Food and drink in the city

What colonial Australians ate 

ROSETTA STABLER respectfully acquaints the Public that she prepares Boiled Mutton and Broths every day at 12 o’clock, and a joint of Meat Roasted always ready at One, which, from its quality and mode of serving, she flatters herself will attract the Notice of the Public. Visitors from remote Settlements, Mariners, &c will find a convenient Accommodation at a moderate expence, and every exertion will be made to render satisfaction.

—The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, 26 June 1803, 4.

S. T. Gill: Ticket to the First Subscription Ball, Ballarat, 1854.

In 1817, Sydney had 52 licensed liquor outlets, Parramatta had 12, Windsor had 4 and Liverpool 3, while Castlereagh had just one, Charles Hadley’s ‘First and Last’. Two brewing licences went to Sydney, and one to Parramatta.

And all Persons, other than those mentioned in the foregoing List as duly qualified and licensed, are strictly prohibited from vending Wine, Spirits, or Beer, or the Brewing of Beer, on Pain of being prosecuted and fined, according to the Colonial Regulations.
— The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, 19 April 1817, 1, http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/2177180

Figures are hard to come by, but in 1859, Frank Fowler said there were no less than five hundred public-houses in Sydney and its immediate neighbourhood, while in 1883, Richard Twopeny said that Melbourne had 1120. [i]

There was no shortage of legitimate liquor sellers in the cities: Gerstäcker noticed this on landing in Sydney in 1851, just before gold fever began. He saw many “dram-shops”.

I was struck by the immense number of dram-shops in the streets;  in Pitt-street and many other places they stand house on house, and nearly every corner is sure to be a grog-shop, with the government license upon it to sell spirituous and fermented liquors; and drunken men and women you meet nearly every where. I have really never been in any place yet where I saw so many drunkards as in Sydney, and, more disgusting still, drunken women.
 — Friedrich Gerstäcker, Narrative of a Journey Around the World, 388 – 9.

In the days of the gold rush, William Kelly noted the same ‘corner effect’ in Melbourne, where such premises invited both streets equally, and the equality went further:

The bars were always full, the tap-rooms always crowded, and in those resorts, at least, there was no disproportion of the sexes. The women were as numerous as the men, and asserted the equality of their gentle genders by as deep potations, and as blasphemous and obscene vociferations, as their rougher associates.
— William Kelly, Life in Victoria or Victoria in 1853, and Victoria in 1858, vol 1, 50.

Less is said about places where meals might be served, but they must have been there, because as we shall see in chapter 15, there were many food places on country roads. Friedrich Gerstäcker certainly saw food being sold in Sydney:

Bread and vegetable-carts meet your eye wherever you look, light milk-carts rattle through the streets early in the morning, and their bells summon the housemaids to the door. “Hot pies, penny a-piece,” are loudly offered, nearly at every street corner, fishmongers drag their hand-trucks through the crowd, and fruit-stalls, with oranges and apples, are every where to be seen at this season of the year.
— Friedrich Gerstäcker, Narrative of a Journey Around the World, 388.

There were certainly prawns to be had, sixpence a pint in Sydney, a shilling in Melbourne, though not always at the most convenient of times. In Sydney,

They are brought to the former place by the Hunter river steamers, and as these boats generally arrive late at night it is not unusual to be awakened from your sleep at one or two in the morning by a fellow shouting “Fine fresh Prawns” just under your window. If the musquitoes are about it is as well to buy some of these prawns, and sit at the window and eat them for amusement.
— Frank Fowler, Southern Lights, 1859.

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[i] Richard Twopeny, Town Life in Australia, ‘A walk around Melbourne’.

Those magnificent men (and women) in their flying machines

Those magnificent men (and women) in their flying machines 

After the end of World War I, Australia had plenty of adventurous young men who had learnt to fly an aeroplane during the war. Before long, a few Australian women started to join them and learn those same skills.

People thinking about World War I think mostly of the Western Front, but a lot of Australians served in the Light Horse around Palestine, and because riding a plane is like riding a horse, some of them transferred to the Australian Flying Corps. (The proof is found in odd places: in the cavalry, majors and lieutenant-colonels are squadron leaders and wing commanders: think about it!)

Anyhow, many young Australian men moved from riding over the deserts to riding above them. Coming from a land where distance is the great enemy, young men flying over vast distances in the Middle East would naturally think of shortening similar distances at home, using aircraft. In the earliest days, the way to make people aware of aviation was to conduct races, but first, the aviators needed explorers to show them the way

In August and September of 1919, Paul McGinness and Hudson Fysh surveyed part of an official air race route from Katherine (Northern Territory) to Longreach (Queensland). They did this from the ground, driving a Model T Ford, and part of their role was identifying places where landings could be made, and ensuring adequate fuel supplies.

Prime Minister Billy Hughes had arranged a prize of £10,000 for the first Australians to fly an aircraft from England to Australia, around 13,500 km, but to win, they had to do it in less than 30 days. The winners were two brothers, Captain Ross Smith (RAF), Lieutenant Keith Smith (AFC) and two sergeants, Shiers and Bennett. The Smiths were knighted, and the sergeants were both made air force officers for their efforts.

Other Australians were blocked from competing, because the race was held under the rules of the Royal Aero Club in Britain. Bert Hinkler had been flying with the Royal Naval Air Service, and wanted to fly alone. The Aero Club decided that was too unsafe. Charles Kingsford-Smith (ex-RAF) had a team of four, but they could not take part because none of them was a good navigator. Back then, many pilots navigated by following roads, rivers or railway lines, but for long distances, especially over sea, somebody on the plane had to be able to navigate by taking sightings on the stars or the sun.

The Smiths and their two sergeants made it to Darwin on December 10, 1919, in just over 27 days. Bert Hinkler saved his money and bought an Avro Avian aeroplane, completing the same route, making it to Darwin in 1928, in just 15½ days.

Charles Kingsford-Smith wanted to fly a plane across the Pacific, and teamed up with another Australian, Charles Ulm. Trying to attract sponsors, they set a record for flying around Australia, taking 10 days 5½ hours in 1927. Stunts and publicity meant everything to the aviators — and aviatrixes, as people called the women pilots.

By 1934, when another London-Melbourne air race was being planned, several women were likely starters, though 19-year-old Nancy Bird (later Nancy Bird Walton) was thought to be less likely to start, because she lacked experience.

In the late 1980s, I took a pioneer Australian aviator, Lores Bonney, on a night visit around the museum I worked in. Her family told me she was past it, as blind as a bat and as deaf as a post, but after a battle of wills, I persuaded her into the wheelchair, declared myself her servant, and we took off, at her imperious directions.

She was a proud old lady, and only agreed to ride in a wheelchair so I could show her more. It was strenuous (I was wearing a dinner suit), but I knew a bit about her and wanted to get more. She was one of our last explorer-adventurers, flying around Australia in 1932, and many other triumphs. In spite of what her family said, she could see Meissen porcelain at 20 metres, she heard and responded to my whispers, and gave me details on how early aviators prepared a new route.

They were very much explorers, and she even researched bush tucker before flying around Australia. In fact, she did what the more effective explorers did. She went out and learned from Aborigines about bush tucker, because she knew she would need it if her plane failed.

She told me also why she flew as “Mrs. Harry Bonney”: she could not have children, and wanted to make her husband’s name live on. While she mentioned that her wealthy husband bought her aircraft for her, she did not tell me that her cousin, Bert Hinkler, had taken her up for her first flight. I found that out later, and I also found these details of her round-Australia flight:

Mrs. Harry Bonney, of Brisbane, who is but comparatively young in the aeronautical world, having completed two years' of flying experience this month, and who is now on a round-Australia solo flight, passed through Longreach on Tuesday morning, arriving at 9.40 a.m. from Blackall … Mrs. Bonney has already two creditable flight to her credit, having flown from Brisbane to Bundaberg and back in a day, whilst in December of last year she flew from Brisbane to Wangaratta. She is using the same Gipsy Moth on the present flight, and which bears a silver plate inscribed with Flight-Lieut. Hill's signature. The machine was used by him on his flight to Australia.
— The Longreach Leader (Qld), 20 August 1932, 15, http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/37232026

Flying towards Longreach, she noticed a leaking petrol pump, and put down at a homestead, only to find that it was deserted. Fortunately, the plane had landed in a good open stretch and, after placing her handkerchief on a mimosa bush for wind directions, got off safely and flew to Macfarlane homestead proper where assistance was given by Mr. Doyle. In landing there she used a windmill for wind direction…

She states she was about early next morning, in preparation for the run [from Blackall] to Longreach and Cloncurry, but … preparatory to taking off, a flock of galahs flew across her path, and alighted in front of the plane. In her own words … it was a pretty sight, but just too nerve-racking at that particular moment, so she roared the engine and frightened them away…

Her approach to Longreach was unostentatious, probably no one outside the Press, the Shell Company representatives, and Qantas, realising that she had arrived and departed. The aviatrix, who had been flying by compass course, struck the Central Western railroad at Ilfracombe, which, by the way, she mistook for Longreach, but her observant eye picked up the line of steel, which she followed, to eventually land on Qantas aerodrome.
— The Longreach Leader (Qld), 20 August 1932, 15, http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/37232026

When she flew solo from Brisbane to London in 1938, she landed and was photographed, perched on the edge of the cockpit, looking down her nose at something, and this photograph can be seen if you use a search engine for images of Lores Bonney. I told her she looked a bit annoyed.

We had stopped so I could take a rest, and for once, I was facing her as I sat on a seat. Her eyes twinkled as she replied in cut-glass accents: “Of course I was annoyed! The man asked me where I was from, and I was thinking, you silly little man, don’t you know that VH on the fuselage means Australia?”

Oral history can conserve what would otherwise be lost, but the history gatherer must know how to ‘oral’ in just the right way. I feel that if I, too, had not been using my best cut-glass accent, I might never have winkled out those matters.

How colonial Australians travelled

Tom Roberts, Bailed Up.

There were plenty of coaches after the 1820s, as Friedrich Gerstäcker was aware in the 1850s. Wanting to travel across country from Sydney to Adelaide, even though he had walked in America from the Niagara to Texas, he felt he had done enough walking, and there was a drought that ruled out going by horseback, because the cost of horse feed was then so high,

…and therefore, following the advice of some gentlemen in Sydney, I went with the mail-coach to Albury, a little town on the banks of the Hume, to see if I should be able to get a canoe there, or, if not, make one myself, and try the river.
— Friedrich Gerstäcker, Narrative of a Journey Around the World, 398.

Private contractors carried people, goods and the mail, and the government cared only about the mails. The way passengers were treated, he said, was “a sin to humanity”. The journey began in a grossly overcrowded coach, which was replaced by a wagon (and rain), and then a two-wheeled cart. One passenger sat beside the coachman, the other two faced backwards, losing their hats to low branches, and in fear of being thrown off on uphill sections.

Gerstäcker mentioned that one cart was marked “licensed to carry nine persons”. He said no sober magistrate could get nine people into it, but he could explain the licence:

The mail contractors, who make an enormous profit by the business, invite the magistrate, whenever there is another wagon to be inspected, to a good breakfast, and there these worthy members of Themis sit till they are thought in a fit state for the occasion—that is, to see the wagon double—when he is perfectly right in licensing the cart for the accommodation of nine passengers, and calling the thing a “royal mail.”
— Friedrich Gerstäcker, Narrative of a Journey Around the World, 406 – 407.

From there, he headed for Albury, which had:

… a court-house, a ferry-boat, five taverns, and—a great improvement in the rising civilization of the interior of Australia—a steam-mill, set up by an enterprising English gentleman, a Mr. Heaver. There are also three stores, a white and blacksmith, carpenter, and other tradesmen in the little place.
— Friedrich Gerstäcker, Narrative of a Journey Around the World, 408.

For now, we will leave him by the river, hewing a dug-out canoe (he was the first to voyage down the Murray), until later in this chapter. Instead, let us turn now to Thomas M’Combie, who went by Cobb and Co., from Geelong to Ballarat.

As he describes it, he went to the booking office of Cobb’s line and got a ticket for the morning coach, explaining that Cobb was an American who had returned long ago to his native country, having started a service from Melbourne to Castlemaine, after the gold discoveries. Cobb had imported the best American coaches, won all the customers, then “he sold out, and retired with a moderate fortune”.

At five minutes to six the coach, drawn by six grey horses, drew up before the office of Cobb and Co., Malop Street. In a few seconds the whole fifteen seats were occupied; the clerk examined each passenger’s ticket, which apparently was satisfactory. Six o’clock, chimed, and with a loud shout to the horses from the driver, we went off at a hard canter.
—  Thomas M’Combie, Australian Sketches, 184.

The company used American ‘Concord’ coaches with leather straps instead of iron springs, giving a softer, rolling ride, though one that made some passengers sick. Pulled by eight horses, the coaches had 12 to 18 people inside, and many more outside, often totalling 40 or 50 passengers. Twenty years after the company started, Anthony Trollope thought the vehicles were comfortable enough:

Cobb’s coaches have the name of being very rough,—and more than once I have been warned against travelling by them…This journey I made and did not perish at all;—and on arriving at Rosedale had made up my mind that twenty hours on a Cobb’s coach through the bush in Australia does not inflict so severe a martyrdom as did in the old days a journey of equal duration on one of the time-famous, much-regretted old English mails.
— Anthony Trollope, Australia and New Zealand, 413-414.

With good horses on the rare good road, coaches might reach 20 km/hr, but they stopped to change horses, and for passengers to take comfort breaks. Coaches averaged about 13 km/hr. The coastal steamer was rather faster and was more comfortable, if you weren’t seasick—but that might happen in a coach, anyhow!

William Kelly said the other companies were inclined to call upon passengers to get down and walk through mud, to the extent that people thought they might as well walk, and save their money. On top of that, the coaches broke and broke down, often needing a blacksmith to fix them. Cobb’s coaches, rather than being cramped, and plated, and bolted with iron, used leather springs, well suited to corduroy roads and broken forest tracks. (William Kelly, Life in Victoria or Victoria in 1853, and Victoria in 1858, vol 1, 280 – 81.)

Honest Australian History

This is about my attempts to disrupt the flow of historical bilge that was churned out to me when I was at school. For example, we were told that Edward John Eyre crossed the Nullarbor (he went around the coast), and the illustration given out was the left-hand one below, which shows him going east, rather than the right-hand one (where he is going west), and right up until the last few days, there was at least one horse.

This was Cod History! Children should not be given such rubbish.

How Eyre and his companion, a Noongar man named Wylie may or may not have travelled.
Now be honest: did you know the companion's name? 

There was nothing in our lessons about everyday life, what people ate or wore, or drank, how they got around, or anything else that made the dead come back to life.

That is what I am fighting against. Then again, the myths about the discovery of gold, and the operations of the bushrangers are all nonsense. And the explorers? They discovered nothing, though they did map the land they travelled over.

So I am setting out to do a bit of truth-telling, and if I get up the noses of a few nasty old fogeys, so be it: there are several ways to get your hands on the facts, all fully documented.

The big lump: You Missed a Bit 

You can buy the dead-tree (print on paper) volume for $60, or the e-book version for just $6, and be aware that the e-book will get additions when I have time. Save your money!

This is almost 350,000 words, and if I say it myself, it is a remarkable resource. It was the first rough draft of the next version (the middling lump, below), which I reduced by 100,000 words so I could add more images.

The print version weighs 1.4 kg, and is 51 mm thick (I used very thin paper), the print size is small, and it still runs out to 820 pages. Don't buy it!

You see, I often come back to particular characters and topics again. later on. Print limitations mean there was no way I could get an index in, but if you use the e-book version, there is a search function waiting to be used.

In short: get the e-book, which needs that $6 price to cover Amazon's in-house costs.

The middling lump: Australia: a Social History

That work is still out there, seeking a publisher: it is 252,000 words, and it is an expanded version of my 80,000 word The Big Book of Australian History, four editions published by the National Library of Australia. At the end of that time, their publishing arm fell over, so I took the rights back, and wrote the version that I thought was needed.

So why all the extra text? Basically, I loathe the way fusty old fogeys want the history of Australia told: nothing before 1788 (aside from a few sailors cruising by, nothing about the geology, the biology or the original people. If you don't understand the geology and the biology, you will fall for the line peddled by the Peasants' Party that Abosrigines wewre dumb: they didn't invent a wheel.

Think about it: kangaroos and wombats cannot pull a cart. By the same token, with no local crop plants, western-style agriculture would not work, but there were still ways to work the land, simple gentle ways of managing and gathering crops.

The silly old grubs' history is about dead but once-important white males and lots of lists that must be learned off by heart. 

I take a different view. The fogeys whine that standards are dropping, that children are no longer taught the important dates and names (presumably including the names of the conservative politicians). If you push them harder to define Australian history, it comes down to Bushrangers and Convicts (both scum), Diggers (the military ones), Explorers (brave openers of untamed wilderness), Farmers (who turned the sterile wilderness into riches at no cost) and Gold (ours by right of conquest). I call this the BCDEFG model.

If you question the politicians about these, they may be able to name five of the more than 2000 bushrangers who once flourished, their understanding of convicts is pitiful, they could not locate a single battlefield on the world map, they would be lucky to name more than four explorers worthy of note (no, Burke and Wills don’t count), they have no understanding of the harm done to country by agriculture, and their “history” of gold is codswallop.

So their BCDEFG history of Australia is a set of worthless scribbles, and only one in fifty of them will amend that to the ABCDEFG, because the ‘Aborigines’ don’t come into it for most of them—and don’t confuse the poor dears by amending it to a more polite IBCDEFG. Mention the role of Indigenous Australia, and they will look at you like a mallee bull that’s just run at full tilt into Crooked Mick of the Speewah (a word of warning: Mick was definitely a legend, but as I tell it, he is highly believable if you aren't paying attention).

Mick also built a railway, and he was a superb cricketer.

For samples, see blog entries like these:

Women Wearing Trousers;

Who Really Found Gold in Australia? but see this as well;

The Strange Case of Samuel Burt;

Australia's slaves (yes, we had some);

What Australians Used to Eat;

How Australians travelled in colonial times;

Getting into the air;

Who Named Australia?;

The Bushrangers.