march 2015

Volume 7 Number 1

On the cover

Cover of The Australian Women’s Weekly, 3 February 1954
trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/page/4812308

The first time a reigning British monarch had ever visited Australia’s shores, the much-anticipated arrival of Queen Elizabeth II at Sydney Harbour on 3 February 1954 unleashed a frenzy of excitement. In a city with a population of 1.8 million people, over a million turned out to welcome the young Queen and her husband.

Gracing that day’s cover of The Australian Women’s Weekly, this painting by Bonar Dunlop imaginatively portrays a smiling Queen Elizabeth alongside the Duke of Edinburgh as they sail into the harbour on the SS Gothic.

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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Members: Mr Thomas Bradley QC, The Hon. Mary Delahunty, Mr John M. Green, Dr Nicholas Gruen, Mr Chris Hayes MP, Ms Jane Hemstritch, Dr Nonja Peters, Professor Janice Reid AM, Senator Zed Seselja
Director-General and Executive Member: Ms Anne-Marie Schwirtlich

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Director-General: Anne-Marie Schwirtlich

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Collections Management: Amelia McKenzie

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Commissioning Editor: Susan Hall

Editor: Penny O’Hara

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© 2015 National Library of Australia and individual contributors

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

The Royal Tour 1954

Medieval Manuscripts: 
The Conundrum of the Golden Camel

Just the Ticket!
The Thomas Keneally Papers

Collections Feature: 
Encountering the White Bear

Isobel Bennett:
Doyenne of the Seashores

In the Frame:
‘Leaving for the Dardanelles’ 1915

Undercover Designs

Of Moths and King-Parrots:
On the Trail of a Colonial Natural History Artist

Gutenberg Fights On:
A Survival Story

The Royal Tour 1954

The first day of Queen Elizabeth II’s historic visit to Australia saw Sydney at fever pitch. Jane Connors travels back in time to soak up the atmosphere

Growing up, little Princess Elizabeth must have heard family stories about the tours made to Australia by her grandparents in 1901, her uncle in 1920 and her parents in 1927—each of them a byword for public clamour and excitement. Nothing, though, could have prepared her for her own arrival in Australia on 3 February 1954, when the biggest crowds ever to gather in Sydney took the world (and possibly themselves) by surprise with the supercharged fervour of their welcome.

Duke and Duchess of York Addressing Crowds in Sydney during Their Royal Tour 1927
b&w glass negative; 10.2 x 12.7 cm
Pictures Collection; nla.gov.au/nla.pic-vn6192174
Fairfax Syndication

It had been so long in coming, this day. Though founded 166 years before, the colony had never been seen by a reigning British monarch. Australians had watched jealously when George VI had toured Canada in 1938 and South Africa in 1947. They had endured the cancellation of minutely planned visits in 1949 and 1952, and had given their all to celebrate the coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953. When she was here at last, inhibitions fell away.

The Royal Visit Souvenir Cut-out Book of Framed Portraits with a Pictorial Itinerary of the Royal Tour in Color
(Australia: c. 1953)
Australian Collection; nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn1599011

Police estimated later that a million people saw the Queen and her husband, Prince Philip, either on their arrival in Farm Cove or, later, in their open car procession through the inner city. The Sydney Morning Herald added to this figure another half a million in the Eastern Suburbs and the North Shore, crowded into ‘every foreshore vantage point from the Heads to the Bridge’ (including an abandoned monkey pit at Taronga Zoo). In 1954, the city had a population of 1.8 million.

This extraordinary congregation grew from a small gathering who arrived at Farm Cove, with bedding, the afternoon before. By nightfall, there were tens of thousands camping out across the city in a midsummer fairyland lit by the glow of Tilley lamps and cigarettes. Many were dampened at dawn when the water carts came to give the streets a final wash, but their spirits were undimmed.

Across the rest of the city, others had stayed up late preparing food and laying out their clothes. They rose before dawn to make their way to town, carrying boiled eggs and orange juice, armed with maps displaying the location of temporary water fountains and toilets, and indifferent to the public safety warnings issued by terrified officials. Two thousand policemen, 28 ambulances, 1,000 St John Ambulance volunteers and 78 first-aid stations had been requisitioned for the day.

A quarter of a million people were already lining the coast at half past five, when a smudge of smoke on the horizon showed the Queen’s ship, the Gothic, on her way. Surfboat crews set out to sea to offer an unofficial escort, later shepherding the Queen through the heads of Sydney Harbour, which was so tightly packed with boats, big and small, that she could almost have walked ashore. There was a thunderous roar of welcome, a mighty hosanna of cheers, sirens, foghorns and whistles, and an echo overhead as RAAF Mustangs and Vampire jet fighters gave a royal salute to their supreme commander.

Crowds continued to gather over the next two hours, while the Gothic weighed anchor in Athol Bight. Those with binoculars could see the Duke of Edinburgh prowling along the deck in shorts, while the Governor-General, the Prime Minister and the Premier came on board (fully suited) to greet their monarch. A full set of civic, state and federal politicians, churchmen, judges, generals, admirals and police commissioners waited on the landing pontoon across the water at Farm Cove.

Higher up, the people of Kings Cross carried kitchen chairs and wireless receivers onto the street, listening to the live broadcast of the doings on the harbour while they waited for the Queen and Duke to come their way later in the morning. By half past nine people were jammed together like sardines on the footpaths and in all the windows overhead. The Cross was painted and primed with flags, paper crowns and other colourful embellishments. Ladders were everywhere, alternating with precarious towers of tables and chairs, and even ironing boards and prams, while spivs were charging latecomers a hefty fee of ten shillings for a fruit box to stand on. The police, contrary to instructions, let it all happen. Perhaps they hadn’t the heart to intervene; perhaps they hadn’t the bottle.

Just after ten o’clock, with the city’s nerves at breaking point, a landing barge set forth from the Gothic with the Queen and Duke on board. The water police cleared a route to Farm Cove and, at 10.33 am precisely, a small foot in a white peep-toed sandal came slowly down to earth. The ABC informed the nation, ‘The Queen is now in Australia’. A second enormous volley of sound broke forth—the ringing of church bells and whistling of jets—but the massive crowd itself fell strangely silent.

Illustration on page 7 in The Royal Visit to Australia of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II and His Royal Highness the Duke of Edinburgh by the Australian News and Information Bureau
(Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1954)
Australian Collection; nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn1511763

‘The first greeting as the Queen landed was not as tumultuous as one had expected’, reported The Sydney Morning Herald. ‘It was a dignified, almost a restrained welcome’, a moment of ‘impressive silence’. Perhaps the weight of expectation, building for so long, had been just too overwhelming, as the uncanny quiet continued through the brief and rather awkward official ceremony. The Queen then embarked on her procession, seated in the third of 17 cars.

Suddenly, it all broke open. The progress through 14 kilometres of the city was a miracle of rolling pandemonium, ‘of unbelievable, spontaneous ovation which roared along the streets as the Queen and Duke passed by’. The effect was intensified by the movement of a million people waving hands, flags, newspapers, hats and even cardigans.

Children were pushed to the fore. There were Legacy wards in Park Street, students from the Institution for the Deaf, Dumb and Blind in City Road, and Guides and Scouts down Dowling Street. In an age when children with disabilities were often hidden away, newspapers carried an unusual number of photographs of them, including one of a little girl who ‘forgot her pain in the joy and wonder of seeing her Queen pass by and smile’. Another child to appear in the newspapers was burns victim 13-year-old Sylvia Briggs, who lay facedown on her bed on the balcony of Sydney Hospital for hours—her hair plaited with tricolour ribbons, a crown pinned to her pillow—waiting for the cavalcade to pass. At the Hospice for the Dying:

the Sisters brought as many inmates as possible to the windows. No one will ever guess how that brief sight of the Queen cheered and heartened the last days of those patients.

Adults with disabilities were also prominent. The ‘Civilian Maimed and Limbless’ sat in a designated stand in Moore Park. War veterans were particularly honoured, with 300 Boer War and pre-Boer servicemen standing in Macquarie Street. Blind veterans had a special corner reserved for them and stood, with their minders, underneath a loudspeaker so that they could hear the radio commentary. One wrote this description of the day for the magazine of the New South Wales War Blinded Welfare Committee:

Never shall we forget how the Royal Couple, slowing down their car, looked towards us with smiling faces when they became aware they were passing us by. They could see us and in our excitement the black curtain lifted and we could see them.

page 9 in The Australian Women’s Weekly, 17 February 1954
trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/page/4811892

The final port of call in the progress, just after 11 o’clock, was the Cenotaph in Martin Place, where the Queen and Duke laid a wreath in honour of Australia’s dead in both world wars. The excitement had built to such a pitch that the throng of many thousands was barely able to observe a minute’s silence for the fallen. The Herald reported that ‘uninhibited girls’ hoisted themselves onto the railings of the men’s toilet and that many women were hysterical and had to be passed over the top of the crowd. When this tribute concluded, the cavalcade headed into its final leg and a tickertape parade. Rose petals, confetti and shredded paper showered down from the thousands gathered in the buildings above.

When the cheering and shouting died down, people began exchanging opinions about the royal couple. One woman told the Herald, ‘My, isn’t she gracious? She looks just like an Australian and I bet right at this moment she would like a cup of tea.’

After the Queen’s car finally disappeared into Government House, authorities began to collate statistics, including 2,075 people treated by ambulance officers and 60 taken to hospital. While some went home, more than a million stayed in town through the hot afternoon, watching workers remove 150 tons of rubbish, and waiting for a lightshow on the harbour in the evening. It was only around midnight, after the worst traffic jam in Sydney’s history had finally dispersed, that the city closed its eyes.

Jemma Posch
left: The Duchess of Cambridge Greeting the Public outside the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra 2014
right: The Duke of Cambridge Greeting the Public outside the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra 2014
digital photographs

In the decades to come, Australian crowds would roar for the Queen’s daughter-in-law, Princess Diana, and, later still, for her grandson, Prince William, and social media would eventually replace the newsreels. Yet nothing would rival that first welcome in 1954.

Jane Connors is a historian and strategy advisor for ABC Radio. She is the author of Royal Visits to Australia (2015), published by NLA Publishing

IN A PREVIOUS ISSUE

The Wedding at Windsor — September 2010

Margot Harker discovers a beautiful souvenir of a very royal wedding

Medieval Manuscripts: 
The Conundrum of the Golden Camel

By Susan Thomas

Through the generous support of donors, the Library’s 2014 Tax Time Appeal is funding a special project to enhance access to our medieval manuscripts. The program of preservation, digitisation and description is making these intriguing items available online for the first time, inviting new interpretations from medieval ‘detectives’ around the world.

This late fifteenth-century book of hours (a collection of prayers and psalms for private devotion) from the Ferrara region of Italy is one of several examples from the Library’s collection that can now be viewed online. A medieval manuscript reflects the time and place in which it was created and, while the precise details of this book’s history have not endured, clues to its past can be found in the way in which it was made, the choice of text and style of decoration.

For reasons lost to us today, the book’s decoration is unfinished; there are a number of pages that contain outlines of what were intended to be intricately worked letters. The book appears to have been produced in a commercial workshop in which several scribes and artists contributed different sections. This shared system of book production flourished in Italy from the thirteenth century, making for faster output and answering a growing demand from an emerging educated merchant class for that ultimate accessory—a book!

Among the tantalising riddles associated with the manuscript is the meaning of the camel at the foot of the first principal folio. Images of camels are not unknown in medieval bestiaries (illustrated moral compendiums of real and imaginary animals), but this one is depicted in what seems to be a heraldic shield, surrounded by a laurel wreath and flanked by two putti (cherubs). The camel was originally rendered in gold or silver (now degraded) on an azure background.

Coats of arms were a popular way of personalising books in Europe at this time and provide evidence about the owner of a manuscript. Preliminary research suggests that the shield is associated with the Gobio family, who were prominent in Mantua (74 kilometres from Ferrara) from the thirteenth century.

This finding has generated much excitement among Library staff, but there are still questions to be answered before we can solve the longstanding conundrum of the golden camel. Was the book commissioned by the Gobio family and duly ‘stamped’ with their family shield? Could it have belonged to another Italian family with a camel in their coat of arms? Or was it associated with a town, some of which also have camels in their shields?

Explore this and other enticing mysteries at our Medieval Manuscripts blog.

Book of Hours c. 1500
in Clifford Collection of Manuscripts Mainly Relating to Roman Catholicism, c. 1250–1915
Manuscripts Collection; nla.gov.au/nla.ms-ms1097-6

Just the Ticket!
The Thomas Keneally Papers

One scholar’s trash is another’s treasure, says Paul Sharrad

J ust over half a century since Thomas Keneally’s first novel was published, now is perhaps a fitting time to be revisiting the extensive collection of his papers in the National Library. In fact, founding librarian Harold White was in touch with Keneally to acquire his material from the moment the author won a Commonwealth Literary Fellowship in 1965 to work on his first Miles Franklin-winning novel Bring Larks and Heroes. Eventually, several truckloads of manuscripts, review clippings, correspondence, family mementos, tapes and book covers arrived, and are now stored in some 320 boxes.

Cheque and Statement from Cassell and Company Limited for Royalties Earned to 31 October 1964 for The Place at Whitton
in Papers of Thomas Keneally, c. 1960–2010
Manuscripts Collection; nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn1082129
Courtesy Thomas Keneally

Like Keneally himself, the collection is an ebullient, compendious and exciting store of stories. It contains a letter from the editor of The Bulletin accepting Keneally’s first published stories, and a statement showing his first royalty payment, in 1964, for his debut novel, The Place at Whitton. There are also letters from Bill Clinton and Patrick White, cards from Gough and Margaret Whitlam and from Audrey Hepburn, and objects ranging from cufflinks to old passports and school ties. Both the extent and the variety of material present some interesting challenges for the librarian and the researcher.

Card to Thomas Keneally from Audrey Hepburn, 12 October 1989
in Papers of Thomas Keneally, c. 1960–2010
Manuscripts Collection; nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn1082129
Courtesy Thomas Keneally

Fax to Thomas Keneally from Bill Clinton
in Papers of Thomas Keneally, c. 1960–2010
Manuscripts Collection; nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn1082129
Courtesy Thomas Keneally

We tend to think of archives as fixed repositories from which we derive some fundamental truth by excavating or ‘drilling down’ through strata to find the bones or the gold. If we shift to a more horizontal metaphor, the archive is a field that we move across to reach the end of whatever journey we are on. Both are goal-oriented narratives of beginnings and ends, implying that there is something beneath or beyond the actual material to which the material points: a person, a work, a truth or a historical reality.

The archive comes into being because we value a person, or a body of work, or a knowledge of social history. However, at some point what we actually confront is a collection of material: a pile of paper, a box of photos, a bag of trophies. This is at once a batch of raw ‘stuff’ and a trove invested with an aura of treasure, of the sacred relic. At the very least, such material appears to us as a collection of rare tools with which to produce cultural meaning. To get to the meanings we give value to, we sort the mere stuff into hierarchical categories: core material, curiosities, incidentals, impedimenta, trash.

Letter to Thomas Keneally from Harold White, 1 December 1965
in Papers of Thomas Keneally, c. 1960–2010
Manuscripts Collection; nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn1082129
Courtesy Thomas Keneally

The reality of dealing with ‘just stuff’, however, can be interesting in itself. Seeing the archive as a flattened, lateral, nomadic and mobile system, rather than a vertical system of greater and lesser values, allows it to meet new demands and provide surprising outcomes.

The Keneally collection is unwieldy in scope and organisation. This makes working with it a mix of a child’s excitement at a lucky dip and a researcher’s frustration at the same. It also leads one to reflect on the nature of archives, and what this particularly encyclopedic and messy one tells us.

Several attempts have been made to catalogue the collection. The numbered boxes, however, are not in any chronological order, and the contents of each box are not always chronologically consistent. Cataloguers, thinking of the possible needs of researchers, try to pull this into some shape for ease of access; that means selecting and reordering. Yet such a systematic arrangement might well destroy what the collection points to. A tidy archive gives the impression of orderly habits and a neat mind. That is not necessarily an accurate picture of Thomas Keneally, person or writer (one of the most frequent words of self-description in letters and interviews is ‘impulsive’). The variety of material in the archive reflects what critics have often noted about Keneally the novelist: the range of his topics and the multitude of his books. Selectively organising the collection might also interfere with unforeseen shifts in what people are interested in.

Take, for example, Box 30. It contains a large plastic bag jammed full of entry tickets and membership cards for rugby games and test cricket matches. In an earlier time, both the assiduous cataloguer short on shelf space, and the literary scholar fixated on how a writer worked at his style, may have regarded this bag of ‘stuff’ as low-grade impedimenta that might well be deaccessioned (got rid of) or, at best, filed as ‘other’ at the end of the collection.

However, these tickets can be used to interpret a whole range of things, especially when ideas of literary scholarship are expanded to include the study of historical contexts and the reading of objects as cultural texts. Approached from the point of view of social psychology, the bag of tickets might signify the pack-rat proclivities of the writer, the need to offload a lot of paper cluttering the house, or a concentration on the next novel that prevents discriminating between old manuscripts and other paper. Studied from a biographical or literary-thematics standpoint, they demonstrate the importance of sport to the writer, and of rugby and cricket to Australian culture. They may prove illuminating from a cultural studies perspective: sport can override political differences, so that John Howard and Thomas Keneally might, for instance, share a guest box at a cricket test match. Quite apart from a researcher’s interest in Keneally, one might find evidence of historical changes in sports management in this motley collection of ‘trivia’: populist bits of cheaply printed paper that let everyone in giving way to more selective membership tickets on cardboard and, finally, flashy plastic nametags showing the corporate marketing of sport. Thus the collection may provide insights when viewed through the lens of sports history, the history of marketing, and printing studies.

Assorted Sporting Membership Cards and Event Tickets
in Papers of Thomas Keneally, c. 1960–2010
Manuscripts Collection; nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn1082129
Courtesy Thomas Keneally

Since we cannot predict the intellectual shifts of the future and what will be meaningful or of use to future scholars, keeping the tickets might be not a rash act on the part of archivists but, in fact, a cautious one. Even from the narrow approach of the conventional literary scholar, this ‘frivolous’ bag of bits and pieces tells us that sport has been important to the writer. Following that cue, the researcher might read Keneally’s autobiography Homebush Boy (1995) and find his early goal to either play five-eight for Australia or win the Nobel Prize for Literature. The researcher might then look through Keneally’s fiction and read it as the compensatory activity of an asthmatic unable to fulfil the first dream, or find in his repeated adventuring, both in real life and in fiction (trips to Antarctica, Eritrea, Auschwitz, the battlefields of the American Civil War and the Western Front) more signs of sporting zeal converted into artistic output. Working with, rather than avoiding, the bag of sporting memorabilia, we come to see how the writer incorporates the would-be sportsman into his writing. Not only does Keneally attain notoriety as Manly-Warringah’s number-one supporter, becoming the unlikely star in a television advertisement for New South Wales rugby, but he also writes a biography of rugby league player Des Hasler (The Utility Player, 1993) and, after winning the Booker Prize, pens a novel (A Family Madness, 1985) in which the central figure is a rugby player for Penrith.

That superfluous jumble of paper and plastic ends up looking like something of significance after all. The archive no longer appears as a fixed, autonomous entity, memorialising a singular phenomenon. It is, in fact, an interactive site, constantly renewed and reconfigured in its encounter with readers from different backgrounds, times and disciplinary formations.

Paul Sharrad spent three months researching the papers of Thomas Keneally in 2014, courtesy of a Harold White Fellowship. He is Senior Fellow in English Literatures at the University of Wollongong

Read Thomas Keneally’s Ray Mathew Lecture in this issue

Collections Feature: 
Encountering the White Bear

By NAT WILLIAMS
The James and Bettison Treasures Curator

Man’s use and abuse of animals has taken many forms. From hunting as a ‘sport’ or for food, to the appropriation of images of animals to sell products—from ice-cream and rum to cola—animals have been seen as fair game. Often it seems that the first reaction of explorers encountering the natural world was not to observe and to marvel, but to shoot and devour. Certainly this was the case when Constantine John Phipps (1744–1792) first encountered the White Bear in his polar exploration in 1773. Phipps scientifically described the polar bear as a separate species and gave it its current Latin name Ursus maritimus, or sea bear. He observed: ‘We killed several … and the seamen ate of their flesh’.

Thomas Pennant (1726–1798), the Welsh natural historian, antiquarian and writer, described Polar or White bears in his History of Quadrupeds (1793, 3rd edition) as admirable swimmers and agile divers that feed on fish and whale carcasses and ‘on human bodies’. ‘They seem’, he wrote, ‘to be very fond of human blood’.

Entry for the polar bear in History of Quadrupeds (3rd edition) by Thomas Pennant
(London: B. & J. White, 1793)
Rare Books Collection; nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn549292

Pennant’s account echoes what appears to have been a rather erroneous popular characterisation of polar bears as bloodthirsty and ‘so fearless as to attack companies of armed men, and even to board small vessels’. The image of the polar bear illustrating Pennant’s 1793 volume is engraved by prolific British printmaker Peter Mazell (active 1761–1802) and is based on this iconic image created in 1779 by John Webber (1752–1793), which today is held in the Library’s collection.

The talented Webber served as chief draughtsman for four years on Captain Cook’s gruelling and fateful third voyage (1776–1780) seeking the North–West passage. Webber’s original work was created after the crew shot and captured two swimming bears, a mother and son. David Samwell, the ship’s surgeon on the Resolution, recorded their capture in his journal, mentioning that the mother ‘had milk’. The crew ate the bears, and their flesh, ‘tho’ fishy’, was ‘generally preferred to salt Meat’. Pennant poignantly observed in his printed account that the affection between the parents and their young was so strong ‘that they would die rather than desert one another’.

John Webber (1752–1793)
White Bear 1779
pencil, ink & wash; 31.2 x 45.2 cm
Rex Nan Kivell Collection (Pictures); nla.gov.au/nla.pic-an2668084

Sadly, Cook did not live to see the polar bear, as the explorer had perished and been dismembered—not by bears, but by angry Hawaiians on his unfortunate and ill-timed return there. Luckily for us, however, he had Webber to richly document the momentous voyage and the animals encountered. Webber was a favourite of Library benefactor and collector Sir Rex Nan Kivell (1898–1977); Nan Kivell owned many of his works in oil and watercolour and as prints, including this important one which, it seems, has never before been exhibited.

Webber’s White Bear and Pennant’s journal describing the bear are on display in the Treasures Gallery

Isobel Bennett: Doyenne of the Seashores

Isobel Bennett (1909–2008)
Nudibranch, Ceratosoma brevicaudata, Cowaramup Bay, Western Australia c. 1986 (detail)
colour slide; 35 mm
Pictures Collection; nla.gov.au/nla.pic-vn4475249

At a time when science was largely a male domain, an enthusiastic and meticulous woman rose to become a founding figure in the study of Australian marine life, writes Ann Moyal

Within the Manuscripts Collection of the National Library lie the papers of one of Australia’s most distinguished early women in science, Isobel Bennett. Conducting her work in a period when science was a patriarchy and women were the amanuenses of scientific men, through chance, enthusiasm and a questing mind, Bennett became one of the pioneering founders of Australian marine science.

Bennett, ‘a typical Queenslander with an outgoing quickness’, as one observer described her, was born in 1909 and educated at Brisbane’s Somerville House. Leaving at 16, she enrolled in a business college, worked in a patent attorney’s office and, moving with her family to Sydney, spent four years on the staff of the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music. With the board’s closure during the Depression in 1932, Bennett lost her job. Together with her younger sister, she joined a five-day P&O Christmas cruise to Norfolk Island, and met Professor William John Dakin and his wife in the next cabin. It proved to be a turning point in her life. Dakin invited her to pursue some unpaid research at Sydney’s Mitchell Library for his book on whaling. Recognising her competence, he took her on in 1933 as a temporary secretary and research assistant in the Department of Zoology at the University of Sydney, the first such appointment to be made. She remained there for nearly 40 years.

LEFT: Portrait of Isobel Bennett 1930s
illustration on page 223 in Against the Odds: Fifteen Professional Women Reflect on Their Lives & Careers by Madge Dawson and Heather Radi (eds)
(Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, c. 1984)
Australian Collection; nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn2962567

RIGHT: Alex Ozolins
Portrait of Australian Marine Biologist Isobel Bennett 1975
b&w photograph; 20.7 x 15.8 cm
Pictures Collection; nla.gov.au/nla.pic-an23208017
Australian Information Service

Dakin, an authority on marine life in Northern Hemisphere waters, had been appointed head of the department in 1928. Very little was known of the waters that lapped Australian shores. Dakin introduced Bennett to the technique of microscope sectioning of the organs of small vertebrates and, learning of her fondness for boats and her capacity as a sailor, attached her as a permanent member of the department’s small research vessel crewed at weekends by students. Bennett netted specimens and recorded sea temperatures, and sorted animals and plants on their return to the university. Her task also lay in the delicate dissection of the catch and its presentation on slides for Dakin to sketch as illustrations that would underpin their pioneering research on plankton, the minute floating animals of the sea. ‘There were no books to guide us,’ Bennett reflected. ‘You just had to teach yourself. It was all a matter of practice.’ The result, a departmental monograph on plankton, was seen as a key stepping stone in the study of marine life.

Herbert H. Fishwick (1882–1957)
Two Female Students Studying in the Grounds at Sydney University, Sydney 1934
b&w glass negative; 17.3 x 21.4 cm
Pictures Collection; nla.gov.au/nla.pic-vn6343121
Fairfax Syndication

During Dakin’s sabbatical leave in 1935, Bennett, under the temporary charge of Professor P. Murray (a cartilage and bone expert), was allowed to take the practical course in zoology; she scored a striking 98 per cent. With Dakin’s return, she became a demonstrator in the department and substantially assisted him in bringing his history of whaling, Whalemen Adventurers, to print. In 1945, their work turned to the intertidal region of the seashore, of which little was known. Bennett then spent her time visiting rock platforms, ocean beaches and the estuarine beaches and bays around Sydney and Port Hacking at low tide, drawing up lists of the various phyla for the distribution of crustaceans, molluscs and echinoderms. By the end of the year she could list all the common animals of the coast. During 1946, together with Elizabeth Pope from the Australian Museum, she embarked on a scientific ecological survey of the New South Wales coast from Sydney to the border of Victoria, checking off her lists and moving south into colder water, where some creatures dropped off and others appeared. A subsequent survey with Dakin carried the investigation from Sydney to Queensland. Her later work, again accompanied by Pope, took in the Victorian and Tasmanian coast and, together with assistants from the Queensland Museum, Queensland’s seashores. It was, however, her early field notes and lists, and her detailed illustrations and captions, that contributed to the preparation of Dakin’s landmark publication Australian Seashores: A Guide for the Beach-Lover, the Naturalist, the Shore Fisherman, and the Student in 1952. Owing to his illness, early retirement, and death in 1950, Bennett edited the book and brought it to print. For the first time, Australian readers were introduced to the richness of the shores around which they bathed.

Bennett’s meticulous rigour was impressive. One time, she spent two low tides alone on the isolated rock platform at New South Wales’ Cape Byron Lighthouse in order to check that barnacles—an important ‘indicator species’—were correctly absent from their lists. ‘I had to be terribly careful I didn’t slip on the rocks and break my neck,’ she recalled. ‘It was a bit hairy; nobody knew I was there.’ The experience was pivotal. ‘For the rest of my life,’ she declared, ‘I never accepted a thing unless I was quite certain about it.’

Herbert H. Fishwick (1882–1957)
Lighthouse on Cliff Top at Cape Byron, New South Wales c. 1932
b&w glass negative; 16.3 x 12 cm
Pictures Collection; nla.gov.au/nla.pic-vn6329149
Fairfax Syndication

During the 1950s she regularly led parties of students from Sydney University to the research station on Heron Island and, later, Lizard Island. In 1952 she had the distinction of joining the Danish research ship HDMS Galathea on its world journey while in south-east Australian waters, the only woman among the crew of 112 people. Later, in 1963, she was invited to join Stanford University’s research vessel Te Vega as a faculty member and ‘Dean of Women’ during its Pacific cruise from San Diego to Singapore.

Bennett’s opportunity for independent authorship came when her publisher, Rigby, invited her to write The Fringe of the Sea. Published in 1966, and brimming with all the knowledge at her disposal and an enthusiasm that lent a magic to her writing, the book proved highly popular. It began:

Along the fringe of the sea lies a fascinating strip of earth’s surface that is neither land nor sea, yet belongs to both … Here, easily accessible to all, is a vast region filled with enchantment, with weird, beautiful, colourful, and exciting creatures, and all competing in the eternal struggle for existence.

The book featured the photography of Frederick Myers and Keith Gillett. Bennett kept her text to a minimum to stimulate readers to undertake their own exploration of the creatures of the seashore, an aim she rehearsed in all her publications. Students dubbed the book their ‘bible’.

Encouraged by The Fringe’s success, Lansdowne Press invited Bennett to work, together with a photographer, on a book about the Great Barrier Reef. Curiously, knowledge of this famous coral reef related predominantly to navigational information for the safe passage of shipping; there was no detailed scientific data. Bennett herself had visited the Low Isles in 1954 but, for the later books, alert to the absence of any detailed scientific knowledge about this 2,000-kilometre maze of coral reefs and islands, she sought permission to travel to the Torres Strait on the lighthouse vessel servicing the lights throughout the reef’s shipping lanes. She travelled to Bramble Cay at the reef’s far north-eastern end and, on a small patrol boat crewed by islanders, continued on to the Murray Islands east of Thursday Island to the northern outer reef. Her pioneering book The Great Barrier Reef was published in 1971. It described the reef’s northern, central and southern sections; provided a detailed account of common species; classified the common coral families; and described both plants and fauna. Bennett would also co-edit A Coral Reef Handbook in three editions with Patricia Mather from 1971, updating it substantially in the last edition in 1999.

Across her career, this modest research assistant with her rising reputation had moved into part-time employment in the Department of Zoology, working under Murray on her marine research and papers (conducting her research and writing at home from 9 pm to 3 am). She became a technical officer and, subsequently, professional officer—although Murray warned her that by joining the technical ranks she could never attain academic status. To her delight, however, the University of Sydney bestowed its first honorary Master of Science upon her in 1962 for her outstanding contribution to marine biology. Over the years she was engaged in the revision and updating of Dakin’s classic, Australian Seashores, travelling at her own expense to distant Australian shores. The book went into numerous editions; she was joint author with Elizabeth Pope in five of these, and was the sole author of the 1992 edition which included her own colour photographs and illustrations.

Isobel Bennett (1909–2008)
colour slides; 35 mm; Pictures Collection
TOP ROW, FROM LEFT: The Distinctive Pink Star Paranepanthia grandis, Bottle and Glass Rocks, New South Wales c. 1975; The Oral Surface Showing Mouth and Tube Feet of Ophiothrix spongicola, Australia 1986

MIDDLE ROW, FROM LEFT: The Hairy Oyster-borer, Septa parthenopea, Gunnamatta Bay, New South Wales 1986; Fiona pinnata among Barnacles on Floating Timber, New South Wales c. 1986; Section Cut through the Apertures of Cunjevoi Pyura stolonifera to Show Internal Anatomy, Newport, New South Wales c. 1985

BOTTOM ROW, FROM LEFT: Purple Stinger, Pelagia noctiluca, Newport, New South Wales 1986; Granata imbricata, Newport, New South Wales 1986

Isobel Bennett retired from the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Sydney in 1971. Yet retirement was merely the prelude to wide international travel and extended field work. Six of her ten books were published in that period, including Shores of Macquarie Island (1971) and books on Norfolk and Lord Howe islands, which she co-authored. For her Macquarie Island study, she and her working partner Hope Macpherson made four visits to the island in the 1960s under the auspices of the Australian National Antarctic Research Expedition supply and relief ships. They were the first two Australian women to be allowed at the sub-Antarctic station.

At last, Isobel Bennett found recognition for her tireless work. In 1982 she was awarded the Mueller Medal of the Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science for her unique contribution to Australian zoology in the twentieth century. For Bennett it was the moment of truth. ‘I felt I had joined the immortals,’ she exclaimed, noting such illustrious recipients as Howard Florey, Douglas Mawson, Edgeworth David and (the only woman to have received the medal up to that time) geologist Dorothy Hill. Two years later Bennett was made an Officer of the Order of Australia for services to marine science. In 1995, at the age of 85, she received an honorary Doctor of Science from the University of New South Wales. Still enthusiastically fostering marine science and environmental causes, she died in 2008 at the age of 98. One genus and five species are named for her.

Isobel Bennett’s accomplishments had been extraordinary. The Mueller Medal citation aptly summed up her career:

Few eminent scientists in the world today had begun their careers by accident, fewer still would have reached their positions without the benefit of a university degree in their discipline, and it is certain that very few of these, if any, would have been a woman.

Yet it was neither feminist principles nor status that motivated her. ‘I did it because I loved it,’ she said. ‘I wanted to make people aware of the seashore and of their maritime heritage.’ Her tools in those pre–snorkel and scuba-diving days were simple: a galvanised billy with the bottom cut out and a piece of glass, and a knife. Yet she had inspired generations of biology and zoology students and laid foundations for future research. As technology and specialisation in biology developed, Isobel Bennett was hailed as ‘the last of the great naturalists’. Her oral history, private field notebooks, book typescripts, correspondence and reports, with 556 of her colour transparencies, now enhance the National Library’s Manuscripts, Pictures and Oral History collections.

Dr Ann Moyal is a founding historian of Australian science and a biographer and autobiographer

IN A PREVIOUS ISSUE

Australia’s Eminent Women Scientists — May 1999

Ragbir Bhathal conducted interviews with top Australian women scientists for the Library’s Oral History Collection

In the Frame:
‘Leaving for the Dardanelles’ 1915

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

Until 1915, it would have been mainly seafarers who were familiar with the stretch of water known as the ‘Dardanelles’. Few in Australia would have heard of it, and fewer still would have travelled along the strait linking the Aegean Sea with the Ottoman capital, Constantinople.

With Turkey’s entry into the Great War, that changed. Visionary strategists in London (notably Winston Churchill) had the idea of striking at the Ottoman Empire by seizing Constantinople, using the might of the Royal Navy. This became the genesis of the Dardanelles campaign.

Among the first formations sent to the Greek island of Lemnos to support the naval attack was the 3rd Australian Infantry Brigade, whose members left Mena camp, on the outskirts of Cairo (practically in the shadow of the pyramids, visible in the background), on the last day of February, 1915.

Here, five unnamed men of the brigade carry their kitbags to wagons to begin the journey to Lemnos. There they will wait, mostly cooped up aboard transport ships, for the orders, which followed the failure of the naval attack, to invade the Gallipoli peninsula.

The 3rd Brigade comprised battalions recruited from what were often called the ‘outer states’—Queensland (9th battalion), South Australia (10th), Western Australia (11th) and Tasmania (12th). They would form the first waves of soldiers to land on Gallipoli.

This photograph was taken by David Izatt, a Scottish member of the 2nd Australian General Hospital, a former sailor who had volunteered for the Australian Imperial Force in October 1914. Underemployed before Gallipoli, he was free to wander about Mena camp taking snapshots—even though men were supposedly forbidden from taking photographs. He would become much busier when casualties, perhaps including some of these men, poured back into Egypt from Gallipoli.

David Izatt survived the war—indeed, he lived long enough to apply for the medallion marking the fiftieth anniversary of the campaign—and his photograph albums are now among the Library’s treasures. His snapshot is poignant because, while the men shown in it are probably just glad to get away from the flies and heat of Mena camp, we know what they will face on 25 April.

David Izatt
3rd Brigade Leaving Egypt for the Dardanelles, Egypt 1915
sepia-toned photograph; 6.3 x 10.2 cm
Pictures Collection; nla.gov.au/nla.pic-vn736016

Undercover Designs

Jim McFarlane (b. 1955)
Portrait of Kristian Fredrikson with a Mouse, during the Making of Film Sequences for Graeme Murphy’s Nutcracker at the National Theatre, St Kilda 1992 (detail)
b&w photograph; 40.2 x 27.5 cm
Pictures Collection; nla.gov.au/nla.pic-vn3098377

Drawings made by costume designer Kristian Fredrikson for his first film commission provide an intimate glimpse into his process and practice, as Michelle Potter reveals

Kristian Fredrikson (1940–2005) is perhaps best known for his groundbreaking collaborations in the theatre, notably with choreographer and director Graeme Murphy. For Murphy, Fredrikson designed costumes for a series of productions by major dance and opera companies in Australia and New Zealand. His input often extended beyond the realm of design to include the co-creation of new narratives for old texts. New texts for Australian Ballet productions of Swan Lake and The Nutcracker led the way in terms of reimagined narratives from the Murphy–Fredrikson stable.

During a career that spanned just over 40 years, Fredrikson also worked alongside many other theatrical luminaries in Australia, New Zealand (where he was born) and Houston, Texas. Over the years Fredrikson’s collaborative colleagues included directors John Bell, Wal Cherry, Judy Davis, Sir Tyrone Guthrie, Robyn Nevin, George Ogilvie and John Sumner; choreographers Sir Frederick Ashton, John Butler, Russell Kerr, Gray Veredon and Stanton Welch; and conductors Richard Bonynge, Richard Divall and Patrick Thomas. He also worked with world-renowned performers, dressing Cate Blanchett, Sir Robert Helpmann, Deborah Kerr, Nicole Kidman, Leo McKern, Keith Michell, Dame Joan Sutherland, Anthony Warlow, Googie Withers and many others.

The work he did in film and television is a lesser known aspect of Fredrikson’s career, but it is one that sheds light on the diversity of his practice. Fredrikson designed costumes for film and television productions that took in a wide range of settings, from Redfern (with Short Changed, a film based on a father’s attempt to gain custody of his child) to the outback (with The Shiralee, a television series based on the novel by D’Arcy Niland). The productions on which he worked spanned an array of subjects and historical eras: from nineteenth-century Australia in Dirtwater Dynasty, which depicted one man’s efforts to establish a cattle ranch and an empire, to 1960s Australia and the jungles of Asia in Vietnam, another miniseries for television. In other work for film and television he ventured into the realms of science fiction and puppetry.

Fredrikson received a number of design commissions for television early in his career, largely for ballets for ABC TV, including, in 1965, The Lovers of Verona and The Awakening. His first film commission, however, came in 1982 with the movie Undercover. Directed by David Stevens and produced by David Elfick for Palm Beach Pictures, Undercover was released in 1983. While its title suggests a spy movie, it was, in fact, the story behind the growth of the Berlei undergarment business. Set in the 1920s, the movie was filmed, in part, in Sydney’s Queen Victoria Building before its restoration, and in the Regent Theatre, a heritage-listed building in George Street, Sydney, which was eventually demolished. The film follows the story of Fred Burley and his brother Arthur, founders of the Berlei enterprise. It highlights their ongoing efforts to improve their undergarments, especially corsets, by making them lighter and less constraining, using new fabrics and ideas to create a product that would appeal to the ‘modern woman’.

Undercover also focuses on the relentless efforts of Fred Burley to promote the Berlei brand. Burley was at the forefront of the concept of ‘Australian made’ and was the founding president of the organisation known as the Australian-Made Preference League. His promotional activities included taking Berlei goods around regional Australia on a train known as the Great White Train. The Berlei company also produced a journal, the Berlei Review, first published in 1922 and then (at least initially) monthly, until the 1950s. It contained news and photographs of the many promotional activities undertaken by the company, which, in the 1920s, included elaborate shop-window displays, competitions, fashion parades, musical shows and, eventually, ‘talkies’ featuring and promoting the Berlei product. The musical shows, which attracted large and enthusiastic audiences around Australia, included Youth Triumphant in 1924, So This Is Elegance in 1925, Radiant Woman—At Beauty’s Shrine in 1926 and Lady Be Beautiful in 1929.

Pages 10–11 in the Berlei Review, October–November 1929
Australian Collection; nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn1428827

Fredrikson’s input into Undercover included the design of a number of 1920s-style outfits for the characters in the story, especially for the leading lady, Libby (played by Geneviève Picot), who comes from out of town to Sydney to seek a better life for herself and ends up with the Berlei organisation, and Nina (played by Sandy Gore) the imposing head designer for Berlei. The National Library’s collection of Fredrikson designs for Undercover includes sketches for every imaginable accessory, including millinery and shawls, in addition to day and evening wear for men and women. Fredrikson rendered his designs carefully on heavy black paper with detailed instructions regarding the making of the costumes: ‘make dress in two parts’, ‘split is diagonally cut front’. He also stipulated the kinds of material and trim from which he wanted the items made: ‘ombré chiffon, sequined’, ‘organza with satin ribbon trim’. He even gave instructions to the production team on occasions: ‘Note: Chorines [ladies of the chorus] must be bound to minimise bust’.

Kristian Fredrikson (1940–2005)
Costume Designs for the Production Undercover
in Papers of Kristian Fredrikson, c. 1960–c. 2005
Manuscripts Collection; nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn3969578

Fredrikson looked at 1920s fashion catalogues for inspiration when creating his Undercover designs. His personal papers include pages from the catalogues of Foy & Gibson—one of Australia’s earliest department stores, reputedly modelled on Le Bon Marché in Paris—and from American fashion magazines popular in the 1920s, such as Pictorial Review. Like his designs for theatre, Fredrikson’s drawings for Undercover demonstrate his insistence on historical accuracy. Fredrikson also had access, as did the entire production team for Undercover, to archival material held by the Berlei organisation, including copies of the Berlei Review, and film and photographic material.

Copies of pages from Pictorial Review, 1925 in Papers of Kristian Fredrikson, c. 1960–c. 2005
Manuscripts Collection; nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn3969578

Of particular interest are Fredrikson’s designs for the theatrical extravaganza with which Undercover concludes. It is partly modelled on the 1926 Radiant Woman production, which was reported in the Berlei Review in September 1926. Radiant Woman included the Berlei Beauty Ballet in several items, including Dance of the Sprites, Fan Dance and Jewel Ballet. It also featured an ‘Enchantress’ into whose cauldron is placed all that is necessary to produce the radiant woman (including a Berlei Corselette). Undercover’s concluding sequences feature similar items and characters, including the Enchantress, played by Isabelle Anderson.

Kristian Fredrikson (1940–2005)
Costume Designs for the Production Undercover
in Papers of Kristian Fredrikson, c. 1960–c. 2005
Manuscripts Collection; nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn3969578

The photographs and drawings featured in the Berlei Review were clearly a visual starting point for Fredrikson’s own designs for the closing moments of Undercover. His design for Undercover’s Enchantress, for example, follows, almost exactly, a line drawing for the same character reproduced in the Review. The Review also contains a photograph of a line of women performing Dance of the Sprites in the first act of Radiant Woman. They are dressed in flowing tunics of the sort frequently worn by dancers of the 1920s engaged in the kind of dancing familiarly known as ‘Grecian’ or ‘free’ dancing. The women hold balls in the air and their tunics are draped with garlands of flowers. Fredrikson’s design for Undercover’s version of Dance of the Sprites shows a more sophisticated design, but one that certainly owes its origins to the Berlei Review photograph.

Fredrikson seems to have loved what he discovered while working on Undercover; he used the 1920s-inspired designs elsewhere over the following years. A drawing of the jewelled headdress for one of the Berlei Beauty Ballet dancers was a starting point for Fredrikson’s designs for the Berlei Dolls in Undercover, who enter tap dancing and singing in the final moments of the show. Fredrikson recycled this design idea, albeit in a more glitzy manner, for showgirls in Tivoli, a collaboration between Fredrikson and Murphy that first took the stage as a joint Australian Ballet and Sydney Dance Company production in 2001. Fredrikson also created a variation on the Berlei Dolls costume for characters in his ballet Peter Pan, made for the Royal New Zealand Ballet in 1999.

Kristian Fredrikson (1940–2005)
Costume Designs for the Production Undercover
in Papers of Kristian Fredrikson, c. 1960–c. 2005
Manuscripts Collection; nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn3969578

Undercover presents what is, perhaps, a little known aspect of Australian business and fashion history with a touch of glamour and extravagance—and a splash of introduced romance. Yet it is when the National Library’s extensive Fredrikson collection is brought into play that a picture emerges of his meticulous and hands-on approach to design and his constant striving for historical accuracy. The extent of the Library’s collection also enables Fredrikson’s work on Undercover to be seen in the wider context of his ongoing commissions, and to be examined for the influence it had on his later designs.

Dr Michelle Potter is an independent arts writer, curator and historian. Her research into the film and television commissions of Kristian Fredrikson was facilitated by a 2012 Scholars and Artists in Residence Fellowship at the National Film and Sound Archive

IN A PREVIOUS ISSUE

Australians Abroad: Ballet Designs by Sidney Nolan and Arthur Boyd — December 2011

Michelle Potter looks at the work of two Australian painters working overseas in the world of theatre and dance

Of Moths and King-Parrots: On the Trail of a Colonial Natural History Artist

King-Parrot (detail) c. 1837
watercolour; 22.5 x 18.7 cm
Pictures Collection; nla.gov.au/nla.pic-an6244864

After several false leads, an unattributed collection of sketches leads Penny Olsen to a tale of two brothers

In the 1960s, Rex Nan Kivell, the great London collector of Australiana, purchased some 80 sketches of Australian plants and animals, which he donated to the National Library. Attempts had been made to identify the artist, but without success. A single dated work and various stylistic, thematic and material clues pointed to Louisa Atkinson (1834–1872), a nineteenth-century Australian-born authoress and natural historian of some talent. One particular illustration of a moth caught my attention—it reminded me of another little painting among a full sheet of lepidopterans in the Atkinson holdings in the Mitchell Library in Sydney. Not only were the insects painted in a similar way, but they were—of a possible 20,000 types of Australian moth—the same species. However, there was also evidence that the works might not be by Atkinson. Firstly, her sketchbooks were said never to have left Australia. Secondly, the collection was clearly the work of more than one illustrator. Thus began a search for clues through museums, archives, libraries and private collections, drawing on advice from contemporary experts and voices from the past. The trail wound through the scientific world past the prominent families of colonial Australia.

LEFT: Louisa Atkinson (1834–1872)
detail from Sketchbook Comprising Mainly Natural History Drawings 1855–1872
sketchbook album; 27.7 x 19.2 x 1.3 cm
State Library of New South Wales; PXA 4499

RIGHT: Dasypodia selenophora Guenée (detail) c. 1837
watercolour; 22.5 x 18.2 cm
Pictures Collection; nla.gov.au/nla.pic-an6244955

Perhaps there would be a clue in the Library’s records about the acquisition of the items. I knew that the source of the material, Nan Kivell, an intriguing character described as ‘the quintessential expatriate, obdurate in his refusal to return, yet obsessed with images of his birthplace and its region’, was less than obsessive with his record keeping. Still, I was hopeful. Library staff retrieved a large, authoritative-looking ledger, but the entry revealed nothing more than the year of acquisition, 1969.

Returning to the sketches themselves, at first glance the collection looked random. However, some of the botanical drawings were labelled as to species and each had a faintly pencilled number in the top right-hand corner, from 1 to 46. By reassembling these pages, along with other matching sheets showing insects, plants and animals, it became clear that they had been sliced from a stitched sketchbook with rounded outer corners and marbled tops to the pages. Two pieces of grey cardboard, with casual scribblings, stored with the collection, appeared to fit at either end. The remainder of the sketches, about 20, all botanical and unnumbered, also appeared to have been cut from a (slightly larger) sketchbook, and a few others had been painted onto a couple of different types of thin card. The last, in particular, were clearly by another hand or hands—they were more vibrant and accomplished.

Gymnopilus fungus (detail) c. 1837
watercolour; 23.7 x 19.8 cm
Pictures Collection; nla.gov.au/nla.pic-an6244404

As well as the page showing the seductive moth, there were others crawling with invertebrates, and two showing rather unprepossessing fungi, which were, I thought, characteristic of Louisa Atkinson and her family. The only dated work, 1824, was a very competent painting of a spray of juicy blackberries, possibly by Louisa’s mother, Charlotte Waring. Waring had studied under John Glover before emigrating from England in 1826 and marrying wealthy agriculturalist and landowner James Atkinson, who had properties near Berrima and in the Illawarra, south of Sydney. A sketch of the bright head and shoulders of an Australian King-Parrot in the Nan Kivell collection, which looks like it could be juvenilia, was in a similar palette to Louisa’s, or her sister’s, more mature-looking depictions of the same species held in the Mitchell Library.

These speculations led to the unattributed sketches being sent to the Mitchell Library for direct comparison with their Atkinson material. A viewing was arranged with the National Library’s Curator of Pictures Nicki Mackay-Sim and colonial art expert and former Mitchell Librarian Elisabeth Ellis. Ultimately, there were similarities in handwriting, and between a pair of drawings of praying mantises, both on thin cardboard, but nothing conclusive could be ascertained.

Spider, Praying Mantis and Slug (detail) 1842
watercolour; 23.7 x 17.3 cm
Pictures Collection; nla.gov.au/nla.pic-an6244852

I revisited the two grey cardboard pages which looked as if they belonged at the beginning and end of a sketchbook. As they had handwriting on them which did not appear to match that on the sketches, I had put them aside for a while. On one was an intimate pencil outline of a young woman, relaxed and reading on a chaise longue. This was topped with a signature, which I deciphered as R.E. or R.G. Burnett. Was the woman Burnett, or was Burnett the artist? The other page was topped by an angled, ink signature in the same or a similar hand—J., or possibly T., Burnett—below which was a mass of numbers in columns. On the reverse were more calculations and, in the lower half, a note:

The Comparisons were made on Nov. 19th 1836 at 10.30 am Civil time in the circle room. The therm in the open air shaded from the sun was 68°. Signed Thos. Maclean. Royal Observatory. Cape of Good Hope.

These appeared to be sea-level readings, among similar records made in Tasmania, at Sir John’s Bar and Observatory Bar. I searched online and through books for relevant Burnetts, Bunnetts and Barnetts. In Ann Moyal’s publication The Web of Science: The Scientific Correspondence of the Rev. W.B. Clarke, Australia’s Pioneer Geologist I found James C. Burnett (1815–1854), surveyor and explorer, who arrived in New South Wales in 1829. I pursued him for a while but could make no links.

R.E. Burnett
sketch in Australian Wildflowers, Animals and Insects 1824–c. 1837
page from album; 25 x 21 x 2.7 cm
Pictures Collection; nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn656475

INSET: Signature of T. Burnett in Australian Wildflowers, Animals and Insects 1824–c. 1837
page from album; 25 x 21 x 2.7 cm
Pictures Collection; nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn656475

I returned again to the species represented in the collection. I had noticed that some of the plants occur naturally only in Tasmania. However, I’d reasoned that there was much interest in exchanging and cultivating plants during the nineteenth century. In addition, the Australian King-Parrot does not occur in Tasmania, pushing the island to the back of my mind. At some point, it dawned on me that the parrot could easily have been a pet. A quick search of the island’s newspapers via Trove turned up advertisements selling King-Parrots, confirming my hunch. So began a focus on Van Diemen’s Land.

Lady Jane Franklin, the wife of Arctic explorer Sir John Franklin, Lieutenant-Governor of Van Diemen’s Land from 1837 to 1843, seemed a good place to start. She was a great champion of the sciences and arts. En route to Tasmania, the Franklins’ ship passed the Cape of Good Hope in November 1836, matching Maclean’s notation in the sketchbook. Lady Jane was not known to sketch herself, so I followed up on her associates. With the Atkinsons still a possibility, I looked into Lady Jane’s famous journey overland to the Illawarra and Sydney in May 1839, but could find no evidence that the two women crossed paths.

Turning back to Van Diemen’s Land, I searched for ‘Burnett’, and variations, in ships’ records, newspapers, books and catalogues, both online and offline. This was hindered by the many mentions of the name Burnett, especially after the arrival of John Burnett, his wife and nine children in 1826. The newsworthy Burnett was first Colonial Secretary of Van Diemen’s Land until his forced retirement in 1855.

LEFT: Telopea tasmaniana (detail) c. 1837
watercolour; 22.5 x 18 cm
Pictures Collection; nla.gov.au/nla.pic-an6243487

RIGHT: Anne Wandby
Japonica 1827
watercolour; 23.8 x 18.4 cm
Pictures Collection; nla.gov.au/nla.pic-an6244861

On a return visit to the Mitchell Library to review the unattributed collection, I noticed a ‘Miss Wandby’ written in ink in cursive script on the back of a well-executed painting of bright flowers, tentatively identified by a cataloguer as those of a Japonica (camellia). So began a search for ‘Wandby’, an unusual name that I hoped would narrow the field. There was, however, next to nothing.

Finally, using the search term ‘Franklin AND Wandby’ on Trove, I found shipping reports in the Colonial Times and The Launceston Advertiser which together revealed that Franklin and his entourage arrived in Hobart Town on the barque Fairlie on 6 January 1837. Wandby, a Lieutenant Burnett and a Mr Burnett were on the combined passenger lists. The poor print quality of the old newspaper articles had left Trove’s search engine unable to pick up the word ‘Wandby’. But now, at last, I was on a roll.

It was not long before Burnett’s tragic tale unfolded. Lieutenant Thomas Burnett was a talented young naval officer sent by the British Admiralty to help survey the island’s coasts. Three months after arrival, on 21 May 1837, Burnett died. The Colonial Times of 23 May reported:

A most fatal accident happened on Sunday, in South Port River, opposite the western extremity of Bruné Island. Lieut. Burnett proposed to examine the shores of this, and connect its course with his coast survey. For this purpose he left … in a small whale boat … When a little way up the river a slight alteration in the setting … became necessary … [with] two starting up to perform it, and a slight puff of wind coming on at the moment, the boat turned over immediately. The whole party were fully clothed, the weather being cold, but Mr. Burnett in particular was dressed in a thick rough great coat, and thus almost instantly sunk.

The rest of the group, including his brother, survived the freezing waters. The brother turned out to be the Mr Burnett who arrived on the Fairlie: Robert Edwin Burnett. The newspapers reported Robert’s distress at Thomas’ death. Robert’s life proved longer and happier; in June 1840, he and Anne Wandby were married in St Marylebone Christ Church, Westminster. The marriage record contained their fathers’ names: Thomas Burnett and William Wandby. From that, it was possible to unearth a birth record for Thomas junior—17 March 1806 in Hampshire, England—making him just 21 when he drowned. Robert and Anne returned to Hobart Town and had two children.

Anne Wandby
Derwent from Sandy Bay c. 1837
watercolour; 12.3 x 22.7 cm
Pictures Collection; nla.gov.au/nla.pic-an4911438

Incredibly, when I searched the National Library catalogue for ‘Wandby’, hoping to find the Japonica illustration, all that came up was a landscape painting signed by her. It had been right under my nose all along! Indeed, it transpired that Nan Kivell purchased Wandby’s landscape, mounted alongside one by Robert Burnett, in 1969, the same year that he bought the collection of unattributed sketches. It seems likely that these mementos of life in the Australian colonies were left with family in England when Burnett and Wandby married. Now, the couple’s landscape paintings and the Burnett brothers’ Australian natural history sketchbook—with some loose sketches by Wandby—can be reunited.

Penny Olsen is a research scientist based at The Australian National University. She has written several books for the National Library of Australia, most recently Louisa Atkinson’s Nature Notes (2015)

IN A PREVIOUS ISSUE

The Independent Ornithologist — March 2009

Penny Olsen discovers that the author of an eighteenth-century folio of parrots was as colourful as his subjects

Gutenberg Fights On:
A Survival Story

Samuel Cooper (b. 1982)
Thomas Keneally 2011
digital photograph

Thomas Keneally gave the fifth Ray Mathew Lecture at the National Library on 4 September 2014

In memorialising Ray Mathew, I thought of a documentary, already screened on the BBC and about to be seen on our ABC, on the famed Australian expatriates of the postwar era. Fronted by Booker Prize–winning author and journalist Howard Jacobson and entitled Brilliant Creatures, it examines the expatriate careers of Germaine Greer, Clive James, Barry Humphries and Robert Hughes, but could also have cast an eye in the direction of actor Zoe Caldwell, or towards deceased writers: the dazzling poet Peter Porter; the author Randolph Stow, that gifted Western Australian; Sumner Locke Elliott; and, of course, Ray Mathew. There is a subgroup of expatriates to which Ray Mathew and Sumner Locke Elliott belonged, and about whom I have recently had my attention riveted by Nigel Starck’s marvellous biography of Russell Braddon, Proud Australian Boy. These are a group whose reasons for expatriation may have included—among all the other complex motives for leaving Australia, including psychological, cultural, personal, economic and other factors—their homosexuality. It is not absolutely clear to what extent this provided partial motivation for Ray Mathew’s leaving of Australia. But, in informal conversations, Sumner Locke Elliott, author of Rusty Bugles; Careful, He Might Hear You; Water under the Bridge; and Fairyland, made it clear to me that his immigration to the United States in 1948, where he became a pioneering television drama writer, was, to a notable extent, due to Australia’s small-community hostility to homosexuals.

In my fiftieth year as a writer, and my seventy-eighth as an Australian citizen, I feel it appropriate to regret that our country’s mean and full-throated trumpeting of its hatred of homosexuals drove some Australian artists to find shelter, not always successfully, elsewhere, and it strikes me that Ray Mathew may have needed to be here for his writing, rather as that uncosy giant, Patrick White, needed his muselike, but dismally envisaged, Australia.

I mentioned the talented expatriate Russell Braddon earlier. I met him occasionally at literary parties in London. I find his case heartbreaking on a number of fronts when it comes to assessing the quality of our society in the period when Ray Mathew and other young Australians of talent contemplated the matter of expatriation. Gunner Russell Braddon, liberated POW of the Japanese, suffered from the trauma of rescue when, in Darwin, having returned to Australia after the peace in 1945, he saw the blood- and sweat-stained pay books that he had saved to return to the families of the dead of the Thai–Burma Railway taken away from him and burned as unsuitable relics by the military authorities. On his return to the south-east of Australia, he would joylessly attend Sydney University and, as a former POW and a homosexual, endure three years of depression and bewilderment. Like many other former POWs, he had to accustom himself to not sleeping on floors and was plagued by recurrent malaria. He felt disengaged from the world, and even perhaps felt himself an internal exile because of his homosexuality. On the Burma Railway he had been a sturdy and courageous presence and was lovingly sketched by his lover of the time, the Englishman and cartoonist Ronald Searle, whose life he was credited with saving and who would become a famous cartoonist and creator of St Trinian’s. But, as a student again, Braddon disintegrated.

Braddon attempted what was then the statutory crime of suicide. He took an overdose of pills but was found before they took his life. The results were punitive, even by the standards of society then. He was transferred to the psychiatric wing of Concord Repatriation Hospital. He found many of his fellow former prisoners stumbling through the corridors and discovered that, in spite of the public’s respect for POWs, here they ran the risk of being treated as miscreants. Those men who resisted the psychiatric regime were threatened with electroconvulsive therapy. Men suffering from war trauma and out of their mind, temporarily or permanently, were thrown into padded cells where they would howl and yell, ‘straitjacketed in their own filth’. An orderly asked Braddon to fellate him and threatened that he would be put on the shock-treatment list if he didn’t comply. Braddon, typically, threatened to ‘bite it off’, and also informed a medical officer. Finally he signed a statutory declaration in which he undertook not to attempt suicide again.

His fellow former prisoner Sydney Piddington, and Piddington’s wife, Lesley, had left for England. Piddington had practised telepathy in Changi and, after an impoverished beginning, embarked on a series of radio shows for the BBC, transmitting phrases and concepts into the mind of his wife and other people. Braddon spent all the money he had to get to London—in other words, to flee Australia—and his arrival in 1949 added a third person to the Piddington operation. Braddon’s career with the Piddingtons continued until he began a successful writing career, his first work being a biography of the Piddingtons and, in 1951, his classic account of his imprisonment, The Naked Island. He had survived by fiction and showbiz and felt a greater latitude for his soul in Britain than in his own country.

The perceived restrictive nature of Australian society operated strongly on most expatriates; they are frankly on-the-record on these matters. So did the postcolonial sense of cultural inferiority which was the mark of Australia when Ray Mathew left in 1960. London was, for Braddon and most of the others, the English language’s Mecca, to which Australian talent went first, willing to become British, as well as Australian, cultural figures. As Howard Jacobson’s documentary illustrates, at that stage of history the most important success an Australian artist in any medium could have was a London success. Ray, of course, became the cherished companion of a New York couple, the Kollsmans, who gave that gentle soul a family in New York where Ray felt he had at last ‘grown up’. His sole novel, The Joys of Possession, was published in 1967, and he died in 2002. So, vale Ray Mathew, who, driven by a range of motivations—including, I would argue, his sexuality—found his own tentative survival in New York.

This is the fiftieth year since I was first published: a young writer, starstruck by figures like Mathew, poet and playwright, whom I met at a Fellowship of Australian Writers event at a bookstore in Pitt Street, Sydney. I think Ray Mathew would not be adverse to my reflecting, in terms of that 50 years—from which I did not learn everything, but must have learned something—on the place of the book and, above all, the novel, in 1964 and 2014. Let me say that over the past 50 years I frequently heard the Death of the Novel-as-We-Know-It proclaimed. Although it is a matter for debate, for many of us Marshall McLuhan seemed to predict the death of the book in a book entitled—what else?—The Gutenberg Galaxy. He wrote:

The world of visual perspective is one of unified and homogeneous space. Such a world is alien to the resonating diversity of human words. So language was the last art to accept the visual logic of Gutenberg technology, and the first to rebound in the electric age.

Modern states became possible, he told us, through the homogenising impact of the printing press. His argument appeared to be that, now, in the electronic age, there would be a return to the tribalism and diversity which preceded movable type: a return to the village—except, in this case, a global village: one in which the non-tribal pursuit of individual excellence in writing or painting would give way to something more communal and exultant. Thus, basically, electronic media would kill the book.

There was no doubting the globalising impact of television. So it was fashionable for us young writers to confidently, and with a trace almost of tragic pride, predict the death of the Gutenberg book. And it was also said by people, on a more understandable level, that if television didn’t kill the book for the reasons given by Marshall McLuhan, it would kill it for the more obvious one that in providing us with new and ample narratives it would utterly replace the book. It proved, though, that the two mediums sang to different parts of the soul and that, in the end, one could leave three hours of television-viewing and still hanker for the imponderable rewards of the printed book.

So, the contrast!

In 1964, the term ‘Australian culture’ or ‘Australian writing’ would have provided the young Barry Humphries with a one-line gag on a London stage. The Australian Society of Authors had just been founded, but had little visibility. There was no visibility for Oz writing. Our literature was lumped, with that of New Zealand, the West Indies, Canada, India and South Africa, into the category of Commonwealth Literature, as if the chief aspect of our writing was our general colonial and postcolonial condition, and not our particularity, our uniqueness. There was no Public or Educational Lending Right compensation for writers as there is now. There was little study of Australian writing in schools. And there was no visible profession of letters. Lastly, there were no literary festivals where a young tyro novelist like the hapless Tom Keneally could go to hear leading writers tell us that writing fiction was an impossible, modest-feast-and-severe-famine way to earn a living.

In 2014, the ASA and Copyright Agency Limited exist effectively; the ASA produced a minimum conditions contract to which publishers agreed; a system of Public Lending Right and Educational Lending Right exists—in this the exertions of Colin Simpson and Frank Moorhouse were crucial, and I particularly admire the energy Frank put into the fight. There is mass-photocopying compensation. There is a visible publishing industry surviving on the 21-day territorial copyright clause of our copyright law. And there are festivals coast to coast, writers with profiles as citizens, and a highly recognised craft of letters.

But why has the Gutenberg book survived? Why does it seem to us to be approaching balance with the ebook? No guarantees exist but, for now, our love of the tactile remains, our taste for the physical. Even young, tech-savvy writers see the printed book as their first option, with the straight-to-electronic option existing chiefly as a fallback, despite its economic equities and theoretically limitless possibilities. There are many examples of remnant institutions which should have been killed by technology, except for our own animal nature and tribal enthusiasms. These include: live opera, live sport, cineplexes, physical university campuses, and the print book.

Writing as an experience is, as it was in the early 1960s, the same exercise as ever, and I am increasingly fascinated by the way in which the conscious and unconscious parts of the brain combine to produce the novel, good or bad. One is not far into writing a book before one knows that the major linkages of structure, imagery, character and events will be provided from the part of the brain that lies beyond conscious knowing. That part of the brain is, I feel, uniquely engaged in writing. The conscious mind gives a work its elegance and sense of knowing. The unconscious supplies its human authenticity and daring, its multiplicity of grace notes, revelations and epiphanies. But this equation accounts for the anxiety about the chance of completion and cohesion of the book which plagues the best of writers during the process.

So nothing has changed for the writer. The book is the same reckless act of trust, infatuation, recklessness, narcissism, near-crippling doubt and delight, together with a sense of the elements being beyond one’s control, as it was in the summer of 1962–3, when Ray Mathew was writing in London, and I wrote my first, flawed novel in a bedroom shared with my medical-student brother in unglamorous Homebush. All changes, and all remains the same. Ray Mathew lived with this bewilderment and questing, and so do we all, whatever changes overcome the business of publishing.

Thomas Keneally is one of Australia’s most successful writers. He has won the Miles Franklin Award twice, and was awarded the Booker Prize for Schindler’s Ark.

This article comprises the notes on which Thomas Keneally’s 2014 Ray Mathew Lecture was based. The audio of the lecture is available here.

The Ray Mathew Lecture is supported by the Ray Mathew and Eva Kollsman Trust