March 2016

Volume 8 Number 1

On the cover

Lores and My Little Ship II during the Australia–South Africa Flight
Papers of Maude (Lores) Bonney, c. 1920–c. 1990
b&w photograph; MS 10127 nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn5976167

Forced landings, savage monsoons and near death experiences didn’t deter pioneering aviatrix Lores Bonney (1897–1994) from creating aviation history in the 1930s. She set a new Australian record for a one-day flight by a woman and was the first woman to circumnavigate mainland Australia by air.

She was also the first person to fly solo from Australia to Cape Town, South Africa, in 1937. This photo was taken during that trip and shows Lores standing next to her Klemm monoplane, My Little Ship II.

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. Copies are distributed through the Australian library network to state, public and community libraries and most libraries within tertiary-education institutions. Copies are also made available to the Library’s international associates, and state and federal government departments and parliamentarians. Additional copies of the magazine may be obtained by libraries, public institutions and educational authorities. Individuals may receive copies by mail by becoming a member of the Friends of the National Library of Australia.

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Contents

Lores Bonney: A Remarkable Woman

the art of cartoons: 
The Holy Grail of Australian Cartooning

Religion in the Celestial Empire

Collections Feature: 
Governor Arthur’s Proclamation Board

The Maltese of Woolloomooloo Wharf

In the Frame:
Belgian Day: Burnie, 24 May 1915

A Long Journey on the Ikebana Road

Guide Alice on Mount Buffalo

Bravery and Disaffection on the Western Front

Lores Bonney: A Remarkable Woman

Lores Bonney overcame many obstacles during her flying career. Telling Lores’ story presented biographer Kristen Alexander with her own set of challenges.

Lores Bonney’s aerial accomplishments were remarkable; in her day she was regarded as perhaps Australia’s most competent aviatrix. In 1931, she set a new Australian record for a one-day flight by a woman and, in the following year, she was the first of her sex to circumnavigate mainland Australia by air. In 1933, she was acknowledged as the first woman to fly from Australia to England. She undertook her last long-distance expedition in 1937, and became the first person to fly solo from Australia to Cape Town, South Africa.

The former airwoman transferred a considerable archive to Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum. She withheld some items, which her goddaughter donated to the National Library of Australia. Without a doubt, the most noteworthy artefacts are Lores’ 1933 and 1937 diaries. Reflecting a multitude of routine activities and intimate concerns, the almost daily entries are a hotchpotch of emotions, social occasion jottings, descriptions of meals and shopping excursions, and fascinating details about the lead-up to, and execution of, her epic flights to England and South Africa.

Often written under trying circumstances, the diaries have spelling, punctuation and grammatical errors. Given the historical nature of its collection, the National Library rightly insists that all quotes be rendered as written. Here then was the first of many challenges that confronted me as I wrote Taking Flight: Lores Bonney’s Extraordinary Flying Career: how to convey the flavour of an idiosyncratic writing style that reveals the airwoman’s state of mind without giving the impression that she was uneducated. Following on from this, and arising from the need to construct a lively narrative, was how to keep in the ‘good’ quotes.

Various Items
Papers of Maude (Lores) Bonney, c. 1920–c. 1990
MS 10127; nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn5976167

For the most part, I avoided citing Lores’ more erratic renditions. I lightly intervened to add missing words or correct spelling and recast to include the essence of a ‘good’ quote. I was concerned that this editing was strangling Lores’ distinctive voice, so, without compromising readability, I gave the airwoman every opportunity to speak for herself. For example, Lores later polished her raw diary entries for publication. It was important to highlight this and so I used extracts from her magazine articles to supplement quotes from the diaries. Taking Flight features over 130 photographs and roughly 40 per cent are of Lores. Many of the captions and text boxes cite her. I also wanted the reader to connect with Lores in a tangible way; I wanted them to gain a sense of her from her own words, in her own handwriting. As Taking Flight is part of the National Library’s Collection Highlight series, I was briefed to ‘write to’ her diary pages, and so I structured the book into shorter chapters to ensure as many as possible would be reproduced.

Despite their vibrancy, the diaries afford some uncomfortable reading from a modern perspective. For example, Lores was a member of the privileged social classes of the British Empire and her language reflected that era’s cultural mores and prejudices. She used words like ‘coolies’, ‘natives’, and worse. Such descriptions do not sit well today but there was nothing unusual about them in Lores’ time and I was reluctant to omit her colourful language.

Lores Bonney (1897–1994)
Diary Entry Dated 20 April 1933
Papers of Maude (Lores) Bonney, c. 1920–c. 1990
MS 10127; nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn5976167

The diaries also expose the woman behind the pilot who, like all of us, possessed strengths, weaknesses, virtues and vices. With the honesty associated with a private record, Lores did not conceal her disappointments and fears, nor her psychological fragility towards the end of her African flight. Such honesty provided another challenge. It is one that all biographers face: how to understand their subject.

I am afraid of flying. It’s no secret, but is certainly an oddity in someone who has spent her entire writing career uncovering the stories of aviators. Given my anxiety, I constantly asked myself: ‘How could Lores trust her life to flimsy aircraft and deliberately fly through tempests that daunted professional commercial pilots?’

Take, for example, her Australia–England flight in 1933, where she encountered a savage monsoon within days of leaving Darwin. The gusts were so brutal ‘it became almost impossible to correct the bumps’. Lores was terrified that ‘my wings would be ripped off’. I shared her terror. The aviatrix’s Gipsy Moth biplane was ‘tossed about like a leaf in the gale’. One moment, it was ‘racing, nose down at breakneck speed’. The next, Lores was thrown onto the right side of the cockpit, then the left. Within a blink, ‘in a violent upward current’, the Moth was practically vertical, seemingly suspended from its upright nose; the machine was ‘hanging on her prop’. Clinging to the controls, Lores used all of her strength and every skerrick of flying skill to maintain stability—and to stay airborne. She couldn’t, and had to make a forced landing. The result was a damaged aircraft, a delay of many weeks and a forfeited record.

I could barely finish reading Lores’ account of the tropical storm, let alone any of her other hair-raising narrow squeaks. I confess that my heart was pounding on many occasions and yet I had to return to those passages again and again as I strove to tell the airwoman’s story. It was not easy.

Lores and Harry Bonney with My Little Ship
Papers of Maude (Lores) Bonney, c. 1920–c. 1990
b&w photograph; MS 10127, nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn5976167

Despite the trials and a handful of near death experiences, Lores refused to hang up her goggles and flying helmet: ‘All I knew was that I wanted to fly and fly I would or die in the attempt’. To me it seemed incredible, but there was more to it than just this striking single-mindedness, a steely core that had been there from the beginning of her flying career. The airwoman often spoke of God as her copilot and, when assaulted by yet another aerial tribulation, she firmly placed her ‘faith in my engine and greater faith in God’. For my part, I struggle to comprehend how Lores could take so many risks despite this faith but I can understand fierce determination to overcome obstacles. In appreciating Lores’ steadfast tenacity—her absolute commitment to achieving her goals—I began to ‘know’ her and felt equal to telling her remarkable story.

Lores dreamed of making another epic flight. After replacing the Gipsy Moth with a sturdier Klemm monoplane, she decided to fly to South Africa. With no intention of breaking records, she planned a leisurely expedition in 1937, which was as much about sightseeing as linking Australia with the land of her birth (she had been born in Pretoria in 1897).

Proud Owner of a Brand New Klemm Monoplane, Lores and My Little Ship II
b&w photograph; Collection of Kristen Alexander

It may have been something of an extended holiday, but Lores was again assailed by multiple flying trials. For one, the Klemm was not a comfortable aeroplane. ‘This is a pig of a machine to fly. Cabin like hell, cramped, bottom sore, back ache. Could not compare with the little Moth—the pet!!’ The desert climate and frequent sandstorms were almost unbearable. It was so hot in Persia (now Iran) for instance, that she ‘nearly died’ while refuelling her aircraft. During the next stage, she flew through ‘terrific heat and against headwinds. Everything else was unpleasant. I was glad when the day ended’. Nor was she spared the horror of discovering that her aircraft was almost crumbling to pieces: ‘My own feelings are that she will collapse in the air if I get an extra bad bump, but I do not care—nothing really matters’. After her forced landing in 1933, Lores had been ‘so distressed at my failure that I felt for my revolver’. She couldn’t find it, which was just as well, as ‘I do firmly believe I would have used it’. She suffered many mood fluctuations during her flight to South Africa, and it seems that, in the face of the Klemm’s deteriorating serviceability, she had again reached that dark place: ‘death is the passport to the happiness perhaps, that I cannot find here’.

Game—Nairobi
b&w photograph; Collection of Kristen Alexander

Lores faced blood-thumping crises aplenty but also enjoyed many comedic moments, which showcase her sense of humour, often at her own expense. I was careful to balance the high drama with lighter anecdotes to ensure a more rounded portrayal of the airwoman’s extraordinary flying career.

The importance of Lores’ diaries cannot be overestimated. They offer great insights into the aviatrix’s character and achievements. They lay bare her fears and uncertainties but also accentuate her fortitude. Significantly, they enhance our understanding of Australia’s era of pioneer aviation and Lores’ place in it. However, as I delved into these very personal writings, I came across something that casts new light on the airwoman’s Australia to England attempt. That discovery prompted perhaps my greatest storytelling challenge, but you will have to read Taking Flight: Lores Bonney’s Extraordinary Flying Career to learn just what Lores’ diaries reveal.

Taking Flight: Lores Bonney’s Extraordinary Flying Career is Kristen Alexander’s fifth book. She won the Military Historical Society of Australia’s Sabretache Writers Prize in 2012 and 2013, and Australia’s Few and the Battle of Britain won the non-fiction category of the 2015 ACT Writing and Publishing Awards. Kristen is currently a PhD candidate and can be contacted via kristenalexander.com.au.

IN PREVIOUS ISSUEs

Staccato Notes from above the Clouds: The Southern Cross Logbook — September 2012

Michael Molkentin delves into Charles Ulm’s blow-by-blow account of his trans-Pacific flight.

Feisty Females: Some Early Australian ‘Lady Pilots’ — December 2009

Christobel Mattingley writes about some of the feisty women who took to the skies.

the art of cartoons: 
The Holy Grail of Australian Cartooning

By Nat Karmichael

While Australia’s cartooning community was gathered in joyful celebration at the annual Awards Night of the Australian Cartoonists’ Association in November 2014, a couple of us were looking forward to the following day. Rob Feldman, Lindsay Foyle and I had kept an exciting secret from our fellow members: we had arranged a meeting with a cartoon buff who believed he owned the original Stan Cross cartoon, For Gorsake, Stop Laughing: This Is Serious!

The cartoon was described as ‘The Funniest Drawing In The World’ by Frank Marien, the then editor of Smith’s Weekly, when it was first published on 29 July 1933. It had been so popular with the Australian public on publication that a large number of high quality prints had been released and distributed around the world. ‘At the time, Smith’s had to employ fulltime staff simply to cope with the public demand for copies of the cartoon to be posted around the world,’ Foyle said.

Even today, the cartoon’s cultural worth to our nation’s identity cannot be overemphasised. In 2015, the ABC named its three-part documentary program on Australian comedy and comedians Stop Laughing … This Is Serious. The Australian Cartoonists’ Association’s annual awards are nicknamed the Stanleys, after cartoonist Stan Cross.

National attempts to locate the original cartoon had been made in 1970 and again in 2000, without success. With thousands of copies of the cartoon in circulation, many people believed that they owned the original. Feldman, Foyle and I therefore exercised some degree of caution in announcing our ‘discovery’ last November.

But as soon as we saw it, we knew it was the original cartoon. The drawing had been well-loved by its owner and had taken pride of place in the home for years. The paper was yellowed from exposure to light, and it was housed in a thin black frame within glass. Pencil marks and some white corrector markings (in the falling anvil in particular) were obvious. I remember being stunned. It was like discovering the Mona Lisa; the Holy Grail of Australian Cartooning was before me. Given that Stan Cross’ original cartoons are held by the Library, it seems an appropriate place to house this masterpiece.

Nat Karmichael is a publisher of comic-related books and magazines and a Committee Member of the Australian Cartoonists’ Association.

Stan Cross (1888–1977)
For Gorsake, Stop Laughing: This Is Serious! 1933
ink; 70 x 49 cm; nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn6816730

Religion in the Celestial Empire

Curator Nathan Woolley examines gods, cults and divination in the Qing dynasty.

Religious life under the Qing dynasty is richly represented in the National Library’s current exhibition, Celestial Empire: Life in China, 1644–1911. Religion in traditional Chinese society provided people with a diverse range of possibilities for engaging with the other world and considering the possibilities of life after death. Practices associated with different doctrines were generally not mutually exclusive. They addressed discrete concerns within the demands of daily life and could be followed according to the needs of the individual or the community.

Gods important to the family were represented in popular prints rendered in bright colours. Known as nianhua, or New Year’s pictures, households generally replaced these items during festivities at the turn of the year. The prints were produced throughout China, sometimes in specialised workshops that gained renown for their particular styles. Each god represented in these images was associated with a particular domain or set of responsibilities, and many were believed to bring rewards or punishments. One of the most important gods was the Jade Emperor. As the ruler of Heaven, he stood at the apex of the popular pantheon and received appeals for aid in times of need. Having first emerged from Daoist practices in the medieval period, by Qing times he was present in the lives of people throughout China.

Jade Emperor (Yuhuang dadi) between 1875 and 1908
ink and pigment on paper; 62 x 54.5 cm
National Library of China

Some local gods emerged from rituals that honoured deceased historical figures or were associated with locations in the landscape. Powerful forces of non-human origin could go through a process of anthropomorphism. One god highlighting the nature of this complexity was Wenchang, a spirit who took many guises. Originally, Wenchang was a deity represented by a poisonous viper who lived atop a mountain near the town of Zitong in Sichuan. As the cult’s influence expanded over the centuries, he was conflated with other regional gods and entered the Daoist pantheon, thereby increasing his relevance and appeal. By the time of the Qing he had evolved into a state-wide cult and become a patron of learning for the civil examinations. From 1857, Wenchang was being honoured in official sacrifices on a par with Confucius.

The Transformations of Wenchang (Xiuxiang wenchang huashu quanji)
Nanjing: 1686; nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn2579133

An influential text for understanding the god was The Transformations of Wenchang, the greater part of which was said to have been first revealed by the god, through spirit writing, in 1181, under the Song dynasty. In spirit writing, a god is assumed to be controlling the hand of a medium as he produces characters on paper or in specially prepared sand. Most religious texts of the Chinese tradition are regarded as having been brought into the world, through such divine intervention at appropriate times, to enlighten humanity and save it from ills. This text consists of accounts of Wenchang’s personal history, including his incarnation in human form during the early stages of Chinese history and his later elevation to the status of deity. The accounts illustrate the god’s ethical behaviour in various circumstances and are designed to inspire readers to lead benevolent and responsible lives. This highly influential work was reproduced until the end of the Qing dynasty. The rare edition of 1686 includes illustrations of the god in his various incarnations. In one he appears as a dragon raising his earthly parents above a flood that he has induced to punish the population of a town.

The complex nature of religion in Chinese society is also demonstrated by the multifaceted historical associations held by individual religious sites. Mount Heng, in Hunan province, is one of the Five Sacred Peaks—reflecting traditional cosmogony, there is one peak for each of the cardinal directions plus the centre. Each was once the site of imperial sacrifices. The layering of meaning on Mount Heng consists of a range of competing narratives, belonging to Buddhism and Daoism as well as to state reverence and popular cults. Because of the depth of its associations, the mountain was also a place of pilgrimage and tourism. The image of Mount Heng in the exhibition shows a tranquil scene: temples sit on the slopes of the hills, and walled towns lie along the river. This mirrors the inner peace that came with some religious observations.

Complete Map of the Southern Sacred Peak (Nanyue quantu) c. 1870
ink and pigment on paper; 32 x 211 cm
National Library of China

Popular forms of divination were also commonplace. Books promising means of understanding the future and one’s place in the world were a salve to feelings of insecurity over life and fate in traditional society. People sought signs, for example, in events and appearances, and consulted guides to physiognomy (for reading faces) and geomancy (for reading the landscape). Uncertain times lent a particular urgency to the need to understand the meaning of events. Pictures of Dissuasion was a popular text used in prognostication; it contained detailed descriptions of 60 omens, each accompanied by a verse. People turned to this work, ostensibly written by a seventh-century Tang dynasty seer but more likely dating to the Song dynasty (960–1279), for guidance in times of political change and social disruption. It was commonly copied out by hand.

Pictures of Dissuasion (Tuibei tushuo) 19th century
National Library of China

The obtuseness of the content allowed for great flexibility in its interpretation, although the edition in the exhibition contains further elucidations. For example, the second image in the book, featuring 18 carp, is explained as a reference to the imperial line of the Tang dynasty (618–907), which had 18 emperors. In Chinese, the world for carp, li, is a homonym for the family name of the Tang emperors, Li. The two impaled carp signify the two Tang emperors who were assassinated. The verse is interpreted as a reference to the fortunes of the imperial house. But new readings were always possible, and this gave the book lasting significance. For example, one line in another section reads, ‘Iron trees bear flowers’. One nineteenth-century foreign observer suggested that this line gained new relevance among Chinese in Shanghai when street lamps were installed in the city.

These works are just some of the items in Celestial Empire, drawn from the collections of the National Library of Australia and the National Library of China, that provide a window on dealings with the world of spirits and fortune during the Qing dynasty. They will be on display in the Library’s Exhibitions Gallery until 22 May.

Dr Nathan Woolley is a historian at the Australian National University and curator at the National Library of Australia. He is the author of the exhibition’s companion publication, Celestial Empire: Life in China, 1644–1911, from which this article has been adapted.

Collections Feature: 
Governor Arthur’s Proclamation Board

By NAT WILLIAMS, The James and Bettison Treasures Curator

In the centenary year of Gallipoli it seems timely to look at an artefact from a lesser-known and overlooked conflict, much closer to home. This robust and enigmatic object is a survivor. It evokes the period of warfare existing in Van Diemen’s Land between the black and white populations in the 1820s. Is it a symbolically loaded piece of propaganda or the remnant of a well-meant gesture of conciliation? The truth is complex, winding intricately through both of these assertions.

The 1st of November 1828 marked the proclamation of martial law by Lieutenant-Governor George Arthur. This followed escalating violence between the opposed communities, who had vastly different means of resolving disagreements. The settlers, generally a mixed lot of convicts and sheep farmers, had guns and the government on their side. The Palawa had courage, stealth and patience but were being steadily killed in the frontier conflict. Their lands were being usurped, food sources blocked and families broken up. Previous proclamations by Arthur attempted to deal with the bloodshed and lawlessness but instead enabled the white population to exterminate the original inhabitants. The colonial authorities wanted to get the Palawa out of the way, to ban them from settled land, clearing areas for productive farming. The Palawa could not possibly understand the significance of the proclamations—they spoke no English. How would they hear of new government restrictions on their use of their lands?

Governor Arthur’s Proclamation to the Aborigines 1830
oil on wood panel; 36 x 22.8 cm; nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn352883

Surveyor-General George Frankland proposed an ingenious, if naive solution. Inspired, he said, by Palawa drawings on the bark of trees, Frankland sketched pictograms, which he hoped they might understand. How he imagined Palawa people would decipher the proclamations is not recorded. He wrote to Arthur:

I have endeavoured to represent in a manner as simple and as well adapted to their supposed idea, as possible, the actual state of things (or rather the origin of the present state) and the desired termination of the hostility.

Similar in style to later comic strip illustrations, these images were anything but comic. With deadly serious intent, the image of Aboriginal people and Europeans living in harmony in the top register—nursing each other’s babies, their children holding hands—presents a utopia of assimilation , presumably designed to suggest that, once transformed, the original Tasmanians could live alongside their white neighbours in peace.

The iconography and symbolism of the Palawa ‘chief’ shaking hands with the Lieutenant-Governor is complex, but it can be read as surrender or conciliation witnessed by the King’s representative, soldiers and a settler. The final two registers of the board provide a bloodthirsty account of the supposedly equal justice meted out on the frontier. The idea of a European person being hanged for murdering an Aboriginal Australian was fanciful, and the first such occurrence was not to be for another decade and then only on the mainland. Created in 1830 as a run of 100 panels, Frankland’s drawing was stencilled onto the painted wooden boards to facilitate easy copying. The painters are unknown. Like the people being hanged in the illustration, the wooden panels were also created to be ‘fastened’ onto trees. What the Palawa made of them is not recorded.

Only seven known proclamation boards exist in museum collections in Australia and overseas. They were also produced later as lithographic prints, with a narrative beneath the scenes and Governor Davey, Arthur’s predecessor, wrongly named as the author. The Library’s painted board was purchased in Hobart in 1936 for £10. The Library also holds what appears to be the original watercolour artwork prepared for the lithograph and some of the prints (nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn2428822).

The proclamation board is displayed in the Treasures Gallery alongside a copy of the 1830 Hobart Almanac (nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn2671848), which outlines Arthur’s various proclamations. The section on ‘Aborigines’ ends with the following words: ‘But the actual use of arms is not to be resorted to, if less violent means will avail, and bloodshed is to be checked as much as possible’. By this stage of the conflict most of the killing had already been done.

The Maltese of Woolloomooloo Wharf

Barry York uses Maltese oral history accounts to discover what life was like in Woolloomooloo’s wharf community a century ago.

A few years ago, I was approached by the producers of the popular SBS TV series, Who Do You Think You Are?, to appear in an episode about one of Australia’s leading entertainers, Adam Hills. I was surprised to learn that Hills had a Maltese great grandfather who migrated to Woolloomooloo, Sydney, in 1912. My oral history work over many years had focused on Maltese migrants and someone from the production company asked if I knew anything about the Maltese community in Woolloomooloo back then. Immediately, my mind turned to a collection of oral histories I had recorded in the 1980s on cassettes that were carefully stored in shoeboxes in a cupboard at home.

I had written books on the larger question of Maltese migration to Australia and had an understanding of the context for the Woolloomooloo community. I also knew of print sources that would provide factual information. But what oral history could provide went to a different, deeper, level entirely. In my cassette collection were interviews with two women who migrated from Malta to Woolloomooloo with their mothers in 1913 and 1914. Both had grown up there, as part of the wharf community. I recorded Christina Couch (nee Farrugia) and Jean Barrett (nee Rizzo) in Sydney in 1984 when they were aged in their 70s. As I located the cassettes and dusted them off, it suddenly struck me: the two interviews represent voices of migration a hundred years ago!

Barry York
(LEFT) Jean Barrett (nee Rizzo) c. 1912 and (RIGHT) Christina Couch (nee Farrugia) 1984
b&w photograph; Courtesy Barry York

The subjective accounts of daily life in Woolloomooloo, in the rectangle of streets pushing 500 metres back from the bay, is unique and priceless. Had the recordings not been made, the individual memories would have been lost; though I wish to point out that my friend and fellow historian, Mark Caruana, had interviewed both women before me, and it was through him that my own opportunity arose.

Woolloomooloo today is highly sought after real estate, with a largely gentrified population. The Finger Wharf is a heritage site, with up-market apartments developed above it and posh restaurants around it. In 1912, it was a tough working class community with many migrants. Back then, the wharves were booming, employing hundreds of labourers, sometimes running three shifts per day. The houses were gas lit but comfortable and, in some ways, similar to those in Malta: double-storeyed, bedrooms upstairs, dining area downstairs, no front yard, steps leading to the pavement. As in Malta, this allowed individuals to sit out the front after work and chat with passers-by.

Fort Lascaris, Malta c. 1915
postcard; Courtesy Barry York

Jean Rizzo and Christina Farrugia both hailed from dock towns in Malta’s Grand Harbour. Jean’s father, Joseph, was a dockyard worker while Christina’s was a deep-sea diver. It is likely that Christina’s father had worked on the construction of Malta’s Breakwater—a major project lasting from 1903 to 1909—and his skills were in demand in Sydney when the huge wharf was being built at Woolloomooloo from 1911 to 1915. Christina recalls him later working on the pylons of the Sydney Harbour Bridge when it was being built. The ‘pull’ of Australia was its reputation as ‘l-art tal-futur’ (the Land of the Future), where hard work was rewarded with good wages.

Malta was a British colony and migration within the Empire was seen as offering a better future than migration to traditional destinations along the north African coast. Australia at this time was developing rapidly, expanding its trade with Europe. There was abundant work in quarries, factories, road and rail construction, and on the wharves. The Maltese who settled in Woolloomooloo were pioneers of urban migration.

Ship at Woolloomooloo, Sydney Harbour c. 1900
b&w negative; 16.4 x 21.4 cm; nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn4654407

There are patterns in history, but within the patterns are multitudes of individual stories. The fathers of both women made the voyage to Australia on their own, with a view to testing the conditions and bringing out their families later on. John Farrugia made the move in 1911 and did well as a diver on the wharf project. When he sent for his family two years later, he had ready for them a rented house in Plunkett Street, a few minutes’ walk from the wharves.

Jean’s father, Joseph, obtained a ‘working passage’ on a boat in 1912 and initially laboured on road construction around Mount Lyell, Tasmania, before moving to Woolloomooloo, where he worked on the wharves and arranged passage for his wife and two-year-old Jean in 1914. A few hundred Maltese worked at Mount Lyell when he was there but many gradually headed north, in part because the wet, cold conditions on Tasmania’s north-west coast were so different to the Mediterranean climate. When Jean and her mother disembarked at Sydney, Joe took them straight to the house he was renting in Nicholson Street, in the heart of the wharf community. Prior to that, he had boarded at the Farrugias’ place with a dozen or so other Maltese wharf workers.

The Farrugias’ house attracted many new arrivals. As Christina recalled:

Any new people who came to Australia, friends would bring them to our place, and they were always made welcome … They’d bring their mandolins and we’d have real good old sing-song … and they’d talk about home and different ones would ask my mother to write a letter home because some of them couldn’t read or write.

The Maltese language was spoken and Maltese cuisine prepared. In the absence of refrigeration, rabbits and chooks were slaughtered fresh. One can imagine the streets of this quarter filled with the scent of baked macaroni and ‘stuffat tal-fenek’ (rabbit stew) and, in the evening, the sound of a mandolin or guitar being played by a Maltese wharf labourer, sitting on his doorstep. There would also have been a strong scent of horses, as there were ‘hundreds of them’, with some carriages drawn by eight horses. And of course, on a warm breezy night, there was the saline scent from the bay.

EB Studios
Panorama of a View of Woolloomooloo and Potts Point, New South Wales; between 1917 and 1946
b&w negative; 19.5 x 120.5 cm

Sometimes migrants suffer homesickness but, according to Jean, her parents were very satisfied at Woolloomooloo. Her mother, Katarina, had been a seamstress, sewing clothes for the Royal Navy in Malta. Her mother told her that life was very hard in Malta. Neither parent had any desire to return, and they never did. The family felt ‘comfortable’, especially with extra income earned when Katarina started a sewing business from home.

The community was a tight-knit one and Jean and Christina recalled at least four other Maltese families among their neighbours—the Carabotts, Cassars, Vassallos and Zahras. ‘We went to [St Mary’s Cathedral] school with their children and we all grew up together’. There were also many single Maltese men who had to wait until after the War to bring out their families. Jean Barrett recalled:

(The Maltese) always used to stick together. You know what I mean? Go on picnics together. Down in Woolloomooloo there’d be no radio or television then so after ten, the men would go and sit out on a step or in the gutter and just talk there, and the women, when they had finished their tea business, they’d go out too but mostly you’d find all the men out there talking … it was always in Maltese!’

There appears to have been a high level of class solidarity with ‘foreigners’ permitted to join the Wharf Labourers Union. The community was ethnically diverse: Maltese wharfies lived alongside the Australian-born, English migrants and Italian fishermen. Neither woman felt they were ever discriminated against while growing up in Woolloomooloo. On the contrary, both speak highly of their Australian neighbours. According to Jean:

we had no trouble with them at all, the Australians. My mother mixed up well with them. My father did too, with the men on the wharf. And I did at work too. But I will say there were some people who used to complain.

Both women married Maltese men in Sydney. In 1927, Jean married a Maltese by the name of Harry Barrett from her hometown, Senglea, and Christina married Charles Cauchi from Sliema in 1930.

Christina’s husband changed his surname from Cauchi (pronounced ‘Cow-key’) to Couch in order to avoid discrimination in employment. Her brothers in Sydney also changed their surnames: from Farrugia to Ferguson. The practice of changing Maltese surnames to English or Scottish ones interests me because in 1947 my Maltese father, Loreto, changed his surname from Meilak (pronounced ‘May-lak’) to York for similar assimilationist reasons.

The interviews capture some of the Maltese culture of that era. As a small island with a few dozen common surnames, nicknames developed as a way of differentiating people with the same names. Christina recalled her father’s nickname was ‘Ganni l-Bughaddas’, which means ‘Johnny the deep sea diver’. Thus her dad could be distinguished from any other John Farrugia by reference to his occupation.

Both women sound very Australian and Christina self-identified as Australian. Jean regarded herself as Maltese but added ‘I’ve been here a long time’. She still spoke Maltese at the local club where she liked to play bingo with other Maltese women.

The Library has digitised the two interviews and they are scheduled to go online. When that happens, people anywhere in the world with access to the internet will be able to experience this particular aspect of history, of century-old migration to Australia, through listening to the individual voices of those who lived it.

Dr Barry York is a historian at the Museum of Australian Democracy at Old Parliament House. He began recording oral history interviews for the Library in 1988 and was a Harold White Fellow in 1997. His email address is Barry.York@moadoph.gov.au.

In the Frame:
Belgian Day: Burnie, 24 May 1915

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

The British Empire had gone to war in August 1914 ostensibly to protect Belgium, whose existence Britain had guaranteed, proudly disdaining the Kaiser’s dismissal of the 1839 treaty as a ‘scrap of paper’.

The invasion that followed saw Belgium subjected to an increasingly harsh German occupation. Reports of atrocities committed against Belgian civilians—actual, exaggerated and invented by British propaganda—flooded newspapers around the world.

Australians responded powerfully to reports of ‘poor little Belgium’. Its own soldiers saw almost no action until April 1915. In the meantime, many Australians devoted themselves to supporting war charities that were directing relief supplies and money to Belgian refugees in Britain and France. Until their own troops entered battle, Belgium became the focus of many Australian civilians’ patriotic fundraising—northern Tasmania’s Belgian funds raised over £30,000 during the war.

This explains why on 24 May 1915 Burnie, north-west Tasmania, celebrated ‘Empire Day’ as ‘Belgian Day’. The fair, held in Burnie’s West Park, raised £50 for the town’s Belgian fund, and a concert that evening raised even more. Here, a buggy has won a prize for the ‘best decorated cart’. The crepe paper ribbons wound around the spokes of its wheels and the flag over the horse’s rump are probably red, yellow and black, the Belgian colours, nearly as common in 1914–15 as the British Empire’s red, white and blue.

But something else catches the eye. The flags displayed on the dashboard include two Japanese flags, and two of the three young women on the seat are dressed in passable replicas of kimonos, with cherry blossom bunches fastened to the back of the seat and a Japanese fan on the horse’s head.

The cart not only celebrates Australians’ profound sympathy for the plight of Belgian refugees, but seems also to point to a sudden change in Australia’s attitude to Japan. No longer a potential threat, Japan was now Australia’s ally.

On Empire Day 1915, Australian troops on Gallipoli experienced the silence of the celebrated ceasefire. From then, Australian civilians would increasingly be supporting their own wounded and bereaved.

Decorated Cart, Belgian Day, Burnie, 24 May 1915
b&w photograph; 8.7 x 13.8 cm; nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn6448884

A Long Journey on the Ikebana Road

Norman Sparnon developed a passion for the ancient art of flower arrangement amid the ruins of postwar Japan, writes Alison Broinowski.

When prosperity returned to Japan after the Pacific War, the nation’s culture awoke as if from hibernation and changed to express a new Japan. Deeply rooted in tradition, the interrelated practices of architecture, tea ceremony and flower arrangement revived too, with postwar boldness. As a new generation of Japanese took to these ancient arts with enthusiasm, recently arrived foreigners were also attracted to them. One in particular earned rare acceptance in a highly competitive field. The iemoto (headmaster) of one of the three leading schools of flower arrangement said that no other foreigner had attained such high proficiency or had shown his work in so many exhibitions in Japan.

The foreign ikebana exponent was an Australian, Norman Sparnon. Arriving in Tokyo in December 1945, the young Army captain was gregarious and he knew he would like Japan. He had not been long in the war-ravaged city, working as a Japanese translator for Supreme Commander Allied Powers (SCAP), when he saw a Japanese woman arranging flowers in a shop and at once asked her to teach him. Soon he found more teachers, Kobayashi-sensei of the Eishin school, and then Hako Terai of the modern Sōgetsu School in Mita, where Sōfu Teshigahara, the iemoto, was shocking traditionalists by creating enormous arrangements, some 30-feet high and some involving no flowers at all. Sparnon was also accepted into the prestigious and traditional Ikenobō School, whose iemoto was Tadao Yamamoto. With the title Sen’ei XLV, Yamamoto was the latest in a succession of headmasters dating from the late fifteenth century, every one of whom had a name beginning with ‘Sen’. He approved Sparnon’s request to study the rikka style. ‘So the long journey along my ikebana road began’, Sparnon recalled in My Ikebana Journey (1990).

Miki Takagi
A Modern Nageire Arrangement
plate 36 in Japanese Flower Arrangement, Classical and Modern by Norman Sparnon
(Vermont: C.E. Tuttle, 1960)nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn1326186

The rikka practice, derived from Buddhist floral offerings for the dead, had been brought to Japan from China in the mid-sixth century by a monk, Ono-no-Imoko, and was adopted by the Emperor Shōtoku. After the Emperor’s death, the monk retired to Rokkaku-do in Kyoto to pray and make flower offerings in what became known as Ike-no-bō (priest’s house by the pond). The hexagonal building was rebuilt several times, the latest in 1877, and it remains the residence and headquarters of the Ikenobō School.

In successive centuries, this devotional art of Buddhist monks became the elaborate pastime of emperors and courtiers, then the austere discipline of warriors and later the exploratory practice of merchants. As its practitioners changed, so did ikebana. Rules governed everything from the selection, preparation and placement of flowers, the choice of appropriate containers and their location in a room to implements and landscape gardening. New terms derived from rikka came into fashion—seika and shōka (both meaning ‘asymmetrical’)—and ikebana (‘living flowers’) was adopted in the late nineteenth century.

Kason Suzuki (1860–1919)
Cha No Yu To Ikebana; (Tokyo: Hakubunkan, 1895)
woodblock; 23 x 31 cm; nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn5744874

In 1868, with the restoration of the Emperor Meiji and the opening of Japan to the West, everything changed, as Sparnon explained in his Japanese Flower Arrangement (1960). Unfamiliar flowers and containers arrived in Japan, and ikebana responded with moribana, a style in which flowers appear ‘stuffed’ in a vase, and with nageire—flowing casualness. For the first time, girls were taught ikebana—up to then, largely a male preserve—at school. By the 1960s, there were more than 100,000 ikebana teachers in Japan, and most of their students were women—although the iemoto were still all men. As Japan sought to rebuild its international image through culture, Sōfu travelled and became widely known in the West, and Ikebana International was established by an American, Ellen Gordon Allen, in 1956. The Japanese Government, aware of the international attraction of ikebana, to this day presents its foreign friends with calendars illustrated with seasonal flower arrangements for each month.

Although some admirers claim Sparnon introduced ikebana in the West, his Japanese Flower Arrangement (1960) was not the first account of it in English. Basil Hall Chamberlain, Ernest Satow, Josiah Conder and A.L. Sadler (who taught Japanese at Sydney University) were among his predecessors. To their histories Sparnon added postwar developments in ikebana, an emphasis on women as practitioners and Australian materials.

Sparnon lived in Japan for 12 years, taking an active part in its reviving cultural life. In 1948, he married Mary Griest from Illinois, who also worked in SCAP. Seven years his senior, she joined him in evening classes in ikebana, and her arrangement won the Prince Takamatsu Award in 1955. Declaring that you should ‘retire while you are on top’, she did not exhibit again. Sparnon first showed his work in 1950 in the Hibiya Park pavilion, and later in prestigious exhibitions in department stores and museums. In 1953, he qualified as a seikyōju (senior teacher) in Sōgetsu, going on to win awards in both Australia and Japan. ‘The fifties were the golden years of ikebana in post-war Japan,’ he recalled (My Ikebana Journey).

After his retirement in 1957, he translated the writings of Japanese flower masters, and demonstrated their work and his own in 11 books, acknowledging in dedications his teachers, his wife, Minobu Oi of Women’s University of Tokyo and photographer Miki Takagi. He continued to take weekly classes in rikka with Yukichu Fujiwara, his master at Ikenobō, and regularly visited Sōfu.

In 1959–1960, Sparnon and Mary travelled widely in Europe and the United States, before returning to Australia in 1961 to live in Sydney’s Darling Point. As Director of the Sōgetsu School, he established eight Ikebana Societies in Australian cities and four in New Zealand. He was also President of the Ikenobō Society in Australia and Honorary Advisor to Ikebana International. Not neglecting his friends in Japan, he made several return visits, while writing books designed to educate and encourage Australians in flower arrangement, with local plants whose difference he found stimulating.

John Tanner
The Consul General for Japan, Mr Nissi Sato, and Mrs Sato Examine an Ikebana Exhibit with Mr Norman Sparnon 1965
b&w photograph; National Archives of Australia A1501, A5765/2

In Sydney, Sparnon quickly made friends, just as he had in Japan. In his three-volume series, Creative Ideas for Japanese Flower Arrangement, the first book, The Beauty of Australia’s Wildflowers (1967), concentrated on local flora gathered in Perth, Adelaide and Sydney. He and Mary befriended Professor E.G. Waterhouse, who had retired from teaching German at Sydney University and was cultivating camellias at ‘Eryldene’ in the Sydney suburb of Gordon. With contributions from camellia-lovers in Sydney and Tokyo, they produced the second book in Sparnon’s series, The Magic of Camellias (1968), which included a history by Waterhouse of camellias and their descendants in Australia, and camellia arrangements by Sparnon, photographed by his new friends Keith Barlow and Don Cameron. Another ikebana enthusiast, Barbara Forbes, made sketches for The Poetry of Leaves (1970), the third in the series. Always, Sparnon repeated his principle: that beauty is created by enhancing natural design, creating space through elimination and placement.

Sparnon was not the only Australian to be attracted to Japan in spite of the bitterness of the Pacific War. Hal Porter based his early novels, plays and stories on his time with the British Commonwealth Occupation Force (BCOF) in Kure; Richard Leplastrier studied with Japanese architects; Peter Sculthorpe and Peggy Glanville-Hicks made connections through Japanese music; and Peter Rushforth, a survivor of the Burma railway, did the same with ceramics, exchanging visits with leading Japanese potters. But only Sparnon knew Japanese. Growing up as the youngest of six children of a tramway employee in St Kilda, he first tried French at Berlitz, but wanted to learn Japanese. Beginning with weekly sessions with Shigeo Yasuhara, Melbourne manager of the Okura Trading Company, he followed Professor Inagaki’s weekly Japanese radio program, using an ABC booklet and Vaccari’s Kanji cards. He then took lessons with Ethel ‘Monty’ Poshon (a lover of Japan who died at 105 and was honoured at Brisbane Expo in 1988). As her only student, Sparnon passed the Intermediate exam.

In 1940, Sparnon enlisted in the Army and was sent to Point Cook. He was surprised to find that £5 was not his weekly fee but what the Army paid him to study Japanese, which he and his four classmates did by translating tokuhon (primary readers) aloud in turn. He was then promoted and sent north, to Brisbane, Townsville and New Guinea with ATIS (Allied Translator and Interpreter Section). In Manila in November 1945, Sparnon began a brief war diary, recording his experience in the war crimes trial of Admiral Tomoyuki Yamashita, as a witness for both the prosecution and the defence. ‘The trial stinks,’ he wrote. ‘During war there is no doubt that gruesome acts are perpetrated by both sides—we are no angels.’

On 14 December, he was flown to Japan, and set about exploring the capital and the country with like-minded friends, on trains that were free to the Occupation forces. He sat on tatami for the first time and had his first Japanese bath. ‘Within three weeks of my arrival the joys of being in Japan seemed to be unlimited,’ he wrote (My Ikebana Journey). Promoted to Captain, he continued routinely translating intercepts. He was approached to join the nascent Department of External Affairs and the BCOF and declined. His father wrote from Melbourne advising him to take the risk: ‘everything in life is a gamble’.

Camellias and Dried Sunflowers
illustration on page 23 in Creative Japanese Flower Arrangement by Norman Sparnon
(Tokyo: Shufunotomo Co., 1982); nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn6571283

Sparnon wrote in A Guide to Japanese Flower Arrangement (1969) that he was ‘blessed to live a life of Ikebana’. He received awards from the governments of Australia (OAM, 1979) and Japan (Order of the Rising Sun, 1983) and the first Sōfu Teshigahara Memorial Award (1991). Not long after Mary’s death in 1989, he suffered a stroke while visiting Tokyo and could no longer speak Japanese. ‘Fortunately,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘I was able to use my Japanese at a time when I needed it’. He died in Sydney on 19 June 1995, aged 82. The Norman and Mary Sparnon bequest provides for Australians to study at Sōgetsu.

Dr Alison Broinowski is a former diplomat, author and academic. She has lived and worked in several Asian countries, particularly Japan, and has written and edited 12 books based on her experience.

IN A PREVIOUS ISSUE

The Craving for Something Japanese — September 2011

Michelle Mortimer explores Japanese influence on the Australian performing arts.

Guide Alice on Mount Buffalo

Hiking Mount Buffalo was in the pioneering Alice Manfield’s blood, explains Jennifer Gall.

In a log hut perched high on Mount Buffalo, like an eagle’s eyrie, the Alpine Girl Guide spent many days and nights, alone. It was no rare happening for the little dwelling to tremble in the stress of storm—wind and whirling snow. But it was stoutly built and the girl it sheltered was unafraid. She has never developed ‘nerves’ you see; and to be alone in a hut on a mountain top, during a snow storm, was nothing remarkable—for a maid of the Alps.

—Charles Barrett, Introduction to Lyre Birds of Mt Buffalo by Alice Manfield

Breath-taking alpine views and extraordinary configurations of granite boulders are Mount Buffalo’s chief attractions. The sheer cliff faces and plunging valleys create splendid panoramas that draw the viewer into nature. Throughout her life, Alice Manfield introduced countless visitors to the mountain’s animal life, the wildflowers and the physical challenges of climbing—an intoxicating combination of outdoor pleasures that converted many to a lifetime of bush exploration.

Alice’s father James and his brother John arrived from England in 1851 to join the Australian gold rush. With Weston, Bradie, Goldie and Carlile they were the first white men to climb to the top of Mount Buffalo, pre-dating the official first ascent by Ferdinand von Mueller and John Dallachy on 26 February 1853. In 1854, the Manfield brothers climbed Mt Buffalo up the Goldies Spur track to investigate potential for guiding walkers, and in 1856 James led a party of miners up the mountain. James Manfield used the adventure to claim the title of first guide on the mountain, determining his family’s careers into the next generation.

By 1874, the railways had reached Wangaratta and in the following year rival guide Bill Weston brought a group of Melbourne doctors to enjoy the therapeutic benefits of alpine hiking. The venture was greeted so enthusiastically that he built a log cabin in 1879. From this time on, Mt Buffalo was viewed as an alpine resort. The Bright Alpine Club was formed in 1887 to promote the benefits of ‘the complete isolation from the world of business, the exhilaration, the wilderness and magnificence of the surroundings [which] brings the tourist in close sympathy with nature’.

In 1888, James Manfield opened Manfield’s Buffalo Falls Temperance Hotel. It was home to his wife, Jane, and their eight children as well as the accommodation for anyone planning the ascent. Manfield transported guests from Porepunkah station to the rudimentary hotel. Its great appeal was its location on the mountain, within easy striking distance of Eurobin Falls and the 3-hour climb to the plateau. Parties were often taken up the mountain on packhorses, and tents were provided for the 3–4-day stay. This was the route on which Alice gained experience, leading parties up to the summit where they would strike camp and light a roaring fire. Hikers would relax as the light ebbed, gazing up at the stars and drinking mugs of cocoa provided by Alice. She was only 12 when the hotel opened, but by the age of 16 Alice was leading parties up the mountain on her own.

Guide Alice on Mount Buffalo c. 1912
b&w negative; 14 x 9 cm
State Library Victoria; H2003.96/20

The race was on to establish the first accommodation right on the mountain. Ted and Mary Jane Carlile succeeded in opening the first hostel in December 1891, built at the foot of The Monolith, overlooking Crystal Brook. James Manfield took out a Miner’s Right and selected a choice position overlooking the Gorge. Through skilful negotiation, Manfield secured the right to build what became known as Granny’s Place. From here, the guide could signal to the family home below.

An early guest who returned many times in subsequent years to climb the mountain, relying on the Manfields’ hospitality, was Sir John Monash, then a soldier-engineer. His diary records his impressions:

The mental impressions cannot soon be forgotten. We lunched, rested and took sketches. We then went on to the precipices at the mouth of the gorge, and stood spellbound at the wonderful and awe-inspiring scene.

Guide Alice, Mt. Buffalo c. 1890–c. 1930
glass lantern slide; 8.5 x 8.5 cm
State Library Victoria; H2003.95/145

Alice’s irrepressible energy and climbing expertise ensured she was the most sort-after Manfield guide. She had an instinct for showmanship, commissioning a ‘quaint alpine costume’ and posing for photographs as ‘Guide Alice’. Trails were neither signposted nor maintained making Alice’s skilled bushcraft indispensable to hikers. Her knowledge of the mountain came from a strong personal connection with the power of the place. When she was worried, Alice would sit on her particular rock to draw in its strength. She wrote in her diary:

We were not in our teens, my brother William and I when we first climbed the mountain. From then on, mountain climbing and the stillness of the mountain top seemed to take hold of me

In 1910, life for Alice changed dramatically with the death of her father, leaving her and her mother alone to run the guesthouse, with Alice as principal guide. Preparations for each tour up the mountain were elaborate:

When a party would advise us of their intention to visit the mount horses would be got ready, packed with bedding and provisions. Sometimes the party would walk, but more often they would ride, making a spectacular sight dodging through the trees and winding in and out the giant boulders ... When ascending the precipitous ‘Zig-Zag’, many riders would cry out in alarm, ‘I am sliding over the horse’s back. What shall I do Guide?’ ‘Put your arms around his neck’ was Guide Alice’s answer.

Eventually a cabin was constructed and guests were offered indoor accommodation. While more comfortable than camping, the cabin retained the feeling of solitude and other-worldliness guaranteed by its isolated position.

Not long after Manfield’s death, the remaining family was instructed to vacate the site by the Lands Department as the new Government Chalet had been completed and the authorities were keen to remove competition. Despite protest, the cabin was eventually demolished and the family was given £50 recompense. A public outcry ensued at the injustice of the eviction of the family who had done so much to promote the mountain and Alice’s mother was granted a building site near Bent’s Lookout where she built a log cabin known as Manfield’s Bungalow. (It was destroyed by fire in 1930.) Undaunted by the move, Alice saw the potential in offering guests at the Government Chalet the outdoor adventures that the manager of the establishment did not provide. She included his guests on walks with her own clients.

Alice was renowned for her ‘Trouser Suit’, which caused a scandal amongst women visitors to Mount Buffalo when they first encountered her wearing the garment. Originally, she wore a woollen skirt and tunic jacket, puttees with lady’s mountaineering shoes and a hat resembling that of a Canadian Mounty, but in 1900 Alice designed a more versatile costume made of woven woollen fabric: jodhpurs with a loose fitting tunic, puttees, boots, a fetching tasselled knitted cap, scarf and long stout staff. Another photograph captures her in a darker, knitted version of the same fundamental design with the trademark side-fastening tunic.

Melba & Co. Melbourne
Guide Alice in Her Hiking Clothes
illustration in The Lyre-birds of Mount Buffalo by Guide Alice
(Melbourne: Robertson & Mullens, 1930s); nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn167097

Alice’s indefatigable constitution became legendary. She would set off at a rapid pace, leading parties to the Cathedral, Dickson’s Falls or the Underground River, taking in a selection of breathtaking rock formations, seasonal wildflowers and frost hollows filled with snowgrass. She gave nature lectures using her photographs transferred onto glass magic lantern slides (this collection is housed in State Library Victoria).

In 1917, Alice married John Edward Manfield, a distant cousin and a ranger in the Parks Service. Their daughter, Genevieve, remembered her childhood freedom in an interview for Parks Victoria: ‘Mum and Dad never worried about me, even if I didn’t come back at night. I’d turn up some time or other. You couldn’t lose me up there’.

Alice and John Manfield’s isolated sanctuary attracted many special visitors. Genevieve recalled a day when, at age 8, she was painting the mountain gorge with the Victorian Alps in the background and guest Arthur Streeton offered some practical advice: ‘Always put the clouds in first’.

The only published book that commemorates Alice Manfield’s dedication to natural history is a slim, 14-page volume, but the photographs in it represent many long hours of patient observation. Alice published The Lyre Birds of Mount Buffalo in 1924. It was the first photographic essay about the lyrebird family, depicting male, female, nest and baby. The photographs were taken with a simple folding camera and the sharp focus of the images and the careful composition are testament to Alice’s patience.

Alice Manfield continued to work as a guide on Mount Buffalo into the 1930s when she finally retired from leading people on the trails she had walked for so many years. She died on 14 July 1960 and is commemorated with a lyre-bird plaque on her beloved Mount Buffalo.

Dr Jennifer Gall is a writer, musician and assistant curator at the National Film and Sound Archive. She writes about music for The Canberra Times and authored In Bligh’s Hand: Surviving the Mutiny on the Bounty with NLA Publishing in 2011.

Bravery and Disaffection on the Western Front

Patricia Clarke looks at the letters of Major Lyndhurst Falkiner Giblin DSO, MC.

Major Lyndhurst Falkiner Giblin was a brave First World War officer who led his men of the Tasmanian 40th Battalion in desperate battles on the Western Front. He was wounded three times and awarded the Military Cross and the Distinguished Service Order, decorations that suggest he was in the mould of a conventional, courageous AIF officer. His wartime letters held in the Library’s Manuscripts Collection, however, reveal a more complex, nuanced attitude to the war than an account of his bravery and leadership might suggest.

Lyndhurst Giblin was a member of a distinguished Tasmanian family and the son of a premier of the colony. Before World War I, he led a colourful, adventurous life marked by independence and eccentricity. He had been an outstanding mathematics scholar at Cambridge, a rugby international for England, a gold-digger and a lumberjack at the Klondike gold rush, a plantation manager in the Solomon Islands, a teacher of Japanese jujitsu in London and an orchardist in Tasmania. In 1913, he was elected to the Tasmanian House of Assembly as a Labor member, was appointed to the University of Tasmania Council and was a member of the first ALP Federal Executive.

Officers ‘D’ Company
illustration in Souvenir: 40th Battalion
(Hobart: J.W. Beattie, c. 1916); nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn6187670

In 1916, at the age of 43, he enlisted in the AIF and towards the end of that year he was leading D Company, 40th Battalion, in the trenches near Armentières. There he began a wartime correspondence with English-born Eilean Burton (later Giblin) whom he had met in Tasmania when she was working her way around Australia. The daughter of an affluent English family, Eilean was a feminist who had been influenced by two aunts, both of whom had been gaoled in Holloway Prison following suffrage demonstrations in London. Giblin’s letters to her reveal him as a man greatly concerned for the welfare of his men and critical of British and Allied military leadership and their conduct of the war.

When Eilean wrote of the hatred for Germans expressed in British newspapers, Giblin replied:

you won’t of course find much of that here. There’s a good deal of fellow feeling with Fritz as the victims of the same sort of higher command—which is apparently callous and unreasonable and quite evidently makes a muddle of nearly everything it touches.

He attributed the big anti-conscription vote from the Somme in the first Australian conscription referendum to ‘the feeling of being fooled about by people who did not know their job’. He discusses alternative policies including a negotiated peace, advocated in radical periodicals and books Eilean sent him, although he found even the left-wing New Statesman contained ‘more jingo every week’. He longed for England to get back ‘a little liberty of speech’ so that ‘one might fairly well hold up one’s head again’.

Alongside his antipathy to the prosecution of the war and restrictions on freedom of speech, Eilean read of his being wounded in terrible battles and, as the war dragged on, she must have wondered whether he could possibly survive. He was first wounded in April 1917 during a German bombardment in preparation for a raid near Armentières. In June, he was back at the front for the Battle of Messines in which he was shot through the thigh by a machine gun bullet as he led his troops through a constant stream of gas shells and mine explosions. Although severely wounded, he rallied his men, consolidating their position. His ‘conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty’ was recognised with the award of the Military Cross and he was promoted to Major soon after. Following his second wounding, Eilean suggested that he try to get a staff job away from the front line but he replied that there were other officers who ‘mentally & physically’ needed relief much more.

Frank Hurley (1885–1962)
Over the Top, a Composite Shot of a World War I Battle in Ypres, Flanders, 1917
b&w photograph; 32 x 58.8 cm; nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn6573507

After some time in hospital in London, he returned to the Western Front for the Third Battle of Ypres, a major British offensive fought over the later months of 1917 with the final objective of Passchendaele. The 40th Battalion joined the attack on Broodseinde Ridge but Giblin, still convalescing, took part in the battle only from divisional headquarters. ‘War is a very attractive game from the point of view of div. Hqrs,’ he wrote. ‘You think of casualties as thousands (not as Dick Hall & Jack Bourke) & glow with the virtue of the life-saver, when they are 7000 and not, as you expected, ten thousand’. The 40th Battalion lost so many men in the battle that Giblin, although still not recovered from his wounding at Messines, resumed command of his company for the attack on Passchendaele a few days later, in which British and Dominion casualties totalled over a quarter of a million.

After the battle he wrote to Eilean:

I don’t know what the papers are telling you about it, but it was a failure on a big scale … My luck was in & I came through untouched. But there are not many of us left between the two affairs—in fact the whole division is out of action for some time.

His next leave in England coincided with renewed calls for a negotiated peace and a tightening of censorship regulations as criticism of the Government escalated following the huge losses at Passchendaele. He wrote to Eilean: ‘I felt very rebellious … If I had been in Hyde Park on Sunday or any other spouting place, I think I should have succumbed to the temptation to hold forth’.

Letter from Lyndhurst Giblin to Eilean Burton, 14 October 1917
Papers of Lyndhurst Falkiner Giblin 1885–1965
MS 366, nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn2950469

When the German spring offensive began in March 1918, the 40th Battalion was sent to a gap in Allied defences east of Amiens with orders to secure the high ground west of Morlancourt. It immediately came under heavy machine gun and artillery fire and suffered many casualties including the commanding officer, leaving Giblin in command. Despite having no artillery or machine gun support and few reserve troops, he led the battalion in holding the ground gained. His leadership received special mention in Haig’s dispatch and his ‘great ability, courage and initiative’ in this action was recognised with a Distinguished Service Order award. But his distress at the conduct of the war continued:
‘I get the impression of unlimited incompetence running right through the whole show,’ he wrote. Frank criticism of the conduct of the war in his and Eilean’s letters and the sending of banned periodicals attracted the attention of the censors and Eilean was questioned. Giblin hoped he would be questioned too: ‘I should rather like to have a row on such a point,’ he wrote.

During his next leave, Lyndhurst Falkiner Giblin and Eilean Mary Burton were married on 29 July 1918 at the registry office in Kingston-on-Thames. Following their marriage, during a walking tour to strengthen his wounded thigh, they stopped at Charleston, the legendary country meeting place of the artists, writers and intellectuals in the Bloomsbury Group, so that Giblin could check on the welfare of writer David Garnett, a conscientious objector whom he had known since childhood. The irony of Giblin’s concern for the life of a conscientious objector was apparent to Garnett who was aware that the convalescent Giblin was about to return to battle.

Giblin arrived back at the battalion for the great Allied offensive that culminated in the end of the war but, less than a month after his marriage, he was badly wounded by shrapnel during the 40th Battalion’s August attack on Bray-sur-Somme. His letters from hospital in Rouen were written in pencil as he lay on his back. They were so faint and difficult to read that Eilean made legible copies before she gave the originals to the National Library. Even in these letters he expressed his dismay at the attitude to the war in the press as the Allied advance continued. ‘The yelp for blood is getting almost triumphant; I don’t like the look of the Times,’ he wrote. ‘You can see the foul slaver on their jaws.’ He was still recovering when the war ended. In April 1919, he received orders to attend an investiture ceremony by King George V in London at which he was the only recipient who failed to obey the instruction to wear gloves. Nevertheless, the King shook his ungloved hand and had a long conversation with him on trench warfare.

He returned to Tasmania in August 1919 with the last of the men who had served under him and went back to his apple orchard; he also quickly re-established his connection with the Labor Party. Eilean, who arrived the following month, was almost certainly unique among war brides in being offered a week at an ALP Federal Conference in Sydney as her introduction to Australia.

William Dobell (1899–1970)
Professor L.F. Giblin 1945
pencil; 26.6 x 17.7 cm; nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn86626
Courtesy Sir William Dobell Art Foundation

In 1920, Lyndhurst Giblin was appointed Tasmanian Government Statistician and during the following decade was influential in the economic, financial and academic affairs of the state. From 1929, he was Ritchie Professor of Economics at the University of Melbourne, acting also as Commonwealth Statistician and adviser to governments in the Depression years. In 1933, he was appointed a founding member of the Commonwealth Grants Commission and two years later a member of the Commonwealth Bank Board. At the outbreak of World War II, he was called to Canberra to chair the Commonwealth Government’s Financial and Economic Committee, a major source of advice on managing the war economy and post-war reconstruction.

By the end of the war he was in poor health, suffering from bronchitis and ‘soft feet’—a legacy of trench warfare. He completed a history of the Commonwealth Bank, published in the year he died in Hobart in 1951, aged 78.