June 2016

Volume 8 Number 2

On the cover

Jim McFarlane (b. 1955)
Justine Summers in Divergence, the Australian Ballet, 1994
b&w photograph; 25.4 x 20.2 cm; nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn2953169
courtesy Jim McFarlane

Stanton Welch’s 1994 ballet Divergence was a provocative and progressive work with costumes to match. Aiming for a high fashion feel with a grunge edge, designer Vanessa Leyonhjelm kept the recognisable shape of the tutu but moved away from traditional materials. Here we see the Australian Ballet’s former principal dancer Justine Summers in Leyonhjelm’s stiff mesh tutu and leather bra ‘that Madonna would envy’, according to The New York Times.

Costumes and headdresses made from foam, lycra, metal and raffia are a long way from the soft bell-shaped skirts of Degas’ dancers or the restrictive panniers and bodices of the early eighteenth century.

Copyright and credits

The aim of the quarterly The National Library of Australia Magazine is to inform the Australian community about the National Library of Australia’s collections and services, and its role as the information resource for the nation.

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(current Council membership at time of printing)

Senior Executive Staff

Director-General: Anne-Marie Schwirtlich AM

Assistant Directors-General, by Division:

Collections Management: Amelia McKenzie

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National Collections Access: Marie-Louise Ayres

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Editor: Amelia Hartney

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© 2016 National Library of Australia and individual contributors

Print ISSN 1836-6147

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The views expressed in The National Library of Australia Magazine are those of the individual contributors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editors or the publisher. Every reasonable effort has been made to contact relevant copyright holders for illustrative material in this magazine. Where this has not proved possible, the copyright holders are invited to contact the publisher.

Contents

Tutu

The Art of Cartoons: 
Billy Abroad

The Bicycle Revolution in the West

Collections Feature: 
The One that Got Away

We Dooks the Dook

Australia Will Be There

In the Frame:
A Soldier and His Pin-up

Companions in Biography

Fred Eden, the Compulsive Bushwalker

Mining Manuscripts:
Notes of Promise

Tutu

Michelle Potter charts the evolution of the iconic dance costume.

The image of a female ballet dancer in a soft, white gauzy dress—a tutu—is a pervasive one. The French artist, Edgar Degas, captured this vision of the ballet dancer in his drawings, paintings and sculptures of Parisian performers of the late 1800s. His dancers are shown in the studio, in the wings, backstage, on stage. We see them resting, practising, taking class, performing. They are shown from many angles: from the orchestra pit, from the auditorium, as long shots, as close-ups. They wear a soft skirt reaching just below the knee. It has layers of fabric pushing it out into a bell shape, and often there is a sash at the waist, tied in a bow at the back. Most of his dancers also wear a signature band of ribbon at the neck. The dress has a low-cut bodice with, occasionally, a short, frilled sleeve. More often than not the costume is white, the iconic colour of a dancer’s tutu.

The history of the tutu begins with the emancipation of female dancers from restrictive garments of various kinds. In 1734, the French dancer Marie Sallé appeared in Pigmalion, a dance she choreographed in which she took the role of a statue that comes to life. Sallé caused a stir because of the outrageous costume she wore—outrageous for the times that is. She shortened her skirt so that her ankles could be seen and removed parts of the restrictive ballet costume she was used to wearing so that she had more freedom to move. Sadly there doesn’t seem to be a visual record of the costume Sallé wore but there is a report, by an anonymous author writing from London where Pigmalion was performed, in the French newspaper of the day, Mercure de France. The report stated:

She dared to appear without a pannier, without a skirt, without a bodice, her hair dishevelled and with no ornament at all on her head; she was dressed only, in addition to her undergarments, in a simple muslin dress draped to represent a Greek statue.

The arrival in the West of the fabric called muslin, of which Sallé’s revolutionary costume was made, was an important development. Most literature on the history of muslin, a fine, woven white cotton, suggests that it had its origin on the Indian subcontinent, although other literature suggests that it was first made in Mosul, a city in present day Iraq. But the fabric was certainly widely made on the Indian subcontinent and was imported to England in the late seventeenth century, most often by the East India Company. White muslin became the fabric of choice for the fashionable woman. Muslin was washable and it fell gracefully like the folds of the costumes on statues unearthed from the ruins of Pompeii in the early to mid-nineteenth century. White clothing also indicated status. A white garment was hard to keep clean so a well-dressed woman in a pristine white outfit was clearly wealthy enough to have many dresses in her wardrobe. Since ballet costuming at the time followed fashion trends, white also became the colour of the new, free-flowing ballet dresses.

Walter Stringer (1907–2001)
Australian Ballet Performance of Swan Lake, 1977
colour photograph; 20 x 25 cm; nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn542969

Soon the white, Greek-inspired dress gave way to the long, white tutu as worn in many ballets created in the Romantic era, ballets like La Sylphide, for example, first performed in Paris in 1832. This costume was a little shorter than the one worn by Sallé, but not yet as short as that worn by a Degas dancer. The influence that these costumes had on the future of ballet was immense. ‘This new style brought an excess of white gauze, tulle and tarlatan,’ wrote the French commentator, Théophile Gautier, in La Presse in 1844. As the National Library’s extensive collection of dance images demonstrates, the long, white, Romantic tutu continues to be part of ballet costuming to this day and represents the image of an elusive and fragile female dancer.

LEFT: Talma
Signorina D’Argo c. 1893
sepia photograph; 16.5 x 10.8 cm, nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn3167099

RIGHT: Spencer Shier (1884–1950)
Anna Pavlova as the Dying Swan, Melbourne, 1926
b&w photograph; 19.6 x 14.4 cm, nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn6294369

As costuming became less restrictive, however, ballet technique began to develop. The removal of weighty costuming, and accessories that disguised the body and hampered its movement, allowed dancers to move faster, jump higher, turn unhindered. And from there, the tutu was progressively shortened to make these newly acquired and sophisticated skills more visible. At first, the tutu usually retained its bell shape, although the bodice became more tightly fitted, emphasising the dancer’s nipped-in waistline. Shortened tutus were worn in Australia in 1893 by Catherine Bartho, a dancer from Moscow, and Enrichetta d’Argo from Italy. These two dancers performed in Turquoisette, a ballet thought to be the first classical work danced in Australia, which was presented by J.C. Williamson Theatres Ltd in Melbourne as an adjunct to their Grand Italian Opera season. The costume crossed into the Australian circus arena around the same time. It was worn by Miss May Martin, a contortionist and horsewoman with Wirth’s Circus, whose success as a performer was constantly praised in press reports during the first years of the twentieth century. Promotional postcards and commercial photographs of Anna Pavlova, who visited Australia in the 1920s, show that she too was wearing the newly shortened tutu for many of her dances.

Paula Hinton in Theme and Variations, National Theatre Ballet, Melbourne, 1952
b&w photograph; 20.3 x 15.5 cm, nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn1051917

Slowly the tutu started to lose some of its soft shape and its skirt began to extend, sometimes quite stiffly, outwards from the hip. By the middle of the twentieth century, the tutu had become even shorter. At times the skirt seemed little more than a frill of tulle, but since then designers have approached the tutu from many different directions. Some have chosen a traditional approach and have done so with a conscious look back at the history of the costume. In an oral history interview recorded for the National Library in 2012, designer Hugh Colman spoke of his approach to designing tutus for a new Australian Ballet production of Swan Lake. He said:

To me [tutus] are a little bit like the costumes that maybe you see in Japanese Noh theatre, where something has been achieved over a number of years and all you can really hope to do is variations on a theme. There is something about the purity of the way the tutu works that is very hard to move away from. There are obviously different skirt lengths and slightly different shapes to the skirt. But, it seems to me, the brilliance of the design of the tutu is that it’s an expression of the weightlessness that is sought, as an effect, in classical dancing: the illusion that the ballerina weighs nothing, despite all the blood, sweat and tears. The shape of the tutu, and the lightness of the gauzy fabrics and tulle, are part of that illusion.

Tom Lingwood’s tutus for an earlier Australian Ballet production of Swan Lake, one produced in 1977 by the company’s artistic director Anne Woolliams, also looked back to tradition for their design. Lingwood opted for a skirt approaching the length of tutus of the late nineteenth century. He also gave his costumes something of the soft, gauzy look of the Romantic tutu.

Other designers have kept a recognisable shape to the costume but have looked towards contemporary materials for inspiration. Vanessa Leyonhjelm, for example, designed tutus for Stanton Welch’s 1994 ballet Divergence, a work in which Welch was seeking ‘a grunge effect’. The materials Leyonhjelm used moved away from anything that might be thought of as even remotely traditional. The Divergence tutus and their accompanying headdresses were made from nylon, cotton, vacuum formed polyurethane foam (similar to the foam used for divers’ wetsuits), leather, lycra, elastic, metal, elastane, nylon crin, raffia, air-conditioning filter mesh and metal wire. The tutus were sent to an automotive spray painter to be sprayed black because the mesh used in the skirt was translucent and needed to be dark.

Jim McFarlane (b. 1955)
Justine Summers in Divergence, the Australian Ballet, 1994
b&w photograph; 25.4 x 20.2 cm, nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn2953169
courtesy Jim McFarlane

Angus Strathie, on the other hand, turned the shape of the skirt upside down when he designed tutus for the Glow Worm scene in Meryl Tankard’s 2003 production, Wild Swans. The tulle skirt was attached to briefs and constructed in gores with a thin metal strip inserted into seam ‘pockets’ between each gore. The tutu skirt fanned upwards from the hip and its inverted position was held in place by those metal strips.

The first-known use of the word ‘tutu’ to describe this iconic item of ballet costuming is recorded in the late nineteenth century. The word derives from a French slang word for backside and reflects the era when ballet moved into the music hall and became a somewhat salacious form of entertainment. But, whether worn in a moonlit forest glade by sylphs or swans, as an item of grunge clothing or as a revealing item in the music hall, the history of the tutu offers a fascinating glimpse into the interrelationship of society, fashion and theatrical costuming.

DR MICHELLE POTTER is a writer, historian and former curator of dance at the National Library of Australia. Her most recent book is Dame Maggie Scott: A Life in Dance (2014).

IN A PREVIOUS ISSUE

Undercover Designs — March 2015

Michelle Potter looks at the drawings of costume designer Kristian Fredrikson.

The Art of Cartoons: 
Billy Abroad

By Guy Hansen

Since Federation, there is one thing that holds true for all Australian prime ministers. They have all experienced the withering gaze of the cartoonist.

For Billy Hughes, Australia’s prime minister during the First World War, his cartoonist nemesis was David Low. Low, in the great tradition of many famous Australians, came from New Zealand and was later destined to further his career in England. While in Australia, however, he made it his mission to prick Hughes’ ego and hold him accountable for his actions.

This cartoon, which was published in The Bulletin, captures a moment during Hughes’ trip to England in 1916. At the time, Hughes was lauded for his strong support of the war effort. Behind the scenes, however, there were tensions between Hughes and the British Cabinet. Here you can see British Prime Minister Herbert Asquith and Cabinet Minister David Lloyd George being harangued by Hughes. There are upturned chairs and fluttering papers. The caption has Asquith saying ‘Talk with him in Welsh, David, and pacify him!’—a reference to the shared Welsh ancestry of Lloyd George and Hughes. Low later said this cartoon was about Hughes’ propensity to grandstand: ‘It was persistently reported … that behind closed doors his habit of talking people down was an embarrassing experience to the AsquithCabinet’.

Ronald Munro Ferguson, Australia’s Governor-General, was so amused by the cartoon that he asked Low for the original. After Munro Ferguson left Australia, the cartoon made its way to the Parliamentary Library, where it was displayed for many years. It is now part of the National Library’s collection and is a great reminder of the role cartoonists play in recording the personalities of our leaders. •

DR GUY HANSEN is Director of Exhibitions at the National Library of Australia.

David Low (1891–1963), The Imperial Conference
pen and ink, pencil; 43.2 x 61.2 cm; nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn2423061
David Low / Solo Syndication

The Bicycle Revolution in the West

Bicycles were a quick and cost-effective means of travel in outback Western Australia from the Coolgardie goldfields to the state’s vast rabbit-proof fence, writes Jim Fitzpatrick.

When gold was discovered at Coolgardie in September 1892, the sandy plains 558 kilometres east of Perth quickly became the scene of the world’s largest gold rush. Eastern Australians, suffering from the great depression of the 1890s, swarmed to the west and, with numerous overseas arrivals, nearly quadrupled the population in a decade. Once there, they found themselves searching for gold, or working in deep lead gold mines, over an area one and a half times the size of the state of Victoria.

Getting about in the hot, arid landscape proved to be a problem. Water and stockfeed were scarce and expensive, and newspapers commented on the number of dead horses in the streets and along bush tracks. It was in those circumstances that the bicycle revolutionised personal transport on the goldfields.

The modern bicycle, with pneumatic tyres, was first commercially available in Australia in 1890. It proved to be reliable and durable and was quickly and widely adopted on the goldfields. The Western Argus, of Kalgoorlie, editorialised that:

One of the great institutions in the district is the trusty bicycle … There are a good many machines in Hannan’s, White Feather, Coolgardie and surrounding districts, and it is no uncommon sight to see ministers of religion, business people & c. making their way on the iron steed

Crowd Gathered in Kalgoorlie in 1895 to Hear Father Long Announce the Location of a Purported Gold Find
pages 168–169 in The Bicycle and the Bush: Man and Machine in Rural Australia by Jim Fitzpatrick
(Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1980), nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn1312169

After arriving in Coolgardie, Henry Walker’s first impression was that ‘bustling merchants and clerks were hurrying past on bicycles to their various occupations’. Julius Price noted the town’s ‘dusty roadway crowded with teams, camel caravans, buggies, horsemen, and bicycles’. A visitor to Cue, 640 kilometres northwest, commented that ‘The first thing that struck [me] ... was the number of bicycles in use ... everyone seemed in too much of a hurry to walk’.

It wasn’t just in the towns, either. The bicycle did not need formed roads, and many commented upon its use for rushing to gold strikes and general prospecting. At a deep lead discovery at Kanowna, the roads were crowded with ‘cyclists, buggies, etc.’. Describing the scene as one man pegged out a claim, the Coolgardie Miner reported that ‘almost as soon as he had put his pegs in, he was surrounded by the usual crowd of peggars on bike, buggy, cart and shanks’ pony’.

LEFT: The Camel and the Bicycle: Two Transport Stalwarts on the Western Australia Gold Fields and RIGHT: A Western Australian Prospector or ‘Coolgardie Nugget’
pages 93 and 167 in The Bicycle and the Bush: Man and Machine in Rural Australia by Jim Fitzpatrick
(Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1980), nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn1312169

The goldfield communities were quickly interlinked by an extensive network of bush tracks. Strings of camels, used to transport heavy goods about the fields, helped to compact narrow paths. Jack Costello, a Kalgoorlie reporter, told me in an interview that a string of only a dozen camels would compact the surface so smoothly that it could be walked on barefooted. He and other workers and travellers were still using the camel pads in the 1930s.

The bicycle was the fastest form of transport on the fields and played a key role in communications. At least half a dozen cyclist messenger services operated between towns, mining sites and telegraph offices until railway and telegraph services were well established. They offered scheduled services and special deliveries at any time to anywhere on the fields. Messages regarding mining claims and investment matters were so important that, to deliver critical information from Coolgardie to the telegraph office at Southern Cross, riders were paid as much as £25—the cost of steerage class passage from London to Perth at the time.

The Kalgoorlie pipeline was completed in 1903 to supply water from the Mundaring Weir, near Perth, to the Eastern goldfields, especially the towns of Coolgardie and Kalgoorlie. At 530 kilometres, it was a massive engineering project and at the time the longest freshwater pipeline in the world. For the next six decades, bicycles were used to patrol it. Men known as ‘lengthrunners’, carrying tools, water bags and their lunch, pedalled a 25 kilometre section, round trip, each day. The task was to keep both the pipeline and the maintenance road that ran alongside cleared of plant growth and to notify the office of any leaks or other problems. The extensive travel made the bicycle particularly effective in terms of cost and time. Ted Creasy and Bert Jeffery, two of the last men to pedal the pipeline, said bicycles were used until about 1962.

Invitation for the Opening Ceremony of the Coolgardie Goldfields Water Supply
Coolgardie Goldfields
Ephemera Collection, nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn3803555

By 1900, plagues of rabbits were forcing farmers in the eastern states to fence their paddocks in order to grow crops, and the animals were migrating across the Nullarbor. In an effort to stem their progress into the agricultural and pastoral areas of Western Australia, the government proposed a 3,275 kilometre network of rabbit-proof fences. At a Royal Commission of Inquiry held in Perth in 1901, all witnesses agreed that bicycles would be preferable to horses or camels to patrol the fence. They cost much less to buy and maintain, and cyclists’ speed would minimise the number of boundary riders needed, with consequent wage savings. In particular, a lack of drinking water along the fence lines prohibited the use of horses. Camels were used to transport supplies to depots along the line and to carry repair crews for work that could not be done by a cyclist alone.

Illegal traffic along the fence was a problem. Permission was rarely granted for anyone to travel the fence reserve, because their animals and vehicles tore holes in the wire and knocked down the posts. Rough surfaces were created by cattle plodding along the fence and vehicles drawn by horse or bullock. Some stretches were so cut up that cyclists could not patrol their assigned lengths in the period allowed, and two additional patrols had to be put on in 1908. In 1910 in the Barrambie area, surreptitious wood-carting traffic left the surface so rough that camel carts had to replace the cycle patrols. Illegal travellers also took water from the tanks, a particular concern for bicycle-mounted riders because of the limited water supply they could carry on their machines.

Bicycles were retired from the fence around 1915 after a majority of the staff volunteered to serve in the First World War. Patrol and maintenance logistics had to be radically re-organised. The camel cart was adopted for all riders, who now had both to patrol and undertake all maintenance work formerly done by repair crews. That was the only way they could carry posts, netting, food, water and other supplies. The bicycle, in those circumstances, was no longer a viable alternative.

The rabbit-proof fence network was ultimately a forlorn effort. The animals came through when gates were left open, when cattle, feral camels and floods knocked over sections of the fence, or when bushfires burned the posts. However the bicycle still had a role in the outback. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, Stewart Crawford, a Western Australian rabbit inspector, would camp at a central location and spend two or three days cycling about adjacent properties, saving petrol and maintenance expenses on his car. He could lift his bike over the fences separating paddocks or neighbouring properties, and carry it across rough areas and watercourses that would have been impassable with a motor vehicle, thus reducing the distance he needed to travel. Seated on his machine, he could have a close look without the nuisance of continually getting in and out of a car. The result was that on his bicycle he could cover more ground more thoroughly in a given area, and inspect portions of properties that he might not otherwise have readily visited.

Len Witt and Ernie Frandsen, who were kangaroo shooters in Western Australia in the late 1920s and early 1930s, specifically referred to the value of the bicycle’s quietness and the ability to cover extensive areas quickly while hunting. They operated out of a central camp and skins were carried back there on the rear rack and handlebars.

With the resurgence in cycling interest over recent decades, numerous riders now tour the goldfields, agricultural and pastoral regions, and the coastal road around Western Australia. It is a major accomplishment over great distances. However, few are aware that, over a century before, thousands of miners and other workers pedalled those remote areas as part of their work routine. Nowhere else in the world was the bicycle used in such large numbers, in such harsh conditions, over so large an area and for such a variety of work.

JIM FITZPATRICK is the author of numerous articles and several books on cycling, military and sport history.

IN A PREVIOUS ISSUE

Great Wall of Rabbit Repulsion — September 2007

Ian Warden tells the story of the Number One Rabbit Proof Fence.

Collections Feature: 
The One that Got Away

By NAT WILLIAMS, The James and Bettison Treasures Curator

This surprising creature was painted in Rome in the early 1600s for an ambitious scholar, antiquarian and bird lover. The artist was Vincenzo Leonardi (1590–c. 1648), about whom little is known. The watercolour was originally part of an extraordinary collection, known as the Museo Cartaceo, or the Paper Museum, assembled by Cassiano dal Pozzo (1588–1657) and his younger brother, Carlo Antonio. Cassiano was secretary to Cardinal Barberini in Rome, who was a nephew of Pope Urban VIII. Cassiano was also a friend of Galileo, the major patron of artist Nicolas Poussin, a member of the scientific Academy of Lynxes and a correspondent with key intellectuals of the period. His remarkable collection of about 10,000 commissioned watercolours, drawings and prints covered antiquities, architecture, zoology, botany and geology. It was an audacious attempt to document the world and to give visual form to human knowledge. Leonardi’s close observation of natural history specimens was key to this memorable enterprise and he worked with Cassiano to produce a book about birds, the Uccelliera (Aviary), in 1622.

So how did our coot find its way to Canberra? From a pope to a cardinal, via British kings and almost into the hands of our Queen, this bird took a surprisingly circuitous and unlikely route to the National Library over three centuries.

The Common Coot’s penultimate owner was collector and National Library benefactor Rex Nan Kivell (1898–1977). In his lengthy will, the collector mentions, among the many generous bequests to his close friends, colleagues and dogs, ‘some 120 Natural History subjects from the collections of Cardinal Alessandro Albani’, intended as a gift to Queen Elizabeth II.

The Museo Cartaceo had a complex and interesting history after Cassiano’s death in 1657. The collection passed first to his brother and from him through the family to Pope Clement XI in 1703 for the Vatican Library. The collection was subsequently acquired by Cardinal Albani in 1714. Almost 50 years later, in 1762, most of the collection came to King George III via the famous architect, Robert Adam. There it sat, with parts being sold off and dispersed across numerous collections, including Sir John Soane’s Museum, the Victoria & Albert Museum, the British Museum, the British Library and Kew Gardens in London, and as far away as Baltimore, USA.

To finance library repairs in the 1920s, Royal Librarian Sir John Fortescue deaccessioned more of the collection and Nan Kivell, via London dealer Jacob Mendelson, managed to scoop up 127 of these beautiful watercolours for a few pounds each in 1935. Having been awarded his much-desired knighthood in June 1976, and aware through his friend, Sir Anthony Blunt, that the Royal Library was seeking to reconstitute its collection, Nan Kivell decided his ultimate and very significant gift should be to his Queen. Most of the watercolours were sent to the Royal Library months before he died in June 1977 and one work Nan Kivell had earlier given to Blunt was also returned to the Royal Collection.

Last year, I discovered this intriguing painting of a coot—Latin name fulica, folaga in Italian—in the Rex Nan Kivell Collection. It is stylistically related to the images in the Royal Library’s collection and the watercolour is inscribed in both Latin and Italian in Leonardi’s hand, as are some other Museo Cartaceo works. The Common Coot is clearly from Cassiano’s original collection and one can only assume that Nan Kivell decided not to part with this particular watercolour as similar birds are common both to Australia and New Zealand. Whatever the reason for its stranding with us, it is a beautiful work and remains a tantalising link to the ambition of the Museo Cartaceo with its rich associations. Our coot exemplifies the great scope of Nan Kivell’s collection, his generosity and his many interests, including birds and the royal family. •

To see more images from Cassiano’s Museo Cartaceo, go to royalcollection.org.uk/collection.

Vincenzo Leonardi (1590–c. 1648)
Common Coot, Fulica atra between c. 1620 and 1630
watercolour and ink; 47.7 x 34 cm
Rex Nan Kivell Collection (Pictures), nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn1379445

We Dooks the Dook

Russell Doust finds a different view of the official opening of the National Capital and its new Parliament House.

The National Library has a collection of 21 bound volumes with the intriguing title, Australian Newspapers and Magazines: First Numbers. They contain the first issues of an extremely varied range of journals and some small newspapers, mostly Australian but a few from New Zealand. The earliest appeared in 1853 and the latest in 1939. There is, no doubt, a story to be written about the wide range of titles and subjects, and the fate of the many publications that never survived to a second issue, but here I want to write about only one, which strictly speaking is not even a first issue since it was obviously a ‘one-off’, written and published for a special occasion. It’s called We Dooks the Dook.

For those of us not well versed in pre-1930s Australian slang, the Macquarie Book of Slang helps: ‘dook, a hand, put up your dooks, an invitation to fight, from British rhyming slang Dukes of Yorks forks = fingers, hands’. The Dook referred to in the title is indeed the Duke of York, who with his wife Elizabeth was in Australia in 1927 to open the temporary Parliament House in Canberra.

It was not the first time that British royalty had visited Australia. The unfortunate Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, was shot and wounded at a harbour-side picnic in Sydney in 1868. On 6 May 1901, the Prince of Wales, Duke of Cornwall and York, opened the first Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia in Melbourne, where it sat in the Victorian State Parliament House until there was a building for it in Canberra. This visit was not only a necessary legal and official event, but also one with immense social implications. Fourteen thousand people had attended a reception for the Duke at the Exhibition Building in Melbourne. Not to be outdone, Sydney managed an outdoor event of 100,000 in the Domain.

In 1920, the Prince of Wales was despatched to thank the people of the Empire overseas for their contribution to the Great War. Although it was a veiled attempt by the British Government to remind the colonies that they remained part of the British Empire, it was widely seen by Australian Commonwealth and state governments, and by the people generally, as a time for celebration. It was, therefore, no surprise that the 1927 visit was viewed in the same way.

Opening of Parliament, 9 May 1927
b&w negative; 3.8 x 10.2 cm, nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn134762

In 1913, a site had been chosen in New South Wales—not without controversy—for the Australian Capital Territory, and by 1927 the nation’s brand new Parliament House was ready for opening. It was a matter of national pride that Great Britain—still the Mother Country for most Australians—was prepared to send a royal duke and duchess to open the building and sit in on the first session of Parliament. For the British, it was a useful flag-waving gesture; for the Australian Government and people, the visit was a further mark of the coming of age of a nation. It was, in every sense, big business. As The Sydney Morning Herald recorded, for the official opening of Parliament, special arrangements had been put in place so that people, wherever they might be, would be able to ‘listen in’ on the wireless through loud speakers set up in public halls, school rooms and other suitable buildings across the state. It was estimated that two million people would be able to hear the proceedings.

Clearly, this was the social event of the year. The selected few who were invited to the garden parties and formal receptions in Sydney had a story to tell grandchildren, but it was a royal visit for the people as a whole. It was a demonstration of Empire solidarity that the opening of the new Parliament House in the specially created Australian Capital Territory was to be performed by royalty, and it must have been seen by the Australian public as being particularly appropriate that it was the Duke (not at that time heir to the throne) and Duchess who came. They were fairly newly married and had left their infant daughter, Elizabeth, behind in England. What better way to show royal devotion to the needs of a part of the Empire could there be than that, and Australians, or most of them, reciprocated in ways both official and popular.

LEFT: Duke and Duchess of York Walking in a Parade during a Royal Tour, Canberra, 1927
glass plate negative; 10.1 x 12.7 cm, nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn6194244
Fairfax Syndication, www.fairfaxsyndication.com

RIGHT: The Duke of York, Accompanied by the Duchess, Opening the First Session of the Federal Parliament in Canberra, 1927
b&w photograph; 28.5 x 36.7 cm, nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn1443612

But there were those who viewed the occasion with a little less solemnity, among them students from the University of Sydney. We Dooks the Dook: An Unofficial, Unauthentic, and Totally Unreliable Account of the Opening of Canberra was published by the Sydney University Undergraduates’ Association in 1927 and was printed by The Publicity Press Ltd, of Regent Street, Sydney (‘They can Print anything but Bank Notes’). We do not know how many copies were printed; the National Library’s copy is stamped ‘1019’.

cover of We Dooks the …. Dook: An Unofficial, Unauthentic, and Totally Unreliable Account of the Opening of Canberra
(Sydney: Sydney University Undergraduates’ Association, 1927)
nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn938220

We Dooks the Dook is a well-produced and substantial 64-page booklet with both photographs and black and white line drawings. A satirical piece entitled The Dook Goes to Canberra is signed by A.D. Hope, later a well-known Australian poet, which perhaps suggests that Hope may have been the editorial presence behind the rest of the equally satirical and irreverent text and illustrations.

An advertisement on page 1 sets the tone: ‘Lindeman’s wines are the right wines for every occasion … special flasks to fit the figure for Canberra campers’. The Parliament House, about to be officially opened by the Duke, was built in the middle of a sheep paddock, as was well known, and it was anticipated that thousands of visitors would ‘camp out’. Also well known was the astonishing fact that the Australian Capital Territory was to be, alone of all other Australian states and territories, alcohol-free. The advertisement for ‘Hotel Bone-Dry … every facility for Indoor and Outdoor Sport … the golf links are 50 miles due west … telephone next door but one’ rather unkindly points this out, although Sydney University undergraduates were probable aware of this.

The cartoon on page 21, ‘An Historic Occasion’, makes the point rather better: huge crowds have left the celebrations at Parliament House in the ACT, and have flocked to a pub in nearby Queanbeyan in New South Wales, where beer, wine and spirits were freely available. It did not take long for Members of Parliament to legislate to overturn their parched existence. The huge crowds in Canberra that day did not exist: Andrew Tink in his Australia 1901–2001 (2014) reminds us that, although catering had been provided for tens of thousands of spectators, only about 16,000 attended. A day or two later, 4.5 tons of leftover pies, sausage rolls and prawns had to be dumped. The undergraduate satire seems now quite appropriate.

page 21 (LEFT) and page 34 (RIGHT)
in We Dooks the …. Dook: An Unofficial, Unauthentic, and Totally Unreliable Account of the Opening of Canberra
(Sydney: Sydney University Undergraduates’ Association, 1927)
nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn938220

The most telling comment, however, is a full-page series of photographs headed ‘The Camera in Society’. The captions read: ‘At the landing. Waiting to greet the Duke and Duchess’; ‘At the Government House Garden Party’; ‘At the Opening of Parliament at Canberra’; and ‘The Royal Bodyguard’. There are 14 men and women in full morning dress in each view—the same 14 men and women. Does that surprise us? Is it likely to be much different in the 21st century? Don’t watch this space—but next time there is a royal visit, look carefully at the newspapers and the women’s magazines.

Oh, and one last thing. In 1934, the Duke of Gloucester was in Melbourne. What should appear but a new publication, We Dooks the Dook: Melbourne University Students’ Souvenir: An Unofficial and Totally Unreliable Account of the Visit of H.R.H. the Duke of Gloucester to Australia, and His Official Opening of the Victorian Centenary Celebrations.

RUSSELL DOUST is a cultural historian and regular user of the Petherick Reading Room in the National Library. He is a former Deputy Director of the National Trust in New South Wales and, in the even deeper past, State Librarian of New South Wales. He now lives in a Canberra suburb, with not a sheep to be seen, although there are occasional kangaroos in the night.

IN PREVIOUS ISSUEs

Canberra as a Symbol of Nationhood and Unity — December 2013

Patrick Robertson writes about Canberra’s first cabinet meeting and the arguments for a purpose-built federal capital.

The Royal Tour 1954 — March 2015

Jane Connors describes the first day of Queen Elizabeth II’s historic visit to Australia, which saw Sydney at fever pitch.

In the Frame:
A Soldier and His Pin-up

Peter Stanley takes a closer look at photographs reflecting life during the First World War.

William Dunlop’s album is one of the photographic records of Australia’s part in the Great War in the National Library’s collection that deserve to be better known.

Dunlop was a doctor’s son from Charlton, a wheat town on the Avoca River in central Victoria. A cadet at the Royal Military College, Duntroon, in 1914, he was immediately commissioned in the Australian Imperial Force on its formation.

He survived Gallipoli (partly because he became a staff officer) and after the campaign returned to the 4th Light Horse Regiment, which early in 1916 was at the Aerodrome camp near the Cairo suburb of Heliopolis.

Is this soldier captured pinning a photograph or drawing to the wall of his hut Dunlop? It seems not, judging by the photographs of a pipe-smoking Dunlop in his album.

This may be one of Dunlop’s fellow light horse officers, brightening his billet with some pin-ups, perhaps from racy magazines such as La Vie Parisienne or The Pink ‘un—racy by the standards of 1916, that is.

Dunlop has defaced the original print by writing ‘Censor!’ across the picture his subject is pinning up. What was it he wanted to conceal? Sensitive military details? Hardly—his album includes many photographs of, say, aircraft. It is more likely that Dunlop’s companion was putting up an image that—on reflection—Dunlop did not want his family to see, perhaps one of the ‘feelthy peectures’ notoriously sold on the streets of Cairo.

But why would these young men not put up such images in their hut? Dunlop was 24 and single, having spent much of his youth either at Geelong Grammar or at Duntroon. He had spent most of 1915 on Gallipoli. His comrades in the 4th Light Horse would spend the next three years serving in the desert of Sinai or in Palestine. Except for those willing to risk VD in the brothels of Cairo, the only women they would see would be in their fantasies.

William Dunlop went on to serve as a staff officer on the Western Front and survived the war. His album offers illuminating, but also intriguing, insights into his Great War.

Australian Soldier Pinning up a Poster on a Wall at Heliopolis Aerodrome, Cairo, Egypt, January 1916
b&w photograph; 6.7 x 8.5 cm, nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn6414156

Australia Will Be There

One wartime song raised Anzac morale more than any other, writes Robert Holden.

If Australians were asked to name songs from the First World War, it is a sure bet that even a century later It’s a Long Way to Tipperary or Keep the Home Fires Burning would feature. Both songs were hugely popular at home as well as on the warfront from the very beginning of the conflict and remain firmly etched in the national memory. As nostalgic and evocative as they are, their enduring popularity continues to highlight what many at the time saw as a failing—they were not dinkum Aussie songs!

However, by December 1915, when the London Times itself lamented the fact that ‘Australians were slow in developing their [war] songs [because] the call had not previously come to them’, that paper was then able to quote the words of what has since become an Australasian favourite. The song was ‘Skipper’ Francis’ For Auld Lang Syne! Australia Will Be There:

Rally round the banner of your country,

Take the field with brothers o’er the foam …

Should old acquaintance be forgot?

No! no! no! no! no!

Australia will be there.

Australia will be there.

The Times article celebrated the fact that Australians had found their own songs when an inspired ‘school of soldier song-writers sprang up in the Commonwealth’.

Australian and Foreign Soldiers Surrounding a Soldier Playing the Piano, New South Wales, c. 1918
b&w glass plate negative; 12 x 16.3 cm, nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn6342416
Fairfax Syndication, www.fairfaxsyndication.com

Skipper’s genius lay in uniting the intense sentimental bond that Auld Lang Syne had for Australians with his catchy new march. More than any other Australian song, it was then celebrated in soldiers’ diaries, in battalion histories and in letters home. The song became so popular that many regarded it then, and now, as the unofficial anthem of the Australian Imperial Forces (AIF). And much of this song’s appeal was surely due to its closing repetition of ‘No!’, which encouraged Anzacs to proclaim their increasingly loud defiance to the world.

The story of Skipper’s timely composition in late 1914 and the astonishing range of significant occasions on which it was heard is a centrepiece of an upcoming National Library exhibition, opening on 10 June. Based on my book, And the Band Played on (2014), the exhibition reveals and celebrates a new soundscape of the war by exposing the Library’s outstanding collection of Australian sheet music from the war years—a collection that gives unprecedented insight into the patriotic fervour, the nostalgic yearning and the new-found national confidence on display as young Australia marched onto the world’s stage.

Walter William ‘Skipper’ Francis (1886–1957) was, at first glance, a somewhat unlikely candidate to compose an Australian march that would go on to sell over one million copies, raise more than £600,000 for various war charities and, in what was surely another unique achievement, be accorded a full column in The New York Times. There, on 27 July 1919, the song’s fame was trumpeted: ‘Never a troopship left Australian shores’, it reported, ‘but “Australia Will Be There” was sung by both populace and soldiers’.

The song’s composer was born in Wales, where a childhood accident left him with a crippled right leg. Despite this disability, he became a noted sportsman, famed for his feats of swimming. In 1912, he swam the Bristol Channel in record time and arrived in Australia during a worldwide tour in mid-1914. In his previous ports-of-call in New Zealand, Skipper had appeared in 121 theatres, and he was soon receiving a popular reception on the Australian vaudeville circuit. Although his theatrical presentation was enhanced by a short film celebrating his swimming exploits, even this novelty was in danger of being eclipsed by the declaration of war.

Showman that he was, Skipper instead took inspiration from that very event. His account of another life-changing achievement would be oft repeated over the following years. One lengthy version appeared in Adelaide’s Register on 9 December 1919:

[When] the war broke out [Skipper] was astonished to see Australian soldiers marching through the streets to the transport singing ‘Tipperary’. Had they no national tunes, he asked, no native Australian patter songs? No one could tell him of any. That night … there suddenly came to Mr. Francis the first four lines of ‘Australia will be there’ .

Initially, though, the eager composer could find no-one to publish his composition. Undaunted, Skipper added it to his repertoire at the Gaiety Theatre in Melbourne on 15 August 1914 and the result was astonishing: ‘it was encored’. Skipper promptly sang the chorus again and the audience tried to join in. ‘Next day,’ it was reported, ‘soldiers in the streets were humming the tune and asked him for the words.’ Within weeks, the work was published and soon became the expected centrepiece of his stage appearances. A performance at the crowded AIF camp at Broadmeadows outside Melbourne popularised the song still further until one of the AIF Bandmasters, Percy Copp, adopted it as his 13th Battalion’s anthem.

ABOVE, FROM LEFT: Walter William Francis (1886–1957)
For Auld Lang Syne! Australia Will Be There
(London: E. Osborne & Company, c. 1916), nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn184312

Walter William Francis (1886–1957)
For Auld Lang Syne! Australia Will Be There
(Melbourne: Dinsdale’s, c. 1916), nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn1624813

Jack Judge (1878–1938)
It’s a Long Way to Tipperary
(Melbourne: B. Feldman & Co.; Stanley Mullen, c. 1912), nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn1327775

As Skipper’s song went through countless editions and gained increasing fame, he initiated something that may be unique in Australian music publishing: a chronology of highly significant occasions when the song was performed was printed and updated on its front cover.

These were events that were defining moments in Australia’s march to nationhood. It was sung by troops as they marched through Melbourne to their troopships on 25 September 1914; played as the overture at every theatre in London as a special compliment to Australia on the arrival of its Prime Minister in March 1916; and sung before King George V at Buckingham Palace on 22 March 1916.

Still this honour roll continued: it was also sung as Aussie troopships left Australia (and returned); was bellowed out as the men sailed through the Suez Canal, much to the surprise of their native audience; and was unfailingly included in the programs of AIF concerts from Egypt to the Western Front. AIF Captain Hugh Knyvett’s autobiography recorded how the song raised his men’s spirits on the very eve of 25 April 1915. Then, once they landed at Gallipoli, the Anzacs of the 13th Battalion went into battle singing the song so heartily that ‘it was heard … three-quarters of a mile away’. After the initial rejection, it was not surprisingly recorded by at least six record companies. And there was still more!

The song was famously used to boost Anzac spirits when two of Australia’s greatest troopships were attacked. When HMT Southland was torpedoed on 2 September 1915 in the Aegean Sea and managed to limp into Mudros Harbour, Lieutenant Sir Michael Bruce who was aboard proudly proclaimed: ‘At the last they sang Australia Will Be There’. His pride was entirely justified, for he continued: ‘By God, he was! We know them brave in a charge. Now we know they are heroes’.

On the second anniversary of Anzac Day in April 1917, the men aboard AIF troopship Ballarat were preparing to commemorate the Gallipoli landing with a memorial service. So stalwart were they and so well trained in evacuation procedures that when the Ballarat was torpedoed and sunk in the English Channel that very afternoon not a single man (or a single mascot) was lost. The London Times considered this something of a modern miracle. And, once again, Australia’s favourite wartime song rang out.

ABOVE, FROM LEFT: Walter William Francis (1886–1957)
For Auld Lang Syne! Australia Will Be There
(Melbourne: Dinsdale’s, c. 1917), nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn145987

Walter William Francis (1886–1957)
Australia Will Be There
(Melbourne: Allan & Co., c. 1927), nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn101277

Walter William Francis (1886–1957)
Australia Will Be There (For Auld Lang Syne)
(Melbourne: Allan & Co., between 1939 and 1945), nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn101221

So popular did the song become that it was soon being called the ‘Australian Marseillaise’. And its popularity was nowhere more evident than on the Western Front in April 1918. AIF Captain Frederic Cutlack’s history, The Final Campaign, honoured AIF Lieutenant Fred Jarvis who ‘did one of those mad, brilliant things which in the heat of the action lift men’s hearts out of all sense of death and superior numbers’. Cutlack writes of Jarvis’ mad, brilliant act: ‘when the German attack was pressing close, he … mounted the parapet, and played in shrill strains, Australia Will Be There’. The unexpectedness of hearing their favourite song rising above the gunfire, the effect of the sheer incongruence of music-making in the heat of battle and the fact that this music was being played on something as taunting as a tin whistle, was immediate: ‘The machine gunners laughed … [Jarvis] awoke memories of many a comic turn at concert parties’.

Within weeks of the first printing of Skipper’s song, on 9 November 1914 Australia’s great naval victory over the German cruiser, the Emden, occurred. With a showman’s timely vision, the composer quickly issued a new printing with an additional verse:

You’ve heard about the ‘Emden’

That was cruising all around,

It was sinking British shipping

Where ‘ere it could be found,

Till one fine summer morning,

Australia’s answer came;

The good ship ‘Sydney’ hove in sight,

And put the foe to shame.

It is stirring to imagine the men of the AIF singing these words and proclaiming their pride to an international audience as they pressed ever closer to the warfront. As The Times so eloquently expressed it:

When the battalion made its excursion to the pyramids the old stones echoed its words, and even the Sphinx, which has for thousands of years listened unansweringly to so many men and many tongues, heard a new thing.

A full generation later, as Australia entered another war, the director of the largest musical publishing house in the country, Allan & Co., praised the song’s longevity. He paid it what was perhaps its greatest compliment. In The Argus of 4 April 1940, Ivan Tate described this work as ‘the only Australian song of the last war that had “lived”’. Today, it lives on in the National Library’s collection and upcoming exhibition.

ROBERT HOLDEN is a Sydney-based historian and curator of the Library’s exhibition, And the Band Played on (opening 10 June). His book of the same title is his 32nd publication.

Companions in Biography

The Australian Dictionary of Biography’s Melanie Nolan and Christine Fernon describe the ADB’s exciting web presence, and the role of the National Library in supporting its online transformation.

‘Let us celebrate the birth of a giant,’ proclaimed W.G. Buick in the Australian Book Review following the launch of volume 1 of the Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB) 50 years ago. Eric Richards, writing in the Journal of the Historical Society of South Australia, described the dictionary as a ‘gift of scholarship to the nation and the world’.

Nineteen volumes (including a supplementary volume of ‘missing persons’) of the ADB, consisting of over 13,500 concise biographies of prominent and representative Australians, have been published since 1966. As well as prime ministers, governors, pastoralists, military leaders, captains of industry and people involved in the arts, science, academia and medicine, you’ll find a wide array of interesting Australians including bushrangers, a ‘wild white man’, street characters, a rabbiter, cricket barracker and landlady.

Australian Dictionary of Biography Staff 1971
b&w photograph, Archives of the Australian Dictionary of Biography

Compiling the ADB is a major undertaking. The project is the largest and longest-running cooperative research enterprise in the humanities and social sciences in Australia. The editorial team is based at the Australian National University in Canberra. Editors fact-check and prepare entries for publication. State and specialist working parties, consisting of academics and other professionals, meet regularly to choose who will have entries and to nominate authors. Both working party members and the 4,500 authors who have written entries for the ADB give their time free of charge to the project.

ADB research editors have been regular users of the National Library over the years—searching through newspapers, parliamentary papers, government and university gazettes, trade journals, manuscript collections, oral history transcripts and everything in between in their quest to verify facts in ADB entries. Nowadays, of course, a lot of this content is online, but ADB staff still find reasons to haunt the Library’s reading rooms.

G. Carpay
Australian Dictionary of Biography General Editor Douglas Pike 1972
b&w photograph, Archives of the Australian Dictionary of Biography

In 2006, ADB entries were placed online (adb.anu.edu.au) where they can be accessed for free. Since 2013, new articles are being published directly online rather than first in hardcopy. Entries for subjects who died in 1992 were published on 18 March this year. They include many familiar faces, such as Torres Strait Islander leader Eddie Koiki Mabo (1936–1992), Australia’s first air hostess Hazel Holyman (1899–1992), mining magnate Lang Hancock (1909–1992), singer and songwriter Peter Allen (1944–1992) and artist Brett Whiteley (1939–1992). Staff are currently editing entries for those who died in 1993, including builder A.V. Jennings (1896–1993), writer Nancy Keesing (1923–1993), seven-year-old Troy Lovegrove, who tragically died of HIV-AIDS in June 1993 (many will remember the moving documentary, A Kid Called Troy, made by his father), and Indigenous author and activist Oodgeroo Noonuccal (1920–1993).

There has been some debate about whether national biographical dictionaries are still needed given the sheer amount of biographical information on the web. It would seem, though, there is still a very important role for curated sites. The ADB attracts over 60 million hits a year. A large percentage of users are school children, but statistics show the site is consulted by a wide cross-section of the population. There is always an immediate spike in searches following the broadcast of documentaries and dramas featuring historical figures. The popular TV series, Underbelly, for example, led to a surge in searches for criminals such as Squizzy Taylor and Tilly Devine. Every year around Anzac Day, John Simpson Kirkpatrick (the man with the donkey) receives numerous hits. Overall, Ned Kelly is the ADB’s most popular entry; Caroline Chisholm is the most popular female entry, closely followed by Mary MacKillop.

Going online has opened up many opportunities and challenges for national biographical dictionaries. Perhaps the greatest continuing challenge is representation. Over the years, the ADB has fielded criticisms that it has too few women (12 per cent); too many military figures (13 per cent); too few Indigenous subjects (1.6 per cent); too many Scots compared to Irish; and too few working-class Australians. In 2004, the chairman of the supervisory committee of the new Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Keith Thomas, spoke of his hope that his dictionary project would one day develop into a ‘database so vast as to be a true national biography’. We, too, have kept this lofty aim in mind when developing companion websites for the ADB.

Peter Fitzpatrick
Anthea Bundock Consulting the ADB’s Biographical Register Card Catalogue 2009
colour photograph, Archives of the Australian Dictionary of Biography

Obituaries Australia (oa.anu.edu.au), launched in 2011, was the first of the ADB’s companion sites. Thousands of obituaries are stored in filing cabinets in the ADB’s offices. They are a primary resource for biographical dictionaries. In 2011, the decision was made that every obituary and biographical notation collected by the ADB from then on would be made accessible to the public via a website. Obituaries taken from Trove’s digitised newspapers are linked back to their original source so that readers can read them ‘in the raw’. The obituaries are indexed and linked to ADB entries where appropriate. Obituaries Australia currently holds over 6,500 published obituaries. It could potentially hold hundreds of thousands.

People Australia (peopleaustralia.anu.edu.au) is the ADB’s overarching site. It searches all our websites simultaneously. It also acts as a biographical register. We have begun to digitise the hundreds of out-of-copyright compendiums of Australian biography, such as Who’s Who of the World of Women (1934), placing the individual records in them in People Australia. Entries can also be added for those who do not leave a published profile. Keith Thomas’ call to create a ‘true national biography’ is taken seriously—even stillborn children are recorded in People Australia. They are part of people’s families, part of Australia’s history. All of the websites use the same template (but have different colour schemes) and the same fielding terms so that users can move seamlessly between the sites. So far 23,000 Australian lives have been registered in the ADB’s suite of websites.

Our online presence means that users can quickly find an individual entry, then entries with similar attributes, such as ‘all Catholics’, and can then undertake sophisticated searches, such as ‘all Catholics who fought in World War I and then worked in the New South Wales public service’. As well as increasing the number of websites since 2011, the ADB has vastly increased the fielding of entries to facilitate research projects. There is little that people did in their lives that is not recorded in our fielding! More importantly, we now describe the nature of the relationship in linked entries: mother/daughter, teacher/pupil, master/convict, senior officer/subordinate officer, and so on. We can then use this information in all sorts of novel ways, including as family trees, visualisations and in social network analysis.

Neil McCracken
Australian Dictionary of Biography General Editor John Ritchie with Prime Minister Bob Hawke 1990
b&w photograph, Archives of the Australian Dictionary of Biography

To investigate what kind of research might be possible using our entries as a resource, we have recently been working on a pilot project tracing the family history of former prime minister Malcolm Fraser. Working with family historians and using Trove’s digitised newspapers as our major source to track down obituaries and information about births, deaths and marriages, school and university exam results, and reports about other life events, we have so far been able to add the details of about 1,500 members of Fraser’s family, starting with his convict ancestor, Samuel Solomon. Family history is an increasingly important area of biographical study. It can be used to interrogate typicality and representativeness in a way that a single life story does not. The ADB—and its companion websites—offers us the opportunity to create ‘big data’ for families and mediate systematically between individuals, families and broader developments in society.

This year we plan to trace the fates of all the people (convicts, crew, naval officers) who set off from England in the first three fleets to New South Wales in 1787–1791. As well as mapping the fortunes of the ‘fleeters’ themselves, we will be documenting the lives of all their children and grandchildren who were born or settled in the colonies. We will also be mapping their movement between the colonies and any trips they made overseas. It should be a fascinating study. Again, we will be making particular use of the resources available through Trove’s digitised newspapers. Other national biographical dictionaries are envious of our access to this marvellous resource.

MELANIE NOLAN is the general editor of the Australian Dictionary of Biography. CHRISTINE FERNON is the ADB’s online manager. They edited The ADB’s Story (2013).

The ADB is celebrating the 50th anniversary of the publication of its first volume by holding an international conference, ‘True Biographies of Nations?: The Cultural Journeys of National Dictionaries of Biography’, at the National Library of Australia on 1–2 July. General editors from a number of national biographical dictionaries will speak about the journeys their projects have taken since moving online. As a special highlight, Barry Jones will discuss writing a Dictionary of World Biography. Coinciding with the conference, there will be a display of some old and rare dictionaries held by the National Library. The public are welcome to attend the conference. For further information, see ncb.anu.edu.au/biographies-of-nations.

Fred Eden, the Compulsive Bushwalker

Colonial walker–adventurer Fred Eden sought respite from city life as he roamed across the country, writes Graeme Powell.

Bushwalking, as an enjoyable pastime rather than an occupational necessity, first became a popular activity in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Most Australians who took up bushwalking were essentially weekend ramblers escaping from the city, as Melissa Harper explains in The Ways of the Bushwalker (2007). They explored, often with the help of guides, such scenic areas as the Blue Mountains near Sydney, Healesville and Mount Buffalo in Victoria, the Mount Lofty Ranges near Adelaide, and Mount Wellington in Tasmania. The first bushwalking clubs were established in the 1890s.

Some walkers were made of sterner stuff. In 1873 and 1874, the painter, William Piguenit, with one or two companions, spent weeks tramping through the mountainous and densely wooded country near Lake Pedder in Tasmania. A few years later, while still a teenager, journalist George Morrison (‘Chinese Morrison’) followed the coast from Melbourne to Adelaide, a distance of about 1,200 kilometres. In 1882–1883, he went even further and walked unaccompanied from the Gulf of Carpentaria to Melbourne. In very different terrain—Gippsland and the Victorian Alps—John Monash and his friend George Farlow carried out a series of long walks between 1886 and 1891. They are recorded in Monash’s diaries (MS 1884) held in the National Library.

Another young walker-adventurer was Morton Frederick Eden (1865–1948), who emigrated to Australia in 1889. He was born in Lisbon, where his father was serving as a diplomat, and his early years were spent in Switzerland and Germany. He came from a privileged background. The Edens had been a prominent family in northern England for five centuries. One member of the family, Lord Auckland, had been governor-general of India, while another, Anthony Eden, went on to become prime minister of Britain. Fred Eden’s mother was a Swiss countess, whose family owned extensive properties in the Bernese Oberland. There is little information on his early life, but evidently he had done some hiking in Italy in his youth.

LEFT: John William Lindt (1845–1926)
Four Women with Walking Sticks Hiking in the Bush near The Hermitage, Narbethong, Victoria, May 1913
b&w photograph on card; 14.3 x 19.4 cm, nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn4699546

RIGHT: Morton Frederick Eden Prior to Going to South Africa, Wearing the Uniform of the Bushman’s Contingent, Australian Army
page vi in The First Bushwalker: The Story of Fred Eden by Jim Barrett
(Armadale, Vic.: Jim Barrett, 1996); nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn2845496

Eden kept diaries over a long period, but only five volumes have survived (MS 9936). They were donated to the National Library in 2005. The first two volumes cover the period from April 1890 to January 1892. At this time, Melbourne was Eden’s base but, despite his aristocratic connections, he had no contact with the wealthy or powerful residents of the city. Instead, he stayed in cheap boarding houses or dormitories in the centre of the city, mixed mainly with poor European immigrants, and from time to time took on casual work of a menial nature. During the great 1890 maritime strike, he worked on the Melbourne wharves as a strike-breaker. He often had very little money and was forced to pawn his belongings more than once, but he could, if need be, live on about a shilling a day. Every three months he was saved by the arrival of a cheque from Cox & Co. in London. It was presumably family money that enabled him to indulge his passion for bushwalking.

In these two years, Eden did eight long walks, each one exceeding 200 kilometres, as well as a few shorter trips. The diaries open with a relatively easy stroll from Adelaide to Morgan on the River Murray, followed by a much longer walk in the Yorke Peninsula and the southern Flinders Ranges. He then spent about six months in Tasmania, first walking from Launceston to Hobart and later exploring some of the wilder regions in the west of the colony. In February 1891, he returned to Melbourne, journeyed into the country in search of work and finally set off to the Victorian Alps, and from there on the long and arduous trek to Sydney. The second diary ends with a journey to the Blue Mountains and his descent from the Narrow Neck Peninsula near Katoomba into the Megalong Valley.

William Charles Piguenit (1836–1914)
On the Craycroft, Tasmania 1878
oil on academy board; 31 x 45.3 cm, nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn358386

Like Morrison, Eden preferred to walk alone. He was once accompanied by two tramps for a couple of days, but in general he felt no need for company. He moved quickly, averaging about 50 kilometres a day when the going was good, and a companion might have slowed him down. At times he followed roads or footpaths, but often found his own way across vast plains or over mountain ranges. He generally travelled light, making do with a blanket and a piece of calico to keep him dry at night, a spare shirt and a few pairs of socks, a billy, a frying pan and a novel to read by the campfire. He sometimes stayed at pubs or farms, where he could get good meals, talk to local residents and read newspapers. When he camped out, sleeping beside a river, under a tree or in an abandoned hut, he apparently lived on little more than oatmeal, cheese, biscuits and dates.

The diaries suggest that Eden was extremely fit and relished physical challenges. On occasion, when in difficult terrain, he liked to imagine that he was a soldier facing ‘withering fire’. He soon tired of cities, where he was ‘surrounded by vice and temptations’, and once in the country he experienced ‘a strange feeling of joy erupt over me’. Within a few days of leaving Melbourne, ‘my mind got dreamy and contented, my body sleek and healthy’. He was driven by an intense curiosity about the Australian countryside. Before setting off on the longer walks, he spent days in the public library, studying maps and guidebooks, working out possible routes. It was the journey, not the destination, that mattered, and his curiosity about mountains, lakes and other landmarks often led him to change direction. He liked the thought of being in little-known country. In the mountains of western Tasmania, he wrote: ‘The feet of men had never trodden many of these virgin valleys. There they lay, silent and mysterious’. Now and then he would break a journey and spend an afternoon sitting on rocks or a pub veranda, reading and admiring the scenery.

Diaries of Morton Frederick Eden, 1890–1940
MS 9936, nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn3586318

Unlike many newcomers to Australia, Eden did not consider the Australian bush to be monotonous. He wrote that ‘all scenery is beautiful to me, be it flat plains and swamps, or wild mountains’. In Tasmania, he passed through ‘scenes of great beauty. No monotony, all things combined to charm your eyes and excite your imagination’. The snow and rocks of Mount Wellington reminded him of his native country. He compared the countryside near Murray Bridge to an English nobleman’s park, while swampland near Port Broughton led him to reminisce about the Pontine Marshes in Italy. ‘I always had a sort of liking for large swamps, there appears to me something wild, mysterious, romantic about them’. His first excursion into the Blue Mountains inspired some of his most lyrical passages.

A good deal of planning went into Eden’s longest and most challenging journey, the walk from Melbourne to Sydney in September–November 1891. The road to Albury would have been too easy. Instead, Eden chose a route that would pass through the wildest part of Victoria. With a heavy pack and two guns, he set off for Healesville and the Black Spur Range, and was soon in largely uninhabited country, with steep mountains, huge rocks, tangled vegetation and fast-flowing rivers. The old tracks of gold-fossickers were confusing and he sometimes veered miles out of his way. He was aware that if he became completely lost or injured there was little chance of his being found. He reached Omeo and pushed northwards towards Bright, but driving snow, slippery ice and almost no visibility on Mount Hotham eventually caused him to retreat. Eden returned to Omeo and, following the advice of an old settler, he headed for the Snowy River and the New South Wales border. When he reached the Snowy he found himself in a

wild, desolate and forbidding valley with steep mountains on either side. The river was quite impassable … I seemed like a condemned soul wandering through part of Dante’s hell and I am sure Gustave Doré could not have depicted more impressively gloomy scenery.

Lonely and hungry, he finally reached Jindabyne. In contrast, the final 480 kilometres to Queanbeyan, Goulburn and Sydney presented few challenges. The whole journey took 63 days.

It seems that Eden continued his walking and climbing for many years. In 1900, he was in Darwin and, gazing southwards, he vaguely contemplated walking across the entire continent. Instead, he went off to fight in the South African War. A few years later he married Mary Therese McMahon, who had grown up in the Burragorang Valley, and they established a farm, ‘Glen Eden’, not far from the Jenolan Caves. The farmhouse was destroyed in a bushfire, and Eden and his family left Australia in 1914. Six years later, they moved into Schloss Marchligen, his mother’s home in Switzerland, where Eden lived for the rest of his life.

In 1940, Fred Eden made a short visit to Australia and was driven to the Blue Mountains and the site of his old home in Glen Eden. His mind drifted back to his life as a young man in the Australian bush:

I had in me the natural desire to escape from civilisation, not to be attracted to it and to succumb to it as is the case with the majority now. Glad I was then to get away from railways & roads to where the packhorse was the only means of transport. Back into the wild, where you had to do most things yourself. I was happy then.

GRAEME POWELL was for many years the Manuscripts librarian at the National Library.

Mining Manuscripts:
Notes of Promise

Claire Cruickshank uncovers stories of financial ruin and failed business ventures in the Library’s collection of promissory notes.

Picture the scene:

Bookplate cafe, mid-morning.

‘Hello. A flat white, please.’

‘Certainly, that’ll be half a pound of flour.’

‘Can you change a bushel of wheat?’

‘Indeed. Do you prefer a pint of rum or a pound of pork?’

Thank goodness someone realised life would be easier if we swapped bits of paper representing value instead of actual goods. Today we take money as a medium of exchange for granted—I buy a coffee from you, you exchange that money for more coffee beans. But in early colonial days, there was very little ‘money’ to go around, so barter, store receipts and promissory notes evolved to fill the vacuum. A promissory note is a private bill in some such form as ‘I promise to pay’, drawn on the issuer, his agent or bank without a fixed printed value. Bills with a definitive denomination are called ‘currency’ notes, precursors of today’s plastic banknotes. Lower denomination notes were also known as shinplasters, calabashes, merchant notes, money tokens, queer money or blankets.

Every detail on these flimsy chits of paper offers a clue to an Australian story. Who issued the note, to whom, why, what was their relationship, where and when were they used? The Library’s donor-funded project to identify and describe currency-related items in the Manuscripts Collection tries to answer these intriguing questions.

A note’s signature is often crucial in discerning its story. Sometimes a name is legible, sometimes not. In the Edmund Barton papers (MS 51), I found 66 promissory notes, mostly issued to someone whose name I couldn’t quite decipher. Some Googling and a search of Trove identified the probable recipient: Daniel Melhado. Who was he? Why was he being promised such large sums of money: £847 in 1869? Pulling on that dangling thread a little more, I discovered that Melhado was a typical self-made colonial who, from humble beginnings (and a possible dodgy interest in horseflesh), became Sydney’s first stockbroker and a business partner of William Barton, Edmund’s father. Sadly, Melhado’s meteoric rise in Sydney society preceded an even more swift fall, when he ‘auto-defenestrated’ from the tenth floor of the Reform Club, aged 60 and in severe financial trouble.

Then there are the many promissory notes for significant sums tucked away in the papers of Sydney merchant and politician Samuel Deane Gordon (MS 9865), all made out to merchant-cum-moneylender Daniel Cowper in 1857. A bit of sleuthing elicited that Gordon was a trustee of the Empire newspaper, owned by Henry Parkes (later Sir), which collapsed in 1858. Revered ‘father of Federation’ he may be, but it seems Parkes was a failed businessman, bankrupted not once but three times and owing over £53,000 in 1857. Presumably Cowper never saw the colour of his money again.

A promissory note may look unimpressive with only minimal pieces of information—the issuer, the amount, the drawee and sometimes the date—but behind every scruffy paper scrap lies a tale that illuminates our past.

‘Err … I’ll take my change in rum.’

CLAIRE CRUICKSHANK is a Manuscripts librarian at the National Library of Australia.

Promissory Note for Eight Hundred and Forty Pounds Sterling, Issued 21 July 1869, to Mr Daniel Melhado
in Papers of Sir Edmond Barton, 1827–1940, MS 51, nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn2049726