History blogs 2 - Helen Webberley

Subtitled The fine arts, decorative arts and architecture of Europe, North America and Australia, 1650-1933, Helen Webberley's ART and ARCHITECTURE, mainly is a consistently good blog.

All those who become interested in history need to set their own thinking in a broader context. We also all draw ideas from others, even though the topic may seem far removed from our normal interest. To illustrate this, I thought that I would take just a few of Helen's posts over time.

Published in July 2009, Traditional Vs Modern Art: 1930s Australia provides an entry point to a significant controversy in Australian art, including links to earlier posts.

I am cautious about some later interpretations of this controversy and of those involved because I feel that they pay insufficient attention to the context of the time and sometimes end by judging the artist on things other than the art. What I do find very especially interesting about the whole imbroglio is the way it helped inspire different forms of of artistic expression.

Posted in November 2009, 19th Century Amusement Centres: healthy living, sport, fun deals with leisure activities. See also Late Victorian pleasure piers Vs inter-war lidos published a little later that month.

The idea of holidays and leisure activities depends directly on the availability of time and money. When most people worked six or even seven days a week, leisure was obviously limited, activities took place close to home. More time, more money plus better transport created a market for a wider range of activities.

Posted in January 2009, Art Deco and Cruise Ships, a marriage made in heaven is a rather wonderful post about Art Deco in cruise ships. 

These few examples are intended to give you just a taste. If you take the time as I did to browse using Helen's tags, I think that you will find it enjoyable and very worth while.  

Icons, history and thunderbolt

Hat tip to Canadian historian Christopher Moore for this one.

Every so often a story, photo or image becomes so much of an icon that the story of the story becomes the story.

This classic photo is a case in point because it has come to illustrate the English class system independent of the original story. In a fascinating piece, FIVE BOYS: THE STORY OF A PICTURE, Ian Jack explores the history of the picture.

I have two reasons for mentioning this story.

The first is that in my Armidale paper I spoke in part about the highly structured class system that emerged on the Northern Tablelands. I want to do some straight personal writing on this, exploring the complexities including the way it affected names and naming.

The second reason is the way that the bushranger Captain Thunderbolt has now entered the iconic class. Some might argue that he always was, but in fact (and this has always puzzled me) Fred Ward has been a poor cousin to the more famous Ned Kelly. Now this is changing.

Following a new book on Thunderbolt, the NSW Legislative Council has passed a motion requesting the NSW Government to release all documents relating to his capture, autopsy and inquest.

According to National's member Rick Colless:

“Greg Hamilton and his co-author, Thunderbolt descendent Barry Sinclair from Uralla, have tried repeatedly to gather this information from the police and were exacerbated by the Police Minister Michael Daley.

“The passing of this motion by the Legislative Council will bypass the Police Minister and guarantee the release of any documents still in existence.”

The aim is to try to establish whether or not it was Thunderbolt who was in fact shot. The painting by Samuel Calvert (La Trobe Picture Collection, State Library of Victoria) represents the event.

When you think about this, all this is quite remarkable. After all, Thunderbolt was meant to have been killed in  Kentucky Creek on 25 May 1870. That's a long time ago.

I have yet to read the latest book. Still, at one level I don't think that it matters. After a certain point, a story just runs and runs, with each repetition adding its own new gloss. The story is now the story in its own right.       

Hillgrove hydro electricity

The mining town of Hillgrove near Armidale was the first town in Australia to be lit by hydro power (early 1895), beating Launceston in Tasmania by ten months. Gordon Smith's  Threlfall Track: Looking down has a nice photograph of the country through which the flume ran to the power plant, along with a link to an article setting out the history of the plant.

One thing not covered in the article is the fact that the Hillgrove operators tried to persuade Armidale Council to use their power. They failed, in part because the Council had a heavy investment in gas lighting. Had Armidale Council agreed, it would have changed the economics of the hydro operation. Perhaps it would still have been in existence today. In the event, Armidale was not to get electric power until 1922.

The history of electric power in Armidale can be found here.

Aviation and the Perdriau Rubber Company

Gordon Smith's Old news from Armidale and New England carried two stories that caught my eye.

The first was For sale: “Booloominbah”. As it happens, I am presently reading Mathew Jordan's A spirit of true learning, a jubilee history of the University of New England. I will write more on this a little later.

In the second story, Sydney to Brisbane flight in nine hours, the name Perdriau caught my attention. The story deals with a Friday 9 July 1920 flight by a plane owned by the Perdriau Rubber Company that landed at no less than six New England towns on its way through.

The Perdriau Rubber Company was formed by Henry Perdriau and ultimately became Dunlop. I had no idea that the company was involved in aviation.

Henry's nephew Raymond took up a selection on the Tweed River in 1906; he carried on dairying and, later, banana-growing. A strong New Stater, he was elected to the NSW Legislative Assembly as a member for Byron in 1920. There are some interesting stories here that I should write about, for the period after the 1920 elections was politically stormy.

North Coast Stories

While I was in Armidale recently, John Ryan from the University of New England suggested that I should write a shot biography of a North Coast figure to go into a new book equivalent to ones published previously for the Northern Tablelands.

Whom do you think might be a suitable candidate?  I have more or less agreed to do it, but thought that it might be sensible to seek some suggestions.

NSW Decentralisation Commission

I am really enjoying Gordon Smith's Old news from Armidale and New England. I just like the random element, and keep looking at the date and story and wondering about the background.

I was struck by his post, Decentralisation, on the hearings of the Decentralisation Commission in Inverell on 11 October 1910. Now this Commission is actually a gap in my knowledge. I know that the failure of the Sydney Government to act on its 1911 recommendations was one of the reasons given to justify the launch of the separatist agitation after the end of the First World War, but the Commission itself is a blank spot.

The web searches that I have done don't tell me a great deal. Does anyone have more details?   

Newcastle University's regional contribution

Finally finished the first draft of the paper I am delivering in Armidale 19 March. One of the issues that I am discussing is the contribution that the New England University College and then the University of New England made to New England thought and to the region. I also mention in passing Southern Cross and the University of Newcastle.

In all this, one big gap in my knowledge is the University of Newcastle itself. I simply don't know enough about that University's contribution. 

One book that I am aware of but have yet to read is Don Wright assisted by Rhonda Geale, Looking back, a history of the University of Newcastle, University of Newcastle, Callaghan 1992. For the moment, I just wanted to record the reference so that I did not lose it. However, I was left wondering whether any readers had suggestions as to other sources on Newcastle or ideas as to the University's role.

What I really want to do is to be able to show the Newcastle University's specific contribution to its region. I have ideas and hypotheses, but I need to be able to test and extend these. Any ideas? 

New England New State Symbols 1

William Oates, the archivist at the University of New England has now produced two posts on  Archives Outside linked in some way to the New England New State Movement:

•   “This is all very silly” : An interesting start to a regional archives. I wrote a companion story on this one - New England Story - new states, archives and the preservation of our past.
• Now he has posted Old State – New States: New England and the New State Movement.

I plan to do a full companion piece later. For the present, I just wanted to make a few notes here on the use of symbols by the New State Movement.

Many of the senior new state leaders over time including (among others) Page, Thompson, Drummond and Sommerlad had media connections and knew how to manage especially the local media. These connections were central to the various movement campaigns. However, it was another man, Ulrich Ellis, who was responsible for much of the symbolism used by the movement in the period after the Second World War.

Andrew Moore's Australian Dictionary of Biography entry on Ellis is quite remarkably partisan and unsympathetic, a hatchet job. I had not seen it before writing this post, and it left me feeling quite angry. Andrew might argue that my own obituary of Ellis ( James Belshaw, Ulrich Ellis: journalist, political agitator, and theorist, public servant and historian, Canberra Historical Journal, New Series, No 10 September 1982, pp 16-22) was biased in the opposite way, but at least it covered the man's full career and was completely referenced.

Just to quote some of Andrew's statements:

•   Ellis attached himself to causes on the periphery of the political mainstream. Leaving aside Ellis's involvement with the new state cause, the Country Party itself was hardly peripheral to the mainstream. Ellis's role there as political secretary to Earle Page, his writing on country causes, was hardly peripheral.
•   As a Canberra resident he was a passionate advocate of local self-government, and of the need to improve Canberra’s amenities and to attract tourism to the national capital. This sentence follows immediately after the previous one. Peripheral? Andrew also does not recognise the role that Ellis played in gaining a greater freedom of expression for public servants.
• Ellis was a foot-soldier whose energy and dedication compensated for his lack of sparkling intellect. Ouch. What a put down.
• His two pioneering historical works, The Country Party: A Political and Social History of the Party in New South Wales (1958) and A History of the Australian Country Party (1963), were unscholarly and partisan. It is nice for Andrew to at least recognise that they were pioneering. At the the time these books were published there was very little Australian political history. Yes, Ellis was writing from a viewpoint, that of the insider, but his own biases were clear and the books provided a base for work by later historians including Don Aitkin and Bruce Graham.
• Ellis is sometimes remembered as less reactionary than his brother Malcolm Ellis. None the less, his argument that the New State movement was `the only permanent safeguard against extremist domination in industry and government’, and his warnings that lax security in Canberra public service offices was assisting communist espionage, echoed his brother’s concerns. This is guilt by association. There is no context for Malcolm Ellis, none for the times, no critical assessment of the statements.

I have sidetracked. I will do some full posts on Ellis because he was an interesting man who deserves a better treatment than this.

For the moment, the point is that it was Ellis because of his long long involvement in various country movements and his role as a journalist and publicist who recognised the value of symbols and symbolism.

It was in this role that he composed  Battle Song of New England as a new state anthem.

I will continue the discussion in another post after I have cooled down!

History blogs 1

While this blog focuses on New England history, I have been thinking for a while that I should broaden it a little to include references to other history blogs that I enjoy. This will also help keep me reading more widely.

To this end, I have created a history section in my favourite blog's list, and thought that I should share some of this with you on an irregular basis. So here goes round one.

Rachel Leow's a historian’s craft looks at history especially from a South East Asian perspective. She writes very well and has, I think, a reasonably large following. Her post quotables, & contortions about racial thinking deals with an issue that I struggle with - labels and the way they acquire a life of their own, the problems in dealing with them.

The Edge of the American West is a group blog with a North American perspective that mixes history with, among other things, current events.

Christopher Moore is a leading Canadian historian.  His Christopher Moore's Canadian History contains short posts with a mix of history and current events, generally with some historical overlay. I find his links very helpful.

History Today on-line is the blog for this now long standing magazine, long standing enough for me to have read it at school!  It is full of entertaining tit bits.

Finally, I mentioned Janine Rizzeti's blob, The Resident Judge of Port Phillip, in my last post, Setting Australian history in context. This is another very well written blog with an especial focus on the Australian early colonial period, extending into broader topics such as the writing of history itself.

Setting Australian history in context

Neil Whitfield had an interesting post, I’m old-fashioned in my way…, dealing with the study of British history in Australia.

Like Neil, I grew up studying a fair bit of British and especially English history along with a slab of European. This has now been largely lost and, like Neil, I think that it's a pity. Yes, I know that the school curriculum is crowded and Governments want to push the study of thing's Australian, but the consequent loss of context does create difficulties. Among other things, it means that more has to be explained.

If you look at my post Patrick Desmond Fitzgerald Murray 1900-1967 you can see how the Murrays  were an Imperial family. The post also refers to the University of New England as it was in the 1960s.

In all the frequent focus on institutions and processes, it is sometimes easy to forget that people with their own histories and ideas make history. The New England University College owed its existence to regional pressures and links. The precise form the new institution took was due to interaction between the ideas of the key founders and those of the early staff, all recruited to the area from outside. 

 Saturday Morning Musings - New England's Ogilvie dynasty looks at a very different family, one of New England's pastoral dynasties. With Edward Oglivie, you can see the tug between his Australian present and his and his father's love of Italy.

In a sense this is just a footnote. However, one issue in New England history is the divide within the squatting community between those who saw the North as primary focus and those to whom it may have been home, but whose real interest lay elsewhere. 

Sunday Essay - church, state and social change in Australia explores aspects of New England's social history. The members of the Ursuline order who came to Armidale and founded the order in Australia had a very particular and European vision of the church and of education. This had a small but significant effect, first in Armidale and then beyond as the order spread.

In Train Reading - S H Roberts the Squatting Age in Australia, 1835-1847 I look at one of the pioneering histories of the early squatting period.  This drew a rather nice companion piece from Janine Rizzeti, ‘The Squatting Age in Australia 1835-1847′. Janine's blog, The Resident Judge of Port Phillip, is a very good blog for all those interested in Australian history.

One of Robert's strengths is his ability to set local colonial events in a British and European context. His description of the changes in the English and European wool industries that opened the door for the Australian industry is very good indeed.

I hope that I have made my point. Australian history at whatever level needs a broader historical context.