ABOUT THE BOOK

From Captain Cook’s globe to Mabo’s map, and Melba’s frock to Cathy Freeman’s running suit, this is Australia’s history told through a gallery of things.

Former Rolling Stone editor Toby Creswell has curated an illustrated popular history of Australia accumulated through the review of 100 fascinating man-made objects. Creswell takes each object as the starting point to explore the stories that make up our national history, exploring and celebrating key technological, social, political and sporting moments. From Ned Kelly’s armour to Henry Lawson’s pen and Julia Gillard’s glasses, the chosen objects are sometimes iconic, sometimes unexpected and quirky; but the mix creates a compelling story. Each entry is accompanied by a striking image of the object.

A book that can be read from cover to cover, or dipped into at any point, History of Australia in 100 Objects is a fresh, popular take on Australia’s history.

For Alice and Samantha

1

40 000 BP
A necklace from Lake Nitchie
First Australians

A long time ago – before the Egyptians organised their crop plantings according to the rhythm of the Nile floods, before the Chinese in Jiangxi province threw pots, and while humans and Neanderthals fought and mated in the forests of France – a group of Aboriginal people sat by a freshwater lake carefully threading 178 teeth from Tasmanian tigers to form a necklace.

This is the oldest piece of jewellery in the world. It was placed on the neck of a man in his thirties who had a terrible aching tooth of his own. His lifeless body was daubed with ochre and forced into a crouch, then buried in a shallow grave.

No one knows precisely how homo sapiens became the dominant animal on the planet. According to the hypothesis that best accords with genetic and archaeological evidence, modern humans evolved between 220 000 and 150 000 years ago in Africa. Between 120 000 and 60 000 years ago they first wandered across the Persian Gulf and the Sinai into Asia and Europe. Over 5000 years they progressed through India and the Indonesian archipelago to Sahul, the landmass that stretched from New Guinea to Tasmania.

The final leg of the journey to Sahul required sea travel – the first noted seagoing by homo sapiens. The evidence of the Malakunanja II rock shelter in Arnhem Land suggests that 55 000 years ago the first homo sapiens arrived in the part of Sahul that is now called Australia. Only 6000 years ago, at the end of the last Ice Age, the waters rose and cut Cape York off from New Guinea. The same climate change soon cut Tasmania off from continental Australia.

There were as many as 1.5 million people over 250 language groups with 600 different dialects on the continent of Australia. Each language ‘nation’ had its own territory, its own laws and its treaties with other nations. The complex patchwork of laws and kinship connections was widely understood, but the Aboriginal nations did not view themselves as a single entity.

Much Aboriginal culture was lost in the disease epidemics and frontier wars that destroyed Indigenous communities after 1788. It suited European purposes to characterise these hunter-gathering societies as ‘primitive’ or ‘Stone Age’ and to discount their culture. It’s also possible the first Europeans on these frontiers had little regard for culture or its preservation.

In Aboriginal society, culture was passed on orally and through ceremony. The tradition of ‘songlines’ was an example of the way that the geography of the land was tied to creation myths and bound into songs that doubled as maps of the country.

Linguists have designated the tongues spoken throughout Australia except for in the south-east and Arnhem Land as the Pama-Nyungan language family. There was also a common thread running through the religious beliefs, rules around marriage and introduction of young boys and girls into adult knowledge.

A complex system of law and genealogy allowed people to travel and trade from the Nullarbor Plain to Far North Queensland. The Indigenous people who lived in the north maintained an active trading relationship across the Timor Sea and with fishers from Macassar who came south to catch the trepang (sea cucumber). There was some leakage of Macassar vocabulary into Aboriginal languages, and vice versa.

The most ancient cultural artefacts created by humankind are burial ornaments that have been found at sites such as Lake Nitchie, like this necklace. The different burial practices of different Indigenous language groups are a good example of the cultural diversity that was happening – some bodies were cremated, some were buried in bark wrappings and others, like the Lake Nitchie man, were buried in a shallow grave. Was the necklace for use in the afterlife or simply jewellery that he wore?

At Devil’s Lair, some 5 kilometres from the Western Australian coast, archaeologists have found human occupation beginning at around 48 000 years BP. Excavations there have uncovered three ground-bone beads dating to 19 000–12 700 years BP. A perforated stone object with wear patterns suggestive of its use as a pendant dated to 14 000 years BP has also been recovered. The limestone Koonalda Cave under the Nullarbor Plain has thousands of square metres of rock paintings that date back 20 000 years, well before the paintings at Lascaux in France.

Many buried bodies were daubed with ochre, a pigment also widely found in the rock art around Australia. Wilgie Mia in the Weld Range was an ochre quarry that was first mined 40 000 years ago and its ochre traded as far as Queensland. There is evidence that the miners created wooden scaffolding to get to the best seams.

Some Aboriginal art relates to the peoples’ religious practice, while other Aboriginal art is entirely practical and a representation of country – a map. Other works we will never know what they were about. The styles of course change over time, but the oldest works do represent the earliest examples of homo sapiens expressing abstract thoughts and the first concrete examples of language on the planet.

2

1000
A marngrook possum ball
Playing the possum

Australians have been obsessed with sport for millennia in one form or another. The first Australians were playing footy when Captain Cook was a boy. Instead of a pigskin they used a ball made of possum skin.

One of the earliest records of an Indigenous football game comes from William Thomas, Assistant Protector of Aborigines in Victoria, in 1841. He is quoted in Robert Brough Smyth’s The Aborigines of Victoria (1878) describing Wurundjeri people east of Melbourne playing the game known as marngrook at Coranderrk mission station:

The men and boys joyfully assemble when this game is to be played. One makes a ball of possum skin, somewhat elastic, but firm and strong. The players of this game do not throw the ball as a white man might do, but drop it and at the same time kicks it with his foot. The tallest men have the best chances in this game. Some of them will leap as high as five feet [1.5 m] from the ground to catch the ball. The person who secures the ball kicks it. This continues for hours and the natives never seem to tire of the exercise.

Marngrook involved kicking the ball, marking or catching the kicked ball on the full (the spectacular ‘mark’, meaning a high jump to catch the ball), and forward positioning of the players (a definite contradiction to Rugby). In those respects it was similar to Australian Rules football.

There are many accounts of Indigenous football, from as far afield as Central Australia, where the Warlpiri had a kicking and catching game with possum skins known as pultja. The Wiradjuri people around the Riverina played woggabaliri, which resembled soccer.

Commonly it is the tribes of the Wimmera, Mallee and Millewa in western Victoria that are most associated with marngrook. The word is from the Gurnditjmara language and means ‘game ball’. There are reports of games of marngrook from Melbourne to the Snowy and elsewhere.

Tom Wills, one of the founders of Australian Rules, grew up in the Western District of Victoria. Unlike many men of the era, Wills enjoyed the company of Aboriginal sportspeople. In fact, he was coach and captain of the first Aboriginal cricket team to tour the United Kingdom.

Wills is one of the heroes of Australian multiculturalism. His family ran a property in Queensland at Cullin-la-ringo. Aboriginal people in the area raided the property and killed Wills’ father and 18 others. Despite the massacre, Wills didn’t encourage reprisals but understood the Indigenous grievance. He never let this horror affect his relations with Aboriginal people. In that sense he was a true sportsman and the relationships between black and white negotiated on the playing field were the beginning of a very long healing.

It has been speculated that Wills adapted the Aboriginal game he learned as a child into the new game he devised, but the evidence for this is only circumstantial. Many of the supposed similarities between the modern game and marngrook, such as the spectacular mark, are recent tropes not described in early versions of the game. Tellingly, Wills himself never stated the connection. We will never know whether or not he was thinking about marngrook in 1858 when he drew up the rules.

Sports, however, are living and evolving cultures. Many Aboriginal players have been among the greats of Australian Rules, and black and white Australians have played the game – it would be naive to think that players would not adapt one code into another. Certainly Aboriginal culture runs right through Australian Rules, possum ball or not.

3

1500
Kimberley points
Indigenous technology

One of the finest examples of the technological skill of Indigenous Australians is the killing tools and spearheads known as Kimberley points, made in the Kimberly region from about 3000 years BP. These small, finely crafted and very sharp stone tools were also used as cutting implements and ceremonial apparatus. Ranging in length from 2 cm to 8 cm, the points were carefully wrought. The process of crafting them was known as pressure flaking.

Early colonial accounts of Aboriginal society painted the Indigenous people as ‘primitive’ and ‘savage’ nomadic hunter-gatherers who subsisted on what luck brought their way. The reality was much more fascinating.

Indigenous Australians developed stone tools about 10 000 years before their European counterparts. The more sophisticated blades and points, the latter ranging in length from 2 cm to 10 cm, begin appearing in the archaeological record at about 6000 years BP. Stone tools and artefacts dating back more than 50 000 years have been found at Rottnest Island and elsewhere.

Three preserved boomerangs were found in Wyrie Swamp near Millicent in South Australia. Made from the drooping she oak, they are at least 9000 years old (possibly as old as 10 200 years) and the oldest wooden human-made objects ever found.

It appears from the archaeological record that about 3000 years ago, Aboriginal nations became more settled – especially in areas such as the Murray Basin, where resources were plentiful.

Europeans thought of agriculture in terms of cultivated fields, hedgerows and enclosures with rolling hills. They were unable to see the ways in which the Aboriginal population cared for the land. Charles Sturt on his 1844 expedition to north-west New South Wales and Central Australia noted that Aboriginal groups near the Murray had created haystacks for the storage of grain.

Australian weather is governed by the El Niño Southern Oscillation pattern, which makes it a land of droughts and flooding rains. The cycle of drought makes the country unsuited to the kind of intensive farming and land use that the European settlers were used to.

Farming in the European sense is impossible without outside interference, finance and technology. Aboriginal communities established a balance in their land use that allowed for the carriage of a reasonable population who respected the environmental pressures. Aboriginal groups planted crops and made resource-management decisions. The crops were irrigated and the people – usually the women – made bread and porridge from the seeds.

Fire was used extensively to control vegetation and to herd animals for slaughter. Kangaroos, wallabies and emus were hunted with the use of nets. Some groups developed complex fish traps in river systems such as the Darling at Brewarrina, where 400 metres of different-sized and different-shaped pens trapped a wide variety of fish on a regular basis.

Kimberley points were highly prized and were traded across the country. The fact that there was a value-based economy and a high price placed on some of these tools, which had a primarily aesthetic value, suggests that the culture was much more sophisticated than the early colonists believed.

4

1616
Dirk Hartog’s plate
The Dutch lack of interest

Dirk Hartog (or Dyrck Hartoochz, as he signed his name) was not the first European to land in Australia, but he is famous because he was the first to leave anything behind – specifically, a pewter plate nailed to an oak post. On it he inscribed in Dutch:

1616, 25 October, is here arrived the ship the Eendracht of Amsterdam, the upper-merchant Gillis Miebais of Liege, skipper Direk Hatichs of Amsterdam; the 27th ditto set sail again for Bantam, the under-merchant Jan Stins, the uppersteersman Pieter Dookes van Bill, Anno 1616

Hartog was one of the many Dutchmen who wrote off Australia. In 1616 he was appointed captain of the United East India Company ship Eendracht (meaning ‘concord’) for a voyage from the Netherlands to Indonesia.

Five years earlier, in 1611, Hendrik Brouwer had charted a route that used the roaring forties to zip across the Indian Ocean and then turn north to the Dutch East Indies. This route almost halved the previous distance, which hugged the coasts of Africa and India. It was only a matter of time until someone misjudged the Indian Ocean leg and hit Australia, and Hartog was that captain. The Eendracht made landfall on 25 October 1616 at what is now known as Cape Inscription on Dirk Hartog Island, Western Australia. This is where Hartog left the pewter plate.

Hartog was underwhelmed, to say the least, by Australia. After only three days of exploration, during which time he encountered no Indigenous people, Hartog and the Eendracht set sail northwards and Hartog continued his trading ventures. His charts of the west coast of Australia greatly expanded the knowledge of the continent, which he called Landt van de Eendracht (Land of the Eendracht). Fortunately the name didn’t catch on and the continent became known as Hollandia Nova (New Holland).

The first European to set foot on Australia had been Willem Janszoon (aka Jansz), who landed near Weipa in the Gulf of Carpentaria on 26 February 1606. Janszoon made some assumptions about the land he encountered around northern Australia and then kept moving.

The Dutch were very active in what was known as the East Indies. The United East India Company (Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie) was for a time in the 17th century the world’s largest trading company. It had a virtual monopoly on the trade in cloves, nutmeg, cinnamon and pepper. At the time, nutmeg was more valuable than gold. The waters around the Indonesian archipelago were hotly contested by the Portuguese and the Dutch but they had little interest in Australia. It’s likely that those with local knowledge were telling adventurers that Australia was largely barren and certainly had none of the spices that were so highly valued.

The best-known Dutchman to visit the new continent was Abel Tasman. In 1642, at the instruction of Anthonie van Diemen, governor-general of the East Indies, Tasman embarked on a voyage to explore the southern oceans. On that trip he discovered the island he called Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania), New Zealand, Tonga and parts of Fiji and New Guinea.

In 1697 Willem de Vlamingh led a mission of three ships to Western Australia to look for survivors of a previous voyage to the East Indies. He had no luck with his mission but did explore the west coast, discovering and naming Rottnest Island and sailing up the Swan River. He found Hartog’s island and the plate that Hartog had left there 80 years before. A new plate was erected on the spot and Hartog’s original was taken to the Rijksmuseum, where it has remained.

The part-time pirate William Dampier, an Englishman, anchored and surveyed the northern end of Dirk Hartog Island in August 1699. He spent nine days in the Shark Bay area before sailing north around North West Cape. He found the land to be barren and dry and described the locals as ‘the miserablest People in the World’.

The French made the occasional foray to Australia. Louis Aleno de St Aloüarn landed on Dirk Hartog Island in March 1772 and claimed it for France. He buried a parchment, a bottle and two French coins but they lay undetected until 1998, by which time sovereignty had been settled by someone else.

In 1801, the Naturalist, under Captain Emmanuel Hamelin, arrived at Shark Bay and found de Vlamingh’s plate half buried in the sand. One of Hamelin’s officers, Louis de Freycinet, wanted to take it back to Europe but was forbidden from doing so by his captain. Freycinet and another Frenchman, Nicolas Baudin, both spent some years exploring Australia in tandem with each other. Freycinet returned to the west coast in 1818, collected the Dutch plate and took it to Paris, where it was filed away and lost until 1940.

These early explorers showed considerable courage and were excited by the prospect of describing the Great Southern Land, but it has to be said that none of them were much excited by the place when they found it.

5

1770
Captain Cook’s globe
The great navigator

‘I had ambition not only to go farther than any man had been before, but as far as it was possible for a man to go.’

– James Cook

This celestial globe took Cook further than even he anticipated – to the east coast of the land he called New South Wales. Made of stucco with lacquer-work applied by hand, and rings of brass, the globe portrays the heavens and their constellations and was a critical navigational tool. The beauty of this ball was not the gods drawn on it or the continents sketched, but the vast empty spaces that Cook filled in for future globes.

James Cook was the greatest of English sailors. During his career in the merchant navy and the Royal Navy he honed his skills as a cartographer and an astronomer, significant in securing him the captaincy of a joint venture between the Royal Society and the admiralty to explore the Pacific.

HMS Endeavour sailed from Plymouth on 25 August 1768 with Lieutenant James Cook in command and a botanist, Joseph Banks, as leader of the scientific party. They were bound for Tahiti to observe the transit of Venus, to enable better measurement of the distance from the earth to the sun.

Cook arrived in Tahiti on 10 April 1769. He carried secret orders that were to be opened once the transit of Venus had been recorded on 3 June. The orders were to discover the Great Southern Land and claim it for the King.

Cook arrived in New Zealand on 7 October and took possession of it for George III. A six-month circumnavigation of the country proved that it wasn’t the Great Southern Land. Cook mapped New Zealand and discovered the strait that separates the main islands (now known as Cook Strait). Unconvinced that there was a Great Southern Land, he turned for home. He sailed west and at 6 p.m. on 20 April 1770 Lieutenant Zachary Hickes saw land at what is now Port Hicks in Victoria.

The Endeavour continued northwards along the coastline, with Cook charting and naming landmarks as he went. On 29 April, the crew came across an extensive but shallow inlet, in which they took shelter. Cook named the bay Stingray Harbour. Some local men came to meet the boats but withdrew very quickly, and the English came ashore. Banks was enthralled by the new plants and animals he and his colleagues Daniel Solander and Herman Spöring came across. They spent a week gathering specimens, making drawings and exploring, and Stingray Harbour became Botany Bay.

Cook sailed north. The Endeavour was damaged by the coral of the Great Barrier Reef and made landfall at Endeavour River, where seven weeks of work went into repairing the ship. Banks again gorged himself on new discoveries. They met local people – the Guugu Yimithirr – and learned the word gangurru, which has been mispronounced ever since as kangaroo.

On 22 August 1770 Cook rounded Cape York and landed at Possession Island, where he claimed the entire coast he had just surveyed for the King and soon after named it New South Wales. Cook identified that the Torres Strait (discovered by Luis Váez de Torres in 1606) separated the mainland from New Guinea, and he followed it to Batavia (Java) where the Endeavour underwent much-needed repairs until Boxing Day.

After three years before the mast, the Endeavour reached home on 12 July 1771. Cook’s first voyage produced maps of 8000 kilometres of previously uncharted coastline – Tahiti, New Zealand and Australia – and he was promoted to commander. Banks brought back extraordinary animals and drawings of even more exotic things.

Cook’s second voyage left Sheerness on 13 July 1772 with two ships: Resolution, captained by Cook, and Adventure. This voyage went west to east, sailing first to the Cape of Good Hope and then south from New Zealand. Cook and the Resolution became the first Europeans to cross the Antarctic Circle, reaching 71°10’ before arriving back home in July 1775. By the end of his second voyage, Cook was a celebrity. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and awarded its Copley Gold Medal, and was described in the House of Lords as ‘the first navigator in Europe’.

In 1776 he started his third quest – to find the ‘north-west passage’ from the Pacific to the Atlantic ocean from the south. At Christmas time he observed an eclipse of the sun from an island that he named Christmas Island, and then he went north-east.

He was the first European to arrive on the Hawaiian Islands, landing at Kealakekua Bay. A first encounter with the Indigenous people went well. Cook sailed east and followed the American coast north until he was stopped by pack ice at 70°44’N, and turned back. Fatefully, he returned to Kealakekua Bay. A disagreement with the locals went badly and Cook was killed on 14 February 1779.

Most of the places Cook visited – including Australia – had been encountered by Europeans before. His great achievement came from his full complement of skills: he was a cartographer and lay scientist as well as a ship’s captain. More than anyone before or since, Cook made sense of where things were in the world and added to the understanding of the globe’s geography as we know it today.

6

1788
The Charlotte medal
A forger starts the art market

The Charlotte medal is a trinket carved by Thomas Barrett, a convict on a ship of the First Fleet, who was waiting to come ashore. Barrett was originally a farm labourer and career criminal who had a natural flair for forgery and artwork. He had no recorded training. Exquisitely designed and just 74 mm in diameter, the medal marks the extraordinary story of the voyage of the First Fleet. The colony’s first artwork then leads to Barrett’s tragedy.

It’s inconceivable now what would have been going through the minds of the 1420 people on board the 11 ships of the First Fleet when they left Portsmouth, England, at daybreak on 13 May 1787. Many of the passengers knew they would die in the new colony – if they survived the long voyage. Six women preferred to be hanged than transported to New South Wales.

Reading accounts of the First Fleet, there’s little sense that the voyagers were embarking on a great adventure and the creation of a new nation. It was a job, a chore and a sentence. With England’s prisons overflowing, the dregs of society had to go somewhere, and Captain James Cook’s New South Wales was as good a place as any.

Captain Arthur Phillip was no one’s first choice as the founding governor of New South Wales. He’d had an undistinguished but sound career in the navy and seemed as qualified as anybody else. And so they went with Phillip.

The First Fleet consisted of two Royal Navy escort ships, HMS Sirius and HMS Supply, accompanied by six convict transports – Alexander, Charlotte, Friendship, Lady Penrhyn, Prince of Wales and Scarborough – and three store ships, Borrowdale, Fishburn and Golden Grove.

The fleet stopped at Brazil for two days short of a month, with the sailors and convicts quickly getting up to mischief. Barrett forged counterfeit quarter dollars out of pewter spoons, old buttons and brass buckles, which marines passed off in the town.

Barrett, about 29 years old at the time, wasn’t destined to grow old. By the time he embarked on the Charlotte he had already been condemned to hang twice: the first time for thievery and the second time for mutiny. Also on board were Mary and Thomas Bryant, who would escape from Australia in a stolen boat. Lieutenant Watkin Tench wrote the first and best books about the early colony, while James Squire was to bring drinkable beer to Australia.

Phillip’s ship, the Sirius, anchored in Botany Bay on 18 January 1788, and within three days the rest of the fleet arrived. The fact that all 11 ships successfully made the voyage with the loss of only 48 lives was close to miraculous. There were 28 human births during the voyage, and the fleet carried 7 horses, 29 sheep, 74 pigs, 6 rabbits and 7 cattle. It had been 252 days since they left Portsmouth, 24 000 kilometres ago.

Botany Bay was a disappointment. Finding good anchorage was difficult and fresh water was hard to come by. Tench records walking along the beach there with a seven-year-old boy and meeting an Aboriginal man who touched the boy’s head ‘with great gentleness’. Tench realised that this place and people had been unchanged for longer than he could comprehend and were about to change completely and forever.

While the boats were anchored at Botany Bay on 20 January, the colony’s chief doctor, John White, who travelled on the Charlotte, commissioned Barrett to make a souvenir of the moment. He gave Barrett silver from a surgeon’s kidney tray to make the medal.

On one side Barrett engraved a ship secured to a buoy, with the sun down near the horizon line on the lower left and a crescent moon and stars on the upper right. Sirius is in the foreground, and convict transports such as the Prince of Wales are depicted to the left. Above the sun are inscribed the words: ‘The Charlotte at anchor / in Botany Bay / Jany. the 20, / 1788’.

On the reverse side of the disc is a detailed description of Charlotte’s voyage:

Sailed the Charlotte of London from Spit Head the 13 of May 1787. Bound for Botany Bay in the Island of New Holland arriv’d at Teneriff the 4th June in Lat 28.13 N Long 42.38 W depart’d it 10 arriv’d at Rio Janeiro 6 of Aug in Lat 22.54 S Long 42.38 W depart’d it the 5 Sept arriv’d at the Cape of Good Hope the 14 Octr in Lat 34.29 Lon S 18.29 E depart’d it th 13 of Novr and made the South Cape of New Holland the 8 of Jany 1788 in Lat 43.32 S Long 146.56 E arrived Botany Bay the 20 of Jany the Charlotte in Co in Lat 34.00 South Long 151.00 East distance from Great Britain miles 13106.

On 26 January the First Fleet moved to Sydney Cove, which was named after Lord Sydney, the British home secretary. The flag was raised. That evening the convicts and crew came ashore, the booze was broken out and all care was thrown to the winds.

The best thing the new country had going for it was Phillip. He quickly realised that the situation in the colony was so fragile that he needed everyone’s support, and he insisted that every person – convict, soldier or officer, including himself – had the same rations.

One month after arriving at Port Jackson, on 27 February 1788, Barrett, Henry Lavell and Joseph Hall were convicted of stealing food from the public store. Barrett was sentenced to death for the third time. This time was the charm.

All 750 convicts and the entire garrison were ordered to attend the execution of the three thieves. At literally the last minute the accomplices were reprieved but Barrett finally swung for his crime, to be the first man hanged in New South Wales.

With Phillip’s immensely pragmatic nature and his optimistic spirit, the founders of New South Wales set about establishing their new country. Farming land was found up the Parramatta River, convicts and soldiers took to fishing to supplement the company stores, and slowly Sydney became a town. Rations were regularly cut as the settlers desperately awaited stores from home, cows escaped and were found years later, and prisoners escaped expecting to find China just on the other side of the Hawkesbury River.

By the time Phillip left in 1892, he could rightfully go down in history as one of the few men to have created a new nation.

7

1790
A wool sample
The sheep’s back

This little bit of wool grown by Elizabeth Macarthur in the name of her husband, John, was the basis of Australia’s prosperity. It’s a story of mendacity and madness at the core of the national myth, and no animal – not even the kangaroo – is a more potent national symbol than the sheep.

John Macarthur was, by all accounts, a thug of the first order who dominated anyone he could dominate, and quarrelled with everyone else. He was lucky his wife created Australia’s economy for him.

Of the dozen sheep that arrived in Australia with the First Fleet, all but one had been killed and eaten by June 1790 when the Second Fleet arrived. On board HMS Scarborough were New South Wales Corps officer Macarthur, Elizabeth, and their sickly son, James.

The next year Macarthur was posted inland to the Rose Hill settlement. Governor Francis Grose gave Macarthur 100 acres (40 ha) of ‘some of the best ground that has been discovered’ to establish Elizabeth Farm at Parramatta. Macarthur added to this property with purchases and further grants.

For Elizabeth Farm’s herds and crops, Macarthur bought 60 Bengal ewes and lambs and later added two Irish ewes and a young Irish ram. In 1797, he acquired two rams and four ewes that were believed to be Escurials, merino sheep from the royal flock of the King of Spain; certainly these were the ancestors of the present-day Camden Park merino flock in New South Wales.

Macarthur’s interest in agriculture was secondary to his obsession with colonial politics. As a leading figure in the New South Wales Corps, he created a corrupt oligarchy that had a stranglehold on the local economy. He was relentless and unscrupulous in pursuit of his business interests, resented the free settlers and emancipated convicts, and exploited anyone he could.

Macarthur was sent back to England in 1802 to answer various charges. It was his luck to return at the very time the Napoleonic Wars’ requirements, technical developments and continental blockade created a critical shortage of wool in Britain.

While in London, Macarthur was approached by two clothiers. From this meeting came the coincidence of interest of the British woollen market and the wool producers of New South Wales, stimulated by the inflated wool prices of the Napoleonic Wars.

Macarthur was a tireless promoter of fine Australian merino wool in England. At home, Elizabeth improved the quality of the fleeces. Careful crossbreeding and paying particular attention to the impact of the environment on both animal and fleece led to the evolution of the Australian merino. As widely respected in New South Wales as her husband was loathed, Elizabeth deserves most of the credit for the establishment and quality of the Australian wool industry. As a biographer wrote, ‘In a small colonial society which delighted in petty gossip, she was not touched by any.’ Meanwhile, John Macarthur’s domineering personality worsened as time went on and he descended into madness, becoming increasingly paranoid and isolated at Elizabeth Farm.

Macarthur’s first shipment of wool was sold in Garraway’s coffee house, just off Cornhill in London, in 1807. Within four decades, the new land had become the world’s biggest wool producer. It is fair to say that in the first 150 years after colonisation, Australia was created by this little piece of wool.

8

1803
Matthew Flinders’ hat
The investigator

With this sturdy bicorn hat for protection, Matthew Flinders was the first person to describe Australia as an island; he also gave the country its name. He was still wearing the black velour bicorn hat, trimmed with black braid, when he was wrongfully detained and his life was ruined by a martinet Frenchman.

Born in 1774 in Lincolnshire, Flinders entered the Royal Navy in 1789, inspired by the novel Robinson Crusoe. In 1795 he sailed for Port Jackson in HMS Reliance with his friend George Bass, a surgeon. Bass and Flinders had a small boat, Tom Thumb, and in it they explored the coast around Port Jackson as far north as Norfolk Island. In 1798 they were given a much larger boat, Norfolk, and investigated whether Van Diemen’s Land was an island or not. Finding it was, they called the separating waters Bass Strait.

Flinders returned to London and in 1801 was promoted to commander and given HMS Investigator to explore more of Australia’s coast. On the same visit to England he married Ann Chappell. Due to events they could not have then foreseen, it was to be a decade before they lived together.

Arriving in Western Australia Flinders sailed east, charting what was called the Unknown Coast. He discovered Spencer Gulf and Kangaroo Island. On 8 April, the Investigator came across the French ship Le Géographe, and befriended Captain Nicolas Baudin.

After a brief stay in Port Jackson, Flinders mapped the coast of Queensland. On board the Investigator were scientists and Flinders’ associate Bungaree, an Aboriginal man who had accompanied Bass and Flinders on their adventures. Flinders also had a cat called Trim.

Despite all manner of trouble with the ship, Flinders finished his circumnavigation – confirming Australia to be a single continent and landmass – and finally returned to Port Jackson on 9 June 1803. He was the first person who could accurately describe what Australia looked like.

Having completed that impressive odyssey, Flinders set sail for England to get a new boat and see his wife. When he put into Mauritius, then a French outpost, he missed his friend Baudin by one day. Baudin had left behind a letter outlining the help that Flinders had given him and asking that he receive the same hospitality in Mauritius. Flinders also had a French passport, given him because of the scientific work he was doing. Baudin’s letter notwithstanding, France and England were at war and the governor of Mauritius, General Charles Decaen, arrested Flinders. After three years Napoleon recommended that Flinders be released, but Decaen defied the order and Flinders was not released until early in 1810.

By the time he reached England, his health was poor. For the next three years he worked on his magnum opus, A Voyage to Terra Australis. It was published on 18 July 1814, and Flinders died the next day. The book was his most profound achievement in a life of many. He wrote in the introduction: ‘Had I permitted myself any innovation upon the original term, it would have been to convert it into Australia; as being more agreeable to the ear, and as an assimilation to the names of the other great portions of the earth.’

A copy of Flinders’ book was sent to Governor Lachlan Macquarie, who began to use the name in official documents – and it stuck. By 1820 the continent had adopted Flinders’ name for itself.

9

1808
A diorama of Governor William Bligh’s arrest
The Rum Rebellion

While two mutinies in a career looks more than careless, Vice-admiral William Bligh was not the coward portrayed in this picture of Australia’s first and only revolution. The diorama represents a stylised version of Government House, and is encased in a glazed cedar case. The figures of Bligh and two soldiers are visible in the front windows. A side lever incorporates a simple yet sophisticated mechanism, which causes the soldiers to appear at the front door while Bligh disappears from the window – presumably to hide under a bed.

Bligh joined the navy in 1770 and six years later was appointed master of the Resolution under Captain James Cook. In 1787 he was appointed commander of the HMS Bounty and dispatched to Tahiti to collect breadfruit. This was the scene of the first mutiny. Master’s mate Fletcher Christian took over the ship and put Bligh and 18 others into an open boat. Through sheer discipline and navigational brilliance, Bligh sailed this boat 5822 kilometres to Timor.

After Governor Arthur Phillip left Sydney in 1792, the officers of the New South Wales Corps bullied the subsequent governors. Bligh’s friend Sir Joseph Banks helped him secure the position of fourth governor of New South Wales. He reached Port Jackson on 6 August 1806 with orders to get the place under control, promote the growth of society and abolish trade in alcohol.

The corps officers thought of themselves as ‘bunyip aristocracy’. They gave themselves huge landholdings and used their control of the government stores to control the colony’s economy in their own interests. They regarded themselves as a class above the colonists and especially the emancipists (ex-convicts). The convicts were there, they believed, to be a slave workforce.

When Bligh arrived in 1806, floods on the Hawkesbury and a shortage of labour and supplies from overseas had slipped Sydney into crisis. A shortage of coinage had led to a barter economy in which the most valuable currency was rum. Captain John Macarthur and the New South Wales Corps controlled the supply of alcohol. On 14 February 1807, Bligh published a general order that prohibited ‘the exchange of spirits or other liquors as payment for grain, animal food, labour, wearing apparel or any other commodity whatever’. It was a shot across the bows to Macarthur.

In December 1807 Richard Atkins, the deputy judge advocate and a hopeless alcoholic, at Bligh’s direction, had Macarthur arrested for a crime. This started a chain of events pitting Bligh against Macarthur and the corps. The governor called on Major George Johnston to arrest the troublesome officers on the grounds of treason.

Instead, on 26 January 1808 – the 20th anniversary of the establishment of the colony – Johnston went to the jail and released Macarthur. Then Johnston declared himself lieutenant governor. The band struck up ‘The British Grenadiers’ as Johnston and his delegation marched, bayonets fixed, through the streets of Sydney to Government House, where Johnston arrested Bligh. Another mutiny. Known as the Rum Rebellion, this was the first and is still the only military coup in Australian history.

Johnston reorganised the government, placing Macarthur in charge of the New South Wales economy. For the next two years, corps officers Johnston, Colonel William Paterson and Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Foveaux ran the colony.

Bligh remained under house arrest at Government House for a year. When given a ship to return to England, he instead went to Van Diemen’s Land, hoping to rally the support of Lieutenant Governor David Collins in a bid to regain control in Sydney. He again failed to make friends and was marooned by Collins on his boat in the Derwent for a year until Lachlan Macquarie arrived in Sydney to straighten things out. Bligh returned to Sydney on 17 January 1810, almost two years after his arrest. He was reinstated by Macquarie for 24 hours and then formally resigned and, in May, returned to London.

The whole mess wound up in the London courts. Macarthur rallied his supporters and besmirched Bligh’s character. The Colonial Office in London could hardly endorse these kinds of uprisings or it would be impossible to maintain the Empire, but they imposed only mild punishment. The New South Wales Corps, now known as the 102nd Regiment of Foot, was recalled to England and replaced with the 73rd Regiment of Foot under the command of Major General Lachlan Macquarie, who took over as governor in Sydney on 1 January 1810.

As with the aftermath of the Bounty, Bligh was promoted first to rear admiral of the blue, and then to vice-admiral. Macarthur escaped trial but was exiled from New South Wales until 1817. He spent his years in London promoting the virtues of Australian wool.

In the end it fell to Macquarie to sort it all out. On arriving in Sydney he declared the coup illegal and undid the proclamations and land grants of the previous two years. The New South Wales Corps was broken up and Macquarie set about establishing civil society. This diorama shows the first test of the rule of law in New South Wales.

10

1816
A mug depicting Governor Davey’s proclamation to the Aborigines of Tasmania 1816
A bitter pill

Violet Mace (1890–1968) was one of Tasmania’s leading ceramicists. Her mug reproduces the propaganda boards that were created at the height of the Black War (1824–31), the most shameful period of Australian history – a genocide conducted by Australians. This mug keeps the memory of that atrocity alive. Mace was a potter of some renown with a keen interest in Tasmanian history who was intent on telling the stories as best she could.

The Empire arrived at Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) in 1803. Wilderness and isolation made this part of the new land an even better penal settlement than Sydney. Whalers and sealers were already visiting the area, so the government thought it prudent to settle this southern border to New South Wales.

Cut off from the mainland around 6000 years BP, Tasmanian Aboriginal people, known as the Parlevar, had created a unique society. There were nine major tribes living in Tasmania when the British arrived, and it’s estimated that the population numbered 4000–5000 men, women and children. There were different languages, tools and cultural practices among the various tribes, and their language was not understood by Aboriginal people on the mainland.

Lieutenant Governor George Arthur took up office at Hobart Town in May 1824. Arthur was a god-fearing, sadistic martinet who, when not praying or punishing, enriched himself through generous land grants and astute purchases.

The settler population grew from 4350 in 1820 to 57 000 in 1840. The land was rich and the sealing and whale fisheries supported a shipbuilding industry. The settlers, bushrangers and convicts attacked the Aboriginal people, took their hunting grounds and raped women. Aboriginal warriors retaliated.

Tasmania’s rugged geography favoured the Aboriginal resistance. The Big River tribe killed around 60 Europeans; raided huts for weapons, blankets and stores; speared stock; and burned haystacks, huts, fences and homes between 1822 and 1831 – but at a cost of about 240 Aborigines killed.

Arthur adopted an increasingly violent policy towards the Indigenous people, and the settlers supported him. The Colonial Times and Tasmanian Advertiser in 1826 famously editorialised:

We make no pompous display of Philanthropy. We say this unequivocally, SELF DEFENCE IS THE FIRST LAW OF NATURE. THE GOVERNMENT MUST REMOVE THE NATIVES – IF NOT, THEY WILL BE HUNTED DOWN LIKE WILD BEASTS, AND DESTROYED!

On 4 February 1829, surveyor and artist George Frankland came up with the idea of what were known as proclamation boards. Generally painted on Huon pine, the boards depicted the way the British saw the law.

In Mace’s piece, which was made in 1934, the proclamation is attributed to Governor Thomas Davey. It is dated 10 years earlier than Arthur’s proclamation – which goes to show how little consideration had been given to the Black War just 100 years after its conclusion. Mace had written to the director of the Tasmanian Museum to check whether Davey or Arthur had issued the boards, but even he was unable to give a certain answer or confirm the date.

The first panel shows friendly contact between Aboriginal man and settler. The second panel shows diplomacy between British officer and native chief. In the third picture an Aboriginal man spears a white man and is hanged. The final picture has a white man shooting an Aboriginal man, and the white man is hanged.

If the Indigenous Tasmanians had bothered to look at these panels, they would have thought them to be a gruesome and unfunny joke. In reality, white people slaughtered black people with the best wishes of the colony and its government.

Obviously the proclamation boards were not enough. In November 1828, Arthur declared a state of martial law. His aim was to remove all Aboriginal people from Van Diemen’s Land. He wrote that ‘the hope of conciliation cannot be reasonably entertained’ and from 7 October to 24 November 1830 left his heavily pregnant wife to supervise the ‘Black Line’, in which thousands of white men combed Tasmania to drive the Indigenous population into the Tasman Peninsula. The operation caught only two, the others disappearing into the bush.

After the failure of the Black Line, official policy defaulted to roaming bands of white settlers hunting Indigenous people. In 1830 George Augustus Robinson, as Protector of Aborigines, was tasked with cajoling the remaining Aboriginal people to leave their tribal homes and resettle on the islands in Bass Strait. Robinson found the Big River tribe on New Year’s Eve 1831; only 24 people remained. They surrendered and were taken to Hobart, where they were paraded through the streets. The Black War was finally over.

Tasmania’s Indigenous population had been decimated to as few as 140 people; they were transferred to Flinders Island, where poor conditions and disease had reduced their number to 47 by 1847. By the end of the century there were no full-blooded Tasmanian Aboriginal people. However, children of mixed race carried on the Tasmanian genetics and culture.

The most notable work of art inspired by the Tasmanian genocide was H G Wells’ novel The War of the Worlds, published in 1898. As he wrote in the preface of that novel:

We must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals such as the vanished bison and dodo, but also upon its own inferior races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years.

11

1820
A bowl with a view of Sydney
The Sydney experiment is confirmed

This bowl represents the first flourishing of the Australian experiment as Sydney turned from a prison into a town. The bowl, probably manufactured in China, also represents the firming of trade between Australia and China. The picture of a frontier society on the cusp of prosperity commemorates Lachlan Macquarie’s legacy.

When the fifth governor arrived at Port Jackson on 28 December 1809, New South Wales was in a mess, a prison farm ruled at the whim of a military junta. It was a place where the currency was alcohol and the ruling class forced convicts into slavery for its own commercial interests. The free settlers were an underclass, and depravity and corruption were the order of the day.

Macquarie was dispatched to clean up after the Rum Rebellion. The new governor’s confidential instructions were to ‘improve the Morals of the Colonists, to encourage Marriage, to provide for Education, to prohibit the Use of Spirituous Liquors, to increase the Agriculture and Stock, so as to ensure the Certainty of a full supply to the Inhabitants under all Circumstances’.

Born into a modest Scottish household in 1762, from an early age Macquarie aspired to a career in the military. With postings in Nova Scotia, America, Jamaica and India, his career had been solid but not spectacular. His ambitions for New South Wales were very modest, but once he settled in Sydney Macquarie grew into the challenge of establishing a community. His energy for the colony and his courage in championing its interests – to his own cost – transformed the place. After being sworn in on New Year’s Day 1810, his first acts were to undo the proclamations, rulings and gifts made during the two-year rule of the Rum Corps. He then embarked on a program of reform.

Macquarie was a great builder. His 265 public works included a new army barracks, a new general hospital and St James’ Church – some of the only Australian buildings of that era that have survived. He also built a network of roads on which he obliged travellers to keep to the left.

The lack of a currency was a real problem that Macquarie solved in 1813 by creating the holey dollar. This was done by taking 40 000 Spanish coins and punching the centre or ‘dump’ out of each one. A dump was worth 15 pence and a ‘holey’ dollar was valued at 5 shillings. In 1816, Macquarie established – against instructions from London – the first bank, known as the Bank of New South Wales (now Westpac). Manufacturing was encouraged, and industries of pottery, linen cloth, and a variety of clothing items such as boots, shoes and hats started. The fledgling wool industry expanded.

A supporter of expansion, Macquarie encouraged the crossing of the Blue Mountains in 1815. Then he personally followed, and established the town of Bathurst. Other towns established under his reign include Windsor, Liverpool, Richmond, Penrith, Springwood, Campbelltown, Newcastle and Port Macquarie. He also introduced town-planning codes in the new towns and in ramshackle Sydney. He shaped Sydney by creating Hyde Park, the Domain and the Botanic Gardens. On Matthew Flinders’ advice, he adopted the name ‘Australia’ for the continent.

Macquarie opened the first racetrack and reduced the number of pubs in Sydney from 75 to 20. Church attendance, marriage rates and school attendance all climbed. Macquarie was a moral man but not one given to moralising too much with others. He had an understanding of the circumstances of this peculiar place at the bottom of the world and was able, through guidance and leadership, to improve the quality of society.

Macquarie was the first governor since Arthur Phillip to show any concern for the people of the Eora nation. He established a school (the Native Institution), a village at Elizabeth Bay for the Sydney tribe, and an Aboriginal farm at Georges Head. However, the local Aboriginal population remained hostile to the invaders and still rose up.

Macquarie always viewed New South Wales as a prison colony, but recognised the emancipists were the most skilled people in the country. They included architect Francis Greenway, surgeon and magistrate William Redfern, surgeon D’Arcy Wentworth, and former highwayman Simeon Lord, who became commissioner of the police force. These ex-convicts were now shaping the community. Macquarie recognised that emancipists were the future, and promoted them in society as equals.

The ‘bunyip aristocracy’, known as ‘exclusives’, who had arrived as part of the New South Wales Corps or were their friends, envisaged a colony of vast estates worked mostly by a slave population of convicts. Free settlers and convicts who had served their sentences (that is, had been ‘emancipated’) formed a lower class and were not permitted into many of the levels of society. This class warfare had been brewing for some time – Bligh’s fate had been sealed because he took the emancipists’ side over the exclusives. Macquarie’s challenge was to find a truce in the class war.

Macquarie retired in 1820, but it was a further two years before he was replaced and could finally set sail for England. When he left the colony in 1822, it was in immeasurably better shape than when he arrived.

The National Trust of Australia has taken responsibility for the maintenance of Macquarie’s grave in Mull, Scotland. It bears the inscription: ‘The Father of Australia’.

12

1832
A bottle of beer
The national beverage

Beer has long been a part of Australian culture. Cascade Brewery in Hobart, Tasmania, is the country’s oldest operating brewery. The brand combined all that was colourful in colonial Australia: crime and booze. The bankrupt Peter Degraves was serving time in HM Gaol Hobart (Campbell Street Gaol) when he hit upon the idea of making beer. He started Cascade in 1832 and through taste and efficient marketing soon found a place in a very crowded field of almost 50 brewers – and that was just in Tasmania.

Transported highwayman James Squire brewed beer on board Charlotte on its 1788 voyage. Once in Port Jackson he cultivated his own hop plants and was appointed to brew for lieutenant governors Grose and Paterson. By 1795 he had set up a hop plantation, brewery and tavern on the Parramatta River at Kissing Point, and he was soon one of the leading emancipists in the colony.

In the 18th and early 19th centuries, beer was not highly alcoholic and was a common drink even for children. Thomas Cooper brewed his first beer as a tonic for his ailing wife in 1862. His recipe was the basis for Coopers – the only extant all-Australian brewery.

Melbourne was the beer capital, and it was in Collingwood that New Yorkers William and Ralph Foster introduced lager to the Australian consumer, who had previously had drunk only ale. The Fosters supplied ice to their outlets so that their lager could be served cold, and thus started another important Australian tradition.

Few other products were so closely tied to regions and states. Until the 1980s, no Victorian beer would have been drunk north of the River Murray, and New South Wales beers from Tooth and Tooheys were unavailable in Victorian pubs. Tasmania was dominated by Cascade in the south and James Boag in the north. Queensland was the exclusive preserve of XXXX, South Australia belonged to Coopers, and Perth was Swan.

The German-born Resch brothers contributed to both New South Wales and Victorian beers and had an empire that bore their name. One of their most popular products was Dirty Annie or Resch’s Dinner Ale. This red, malt-flavoured beer was a sophisticated refreshment suitable for serving in the home. (Wine was rarely drunk with dinner until well into the 1960s.)

The depression of the 1890s caused a massive contraction in the beer industry. Then, in the 1980s, corporate raiders targeted breweries and another consolidation took place. Coopers remains in the family’s hands and is based in Adelaide, but all the other major beer brands are owned by either the Foster’s Group or New Zealand company Lion Nathan.

Beer is intrinsic to the Australian male identity. No one typified this more than Barry Humphries’ satirical character Barry McKenzie, a parody of the boorish Aussie male. Bazza’s love of Foster’s Lager was as legendary as his ability to vomit it up. Bazza seemed like a grotesque satire until, in 1977, Australian cricketer David Boon consumed 52 cans of beer on one plane flight. He was carried off the plane paralytic and comatose, like some gladiator.

Australia remains one of the few countries where a prime minister (Bob Hawke) can be revered for his ability to drink a yard of beer. As Barry McKenzie would say, ‘Only in the greatest little country in the world – no risk.’

13

1835
A convict uniform
The convict stain

Convicts in the early colony wore canvas or calico trousers, a striped shirt and a wool jacket. This two-colour uniform was worn by prisoners who had broken the law while serving a sentence, and was meant to humiliate the wearer.

The first two-colour uniforms in Australia were black and white, introduced by Governor Lachlan Macquarie to New South Wales in 1814 and then to Van Diemen’s Land. Political prisoners and inmates of Port Arthur wore all yellow. The arrow motif or pheon that decorates the trousers is a symbol that dates back to the 17th century and designates government property.

There’s no escaping the fact that Australia was conceived as a prison farm to be filled with the dregs of English society. The most heinous criminals were not sentenced to transportation: they were hanged. It fell to the second tier of criminals to populate Australia. Most of those transported were second or repeat offenders. Eighty per cent of them were thieves – city dwellers with an average age of 26 – and few were transported for political activism.

The First Fleet transported 775 felons. The Lady Juliana followed the next year with an all-female contingent of 226; it was sometimes referred to as a floating brothel. The Second Fleet brought 1006 convicts (928 male and 78 female) under inhumane conditions. And so it went on.

Necessity was the mother of emancipation. Governor Arthur Phillip saw that there were two classes of people: those who would work and those who shirked. Both classes could be seen in the ranks of the garrison as well as the prisoners.

Phillip created concessions for prisoners who contributed to the colony. Those who had served their term and decided to stay were classified as emancipists. The garrison and its mess never really believed that emancipists should be admitted to society, but they were very grateful for their industry.

Governor Philip King introduced the ‘ticket of leave’, which was effectively parole for the well behaved. He was moved not by philosophy but by the fact that the relevant convict would be responsible for his own keep and not a charge on the government purse.

The military made an insignificant contribution to the development of New South Wales: former convicts established most of the institutions in Sydney. Community leaders like William Charles Wentworth (the first police commissioner), architect Francis Greenway, James Ruse and Mary Reibey, to name just a few, were emancipists. A great many convicts who came to Australia served their sentence and found themselves a place in society either with a small farm or a small business.

Soon after the establishment of Sydney, Phillip sent a ship to Norfolk Island with 15 convicts to establish an outpost there. It was thought that the island had potential for the harvesting and manufacture of flax, but this was not to be the case, and Norfolk Island continued as a penal colony. Meanwhile, from 1803 to 1853 around 75 000 convicts were transported to Tasmania. By 1835 there were over 800 working in chain gangs at the infamous Port Arthur penal station.

Robert Hughes’ remarkable history of convict Australia, The Fatal Shore, documents the terrible privations the convicts suffered. The sadistic treatment dealt by the jailers and some governors is almost unimaginable. Nonetheless, the convicts applied themselves to the opportunities Australia presented.

From about the 1830s, free settlers started to arrive. A more enlightened attitude to crime and punishment evolved and the colonies gradually became cosmopolitan. The movement to end transportation started. South Australia established itself as a colony not founded on convict labour; instead, it was the product of muscular Christianity alone. Some South Australians take smug pride in this aspect of their history.

Transportation came late to Western Australia because there was no way to get people there other than in chains. That colony’s first convicts came from New South Wales: from 1850 to 1868 about 10 000 arrived to help settlers.

The Hougoumont disgorged the final 269 convicts in Australia on 9 January 1868 – almost 80 years to the day since the first prisoners condemned to transportation had stepped off their boat.

In all, the Australian colonies received a total of around 162 000 convicts, transported on 806 ships. The majority were English and Welsh (70 per cent), Irish (24 per cent) or Scottish (5 per cent). Would a place so inhospitable and distant ever have otherwise been settled by a European or other developed nation? Probably not.

Although by the end of the convict era reformed criminals made up only a minuscule fraction of the national population, the ‘convict stain’ infected all of Australian culture. Hughes assessed that ‘This contemptuous resistance to everyone and everything outside one’s small group was one of the roots of Australian mateship’.

In a twist of irony, while having a convict ancestor was once something to be kept quiet, it is now a source of national pride, celebrated by organisations such as the Fellowship of First Fleeters. Such is life.

14

1835
Batman’s contract for Melbourne
A handful of sand

John Batman’s contract to buy land from the tribes around Port Phillip was an extraordinary folly that led to the creation of Melbourne.

No one knows who ‘founded’ Melbourne. Obviously the Wurundjeri tribes had been there for several centuries before white people arrived. The first European settlement in Victoria was at Sullivan Bay, near Sorrento, in 1803, but it was abandoned due to a lack of fresh water. William Buckley, an escaped convict of this settlement who inspired the expression ‘Buckley’s chance’, lived among the local tribes of Melbourne for 33 years before Batman’s arrival.

Batman was the free son of a convict called William Bat(e)man and his wife, Mary. He drifted to Van Diemen’s Land, where he formed a family and had some success as a grazier. But the rugged island could only support so many cattle, and by 1827 land was scarce. Batman lobbied the authorities to open up pastures across Bass Strait but was turned down.

In May 1835, Batman and a small party crossed Bass Strait and surveyed the area, noting his notorious ‘spot for a village’. Apparently intending to legitimise his settlement, Batman had Joseph Gellibrand, a lawyer, draw up a deed by which Batman would acquire 600 000 acres (242 800 ha) of what is now Melbourne for the sum of 20 pairs of blankets, 30 tomahawks, 100 knives, 50 pairs of scissors, 30 looking glasses, 200 handkerchiefs, 100 pounds (45 kg) of flour and 6 shirts. Batman offered a further annual tribute of 100 pairs of blankets, 100 tomahawks, 50 suits of clothing, 50 looking glasses, 50 pairs of scissors and 5 tonnes of flour.

According to legend, the deed (which is variously known as the Batman Treaty, the Dutigullar Deed and the Dutigullar Treaty) was signed by eight Aboriginal elders of the Kulin nation (an alliance of five Aboriginal nations – Wurundjeri, Bunurong, Wathaurong, Taungurong and Dja Dja Wurrung). At the same time, Batman signed the Geelong Deed, giving him land in the Geelong area south-west of Melbourne. The signing of these deeds supposedly took place on the banks of the Merri Creek in what is now the Melbourne suburb of Northcote. The ceremony was, according to Batman, marked by the traditional owners giving him a handful of soil.

The Indigenous people were obviously not familiar with Batman’s language, nor he with theirs: Batman’s Aboriginal companions were from Sydney. The local people had no concept of contract law, and the contract would now be unenforceable in any court. In any case, the colonial government’s view was that all land belonged to the Crown.

Batman’s audacious move prompted the governor of New South Wales, Sir Richard Bourke, to issue a proclamation nullifying the treaty. That proclamation became the basis for the argument of terra nullius (which said that there had been no prior occupation of the land before British settlement), which was thereafter deployed as justification for the expansion of white rule of all of Australia and the Torres Strait.

It was not until 1992 that terra nullius was finally unwound, in the Mabo case. Batman may have thought he was doing the right thing, but in fact he set the reconciliation cause back by centuries. The notion that Batman had any great affection for Indigenous people is contradicted by his active participation in the Black War genocide in Tasmania, where 1000 Indigenous people were slaughtered. It seems more likely that his gesture was a means to get around the New South Wales government, which was blocking his purchase. He looked for non-government owners under the guise of moral righteousness but should have done what whalers and others had done – just squat. Nonetheless, he pursued his ‘contract’.

After signing his deed, Batman sailed to Launceston to collect his family. In August he returned to Port Phillip, where he was surprised to find that a rival, John Pascoe Fawkner, was already establishing a settlement, having promised that he would leave Batman’s territory alone.

The rivalry between the two ambitious landowners continued until Batman’s death a few years later. By the time he moved to Port Phillip, his health was in rapid decline: his nose was mostly eaten away by syphilis and he was an alcoholic. Abandoned by his wife, Batman died on 6 May 1839. Fawkner lived much longer, opening the first Port Phillip pub and becoming a pillar of the community. The present suburb of Pascoe Vale covers some of his holdings.

It was Batman’s and Fawkner’s determination to defy the colonial administration and move to the banks of the Yarra that forced the creation of Melbourne. Within a year of their settlement, 177 other settlers and more than 26 000 sheep had arrived. A commissioner reported to Governor Bourke on 25 May 1836 that the settlement amounted to 13 buildings: three weatherboard, two slate and eight turf huts, housing 142 males and 35 females.

The following year, on 4 March 1837, Bourke named the place Melbourne after the then prime minister of the United Kingdom, Lord Melbourne. He instructed the assistant surveyor-general, Robert Hoddle, to lay out the town. Hoddle envisaged a grid with very wide streets, and his vision has shaped Melbourne until the present day. Within 16 years of settlement, Victoria was proclaimed a state and Melbourne its capital.

15

1845
A pepper-box revolver from Lambing Flat
White Australia fights back

This primitive gun – a pepper-box revolver – was used in the first violent confrontations between white and Asian settlers, and led in part to the White Australia policy. The revolver is an early version of the repeating firearm, and one of the most common personal firearms in the 19th century.

The discovery of gold in New South Wales and Victoria in the 1850s brought a massive influx of immigrants from China. Prospecting required hours of backbreaking work for meagre returns. Europeans tended to be lone speculators, but the Chinese organised themselves into cooperative groups.

A journey from China to Dai Gum San, the ‘new gold mountain’ in far-off Australia, cost around £12. This money was usually raised by the immigrant paying heavy interest charges to a travel agent or by using his family as collateral. The trip to Australia was hazardous, and immigrants often slept on decks open to the weather, with little food and water.

When the gold rush was at its height, the Victorian government tried to limit the flood of ‘celestials’ and imposed a £10 tax on Chinese immigrants. So the Chinese sailed to South Australia instead and walked to the goldfields. Between 1857 and 1863, 16 261 Chinese males and one female landed at the port of Robe on Guichen Bay in South Australia and walked 800 kilometres to the Bendigo goldfields. It was one of the largest single migrations in all human history, and is the largest in Australian history.

A local described the scene of a Chinese trek to the goldfields as ‘between six and seven hundred coming overland from Adelaide. They had four wagons carrying their sick, lame and provisions. They were all walking single file, each one with a pole and two baskets. They stretched for over two miles [3 kilometres] in procession.’

The journey took five weeks, the people jog-trotting 35 kilometres a day in long, single-file groups, wearing parasol hats, woollen blouses and blue trousers. On their shoulders they balanced bamboo poles carrying buckets, cradles, shovels and bedding. They flew paper kites at their camps and smoked opium.

On the goldfields the Chinese were victims of discrimination by the Anglo-Irish establishment. Forced off the best sites, they were bullied into re-mining areas that others had worked dry. The Europeans accused the Chinese of using too much water, muddying the waterholes, and being unsanitary, un-Christian and generally immoral. A Chinese Immigration Regulation Bill went before the New South Wales parliament.

The first anti-Chinese violence occurred in Bendigo in July 1854, and a major riot broke out at Buckland River in July 1857. These attacks were thuggish mob incidents that aimed to drive the Chinese away. The violence in Victoria encouraged the Chinese to move north to New South Wales, and by 1861 there were 13,000 Chinese migrants on the New South Wales goldfields. The anti-Chinese violence continued, with brawls in the Burragorang region at Spring Creek, Stoney Creek, Back Creek, Wombat, Blackguard Gully and Tipperary Gully.

Trouble began in the Burragorang area in December 1860. A miners’ ‘vigilance committee’ on 12 December alleged that Chinese people were running gambling dens and other immoral activities. These allegations fired up a mob, who set upon the Chinese camp, killing several people and wounding others. A military unit was sent to restore order and remained until June 1861.

The major riot on the New South Wales goldfields took place at Lambing Flat on 30 June 1861. The provocation came from the New South Wales Legislative Council, which rejected an anti-Chinese immigration bill; this was combined with a rumour that 1500 more Chinese prospectors were on their way to the area.

Some 3000 white men rallied in front of a banner that said ‘Roll up! Roll up!’ Fired up on xenophobic oratory and accompanied by a brass band, the mob moved through the Chinese camp beating the people, looting their possessions and cutting off their pigtails. Chinese miners’ tents were set on fire and their mining tools destroyed. The Lambing Flat Miner newspaper estimated the value of property destroyed at £3000.

One thousand Chinese people took shelter on the Currowang sheep station, 20 kilometres away. The white mob moved 8 kilometres further on to the Back Creek Chinese camp, where they did more looting and assaulting. Over the coming days, police arrived and arrested the ringleaders and restored order. Nonetheless, the attacks on Chinese continued. On 14 July, the police were attacked by almost 1000 miners. One rioter died in that melee.

The police and military presence was increased to almost 300 reinforcements and they remained for a year. Peace was restored but the Lambing Flat massacre cast a pall over Chinese–Australian relations for a century.

In Victoria, ‘An Act to Make Provision for Certain Immigrants’ was passed in 1855. The New South Wales government passed the Chinese Immigration Restriction and Regulation Act in 1861, Queensland introduced restrictions in 1877, and Western Australia followed suit in 1886. This eventually led, upon Federation, to the Immigration Restriction Act 1901 – commonly known as the White Australia policy.

Out of shame, the town of Lambing Flat changed its name to Young.

16

1848
A Staffordshire porcelain figurine of Protestant Irish nationalist convict William Smith O’Brien
The Irish question

This figurine of the Irish nationalist, parliamentarian and convict William Smith O’Brien would have been made for the home of an Irish descendent or Irish nationalist. Figurines of public figures, local heroes and the notorious were popular in early Victorian times. This one was made by the Alpha Factory potters in Staffordshire. The figurine shows O’Brien, barefoot and in convict garb of white shirt and trousers, hands manacled with gold cuffs, leaning against a pink plinth. The statuette weighs 500 grams and is a little under 25 cm in height.

O’Brien was born into a minor aristocratic family in County Clare. He sat in the British parliament but was increasingly taken by the cause of Irish nationalism. He led an unsuccessful rising against police on 29 July 1848 and was sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered. The sentence was commuted to transportation for life. After being imprisoned on Maria Island in Van Diemen’s Land, O’Brien was transferred to Port Arthur.

By 1854 O’Brien was considered sufficiently rehabilitated to be conditionally pardoned, and he returned to Europe. There is a statue of him on O’Connell Street, Dublin, and the cottages in which he lived on Maria Island and Port Arthur have been preserved in their 19th-century state.

Like O’Brien, the Irish generally came to Australia with chains on their ankles or hunger in their bellies. On the arrival of Minerva in 1800, with its cargo of around 800 Irish people, Elizabeth Paterson, wife of Governor William Paterson, wrote: ‘I cannot say I like the place near so well as I did before.’

A second-tier English Protestant class established Australia, which meant that the Irish were always going to be second-class citizens. That the majority of Irish people were Catholic further entrenched the social division. Catholics were officially excluded from many clubs and organisations right up until the 1970s. An unspoken discrimination went even deeper.

Some of the most effective troublemakers in Australia were Irish. The first convict uprising, the Castle Hill rebellion of 1804, was dubbed the Second Battle of Vinegar Hill after a battle of that name (Cath Chnoc Fíodh na gCaor in Gaelic) in the Irish rebellion of 1798. Philip Cunningham, who led the rebels at Castle Hill outside Sydney, was in fact in New South Wales due to his role in that 1798 stoush. He led 200 convicts in a plan to capture ships and return to Ireland to continue the war of independence. Needless to say, the uprising was ill considered and quickly suppressed; its leaders were hanged.

The threat of an Irish uprising was widely felt in the colony afterwards, and the first militia group was founded in New South Wales to protect citizens from a possible attack.

Around 40 000 Irish convicts were transported to Australia between 1791 and 1867, and about one-third of convict women were Irish. Given that the Irish were heavily discriminated against and oppressed in Britain, it’s unsurprising that they would have a high crime rate. And then there were the revolutionaries: the last batch of 280 convicts transported to Australia in 1868 included 62 Irish rebels. In 1876 the world’s most extravagant prison break was organised to free Sinn Fein prisoners in Western Australia; the plot involved sailing around the world and a last-minute chase to international waters.

At least half the rebels at the Eureka Stockade were Irish; the leader, Peter Lalor, certainly was. He had cut his teeth as a firebrand in Ireland and was one of the few at the stockade to have any political skills. Lalor survived Eureka and went on to a distinguished and conservative career in the Victorian parliament. Such a transition story was not uncommon.

The Great Famine (an Gorta Mór) in Ireland that began in 1845 saw unprecedented migration from the country, especially to the United States and Australia. The discovery of gold in 1851 turbocharged that migration, and some 101 540 arrived between 1851 and 1860. The peak of Irish migration occurred in 1891, when it reached 228 230.

During the famine years, the secretary of state for the colonies, Earl Grey, devised a scheme whereby young women between the ages of 14 and 18 in workhouses could be given assisted passage to Australia, where they would find work as domestic servants. Some 4114 Irish girls were transported under this scheme, which operated for just under two years.

The poverty in Ireland and the oppressive rule by the British were always powerful incentives for migration. In 1871, more than 25 per cent of the Victorian population was Irish, though they were not all in poverty. Such was the penetration of the Irish at the time that Ireland’s most famous Australian son, Ned Kelly, was sentenced to death by another Irishman, Sir Redmond Barry.

The most famous Irish Catholic Australian in the first half of the 20th century was the Most Reverend Daniel Mannix, Archbishop of Melbourne. He was born in County Cork and came to Australia in 1912. Mannix loved God and hated the English with equal fervour. His distaste for England and his Irish republicanism made him a fierce opponent of World War I; Mannix was the prime mover in the anti-conscription campaign.

Mannix made a tour to the United States and then to Rome in 1920. He planned to visit his homeland but British prime minister Lloyd George launched the Royal Navy to intercept the RMS Baltic and had Mannix put ashore in Penzance, Cornwall, where he could be watched and contained.

Despite discrimination, many of the founders of the Australian nation were of Irish decent, including High Court judge Henry Bournes Higgins, solicitor Francis Bede Freehill, brewer John Thomas Toohey, and businessman and underworld identity John Wren – a broad cross-section of society.

17

1854
The Eureka flag
Under the Southern Cross

The Eureka flag is 2600 mm wide and 3240 mm high and is made from wool and cotton. The flag was designed by Canadian miner ‘Captain’ Henry Ross, a member of the Ballarat Reform League, and sewn by Anastasia Withers, Anne Duke and Anastasia Hayes on 29November 1854. There was a growing solidarity among the miners and Ross saw the advantage in defining the group. A week later it was damaged by swords and bullets during the battle known as the Eureka Stockade. Trooper John King souvenired the flag from the battlefield and took it to his home, where it stayed for years.

In the 1850s, Victoria contributed more than one-third of the world’s gold output. Ballarat was the richest field in the world. More people came to Australia in search of gold than were transported as convicts, with gold fever pushing the population from 70 000 in 1850 to 400 000 in 1856. The revolutions of 1848 in Europe had displaced many who brought ideas of socialism and democracy to Australia.

The polyglot community on the diggings made that area a powder keg. The Victorian government squeezed miners, who were charged 30 shillings per month (twice the average weekly wage) for a licence. Matters came to a head on the Ballarat fields on what was known as the Eureka Lead, an area with a high concentration of Irish prospectors. On 6 October 1854, James Scobie was murdered at the Eureka Hotel. The publican, James Bentley, and his staff denied any responsibility and were not charged, but the locals thought the magistrate was in the sway of Bentley and burned down the pub. The arrests of miners over the hotel fire in the ensuing weeks led to large public meetings and lists of demands being drawn up.

On the fateful day of 11 November 1854, a crowd that may have been as large as 10 000 diggers gathered at Bakery Hill. Clearly there were rebellious Irish, American and European ideas circulating. The Ballarat Reform League, mimicking American revolutionaries, declared that taxation without representation was tyranny. There were calls for a republic. Goldfields commissioner Robert Rede, concerned about radical politics, ramped up the police presence. He wanted any confrontation to be quickly and decisively suppressed.

Tension escalated. Eight miners were arrested on 30 November for licence defaulting, and this provoked a fight. The troopers were attacked. A meeting at Bakery Hill resolved to take armed resistance to the government. Lalor found himself de facto leader of the insurrection and a new flag based on the stars of the Southern Cross, which had been unfurled the day before, was hoisted. Lalor and other demonstrators knelt under the ensign and declared: ‘We swear by the Southern Cross to stand truly by each other and fight to defend our rights and liberties.’

Lalor and the Reform League began to build a stockade – a rickety fence – and started training for battle. At 3 a.m. on Sunday, 3 December, the troopers and police attacked. It was over in less than half an hour. Thirty-three diggers, including Captain Ross, and five soldiers were killed and over 100 prisoners taken. Lalor, wounded, escaped but lost his left arm.

Public sympathy was with the rebels, and the public in Melbourne, Geelong, Bendigo and Castlemaine were outraged by the savagery of the police attack. Charges of treason against Lalor and the 13 diggers were dropped or lapsed. The government came to the negotiating table, appointing two representatives – one being Lalor – from the diggings to the parliament.

The Eureka Stockade – Australia’s biggest rebellion to date – was over in less than an hour, but the Eureka flag lives on as a motif for an independent Australia.

18

1858
An Australian Rules Sherrin
A game of our own

As anyone from Melbourne will gleefully tell you, Australian Rules is the oldest football code in the world. Originally made from leather, the Sherrin is the most Australian of sporting objects. It’s named after Thomas William Sherrin, who in 1880 recast a misshapen rugby ball with pointed ends, to aid the bounce. Sherrin started manufacturing the balls – which were ideal for Australian Rules – in a Collingwood factory in 1897. Sherrin is now the generic name of an Australian Rules ball.

In the middle of the 18th century there were many different types of football being played, with rules transmitted by custom and word of mouth or improvised on the spot. It would be some years before the games we now know as Rugby and soccer were codified.

On 7 August 1858, Melbourne Grammar School met Scotch College at Richmond Paddock in Yarra Park. The teams were 40 players per side and the match was played over three Saturdays (7 and 21 August and 4 September). The ball was round. The distance between the goals was half a mile (800 m) and the first team to score two goals would be the winner. Over the three sessions each side scored one goal, making the match a draw. Tom Wills, one of the organisers, umpired.

There are rules to Australian Rules – initially just 10 of them, which were drawn up in a pub. On 17 May 1859, Wills, J B Thompson, William Hammersley and Thomas Smith – a group of semi-professional sportsmen – met in a back room of the Parade Hotel in Melbourne and, at the suggestion of the Melbourne Cricket Club, drew up the rules of the new game.

Wills is the most interesting sportsman the country has ever produced. He grew up mostly in the Western District of Victoria. At age 14 he was sent to Rugby School in England, where he excelled at cricket but also played Rugby. His cricket style was considered unorthodox or perhaps untrained: he was known for going for wild shots and was a fearsome bowler. After school he went up to Cambridge and continued to play cricket. He returned to Australia in 1856.

On 10 July 1958, Wills wrote a letter to Bell’s Life in Victoria and Sporting Chronicle suggesting that a game be devised that would keep cricketers fit in the off-season. A number of different games involving footballs were then being played, and it was really Wills organising a meeting – which included two journalists – and codifying some rules that established Australian Rules as the game it is. The original rules drew on the games played at British public schools Winchester, Harrow and Rugby, and included the distinctive features of the Australian game: no tripping or ‘hacking’ (kicking a player in the shins), no ‘off-side’ rule, the ‘mark’, and carrying the ball only as far as was needed to kick it.

Also at that meeting was Wills’ brother-in-law, Henry Harrison. A champion ‘pedestrian’ and a public servant, Harrison brought the qualities of an ordered mind and a love of raw competition to the establishment of this ‘game of our own’ – as he said his brother-in-law called it. In 1866, Harrison further codified the rules of Victorian football.

Australian Rules really is a game of our own. It has influences from Gaelic football and from Rugby and possibly from Indigenous games that were observed and played around the colony. Great debates rage about its origin, but given that the actual written records of its founders say nothing on this issue, they are just speculation. It’s likely that if Wills was influenced by the Aboriginal game of marngrook he would have said or written something about it.

As historian Geoffrey Blainey has observed, a player with a new technique often changes the game – and undoubtedly that occurred in the early days of Australian Rules. Neither Wills nor anyone else wrote that they wanted to create a version of an existing game. Rather, their impulse was to create something that was native to Australia.

The prosperity brought about by Victoria’s gold rush was one factor in the success of Australian Rules. The new prosperity allowed for some relaxation of working hours. The half-day holiday on Saturday created scope for greater leisure activities, and Australian Rules naturally filled that gap. The economy was transforming Melbourne in the late 19th century and each region of the city was growing and creating its identity. Nothing better expressed the identity of a new district than having a football team. As Victoria prospered so did its native sport, and the two became entwined. During the 1870s, more than 125 clubs appeared in Melbourne and another 60 senior clubs were established elsewhere in Victoria.

The game itself was never static. In 1865 it was established that the player with the ball had to bounce it off the turf at least every 10 m. By 1874 players no longer scored by carrying the ball between goal posts, but by kicking it through them. From the 1880s the practice of the spectacular mark – a high jump to catch the ball – became a feature of the game. And in 1897 the behind, worth one point, came in. The Grand Final was first contested in 1898, and in 1904 it was held at the Melbourne Cricket Ground for the first time – and it is still held there every year. Throughout, the Sherrin ball remained a constant.

19

1861
Robert O’Hara Burke’s water bottle
The glorious race across the continent

This tear-shaped water bottle of hardened leather that once belonged to Robert O’Hara Burke was with him when he died of hunger and thirst. The death of Burke and his accomplice, William Wills, became a powerful metaphor for the white occupation of Australia. And for sheer foolishness.

Burke is Australia’s most famous explorer. Much of northern Australia was opened by his expedition, or at least by other explorers looking for him after he became lost.

Born in Ireland in 1821, Burke was superintendent of police in Castlemaine, Victoria, in 1860. He had a crush on an actress, Julia Matthews, who did not return his interest. Burke felt he needed to prove himself to her, and his chance came when the Royal Society of Victoria raised the huge sum of £2000 and appointed him to lead a group of 19 men in the first south–north crossing of Australia. They departed from Melbourne on 20 August 1860.

Burke had no experience as an explorer or a bushman. He had 27 camels, 23 horses, 6 tonnes of firewood, two years’ worth of food, rockets, a cedar table, a bathtub and a Chinese gong. For some reason, although he had horses and camels he insisted that the 19 men had to walk.

In Menindee, Burke jettisoned most of his equipment and the experienced bushmen who were on the team quarrelled with the leader. Burke, Wills and two others set off for the Gulf. They went on foot, despite having six camels and a horse in tow. After four months of solid trekking they had covered 2414 kilometres, and in February 1861 reached the mangrove swamp near present-day Normanton in the Gulf Country. They had the luck of a rainy year; otherwise, they never would have made it that far.

The luck they had on their outward journey evaporated as they trudged back. One of the party died en route. On 21 April 1861 Burke and Wills arrived at their base in Cooper Creek. Nine hours previously, their support party had finally given up on them and set off for Melbourne via Menindee. Some provisions with instructions about the support party had been left buried under a tree.

Wills, Burke and John King, their last colleague, were starving and exhausted and in no shape to catch the support party. Wills and King thought setting off for Menindee might be the best thing, but Burke wanted to head for the cattle run at Mount Hopeless, 241 kilometres away, where he hoped to find help. So that’s what they did. Burke left a note under the Dig Tree, where the provisions had been, but he failed to change the date or the details on the note suggesting that his route and details were there. This was his penultimate blunder.

It was another stupid mistake. By trying to reach Mount Hopeless, they missed the search party that came to look for them. Because Burke, Wills and King did not alter the message on the Dig Tree, the search party had no idea that they had returned from the Gulf and might be in the vicinity.

And so they lay down to die. The local Aboriginal people came with fish and fresh food for them, but Burke wouldn’t demean himself by associating with the natives, and he shot at them. Burke and Wills died slowly of starvation. King was less proud: he befriended the local people, who fed him and nursed him back to health. He was found by Alfred Howitt in September, 13 months after the expedition had started.

The Burke and Wills expedition is one of the fundamental stories of Australian settlement. Here was a case of white men who had all the wealth in the world, the glory of the Empire and their own arrogance pitting themselves against the brutal heart of the Australian continent and then refusing to acknowledge the wisdom and knowledge of the Indigenous people.

Burke’s water bottle was discovered by Alfred Howitt next to the bodies of Burke and Wills, which had been chewed by dingos. The small bladder was a symbol of so much that White Australia got wrong.

20

1866
Mrs Butters’ press dress
Liberty of the press

Mrs Matilda Butters had this gown made in September 1866 for a fancy-dress ball given by the mayor of Melbourne to celebrate the arrival of the new governor of Victoria, the 3rd Viscount Canterbury, Sir John Henry Thomas Manners-Sutton.

According to the State Library of Victoria, the gown was constructed from panels of silk printed with the front pages of Melbourne newspapers. The skirt is made from 14 panels edged with gold braid, and has a circumference around the hem of more than five metres. The outfit was completed with a coronet headdress proclaiming ‘Liberty of the press’, and on the night Mrs Butters carried a miniature printing press she used to print lines from Lord Byron’s poem Lara onto satin ribbons.

Mrs William Dobbs of Gardiners Creek Road, South Yarra, about whom little else is known, made the dress. The papers featured on it were The Age, The Argus, the Weekly Age, The Leader, The Australasian, The Herald, Bell’s Life, The Spectator, Journal of Commerce, Government Gazette, Dicker’s Mining Record, Illustrated Australian News and Punch.

The colonial media was a lively place, full of hard reporting, scandal, shipping news, scurrilous gossip, libel and slander. Public issues were aggressively debated: White Australia, Federation, free trade versus protectionism, social vice, religion and corruption. Newspapers came and went – more than one folded or was sold when the proprietor couldn’t meet the cost of a libel action.

The first newspaper in Australia was the Sydney Gazette: its first issue was published on 5 March 1803 by George Howe. A weekly four-page list of government notices, public announcements, shipping news, auction results, crime reports, agricultural notices, local news and sundry items, it was produced out the back of Government House by ex-convict Howe, who had arrived at Port Jackson in 1800.

William Charles Wentworth launched the colony’s second real paper, The Australian, in 1824. Within ten years there were seven daily papers in Sydney, and by the middle of the century Australia boasted 50 newspapers of varying stability, quality and frequency.

John Fairfax was born on 25 October 1804 in Warwick, England. A printer, bookseller, newsagent and part-owner of the Leamington Chronicle and Warwickshire Reporter, in 1836 he was sued for libel and went broke. He arrived three years later as a free settler in Sydney with £5 to his name. Three years after that he borrowed enough to purchase, with Charles Kemp, the daily Sydney Herald. On 1 August 1842 the masthead was changed to the Sydney Morning Herald. Through Fairfax’s sheer hard work and good decisions, within a few years the Herald had become the major newspaper in New South Wales.

Three businessmen launched The Age in Melbourne on 17 October 1854: brothers John and Henry Cooke, and Walter Powell. Its editorial policy was politically progressive, supporting labour reform, the diggers on the goldfields and the eight-hour day.

Two years later the paper was sold to Ebenezer Syme and James McEwan. Management and editorial policy fell to Ebenezer’s brother David. After Ebenezer’s death in 1860, David Syme took more control and eventually bought out his partners so that by 1891 he was sole proprietor. With a liberal editorial policy, he steadily built the paper’s circulation to become market leader in Victoria. By the end of the 19th century The Age was the most successful newspaper in the Empire.

In the latter part of the 19th century, Syme was one of the half-dozen most powerful men in Victoria. He fundamentally understood the power of the press and was not shy about using it to support his favourite politicians and causes. Politicians curried his favour and respected his views on issues. A man with few friends, he avoided getting too close to his journalists. The exception to this rule was Alfred Deakin, a journalist on The Age who became Australia’s second prime minister.

John Feltham (aka Jules François) Archibald wished for nothing more than to write for The Argus. After years of rejection, he and John Haynes launched The Bulletin on 31 January 1880. Its first two editions sold out. Archibald’s personality was fundamental to The Bulletin. He delighted in making mischief and stood for the ‘average Australian working man’. Archibald was a White Australia nationalist and opposed the monarchy, poverty, hypocrisy, un-Christian Christianity, inhuman piety and cant. He sponsored writers such as Henry Lawson, whom he sent on a long trip through the bush to bring stories of outback life to the city. The Bulletin was a mirror for Australians just at the moment when a nation was being born from the colonies.

Of course Mrs Butters’ press dress tells only a portion of the story of the media in Australia. It fell to David Syme to mentor Australia’s most influential journalist, Keith (later Sir Keith) Murdoch. His father, the Rev. Patrick John Murdoch, knew Syme, who took young Keith on as district correspondent for Malvern. Keith increased The Age’s circulation in the area and worked his way up the ranks. He was a founding member of the Australian Journalists’ Association. Then, in 1915, he was appointed to the United Cable Service office in London.

En route to London, Murdoch stopped in Gallipoli for four days, where he wrote some of the most impassioned reports of World War I. He celebrated the diggers and was unstinting in his criticism of the British bungles in the campaign. This reporting was an important part of the creation of the Anzac myth.

Once in London, Murdoch perfected his talent for getting close to politicians and men in power. He was always happy to lend his influence and words to causes he believed in. In January 1921 he was appointed chief editor of the Melbourne evening Herald, and from this position he worked his way to the board of the Herald and Weekly Times.

Murdoch perfected tabloid newspapers in Australia. He was a complex editor and publisher, although, unlike the others mentioned, he was not a proprietor or media baron. He did however have one paper of his own, the Adelaide Advertiser, which he bequeathed to his son, Rupert.

21

1877
A Coolgardie Safe
Cool things

This Coolgardie Safe is probably homemade, but it accords with the basic principles of a galvanised-iron frame supporting two doors and some internal shelves. On top was a tray of water and on the sides were hessian sheets soaked in water. The safe was placed in a breeze and the evaporating water cooled its inside. The legs were often placed in a tray of water to keep ants at bay.

Keeping things cool was one of the first and most important tasks of white settlement in Australia. The tyranny of distance was especially acute if you were in the meat business, and the first person to really address the issue was Thomas Sutcliffe Mort, an auctioneer, dairy farmer, woolgrower and cattleman, in the 1840s. He transported meat from his Lithgow abattoir to Sydney, where it was kept in the world’s first refrigeration works. His use of refrigeration allowed him to transport milk and dairy products around New South Wales and maximise markets for his Bodalla dairy-farm produce.

Mort, a devout Anglican, saw his divine quest as taking Australian meat to the world. He announced to the Sydney Chamber of Commerce in 1870: ‘Climate, seasons, plenty, scarcity, distance, will all shake hands, and out of the commingling will come enough for all, for the Earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof.’ Tragically, a burst pipe on his ship The Northam ruined his first funded venture in 1877, and he died the next year.

Refrigeration was a hot topic at the time throughout the world. French scientists and traders experimented with importing meat from South America and in 1877 the steamship Paraguay brought 80 tonnes of meat from Buenos Aires – but it was a one-off event. Bell and Coleman of Glasgow eventually devised a reliable, efficient air compression/expansion refrigeration system.

Queensland grazier Thomas McIlwraith and his partners chartered the Strathleven and had Bell-Coleman machinery fitted. The ship left Melbourne on 6 December 1879 with 40 tonnes of meat, which was delivered deliciously to London on 2 February 1880. Within three years, eight ships had been fitted with refrigeration equipment and the trade was off and running.

Living on a hot, dry continent, Australians loved refrigeration. On the West Australian goldfields, where the temperatures ran into the 40s and grocery shops were 180 kilometres away, Arthur Patrick McCormick noticed that the evaporation of a wet bag cooled any object underneath, especially when the bag was placed in a breeze. From there he developed the Coolgardie Safe. By the early 20th century, the safes were ubiquitous, usually set on verandas to catch the breeze.

J M Larsen produced the first domestic refrigerator in America in 1913. In Australia, the first domestically designed and manufactured refrigerators were made by Edward Hallstrom. His first model, developed in 1928, was called the Icy Ball and was powered by kerosene.

Hallstrom, who as a hobby collected the hats of famous people (including Charlie Chaplin, Winston Churchill, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower), developed an upright model in 1935 – the Silent Knight – which was first powered by gas and later by electricity.

According to the Powerhouse Museum, the first icebox sold under the trademark Esky was manufactured by Malley’s, a refrigeration business based in Sydney, in 1884. In 1952 Malley’s launched the first portable Esky (short for ‘eskimo’) cooler in the world, calling it the Esky Auto Ice Box. The cooler kept its contents chilled with two layers: a polypropylene outer shell and a polyurethane inner layer (originally cork). The cooler was steel and finished in baked enamel and chrome. Later versions have been made with plastic.

The Esky was marketed to motorists and the aim was to have it – like a jack and jumper leads – as standard in every family car. It symbolised a carefree, open-road lifestyle where a cold beer was always to hand.

22

1880
Ned Kelly’s armour
The national symbol

Ned Kelly’s suit of armour weighs 44 kg. It has a cylindrical helmet, a long breastplate, shoulder-plates, back-guard, and aprons at the front and back. The inside was padded and Kelly wore a padded cap. The individual parts are made of iron that is 6.35 cm thick. Some have suggested that the armour was made by a professional blacksmith, but it is very roughly shaped and unevenly fired. It’s a collection of bits of ploughs and scrap and leather.

The Kelly Gang needed all the protection it could muster by early 1880. While hiding out in the Wombat Ranges for four or five months, the members of the gang (Ned Kelly, Dan Kelly, Joe Byrne and Steve Hart) designed and manufactured suits of armour to thwart the police. For some months they worked in their bush forge, heating the iron and beating it over a green stringybark log and then shaping and riveting it.

Ned Kelly was born into struggle in 1854. His father was an Irishman transported from Tipperary to Victoria for stealing pigs; he died when Ned was 12. Ned’s mother, Ellen, was a tough Australian woman with Irish parentage who, after her husband died, entertained men for money and worked a small selection at Greta, east of Benalla. The Kellys – Ellen had eight children in all – were part of the Irish crime underworld that operated throughout Victoria stealing cattle and horses.

Ned was a horseman of great ability. His first offence was the assault of a Chinese man, and police held him as a suspected accomplice of the bushranger Harry Power. At age 15 he assisted a pal to send a pair of calf’s testicles to the wife of a local toff as part of an ongoing squabble, and for this and summary offences he was sent to jail for six months. Shortly after his release he was arrested for stealing horses and did three years. After being paroled he was again arrested, for riding a horse on the footpath.

Clearly, police targeted Kelly and his family. Whether the attention was justified or not is unclear, but they probably were living outside the law. The straw that broke the camel’s back, however, was not Kelly’s fault.

In April 1878 Constable Alexander Fitzpatrick arrived at Ellen Kelly’s house with a warrant to arrest Dan Kelly on a charge of horse stealing. Fitzpatrick was drunk and made an improper advance to Dan’s sister Kate. Dan came to her aid, there was a scuffle and Fitzpatrick’s gun went off, injuring him.

The next day, possibly out of shame, Fitzpatrick swore that Ned, who was 640 kilometres away at the time, had attacked him. Dan took to the bush and the police arrested everyone left at the Kelly house. Ellen was given three years’ hard labour and the judge, Redmond Barry, announced that had they caught Ned he would have been sentenced to 21 years.

Their friends Steve Hart and Joe Byrne joined the Kelly brothers on the run from the police in the Wombat Ranges. On 25 October 1878 the Kelly Gang ambushed police camped at Stringybark Creek. Ned killed constables Thomas Lonigan, Michael Scanlan and Sergeant Michael Kennedy. With three policemen’s deaths to his name (the most Australian police ever killed in a single incident), Ned was the nation’s most wanted man. A bounty of £500 was placed on his head, an amount that was to rise to £8000.

On 10 December the gang bailed up a homestead at Faithfull’s Creek and the next day they robbed the local bank, taking £2000 in notes and gold. Two months later they robbed the Jerilderie bank while wearing police uniforms. Again, no one was killed. The bank lost £2141 and Kelly left behind an 8000-word open letter. He saw himself as a revolutionary rising against the squattocracy and the police persecution of Irish settlers, and that manifesto, the ‘Jerilderie letter’, was part of his campaign. Years later it inspired Peter Carey’s acclaimed novel True History of the Kelly Gang.

By mid-1880 the hunted Kelly Gang had their suits of armour ready. They met at Glenrowan at about 8 a.m. on Sunday, 27 June and took over the hotel and with it 60 hostages. They knew a special train full of police was on its way so they disabled the track and returned to the hotel, where they waited in their armour, which was concealed by dust jackets. They made use of the bar and so were somewhat impaired when the police arrived the next morning.

The battle at Glenrowan was bloody. The armoured suits initially surprised the police but the sheer firepower against the Kellys sealed their fate. Ned escaped for a while and then returned to the battle, still in full armour, to be with his friends. The area was shrouded in mist, Kelly otherwordly. The trooper fired at his uncovered legs and he was toppled, wounded and humiliated to be taken alive when his comrades had all died of their wounds or the fire that raged through the pub.

Kelly was tried for the murder of Constable Lonigan and on 11 November he was hanged.

Ned Kelly has become an iconic Australian figure, mostly on the basis of the brilliance of the design of the armour. The primal lines and simplicity of it combined with the sheer audacity of creating a suit of armour added to the romance of the Ned Kelly story.

In the 1940s, Sidney Nolan began painting the Kelly story. Nolan conjured Kelly with angular shapes and placed the caricature in quintessential Australian landscapes. Nolan’s Kelly was a stranger in a strange land, and somehow many Australians saw themselves in his paintings.

23

1884
A Sunshine stripper harvester
The machine that built Australia

No single machine has transformed Australia as profoundly as this one. The stripper harvester combined the job of stripping wheat with the job of threshing and winnowing. The ears of grain from standing wheat crops were stripped, and the grain and chaff passed through a winnowing drum with riddles. The separated grain was elevated by a continuous belt to a storage bin. The machine required three to five horses to pull it and harvested up to 8 hectares per day.

James Morrow of Shepparton patented the first combination stripper harvester in 1884. In January 1885, Hugh Victor McKay built his first stripper harvester in the family blacksmith shop in Drummartin, near Bendigo. In 1895 he produced a dozen machines. Six years later, the Sunshine factory was producing 500 annually.

McKay started to export his Sunshine machines after 1902 and within a few years was the nation’s leading manufacturing exporter, sending machines to South America and as far afield as Russia. The company expanded from just harvesters to a comprehensive range of agricultural machinery. It was the largest factory in Australia.

Outgrowing his first works near Ballarat, McKay established a factory at Braybrook Junction, Victoria, which he renamed Sunshine – a name the Melbourne suburb still bears. Here, McKay established his model town. Sunshine featured state-of-the-art housing for workers and their families. He built schools, tennis courts, a bandstand, department stores, a public hall and library, a coffee palace, a bowling green and the 3-ha Sunshine Gardens.

McKay introduced a form of superannuation for long-term employees and offered insurance schemes, holiday leave, mortgages and banking services. A religious man who obviously cared about his employees, he was implacably opposed to the union movement, and what he saw as generous initiatives, his opponents thought paternalistic. McKay’s vigorous antipathy to unions, socialism or anything that smacked of either was well known.

Henry Bournes Higgins was no friend of socialism but he did hold progressive views. Taking leave from the High Court of Australia, he was appointed president of the Commonwealth Court of Conciliation and Arbitration. The Deakin government introduced the Excise Tariff (Agricultural Machinery) Act, which determined that tariff protection should apply only to companies that paid ‘fair and reasonable wages’. In 1907, when the Agricultural Implement Makers Society disputed the wages and conditions at Sunshine, it fell to Higgins to determine what ‘fair and reasonable’ meant.

Higgins felt obliged to set a benchmark. He looked to Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical, Rerum Novarum, which addressed the relationship between workers and firms, and suggested that remuneration ‘must be enough to support the wage earner in reasonable and frugal comfort’. Higgins heard evidence about the cost of living and set a standard for the average family, which he based on a husband, wife and three children. He set the wage for an unskilled worker ‘as a human being in a civilised community’, entitled to marry and raise a family, at £2 2 shillings per week, or 7 shillings a day.

Higgins defined a ‘civilised’ life as having frugal comforts, decent shelter, partitioned rooms, fresh air, water to wash in, enough wholesome food, and provision for ‘evil days’. He considered the costs of clothes, boots, furniture, life insurance, union pay, sickness, books, newspapers, alcohol, tobacco, transport, holidays and the church plate. Higgins heard a great deal of evidence as to what constituted the life of working families and heard testimony from wives as well as husbands on the grounds that the women would have a better understanding of the cost of living and be more honest about their ability to meet it.

In part of his judgement, Higgins praised the quality of McKay’s work and his creativity as an industrialist:

I regard the applicant’s undertaking as a marvel of enterprise, energy and pluck . . . he is allowed – if my view of the Act is correct – to make any profits that he can and they are not subject to investigation . . . But when he chooses, in the course of his economies, to economise at the expense of human life, when his economy involves the withholding from his employees of reasonable remuneration, or reasonable conditions of human existence, then, as I understand the Act, Parliament insists on the payment of the Excise Duty.

The case ran between 7 October and 8 November 1907 in the Commonwealth Conciliation and Arbitration Court in Little Lonsdale Street, Melbourne. Higgins’ findings, known as the Harvester Judgement, became the foundation for labour relations in Australia. The next year, in a case against mining company BHP, Higgins ruled that the basic wage was not subject to reduction, even if the cost of labour reduced profitability.

McKay appealed the Excise Act, to which the harvester case related, and the judgement was overturned, but labour relations were never the same afterwards. As former prime minister Bob Hawke noted:

The Harvester judgement and Higgins are foundationally important. The philosophy was so right and so in tune with the Australian ethos that it spread. And not just through federal jurisdiction – it became embraced by various state jurisdictions. I think it is impossible to overstate the significance of both the judgement and its author, Henry Bournes Higgins.

H V McKay continued to be one of Australia’s leading manufacturers and exporters until his death in 1926. In Sunshine today, the H V McKay Memorial Gardens, H V McKay Memorial Church, Harvester Technical College and Sunshine Bowling Club are all, in their way, monuments to his extraordinary drive and vision, which began with the Sunshine harvester.

24

1891
A pair of shears
‘If blood should stain the wattle’

These metal hand shears, with their triangular blades and rounded handle, are made in two pieces, bolted together at the top. They are believed to date from the 19th-century shearers’ strike.

The power of the unions, especially the shearers’ union, was growing, and from 1890 the shearers’ union sought to extend that power by closing the shop: shutting down any shearing sheds that employed non-union labour.

It was raining at Logan Downs Station on 5 January 1891. Roughly 120 workers gathered to hear the boss, Frederick Fairbairn, read out the new shearing agreement. They were presented with a contract that stipulated the right of any worker, union or otherwise, to work the shearing shed and the right to ‘give or accept work without interference or molestation’.

The shearers refused and walked off, setting up camp on the banks of Wolfang Creek. Shearers from Gordon Downs and Mount Abundance next went out on strike. The Logan Downs scene was soon acted out throughout central and western Queensland.

The striking workers met at Barcaldine on 1 February 1891 to assert that a line had been drawn in the sand. A fortnight later some 150 ‘scabs’ turned up from Victoria by ship, docking at Rockhampton. An open-air meeting at Barcaldine on 15 February declared the woolsheds at Bimberah, Beaconsfield, Barcaldine Downs, Lorne Minnie Downs, Bowen Downs, Northampton Downs, Maneroo, Isis Downs, Salter Creek and many more ‘black’. The squatters hired 2000 workers from Victoria, and there were Aboriginal and Chinese workers in the area who were prepared to take lower wages.

The arrival of scab labour turned up the heat. The unions brought firearms and ammunition to the district and the police and military presence was increased. It was more by luck than good management that no one was killed. Thousands of workers set up in tent towns around southern Queensland. Over the coming months unionists set shearing sheds and fences alight, riots were staged and picket lines patrolled. Bullock teams were attacked and scab labour was intimidated. There was a genuine fear of large-scale civil unrest. At Barcaldine, 1500 unionists faced off against a police contingent as scab labour arrived. There were several thousand angry unionists and a cavalry unit of as many as 200 mounted horsemen versus soldiers armed with Nordenfelt machine guns and Martini–Henri rifles. At other riots, bayonets were drawn.

Throughout the next six months, Barcaldine, about 1100 kilometres north-west of Brisbane, was the centre of operations. The town featured a large ghost gum (Corymbia aparrerinja) and this tree has slipped into legend as ‘the Tree of Knowledge’. According to The Worker: ‘The thousand-odd men at Barcaldine are encamped in a regular canvas town, and from a tree the blue [Eureka] flag is flying.’ In fact, the threat of violence and riot was much greater in Queensland than it had been on the Victorian goldfields.

The authorities charged 14 union leaders with sedition and conspiracy against the Crown and they were each sentenced to three years’ jail. A gathering of remaining union leaders and rank and file met, according to legend, under the Tree of Knowledge and at this point changed the labour movement’s strategy and tactics. Instead of direct action alone, the unions would also use the ballot box and form ‘Labour Electoral Leagues’, which evolved quickly into the Australian Labor Party (ALP) – the oldest political party in Australia.

The movement towards a political wing of the union movement had had green shoots elsewhere around the country, but it was the shearers’ strike that provided the catalyst for the formation of the party. In 1892, the manifesto of the Queensland Labour Party, a foundation document of the ALP, was read out at the foot of the tree.

But after six months, the shearers’ resources were spent and they gave in. The end of the strike came as a great blow to many activists. Journalist William Lane was particularly devastated. Lane had founded the Australian Labour Federation and was the editor of The Worker, for which paper he had covered the union trials. He was shaken by the result and hatched a plan to create a new, utopian society of Australians in the jungles of Paraguay – which he did in one of the legendary disasters of Australian history.

There was another shearers’ strike in 1894 when the graziers wanted to dramatically reduce the wage for shearing 100 sheep. Martial law was introduced in Winton, Queensland. This strike and the associated battles spread across the state. A number of sheds were burned and there was some small-arms conflict. At Dagworth Station the shearing shed was torched and 1240 sheep were killed. At least one unionist was killed. This incident and the pursuit of the unionists were immortalised by Banjo Paterson in his lyrics for ‘Waltzing Matilda’.

The 1891 strike had also been committed to verse by Henry Lawson and published by Lane in The Worker. Lawson’s poem ‘Freedom on the Wallaby’ read, in part:

So we must fly a rebel flag,

As others did before us,

And we must sing a rebel song

And join in rebel chorus.

We’ll make the tyrants feel the sting

O’ those that they would throttle;

They needn’t say the fault is ours

If blood should stain the wattle!

25

1892
Dame Nellie Melba’s dress
The diva

Melba was Australia’s first real superstar. She was the first Australian celebrated as a classical musician, and the first Australian featured on the cover of Time magazine. She was the first Australian to make a name internationally for anything at all.

Having made her debut as Desdemona in Verdi’s Otello in 1892 she returned to the highly dramatic role in 1924, by now a diva of the first order. This dress is made of champagne silk crepe de Chine and edged all of the way around with a band of gold leaf and pearls. The train is interlined with fine wool and lined with cream-coloured Japanese silk. The garment was worn with an accompanying tabard and headdress, and a long-sleeve shift, and was made by Mary E Fisher, theatrical costumier of Bedford Street, London.

Helen Mitchell was born in Richmond, Melbourne, on 19 May 1861. She showed no particular gifts and had an unspectacular early life that was marred by the tragedy of the deaths of her mother and sister. She and her father moved to Mackay in Far North Queensland, where she married Charles Armstrong. The marriage was not happy: her husband was violent.

In 1884 Helen left Mackay for Melbourne to become a singer. She had lessons with Pietro Cecchi and gave a few performances. In 1886, she accompanied her father to Europe where she found a teacher, Mathilde Marchesi, in Paris. Mme Marchesi shook off Helen’s colonial dust and introduced her to composers. She also encouraged her to change her name to ‘Melba’, a contraction of the name of Nellie’s birth city.

Melba made her debut in Brussels in October 1887 as Gilda in Rigoletto. Two years later her performance in Roméo et Juliette at Covent Garden was a massive hit. She later said, ‘I date my success in London quite distinctly from the great night of 15 June 1889.’

Melba never looked back. She appeared at La Scala, at the Metropolitan Opera in New York and repeatedly at Covent Garden. She sang for Queen Victoria, Tsar Alexander III, King Oscar II of Sweden, Emperor Franz Joseph, the president of France and Kaiser Wilhelm II. She was mobbed by fans like a pop singer is today. Her affair with Prince Philippe, Duke of Orléans and heir of the Bourbon pretender to the French throne, was breathlessly hinted at by the tabloid media.

Such was Melba’s celebrity that the acclaimed chef Auguste Escoffier at London’s Savoy Hotel created dishes in her honour – peach Melba (peaches, raspberry sauce and vanilla ice-cream) and Melba toast (a thin slice of bread lightly toasted on both sides, cut in half laterally and then returned to the heat).

This magnificent costume gives some idea of the scale of Melba’s stardom.

Melba maintained her connections with Australia. Her 1902 return tour was an unprecedented success and the box office for the Sydney concert was a world record for a singer at that time. Her 1909 tour took her through regional and remote Australia and she was universally adored. During World War I she raised an enormous amount of money for war charities and was honoured for her work by being made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire.

Through the 1920s Melba continued to sing in Europe, the USA and Australia, though not always grand opera. She had a house built for herself in the Yarra Valley, outside of Melbourne, and taught at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music. When asked for advice about doing an Australian tour, Melba told Dame Clara Butt to ‘Sing ’em muck!’ – she was using the word ‘muck’ as a synonym for popular songs.

Melba made over 100 recordings. She gave her last Covent Garden performance in 1926 and undertook her final Australian tour in 1928. On her way back to Europe after that tour she developed a fever in Egypt and never fully recovered her health. She died in Sydney in February 1931.

One cannot underestimate Melba’s importance to Australia in her time, and this cloak of riches is a testament to the brightness of her star. Not only did she love her Australian audiences and heritage, she promoted Australian talent internationally as well. She played up the rugged, straight-talking Australian character overseas and sang the newborn country onto the world stage.

26

1892
A women’s suffrage movement banner
‘Their daughters’ daughters do adore them’

On 17 June 1911, 40 000 people marched in the Women’s Coronation Procession in London, organised by women’s suffrage groups from Britain and the Empire. The suffrage banner, which featured the words ‘Commonwealth of Australia / “Trust the Women Mother as I Have Done”’, was designed and carried by artist Dora Meeson and her husband, George Coates, at the head of the Australian and New Zealand contingents.

The Australian contingent included Mrs Margaret Fisher, wife of the Australian prime minister; Mrs Emily McGowen, wife of the New South Wales premier; and Australia’s leading feminist and suffragist, Vida Goldstein. The banner shows Australia appealing to the mother country to accept a young country’s advice on the wisdom of adopting women’s suffrage.

The first women in the West with the vote were the descendants of the Bounty mutineers on Pitcairn Island, but they were not a statistically large enough number to effect social change.

The New South Wales Legislative Council held the first Australian elections in 1843. Voting rights were limited to men who owned property or had financial capacity. In 1850, rights were extended further in New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania. In 1855, all male South Australian British subjects 21 years and over were enfranchised; this was extended to Victoria in 1857 and New South Wales the following year. Tasmania became the last colony to grant universal male suffrage, in 1896.

It’s worth noting that these Australian advances were way ahead of Britain and most of Europe. For most of the 19th century in the United Kingdom, the right to vote was limited to property holders.

Women were briefly enfranchised in Victoria. The Electoral Act, 1863 used the phrase ‘all persons’, which meant that everyone who was on the rolls at municipal level could vote in the 1864 Victorian Legislative Assembly elections. Municipal rolls included some women who owned property, and some of them dared to exercise their right under the new Act. The Argus reported: ‘At one of the polling booths . . . a novel sight was witnessed. A coach filled with ladies drove up, and the fair occupants alighted and recorded their votes.’ The Act was soon amended and the women were disenfranchised.

New Zealand can claim to be the first country to give women the vote, in 1893, but the colony of South Australia was the first parliament that not only gave women the vote but also allowed them to stand for election.

The women’s suffrage movement in Australia grew out of charitable or Christian organisations, temperance leagues and the anti-sweatshop movement. In the end, the vote for women came about through the tireless public activism of some very determined women.

Mary Lee campaigned to raise the age of consent to sixteen. That victory in 1885 spurred the establishment of the South Australian Women’s Suffrage League in July 1888. Lee’s campaign for the vote was the template for all the other colonies: she collected a petition 122 metres long with 11 600 signatures and eventually wore down Premier Charles Kingston; the Constitution Amendment Act was passed on 18 December 1894 and women cast their first ballots at the 1896 election. Western Australia enacted female suffrage in 1899.

Catherine Helen Spence wrote and published the first novel written about Australia by a woman, called Clara Morison: A Tale of South Australia During the Gold Fever. It was followed by Tender and True: A Colonial Tale. Aside from charitable works and writing, Spence ran for the Federal Convention in 1897 and became Australia’s first female political candidate.

Henrietta Augusta Dugdale, Victoria’s first noted feminist, believed in temperance, birth control and ‘applying the surgeon’s knife to rapists’. In Victoria, Marie Kirk, Vida Goldstein, Annette Bear-Crawford and their supporters went from door to door gathering 30 000 signatures in support of the proposition that ‘Women should Vote on Equal terms with Men’. That document, known as the Monster Petition, is 260 metres long. The Age reported that Bear-Crawford had ‘uttered the rather astounding dictum that most things worth having were originally produced by women’.

In 2008 the State Government of Victoria commissioned a sculpture to acknowledge the early suffragettes, and it now stands in the garden near Parliament House in Melbourne.

Goldstein became one of the first four women in the British Empire to stand for a national parliament; she polled 51 497 votes in 1903 but it was not enough to secure a Senate berth.

In 1902, the Commonwealth parliament enabled women to vote and stand for election for the federal parliament. Australia became the first country in the world to give women the right both to vote in federal elections and to be elected to a national parliament. However, despite having the right, it wasn’t until Edith Cowan won West Perth in 1921 that a woman had a seat in an Australian parliament. And in 1902, only New South Wales, South Australia and Western Australia allowed women to vote in state elections. The franchise wasn’t extended in Victoria until 1908, and until 1911 in the Australian Capital Territory and the Northern Territory.

The laws were chaotic. Some Aboriginal people, including Aboriginal women, had the vote from the start, while others did not and some had to abide by conditions. But by and large most men and women in Australia voted for the national parliament after 1902. It took some years for Britain to act upon the banner designed and carried by Dora Meeson and George Coates back in 1892: women didn’t get the vote there until 1928.

27

1894
Jandamurra’s boomerang
If we fall, others are rising

The boomerang is a curved piece of wood generally used for hunting or warfare. There are many different types of boomerangs – the oldest in Australia dating back 10 000 years. Some of them are designed to return, others not. They are used in communities all over Australia. The boomerang came to symbolise Aboriginal culture but it was also a powerful weapon in the Aboriginal resistance to European settlement.

The European settlement of Australia gave rise to some impressive Indigenous resistance leaders. One of the first was Pemulwuy. He was born into the Bidjigal people around Castle Hill, north-west of Sydney Town. The Bidjigal were part of the Eora nation, who occupied the land from the Hawkesbury in the north to Botany Bay in the south.

Pemulwuy’s first act of resistance was to kill Governor Arthur Phillip’s gamekeeper. The governor ordered a posse to bring back six Bidjigal hostages or their heads. The party, under the command of Watkin Tench, failed to find any Bidjigal at all – they had vanished into the bush.

Pemulwuy continued his guerilla campaign, harassing farms in Parramatta and Toongabbie. He raised a force of 100 men and attacked the town of Toongabbie in 1797, during which he was shot. He survived his wounds and his resilience became legendary. One settler wrote, ‘He has now lodged in him about eight or ten ounces [230–280 g] of lead and he is supposed to have killed over 30 of our people.’

Many believed that he was impervious to guns; he was not. Pemulwuy was finally killed in 1802. He was decapitated and his head was sent for study in London. His son, Tedbury, carried on the campaign.

Windradyne (know to the squatters as ‘Saturday’) was a Wiradjuri man who lived in the Bathurst area. He built up a band of warriors who attacked the settler stations and sometimes killed stockmen. When he took over the Brucedale property of Henry Sutton, however, he spared the family because they had a history of treating Aboriginal people with respect.

By 1824, tension between the Aboriginal people and squatters had become so great that Governor Thomas Brisbane declared martial law in the district and increased the troops significantly. The Battle of Bathurst occurred on 10 September 1824 at a station on the Cudgegong River, and 19 lives were lost. On 18 September more troops arrived; they systematically slaughtered as many as 1000 Aboriginal people in 10 days.

Windradyne surrendered at Parramatta but was pardoned by Brisbane and returned to Bathurst, where he was eventually killed in a tribal fight.

Jandamurra was a Bunuba man who grew up around Windjana Gorge in the Kimberley region of Western Australia. As a young man he worked with the white settlers at Lennard River Station. He was regarded as an adept stockman and was given the nickname ‘Pigeon’ because he was small, fast and cheeky. Later he was picked up by police for sheep stealing and taken to Derby, where he started working with the police, taking care of their horses.

After returning to his traditional land he went to live at Lillimooloora Station, where he befriended the stockman Bill Richardson, who later joined the police force. Lillimooloora Station became home to Jandamurra, Richardson and Captain, another local Aboriginal man. They were a tight bunch and Jandamurra saved Richardson’s life when a Bunuba warrior attacked him.

On one of their police actions, the trio captured a group of 16 Bunuba people, including Jandamurra’s uncle Ellemarra and some of his blood relations. The captured band taunted Jandamurra about his betrayal of his people. He saw the logic of their arguments and shot his friend Richardson in the head. The prisoners and trackers then captured a wagonload of guns and ammunition and began a ten-year guerilla war against the white settlers.

Jandamurra’s ability to disappear into the harsh Kimberley landscape made him an almost mythical figure. He struck fear into the hearts of the white settlers and was an inspiration to the Bunuba people.

At the battle of Windjana Gorge on 16 November 1894, 50 warriors painted with traditional ochre made a stand against 30 troops and settlers. Ellemarra was killed and Jandamurra was wounded. He and his followers retreated but continued their guerilla campaign for another three years, raiding stations and killing livestock. His last assault was at Oscar Range Homestead in March 1897. Most of the 20 warriors were killed but again Jandamurra escaped. Aboriginal trooper Minko Mick finally shot him dead at Tunnel Creek on 1 April 1897.

The Aboriginal resistance has continued until the present day. Its means may be different but one of its primary aims – the return of land to Aboriginal people – remains unchanged. One of the best-known modern warriors is Vincent Lingiari. Born shortly after the death of Jandamurra, Lingiari was a Gurindji man who, with many of his people, worked at Wave Hill Station, an agribusiness owned by Lord Vestey.

Fed up with substandard wages and conditions, in 1966 Lingiari led a strike that demanded that the land at Wave Hill be returned to its traditional owners. His petition to the governor-general said, ‘We want them Vestey mob – all go away from here. Wave Hill Aboriginal people bin called Gurindji. We bin here long time before them Vestey mob. This is our country, all this bin Gurindji country. Wave Hill bin our country. We want this land; we strike for that.’

The Gurindji set up camp at Wattie Creek and waited. They had some friends in the towns, including author Frank Hardy, politician Bill Wentworth and, in 1972, Prime Minister Gough Whitlam. The Whitlam government set up the Woodward Royal Commission to assess how best to deal with Aboriginal land-rights claims. Meanwhile, Vestey caved in and handed back 777 000 square kilometres of the property.

In 1975, Whitlam flew to Wave Hill with the deeds of the Gurindji land. In a gesture that referred back to John Batman’s ‘purchase’ of Melbourne, Whitlam ran a handful of sand through Lingiari’s hands. It was another step in the battle that had begun with Pemulwuy.

28

1895
A billy
The story of ‘Waltzing Matilda’

Tea was (some would say still is) a cornerstone of the Australian diet, especially in the bush, where it was prepared in a billy can. These all-purpose light metal cans were the standard cooking implement for campfires. Standard kit in the bush consisted of a swag or blanket to sleep in and a billy with which to cook. The phrase ‘watching the billy boil’ connotes an evening’s contemplation, solo or in company, next to an open fire as the tea is brewing.

It wasn’t until the middle of the 19th century that black tea from India and Ceylon was in common use, and by the end of the 19th century 90 per cent of the tea for domestic consumption was coming from the subcontinent rather than China.

The most famous Australian tea merchant was Philip Bushell. His father, Alfred, opened a teashop in Brisbane in 1883. His sons went into the tea trade, retailing and wholesaling teas aggressively over the next decade. One of Australia’s most popular brands was Billy Tea (now owned by Bushells). In 1903, Billy Tea bought a song as a jingle. The lyrics were written by Andrew ‘Banjo’ Paterson to a tune by Christina Macpherson.

In 1890 The Bulletin had published Paterson’s ballad ‘The Man from Snowy River’ and it was an immediate success. A number of epic poems followed, including ‘The Geebung Polo Club’, ‘Clancy of the Overflow’ and ‘The Man from Ironbark’. Within only a few years Paterson, a lawyer by training, was a celebrated poet at the centre of the Bulletin circle. Rudyard Kipling was a fan.

Paterson and Henry Lawson started Australia’s first significant literary feud when they publicly argued about the way the bush should be represented in literature. Lawson’s work was much more realistic than Banjo’s idealised and sentimental work.

Paterson was already a celebrity when he and his fiancée visited her friend Christina Macpherson at Dagworth Station near Winton in Queensland in January 1895. Paterson heard Christina playing a tune, ‘The Craigielee March’, based on the Scottish tune ‘Thou Bonnie Wood of Craigielea’, on the zither and began to pen lyrics for the song he called ‘Waltzing Matilda’.

A ‘matilda’ is a swag, and ‘waltzing matilda’ refers to a swagman wandering the roads of the outback with his swag. The song tells of a swagman who comes across a waterhole (billabong) and a wandering sheep, which he steals. He is set upon by the police and a local squatter. Rather than be taken to prison, he drowns himself in the billabong.

In September 1894, four months before Paterson arrived, there had been a strike at Dagworth Station during which buildings were torched and the union leader committed suicide near a waterhole on the Diamantina River. Christina’s brother Bob was involved in the pursuit of the unionist and undoubtedly this story would have been part of the conversation when Paterson arrived. It seems to be the basis for the lyrics.

Paterson spent an inordinate amount of time working on the song – so much so that his fiancée called off their engagement. For whatever reason, he didn’t think much of ‘Waltzing Matilda’ and sold the copyright along with miscellaneous verses to publishers Angus & Robertson for £5. From there, in 1903 it was bought by the Billy Tea Company, who changed the line ‘He sang and he looked at the old billy boiling’ to ‘He sang and he watched and waited till his billy boiled’.

The Billy Tea version was set to music written by Marie Cowan and it is this melody that we know today. When the 1st Australian Imperial Forces (AIF) went to World War I, ‘Waltzing Matilda’ became their unofficial anthem. The defiant fatalism of a larrikin underdog who would rather die on his feet than live on his knees accorded with the diggers’ ethos, and the song turned into Australia’s unofficial anthem.

In 1929 Australia became the world’s premier tea-drinking nation, with its per capita tea consumption eclipsing that of the United Kingdom.

29

1896
Dally Messenger’s cap
The workingman’s game

Herbert Henry ‘Dally’ Messenger was a genius of Rugby and he was given this cap as a representative player for New South Wales. The tradition of ‘capping’ started in cricket and flowed to other sports. When you joined a state or national representative team you got a cap. Two years after Messenger was presented with this one he threw it in and joined the fledgling Rugby League as its superstar player, and Australia was never the same.

From the turn of the 20th century, Messenger had played Rugby Union as a centre for the Warrigal club and then Eastern Suburbs, New South Wales and Australia. Like most footballers, he was a working-class boy – his father had a boatshed. Rugby Union, or just Rugby as it was known then, was a gentlemen’s game: players were not paid or compensated for time off work. In the autumn of 1908 Messenger made a decision to leave Rugby to play Rugby League, the professional code.

Messenger’s skill with the ball was breathtaking and his strategy as captain was simply stated: ‘Just bung the ball out to me, boys, as quickly as you can.’ He was said to be able to score from anywhere on the park. One famous story has him kicking a goal while another player was holding one of his legs.

On 8 August 1907, a consortium headed by businessman J J Giltinan and cricketer Victor Trumper formed the New South Wales Rugby Football League at Bateman’s Hotel in George Street, Sydney. The foundation teams were Glebe, Newtown, Western Suburbs, South Sydney, North Sydney, Balmain, Eastern Suburbs, Newcastle and Cumberland, and the first matches were scheduled for Easter Sunday 1908, 20 April, to be played in double-headers at either Glebe or Birchgrove (Balmain).

Messenger was a critical part of the plan: his prestige and drawing power were essential for the League’s authority. The New South Wales Rugby Union struck Messenger’s Rugby games from the record books when he defected. (It was to be 100 years before they were restored.) That didn’t seem to bother Messenger, who signed on with Eastern Suburbs and scored the League’s first try and first goal.

In 1909, the two codes went head to head in a four-match series of the Wallabies (Rugby) versus the Kangaroos (League). As they say these days, ‘rugby league was the winner’. Not only did the Kangaroos prevail on the field but most of the best Union players signed on for the 1910 season.

Messenger, known as ‘The Master’, was Rugby League’s first and greatest hero. In 1910, Messenger got another cap as captain of the Kangaroos in their first test against England. There were plenty of other legends to follow. In the 1950s, diminutive South Sydney fullback Clive Churchill was dubbed ‘The Little Master’ because of his ball-handling skills and elusiveness. He even played a game with a broken arm and kicked the winning goal. In the 1960s, Arthur Beetson became the first Indigenous player to captain any Australian representative team.

In the 1980s League faced increased competition from other sports – including a resurgent Rugby Union, and Australian Rules – but it has thrived.

30

1897
A slouch hat with rising sun badge
The national helmet

The khaki felt Australian Army slouch hat is the standard headgear of an Australian soldier. It features four brass ventilating eyelets in the crown, a further pair of small brass eyelets located lower on the crown, and one on either side, normally concealed by a puggaree (scarf). The turn-up is secured by a press-stud and is adorned with an oxidised-brass rising sun badge.

The idea of a felt hat with one side pinned up to the crown came from the Burmese native police and was introduced to the Victorian Mounted Rifle by Lieutenant Colonel Tom Price in 1885. The rising sun badge was an addition made to the hat in 1902, possibly at the suggestion of Major General Sir Edward Hutton, commander-in-chief of the Australian forces during the Boer War. The design is based on a collection of bayonets radiating in a semicircle from a crown. The 1902 original now looks very crude and the design has been modified seven times since, with various units also applying their own modifications. The rising sun, however, is the motif that has led Australian troops through two world wars and many difficult situations.

In 1890, when the military leaders of the individual Australian colonies met to develop a national uniform, the slouch hat was the popular choice. Different units allowed different adornments. The Queensland Mounted Infantry and the Royal Australian Armoured Corps chose emu plumes, while other units opted for the feathers of other birds.

When hostilities opened in the Second Boer War in 1899, each of the six Australian colonies offered troops. The Australians were represented in the war in various ways: by the colonial troops, by Australians then living in South Africa who enlisted, and by groups of irregulars – essentially freelance adventurers, such as the 1st Bushmen Contingent (New South Wales), the Citizen Bushmen groups from Queensland, South Australia, Victoria and Western Australia. But of these groups of irregulars, the best known is the Bushveldt Carbineers.

In the early stages of the conflict the British suffered dramatic losses. It was classic asymmetric warfare where established regiments of the Imperial British forces were ranged against mounted Afrikaans (Boer) farmers, who used the terrain to best advantage. Within a year of the first salvos, the British had taken back their lost territory and were ruthlessly pursuing the Boers, who fell back on a bitter two-year guerilla campaign.

The Australian troops, many of whom were skilled bushmen and riders from a climate similar to that of South Africa, excelled. They were most effective in mounted infantry units and in situations where they could use their bushcraft. For instance, 500 Australians and Rhodesians were pinned down at the Battle of Elands River at Brakfontein in August 1900. At the end of the 13-day siege, Boer commander Koos de la Rey was quoted as saying:

For the first time in the war we are fighting men who used our own tactics against us. They were Australian volunteers, and though small in number we could not take their position. They were the only troops who could scout our lines at night and kill our sentries while killing or capturing our scouts. Our men admitted that the Australians were more formidable opponents and far more dangerous than any other British troops.

Sentiments such as these inspired the Anzac myth.

The conditions in the field were horrendous. Disease was endemic, with the water frequently poisoned by corpses. As many Australians were lost to disease as to battle. Australia lost slightly more men in the three years of the Boer War than it did in the 10 years Australia was in Vietnam.

As the war entered its guerilla phase, it became even more gruesome. Lord Kitchener took over the British command and instituted a scorched-earth policy, burning crops and killing livestock. He encouraged small units to roam the countryside and engage as many of the enemy as possible. The strategy was to starve the Boers into submission, and it worked.

The Bushveldt Carbineers were one anti-guerilla unit, known for its members’ ruthlessness and willingness to shoot prisoners. Their most famous officer was Lieutenant Harry ‘The Breaker’ Harbord Morant. In August 1901, Captain Percy Hunt was killed while on patrol and his body mutilated. His close friend Morant was incensed and bent on revenge. With Lieutenant P J Handcock he left the base and combed the district for enemy, at least one of whom was shot. Later, a group of eight Boers surrendered and a passing missionary, Rev. C A D Heese, talked with them. Morant took the lot into custody and had them all shot. Morant, Handcock and others shot three more locals who were attempting to surrender the following month.

On 22 October 1901, Morant and Handcock were arrested and the matter set down for court martial the following January. During the trial the courthouse came under attack from Boer commandos. The court adjourned, the prisoners were handed rifles and all hands went to battle. With the Boers repulsed, court resumed.

Morant, in his own defence, claimed that he was specifically given orders to ‘take no prisoners’ and should not be under arrest. Nonetheless, both he and Handcock were found guilty and sentenced to death. At his execution, Morant’s final words were supposedly: ‘Shoot straight, you bastards. Don’t make a mess of it.’ This stoicism added more fuel to the Anzac myth.

The war grew unpopular at home and the Boers’ surrender came not a moment too soon. By the time all the Australians had returned home, Australia was a federation and the colonial defence forces were a single army. The slouch hat turned up on the left side, which had worked so well in South Africa, became standard kit.

31

1901
A Federation flag
Australia begins

This flag measures 485 mm by 710 mm and depicts Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, the Prince and Princess of Wales and the Union Jack. The Southern Cross links them. The flag was made for the festivities that surrounded Federation in 1901 and perfectly depicts how White Australia saw itself in relation to England – constitutionally and emotionally.

Australia did not become a nation at Federation on 1 January 1901. On that day, six distinct self-governing colonies of the British Empire – Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania, South Australia and Western Australia – federated into the Commonwealth of Australia, but gleefully remained subservient to the British government in Westminster. Under the Colonial Laws Validity Act of 1865, any act of the Australian parliament was deemed invalid if it was ‘repugnant’ to the British parliament.

The Australian parliament couldn’t make foreign policy, and there was no Australian military. The country had no power to make war or peace. The highest court in the land was the Privy Council in London and any Acts of the Australian parliament could be overturned, written or rewritten by Westminster. The public was not concerned: by and large, Australians were faithful sons and daughters of the Empire.

If it were to be done, there was disagreement as to how it was to be done. The Free Traders, who were mostly Tories, wanted the abolition of tariff barriers and the creation of a laissez-faire economy. The Protectionists were politically progressive and saw tariff revenue as a way that government could fund its reforms and support local industry and the local economy.

Queen Victoria royally proclaimed Australia on 17 September 1900 and declared that the Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act 1900 (UK) would take effect on 1 January 1901. Edmund Barton was appointed caretaker prime minister.

The ceremony of Federation was held in Centennial Park, Sydney, on 1 January 1901, the first day of the 20th century. Tens of thousands of people gathered for the celebration, including 1400 schoolchildren who sang. On the day John Adrian Louis Hope, 7th Earl of Hopetoun, became the first governor-general. Federation parties were held all over Australia, and the fervour was palpable, with acres of bunting and dancing in the streets. According to the Adelaide Observer of 5 January 1901:

The rays of the sun, which had now come out to peep at and bless the passing show, danced from the highly polished scabbards, the noble steeds caracoled along the street, chafing at the restraint of the curb chains; orderlies galloped past with final instructions, and at last the procession was in motion. Then was unfolded to the view of hundreds of thousands the greatest spectacular demonstration ever presented in the southern hemisphere.

From these beginnings, Australia inched towards nationhood. Prime Minister Billy Hughes would demand the dominions separately sign the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, and in 1930, Prime Minister James Scullin defied the Palace and appointed an Australian-born governor-general.

In the 1930s the British parliament passed the Statute of Westminster allowing dominions independence. Australia declined to take the offer until 1942 when a Japanese invasion was at its door. In 1975, Prime Minister Gough Whitlam ended appeals to the Privy Council and Imperial honours, but it wasn’t until 1986 and the passage of the Australia Act in Britain and Australia that all Australian parliaments threw off the final yoke of Westminster. The Australia Act was the first time an official document of either parliament acknowledged that Australia was ‘independent’ of Britain.

But there, in Centennial Park on that rainy Tuesday as the new century dawned, the massed choirs and 1400 schoolchildren sang ‘Federated Australia’, the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’ and, finally, ‘God Save the Queen’.

32

1904
Henry Lawson’s pen
The Bulletin crowd

This pen – the end of a pencil in which a steel nib has been inserted and attached with a piece of string coiled up around the pencil – looks a lot like Henry Lawson himself. He was a broken man of parts bound together just well enough to write and always in danger of coming apart again. The cracks and the loose string notwithstanding, Lawson was Australia’s first truly great literary artist. The torn and frayed man understood Australia and its despair, depression, loneliness, uncommon beauty and gallows humour. Although the short story was his ideal form, it’s the poetry within his sentences that make him a giant.

Born in 1867, Lawson suffered hearing loss as a child, and near-deafness intensified his tendency towards isolation and melancholy. He ended up in Sydney with his single mother, Louisa Lawson, a suffragette and publisher of newspapers and pamphlets.

Lawson’s first published poem, ‘A Song of the Republic’, was published in The Bulletin in 1887. Poetry and journalism gave him a way out of the drudgery of unskilled labouring. Louisa published his first book, Short Stories in Prose and Verse. Henry and Louisa always had a difficult relationship, but then there were few easy moments in his life.

Although he spent almost all of his life in the city, Lawson understood that the Australian psyche lay in its dead heart. The Bulletin sent the poet to the drought-blighted west of New South Wales, and his harrowing reports capture the bravery of the Australian pioneer. ‘The Loaded Dog’ and ‘The Drover’s Wife’ are two of his most famous stories; the former story captures the laconic, knockabout Australian wit that masks the despair, fear and isolation of the latter tale.

Lawson married and had two children and a contract from publishers Angus & Robertson, but he never overcame drink and depression. Most of his life was spent writing, drinking and begging on the streets, before the courts or in the asylum until his death in 1922.

The first book written by an Australian and published in Australia was A Statistical, Historical, and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and Its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen’s Land, With a Particular Enumeration of the Advantages Which These Colonies Offer for Emigration and Their Superiority in Many Respects Over Those Possessed by the United States of America (1819). It took a half a century before Australian authors learned how to write about what was really going on.

Although the country has always been predominantly an urban society, the great early works of Australian literature were mostly set in the bush. Thomas Browne – aka Rolf Boldrewood – wrote as much for extra income to support his large family as for literary pleasure. In 1882 Robbery Under Arms, drawn from bushranger folklore, began to appear serialised in the Sydney Mail. It earned praise from Mark Twain and H Rider Haggard and remains a classic of its type.

Marcus Clarke also used real events as the basis for his novel For the Term of His Natural Life. The Gothic romance is based on stories about the Tasmanian penal settlement, including the legendary story of the cannibal Alexander Pearce.

Perhaps the only writer of this first era of Australian literature who didn’t suffer from madness, drink or depression was Joseph Furphy, aka Tom Collins. Furphy drove a bullock train around the Riverina before settling in town and writing yarns from the trail. He sent his manuscript for Such Is Life to A G Stephens, the literary editor of The Bulletin, who said, ‘It seems fit to me to become an Australian classic, or semi-classic, since it embalms accurate representations of our character and customs, life and scenery which in so skilled and methodical a form occur in no other book I know. I think the book ought to be published and would find a sale.’

Such Is Life wasn’t a success then, but has since become a classic. The title is the final sentence allegedly uttered by Ned Kelly. Furphy takes folklore and twists it with Shakespearean allusions and a touch of dry wit:

Such is life, my fellow-mummers – just like a poor player that bluffs and feints his hour upon the stage, and then cheapens down to mere nonentity. But let me not hear any small witticism to the further effect that its story is a tale told by a vulgarian, full of slang and blanky, signifying – nothing.

Perhaps the author with the weightiest legacy is Miles Franklin. Her first book, My Brilliant Career, was initially rejected by all the Australian publishers upon submission. Henry Lawson was a big fan and was instrumental in finding a London publisher in 1901. The book has since become a major Australian classic and of course the basis for a hit movie. Franklin was a tireless supporter of Australian writers and the journals Meanjin and Southerly. Upon her death in 1854 she left a bequest for a prize to be handed out each year to a novel of the highest literary merit that ‘presents Australian life in any of its phases’.The first award went to Patrick White for Voss in 1957. The Stella Prize, established for women writers in 2013, is also named after Franklin.

Australian literature owes its birth to the bookseller and publisher George Robertson, who arrived in Sydney in 1882. Four years later he paid £15 for a half-share in David Mackenzie Angus’s bookshop in Market Street. Robertson wanted to publish Australian books by Australian writers. His first big successes were Banjo Paterson’s The Man from Snowy River and Other Verses and Henry Lawson’s two collections In the Days when the World Was Wide and While the Billy Boils. Robertson’s other major publishing achievements were C J Dennis’s The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke and Norman Lindsay’s The Magic Pudding.

Largely self-educated, Robertson was personally involved in editing the books he published, and in working with the often impecunious and sometimes tragic authors like Lawson. However, he thought the role of books was a fundamentally civilising influence and made his shop a place to browse as much as customers liked.

Robertson was absolutely right. Literacy improved in the colonies after 1872 when school education became more widespread. The confluence of seminal authors like Lawson and publishers like Robertson created and dispersed the image Australians had of themselves.

33

1909
St Mary Mackillop (St Mary of the Cross) rosary
Mary MacKillop’s mission

These plain wooden beads, which belonged to St Mary of the Cross’s rosary, perfectly symbolise the first Australian saint’s spiritual views, practice and legacy. Mary MacKillop, the eldest of eight children, was born in Fitzroy, Melbourne, in 1842. Her father had trained in Rome for the priesthood but abandoned his vocation. From a young age, Mary had a calling. Her mentor, Father Julian Tenison-Woods, established a religious society and a school at Penola in South Australia and Mary joined him.

On 21 November 1866, the feast day of the Presentation of Mary, MacKillop adopted the religious name of Sister Mary of the Cross. She helped found a community called the Sisters of St Joseph of the Sacred Heart, otherwise known as the Josephite order, who adopted a brown habit that led to the nickname ‘the Brown Joeys’. The Josephites eschewed convent life, opting to live plainly in the community, dedicating their lives to prayer and educating the poor. The order was administered by a superior general chosen by the congregation rather than by the bishop. It refused government funding and declined pupils from affluent families.

Scandal engulfed the order when the Josephite sisters suspected a local priest, Father Keating, was abusing children. They spoke out against him and he was moved to Ireland. This insurrection of nuns against fathers angered senior clergy and that incident, and MacKillop’s tendency to stand her ground, led to a falling-out with Bishop Sheil. She was excommunicated for insubordination.

Five months later the bishop recanted and removed MacKillop’s excommunication, and an episcopal commission eventually completely exonerated her. Emboldened, the following year she went to Rome to get papal approval for her order.

In 1880, church schools were cut off from state aid and it fell to the teaching orders – the Christian Brothers, the Sisters of Mercy, the Marist Brothers, the Presentation Order, the Jesuits and the Josephites – to provide religious education. The Josephites were particularly dedicated to the rural poor, especially in South Australia. The Brown Joeys also worked with orphanages, neglected children, girls at risk and the elderly.

Pope Leo XIII gave final approval to the Sisters of St Joseph of the Sacred Heart in 1888. By then, they had schools throughout rural Australia and in New Zealand.

MacKillop was plagued by ill health in her later years. In 1902 she suffered a stroke and was paralysed on her right side. Confined to a wheelchair, she continued a full schedule as superior general of the order until her death on 8 August 1909.

The legacy of MacKillop is still very strong in Australian Catholic circles. More than 20 per cent of Australian children are educated in Catholic schools.

The process of MacKillop’s beatification was begun in 1925. It was halted for 20 years and then resumed, and on 1 February 1973 the Actor Causae request was formally introduced. MacKillop’s ‘heroic virtue’ was declared in 1992.

Pope John Paul II beatified Mary MacKillop on 19 January 1995 at Randwick Racecourse, Sydney, in a mass. In 1993, the Vatican accepted that she had been responsible for miraculously curing Veronica Hopson of leukaemia in 1961. Her second miracle, approved by Pope Benedict XVI, was healing Kathleen Evans of inoperable lung and secondary brain cancer in the 1990s.

With those two miracles proven, MacKillop was canonised as St Mary of the Cross at a mass celebrated by Pope Benedict XVI in St Peter’s Square, the Vatican City, on 17 October 2010.

34

1911
Marion Mahony Griffin’s plan for Canberra
The splendid vision

Few cities have been imagined as beautifully as Canberra. Marion Mahony Griffin, the wife of Walter Burley Griffin, rendered her husband’s dream of Canberra on cotton with watercolour and gold leaf. The plans were so breathtakingly beautiful that the Griffins won the competition to design Australia’s capital city.

Their design was full of spiritual direction, imbued with a reverence for nature and pure aesthetics. They believed that beauty and utility could elevate political discourse out of venality and self-interest. And then they met Australian politicians, whose bloody internecine wars compromised everything.

King O’Malley, the minister for home affairs, launched the Federal Capital Design Competition in May 1911. The objective was to build a national capital on what was then a sheep run. Griffin, entrant No. 29 of 137, submitted a magnificent original design with drawings in gold on cotton cloth. The drawings were executed by his wife of three months, Marion Mahony.

Griffin was the only one of the contenders who saw the project as not just town planning but an attempt to imbue deep philosophical ideas into the architecture and provide not just streets and houses but a heart for the city.

Both Walter and Marion came from a Protestant church background and they were influenced by the teachings and idealism of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman and Thomas Jefferson, among others. They felt a deep connection to nature, and believed that democracy and freedom elevated the human race. Griffin and Mahony were architects in Chicago, then the most innovative built environment in the world. Mahony was known as the best draftsperson in the studio of Frank Lloyd Wright, for whom Griffin also worked a little. She was the second woman to graduate in architecture from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the first woman to practise architecture in Chicago.

Both Mahony and Griffin were members of what was known as the Prairie School, which promoted the idea that a building should look as though it organically belonged in its environment rather than be imposed on it.

Most national capitals were old cities that had been modified over generations. They were capitals of countries that had long histories. Australia was very different. With no European history to celebrate, the Griffins thought the key to the new city would be its relationship to the natural environment.

Walter conceived Canberra along mountain axes from Mount Ainslie to Mount Bimberi in the Brindabellas, passing through Camp Hill and Kurrajong (Capital Hill), where a ziggurat would house the government. The land axes would be cut by the water axis, based on the river and augmented by lakes.

The Griffins had only nine weeks to design their city and draw up the plans. Mahony’s process was exacting. The first drawings were in ink on linen. They were lithographed on window shade and rendered with watercolour and photograph dyes, and then lithographed on satin, dipped in sealant and stretched smooth on a board. After drying, the drawings were rendered with dyes.

The project was done literally just in time. Mahony recalled: ‘Toward midnight of a bitterly cold winter night, the box of drawings, too long to go in a taxi, was rushed with doors open and men without their coats to the last train that could meet the last boat for Australia.’

Walter Burley Griffin conceived the city and pictured the plan in a landscape he had never actually seen. As a conceptual piece alone, his plan for Canberra was a great achievement. He placed sophisticated, modernist ideas from the progressive Chicago schools into a country and a topography that he could only imagine. He is now celebrated for his skill as a landscape architect, his ability to imagine the possibilities of Canberra’s natural setting, and the sociopolitical idealism that underpinned his decisions.

Beyond placing the buildings ‘organically’, Griffin designed the city to represent the values of democracy. The houses of the prime minister and governor-general were at one apex of a triangle in relation to the houses of parliament. They looked to Kurrajong, where the ziggurat would be a secular temple. A public space that commemorated national achievements would house the national archives and be a gathering place for Australians.

In the end the ziggurat was nixed; the modern Parliament House is now on that spot.

From the start, the project was subject to the whims of ministers and their bureaucracies. Endless changes to the budget and special reports slowed construction. The Griffins arrived in Melbourne in 1913 to start work but nothing happened. A royal commission was established to investigate the affair. In 1920, Griffin fell out with the prime minister and was taken off the project.

The Griffins continued to make major contributions to Australian architecture and design through the 1920s and early 1930s. In their 21 years in Australia (1914–35) their range of work was great and included Canberra, five new towns, several suburban communities, three campus plans, houses, industrial buildings (primarily incinerators) and commercial buildings.

Almost all of the Griffins’ public buildings in Sydney have been demolished, and just a few remain in Melbourne. But Marion Mahony Griffin’s design for Canberra rendered in silk is a testament to the scope of their creative vision for the Australian capital.

35

1911
Mawson’s Antarctic sledge
The epic journey

This sledge was made by L H Hagen & Co. of Oslo, Norway in 1911 and was one of 20 commissioned by Sir Douglas Mawson for his 1911 expedition to the South Pole. The sledge carries Mawson’s name, although it was not the one he personally used on his heroic trek.

The design of sledges at the time allowed for two boxes: one for supplies, a portable gas stove and cooking and heating equipment, and the other for scientific instruments. The rations were mostly powdered dried beef for making thick soup, and chocolate, biscuits and butter. The sledge was around 3 metres in length, and made of American ash and hickory.

Mawson was the most famous Australian Antarctic scientist. He joined Ernest Shackleton’s Nimrod Expedition (1907–09), during which he became one of the first people to climb Mount Erebus and to reach the South Magnetic Pole. This involved Mawson in the longest (to date) Antarctic man-hauling sledge journey, 122 days, with his mentor Edgeworth David.

Mawson put together his own expedition under the name ‘Australasian Antarctic Expedition’. It departed Hobart in December 1911 with the objective of carrying out geographical exploration and scientific studies, including a visit to the South Magnetic Pole. The AAE charted Antarctic coastline, investigated the ocean between Australia and Antarctica, and examined the sector of the Antarctic continent immediately south of Australia, which was until that time entirely unexplored.

On 10 November 1912 Mawson and two others, Belgrave Ninnis and Xavier Mertz, set out by sledge to chart the area east of their base. On 14 December, Ninnis and the sledge he was walking beside broke through the snow lid of a crevasse and were lost. The six best dogs, most of the party’s rations, their tent, the sledge and other essential supplies disappeared into the massive crevasse. Mawson and Mertz turned back immediately. It was 500 kilometres to Main Base across at least two glaciers. They knew that their supply ship would have to leave Antarctica before the end of January or be trapped by pack ice.

As they slowly made progress, they sustained themselves by slaughtering the sled dogs. ‘Their meat was stringy, tough and without a vestige of fat,’ Mawson recalled in The Home of the Blizzard. ‘We were exceedingly hungry, but there was nothing to satisfy our appetites. Only a few ounces were used of the stock of ordinary food, to which was added a portion of dog’s meat, never large, for each animal yielded so very little, and the major part was fed to the surviving dogs. They crunched the bones and ate the skin, until nothing remained.’

Mertz was overtaken by fever and hallucinations and at one point had to be physically restrained. On one occasion he refused to believe he was suffering from frostbite and bit off the tip of his own little finger. Tending to Mertz cost Mawson valuable time. Eventually the Swiss skier died. Recent research suggests that his death could have been caused by hypervitaminosis A – an overdose of vitamin A from the livers of the sled dogs.

Mawson cut down his sled and divested himself of everything he could do without except his geological specimens, then trudged the final 161 kilometres alone in 30 days. Just under 10 kilometres from Main Base he came to a forward supply depot that was stocked with food – but the pleasure of this find was deflated by a blizzard that trapped him there for a week. When the weather cleared he pushed on, reaching Main Base on 8 February only hours after the supply ship, SY Aurora, had sailed.

Six members of the expedition had stayed to wait for Mawson, and they conducted scientific experiments for the year until a relief ship arrived. Mawson’s 1600-kilometre journey remains one of the most inspiring acts of endurance, courage and initiative in recorded history.

Knighted in 1914, Mawson returned to the University of Adelaide after World War I. He revisited the Antarctic over two summers from 1929 to 1931: these were largely scientific trips, but Mawson also claimed British sovereignty over Antarctic territory, including Cape Denison, where his previous expedition had been based.

As a consequence of Mawson’s efforts, Australia has the largest territorial claim on the Antarctic.

36

1913
George Julius’ totalisator machine
The lucky shop

The automatic totalisator designed by Australian George Julius changed gambling profoundly all over the world by taking some of the human element out of losing the family’s shopping money with the SP bookmaker. This is a scale working model of a machine designed to record bets and calculate the changing odds and dividends at the racecourse.

Parimutuel betting was invented by the Spanish bookmaker Josep Oller i Roca in 1867. The parimutuel system pools all the bets on a particular race and totals them up, and thus the odds are set by the collective wisdom of the punters. The house takes a fixed percentage.

The parimutuel system was eagerly adopted by punters and SP bookmakers. Oller i Roca went into the nightclub business and founded the Moulin Rouge and then the Paris Olympia.

In Australia, a parimutuel betting shop was known as a ‘tote’ – short for ‘totalisator’, based on the machine that calculated the odds. The most famous of them all was the Collingwood Tote, which was owned by John Wren.

Born Irish, poor and Catholic, Wren left school at the age of twelve. He showed an aptitude for gambling and opened his totalisator in 1893 at 136 Johnston Street, Collingwood. The front of the building was a teashop; at the back was a lumberyard with no wood. It was one of the most notorious buildings in Melbourne and is now a much-loved venue for live music.

Wren added to his reputation with public generosity to the church, the Collingwood Football Club and the poor. After he had been warned off racetracks, he bought his own – and then motoring tracks and public halls throughout Melbourne and as far afield as Brisbane. He closed his tote in 1907.

George Julius invented his automatic totalisator machine in 1908 to count election ballots. The government didn’t much care for it but he found another client base. ‘I set to work on a machine that would permit the simultaneous addition, give instantaneous records, and would satisfy the requirements of any racecourse,’ he later explained.

The first machine was installed at Ellerslie Racecourse outside Auckland, New Zealand, in 1913. It was the size of a room. The Ellerslie tote was the largest calculating machine in the world until the first generation of mainframe computers were built after World War II.

Julius’s company, Automatic Totalisators Limited, was one of the most successful Australian businesses for 50 years. He was the first chairman of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (later the CSIRO).

By 1970, almost every racetrack in the world was using a version of an ATL tote. Shortly thereafter, the first computers came on the scene, and within ten years they had superseded the totalisator.

37

1914
Two-up kip and coins
Pennies from heaven

Two-up is Australia’s native gambling game. Two pennies (or other coins) are placed on a piece of wood known as a ‘kip’ and tossed in the air, and bets are placed on whether the coins will come up both heads, both tails or one of each. The odds are respectively 25 per cent, 25 per cent and 50 per cent. Of all gambling games, two-up is the least open to manipulation.

A spontaneous game is known as a ‘school’ and an established, organised game is an ‘alley’. The ‘boxer’ runs the betting but doesn’t participate. One player becomes the ‘spinner’. He or she stands in the middle of a circle of other players and places a bet on the coin drop, which is matched by another player before the first throw. The other members of the circle place side bets on whether the spinner will win or lose. When all the bets are in, the ‘ringmaster’ yells, ‘Come in, spinner!’ and the spinner, using a kip, tosses the coins in the air at least 6 feet (1.8 metres). If the spinner throws two heads they win their bet. If it’s two tails they lose and give up their position. If it’s one of each, they throw again.

The origins of the game go back to an Anglo-Irish contest called pitch and toss, which arrived in Australia on the early convict ships. Two-up was played regularly on the goldfields but really came into its own during World War I, when the diggers whiled away their monotonous hours in the trenches playing it. Its popularity continued throughout World War II, and it has become embedded in the Anzac myth – so much so that the game is legal everywhere on Anzac Day, on Victory in the Pacific Day and on Remembrance Day afternoon. A game of two-up is now as much a part of the Anzac Day tradition as the morning march.

Two-up is regarded, with some exceptions, like any other gambling game and is illegal to play for money except in regulated premises or in Broken Hill, where it has special dispensation.

There was a famous two-up alley in Crystal Lane in Broken Hill. One room was for players wagering two shillings, while in another room the high rollers laid £10 and £20 on the coin toss. This game continued behind a ‘blue door’ from Federation until police shut it down in 1984. There was a public outcry and a court appeal, and in the end the court found that two-up was a cultural activity of long standing in Broken Hill and should be allowed to continue.

38

1915
A Gallipoli boat
The birth of the nation

Lifeboats such as this – the No. 5 timber lifeboat from Troopship A3, formerly the P&O ship SS Devanha – ferried diggers to the beach at Gallipoli on 25 April 1915 in groups of thirty.

The SS Devanha was built in 1905 and covered the run from Great Britain to India and the Far East until it was requisitioned for the Great War. All requisitioned vessels continued to be manned by their normal Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company staff of officers and peacetime P&O crews. After disgorging its troops, the Devanha steamed up the Turkish coast as a feint. It then began duty as a hospital ship, transporting the wounded to hospital bases. His Majesty’s Hospital Ship Devanha remained on duty for the entire Gallipoli campaign. Having put the troops on the beach, these kinds of boats later took them away.

The Gallipoli campaign was a defining moment for Australia and New Zealand. Britain declared war on Germany on 4 August 1914. As Australia was still a dominion of the Empire, it was also at war. Australian forces immediately captured German territories in Samoa, New Guinea and New Britain – the first blood of the war. On 9 November 1914 the HMAS Sydney sank the German raider SMS Emden. Meanwhile, the army assembled the all-volunteer AIF.

The Tsar requested his allies open a front against the Ottoman Empire to take pressure off Russia’s southern flank and allow it access through the Dardanelles to the Mediterranean, and Australian and New Zealand troops joined the French and British in this plan. In classical times the Dardanelles – a 61-kilometre strait connecting the Aegean Sea to the Sea of Marmara and thence to the Black Sea – were known as Hellespont. This area has been contested since the Trojan War, and the Australian experience would be no less tragic.

Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, proposed a massive naval and army invasion on the Gallipoli peninsula – a barren landscape of rocky, rugged scrub with high hills overlooking comparatively narrow beaches and possessing little fresh water or shelter. The Allies had very poor intelligence on the area under attack and often relied on tourist maps.

By 15 April, the Turks had 62 077 troops waiting for the Allied attack. The Ottoman Fifth Army was commanded by a German officer, Otto Liman von Sanders, and under him Mustafa Kemal, a 34-year-old lieutenant colonel familiar with the Gallipoli peninsula who was Turkey’s most exceptional military mind. The Turks were completely underestimated.

Allied troops went ashore first before dawn. There was confusion and panic in the darkness, and all they could do was get on dry land and dig.

The hills above Anzac Cove were defended by the Turkish 57th Infantry Regiment, who ran out of ammunition. Kemal ordered the men to fix bayonets as he said, ‘I do not order you to fight, I order you to die. In the time which passes until we die, other troops and commanders can come forward and take our places.’ The entire regiment was lost. In their memory, there is today no 57th Regiment in the Turkish Army.

By the end of the first day the two sides found themselves in a stalemate that persisted for the rest of the year. The Australians were pinned down in their trenches and dugouts, and dysentery was endemic. As many as half of the diggers at any time were incapacitated by illness. The bodies of the fallen on both sides gave the place an extra stench.

In August the Anzacs staged an offensive, including the legendary Battle of Lone Pine, after which seven Victoria Crosses were awarded. According to Private Tom Billings, ‘As we captured Lone Pine we felt like wild beasts and as fast as our men went down another would take his place but soon the wounded were piled up three or four deep and the moans of our poor fellows and also the Turks we tramped on was awful.’

For six months across these battle zones – Hill 60, the Nek and others, which have become legend – the Allies and Turks went back and forth. The net result was only death. By the end of the summer it was clear the situation was hopeless, and a withdrawal was planned.

Plans for the evacuation of Gallipoli began in October. The loss of this front shook up the high command and Churchill resigned as First Lord of the Admiralty. The carefully staged withdrawal was completed in January 1915 and the Devanha was the last hospital ship to leave.

In Turkey, the Gallipoli campaign is known as the Battle of Çanakkale and marked on 18 March – the Turkish national day. Kemal’s reputation as a national hero was made in those bloody months, and after the war he led the War of Liberation and became the founder of modern Turkey.

The Gallipoli campaign saw 8709 Australians killed and 19 441 wounded, and was characterised by the incompetence of British officers. And yet the Australians performed with great courage, common sense and resilience. We lodged our young nation into international affairs and the diggers brought great credit to Australia.

In April 1916 the first Anzac Day was celebrated in London, Brisbane and Melbourne. Organised marches by veterans began in 1925. The Gallipoli campaign was the baptism by fire of three nations.

39

1917
Pin flags for General Sir John Monash
The Western Front

These 97 glass-headed pins hold variously shaped paper tags that represent the units of the Australian Corps that fought on the Western Front under the command of General Sir John Monash. The Australian troops in France were collected in four divisions. Some had come from the Middle East, but many were fresh. The pin flags were moved around the map at Monash’s headquarters, allowing him to keep track of the Australian Corps. Monash was a gifted general with a great respect for his soldiers. The detail of the pins reflects Monash’s first career as an engineer, and there is something in the art of them that reflects a humanity even in the most hellish experience.

After the disaster of Gallipoli in 1915, the Australians were dispatched to France where they joined in the ghastly trench warfare of the Western Front. Rain, mud, blood and dismembered limbs all blended together in a diabolical liquefaction. Then there was the gas. Often the tear gas came first, encouraging the soldiers to whip off their masks to stop the infernal irritation. Then came the next gas. Chlorine and phosgene gases caused the lungs to fill with blood and fluid, and drowned a man in front of your eyes as he panicked. Mustard gas burned the skin and the eyes, and lay toxic on the fields waiting for exposed skin to inflame.

On the evening of 19 July 1916, Australian and British infantry attacked the Fromelles ridge. The Australians suffered 5533 casualties in 24 hours and gained no territory. According to the Australian War Memorial, Brigadier General H E ‘Pompey’ Elliott said, ‘Practically all my best officers, the ANZAC men who helped to build up my Brigade, are dead. I presume there was some plan at the back of the attack but it is difficult to know what it was.’

Two months fighting at Pozières yielded 23 000 Australian casualties, almost a third of them fatal. Some wrote in letters home that they were relieved to have been wounded and taken from the field. Artillery shells tore bodies to pieces and many were never recovered. In small compensation, five Victoria Crosses were won there.

The slaughter continued through 1917. The British 5th Army under Sir Hubert Gough launched an ill-conceived attack on the German line at the village of Bullecourt on 11 April. The Australians suffered 3300 casualties, and 1170 were taken prisoner. Gough launched a second, equally ill-planned attack on 5 May over the same ground, with 7482 Australian casualties. According to the official historian Charles Bean, Bullecourt was the point where the Australians lost faith in their British commanders.

In June, the Australian 3rd Division under Monash had a great success at Messines. From then on Monash had a string of victories and was regarded as one of the best Allied tacticians. He was involved in the Third Battle of Ypres, known as Passchendaele. The casualties there were 325 000 Allied and 260 000 Germans for a gain of 8 kilometres. Australian dead or wounded stood at 38 000.

Monash was promoted to lieutenant general in early 1918 and given control of the Australian Corps. He disliked the British tactics and the war of attrition that the Western Front had become and wanted a more active, aggressive plan utilising artillery in tandem with infantry.

In April 1918 the Australians held the German advance at Dernancourt. The Germans captured Villers-Bretonneux on 24 April but Australian forces soon recaptured it. The intense fighting there earned the Australians the great respect of the French: the town still has monuments to the Anzacs, and Anzac Day is celebrated there by both French and Australians.

The Battle of Hamel on 4 July was Monash’s finest moment. Here, he devised a new strategy for using tanks in tandem with artillery, air support, gas and infantry. Until that point, tank corps had been separate units. Monash assigned tanks to infantry units and they drilled together, and instituted conferences of senior officers to discuss intelligence and tactics. One of his innovations was to build fake tank units to distract the Germans.

For some days before the battle, Monash shelled the German lines with a combination of coloured smoke and gas so that the enemy associated coloured smoke with poison gas and would immediately put on their gas masks. On the day of the assault there was only coloured smoke but the Germans put on their gas masks, which made it harder for them to shoot at the Allies. Monash used air support to soften up the German lines, and noisy old aircraft to mask the sound of the tanks moving into position. Reconnaissance planes and a team of motorcycle riders provided fast intelligence.

The preparation paid off, and the village of Le Hamel was captured in less than two hours with the loss of only 800 Australian lives. It was described as the perfect battle.

Hamel set up the Battle of Amiens only a few weeks later, on 8 August. Here again a coordinated assault with Australian troops among the vanguard broke the German line in less than three hours. General Erich Ludendorff, head of the German forces, famously described it as ‘a black day for the German army’. He recognised that Germany had lost the war.

On 12 August at Villers-Bretonneux the King invested Monash with his knighthood. It was the first time in 200 years that a general had been knighted in the field.

After the war, the Australian government’s policy was to stagger repatriation over years to avoid unemployment at home. Monash took it upon himself to get 160 000 Australian soldiers home within eight months even if it meant personally finding the ships to take them. The Australian War Memorial has a box of metal pins with flags. On each one is the name of a ship that Monash cajoled or commandeered into transporting diggers home.

40

1917
Winnie O’Sullivan’s locket
The Maitland Wonder

James Leslie (Les) Darcy gave his sweetheart, Winnie O’Sullivan, a gold locket that held his picture and a lock of his hair. Winnie was the landlord’s daughter at the Lord Dudley Hotel in Paddington, Sydney. It’s a modest keepsake but powerful in its simplicity. Darcy was an uncomplicated man who perhaps got in over his head. Born on 31 October 1895, Darcy was one of eight children in a typical devout working-class Irish Catholic family. He grew up in a bark hut near Maitland in New South Wales and competed in his first professional boxing match at 14, using his fists to support his family. Within two years he was in Sydney, moving up the card.

Darcy’s fabled bout at Sydney Stadium against the American Fritz Holland in July 1914 drew crowds from as far afield as Newcastle and Maitland. When the points decision went against him, there was a riot.

The following month war broke out in Europe. As an Irish Catholic, Darcy was ambivalent about the war. His career was going well. He neither smoked nor drank and sent almost all his winnings – some £10 000 – home.

Darcy remained in Sydney, living at the Lord Dudley Hotel, just up the hill from the stadium, and working there as a barman. He became close friends with the publican’s son, Maurice O’Sullivan, and fell in love with and became engaged to Maurice’s sister Winnie. She was his first and last true romance.

Undefeated in 22 bouts from early 1915 through to September 1916, Darcy was a major star, known as the Maitland Wonder. He was middle and heavyweight boxing champion of Australia and regularly beat American pugs. There is no question that he was a contender for the world title.

At one bout he lost several teeth. They were replaced in the ring and fastened into his mouth with gold staples.

The Easter Uprising in Dublin inflamed Irish passions against the English and the war. Meanwhile, Prime Minister Billy Hughes campaigned rabidly for conscription. Darcy, Australia’s champion, found himself at the centre of the anti-conscription movement and was publicly branded a coward.

On 27 October, in breach of the War Precautions Act, Darcy and his manager sailed for the USA, which was not yet at war. But by the time the boxer arrived in New York, the stories of his reputation as a coward and the clandestine way he had left Australia had sullied his reputation to the point where he couldn’t secure a bout. In Australia, the authorities stripped him of his titles.

In April 1917, Darcy became an American citizen and enlisted in the US Army. Ten days later, on 27 April, he collapsed with septicaemia and endocarditis. It’s probable that the septicaemia had been caused by the haphazard dentistry at the Sydney Stadium years before.

Winnie rushed to his bedside. Despite whatever comfort she could give, he caught pneumonia in hospital and died in Memphis on 24 May. According to family folklore, she took the clipping from Darcy’s hair then. Darcy’s body was embalmed and returned to Australia, and his coffin received a hero’s welcome as hundreds of thousands of Australians paid their respects in Sydney and on the cortege’s slow progress to Maitland.

Winnie O’Sullivan later married and raised a family. The locket was discovered among her treasures after her death in 1974 – a memento of a lost love that could be opened and closed in private moments of grief.

41

1919
A Billy Hughes novelty paperweight
The little digger

A ceramic paperweight caricature of Prime Minister William Morris Hughes was made in 1916–17 by Mashman Brothers in Sydney. The figurine clearly makes fun of the prime minister’s oversized features, but it’s unclear whether the humour is in jest or spite – Billy Hughes was a divisive figure.

Hughes was elected for the Australian Labor Party to the first federal parliament in 1901. A senior minister in two administrations, he became prime minister in 1915 when an exhausted Andrew Fisher retired. Hughes was quickly swept up by the Great War, and his visits to the United Kingdom and then the Western Front entrenched his belief in the rightness of the Empire’s battle against the Germans. Australia, he felt, was not doing enough. His solution was to conscript Australians.

Hughes almost tore the country apart with his 1916 and 1917 conscription campaigns. In November 1917, when he was campaigning in the town of Warwick, Queensland, his hat was knocked off his head by a thrown egg. A fight broke out and Hughes attempted to get into the melee personally. The PM demanded Senior Sergeant Henry Kenny arrest persons in the crowd. When Kenny declined, Hughes resolved to create his own police force – which evolved into the Commonwealth Federal Police.

Conscription divided Australia as never before or since. The greatest opposition came from the Irish community, and especially Archbishop Daniel Mannix, who was called by some ‘the Rasputin of Australia’. The sectarian divide that had always been strong in Australia widened. The ALP was essentially a Catholic party, and the war became a great moral quandary for it.

When the first conscription plebiscite was lost in October 1916, Hughes was expelled from the ALP. He took 24 members with him, merged with the Opposition and retained the prime ministership. In November 1917, he held another conscription referendum that was even more divisive than the first.

Hughes was in Europe for the peace conference at Versailles. Legally, Britain spoke for its dominions, which included Australia. Hughes’ main contribution was insisting that the dominions be represented and have a seat at the conference separate from England’s. The Treaty of Versailles was the first international agreement Australia signed.

Regarded by many as an irritant and buffoon, especially by American president Woodrow Wilson, Hughes took it upon himself to hobble Wilson’s League of Nations. Being a staunch racist, Hughes fought the Japanese push for racial equality in the League. He opposed the American postwar plan for German reconstruction, finding common ground with the excessively punitive French.

In Australia, Hughes lost the prime ministry to Stanley Bruce but stayed in parliament until he died at the age of 90. He was the longest-serving member of the federal parliament, changed party five times – three times due to expulsion – and was the last member of the first parliament to leave.

Hughes, even as a young man, resembled a gnome, and thus was a gift to caricaturists. He was partly deaf and prone to turning off his hearing aid when it suited him. His voice was harsh and unpleasant but he was clearly a charismatic figure and a polarising personality – arguably the dominant character of his age.

42

1922
A Felix the Cat doll
The birth of the Australian film industry

This toy is based on the cartoon character Felix the Cat. The first stuffed toys were produced in Australia in 1922, and at that time Felix was the biggest star of silent film. This well-loved doll, made of synthetic fur and straw, was a commercially produced toy but bears no manufacturer’s or designer’s marks. The museum dates the doll to between 1922 and 1931, when Mickey Mouse eclipsed Felix’s star. In his heyday, though, Felix was the pioneer of film spin-off merchandise.

Then, as now, Australians had to go to Hollywood to prosper in the film business. So it was with this mischievous puss, dreamed up by Sydney artist Pat Sullivan. Sullivan left for London in 1909 and woke up one day in New York, where he wrote and drew the animation The Tail of Thomas Kat.

Sullivan evolved the character and employed Otto Messmer to draw Felix and his adventures. Sullivan didn’t ink the final work, just as Disney didn’t draw Mickey Mouse and Matt Groening can’t draw Homer Simpson on a bet. Messmer claimed, because Sullivan was often drunk, that Felix was his creation, but after decades of dispute it’s now generally agreed that the cat is Sullivan’s creation. The dry, knockabout humour that made Felix popular owes something to Sullivan’s Australian heritage and his work in vaudeville.

In the mid-1920s, Felix had the star power of Charlie Chaplin. Sullivan was one of the first animators to understand the possibilities of merchandise, and the animated character of Felix was spun off into a newspaper comic strip, toys, dolls and homewares. Charles Lindbergh took a Felix doll on his legendary first Atlantic air crossing, and in 1928 Felix was the first character broadcast on television as Radio Corporation of America began experimental transmission in New York.

Felix the Cat wasn’t the only Australian to star in the movies. Between 1906 and 1930 (the coming of the sound era), more than 250 silent films were made in Australia. In another legendary Australian story, theatre usher Charles Tait and his concert-promoter brothers raised a budget of £1000 and Tait wrote and directed The Story of the Kelly Gang, which was the world’s first motion picture to run for longer than 60 minutes. The film (presented with live narration) opened on Boxing Day 1906. It recouped its budget in two weeks and opened around the world with a total gross estimated at £25,000, making it one of the planet’s first blockbusters.

But the most important Australian filmmaker of the period was Raymond Longford. In 1911, Lottie Lyell appeared in his film The Fatal Wedding, and they formed a partnership that took Australian drama to a new level. Lyell acted, wrote, co-directed and co-produced with Longford films that included the original The Mutiny on the Bounty (1916). Longford’s adaptation of C J Dennis’s The Sentimental Bloke is generally regarded as the first Australian film masterpiece and there was some truth to Longford’s assertion, ‘I have been, and still am, the outstanding figure in the industry’.

That statement was made to a 1927 royal commission into the film industry. American studios were soon to run local production into the ground: after 1929, the Australian film industry almost completely evaporated for several decades. But Felix the Cat remains among the most recognised cartoon characters; the rights to him were recently acquired by DreamWorks Animation.

43

1922
A Country Women’s Association cup and saucer
Tea and sympathy

The Country Women’s Association (CWA) – the largest organisation representing Australian women – was built on tea, sympathy, scones and helping. The Toowoomba Queensland Country Women’s Association served 13 350 cups of tea in 1951 in cups just like this. The decoration on the cup was to celebrate the QCWA’s silver jubilee.

Grace Emily Munro loved the country property she had with her husband, Hugh, at Keera in western New South Wales, but in 1911, tragedy struck her idyllic life. While she was in Sydney accompanying one of her sons to hospital for an emergency appendectomy, her youngest son died suddenly of croup. This tragedy led to Grace establishing the Country Women’s Association of New South Wales in 1922. She was determined to see that isolation not kill more children.

The CWA is a non-political network of women dedicated to assisting rural women, improving their standard of living, health services and childcare resources. Where appropriate, the CWA advocates for country women with government. The CWA’s original aim was: ‘The drawing together of all women, children and girls in the country and making life better, brighter and more attractive, thus helping stop the drift from the country to the city.’

Within a year of the formation of the CWA in New South Wales, there were 68 branches across New South Wales and Queensland. South Australia followed in 1926 under the leadership of Mary Warnews of Burra, and by 1936 the CWA had become a national movement. The state associations federated on 7 June 1945 to create a national body. Its aim was to ‘enable Country Women’s Associations throughout Australia to speak with one voice on all national matters, more especially concerning the welfare of country women and children’.

The CWA was for many years one of the few avenues that allowed women to participate in public life. Some of the issues they dealt with were the right of married women to retain their own nationality, and the introduction of domestic science into the university curriculum. Cooking has always been central to the CWA, and during the Depression the organisation assisted those in need with food and clothing parcels. In World War II the CWA provided meals for troops in Quorn, South Australia, and Tennant Creek, Northern Territory.

But perhaps the CWA is at its pragmatic best when raising funds – often through sales of its cookbooks – to establish child health centres, women’s rest rooms and maternity wards at local hospitals, and to support bush nurses. The establishment of child health centres and CWA rest rooms provided places where women could not only get practical health services and advice on childcare, but also meet and share their experiences.

The CWA in modern times has remained a strong organisation, even though Australia has become increasingly urban. And cooking is still at the heart of the CWA, a strong presence at agricultural shows around the country. Its members understand that old Australian tradition: when things appear at their most bleak, sometimes the best thing is a cup of tea, a scone and a chat.

44

1924
A Vegemite jar
The paste from the land down under

This is an early jar of Vegemite. The brown glass is typical of the period, and it has few distinguishing markings. President Barack Obama said to Prime Minister Julia Gillard in 2011: ‘So it’s like a quasi-vegetable by-product paste that you smear on your toast for breakfast – sounds good, doesn’t it?’

It may be that you have to be Australian to truly appreciate Vegemite. It took Australians many years to do so.

In early 20th century Marmite, a spread made by Sanitarium in New Zealand of yeast and beef extract, was the market leader in the yeast spreads category. The beef stock drink Bonox, made in Australia by Fred Walker and Co., was another popular savoury treat.

World War I disturbed trade between Australia and Europe, and because of this, and simple entrepreneurship, Fred Walker hired chemist Percy Callister to create a paste using brewer’s yeast and vegetables that could compete with Marmite. The yeast came from Carlton & United Breweries, and the other ingredients included salt, onions and celery. Vegemite is one of the world’s richest known sources of B vitamins, specifically thiamine, riboflavin, niacin and folic acid.

Vegemite was launched in 1924, but the public was underwhelmed. By 1928 Walker was so desperate he changed the name to Parwill (a pun on ‘Ma might’/Marmite). Salvation came in the 1930s. Walker had the licence to make Kraft processed cheese, which was very popular. He gave away coupons for Vegemite with Kraft cheese products and gradually the public became used to the taste. By the 1950s more than three-quarters of all Australian homes had a jar of Vegemite in the larder. The advertising jingle ‘Happy Little Vegemites’ became a well-used phrase, and everything about Vegemite was incorporated into authentic Australian culture.

The paste was given international prominence in Men At Work’s hit song ‘Down Under’, which was an ode to Australianness and an international smash hit. For foreigners, the lyric ‘a Vegemite sandwich’ connoted a very exotic snack until they tried it. For a while Vegemite became an internationally recognised Australian icon, but no one except Australians can bear the taste.

45

1925
The Kinchela Boys Home gate
The stolen generations

In the late 1990s an old gate was found slowly rotting in the Macleay River on the New South Wales north coast. This innocuous piece of ironwork was for many local Indigenous men the gate to Hell – the Kinchela Aboriginal Boys Training Home in Kempsey.

At Darlington Point I have heard an Aborigine, who was highly educated, explaining in the best of English how the Aborigines were plundered of their rations, robbed of their lands, and reduced to the position of slaves. I do not say the man was right in all his contentions, but when you meet men who understand all these things, you cannot expect them calmly to submit to an order to take from them their girls or boys and to place them in a Government institution.

– Robert Scobie, MP, during parliamentary debate
on the Aborigines Protection Bill, 1915

By the last decade of the 19th century there were enough half-caste Aboriginal children to make miscegenation an issue of public policy. The mixing of the races could not occur, and so the various state protectors of Aborigines and their political masters thought the best thing was to separate black from white. A child with a light skin clearly had a chance to defy his or her Aboriginality and to ‘breed out the black’, and so a policy of taking children from their families began.

Children were adopted out, fostered or institutionalised. In the Northern Territory all Aboriginal children were automatically wards of the state. In New South Wales the courts were often involved. Sometimes the kids were violently ripped from their mothers’ arms. In other cases there was a certain amount of cajoling and bargaining, with promises of reconciliation made but not kept.

The common scenario with stolen children was to take them from their parents, change their names and, where possible, invent a new identity for them. The children were not allowed to use their language and were not allowed contact with full-blood Aboriginal people. They were generally told that their families didn’t want them or their mothers had given them up. Often they were told they were ‘white’ or ‘southern European’. There were some successful adoptions and fosterings, but they were few.

The Kinchela Aboriginal Boys Training Home was typical of the institutions of the day. Established in 1918, it moved in 1924 from Kinchela to Kempsey. According to the Bringing Them Home report, an investigation by the NSW Board for the Protection of Aborigines strongly advised the manager of the home to give up taking intoxicating liquor, particularly when in the company of the boys, and informed him ‘that on no account must he tie a boy up to a fence or tree, or anything else of that nature, to inflict punishment on him, that such instruments as lengths of hosepipe or a stock whip must not be used in chastising a boy, that no dietary punishments shall be inflicted on any inmate in the Home’. He was also told that the practice of loaning out boys to local farmers was not approved.

Testimony was heard from one man who had grown up there:

Kinchela was a place where they thought you were animals. You know it was like a place where they go around and kick us like a dog . . . It was just like a prison. Truthfully, there were boys having sex with boys . . . But these other dirty mongrels didn’t care. We had a manager who was sent to prison because he was doing it to a lot of the boys, sexual abuse. Nothing was done. There was a Pommie bloke that was doing it. These attendants – if the boys told them, they wouldn’t even listen. It just happened . . . Every six months you were dressed up. Oh mate! You were done up beautiful – white shirt . . . . We were prisoners from when we were born . . .

Abuse wasn’t confined to institutions. The children – especially the girls – were liable to be raped by their employers or foster families. One girl of 16 made a complaint to the NSW Aborigines Protection Board; she was accused by officials of being a nymphomaniac, and sent to a mental home for 21 years. That was extreme – the usual response was a severe beating.

On 11 May 1995, the federal government launched the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families. The inquiry heard from more than 500 Indigenous people and organisations. The ensuing report, Bringing Them Home, which was tabled in parliament in May 1997, is a powerful document. One of the recommendations of the inquiry was for a formal apology from politicians and the government. The prime minister at that time, John Howard, refused to make an apology or say sorry, and it fell to the next PM, Kevin Rudd, to do so. He made the apology on 13 February 2008, shortly after his election, saying:

We apologise for the laws and policies of successive Parliaments and governments that have inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss on these our fellow Australians. We apologise especially for the removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families, their communities and their country. For the pain, suffering, and hurt of these stolen generations, their descendants and for their families left behind, we say sorry. To the mothers and the fathers, the brothers and the sisters, for the breaking up of families and communities, we say sorry. And for the indignity and degradation thus inflicted on a proud people and a proud culture, we say sorry.

46

1928
Penicillin moulds
Scientific excellence

These two preserved specimens of Penicillium notatum (now known as Penicillium chrysogenum), the mould that makes penicillin, were given to Dr Royal de Rohan Barondes in Oxford in 1944 by Australian pharmacologist and pathologist Howard Florey. Each of the two specimens is in a sealed glass Petri dish, the lid of one inscribed in black ink ‘P.notatum’ and the lid of the other inscribed in white ink ‘P.notatum / 4 days’.

Dr Barondes had a warm correspondence with Professor Florey. Barondes served in the United States Army Medical Corps and visited Florey at his Oxford laboratory shortly before the Allied D-Day invasion in June 1944. These moulds were a memento of the visit. Large quantities of the antibiotic were manufactured for D-Day – the first time it was used in quantity and with great success.

Penicillin has saved more lives and raised more people out of poverty than any other scientific discovery. The first recorded observation of the antibiotic power of Penicillium was by England’s John Tyndall in 1875. Other observations followed in Brazil, Italy, Costa Rica and France. None of these discoveries led to the development of penicillin.

On Friday, 28 September 1928, Dr Alexander Fleming noticed a Petri dish containing a Staphylococcus plate culture he had mistakenly left open was contaminated by blue-green mould. The mould formed a visible growth that killed the Staphylococcus. Fleming then grew a pure culture and coined the term ‘penicillin’, but he saw no future in it as a drug.

It was Australian-born Florey, professor of pathology at Oxford University, who conducted the first clinical trials of the drug. In 1938, Florey and his associate Ernst Chain were studying antibacterial substances produced by bacteria and fungi when Chain came across Fleming’s paper on penicillin. Florey’s Oxford team injected eight mice with a lethal dose of Streptococcus bacteria; the four subsequently treated with penicillin recovered and the untreated mice died. The results were so conclusive that with World War II now raging, Florey moved quickly to human testing.

The first subject was Albert Alexander, who had been infected with both Staphylococcus and Streptococcus by a rose thorn. In February 1941, Alexander was given penicillin. Within a day his temperature had dropped and the infection was healing. Unfortunately, though, not enough penicillin had been manufactured to fully defeat the infections, and in March, Alexander died.

In order to step up the manufacture of the drug, Florey and his team were flown to the USA in a blackened plane. Chain opposed the move because he thought they should get their patents before manufacturing the drug, but Florey insisted that penicillin should be in the public domain. This decision cost the team hundreds of millions of dollars each, but undoubtedly saved millions of lives. They found that penicillin can treat infections ranging from skin conditions to sexually transmitted diseases, and is especially useful in treating infected wounds.

By the end of the war, pharmaceutical companies such as Merck, Squibb and Pfizer and the Commonwealth Serum Laboratories in Australia were making 650 billion units of penicillin a month. Australia was the first country that made the drug available for civilian use.

Howard Florey was born in Adelaide in 1898. A graduate of the University of Adelaide, in 1921 he won a Rhodes Scholarship. After World War II he was involved in the establishment of the Australian National University; he became its chancellor in 1965. Florey, Chain and Fleming shared the 1945 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

Florey was the third Australian Nobel laureate and the first for physiology or medicine. He was followed by Sir Macfarlane Burnet, Sir John Carew Eccles, Sir Bernard Katz, Peter C Doherty, J Robin Warren, Barry J Marshall and Elizabeth Blackburn. Sir Robert Menzies highlighted the significance of Florey’s work, stating that ‘In terms of world well-being, Florey was the most important man ever born in Australia.’

47

1930
Charles Kingsford Smith’s cigarette case
The magnificent men

Charles Kingsford Smith and his fellow aviator Charles Ulm were the best of friends. Ulm presented Kingsford Smith with this gold cigarette case inscribed ‘Smithy Old Son / We made it / Charles’. They had just crossed the Pacific from California to Queensland – the first aviators to do so. But they were soon to become the most bitter of enemies.

Kingsford Smith and Ulm served with great bravery and were wounded in World War I. On one Western Front mission Kingsford Smith was shot, fell unconscious and then pulled himself together and landed the plane.

After the war Kingsford Smith tried anything that would get him in the air. He gave lessons, worked the stunt-flying circuit in the USA, joined a flying circus and ran joy flights. Back in Australia in 1927, he and pilot Keith Anderson joined with Ulm in an air-transport business called Interstate Flying Services. That year, as a publicity stunt, Kingsford Smith and Ulm flew around Australia in 10 days and 5 hours, halving the previous record.

A combination of tenacity and publicity raised enough money for Kingsford Smith and Ulm to finance the first trans-Pacific air crossing. Together with two crew (navigator/engineer Harry Lyon and radio operator Jim Warner), they took off from Oakland, California, on 31 May 1928 in the Southern Cross, a three-engine Fokker monoplane. Tropical storms almost cost them their lives. The engines were so loud that the crew communicated with handwritten notes. Flying via Hawaii and Fiji to Brisbane, they made the jump in 83 hours 38 minutes, landing at Eagle Farm, Brisbane, on 9 June 1928 as national heroes.

The hard-drinking, womanising Kingsford Smith made the absolute most of his fame.

He and Ulm flew the Southern Cross to England, then across the Atlantic and North America to Oakland – the first around-the-world flight. In 1928, Kingsford Smith made the first non-stop flight across Australia, from Point Cook near Melbourne to Perth.

The following year, on their way to England, Kingsford Smith and Ulm were forced down in the Kimberley and were lost for almost a fortnight. Their friends Keith Anderson and Henry Smith ‘Bobby’ Hitchcock crash-landed in the Tanami Desert in the Northern Territory and died of thirst and exposure while searching for them. Kingsford Smith and Ulm continued on to London and completed their flight in record time.

In 1930 Ulm was best man at Kingsford Smith’s wedding, but both the marriage and the two men’s friendship were destined for the rocks. Ulm ran the business and Kingsford Smith continued to fly stunts. In 1931, Kingsford Smith published his autobiography. Ulm found that he had mostly been written out of the narrative, and he contacted his lawyer. The friends never reconciled.

Kingsford Smith continued to take reckless challenges and to pursue publicity even as his fortunes declined. By 1932, when he was knighted, he was running joy flights.

Ulm established the mail service from Australia to New Zealand and intended to establish a trans-Pacific service. With a crew of two, he took off from Oakland in December 1934 but failed to make it to Hawaii and was never found.

There was only ever going to be one fate for Kingsford Smith. On 6 November 1935, while flying at night on a London–Sydney run, his plane went down off the coast of Burma, south-east of Rangoon. Wreckage from the Lady Southern Cross confirmed Smithy’s fate, although his body was never recovered.

Kingsford Smith and Ulm’s courage connected Australia across the Pacific and to Europe. Their friendship helped Kingsford Smith achieve greatness, but his ego tore the two men apart.

48

1932
A Waterside Workers banner
The power of the union

This banner was created by the Sydney branch of the Waterside Workers Federation in 1902. Made from two joined oil-painted canvases more than 3 metres square, it would have been used for May Day and Labour Day parades. One side is dedicated to members who died in the Great War, and the other glorifies the hard yakka of the workers.

There was significant pride in the union movement at the turn of the last century. Their gains had been made in blood. In Melbourne, wharf labourers congregated at the ‘Wailing Wall’ on Flinders Street. In Sydney they called Hickson Road in The Rocks ‘the Hungry Mile’. These were places where itinerant workers would front up twice a day in the hope of getting a day’s stevedoring work on the docks to put a meal on the table that night.

This ‘bull’ system was as cruel as the work was backbreaking and dangerous. Everything from wheat to concrete and metal was shifted from ships on wharfies’ backs. They carried coal and coal dust filled their lungs, sulphur burned their skin and, later, asbestos dust covered everything. If they didn’t break their backs, they were liable to fall to their deaths.

In the late 19th century, workers on the wharves organised themselves into unions. The Sydney Wharf Labourers’ Union and the Seamen’s Union in Melbourne formed in 1872. The Waterside Workers Federation of Australia was established in 1902; two prominent members were future prime ministers Billy Hughes and Andrew Fisher. These unions eventually amalgamated into the Maritime Union of Australia, now the oldest continuing maritime union in the world.

The Depression, which peaked around 1932–3, caused great rifts in Australian society, with the formation of proto-fascist groups on the right and communists on the left – especially in the trade union movement. Organised labour on the docks has become a powerful force on this island nation. Many of the most militant unionists this country has known have worked in maritime industries, and are or were communists. Any strike on the docks is and was expensive, too. With so much at stake, the waterside workers became known for steely determination. The stevedoring companies played hard as well, employing gangs of thugs as strikebreakers.

The first issue for waterside workers was the abolition of the bull system, which they wanted replaced by rosters or a ‘gang’ system free of nepotism and the whims of bosses. The issue was contested at different times at different ports over almost 30 years, but eventually all Australian ports changed.

In 1938 Japan Steel Works Ltd chartered the British tramp steamer The Dalfram to carry pig iron from Port Kembla to Kobe. The ship docked in Port Kembla on 15 November. The Waterside Workers Federation, disapproving of Japan’s invasion of mainland China, refused to load the boat. Prime Minister Robert Menzies came out strongly against the union but the strike lasted two months and finished only when the government agreed to end further pig-iron shipments. Three years later, Australia was at war with Japan.

In 1945 the maritime unions sided with Indonesian rebels against the colonial Dutch government and refused to load 559 Dutch ships in Australian ports. The Seamen’s Union of Australia refused to allow merchant ships to carry weapons to Malaya in 1948 during a communist uprising.

If the Seamen’s Union was tied down by Marxist dogma, the Federated Ship Painters and Dockers Union, established in Balmain on the Sydney waterfront in May 1883, was tied up in a different business. The shipyards were at the centre of the Balmain economy and community. In the 1970s the Melbourne branch of the Painters and Dockers was overtaken by powerful gangsters, notably Graham ‘The Munster’ Kinniburgh.

Frank Costigan QC headed a royal commission into the activities of the Painters and Dockers in 1980. He found that ‘The Union has attracted to its ranks in large numbers men who have been convicted of, and who continue to commit, serious crimes’ and that ‘Violence is the means by which they control the members of their group. They do not hesitate to kill.’

Costigan’s findings listed 15 murders, 23 possible deaths and 23 other acts of violence by members of the Painters and Dockers. Costigan also found that the union was involved in taxation fraud, social security fraud, ghosting (the practice of having non-existent workers on the payroll), compensation fraud, theft on a grand scale, extortion, drugs and weapons.

Increasing mechanisation changed the waterfront in the 1970s. Most of the trades on the docks became redundant, the workforce shrank by 60 per cent, and by 1992 the Waterside Workers Federation and the Seamen’s Union amalgamated to form the Maritime Union of Australia. Although diminished in size, the MUA still exercised authority on the waterfront. The Howard government colluded with the National Farmers’ Federation and a stevedoring company called the Patrick Corporation to break union control of the docks and introduce non-union labour.

On the night of 7 April 1998, the Patrick Corporation sacked its entire workforce and introduced a scab crew they had secretly trained in Dubai. A 14-day lockout followed until Justice Tony North ordered the reinstatement of the 1400 sacked MUA workers. The union survived but was severely wounded, and a tradition of radical leftist trade unions was effectively ended.

49

1932
The Play School rocket clock
Your ABC

Thousands of Australian children learned how to tell the time by looking at the rocket clock – a large rocket with a clock face near its tip that featured in a regular segment on the children’s television program Play School. The naive style is typical of the 1950s. Based on an English show, Play School became one of the longest-running and most popular shows on Australian television, and a childhood experience shared by Australians in every location and every possible demographic.

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (formerly the Australian Broadcasting Commission) is the cement that holds Australia together. For 80 years, the ABC has been the one public amenity that binds all Australians and is used in some way by all Australians at some point in each day. More than 80 per cent of Australians approve of the ABC and believe it is a trusted source. In times of distress, it is the national information source.

In 1932 the federal government nationalised 12 failing regional radio stations and amalgamated them into a new network. Like the British Broadcasting Corporation, the ABC was funded by licences. Prime Minister Joe Lyons made the first speech on the network, at 8 p.m. on 1 July 1932.

The ABC’s brief was to offer music, news and current affairs, sport, drama, children’s educational supplements and school broadcasts. The first day’s programs included a Children’s Session, ‘Racing Notes’ and a call of the races at Randwick, ‘British Wireless News’ received by cable from London, weather, stock exchange and shipping news, the ABC Women’s Association on ‘commonsense housekeeping’, and a talk on goldfish and their care, as well as ‘Morning Devotions‘ and music.

From that point, the ABC gradually evolved. News bulletins used to be a simple read-out of the newspaper, but in the late 1940s the ABC began hiring its own journalists and establishing an independent news service. It was also during the 1940s that the formal relationship with the government was codified to ensure the ABC’s independence. Parliament began to be broadcast. That service and coverage of Test cricket were essential pan-Australian services linking the country.

There have long been claims that the ABC has a left-wing bias driven by its staff, but every inquiry into the matter has found this not to be the case, and that ABC reporting is balanced. A survey of ABC journalists who have become politicians found that 10 went Labor and nine went Liberal.

ABC radio began the Argonauts Club in 1933 but it went on hiatus until 1941 when it was revived as part of the Children’s Session. Named for the Greek myth of Jason and the Argonauts, the club was a national organisation. Members were given a card with a pseudonym and a number – and many remembered their names and numbers for the rest of their life. Argonauts were encouraged to send in stories and contributions. Each day guests would provide educational and improving talks. At its height, the Argonauts had 50 000 members around the country. The program ran six days a week for 28 years.

Prime Minister Robert Menzies launched ABC TV on 5 November 1956, and children’s programming on that medium has also been critical. One of the first programs was Kindergarten Playtime, which ran until Play School replaced it.

Based on the BBC program of the same name, Play School was first broadcast on 18 July 1966. The program revolves around simple activities appropriate for preschool children, such as telling the time, reading stories, playing games and craft activities. All of the craft activities are created with items that can be found in the home. The Play School theme song, beginning with ‘There’s a bear in there’, is one of the most widely known Australian songs.

Some 80 per cent of children under six in Australia watch Play School at least one day each week. So many Australians have grown up with the program that toys from the show Big Ted, Little Ted and Jemima are national icons. Play School was a launching pad for The Wiggles in the early 1990s, but perhaps the most significant of all Play School segments is the Bananas in Pyjamas. The song, by Carey Blyton (nephew of Enid), was incorporated into the program’s repertoire in 1976. By the late 1980s the Bananas were being played by actors, and then in 1992 they graduated to their own TV show with teddy bears Morgan, Amy and Lulu. The Bananas have since become known around the world.

Play School has attracted many of Australia’s best actors and screen performers as hosts, including Lorraine Bayly, Benita Collings, John Hamblin, John Waters, Noni Hazlehurst, Colin Friels, Philip Quast, Simon Burke, Deborah Mailman, Rhys Muldoon, Justine Clarke, Brooke Satchwell, Georgie Parker and Eddie Perfect.

There isn’t space here to list all of the ABC’s achievements in broadcasting. Its news and current affairs programs represent the gold standard in reporting, despite the organisation’s small budgets, and the departments of drama and light entertainment have produced some of Australia’s most loved and most influential programming.

The ABC now operates with a total annual budget of $1.22 billion to cover four television stations plus the Australia Network and Radio Australia. It operates a national radio network and a network of regional and metropolitan stations, as well as youth network triple j, classical music network Classic FM, and a range of online and new media initiatives.

The ABC has always courted controversy and complaint, be it about bias, moral standards or a thousand other issues. The controversies always reflect the arguments raging in the community at large. But for all its perceived faults, the ABC and its programming and products reflect and define Australia and its people.

50

1933
The Heidelberg dress
Australia in the Depression

At the height of the Depression a function was held in Heidelberg, Victoria, that offered a cash prize for the best costume. Eight-year-old Patricia Chalcraft wore this dress, made from curtains with designs painted on the fabric in household paints. The Chalcrafts were involved in the Heidelberg Unemployment Bureau, and the dress had the dual aim of publicising the life of the unemployed and hopefully winning the price of a pair of shoes for Patricia. ‘The dress was my father’s hope not only for himself but for all his friends and people that were needing work,’ Chalcraft told the National Museum of Australia in 1999. ‘If he could in some way help others, as well as himself, it was all he wanted. I think by painting this dress he was more or less putting himself in the place of all of these jobs, thinking that he could do it or someone close by could do them, and hopefully that somebody might see it as an advertisement to work if they needed it.’

There impact of the Depression was profound politically, and it was the catalyst for great turmoil. But it also solidified the theme of mateship that was a large part of Australia’s self-image. The average Australian was stoic, resourceful and good-humoured in bleak times. The Heidelberg Unemployment Bureau held meetings, dances and social engagements to keep community spirits up.

‘People were forced into all sorts of tricks and expediencies to survive, all sorts of shabby and humiliating compromises. In thousands and thousands of homes fathers deserted the family and went on the track (became itinerant workers), or perhaps took to drink,’ wrote Wendy Lowenstein in her oral history Weevils in the Flour. ‘Grown sons sat in the kitchen day after day, playing cards, studying the horses [betting on horseracing] and trying to scrounge enough for a threepenny bet, or engaged in petty crime, mothers cohabited with male boarders who were in work and who might support the family, daughters attempted some amateur prostitution and children were in trouble with the police.’

According to one worker: ‘Depression! I was walking the country looking for work from the end of the World War I until the start of the Second, till 1939!’ The lack of social security payments meant that men were required to go on the track looking for work; many of them relied on the kindness of strangers when jobs were not forthcoming.

Curiously, even though unemployment reached 32 per cent in some towns, there was not a huge surge in support for the Communist Party and no widespread social unrest. Political extremism happened on the right, with a middle-class swing to the ultra-right and organisations such as the New Guard.

The world had not seen a great depression before, and there were two schools of thought as to how to deal with it. The classical-economics approach was to withdraw, live within one’s means and wait until it passed. The other approach, which came to be associated with the economist John Maynard Keynes, was to say that when demand from the commercial sector dried up, governments should create demand through public spending.

The debate was personalised in the shape of the Bank of England’s Sir Otto Niemeyer, who visited Australia in 1930 and insisted that the nation not default on its loans – especially those from the Bank of England and other British corporations. He advised that the way out was slashing government spending, cancelling public works, cutting public-service salaries and decreasing welfare benefits. This was known as the ‘Melbourne Agreement’. The other case was put by the blustering, corpulent Jack Lang, premier of New South Wales. A follower of Keynes, Lang advocated public works such as continuing the construction of the Sydney Harbour Bridge – and if that meant a moratorium on foreign bank repayments, then so be it. Federal treasurer Ted Theodore also supported an inflationary, expansionist policy, but he was defeated in the party room.

The Premiers’ Plan required federal and state governments to cut spending by 20 per cent, including cuts to wages and pensions, plus tax increases, reductions in interest on bank deposits and a 22.5 per cent reduction in the interest the government paid on internal loans. These were contractionary policies.

The Labor government of James Scullin and most of the state Labor Party leaders fell in behind Niemeyer, but Lang would not be shifted, and while he signed on to the Premiers’ Plan he refused to pay interest on his loans. The Sydney Harbour Bridge opened on 19 March 1932. The standoff between Lang and the banks and the Federal government continued until 13 May 1932 when the governor of New South Wales, Sir Philip Game, used his reserve powers and sacked Lang.

The Depression threw the federal Labor Party into disarray. Joe Lyons quit the party, brought down the government and became prime minister himself. History has shown that the conservative approach of Niemeyer and the Scullin and Lyons governments actually exacerbated the Depression in Australia and that the stimulus package devised by Lang, which was adopted as the New Deal in the USA, was the correct response to a depression.

The Chalcrafts’ dress inexplicably won only second prize (the winner has not survived). Patricia won a book voucher but no shoes.

51

1933
A model of Nancy-Bird Walton’s Gipsy Moth aircraft
Flying doctors

Nancy-Bird Walton bought a de Havilland Leopard Moth in London for £1700. The full-size plane had a maximum speed of 137 mph (220 kph), with a range of 715 miles (1150 kilometres). This model of the plane was made by Mr Ernie Holden for Walton.

The first Australian woman licensed to fly was Millicent Bryant in 1927. Shortly afterwards, at the appropriately named town of Wingham in New South Wales, Nancy DeLow Bird took her first flight and never looked back.

‘At the air pageant,’ she recalled, ‘I went up for a flight, a ten shilling flight and then I gave a whole week’s wages two dollars – one pound – and asked the pilot if he’d do some aerobatics with me and he did some aerobatics and that became the ruling passion of my life. I then bought a book on flying. I studied and everybody laughed at me of course.’

In Wingham she met Charles Kingsford Smith, who invited her to come to Sydney and enrol in his flying school. She was accredited as a pilot quite quickly but had to wait until 1935 and her 19th birthday to get a commercial licence – the first Australian woman to do so.

With a Gipsy Moth, a gift from her parents, Bird set off to earn a living in the sky. She was a barnstormer and a courier and flew joy flights. Pilots of the time relied on Shell road maps for direction. Landing strips tended to be paddocks: if you were lucky, a local would drive a truck to stir up the dirt to indicate wind direction.

Bird’s first customer was Reverend Stanley Drummond of the Far West Children’s Health Scheme, for whom she flew nurses, mothers and children around the outback from her base in Bourke, in north-western New South Wales. The Gipsy Moth clapped out and in 1935 she upgraded to a Leopard Moth. After a year at Bourke, she found a new base 160 kilometrres away in Cunnamulla in southern Queensland and ran a charter and air-ambulance service.

Returning from the United Kingdom by boat in 1938, she met Charles Walton. Bird’s friend the Reverend John Flynn, who was known around Australia as the Flying Doctor, conducted their wedding.

John Flynn joined the Presbyterian ministry in 1903. In 1912 he became the first superintendent of the Australian Inland Mission, a parish that encompassed 2 million square kilometres of outback. Flynn wanted to create ‘a mantle of safety’ for the outback. In 1928, he formed the AIM Aerial Medical Service, a one-year experiment based in Cloncurry, Queensland. In that first year of operations, the service flew approximately 32 000 kilometres in 50 flights, making it the first comprehensive air-ambulance service in the world.

From the mid-1920s, Flynn experimented with bush radios that might connect outback stations. His friend Alfred Traeger invented a reliable pedal radio that was perhaps the greatest boon to the outback: it enabled communication, education and a medical network that transformed life in remote Australia. Adelaide Miethke launched the School of the Air utilising the network that Flynn had connected.

The pastor was also known for his enlightened views about race. Aboriginal patients were always welcome in his hospitals, and he insisted that Indigenous Australians be encouraged with education and self-determination. He suggested that Australians who had been happy to contribute to the Belgians displaced by the German invasion of their country in 1914 should consider offering the same generosity to the people displaced by the European invasion of Australia in 1788.

Nancy Walton did a great deal of work with Flynn and the Flying Doctor service. Her work in the outback earned her an Order of Australia and the designation a Living National Treasure. Politically she campaigned for far right-wing causes although she was very strong on women not voting according to their husband’s preferences. After her marriage she gave up most professional work and retired the Leopard Moth. Qantas named their first A380 plane in her honour.

52

1934
A Cherry Ripe chocolate bar
The age of adventure

The Cherry Ripe is an oblong blend of coconut, cherries and dark chocolate wrapped in a crimson foil package. The Cherry Ripe was unique to Australia when the chocolate bar was launched by MacRobertson’s. It symbolised the entrepreneurial spirit of a young Australia.

At dawn on 20 October 1934, 60 000 people gathered at RAF Mildenhall in East Anglia to watch 20 planes take off in the MacRobertson Trophy Air Race. The race, also known as the London to Melbourne Air Race, took place over a distance of 18 200 kilometres. It was watched avidly all around the globe, but especially in Australia, where it was an important step in joining Australia to the rest of the world. At the time only 12 planes had ever flown to Australia.

Billed as ‘The World’s Greatest Air Race’, the event was instigated by Melbourne’s lord mayor, Sir Harold Gengoult Smith, to mark the centenary of the foundation of Victoria. Prize money of £15 000 came from Sir Macpherson Robertson, proprietor of MacRobertson’s Steam Confectionery Works, which was then the largest confectionary business in the Commonwealth.

Robertson was born on 6 September 1859 in Ballarat, Victoria, the eldest of seven children. In 1874 he was apprenticed to the Victoria Confectionery Co. and in 1880 he began making novelty sweets in his bathroom at home in the Melbourne suburb of Fitzroy and personally hawking them to local shopkeepers.

Taking its name from a combination of its founder’s first and last names, MacRobertson’s Steam Confectionery Works expanded quickly. By the early 1900s, it was a significant player in the competitive Melbourne confectionery market, previously monopolised by English importers. Its signature chocolate brand was Old Gold, and Old Gold chocolate became a key ingredient, along with coconut and cherries, in the Cherry Ripe bar.

Robertson introduced chewing gum and fairy floss to Australia and created a number of iconic Australian sweets, including the Freddo Frog and Snack chocolates. In 1926, he acquired the Life Savers franchise and introduced the Australia-only flavour ‘musk’.

Like some between-the-wars Willy Wonka character, Robertson was always dressed immaculately in white. His Fitzroy complex of white-painted factories housing several thousand white-uniformed employees was known as White City. His delivery trucks were drawn by prize grey draught horses. The business prospered.

In 1926 Robertson established the MacRobertson International Croquet Shield, which remains the premier croquet teams event in the world. It is currently competed for by Australia, Great Britain, New Zealand and the USA. Robertson financed the MacRobertson Round Australia motor truck expedition in 1928, and in the same year founded the MacRobertson-Miller Aviation Co., which serviced Western Australian towns for the next 40 years. The confectioner made substantial gifts to British, Australian and New Zealand Antarctic expeditions in 1929 and 1930, and Douglas Mawson named MacRobertson Land in Antarctica in his honour.

Robertson actively promoted his legend as a self-made man, but unlike other industrialists of the period he saw the value in trade unionism. He ran a closed shop and encouraged the Female Confectioners’ Union. During the Depression, he turned off his mechanised factories and went back to manual production lines. In 1934, he gave £146 000 to Melbourne to stimulate the Victorian economy hit by the Depression. The funds were used to build the National Herbarium at the Royal Botanic Gardens, a fountain near the Shrine of Remembrance, the MacRobertson Girls’ High School and the Grange Road bridge, known as MacRobertson’s Bridge, over the Yarra River.

The success of Old Gold and the Cherry Ripe funded all kinds of public benefits in the first half of the 20th century. The 1934 MacRobertson Trophy Air Race was organised by the Royal Aero Club in part to help connect Australia to Britain. When the English team of C W A Scott and T Campbell Black landed at Darwin airport, they had clipped four and a half days off the existing UK–Australia record. Despite one faulty engine and a faulty oil-pressure indicator, Scott and Black flew through pylons at Flemington Racecourse in front of 40 000 spectators to claim first place. Their total flying time was two days, 22 hours and 34 minutes.

Second place went to K D Parmentier and J J Moll of the Royal Dutch Airlines (KLM). Towns all across Australia had been alerted to look out for aircraft in difficulty, and when the KLM plane was lost in a thunderstorm and blown off course near Albury in New South Wales, the locals came to the rescue. In gratitude, KLM made a large donation to Albury Hospital, and Alf Waugh, the mayor of Albury, was awarded a title in Dutch nobility.

The MacRobertson Trophy Air Race marks the beginning of serious aviation in Australia. The Queensland regional air service was about to become Qantas, the Royal Flying Doctor Service was about to start, and commercial airlines began to look at Australia as part of their global network.

And while MacRobertson’s Steam Confectionery Works was acquired by Cadbury in 1967 and then merged with Schweppes Australia in 1969, Australians today still enjoy Robertson’s Cherry Ripe bar.

53

1934
Don Bradman’s 1934 bat
The blade

No piece of sporting equipment aroused more passion in Australia in the first half of the 20th century than Don Bradman’s cricket bats. In the gloved hands of the Don, these strands of willow made by William Sykes & Sons of Yorkshire astounded cricket fans, inspired the inflamed battle of the Bodyline series and later became a source of great national pride.

Contests between Britain and Australia, which commenced in 1861, were always hard fought. On 29 August 1882 at The Oval, the Australians, led by ‘The Demon Bowler’, Fred Spofforth, staged a breathtaking fightback so spectacular that English journalist Reginald Brooks, under the pseudonym ‘Peter Blobbs’, opined in the Sporting Times that English cricket had died and its ashes had been taken to Melbourne. Thereafter the contest between Britain and Australia became known as the tussle for the Ashes.

Almost half a century after that Test, in 1930 Don Bradman arrived in the United Kingdom and played cricket as it had never been played before. At Lord’s he scored 254. In the third Test, at Leeds, he scored a century before lunch and another between lunch and tea, and had reached 309 not out at stumps. This remains the only time a player has passed 300 in one day in a Test match, and Bradman’s eventual score of 334 was a world record. By the end of the series he had an average of 139.14, with an aggregate of 974 runs in seven innings. All of Bradman’s statistics in this series were, as they say, out of the park. Australia returned triumphant. The performance in 1930 – and there were other stars as well as Bradman – buoyed the national spirit during the Depression. Wise pundits said that England would never regain the Ashes while Bradman appeared for Australia.

The British selectors chose Douglas Jardine as England captain for the 1932 Ashes series. The aggressive Jardine and his team developed a version of fast-leg theory with balls pitched to come up fast and short; this became known as Bodyline. The attack, combined with an intimidatory field setting, limited the batsman’s options – the fast, short-pitched balls could easily hit him, and they did. Bodyline was developed for the single purpose of defeating Bradman.

In the 1932 series, a number of players were badly injured by Bodyline tactics. As the Australian captain said, ‘There are two teams out there. One is playing cricket and the other is not.’ Bodyline did limit Bradman’s scoring and England did regain the Ashes, but at great cost.

Australia was determined to regain the Ashes in 1934. Bradman seemed troubled in the early matches, but with the series tied as they went into the fourth Test at Leeds, he again put on a bravura show with a then-world-record partnership of 388 with Bill Ponsford. In the fifth Test, Bradman and Ponsford bettered that with a 451-run partnership – a record that stood for 57 years.

International cricket was interrupted by World War II, but in 1948 the Ashes series resumed and Bradman led a team to the UK that was dubbed, for its feats, the Invincibles. He retired at The Oval in triumph with an average of 99.94 that is unlikely ever to be equalled.

Bradman was a national hero of unprecedented fame. Through the tough years of the Depression, the notion of a kid from Bowral becoming the greatest cricketer of all time was a great source of comfort to Australians.

54

1934
A Melbourne Cup
Horseracing in Australia

Many wise men of the turf have said that the chestnut stallion Peter Pan was a better horse than Phar Lap. After all, he won twice as many Melbourne Cups. This is his second, the 1934 Cup. The inscription on the three-handled, 18-carat gold ‘loving cup’ made by James Steeth for William Drummond & Co. reads: ‘Melbourne Cup, 1934. Won by Mr RR Dangar’s Peter Pan, age 5 yrs. Weight 9st 10lb [62 kg]’.

The Melbourne Cup is indeed the race that stops the nation at 3 p.m. on the first Tuesday each November. The mythology and drama that surround the Cup make it Australia’s single-most important sporting event.

The gold rush in the 1850s swiftly brought enormous wealth to Victoria. It was a time of extravagant bets and irrational enthusiasm. At its height, grazier and racehorse owner Andrew Chirnside boasted that no horse could beat his mare Alice Hawthorn. With prize money of £1000, a challenge was laid out – a ‘Championship of the Colonial Turf’ was the description. The race was to be run over 3 miles (4.8 kilometres) on 3 October 1857. The prize went to Veno, owned by George T Rowe of Liverpool, New South Wales, and trained by Etienne de Mestre.

A New South Wales horse beating a Victorian horse in Melbourne was a colonial outrage, and a rematch was demanded – reputedly at the instigation of Frederick Standish, a member of the Victoria Turf Club and a constable. Standish had a role not only in restaging the first Melbourne Cup, but in putting down the Eureka rebellion and in the capture and execution of Ned Kelly – three of the most significant events in Victoria’s history.

The first Melbourne Cup was raced over 2 miles (3218 metres) on Thursday, 7 November 1861, and was attended by 4000 people. The track was slow. The grass was 30 cm high in some places and 90 cm high in others. The favourite was local horse Mormon at 3 to 1, with Sydney stallion Archer at 6 to 1 and Inheritor at 8 to 1. The Sydney horse opened strongly and just kept getting better. Coming into the home stretch, he was three lengths ahead of the 18-horse field. The final result saw Archer six lengths ahead of Mormon, with Prince third, at a time of 3 minutes 52 seconds – the slowest in Cup history.

Governor Sir Henry Barkly presented the trainer-owner Etienne de Mestre with a gold watch and a cheque for £930. In 1862 Archer and de Mestre again beat Mormon, by an even greater margin. The length of the race and the size of the prize money made the Melbourne Cup, from the start, the peak event in the national racing calendar.

The first trainer to be presented with a cup trophy was Mr B C Marshall in 1865, when Tory Boy won from Panic and Riverina by two lengths at 25 to 1. Marshall thought the trophy, a silver bowl on a stand, so ugly that he sold it to the Flemington Hunt Club. The oldest cup in its original state is the 1866 Cup won by The Barb and trained by John Tait, who was de Mestre’s chief rival.

The first Melbourne Cups were casual affairs. Trophies weren’t presented every year, and it wasn’t until 1875 that race day was determined as the first Tuesday of November. A new Cup was designed each year until 1919, when Steeth designed the ‘loving cup’ that has been the model for every Cup since. By 1890, attendance had grown to 80 000 punters and the field expanded to 39 horses (the peak). There is now a limit of 24 starters.

From 1865 Cup Day was a half-holiday in Melbourne and in 1873 it was gazetted as a public holiday. The winner that year was Carbine, known as Australia’s greatest horse. His record stood at 33 wins from 43 starts and he failed to place only once, due to injury. On four occasions he won two races on the same day.

Carbine entered the 1890 Melbourne Cup carrying a record handicap of 10 st 5 lb (66 kg), and won the race in record time. Injury ended his racing career prematurely; however, at stud he again proved to be a champion. Over half of the 65 Melbourne Cup winners from 1914 to 1978 were descendants of Carbine, including Comic Court, Phar Lap, Rising Fast, Rain Lover and Think Big.

In 1927 luckless Sydney trainer Harry Telford and an American businessman purchased the cheapest horse at an auction and named it Phar Lap, after the Thai word for lightning. When the horse ran unplaced in his first four starts, Telford hired strapper Tommy Woodcock and things began to turn around. Phar Lap entered the 1929 Melbourne Cup as favourite but placed third after Nightmarch. In Melbourne Cup Week 1930 Phar Lap won four out of four races, including the Cup itself. Security was so tight that he became the first and only horse to have a police escort to the track. Controversy and conspiracy theories involving US gangsters followed Phar Lap’s death in 1932, which is believed to have been caused by arsenic poisoning. The great horse is honoured by a majestic statue at Flemington Racecourse.

The Melbourne Cup remains one of Australia’s major events. The race is now for three-year-olds and over, and remains the richest handicap turf race over 2 miles in the world. Competition now comes from all over the globe. The winner takes home $3.6 million, and the value of the Cup itself is $175 000.

History was made in 2015 when the Melbourne Cup was won for the first time by a female jockey, Michelle Payne, on Prince of Penzance. Payne instantly became a role model, and a spokesperson for equal opportunity in sport.

55

1935
A cane-toad statuette
The national pest

This is Bruno, now stuffed. He was one of the stars of the film Cane Toads: An Unnatural History and represents a species that has invaded Australia and taken hold of the national consciousness like no other. By far the biggest ecological disaster in Australia has been the introduction of the cane toad.

The prickly pear cactus (Opuntia stricta) was introduced to Australia in 1839. An attractive plant, it’s the core ingredient in making cochineal dye. In less than 25 years it spread from Sydney to Central Queensland, and by 1920 some 24.25 million ha of Australia were covered in it. As fast as farmers burned and chopped the plants away, they came back.

The Queensland government offered 100,000 acres (40 468 ha) reward to anyone who could rid Australia of the troublesome plant. In 1925, the Commonwealth Prickly Pear Board introduced 3000 Cactoblastis moth eggs and larvae from South America. The cactus moth loves the prickly pear. Over 100 000 eggs were hatched. The second generation yielded 2.5 million eggs. It was a spectacular success and by 1933 almost all the cactus was gone.

The larvae of two native species of insect (the greyback cane beetle and French’s cane beetle) eat the roots of sugar cane. Despite the warnings of New South Wales government entomologist W W Froggatt and the Australian Museum’s Roy Kinghorn, the Bureau of Sugar Experiment Stations imported about 100 cane toads from Hawaii to the Meringa Sugar Experiment Station near Cairns in the hope that they would eat the beetles.

The cane toad (Rhinella marina) is native to Central and South America and is not a natural predator for the beetles. It prefers insects but will eat anything, including food scraps, pet food and small animals. Once in an environment, the cane toad is a very aggressive competitor for food. It breeds very fast. Females lay 8000 to 35 000 eggs at a time, twice a year. For all these reasons, cane toads are a serious threat to native fauna.

The milky poison produced by the parotoid glands on the cane toad’s head is fatal to most potential predators, including domestic dogs. The poison is absorbed through mucous membranes such as those in the eyes, mouth and nose. No human deaths have been recorded in Australia but ingestion can cause burning of the eyes and hands, skin irritation, vomiting and shallow breathing. There is an urban myth that cane-toad venom is a hallucinogenic.

The introduced cane toads did attack the larvae but not in sufficient numbers to wipe out the beetles. They steadily expanded their environment. Starting in Far North Queensland in 1935, by 1978 the cane toad had reached well into New South Wales and within a decade had crossed the badlands of Central Queensland into the Northern Territory and, by 2001, the pristine wilderness of Kakadu National Park.

The toad is a significant menace – no ecosystem is unchanged by its arrival – but its sheer resistanqce to being exterminated has led to some people having a grudging respect for it. Queenslanders have adopted the cane toad as a state symbol and proudly refer to themselves as ‘Cane Toads’. Mark Lewis’s multi-award-winning film Cane Toads: An Unnatural History significantly increased the public’s knowledge of the animal, but also went a long way towards transforming it from a pest to a curio.

56

1942
A Japanese Himitsu-Bako puzzle box
Midget submarines

This wooden-veneer puzzle box features an interwoven geometric yosegi pattern on all four sides and on the face of the hidden drawer, and a traditional coloured inlaid scene of Mount Fuji with boat and house on the sliding cover.

Originating in the Hakone region of Japan, puzzle boxes are wooden boxes that can be opened only by a certain series of manipulations. They often contain a lucky charm inside. The lid of this box is removed by sliding the top half of the proper right-side panel, which releases it to reveal a box half the depth of the whole. Pulling up the proper left-side panel reveals a sliding drawer fitted with a sliding lid nestled in the lower half of the box. The drawer face is equipped with a small round orange celluloid handle. Some puzzle boxes require as many as 100 movements to solve – this needs only five.

Early in the evening of Sunday, 31 May 1942, a Japanese sailor sat in a midget submarine, HA-14, just outside Sydney. He waited until 8 p.m., when he would be able to sneak through the Heads. In the cramped space he played with a wooden puzzle box to help him while away the time. He probably expected that he would never see Japan again. This was his last entertainment.

Five Japanese submarines lay 11 kilometres north-east of Sydney. They launched three midget submarines: the first was caught in the anti-submarine net that stretched across the Heads, but the others snuck through with the Manly ferry and various small boats. One was detected and destroyed with depth charges.

The two-man midget submarines were here to destroy the USS Chicago and other Allied naval targets. Submarine M-24 got off two torpedoes, one of which exploded under HMAS Kuttabul, killing 19 sailors and wounding ten. M-24 then made it back out of the Heads. The third of the submarines was detected and attacked with depth charges.

The submarine M-24 was found off the coast of the northern Sydney beach of Long Reef in 2006. Robert Judge, a civilian boilermaker, discovered the Himitsu-Bako puzzle box hidden inside the midget submarines when he cut it open.

The four Japanese submariners in the captured vessels took their own lives before their submarines were brought to the surface. They were cremated at the Eastern Suburbs Crematorium on 9 June 1942, and Prime Minister John Curtin allowed the Japanese ambassador to Australia, Tatsuo Kawai, to take the ashes back to Japan – a rare act of grace in a very ugly time.

Australia, always fearful of ‘the yellow peril’, had long had a prickly relationship with Japan. As early as the 1930s some Australians had warned of a potential Japanese invasion. The military had evidence of Japanese spies, one of whom was known as Jiro. He arrived in Australia in 1916 and took over an uncle’s business in Townsville, which he expanded to Sydney and Brisbane and eventually transformed into one of the largest trading companies in Australia. According to historian Dr Pam Oliver, Jiro lived a high life of gambling and womanising. In 1933 he was observed photographing ports and roads and sending the photographs to Japan in hollowed-out golf clubs. The contents of containers carried by his shipping company sometimes mysteriously disappeared.

Jiro was connected to a man called Dino, who came to Australia at age 14 and started a laundry. One of the laundry’s clients was the Japanese embassy. Dino’s business gave him unfettered access to the whole of Sydney, and he was known to drive Japanese intelligence agents around Sydney, Newcastle and the Blue Mountains. Dino and his wife were active parts of a spy network that included Japanese newspapers, trading companies and captains of merchant ships.

A year before the attack on Pearl Harbor, Major Sei Hashida was granted a two-month permit by the British embassy in Tokyo to visit Australia. Unknown to the British, he was a Japanese intelligence agent. Hashida recorded details of troop strengths and facilities and obtained detailed military maps and photographs of the coastline.

But it’s unlikely Japan planned to invade Australia. The Imperial navy was initially for it, but the Japanese Army’s plans only ever went as far as Timor and New Guinea. Australia needed to be neutralised only as an American base.

By mid-February 1942 the Japanese had captured Ambon, Borneo and Celebes (Sulawesi). Landings on Timor were scheduled for 20 February, and an invasion of Java was planned to take place shortly afterwards. To protect these initiatives, the Japanese military command wanted to deliver a knockout blow to Darwin.

At 9.58 on the morning of 19 February 1942, 188 planes – fighters, dive-bombers, and 81 torpedo bombers – led by Captain Mitsuo Fuchida, who had also commanded the first wave of attackers during the raid on Pearl Harbor, attacked Darwin. In 40 minutes the Japanese sank three warships and five merchant vessels and damaged another 10 ships, with the loss of three aircraft. At midday, 54 bombers attacked RAAF Base Darwin, destroying or damaging about a dozen planes. Later that afternoon dive-bombers returned and sank two American ships, Florence D and Don Isidro.

Inadequate radar allowed the enemy maximum surprise and terror, and Darwin was completely unprepared for the attack. In all, 250 people were killed in the raids. Civil order collapsed immediately as half of the town’s civilian population fled inland. There was widespread looting, including by Australian troops.

Over 18 months the Japanese navy attacked 22 ships in Australian waters, killing 621 seamen. Northern Australia endured more than 100 air raids all across the Top End. The Japanese attacks, coming as close as Sydney Harbour, brought a new resolution to the war effort. As Mrs Jones of Sydney’s Surry Hills said after the midget-sub affair, ‘If London can take it, Surry Hills can take it!’

57

1942
A road sign to Tobruk
The Rats’ nest

This sign was souvenired by Lieutenant Colonel A R Allen at Red Flag Corner, about 400 metres west of Tobruk. It is blue and white enamel with inset glass beads, which acted as reflectors. The word Tobruk is made up of individually attached metal letters, each with a number of glass-reflecting beads. Two letters are missing.

The sign embodies the violence of the Africa campaign in World War II. At Tobruk (in modern-day Libya) the German forces received their first setback of the war – at the hands of Australians.

Italy declared war on France and Britain on 10 June 1940. Within days, skirmishes erupted on the border of the Italian colony of Cyrenaica (Libya) and Egypt. The British and Australians took the port of Tobruk on 22 January 1941. The Allies pushed further west, destroying the Italian army until Nazi general Erwin Rommel and his Afrika Corps arrived in Tunisia and counterattacked. If Tobruk fell, Rommel’s path would be clear to Cairo, and from there to the Suez Canal and the Arabian oilfields.

By 11 April, the Allies – mostly the newly formed Australian 9th Division – were pinned down in Tobruk. According to Sergeant Max Thow, ‘We just lived in holes in the ground and it was filthy sand. We had sand in our mouths, we had sand in our food, we had sand in our clothes.’

Rommel launched the Battle of the Salient in April–May but was unable to dislodge Lieutenant General Leslie Morshead and the Allies in Tobruk. This was the first major setback for Rommel’s Panzer division. The two sides settled into a long siege. During the ensuing weeks Nazi radio broadcaster ‘Lord Haw Haw’ dubbed the resisters ‘the Rats of Tobruk’. Rather than allowing this epithet to corrode morale, the Australians wore it as a badge of courage.

For almost nine months the garrison at Tobruk fought back and forth. In the stalemate the Australians dug themselves into defensive tunnels, wearing the ‘Rats’ nickname. Australian casualties numbered 749 killed, 1996 wounded and 604 prisoners.

The Allied Eighth Army lifted the siege on 7 December with an offensive that pushed Rommel back further west. However, in January Rommel regathered his strength and drove east across North Africa right through Libya and across the Egyptian border. He was within striking distance of Cairo when, on 30 June 1942, he came to El Alamein.

El Alamein is a train-station town on the Egyptian coast, approximately 95 kilometres west of Alexandria. It stands at the northern end of a 65-kilometre-wide bottleneck between the sea and the impassable Qattara Depression. Anticipating the war before its outbreak, the British had already established defensive positions in the El Alamein line. It was here that they were to make the stand. Another stalemate produced thousands of casualties on both sides.

English general Bernard Montgomery started a massive artillery bombardment of the Axis’s northern line that was followed by an advance by four infantry divisions, including the Australian 9th. The German and Italian forces were caught completely off guard and the Allies made ground until the depth of the Axis defences thwarted them.

The two sides ground each other to another standstill on the edge of the Sahara Desert, where they were beset by flies, sand, heat and the stench of bodies bloating under the unforgiving sun. The Anzacs continued to gnaw away at the enemy lines, corroding their defences and forcing the enemy to move more material and support away from its southern flank.

Between 23 October and 5 November the Australians experienced their most ferocious fighting of the war. On 2 November, Montgomery attacked the enemy’s southern flank with his tanks and broke through. Rommel, his supply lines stretched and short of fuel and with an exhausted army, saw that the game was up. He asked Hitler for permission to withdraw but was denied. Finally, on 4 November, he was allowed to retreat and raced westward. Pursued by the Allies, Rommel and his Afrika Corps were driven from Africa.

The final Battle for El Alamein was the first major Allied victory of World War II and the beginning of the end for the Axis powers. The cost was enormous: the Australian 9th Division lost 1200 men and another 1944 were wounded, the Eighth Army suffered 13 560 casualties, and the Axis lost 90 000.

A quarter of a century after the battle, Montgomery visited the El Alamein cemetery and said, ‘The more I think back, the more I realise that winning was only made possible by the bravery of the Australian 9th Division in holding the road against counter-attacks and slowly pushing forward despite increasing casualties. I do not know of any [other] Allied Division who could have done it.’

58

1943
Weary Dunlop’s medical instruments
Life on the Death Railway

A Dr H von Recklinghausen sphygmomanometer in a bakelite case, used for measuring blood pressure, was one of the few instruments Captain Edward ‘Weary’ Dunlop had at his disposal to treat hundreds of men who lived at death’s door on the Burma Railway during World War II.

Twenty-two thousand Australians, mostly from Singapore and Java, were taken prisoner by the Japanese. More than a third of these prisoners of war died, accounting for about 20 per cent of all Australian deaths in World War II. Dunlop was one of 44 POW doctors assigned to the Thai–Burma Railway, one of the most vicious areas in South-East Asia at the time.

‘Weary would send people out into the jungle to trade with the Chinese and Thai traders,’ recalled ex-POW Tom Uren.

They’d get drugs and food for our sick and our needy. In our camp it was the strong looked out for the weak, the young looking after the not so young, and the fitter looking after the sick. This was the collective spirit. Now that’s saying something, but really this collective spirit under Weary, and I’ll never forget it.

In 1942, the Japanese began work on the Thailand–Burma Railway – also known as the Death Railway – running 415 kilometres between Ban Pong, Thailand, and Thanbyuzayat, Burma. Clearing rainforest, blasting through land and creating tunnels took roughly a year. Of 9500 Australian POWs, 2646 died. A third of that number were killed by disease, especially diarrhoea and dysentery. Sixty-nine of them were beaten to death by Japanese guards.

‘The treatment of the POWs working on the railway line was absolutely horrendous,’ recalled former prisoner Bert Beecham. Not only in the way they were treated, the way they were fed, the way they were beaten, the way they were abused, the way they had no clothing. Some of ’em were working in bare feet and a piece of rag tied ’round their waist . . . The food was disgusting if you got it at all, sometimes twice a day, at one stage there we got it once a day and people were dying like flies. We had cholera, we had malaria, we had dysentery, we had scrub typhus, we had beri-beri.

The most notorious section of the railway was known as Hellfire Pass: ‘The monsoons just lashed, and it rained for something like 140 days,’ recalled Bill Haskell. ‘Which is bad enough in themselves, but they were plagued with every tropical disease you could think of, and they were starved, and that’s not the finish of it – they had taskmasters who stood over them and belted them and hit them.’

Life in the camps was barely subsistence. The food was generally contaminated, and insufficient for the men. Tropical ulcers ate into the men’s limbs, exposing flesh right down to the bone. With insufficient medicine or bandages, the optimum solution was to dangle the infected limb in the river and have fish eat the dead skin.

Weary Dunlop, standing over 180 cm tall, was the most prominent of the doctors in the jungle. He earned his nickname by virtue of his surname – Dunlop tyres leads to Weary Dunlop. He faced execution for standing up to the Japanese on more than one occasion, and suffered numerous beatings. One patient recalls Dunlop being beaten by a Japanese officer while talking with a patient at the same time and never flinching.

Weary’s skill as a doctor saved many lives, and his ability as an administrator kept down the fatalities caused by malaria, dysentery and cholera. He was very resourceful in illicitly buying medical supplies and manufacturing makeshift equipment.

Although Dunlop had seen humanity at its worst, after the war he was the leading advocate for reconciliation with the Japanese. His compassion and generosity made him a national hero.

59

1943
A Japanese flag from the Kokoda Track
The darkest hour

This rectangular-shaped Japanese flag with centrally printed hinomaru (rising sun) was brought back from New Guinea by Private Kelvin King. There are many handwritten notes on it, ranging from wishes of good luck to patriotic slogans. Along the top is written ‘Good fortune & good luck in war’.

There was no luck for anyone on the Kokoda Track. Fortunately Private King came home.

Within six months of the attack on Pearl Harbor the Japanese had reached New Guinea, which was then Australian territory. It was Australia’s darkest hour. Australia’s best troops were in Europe. Australia was in the hands of the CMF – the citizens’ militia. The CMF were conscripts, some picked up off the streets of Sydney and Melbourne, who were never intended to serve outside Australia. They had little military training and were referred to as ‘chocolate soldiers’ or ‘chocos’.

The Japanese goal was Port Moresby. The army was to march across the Owen Stanley mountain range, for which the only path is the Kokoda Track. It starts at the village of Wairopi in the north and runs for 96 kilometres of single-file pathway to Owers Corner, 40 kilometres north-east of Port Moresby. Kokoda is a village on the southern side of the mountains that has the only airfield between Port Moresby and the north coast.

This is some of the most difficult landscape on earth – treacherous jungle rainforest with steep mountains. The track reaches 2250 metres at Mount Bellamy, and the weather combines hot humid days with intensely cold nights, and torrential rainfall all afternoon and into the evening. The jungle is so dense that in places visibility is reduced to a few metres. Most of the time the track is just mud. It winds up steep hills and then plummets on the other side. Malaria and other tropical diseases are endemic in the area.

The Japanese South Seas Detachment landed at Gona on the north coast on 21 July 1942 and two days later met a combined Australian and Papuan defence. This was to be a baptism of fire for the CMF.

At Awala, 40 kilometres north of Kokoda, the Australians met the full force of the Japanese Army that had just laid waste to Asia. The Australians put up resistance but staged a fighting withdrawal back through the jungle. And so it went through the mud and the rain, the lack of supplies, and the days that, because of the canopy, were dark at noon, up slopes of 60 and 70 degrees and then down the other side, the soldiers’ shoes caked in mud and their socks rotting on their feet.

At Isurava, after six days of intense fighting, the Australians again fell back. Kokoda and its airfield were lost, and with them any chance of air support.

Over at Milne Bay, on the south-eastern tip of Papua, a combined force of Americans and Australians defeated the Japanese. It was the first time the Japanese had suffered a defeat since Pearl Harbor, nine months before.

Meanwhile, back in Kokoda, jungle fighting continued. By 17 September, the Japanese held the ridge at Ioribaiwa. From there they could see the lights of Moresby. Japanese major general Tomitaro Horii’s strategy was to make a dash for the town, where he would be able to resupply and rest his exhausted troops.

The sheer level of difficulty involved in surviving the New Guinea jungle was never really understood by senior staff at headquarters on the mainland. American supreme commander Douglas MacArthur accused the Australians of being incompetent and cowardly, and Australian commander Sir Thomas Blamey agreed. Macarthur and Prime Minister John Curtin dispatched Blamey to New Guinea to take charge. On 22 October, he addressed the men of the 21st Brigade on a parade ground. They expected praise for their courage and creativity but instead, Blamey berated them for their defeats and called them cowards by saying, ‘Remember, it’s the rabbit who runs who gets shot, not the man holding the gun.’ Blamey was lucky to escape with his life. Rarely has an officer in the Australian Army been so loathed.

Ioribaiwa was to be the final point on the Imperial Japanese expansion. Major General Horii received orders that he should withdraw to the north coast. His soldiers were at the point of collapse, suffering from malaria, typhoid and dysentery. They were eating wood, grass, roots and other inedible material. In some cases, the soldiers engaged in cannibalism.

The Australians launched a counter-offensive. At Templeton’s Crossing it took more than a week of hard and costly fighting to push back the enemy. Finally, Kokoda was retaken.

Two days later, the Japanese dug in to make a final stand at Oivi and Gorari, where the fighting was hand-to-hand. They retreated across the Kumusi River and Horii took a boat down the river to prepare for the assault on the coast. The boat was taken by a freak tide and swept into the ocean, and Horii drowned.

In New Guinea between 22 July and 16 November 1942,625 Australian soldiers were killed and 1055 were wounded in battle. Three times that number were killed or injured on the track by disease. Of the 13 500 Japanese troops who began the campaign, only 5000 survived.

The Japanese fell back to the ports of Buna, Gona and Sanananda. There, with their backs to the sea, it took a month for the Allies to cut them off. Some of the most savage incidents of the war occurred on this waterlogged territory. By 2 January 1943, the Japanese were finally turned back from New Guinea for good, and the tide of the Pacific War had turned.

‘We liked the lesson about supposedly ordinary people; we liked finding that they were not ordinary at all,’ former prime minister Paul Keating said of the Kokoda campaign. ‘Despite the fact that the military campaigns were shockingly flawed and incompetently executed, those ordinary people distinguished themselves by their latent nobility.’

For Australians, Kokoda felt like we had finally defended our soil with our blood. At Isurava there is a grey stone monument that reads: ‘Courage / Endurance / Mateship / Sacrifice’.

60

1945
Ben Chifley’s pipe
After the war

Ben Chifley’s smoking pipe, with its hexagonal bowl carved from dark wood, and black detachable mouthpiece, was his talisman. The sight of the salt-of-the-earth treasurer and then prime minister was a comfort to a nation first at war and then faced with the difficulties of postwar reconstruction.

When John Curtin died in July 1945, it fell to Chifley to finish the war and start the peace. The Australian Labor Party imposed austerity fairly across the whole of society, and introduced a socialist program of widows’ pensions, maternity allowances, and unemployment and sickness benefits while managing the cost of the war.

In 1946 the ALP was re-elected, and Chifley continued his plans for postwar reconstruction. The government established a civilian rehabilitation service, founded the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, introduced Commonwealth scholarships and established the Australian National University. Chifley pushed for General Motors to set up manufacturing Holden cars; he watched the first one roll off the line at Fishermans Bend in Victoria. The Pharmaceutical Benefits Act of 1947 established what is now known as the PBS system, which regulates the cost of drugs. The Snowy Mountains Scheme was started, and immigration was opened up. Trans Australia Airlines was established as a state-owned airline to compete with private carriers.

Chifley’s great achievement was to establish the basis of a mixed economy where there was a sense of the public good – of social justice within a flexible marketplace. Reform was such a priority for his government that in just four years of office it passed 299 Acts.

The prime minister’s intention of nationalising private banks lost him support. In response, the financial corporations mobilised against the ALP and Chifley. All the bipartisan goodwill he had built through the war was lost. In the end, the High Court and the Privy Council knocked down his Banking Act of 1947. Then, in 1949, militant coalminers went on strike, and an exasperated Chifley sent in the army to break the strike. That a Labor prime minister would do this sent a shock through the community and sounded the death knell for Chifley’s government. They lost the 1949 election to Robert Menzies’ Liberal Party.

Like Curtin, Chifley wasn’t interested in airs and graces or frippery. As prime minister he declined to live at The Lodge, preferring the Hotel Kurrajong. He preferred walking to using Commonwealth cars and was generally as frugal as he expected the nation to be.

Chifley died on the night Prime Minister Menzies hosted a state ball. Menzies announced the sad news, saying, ‘It is my very sorrowful duty during this celebration tonight to tell you that Mr Chifley has died. I don’t want to try to talk about him now because, although we were political opponents, he was a friend of mine and yours, and a fine Australian.’

It was Chifley who, in 1949, gave the ALP its mission statement when he said:

I try to think of the Labor movement, not as putting an extra sixpence into somebody’s pocket, or making somebody prime minister or premier, but as a movement bringing something better to the people, better standards of living, greater happiness to the mass of the people. We have a great objective – the light on the hill – which we aim to reach by working for the betterment of mankind not only here but anywhere we may give a helping hand. If it were not for that, the Labor movement would not be worth fighting for.

If the movement can make someone more comfortable, give to some father or mother a greater feeling of security for their children, a feeling that if a depression comes there will be work, that the government is striving its hardest to do its best, then the Labor movement will be completely justified.

61

1947
A ten-pound Pom’s suitcase
The British are coming

On 31 March 1947, 23 314 British immigrants arrived in Australia as the first group of ten-pound Poms. To qualify they were required to be British subjects under 45 years of age, in good health and committed to stay for two years. This assisted-passage scheme devised by the Chifley government was intended to boost Australia’s population to enable it to resist an invasion, as faced during World War II, and to build a manufacturing base to meet its economic targets. To this end it offered a voyage to Australia in which adults paid only £10 towards their fare and, after 1960, children travelled free of charge.

Although the scheme commenced in 1947, numbers didn’t peak until the 1960s. Between 1961 and 1971, Australia experienced the largest intake of British immigrants in its history: the English-born population rose by 286 000, the Scottish by 27 000 and the Irish and Welsh by 20 000. The scheme was starting to wind down in 1972 and was closed ten years later.

The policy, while racist, was sensibly executed. Importing members of the same language group and political heritage did reduce cultural dislocation, and the immigrants and their families made massive contributions to Australian life. Prime ministers Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott both arrived in Australia on assisted passage, as did the Gibb brothers (the Bee Gees), Hugh Jackman, and the Young family (of AC/DC and Easybeats fame).

South Australia and other parts of the country were transformed by the arrival of the British immigrants. Towns such as Elizabeth on the edge of Adelaide were built especially to house the Brits who came to work in manufacturing businesses. This influx of skilled workers was a great boon to an economy that was growing rapidly through the long boom of the 1960s.

But many of the immigration schemes had dark consequences. There were over 30 group homes approved by the Commonwealth for the housing of child migrants. Most were run by voluntary and religious organisations, with the government contributing towards running costs. Promised ‘oranges and sunshine’, most of the migrant children were sent to the group homes and were treated as slaves for the relevant organisation, which included Barnardo’s, the Salvation Army, the Fairbridge Society, the National Children’s Home, and the Catholic and Anglican churches. Many of the children were physically and sexually abused by other children and by their carers. Many of these children were not orphans. Some of them were the product of teenage pregnancies; others were in temporary care. Once in the system, the children’s names and personal details were changed and their birth records destroyed, so they were robbed of their identity and the opportunity to find their parents later in life.

Margaret Humphreys, the British social worker who first uncovered the Home Children scandal and subsequently established the Child Migrants Trust, said, ‘This was a group of people who had everything taken from them – their families, their country, their identity, their communities, their extended family, their schools, their little networks. Everything had gone. What they did was eradicate their identities by dates of birth being changed or incorrect or by names being changed or incorrect, so I think that was to take away the child’s sense of self and identity.’

The Australian government made an official apology in 2009 and the British government followed suit, but the matter is far from settled.

62

1948
Holden Prototype No. 1
Australia’s car

Prototype No. 1 on show in the National Museum of Australia is one of three prototypes that were handmade in Detroit at General Motors headquarters. Legend has it that these three cars were driven under cover of darkness to the Fishermans Bend factory in Melbourne. Registered as JP-480, Prototype No. 1 was tested on a circuit east of Melbourne specifically designed to replicate Australian driving conditions.

The car was eventually sold to Holden foreman Arthur Ling. It was later traded to a Holden dealership in Morwell, Victoria, where it rotted until Holden enthusiasts Gavin and Graeme Strongman discovered the vehicle and restored it to its original glory.

The first Australian-made Holden hit the road on 29 November 1948. The 48-215, universally known as the FX, was an idea whose time had come – to the point where there were customer orders, sight unseen, for 18 000 cars.

Success has many fathers, but chief among Holden’s must be Laurence Hartnett (1898–1986), managing director of General Motors-Holden’s Ltd. Born in England, Hartnett had been involved in the automobile business in the Far East and Europe before coming to Australia, where his maverick streak settled in well with the local larrikinism.

Hartnett was determined to create a car for Australia’s unique environment. The American automobile corporation General Motors had been active in Australia for many years and, during the Depression, had acquired Holden’s Motor Body Builders Ltd, the company that did most of its vehicle assembly. Edward Holden was the chairman of the local company, although by the time the car that bears his name first appeared on Australian roads, he had died.

Both General Motors-Holden’s and Ford lobbied the Australian government for support to manufacture an Australian car. In the end, the GMH proposal was green-lit by the Chifley Labor government, in large part because it required less government investment. Hartnett commissioned Australian designers to develop the car. He was overruled, however, by headquarters in Detroit, which insisted on a previously rejected 1938 Chevrolet design. By the time the first Holden was built at Fishermans Bend in Melbourne, Hartnett had left the company after numerous disputes.

American and Australian engineers hand-built the three prototypes. There were no direction indicators and no provision for heating or demisting, and at the rear there was only a single, centrally positioned tail lamp.

The car was marketed simply as the ‘Holden’, without a model name. It had a 132.5-cubic-inch (2171 cc) cast-iron straight-six engine that produced 60 hp (45 kW), connected to a three-speed manual transmission.

The Holden was a vivid manifestation of Australian dreams of prosperity, which had been made more intense by years of wartime austerity. More than just a car, the early Holdens were complex symbols of freedom. The Holden 48-215 or FX was manufactured from November 1948 until October 1953, when it was replaced by the FJ.

63

1949
Lord Warden of Cinque Ports uniform as worn by Robert Menzies
Ming the Magnificent

Sir Robert Menzies was appointed Lord Warden of Cinque Ports in 1966, a post that came with this uniform. He succeeded Winston Churchill to the illustrious post, which dates back to the 13th century, and was followed by the Queen Mother. This arch-monarchist was the last Australian prime minister or politician to retire to the House of Lords.

Sir Robert Gordon Menzies, who was known as Ming (from Mingis, the Scottish pronunciation of Menzies), shaped modern Australia more than any other individual. He was the longest-serving prime minister to date, at 18 years in office, and created the Liberal Party, but more than anything else he personified a view that Australians had of themselves. He was for the British Empire and the British way of life, but also had great faith in Australia.

Menzies was born the son of a shopkeeper in rural Victoria. He was well read and a natural scholar who took easily to the law and had strong success early on with industrial cases. He was drawn into Victorian state politics through the 1920s and in 1934 stood for the seat of Kooyong for the United Australia Party in the federal parliament.

His obvious intellect and the sense of superiority that he radiated made him a polarising figure. He was attorney-general to Prime Minister Joe Lyons but aspired to the leadership. Both Country Party leader Earle Page and Lyons’ wife, Dame Enid, blamed Menzies for plotting against Lyons and hastening his illness and death. In any case, he succeeded Lyons. The outbreak of war in September 1939 set the agenda for his administration. Then, in 1941, Menzies was forced to the sidelines and Australian Labor Party’s John Curtin became prime minister. Menzies put these years of the war and his political wilderness to good use, rebuilding the UAP and rebranding it as the Liberal Party. The new organisation was ‘liberal’ and very much in the image of Menzies. He won the 1949 election.

One of Menzies’ great crusades was against socialism and communism. The ALP’s decision to nationalise the banks gave him an issue about which he was passionate. The Cold War was another. He spearheaded a campaign to have the Communist Party outlawed, taking the proposal twice to the people – once at a referendum – but his bill was struck down by the High Court. Fortunately for him the ALP was split by unions on the left and right on the issue of communism, the ALP leader, H V ‘Doc’ Evatt, went publicly insane and Catholic Labor members split from the party.

Although Menzies was anti-communist, he was by no means convinced of the virtues of an unfettered free market. In a speech in 1942 he stated:

The country has great and imperative obligations to the weak, the sick, the unfortunate. It must give them all the sustenance and support it can. We look forward to social and unemployment insurances, to improved health services, to a wiser control of our economy to avert if possible all booms and slumps which tend to convert labour into a commodity, to a better distribution of wealth, and to a keener sense of social justice and social responsibility.

Menzies was not universally liked and a couple of times came close to losing power, but essentially he was able to control the nation’s destiny through the 1950s and early 1960s. He was fortunate that he came to power at the beginning of the long boom: commodity prices, especially for wool, were high, and great government initiatives – large-scale immigration, the Snowy Mountains Scheme, the establishment of a manufacturing sector – pushed Australian prosperity to unknown levels.

In a speech relatively early in his career Menzies identified his constituency as ‘the Forgotten People’ – ‘salary earners, shopkeepers, skilled artisans, professional men and women, farmers and so on’ as the ‘ordinary’ middle class, ‘the backbone of the nation’. He understood middle-class values, especially in terms of fairness, social responsibility and respectability, and to a large extent delivered the government that middle-class people wanted. Menzies’ longevity as prime minister became a symbol of national stability. He was a man who had considerable wit and a great love of life and communicated these qualities as part of his persona.

Menzies’ proudest achievement was federal government involvement in education, and especially his expansion of the university sector. For all of that, he was not geared to innovation. He was happy to stay within the Empire and didn’t promote innovation in the economy or in the social and cultural spheres. He was known for his passion for cricket and the monarchy.

After 16 continuous years as PM, Menzies retired in January 1966. He was the last prime minister to set the date of his own departure. Appropriately, he succeeded Winston Churchill as Constable of Dover Castle and Lord Warden of Cinque Ports. He was the last prime minister to retire into a peerage – and that too was entirely appropriate.

64

1951
A bottle of Grange Hermitage
Plonk

The 1951 Grange Hermitage was the first vintage created by winemaker Max Schubert, and it is now the most prized wine in Australia. The following year’s Grange proved the long-term viability of premium wine in Australia. ‘A concoction of wild fruits and sundry berries with crushed ants predominating’ was, according to Schubert, one of the first reviews of the wine.

The first vines arrived in Australia with the First Fleet but, like other efforts in early agriculture, the results of the plantings were underwhelming. Blue Mountains explorer Gregory Blaxland had developed a vineyard in the Sydney region by the early 1820s and was exporting to Europe, but the wine was ordinary. The climate elsewhere in the country, especially the Hunter Valley and the Adelaide Hills, was more favourable. Most regions, from the Hunter Valley through the Riverina, Victoria, Tasmania and as far west as Margaret River in Western Australia, had some success with vineyards. Medicos such as Dr Henry Lindeman and Dr Christopher Rawson Penfold were initially interested in wine as a medicine.

The family names of Brown Brothers, Henschke, McWilliam, Tyrrell, Hill-Smith and Seppelt, to name a few, are now all associated with wine from the early days of the Australian industry, and are still found on the labels of contemporary bottles. The family association gives a sense of the scale of the Australian industry in its first century.

By and large, the early Australian product was fortified wines such as port and sweet sherry. As late as 1965, Australians averaged roughly five bottles of wine per head per annum, only one of which was table wine. The standard refreshments were beer and spirits.

Things began to change in the 1950s. A wave of immigration from Mediterranean countries broadened Australian eating habits, especially with the cheap Italian and Greek eateries that were established in the major cities. Most Australians in the 1950s would have looked disdainfully at local wine, preferring French. However, technical innovation and the creativity of Australian winemakers in that decade transformed the quality of local wine, and it quickly grew in popularity.

In 1956 Colin Gramp at Orlando launched the sparking white wine Barossa Pearl, based on a German style known as Perlwein. This faux champagne was an instant hit, especially with women, and it was soon followed by similar sweet and sparkling wines with exotic names such as Sparkling Rhinegold, Starwine, Gala Spumante and Porphyry Pearl.

But the big bang in Australian wine had occurred five years earlier, in 1951, when Max Schubert made his first vintage of Grange Hermitage. The country just didn’t know it yet.

Schubert came, as did many immigrant families in the district, from Silesian stock. He joined Penfolds in 1931 as a roustabout and, aside from war service, worked there for his entire career. By 1948, he had been promoted to production manager at Magill Winery and two years later went to Europe on a study tour – ironically, to study sherry. He was seduced by Bordeaux reds and resolved to create an Australian wine of similar quality that would age over decades.

‘It was during my initial visit to the major winegrowing areas of Europe in 1950 that the idea of producing an Australian red wine capable of staying alive for a minimum of 20 years and comparable with those produced in Bordeaux first entered my mind,’ said Schubert. ‘I was fortunate to be taken under the wing of Monsieur Christian Cruse . . . and he afforded me . . . the rare opportunity of tasting and evaluating Bordeaux wines between 40 and 50 years old which were still sound and possessed magnificent bouquet and flavour.’

Returning to South Australia, Schubert was faced with a much smaller selection of grapes than that available to the French masters. Making a virtue of necessity, he chose to use only Shiraz (then also known by the French appellation of Hermitage) from two particular vineyards, one being Penfolds Grange vineyards at the Magill winery in the foothills of the Mount Lofty Ranges, outside Adelaide, and the other a vineyard south of Adelaide. Schubert, now an expert in refrigeration and the most up-to-date techniques, created his rich, ‘ruby red’ liquid.

Early opinions were not favourable. After six years, Penfolds’ head office called for a selection of each year’s output and a taste test was arranged. The verdict was catastrophic: Schubert was instructed to stop production of Grange Hermitage.

Despite this directive from head office, Schubert, with the support of assistant general manager Jeffrey Penfold Hyland, continued producing Grange. In 1960 the ban was lifted and Schubert was asked to reactivate his project. The 1955 vintage – which the vintner considered to be one of the best-ever years – was entered in the Open Claret class at the 1962 Sydney Royal Easter Show, where its sophistication astounded the judges.

That wine has now won more than 50 medals in Australia and internationally and has been noted in some international journals as one of the great wines of the 20th century. The richness and quality of Grange has consistently impressed and delighted drinkers. Schubert proved that Australian wine could have its own style and be as sophisticated as any wine in the world.

In 1990 the European Union insisted that Australian winemakers stop using European regional names for their fruit, and so the name of Schubert’s famous wine was shortened to Penfolds Grange – but its fame remains undiminished.

Now with a standard-bearer, the wine revolution took off during the 1960s. Bon vivant Len Evans became a tireless promoter of local wine both in Australia and overseas. In 1965 the wine cask, also known as a ‘bag in a box’ or ‘goon’, came to market, reflecting the rapid adoption of still wine as a popular beverage.

The rising tide of popularity raised all boats. The Independent recently reported domestic consumption as 36 bottles per head per year. The United Kingdom drinks more Australian wine than it does French.

Although it started out reasonably priced, Grange is now beyond the reach of most Australians: a bottle of the 1951 vintage will set you back around $50 000. But its influence is felt all the way down to the lowly cleanskin.

65

1952
A Cimbali espresso machine
Italian Australians

This Cimbali espresso machine is typical of the machines that infiltrated Melbourne after World War II, with the emergence of Italian migrants and cafe culture. These machines became a symbol of the mechanical age and the exotic tastes and cultures coming out of the non-English-speaking world.

The first Italians to glimpse Australia were on the deck of the Endeavour in 1770. Antonio Ponto was a professional sailor born in Venice, while midshipman James (Giaconda) Matra was an American of Corsican descent who grew close to Joseph Banks. Matra was partly responsible for the British government establishing a convict colony in the new land – it was his suggestion. He testified to a House of Commons committee inquiring into the resumption of transportation in May 1785. The Sydney suburb of Matraville is named in his honour. Less honourable was Giuseppe Tusa, a Sicilian thief deported from England on the First Fleet who became a prosperous farmer.

A hundred years of political upheaval in Italy from the middle of the 19th century was a strong driver of the Italian diaspora. Italians gradually settled in Australian cities and made important contributions to their cultural life. Significant Italian communities grew up in Carlton in Melbourne and in Darlinghurst and Leichhardt in Sydney. In 1879, 50 Italian firms were represented at the Great International Exhibition in Sydney, presenting marble statuary, mosaics, wine, liqueurs, preserved fruit and olive oil.

The introduction of the White Australia policy at the turn of the 20th century created a demand for European workers. The cane fields of Queensland were hungry for workers, and significant Italian communities blossomed in north Queensland around the towns of Ayr and Innisfail.

After 1945, the Australian government had a ‘populate or perish’ policy and the Labor administration was greatly in favour of importing Catholics. There’s no doubt that some Australians regarded Italians as ‘wops’, ‘wogs’ or ‘dagos’ and there was some bigotry and denigration, but it was much the same in most English-speaking societies of the time. A 1957 comic novel, They’re a Weird Mob by Nino Culotta (John O’Grady), satirised both Australia and ‘new Australians’ and was a massive bestseller.

The 1881 census, the first year of census figures for Italian migrants in all Australian states, records that there were 1880 Italians in all the colonies put together. By 1911 that figure had reached 6719, and in 1921 it was 8135. By 1933 the number had jumped to 26 756, and by 1971 the number of Italian-born people in Australia was up to 660 000.

Italians were very prominent in the food trade as farmers in the Riverina and as market gardeners around the cities, or the owners of retail outlets. The Italian influence profoundly changed Australian food culture, introducing pasta, garlic and other Italian staples that were virtually unheard of prior to the war. The drinking of wine with meals and the appreciation of a cuisine that was neither English nor Cantonese are almost entirely down to the Italians.

Nothing exemplifies the influence of the Italians in Australia more than espresso coffee. From the 1950s, cafes dominated the inner-city bohemia. Italian-style trattorias and cafes have so dominated Australian cities that Australian espresso is now, on average, better than that in Italy – and a Cimbali can still be found in many Australian establishments.

66

1952
Rock shovel bucket
The nation’s prosperity

This rock shovel bucket was used at Mount Tom Price, 1500 kilometres north of Perth, attached to a hydraulic mining excavator. It is nearly 3 metres high and, being made of solid steel, weighs 15.2 tonnes. Iron ore deposits were discovered in the area in 1952. Mount Tom Price, owned by Rio Tinto, was the first major mine opened in the Pilbara. Today, buckets three times the capacity of this one are used at Tom Price.

The Hamersley Range contains 80 per cent of all identified iron ore reserves in Australia and is one of the world’s major iron ore provinces. Western Australia has 22 per cent of the world’s known iron ore deposits. The sheer size of the deposits is staggering: tens of million of tonnes of ore are being shipped out of ports almost as fast as they can be blasted out of the ground. The rapid growth rates that have been seen as Asian economies industrialise have created a once-in-a-century demand for resources like iron ore.

Francis Gregory, who travelled though the Pilbara in 1861, observed the obvious iron ore deposits in the red landscape. In 1876 William Rudell named the highest mountain in the Ophthalmia Range Mount Newman in honour of his fellow explorer Aubrey Woodward Newman, who died on a trek through the West Australian desert regions.

Harry Page Woodward, Western Australian government geologist from 1887 to 1895, had already noted: ‘This is essentially an iron country, for one cannot travel a mile in the parts where the older rocks appear at the surface, without encountering a lode.’ Woodward also noted that the absence of people for labour was the sticking point for the exploitation of these lands.

Lang Hancock’s family arrived in Western Australia aboard the Warrior in 1830 and established pastoral businesses in Roebourne, then Woodbrook Station and Mulga Downs Station. Hancock was always interested in prospecting, and the discovery of a large deposit of asbestos at Wittenoom led to his first big mining enterprise. From the start, he partnered with his schoolfriend Peter Wright. In 1952 they discovered massive iron ore deposits.

Fearing that the resource was scarce, the Australian government banned the export of iron ore in the 1930s. Without the prospect of overseas markets, the mountains of ore were worthless. Wright and Hancock worked on lifting the embargo before they could announce their discoveries. In 1956 Stan Hilditch realised that Mount Whaleback near Newman was a massive deposit of iron ore, and he too had to sit on the knowledge.

In 1960 the export ban was lifted and the floodgates opened. Hancock and Wright with Rio Tinto developed the Hope Downs iron ore lease. Rio Tinto had Tom Price, and BHP and Mount Newman Mining turned Mount Whaleback into the biggest single-pit open-cut iron ore mine in the world. The Mount Whaleback mine will eventually reach a depth of 350 metres below the current ground level. Today the area of Western Australia being mined for ore is the size of Peru.

In recent years miners such as Gina Rinehart, Clive Palmer and Andrew Forrest of the Fortescue Metals Group have taken a very active role in public life and a direct role in national politics. Mining will no doubt boost the national economy, but its effects will be even more far-reaching over the 21st century.

67

1954
Evdokia Petrov’s shoe
Reds under the bed

Evdokia Petrov’s shoe is brandished by a member of the public as the crowd attempts to save her from the KGB agents dragging her on to their plane.

On 13 April 1954, Prime Minister Robert Menzies announced the defection of Vladimir Petrov, a third secretary at the Soviet embassy in Canberra. Menzies, behind in the polls, then announced a royal commission to investigate Soviet espionage in Australia, and called an election.

There was good reason to fear the expansion of communism. In Australia, communists controlled the most militant trade unions. However, as real as the Cold War was, conservative politicians amped up community fears that a fifth column of communist agents lay dormant in the suburbs, waiting for their moment to strike.

Vladimir Petrov’s defection on 3 April 1954 – conveniently, moments before an election was due to be called – appeared to Dr H V Evatt, leader of the Australian Labor Party, as a stunt. The ALP won a majority vote at the 1954 poll but was seven seats short of victory.

Back at The Lodge, Menzies announced a royal commission into the so-called Petrov affair and into communist infiltration of the Australian government. Petrov appeared to be a low-level embassy employee whom Menzies tricked up into a counterintelligence coup. In fact, Vladimir and his wife, Evdokia, were experienced spies who had arrived in Australia in 1951 after having spent their entire careers inside the Soviet state security system. He was a lieutenant colonel and she a captain.

Vladimir’s taste for sex workers made him susceptible to grooming by Australian agents. Meanwhile, the political winds within the always-treacherous MVD (the forerunner of the KGB) turned against the couple. Vladimir faced recall to Moscow and life in a gulag – or execution. His decision to defect was a simple one for him. So, on 3 April 1954, he came in from the cold without telling Evdokia.

On 19 April, Evdokia and two security agents left the embassy for the long journey. A mob had gathered at Kingsford Smith (Mascot) Airport in Sydney and broke through the cordon, rushed on to the tarmac and tried to grab Evdokia from her minders. In the melee, she lost one of her red shoes.

On the plane, flight attendant Joyce Bull gave Evdokia a pair of shoes to replace those she had been wearing at Mascot. While the plane made its slow progress across Australia, Menzies and the Australian Security Intelligence Association tried to determine via the pilot whether she really wanted to defect. Given that her likely fate was execution, she did.

The Australians then crafted a plan to create a distraction when the plane touched down in Darwin for refuelling. Australian security agents manoeuvred themselves into a position close enough to the prisoner to ask if she wanted asylum in Australia. She said she did and it was immediately granted. The Russians left Australia empty-handed.

The Petrovs had extensive knowledge of Soviet codes, organisations, structures and techniques and the identities of several hundred agents around the world, including six Australian spies. They confirmed that all the consular staff at the Russian embassy in London were members of the MVD, and had information about the defection of British double agents Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean.

Vladimir and Evdokia moved to the suburbs as Sven and Maria Anna Allyson of Bentleigh, Melbourne. They found low-level jobs and remained unhappily married. Vladimir lived in fear that he would be assassinated and drank excessively until his death in 1991. Evdokia worried that her family in Russia would be punished; her father did lose his job but she was eventually able to correspond with her mother and sister Tamara Alekseyevna Kartseva, who migrated to Australia in 1990. Evdokia died in 2002.

68

1955
A Paula Stafford bikini
Itsy bitsy beginning for Australian fashion

This bikini was designed by Paula Stafford, a leading Australian swimsuit designer from the 1950s through to the 1980s. It is made of navy and white cotton and is reversible – a design feature for which Stafford bikinis were well known.

Government regulations recognised that the combination of the sun, the surf and women’s skin could lead to all kinds of immorality. In 1838, bathing in Sydney’s harbour and at beaches was banned between the hours of 6 a.m. and 8 p.m. These rules were not relaxed until 1902.

World-champion swimmer Annette Kellermann understood the appeal of mixing sport, sex and vaudeville. When not undertaking a 22-mile (35 kilometres) challenge down the Danube, she appeared on stage as the ‘Australian Mermaid’ and ‘Diving Venus’ wearing swimsuits that showed to best advantage her body, judged to be that of ‘the perfect woman’. (‘From the neck down!’ she quipped.) In 1907 Kellermann was arrested on a Boston beach because authorities deemed her one-piece swimsuit too brief.

Beatrice Kerr followed in Kellermann’s footsteps, competing in swimming races and appearing in theatrical aquatic events and demonstrations. Audiences were as keen to see her in a ‘daring’ swimsuit as they were to be instructed in the finer points of the trudgen stroke.

As the 20th century progressed, swimsuits became briefer. The two-piece neck-to-knee with a long skirt over thigh-length pants was all the rage in 1910 but destined for redundancy. American company Jantzen created a one-piece woollen ‘tank suit’ for women in 1918.

In 1927, the MacRae Knitting Mills of Sydney introduced a one-piece cotton costume for men that exposed their shoulders and back like a singlet. It was considered too brief for some beaches but its streamlining gave the swimmer extra speed in the water, hence the product’s name: Speedo. At the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics, Australian swimmer Clare Dennis won gold in the 200-metre breaststroke in a Speedo suit that was said to ‘show too much shoulder’.

The next big revolution in women’s swimwear occurred in France in 1946, when haberdasher Louis Réard designed a costume that was so risqué no model would pose in it and he had to use an exotic dancer, Micheline Bernardini, to model it on 5 July 1946 at Piscine Molitor in Paris. He named it the bikini after Bikini Atoll in the Pacific where France had recently carried out nuclear testing. In his promotion he said it wasn’t a bikini unless it could be pulled through a wedding ring.

The bikini and its display of the navel were a bridge too far for many, from the Pope to Hollywood producers. It was even too much for Bondi Beach in Sydney. On the October long weekend in 1961, between 50 and 75 women were ordered off Bondi Beach, and that month, dancer and actress Joan Barry was fined £3 for wearing an offensive swimming costume on Bondi. However, by the end of the year Waverley Council raised the white flag and permitted bikinis onto the hallowed sands of Bondi. The following year Playboy magazine featured its first bikini cover, and two years after that Sports Illustrated launched its now-legendary annual swimsuit issue. Australian model Elle Macpherson made her name and career internationally as a Sports illustrated model, appearing on the cover a record four times.

In most parts of the world, beach culture is experienced only on vacation for a couple of weeks a year, but in Australia the beach is a fundamental part of the culture and a swimming costume is an essential item, not an accessory. For that reason Australians have excelled at the design and manufacture of swimwear.

Paula Stafford, who made bikinis for her shop in Surfers Paradise from the 1940s, is the Australian queen of the bikini. She claimed that the brevity of her costumes was due to wartime rationing and shortages of textiles. Her Tog Shop on Cavill Avenue in Surfers Paradise was the acme of sophistication in Australia. Stafford brought a bit of that ambience to Sydney Town Hall in 1956 with the first bikini parade. Part of the glamour rubbed off on her garments, and she was soon exporting interstate and internationally to stores such as Selfridges and Liberty of London, Myer, Georges and David Jones.

In 1952, model Ann Ferguson was asked by police inspector John Moffatt to leave the beach in Surfers Paradise because her Paula Stafford bikini was too revealing. According to Stafford, ‘Well, it wasn’t any smaller than what the others wore . . . she was just too sexy!’ The publicity was a great fillip to her business, and the next day she had five models in bikinis on the beach and a bevy of photographers. Stafford’s daughter Sybil was asked to leave St Vincent’s College boarding school in Sydney because of the moral taint. We have come a long way from there.

69

1955
Snowy Mountains Scheme coasters
Blasting the new Australia

People came from all over Australia to marvel at the Snowy Mountains Scheme, as well they might. This set of coasters is decorated with printed colour transfers adhered to the uppermost side with pictures: ‘Eucumbene Dam, Snowy Mountains Scheme’; ‘Cooma’; ‘Summit Mt Kosciuszko’; ‘Cabramurra’; ‘Eucumbene Tea House’; and ‘Snowy Mountains’. It was made to sell to one of the thousands of tourists who visited the Snowy Mountains Scheme during the late 1950s.

In all, 121 men died blasting the biggest civil engineering project ever undertaken in Australia, one that the American Society of Civil Engineers called an ‘engineering wonder of the world’. The Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme marked the beginning of a new Australia. Prime Minister John Howard summed up the scheme’s historical and cultural significance in 2006:

There is overwhelming feeling in the community that the Snowy is an icon. It’s part of the great saga of post-World War II development in Australia . . . It conjures many stories of tens of thousands of European migrants coming and blending with each other and in the process of working on the Snowy becoming part of this country.

A network of 16 dams, seven power stations, 80 kilometres of aqueducts and 225 kilometres of tunnels and pipelines trapped the seaward-flowing waters of the Snowy and Eucumbene rivers and drove them westward through long trans-mountain tunnels to flow into the Murrumbidgee and Murray river systems. The water irrigated the dry inland plains while generating electricity for the Australian Capital Territory, New South Wales and Victoria. The scheme has a generating capacity of 3.74 million kW of hydro-electric power and provides an average of 2.36 million megalitres of water for irrigation and other purposes per year.

When the Snowy scheme began, Australia was importing engineers and managers – but by the end of the project, the Snowy Mountains Engineering Corporation had not only built up a world-class team of engineers but was exporting their expertise internationally.

The Snowy River rises high in the Australian Alps in New South Wales, fed by melting snow and precipitation from the prevailing winter depressions of Antarctica. The water originally flowed onto the river flats of East Gippsland and thence out to sea, but at the end of World War II the governments of New South Wales and Victoria had designs on the flows of the Snowy. New South Wales wanted to irrigate the Riverina and provide drinking water for Sydney, while Victoria wanted a large hydro-electric power scheme and a fillip for the Murray River.

Essentially the waters would be diverted through a series of dams that fed hydro-electric generation before discharging into the Murray and the Murrumbidgee. The creation of the dams involved the drowning and then rebuilding on higher ground the towns of Adaminaby, Jindabyne and Talbingo. The Snowy Authority created the towns of Cabramurra and Khancoban and the lakes themselves became tourist attractions, while the roads built by the authority gave access to the snowfields at Thredbo and Guthega. More than 1600 kilometres of roads were constructed and main camps were established at over 100 locations with community services and amenities.

The Chifley government proposed this ambitious program. To get over interstate squabbles, Ben Chifley designated the project under the Snowy Mountains Hydro-electric Power Act 1949 as a matter of national defence, despite the strenuous opposition of Robert Menzies’ Liberal Party. Nelson Lemmon, the minister in charge of the scheme, was described as using ‘more energy than tact’ to deal with difficult state premiers.

The Snowy Mountains Scheme was completed on schedule and on budget in 25 years. Much of the credit for its success belongs to engineer Sir William Hudson, who not only oversaw the building of the scheme but also administered a workforce of 100 000 men – of whom as many as 7000 at a time were living away from their families, often in a new country. Hudson provided amenities and reasonable pay, employed a private arbitrator and scheduled regular meetings between management and union representatives to anticipate and avoid strikes.

The first power from the Snowy flowed from Guthega Power Station in February 1955. In April 1966 the first diversion of water was made from the Snowy River to the Murray River, and finally, in August 1974, the last unit in the hydro scheme was brought into service.

Hudson reportedly uttered to his workers the line: ‘You aren’t any longer Czechs or Germans – you are men of the Snowy.’ After so much war in the 20th century, there was a desire to start building a peaceful future, and the Snowy scheme was a manifestation of that.

70

1956
Olympic stamp from the 1956 Melbourne Games
The world comes to Melbourne

This first-day cover was produced in 1956 as a souvenir of the Olympic Games held in Melbourne. The stamped and franked envelope is addressed to Paul Fetter and is sealed but empty. It was posted by a family member to the donor’s mother’s father and sister as a keepsake.

The Games of the XVI Olympiad opened in Melbourne on 22 November 1956. It was the first time that the Olympic Games had crossed the equator or left the Western Hemisphere. It was called the ‘Friendly Games’ but became known for the famous ‘blood in the water’ water-polo match.

The Games took place at the height of Cold War tensions. The People’s Republic of China withdrew at the last minute because Taiwan was competing under the name Formosa, and Egypt, Iraq and Lebanon staged a boycott because Britain, France and Israel had occupied the Suez Canal. The Netherlands, Spain and Switzerland all declined to come in protest at the USSR’s brutal suppression of the Hungarian Revolution.

In October 1956, a demonstration by students of the Budapest University of Technology and Economics had grown into a protest against the communist government. Russian tanks rolling into Budapest brutally and swiftly put down the incipient liberalising movement, and as many as 3000 Hungarians were killed. The Hungarian Olympic team only heard the full story when they read the Melbourne newspapers. The Hungarian flag was removed from the athletes’ area and the Free Hungary flag was flown.

Matters came to a head in the water-polo semifinal between Hungary and the USSR on 6 December. Within moments of the game starting, a Soviet player had taken a severe blow to the chin, sparking a brawl. Five players were pulled out of the pool. The auditorium was packed with Hungarian émigrés yelling for the Soviets’ blood.

In the last stages of the match the Hungarians were up by 4 to 0. With a minute to go their star player, Ervin Zádor, took a massive smack to the face from Soviet Valentin Prokopov. The blow cut his eye and blood from the wound went into the pool – in front of the television cameras. Hungarian fans rushed the pool and police had to escort the Soviets to safety before a full-scale riot ensued. Hungary finished fourth on the medal tally and then half of their Olympic team, including Zádor, defected to either the USA or Australia.

Despite all the fuss, Melbourne put on a brave face and its best foot forward. Television was significant for the first time. There was sufficient penetration overseas that Australia could show itself off to a massive global audience. Australia came third in the medal tally – our best-ever result. With 325 athletes participating, the overall Australian medal haul was 13 gold, 8 silver and 14 bronze – a total of 35.

Australia’s lasting contribution to the Olympic tradition came that year from a 17-year-old apprentice carpenter, John Ian Wing. Having watched the spectacular opening ceremony, he wrote to the International Olympic Committee to suggest abandoning national colours for the closing ceremony: ‘War, politics and nationalities will be forgotten. What more could anybody want if the world could be made one nation?’ That’s still the goal.

71

1957
Old Purple
Slim Dusty’s road

This 1971 Ford Fairlane sedan used by Slim Dusty on his tours of the Australian outback was dubbed ‘Old Purple’. It was one of the most famous vehicles used by the King of the Road.‘We hit the road in ’54 in a Ford and a homemade caravan,’ Slim recalled shortly before his death in 2003. ‘A caravan and a car on the road then was a novelty. We had the caravan, we had the car, and the boys had a little tent so they either slept in the hall or the little tent, so we did reasonably well . . .’

For half a century David Gordon Kirkpatrick, aka Slim Dusty, toured Australia. No town was too small for the favourite son of Nulla Nulla Creek, New South Wales. More than any other artist before or since, Slim brought culture to the bush and brought the culture of the bush to the city.

Slim came to Sydney in 1946 and cut his first track, ‘Song for the Aussies’. His first single, ‘When the Rain Tumbles down in July’, was released that same year and ignited his career. It would be years of one-nighters. In 1951 he met and soon after married Joy McKean and she joined the travelling show and raised two kids, often under canvas.

After more than a decade, in 1957 Slim recorded his 13th record, the B side of which was a novelty song called ‘A Pub with No Beer’. That track became the first No. 1 record by an Australian artist. For the next ten years it was the most popular Australian song, and it was the first and only Australian 78 rpm record to go gold. The success of ‘A Pub’ opened up city audiences to the Slim Dusty Show, but mostly his life continued as usual. The Australia-round tour went on for ten months, over 48 280 kilometres.

Both Slim and Joy were keen songwriters, and he encouraged all those who came in his wake. A Slim Dusty song documented country life and family and celebrated the wide brown land. His bands featured some of the best young talent in the bush: Keith Urban was an early Slim protégé.

Unlike many of his contemporaries, Slim was an early supporter of Indigenous culture. He visited Aboriginal communities, recorded songs about the people’s lifestyle and heroes, and was a benign force for reconciliation before it was even acknowledged as an issue.

Over the course of his career Slim received an unequalled 37 Golden Guitar awards at the Tamworth Country Music Festival, and two ARIA awards. He was inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame and the Country Music Roll of Renown. At the time of his death in 2003 at the age of 76, Slim was working on his 106th album for EMI Records. He is the only artist in the world to have recorded 100 albums for the same label. In 2007, his domestic record sales in Australia surpassed seven million.

But the statistics don’t tell the story of the importance of an artist travelling tens of thousands of kilometres of dry dusty roads. The 1971 Ford Fairlane sedan christened Old Purple was his favourite car of many.

‘My work is no nine-to-five job, it’s a lifetime commitment to Australia and its song,’ Slim wrote in his memoir Another Day, Another Town. ‘It’s also an enjoyment of playing music with my muso mates, of travelling across the country and of being on stage everywhere from a tin shed to the Opera House. I’m a restless soul.’

72

1960
Dame Edna costume
A vulture of paradise

Dame Edna Everage poses against a red backdrop in a pink beaded gown with gladioli attached around the neckline. She is wearing diamante-studded glasses. The gown was worn for her 1985 show, Tears before Bedtime.

Barry Humphries’ early dreams of being a painter fell by the wayside when he discovered he had a talent for dadaist art. He often performed his art on Melbourne public transport, where he disturbed commuters with stunts in which he pretended to eat his own vomit or assaulted the blind. ‘I don’t know why I like shocking people,’ Humphries told New Yorker critic John Lahr. ‘I think it just gave me a sense of identity. I guess it gave me a sense of power too, because I felt rather powerless and swamped by – well, the dullness of Melbourne.’

On a tour of Twelfth Night through regional Victoria, Humphries created his housewife character Edna Everage. He was encouraged to develop Edna further by Ray Lawler, author of Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, and then Australia’s pre-eminent playwright. She made her debut on 19 December 1955, discussing the imminent arrival of foreign athletes at the 1956 Olympics and the possibility of billeting one at her home – number 36 Humouresque Street, Moonee Ponds.

Edna, who bore more than a passing resemblance to Humphries’ mother, came out of his deep ambivalence towards and hatred of the suburban ‘wildlife’ in Melbourne. ‘Edna was conceived to remind Australians of their bigotry,’ Humphries said. ‘She was a rebuke. She was a silly, bigoted, ignorant, self-satisfied Melbourne housewife.’ But people loved her. One part of the audience laughed at her silly affectations and the other part identified with her.

In 1960 Humphries made the obligatory move to London to try his luck. He was ‘discovered’ by comedian Peter Cook and given a season at Cook’s club, The Establishment. Humphries brought out a range of character studies to very bad notices but to the delight of Cook.

Humphries slotted into the London comedy scene and almost joined the Monty Python gang. The Python sketches about idiot Australians named Bruce were originally written as ‘Barry’ but were changed to protect Humphries’ feelings.

Humphries excelled at one-man revues and through them all, Edna Everage endured. Her fame grew exponentially through the 1970s, when something about her garish and superficial personality made her a Zeitgeist figure. With success came ever more glamorous costumes and a number of TV specials and talk shows. Dame Edna, as she became, described herself as a ‘Housewife and Superstar’. And she was.

Over 50 years she evolved and changed. Shaking off the timid but proud housewife from suburban Melbourne like a yellow-bellied black snake loses its skin, she blossomed. Still deeply nasty, narcissistic and cruel, she became increasingly sophisticated and complex.

The key to Edna, as Lahr put it, is ‘lowbrow antics with highbrow aesthetics’. Humphries began his working life with paint and an easel and that may still be his ultimate bliss. However, he needs neither of these. Barry Humphries is already one of Australia’s most celebrated artists.

73

1961
Jørn Utzon’s model for the Sydney Opera House
The ship building

This is the architect’s model for the geometry of the Sydney Opera House shells in paint, wood and Letraset type.

A hut ‘built of brick, twelve feet [3.6 metres] square, and roofed with tiles’ was constructed for Gadigal man Bennelong in 1790 – hence the name of the peninsula on the eastern side of Sydney Cove. A century and a half later, New South Wales premier Joe Cahill instigated an international competition for another building there. The winning design had a roof of one million tiles.

Danish architect Jørn Utzon was 38 when he won the Sydney Opera House competition. His father was a naval architect and he grew up around shipyards. Nautical imagery was at the forefront of his mind as he pored over naval maps, films and pictures of Sydney Harbour. Utzon had travelled through Europe and America, meeting, at one time or another, all the major figures of high modernism. He had also studied Hinduism and had visited Mayan temples in Central America. All of these ideas came together in his initial drawings.

The Utzon plan was one of the last received by the judging committee but it was overwhelmingly the favourite. Its design was so bold and innovative that it expressed the idea of a culture moving forward unencumbered by cultural traditions. It was innovative in part because it had never been tried before.

Once Utzon was commissioned, he had to work out how to make the light sculptural roof: the designs he had submitted were little more than preliminary drawings. Some initial designs sent to the Anglo-Danish engineers Ove Arup & Partners referenced waves rising and breaking on a beach, while one was the ribbed fan shapes of palm leaves over a terraced floor. Arup advised Utzon that his geometric shells could not be built.

‘We had to commence building at a stage where the working drawings had not yet been completed or finalised, so construction began at the building site a long time before we had completed the drawings, and construction drawings were being produced just ahead of construction as the building grew,’ Utzon wrote recently.

This of course is not the best way to do things but on the other hand, if the decision back in the late 1950s had been that the project should have been completed entirely and then sent out for tender, then the Opera House would not exist today. It is thanks to the political foresight of Cahill that the building was commenced on the loose grounds it was, and that Sydney now has this landmark.

Many aspects of the Opera House’s design had to be developed more or less from scratch, simply because they hadn’t been done before. One of the overriding principles in Utzon’s work was finding solutions that were in harmony with the natural world. It wasn’t until two years into the construction that he finally found a solution to the problem of the sails or shells. His ‘key to the shells’, inspired by peeling an orange, allowed him to ‘attain full harmony between all the shapes’, as is demonstrated by the Utzon model shown here. He worked as a sculptor rather than on paper to bring his vision alive.

Utzon’s assistant Helge Hjertholm recalled the architect slicing spherical triangles from an orange and creating shells with the peel. All the segments of the Opera House roof could be derived from a single sphere – the 14 shells of the building, if combined, would form a perfect sphere. The Helsingor shipyards produced a wooden model of this idea.

Utzon intended the building to be a sculpture. He intended its white tiled sails to reflect the beauty of the sun and its changing light, and to contrast with the darkness of the harbour and foreshores.

The Opera House took 16 years to complete. Part of the attraction of the building is its sculptural quality and the legend of its birth. Utzon had the vision and organically had to work through the problems of bringing his vision into life. In this sense, the Opera House is an embodiment of the creative process itself.

74

1964
A detective’s hat
How television took off

This pork-pie hat worn by actor Leonard Teale on the TV drama Homicide became a national icon. Made by Crawford Productions, Homicide was the first successful Australian TV drama and a major hit, beating its international rivals in the ratings and creating an iconography of Australian police detectives in ill-fitting hats.

Television arrived in Australia on 16 September 1956, more than a decade after its American debut and just in time for the 1956 Olympic Games. The Labor Party intended to introduce a government-run monopoly following the example of the British Broadcasting Corporation, but they lost power. The Menzies government went with a mixture of commercial and government options, handing the licences to the country’s two main media players: the Fairfax family (Channel Seven) and the Packers (Channel Nine).

There was no local content quota and the two commercial stations were delighted to reuse American material that then, as now, could be purchased at a fraction of the price. The early local productions tended to be quiz and panel shows and news and current affairs programs. Some 97 per cent of all drama shows broadcast in Australia between 1956 and 1963 were American.

Hector Crawford was an orchestral conductor who, with his sister Dorothy, produced and packaged radio shows. They were quick to move into TV with the marriage game show Wedding Day on air in 1956 and the sitcom Take That! the following year. The courtroom drama Consider Your Verdict (1961–64) was a step up in terms of local drama. Then, in 1964, Hector finally found a taker for his police procedural.

At 7.30 p.m. on Tuesday, 20 October 1964 on Channel Seven in Sydney and Melbourne, Inspector Jack Connolly (John Fegan), Detective Sergeant Frank Bronson (Terry McDermott) and Detective Rex Fraser (Lex Mitchell) dragged the first crims back to Russell Street in the first episode of Homicide. The production values were a significant notch higher than other Australian productions. With external scenes shot on film and a very tight budget, Homicide had a gritty realism that immediately appealed to Australian audiences. It was a ratings smash – the first Australian drama to compete with and beat the imported shows. Some episodes rated more than 50, which would be an unheard-of number these days. The series ran for 510 episodes and aired from October 1964 to January 1977.

Making a virtue of necessity, Homicide stories were taken directly from the police blotter. The show didn’t flinch from difficult topics such as gang rape, poverty, drugs, sex work, child abuse and ‘poofter bashing’. The more controversial or salacious episodes were preceded by Fegan, the actor who played the senior detective, prologuing the episode with a community announcement. Hector Crawford himself introduced ‘The Rape of Lennie Walker’, which was about child murder.

Homicide pioneered and guaranteed the viability of Australian television drama and the Australian feature-film industry. ‘I think it was the Melbourne people that decided it,’ said Teale when asked about the success of Homicide. ‘And the fact that it was the first outside action series and the people spoke the Australian language . . . all those things were part of it.’

75

1965
Oz magazine
A magazine of dissent

The artistic community in Florence had the Medici – in Sydney, they made do with the students of Sydney University. But what a glittering bunch they were, there at the beginning of the sixties: Clive James, Germaine Greer, Richard Walsh, Bruce Beresford, Robert Hughes, Charlie Perkins, Richard Wherrett, John Bell, Bob Ellis, Frank Moorhouse, all pounding out polemics for the university stage or the press. Across town, Jim Sharman and Richard Neville were creating drama at the University of New South Wales, and Martin Sharp was at the National Art School. Never before or since has there been a group of Australians who have had such a profound impact on the world at large. This was the best and brightest generation Australia had produced and they were all in one city. Oz magazine was the launching pad for the writing of Hughes, James, Ellis and many other prominent Australian ratbags. Garry Shead and Alex Popov were regular contributors. This cover of Oz #3 features Boofhead, one of artist Martin Sharp’s recurrent motifs.

In July 1962, Neville, Walsh, Popov and Daily Mirror cadet Peter Grose attended a conference of student magazine editors, and hatched the idea for ‘a magazine of dissent’. In January 1963, Neville convened a meeting at his house with a group of friends, including Sharp, Shead, Walsh and Grose, to put the plan into action: to create a satirical magazine along the lines of the English rag Private Eye. It was here that the name Oz was conceived.

Oz launched on April Fools’ Day 1963. The 16-page first edition sold 6000 copies on the first day. Parodying the Sydney Morning Herald, Oz led with a front-page hoax about the collapse of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. There was a centre spread on the history of the chastity belt and a story on abortion. Walsh wrote a satirical diary of the mishaps of the recent royal tour; Sharp drew a caricature of the Queen with a smile-mask tied over her face.

After the publication of issue 3, the editors were charged with distributing an obscene publication. The police were back in April 1964 and Neville, Walsh and Sharp were again charged with obscenity. Magistrate Gerald Locke sentenced them to three to six months in prison with hard labour. This was a watershed court case. Future premier Neville Wran and future governor-general John Kerr headed the Oz legal team. A benefit concert to raise the defence fund featured TV stars and underground rock groups and was the party of the era. Fortunately the convictions were overturned on appeal.

‘The Oz Guide to Sydney’s Underworld’ in 1965 included a ‘Top 20’ list of major Sydney criminals. The #1 spot was blank – for Premier Robert Askin. Gangster Lennie McPherson was at #2. McPherson visited Neville’s Paddington house to threaten him, and later killed criminal Jacky Steele for mocking him about his place on the Oz list.

The magazine was relentless in pursuing police oppression of homosexuals and the illegal abortion industry, among other issues. It lampooned hypocritical politicians, monarchists and the White Australia policy mercilessly and developed a new graphic style with Sharp’s cartoons and illustrations. The writers did some solid investigative reporting and held a mirror up to Australian culture. Oz did more than any other media production to break down wowserism in Australia. It was the cornerstone of a popular culture that had a peculiarly Australian vernacular.

76

1965
Harry Vanda’s guitar
Easybeats

Harry Vanda played this guitar with the Easybeats – one of Australia’s most successful early rock bands – during their heyday. With its fire-engine-red body and black neck, it’s a semi-acoustic guitar in a style similar to the Gibson ES-335, with two f-holes and two pick-ups. There are scratches on the back from Vanda’s belt buckle. The guitar is actually a Maton 12-string semi-acoustic model. Australia’s longest-running and most successful guitar manufacturer, Maton, pioneered the use of Australian wood species in guitar construction.

Not much was happening in the metal silver city of Villawood Migrant Hostel in 1964 Sydney. This was one of the camps the wave of postwar immigrants washed through on their way to a new life. It was here that two Dutch ‘mods’, Harry Vanda and Dick Diamonde, formed a band. A Glaswegian called George Young and two Pommies joined them. They became the Easybeats and were soon heading for the clubs of Sydney, riding the wave of post-Beatlemania craziness. The Easybeats dripped with attitude. They had a dynamic frontman in Stevie Wright, whose energy matched his cheeky lyrics. Most of all they had George Young – always enigmatic, always tough.

Whatever the reasons, the chemistry worked and the Easybeats produced a string of classic hits: ‘She’s So Fine’ (#3), ‘Wedding Ring’ (#7), ‘Sad and Lonely and Blue’, ‘Easy as Can Be’, ‘Women (Make You Feel Alright)’ (#4), ‘In My Book’, ‘Come and See Her’ (#3), ‘I’ll Make You Happy’ (#1) and ‘Sorry’ (#1).

Their ambition was formidable, too. Under the wing of mentor Ted Albert, the Easybeats went to the UK to try their luck at the centre of the pop universe. The luck didn’t break their way: the band gained a strong reputation but never scaled the peaks of popularity that they had in Australia. They did, however, make one masterpiece: ‘Friday on My Mind’. Written by George and Vanda and produced by the legendary Shel Talmy, ‘Friday’ cut through the airwaves and became a classic. It was a personal favourite of the Beatles, David Bowie and Bruce Springsteen.

This success was too late to save the Easybeats, but it cemented the relationship between Vanda and Young. Back in Australia in the early 1970s, they turned their mind to producing other artists. Their main project was a band formed by George’s brothers Malcolm and Angus. The Young brothers’ band, AC/DC, kept things absolutely simple. They developed a basic rock’n’roll sound – raunchy, risqué and tough – that was complemented by the cartoonish antics of lead guitarist Angus Young, the salacious persona of singer Bon Scott and a Glaswegian sensibility as hard as nails. AC/DC was perfectly Australian in that the band avoided all the pretensions of pop, forsook the fashions of the day and appeared to care about nothing other than their fans. They were self-defining outsiders. The band had the contempt for authority, all-male-gang attitude and wicked humour that typified Aussie blokes of the time.

Australia had its share of talent, but it lacked the infrastructure to create international success and eventually most of the English migrant bands returned home. AC/DC and the Bee Gees, the best known of these, are among the most successful music acts of all time. So, having played nearly every community hall and pub around Australia, in 1976 AC/DC flew to the UK where they began their slow climb to become the biggest band in the world.

The Seedies, as they were known, arrived in London at the height of punk rock, but were one of the few old-school rock’n’roll bands that could command the respect of the punk rockers and the establishment.

While AC/DC climbed the international charts, in the 1970s a vibrant live music scene grew up in Australia. Between the years 1977 and 1987, hundreds of thousands of Australians saw live music every week, and AC/DC became one of the most successful acts. LPs by local artists such as Cold Chisel, Midnight Oil, Australian Crawl and the Divinyls sold in their hundreds of thousands. Skyhooks’ 1973 album Living in the 70’s emerged from that scene and was a massive success with its mixture of glam rock and acerbic social satire. The 1970s also saw the rise of an art-music scene in the inner-city bohemias. Groups like the Saints, the Triffids, Radio Birdman and the Birthday Party all made records that were critically lauded at home and internationally.

Early in 1980, Bon Scott died in London. The group continued with Brian Johnson installed as new frontman and released the album Back in Black – one of the biggest-selling albums of all time – as a tribute to Scott. Melbourne City Council renamed a CBD lane in 2004 to AC/DC Lane, and it has become a site of pilgrimage for rock enthusiasts from around the world. Then-Melbourne mayor John So launched the renamed lane with the words: ‘As the song says, there is a highway to hell – but this is a laneway to heaven. Let us rock.’

Fifty years after the Easybeats emerged from the Villawood Migrant Hostel and Vanda performed with his red guitar, Australian popular music remains the only cultural movement that has transcended these shores.

77

1966
Long Tan dolls
Against impossible odds

The Battle of Long Tan on 18 August 1966 was Australia’s greatest victory in the Vietnam War. It’s a story of extraordinary heroism and mateship. The Australians, pinned down by overwhelming enemy force in a rubber plantation, won the day against all odds. Their achievement was recognised by the president of the United States and a grateful South Vietnamese government. The Australian government thought it inappropriate for Australians to receive medals from the South Vietnamese, and the Australians were instead given dolls as this one – girls dressed in traditional Vietnamese attire.

In the middle of 1966, the 1st Australian Task Force was established as a separate operational unit from the US Forces in Vietnam. The Australians were given control of the relatively subdued but strategically important province of Phuoc Tuy. The Task Force base was at Nui Dat, and Long Tan was a rubber plantation on the outskirts of the base.

In the days before the attacks there had been signals intelligence of movements of Vietcong and North Vietnamese soldiers in the area, but patrols found no evidence of the enemy. Then, on the nights of 16 and 17 August, Nui Dat came under mortar and rifle fire. Patrols the next day still found little trace of the enemy.

At 11.15 a.m. on 18 August, 105 soldiers of D Company, 6 RAR and three New Zealanders went on patrol with the sounds of a Little Pattie and Col Joye concert at Nui Dat ringing in their ears. They reached Long Tan Plantation, 5 kilometres away, at 3.15 p.m. Almost by chance 11 Platoon came upon a few Vietcong and engaged them. Then the onslaught started, with rifle and mortar fire raining down on 11 Platoon. The other Australians came to their support during three hours of intense fighting amid a torrential monsoon soaking that reduced visibility to metres. Wave after wave of the enemy attacked the Australian positions. The soldiers were so pinned down and the enemy so close that the Australians called in artillery shells on themselves. They thought they were so thoroughly surrounded that if they called in the artillery they could at least save the other soldiers and the platoon behind them. The Australian commanders decided not to send the artillery down on their own men and pitched their fire 50 metres ahead of the grid reference given by D Company.

It was soon apparent that the Vietnamese force was much larger than anything the Australians had expected to find. In fact, D Company had walked into a force estimated at between 1500 and 2000 of both Vietcong and regimental North Vietnamese soldiers.

Lieutenant Colonel Colin Townsend, back at Nui Dat and fearing an assault on the base, was reluctant to send reinforcements to Long Tan. Out in the rubber, 108 men were pinned down, virtually all of them without ammunition. They needed resupply by helicopter or armoured vehicles, but both were delayed. Finally the helicopter pilots defied their commanding officers and insisted on flying ammunition out to the battle zone. Three helicopters flew through torrential downpour at treetop height braving heavy Vietcong fire, and circled the dense rubber plantation canopy. The choppers dropped crates of bullets that happened to land almost on the heads of the Australian troops – certainly they were close enough to be found and used.

Finally Townsend agreed to send armoured vehicles with troops and more weapons. That is what saved the Australians – that and the incredible performance of the artillery. As night fell and reinforcements arrived, the Vietcong withdrew and the assault was over. Nui Dat was never again seriously threatened.

It has become apparent from captured documents and subsequent intelligence that there was a major force in the area gathering to attack Nui Dat. Given its size and its preparations, had that assault happened Nui Dat would probably have fallen and such a large-scale defeat would have had a severe impact on Australia’s capacity and willingness to remain in Vietnam. It was the sheer fortune of coming upon the enemy prematurely that averted a massive tragedy. In all, 18 Australians died in the action and 21 were wounded. The communists lost 245.

The Australian achievement was widely admired. US president Lyndon Johnson awarded D Company the United States Presidential Unit Citation for ‘Extraordinary Heroism in Military Operations Against an Armed Enemy’. The South Vietnamese government wanted to award the Gallantry Cross with Palm (CGCP) Unit Citation to D Company, but the Australian government decided that its servicemen would otherwise be presented with dolls and lacquered cigarette cases.

The indignity that flowed from Long Tan was typical of the ambivalence of senior Australian military and political figures towards the soldiers in Vietnam. In other incidents, awards were denied because the war had not been officially ‘declared’. This patronising attitude continued after the war, when the Returned and Services League refused to admit Vietnam veterans. Since then, the veterans have slowly found official acknowledgement, and Long Tan Day – 18 August – is now the official commemoration of that battle in the rubber.

78

1967
Faith Bandler’s gloves
Day gloves, iron fist

This pair of ladies’ short white gloves dates from around 1955. They were worn by civil rights activist Faith Bandler. White gloves were representative of the formal dress code that was popular among middle-class white women at the time. By wearing the gloves, Bandler – who was of South Sea Islander and Scottish-Indian heritage – hoped to be taken seriously by her predominantly white female audience.

There’s a common misconception that the 1967 referendum gave Australian Aboriginal people the vote. In fact, in all states other than Western Australia and Queensland, the Aboriginal population had always had the same franchise as white Australians. The matter had been amended through legislation in those other states by 1965. Nonetheless, the 1967 referendum was a very important landmark in Australia’s history and on the road to reconciliation.

In May 1967, two suggested changes to remove discriminatory provisions from the Constitution were put to a national referendum. The second proposition related to the way Indigenous Australians were referred to in two sections of the Constitution. They were:

51. The Parliament shall, subject to this Constitution, have power to make laws for the peace, order, and good government of the Commonwealth with respect to:- . . . (xxvi) The people of any race, other than the aboriginal people in any State, for whom it is necessary to make special laws.

127. In reckoning the numbers of the people of the Commonwealth, or of a State or other part of the Commonwealth, aboriginal natives should not be counted.

Section 51 impeded the federal government from acting in matters of Aboriginal welfare, while Section 127 caused the classification of Aboriginal people based on the percentage of their ancestry, i.e. 50 per cent or 25 per cent ‘aboriginal’. Excluding Aboriginal people from the census, aside from being incredibly racist, distorted the size and shape of the Indigenous population. Surprisingly, the campaign to get the referendum put took ten years. It made a national figure of Faith Bandler.

Born in northern New South Wales in 1918, Bandler’s father had been ‘blackbirded’ from his home in Vanuatu and sold into slavery on the Queensland cane fields. He escaped and settled in New South Wales, where he married an Australian woman of Indian-Scottish descent and they had a child called Faith.

Faith Mussing trained as a dressmaker and moved to Sydney, where she mixed in cosmopolitan circles. She married Austrian Jewish émigré Hans Bandler, an engineer. They settled into a comfortable bourgeois life on Sydney’s North Shore but were both politically aware. Bandler’s mentors were the feminist Jessie Street and the Aboriginal activist Pearl Gibbs.

For a decade Bandler addressed town-hall meetings and community groups and appeared on television and radio arguing for the referendum. In 1965 she led a delegation to Prime Minister Robert Menzies to press the referendum case.

Her social status as an articulate, middle-class woman who was also a person of colour gave her message a powerful cut-through. She reinforced it with her dress and touches like the cotton day gloves. Bandler’s dress and demeanour were so different from the contemporary idea of a black woman that she profoundly challenged white suburban ideas.

After the 1967 referendum case was won, Bandler took up the cause of the Torres Strait Islanders and the descendants of the Kanaks. In the latter case, it took a long time for the fact of slavery to be acknowledged (people argued that the Kanaks had been economic migrants). She was also an early figure in the Women’s Electoral Lobby – the feminist activist group of the early 1970s.

Bandler’s gloves are a potent symbol of the way that social change can be achieved often by quiet, persistent discussion rather than large public demonstrations.

79

1970
Patrick White’s typewriter
Defying the cultural cringe

This portable Optima typewriter was among the items bequeathed to the State Library of New South Wales by Patrick White. The bequest also included the author’s desk, chair, cushion, desk lamp, a ceramic ashtray and a couple of pens. White destroyed the majority of his manuscripts and most of his correspondence. He handwrote the early drafts of his work before producing a typewritten version, with further corrections made by hand.

White winning the 1973 Nobel Prize for Literature was a delightful torture all around. Australians liked the international attention but the Nobel Prize for Literature wasn’t really on the radar, and nobody in Australia read White. What many knew of him they didn’t much care for. The author, for his part, deplored awards and gongs – except the Nobel. Most of all, he deplored publicity, interviews with television reporters and being a public figure.

White was born in London in 1912 to Australian parents and was rarely comfortable in either England or Australia. His parents came from the squattocracy and he lived his early years in Australia before going to an English boarding school. After school finished, there were stints as a jackaroo and at Cambridge. His patrician English side disdained Australian crudity but his Australian streak felt the same way about English pretensions.

White had an acute, wicked sense of humour. He said of his education: ‘My English housemaster deplored [my writing]: “You have a morbid kink I mean to stamp out”; and he then proceeded to stamp it deeper in.’

During World War II, White met his life partner, Manoly Lascaris. After the war they settled on a small farm on the outskirts of Sydney and White applied himself to writing. He was quoted by the New York Times as saying: ‘It’s the country of my origins – that, I think, is what matters in the end, whether one likes it or not. Certainly, I had to experience the outside world and would have felt deprived if I didn’t have that behind me. But it’s from the Australian earth, Australian air, that I derive my literary, my spiritual, sustenance. Even at its most hateful, Australia is necessary to me.’

His postwar novels, including The Aunt’s Story (1948), The Tree of Man (1955), Voss (1957), Riders in the Chariot (1961) and The Solid Mandala (1966), were ambitious, complex books that addressed the Australian condition with a seriousness and a surgical eye for getting to the guts of the matter.

White wrote that during the war he had missed the Australian landscape, and there’s a sense that one of the things that attracted him to Australia was its emptiness: he seemed to find that emptiness a significant part of the human condition. His work – especially a book like Voss, which was based on the life of doomed explorer Ludwig Leichhardt – put figures in the Australian landscape. But more importantly, White was an Australian artist who dared to ask the big questions.

He beat a field that included Graham Greene, Vladimir Nabokov and André Malraux to win the Nobel. According to the committee, ‘White’s literary production has failings that belong to great and bold writing, exceeding, as it does, different kinds of conventional limits. He is the one who, for the first time, has given the continent of Australia an authentic voice that carries across the world, at the same time as his achievement contributes to the development, both artistic and, as regards ideas, of contemporary literature.’

White’s front lawn was full to overflowing with TV crews who had the week previously not heard of him or known where he lived. The author presented himself to the cameras and did his duty.

Over the ensuing months, White relaxed into his role as a public intellectual. There were so few that he had the field almost to himself, and Australians quite liked the cranky novelist with the deep-set eyes. They respected his craft even if they didn’t understand it. ‘I am amazed at the way Australians have reacted, in a way they usually behave only for swimmers and athletes,’ he is quoted as saying by his biographer, David Marr. ‘I am very touched, and have been feeling guilty for some of the things I have said in the past.’

There was much to be said. Australia in 1973 was in turmoil. The Whitlam government was halfway through its term and a great many issues were being discussed at fever pitch. Disarmament, the arts, the environment: White, the Nobel laureate, could and did add his weight to all these issues. He regularly appeared at demonstrations and was outspoken about the green bans – an initiative of the Builders Labourers Federation to preserve Sydney’s built and natural heritage.

An important part of the Whitlam era was an embrace of the arts and high culture. At the time Australians wore their abhorrence of culture almost as a badge of honour or authenticity: in 1973 there were genuine howls of indignation when Gough Whitlam authorised the purchase of American artist Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles for $3 million. The controversy ran for months (the painting is now worth over $100 million). The Australia Council for the Arts was, meanwhile, seen to be handing out large cheques to socialists with drinking problems.

Underneath the complaints there lurked a deep feeling of cultural insecurity – the idea that Australians could not produce profound works of art. White’s Nobel demonstrated the opposite. The award was important for him, but it was even more important for chipping away at Australia’s cultural cringe.

80

1970
Evonne Goolagong’s tennis racquet
A star in the golden age of Australian tennis

This racquet was used by Evonne Goolagong. It is a Dunlop ‘MAXPLY / FORT’ brand laminated brown wooden tennis racquet. The grip is spiral bound with brown leather and the strings are animal gut. Its owner is one of only two mothers to have won the Wimbledon title (the other was Dorothea Lambert Chambers, in 1914). But then Goolagong broke plenty of records.

Born in Griffith, New South Wales, to Wiradjuri parents, Goolagong grew up in the town of Barellan, where she had the opportunity to play tennis, a game for which she had a natural aptitude. Her aunt gave her a tennis racquet on Evonne’s ninth birthday and the girl was immediately hooked. She started hanging around the Barellan War Memorial Tennis Club. There is an apocryphal story that she used to hit a tennis ball against a wall using only a thin paling as a racquet, which perhaps sounds a little too close to Don Bradman’s story. In any case, coach Vic Edwards discovered her and brought her to Sydney to train in 1965, when she was fourteen.

The golden age of Australian tennis ran from the 1950s to the early 1970s. There was a large pool of community and business support for Australian amateur tennis players, which allowed the players to compete internationally at the highest level. Australia also had plenty of sunshine and a healthy lifestyle, especially in comparison to Europe, which had been ravaged by the Depression and war.

In the 1960s, men’s tennis titles were dominated by seven Australians: Rod Laver, Roy Emerson, John Newcombe, Tony Roche, Ken Rosewall and Fred Stolle. Margaret Court and Evonne Goolagong were fearsome women’s tennis players. From 1968 the game evolved with the introduction of ‘open’ tennis, where professionals and amateurs competed together. Australian ‘amateurs’ lost their edge in the wider competition.

Goolagong quickly moved through all the Australian tournaments on a winning streak. Then she dominated international tennis in the 1970s and was ranked in the top ten for nine years. ‘I’d much rather people knew me as a good tennis player than as an Aboriginal who happens to play good tennis,’ she was reported as saying to the New York Times. ‘Of course I’m proud of my race, but I don’t want to be thinking about it all the time.’

Activism wasn’t in Goolagong’s temperament. However, like the boxer Lionel Rose, she provided an example of a highly achieving Aboriginal person that was contrary to the popular stereotype.

After winning Wimbledon in 1971, she was invited in 1972 to play with other superstars on a tour of South Africa, which was then at the height of the apartheid regime. The South African government designated her an ‘honorary white’ person. Although some players boycotted the tour, Goolagong’s reputation didn’t suffer from her participation.

In 1975 she married Roger Cawley and the media changed her name for her: she was thenceforth called Evonne Cawley despite her wishes. She came under unfair criticism that she tried to hide her Aboriginality, which did hurt her personally.

Goolagong eventually won seven Grand Slam singles titles from 17 finals – a record for any player, man or woman. She was briefly ranked the world’s No. 1 in 1976.

Following her retirement in 1983, the Goolagong Cawley family settled in the USA for a few years before moving back to Australia and setting up tennis camps in Queensland in 1991. Following the birth of her children, Goolagong took more of an interest in her Indigenous roots and since then has lent her reputation to Indigenous initiatives.

Evonne Goolagong negotiated a difficult career path with grace, discretion and a steely determination. ‘She can be down love–40, apparently beaten, and she’s still trying to hit winners,’ said Margaret Court before she lost her Wimbledon crown to Goolagong in 1971. ‘She just won’t play safe tennis, and her shots are quite unpredictable. They’re liable to come back in any direction. She never lets up trying to hit for the lines or catch you on your wrong foot. The harder you hit the ball to her, the more she likes it.’

81

1972
ALP badge 1972
Whitlamism

The slogan ‘It’s Time’ was as much a statement of fact as a proposition. The 1972 federal election campaign was the first modern Australian election campaign, and badges, jingles and T-shirts were all part of it. As much as anything, the campaign promotions reflected the fact that the Australian Labor Party was forward looking.

Men and Women of Australia! The decision we will make for our country on 2 December is a choice between the past and the future, between the habits and fears of the past, and the demands and opportunities of the future. There are moments in history when the whole fate and future of nations can be decided by a single decision. For Australia, this is such a time. It’s time for a new team, a new program, a new drive for equality of opportunities: it’s time to create new opportunities for Australians, time for a new vision of what we can achieve in this generation for our nation and the region in which we live. It’s time for a new government – a Labor government.

So began Gough Whitlam’s speech as he opened the 1972 election campaign in Bankstown in Sydney’s west. The Liberal–Country Party coalition had held power for 23 years – decades of enormous international change, and Australia had not kept up.

Whitlam represented a new face of Labor politics. He was the last prime minister who read classics at university, a product of the middle class who was nevertheless wedded to blue-collar politics. The world had been through the civil rights movement, Vietnam, the counterculture, colour TV, an explosion in ideas and the successful establishment of the welfare state. But change had come slower to Australia. Through the 1960s Whitlam modernised the ALP, wresting the levers of power away from the union movement and vesting them with the parliamentary caucus. The election result, when it came on 2 December 1972, was no surprise. What happened next was.

Whitlam was elected on a significant, broad platform of social change for everything from Aboriginal rights and recalibrating foreign policy to implementing sewerage systems in the western suburbs of Sydney. Before parliament could resume sitting, the governor-general swore in Whitlam and his deputy, Lance Barnard. They divided the portfolios between them and, with Governor-General Sir Paul Hasluck sitting in, enacted a stream of legislation that included ending the Vietnam War, recognising China, reopening the equal-pay-for-women case, removing the sales tax on contraceptives, and a raft of other measures. Those two weeks of the duumvirate set the pace for what was to follow over the coming three years. In 1973, for example, 203 bills were passed – 46 more than the previous record of 157 in 1968.

The conservative camp was, after all those years, incredulous that it was no longer in power. A campaign of intense conflict and smear was launched against the ALP. In 1973 the OPEC oil crisis sparked a global recession that marked the end of the long postwar boom. At the same time, Whitlam reduced tariff barriers that had subsidised many industries. In that sense the Whitlam era brought Australia kicking and screaming into the present.

Whitlam stopped appeals to the Privy Council in London, and abolished English honours and replaced them with an Australian honours system. He changed the national anthem from ‘God Save the Queen’ to ‘Advance Australia Fair’. The country seemed to be transforming at a breakneck pace. Partly it was the times; partly it was the transformation from a sleepy British outpost into something else. Nothing seemed as it should be – the ALP led by a white-collar classicist, all these Jackson Pollock paintings, no-fault divorce, and the external pressures of a global recession after three decades of unprecedented growth. It was all too much.

It has to be said that the Whitlam government lacked discipline: ministers went off on their own frolics. As the oil crisis hit there was a rapid escalation of wages, the public service bloomed, sleepy protected industries fell in a heap and the government was supporting equal pay for women. Never had such change been undertaken under such circumstances and with such external pressure.

A series of scandals engulfed the government through 1975. Opposition leader Malcolm Fraser, in concert with corrupt Queensland premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen and New South Wales premier Tom Lewis, up-ended almost a century of constitutional convention and blocked the government’s supply bills.

Fraser threatened to shut the country down by refusing supply. In the end, the Whitlam-appointed governor-general, Sir John Kerr, sided with the conservatives and, on 11 November 1975, sacked Whitlam and asked Fraser to be caretaker prime minister and call an election. Known commonly as ‘the Dismissal’, this was a massive political crisis in Australia. It ripped apart the country more than any other moment since World War I. Fraser and the Liberals won the subsequent election but it took many, many years for the scars to heal.

82

1975
Miranda’s dress
The Australian film renaissance

No one could be certain what happened to the young girls who wandered into the Hanging Rock landscape, but the film Picnic at Hanging Rock was the focal point for a revolution in Australian cinema. Director Peter Weir took Joan Lindsay’s novel about the mysterious disappearance of some schoolgirls and created a film full of resonances about the supernatural, the nature of Australia and our cultural history. The film was a massive hit in Australia and internationally. According to the New York Times, ‘The movie, both spooky and sexy, broke fresh ground.’ A large part of its attraction was the group of beautiful young women in lace dresses such as this one, worn by Anne-Louise Lambert as Miranda.

Lambert provided the following notes on her costume: ‘The dress – daisy pattern in the lace was Miranda’s favourite flower. The butterfly buckle – because like her their lives are beautiful and brief. The ribbons – the satin one I was supposed to wear and the one I actually wore. The petticoat – the piece of lace cut from the hem was what Michael was clutching when he was found on the Rock.’

Hanging Rock was the culmination of a decade’s work building a film culture. Australia had once had a vibrant film industry that made all kinds of melodramas, bush comedies and epic Australian stories about the diggers in the Middle East. However, from the 1920s onwards the Hollywood studios, with the compliance of the federal government, waged war against local production and distribution of Australian films, and by 1960 it was almost impossible to make an Australian feature.

In the mid-1960s things began to turn around. The Gorton government established a national school, the Australian Film, Television and Radio School, and South Australian premier Don Dunstan, at the urging of writer Phillip Adams, set up the South Australian Film Corporation to fund local production. Art films from Europe created an interest in low-budget storytelling and meanwhile some talented directors and technicians were coming through the advertising industry, television production and the Commonwealth Film Unit. Camera equipment became cheaper and more portable.

The ‘renaissance’ probably began in 1971 with Tim Burstall’s film Stork, which gently satirised the ‘chardonnay intelligentsia’ while introducing the ‘ocker’ to the screen. The following year Bruce Beresford’s The Adventures of Barry McKenzie introduced Barry – the ultimate ocker – to the world. Australians were also enamoured of the sex romp: the priapic Alvin Purple and Petersen films with their Benny Hill-style busty sheilas and hapless blokes were close to the national dream at the time.

Picnic at Hanging Rock brought all these themes together. The disappearance of the girls into the mystic bush, the art-house pace of the film and the steamy sexual undertones of schoolgirls dressed in linen and disrobing made for a winning combination.

Weir’s background was in making art films. He ran with the Sydney University set and the Sydney Filmmakers Co-operative, making slightly surreal short films that gradually grew in length and ambition. His first major film was Homesdale, a thriller that owed a debt to Agatha Christie and Alfred Hitchcock. His first feature, The Cars that Ate Paris, was a more significant hit, being a zombie exploitation art-house film with surreal cars.

Picnic was a step up from those earlier projects. It had the elements of a genre exploitation film and the sophistication of an art film, and it lacked a conclusive ending.

The book Picnic at Hanging Rock was published in 1967. It’s the story of a group of pupils at Appleyard College in the Mount Macedon area near Melbourne who go on a picnic on St Valentine’s Day in 1900. Three girls and a teacher disappear. The mystery is left open and readers filled the gap with their own explanations. The popular options were sex or the supernatural, with a touch of the cosmic.

According to actor Jacki Weaver, who played Mrs Appleyard’s servant Minnie in the film, ‘It was a very sensual film shoot, hot and gum-scented, seething with undercurrents of lust and intrigue, rather like a contemporary reflection of the film itself. Picnic is a very beautiful film, and the set was indeed suffused with a kind of beauty – not just from the plethora of nubile young women, but from the entire design and look of the piece.’

Picnic was followed by a series of exceptional Australian films: Sunday Too Far Away (1975), The Devil’s Playground (1976), Storm Boy (1976), The Getting of Wisdom (1977), The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1978), Newsfront (1978), My Brilliant Career (1979), Mad Max (1979) and Breaker Morant (1980). Most of the successful films of the era addressed events in Australian history – there was a rush to tell stories that had not previously had a forum.

The technical quality of the films was also critical – cinematographers such as Russell Boyd and Dean Semler portrayed the Australian landscape in ways never captured before. The films gave a heroic and epic frame for life in the Antipodes. They fundamentally altered the way Australians saw their country, and certainly the way foreigners did.

83

1979
Bob Brown’s raft
Letting the river run

This yellow rubber raft with metal eyelets in the lateral seam around the edge of the inflatable hull bladder was used by conservationists Bob Brown and Paul Smith in the 1979 campaign to save the Franklin River. A matching seat is attached from one side to the other at one end of the raft. The bladder appears stable despite numerous patches, and the floor is also patched. The raft’s handles are missing.

Postwar reconstruction boomed in the 1940s and 1950s. It was a time of big dreams, and in the small state of Tasmania the unions and businesses dreamed of a huge manufacturing base supported by an endless supply of hydro-electricity created by damming the wild rivers of the south-west. Inevitably, environmentalists, the government and unions came into conflict. The first major battle was to save Lake Pedder, a large lake in the island’s centre. The protests started in 1967 but the fight was lost and the lake flooded in 1973. Nonetheless, the campaign built a strong conservation coalition that was mobilised to stop the dam on the Franklin River. That proposal was to inundate 37 kilometres of the middle reaches of the Gordon River and 33 kilometres of the Franklin River valley to construct a dam to power a 180-megawatt power station. The protest began in 1979 and its leader was a Tasmanian doctor, Bob Brown.

The majority of Tasmanians supported the dams. Both political parties were (and still are) in favour of heavy industry in the state. Liberal prime minister Malcolm Fraser offered Tasmania $500 000 to call off the project, but the federal Liberals were rejected by the state branch.

Various arguments were presented about the discovery of unique Aboriginal tools and art and about the project causing the extinction of several animal species. However, the key to the success of the campaign to save the Franklin River was that Brown and others were able to film and document the powerful majesty of the wild rivers.

A blockade protest started on 14 December 1982, the day the Western Tasmanian Wilderness National Parks World Heritage Area was listed. Protesters chained themselves to gates at the Hydro Electric Commission in Strahan and formed blockades in rubber duckies at the building site. The campaign ran through the summer of 1982–83. In all, 6000 protesters blockaded the Franklin River dam project. Of them, 1200 were arrested and 500 were put behind bars, including Brown and English botanist David Bellamy (who had a significant media profile), future Supreme Court judge Pierre Slicer, state Labor MP Andrew Lohrey, and future Greens leader Christine Milne.

The Franklin was the largest public movement since the end of the Vietnam War. The High Court’s ruling to ‘Let the Franklin run free’ was a win and a turning point for the conservation movement in Australia and around the world. Bob Brown took a seat in the Tasmanian parliament – a foundation moment for the Greens party in Australian politics. From there he eventually moved to the federal Senate and an illustrious career in politics. The Greens have become an important political party.

The Franklin River was an issue that touched people in a very emotional way. Brown’s journey down the river on this raft helped inspire his passion to save the wilderness, and ignited his political career with the Greens.

84

1979
Dàn tre musical instrument
The boat people

Minh Tam Nguyen created this musical instrument, which he called the dàn tre (meaning ‘bamboo musical instrument’), while in a prisoner-of-war camp in Vietnam. It features 23 wire strings attached to a bamboo tube, with a resonator at the base. The instrument owes something to the Vietnamese bamboo zither and western instruments such as the guitar.

Nguyen was a lieutenant with the Army of the Republic of Vietnam when he was captured by the Vietcong in March 1975. During his six years in the re-education camps, he made his first dàn tre from recycled materials. In 1981, after his release, he and his son fled Vietnam by boat and wound up in the Philippines. As for most refugees, the journey was fraught with heavy storms that twice almost sank their vessel.

While in a refugee camp on the island of Palawan, Nguyen made another instrument. He brought that instrument to Australia in 1982 and modified the resonator by using an olive-oil can. One of the major advantages of the dàn tre is its versatility – it can play both western and non-western scales. For Nguyen, it symbolises his journey by sea and blood, sweat and tears.

The term ‘boat people’ entered the Australian vernacular in the 1970s with the arrival of the first wave of boats carrying people seeking asylum from the aftermath of the Vietnam War. The first boat, a 17-metre fishing vessel known as KG4435, arrived in Darwin on 26 April 1976 carrying five Indochinese men. Over the next five years 2059 Vietnamese people arrived by boat. Within three years a further 53 refugee boats had arrived.

In 1982, the Australian, United States and Vietnamese governments agreed on an orderly migration program emphasising family reunion, and two-thirds of arrivals over the next few years were women. Within a few years the Vietnam-born population in Australia had again doubled. The controlled migration kept people out of dangerous and fragile boats and thus kept the issue off the front pages of newspapers.

Australia had been involved in the war in Vietnam since its inception as a phoney war, leading up to sending Australian ‘advisers’ in 1962. Australians stayed there until 1972, when only embassy and diplomatic staff remained.

When Saigon, the capital of the south, fell to the invading North Vietnamese Army on 30 April 1975, the country was thrown into turmoil. The Australian embassy was instructed that its staff could not evacuate any Vietnamese people. Essentially, Australia abandoned the people it had spent so much blood and treasure trying to help.

Over the coming years the whole of Indochina was enveloped in various wars. Cambodia was overtaken by the genocidal Pol Pot regime and then invaded by Vietnam. Political unrest throughout the region contributed to a vast refugee problem: the number of people seeking refuge during those years has been put at as high as 1.5 million, and as many as 200 000 may have died. In the end, the refugee intake of western nations stands at: USA 823 000, Britain 19 000, France 96 000, and Australia and Canada 137 000 each.

Those people who took to the sea faced sinking boats and pirates. They made for any port they could in the Philippines, Thailand or Malaysia. There they wound up in refugee camps and awaited resettlement. Some braved the ocean as far as Australia.

Approximately 90 000 Vietnamese in the initial exodus came by plane through the refugee system and were resettled in Australia. Only 2000 arrived by boat.

The Fraser government managed the refugee intake cautiously. In the first two years following the end of the Vietnam War, approximately 130 000 refugees left Vietnam: the Fraser government took 3732. When six boats arrived during the 1977 election campaign, the prime minister suggested that some might have to be deported. Other ministers suggested that the people were economic refugees.

It’s probable that Malcolm Fraser felt some responsibility towards the former allies who were now victims. Certainly there was an orderly resettlement of Vietnamese refugees over the next few years and certainly the government didn’t try to make political capital out of the refugee situation. Over the ensuing years the Fraser government increased the formal refugee program. Most of the immigrants came from refugee camps in Malaysia or the Philippines and most of them came by plane.

In the 1980s, Vietnamese immigration resurfaced as a hot topic in public debate. It was only ten years since the end of the White Australia policy. Suburbs such as Cabramatta in Sydney and Footscray and Springvale in Melbourne became enclaves of a new Asian diaspora. While the overwhelming majority of immigrants were respectable citizens, there were some criminal gangs. The tabloid media popularised the idea of Vietnamese gangs dealing in heroin who had their own style of organised crime.

At the same time, historian Geoffrey Blainey and the then deputy opposition leader John Howard speculated that the rapid increase in and scale of Asian immigration might not be in Australia’s economic interest. The race debate was only to heat up over the next ten years. Howard continued to put race and Asian immigration at the forefront of Australian politics.

According to the 2011 census, 185 000 people in Australia were born in Vietnam and 219 000 speak Vietnamese at home. Vietnamese Australians have made significant contributions to all levels of Australian society. It has not been easy to get to this point of multiculturalism, and a great many people have contributed to the final result. But just as Nguyen’s dàn tre can play a combination of western and non-western scales, the Vietnamese experience demonstrates that a multicultural Australia is achievable.

85

1980
Tobacco tin containing white ochre paint
The art of the Western Desert

This red tin belonged to Uta Uta Tjangala, who was part of the Western Desert art movement that in the 1980s spread from Papunya to the salons of New York and London.

The first desert artist who came to prominence in the cities and towns of the world was Elea (aka Albert) Namatjira, an Arrernte man who was born at Hermannsburg Mission in 1902. He had a natural desire to draw, and an aptitude for it. In 1934 he met artist Rex Battarbee, who showed the Hermannsburg residents western-style landscape painting. Two years later Battarbee returned and, with Namatjira, went on a painting expedition through the MacDonnell Ranges.

Namatjira held his first exhibition in Melbourne in 1938 and it was a great success. Indigenous people had never seen their land rendered in watercolour like this, and Europeans had not seen land like this at all.

Namatjira had a unique insight into the landscape and a great gift as a painter. At a time when Indigenous Australians were treated as third-class or lesser members of society, Namatjira was included in Who’s Who in Australia and in 1954 was presented to the Queen. On the other hand he was bullied by the councils in the Northern Territory and by arts organisations who insisted on controlling his career against his wishes. Half the art community’s critical establishment eventually decried Namatjira’s style as derivative and repetitive, while some traditionalists deplored his ‘western’ vocabulary.

Although he did figurative paintings and work in other media, Namatjira produced a great many pictures of the MacDonnell Ranges and gum trees. This was in part to satisfy the demand for such pictures, but also because they represented his cultural background and his stories. Namatjira was a unique Australian artist in the way that he combined different sensibilities into one body of work. The breadth of his artistic reach and ambition was not understood until many years after his death.

Because of Namatjira’s status he could buy alcohol, unlike other Aboriginal people. In 1958 he was arrested and charged with supplying alcohol to the artist Henoch Raberaba, and sentenced to six months’ imprisonment with labour, which was dropped to two months at the Papunya settlement.

Papunya, about 385 kilometres west of Alice Springs, was a settlement created in 1959 to service various Western Desert nations, especially the Luritja, Anmatyerr, Warlpiri, Kukatja and Pintupi. Coincidentally, it was at Papunya a dozen or so years later that another group of artists addressed the issue of rendering the landscape.

By 1971 Papunya had a population of about 2500. It was not a peaceful place; it was beset with chronic problems. With a population of displaced people who had been removed from their ancestral homes and a white administration that never really understood the citizens, Papunya could be a place of great creativity and wisdom, or a death camp.

Geoffrey Bardon, a local art teacher, observed the tribal art that was represented in body painting and sand art. He encouraged the children at his school to paint murals in their own styles. A group of senior painters saw what was going on and began a dialogue with Bardon about their art.

The first major piece of the Papunya Tula School was a mural on the school wall portraying the ‘Honey Ant Dreaming’. Working under the direction of custodians Mick Wallangkarri Tjakamarra and Tom Onion Tjapangati, the artists included Kaapa Tjampitjinpa, Billy Stockman Tjapaltjarri, Long Jack Phillipus Tjakamarra, Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula and Don Ellis Tjapanangka.

In September 1971, Kaapa Tjampitjinpa won equal first prize in the Caltex Art Award in Alice Springs for his Men’s Ceremony for the Kangaroo, Gulgardi. This outside recognition of a local painter was an encouragement for others in Papunya to take up painting in the ‘traditional manner’.

After the success of the ‘Honey Ant Dreaming’ and the Caltex Prize, Bardon set up the Men’s Painting Room. Bardon’s other legacy was establishing the Papunya Tula collective, which kept ownership of the works with the painters and the community and avoided the exploitation that usually went with Indigenous and white dealings in Australia.

As time went on there was controversy in the community about letting traditional knowledge out to the wider world, and so the artists would change the old stories or make up new ones in the same visual style but without compromising their secret tribal knowledge. Utilising new materials such as acrylic paints on masonite boards – or indeed any kind of material, from shoe polish to house paint – inevitably and substantially changed the art. The Papunya community was made up of a number of different language groups forced into an artificial community.

Although their roots were prehistoric, the Papunya Tula painters were completely modern. Initially painting was an exclusively male pursuit but in the 1980s the rules were relaxed to allow women painters as well, and artists such as Daisy Leura Nakamarra and Pansy Napangardi have been very successful.

Word of the Papunya painters started to get out in the late 1970s. In 1981, three Papunya paintings were selected for the Australian Perspecta exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. The boldness and originality of the artists surprised urban audiences.

Some of the better-known Papunya painters today are Anmatyerr men Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri and his brother/cousin Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri, both of whom grew up on Napperby Station.

Possum’s adopted father, One Pound Jimmy Tjungurrayi (aka Gwoya Jungarai), was one of the earliest desert Aboriginal people to be photographed. He was a survivor of the Coniston massacre, an incident that occurred in 1928 in which up to 110 Aboriginal people were killed. An image of him became iconic in the early 20th century and was used on a postage stamp. Warlugulong, a collaboration between Possum and Leura, was an early masterpiece of the Papunya Tula School.

The Papunya Tula School encouraged a huge outpouring of art from the Northern Territory and Western Australia. ‘We started it, like a bushfire, this painting business,’ said Long Jack Phillipus, ‘and it went every way: north, east, south, west, Papunya in the middle.’

86

1981
Eddie Mabo’s map
His island home

Eddie Mabo’s original hand-drawn maps and diagrams of various portions of land and boundary markers, rendered in ink and coloured felt-tip pen on paper and each measuring 325 mm by 204 mm, are some of the most powerful drawings ever made in Australia.

The Murray Group of islands – Mer, Dauar and Waier – lies in the Torres Strait between Queensland and Papua New Guinea. With a total area of 6 square kilometres, the islands are home to a Melanesian people known as the Meriam. The islands were named by Captain Edward Edwards of HMS Pandora in 1791 but were not formally annexed to the colony of Queensland until 1879.

Eddie Koiki Sambo of the Piadaram clan was born in 1936 on the island of Mer (aka Murray Island). His mother died in childbirth and he was adopted by her brother Benny Mabo, and raised as part of his family. He preferred the name ‘Koiki’ to the Anglo-Saxon ‘Eddie’. The teenage Koiki was caught in a scandal involving a young woman and alcohol and the tribal administration exiled him, at age 16, to the mainland, where he worked at various unskilled jobs. In 1959 he married Bonita Neehow, who provided him with ten children and unswerving support as he was drawn into the civil rights struggle.

In 1967 Koiki took a job as a gardener at James Cook University in Townsville. It was here that he met historians Henry Reynolds and Noel Loos, who encouraged him to explore his heritage and to lecture their students about it. Mabo became a leading activist for the Aboriginal and Islander community in northern Queensland. He sat for hours in a pub holding a sign demanding to be served. Aboriginal people were unwelcome in some jobs, in some parts of the towns and in hotels, but Mabo was not the accommodating type.

In 1972 the Queensland government maintained a paternalistic administration of Indigenous settlements. When Mabo tried to go back to Mer to see his ailing father his application was denied by the authorities, who feared that he was too much of a troublemaker.

In 1981 he made a speech at a land-rights conference at James Cook University. He outlined the tribal law on the Murray islands and the social and economic organisation there. A lawyer in the audience was sufficiently impressed to suggest that Mabo launch a test case to claim land rights through the court system.

In 1982 Meriam men Eddie Koiki Mabo, Sam Passi, Father Dave Passi, James Rice and Celuia Mapo Salee, represented by the legal team of Ron Castan, Bryan Keon-Cohen and Greg McIntyre, commenced proceedings in the High Court in response to the Queensland Amendment Act 1982. That law allowed the Queensland government to make land grants on trust for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

The Queensland government pre-empted the court’s decision by enacting the Queensland Coast Islands Declaratory Act 1985, which declared that on annexation of the islands in 1879, title to them was completely vested in the colony, and now state, of Queensland. The High Court found that this legislation was incompatible with the Racial Discrimination Act 1975, and therefore invalid. That decision was known as Mabo v Queensland (No. 1) [1988].

The case set the stage for another round in which Mabo could make a land claim. Mabo and Others v Queensland (No. 2) commenced in 1991 before a full bench of the High Court. It was up to Mabo to prove that the Meriam people had a strong and continuous relationship with the land, had their own system of ownership, and were owners: ‘as possessors; as occupiers; or as persons entitled to use and enjoy the said islands’.

A majority of the court found that there was a concept of native title at common law; that the source of native title was the traditional connection to or occupation of the land; that the nature and content of native title were determined by the character of the connection or occupation under traditional laws or customs; and that native title could be extinguished by the valid exercise of governmental powers provided a clear and plain intention to do so was manifest.

The court also ruled on the concept of terra nullius – a phrase that has since gone into common usage in Australia. Most people assume it means that the land was unoccupied, but in fact the phrase was meant to suggest that the land was occupied by people who were not sophisticated enough to understand law and property rights and so to that extent the land was unclaimed and was open to being claimed by the British Crown.

The majority of the High Court (6 to 1) ruled that the concept of terra nullius did not apply in Australia. The fact that the Meriam witnesses could speak to their law in such detail, and that they clearly understood property and the implications of ownership, meant that terra nullius was not applicable when discussing Australian history.

This decision changed the relationship between Indigenous and white Australia. The court was saying that instead of ‘settling’ the continent, the British Empire had ‘conquered’ the country. The court seemed to use the opportunity to, in Justice William Deane’s words, ‘retreat from injustice’ and redress the issues that had arisen in 1788. Justice Gerard Brennan noted that ‘it is imperative in today’s world that the common law should neither be nor be seen to be frozen in an age of racial discrimination’. The court also found that Meriam law was a valid system that existed alongside British common law.

Prime Minister Paul Keating responded to Mabo with the Native Title Act 1993. This established the National Native Title Tribunal, charged with making native title determinations.

Edward Koiki Sambo perhaps never imagined the impact his hand-drawn maps would ultimately have. In a tragic twist, he died of cancer five months before the High Court handed down its 6–1 judgement on 3 June 1992. Mabo Day (3 June) is now an official holiday in the Torres Shire, and Mabo rests in peace, buried according to custom, on Mer. His legacy is in his drawings which are critical steps on the path to reconciliation between black and white Australia.

87

1982
A Jenny Kee knitted jumper
Koala chic

This woollen knitted jumper was designed with a motif of a koala by Jenny Kee for sale in her Flamingo Park, Sydney, store. One of the jumpers was given to Diana, Princess of Wales. Kee made Australiana chic.

Kee was typical of many in her generation. In the 1960s she had the overwhelming sensation that life was elsewhere, and she migrated to London with the Oz crew – Martin Sharp, Richard Neville, Louise Ferrier, Philippe Mora and others. In 1972 Kee returned to Australia and was stunned by a new vocabulary in the arts. She opened a frock shop, Flamingo Park, in partnership with fellow designer Linda Jackson. Flamingo Park became synonymous with confident new Australiana.

The work that Kee and Jackson did was based on the Australian natural environment, taking the imagery of the bush and traditional Australian motifs such as the opal. Kee opted to use a lot of wool, in part because of its historical association, and drew on Australia’s cultural and natural landscape and Indigenous art to create a unique Australian aesthetic and fashion statement.

In 1974 Kee showed her first koala jumper, and Australian fauna became a continuing motif for her. The Sydney Daily Telegraph announced: ‘There’s a new Nationalism taking over the Australian fashion industry. Imported goods are strictly taboo on the fashion front. Now the industry is swinging to the tune of Advance Australia Fair and fashion-conscious shoppers are snapping up clothes that herald a true blue fashion.’

Kee’s garments changed the way heritage Australian issues were thought about domestically and internationally. In the years leading up to the 1970s, Australian artists of all genres had sought international acclaim by playing down their Australian characteristics and attempting to compete with the English and the Americans on their own terms. It was only in the 1970s and as a consequence of the Whitlam government that a significant number of artists began to wear their heritage proudly.

Part of Kee’s inspiration lay in reclaiming the icons of her childhood. One of her first designs was based on the cartoon character Blinky Bill. But the reclamation of Australian childhood wasn’t just central to Kee’s work: it was a very important step for modern Australia.

No one did more in this area than Martin Sharp. The Oz artist returned to Australia in 1969 and set up the Yellow House in Macleay Street, Potts Point, as an artist commune and gallery. Sharp’s 1960s work had been a unique take on psychedelia, with violent vortices of line and explosive ink. Once back in Australia he adopted a new iconography, drawing the characters of our collective childhood into the modern world: Boofhead, Ginger Meggs, Krazy Kat. And in 1973 Sharp, Richard Liney, Tim Lewis, Peter Kingston and others worked on the renovation of Luna Park in Sydney as a reclamation of a traditional Australian aesthetic.

One of the motifs that Sharp resurrected was Arthur Stace’s copperplate motto ‘Eternity’. The chalk artist had been long forgotten when Sharp began to incorporate his version of the motif in his work, and it led to a re-examination of Stace’s iconic copperplate graffiti – and the adoption of his catchcry as part of the fireworks on Sydney Harbour Bridge to celebrate the new millennium, and later the Sydney Olympic Games.

Redirecting attention to Australiana was further manifested in other artists in that circle, such as Cressida Campbell, whose work drew on earlier native artists like Margaret Preston. It then filtered out to the wider public through work such as that of Ken Done, whose sunshine-bright designs drew on the natural landscape, Australian light, beach culture and Sydney-centric motifs of the harbour. Trained as a painter and then in advertising, Done was the most popular designer of the early 1980s.

When Prince Charles married Lady Diana Spencer in 1981, the people of New South Wales sent a gift of a pair of Kee’s koala and kangaroo motif jumpers, with animals on the front and a map of Australia on the back. Of all the gifts she received, Diana, the most stylish woman in the world, chose to wear the Kee knit. It put the map of Australia on the map, and was further seen as an early example of the princess defying tradition (pearls and a twin-set) in favour of the modern and the populist.

Artists like Kee created a new visual vocabulary and a new sensibility that was an important foundation in developing Australian culture.

88

1982
Azaria Chamberlain’s dress
As Australian as a witch-hunt

This black dress and panties and red booties worn by Azaria Chamberlain are a powerful illustration of the frenzy of speculation that surrounded the Chamberlain story. The outfit was originally made for Lindy Chamberlain’s son Reagan. However, rumours emerged that Lindy often dressed her daughter in black – a colour perceived by some to be an ‘unnatural’ colour in which to dress a child, and another sign of her apparent guilt.

On the night of 17 August 1980 Azaria Chantel Loren Chamberlain, nine weeks old, was killed by a dingo as her family prepared dinner at their camp site near Uluru in the Northern Territory. A frantic search for the baby recovered no trace of her. What followed was a public and shameful miscarriage of justice. The consequences of the Chamberlain trials were a grieving family torn apart and a woman falsely imprisoned.

The Azaria Chamberlain case had many complicating qualities: its location in the dead heart of Australia in the shadow of the Rock; the fact that the family were members of an ‘exotic’ religion and had given the child an unusual name; and finally, that this was a case tried by the media and corrupt police, in which the clear facts of the matter were obscured by nonsense.

Alice Lynne (Lindy) Murchison was born into the Seventh-day Adventist Church. In 1969, at the age of 21, she married a pastor, Michael Chamberlain. In 1980 they were living with their three children in Mount Isa and went on a camping holiday to Uluru.

On the night Azaria was taken, Lindy was looking after the family and preparing for the evening. She put the baby down and was gone for only minutes; when she returned to the tent, Azaria had gone. She was close by other campers, who backed her story.

It was impossible for Lindy or anyone in her family to have killed Azaria and hidden the body in the few seconds each person was unaccounted for. Three people heard the baby cry, and the blood and dingo tracks suggested, especially to Aboriginal trackers, exactly what had happened. No murder weapon was found and no motive was proffered. Dingoes were certainly around the camp site and there had been recent attacks on children. One dog was thought to have gone rogue.

The coroner was critical of the police investigation. At the first coronial inquest, magistrate Denis Barritt accepted the Chamberlains’ version of events and concluded that ‘the body of Azaria was taken from the possession of the dingo, and disposed of by an unknown method, by a person or persons, name unknown’.

In the six months between the disappearance and the findings of the coronial inquiry, the Chamberlain case caused an epidemic of speculation – the dog, the Rock, the strange religion. Reliable media outlets carried rumours such as that the name Azaria meant ‘sacrifice in the wilderness’ when, in fact, it means nothing of the kind.

Lindy Chamberlain’s stern demeanour in court was taken as a sign of her guilt. Public interest in the case was high and every move by the Chamberlains was documented and speculated upon. Ridiculous theories were proposed about the rites of the Seventh-day Adventist church. There was much talk of witchcraft, blood sacrifice, postnatal depression and other wild hypotheses. All kinds of theories were advanced, but no one answered the basic question of ‘How do you take a child, murder it and hide the corpse where no one can find it in a couple of minutes?’ Common sense was suspended.

The desire of the local rangers and police to mend the coroner’s ‘slight’ and the frenzy by a media desperate to sell papers prompted a second inquest, which led to a trial for murder. The Crown case was based on circumstantial, improbable forensics, much of which turned out to have been tampered with. Odd experts were found all around the world. In her defence, Lindy offered unshakable alibis, evidence of dingo behaviour and the lack of any motive as arguments for her innocence.

In October 1982, Lindy was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. She was, by then, pregnant with her fourth child and destined to give birth in Darwin jail. Michael was convicted as an accessory after the fact and received an 18-month suspended sentence. An appeal to the High Court in 1983 failed.

In 1985, John Bryson’s book Evil Angels laid out the case in clear-minded prose. The book highlighted the way a desire for a good story – such as occult blood sacrifice – in the press and among readers had outweighed any sober consideration of the facts. The book was the basis of a film (retitled A Cry in the Dark overseas) directed by Fred Schepisi and starring Meryl Streep. The Chamberlain case had become one of Australia’s most widespread and profound legends.

The chance discovery of Azaria’s matinee jacket in 1986 supported Lindy’s original explanation of events, and she was released from prison. A royal commission into the case found that there were ‘serious doubts and questions as to the Chamberlains’ guilt’. In September 1988, just over eight agonising years after the attack, the Northern Territory Court of Criminal Appeal unanimously overturned all convictions against Lindy and Michael Chamberlain. A third, inconclusive inquest was conducted in 1995 and a fourth inquest in 2012 finally supported the findings of the first, 12 years previously.

Four inquests, a trial, an appeal to the Supreme Court in the Northern Territory and the High Court, and a royal commission made the Chamberlain case the most exhaustive witch-hunt in Australian history. The film was internationally popular and gave an insight into Australia. After ‘slip a shrimp on the barbie’, the phrase that most connotes Australia overseas is a misquote of a line from the film: ‘a dingo ate my bay-bee’.

89

1983
Australia II
The America’s Cup

Australia II – Australia’s most famous boat after the Endeavour, with its famous winged keel – was designed by Ben Lexcen.

The most elite sport in the world, 12-metre yacht sailing is undertaken only by the uber-uber-rich, and in 1983 watching it was as slow as watching the proverbial paint dry. Australia was one of the few nations that ever bothered to contest the America’s Cup, and Australians were the only sailors who had ever won even one race in the best-of-seven contest. The New York Yacht Club had hung on to the ‘auld mug’ for 132 years since the first race was contested around the Isle of Wight in 1851.

In 1962, media mogul Sir Frank Packer and his boat Gretel made a strong showing. Packer’s second boat, Gretel II, finished first in two races in 1970 – the first non-American boat to beat an American boat twice. However, it was disqualified from one win by the NYYC’s own protest committee. As Sir Frank said, ‘Protesting the New York Yacht Club is like complaining to your mother-in-law about your wife.’

Perth businessman Alan Bond, who had arrived in Australia as a signwriter and quickly established himself in the property market and then as a corporate raider, made his first America’s Cup bid in 1974. Other bids followed in 1977 and in 1980, when Bond’s boat Australia took one race.

For the 1983 challenge, Bond entered Australia II, bearing sail number KA6, for the Royal Perth Yacht Club. John Bertrand, who had won Olympic bronze in sailing, headed the Australia II team.

The chief boat designer was Lexcen. Born Robert Miller in 1936, he was abandoned by his family and went to live with his grandfather but had left school by the age of 14. He discovered an aptitude for boats and was considered a savant. He designed Southern Cross for Bond’s 1974 America’s Cup challenge and America in 1980.

By 1983, his ideas were getting bolder. Lexcen experimented with different keel designs, including using ‘wings’. A winged keel makes a boat more stable and manoeuvrable by lowering the drag in the water. Australia II had other innovative features, including radical vertical sail designs, Kevlar running rigging, and a lightweight carbon-fibre boom. Lexcen designed the hull with a slightly shorter waterline and greater sail area than normally used by a 1metre boat.

The Australia II team went to extravagant lengths to keep the winged keel under wraps. It was shrouded when the boat was out of the water or at rest. The Americans unsuccessfully used skindivers to spy on the underside of the Australian boat when it was in the water, and protested to the NYCC committee. The mystery boat and its magic keel gave the Australians a psychological advantage in the race.

Bertrand as skipper recruited a crack team and Bond provided financial support. The team created a logo – the boxing kangaroo – and adopted a theme song, Men at Work’s ‘Down Under’, which had recently been a hit on the US charts.

Both the Australian and the US skipper played the start of the series decider very carefully. American Dennis Conner won the start and his boat Liberty was 29 seconds ahead at the first mark. Conner kept increasing his lead slightly and was as much as 57 seconds in front at some points. Then, on the final leg, the challenger finally caught Liberty and squeezed past. Carefully picking the wind, the race came down to the last tack, and Bertrand’s team crossed the line 42 seconds in front. Spectators reported a ‘strange, stunned silence’ and then everything exploded. The longest winning streak in the history of sport was over.

The Australians at Newport exploded in jubilation to the high-decibel sounds of ‘Down Under’ and the popping of every champagne cork in town. The race had run overnight and through the early hours of the morning in Australia, but a considerable portion of the population was up watching it on television.

Prime Minister Bob Hawke was in Perth and watched the race from the Royal Perth Yacht Club. Footage shows the pure excitement on the PM’s face as the race is won. In front of the nation he declared, ‘Any boss who sacks anyone for not turning up today is a bum!’ It was the first time a prime minister had spontaneously declared a national holiday. ‘It was completely unpremeditated and for all the brilliant things I’ve ever said since, none of them count – that’s the one everyone remembers,’ Hawke said much later.

The victory of Australia II in an obscure yacht race became more than just a sporting triumph. It coincided with a new prosperity in Australia, a new optimism that came with the Hawke administration, and was accompanied by a resurgence in Australian movies and music.

90

1984
A prawn on a barbecue
The rise of the ocker superhero

Australia has always had a distinctive culture, but Australians have generally been embarrassed about it. The broad accent known as ‘strine’, with its long vowels and slow pace, suggested a lack of cultural erudition and book learning. Australians considered themselves to be straight-talking, direct, simple folk with a wry sense of humour, a big dose of common sense and hearts as big at the outback. As a general rule they didn’t push themselves forward or go into depth about anything, which explains why, until relatively recently, Australia produced little cultural product of interest.

Until the 1960s, Australians were so embarrassed by their unvarnished selves that members of the middle class and upward, academics and performers affected a British accent. Their behaviour was a colonial version of how they believed things went on in the suburbs of London. An Australian accent was not allowed on the Australian Broadcasting Commission. The manners, accents and behaviours of the bush or the working class were seen as vaguely comical – certainly not virtuous, or anything to be celebrated.

It’s said that the word ‘ocker’ dates back to the 1940s and the Ginger Meggs cartoons; Ginger was the apotheosis of a larrikin sprite. The term gradually seeped into common usage and was used pejoratively to denote a simpleton. Ockers were invariably men, and men who preferred the company of other men (but not in a homosexual sense). The Australian society of football, meat pies, kangaroos and Holden cars had little to say about the ‘sheila’ in the kitchen. Australian culture was something that men did together.

All of that began to change in the 1960s, largely due to the efforts of a couple of people – both of whom were in advertising. John Singleton started to use ocker characters in his ads. The most famous of them was a retail ad with the catchphrase ‘Where do you get it?’ as spoken by Tex Morton in a squealing, rasping voice. The voice and accent were so foreign to television viewers that the campaign had enormous cut-through and was a massive success. It was directed at working-class and lower-middle-class families who were looking for supermarket bargains. The fact that the commercials grossly offended bourgeois sensibilities was beside the point – they weren’t the target market. The howls of complaint from the well-to-do only added a frisson and some extra PR to the campaign. Essentially, the ad man was saying that Australians should speak in their own voices, even on television.

Then Paul Hogan came along. Hogan was genuinely working class. He’d had a variety of jobs and was famously working on the Sydney Harbour Bridge when he signed on for TV talent show New Faces. Hogan’s comedy act was designed to give the judges a hard time. He regarded their sarcastic and belittling comments to amateur entertainers as un-Australian. He was the underdog biting back.

‘Hoges’ was soon in demand for current affairs commentary and was swiftly given his own TV comedy sketch show. He too went into advertising, as the face of Winfield cigarettes. Winfield was a new Australian brand aimed at the working-class smoker. In the advertisements Hogan appeared not in his customary shorts and cut-down shirt but in a tuxedo. The setting was a concert hall and there was a full orchestra behind him as he extolled the qualities of Winfields – including the low price. The symbolism was not subtle, but it was funny and defiant.

Hogan’s next commercial became Australia’s best-known single cultural artefact – and it was shown for only five years in the USA. The ‘Come and say g’day’ campaign launched in 1984 on the back of Alan Bond’s America’s Cup win and rock bands such as INXS and Men at Work breaking into the American charts. Hogan, who co-wrote and presented the ad, was seen enjoying the casual outdoors lifestyle of the greatest country in the world – no risk. The catchphrase was his immortal ‘I’ll slip an extra shrimp on the barbie for you’. That phrase is still the best-known introduction to Australia.

Within three months, Australia went from No. 78 on the most-desired holiday list for Americans to No. 7, and tourism numbers doubled in ‘the country that invented the fridge, the Li-Lo and the ring-pull beer can’.

Where the traditional ocker character had been something of a simpleton, Hogan’s on-screen ocker persona was as sharp as a whip. There’s a kind of reticence to the character that is probably an extension of his own personality: he describes himself as a ‘cold’ person. His characters are engaging and friendly but also in control of any situation. They are always the smartest guys in the room.

Which leads us to ‘Crocodile’ Dundee, featuring the ultimate ocker character. The film’s hero, Mick Dundee, is a version of how Australians see themselves: under-educated in book learning but resourceful, not worldly but in fact a little better than the sophisticates when it counts. Hogan described Dundee as ‘an attempt to give Australia a hero. It’s a country desperately short of heroes. We haven’t got a Daniel Boone or a Robin Hood. All we ever had was Ned Kelly, an Irishman with a bucket over his head who pulled a few unsuccessful robberies a long time ago.’

‘Crocodile’ Dundee was the most successful Australian film of all time at home and abroad. Globally, it was the third-biggest-grossing film of 1984. The two ‘Crocodile’ Dundee films grossed well over $500 million despite the fact that they were written by first-time screenwriters (the second one was written by Hogan and his son Brett) and directed by TV variety show director Peter Faiman and novice director John Cornell. It was the Mick Dundee story behind the cameras as well – mates together against the world.

The ocker was the character that finally got up and killed the cultural cringe.

91

1993
‘Cotton Blossom’ Mardi Gras costume
The lifesaving parade

Ron Muncaster has been designing beautiful Sydney Mardi Gras costumes from the very early parades. Made in 1993, this costume is called ‘Cotton Blossom’ and is one of his finest. It consists of a white, sleeveless, fitted sequinned gown with a velcroed full skirt of white tulle decorated with multicoloured tulle rosettes, the whole trimmed with sequins. The skirt is supported on a foundation of fibreglass rods and roller-blind material. The gown is accessorised with an elaborate hat of white tulle, peacock and Chinese cock feathers (mounted on surgical mesh), a fan of ostrich and Chinese cock feathers, white elbow-length gloves, a handbag trimmed with oversized pearls, and a pearl necklace and earrings.

The first gay pride parade in Sydney was not called Mardi Gras: it was the finale of the Day of International Gay Solidarity. On Saturday, 24 June 1978 there were demonstrations in the afternoon. At night, a crowd of 1500 gathered at Taylor Square and marched down Oxford Street then turned towards Hyde Park, where there were speeches. When the demonstration moved off to William Street and up to Kings Cross, the police halted the procession and their aggressive behaviour incited a riot from which 43 people were arrested. The Sydney Morning Herald published all of their names. Most of them were released without charge, but they had been outed by the media in an era when being gay could cost you your job – to say nothing of personal embarrassment.

The march marked a watershed moment for the gay and lesbian community. Political activism was now on the agenda. Within 12 months, New South Wales premier Neville Wran had repealed the Summary Offences Act, the catch-all law that had been used against the marchers the year before and was used against gay men arbitrarily.

The first Sydney Gay Mardi Gras parade was held on 30 June 1979 following a candlelight vigil held two days earlier at Parliament House. On the Saturday evening about 3000 people marched along Oxford Street. The marches continued annually thereafter, growing with each passing year. In 1981 the march was moved to a date at the end of summer, when the night was generally still warm. The size of the demonstrations created a feeling of solidarity – out and proud.

The 1983 Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras parade featured 44 floats and attracted 20 000 onlookers – mostly families from the suburbs. As the parties got bigger, the stakes got higher. The first diagnosis of HIV in Australia occurred in Sydney in 1982 and the following year a man died in Melbourne. News of AIDS (which was called by some ‘the gay plague’) spread faster than understanding of the infection. The pandemic was devastating.

HIV and AIDS made people put their cards on the table. The most significant single event was the initiative of Dr Alex Wodak and his team at St Vincent’s Hospital in Darlinghurst. Wodak, defiant in the face of prosecution, gave away free needles to drug users and condoms to anyone who wanted them. This kind of initiative really made headway against the epidemic.

From 1983, the gay and lesbian community in Sydney was focused on the issue of HIV and AIDS – destigmatising the victims, helping the sick, supporting research and educating the community about safe sex. The Mardi Gras became an important part of getting those messages across.

By 1985 100 000 people were lining Oxford Street to watch the parade, which went on despite the prayers (for rain) of the Reverend Fred Nile. In later years the Mardi Gras parade would be televised and the parade and party would attract some of the world’s biggest celebrities.

By the end of 2011 there had been 31 364 diagnosed HIV infections in Australia, and around 24 731 people were living with HIV and AIDS – but Australia has contained the spread of infection better than any other country, largely as a result of the community activism and understanding generated by the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras.

92

1996
A Port Arthur memorial
A massacre in Tasmania

This cross that forms part of the Port Arthur Memorial Garden bears the names of the 35 people who were shot and killed by Martin Bryant on Sunday, 28 April 1996.

It was a day that profoundly shocked the nation. Around noon, Bryant went to the Seascape bed and breakfast near his home at New Town in Tasmania. He gagged the owners, David and Noelene Martin, stabbed David and shot both of them. Then he drove to the nearby town of Port Arthur.

On the way he visited a property owned by the Martins. He struck up a conversation with Roger Larner, an acquaintance, and expressed an interest in seeing Larner’s wife but changed his mind and continued on to Port Arthur, arriving shortly after 1 p.m. After sitting in his car for a while, Bryant gathered a bag containing three high-powered automatic rifles and went to the Broad Arrow Cafe, where he bought lunch. He ate outside while casually chatting with tourists.

After finishing his meal, Bryant returned inside the cafe, pulled a rifle from his bag and shot through the cafe and gift shop. Within 90 seconds he had killed 20 people and injured 12 others. Outside in the car park he shot four more people fatally, and wounded others.

Bryant continued up the road, firing randomly at tourists. The savagery of shooting, at point-blank range, a mother pleading for the lives of her two infants and then killing them too is almost unimaginable. He showed no mercy as he wandered through the tourist spot.

In a stolen car he drove back to Seascape, killing and wounding people on the way. At a petrol station he murdered more people and took a hostage. Back at the Martins’ B&B, Bryant settled in. Police arrived for an all-night siege. Finally, the next morning, Bryant set fire to the house and fled to the police with his clothes burning. The hostage was found inside the house. By the close of the whole bloody day 35 people were dead and 18 had been wounded. Many others were injured in minor ways and severely traumatised.

Martin Bryant was born in 1967. A hyperactive, emotionless child with a low IQ and a range of difficulties, he was diagnosed as an invalid and probably schizophrenic. He never socialised with other children and left school at the age of sixteen. Most of his medical assessments suggested that he was volatile and violent – a time bomb only kept in check by his father, Maurice.

Bryant’s only friend was Helen Harvey, an elderly woman who had mental health issues of her own. For some years Bryant and Harvey were inseparable. In October 1992 a car carrying them was involved in a bad accident and Harvey was killed; Bryant may have caused the accident on purpose. As her sole heir, the troubled man inherited more than half a million dollars and a number of properties.

Then, in August 1993, Maurice Bryant took his own life. Martin was now wealthy and unsupervised. He collected a wide range of high-powered weapons, many of them automatic, and after three years, reached that place in his mind.

The immediate reaction to the horror at Port Arthur was incredulous sorrow. Prime Minister John Howard was particularly moved and announced that self-loading rifles, self-loading shotguns and pump-action shotguns were to be either banned or heavily restricted. He instituted a national buy-back of extant weapons, and some 643 000 firearms were handed back, at a cost of $350 million. This decisive move was one of the few issues almost all Australians agreed on in the Howard era.

93

1997
Wi-fi technology
The clever country

Wi-fi came out of the CSIRO’s pioneering work in radioastronomy. The technology was first embodied in an industry standard in 1999 (called IEEE 802.11a). By 2012 CSIRO had licence agreements with 90 per cent of the industry, with total revenue earned in excess of $450 million. As well as computers, wi-fi is now used to connect electronic devices wirelessly, including printers, game consoles, TVs and phones.

The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation is one of the most esteemed creations of 20th-century Australia. A government body dedicated to scientific and industrial research was established as early as 1916. The Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, under the leadership of George Julius, David Rivett and Arnold Richardson, ramped up research for primary industry.

Prime Minister Ben Chifley restructured the organisation in 1949 and renamed it the CSIRO, under the chairmanship of Ian Clunies Ross. The organisation and its predecessors were involved in developing varieties of wheat, cotton and wool that would respond to the Australian environment. It was this not-for-profit research that provided the backbone of Australian primary industry.

After World War II Clunies Ross encouraged expansion into the areas of radioastronomy, electronics and computing. English scientist Trevor Pearcey’s team ran the first test program on CSIR Mark 1 in November 1949. This was the fourth modern computer in the world and it came on line for full operation in 1951.

CSIR Mark 1 was an essential tool in the implementation of the Snowy River project and many other civil and social engineering initiatives. The huge mainframe computer was eventually renamed CSIRAC (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Automatic Computer), but unfortunately there were no Australian entrepreneurs ready to develop the project and it languished behind the work of American, British and European corporations.

In the immediate postwar period, the CSIRO also developed myxomatosis and calicivirus for the control of rabbit populations. Research into insect control to keep flies off cattle and reduce disease led to the development of insect repellents such as Aerogard, which was used by the Queen when she visited Australia in 1963 and became an essential condiment to the outdoor lifestyle.

The CSIRO invented Relenza, the world’s first effective flu treatment, as well as soft contact lenses, fabric softeners, gene shears, a vaccine for the Hendra virus, polymer banknotes, rubber based on the proteins from fleas, microwave landing systems for aircraft, and many other domestic, agricultural and industrial processes. In conjunction with the University of Texas in Dallas, the CSIRO has led the way in developing carbon sheeting.

But perhaps the most memorable breakthrough was wireless LAN IEEE 802.11, which was developed by a team led by John O’Sullivan and including Terry Percival, Diet Ostry, Graham Daniels and John Deane. The device enabled wireless communication between computers – what is now referred to as wi-fi and is implanted in some five billion devices, including all wireless-enabled laptops, smartphones and tablets.

Wireless networks had been first developed in the 1970s, but they were not very efficient. O’Sullivan’s background in radioastronomy inspired him to look at ‘multipathing’, and this proved to be the answer. The LAN IEEE 802.11 was patented in 1996 and had been adopted as the industry standard by the turn of the century. US Patent 5487069 is essential in the manufacture of any wireless device and earned the CSIRO upwards of $430 million in royalties before its expiry in 2013.

The CSIRO holds 3582 patents and 275 trademarks and has been credited with 728 inventions. Every so often in Australia’s history we aspire to becoming ‘the clever country’, at which time the CSIRO prospers. It’s a credit to the nation – even when the signal drops out.

94

1998
An East Timorese native sword
Treachery in the jungle

This edged sword has a wooden grip in the form of an animal hoof. The single-edged plain blade is slightly curved and very rusty. It was collected from Dili in East Timor and was a gift from the prison police superintendent.

The island of Timor was colonised in the 17th century by the Dutch in the west and the Portuguese in the east. Other than its providing massive quantities of sandalwood, the Portuguese thought little of the place.

In 1769, the city of Dili was founded as the capital of Portuguese Timor; it was pretty much neglected thereafter until 1942, when the Imperial Japanese Army swept through – Portuguese neutrality in the war notwithstanding. Sparrow Force, an Australian operation, was sent to thwart the Japanese. The Australians were overwhelmed by the courage and inventiveness that the Timorese people showed them in the war.

Indonesian nationalists threw out the Dutch after World War II, and West Timor was incorporated into the Indonesian Federation. East Timor remained a Portuguese colony.

In the early 1970s, Australia and Indonesia began negotiations on territorial borders and the ownership of minerals, gas and oil in the waters between the two countries. The area was ill defined and Australia argued that its border extended to the edge of Australia’s continental shelf – a distance that is more than halfway to Indonesia.

In 1972, Indonesia agreed to the boundary. However, one area couldn’t be defined, and that was the border with the Portuguese colony. Lisbon took the view that the border should be the median point between the countries, as it was between Australia and New Zealand. This ill-defined area became known as the Timor Gap.

After the fascist regime in Portugal fell in 1974, Lisbon abandoned its colony and the power vacuum was filled by warring Timor nationalists, many of them Marxists or pro-Indonesians.

On 28 November 1975, Timorese rebels declared independence in East Timor. The following month Indonesia invaded. During the course of the Indonesian takeover five Australian journalists were shot by the Indonesian military in the town of Balibo, on 16 October 1975. An Australian AAP-Reuters journalist travelled to East Timor to investigate the deaths of the Balibo Five and was summarily executed by an unidentified Indonesian soldier in Dili on 8 December 1975.

Indonesia annexed East Timor on 17 July 1976. Australia was the only western country to recognise the annexation. Australia and Indonesia worked on resolving the Timor Gap issue to exploit the tens of billions of dollars of resources under the water.

A turning point came in 1991 when the Indonesians massacred 250 Timorese in the Santa Cruz cemetery in full view of international media. The US government suspended military aid; then the Asian financial crisis hit Indonesia in the mid-1990s and the costs of maintaining a large police and military force in Timor became prohibitive. Believing that human-rights reform over Timor would help the Indonesian case with the USA, the Indonesian government agreed to allow the Timorese to vote on independence or staying within Indonesia.

The United Nations Mission in East Timor (UNAMET) conducted the poll in August 1999, which resulted in an overwhelming vote in favour of independence and incited a new wave of violence from pro-Indonesian militias. Australia led the International Force for East Timor (INTERFET) as peacekeepers, contributing 5500 personnel under the command of Major General Peter Cosgrove.

On 19 October 1999, Indonesia formally recognised the result of the referendum. East Timor became the first new sovereign state of the 21st century on 20 May 2002.

The newest country was also one of the poorest countries. With fires still burning from the militias’ violence, Australia and East Timor – or Timor-Leste, as it’s officially known – repudiated the Timor Gap Treaty and resumed negotiations on the oil and gas reserves, which were Timor’s only hope of economic survival.

Timor was a country that had just survived 25 years of violence and political terrorism leading up to a vicious war of independence. Against that background, Australia, under the direction of Foreign Minister Alexander Downer, went into the negotiations hard. Two main treaties were to be negotiated.

The Timor Sea Treaty allocates revenues from the Joint Petroleum Development Area in the Timor Sea. East Timor receives 90 per cent of these revenues and Australia receives 10 per cent. The JPDA is almost tapped out.

The second treaty, Certain Maritime Arrangements in the Timor Sea, deals with the Greater Sunrise field. This is a potentially massive oil and gas field, all of which is in Timor’s waters, but of which Australia claims 80 per cent of revenue. Downer – subsequently a consultant to Woodside, the company that is developing the Sunrise field – made it clear that if Timor didn’t agree to Australia’s terms it would be starved of all Timor Sea revenue and the state would collapse. It has now emerged that the Australian government used Australian security forces to illegally spy on the Timorese prime minister and his negotiating team.

In 2004, when Australia negotiated its sea boundary with New Zealand, it opted for the United Nations Convention’s median point. But there was no oil money at stake there, and New Zealand could not be bullied. Through all the negotiations with Timor-Leste, Australia through its foreign minister portrayed itself as a patron and benefactor. That may be true, but the revenue extracted from Timor’s waters is several times greater than the money spent on aid.

According to the Australian War Memorial, ‘one Australian survivor of the year-long guerilla campaign in 1942 commented that the creados [Timorese who assisted the Australians] were so good . . . they risked their lives all the time for us, it shamed you really.’

95

2000
Cathy Freeman’s running suit
The 2000 Games and the ‘Sorry’ message

At the 2000 Olympic Games Cathy Freeman wore a hooded one-piece Nike TurboSpeed racing suit like this one. The design of the suit had been ongoing for more than a decade but the company had worked on it intensively since 1998. The aerodynamically designed suit reduced drag and helped Freeman win 400-metre gold at the Sydney Olympics.

The Games of the XXVII Olympiad were held in Sydney in 2000. Much had changed since Australia hosted the 1956 Games in Melbourne. This was a chance to show off an independent, forward-thinking country – but as it turned out, the Sydney Olympics were really about Australia talking to itself. At the time the nation was deep in a discussion about reconciliation between non-Indigenous and Indigenous cultures. The public question was whether there should be an official apology to Indigenous Australians who were members of the stolen generations. The chief opponent of the ‘Sorry’ statement was Prime Minister John Howard.

One of the two unquestioned stars of the Games was runner Cathy Freeman, whose grandmother was a member of the stolen generations. Australia was set to have a domestic argument in front of the neighbours – indeed, the whole world.

The Games got off to an amazing start on 15 September with an opening ceremony that celebrated Australia’s history from pre-colonial times to the present day. It was a mark of the national confidence that Australians could glory in the troppo phalanxes of Victa mowers and Hills hoists, something that would never have been attempted at the 1956 Olympics.

Australian Olympic champion Herb Elliott brought the Olympic flame into the stadium and then, to celebrate a centenary of women Olympians, a relay of Australian women champions – Betty Cuthbert, Raelene Boyle, Dawn Fraser, Shirley Strickland, Shane Gould and Debbie Flintoff-King – brought the torch through the stadium to its final carrier, Cathy Freeman, dressed in a shiny white sprint suit.

Two athletes dominated the Sydney Games: swimmer Ian Thorpe and runner Cathy Freeman. Only 17 years old at the time, on the first night in the pool Thorpe won gold in the 400m freestyle and as part of 4 by 100-metre freestyle relay. He finished the Sydney Games with a record three gold and two silver medals, making him the most decorated Australian swimmer in Olympic history. Throughout he wore a full-body ‘swift suit’, and something about the futuristic styling fitted well with the ethos of these games of the new millennium.

The most important track race was the women’s 400 metres. This was Freeman’s event. She had been the first Aboriginal person to win a Commonwealth Games gold medal and the first Aboriginal woman to compete in the Olympics (in Barcelona, 1992). Freeman won an Olympic silver medal at Atlanta in 1996 in the 400 metres.

After her 400-metre victory at the 1994 Commonwealth Games, Freeman had spontaneously grabbed an Aboriginal flag and draped it over her shoulders for a victory lap. That gesture sparked an enormous controversy. All kinds of terrible things were threatened if Freeman dared to replay it at the Sydney Olympics, but there was little doubt that if given the chance, she would.

Freeman had won her first Commonwealth Games gold ten years previously at age 16. Having won the world title in the distance in 1997 and 1999, she entered the stadium on 25 September 2000 as the favourite to take out the race. She was a commanding figure in her hooded one-piece racing suit of pale green, yellow and white. A crowd of 112 524 exploded in a spontaneous cheer as she flew out of the blocks.

Sticking to her strategy, she took the first half of the race easily, finding a groove and a position from which she could seize the lead when she chose to. And she timed it beautifully. She crossed the line in 49.11 seconds and collapsed on to the turf. The stadium erupted in camera bulbs and an almighty roar. Freeman picked herself up and, holding both the Aboriginal and Australian flags, made her victory lap. ‘This was my race and no one was going to stop me telling the world how proud I was to be Aboriginal,’ she said later. ‘Somewhere deep inside, I’d absorbed all the pain and suffering my people had endured and turned it into a source of strength.’

There had been political moments at the Olympics before – notably when Tommie Smith and John Carlos gave their famous Black Power salute in Mexico in 1968 (which ended their careers). Freeman’s lap of honour was equally strong and inspiring. The grace of her performance silenced her critics.

The Games closed with agit-rock band Midnight Oil wearing suits that said ‘Sorry’, just to confirm the message. Eight years later the word was finally said by Australia’s prime minister at the time, Kevin Rudd.

A splendid time was had by all at the Games. Teams from 199 countries sent 10 651 athletes for 300 events. Australia won 17 swimming medals in the pool and 58 medals in all, coming fourth on the medal tally. Australians basked in the international spotlight and we were pleased at notices like Bill Bryson’s in The Times, in which he wrote, ‘one of the most successful events on the world stage’.

96

2001
Lifebuoy from the MV Tampa
Turning back boats

This is a lifebuoy from the Norwegian ship MV Tampa that rescued asylum seekers on a boat between Australia and Indonesia in 2001. The Tampa crisis, as it was known, set the agenda for what has been Australia’s refugee policy ever since.

On 24 August 2001, a 20-metre wooden fishing boat, the Palapa 1, became stranded in international waters about 140 kilometres north of Christmas Island. On board were 438 refugees – 369 men, 26 women and 43 children.

According to the law of the sea, all boats have an obligation to go to the assistance of a vessel in distress on the high seas, to rescue people and transfer them to the nearest appropriate port. The nearest vessel to the Palapa 1 was the Norwegian freighter MV Tampa, with a crew of 27 and licensed to carry no more than 50 persons. The Tampa responded to the Palapa’s call.

Under Australian and international law people have the right to seek asylum from countries that persecute them. Under the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, Australia’s protection obligations are engaged when asylum seekers enter its jurisdiction by entering its territorial seas.

Once an asylum seeker reaches Australia, his or her asylum claim can take years to go all the way through the courts. The destination for many of the boat people was Christmas Island, a nondescript rock 500 kilometres south of Jakarta and 2000 kilometres off the north-west coast of Australia.

As 2001 began, the Howard government was behind in the polls and facing an election before Christmas. Prime Minister John Howard was determined to show that he had ‘a steady hand on the helm [and] needed to guide Australia through those very difficult circumstances’.

The MV Tampa was under the command of Captain Arne Rinnan on a voyage from Fremantle to Singapore via Sunda Strait. When it reached the Palapa at about 2 p.m. the fishing boat was disintegrating on the water. Rinnan took on board the crew and passengers of the Palapa. A number of passengers, perhaps a dozen, were unconscious. Many others were suffering from dysentery.

A delegation of the refugees came to Rinnan and announced that they were not going back to Indonesia under any circumstances. With a crew of less than 50 versus almost 400 asylum seekers, Rinnan feared losing control of his ship. Given that Christmas Island (then part of Australia) was the closest port, he turned the Tampa around and headed for there.

The Australian government refused permission for the Tampa to enter Australian waters. The vessel was caught in limbo, unable to get to port in Australia and unable to go to Indonesia. Through the early hours of 29 August, it sent increasingly insistent calls for medical assistance, but Australian authorities continued to forbid it from entering Australian waters.

At 11.26 a.m., Rinnan sent a message saying that he had tried to accommodate the wishes of the Australian authorities but the situation was getting out of hand. He advised his intention of proceeding to the nearest shore immediately. At this point, 45 SAS troops boarded the Tampa. The SAS doctor reported that the refugees were dehydrated, malnourished and suffering from exhaustion and minor ailments, including 61 cases of scabies, 46 of head lice and 24 of gastroenteritis. The doctor also attended to four pregnant women.

The Norwegian government protested the military action. After a period of negotiations the refugees on the Tampa agreed to be transferred to the Royal Australian Navy vessel HMAS Manoora. Some of them hoped to be going to Australia, but in fact the Australian government had negotiated with New Zealand to take some of the refugees. The others would be encamped on Nauru, where their claims for asylum would be processed.

As the refugees steamed towards Nauru on the morning of 11 September, two hijacked planes went into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York and another hijacked plane crashed into the Pentagon in Washington. Afghanistan and the Taliban were suddenly, and for the first time, front-page news.

Although we now had common cause with the passengers on the Palapa 1 – a common enemy in the Taliban – the public lack of support didn’t change. In fact, the Palapa 1 passengers had gone from being ‘queue jumpers’ to ‘potential terrorists’ – a transformation aided by the suggestions of shock-jock radio announcers and government ministers.

On 28 October Howard uttered the statement that will forever define his leadership: ‘we will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come’.

The Tampa crisis led to the ‘Pacific Solution’, whereby asylum claims would be processed offshore without redress to Australian courts. Certain parts of Australia, such as Christmas Island, the Cocos Islands, Ashmore Reef and other havens, were deemed to be outside the authority of the Migration Act and for some purposes were excluded from Australia.

On the afternoon of 6 October 2001, the Olong, a wooden ship designated SIEV (Suspected Illegal Entry Vessel) 4, carrying 223 asylum seekers, was intercepted by HMAS Adelaide 100 nautical miles (190 kilometres) north of Christmas Island. The boat’s engine was not working and it had holes in the hull, some of which were below the waterline. Passengers, including children, were in the water, as were navy personnel. It was only through bravery, great skill and luck that no one drowned.

Some naval personnel took snapshots of the rescue attempt. These pictures made their way through naval circles to the politicians who were running the anti–asylum-seeker campaign: ministers Philip Ruddock, Alexander Downer and Peter Reith and the prime minister.

The next day, Howard called a federal election. One day into the campaign senior ministers released the snapshot and Ruddock, Howard, Reith and Downer claimed that adults had thrown the children into the water. They kept up these claims even after they knew them to be false. The Howard government was re-elected in a landslide.

Captain Rinnan was lauded internationally and in Norway for his courage. A captain for 23 years, he undertook one more voyage before retiring. He said of the five days off Christmas Island: ‘I have seen most of what there is to see in this profession, but what I experienced on this trip is the worst. When we asked for food and medicine for the refugees, the Australians sent commando troops on board . . . The soldiers obviously didn’t like their mission.’

97

2002
Bali bombings cross
When terror hits

This small, simple, white-painted wooden memorial cross was one of the many items left on the Victorian Parliament steps in the two weeks following the Bali bombings in October 2002. ‘TO ALL THE / VICTIMS OF BALI / R.I.P.’ is written in black ink on the side of the plinth. The cross is accompanied by a white, yellow and purple lei that was draped across it.

On the night of 12 October 2002 three homemade bombs went off in the busy Kuta precinct on the Indonesian island of Bali. The carnage was horrific. At 11.05 p.m. Central Indonesian Time a suicide bomber exploded a vest bomb in Paddy’s Pub, a tourist destination. There was mayhem as people were killed and injured and those who were able fled the bar into the street. Twenty seconds later, across the road outside the Sari Club, a massive van bomb exploded, killing and maiming not only people seeking refuge on the street but also patrons of the club. The explosion left a metre-deep crater. Two hundred and two people were killed, 88 of them Australian, and a further 240 were injured, many of them very seriously.

Over the ensuing months investigators would determine that the attacks had been carried out by a fundamentalist Muslim group known as Jemaah Islamiyah, which had direct links to the international terrorist group al-Qaeda that one year before had carried out the September 11 attacks on the USA. A week after the Bali bombings, al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden released an audio message saying that Australians had been targeted for this attack because their government had supported the independence of East Timor.

This was the first time that Australians had been targeted in any international incident or act of terror. The attacks took place in Bali, a place that Australians regard as their exotic playground. The attacks were scheduled for 11 September, the first anniversary of Osama bin Laden’s attack, but the bombs were not ready.

Planning of the Bali attack had begun ten months earlier in Thailand. Up to a dozen men were involved in the planning and execution of the attacks. Riduan Isamuddin (aka Hambali), the connection between JI and al-Qaeda, expounded a strategy of hitting soft targets such as nightclubs, hotels and bars. One member of the conspiracy, Ali Imron, testified that the plan came together in August 2002 in the town of Solo. He said that Bali was chosen as a target because it was popular with America and its allies. A secondary motive was to destabilise the Indonesian economy by driving away tourists.

JI is an organisation run by Abu Bakar Bashir dedicated to the establishment of a fundamentalist Muslim state in Indonesia. Bashir has been politically active since the early 1960s and was arrested by the Suharto regime. He went into exile in Malaysia and has been fomenting dissent throughout South-East Asia and especially in the Philippines ever since. Terror attacks by JI and other revolutionary groups were usually directed at domestic targets, but Bali was different – part of a global jihad.

Within hours of the bombs going off, Australian federal police and security officers were in Bali. In the ensuing months, more than 120 Australian police and security personnel worked alongside Indonesian police. Australia subsequently funded most of the team called Special Detachment 88 – a highly effective counterterrorism group that operates throughout Indonesia. The cooperation between the two countries and the level of trust deepened year by year and became one of the most tangible points of Australia’s much-touted engagement with Asia.

In 2005, another attack on Australians in Bali killed four and injured nineteen. These blasts killed 15 Indonesians and injured sixty-eight. Since then there have been no further major incidents, which suggests that JI has been significantly destroyed. Bashir is frequently behind bars and Hambali has disappeared into the American intelligence network – and of course bin Laden is dead.

Rather than frightening Australians away from Bali, the level of tourism has increased markedly, the number of Australians now living in Bali has increased, and there is a common fly-in fly-out culture of people working in Australia and living in Bali.

Fifty years ago, Indonesia was a place that Australians flew over to get to other places. It is now rapidly modernising and its economy is growing at a great rate. Australians and the Australian government are having to deal with a confident and increasingly powerful Asian country, and the adjustment has not always been easy.

98

2007
A ‘Kevin 07’ T-shirt
Zipping

Kevin Rudd led the Australian Labor Party to an election victory in 2007 by representing progressive politics after 13 years of conservative rule. He employed techniques of modern politics with the use of social media and engaging graphics and slogans borrowed from the USA.

John Howard comprehensively dominated Australian politics and public life for more than a decade. He oversaw the biggest surge in national wealth since the gold rush of the 1850s and used that national contentedness to redraft the vision Australians had for their nation. The Howard years saw a steady rebalance of national income towards the wealthy. Social policy was geared to entrenching the status quo. Howard presented as someone who wanted to get back to the ‘relaxed and comfortable’ certainties of the Menzies era in the 1950s. He stood for the Queen and the nuclear family.

After 13 years, the public was tired of Howard. The new century seemed to be about new ideas, greater engagement with the world and with Asia, and reconciliation with Indigenous people. Climate change had begun to be a major issue. But it wasn’t just one issue that turned the tide against Howard. There was his refusal to acknowledge the sins of Australia’s white settlement and say ‘sorry’ to the survivors of the stolen generations. His refusal to acknowledge climate change until almost the last moment reflected not only his conservative views, but also an unwillingness to look to the future (the full impact of current carbon pollution will not be felt until decades hence). Howard was conservative on many issues, including religion and homosexual law reforms.

Kevin Rudd came to the leadership of the ALP in December 2006 as an apparent cleanskin. He had been a bureaucrat in the Queensland Labor government and then a diplomat with an interest in China. For the past decade, Labor had been unable to settle on the right leader. Kim Beazley, Simon Crean and Mark Latham – all traditional Labor men – had by turns led the party. Two were the sons of Whitlam ministers and the third held Gough’s old seat, but they struggled to articulate a new Labor vision.

Rudd carried none of their baggage. He was a relentless orator on television and radio, an enthusiastic user of social media and a regular on TV talk shows. He embraced the new technology, understood climate change and could speak Mandarin. He seemed like a man of the future. It was time for a change.

One of the big issues that concerned Howard and Rudd was the Kyoto Protocol. This international agreement, made in 1997, set targets for national levels of carbon dioxide emission. Australia had been party to setting up the Kyoto Protocol, but when the United States refused to ratify the agreement, Australia followed suit – one of the few countries to do so – and maintained its position, which was to act in lock step with the USA. In the light of the Iraq War and the threat of climate change, this blind allegiance seemed very old-fashioned.

Rudd marketed himself as an ALP version of Howard: Christian, morally and fiscally conservative, but with a readiness to address contemporary political issues. He seemed to have come from somewhere outside of the political scrum and was a man who loved big ideas and grand gestures. The Australian people thought so – Labor won the 2007 election by a landslide, and Rudd was sworn in as the 26th Prime Minister of Australia.

As he had promised, soon after the election Rudd ratified the Kyoto Protocol. When parliament resumed, he staged the apology to the stolen generations. His government dismantled Howard’s industrial-relations legislation and set about rapid reform.

Less than a year into the Rudd government, the global financial crisis of 2008 overtook all other political issues. Rudd and his inner sanctum (treasurer Wayne Swan, finance minister Lindsay Tanner and deputy PM Julia Gillard, with Reserve Bank governor Glenn Stevens and the head of Treasury Ken Henry) made some strong early decisions that saved the Australian economy.

This ability to devise solutions rather than just relying on great and powerful friends demonstrated a new Australian maturity. As the UK and the USA were devastated by economic headwinds, Australia sought to recalibrate its priorities towards Asia, using rhetoric that would have been unthinkable 30 years before.

For a time, Rudd could do no wrong. His gaffes and failings were overlooked. He had delivered the nation from Howardism into a bold, new, independent era. But rumours of impulsiveness and despotism, of inefficiency and of growing frustration within the parliamentary party slowly began to filter out, and persisted.

The Rudd government seemed to falter in its second year. The failure to get a global agreement on climate change was an early hiccup. Tony Abbott became leader of the Opposition and pursued a policy of climate denial and populism. A scandal arose about deaths related to the government’s scheme for supplying insulation. Rumours continued to leak out about Rudd’s personal style and from early 2010 his stratospheric popularity started to sink.

In the autumn months of 2010, Rudd and his government appeared to be losing their grip. Rudd never recovered from the collapse of the climate-change agenda. He appeared to be desperate to regain the public’s love.

Opinion polls placed deputy PM Gillard as a more popular alternative PM and she had the support of the party. On 23 June 2010, in a dramatic few hours during which no doubt everyone involved wishes they’d behaved differently, Rudd lost control of the party he had personally revived and delivered to the Treasury benches.

On 24 June, Gillard was elected unopposed as the leader of the ALP and Australia’s first woman prime minister. A very critical corner had been turned, and nothing was the same thereafter.

99

2009
A burned car
Global warming

Chris Lee had a collection of six early-model Holden cars. He stored them in a shed on his property at Koornalla, south of Traralgon in Victoria. The Holden 48-215 aka the FX was the first mass-produced car manufactured in Australia. This particular car has been destroyed by fire, which has taken off the duco, the interiors of the car and sealed the hood. Chris Lee bought the car in 1998 and drove it once a month or so until 7 February 2009. That date is known as Black Saturday when bushfires raged through Victoria destroying 247 houses.

No rain had fallen for two months; the drought had doggedly persisted for the past decade. The previous week had sweltered under a record-breaking heatwave. In Melbourne, the mercury beat 43 degrees Celsius on three days. On 30 January it reached 45.1 – the third-hottest day since records had begun in 1859. On 6 February, the Victorian premier, John Brumby, predicted that the following day would be ‘just as bad a day as you can imagine and, on top of that, the state is tinder-dry . . . [it’s the] worst day in the history of the state’. As the day unfolded, railway lines buckled in the heat.

As 7 February dawned, some 3582 firefighting personnel were ready around the state. When the weather conditions get like this, fires are inevitable. Any random spark, a cigarette, an electrical or mechanical fault or, often, an arsonist will start a fire that is likely to soon escalate beyond control. Most of the residents of the Dandenong Ranges had prepared their houses according to established fire plans and had made decisions to stay or go. Temperatures were nearing 40 by 11 a.m. across the state, and later climbed to the mid-forties.

In the end, all the possible triggers started fires. The first blaze to get out of control began in Bunyip State Park. As the air temperature rose, so did the winds. At 11.20 they brought down powerlines that started a fire in the Kinglake-Whittlesea area that was fanned by north-westerly gusts of up to 125 kph. The fire entered a pine plantation and intensified.

By lunchtime, fires were breaking out everywhere through the district and growing more and more intense. In all, 47 fires burned through the area. According to the later royal commission:

Very dry fuels and strong surface winds resulted in erratic fire behaviour and the development of strong convective activity capable of lifting firebrands such as burning bark high in the convection column. Strong upper air winds transported burning bark downwind for many kilometres, resulting in long-distance fire spotting.

The smoke from the fires brought down communications everywhere. At 3 p.m. the Melbourne temperature peaked at 46.4, with humidity at less than 6 per cent. Two hours later, the temperature plummeted 15 degrees in 15 minutes and the cold atmosphere brought gale-force winds from a new direction, creating massive fire fronts that killed 38 people in Kinglake, 27 in Strathewen and 12 in St Andrews. In all, 164 people died either in the fires or as a result of their injuries.

Australia is the driest inhabited continent in the world. The poet Dorothea Mackellar mentioned ‘flood and fire and famine’, but she could not have imagined, back in 1908 when her verse was first published in London, what the wide brown land would look like 100 years on. Australia is a tough, hard-bitten continent, at the mercy of Pacific Ocean currents and winds off the Indian Ocean. The environmental settings required for human comfort are very sensitive: most of Australia is already uninhabitable.

The vast majority of scientific research says that the planet is undergoing a warming due to the increase in greenhouse gases produced since the industrial revolution of the 1800s. The effects of this warming are already being felt in Australia and are most easily seen in the frequency and increased severity of extreme weather events such as bushfires.

As Mackellar told us, bushfires are an ever-present part of the Australian landscape. Certain parts of the eucalypt forests in south-eastern Australia depend on fire for germination and other aspects of their life cycles. The eucalyptus oil from the trees is part of a fire cycle. Archaeologists believe that the first Australian peoples used fire as a farming technique. If this is the case, the Indigenous people greatly contributed to the growth of eucalypt forest and the vegetation of south-east Australia.

It’s not possible to ascribe the ignition of one bushfire to climate change. However, global warming has seen an increase in the intensity, duration and frequency of heat extremes, a greater prevalence of tinder, more forceful winds and a general drying of the continent, all of which increase the area vulnerable to fire. The ‘bushfire season’ was once confined to midsummer but now starts in spring and lasts through autumn.

Fundamentally, the conditions that exacerbate bushfires are high temperatures, dry heat and high winds. The average temperature has increased steadily over the past 50 years, and each year in Australia since the mid-1990s, with one or two aberrations, has been hotter than the year before. The 13 hottest years on record have occurred during the past 15 years. The country has also been subject to extended drought – the most recent one lasting for 12 years.

Some 800 people have died in bushfires since 1788, and almost 25 per cent of these died in one fire event: Black Saturday in 2009. The Black Friday fire on 13 January 1939, which burned through Victoria, was once the worst bushfire in the nation’s memory, with more than 70 people killed and many towns destroyed. On 7 February 1967, the Black Tuesday fires ravaged Tasmania, killing 62 people, and on Wednesday, 16 February 1983, bushfires raged across Victoria and South Australia, killing 75 people. That day coincided with Ash Wednesday on the Catholic calendar and will be forever known by that name.

The published research on the subject of climate points to a future of extreme and unpredictable weather events and changing patterns of rainfall and drought. Humans are clearly affecting the weather. The changes are not necessarily hurting the planet but they are making it unsuitable for human life. The best projections at present suggest an increase in the number of days over 40 degrees Celsius and prolonged heatwave conditions, an increase in the frequency and severity of tropical cyclones, an increase in ocean salinity, and the destruction of the coral on the Great Barrier Reef. But nobody really knows exactly what will happen or when – only that life will become less comfortable.

Climate change was the overwhelming issue of the early 21st century. While the sceptics and the scientists and their teams argued, the forests burned.

100

2013
Julia Gillard’s spectacles
A woman’s work

Prime Minister Julia Gillard kicked off the election year of 2013 with an address to the National Press Club on 30 January. The following day the political stories in the news fought for space with stories about her Oliver Peoples rose-red spectacles. Why these glasses should be so controversial explains part of the Gillard prime ministership; women in power are scrutinised differently.

On 8 October 2012, Prime Minister Julia Gillard fielded a question from Tony Abbott, the leader of the Opposition. The question related to text messages sent by Abbott’s good friend but now political enemy the Speaker of the House, Peter Slipper. The private but sexually explicit messages were in poor taste and Abbott taunted Gillard about them.

Gillard rose and opened her answer with:

I will not be lectured about sexism and misogyny by this man. I will not. And the government will not be lectured about sexism and misogyny by this man. Not now, not ever. The leader of the Opposition says that people who hold sexist views and who are misogynists are not appropriate for high office. Well, I hope the leader of the Opposition has got a piece of paper and he is writing out his resignation. Because if he wants to know what misogyny looks like in modern Australia, he doesn’t need a motion in the House of Representatives – he needs a mirror. That’s what he needs. Let’s go through the Opposition leader’s repulsive double standards . . .

Gillard enumerated in the parliament the double standard, the sly sexism that operates in our society. It’s a world in which women have the apparent trappings of equality but are not the equal of men. It’s a world where women are still doing the ironing while men look after the ‘big’ jobs.

Gillard’s speech stopped the nation in its tracks for its passion and its plain speaking. It was reported all over the world – the only time in 200 years that an Australian prime minister’s remarks have been. Australian women, even the legion who otherwise despised Gillard, recognised that for the first time someone had articulated the sexism and discrimination they put up with on a daily basis.

The 27th prime minister of Australia and the 13th Labor prime minister, Julia Gillard was the first woman to hold the top job and the first woman to lead the ALP. She was, even for years before that, a character who fascinated and polarised the Australian public. Unlike other ambitious politicians, Gillard never married, never pretended to have religious beliefs, spoke with a very broad accent, and in one of her first major photo shoots posed in a kitchen with an empty fruit bowl and little evidence of hominess. These characteristics were commented on incessantly. One especially uncouth Liberal politician accused her in parliament of being ‘barren’.

There is a general sense that sexism goes unremarked. Women are supposed to put up with it because they are ‘good sports’ or because it’s beneath them to acknowledge it. The fact that women make up 50 per cent of the population and yet only 3.7 percent of prime ministers goes completely unremarked. Gillard’s ascent to the top job was a lightning rod for men and women in Australia who were threatened by the idea of a woman being in charge.

Gillard’s position was not helped by the coup that installed her in power. She had been deputy to Kevin Rudd following the 2007 election. By 2010 most of the government had lost confidence in Rudd as prime minister and believed that the ALP was facing defeat at the imminent election. Gillard stood against Rudd and won the prime ministership, but was thereafter seen as a traitor. Her ascent over Rudd was the same as that of Bob Hawke over Bill Hayden, Paul Keating over Hawke, John Howard over a number of people and Rudd over Kim Beazley, but Gillard was painted as a Lady Macbeth and never transcended that archetype. The fact that Rudd launched a relentless destabilisation campaign against her helped neither Gillard nor her government.

With a massive reform agenda to pursue, the Gillard government was beset with leadership tensions and manufactured scandal. The ALP was in a minority position, governing with the support of independents, and certain members of the party were under investigation for sleazy sex scandals. None of this made the government feel stable. It made its share of mistakes all of its own.

Nonetheless, the government pushed through major reforms, especially in the areas of disability care and education funding. Gillard created and implemented significant climate-change policies and a framework for a market-based scheme to reduce emissions. As a result of her government’s policies, Australia’s carbon emissions are declining.

However, the most significant achievement of the Gillard government was getting sexism and gender equality on the agenda.

There is a general view that successful women should not comment on sexism when they come across it, and that they shouldn’t talk about their own success in the context of feminism. Gillard took that approach during her career: she made little mention of the fact that she was a woman. Others did – such as shock jock Alan Jones, who called her a ‘witch’, and even feminist Germaine Greer, who commented on Gillard’s body shape.

‘My first strategy was to ignore it [sexism], but as time went on, increasingly I thought it was better to name it,’ said Gillard.

I think just for me, you know, the sense that after everything that I as the first woman prime minister had seen happen around me about gender, and to me in that position, I was not going to stand there and get lectured about sexism. And so I think that frustration, even anger, shows in that speech.

For individual women in the moment, there’s always this really difficult judgement call, and this is true whether you’re in the highly exposed world of politics or whether you work in a business or you’re at a university . . . there’s that judgement in the moment of ‘Do you name it, or do you just put up with it?’

She named it, and the genie is now out of the bottle.

PHOTOGRAPHY CREDITS

1  A necklace from Lake Nitchie: courtesy of the National Archives of Australia

2  A marngrook possum ball: photography by Jim Poulter, private collection

3  Kimberley points: photography by George Serras, National Museum of Australia

4  Dirk Hartog’s plate: courtesy of the Rijkmuseum

5  Captain Cook’s globe: courtesy of the State Library of Victoria

6  The Charlotte medal: courtesy of the Australian Maritime Museum

7  A wool sample: photography by George Serras, courtesy of the National Museum of Australia

8  Matthew Flinders’ hat: courtesy of the State Library of New South Wales

9  A diorama of Governor William Bligh’s arrest: photography by George Serras, courtesy of the National Museum of Australia

10   A mug depicting Governor Davey’s proclamation to the Aborigines of Tasmania 1816: courtesy of the National Museum of Australia

11   A bowl with a view of Sydney: courtesy of the State Library of New South Wales

12   A bottle of beer: photography by Giovanna Trenoweth

13   A convict uniform: courtesy of the National Library of Australia

14   Batman’s contract for Melbourne: photography by George Serras, courtesy of the National Museum of Australia

15   A pepper-box revolver from Lambing Flat: courtesy of the National Museum of Australia

16   A Staffordshire porcelain figurine of Protestant Irish nationalist convict William Smith O’Brien: courtesy of the National Museum of Australia

17   The Eureka flag: courtesy of the Ballarat Art Gallery

18   An Australian Rules Sherrin: photography by Giovanna Trenoweth, private collection

19   Robert O’Hara Burke’s water bottle: photography by Dean McNicoll, courtesy of the National Museum of Australia

20   Mrs Butters’ press dress: courtesy of the State Library of Victoria

21   A Coolgardie Safe: courtesy of the Powerhouse Museum

22   Ned Kelly’s armour: courtesy of the State Library of Victoria

23   A Sunshine stripper harvester: courtesy of Museum Victoria

24   A pair of shears: courtesy of the Queensland Museum

25   Dame Nellie Melba’s dress: courtesy of the Performing Arts Collection, Arts Centre

26   A women’s suffrage movement banner: courtesy of the Parliament House Art Collection

27   Jandamurra’s boomerang: courtesy of Museum Victoria

28   A billy: photography by Samantha Trenoweth

29   Dally Messenger’s cap: photography by Lannon Harley, courtesy of the Canterbury Bulldogs

30   A slouch hat with rising sun badge: courtesy of the Australian War Memorial

31   A Federation flag: courtesy of the Powerhouse Museum

32   Henry Lawson’s pen: courtesy of the National Library of Australia

33   St Mary Mackillop (St Mary of the Cross) rosary: courtesy of the Mary MacKillop Place Museum

34   Marion Mahoney Griffin’s plan for Canberra: courtesy of the National Archives of Australia

35   Mawson’s Antarctic sledge: courtesy of the Powerhouse Museum

36   George Julius’ totaliser machine: courtesy of the Powerhouse Museum

37   Two-up kip and coins: courtesy of the Australian War Memorial

38   A Gallipoli boat: courtesy of the Australian War Memorial

39   Pin flags for General Sir John Monash: courtesy of the Australian War Memorial

40   Winnie O’Sullivan’s locket: courtesy of the National Museum of Australia

41   A Billy Hughes novelty paperweight: photography by George Serras, courtesy National Museum of Australia

42   A Felix the Cat doll: courtesy of the Powerhouse Museum

43   A Country Women’s Association cup and saucer: courtesy of the Queensland Country Women’s Association

44   A Vegemite jar: courtesy of the Powerhouse Museum

45   The Kinchela Boys Home gate: photography by Kate Shanahan courtesy of the National Museum of Australia

46   Penicillin moulds: courtesy of the Powerhouse Museum

47   Charles Kingsford Smith’s cigarette case: courtesy of the National Museum of Australia

48   A Waterside Workers banner: photography by George Serras, courtesy of the National Museum of Australia

49   The Play School rocket clock: photography by George Serras, courtesy of the National Museum of Australia

50   The Heidelberg dress: photography by George Serras, courtesy of the National Museum of Australia

51   A model of Nancy-Bird Walton’s Gipsy Moth aircraft: courtesy of the Powerhouse Museum

52   A Cherry Ripe chocolate bar: photography by Giovanna Trenoweth

53   Don Bradman’s 1934 bat: photography by George Serras, courtesy of the National Museum of Australia

54   A Melbourne Cup: photography by George Serras, courtesy of the National Museum of Australia

55   A cane-toad statuette: photography courtesy of Mark Lewis

56   A Japanese Himitsu-Bako puzzle box: courtesy of the Australian War Memorial

57   A road sign to Tobruk: courtesy of the Australian War Memorial

58   Weary Dunlop’s medical instruments: courtesy of Museum Victoria

59   A Japanese flag from the Kokoda track: courtesy of the Australian War Memorial

60   Ben Chifley’s pipe: photography by George Serras, courtesy of National Museum of Australia

61   A ten-pound Pom’s suitcase: courtesy of the National Museum of Australia

62   Holden Prototype No. 1: photography by Dragi Markovic, courtesy of the National Museum of Australia

63   Lord Warden of Cinque Ports uniform as worn by Robert Menzies: courtesy of the National Library of Australia

64   A bottle of Grange Hermitage: courtesy of Treasury Wines

65   Cimbali espresso machine: courtesy of Collezione Enrico Maltoni

66   Rock shovel bucket: photography by Jason McCarthy, courtesy of the National Museum of Australia

67   Evdokia Petrov’s shoe: courtesy of NEWSPIX

68   A Paula Stafford bikini: courtesy of the Queensland Museum

69   Snowy Mountains Scheme coasters: courtesy of the Powerhouse Museum

70   Olympic stamp from 1956 Melbourne Games: courtesy of Museum Victoria

71   Old Purple: photography by John Elliott

72   Dame Edna costume: photography by John Timbers, courtesy of the Performing Arts Collection, Arts Centre Melbourne

73   Jørn Utzon’s model for the Sydney Opera House: courtesy of the National Library of Australia

74   A detective’s hat: courtesy of the Performing Arts Collection of the Arts Centre

75   Oz magazine: photography by Toby Creswell, cover design by Martin Sharp, collection

76   Harry Vanda’s guitar: courtesy of the Powerhouse Museum

77   Long Tan dolls: courtesy of the Australian War Memorial

78   Faith Bandler’s gloves: photography by George Serras, courtesy of the National Museum of Australia

79   Patrick White’s typewriter: courtesy of the State Library of New South Wales

80   Evonne Goolagong’s tennis racquet : courtesy of the National Museum of Australia

81   ALP badge 1972: photography by Giovanna Trenoweth, private collection

82   Miranda’s dress: courtesy of NEWSPIX

83   Bob Brown’s raft: courtesy of the National Museum of Australia

84   Dàn tre musical instrument: photography by George Serras, courtesy of the National Museum of Australia

85   Tobacco tin containing white ochre paint: courtesy of the National Museum of Australia

86   Eddie Mabo’s map: with permission by Gail Mabo, and courtesy of the National Library of Australia

87   A Jenny Kee knitted jumper: photography courtesy of Jennny Kee, private collection

88   Azaria Chamberlain’s dress: courtesy of the National Museum of Australia

89   Australia II: photography by Michael Gregg, courtesy of the Western Australia Museum

90   A prawn on a barbecue: photography by Giovanna Trenoweth

91   ‘Cotton Blossom’ Mardi Gras costume: costume designed and made by Ron Muncaster, courtesy of the Powerhouse Museum

92   A Port Arthur memorial: photography by Eddie Safarik, courtesy of NEWSPIX

93   Wi-fi technology: courtesy of the Powerhouse Museum

94   An East Timorese native sword: courtesy of the Australian War Memorial

95   Cathy Freeman’s running suit: photography by Nicole Garmston, courtesy of NEWSPIX

96   Lifebuoy from the MV Tampa: courtesy of the National Museum of Australia

97   Bali Bombings cross: photography by George Serras, courtesy of the National Museum of Australia

98   A ‘Kevin 07’ T-shirt: photography by Giovanna Trenoweth, private collection

99   A burned car: courtesy of Museum Victoria

100   Julia Gillard’s spectacles: photography by Nina Gerace, courtesy of Julia Gillard

Front Cover Image Credits

The Charlotte medal: courtesy of the Australian Maritime Museum; The Eureka flag: courtesy of the Ballarat Art Gallery; An Australian Rules Sherrin: photography by Giovanna Trenoweth, private collection; Ned Kelly’s armour: courtesy of the State Library of Victoria; Henry Lawson’s pen: courtesy of the National Library of Australia.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

There are more than 100 objects that tell the history of Australia. The selection criteria for this book was inspired partly around museum collections to ensure readers have some hope of seeing these objects. However, some items are from other sources, depending on the story and the images available. Some of these stories are of the great upheavals in Australian society, like the Rum Rebellion, World War I, Federation and Reconciliation. Sometimes these big stories were most powerfully represented by a small object that belonged to a person whose name was never widely known, like the beautiful Heidelberg dress that tells of the sorrow and the desperation of the Depression, or a simple cup and saucer from the Country Women’s Association, which did more to settle the outback than any number of explorers. The history of Australia is enshrined in acts of Parliament and wars and the exploits of great men. But it is also enshrined in the lives of ordinary Australians – black and white, Asian, Indigenous and European. So I hope there is a balance struck. Every picture . . .

There would be no pictures in this book but for Samantha Trenoweth, who wrangled bureaucracies, and Giovanna Trenoweth, who took beautiful pictures. Thanks go to Ben Ball for commissioning this book and to Rachel Scully who did hard yards with me on the manuscript; to John Canty who perfected the design; and to editors Katie Purvis and Clementine Edwards, and proofreader Nikki Lusk, all of whom helped it over the line.

For tea and sympathy, I’d like to thank: Jolyon Burnett, Tara Anderson, John O’Donnell, Martin Fabinyi, Larry Meltzer, Kate Butchart, Martin Pedersen, Rachel Perkins, Lisa Anthony, Mark Danta, Tony Pooley, Joanna Quilty, Tony Mott, Catherine Courtenay, Anne Briggs, Geoffrey Datson, Anna Christie, Geoff Peterson, Carlson Loke, Sharon Draper, Ross Brookes, Bob Short, Clinton Walker, Paul Goldman, Gail Mabo, Ian Jones, Deborah Tobias, Tim Singleton, Michael Creswell and Philip and Gwen Creswell, Ann, James and Sean Trenoweth and Glenda Fisher and Artemesia Trenoweth.

For going above and beyond, I’d like to thank: Jane Burridge, Annette Hughes and Denis French at the National Museum of Australia; Kathy Hackett at the Powerhouse Museum; and Val Brown, Mary Morris and Lorenzo Iozzi at Museum Victoria.

Additional thanks to June Oscar, Jenny Kee, Rosemary Wilson, Wendy Farley, Enrico Maltoni; Kate Boesen, Margy Burn and the team of librarians at the National Library of Australia; Nina Gerace, Marielle Smith and Bruce Wolpe from the Office of the Honorable Julia Gillard; Tim Fisher at the Arts Centre, Melbourne; Sophie York and Michael Greg at Museum WA; Ron Schroer and team at the Australian War Memorial; Janine Flew at the Australian National Maritime Museum; and Barbara Robinson-Tan from the Sisters of St Joseph.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Toby Creswell is a former editor of Rolling Stone and founding editor of Juice and other magazines. He has written several books including 1001 Songs. He has written and produced several history and music documentaries and was an executive producer of the film Paul Kelly: Stories of Me.

VIKING

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Penguin Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies

whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

First published by Penguin Random House Australia Pty Ltd, 2016

Text copyright © Toby Creswell 2016

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Cover and text design by John Canty © Penguin Random House Australia Pty Ltd

Cover photography: all images reproduced with permission.

See photography credits in endmatter for detailed listing.

penguin.com.au

ISBN: 978-1-74348-379-4

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