Some thoughts about sharing history

It will be noticed that the teaching of history is conspicuous by its absence. But for Australians, who so far have no history of their own, this important area of knowledge comes last. History is only taught in the State schools of Australia by means of unconnected accounts strewn throughout the six graded books (called royal readers), which are used to teach the children to read. It is not enough.
 — Oscar Comettant, In the Land of Kangaroos and Gold Mines, 154.

I am a member of Project Wombat: an international gang of devotees of the fictional Greek goddess Erudite. We burrow for hard to find facts. Some of what I will be serving up hereafter is based on things I have written over the past fifty years, as I indulged (1) my curiosity about what happened when, and (2) my taste for the muted rabble-roused riot that is the story of recent (post invasion) Australia.

This won't be Grand Approved History, with lists of dates and lots of dead white males, as approved by conservative politicians: this is the warts and all version, the small realities that make us Us. It will be, to be honest, gossip disguised as social history . It is the stuff I was never taught in school, like the following little known act of female larrikinism that took place in Melbourne in 1901. These ladies may have acted up, but they were Australians, and I think they deserve our admiration.

The ladies, in their eagerness to show their loyalty, climbed on their chairs, waved their handkerchiefs, and joined as loudly in the applause as their powers would admit. It was a fitting conclusion to a magnificent ceremony.
—The Brisbane Courier, 10 May 1901, 5.

That account described the opening of the first Australian Parliament in Melbourne in May 1901, and most Australians were ecstatic. A century earlier, in 1801, Australian society ladies (we must have had several of them by then) would never have stood on chairs , or waved handkerchiefs and if they had, it would have been hushed up. Hiding that sort of thing was easy when Australia s historical records were written with quill pens (steel pens came later) in special books, or on sheets of paper that were later bound into books. There was usually only one copy, easily misfiled

I once acquired a manuscript foolscap ledger. It came my way in a box of books from a deceased estate , and it was clearly important , so I consulted a rare books librarian at the University of Sydney's Fisher Library. He immediately implored me to donate the volume to Fisher, but I decided to consult somebody at the State Library's Mitchell Library first. Then on the way across town, I popped in and showed the volume to an antiquarian bookseller of my acquaintance. He took one look and offered me $200 for it.

I was a young science undergraduate, and that was a lot of money back in 1966, but I knew my apples. When I said "Henry, I think you'll find that this comes under the Archives Act", his face took on a definite pallor I don't think he expected a spotty youth to know about the relevant legislation, but I did and clearly, he knew about the Act as well.

At the Mitchell Library, I was handed over to an important person, and when she declared the work genuine, I told her that I would bring it in next week, once I had photocopied it. No, you won't, she told me gently but firmly This is a Black Book, and I've seen Tasmanian ones, but no other New South Wales volumes exist. It's very rare, and it's staying here!

I agreed and when I told her about Henry's offer, I was slightly deafened as she ground her teeth. You see, the ledger was a list of convicts in the Hunter Valley, their crimes in Britain, ships and sentences, their assigned masters, each offence they had been tried for in Australia, the witnesses called, and the punishments meted out, so we could both see its importance.

“And if you'd sold it to that old rogue , it would have disappeared forever, she told me. I produced the wrapping I had found it in, and b etween us, we deduced that this document , recording many convicts and their misdeeds, had been in a courthousecourthouse in Burwood, before it was sent to Manly in Burwood, before it was sent to Manly courthouse in the 1930s, and fell into the hands of in the 1930s, and fell into the hands of the deceased owner of the estate. Probably, said the librarian, it had  been stolenstolen to cover up the name of a convict ancestor.

The volume did indeed come under the Act, and it now lives in the State Archives. When I say records can go astray, I mean it.  This is why we often don't know how, or why, people did things as they did, because the humdrum and the ordinary if they had ever even been mentioned, became collateral damage as unfortunate facts and uncomfortable truths were deep sixed.

Then again, some record keepers were good at their duties but their handwriting was atrocious, which helped hide the details. Another librarian told me once that a researcher she knew had concluded that a single hand had written the whole of one set of shipping records. Some pages were neat and clear but others were totally illegible, and the researcher believed the official might sometimes have been drunk, reducing his lists on those days to a fearful scrawl. We will never know, now, we will never read some of the pages, either, and already, many young people can no longer read even a clear cursive script.

Even if the records survived and the handwriting was clear, later scholars had to travel to where the registers, records, ledgers account books, lists and letters were stored. Most of these are now in Australia, but others are or were in Britain, so r esearch cost time and money especially time. Locally held microfilms still give the reader walloping great headaches, and microfiches are almost as bad.

Now more and more of the surviving old records and rare books have been digitised and are online, so we can sit comfortably at our desks, sipping tea and reading documents that are stored on the other side of the street, the town, or the world. Distance is no problem any more, because our world has repeatedly changed.

There have been five distinct quantum leaps (a term I use in its correct, scientific sense) in the elimination of distance for Australians. The first was when steamships replaced sail and reduced the time to or from Europe from up to half a year to a couple of months, via the overland route at Suez, and later, through the Suez Canal

Miss Douglas “planting” the first post for the Overland Telegraph.

The second change came just a few year s later, when the Overland Telegraph, combined with cables under the sea, reduced the time it took for vital news to cross the world from two months to a day or less, just as rail lines and a growing sense of common destiny linked our scattered colonies to gether. These first two advances happened in colonial times and both changed Australia.

The other three improvements came in post colonial times: the availability of jet travel that takes us to Europe in around 24 hours, the introduction of satellite TV, and the internet. Today, thanks to modern technology, we can all read the real stories of real people from the past, using original sources, sitting anywhere in the world.

In the 21st century, writers aren't the only ones to scour the records , so every history reader can now be a history researcher. I have always cherished the view of computer art that two of my favourite mathematicians once offered their readers, because their vision applies to many other pursuits, including history!

If computer art has a future as an art form in its own right, it is to be found in the dynamic, the animated, the interactive. It should look not towards Rembrandt, but towards Verdi’s ‘Aïda’. Not just the classical ‘Aïda’, but an ‘Aïda’ with the audience singing along and scrambling onto the backs of the elephants on stage. Chaos? No. Total theatre.
— Philip J. Davis and Reuben Hersh, Descartes’ Dream, Penguin, 53.

I also have a personal reason for doubting all official records, because I was born in Queensland in the later days of World War II, and when my father (an RAAF officer), moved north into “the islands”, my mother flew to Sydney with me as a babe in arms on an Air Force Catalina, what they quaintly called a “flying boat”.

The RAAF was driven by regulations, and the number of passengers allowed on a Catalina was restricted. As we were one over on the head count, an Air Commodore who was on the flight ordered that I be embarked as a Gladstone bag, and that was how I appeared on the manifest. Anybody seeking evidence of my juvenile interstate travels on faded, curled foolscap sheets, or even their digitised versions, would now seek in vain.

I am grateful in retrospect to the Air Commodore, but according to my mother (never the most reliable of witnesses), I showed my gratitude at the time by throwing up on him. I tend to believe this, because I have always been a bit of an anarchist at heart, but posthumously (so far as he is concerned), I express my thanks and unreserved regrets to that kindly, and at one point, slightly smelly Air Commodore.

Still, neither my travel nor the arc described by my gastric contents appears in any surviving record. There is a lesson there for us all: should we trust records, even those of apparent eyewitnesses? In my youth in the 1950s, long before history became a participation event, my cohort were subjected to rote learning from the ‘Social Studies’ texts of G. T. Spaull, M.A.

To my young mind, an image was evidence, and the image on the left, below, seen in many different books before I reached my teens, reflected the Truth of the travels of Edward John Eyre and Wylie, walking the southern coast of Australia, more than a century earlier.

Two versions of a common but anonymous image of Eyre and Wylie on the Great Australian Bight. [ii]

Early this century, I read Eyre’s journals as an active history participator, and I looked at the left-hand image again, wondering where Eyre’s horses were, because I knew he released them just as he reached the outskirts of Albany. Then I saw the men’s shadows pointing to the ocean, with the sun on their left. According to that image, they were (and are) going east, the wrong way!

At first, I blamed a lazy northern hemisphere artist for the error, but there is a simpler explanation: most 19^th century images were created first as art work on paper that was copied onto a plate which was used to print an image that was a mirror-image of the plate. Today, with computers, this sort of reversal is easily fixed, as you can see from the right-hand version, which I created with three keystrokes. If you look at images of the Endeavour River, where James Cook’s crew repaired their ship in 1770, you can see a similar reversal ‘twixt painting and engraving in some versions.

Louis de Freycinet’s wife Rose (1794 – 1832) stowed away on Uranie, her husband’s ship, in 1817 and sailed with him until 1820. He seems never to have publicly mentioned her presence after they returned to France, though he had named a dove and a Samoan island after her. She was shown in a watercolour painted by Alphonse Pellion near Shark Bay, but when the painting was later engraved for printing, Rose de Freycinet was nowhere to be seen.

 Now you see her, now you don’t. Rose de Freycinet is visible in front of the conical tent in the left-hand picture (the original watercolour), but not in the engraved version, which is on the right.

The Paris authorities learned of Rose’s stowing away after Uranie was wrecked in the Falkland Islands, but Louis seems to have suffered no punishment, and the matter was probably hushed up. True, there is that watercolour of Shark Bay, painted in 1818, showing Rose on the shore, but when it was reproduced in the official report she was no longer in the picture.

In those days, image doctoring may have been a challenge, but back then, every painting needed to be engraved, allowing such blemishes as unofficial women to be quietly deleted at that stage, though in the small colony of Sydney, her presence had been recorded in the local newspaper:

On Monday last the Commandant of the Expedition and Madame de FREYCINET entertained the principal Officers of the Colony, and their Ladies, on board the Uranie.
— The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, 18 December 1819, 3, http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/2179142

So are words any more reliable? We might hope so, because this book uses many contemporary accounts, but can we trust such stories? Here is a tale which firmly says “no!”. Mind you, the anecdote may or may not be true—but Thomas Carlyle certainly believed that trust should be rationed. He wrote:

The old story of Sir Walter Raleigh’s looking from his prison window on some street tumult, which afterward three witnesses reported in three different ways, himself differing from them all, is still a true lesson to us.

Thomas Carlyle, ‘On History’, Fraser’s Magazine, November 1830, 415. Sabine Baring-Gould could only trace the story to the Journal de Paris, 1787, and from there to Letters on Literature by Robert Heron (John Pinkerton), 1785.

Theoretical historians say first-hand accounts are the best sources, but practical historians take all tales with a pinch of salt—if not a whole bucketful. Here are nine accounts from eight people, about a lightning strike that killed livestock, not long after the First Fleet landed in Sydney Cove.

As I warned earlier, the curious (some might say illiterate) spelling you will see here happens because even educated people back then often used odd or eccentric spelling, and throughout this book, I have retained the original forms, in all their glory. The words in bold show you the details to look at. Yes, I was too tired to add the sources: Google the exact phrase Six Sheep 2 Labms and one Pigg belonging to Major Ross, and you will find the lot.

[John Hunter] In February, the weather was sultry, with lightning, thunder, and heavy rain; this sort of weather continued for a fortnight, with few and very short intervals of fair weather; a flash of lightning fell one night near the camp, and struck a tree near to the post of a centinel, who was much hurt by it; the tree was greatly rent, and there being at the foot of it a pen in which were a few pigs and sheep, they were all killed.

[Watkin Tench] Ere we had been a fortnight on shore we experienced some storms of thunder accompanied with rain, than which nothing can be conceived more violent and tremendous, and their repetition for several days, joined to the damage they did, by killing several of our sheep, led us to draw presages of an unpleasant nature.

[Arthur Phillip] The month of February was ushered in by a very violent storm of thunder and rain. The lightning struck and shivered a tree, under which a shed had been erected for some sheep, and five of those animals were at the same time unfortunately destroyed by it.

[John White ] 2nd February. This morning five sheep, belonging to the lieutenant-governor and quarter-master, were killed by lightning under a tree, at the foot of which a shed had been built for them. The branches and trunk of the tree were shivered and rent in a very extraordinary manner.

[Arthur Bowes Smyth ] Abt. 12 o’Clock in the night one severe flash of Lightg. struck a very large tree in the centre of the Camp under wh. some places were constructed to keep the Sheep & Hogs in: it split the tree from top to bottom; kill’d 5 Sheep belonging to Major Ross & a pig of one of the Lieuts.

[George Worgan ] On the First Day of this Month, We had a vast deal of heavy Rain. Thunder & Lightning, and the next morning 5 Sheep, 1 Lamb & 2 Pigs, were found dead, lying under a Tree, which was riven in a violent Manner by the Lightning.

Worgan was not satisfied with a single conflicting account, and gave a second version:

[Worgan again] We have reason to apprehend that much Mischief may be done by Lightning here. Indeed we have experienced its fatal Effects since we have been here, for one Night 6 Sheep 1 Lamb, & 2 Pigs that were lying under a Tree, were all killed and the Tree violently riven.

[David Collins ] In the night of the 6th February, six sheep, two lambs, and one pig, belonging chiefly to the lieutenant-governor, having been placed at the foot of a large tree, were destroyed by the lightning.

[Ralph Clark] Thursday 7…I am Sorry to find that by the very hard clap of Thunder the lightning Struck one of the Trees near where we were at Supper and Kild Six Sheep 2 Labms and one Pigg belonging to Major Ross…

Well, at least Clark and Collins agreed on the numbers (and in spite of appearances, they probably agreed on the date, as well, seeing that it probably happened on the night of the 6^th – 7^th).

Still, with those examples to warn you, this book describes the matters of daily life that concerned colonists, drawing as far as possible, on the evidence the colonists themselves provided.

Just remember the blind men and the elephant in the old Indian legend. They all felt different parts of the elephant and described it in different terms, each from a limited perspective, just as people in real life always see things from different perspectives.

And where the blind men were dispassionate assessors, our witnesses often had a strong interest in the matters and events, and must, at times, have been seeking to serve those interests. For example, based on his experience in India, Thomas Maslen was convinced that Australia needed elephants and said so in The Friend of Australia (q.v., if you dare):

When arrived in Australia they should be kept in stables at night; and in the winter, well and warmly clothed with a large cloth of stout texture, and a tarpaulin over it fastened on with a girth round the body; and they should sometimes be treated with a meal of cinnamon to warm their insides.

Men of capital who could afford to keep an elephant would clear more land of trees in a month, with a few men to cut them down, than probably a hundred convicts could in double that time without the assistance of that animal.
— ‘A Retired Officer’ (Thomas Maslen), The Friend of Australia, 218.

He also recommended camels and offered designs for towns with a goivernor's palace, a senate house, churches, prisons, cemeteries and no hospiltals or schols. They say a stopped watch is correct twice each day, but Maslen generally missed his time slot. When it comes to ideas like his, they are of little use to those of us not attached to surrealist Grand Guignol and/or the Theatre of the Absurd. 

In the end, the reader must weigh all the elephants, I’m sorry, I mean all the evidence.

So now you know what the next month or so may bring. Here, I may look at the governor who had a tame thief, the one who pardoned a bushranger for being good at escaping, and the one who once owned slaves. I am still working on slavery in Australia, so there may be quite a bit on that sort of inhumanity. I won't discuss women in trousers, though.

---

[

The Founding Principles of Science

 …hand-copying of algebra texts and illuminating their pages with olive leaves and cheerful cherubim surrounding tables of logarithms…
— Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz, chapter 7.

Miller was describing a monk, in a future Dark Age, laboriously decorating a scrap of mathematics. Across a millennium, in a monastery in the south-west of the USA, the monk and his order kept all the bits of paper that had survived a nuclear war and its aftermath, copying and decorating them as they faded.

In my youth, I read a lot of science fiction. Come to think of it, if reading that genre defines my youth, then I must still be in my half past morning tea time, but I have to admit that it was many years ago that I encountered that scene which has remained with me ever since, even if I recalled the passage featuring an illuminated printed circuit as the object of veneration.

Now, I am almost in the frame to be venerated as a relic, but over the years, that image of the monk has stayed with me and, writing about history and science, I often wonder what would happen if our society went belly-up (or, more realistically, when it collapses). With climate change surging, totalitarian states on the rise, antibiotic-resistant bacteria and bungled epidemic management, I have long thought chaos was likely to break out.

Still, we earth-dwelling humans keep lurching on, but in the 1990s, my concerns led me to pose the following question on an email list (remember those?) called Science Matters:

You anticipate a new Dark Age, and you wish to engrave key information on indestructible plaques, the idea being to assist later people of wit to pass through their Renaissance faster by giving them the working tools of science. You only have a thousand plaques, each good for 160 characters: what are the most important ideas to pass on?

Several players immediately mentioned Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in the Court of King Arthur, but he was a time traveller taking late 19^th century workshop practice back to the Middle Ages, while what I wanted (and want) to do is to provide a scientific framework for a fractured society to build on. I want solid foundations, not olive leaves and cherubim in the margins.

Most lay respondents answered in terms of explaining how to make steam engines or how to harness nuclear energy, both hard to do in thirty words or so. The plaques may be separated, so it would not be safe to write “to be continued” on plaque 8 and proceed with more detail on plaque 9.

The bigger issue is that any technology, if sufficiently advanced will, as Arthur C. Clarke explained to us, seem like magic. That is why I set the limit, because it helps people concentrate on the basics, things which are easily grasped, but hard to find unless you know where to look. Magnetic lines of force, phlogiston and electrons orbiting a nucleus may have helped us think for a while, but they didn’t and won’t help us discover new things.

Most suggestions from science-trained people offered things like a recipe for soap starting with extracting tallow and making lye, the recipe for gunpowder, principles of radio, how to generate and convey electricity, how to make transformers and AC motors, basic hydrodynamics, the periodic table, how to make steel, a map of the world, the scientific method or trigonometry.

Other suggestions included notions like Mendelian inheritance, the second law of thermodynamics, and principles like evolution, the activity series of metals and the law of superposition in sediments. Some of them even offered draft texts:

·       To see tiny animals: carefully grind two clear glass discs into convex shape. Polish these very finely. Look through these together at various distances. Fix in tube.

·       Copy writing. Carve wooden blocks into letter shape. Arrange into words. Apply ink. Apply paper. Metal can be cast into letter shapes and put on drum which rolls over paper.

This was the format that I later chose, because it constrains you to think each idea through, to hone it to perfection, but they made a manual, not a guide. I have since concluded that I would probably start with:

·       Wash your hands, boil your water. Many types of illness are caused by small living things, too small to see. They get into wounds and our digestive systems.

Awareness of this idea would save a great deal of suffering, because looking back, finding out about microbes has not been easy, and knowing what to do after we did find out about microbes was just as hard. Without a healthy population education does not happen, poverty is rife, and progress is blocked. Above all, a framework has to facilitate growth, well-being and a revival of humanity.

Our human voyage is not yet over, but we are quite possibly on a lee shore, with the engine seized from lack of maintenance. The main question is whether we have recourse to the anchors or the lifeboats. Either way, it seems to me that a new Dark Age, driven by stupidity, greed and the fightback of the microbes, is so close that we should sharpen our burins and start engraving the plaques. One thing, though: I decided to go long-form here, stating reasons and background for my choices. I leave the wording and engraving to you, the reader.

I began my adult life wanting to be a pre- and post-Islamic Mediaeval Javanese historian (honest!), but outside events drove me to get a science degree instead. I have practised science most of my life, and taught science at every level from kindergarten to undergraduate, plus adult classes. Over the past two decades, after six years as a science journalist, I drifted back to writing history again, much of it tied to my familiarity with science and technology, and I think that leaves me well-placed to offer a plan.

And now, having said we need principles not recipes, there are a few recipes that will greatly assist the proto-scientists of any New Renaissance. The two key things that define humans are using fire and tools, but even after a nuclear meltdown, the survivors will know to bang the rocks together. Making fire, finding materials and making things, and ensuring health, though, all of these require recipes.

So where would you begin?

New books for this year from Peter Macinnis

I am, as my cohort say, of advanced middle age. That means, like it or not, I am approaching my-use-by-get-in-the-box date, and my arms and hands are decaying with arthritis. For this reason, if no other, I have been busily polishing off partly-completed titles.

These works, I have to say, I am self-publishing, because I am tired of hawking my wares around to publishers who fail to share my vision — or any vision at all, in many cases. I think what happens is that they are failed scrubblers (I stand by that word) who feel that by inserting a herb border with snapdragons into a work, they are almost Authors.

My concern is to get ideas out there, where young or young-at-heart minds can get into them. Most of my more serious books need colour illustrations, and those rack the price up, so I am doing budget-level full-colour pics ebooks, and for those who must have a piece of dead-tree in their hands, they will have to settle for half-tone (black-grey-white) illos.

The first cab off the rank is The Biggest Book of Australian History, and that has been out for a couple of weeks, and if you want to kick the tyres, try this sample chapter.

To buy it, go here.

Now, because Amazon messed me about, I had to settle for their AI-directed cover for the e-book, and not this one on the left (I also had to change the title to say Biggest, long story). The National Library of Australia, after four sell-out editions of The Big Book of Australian History  lost their creative staff and lost their impetus, so I took back my IP, and wrote a book 3.3 times the size, and instead of costing $40, the huge ebook, with all of then interesting stuff added, costs $6. Even the paperback comes in under their cost, and you can get the two for $40.

My advice is: get the print book for libraries and gifts and the e-book for serious exploration.

The next book is a bit from left-field, and it will suit a niche market, but those who need it will love it. This link will tell you more.

Most writers of Advanced Middle Age will have a commonplace file or book, where they store all of the pithy and ineresting quotes that they come across, and most of those files disappear when they fall off their perch, but I had a lovely set of quotes to share, so I decided to save them in two ways: both in a separate blog, and also as an ebook that is searchable and as a dead-tree book.

I decised to make it available when  I found a quote that appears in another entry, that I saw while prepping for a tour of southern Italy:

…one, the notoriously unreliable monk Radulph Glaber (the wildness of whose imagination was rivalled only by that of his private life, which gives him a fair claim to have been expelled from more monasteries than any other littérateur of the eleventh century)…
— John Julius Norwich, The Normans in the South, 1016–1130, 1992.

You can't make up stuff like that, and you can't Google this sort of clever malice up, either, and while in a cave in Matera, I started really working on my commonplace book, with beer for sustenance. For marketing reasons, I gave it a pun-loaded title, as you can see from the cover. Unless you are familiar with René Magritte's Ceci n'est pas un pipe, you will miss the more subtle play on words. My lips are sealed.

Then there is Australianisms, and I did some work on that as well, while schlepping from Helsinki to Malta in April to June with two bunches of Auatralianisms, and that one is now out in paperback and also as an ebook.

Look, if you want a damn thick square book for your shelves, buy the print version, but it is >280 000 words, and weighs 940 grams, while the ebook is almost weightless, and it is searchable: some of your best discoveries will be stochastic side-blows from a directed search, and the e-book is cheaper! Also, today, I added another 30 entries to both versions, but once you get the print version, you won't see any later bits. Buy it as a gift, but the e-book is better, and much easier to read in bed. When you sleep, dream of the carbon benefits!

I am not in this game for the money: I want to educate, but the next book is one that your friends really should not be allowed near. Your enemies, on the other hand, should be encouraged to both read it and believe it.

The Lesser of Two Weevils is available as an ebook, and also as a dead tree book. Buy the ebook for yourself, and the dead tree version for your enemies. If you have no enemies, give this to your friends to boost your enemy ranks. Works like a dream...

Sixty years ago, I had a boss, named Doug 'Udson (he was the original 'Udson with a haitch, and sadly he is dead. I say sadly because, while he was malignant, he would believe anything. When I wrote in an official file that a matter was 'in train', giving a reference to another file where the matter was being dealt with, he charged me with leaving an unspecified file on a train. 

Now the thing is that he had looked up "train" in a tiny book called a 'Collins desk dictionary', whereas I advised him in the trial to at least consult the Shorter OED, a reference which he failed to understand, though my two Arts-graduate superiors/judges got it mmediately. I, as a 20-year-old had dunked him in putrid smelly stuff with that one line.

The context: he was a Hard Right member of our union, I was soft left, but given to tripping him up at Styate Branch Council meetings, so he was out to get me. In the hearing, I explained that I was puzzled, and asked which file he thought I had left on the train, and while he stammered and muttered, the case was dismissed. My judges were urbane, and kept straight faces while dismissing the charge, then thanked me with a giggle after he had stalked out, but people like Doug need to be brought down, and reading this book will do just that. Make sure they get it, because they certainly won't!

If any sort of AI ever scoops this one up, all sorts of Hell will break loose. As I maintain that AI means Artificial Inelegance, I have my hopes. Here are some reviews for The Lesser of Two Weevils:

He would say that, wouldn’t he? —Randy Mice-Davies, Buxton Bugle.
Exceedingly dense. —F. R. Leavis, New Hearings in English Pottery.
Nobody ever erected a statue to a cricket. —Jean Sibelius (attrib.)
I wish I had as many dollars as this book has given me belly rumbles… —Gina Rinestone, The Young Exploiters’ Almanac.
I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. —Franz Kafka, Cygnis ad Nauseam.

So here, you will find, not A Beginners' Guide, but A Suckers' End. If you want a sample, I post a piece most days to this Facebook page. I also share them on Bluesky, where there is less clutter. There are also some samples here, or try these:

casse-noisette. A French device, whirled around on a string, which imitates the sound of a fart.

castigate. A small cast iron gate at the top of a high tower, overlooking the most noisome part of a castle moat. A problematic troubadour might often be ejected with great ceremony and heroic swearing from here, and being castigated has now come to mean rough treatment of almost anyone.

casting couch. Many are culled, and few are chosen.

castration. A eunuch experience.

casus belli. A Latin term for a male corset, used to hold a wobbly abdomen in a tight grip. In mediaeval Europe, revealing that a foreign ruler used a casus belli was seen as a declaration of war.

Also to be added in the months ahead, Tales My Mother Taught Me (but shouldn't have) and Keeeping People Is Wrong. The first is former-quiz-star smart-arsery about fondly-held myths, the latter is a very serious look at slavery in Australia.

This is my problem, you see, I keep swapping genres. Speaking of which, I have also  just published Sheep May Safely Craze, as both a book an e-book: below you can find a taste of this intellectual minefield.

This sample does not mention the ravens who used to be dragons, the role the Lone Ranger played in the change, what caused the Vesuvius eruption that buried Pompeii, the vampire wannabe novelists, Enid Blyton and Barbara Cartland, or how Dr Moreau operated on King George III. These were all in the NDA I signed, but the rats' lawyer was a crook, and for two doubloons and residual rights, she made sure that the NDA said nothing about books.

The NDA also said nothing about the dark side of pea soup, but I have been counselled against even mentioning that topic.

Since the dawn of time, humans have always pondered: what is life? why are we here? is there life after death?  This book does not answer any of those questions, but it has nice colours.
—Loki Svartifossson, R. E. M.

Loki-verification: with the exception of this statement, absolutely nothing in this book is completely untrue.

Prologue

Reader, here, we reduce a tale of multidimensional beings to a linear narrative. Just hang onto your hat, seat and undergarments (also your teeth, if the Ninja Tooth Fairy warning light is flashing). We will be as gentle as we can.

<SPOILER ALERT> To begin at the ending (and this is quite helpful as a way of reassuring any excessively nervous readers), the sheep had completed their quest and had very clearly won. <END SPOILER ALERT> So now they were free from all compulsion, but the first dawn of their new freedom saw them stuck with a great deal of filing. Some of the more classically trained ones even muttered darkly about Pyrrhic victories.

Of course, it might have been worse, because the winners in any quest must always meet the stern and precise requirements of the five Protocols of Postadventurism. The rats had gone off somewhere, Eric, Alice and the ravens were headed for Paris, and as usual, the sheep were left with the task of tidying up and clearing away.

According to a paragraph (in somebody else’s hand-writing, but found on an early page in Hypatia’s notes), this requirement exists mainly to stop winners getting too full of themselves when they have successfully completed their allotted tasks in a quest. Aided by Alice and Eric, the sheep had completed every single task in their quest (OK. so there was only one…), and now was the time for somebody’s comeuppance. It was No Free Lunch time…

Even Erasmus, who had been through all of this before, could not recall the full details of the Protocols, so Hypatia went into the Library of Lost Manuscripts while the others stopped for coffee, read up on the subject, and returned to tell them they had got off lucky.

“It seems we did very well,” she said, in a fruity school-marmish contralto. “By tradition and law, those left standing at the declared end of any adventure must meet the specific terms of a total of five Protocols, but as things have turned out, only the last Protocol really needs any attention. That said, even that one can be onerous, but at least it’s far less messy.”

She went on to explain that the first of the Protocols involves sorting out dead bodies, including body parts and portions too large to fit in a bucket, but as they all agreed after looking around, those bits were all entirely absent. The second item relates to damaged people and property, along with smaller loose, lopped or separated body parts, and there were none of those either, while the third Protocol (stitching, gluing, soldering and minor surgical procedures) was clearly not applicable.

The fourth Protocol is mainly concerned with the mopping up of blood, but after a quick discussion, the sheep all agreed that, even under a generous and loose reading of the text of the Protocols, bleeding noses caused by high-kicking IT people doing the can-can in their celebratory conga line shouldn’t really count as Adventure-related, so the survivors could ignore the fourth Protocol as well, and leave the robotic floor scrubbers to deal with it.

That meant that the fifth and final Protocol was all they had to work on. That one deals with Filing — and as finger-wagging lawyers will tell you, that requirement can neither be avoided nor evaded. In the aftermath, there is always a great deal of serious Filing to be done, and those who are still conscious and upright must set to work, each in his, or her, own way.

While it may be argued that some of their own-way efforts did not necessarily lie entirely within the strict meanings set out in section 84 (2) (b) (iii) of the Protocols Interpretation Act, Hypatia had decided to let that ride. Just being seen to be filing if the inspectors came in would meet the letter of the law, so Myfanwy was filing a callus on her right front hoof, a lump caused by the waldos she wore for operating keyboards, phones and calculators.

Beside her, and totally unaware that all the items in question were made from papier mâché, King George III was filing the padlock on the ball and chain that Health and Safety had attached to his ankle, just before midnight, as the conga line went can-can. His file was also made of papier mâché, but nobody said a word to George about how that choice of materials might be related to his slow progress in the act of freeing himself.

Nobody minded his failure to contribute, because this task kept him engaged, slightly amused, and out of harm’s way, and as Hypatia pointed out, if the inspectors did show up, they would go after him first, and arguing with King George III invariably made inspectors collapse into a confused slumber. George may have been short on IQ points, but his fracturing illogic was a weapon of mass distraction.

As a group, the reserve team red sheep conga line, weren’t very bright, either, and their Filing consisted of forming a line (after all, as they explained to Erasmus, they were in single file) and zipping back and forth across the floor, trying out the less outrageous of the advanced moves that the élite top team had shown off, late on the previous night. Wisely, these second-tier sheep elected not to try imitating the moves of the IT people, whose can-can conga had totally eclipsed the top team’s performance.

All the same, the actions of the reserves were enough to cause Erasmus to wonder briefly if any elements of the first four Protocols might soon come back into play, but Erasmus often worried about the wrong things. In hindsight, he should really have been worrying about Loki, who had donned his blue waldos, and stripped down his abnormality projector, before using a triangular file to give it a hair trigger, but that’s another story.

Only Erasmus and Hypatia were doing things that truly qualified as Filing within the strict and rigid meaning of the fifth Protocol. At the end, as Hypatia slammed the last box-file shut, a single sheet of paper flew loose, and drifted, almost unseen, to the floor. Humming Candle in the Wind with a twisted and inverted conga rhythm that totally wrong-footed the entire reserve team, King George III bent and picked up the paper before he passed it up to Hypatia.

See? More smart-arsery, and in most cases running several layers deep. F'rinstance, do the names Eric Blair and Alice Liddell ring a vague bell? I mean, in another quarter, Eric Blair wrote Homage to Catatonia, and Alice Liddell worked with Charles Lutwidge Dodgson on looking-glases, but my latest NDA allows me to go no further.

Australian history as it should be: a new book

I have, this morning published an ebook and a paperback with the same content. One has full-colour illustrations and costs $6, but because of printing costs, the $34 paper version is monochrome.

The pricing if you buy both is exactly the same as any one of the four editions published by the National Library of Australia. The difference? 264,000 words here, as against 80,000 there. Now I have added in all of the improbable, unlikely but true details. You might call this the QI (Quite Interesting) of Australian history.

Two of my history teachers would approve my work, but I am sure that conservative politicians (ptui!) would not. For starters, I offer S. T. Gill's two views of  'squatter', 1788 and 1863, as evidence. These offer warts-and-all history, all the stuff that prim conservatives shriek and run away from. Here they are:

I detest those conservative fogeys who demand that History be LISTS OF PEOPLE ("like me", implied). History should not be endless lists, it needs to be stories that we can learn from.  

Those conservatives want our history to be tales of  BCDEFG: Bushrangers and Convicts (all scum), Diggers (the military ones), Explorers (brave openers of untamed total wilderness), Farmers (who turned the sterile wilderness into riches at no cost) and Gold (ours by right of conquest). They cannot name even five of more than 2000 bushrangers; their grasp of the convict system is pitiful (they can’t tell a ticket of leave from a pardon); they could not locate a single battlefield on a map; they would be lucky to name more four explorers worthy of note (and  Burke and Wills don’t count!); they don't know the harm that farming does  on our fragile soils, they know nothing about gold before Hargraves.

No lists of things, dates or people here. I had to learn lists in the 50s, like all the rivers Leichhardt crossed or followed in 1844 – 45, and performing that is my party trick among people who think. I enjoy watching them wince in horror as they realise (or recall) that such tasks were once thought to be education.

My version of Australian history is written by a science-trained story-teller, so it begins with geology and biology, then the first Australians and then the invaders. It also argues that Australia Day should be January 30.

I mention a few usual suspects, but you will also meet some Melbourne pirates; intellectuals; fools; geniuses; crooks, liars, hoaxer, frauds and cheats; eccentrics; runaways and women who wore trousers, swam naked or ran races in crinolines. I offer Governor King’s official thief and Moondyne Joe, pardoned for being good at escaping; a monster snake; a governor who owned slaves and a bureaucrat who saved Macquarie Street in Sydney; and teenage, girl and women explorers: they don't mention those in schools!

You will learn how poor people survived the Depression; their medicines, what they ate and wore, and meet a cannibal who died of plague—stuff that was left out of my school classes, as were the crimes against the first Australians. You will learn the true tale of gold discovery, which is not at all what you read, and how the Australian Light Horse annoyed Lawrence of Arabia. I also explain the first redback on a dunny seat.

Then there are bunyips, how to treat scurvy, how Eyre is usually shown walking backwards and Major Mitchell’s duel. Also, there are the scandals like the German’s fat-bellied fish: honestly it sound like fiction but it isn’t, and there are references to let you check.

Why did I write this book? I know where the bodies are buried, but more to the point, George Santayana said “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” In my view, those who seek to cover up our past must be wickedly determined to ensure that we all repeat it. We can do better than that, and for the good of our nation, we have to do better than that. The stuff here may trigger hissy-fits among the white-blindfold mob: so be it.

I have lived in Australia for just over one-third of the elapsed time from 1788, when Australia was invaded* by my people, up to now. Our population has quadrupled since I was born, and our ways of thinking have changed during that time, mainly for the better. In the past, I have talked to old Anzacs, old World War II POWs,19th century motorists, and people who knew the explorers. I used to sit under dining tables and behind lounges and heard unsuitable things, as the adults would have said.

This is history as it should be.

* For the cretins who think 1788 was not an invasion, chew on this: taken from David Collins, An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, vol. 1, 2-3, published 1798.

It must however be observed, that at Botany Bay the natives had hitherto conducted themselves sociably and peaceably toward all the parties of our officers and people with whom they had hitherto met, and by no means seemed to regard them as enemies or invaders of their country and tranquillity*.

[footnote on page 3:]
* How grateful to every feeling of humanity would it be could we conclude this narrative without being compelled to say, that these unoffending people had found reason to change both their opinions and their conduct!

Or, consider William Westgarth, Personal Recollections of Early Melbourne & Victoria, 15 (1844).

This was a grand corrobboree, arranged for amongst themselves by surrounding tribes, including the still considerable tribe of the River Goulburn. This was, as it were, one last aboriginal defiance, hurled in despair from the expiring native cause against the too-victorious colonial invasion.

These quotes are part of my 280,000-word collection Australianisms, to be released on Amazon, just a few days from now: go for the ebook which has colour, and is much cheaper.

Oh yes, I forgot: as part of my support for multiculturalism, here is the whole of chapter 21.

What is multiculturalism?

I am back from a long tour (eight weeks) in Europe, and now polishing off several almost complete books before galloping arthritis stops me from writing polemics. One of these works is the fifth edition of The Big Book of Australian History. The first four editions were commissioned by the National Library of Australia (for foreigners, it's a bit like the Libary of Congress. but Australian). Anyhow, the flow each time was hobbled by space requirements. The Library accepted my (as they termed it) Bolshie attitudes (that meant I was brutally honest), but I had to leave out a whole lot of truthful stuff. It is just about all wrapped up, and as I polish chapter 21 (Multiculturalism), some idiot fishwife is squealing to an adoring press about this very topic. An Opposition leader (once a GPS boy, and with all their charm) is dodging defining the word, so here is my present view of the matter: comments welcome.

Oh yes, I forgot to say that the fifth edition is three times as long as the fourth. Here, you will meet a Chinese bushranger, a sewer that ran through Sydney, how John Hindmarsh almost sank Adelaide, a cruel joke about Perth, how Melbourne's society feared an invasion, how my Auntie Dulce was the second Australian to know about the Japanese midget subs, a governor who owned slaves, women who wore trousers and lots of Good Blokes and Good Blokesses. I explain how the Light Horse pissed off Lawrence of Arabia, how Rupert Murdoch's father nearly lost us the Great War and when the better class of ladies climbed on their chairs and twirled their hankies in 1901.

In my books, there are more good people than people to whom I have to say:

In Veritas, Rectum Es *

 21. Being Multicultural

Australia had many cultures before 1788, but modern Multicultural Australia began in 1788, when people came here from all over the world as officials, convicts, servants or crew members on ships, and later as migrants or refugees. They were outnumbered by English speakers and just adopted the customs of the majority British, giving up their own cultures, knowledge, language and insights. Then in the end, Australians started to realise what they were losing.

A White Australia Policy

Officially, there was no White Australia Policy. Still, in the first half of the twentieth century, some non-white people were given a dictation test in a European language they were unlikely to know. If they failed the test, as they usually did, they were not allowed to stay in Australia. This approach was also used for ‘political undesirables’ like the communist journalist Egon Kisch. Kisch came to Australia in 1934 to warn about the threat from Hitler’s Germany. He was fluent in several European languages, and so he was tested in Scottish Gaelic. When he failed the dictation test, he was ordered to leave Australia. Kisch challenged the order in the High Court and won, so he was allowed to stay and spread his message. His challenge made some Australians, especially his left-wing supporters, even more aware of how unfair the test was. Because there was no officially named ‘White Australia Policy’, no official action was required to remove it and so, over time, the White Australia Policy was allowed to fade away.

Nabbing Nancy
In 1965, a little girl called Nancy Prasad was to be deported from Australia, mainly because she was an Indian Fijian. An Aboriginal student activist Charles Perkins staged a ‘kidnap’ of Nancy at the airport to draw attention to the unfairness of Australia’s immigration policies. To the demonstrators’ disappointment, the government made sure Nancy left the next day. She was finally allowed to settle in Australia in the 1970s when she was a teenager.

The Labor Party was usually the party that supported equality but, because the unions feared ‘opening the floodgates’ to foreign labourers, who might work for lower wages, the party was afraid to act. Instead, former cycling champion Hubert Opperman, as Liberal Minister for Immigration between 1963 and 1965, oversaw the end of the old policy.

Historical background

In 1895, the colonial premiers had met to discuss restricting the entry of all non-white people in the event of federation of the colonies. In the end, they agreed instead to ban ‘undesirable persons’. There were probably some who would have suggested banning the Irish, or even the Scots.

A pipe band after an Anzac Day march in Melbourne. Nobody would now question the right of these ‘foreigners’ to lead the march.

One thing was certain: with three of the first six governors (Hunter, Macquarie and Brisbane) being Scots, the Scots would be accepted as part of the ruling group. Long before other ethnic groups established their cultures as worthy of celebration, the Scots were being Scottish in public. They celebrated St Andrew’s Day, marked Hogmanay (New Year’s Day) and toasted Burns’ Night (January 25); they wore the kilt, played their pipes and showed the way for other cultures, later, to preserve their own cultures, with Highland Games. Sadly, much of what has been saved can be listed under three headings: “weird music” (such as bagpipes); “spicy tucker” (think haggis); and “peculiar clobber” (like kilt and sporran). These three headings are used to stereotype any group, but as any member of any minority culture knows, a culture is far more than the sum of those items—but that trio is at least a start. Having a Scots name, I see stereotyping, but for us, it is harmless: others are less lucky. The Scots, according to Anthony Trollope, were well represented in the squattocracy:

Most of [the squatters] have, I think, originally come out of Scotland. When you hear an absent acquaintance spoken of as ‘Mac’, you will not at all know who is meant, but you may safely conclude that it is some prosperous individual. Some were butchers, drovers, or shepherds themselves but a few years since. But they now form an established aristocracy, with very conservative feelings, and are quickly becoming as firm a country party as that which is formed by our squirearchy at home.
—Anthony Trollope, Australia and New Zealand, 442.

Customs officers would examine the papers and backgrounds of people applying to enter Australia. If the applicants seemed to be ‘the wrong sorts’, the dictation test would be used to ensure that they failed. Entry was never refused on racial grounds because, officially, all entrants were given the same test. In 1901, at the time of Federation, there were two major groups in Australian politics—the Protectionists and the Free-Traders. The Australian Labor Party (ALP) was growing, and Protectionist Edmund Barton only became Prime Minister in 1901 with the support of the ALP.

The ALP had to act in the interests of its greatest supporters, especially the Australian Workers Union (AWU). This union had grown out of a number of shearers’ unions in the individual colonies. The AWU feared the effect of cheap foreign labour on the working conditions of its members. The original plan was to ban all foreign nationals, but Britain complained that this would offend British subjects in India and people from Japan—then Britain’s ally—so the dictation test was introduced instead. After World War I, with Japan taking over old German colonies in the Pacific, Japan was later seen as a threat, and World War II seemed to justify that view.

In 1910, ‘White Australia’ supporters even had their own music to march to.

During World War II, many refugees reached Australia, including 4400 ‘Asiatics’. In December 1947, Arthur Calwell, the Minister for Immigration, spoke of plans to send most of these refugees back to their home countries, even though some had married Australians. He then made insensitive comments that upset many people. That may have contributed to the ultimate failure of the White Australia Policy, although there were other influences.

The Colombo Plan

The Colombo Plan was designed to help restore Asian economies affected by Japanese occupation and the deprivations of World War II. It began in 1950 and originally involved sending Australian experts in various fields to Asia. By 1952, 150 Asian students were studying as undergraduates or for higher degrees in Australian universities, and the number grew rapidly.

Later, there was a similar plan for people from African countries that were members of the British Commonwealth—the Special Commonwealth Assistance for Africa Plan, and a Commonwealth Scholarship Fellowship program.

(Your author spent the year 1965 greeting and farewelling the scholars and fellows, and later counted a number of them as friends, so this is from the horse’s mouth, so to speak.)

These plans worked on two levels. The students were selected carefully and, once in Australia, they were supported and taught about local customs and manners. In fact, they were generally given far better support than most post-war migrants.

In the longer term, many of these talented students returned home and then rose to prominence in their own countries. By then, they had a good understanding of Australia, and often had fond memories of the time they had spent here. They were welcomed to Australia as guests and were never regarded as foreign job-stealers. Some of the old fears about foreigners were now dying away.

The dictation test remained until 1958 and after 1963, under Hubert Opperman, the Immigration Department began easing the restrictions on people of ‘mixed race’, making entry easier for foreigners with qualifications.

Sadly, in recent times, we have begun to hear uneducated people with a Trumpist mindset murmuring about ‘White Australia’, once again, babbling about the need for a monoculture. I have a policy of never acknowledging scum by name.

Luckily, the scum are very much a minority in Parliament (even if they are surging in some polls, as I write this), because Australia still has only a weak hold on its status as a world citizen.

Refugees in Australia

Vietnamese ‘boat people’

At the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, many people in South Vietnam feared living under a communist government. Some of them had worked for the allies, others had fought in South Vietnam’s army against the communists, and some just did not agree with communism.

An estimated 60,000 South Vietnamese were executed at the end of the Vietnam War. Another million were sent to ‘re-education’ camps, where around 160,000 died. About 130,000 Vietnamese who were close allies of the USA were helped to leave the country and resettle, mostly in the USA. The Vietnam War was fought to contain international communism and, before the war was lost, the domino theory predicted that international communism would roll south, but this did not happen. In 1976, the Vietnamese communist party was purged when one faction, the pro-China wing, lost power, while the pro-Russia group took full control. This alarmed China, because there were many people of Chinese origin in Vietnam.

These people of Chinese origin, known as the Hoa, felt threatened and, in both Vietnam and China, ethnicity tended to count even more than politics. There were other problems in nearby countries. In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge was trying to persuade the Chinese to remain neutral when war broke out between Cambodia and Vietnam.

The Vietnamese pressure on the Hoa people increased during 1977 and 1978, and many fled to China, where they were welcomed, but then sent to work as peasants on state-run farms. Most of the Vietnamese Hoa were wealthy traders and merchants and so, rather than work on a farm, many of them travelled by boat to other places like Hong Kong, the Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia. Later, some of them sailed even further.

On 25 December 1978, Vietnam invaded Cambodia and forced the Khmer Rouge out. In February 1979, the Chinese army invaded Vietnam, but achieved little. The Vietnamese occupied Cambodia for almost ten years. Most of these incidents were part of a larger fight for supremacy between Chinese and Russian communists.

It seemed that the ideal of international communism had been lost. There was still a lot of suffering in the name of communism. Many Vietnamese ‘boat people’ who had reached other Asian nations wanted to settle somewhere else, and so they looked to their former allies. In the end, the USA agreed to take 823,000 Vietnamese refugees, Australia and Canada each agreed to take 137,000, France offered to take 96,000, and Britain and Germany each agreed to accept 19,000. Many more refugees who left Vietnam by boat either drowned or were killed by pirates. One of the first Vietnamese ‘boat people’ was Hieu Van Le, who reached Australia in 1977. In September 2014, he became the first Asian migrant to be sworn in as the Governor of South Australia. He stepped down in 2021, and on his last day in office, he appealed for kindness to refugees coming in from Afghanistan.

Unlike today’s ‘boat people’, who usually come by boat from refugee camps in Indonesia, most of the first wave of refugees who came to Australia in the late 1970s and early 1980s arrived by plane on the last leg of their journey. Many of the patterns and assumptions for later waves of refugees were established then, but there were many other refugees with different needs.

Vietnamese ‘boat people’ reaching Darwin in November 1977.

Economic refugees

The United Nations High Commission on Refugees distinguishes between economic migrants, who leave their country to find a better life elsewhere, and refugees, who leave their homes because their lives are in danger or they are being persecuted because of their religious, cultural or political beliefs.

Many refugees started coming to Australia from Lebanon in the Middle East after a civil war broke out there in 1975, but the first Lebanese migrants had actually reached Australia in the late 1800s. The early arrivals were mainly Christian and well-off, but many of the later arrivals were poor Muslims. Australia had no qualms about taking them in, even though their culture, language, religion and ethnicity were different. Still, some people did question their ability to fit in.

Today, Australia is being asked to accept refugees from many parts of the world—Tamils from Sri Lanka, minority groups from Burma, Syrians, Farsi-speaking Hazara people from Afghanistan, as well as people from Somalia, Ethiopia and other African countries. Under the law, anybody can ask for asylum as a refugee in Australia, but that is not the same as being granted asylum. In 2009–12, only around 44 per cent of requests for onshore protection visas were approved.

Australia has shown compassion for the victims of many conflicts—too many people, according to the critics, but far too few, according to others.

 

 

Afghan refugees with a treasured carpet that they brought from Kabul, 2005; an African food stall, Newcastle, 2010.

Chain migration

When people arrive in a new country, they often seek out links to their home country: food, clothing, news, their own language and religion, plus the support of friends and family. Immigration often begins with a handful of people migrating and then encouraging others to follow them, so they have familiar company in their new country. As a migrant community grows, others from the same area or culture may follow from the home country. This is called chain migration, and it happened in Australia.

Working in Australia

Until the gold rushes, groups of people from the same country did not usually congregate in one place in Australia. On the large goldfields, Germans, Scots, the Irish, even American diggers often worked with their own people. Before the gold rushes, convicts went where they were sent, and free workers went where there was work. Many Scots became squatters in Victoria and New England, but there were few other ‘ethnic clumpings’ in the 1800s.

Other concentrations of national groups were less obvious. The Cornish tin miners at Moonta in South Australia went there to mine copper, and many Cornish people, whose descendants live around Daylesford in Victoria even today, settled there because they were ‘hard rock’ miners.

Late in the nineteenth century, some of them moved to Kalgoorlie and Coolgardie to mine reef gold. German immigrants were recruited to work in South Australia and in Queensland, where German place and personal names can still be found.

Other trades sometimes brought national groups to a single place. After World War I, parts of the old Austro- Hungarian and Ottoman Turk Empires were formed into Yugoslavia, but many people from that area, including Croatians and Serbians, began leaving in the mid-1920s.

Some of them reached Fremantle and settled there as fishermen, while others moved to the eastern goldfields of Western Australia, where they mainly worked at cutting the timber that fuelled the steam engines. Migrants from the Greek islands understood fishing, and so they often settled in fishing ports.

Migrants leaving their ship in 1964. Many of them had family or friends waiting on the dock.

Chinese gold diggers usually came to Australia in close-knit groups from a single village or group of villages. In some cases, the Chinese gold diggers were allowed to work only in certain diggings, but even off the diggings they tended to stay together, living near their temples. The term ‘Chinatown’ was used in California in the 1850s, and it probably came to Australia from there. Ballarat had the first Australian Chinatown, although Bendigo’s was established soon after.

A Chinese-staffed furniture factory.

Chinese carpenters

Woodworking tools are much the same, all over the world, so many Chinese left the gold-fields behind and began to make furniture. The pieces were well-made, so the workers were seen as a threat, and in the late 19th century, laws required Chinese-made and “part-Chinese-made” furniture to carry a stamp stating this.

(Some manufacturers went further, adding stamps stating that no Chinese labour had been used, and the author regrets not having kept the low-boy, a kind of closet, that he used in the 1940s and into the 1960s, which featured a decal offering this certification of racial purity, but it went to the tip, which was probably the most appropriate way to deal with it.)

In the late nineteenth century, Cairns, Rockhampton and other Queensland towns had Chinatowns, and so did Sydney. The original Sydney Chinatown was in The Rocks area, until bubonic plague (which came in with diseased rats on ships) broke out in that area in 1900. Many buildings were demolished, and Chinatown moved to an area near the Haymarket, where it is today.

In other areas, Chinese workers “fitted in”, becoming market gardeners who provided vegetables to miners, and so managed to avoid being seen as competitors. In 1874, much to the annoyance of carters at Cooktown, Chinese storekeepers brought in 400 ‘coolies’ to carry stock across to the Palmer River gold-fields.

Being competitors always put them at risk. The Chinese carriers walked with baskets on bamboo poles, and because they feared the attacks of Aboriginal warriors, they always travelled in numbers and in single file.

Many a time they would draw down anathema of carriers by parading on the off-side of the bullocks, which were being yoked up, dangling their tins in an offensive manner to the animals, which often resulted in the drivers hunting them away with their bullock whips.
—W. H. Corfield, Reminiscences of Queensland 1862-1869 (1921), ch. 6.

John Alloo’s Chinese Restaurant, Main Road, Ballarat, 1853. His real name was Chin Thum Lock.

The first Chinese Australian.
This was Mak Sai-Ying, who arrived on Laurel in February 1818, presumably having boarded the ship at Canton. He is sometimes listed under the name Matchiping, and he worked as a carpenter. By 1829, was the licensee of the Lion Hotel (or Golden Lion Inn) in Parramatta, under the name John Shying, and he sold off a number of houses in the Parramatta area in 1830.

Moving in, moving on

In ‘pure’ chain migration, one or two men reach a new land, find work, learn enough of the local language to survive, and then send for more people from their family or their village. The new arrivals settle close to the founders but, within a generation, the well-off often move out. Sydney’s Leichhardt was a centre of Italian culture but, just 20 years after the first Italians settled there, some of them were moving to suburbs like Five Dock, or further afield.

A church, temple, synagogue or mosque can be a powerful anchor to hold people in an area. For example, before the number of Vietnamese in Cabramatta in Sydney grew, the area was dotted with Serbian Orthodox churches. Melbourne was once called the city with the second-highest number of Greeks anywhere in the world. This would not be so now, partly because fewer Greeks have migrated to Australia recently, but mainly because later generations moved around and married outside their culture. This often leads to the loss of old traditions, and it is important that we cling to as much of the old ways as we can.

Early white settlers in Australia usually married partners from their own country and, until the 1950s, Australians usually married people of the same religion. Many people now marry partners from different races and with different religious affiliations. The challenge for future Australians is to appreciate and conserve as much of our rich multicultural heritage as we can.

Multicultural Australia

In many ways, Australia has always been multicultural. In colonial times, the Scots and the Irish sometimes seemed like alien cultures to the English, but there were also Africans like the outlaw ‘Black Caesar’, as well as Chinese, Indian and people from other races who had come to Australia in small numbers. Even earlier, Maori sailors from New Zealand could also be seen on Sydney streets.

Once the gold rushes started, the number of different nationalities increased greatly, but these people, if they stayed in Australia, were expected to assimilate—to give up their ‘foreign ways’, to learn to speak English, and to conform to British standards.

Just about the only culture, apart from the English, that thrived was that of the Scottish community, although the Irish also managed to hang onto many of their old ways. Today, the pipe bands that lead the Anzac Day march and the celebration of St Patrick’s Day are part of Australian tradition for many people.

Introducing ‘exotic’ food

Some of the twentieth-century waves of refugees introduced unfamiliar religions to Australia, and they also brought new food traditions with them from places like Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia. Indian and Lebanese food was also introduced, and it represents a wide range of Mediterranean and Islamic or Arabic traditions.

In a way, food was often a vehicle for the acceptance of new cultures into Australian life. In rural Australia, some Greek migrants opened cafes in which standard ‘Aussie fare’—such as meat pies, steak and eggs, and ‘mixed grills’—were served. They also served souvlaki, dolmades and other Greek delicacies. Before long, a few Anglo-Australians, some of whom had widened their horizons through overseas travel, were trying this food, and these foods slowly became an accepted part of Australian culinary tradition.

Chinese restaurants also opened up, offering ‘Australian’ meals and Australianised Chinese food. Such food introduced more ‘exotic’ foreign dishes such as sweet-and-sour pork, along the same lines as Italian ham and pineapple pizza, and mild Indian curries.

The food was often far from authentic, but it allowed Australians to taste and to start to appreciate what other cultures had to offer. These dishes were a way in. Multicultural food helped many Australians to appreciate that there is more than one way of looking at the world, and that every culture is worthy of respect.

So advice, good friends: have I been sufficiently Bolshie?

* You really are an a-hole