practice of self-government? Are we not gaining general education? Well, if you can show me a fair chance that a republic here will be free from the political corruption that hangs about the monarchy, I say, for my part—and I believe that the middle classes in general will say—let it come.’ The part of the speech caused a furore of indignation. Sir Charles’ words were twisted and many newspapers alleged that he was “threatening to overthrow the monarchy”. Charges of treason were levelled against him on the grounds that he had defied his oath of allegiance as a Member of Parliament. At a meeting at Bolton three weeks later a gang of ‘Tory toughs’ tried to break up Sir Charles’ meeting, and tempers became so violent that a man was killed. Eight of the ringleaders were arrested, but Sergeant Ballantine, the most fashionable Q.C. of the day, made such play with ‘Citizen’ Dilke’s unpopular opinions that the jury felt as loyal men they must acquit the prisoners, and promptly did so. Queen Victoria never forgave Dilke for his utterances, and in the years to come she consistently did her best to prevent his inclusion in the Government. After all, Sir Charles’ father had helped the Prince Consort organise the Great Exhibition of 1851 and had been rewarded with a baronetcy for his labours. Why should his son have republican views? Indeed, the Queen had once met the small boy, Charles, and she recalled to a friend that ‘she remembered having stroked his head and supposed she had stroked it the wrong way’.” 118585

If it had been left to Queen Victoria the Republican Movement might well have grown and changed the future of Britain. But the Royal Family had a ‘secret weapon’. She was Edward’s beautiful Danish wife, Princess Alexandra. There was already considerable sympathy for her as Bismarck’s newly powerful Germany trounced little Denmark over the question of Schleswig-Holstein (Victoria, needless to say, was on Germany’s side). She urged the Queen to show herself, she put up with Edward’s constant infidelities with dignity, she provided a moral tone that was unsophisticated but kind and affectionate. Flora Thompson in Lark Rise to Candleford writes, “Up to the middle of the ’eighties the hamlet had taken little interest in the Royal House. The Queen and the Prince and Princess of Wales were sometimes mentioned, but with little respect and no affection. ‘The old Queen’, as she was called, was supposed to have shut herself up in Balmoral Castle with a favourite servant named John Brown and to have refused to open Parliament when Mr Gladstone begged her to. The Prince was said to be leading a gay life, and the dear, beautiful Princess, afterwards Queen Alexandra, was celebrated only for her supposed make-up. By the middle of the decade a new spirit was abroad and had percolated to the hamlet. The Queen, it appeared, had reigned fifty years. She had been a good queen, a wonderful queen, she was soon to celebrate her Jubilee, and, still more exciting, they were going to celebrate it, too, for there was going to be a big ‘do’ in which three villages would join for tea and sports and dancing and fireworks in the park of a local magnate. Nothing like it had ever been known before.” (The expenditure and hyperbole, the massive pomp and propaganda surrounding the Queen’s Golden Jubilee in 1887 undoubtedly influenced people and encouraged them to believe that Victoria was the best thing that had ever happened to them.) In 1890 the Royal Family was convulsed by what was called The Royal Baccarat Scandal. The facts were relatively trivial. At a rather mixed house party given by the nouveau riche merchant family, the Wilsons, were brought together the Prince of Wales, several military men, several of the Prince’s staff including the Somersets, and the wealthy banker Sir Reuben Sassoon. The Prince wanted to play baccarat (which was an illegal game at that time), the Wilsons saw no choice but to acquiesce, and during the game several people thought they saw Lieutenant-General Sir William Gordon-Cumming cheat. The suspicion was treated very ineptly, not least because everyone was terrified of any sense of scandal leaking out and damaging the Prince; Gordon-Cumming insisted on his innocence but was pressured into signing a statement admitting guilt and promising not to play cards in the future, in return for everyone’s silence. But within weeks it was being gossiped in London that Gordon-Cumming had cheated at cards. To try to retrieve his good name, he took a case to court. The scandal that people had feared was well and truly out in the open and the Prince was required to attend as a witness. But Gordon-Cumming faced with a biased judge and a deferential jury lost his case. It was the end of his military career as he was cashiered by the army and left in dishonour; he was forced to resign from all his clubs. But, strangely, it did not bring about a resurgence of Republicanism. Sir Charles Dilke was in disarray with a very messy divorce case about to destroy his career; Chamberlain had become increasingly conservative and jingoistic, the trade unionists were putting their efforts into developing a strong Union movement, Socialism, Fabianism, and the like. The people who criticised the Prince tended to be the strict Non-Conformist Churches who focussed on the evils of gambling. A Republican Movement sprang up in the time of George IV, fuelled by his licentious and extravagant behaviour. He was expensive and he showed himself to be expensive. Queen Victoria was even more expensive but she didn’t show herself to be anything much, preferring to spend ‘her’ money on her children and her private comfort 186186 and the refurbishment of Balmoral. So there would seem to be some lessons there for any Republican Movement. If it is founded on anti-Monarchism rather than pro-Republicanism it is on shaky ground. If there is no broad agreement on what it can and should achieve, its supporters will naturally look to more immediate means of achieving their objectives. If it is about male egos and male power, it will always have difficulty gaining the whole-hearted support of women. Neither Princess Alexandra nor Princess Diana were in any way remarkable people but they are a reminder that people are swayed as much by their hearts as by their minds—and equally that their perceived humiliation and mistreatment by a powerful non-accountable Establishment swayed people in ways that have nothing to do with dry arguments about what form of government and allegiance is most appropriate. And maybe there’s room to develop Republican Clubs at a grassroots level rather than relying on a top-down remotely-run Republican Movement. If such clubs were places of fun and the vigorous discussion of ideas and aspirations in a friendly and informal atmosphere they would give life to the movement. Who knows? They might also give life to other things ... * * * * * It seems rather a pity that Aleister Crowley cannot be framed for the Ripper murders; not only would he have enjoyed the notoriety, he would have read many bizarre kinds of symbolism into the mutilations, timing and places. But he was only thirteen at the time the murders happened. Aleister Crowley was brought up in the odour of respectability and beer, or more precisely the Plymouth Brethren and Crowley’s Ales. But all that Bible reading as a child led to a fascination with the book of Revelations and the idea of the ‘False Prophet’, the ‘Beast whose number is 666’ and the ‘Scarlet Woman’; he eventually joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn which had been founded in 1888 by three Freemasons. This was a time of tumult in occult fascination, hypnosis, and complex, contradictory and often confusing ideas. The Golden Dawn drew on Freemasonry, Theosophical thought, a mish- mash of Celtic, Egyptian, Middle Eastern, Christian (or more specifically what was claimed as Templar thought) and Rosicrucian ideas. It drew people such as W. B. Yeats and Oscar Wilde’s wife, Constance. It saw itself as a kind of university of the occult. But along with its factionalism (and I wonder if any organisation could adequately merge such a range of beliefs and ideas) its leaders, Samuel Liddell “MacGregor” Mathers and Israel Regardie, were strong-minded power-hungry men not keen on compromise, it also failed to meet Crowley’s fascination with sex. It split off into the Holy Order of the Golden Dawn (which numbered mystic Christian, Evelyn Underhill, as an adherent) then another splinter group, the Order of the Morning Star (which had Edith Nesbit as a member) and Crowley himself formed his Order of the Silver Star, and, later, the Order of the Templars of the East. This is probably not surprising. The original Freemason basis offered its members a seemingly endless range of degrees with esoteric names. But Crowley constantly saw a need to push his own boundaries of what was acceptable. He believed in his own guardian spirit called Aiwass, who supposedly dictated to him The Book of the Law in which he incorporated both his ideas on the right to let his lust take him where he willed (and in this he is not so different from the massive egotism that underpins the major book of the Victorian sexual underworld, My Secret Life)—‘Be strong, o man! lust, enjoy all things of sense and rapture: fear not that any god shall deny thee for this’, and the simple but brutal philosophy ‘Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law’. He produced a magazine for the Silver Star, called ‘The Equinox’, and wrote prolifically. His first writings, perhaps influenced by the work of Richard Burton, have names like ‘Snowdrops from a Curate’s Garden’ and ‘The Scented Garden of Abdullah the Satirist of Shiraz’, under which they hid their pornographic content. 187187

In later books he saw no need of this fiction, calling his work The Diary of a Drug Fiend, Confessions, and Magick in Theory and Practice. Craig Munro describes him in his later years: “Crowley was thick-set, with head shaven smooth as an egg, some said so that it resembled an enormous penis.” And that “He wore a musk-like scent of his own manufacture, but no underclothing since he regarded sweat as the physical basis for the ‘magnetism of men and women’.” This didn’t mean he liked women. “Crowley considered women to be animals ‘with no consciousness beyond sex’, and he approved of men who were strong enough to use women as ‘slaves and playthings’.” Nor was sex his only preoccupation. “Crowley’s fantasies were aristocratic as well as sexual, and among his aliases were the self-proclaimed titles Lord Boleskine, Count Vladimir Svareff, Prince Chio Khan, and Alastor de Kerval.” The Encyclopedia of Man, Myth & Magic says of him, “An air of unsavoury mystery still surrounds the life and teachings of Aleister Crowley nearly a quarter of a century after his death” and the Cambridge Biographical Enclyopedia says, “He liked to be known as ‘the great beast’ and ‘the wickedest man alive’—and certainly many who associated with him died tragically”. He was definitely Ripper material. He was just a bit young. * * * * * October 13th: Iona Opie October 14th: Kate Grenville October 15th: Mario Puzo C. P. Snow October 16th: Oscar Wilde October 17th: Les Murray October 18th: Terry McMillan October 19th: Allan Massie October 20th: Jack Lindsay October 21st: Patrick Kavanaugh October 22nd: Doris Lessing October 23rd: Michael Crichton October 24th: Denise Levertov October 25th: John Berryman Anne Tyler October 26th: Andrew Motion October 27th: A. N. Wilson Erasmus October 28th: Tasma October 29th: James Boswell G. I. Gurdjieff (d) October 30th: Geoff Dean October 31st: Dick Francis November 1st: Nigel Dempster Edward Said November 2nd: Odysseus Elytis Martin Flavin November 3rd: Conor Cruise O’Brien * * * * * The question ‘what if’ is almost the key stock-in-trade of the fiction writer; I know I use it frequently. Such-and-such happened, I know, but what if, instead, such-and-such happened—and away I run on a quite different imaginative route. But the real world is also full of ‘what ifs’. Here are three which, I think, are intriguing in their imaginative outcomes. 188188

Niall Ferguson in The Pity of War says: ‘One reason the Admiralty ultimately acquiesced in the adoption of the BEF strategy was that it was not incompatible with the navy’s alternative strategy of a long-distance blockade of Germany. To be sure, not everyone in the navy believed in this — Arthur Wilson privately doubted whether a blockade could affect the outcome of a Franco-German war — just as not everyone at the War Office was sure of the Expeditionary Force strategy. On the other hand, it is important to note that the former strategy had major implications for the latter. In December 1912, at another CID meeting, both Churchill and Lloyd George argued strongly that, in the event of war, ‘it would be quite impossible for the Netherlands and Belgium to maintain their neutrality ... They must either be friends or foes.’ ‘This country could not afford to wait and see what these countries would do,’ argued Lloyd George: The geographical position of the Netherlands and Belgium made their attitude in a war between the British Empire in all with France and Russia against the Triple Entente ... one of immense importance. If they are neutral, and accorded full rights of neutrals, we should be unable to bring any offensive economic pressure upon her. It was essential that we should do so. It also worried General Sir John French, Nicholson’s successor as CIGs, that the Belgians might be prepared to disregard a limited infringement of their territory. The meeting concluded that In order to bring the greatest possible pressure to bear upon Germany, it is essential that the Netherlands and Belgium should either be entirely friendly to this country, in which case we should limit their overseas trade, or that they should be definitely hostile, in which case we should extend the blockade to their ports. In other words: if Germany had not violated Belgian neutrality in 1914, Britain would have. This puts the British government’s much-vaunted moral superiority in fighting ‘for Belgian neutrality’ in another light. The Belgians were not, it should be said, unconscious of these deliberations. In April 1912 Lieutenant-Colonel Bridges expressed the view that, if war had broken out over Morocco the previous year, British troops would have landed on the Belgian coast. But the Belgian view was that such intervention could only be legitimate if they appealed to the guarantors under the 1839 treaty; and the British were doubtful that such an appeal would be made — especially if, as was still considered possible, a German invasion passed through only part of the country, say to the south of Liège. When in 1910 the Dutch proposed to build a new fort at Flushing which might have given them command of the mouth of the River Scheldt, there was consternation in London, as such a fort would have threatened British naval access to Antwerp. The Belgians, however, did not express strong objections; they feared a British naval violation of their neutrality as much as the German army.’

Barbara Tuchman in August 1914 says: ‘Turkey at the time of Sarajevo had many enemies and no allies because no one thought her worth an alliance. For a hundred years the Ottoman Empire, called the ‘Sick Man’ of Europe, had been considered moribund by the hovering European powers who were waiting to fall upon the carcase. But year after year the fabulous invalid refused to die, still grasping in decrepit hands the keys to immense possessions. Indeed, during the last six years, ever since the Young Turk Revolution overthrew the old Sultan, ‘Abdul the Damned’, in 1908 and established under his more amenable brother a government by the ‘Committee of Union and Progress’, Turkey had begun to be rejuvenated. The ‘Committee’, otherwise the Young Turks, led by their ‘little Napoleon’, Enver Bey, determined to remake the country, forge the strength necessary to hold the slipping bonds of empire, fend off the waiting eagles and retrieve the pan-Islamic dominion of the days of Ottoman glory. The process was watched with no relish at all by Russia, France and England, who had rival ambitions in the area. Germany, 189189 late on the imperial scene and with Berlin-to-Baghdad dreams of her own, determined to become the Young Turks’ patron. A German military mission sent in 1913 to reorganise the Turkish Army caused such furious Russian resentment that only concerted effort by the Powers to provide a face-saving device prevented the affair from becoming that ‘damned foolish thing in the Balkans’ a year before Sarajevo. From then on the Turks felt creeping over them the shadow of the oncoming day when they would have to choose sides. Fearing Russia, resenting England, mistrusting Germany, they could not decide. The ‘Hero of the Revolution’, handsome young Enver, with his pink cheeks and black moustache worn in upturned points like the Kaiser’s, was the only wholehearted and enthusiastic advocate of a German alliance. Like some later thinkers, he believed in the Germans as the wave of the future. Talaat Bey, political ‘Boss’ of the Committee and its real ruler, a stout Levantine adventurer who could devour a pound of caviar at a sitting and wash it down with two glasses of brandy and two bottles of champagne, was less sure. He believed Turkey could obtain a better price from Germany than from the Entente, and he had no faith in Turkey’s chances of survival as a neutral in a war of the Great Powers. If the Entente Powers won, Ottoman possessions would crumble under their pressure; if the Central Powers won Turkey would become a German vassal. Other groups in the Turkish Government would have preferred an alliance with the entente, if it had been obtainable, in the hope of buying off Russia, Turkey’s age-old enemy. For ten centuries Russia had struggled for control of the Black Sea. That narrow and famous passage called the Dardanelles, fifty miles long and nowhere more than three miles wide, was Russia’s only year-round egress by sea to the rest of the world. Turkey had one asset of inestimable value—her geographical position at the junction of the paths of empire. For that reason England had been for a hundred years Turkey’s traditional protector but the truth was that England no longer took Turkey seriously. After a century of supporting the Sultan against all comers because she preferred a weak, debilitated and therefore malleable despot astride her road to India, England was at last beginning to tire of the fetters that bound her to what Winston Churchill amicably called ‘scandalous, crumbling, decrepit, penniless Turkey’. The Turkish reputation for misrule, corruption and cruelty had been a stench in the nostrils of Europe for a long time. The Liberals who had governed England since 1906 were the inheritors of Gladstone’s celebrated appeal to expel the unspeakable Turk, ‘the one great anti-human specimen of humanity’, from Europe. Their policy was shaped by an image half Sick Man and half Terrible Turk. They believed Turkey to be incorrigible, beyond reform, senile and soon to die anyway. Lord Salisbury’s sporting metaphor after the Crimean War, ‘We have put our money on the wrong horse’, acquired the status of prophecy. British influence at the Porte was allowed to lapse just at the time it might have proved beyond price. A request by Turkey for a permanent alliance with Great Britain was turned down in 1911 through the medium of Winston Churchill who had visited Constantinople in 1909 and established ‘amicable relations’, as he conceived them, with Enver and other Young Turk ministers. In the imperial style used for addressing oriental states, he suggested that although Britain could accept no alliance, Turkey would do well not to alienate British friendship by ‘reverting to the oppressive methods of the old régime or seeking to disturb the British status quo as it now exists’. Superbly surveying the world from his Admiralty post, he reminded Turkey that British friendship would be of value so long as Britain ‘alone among European states ... retains supremacy of the sea’. That Turkey’s friendship or even her neutrality might be of equal value to Britain was never seriously considered by him or any other minister in the last years before 1914. In July 1914, with the two-front war looming before them, the Germans suddenly became anxious to secure the ally who could close the Black Sea and cut off Russia from her allies and their supplies. An earlier Turkish proposal of alliance that had been left dangling now suddenly looked desirable. The Kaiser in his alarm insisted that ‘the thing to 190190 do now is to get every gun in readiness in the Balkans to shoot against the Slavs’. When Turkey began to haggle over terms and make a show of leaning towards the Entente, the Kaiser in increasing panic directed his ambassador to reply to the Turkish offer ‘with unmistakably plain compliance ... Under no circumstances at all can we afford to turn them away’. On July 28, the day Austria declared war on Serbia, Turkey formally asked Germany for a secret offensive and defensive alliance to become operative in the event of either party going to war with Russia. Within the same day, the offer was received in Berlin, accepted and a draft treaty signed by the Chancellor telegraphed back. At the last moment the Turks had difficulty bringing themselves to the point of tying the knot that would tie their fate to Germany’s. If only they could be sure Germany would win ... While they were hesitating England gave them a helpful push by seizing two Turkish battleships then being built under contract in British yards. They were first-class capital ships equal to the best of Britain’s, one of which was armed with 13.5-inch guns. The spirited First Lord ‘requisitioned’—to use his own word—the Turkish warships on July 28. One, the Sultan Osman, had been completed in May and a first instalment on payment already made but when the Turks wished to bring her home, the British, supplying sinister hints about a Greek plot to attack her by submarine, had persuaded them to leave her in Britain until her sister ship, the Reshadieh, was completed and the two could return together. When the Reshadieh was ready early in July, further excuses for departure were offered. Speed and gunnery trials were unaccountably delayed. On learning of Churchill’s order, the Turkish captain who was waiting with 500 Turkish sailors aboard a transport in the Tyne, threatened to board his ships and hoist the Turkish flag. Not without relish the voice at the Admiralty gave orders to resist such an attempt ‘by armed force if necessary’. The ships had cost Turkey the immense sum—for that time—of £7,500,000. The money had been raised by popular subscription after their defeats in the Balkan wars had aroused the Turkish public to the need of renovating their armed forces. Every Anatolian peasant had supplied his penny. Although not yet known to the public, news of the seizure caused, as Djemal Pasha, the naval Minister, not excessively put it, ‘mental anguish’ to his government. England took no pains to assuage it, Sir Edward Grey, when officially informing the Turks of this simple piece of piracy on the Tyne, felt sure Turkey would understand why England found it necessary to take the ships for ‘her own needs in this crisis’. The financial and other loss to Turkey—a matter of ‘sincere regret’ to His Majesty’s Government— would, he blandly said, be given ‘due consideration’. Compensation he did not mention. Under the cumulative effect of the ‘Sick Man’ and ‘wrong horse’ concepts, England had come to regard the entire Ottoman Empire as of less account than two extra warships. Grey’s telegram of regrets was sent on August 3. On the same day Turkey signed the treaty of alliance with Germany.’

And Conor Cruise O’Brien in ‘The Embers of Easter’ provides this ‘what if’: ‘In April 1918 the British Government moved to impose conscription on Ireland. In Parliament the Irish nationalist Party—moderate, constitutional and hitherto in support of the war effort—opposed this measure, described as ‘a declaration of war against Ireland’, and on its being carried, left the House of Commons ‘to organize resistance in Ireland’. A one-day general strike took place on 23 April. If the Easter Rising of 1916 had not already taken place, and if Clarke, Pearse, Connolly and the other leaders had been alive and watching for their opportunity, they would surely have taken it at this time—a vastly better opportunity than they had at Easter 1916 when the only provocation they could muster was the famous ‘Castle document’, a paper listing various aggressive measures allegedly intended by the British authorities, and almost certainly concocted by the rebels themselves. In 1918 the provocation was real and serious, and the country united against it. 191191

It is reasonable to assume that in these conditions the revolutionary leaders could have brought about insurrection, not of a few hundred men in Dublin, but of several thousand throughout most of the country. The consequences of such an event, in the conditions of 1918, would certainly have been far more serious than in 1916, and might conceivably have significantly diverted the course of world history. First of all, Britain would have had to send troops in considerable numbers to Ireland. An Irish rebellion with mass support—which the 1916 Rising lacked, and which one in 1918 would probably have had—would have turned to a guerrilla and the effort to suppress a guerrilla always ties up disproportionately large numbers of troops. General Macready had forty battalions in Ireland in 1920; in 1918 forty battalions could not easily be spared. Whatever the number of troops that could be made available, however, the British Government would have had to adopt the same methods of terrorism as they did at the time of the Black and Tans; indeed the fewer the troops available for suppressing a rebellion, the greater the need for terrorism becomes. If the British Government had had to use terrorist methods in Ireland in the spring and summer of 1918, it is overwhelmingly probable that there would have been mutinies and desertions among the Irish troops on the Western Front. These troops, by reason of their situation, would have had little sympathy with the original ‘Anti-conscription’ movement, but the application of terror, affecting their own towns and villages, would have speedily altered their mood—in much the same way as the execution of the 1916 leaders did change the mood of the Irish people. What would have been the effect of wide-spread mutinies among the Irish in the British Army in the summer of 1918? Certainly there would have been little or no sympathy with the Irish as Irish: most English people habitually regarding the sufferings of the Irish as both imaginary and richly merited. But in 1918, uniform was more conspicuous than nationality, and the actions of a mutineer would speak louder than his accent. By 1918 mass-mutiny had taken Russia clean out of the war; the French Army had been seriously shaken by the mutinies of 1917; the morale of the British Army, like that of all the belligerents by now, was low; the senseless slaughter looked as if it would go on forever— These were conditions favourable to the spread of a mutiny, started by Irish troops, throughout the British Army. A British mutiny would almost certainly have spread to the French Army, which had already been on the verge of mutiny, and it might—though this is more doubtful—have spread to the German Army. This would have been the pre-condition of ‘the European revolt of the proletariat’ which Lenin expected. Never again, certainly, were the conditions for such a revolt to be so near fulfilment as they were in the first half of 1918. Explosive forces capable of destroying the older order—the rule of the classes and castes who brought the world to war in 1914—had accumulated by 1918. A spark was needed to set them off; that spark might have been provided by an Irish Rising in April 1918. In Connolly’s metaphor, the ‘pin in the hands of a child’ would then indeed have ‘pierced the heart of a giant’—the giant of the European capitalist order. The premature character of the Rising—as it now appears in the light of the much more favourable conditions which developed later—may not, then, have been just the ‘misfortune of the Irish’ as Lenin supposed. It may have been the misfortune of all who hoped, like Lenin, to see ‘the European revolt of the proletariat’. It may also have been the misfortune of those who were to die in the Second World War.’ * * * * * All kinds of documents, books, papers, have been created for all kinds of reasons, passed off as this and that, with all kinds of end results. Hans Magnus Enzensberger in ZIGZAG: The Politics of Culture & Vice Versa writes, “When the Scot James Macpherson wrote his Ossianic songs, all of Europe was enthralled. The author claimed that his work was a translation from the Gaelic and dated his fictive original back to the third century. For a long time the supposed relic was held to be authentic. This had far-reaching 192192 consequences. Macpherson’s counterfeit sparked a renaissance in Celtic studies, and the research of Scottish and Irish history owes its essential impulses to him. When some factions of the 1968 student movement hearkened back to Trotsky’s permanent revolution and the Bolshevik idea of the cadre, they launched an unintentional parody, but this same movement helped to bring some buried traditions of the European left to light. Even in its most dubious forms, anachronism can be productive.” Neal Ascherson in Black Sea writes: ‘Eric Hobsbawm has warned, most insistently in the years since the 1989 revolutions, that it is the duty of the historian always to denounce the element of myth in the construction of nations or ethnicities, and his hero in that particular struggle — one of mine, too — is T.G. Masaryk, facing down a tempest of abuse, was not afraid to proclaim that the ‘Libuse Manuscripts’, the epic poems which seemed to authenticate an antique and distinct Czech culture, were forgeries.’ Thomas Chatterton created his myths, supposedly the work of a fifteenth century monk, Thomas Rowley; he lived long enough to hear himself denounced as a fraud but not long enough to hear his poetry lauded and admired for its quality. He committed suicide by taking arsenic at the age of seventeen. The Catholic Church benefitted from a famous forgery, according to Brian Tierney in The Crisis of Church & State 1050-1300: ‘It was also most probably between 750 and 800 that some enterprising cleric of the Roman curia produced the most famous forgery of the early Middle Ages, the so-called Donation of Constantine. Its drafter must have hoped that it would establish beyond all doubt and for all time the legality of the pope’s claim to central Italy, for the Donation purported to be a charter of the first Christian emperor, Constantine, bestowing on the contemporary pope, Sylvester, rule over Rome and its possessions in the West on the occasion of the emperor’s withdrawal to his new Eastern capital of Constantinople. The story was not entirely a fabrication of the eighth century. In the days of Pepin and Pope Stephen there was current in Rome a legend telling how Pope Sylvester not only baptized Constantine but also miraculously cured him of leprosy, and how Constantine in gratitude relinquished his rule over Rome to the pope. This legend, which can be traced back to the fifth century, inspired the forged Donation. There is no reason to doubt that by the middle of the eighth century the popes themselves were entirely convinced of their right to rule Rome, and, as we have observed, the papal government had in fact come into existence in a sufficiently legitimate fashion—as much so certainly as that of any other European state. Moreover, the political situation that developed at Rome was not altogether unique. In many cities of the Western empire during the tumult of the Germanic invasions the people turned to their bishop as a governor, judge, and protector, and throughout the Middle Ages there were prince-bishops who exercised both spiritual and temporal authority over their subjects as the pope did over the Romans. The great difference was that the pope’s city was the capital of the old Roman empire. Whoever succeeded to its rule might be tempted to claim all the universal authority of the ancient Caesars, and for later popes the temptation was increased by the vague and far-reaching claims embodied in the Donation of Constantine. Indeed, from the eighth century onward the essentially political claim of the popes to be rightful rulers of Rome came to be increasingly confused with an essentially theological claim that they were overlords of all Christian kings by virtue of their supreme spiritual office.” In 1924 a forged letter was used in Britain to undermine the Labour vote. A.J.P. Taylor wrote, ‘Was Labour secretly sympathetic to the communists despite its seeming moderation? The question was raised still more sharply just before polling day, when a letter was published, allegedly from Zinoviev, president of the Communist International, to the British Communist party, with instructions for all sorts of seditious activities.’ Taylor suggests that the fraudulent letter originated with White Russian émigrés in Berlin who ran a substantial trade in such documents; but the British newspapers and politicians who irresponsibly published and gave credence to the document were just as culpable … 193193

When Paul Radley won the 1980 Vogel Award with his novel Jack Rivers and Me, Helen Daniels was kind enough to write of it ‘Radley writes with bawdy vitality, a comic vigour which can also quieten to the contemplative mood ... great vitality and assurance, impressive from a 19 year old writer’. It was many years later that we learnt that it wasn’t a 19-year-old writing the novel and winning the Award. It was Paul Radley’s uncle. But this wasn’t a hoax. He wasn’t pretending to have found a ‘long-lost manuscript’, it wasn’t the creation of a fictitious Ern Malley, it was a deliberate fraud. He had entered a competition for which he wasn’t eligible, using the name of a living person, and won a rich award. So why did this pass with so little media attention? The fraud had remained undetected for nearly 16 years and was only exposed by the uncle coming forward and confessing to it. So how had it gone undetected for so long? Was it simply that the media was less intrusive in 1980, that it cared less about writers as people, or did Paul Radley keep such a low profile that the media soon lost interest in him and his subsequent career? And what of the ‘wicked uncle’? The reason he gave for the fraud was that the Vogel discriminated against older writers. But it might be argued that all writing competitions discriminate against someone. They all have rules and regulations. They are only open to ‘Australian citizens’, ‘Tasmanian writers’, writers who live in ‘the shire of X’ or ‘the city of Y’; they are only open to ‘tertiary students’ or ‘people over 18’ or ‘under 14’; or ‘women writers’ or ‘writers who are members of Z’ they are for poetry of less than 20 lines or mystery stories or travel articles of less than 2,000 words, they are for Aborignal writers or handicapped writers or women over 60 or writers who have never been published ... and when you sign the covering sheet you are agreeing to abide by the rules whatever the rules happen to be. Many competitions are set up by or run in memory of someone so they are for writers whose work (or age or background etc) most appeals to the people donating the money. Fair enough. And in the process a vital element comes into it: trust. People putting on writing competitions face all sorts of difficulties from judges getting sick at the last moment to receiving a grand total of 2 entries. People entering competitions also face problems (I know of a competition in Queensland where the secretary calmly pocketted the prize money and left the competition winners whistling in the wind). And judges do not have an easy time. I have never been asked to judge a literary competition but I have judged haikus by schoolchildren, as well as cut flowers, children’s cookery, even a human rights award—and it is not easy. Dear me no! The best time is when one entry stands head and shoulders above the rest but that rarely happens. And if you’re one of a panel the difficulties multiply. There’s that one person absolutely determined to get his/her choice up who just ignores the other members; but we all bring personal prejudices, likes, concerns, fears that the best story is rather like a story we’ve read recently, problems with information that cannot easily be checked, stories that are well-written but pedantic, stories that are shaky on grammar but good on plot, stories that were no one’s first choice but no one disliked and thus get up as a compromise choice ... and there’s the influence of how many prizes you can hand out, whether there’s the possibility of giving out Highly Commendeds or whether there is to be one winner and one winner only ... I do see the problem the uncle had: there aren’t many competitions for unpublished novelists. I appreciate this problem. The one I have is even larger: there are so few competitions for the long short story and the novella. Most of my stories come out at around 10,000 to 30,000 words. But where to send them? Yet if Jack Rivers and Me was good enough to win, to get published, to sell, then surely it was good enough to find a publisher with the uncle’s name on the cover—or wasn’t it? It has at times a tedious quality— ‘Skip it!’ Connie said and whopped out of bed. This was strange behaviour for someone who usually dragged herself out of bed like Big Fat Nellie all dressed up on the way to Kincomba gauging the railway station steps as if they were Mount Koscuisko. 194194

Both Peanut and Jack Rivers took this to mean it was going to be some strange kind of day. Soon after breakfast they knew it wasn’t going to be hilarious. Connie sauntered after them like a rent-a-Vesuvius, passing casual fire in whews and phews. ‘Fancy Gentleman Jack going to school tomorrow! He doesn’t know so much after all.’ ‘You’re awful, Connie,’ Peanut said. ‘I shall care! Kid Rivers is a phoney an’ means nothing to me. He doesn’t buy my pyjamas. In fact ... I hardly know him.’ ‘But you once said ... ’ ‘What I once said and what I’m saying now,’ Connie shouted, ‘is my business and your misfortune. And tell me, what does your fribbly friend do for a crust, Peanut? If anything.’ ‘Jack Rivers gets by.’ Commandeering a phrase of their father’s, Connie said, ‘And by whose goddam standards does he get by? Jack Rivers is a bum kid! They’re writing it on the fences.’ ‘Sticks and bricks won’t give me kicks,’ Peanut said, defiant for his Jack. ‘Jack doesn’t give a bean for who’s writing what on the fences. Jack wouldn’t even look at that stuff.’ ‘Because he can’t read,’ Connie said. ‘Well, you tell him, my little chickenshit friend, that I’m writing it on the wall and I hope for his stupid sake he knows the difference. And quit walking round in front of me.’ ‘But you’re following us, Connie.’ ‘Shut up, you dirty little sonofabitch!’ She let them alone for an hour after that, until their mother went along to the Store. The Boys, dreading the bedevilled Connie, begged to be taken, but Nance Delarue did not decipher the urgency in her son’s chirruping’— —but was this enough to make it publishable only from the pen of a 19-year-old? * * * * * On the one hand there are the ‘what ifs’ of history. On the other hand there are the prophecies. General Maxwell charged with putting down the Easter Rebellion in Dublin dusted off his metaphoric hands and said complacently: ‘That will be the end of the so-called Government of the Republic. I assure you, gentlemen, no more will be heard ever again of an Irish rising of 1916.’ * * * * * November 4th: Walter Cronkite Art Carney Jay Anson November 5th: Sam Shepard November 6th: James Jones Thomas Kyd November 7th: Helen Garner November 8th: Ben Bova November 9th: Roger McGough November 10th: Oliver Goldsmith Winston Churchill * * * * * This interpretation comes from Lord Altrincham in Churchill by his Contemporaries: ‘Before, however, I proceed with this theme into World War II, I must pause to interpolate, with chronological correctitude, a necessarily telescoped reference to another of Churchill’s contributions to international history—his strong and consistent support for Zionism. He had—so far as I know—nothing to do with the Balfour Declaration of 1917, 195195 out of which the State of Israel was born; but he was responsible as Colonial Secretary for the Middle Eastern settlement, which, in the winter of 1920-21, established the British Mandate in Palestine and at the same time the Kingdom of Iraq (then including Syria) and the Emirate of Transjordan, in both of which (like a new Kingmaker Warwick) he seated Hashemite princes upon newly created thrones. It would be impossible to abridge the story that resulted, both before and after World War II, without dogmatising on “might-have- beens” which are still in violent dispute. But in view of subsequent Arab wrath against him, it was right to quote what Lawrence of Arabia, no enemy of Arab peoples, said of the settlement which he then devised and imposed: “Winston Churchill was entrusted by our harassed Cabinet with the settlement of the Middle East. In a few weeks at his Conference in Cairo he made straight all the tangle, finding solutions fulfilling (I think) our promises in letter and spirit (where humanly possible) without sacrificing any interest of our Empire or any interest of the peoples concerned. So we were quit of war-time Eastern adventure, with clean hands, but three years too late to earn the gratitude which people, if not States, can pay.” ’ (A different interpretation has been ‘Iraq was created by Churchill, who had the mad idea of joining two widely separated oil wells, Kirkuk and Mosul, by uniting three widely separated peoples: the Kurds, the Sunnis and the Shi’ites.’) ‘This quotation which is taken from Seven Pillars of Wisdom, ends with a touch of cynicism which suggests that Lawrence had little genuine confidence in the concordat which Churchill hoped he had made between Arabs and Jews. Despite, however, all that has gone wrong in Palestine between that year and this, I say with confidence, as the member of Churchill’s Government who was resident in the Middle East in 1944 and 1945, that the Arab-Zionist issue in Palestine would have been peacefully settled, with the indispensable support of the United States, if Churchill had not been ousted by Attlee in 1945 at a moment when all was at stake. The rest of the story is Ernest Bevin’s, who did not understand either Jews or Arabs and failed to prevent President Truman from playing American domestic politics, crude and unashamed, with a Middle Eastern question of vital moment to the freedom of the West. The N.A.T.O. nations are still paying for that; but Churchill has no responsibility for the state of suppressed war between Israel and her neighbours which the Kremlin is now busily exploiting. Nor has he yet said his last word upon that issue. All is at present on a razor’s edge—and that is that. But while the issue remains uncertain, Churchill’s mind and method in dealing with it have been so distinctive that they throw much light upon other aspects of his record and so demand a passing note. Sir Winston Churchill has a vivid sense of history which is sometimes more romantic than correct, and also a strategic instinct which—as I have already said repeatedly—is never at fault. Both made him a Zionist. The home-coming of the Dispersion to Palestine, the seat of David and Solomon, is a restoration from which no historian—be he Old- Testament Christian or Liberal hater of imperialisms—can easily dissent. As for the strategic side, Churchill was right in judging from the first that an infusion of Jewish capacity might do much to refertilize the many empty and long-neglected lands in what was once justly called the Fertile Crescent. The fact that Palestine doubled its population under the Mandate and that Arabs constituted a good half of that increase proves the justice of his belief. If only Jews and Arabs had been able to co-operate, both Syria and Jordan as well as Palestine would now be highly prosperous, contented and reasonably stable States. This was Churchill’s aim, based on the desire to bring a new non-alien element of strength and stability into the critical strategic area which stretches from the Nile to the Persian Gulf; and it was not unreasonable to hope for its success, since the Jews belong ethnically to the Arab’s own Semitic race. The danger lay in a clash of Arab and Jewish nationalism, only to be prevented (as I myself believed) by working for a Palestine State of double nationality, in which Jewish capacity would undoubtedly have taken the lead but of which the Arabs of Palestine would 196196 have been equal members with a security now lost. Many Zionist leaders of high standing agreed that the Jewish Home in Palestine could best be developed on these lines—such men, for instance, as the late Dr. Magnes, who was head of the Jewish University on Mount Scopus, now in Arab territory and derelict. But others like Israel’s late President, Dr. Weizmann, a scientist of outstanding talent and a leader strong in personality and faith, moved steadily towards the conversion of the Jewish Home into a Jewish National State; and this became the purpose of the Jewish Agency in Palestine, though it involved some infringement of the Mandate and the wholesale alienation of Arabs not only in Palestine itself but throughout the Middle East. I myself shared in 1945 the conviction of Dr. Magnes that, despite the fanaticism of the modern Jewish sicarii (who murdered Lord Moyne, my predecessor as Middle Eastern Minister), it would still be possible, with firm American support, to bring Jews and Arabs together in a bi-national Palestinian State and thus prevent the bitter strife which has divided the Holy Land and Jerusalem itself between two hostile governments. Churchill has assuredly not been responsible for any part of the tragedy; but it is, I think, a fact that since 1945 he has underrated the pyschological reaction of the Arab world to Israel’s national mystique and that, but for this, he might have done much with his enormous influence to modify the one-sidedness and incomprehension which have distorted the Middle Eastern policy of the United States. Arab pride is now most deeply wounded, and much suffering has been caused by the expatriation of two-thirds of the Palestinian Arabs from their ancestral homes. All of this need not have happened, and there will be no security against Communist imperialism in Egypt or the Arabian Peninsula until it is repaired. The story is worth attention here, not only because Churchill’s Zionism has been a constant element in his approach to international affairs, but also because it illustrates a strong tendency on his part to overlook the ingrained particularities of ancient peoples in the sweep and broad good sense of his international ideals. There was some of this, as we shall see, in his handling of his magnificent campaign for European unity. For deep-seated suspicions and fears, which will yield but slowly to healing statemanship, are not peculiar to the Arabs; they also divide the French and the Germans despite all argument that their not-so-ancient feud should be buried with Hitler whose diabolical soul, despite his Götterdämmerung obsequies, is still alive in Germany, and, like John Brown’s marching on.’ * * * * * This is a curious case of mistaken identity—it reminds me of Paul de Serville writing in Pounds and Pedigrees “Would the Kelly cult ever have flowered if his name had been McNab or Hogg?” or William Shirer in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich referring to the nick-of-time legitimisation of Adolf Hitler’s father and the question of whether ‘Heil Schicklgruber!’ would have rallied the German people in the way ‘Heil Hitler!’ did—of course, I might once have said, there’s only one Winston Churchill. But in fact there are two, there may indeed be dozens. But the one I came across quite by accident was born in St Louis, Missouri, in 1871 and became a best-selling novelist. His first novels dealt with historical subjects such as the American Revolution and the Civil War; his later books frequently dealt with corruption in high places. His novels include Richard Carvel (1899), The Crisis (1901), The Crossing (1904), Coniston (1906) and The Dwelling Place of the Light (1917). This Winston Churchill also made me reflect on questions of identity, of uniqueness, of belonging. Identity is one of those words that get tossed round day in, day out, without anyone precisely explaining, or being asked to explain, what they mean by identity. I don’t give much thought to what the word means, personally or collectively, but I know a lot of people do. So this is for them. I came across two strange statements recently; one of them was the claim that the 197197

Ashkenazi Jews were not actually refugees from ancient Palestine but converted Khazars, the other was the Soviet decision to set up a Jewish homeland in Birobidzhan in the 1920s. Both these statements were quite new to me. The second is obviously true. Bernard Wasserstein says of it in Vanishing Diaspora, “In 1928 the Jews were even accorded an ‘autonomous area’ (promoted after 1934 to ‘autonomous region’) in Birobidzhan, a remote area of Central Asia near the Chinese border. A few thousand pioneers were induced to emigrate there and establish collective farms. Pro-Soviet organizations in the United States also raised money to help settle Jews on farms in ‘national districts’ in Ukraine and the Crimea. A handful of disappointed Zionists even returned from Palestine to join such enterprises. But the Jewish population of Birobidzhan never exceeded 30 per cent of the total in the region, and was never more than 1 per cent of the total number of Jews in the USSR. Soviet propaganda in the 1930s displayed photographs of enthusiastic Jewish pig farmers in Birobidzhan and the Crimea in order to demonstrate that the Soviet Union rather than Palestine had achieved a solution to the Jewish problem. The Ukrainian and Crimean Jewish settlements were all annihilated during the German sweep through the region in 1942, but Birobidzhan survived as a strange relic into the 1990s.” I must admit I was quite intrigued. Where was Birobidzhan, what was it like, who lived there before it was designated as a Jewish homeland, what did it have to offer, why did it never appeal, did Jews in the Ukraine and the Baltic States know about it, did they not want to go there because of its remoteness, its lack of opportunities, because of the expense of getting there, because it was seen as a ‘pioneering venture’, because it offered no comforts, because there was friction between arriving settlers and indigenous people ... I tried to find answers to some of these questions. The Great Soviet Encyclopedia notes that it is a city on the Bira River, a station on the Trans-Siberian railway, and a centre of the Jewish Autonomous Oblast, of Khabarovsk Krai, RSFSR, 175 kms west of Khabarovsk, that it arose in 1928 on the location of the small Tikhon’kaia Station, that it had 30,000 people by 1939 and over 80,000 by 1991. They also noted it as having “evening mechanical, and mechanical engineering technicums and medical, pedagogical, and cultural enlightenment colleges. There is a museum of regional studies and national theaters (Jewish and Russian)”; it also had its own newspaper in Yiddish, the Birobidzhaner Shtern which came out three times a week. The Encyclopedia Britannica noted that “Yevreyskaya, also spelled Evreiskaia, also called Birobidzhan, autonomous oblast (province) in Khabarovsk kray (region), far eastern Russia” is 36,000 sq. kms and is a place of plains, extensive swamps, fertile grasslands, and dense forests of spruce, pine, fir and larch. Papermaking is important as is small industry such as making shoes. They say “Winters are dry and severely cold, summers hot and moist”. I did not like the sound of those “severely cold” winters but then I am a Queenslander, not a native of Kiev or Vilnius or Warsaw. They go on to say, “Although established in 1934 theoretically as a home for the Jews in the Soviet Union, no mass Jewish migration developed, and Russian and Ukrainian settlers heavily outnumber the Jews.” Sally Belfrage in A Room in Moscow which came out in 1958 records the complaint of someone who had no time for Krushchev, “Personally I wish Stalin had lived—then it all would soon have been over. He would have deported all the Jews to Birobidzhan, for one thing, committed all kinds of atrocities and—well—there would have been a revolution. Now there’s a sort of political vacuum; most people feel inertia.” It is perhaps not surprising that people did not want to go to Birobidzhan if it was perceived as somewhere people were sent. George Negus in Across the Red Unknown: A Journey through the New Russia starts his 1990’s Trans-Siberian rail journey in Vladivostok, then on to Khabarovsk, then, “Next morning we got to Birobidjan, seemingly an unexciting, run-down soviet town. But, it was also precisely what we had hoped the Red Unknown would be about — the totally 198198 unfamiliar — for Birobidjan is, in fact, the capital of an autonomous Jewish oblast, and has been since 1934. Jews in this oblast have never had to hide their religion, even during the vehemently anti-religious decades in the USSR. There’s a touch of ‘the right thing for the wrong reasons’ about the existence of an apparently contradictory place like Birobidjan. During the repressive Stalinist period, settlement here was voluntary, and one hundred per cent of the Russians who lived here were Jewish. But, there have always been good reasons for doubting Josef Stalin’s real motives about anything, and it happens that earlier, he had failed to force Jews onto collective farms west of Moscow. As an alternative, he convinced (there is a less charitable way of putting it) thousands of young Jews to move to the bleak, swampy region around Birobidjan. There we visited a very simple synagogue in a very simple wooden Siberian cottage, and chatted with 90-year-old Ali Spector, one of those Jews who went voluntarily to Birobidjan more than fifty years ago. In conversation, we found he was yet another example of how sceptical and wry the Russians — Jewish or otherwise — can be about the repressive old communist system and its effect on their daily lives. Despite a history of persecuting Jews, Soviet authorities have always regarded them as a separate nationality and anyone who declared their Jewishness in the census is counted as a Jew. With the inconsistent level of Jewish emigration in recent years, it is difficult to put a figure on the precise number of Soviets claiming Jewish nationality. It is probably between two and three million. Only about fifteen per cent give Yiddish as their mother tongue, but we did hear it in Birobidjan, even though these days less than one in ten of its small population is Jewish or of Jewish descent. In Birobidjan, we also discovered a religious unknown within a political unknown. As you might expect, these descendants of the original Jewish settlers from the thirties still practise Judaism, but paradoxically they also believe in Jesus Christ. They read both the Old and New Testaments, and apparently see no contradiction in this cross-over of beliefs.’ As most early Christians were Jews this did not strike me as impossible; and where people feel safe physically they may also feel safe to explore intellectually, religiously, metaphysically, spiritually ... it also feeds into the debate over what extent Jewishness is racial, cultural or religious and the extent to which those aspects ‘need’ outside pressures to remain a major focus of individual or collective life. I also wondered if, along with the resistance to collectivised rural life, the Jews offered a home in Birobidzhan resisted because they felt themselves to be European rather than Asian or Middle Eastern. I have heard someone say that part of the deep resentment felt by Palestinians is a resentment against the Europeanisation of a Palestine that was Eastern with only a thin veneer of European ways, a Westernisation of a non-Western society, a colonisation far more intrusive than they had experienced under the old British mandate or the preceeding Ottoman rule; to talk of ‘non-aliens’ is incorrect, the arriving Jewish settlers were European first and Semitic or partly so somewhere down the line. As Rupert Emerson put it, ‘If Israel’s leading elements had been drawn from the Jewish communities of the Middle East its political structure and history would presumably have taken a quite different course.’ Perhaps Israel could begin by insisting on playing in the Asia region for all sporting events, soccer, athletics etc, as a way of expressing its commitment to the region? Neal Ascherson in Black Sea provided a simple introduction: ‘The Khazars were Turkic-speaking pastoral nomads who arrived out of central Asia in the eighth and ninth centuries AD, and put together an ‘empire’ around the northern shores of the Black Sea, including Crimea. Offered conversion to Christianity by St Cyril, the Khazars preferred to adopt a form of Judaism.’ Though the Khazars had a war-like reputation they, in their turn, were displaced westwards by the arrival of the Mongol hordes four hundred years later. But there were 199199 also the Karaim, he says, who were ‘a Jewish sect which began in Mesopotamia in the eighth century and broke with the mainstream of rabbinical Judaism two hundred years later. The Karaim believed that the word of the Lord was to be found in Scripture but nowhere else, and that the additions of the Talmud were impious and decadent ... The Karaim reached Crimea in the twelfth century, dislodged from Palestine and Egypt by the upheaval of the First Crusade. They migrated into the Byzantine Empire and beyond it into north-eastern Europe, where parties of Karaim settled in the lands of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.’ So if Cyril was a failure as an evangelist, how did he become a saint, and conversely, who converted the Khazars? The Encyclopedia of Religion told me that Cyril (c. 826 - 869, who began life under the name of Constantine) and his brother Methodius were Greeks who became known as the “apostles to the Slavs”. Cyril “became librarian of Hagia Sophia, the leading church in the East, and later professor of philosophy at the imperial university. He also participated in religious debates with church leaders and Muslim scholars.” ... “In 869, the patriarch sent Constantine and Methodius on a mission to the Khazars, a people occupying the territory northeast of the Black Sea, who had asked that the Christian message be explained to them. The result of this visit was that two hundred Khazars requested baptism.” But he was then directed to work among the Slavs who, then, had no written language so “He formed the alphabet from Hebrew and Greek letters (in its final form, this alphabet, the Cyrillic, is still used in modern Russian and in a number of other modern Slavic languages.) Using this alphabet, Constantine translated the Gospels and later the epistles of Paul and the Book of Psalms into Slavic.” The brothers faced considerable opposition in their work, not from the Slavs, but from the push to spread the Germanic languages eastward and also from Church officials who were afraid of Latin being displaced as the Church language. But the two men eventually had their work crowned by a Papal Bull by John VIII which “expressly authorized the Mass in Slavic”. Cyril was only about 42 when he died. While I was looking up sources I came upon a curious novel called Dictionary of the Khazars by Milorad Pavic. It might be described as history when we lack history; a strange collection of real and mythic peoples, the gaps in knowledge filled with stories and magic; the real over-laid by the non-real; and history from the differing perspectives of Christian, Jewish and Muslim ‘historians’. The result is rather attractive. For a brief taste, here is part of his entry for St Cyril’s brother, Methodius: ‘Hailing from the family of the Byzantine commander of Thessalonica, Drungar Leo, Methodius tested his talents as administrator of a Slavic region, in all likelihood in the area of the Strumica (Strymon) River. He knew the language of his Slavic subjects, who had bearded souls and in winter carried birds inside their shirts to keep warm. In the year 840 A.D., after a brief period, he left for Bithynia, near the Sea of Propontis, but for the rest of his life he rolled the memory of his Slavic subjects in front of him like a ball. The books cited by Daubmannus say that he studied there under a monk, who once told him: “When we read, it is not ours to absorb all that is written. Our thoughts are jealous and they constantly black out the thoughts of others, for there is not room enough in us for two scents at one time. Those under the sign of the Holy Trinity, a masculine sign, take in only the odd sentences of their books when they read, whereas we, under the sign of the number four, a feminine number, take in only the even sentences of our books. You and your brother will not read the same sentences from the same book, since our books exist only as a combination of masculine and feminine signs ...” Indeed, there was another person from whom Methodius learned—his younger brother, Constantine. At times he would observe that this younger brother of his was more intelligent than the author of the book he was currently reading. Then Methodius would realize that he was wasting his time, close the book, and converse with his brother. Methodius became a monk on the Asia Minor coast in a colony of ascetics called Olympus, 200200 where he was later joined by his brother. They watched the sand, swept by the Easter wind, reveal on each holiday yet another ancient desert temple as a new site, showing only enough for them to make the sign of the cross over it and read out the “Our Father,” before it was buried again forever. It was then that he began dreaming two parallel dreams, and this led to the legend that he would also have two graves. In the year 861 A.D. he departed with his brother to see the Khazars. This was nothing new for the two brothers from Thessalonica. They had heard of these powerful people from their teacher and friend Photius, who had contacts with the Khazars, and they knew that the Khazars preached their faith in their own language. On orders from the capital, Methodius now participated in the polemic at the Khazar court, both as a witness and as Constantine’s associate. The 1691 Khazar Dictionary notes that on this occasion the Khazar khagan told his guests something about the sect of dream hunters. The khagan despised the sect, which was loyal to the Khazar Princess Ateh, and he compared the futile work of the dream hunters with the Greek story of the skinny mouse who slipped easily enough through the hole into a basket of wheat, but when he had eaten his fill could not get out on his full stomach: “You cannot get out of the basket when you are full. You can do so only when you are hungry, as when you entered. And it is the same with the swallower of dreams; he easily slips through the narrow chink between reality and dream when he is hungry, but when he has caught his prey and picked his fruit, he can no longer return with his fill of dreams, because to leave you must be the same as when you entered. So he must leave his pickings or else forever remain in dreams. Either way, he is of no use to us.... ” The New Catholic Encyclopedia says, “At the beginning of the 8th century, dynastic ties bound the Khazars more closely to Constantinople, which led to a limited spread of Christianity among them. They also became acquainted with Judaism from the numerous Jews who lived in the Crimea and along the Bosphorus. When the Byzantine Emperor, Leo the Isaurian, persecuted the Jews in A.D. 723, many Jews found refuge in the Khazar kingdom, and their influence was so great that, around the middle of the 8th century, the king of the Khazars and many of the Khazar nobility accepted the Jewish faith. According to a widespread legend, the conversion of the Khazars to Judaism followed a religious discussion in which their king was particularly impressed by the arguments of the Jewish theologians. After the conversion of the leading Khazars to Judaism, many Jews, including several Jewish scholars, migrated to the Khazar kingdom, where they kept in touch with the intellectual centres of the Jewish world, especially those in Mesopotamia and Palestine. The Literary sources indicate explicitly that the Khazars acknowledged the authority of the Talmud; hence, they must not have been affected in religious matters by the Karaites.” But the peace of their kingdom was to be broken first by the Turkic Petchonegs moving west, then the Russians moving south, then the Mongols moving west. In this massive dispersion many converted to Islam, others formed small remote communities in inaccessible areas, but “the others were absorbed, partly by the Rabbinite and partly by the Karaite communities of Jews. Yet the so-called “Mountain Jews” of modern times are in part descendants of the ancient Khazars. Some Khazar elements seem to have entered Hungary, too, at an early date in the train of the Magyars, who were akin to the Khazars and once belonged to their kingdom. Although the European Jews in the first Christian millennium had some knowledge of the existence of a Jewish kingdom in Khazaria, they did not have much precise information about it. The Spanish-Jewish scholar and statesman, Hasdai ibn Shaprut, who lived around the middle of the 10th century sent a letter to King Joseph of the Khazars in which he asked several definite questions about this people. The King’s answer, written in Hebrew, was cited by various medieval authors and was also used by Judah ben Samual ha-Levi in his Kuzari (about A.D. 1100). Toward the end of the 19th century a copy of this letter was discovered among the documents that were found in the geniza of the synagogue 201201 of Old Cairo, together with other documents concerning the Khazars. Their contents largely corroborate the data already known about this people from the Armenian, Byzantine, and Arabic historians.” Unlike the Khazars who assimilated and were assimilable, the Karaim kept strictly to their own communities, not unlike, perhaps, twentieth-century Amish people. They could be ghettoised easily because of their inward-looking strictly-ruled communities which resisted inter-marriage; unlike the Sephardic Jews of the Mediterranean who, as fast as they were corralled or exiled or excluded, seemed to diffuse and re-enter, such as the exiled Portuguese Jews who went first to Antwerp and Amsterdam and the other cities of the Low Countries yet within a couple of generations were playing an important role in the merchant life of Portugal’s most important colony, Brazil. But I had a more fundamental question about identity. Who were all the peoples in the Bible who appear and then disappear, often never to be heard from again. What happened to them? David without Goliath is unthinkable. But who were the Philistines? And not only the Philistines but the Babylonians, the Moabites, the Syrians, the Persians, the Thessalonians, the Cretans, the Ezrahites, the Egyptians, the Tyrians and Idumeans, the Jebusites and Perizzites, Shulamites and Chaldeans, Nazarites and Ammonites, Edomites and Amorites, Hittites and Canaanites, Samaritans and Amalekites, Pirathonites and Mesobailes, Korhites and Tishbites and Girgashites ... I turned to books on archeology such as Magnus Magnusson’s B.C. and Dr P.R.S. Moorey’s A Century of Biblical Archeology for starters. Next thing I was gripped by the excitement and adventure of the world they touch upon. The search began very much as a Protestant and predominantly English-speaking venture. But alongside the British and the Americans were Swiss, French, Italian, Irish and German seekers. Indeed probably the first ‘guidebook’ to the region was a Dutch offering, Palestine illustrated by Ancient Monuments, by Adrian Reland which came out in 1714. Irish archeologist R.A.S. Macalister wrote, “We learned from experience; and experience in the campaign thus inaugurated has taught us the undersirability of this kind of roving commission. It was another illustration of the old mistake of embarking on excavation work with a fixed programme. The programme set before the excavator was ‘Find Gath’. It would have been better to have said, ‘Excavate Tell es-Safi, and see what it has to tell us, whether you succeed in discovering its ancient name or not ... ’ ” The Americans Edward Robinson and Eli Smith also wrote of their way of learning, “The first was, to avoid as far as possible all contact with the convents and the authority of the monks; to examine everywhere for ourselves with the Scriptures in our hands; and to apply for information solely to the native Arab population. The second was, to leave as much as possible the beaten track and direct our journies and researches to those portions of the country which had been least visited.” But what was lost and looted while well-meaning amateur archeologists learned on the job? And what was wrongly labelled and despatched to museums because of the perceived need to prove the Bible correct? It was not until the work of Flinders Petrie (grandson of explorer Matthew Flinders) in the late 19th century that methods of excavation began to achieve a careful scientific basis. In the mid-20th century Jewish archeologists gradually began to take over more sites and more research. If the desire by Christian archeologists to prove the Bible true was fuelled by both a need to underpin Christian history and Christian morality—and the damage that need could cause—then the desire by Jewish archeologists to prove the Bible true as a way of underpinning both religion and land rights also carries with it dangers to impartial scientific excavation and enquiry. But it is a fascinating subject and I feel I have so far only had time to scrape a little dust from the surface. Even those who seem obvious, Egyptians and Persians, Greeks and 202202

Syrians, aren’t necessarily what they seem. As they say, watch this space ... * * * * * The question of the anti-Semitism of Wagner remains a hot potato. Should his music be played? Should his music not be played in certain places and by certain people and at certain times? I came across a lengthy discussion of this question by Brian Magee in Aspects of Wagner. ‘In the last hundred years three people have produced theories about man and his environment which in depth, originality and scope are equal to almost any before them — Marx, Freud and Einstein. The theories are not compatible, but each is a creative achievement of the highest order, and their influence has been immense. Marx, in fact, has had more influence in less time than anyone else in history: within a mere seventy years of his death a third of the human race was living under governments calling themselves Marxist. The intellectual achievement of Einstein is more impressive, and may prove in the end to be as important in its practical application, if only because of the hydrogen bomb. As for Freud, he has done more to extend our vision inward, into ourselves, than anyone else; doing his work required unimaginable courage, and unlike that of the other two its good consequences are more obvious than its bad. All three, I think, must be ranked among the greatest of the world’s creative geniuses. All three were Jews. This fact is remarkable for many reasons. One is that there had been only one Jew of comparable achievement, Spinoza, in the previous eighteen hundred years. Another is that, in spite of this, these three pioneered a Jewish renaissance of fantastic proportions. Jewish philosophers since Marx include Husserl, Wittgenstein and Popper. Not only Freud but most of the famous psychoanalysts have been Jews: in the sciences not only Einstein but Nobel Prize winners so numerous it would be tedious to list them (since the Nobel Prize began in 1901 it has been awarded to more than forty Jews). All this is doubly amazing when one remembers that the total number of Jews in the world is only about thirteen million — the population of Greater London. In no field has their contribution been more outstanding than in music. Mahler was Jewish, as were Schoenberg and most of his famous pupils. The greatest instrumentalists of this century have been Jews. Even if one forgets Kreisler, Schnabel and all the other great dead, and considers only the living, the best violinists are nearly all Jews (and, oddly enough, from Russia) — Heifetz, Menuhin, Stern, Milstein, Oistrakh. Jewish pianists include Serkin, Rubinstein, Richter, Solomon, Horowitz, Graffman, Ashkenazy and Barenboim. And the conductors Klemperer, Solti, Horenstein, Kletzki, Leinsdorf, Bernstein, Previn and Maazel. These lists, themselves grossly incomplete, can not be matched by the 99½ per cent of the human race who are not Jews. If anyone wants to tell me this is coincidence my reply is that this is simply not credible. The intellectual and artistic output of Jews in this century relative to their numbers is a phenomenon for which I can think of no parallel in history since Athens five centuries before Christ. It is something that calls for explanation. In fact there are two questions requiring an answer, each of which helps to set the other. First, why in the modern era did Jews produce scarcely any creative work of the front rank until only the last century? Second, why was there then this amazing harvest of achievement? Jews tend naturally to be much more excited by the second question than the first. I have often heard them discuss it and often discussed it with them. The trouble with the answers they most commonly produce is that they fail to accommodate the facts behind the first question. One explanation, offered with extreme reluctance to a non-Jew (and for that reason, I am sure, much more commonly believed than expressed), is that Jews are specially gifted in some innate way. People who think this are really just formulating the ancient doctrine of the “chosen people” in terms of genetics. There is no evidence for its truth. German and 203203

American racists have tried very hard in our century to produce scientific evidence for this kind of difference between races, and always failed. Jews, of all people, ought by now to be prejudiced against Master Race theories. But perhaps that is asking too much of human nature. One’s natural reaction to disparagement is to assert one’s special value, and centuries of persecution can only have given the Chosen People doctrine added appeal. Nevertheless the belief by people of any race that they are inherently superior is beneath respect, and I have no hesitation in saying of this one, as of the others, that it is superstitious, obviously false, and nasty. Most Jews, I am sure, do not believe it. The explanation most commonly offered is that the cultural distinction of modern Jewry is due to their unique religious and intellectual tradition. But what this implies is the exact opposite of the truth. For it is only Jews who have escaped from their religious and intellectual tradition who have achieved greatness. Every single Jew I can think of who has reached the highest levels of attainment in the modern era has repudiated Judaism: Spinoza, Heine and Mendelssohn if anyone wants to include them, Marx, Disraeli, Freud, Mahler, Einstein, Trotsky, Kafka, Wittgenstein, Schoenberg. (Schoenberg returned publicly to the faith in 1933, but made it clear that this was not a religious conversion but a declaration of solidarity with the Jews in face of Nazi persecution.) So it seems, rather, that freedom from that most tribal, observance-ridden and past-orientated of religions is a precondition of true and deep originality. And here we come to what seems to me the right explanation — and one that answers the first as well as the second of our two questions. Originality in fundamentals is inimical to any closed, authoritarian culture, because such cultures do not and can not allow their basic assumptions to be questioned. The two greatest moralists there have ever been, Socrates and Jesus, were executed for doing precisely this. Only in comparative freedom — or at least when authority was on the defensive — has individual creativeness flourished: in ancient Greece, the Renaissance, Protestant Europe, or the rest of Europe since the dawn of liberal thought. Authoritarian cultures — ancient Rome, classical China and India, medieval Christendom, contemporary Communism — have been by comparison barren. Of course they have had their brilliant lawgivers, scholars, theologians, establishment artists and so on within the system, but any man who denied the basic assumptions of the system itself was crushed — in most cases tortured and killed. In such circumstances radical innovation is impossible. The great flowering of European drama, poetry, science, mathematics, philosophy, music, began with the emancipation of these activities from the Church. Not surprisingly it took two or three generations to reach full growth. So the peak came in the seventeenth century (though music, as always, was behind the others — just as, later, the high point of Romanticism in music came when the romantic Movement in literature was already spent). There could have been no question of its happening within the Church. Some of the greatest geniuses of all, like Copernicus and Galileo, had their work officially condemned by the Church. The Inquisition which tried Galileo had thousands of less eminent intellectuals imprisoned, tortured or executed. In Italy scientific work was stamped out altogether and did not revive for generations. But in all this the Jews had little part — except in Spain, where they were treated in a way that foreshadowed the Nazis. Over most of Europe they were still living in a closed religious culture of their own, where they were condemned to remain until the ghettoes were opened. The banning of instrumental music and graven images from the Synagogue meant that within that culture the development of the non-literary arts was just as impossible as the development of science. And when the ghettoes were finally opened the Jews had a parallel renaissance of their own, with all the same broad features: the lapse of two or three generations between emancipation and the peak of achievement; the dissociation of the greatest creative geniuses from the closed religious and intellectual tradition; the lifelong struggle against institutional prejudice and personal resentment — 204204 and, before the end, murder on an enormous scale, highly organised and state-supported. If this explanation is the right one the Jewish renaissance was a once-for-all phenomenon which can neither continue nor happen again. As time goes on the difference between Jews and non-Jews is bound to diminish. Now that most Jews, like most other Westerners, have abandoned religion the chief thing that gives them any active sense of being Jewish is anti-Semitism, above all the recent attempt to murder them all. Orthodox Jews dread and hate integration, but they are a minority, and now that the taboo on intermarriage has weakened for all but a few it is bound to happen in the long run.’

He goes on, ‘And what, it may be asked, has all this to do with Wagner? The answer is that he was the first person to see any of it — a small part, perhaps, but as much as it was possible for anyone in the nineteenth century to do, and more than anyone else in that century did. And because of his anti-Semitism he has never been given credit for it. The Jewish renaissance has happened almost entirely since his day, and he did not foresee it, but he did regard the fact that there had been no great Jewish composers up to his time as something requiring explanation. The explanation he offered was almost unbelievably original, and largely correct. The key document is an article he published in 1859 called Das Judentum in der Musik (Judaism in Music). Its central argument is as follows. A really great creative artist is one who, in freely expressing his own fantasies, needs, aspiration and conflicts, articulates those of a whole society. This is made possible by the fact that, through his earliest relationships, mother tongue, upbringing and all his first experience of life, the cultural heritage on which he has entered at birth is woven into the whole fabric of his personality. He has a thousand roots in it of which he is unaware, nourishing him below the level of consciousness, so that when he speaks for himself he quite unconsciously speaks for others. Now in Wagner’s time it was impossible for a Jewish artist to be in this position. The ghettoes of Western Europe had only begun to be opened in the wake of the French Revolution, and their abolition was going on throughout the nineteenth century. The Jewish composers of Wagner’s day were among the very first emancipated Jews, pastless in the society in which they were living and working. They spoke its language with, literally, a foreign accent. In composing its music — including, quite often, Church music — they were turning their backs on a distinctive and entirely different musical tradition of their own. So their art could not possibly be “the conscious and proclaimed unconscious”. which Wagner believed all great art to be. It could only be synthesized at the upper levels of the personality. In fact its articulated content could originate no deeper than the composer’s conscious intentions. So however great his gifts it could only be shallow by the standards of great art. “Mendelssohn”, Wagner wrote, “has shown us that a Jew can have the richest abundance of specific talents, be a man of the broadest yet most refined culture, of the loftiest, most impeccable integrity, and yet not be able — not even once, with the help of all these qualities — to produce in us that deep, heart-seizing, soul-searching experience that we expect from art.” One does not need to share Wagner’s view of Mendelssohn to see that this argument is substantially correct. The obvious thing about it that Wagner failed to see is that of its very nature it relates to a transition period, during which its application was bound to diminish as the descendents of emancipated Jews became more and more absorbed into society. On the basis of his own argument he ought to have expected great Jewish composers to emerge in the future. Even so, when they in fact did emerge in the persons of Mahler and Schoenberg, his argument still illuminated something important about them. (Neither of these, incidentally, held Wagner’s anti-Semitism against him: they both idolized him.) Both men were alienated from two cultures — each rejected the Jewish religion yet was a lifelong victim of anti-Semitism — and the music of both gave full expression to their personal and artistic isolation, even to its neurotic aspects. What was happening then and since is that while with the passage of generations 205205

Jews were integrating with the Western cultural tradition, that tradition was disintegrating to meet them half way. The atomization of society, the increase in pace of change and hence problems of adjustment, the consequent rootlessness of the individual, his alienation from himself, from society, and from the past of both — these have become major themes of the culture of our time. Our age is characterized by superwars, the mass migration of entire populations, the scattering of dozens of millions of individual refugees, and by genocide. With every one of these things Jews are likely to be identified, and emotionally involved, more deeply than other people. At last they are in a position unconsciously to articulate the deepest concerns of the age they live in. The Jew has become the archetypal modern man. But this is only another way of saying that the rest of us are now almost as badly off as the Jews — which culturally speaking is true. And this is another reason for believing that we are now in the final stage before integration. The degree of Wagner’s originality in this, as in so many things, is almost bewildering. As usual he was offering explanations for what other people had not even noticed. But the trouble, again as usual, is that what was marvellous about his contribution was commingled with what was repellant to such an extent that it got overlooked and rejected along with the rest. In this case the argument I have salvaged from his anti-Semitic writings is the baby that was thrown out with the bathwater. The bathwater was foul. Wagner’s anti-Semitism is strikingly similar in its personal origins to Hitler’s. The worst period of deprivation and humiliation he ever had to suffer was the two and a half years during which he tried and failed to establish himself in Paris, which was then the world capital of opera, at a time when the roost was ruled by Meyerbeer, a Jew, and the next figure to him was Halévy, also a Jew. It came close to breaking his spirit. (His fears found expression in a short story he wrote at the time about a young German composer dying in Paris in neglect, poverty and despair.) Even in its duration the period of the humiliation was roughly the same as Hitler’s in the Vienna dosshouse. Both men were the sons of petty officials, both were megalomaniac, and in both of them the experience of being brought to the edge of starvation by society’s total disregard of them seems to have activated a sense of persecution which bordered on paranoia, which cast “the Jews” as the villains, and which became a mad hatred that never afterwards died. Wagner — ferociously conscious of his neglected genius, and utterly destitute — hated the works whose popular acceptance barred the way to his own. He saw them as gimcrack and fraudulent, which they were. In retrospect he hated them all the more because in desperation he had succumbed to the temptation to write like them himself. “ ‘Grand Opera’ stood there before me in all its scenic and musical pomp, its emotionalism, its striking effects, its sheer musical bulk. And the object of my artistic ambition became not just to copy it but to outdo it with reckless prodigality on all fronts.” So he wrote Rienzi, which von Bülow once described as Meyerbeer’s best opera. The canon Wagner laid down in later life begins with the work he wrote after that, The Flying Dutchman. Rienzi has not been performed at Bayreuth to this day. Wagner attributed all that was meretricious in Paris opera to the Jewishness of its composers. “Of necessity what comes out of attempts by Jews to make art must have the property of coldness, of non-involvement, to the point of being trivial and absurd. We are forced to categorize the Jewish period in modern music as the period of consummate uncreativeness — stability run to seed.” Jewish music not only did but was bound to cultivate the surface qualities of attractiveness, technical skill, facility, fluency, charm, glitter, surprise, the striking effect. It was a succession of effects in the bad sense, “effects without causes”. This was why it found its natural expression in the theatre of unmotivated spectacle — Grand Opera. To write works of this kind was to make use of art as a mere means — a means of entertainment, a means of giving pleasure and getting to be liked, a means of achieving status, money, fame. For Jews it was a means of making their way in alien society. “Like all the Parisian composers of our day Halévy burned with enthusiasm 206206 for his art for just so long as he needed it to help him scale the heights of success. Once this was done and he had entered the ranks of privileged and lionized composers he cared nothing beyond turning out operas and getting paid for them. In Paris fame is everything, the artist’s delight — and his destruction.” The first eight words of this quotiation betray Wagner’s double standard in the very act of trying to dissemble it. Gentile or Jew, nearly all artists who have been famous in their day and subsequently disregarded have been people who used their art to please others and win social and financial success for themselves. There is a special irony in the fact that of all the really great composers the least indifferent to social and financial rewards was Wagner. In Wagner’s defence it can be said that his central argument was correct, and decades ahead of its time; that it illuminated many side issues; that he acknowledged the eminence of Jewish intellectuals as distinct from creative artists; and that he attacked the Christian tradition as much as he attacked Judaism. Against that it must be said that although the validity of an argument is unaffected by the motives of the person who uses it, it is still a fact that Wagner’s motives in this case were twisted; that what is true in his argument could have been advanced without anti-Semitism, which was therefore superfluous even from his own point of view; and that his attacks on Christianity never had the same personalized venom as his attacks on Judaism. The authority which most people erroneously suppose genius to confer has enabled Wagner’s anti-Semitism to do terrible harm. Quite apart from anything else, Hitler made use of it. So there is poetic justice, although neither logic nor justification, in the fact that among the people who have been most severely damaged by it is Wagner himself.’ This is a much longer quote than usual but as it touched on a number of regularly raised issues I thought it was worth quoting in full. But the question remains: has Wagner been damaged? It seems to me it is the anguish, contention and division among musicians over whether to include Wagner in their repertoires and concerts which causes damage to individual reputations and helps to keep alive old wounds … while Wagner himself goes on largely untouched and undamaged … * * * * * Recently I found myself browsing through some back copies of Petits Propos Culinaires, little booklets devoted to the oddities of food and food preparation. Here are ways to use just about everything, fron caterpillars to cranes, from swans to skunks. For example, one article says, “In winter, many a trapper escaped starvation by bleeding his horse and drinking the blood; cutting off and eating his mule’s ears; eating his leather moccasins, rawhide, red ant cakes, larvae, and boiled black crickets.” But one of the most curious recipes comes in an article by Barbara Kirshenblatt- Gimblett. She writes, “In his pioneering ethnography of Yemenite Jews, Erich Brauer reported that meat was a luxury, particularly among Jews in rural areas. Even in the city, where Jews could buy their meat from the slaughterer, they ate it almost exclusively on the Sabbath and holidays. In the countryside, where Jews had to slaughter the animals themselves, several families would share an animal to provide meat for a Sabbath or festival meat. If, however, after ritually slaughtering the animal, they discovered it was unfit according to Jewish dietary laws, Yemenite Jews in the countryside simply did without meat on that occasion.” After carefully preparing the meat, it is not surprising to learn that virtually every part of the beast was used. So if you are looking for a talking point at your next dinner party, here is their recipe for Geed, which is the penis of the ox or bull. 500 grams penis black pepper 1 tomato, chopped cumin 1 onion chopped saffron cloves of garlic salt 207207

coriander Scald the penis and clean it. Boil 10 minutes, remove and slice. Brown the onion, garlic, coriander in oil. Add penis and fry. Mix (and add) chopped tomato, pepper, cumin, saffron and salt. Cover the pot. Cook over low flame 2 hours, adding a little water from time to time to prevent burning. Serve hot. Season with hilbeh. And hilbeh is a mixture of ground fenugreek seeds that have been soaked in water for two hours, drained, mixed with tomato purée and a little zhuq (a spicy mixture of ground black pepper, caraway seed, cardamon, dried red peppers, garlic, and fresh coriander). Serves four. * * * * * The assumption that there would have been a better outcome in Palestine had Sir Winston Churchill been in power cannot, of course, be tested. But I don’t think the claims made for such an outcome stand up very well when held against some of the decisions he did make. He says in his monumental The Second World War: “The moment was apt for business, so I said, “Let us settle about our affairs in the Balkans. Your armies are in Rumania and Bulgaria. We have interests, missions, and agents there. Don’t let us get at cross-purposes in small ways. So far as Britain and Russia are concerned, how would it do for you to have ninety per cent predominance in Rumania, for us to have ninety per cent of the say in Greece, and go fifty-fifty about Yugoslavia?” While this was being translated I wrote out on a half-sheet of paper: Rumania Russia 90% The others 10% Greece Great Britain (in accord with U.S.A.) 90% Russia 10% Yugoslavia 50-50% Hungary 50-50% Bulgaria Russia 75% The others 25% I pushed this across to Stalin, who had by then heard the translation. There was a slight pause. Then he took his blue pencil and made a large tick upon it, and passed it back to us. It was all settled in no more time than it takes to set down.” Would ‘no more time that it takes to set down’ have provided a better outcome for Israel? I doubt it. It was rush, pressure, impatience ... the lesson from the impatience of 1922 that turned Ireland into a weeping sore was not learnt; it just changed the protagonists and sent British soldiers to their deaths in the 1990s in defence of a status quo which care and patient negotiation and vision in the 1920s could have seen was ultimately untenable. * * * * * November 11th: Kathy Lette Carlos Fuentes November 12th: Janette Turner Hospital November 13th: Robert Louis Stevenson November 14th: Steele Rudd November 15th: William Cowper November 16th: José Saramago November 17th: Auberon Waugh November 18th: C. E. W. Bean Margaret Atwood 208208

November 19th: Mikhail Lomonosov Louis Golding November 20th: Nadine Gordimer Don DeLillo November 21st: Voltaire Harold Nicolson November 22nd: George Eliot November 23rd: Gayl Jones P. K. Page November 24th: Laurence Sterne November 25th: Poul Anderson W. R. Burnett Lope de Vega November 26th: Charles Schulz November 27th: Gail Sheehy James Agee Frank Clune November 28th: Rosie Scott Alexsandr Blok November 29th: Louisa May Alcott November 30th: L. M. Montgomery Changxin Zhang Sir Winston Churchill John Bunyan Sir Philip Sidney * * * * * Women writers have been more influenced by the life and writings of Virginia Woolf than the life and writings of Lucy Maud Montgomery. That ‘A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction’ is brought up so often it must surely still undermine women’s ability to believe in themselves. I find much more to admire in the life of L. M. Montgomery. I was just flipping through Harry Bruce’s Maud: The Life of L.M. Montgomery. She was born in 1874 into a Scottish farming family in the remote Canadian province of Prince Edward Island. Her father was a Montgomery, her mother a Macniell, her cousins Campbells, her husband a MacDonald. She would need the toughness they brought her. Her mother died when she was a baby and she was brought up by her grandparents when her father virtually abandoned her. But her grandparents were old, rigid, stern, puritanical in the worst Presbyterian sense, unsociable, and only too willing to remind her constantly that she owed them everything. As Bruce says, “Both as a girl and as a young woman, Maud lived in a world without electricity. She therefore endured a domestic life that, by today’s standards, was jammed with darkness and drudgery. The amazing thing was that, out of her grueling schedule of chores, she always carved enough time to do some writing.” There were no mod cons, nor were there the servants Virginia Woolf took for granted. She received no encouragement from her grandparents or her father but she was fortunate to live in a countryside she loved and to have the ability to cultivate a rich life in the imagination. After a visit to her father in Saskatchewan she returned to Cavendish in June 1892, and “decided that, to support herself while becoming a professional writer, she should become a schoolteacher. By August she had somehow persuaded her grandparents to allow her to go back to the Cavendish school to study for the entrance exams for Prince of Wales College in Charlottetown. There, she hoped to earn her teacher’s license.” It was only a little one-teacher country school and the entrance exams included 209209

English, French, agriculture, Latin, algebra, geometry and arithmetic. Out of 264 entrants she came in fifth. Charlottetown, the island’s capital, was a town of 11,000 people. Here she boarded while she undertook “a backbreaking load of courses at Prince of Wales College. She enrolled as a First Class student, which meant taking eighteen subjects, including tough ones like trigonometry, Latin, and Greek. ... To succeed in the First Class, students normally spent two years, but Maud finished the whole program in only one.” She then went out to try and find a job. So against her plan were her grandparents that they refused even to let her use a horse to get to interviews. But she was given the one- teacher school at Bideford. “Island children went to school in midsummer in 1894, and it was on July 30, a sweltering Monday, that Maud put in her first day as a teacher. Twenty children had gathered in the big, dirty Bideford schoolhouse, and she quickly sensed that they were not only behind in their studies, but also ignorant in the ways of learning. Still only nineteen, she was nervous.” By August though enrollments “had already climbed to an unwieldy thirty-eight pupils, she warmed to them all. Before she arrived each morning, children covered her desk with fresh flowers. More and more pupils showed up. By mid-September, Maud was responsible for the schooling of forty-eight youngsters.” By the following June, “she had no fewer than sixty pupils under her young wing.” She could not afford to do a university degree but she saved enough to give herself one year at Dalhousie College in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Again she faced the opposition of her grandparents. “ “I don’t believe in girls going to college with the men and cramming their heads full of Latin and Greek and all that nonsense,” Mrs. Rachel Lynde tells Anne Shirley. In real life, such attitudes struck Maud as especially cruel to single women. Without enough education to make their own living, many faced outright poverty, or a humiliating future accepting charity from relatives.” And all this time she was sending out stories and poems to magazines and newspapers, getting things taken but only being paid in copies. But now, in 1896, in her year in Halifax, the money started to come in. In quick succession, she sold two poems and a story for the grand total of $22. But a “young woman could do a lot with twenty-two dollars in 1896. Maud’s whole year’s fees at Prince of Wales College had amounted to only five dollars.” Back home she had to find a school to take her and ended up in Belmont. Here too she wrote and sold poems and stories. “Her free-lance income was not yet big enough to support her totally, but at twenty-three, she could call herself a professional writer.” Then her grandfather died and she was expected to come home and look after her elderly grandmother, now going deaf, racked with rheumatism, so soured that she made visits so unbearable that friends and relatives stopped coming to the farm. “Maud’s fate was inescapable. It was a matter of duty, and if the Presbyterian church had taught her nothing else, it had taught her the duty to do right. It was not right in 1898 to put old people in the care of strangers just because they were a nuisance.” Her grandmother was also responsible for the local post office which meant in effect that Maud became postmistress, housekeeper, farmer, and carer. But she still wrote; “Maud cheerfully told her journal that during 1899 she’d earned $96.88 as a writer. Even though that was merely half what she’d earned as a teacher, and even though editors still rejected nine out of ten of her submissions, Maud never doubted that one day she’d make a good living with her pen.” Then in 1901, “when Maud’s first cousin Prescott Macniell agreed to live with his grandmother, the old woman allowed Maud to move to Halifax to work for the Daily Echo. The newspaper paid her only five dollars a week, but Maud wanted both newspaper experience and a foothold in journalism. The months at the paper would turn out to be her last fling at an independent life for nine dark years.” 210210

She did proof-reading, society notes, prepared serials for reproduction, even had her own column. “Her salary covered only her meals and bedroom, so just to keep herself dressed, she had to start selling to magazines the moment she reached Halifax. At first she tried to write in the evening, but she was too tired to do anything except darn and sew. Some mornings she rose at six to write, as she’d done as a teacher in Belmont. Now, however, she found that in a chilly room, before sunup, on an empty stomach, she could no longer string words together. She had two choices: crawl back to the Island, defeated, or learn to write in the din at the Echo. Maud had always believed that to write creatively, she had to be utterly alone in a silent room. “I could never have even imagined that I could possibly write anything in a newspaper office,” she wrote shortly after joining the Echo, “with rolls of proof shooting down every ten minutes, people coming and conversing, telephones ringing, and machines being thumped and dragged overhead. I would have laughed at the idea ... But the impossible has happened. I am of one mind with the Irishman who said you could get used to anything, even to being hanged! All my spare time here I write.” But she had to go home and take over the care of her grandmother again. “All writers must resolve the conflict between the demands of their calling and the demands of everyday living. Before, during, and after Maud’s time, this challenge was harder for women than for men, but Maud had it tough by any standards. She was a cook, duster, seamstress, dishwasher, and floor scrubber, and she served as a kind of unpaid innkeeper for relatives on summer vacations. The older her grandmother got, the bigger Maud’s post office responsibilities became. At church, she played the organ, ran the choir, and taught Sunday School. She belonged to both the Cavendish Women’s Institute and the Literary.” ... “In striving to be a writer, however, Maud faced bigger obstacles than her grandparents. Today, writing fiction is an accepted and even glamorous career for women, but in the late years of the male-dominated Victorian Era, on an island of farmers in a remote corner of the British Empire, a woman’s gaining fame as a novelist was as unlikely as a blizzard in July.” “In going about her work, Maud was practical, professional, and superbly organized. She knew she’d never be a great writer ... and only hoped to become known in her chosen profession as “a good workman.” She was already that. With no fewer than seventy British, American, and Canadian periodicals on her list of buyers, she found that merely addressing envelopes ate up a fair bit of time.” But her writing was both the means to keep her sane in the years when there seemed no end to her servitude, and her income. “By 1903, American magazines were actually asking her for stories and were billing her as a “well-known and popular contributor.” That was the first year in which she earned five hundred dollars. In 1904, she made six hundred dollars, and in 1906, nearly eight hundred dollars, more than triple what she’d have earned as a teacher. At thirty-two, she had become one of Canada’s first successful free-lance writers.” To try to write a book she had to carve out extra time as she couldn’t afford to stop her production of ‘pot-boilers’ both because they were her income and also, if her book didn’t succeed, she needed the good relationships she’d built up with editors as a reliable contributor. She scraped up hours here and there and wrote her first book and called it Anne of Green Gables. It was published in 1908 and, as they say, the rest is history. Her grandmother died in 1911 and Maud married the Rev. Ewan MacDonald. It meant exchanging her beloved Prince Edward Island for Ontario, and her overly narrow life with her grandmother for the overly public and busy life of a minister’s wife. But it brought her two sons, her first born when she was 36, and the increasing fame of her writing. 211211

Her writing sometimes shows her lack of time and preoccuption; perhaps with a different life her writing would have been broader. But she had learned the hard way the greatest needs of the free-lance writer, discipline, persistence, and a belief that you can make your own success. It doesn’t need rich husbands, influential friends, university degrees, expensive software. She had learnt much in the life she’d been given and her writing is permeated by a warmth, confidence, and self-reliance. By all means give your daughters Virginia Woolf to read for polished prose, but if their belief in themselves matters give them L. M. Montgomery. * * * * * December 1st: Max Stout Henry Williamson December 2nd: Mary Elwyn Patchett December 3rd: Joseph Conrad December 4th: Thomas Carlyle December 5th: Christina Rosetti December 6th: Evelyn Underhill Susana Moodie Eric Newby * * * * * I remember coming upon the T.S. Eliot poem ‘Little Giddings’ and thinking that it reminded me of something else.

Time present and time past, Are both perhaps present in time future, And time future contained in time past. If all time is eternally present All time is unredeemable ...

At the still point of the turning world. But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden ...

Sudden in a shaft of sunlight Even while the dust moves There rises the hidden laughter Of children in the foliage Quick now, here, now, always— Ridiculous the waste sad time Stretching before and after ... etc …

Finally, it came to me. It was a little like the Dorothy Sayers’ poem in Gaudy Night:

Here then at home, by no more storms distrest, Folding laborious hands we sit, wings furled; Here in close perfume lies the rose-leaf curled. Here the sun stands and knows not east nor west, Here no tide runs; we have come, last and best, From the wide zone in dizzying circles hurled To that still centre where the spinning world Sleeps on its axis, to the heart of rest.

Lay on thy whips, O Love, that me upright, Poised on the perilous point, in no lax bed 212212

May sleep, as tension at the verberant core Of music sleeps; for, if thou spare to smite, Staggering, we stoop, stooping, fall dumb and dead, And, dying so, sleep our sweet sleep no more.

She wrote, or at least published her poem first. Did it influence Eliot or are the images common to both poems images with a long and vigorous life? While I was pondering this I came upon the Evelyn Underhill poem:

Within thy sheltering darkness spin the spheres; Within the shaded hollow of thy wings. The life of things, The changeless pivot of the passing years— These in thy bosom lie. Restless we seek thy being; to and fro Upon our little twisting earth we go: We cry, “Lo, there!” When some new avatar thy glory does declare, When some new prophet of thy friendship sings, And in his tracks we run Like an enchanted child, that hastes to catch the sun.

And shall the soul thereby Unto the All draw nigh ? Shall it avail to plumb the mystic deeps Of flowery beauty, scale the icy steeps Of perilous thought, thy hidden Face to find, Or tread the starry paths to the utmost verge of the sky? Nay, groping dull and blind Within the sheltering dimness of thy wings— Shade that their splendour flings Athwart Eternity— We, out of age-long wandering, but come Back to our Father’s heart, where now we are at home.

This, in its turn, predates both Eliot and Sayers. So, perhaps, no matter how far back I might go I would still find similar sentiments and images being recycled? Certainly this thought was in my mind when I came upon the Sara Coleridge poem ‘Prayer for Tranquillity’—

Dear Lord, who, at thy blessed will, Didst make the raging wind be still, And, smooth the tossing of the Sea, Oh! cause our stormy griefs to flee, Our wild tempestuous thoughts allay, And fires of passion send away. Conduct us here to perfect peace, When all our earthly transports cease, And lastly, while to Thee we cling, Our souls to that blest haven bring, Above the sphere of Care and Woe Were earthly blasts can never blow, 213213

With Thee to dwell, supremely blest, Anchored on everlasting rest.

Different ages will use speech slightly differently, different poets will bring different abilities, but while we are all dipping into the same basic pot a sense of familiarity will accompany all our writing—no matter how hard we strive to write something that is ‘new’, ‘different’, ‘unique’ ... perhaps we are worrying too much about our ‘uniqueness’ and not enough about the possibilities still inherent in age-old images and ideas? * * * * * I was looking for mystery writer Susan Moody and came upon Susanna Moodie; perhaps she spells her name variously I thought but no, this Susanna was an interesting nineteenth century Englishwoman who became a pioneer in Canada and wrote of her experiences; and was written about by Margaret Atwood. Nothing to do with the very modern Susan whom I heard say that evil is much more interesting, the ‘why should the devil have all the good tunes’, ‘bad girls get all the fun’ etc. Now I’ve heard these sentiments quite often and I’m not sure I agree. What are all these wonderful tunes the devil gets? ‘Night on Bald Mountain’? Some rap tunes extolling violence? ‘Botany Bay’? Do they compare with the ‘Ode to Joy’ or the ‘Messiah’? I think what people really mean when they’re contrasting ‘good’ and ‘evil’ is that the law-abiding, the pious, the well-behaved, the decent, can be rather bland. But how many of us have met a truly good person? How many of us, for that matter, have met a truly evil person? True goodness is a radiance, a joy that envelops you, that makes life seem full of greater richness and possibilities. True evil is dull because it is a life that is going nowhere, that has no possibilities, it is stagnant, chilling and sometimes repellant. In Elmer Gantry we have what fiction writers like: the larger-than-life, the brash, the incorrigibly greedy, selfish and self-indulgent, done up in a wonderfully theatrical package—while those who try to be decent and compassionate are, let’s face it, a bit pathetic and forgettable; as soon as it comes to a bit of push and shove they fade away into the outer darkness. But if they were truly good would they have given up so easily? And was Elmer truly bad? How many writers line up to visit Martin Bryant or chat over lunch with Ivan Milat? They just aren’t very interesting. Take the whole Nazi edifice away and put Hitler in a cell at Risdon Prison with an over-worked staff too busy to pamper his tantrums and you’d have a tedious little man with a hygiene problem. We toss around words such as good and bad, good and evil, crime, sin, wrong-doing etc—but what precisely do we mean and do we all mean the same thing? With the controversy over mandatory sentencing which says these questions can be reduced to a formula (which has meant that at the same time we see a boy going to prison for stealing a box of texta-colours and Alan Bond walking free after stealing more than a billion dollars) it is very clear that these words are always filtered through a range of other questions, from “what the community wants”, “is it a vote-winner” to whether further probing can be justified on the grounds of expense, or whether it will take us further into the murky depths of corporate, political, religious or social wrong-doing. Undoubtedly a great many other people knew what Alan Bond was doing and either actively helped, benefited in some way or another, or tacitly kept their mouths shut or their eyes averted. I was pondering on sin when I came upon William Barclay’s interesting piece: “The New Testament uses five different words for sin.” These are: “(i) The commonest word is hamartia. This was originally a shooting word and means a missing of the target. To fail to hit the target was hamartia. Therefore sin is the 214214 failure to be what we might have been and could have been. Charles Lamb has a picture of a man named Samuel le Grice. Le Grice was a brilliant youth who never fulfilled his promise. Lamb says that there were three stages in his career. There was a time when people said, “He will do something.” There was a time when people said, “He could do something if he would.” There was a time when people said, “He might have done something, if he had liked.” Edwin Muir writes in his Autobiography: “After a certain age all of us, good and bad, are grief stricken because of powers within us which have never been realized: because, in other words, we are not what we should be.” That precisely is hamartia; and that is precisely the situation in which we are all involved. Are we as good husbands or wives as we could be? Are we as good sons or daughters as we could be? Are we as good workmen or employers as we could be? Is there anyone who will dare to claim that he is all he might have been, and has done all he could have done? When we realise that sin means the failure to hit the target, the failure to be all that we might have been and could have been, then it is clear that every one of us is a sinner. (ii) The second word for sin is parabasis, which literally means a stepping across. Sin is the stepping across the line which is drawn between right and wrong. Do we always stay on the right side of the line which divides honesty and dishonesty? Is there never any such thing as a petty dishonesty in our lives? Do we always stay on the right side of the line which divides truth and falsehood? Do we never, by word or by silence, twist or evade or distort the truth? Do we always stay on the right side of the line which divides kindness and courtesy from selfishness and harshness? Is there never an unkind action or a discourteous word in our lives? When we think of it in this way, there can be none who can claim always to have remained on the right side of the dividing line. (iii) The third word for sin is paraptoma, which means a slipping across. It is the kind of slip which a man might make on a slippery or an icy road. It is not so deliberate as parabasis. Again and again we speak of words slipping out; again and again we are swept away by some impulse or passion, which has momentarily gained control of us, and which has made us lose our self-control. The best of us can slip into sin when for the moment we are off our guard. (iv) The fourth word for sin is anomia, which means lawlessness. Anomia is the sin of the man who knows the right, and who yet does the wrong; the sin of the man who knows the law, and who yet breaks the law. The first of all the human instincts is the instinct to do what we like; and therefore there come into any man’s life times when he wishes to kick over the traces, and to defy the law, and to do or to take the forbidden thing. In Mandalay, Kipling makes the old soldier say:

“Ship me somewheres east of Suez, where the best is like the worst. Where there ain’t no Ten Commandments, an’ a man can raise a thirst.”

Even if there are some who can say that they have never broken any of the Ten Commandments, there are none who can say that they have never wished to break any of them. (v) The fifth word for sin is the word opheilema which is the word used in the body of the Lord’s Prayer; and opheilema means a debt. It means a failure to pay that which is due, a failure in duty. There can be no man who will ever dare to claim that he has perfectly fulfilled his duty to man and to God: Such perfection does not exist among men. So, then, when we come to see what sin really is, we come to see that it is a universal disease in which every man is involved. Outward respectability in the sight of 215215 man, and inward sinfulness in the sight of God may well go hand in hand.” But murder mysteries are not about sin. They are only about those people who have transgressed the laws a particular nation at a particular time has chosen to put on its statute book. I came across the question, in Introducing Law: ‘Did you know that in the State of Victoria in June 1984 there were 831,934 laws for you to break?’ It is simply not possible for anyone to know every committable crime and misdemeanour and infringement. Which is why, in the best sense, we need religion. Because it goes to the heart of the matter. Are good people boring? First find your genuinely good person ... then mystery writers can pronounce ... * * * * * Susana Moodie was born in England and began writing to help ends meet after her father died in 1818. She wrote what she could sell, articles, stories and poems mainly for magazines, but she also brought out two anti-slavery books: The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave and Negro Slavery Described by a Negro. Then she married and went to Canada where again she turned to writing romantic fiction and magazine pieces to help keep the pot boiling. Her best-known books came out in the 1850s, her books of personal experience in the Canadian wilderness, Roughing it in the Bush and Life in the Clearings, and a novel Flora Lyndsay. She died in Toronto in 1885. She sounds an interesting and brave-hearted woman and you might like to track down Margaret Atwood’s biography. * * * * * December 7th: Noam Chomsky December 8th: Jean Garrigue Horace December 9th: John Milton Jean de Brunhoff * * * * * You may remember the little bit about Thomas Ellwood saying to John Milton after reading Paradise Lost, “Thou hast said much here of Paradise Lost but what hast thou to say of Paradise Found?” Had Milton already a sequel in mind? Did he say “What a good idea”? Did he go away and think, ‘Of course, why didn’t I think of that’? Did he feel sufficient respect for Ellwood to give the idea serious thought? We don’t know for certain. But Ellwood says that later, “he showed me his second Poem, called Paradise Regained; and in a pleasant Tone said to me, “This is owing to you; for you put into my Head by the Question you put to me at Chalfont; which before I had not thought of.” But the question might be—who was Thomas Ellwood? He was born in 1639 in modest comfort, his father being the squire of Crowell in Oxfordshire and he grew up to be a pleasant kind attractive young man, not remarkably intelligent or well-educated, yet it was given to him to play an important role in the lives of three eminent seventeenth century figures. As secretary to the blind Milton he both read to him and wrote down his dictated material. He described Milton as a “Gentleman of Great Note for Learning throughout the learned World” and says that Milton “perceiving with what earnest desire I pursued Learning, gave me not only all the Encouragement, but all the Help he could. For having a curious Ear, he understood by my Tone, when I understood what I read, and when I did not; and accordingly would stop me, examine me, and open the most difficult Passages to me.” . As childhood playmate to Gulielma Springett who was to become the wife of William Penn, founder of the ‘Holy Experiment’ of Pennsylvania and the ‘City of Brotherly Love’, Philadelphia, it was Thomas Ellwood who gave her the love and support which helped her and her children survive the long periods of absence; it might even be 216216 suggested that William Penn’s life would’ve been different without the undemanding but unswerving loyalty and affection of Thomas Ellwood. And Thomas Ellwood was the scribe and editor for a considerable part of George Fox’s Journal, taken down in 1690 when he was also trying to write a History of the Old Testament. As Frances Anne Budge said in a book with the delightful title of Thomas Ellwood, and Other Worthies of the Olden Time which came out in 1891, “In 1669 Thomas Ellwood married a friend named Mary Ellis, who became an esteemed minister. Their home was at Hunger Hill, in the parish of Aversham, Buckinghamshire. But scant details are left us of the remaining forty-three years of Thomas Ellwood’s life. He was an industrious author, and we are told that he was particularly “qualified by spiritual wisdom and great strength and depth of judgment” to defend the truths he held dear. In 1690 he copied and prepared for the press the journal of George Fox, which was printed in folio in the following year. His principal work is “The Sacred History of the Old and New Testaments.” ... Thomas Ellwood was much respected by his neighbours, and his doors were open to the poor and sick.” He died in 1713. Frederick Nicholson in Quakers and the Arts says “Thomas was ‘a man of a comely aspect, of a free and generous disposition, a gentleman born and bred, a scholar, a true Christian’. ... He had enjoyed the rare privilege of reading the manuscript of Paradise Lost and had prompted the writing of the sequel, Paradise Regained. It is interesting to speculate whether Milton would have composed the sequel without Ellwood’s suggestion.” And “No one could describe Ellwood as a great poet: he is scarcely a notable minor poet, but his posthumous Collection of Poems on various subjects contains some poems of real merit.” Nicholson praises The History of the Life of Thomas Ellwood as an “Ingenuous record of personal fortunes and misfortunes, of domestic and social manners, of Quaker sufferings and fellowship. Ellwood’s style is easy and the narrative flows smoothly in a clear stream of spiritual and emotional sincerity. It is an unself-conscious revelation of graciousness, gallantry and genuine modesty not easily found in Puritans. He had a natural capacity for leadership and a tender solicitude for his fellows. In prison he was cheerful, resourceful and helpful—as when he applied balsam and dressed a prisoner’s wound with a feather; or sat cross-legged sewing ‘night-waistcoats of red and yellow flannel for women and children’. Out of prison Thomas Ellwood was continually helping people ... ” Ellwood expressed something of his own philosophy in: Nor can true Love to hatred ever turn Although it never should acceptance find; But, like a lamp, clear to the last would burn And thereby manifest a noble mind.

* * * * * December 10th: George Macdonald * * * * * This morning I was in a conversation that went something like this: Me, holding out book: “Do you want to read it before I take it back to the library? It’s mainly defending Lord of the Rings as a great book.” Ken: “Well, it is.” Me: “But would you devote a whole book to saying so?” Ken: “No.” Strictly speaking Joseph Pearce’s book Tolkien: Man and Myth is both biography and defence. But as it was obviously inspired by polls that put Lord of the Rings as the greatest book of the twentieth century, at least by English readers and book-buyers, the book in many ways overshadows the author. Perhaps this is just as well. I found I came away liking Tolkien less as a person. 217217

But in pondering on the response both of readers and critics I felt several things hadn’t been taken in to account. As Tolkien tends to be a writer first come across in either childhood or adolescence, the kind of affectionate nostalgia which often causes readers to nominate quite modest books as their favourites comes into play. I see nothing wrong with this. Except that confusing affection and quality can get in the way of a realistic appraisal. (I remain a fan of L. M. Montgomery but if someone suggested Anne of Green Gables as a great book of the twentieth century I would see this kind of response coming into play. Yet, though it has faults, I continue to see it as both a joyful and a special book. And I understand why people continue to nominate writers such as Norman Lindsay, May Gibbs and Richmal Crompton with a similar sense of nostalgia-cum-worth.) And this overlaps with the question of the critical response of various teachers, reviewers and critics as opposed to readers. Someone whose business is books tends to read such numbers that it becomes harder and harder for a particular book to rise to the surface as out-and-away the best. The books first come across in childhood, even now when children’s shelves bulge, still tend to have the quality of the first opening on a particular place, subject, time, world ... they have that special bright quality of being the first, like opening an Advent calendar on a new window each day ... It is true too that not everyone looks upon Lord of the Rings with affectionate nostalgia. “It was an extremely violent book. Battle after ambush after vicious attack. Not a whiff of peace, love and vegetarian cigarette papers, yet the hippies worshipped it and recently it had been voted the Book of the Century by the British reading public.” (Hour of the Tigress by Irene Lin-Chandler.) Perhaps little furry fantasy creatures can get away with more than school bullies. I must admit that I have problems with fantasy. And I think that the blurring of the lines between myth, fable, fairy tale and fantasy gets in the way of explaining why I am not particularly fond of this genre. But myth, fable and fairy tale have a quality which fantasy does not require. They have a magical dimension of some kind—talking animals, a ‘God’ or ‘Gods’ that communicate in various ways with human beings, flying horses, spells or magic potions—yet they are still about real worlds just as science fiction has a base in science fact. But fantasy, though it may be a beautifully told story, beautifully written, does not require this link (so that in one respect stories such as Alice in Wonderland, The Princess and the Goblin, or The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe are closer to fairy tales than fantasy). I think it could be argued that all fiction contains elements of fantasy but to argue that a fantasy world is in the nature of a myth which can tell us truths about our lives and our world I find disingenuous. It remains the author’s creation and the author always holds good and evil in an artificial and carefully manipulated relationship. One such manipulation is that the heroes go out to meet their fate and make their decisions; the Lord of the Rings like many such books is a ‘quest’ or ‘journey’ book. It suggests that good and evil are waiting out there and that you will meet them and make choices. Yet good and evil are found at their most insidious, their most ‘grey’, their most confusing, their most layered, in our homes and families. Every day, year in and year out, we struggle with the need to determine instantly whether our children’s actions are ‘naughty’, ‘mischievious’, ‘wrong’, ‘malicious’, or equally the result of misunder- standing, lack of example, bad influence, a prank or game gone wrong or got out of hand, have they seen our ‘double-standards’, are mother and father sending different messages, are they the result of jealousy, sibling rivalry, are teachers, playmates, radio, computer games, television, books, all pushing our children in different confusing ways (pushing us for that matter); how should we respond, what should we say, what is an appropriate response ... Sometimes the problems come, unexpectedly, to people varyingly prepared for momentous moral choices. Philip Hallie in Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed wrote, “On this particular day, I was reading in an anthology of documents from the Holocaust, and I came 218218 across a short article about a little village in the mountains of southern France ... About halfway down the third page of the account of this village, I was annoyed by a strange sensation on my cheeks. The story was so simple and so factual that I had found it easy to concentrate upon it, not upon my own feelings. And so, still following the story, and thinking about how neatly some of it fit into the old patterns of persecution, I reached up to my cheek to wipe away a bit of dust, and I felt tears upon my fingertips. Not one or two drops; my whole cheek was wet.” But the people of Le Chambon found that following their consciences was not in their personal or community self-interest. They found, “The righteous must often pay a price for their righteousness: their own ethical purity”. And, “Following their consciences meant refusing to hate or kill any human being. And in this lies their deepest difference from the other aspects of World War II. Human life was too precious for them to be taken for any reason, glorious and vast though that reason might be. Their consciences told them to save as many lives as they could, even if doing this meant endangering the lives of all the villagers; and they obeyed their consciences. But acts of conscience are not important news ... ” I have read Philip Hallie’s book twice; I feel sure I will want to read it again. I cannot say that for Tolkien. * * * * * I must admit the idea of what people see as the century’s “greatest book” intrigues me. So I decided to run a little survey of my own. I prepared slips to say: WHAT DO YOU SEE AS THE 20th CENTURY’S GREATEST BOOK? FICTION NON-FICTION (Can be a novel, collection of short stories, (Can be biography, travel, poems, plays etc) history, science etc) Name ...... Or circle: Male Female if you prefer. What is your favourite book if different from either of the above?

I thought I would try to get replies from both people I knew and strangers; not a significant response in statistical terms but enough to be interesting. But I soon realised that people were conflating 3 questions: (1) What do you think is the greatest book, (2) what is your favourite book, (3) what do you regard as the most influential book? They would even, sometimes, add in a further question: what book do you remember from your childhood with most affection? People would say things like “Oh, The Woman’s Room by Marilyn French made such an impact on me” or “Keri Hulme’s The Bone People had me in tears” or “I’ve read and re-read Interview with a Vampire by Anne Rice”. (And yes, several people nominated Tolkien.) “I just loved—” I also noticed something curious. The more devoted a reader a person was, the harder they found it to come up with an answer. They would sometimes just laugh and shrug and say, “Oh, I really don’t think I can choose.” Of course, all the questions may come to rest in the one book but I think that would be very rare. So I’m not sure that I would believe the result of any Best Book survey unless I could be sure this kind of rigour was built in to it. Then I was faced with the question—what would I answer myself. I simply couldn’t decide! Oh, such-and-such, of course, but ... I have problems with ... well, what about ... good, but not great? Perhaps ... but ... so-and-so is a great writer but I’m not sure that one book stands out ... I always found such-and-such a bit pretentious ... and so it went. I thought if I went and wandered up and down the library shelves something would be sure to leap at me. Of course! I would say. I spent a half hour or so in both the Hobart and Glenorchy libraries without coming to any decision. Well, what about Nobel laureates? Surely that would be a collection of Great Books. I need only stab with a pin! But I discovered that of the winners in the 20th century I had 219219 only read something, not necessarily their best-known or best-regarded book, of a mere forty or so of winners. I wasn’t impressed with my record. So can I talk of a great book coming from such a limited background of reading? Yet, I don’t suppose anyone has read every ‘great book’, not even the most dedicated critic or teacher or editor or publisher. Well, the books on my own shelf are there because I think they’re special, presumably, in one way or another. I went and pondered but by the time I’d cut out all that were not 20th century, all that were there for reasons of information or sentiment, it was beginning to look rather sparse. So what if I broke down the categories into bite-size chunks. After working through them, what would I be left with? But it was just as hard to decide on Best Mystery or Best Play or Best Children’s Story as Greatest Book— The Mercury in 1996 published a list of 100 favourites of all time, chosen by 19 Australians, but this included books published prior to the 20th century and ‘favourite’ and ‘best’ are two different things. Still, it was interesting. It included three books by Elizabeth Jolley, two each by Patrick White, E. Annie Proulx, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Dorothy L. Sayers, Raymond Chandler, Helen Garner, Evelyn Waugh and David Malouf. But even though it included old favourites such as The Wind in the Willows and Anne of Green Gables and several books I would describe as ‘very good’ I don’t think it contained the greatest book of the twentieth century. And interestingly it had The Hobbit rather than Lord of the Rings as the favourite Tolkien. * * * * * For some reason not known to me I was never able to finish George MacDonald’s book At the Back of the North Wind; I read the Curdie books and whilst not enamoured I had no difficulty in finishing them but somehow each time I set out on this one I’d read a chapter or so then somehow it’d get put aside until the next time I thought I’d have a go at it. Recently I bought a copy in an op-shop and read it right through. I couldn’t precisely pinpoint why I’d never managed to read it all those years ago. But it isn’t a gripping book. In a way none of MacDonald’s prose is. But surprisingly his verse is rollicking and lively and doesn’t seem to groan and sink under that weight of Victorian morality.

Prince Breacan of Denmark was lord of the strand And lord of the billowy sea; Lord of the sea and lord of the land, He might have let maidens be!

A maiden he met with locks of gold, Straying beside the sea: Maidens listened in days of old, And repented grievously.

Wiser he left her in evil wiles, Went sailing over the sea; Came to the lord of the Western Isles: Give me thy daughter, said he.

And if you want the gripping climax you can turn to Stories in English Verse by George G. Loane. Loane says of him, “George MacDonald (1824 - 1905), the son of a Scottish farmer, was brought up in an atmosphere of Calvinism, and after taking his degree at Aberdeen University, he went to London to study for the Congregational ministry. After some years’ work as pastor, his health broke down and he made literature his profession. His first poetry appeared in 1856, and two years later came Phantastes, fairy-tale in prose and verse containing his masterpiece, “Alas! How easily things go wrong.” David 220220

Elginbrod (1862) is probably the best remembered of his novels, which were popular in their day; but one gets the impression of a man whose personal influence was greater even than that of his writings. He lectured with success in America and for some time edited an admirable magazine, Good Words for the Young.” I came upon this little quote in Televangelism: Power and Politics on God’s Frontier: ‘The New York Times and other publications that take note of best-sellers don’t include the sales of Christian books in their listings; if they did, Christian books would predominate.’ In a sense this is the question many writers have grappled with (Morris West leaps to mind, and George MacDonald before him): how to incorporate Christian values in the writing without the reader feeling preached at. MacDonald drew heavily on two strands in his work: the delight in fairytales and in Celtic culture and mythology. The result to my mind is not wholly successful but I think that was simply because MacDonald had only modest writing talent and with a family of eight to support he was often rushed to finish stories and books. Michael Phillips introducing MacDonald’s novel The Fisherman’s Lady says, ‘An interesting frontispiece appears in a 1935 edition of a book dealing with nineteenth-century authors: a composite photograph of a group of eminent Victorian writers—J.A. Froude, Wilkie Collins, Anthony Trollope, W.M. Thackeray, Lord T.B. Macaulay, E.G. Bulwer- Lytton, Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens and George MacDonald. The modern student of the period might easily do a double-take at first glance, asking, “Who is George MacDonald, and what is he doing there?” But as MacDonald’s biographer (Richard Reis) has pointed out, “Such a question would not have occurred to most of MacDonald’s contemporaries. Instead they might have expressed surprise to learn that he would be largely forgotten by the middle of the twentieth century. For throughout the final third of the nineteenth century, George MacDonald’s works were bestsellers and his status as a (writer and Christian) sage was secure. His novels sold, both in Great Britain and in the United States, by the hundreds of thousands of copies; his lectures were popular and widely attended; his poetry earned him at least passing consideration for the laureateship; and his reputation as a Christian teacher was vast. This ... popularity alone makes MacDonald a figure of some significance in literary history.” And though in certain ways he had to cater to the public, MacDonald was not the ordinary “popular” writer who is successful in the marketplace but is not taken seriously by qualified critics. “In his own time MacDonald was esteemed by an impressive roster of English and American literary and religious leaders. He was among the closest friends of John Ruskin (Lewis Carroll, Lady Byron) and Charles Dodgson; and he moved as a peer in the company of Alfred Tennyson, Charles Kingsley, F.D. Maurice, R.W. Gilder, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Mark Twain, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. All of them respected, praised, and encouraged him, yet his reputation has nearly vanished while theirs survive ... ” Sheila Egoff in Thursday’s Child said of him: ‘One of the major spokesmen of this new middle class was George MacDonald, Congregational minister and poet. He most clearly expressed the cultural perception: while children should be cherished for their innocence and clear-sightedness, they must also be trained in the manners and virtues of the day, fulfilling the maxim “As the twig is bent, so grows the tree.” In MacDonald’s At the Back of the North Wind (1871), The Princess and the Goblin (1872), and its sequel, The Princess and Curdie (1883) he introduces two concepts that were to become an integral part of children’s literature up until the late 1950s. Gillian Avery has described these as “the doctrine of perception” and “the doctrine of good breeding.” The former assumes the natural goodness of children and their ability, unique to childhood to cut through the gray areas of a question and get to the heart of the matter. But in MacDonald’s time this ability also involved an innate trust on the part of a child in God 221221 and His surrogates on earth. The second doctrine emphasizes the crucial role of manners. Behaviour rather than birth turned little boys into gentlemen and little girls into princesses. But unlike the children of the past, these qualities of character rarely were achieved without a sustained struggle.’ Over and over again, it is the man himself who is seen as the Christian influence, rather than his writing. It may be a blow to posterity but I think that is the way it should be. * * * * * There is an intriguing little side story in Philip Hallie’s book. “In 1942, Albert Camus spent about a year in the region of Le Chambon. He lived in an old granite house named Le Panelier, within easy walking distance from the center of Le Chambon, and in that house he began writing his novel The Plague.” This earned Camus the 1957 Nobel Prize for Literature. “In some ways the story of Le Chambon is a companion piece to this novel. In both stories there is a leader totally dedicated to saving lives; in both stories not only courage but realizing, comprehending the horror of dying, plays a central role in the leader’s mind and in the minds of his closest associates. ... And in both stories the plague disappears as terribly as it came, pointlessly killing a person here and a person there, and then subsiding.” But, “One is fiction, and the other is true; one is mainly the story of a committed atheist, and the other is mainly the story of a committed Christian.” Yet, “In both stories, death comes absurdly into the intimate life of the “good man”.” * * * * * ‘I did not know they were so near; in this house, in this street, in this office; my neighbour, my colleague, my friend. As soon as I started to open the door I saw them, with outstretched hands, burning eyes, longing hearts, like beggars on church steps. The first ones came in, Lord. There was after all some space in my heart— But the next ones, Lord, the other men, I had not seen them; they were hidden behind the first ones. There were more of them, they were wretched; they overpowered me without warning. We had to crowd in, I had to find room for them. Now they have come from all over; in successive waves, pushing one another, jostling one another. They have come from all over town, from all parts of the country, of the world; numberless, inexhaustible. They don’t come alone any longer but in groups, bound one to another. They come bending under heavy loads; loads of injustice, of resentment and hate, of suffering, of sin— They drag the world behind them, with everything rusted, twisted, or badly adjusted. Lord, they hurt me! They are in the way, they are everywhere. They are too hungry, they are consuming me!— Lord, I have lost everything, I don’t belong to myself any longer; There’s no more room for me at home. Don’t worry, God says, you have gained all. While men came in to you, I, your Father, I, your God, slipped in among them.’ This little piece from Michel Quoist’s Prayers for Life, like Philip Haillie’s book, never fails to move me no matter how often I read it. * * * * * December 11th: Naguib Mahfouz 222222

Birago Diop Grace Paley December 12th: Eugene Burdick December 13th: Heinrich Heine December 14th: Rosemary Sutcliffe Harold Stewart * * * * * Michael Heyward writes ‘All of it—Ethel, Ern, the poems, the life, everything—was a hoax, of course, the biggest literary hoax of the century. It began in Melbourne one Saturday afternoon in early October 1943. Lieutenant James McAuley and Corporal Harold Stewart were at their desks in the general office of L Block at the Victoria Barracks. They were the rostered CO and NCO on duty at their outfit, the Directorate of Research and Civil Affairs.’ He goes on to say ‘Malley was born in an idle moment that afternoon in the spring of 1943. After lunch McAuley and Stewart had the place to themselves: there were no urgent telegrams to deal with, no research jobs to finish on the double. Here was their chance to do something they’d fantasized about, take Angry Penguins down a peg or two. Another issue was just out—they thought it reached new heights of pretension. They set to work improvising Ern Malley, their Primitive Penguin, writing his poems out on an army-issue, ruled quarto pad, tearing each page off as they filled it. They worked rapidly, buoyed by the wickedness of what they were up to, and spurring each other on—but they were stone cold sober.’ Ever since, the Directorate has been seen as something not to be taken seriously; maybe it did some good work on mosquitoes, maybe it brought together a group of highly intelligent men ... but ... it didn’t do much, did it ... or did it ... Peter Charlton in The Unnecessary War says ‘From October 1944 and until the end of the Second World War the following August, Australian forces under the command of General Sir Thomas Blamey fought a series of campaigns that had no strategic value in the defeat of the Japanese forces in the South-West Pacific Area or for the defence of Australia ... They were fought on a scale, and to an extent, that did not then have the specific approval of the Australian government.’ He goes on to say that these campaigns did not have MacArthur’s support, and therefore they were fought with insufficient equipment, they were fought through jungles and swamps, and ‘they were fought against an enemy already defeated, reluctant to fight, incapable of being evacuated or reinforced, forced to live off the land—‘self-supporting prisoners of war’, one bitter veteran called them. The Japanese in the islands fought only when they were forced to. The Australians forced them to fight. ... The soldiers in the islands thought they were fighting ‘a politician’s war’. They were not. They were fighting a general’s war. The war of Sir Thomas Blamey.’ Charlton says of him, ‘When Blamey increased the pace of the war in March 1945, he was making decisions that he was neither competent nor authorized to make. Political decisions by elected politicians were required, not political decisions by appointed generals. When his policies were finally challenged by an increasingly restive parliament and a querulous press, it was too late. The fighting was nearly over; the dying was nearly done.’ Behind Blamey was a man who was not elected and it is debatable whether he could even be described as appointed: Alfred Conlon. The Directorate of Research and Civil Affairs was his brainchild. He used it to develop his own standing as an expert, even though his career up till then had been unimpressive to say the least. The Directorate gave him sufficient clout to have people like Curtin and Blamey take seriously his ideas. He felt that Australia must begin to look to its post-war role well before the war was over. To turn the Australian Army into the ‘liberators’ of our nearby islands—from the Solomons north to Borneo—would enable Australia to be well-placed for a significant post-war role in the region. 223223

Because his ideas were never discussed by parliament or in the press, they were never questioned. Over a thousand Australian troops died for no reason and the people who were meant to look to us as ‘liberators’ were caught up in an equally unnecessary war and suffered greatly. The Native War Damage Compensation Committee, set up in the immediate post-war period, pointed out “one quarter of the population of Bougainville may have perished ... The invasion and war activities ... have had effects upon the natives so calamitous and so far removed from anything with which their experience and way of life have made them familiar, that it is beyond their power to cope with them”— The Directorate of Research and Civil Affairs undoubtedly did some good work; it also managed to make a terrible miscalculation which has never been laid squarely at its door. * * * * * One day I was watching some old footage of World War I which showed ‘a Chinese Labour Corps’ with the Australian Army in France. That they should be labouring, or cooking, or laundering, did not surprise me—but these were times of virulent White Australian passions and I was curious enough to go and consult Mr Bean, that is to say, C. E. W. Bean. His huge opus, an entire Australian history of WWI, took him 21 years to complete, working, often, 7 days a week and up to 12 hours a day with secretarial help and the unselfish and unflagging support of his wife who, at times, must have felt she was married to a very large pile of paper ... In fact, I discovered from Bean and other sources, the Chinese Labour Corps were mainly recruited by the British from within China—around 170,000 of them—and after seeing the ‘Foreign Devils’ peddling opium in China they now had the unedifying spectacle of the ‘Foreign Devils’ on home ground killing each other with great gusto. At this time, the total Chinese population of Australia was around 30,000. And Bean does give a mention to “a keen half-Chinese Australian named Shang” on “the first Oosthavarne Line, a quarter of a mile beyond the advanced front” who “managed to get a Lucas lamp into working order and, at the order of an officer there, sent a message asking for the assistance of the artillery. To the surprise of those who watched, an answering signal showed that the message had been received”. But wherever I went the Chinese were like shadows in the official histories and memoirs, even in Biggles; there but never truly seen. (Yes, Biggles of 266, has: “What do those lads think they’re trying to do!” he asked Mahoney, who had seated himself on a chock close by, as a large party of Oriental coolies arrived and began unloading and spreading what appeared to be the brickwork of a house that had got in the way of a big shell. “They’re going to repair the road,” Mahoney told him. “What’re those birds, anyway?” asked Biggles curiously. “Chinese, from French Indo-China, I think. The French are using a lot of Colonial troops, but most of them simply for fatigue work—road-making and so on—behind the Lines.”) They were shot for refusing to obey orders, undoubtedly they occasionally found themselves caught in the thick of things, ... but I could find no mention of fatalities or of their future after the War ... even though added to the British and French recruitments were undoubtedly some further recruitments from the German concession in China and other small numbers within the armies of both sides taking the number probably close to a quarter of a million. And the only ‘payment’ made for their sacrifice was for Britain and France, shamefully and foolishly, to force China to cede its prosperous Shantung region to Japan. So why has no one ever thought to document their experiences? * * * * * John Hetherington in his biography of General Blamey tells an intriguing story from 224224

WWII: ‘The power of command cannot be defined in words. The most that anyone can say of it is that when you meet it there is no mistaking it. Blamey had a prodigious share of it and few men ever tried to stand against him. The records of the second World War mention only one member of the Australian Army who defied him and won. And he was not an Australian. Ching was one of six Chinese refugees from Pacific islands over run by the Japanese in the early stages of the war. These six were enlisted in the Australian Army to work in Blamey’s mess in Brisbane. Five were mess servants and the sixth, Ching, was Blamey’s personal attendant. The six Chinese, who liked to wear their digger hats undented, their boots half-laced and their shirts hanging outside their trousers, were unsoldierly figures but in every legal sense were Australian soldiers, earning army rates of pay and subject to army discipline.’ But they came to believe that the Chinese in the US Army were better treated and better paid. When Ching was ordered to get ready to go to Melbourne in 1943 he said simply, ‘No go Melbourne.’ and he continued to say this—‘Nonsense,’ said Blamey, ‘give him a prod with a bayonet and he’ll move fast enough.’ But Ching remained adamant and was finally forcibly loaded on to the Melbourne plane. In Melbourne he was ordered to get a meal ready. ‘No get meal,’ said Ching. And so it went. Finally the Australian Army and Blamey gave up. ‘For the only time in his life a private soldier had got the better of him. The Military Police were called and took Ching away. He was sentenced to twenty-eight days detention. When he’d served his time he was discharged from the Australian Army and joined the Americans at Mount Isa.’ ‘He probably never guessed he had won a victory that no white Australian soldier, whether general or private, would have dared to dream about.’ * * * * * Australians have bemoaned the circumstances which tie us to British aprons, we have managed quite a fine cringe when it comes to American influences and although this is often seen as a post-war problem Vance Palmer was writing in 1923, “It is perhaps too much to hope that the steady stream of cheap American fiction into Australia will slacken. We have grown used to those sentimental Kentucky landscapes, those pictures of strong, silent oil magnates, those chunks of sugary philosophy from Uncle Eb and Aunt Martha. We may even provide a market for them when the home demand has begun to flag. In that contingency it would be better to bar them out before our taste for them becomes chronic. At the worst we have writers enough of our own to supply the home demand for rubbish.” In 1946 the Anglican Bishop of Goulburn wrote: “We have to remind ourselves that geographically we are Oriental, we are not European. We are an island just off the south- east coast of Asia, and are part of the Oriental world. There our fate is set. We are there geographically and there we will stay. We are not bound up with the fate of Europe, but with the fate of Asia.” And John Douglas Pringle did an article for The Times in 1968. “Some Australian nationalists find a painful irony in the circumstances that, having fought against British influence all their lives, they have won their battle to find that American influence has taken its place. Will Australia never be independent, they ask? ... To balance this is a new cosmopolitanism, with a special stress on Asia, that is wholly good. The most remarkable change in the last 10 years is the degree to which Australia has reorientated itself towards Asia. Asian news has taken the place of European news in the papers, Asian languages are beginning to take the place of European languages in the schools and universities. Goods from Japan, China, Taiwan, Hongkong and Singapore fill the shops. A young man will be proud to own a Japanese sports car and a Thai friend. Middle-class women study Japanese flower arrangement or Indian Yoga” ... but is it “wholly good” or is it just the same old 225225 cringe dished up in yet another guise? Africa is visible from Europe, and vice versa, but do Africans agonise over whether they ‘belong’ in Europe—and vice versa—or do they have a sense of self which is not dependent on geography or other people’s cultures? The tyranny of geography can be as damaging as the tyranny of history. I have just been browsing in Robin Gerster’s Asia Hotel which is a collection of Australian experiences in Asia, both fictional and true,—travel, war, romance, as well as more esoteric pursuits in Eastern monastries (you may wish to complain about the use of ‘Eastern’; I know a number of people insist we should refer to it as our Near North. By all means. Victoria is the Near North for those of us who live in Tasmania—but it is still in South-East Australia.) He has some interesting omissions (though that may indicate lack of space or a lack of interesting Australian writing in certain areas) particularly Australian missionaries working in Asia and the growing army of Australians who go, and have gone, to Asia to do business; a report on a university study Widening Our Horizons notes that Singapore businessmen think their Australian counterparts are rude, crude, and vulgar, and that ‘Australian businessmen with no knowledge of foreign cultures or languages often were regarded as offensive by overseas business partners’. Dear me! But a fertile subject for a collection of stories? A cousin of my mother’s wrote a book about the paternal side of her family, A Strange Bird on the Lagoon; her grandfather was my great-grandfather, and she says of him: “He was 17 when they embarked their first lot of horses, probably destined for India. The horses all died of sea-sickness in a typhoon. I think there may have been later, successful runs to India, but I am not sure. On another trip to Java, the horses were confiscated because the ship had not been fumigated after an earlier lot of horses that had glanders. The horses were shot and thrown overboard, and W.J.B. Cameron found himself penniless in a strange land. An Irish policeman got him a job with a blacksmith, and he worked there for a while, until his lucky star rose again.” One day, in an extraordinary coincidence, he was recognised by a Viennese lady who had visited Ireland as a lady-in-waiting to the Empress of Austria and remembered seeing him there as a small boy; given that he probably now had a considerable-sized beard I think she must have asked a few pertinent questions after hearing an Irish voice and before she claimed recognition! “She was now the wife of a merchant, Van Houten, (his cocoa, Van Houten’s, was a household word in those days) and she persuaded her husband to find a position in the firm for grandfather. Languages apparently came easily to grandfather. He learned to speak both Malay and Dutch. The city then called Batavia, now Djakarta, used to be known as “The Pearl of the Orient” because of its wealth, or perhaps its beauty. It was called “The White Man’s Grave” because of its climate. The hot, steamy city, with a year-round humidity of around 99 per cent, did not agree very well with Europeans, and three years was considered the safe time for a man to live there. Grandfather lived there for ten years, and took no harm. Colour consciousness apparently never worried grandfather. He formed a high opinion of the Malay people, and learned a great deal about gardening from them. One mulching idea he learned there was to plait a coarse rope from long grasses, and lay it around and around a fruit-tree like a mat. This held the moisture, kept down weeds, and finally broke down into the soil. He undertook, in an honorary capacity, the duties of court interpreter whenever an English-speaking person needed this assistance. This was one of his duties in the firm, probably. However, when in court he observed how disadvantaged many of the Malay villagers were when dragged to justice. He constituted himself their interpreter also, on a voluntary basis.” In 1872 he returned to Australia (he had come alone to Australia as a 14 year-old) 226226 and eventually married. His eldest daughter, Meta, travelled even further afield in Asia. The man she married was in charge of building the water supply scheme for Brisbane (he’d previously worked with similar schemes in Liverpool, Birmingham, and the island of Jersey) and together they went to Korea to provide a water supply for the city of Seoul. She wrote of Korea—‘There are delightful walks all about here and the scenery is beautiful, also many wild flowers, principally of the lily family. Ferns and clematis grow right up to the door. Dear little white clematis. The greater part of the time there are no white men in the place and yet, though we are surrounded by a colony of Buddhist priests, some of whom are married and have families, (though it is contrary to their law, strictly speaking) yet we are able without any fear to sleep with all doors and windows open ... ’ * * * * * Francesca French in Thomas Cochrane: Pioneer and Missionary Statesman writes: “In Peking, instead of being sole missionary in a wide area, he became the representative of a Congregational Mission among many other Societies, and here he found sectarianism to be a strong factor. Not only was the Westerner tenacious of his own sect’s dignity and highly conscious of its honourable historical background, but the Chinese Christian community, with no conception whatever of the forces which had brought into being the strong parties called Methodism or Congregationalism, yet caught up the titles and styled itself the Mei-Mei (Methodist) Church, or more senseless still, the Lun-dwen (London) Church. Dr. Cochrane was by no means the first missionary to be revolted by this meaningless jargon, but he was first to make the bold suggestion that one general term for the Chinese Christian Church should be adopted, and that all missionary representatives should combine to swamp their sectarian nomenclatures and agree to abolish the use of any Western term which served to emphasize the divisions of Church organizations. He failed to secure his point, or to make fellow committee members appreciate the strength of his argument, and it was left to the Chinese Church itself, nearly twenty years later, to declare its convictions in General Conference to the assembled missionaries: “Your sects can mean nothing to us. We appreciate your respect for the historical events which brought them into being, but you cannot expect us to share your feeling. The Church of Christ in China shall be the name by which we call ourselves and the Church will embrace all who are followers of the Lord Jesus Christ, irrespective of sectarian divisions.” ’ A short article by Ruth Baker ‘Christianity in China Today’ says “Attempts in previous centuries to root Christianity in the soil of China had little lasting success and even the prodigious missionary efforts during the 100 years before Liberation in 1949 produced a relatively frail plant. In spite of the enlightened approach of some missions, Christianity was generally regarded as a foreign religion. “One more Christian, one less Chinese” was frequently quoted. To understand how Christianity has been given a Chinese face one must look at the history of the past 37 years. In the search for national unity in the first years after Liberation the Communists permitted freedom of belief and worship to religious groups provided that they threw off “the shackles of imperialism”. Christians were called upon to demonstrate their love of country, as well as Church, by sweeping out foreign influence and following the Three- Self way, Self-government, Self-propagation and Self-support. This caused special problems for the Catholic Church as its allegiance to Rome was not understood and has led to the existence of two groups, a small group loyal to the Pope as Head of the Church and a separate Catholic Patriotic Movement which now enjoys freedom of worship and increasing numbers ... Chinese Protestants found the break easier as there had been a longing for independence for many years. Some groups had already achieved a measure of self-sufficiency but the readiness with which the Church took up the challenge from the Government and established the Three-Self Movement came as a shock to many missionaries. The bitter accusations, the loss of foreign money and personnel lead to 227227 greatly reduced numbers of worshippers and many churches closed. As pastors shared the care of their flocks, denominational barriers inherited from the missionaries began to break down and Church leaders spoke hopefully of a united Church.” But the churches suffered greatly in the next years and it wasn’t until the 1980s brought a degree of relaxation and toleration that Christianity began to grow again; the number of Christians more than trebling in a few years, not least “because there was much admiration for the way individual Christians had borne their hardships and privations”; but the growing Church in China is very different to the Church the missionaries brought. Chinese Christians speak of their Church as post-denominational. Christians from many traditions worship together, often using different forms on different occasions, and mutual respect for denominational differences is constantly emphasised. It is recognised that the potentially divisive questions of Faith and Order can only be explored when a strong foundation of trust has been established. Denominational roots have historical importance and are being carefully recorded before memories fade. There is great joy at the renewal of contacts with former missionaries but no desire to return to the old divisions and rivalries. Young people with no previous religious background find a united Church more appropriate, as do many older Christians, although some regret the changes in the form of worship.” Evan Whitton in The Cartel writes of the Royal Commission that was set up in Britain in 1991 to enquire into the system that had recently produced “a series of gross miscarriages of justice”; ‘ “But the Royal Commission elected not even to consider whether it might be possible to adapt and improve existing inquisitorial methods. It dealt with the matter of basic procedural structures in just six paragraphs of a 261-page report, saying: ‘Every system is the product of a distinctive history and culture, and the more different the history and culture from our own, the greater must be the danger that an attempted transplant must fail’.” The answer to that is provided by Dr R. M. Jackson, Professor of the Laws of England at Cambridge. ... he says: “ ... the machinery of justice in England has to be seen in its peculiar historical setting. It must not be regarded as a logical structure designed round basic principles. Procedures and practices led to a ‘contest’ conception of trial ... but this gives it no special sanctity.” Viscount Runciman would have done well to also order research on the origin of England’s criminal justice system. He may have found that the cartel’s insular dislike of Europe in the 13th century and the machinations of defence lawyers and the poltroonery by judges in the 18th were major factors in the “distinctive history and culture” that produced the absence of truth, fairness and justice in the system.’ Just as the Chinese were asking for the essence of Christianity rather than a wrangling multiplicity of sects all of whom were as much concerned with their own particular interpretation which was in turn embedded in their own particular history, so it could be suggested that Aboriginal Australians have the right to ask for the essence of justice and fairness, not something that depends upon its “peculiar historical setting”, era, personalities, and desired outcomes. Aboriginal law depended on the one hand on a shared belief in seeking the safe harmony of the tribe or community and on the other hand on a shared belief that physical stoicism and courage was an essential part of the provision of justice. The Royal Commission into Black Deaths in Custody made many sound and sensible suggestions about the justice system as it relates to Aboriginal people but it did not really engage with the underlying problems that white justice puts an unfair and unnecessary burden on the mental status of Aboriginal people, that white justice tends to break up, disperse, and undermine the tribe or community rather than enhance its safety and harmony, that white justice has sought to provoke fear in Aboriginal communities but has done little to provoke respect, and more fundamentally that the whole concept of what 228228 constitutes a crime and what then should constitute its punishment or restitution remains intimately linked with the “distinctive history and culture” of Britain, not the “distinctive history and culture” of Aboriginal Australia. The Chinese are numerous enough and strong enough to make sure their vision of the essence of Christianity is likely to prevail in China; Aboriginal people are still looking to achieve the essence of justice. * * * * * This is a little poem about Jesus by a young Communist poet, Mei Ch’ing: ‘In the days when the people were bitterly oppressed He came to be born in Bethlehem town. Mary .... With her own hot blood and tears Bathed her baby’s body. Sun and stars, wind and rain, frost and snow, Stained his life with bright colours.’

And this is a little poem about rice by a Christian missionary in China, Thomas Hodgkin: I grow mid haunts of common men, Where peasants dig and barter; I grew when Mongols ruled the land And ’neath the cruel Tartar Within my watery bed I grow, And by the winding river, For men may fight and men may die, But I grow on for ever.

Where bullocks move with heavy tread, And muddy waters spatter; While war-lords meet in far Peking, And scrap and plot and chatter; When students stir the hearts of men With speeches wild or clever; It is I who feed the hungry ones, For I grow on for ever.

While China suffers still from greed, From schemer and from scorner; While merchants pile their dollars up And make of me a corner; While starve the poor who cannot buy, In vain their best endeavour, I carpet green the countryside, Yes, I grow on for ever.

Though China sink ’neath debt and war, Though bandits sport and rend her, Yet I, the rice that never fails, Am still at hand to mend her, The patient peasant sows and tills, His labour endeth never; So I’m the hope of China still, 229229

And I’ll grow on for ever.

Christian missionaries rode into China on the coat-tails of a pretty unpleasant and greedy Western rabble; earlier Muslim missionaries reaching into Western China, and even earlier Buddhist teachers arriving from India, brought a cultural baggage with them, but the Western baggage was underpinned by more power and had a far wider gap to cross. Yet the missionaries, precisely because of this gap, and the fact that the power diminished the further they moved away from the foreign cantonments of the coastal areas, were often forced into living and teaching in extraordinarily difficult circumstances. And this living and teaching often in effect skimmed the pool of missionaries. Those who couldn’t cope returned to Shanghai or Hong Kong where they often dismayed visitors, if not the Chinese, with their greed and arrogance. Those with the greatest courage, serenity, humility, faith, toughness, belief, and simplicity, went on. Missionaries like Gladys Aylward have been trivialised and sentimentalised by popular fiction. And the message they brought often did not flourish or if it put down roots the plants that grew were vastly different from what missionary societies in London and Scotland and America envisaged. Missionaries responded in many different ways to the victory of Mao and the Communists; one of the responses was that the Marxism was the result of the Christian Church not paying sufficient attention to social justice. Missionaries tended to relate to the middle and upper class Chinese, the educated, those with some small knowledge of Western society; to cross the gap to the vast poverty-stricken illiterate masses was beyond their skills, resources, and possibly their aspirations. Yet the Marxism that took root in China owed quite a lot to the Western missionary endeavour, to ideas about being equal in God’s sight, in men and women working together, feet unbound, heads unbowed, and the fact that some of the best education available in China which provided a pool of idealistic and highly-motivated young people, from which the Communists drew regional leaders and practical technical skills, was that provided in Christian schools and universities. * * * * * As we’re on things Chinese, I could not resist this little report in The Writers’ Digest. ‘It took him three volumes and 5,840 footnotes, but Professor Xiao Qian has translated James Joyce’s Ulysses into Chinese. It’s the first full Chinese translation. Says the translator of the author: “I think he made it deliberately difficult.” Xiao’s publisher then asked the professor to tackle Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake. His reply needed nary a footnote: “No.” ’ * * * * * You may have noticed the uproar over Japanese school textbooks and what was put into them (or, more importantly, left out of them) about WW2. I’m all for people being honest and unsparing about their past; difficult, dangerous, embarrassing, humiliating it may be to the generation facing the past but that honesty will be invaluable to the next generation. But the question remains: how much of this unsparing honesty should be placed on children. Should we reproduce Emily Caroline Creaghe’s diary (or the part of it that appears in Tim Flannery’s The Explorers) in our high school textbooks? She writes of entering a settler’s hut in North Queensland and seeing 40 pairs of Aboriginal ears nailed to the walls. She notes in her diary, ‘They brought a new black gin with them who can’t speak a word of English. The usual method here of bringing in a new wild gin is to put a rope around her neck and drag her along from horseback, the gin on foot.’ ... ‘The new gin whom they call Bella is chained up to a tree a few yards from the house, and is not to be loosed until they think she is tamed.’ Should we share Amanda Lohrey’s comments on the film ‘Gallipoli’ with our young students? ‘What’s left out is not just a minor aspect of the Australian troops behaviour in 230230

Cairo but one of the defining characteristics of their presence — their extraordinarily aggressive racism. And once again Gammage (an adviser on the film) gives us a list of unsavoury offences; throwing Egyptians off moving trains, sniping at them with rifles, running down small boys in the market, beating up railway officials and so on and so on ... If I seem to be emphasising the worst elements of the Australian troops’ behaviour it’s not because I want to make out a case for the Australian male as some unique species of thug but because I want to make clear the ways in which the film signifies the Gallipoli myths’ projection of a national innocence.’ Do we give our textbooks over to a long grim recital of massacres, of people dying from smallpox and tuberculosis (I remember a teacher in primary school actually laughing when he told us the blacks put their children, suffering from the mysterious misery of measles, into creeks to cool them; this, according to him, was a sure sign of the ignorance and stupidity of the natives); do we explain what agonies people given poisoned flour or thrown into sheep-dip went through; do we give our students graphic descriptions of the rape of Aboriginal women; do we try to capture the anguish of mothers whose children were snatched without explanation from their arms and whom they never saw again? Do we? Or do we accept that childhood is not the place to grapple with the horrors many adults prefer to ignore or dismiss? * * * * * The same day I finished reading John Bailey’s The White Divers of Broome I happened to come across a copy of Ion Idriess’s Forty Fathoms Deep in an op-shop. Idriess provides a medley; the romance of pearls, the strangeness of the underwater world, the adventure of diving, and the juxtaposition of ‘cunning’ rogues of coloured men and their white masters whom they apparently loved and who were thoroughly decent chaps; or as he puts it: ‘I have used names well known in the pearl world of Broome, but have taken care not to hurt susceptibilities.’ The Asian divers, we are to assume, were devoid of susceptibilities. But Idriess was writing in 1936. Bailey was writing in 2001. All the people who were involved in the experiment to bring twelve British divers to Broome in 1912 are long since dead. The gathering of shells for the mother-of-pearl industry (and the occasional lucky find of a pearl) began along the beaches and reefs uncovered at low tide of northern Australia and Aboriginal women and children were the first unpaid recruits. But as the shores were picked bare, the pearlers needed skin-divers and, ‘Increasingly more forceful methods of obtaining labour were required, and the men of the pioneering families looked forward with anticipation to the commencement of the pearling season when the hunt for bush Aborigines began. As a correspondent for a Perth newspaper, Mr R. Thatcher, wrote: ‘Then comes the most important part ... the picking up of niggers ... for pearling after all would never pay white labour.’ Men rode out with rifles, stock whips and shackles on dawn raids of black camps. While one held a rifle at the ready, another would dismount and attach neck chains around the throats of the healthy-looking for the long walk overland to the coast. Anyone who protested was beaten into submission. Professional blackbirders began to ply their trade. They offered to kidnap and supply Aborigines for £5 each — or have them shot for two shillings and sixpence. White men with chains and rifles took Aborigines to nearby islands where their resistance was weakened by starvation pending a sale to shellers looking for crews. Women were held on island barracoons as prostitutes for visiting crews. ... By the mid 1880s, as the shallow waters became depleted of shell, the boats were forced to move further out to sea and the shore became a line in the distance. Harsh measures were required to force divers into deeper and deeper water. After several days of diving to depths of 6 to 8 fathoms, the Aboriginal divers would rise to the surface with blood dribbling from their ears or pouring from their noses. While lying at night on the decks they moaned with shooting pains in their limbs and paralysis of their arms.’ 231231

But deeper waters could not be dived with kidnapped people forced overboard; professional divers were needed, and professional divers would have to be paid. The master pearlers began to bring in divers from Japan, Manila and the Dutch East Indies. They could be paid low wages and fed on rice. They kept profits high despite the dangers of cyclones, sharks, drops in shell price, and all the other imponderables. But then came Federation and the White Australia Policy. White labour gradually took over the cane- fields of north Queensland but pearling was the last hold-out of Australians determined to keep their imported labour. Of course there were simple solutions. The master pearlers could have been required to pay all their Asian crews white wages which would have undermined the differential that made Asian labour more profitable. The master pearlers could have been required to set in place proper apprenticeship schemes to train and pay Aboriginal labour in all aspects of sailing and diving, leading eventually to a predominantly indigenous labour force, skilled and respected ... Instead the Government decided to bring out a group of ex-Navy divers from Britain. Although the men were highly-trained as divers they had no experience in tropical waters or with the gathering of pearl-shell. Idriess writes, ‘The diver has to serve a long apprenticeship in learning where to look for the shell, just as a prospector has to learn the likeliest places to seek for gold.’ And time to learn was the one thing the master pearlers were determined not to give them. They were paying these men more than they paid their Japanese divers (admittedly only a matter of an extra £ or two; but then there was the extra expense of providing European food on the boats—) and they wanted more shell pronto. The divers were exposed to ridicule from their new bosses and constant invidious comparisons with their Asian counterparts of long experience. To what extent this barrage of criticism lead to the men over-extending themselves is unclear; just as it is unclear to what extent the master pearlers deliberately undermined the trial. It ended in deaths and dismissals. Founded in official racism, it ended in personal tragedy for the men and their families. But the master pearlers were delighted at the outcome. They could continue to hire Japanese divers at a lower rate and without concern for the families of the men who died or were paralysed. And then World War I took the bottom out of the pearl-shell market. When it recovered in the twenties it was a thoroughly Japanese operation. They had quietly moved in to virtually every aspect of the business. The Depression again ruined the market. But the Japanese had gained something more important than pearls. I do not subscribe to the view that a Japanese invasion of Australia was likely. Spread thinly across Manchuria, China and South-East Asia, an invasion would have been an incredibly foolhardy venture. Long vulnerable supply-lines, restive populations in newly-acquired territories, the ever-present possibility that Chiang-Kai-Shek’s Nationalists and Mao-Tse- Tung’s Communists would sink their differences and present a united front against Japan, the increasing possibility that the Soviet Union having turned Hitler back would find the troops to send into Manchuria, and a home population being asked for ever more sons and ever more sacrifices ... But the Japanese had certainly done their homework. As Idriess writes, ‘Much to-do has recently been made over an occasional sampan operating off our northern and north-eastern coasts. These stray sampans have visited our Great Barrier Reef on the north-eastern coast, the Northern Territory coast-line, and the extreme north-west of Western Australia for many years past. Why the fuss now? Any damage that could be done has been done. In view of the fact that for forty years we have been training and paying Japanese seamen to sail six thousand miles of our own coastline in our own vessels, it seems inconsistent to become uneasy now over a stray shark-fishing sampan ... ’ * * * * * 232232

Harold Stewart lived his later life in Japan, a strange life in a country whose religion and art he admired but whose language he declined to learn and whose food he avoided. He produced books such as By the Old Walls of Kyoto and The Ascension of the Feng Huang. But the Ern Malley hoax became the albatross upon his reputation. As Michael Ackland says in Damaged Men, ‘Ethel Malley is his best known persona, the Buddhist poet-recluse of Kyoto the image by which he hoped to be remembered. Underlying these and other masks was a mixture of despair and self-belief. It led him alternately to shun or to solicit a world which he believed was fundamentally antithetical to, and unappreciative of, all that was dearest to him. As proof he would cite the unwaning popularity of the Ern Malley poems, which even obscured the hoaxers’ more serious efforts, leading him to claim that one day ‘it will be irrefutably proved that James McAuley and Harold Stewart were really figments of the imagination of the real-life Ern Malley and in fact never existed!’.’ * * * * * December 15th: Edna O’Brien Betty Smith December 16th: Jane Austen December 17th: John Greenleaf Whittier Jalauddin Rumi (d) December 18th: Jacqueline Briskin December 19th: Richard Leakey Eleanor Porter December 20th: Max Lerner December 21st: Benjamin Disraeli December 22nd: Yan Xiao Jian December 23rd: Giuseppe di Lampedusa December 24th: Philip Ziegler Eric Van Lustbader December 25th: Rebecca West Carlos Castaneda December 26th: Fred Schepisi December 27th: Elizabeth Smart Johannes Kepler December 28th: Mortimer Adler Tony Cohan December 29th: Peter Meinke December 30th: Timothy Mo L. P. Hartley December 31st: Ram Krishna Singh Fumiko Hayashi Horacio Quiroga * * * * * There is a Uruguayan lady who is a Jehovah’s Witness who occasionally calls by. One day she happened to mention that Jehovah’s Witnesses, like Roman Catholics and other Christian faiths, believe in bodily resurrection. I must admit I don’t; nor have I ever met anyone who wanted to be resurrected in their old body. I believe that the essence of human experience is the experience of a material body and all that that means. The pleasure of eating, of sex, of getting warm on a cold day, or slipping into cool water on a hot day; the pleasures of sound, of sight, of taste ... all the restrictions that physicality brings with it ... the embarrassments of bodies ... the excitement … the pain, the grace, the oddity, the mystery of being human, of thoughts and ideas and dreams and hopes being enclosed within flesh, the limitations and the ability to transcend apparent limitations … 233233 the human experience is an extraordinary one … ‘We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; We are spiritual beings having a human experience’ wrote Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. And it seems sad, to me, that religion often urges us to forget or ignore or transcend or abuse or terminate the uniqueness of this ‘human experience’. * * * * * Richard Gott, introducing Alain Labrousse’s The Tupamaros, writes, ‘In January 1967 a group of Brazilians and a Uruguayan asked for political asylum in the Czech embassy in Montevideo, stating that they wished to go to a socialist country to pursue their revolutionary activities. They were, they said, under constant surveillance and harassment from the Uruguayan police. The Czech ambassador was horrified by their request and threw them out, saying there was no police persecution in Uruguay. When the revolutionaries camped in his garden, the ambassador called the police. In those days ‘social democracy’ and ‘Switzerland’ were the words that sprang most readily from the visiting journalist’s palette as he briefly stopped off at Carrasco airport on his travels to and from more troubled parts of the Latin American continent. Though visibly in decline, Uruguay seemed to possess many of the qualities that President Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress was designed to promote: a small, literate, birth- controlled population (2.7 million), a stable democratic system of government and full liberty of the press and of association. Montevideo, with its huge complement of exiles from Argentina and Brazil, could compare with Paris as a center of radical Latin American thought. Its peeling sea-front and its dingy crowded coffee-houses might seem old-fashioned, but for many people it was a welcome haven from the gathering Latin American storm. From this internationally flavoured intellectual milieu sprang the fortnightly review Marcha, virtually the only Latin American magazine with subscribers all over the continent. The revolutionaries in the Uruguayan coffee-houses were for the most part Brazilians, thrown out of Brazil in 1964, or Argentinians thrown out in 1966, or Paraguayans, thrown out of Asunción every year as each succeeding generation reached years of indiscretion. Although Uruguayans might have joined in the coffee-house conversation, few then thought that Uruguay itself would provide much of a front in the unfolding continental revolution. Indeed, in his speeches in Havana, Fidel Castro often used to hold up Uruguay as an example of the kind of Latin American country that almost certainly would never experience a violent revolution on the Cuban model. The Czech ambassador, while wrong in practice — and somewhat lacking in revolutionary solidarity — nevertheless reflected the prevailing mood of the time when he expressed astonishment at the idea of a repressive Uruguayan police force.’ John King introducing Carlos Martínez Moreno’s searing indictment of Uruguay’s term as a brutal police state in El Infierno says, ‘Uruguay for the first half of the twentieth century had a stable democratic system and was known as the ‘Switzerland of Latin America’. From the 1950s, however, rapid inflation, low economic growth and a stagnant export economy (which had previously generated the wealth of the country) put great pressure on this, the first welfare state in Latin America.’ The film of the same events, State of Siege, asks the question: ‘Must a serious revolutionary impose the same terror and inhuman actions as the Establishment he seeks to overthrow?’ And Eduardo Galeano wrote, ‘There are those who praise Uruguay by calling it the ‘Switzerland of America’. But we Uruguayans are somewhat nonplussed by the homage. Does it allude to the country’s democratic vocation, or to secret banking practices? For some years now, banking secrecy has been turning Uruguay into a strong-box with a view to the sea.’ I remember going with a friend to a book launch years ago and during the evening she looked around the crowd in the Hobart Bookshop and said suddenly, “I never realised 234234 before—what a lot of good writers Tassie has!” I wonder if people say similar things at gatherings of writers in Uruguay? Because its list of writers is long and glittering. Its only problem is that many of them have chosen to live outside Uruguay. Enrique Amorim, Horacio Quiroga, Carlos Martínez Moreno, Hugo Achugar, Eduardo Galeano, Juan Carlos Onetti, Mario Beneditti, Juana de Ibarbourou, Sara de Ibáñez, Cristina Peri Rossi, Carlos Maggi, and the one best known in our house Julio Herrera y Reissig (not to be confused with Julio Herrera Vergas who, as director of the Bank of the Republic, wrote critically of the devaluation of April 1968 in his book How to Make the National Crisis Worse; not surprisingly his marching orders soon followed). George McMurray in Spanish American Writing Since 1941 says “Uruguay, one of Latin America’s smallest nations, has produced more than its share of first-rate contemporary writers of fiction.” And he says of that Julio Herrera, “Uruguay’s Julio Herrera y Reissig (1875-1910) remains to this day one of his nation’s most renowned poets. The outstanding symbolist of the modernistas, he wrote verses ranging from simple lyricism to the extreme complexity of the subsequent ultraista movement.” Pablo Neruda wrote, “The sixth number of Caballo Verde was left on Viriato Street, the pages not yet collated and sewn. It was dedicated to Julio Herrera y Reissig—a second Lautréamont, produced by Montevideo—and the texts written in his honour by the poets of Spain were silenced in all their beauty, still-born, having nowhere to go. The magazine was to have come out on July 19, 1936, but on that day the streets were filled with shooting. In his African garrison an obscure general, Francisco Franco, had risen against the Republic.” Gail Sheehy wrote “The root of the word testimonial is testis (plural testes). I read somewhere that when one aboriginal man bumped into another, he cupped the sexual parts of his tribesman in greeting. It was a “testimonial to manhood” and the original basis for the handshake.” Testimony, too, comes from the same root. (Strictly speaking, testis means witness.) But as Hugo Achugar writes, “Critics generally do not much distinguish autobiography, memoir and testimonio. Some, however, have emphasized that the I in testimonio is a collective subject, unlike the individual and personal I of autobiography.” He also says “Testimonio invariably sees itself as counterhegemonic because it is giving written form to the testimony of an Other, a person and collectivity that have suffered the role of barbarian: outside our language, our laws, our values, our culture. Traditionally biography and autobiography in Latin America—and elsewhere I assume—have ignored the Other and dealt exclusively with the hegemonic role model. A third trend has begun to appear in autobiographies that privilege ordinary experience and “partial histories.” It’s possible that these new autobiographies are evidence that new social groups are gaining access to writing and print, or that neoliberal cynicism has simply found its latest tactic in search of new publishing markets.” More simply, Testimonio in Latin America became a combination of autobiographical writing and political statement that challenges those in power. The image of the prisoner with the wires tied up to his testicles and the men in dark glasses standing over him is the ultimate perversion of the gift of sexuality. So it is perhaps right that the challenge to the abuse of power should be deeply rooted in physical imagery. Achugar takes the legend of Narcissus and Echo to illustrate the nature of testimony but it remains, at heart, an image that is very male. Echo is rejected and fades away. But Narcissus does the rejecting and the choosing. His death is his choice. The fascination with death as an end is a male preoccupation in Latin American writing. Death in the writing of Latin American women is always offset by the renewal of birth. * * * * * And McMurray says of Horacio Quiroga (1878-1937), “Quiroga’s tales of horror and death suggest the influence of Edgar Allan Poe, a well-known example being “El hombre muerto” (1920: “The Dead Man,” in The Decapitated Chicken and Other Stories, 1976), in which the protagonist experiences the onslaught of death thirty minutes after falling on his machete. Quiroga not only was the first Spanish American short-story writer to pay close 235235 attention to structure and impact on the reader, but he also relied on fantasy and archetypal human conflicts to transcend the regional settings—often the jungles of northern Argentina—that so dramatically framed his works.” * * * * * But probably the Uruguayan writer best known to outside readers is Eduardo Galeano because of the column he writes for the New Internationalist. His writing is both vivid and moving. To read him you can of course nip out and subscribe to NI. But here is a little taste: ‘José Saramago’s grandfather was silent: a man of the Portuguese earth, Jerónimo never studied, but he was wise of a wisdom without words. When Grandpa Jerónimo grew ill, he knew, silently, that the time for goodbye had arrived. So he walked through his orchard, pausing by each tree, and he hugged them, one by one: he embraced the fig-tree, the laurel, the pomegranate, and the three or four olive trees. He hugged them all and was hugged in return. On the road, a car waited. The car took him to Lisbon, to death.’ (March 2001) ‘In search of Franz Kafka, I walked the streets of Prague. I wandered in silence, surrounded by silence, despite the hubbub of the crowd and the roar of the traffic. No matter how much noise or how many people were there, Prague was silent like Kafka, silenced of him—and alone. I crossed the city from end to end, and it was dark when I reached a street called Celetnà. On the corner where Celetnà opens on to the great plaza of the Old City, a voice suddenly cracked the silence around me. A woman was singing. Rising out of her wheelchair, a woman tore open the night with the most beautiful voice I had ever heard. The most beautiful voice, the most wounded: anchored in the black glow of the cobblestone, that woman sang the painful cry of all the lonely people of the world. I was speechless, I pinched myself. Was I asleep? Was I dreaming? What world was I in? But behind me, a few boys mocked the crippled singer, imitating her and laughing uproariously. She stopped and hung her head. And then I was certain I was awake, truly awake, at the very centre of this world.’ (November 2000) * * * * *

The End * * * * *

Acknowledgements: ‘Activism Australian Style’ appeared, in a shorter form, in It’s Time to Lead the Way (ed. Lisa Rasmussen, pub. ETRA Vic 1995) and in Hobart East Timor Committee: Papers 1998.

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