History revisited - technology, transport and our view of the world

One of the things that fascinates me wearing my historian’s hat is the way that technology affects our view of the world. Last week, I talked about the bicycle. This week I want to talk about feet and hooves.

We live in an accelerating world. Our world has expanded, but also contracted. The intensity of immediate place has been lost.

This has practical implications for places like Armidale that have been sidelined by time because they are outside the main transport nets. However, for now, my interest is more basic.

As a rough starting point to our discussion, human beings on a long distance ramble walk at around two and a half miles (a bit over 4k) per hour. At this speed, they can go and go.

A Roman Army was expected to be able to march in full kit perhaps 24-32k per day and then set up camp. Alexander the Great’s army was estimated to occupy 26k of road without baggage animals. This meant that the leading elements would be setting up camp before the previous camp had emptied fully!

Now introduce hooves. Surely things went faster? Well, not necessarily.

Travelling with stock, speed is determined by the speed of the animal. From my limited experience with sheep, I haven't travelled with cattle, travel becomes a slow amble, less than a normal walking pace. Say eight hours to drove from Uralla to Armidale. You may have horses, but your speed is determined by the stock.

A bullock dray is not much faster. You now have the capacity to carry heavier loads, but the pace is slow. There are a number of recorded stories of women and children leaving the dray on foot and arriving home hours before it. Just walking like them, you might get to Uralla in five hours.

Say you have a horse. The fastest sustainable speed for a horse is a trot, a speed that can be maintained for an extended period. My research suggests that this equals about 8 mph (13 km/h). Now, speeding, you can get to Uralla in a bit under two hours. Presumably roughly the same speed equation would hold for something like a sulky.

Growing up in Armidale, I was probably closer to this old world than modern Armidale kids or indeed their parents.

We travelled by foot or bike. When we went by car along the dirt roads to a picnic at, say, the Gwydir River, we knew the exact patterns of country, the precise point at which the Tablelands suddenly turned to the Western slopes. It was a very particular peak on the road.

When I first returned to history, I was absorbed in the present. I couldn’t properly understand some of things I read. They seemed strange, odd. Then I realised that I had to put myself back into that past, into a world marked by the vast presence of the immediate locality. My writing is the better for it.

Note to readers: This post appeared as a column in the Armidale Express Extra on 21 August 2013. I am repeating the columns here with a lag because the columns are not on line outside subscription. You can see all the Belshaw World and History Revisited columns by clicking here for 2009, here for 2010, here for 2011, here for 2012, here for 2013. The photo comes from John Caling.

History revisited - rhyme and reason for bicycle mania

Written by Banjo Patterson and first published in the Sydney Mail on 25 July 1896, one of Australia’s favourite traditional poems begins “Twas Mulga Bill, from Eaglehawk, that caught the cycling craze.” I think that most Australians who have read the poem would think of it a good poetic yarn, but it’s also culturally significant.

Growing up in Armidale, bikes were everywhere. I actually resented this, because I didn’t get one until I was in year five. That bike lasted me until the end of secondary school!

Very few people went to school by bus, almost none by parents’ car. The congested tangle we see today outside schools as mum or dad wait to pick up their child or children was unknown. You walked to school or you rode. That was it.

Even though I grew up at a time when bicycles were still very common, I had no idea of the cultural and economic importance of the bike at the time that Patterson wrote.

Bicycles have quite a long history. However, it wasn’t until John Dunlop's reinvention of the pneumatic bicycle tire in 1888 that biking really took off.

For the better off, it became a means of touring, of seeing new places. Like the airlines today, the North Coast Steam Navigation Company wanted passengers. “Come on one of our steamers”, the Company said. “We will drop you of at one of our ports and then you can tour by cycle to the next port to catch the return steamer.” Their promotional photos featured shots of the beautiful country to be seen.

The emerging middle class took to cycling as a craze, in so doing making a blow for female emancipation, for this was a sport that women could join in. However, it was the working class person who gained the greatest benefit.

In urban areas, a bike provided a way of getting to work, of delivering things or taking orders. In Armidale as late as the early 1950s, the salesmen from local stores would ride around with bicycle-clipped pants, their order book in their back pocket, collecting grocery orders.

Today, the kamikaze messengers bike though Sydney streets, weaving through the traffic, delivering documents far faster than other physical means. Their numbers drop as on-line becomes more important, but they are still there for deliveries where physical documentation is required.

It was in the bush that bikes arguably had their greatest impact. Bikes were cheaper than horses and faster over distances. Bush workers of all types travelled by bike, with their possessions in panniers or just strapped to the frame.

Those days are long gone. But Banjo Patterson’s poem was published at the height of the biking fashion.

Note to readers: This post appeared as a column in the Armidale Express Extra on 14 August 2013. I am repeating the columns here with a lag because the columns are not on line outside subscription. You can see all the Belshaw World and History Revisited columns by clicking here for 2009, here for 2010, here for 2011, here for 2012, here for 2013.

History revisited - colleges provide character for Uni

The story of the establishment of the University College is fairly well known. I have written on different aspects of it in this column. Given that, I thought that I would take you in a different direction in completing my series on the early days of Armidale’s two colleges

There was no great public demand for an establishment of a university college in Armidale. The Depression was still very much in people’s minds. Politicians, officials and voters were very conscious of limited government funds, while demands on government for immediate services were great.

There was also a measure of distrust at the very concept of a university in the North. Universities were elite institutions. Very few people had had any contact with a university. Many were actually distrustful of the impact on their children, or saw a university of any type as irrelevant to their family needs.

Distrust is difficult to measure, but there is little doubt that it existed. On top of that, the proponents still had to manage deeply held local parochialisms that might translate into opposition at Armidale receiving a benefit at the perceived cost of others.

Limited funds, a slowly receding depression, limited support for the very idea of a university and the risk of arousing local parochialism; all would seem to make the task impossible. And yet, somehow, it happened and in quite quick time.

Two things were absolutely critical here.

The first was the successful establishment of the Teacher’s College. By the time the University movement was really growing, the Teacher’s College halls again echoed with students. The idea of co-locating a University there to take advantage of under-utilised facilities was no longer feasible. However, the College had demonstrated that a country college would work and had also consolidated Armidale’s place as the pre-eminent education centre, the Oxford, of the North.

The second was the Northern leadership linked together by battles for Northern development over more than twenty years.

David Drummond may have been Minister for Education, he may have helped drive the concept, but he did not get the University College for that reason. He helped bring it about because he was an integral part of a Northern leadership that he was able to convince and that was committed to a new vision.

That powerful base provided credibility that helped draw in others and could be used by those who already had or could be drawn to the vision of both the North and the desire for a very specific Northern university. They knew how to cooperate, to work the levers of power and to manage local objections.

This history had a profound influence on the character of the new institution. The academics that came and many of the Northern leadership had an Oxbridge vision of the role of a university. However, the leadership also saw it, as they had in 1920 with Australia Subdivided, as a place that educate Northern kids, that would help preserve the history and culture of the North and would contribute to its development.

They would not be disappointed, although it would take decades for some elements of their vision for the new institution to be realised.

Note to readers: This post appeared as a column in the Armidale Express Extra on 7 August 2013. I am repeating the columns here with a lag because the columns are not on line outside subscription. You can see all the Belshaw World and History Revisited columns by clicking here for 2009, here for 2010, here for 2011, here for 2012, here for 2013.

History revisited - if you want something, build it fast

At the end of my last column I suggested that Drummond, Smith, Hicks and Newling proved an irresistible combination when it came to the establishment of the Armidale Teacher’s College.

The pace of events was truly remarkable. Drummond was sworn in as Minister in October 1927. The College opened for business in February 1928 using temporary buildings. Each man played a different role over those few frantic months. .

Smith marshaled the Department’s resources to support his Minister’s dream. Hicks provided critical on-ground logistics and other support. As new Principal, Newling dealt with the myriad practical details required to create a new institution from scratch.

Drummond was determined that his new baby would be healthy with every chance in life. He also wanted the College to be seen as a college of the North, not just Armidale. An activist minister, his ministerial letter books are full of instructions, suggestions and requests as he looked for resources for the new College.

He also worked behind the scenes to marshal broader Northern support. This College, he told Armidale Mayor Morgan Stephens, must be seen as the College of the North, not just Armidale.

The new state campaigns of the early 1920s had been led by key Northern pressmen. Drummond knew the editors and proprietors; he was now a newspaper man himself, so gaining friendly newspaper coverage was not hard.

With the College open, Drummond turned his attention to ensuring that it was properly housed in a building befitting its Northern status. He paid attention to every detail. Later he would be criticised for this, for extravagance, but his approach proved to be wise.

None of the players in those hectic days in 1928 and early 1929 realised that a cataclysm, the Great Depression, was about to break. As it hit, state revenues declined and cuts had to be made, including the number of student teachers. Student intakes dropped and dropped again.

The halls of the new College echoed to the sound of fewer and fewer footsteps. The College became known as Drummond’s White Elephant, There were demands to close it.

Drummond was unrepentant, although he had a sneaking sympathy for William Davies, his successor as Minister in the Lang Labor Government. Davies came to visit and the College was saved. The project was really too far advanced to cancel.

I will finish the early story of Armidale’s two colleges in my next column.

Note to readers: This post appeared as a column in the Armidale Express Extra on 31 July 2013. I am repeating the columns here with a lag because the columns are not on line outside subscription. You can see all the Belshaw World and History Revisited columns by clicking here for 2009, here for 2010, here for 2011, here for 2012, here for 2013.