September 2015

Volume 7 Number 3

On the cover

William Strutt (1825–1915)
The Little Wanderers 1865
watercolour; 14.8 x 19.4 cm
nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn2729057

This watercolour of children lost in the Australian bush (a subject popular with nineteenth-century artists) is one in a series of illustrations by artist William Strutt.

Born in England, Strutt lived in Australia during the 1850s and early 1860s, a period during which ‘heroic’ archetypes, from bushrangers to explorers, were finding their place in the Australian consciousness. His large canvases depict moments in Australian history on a monumental scale, from the burial of fated explorer Robert O’Hara Burke to the Black Thursday bushfires of 1851.

Heroes and Villains: Strutt’s Australia is the latest exhibition at the National Library.

Copyright and credits

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Contents

Heroes and Villains: Strutt’s Australia

medieval manuscripts: 
Ding-dong, CRASH! Chertsey Abbey, 1370

Boxing in Australia: Fighting for Equality

Collections Feature: 
Keith Murdoch’s Gallipoli Letter

Lost and Found on the Albert Hall Trail

In the Frame:
Sheltering from Bursting Shells 1915

A Century of Peace Work

Who Was Usagiya? A Publishing Puzzle

Gifts from Friends

Heroes and Villains: Strutt’s Australia

Matthew Jones gives an overview of the work of William Strutt, the subject of the Library’s latest exhibition

It is lamentable to see men of true genius wasting their powers on twaddling little sujets de genre when the pages of history offer such an abundance of splendid subjects.

So wrote English artist William Strutt to James Smith, art critic for The Argus, in 1861. Except for a brief stint of 18 months in New Zealand, Strutt had been living in and around Melbourne since 1850 and, in that time, the area had seen many changes. When Strutt arrived, the gold rush was still a year away, Victoria was part of New South Wales, and the population of the ‘then unpretending but prosperous city of Melbourne’ was around 20,000. Eleven years later, when Strutt wrote this letter to Smith, Melbourne had a population of over 125,000; was the capital of a new colony, Victoria; and held the honour of being one of the richest cities in the world. The pages of history were overflowing with significant events, and a new catalogue of Australian ‘heroic’ archetypes—bushrangers, explorers and gold diggers—was cementing itself in the Australian consciousness.

Strutt wanted to transfer some of this drama to heroic, monumental canvases. As he was the first artist to work in Australia who had studied at the most prestigious art academy in Europe, the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, he had the right kind of training to create such paintings. Alas, he was never to secure any such commissions while living in the colonies. His only large-scale history paintings on Australian themes were completed in England and did not bring him the admiration and financial security he had hoped for. The story of William Strutt could be viewed as one of thwarted artistic ambition, but that would be to undervalue what remains. He left behind a clutch of history paintings on Australian themes, and an archive of preparatory sketches, watercolours and prints which provide an extensive visual record of Australia in the 1850s and early 1860s.

Many of these works are on display in Heroes and Villains: Strutt’s Australia, a new exhibition at the Library which surveys his Australian work and demonstrates, through preparatory sketches, the development of his most famous paintings. The Library has a number of works by Strutt, which will be displayed, many of them for the first time, alongside important paintings held in other Australian collections.

Born in England in 1825, William Strutt had the pedigree and training to become a successful painter. He started at the atelier of Michel-Martin Drolling, a former pupil of Jacques-Louis David, in 1838, and was later accepted at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts where he received further instruction from stalwarts of the French academic system, Horace Vernet and Paul Delaroche. The training was systematic and thorough. First, pupils were taught to copy from engravings and plaster casts, then from live models, before advancing to painting and composition. As a result, Strutt emerged as a superb draughtsman and renderer of the human figure and had an ability to compose complex narrative works with a large cast of characters.

This training not only shaped Strutt’s methodology; it also fired his ambition. The French academy promoted a hierarchy of genres in which history painting—big, dramatic canvases of narrative scenes from classical literature, the Bible and, increasingly in the nineteenth century, contemporary historical events—was considered to be the highest form of art. It was Strutt’s desire to work on such pictures, but it was to be some time before that happened.

After an underwhelming start to his career in Europe, and a period of ill health, Strutt made the radical decision to ‘plunge into the unknown’ and set out for Australia at the age of 25. He arrived in Melbourne on 5 July 1850 and was quickly employed by the Ham brothers (publishers Thomas, Theophilus and Jabez) to make illustrations for prints which would appear in a new publication called the Illustrated Australian Magazine, the first such periodical published in Australia. There was much to document and Strutt produced illustrations celebrating the separation of Victoria from New South Wales in 1851 and life on the Victorian goldfields.

Portrait of John Pascoe Fawkner, Founder of Melbourne 1856
oil on canvas; 61.3 x 51.2 cm
nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn1850800

He was also fortunate that his artistic abilities came to the attention of John Pascoe Fawkner, the self-styled ‘Father of Melbourne’. A former convict, journalist and businessman, Fawkner shared Strutt’s ambition to record great events on large canvases. Half a century before Tom Roberts made his ‘Big Picture’ of the opening of Federal Parliament, they planned to produce large oils of the inaugural sitting of the Victorian Legislative Council (of which Fawkner was a member) in 1851 and the first sitting in the new Victorian Parliament House in 1856. Strutt attended both openings to make the required preparatory drawings but both times the funds necessary to complete such large works could not be raised. He described the result of the second project as the ‘disastrous ending of all my labour’. Luckily, the sketches have survived and are in the collections of several Australian institutions.

LEFT Study for the Opening of the First Victorian Parliament, Melbourne c. 1856
pencil and wash; 30.7 x 41.6 cm
State Library of Victoria H329

Right Study for the Opening of the First Victorian Parliament, Melbourne c. 1856
oil on canvas; 19 x 28.5 cm
State Library of Victoria H91.282/3

Illustration work kept Strutt going when he first arrived in Australia but, as art historian Elisabeth Findlay notes, ‘it was the lucrative commissions for large-scale portraits that allowed him to survive in the colony’. He painted portraits of Fawkner and his wife, as well as Governor Sir Edward Macarthur (the son of wool baron John Macarthur) and the explorer Robert O’Hara Burke. Strutt made multiple sketches and took photographs of Burke and the rest of the Great Victorian Expedition party at Royal Park in August 1860 before they left Melbourne on their heroic, but ultimately doomed, odyssey across the continent. He also did extensive research on the last moments of Burke and Wills, collecting studies of Cooper’s Creek, where their lives ended in 1861, and portraits of the men who buried them. Strutt recorded ‘everything likely to be useful. No detail, in a word, was neglected’, perceiving ‘at once that this was a subject to paint’. He would depict it on a large canvas, but not for another 50 years.

William Strutt (1825–1915)
Black Thursday, February 6th. 1851 1864
oil on canvas; 106.5 x 343 cm
State Library of Victoria H28049

Strutt went back to England in 1862 and had an unremarkable career as an artist and teacher. He never returned to Australia but did eventually complete some large historical works on colonial themes which have become his most memorable pictures. The first, Black Thursday, February 6th. 1851, his biggest work, painted in 1864, was based on the devastating fire that consumed Victoria. Referring to the copious notes and several sketches made in its aftermath, Strutt worked for three years on his magnum opus—an epic panorama featuring terrified crowds of people and animals running for their lives under a sky that he described as ‘the colour of mahogany’. The spectacular work was praised in the English press, yet took decades to find a buyer. It sat in Strutt’s studio for 20 years and was finally shipped to Australia. A dealer exhibited the painting several times in various locations around the country before it was sold to an Adelaide buyer in the early twentieth century, disappearing from public view. It eventually made its way into the Public Library of Victoria collection, now the State Library of Victoria, in 1954, and has been displayed consistently since 1965.

TOP LEFT Bushrangers, Victoria, Australia, 1852 (preliminary sketch) c. 1860
pencil; 20.1 x 12.6 cm; nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn1203439

TOP RIGHT Bushrangers, Victoria, Australia, 1852 (study of first bushranger) 1886
pencil and wash; 52.7 x 36.3 cm; nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn1201566

MIDDLE Study for Bushrangers, 12 Figures All Sitting at Once for Proportion 1886
pencil and wash; 31 x 70 cm; Rex Nan Kivell Collection, nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn2724525

BOTTOM Bushrangers, Victoria, Australia, 1852 1887
oil on canvas; The University of Melbourne Art Collection. Gift of the Russell and Mab Grimwade Bequest 1973.

Strutt’s next large colonial work, Bushrangers, Victoria, Australia 1852, painted in 1887, was also based on a real-life incident which took place during his time in Australia—the bailing up of a group of people on St Kilda Road. The archive of preparatory sketches for this work, today held at the National Library and in other collections, provides a fascinating insight into the exhaustive approach of an academically trained artist. Even though Strutt painted the work over 20 years after he left Australia, he successfully captures what he described as ‘the extraordinary clearness of the atmosphere through which everything was sharply defined in the pure and searching light’. Only the central bushranger figure avoids this ‘searching light’; his face remains in shadow. Unlike his greedy accomplices, his status is more elusive—is he a hero or a villain?

In England, Strutt completed other works on Australian subjects, including a series of illustrations based on children lost in the bush—a subject popular with Australian artists in the late nineteenth century. They were meant to accompany a children’s book, Cooey, or, The Trackers of Glenferry, which he failed to publish during his lifetime (it was published by the National Library several decades later). Strutt’s last big Australian picture was also based on the theme of people stranded in the outback. A former trustee of the National Gallery of Victoria, Dr William Gillbee, left a bequest to the gallery for the purpose of funding a large memorial painting based on the death of Burke and Wills. Strutt had applied for the commission but it was awarded to John Longstaff. Bitterly disappointed, Strutt went ahead with his own version, The Burial of Burke (1911), which was based on the material he collected while still in Australia. It was Strutt’s last significant work on an Australian subject. He died at the age of 89, four years after completing it.

The Burial of Burke 1911
oil on canvas; 122 x 204 cm; State Library of Victoria, H13087

These works completed in England are very different from most of those which Strutt made in Australia. The Australian works are varied in tone and mood, but for the most part they celebrate and record the beginning of a new and ultimately prosperous colony. The later works are darker. Melancholic, even apocalyptic, they emphasise the dangers of life in Australia, from getting lost in the bush to being caught in bushfires and bushranger hold-ups.

That someone with Strutt’s training and ability should visit Australia ‘during a decade so significant in her history’ is, art historian Heather Curnow has posited, ‘a fortunate coincidence’. Other talented artists worked in Australia during the 1850s and early 1860s, but Strutt’s ability to draw the figure and direct large, complex compositions differentiates him from many of his colonial contemporaries. His pictures are distinctive and ambitious, a rare example of the intersection of French academic training with Australian colonial subject matter.

Matthew Jones is the curator of Heroes and Villains: Strutt’s Australia, on show at the National Library until 15 November

medieval manuscripts: 
Ding-dong, CRASH!
Chertsey Abbey, 1370

By Karen Johnson

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.

One of the most intriguing medieval manuscripts in the Library’s collection is the Chertsey cartulary. This fourteenth-century compendium contains copies of deeds and other transactions of St Peter’s Benedictine Abbey, Chertsey, Surrey, which was founded in 666.

In the Middle Ages, original records were kept in a monastery’s ‘muniment’ chest. Transcriptions of the documents were made for safekeeping and bound into a cartulary. In the twenty-first century, cartularies provide tantalising windows through which medieval monasteries can be viewed and brought to life once again.

An entry for July 1370 recounts how the mid-summer serenity of the abbey was broken by a thunderous crash, moments after the monks had met in the chapter house for their regular mid-morning meeting:

In the month of July, on Wednesday after the anniversary of St Swithun’s, immediately after Chapter … when the meeting was being held before the coming Parliament, the greater part of our bell tower fell to the ground in ruins, to the irreparable loss of our monastery.

The cause of the collapse—which also broke the bell—is unrecorded, but may have resulted from a lack of maintenance (there was much loss of income due to the devastations of the plague) and a series of violent storms.

Bell towers began to appear in England during the Norman period to sound the nightly curfew (‘cover fire’), a regulation imposed to discourage after-dark gatherings and to minimise the risk of fires spreading at night.

Chertsey Abbey had been damaged by fire in 1235 and Abbot John de Rutherwyk may have been mindful of this when he had a tower built and bell made in 1310, during the peak of its prosperity. According to contemporary accounts, Rutherwyk was a ‘vigorous personality’ who presided over many improvements, ‘draining marshes, erecting mills and stone bridges, enclosing lands, sowing acorns, repairing chapels and farmhouses, sinking wells, building barns’ and constructing one—ultimately unfortunate—bell tower.

In addition to bearing testament to this unhappy event, the cartulary, part of the Library’s Clifford Collection, is significant because it is the only example of a medieval cartulary in the Southern Hemisphere and contains the only known accounts of Chertsey Abbey.

Of particular interest is the high degree of correlation between this cartulary and a ‘sister’ copy held by the British Library. This raises the question: was one volume the original copy on which the other was based? The digitisation of the Clifford cartulary will allow scholars around the world to inspect it more closely and compare it with the sister copy without having to travel to Australia, presenting the exciting possibility that this 700-year-old mystery may yet be solved.

Benedictine Abbey of St Peter
Cartulary fourteenth century
in Clifford Collection of Manuscripts Mainly Relating to Roman Catholicism, c. 1250–1915
manuscript material; nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn1144055

Boxing in Australia: Fighting for Equality

The battle for racial equality in Australia has also been fought in the ring, says Grantlee Kieza

The history of boxing in Australia is the story of the human spirit triumphing over adversity, of battlers rising above humble origins to carve their own niche in the world. Some made fortunes; some finished with nothing; some died trying. All of them took part in a sport that created a unique kind of heroism in an arena of physical combat that tests physical and mental toughness and personal courage.

Boxing has produced some of Australia’s iconic sporting champions, from Les Darcy in the years of the First World War, to Great Depression hero Jack Carroll, to postwar greats such as Vic Patrick. It has seen the rise of Indigenous champion Lionel Rose, as well as stars of the modern era such as Jeff Fenech, Kostya Tszyu, Anthony Mundine and Danny Green.

I have been privileged to cover boxing for News Corporation since 1980 and also to have worked as the chief cornerman for some of the big names in Australian boxing. I was in the corner, as the assistant trainer to Johnny Lewis, for all of Jeff Fenech’s world-title wins and for the early part of Jeff Harding’s career as he marched toward the world light-heavyweight title. I was Joe Bugner’s chief second when he fought future world champion Frank Bruno before 37,000 people at White Hart Lane, London, in 1987, in what was then the richest fight ever held in Britain. I was also in the corner for Lovemore Ndou when he fought Saúl Álvarez in a baseball stadium in Mexico a couple of years before Álvarez met Floyd Mayweather in what was, at the time, the most lucrative bout in history.

Boxing was once one of the dominant sports in Australia. It has also been an instrument of social change. Certainly the success of Aboriginal boxer Lionel Rose in the late 1960s did great things for relations between the Indigenous and non-Indigenous population at a time when Aboriginal Australians were only starting to be recognised as citizens.

LEFT Samuel Thomas Gill (1818–1880)
McLaren’s Boxing Saloon, Main Road, Ballarat 1854
watercolour; 26.3 x 36.4 cm | Rex Nan Kivell Collection, nla.gov.au/nla.pic-an2376887

RIGHT Lionel Rose and Fighting Harada during Their Match for the World Bantamweight Title at the Nihon Budokan, Tokyo 1968
b&w photograph 18.6 x 24.6 cm | nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn3060317

Rose’s victory over Japanese boxer Fighting Harada for the world bantamweight title in Tokyo in 1968 was one of the most extraordinary moments in Australian sport. Only the second Australian boxer in history to have held a universally recognised world title, Rose returned to Australia on 29 February that year to unprecedented scenes in Melbourne. An estimated 250,000 people lined the streets to honour the teenager who, not long before, had been living in a dirt-floor shack. There had been no running water, no electricity and certainly no money. Kerosene lamps, candles or the flickering light from his mother’s cooking fire inside an old oil drum illuminated the home at night.

In a nation that prided itself on punching above its weight at sport, this shy, modest boy had notched a victory so remarkable and unexpected that it had catapulted him into the nation’s heart. Still four months shy of his twentieth birthday, he was now the most feted sports hero in Australia. He would soon be voted Australian of the Year and receive an MBE. They were impressive accolades for a young Aboriginal man in a country that had only just included its Indigenous people in the census and was not noted for giving them glory.

Arriving home after his momentous win, Lionel remembered the words of George Bracken, another Aboriginal fighter. ‘Boxing is one of the few places where an Aborigine can be treated as an equal’, Bracken had told him many times, ‘because with our people we all started life behind the eight ball. In boxing we could show that we were as good as anybody else, sometimes even better’.

Rose’s achievements also shone a spotlight on the sport. The popularity of televised boxing in Australia in the 1960s and 1970s, accelerated by his success, coincided with the rise of other emerging luminaries, including Johnny Famechon, Charkey Ramon, Henry Nissen and Bobby Dunlop.

Although Lionel’s life was later to hit turbulence, until his death in 2011 he remained a much-loved and inspirational figure, offering encouragement to Jeff Fenech, Kostya Tszyu and Anthony Mundine when they followed in his footsteps as Australian boxing’s leading drawcards.

Yet while boxing has been a force for change in Australia, in its early days it also reflected the ugly face of racial inequality throughout society. The crowds that gathered to laud the young Indigenous fighter in the 1960s were of an altogether different kind from those who had come to witness the long-awaited bout between a white champion and his black challenger half a century earlier. The bout turned the world on its head; it was one of the most important moments in history when African-American Jack Johnson, the son of former slaves, battered the white Canadian Tommy Burns for the world heavyweight title, then the most cherished prize in the sporting world.

LEFT Norman Lindsay (1879–1969)
Tommy Burns versus Jack Johnson, World Heavyweight Boxing Championship, Rushcutters Bay, Sydney, 26 December 1908
colour photograph of print; 13.1 x 8.9 cm | nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn3050654 Courtesy H.C. & A. Glad

RIGHT Tommy Burns, Champion of the World, v. Jack Johnson, Colored Champion of the World: The World’s Heavyweight Boxing Championship—The Stadium, Rushcutters’ Bay, Sydney
(Sydney: 1908) | nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn2227362

More than 20,000 people packed into the newly built wooden structure called Sydney Stadium on Boxing Day 1908 and as many as 50,000 waited outside. No black man had ever fought for the world heavyweight championship. Sydney boxing promoter Hugh D. McIntosh, a pie salesman made good, wanted to break the embargo, not because he believed in racial equality—far from it—but with an eye to the massive profit that a legally sanctioned ‘race war’ could generate. Tommy Burns wanted nothing to do with the proposed fight but, after he beat Australian Bill Lang, the Richmond football club’s star fullback, McIntosh made him an offer he couldn’t refuse: £6,000 (about $A4.5 million in today’s money).

At a time when, in America, black men could be lynched for whistling at white women, Jack Johnson flaunted his sexual, intellectual and fighting prowess. When he wasn’t battering white men to a pulp, he trampled on society’s taboos, living with a succession of white prostitutes. ‘When whites ran everything, Jack Johnson took orders from no one’, Ken Burns explained in his documentary Unforgivable Blackness. ‘To most whites, and even to some African-Americans, Johnson was a perpetual threat: profligate, arrogant, amoral—a dark menace and a danger to the natural order of things’. When most white men still travelled by horse and cart, Johnson roared about recklessly in the most expensive automobiles, dressing in furs and diamonds.

Barroni & Co.
Portrait of Jack Johnson c. 1908
b&w photograph; 19.5 x 13.7 cm | nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn3060857

Johnson had beaten the best black fighters: Joe Jeanette, Sam McVea and Sam Langford. Now McIntosh was offering him the chance to prove he was better than the best white man in the world. Writers—including the American novelist Jack London, who, like most of the reporters, was vocal in his support for the white champion—travelled from all corners of the globe to cover the fight.

Crowds of Sydney girls flocked to see the exotic Texan training for his historic bout. Johnson even stuffed heavy gauze bandages down the front of his tights to fatten his reputation. Burns prepared for the fight at retail king Mark Foy’s plush Hydro Majestic Hotel in the Blue Mountains. Johnson set up camp at the more modest Sir Joseph Banks Hotel in Botany, alongside former New York prostitute Hattie McClay, one of the many Mrs Johnsons in his life. He also trained at a cottage at Manly where he would bodysurf with the locals.

By Boxing Day, Sydney was agog with fight fever. Thousands spent the evening of Christmas Day camped outside the stadium and were milling around the gates by 2 am. At 10 am, an hour before the fight was due to start, 20,400 fans filled the vast wooden structure. One of them, Charmian London, Jack London’s wife, was the first woman to be admitted to a boxing match in Australia—though, as women were banned from attending bouts, she had to disguise herself in men’s clothing. As many as 50,000 people—mostly men and boys—unable to buy tickets, scaled whatever vantage point they could (trees, telegraph poles and roofs) outside the wooden arena.

Charles H. Kerry (1858–1928)
Burns–Johnson Boxing Contest, Sydney, 26 December 1908
b&w photograph; 42.2 x 101.4 cm | nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn3060336

The word was that Burns would attack Johnson’s body. Accepted wisdom of the time suggested that blacks had thicker skulls and a higher pain threshold than the ‘civilised’ white man. The white audience was certain that their little champion would emerge triumphant, even though Johnson was more than 5 inches (13 centimetres) taller than Burns and much more physically imposing. As Jack London wrote, once the bell rang Burns had as much chance as ‘a dewdrop in hell’. ‘The fight?’ London exclaimed. ‘There was no fight.’ Burns hit the deck within seconds of the opening bell and for the next 14 rounds suffered a public flogging.

All the while, Johnson flashed his gold-capped teeth in a dazzling smirk that only exacerbated Burns’ agony. ‘Cahm on leedle Tahmmy’, he would drawl, before cutting Burns’ face some more. ‘What’s wrong Tahmmy? You hit like a girl.’ Burns, exhausted and broken, flailed helplessly, cursing his tormenter through shredded lips as Johnson moved away, drawing Burns onto his heavy counterpunches. ‘Stand and fight, nigger’, the champion screamed at one stage. ‘Fight like a white man.’ The massacre continued until Johnson was finally declared the winner in Round 14 when the local police switched off the movie cameras and told Burns he was done.

While black newspapers in America celebrated Johnson’s win as the most significant triumph for African-Americans since the abolition of slavery, Fairplay magazine lambasted the new heavyweight champion of the world as a ‘huge, primordial ape’. The Bulletin magazine declared Johnson’s taunting of Burns so objectionable that if he had tried it in America he would have been shot dead. Journalist Randolph Bedford, writing in the Melbourne Herald, described Burns’ defeat as beautiful sunlight being snuffed out by ugly darkness. In America, race riots and lynchings greeted news of Johnson’s victory. Nevertheless, black had finally triumphed over white.

Jack Johnson’s victory had worldwide repercussions and, more than a century later, is still talked about as a defining moment in sporting history. Most fighters never achieve that sort of fame, fortune or historical standing. Only a few hit the dizzying heights reached by stars such as Lionel Rose and Jeff Fenech. Yet every fighter who has stepped between the ropes to enter the great cauldron of human combat has scored a victory over his or her fears. As the great Vic Patrick told me not long before his death in 2006: ‘Boxing builds up a person’s character. Even if you’re just a preliminary boy it takes a lot to lace on a glove’.

Grantlee Kieza is an award-winning journalist who has been Australia’s leading boxing writer for the past 35 years. His latest book is Boxing in Australia, produced by NLA Publishing

IN A PREVIOUS ISSUE

A Ringside View — November 1995

Barry York explores the history of professional boxing in Australia through the National Library’s collections

Collections Feature: 
Keith Murdoch’s Gallipoli Letter

By NAT WILLIAMS, The James and Bettison Treasures Curator

Receiving journalist Keith Murdoch’s letter written after his brief visit to Gallipoli must have been a very uncomfortable experience for Australian prime minister Andrew Fisher when it was telegraphed to him in September 1915. Fisher had commissioned his friend to give a frank account of what was happening in the Dardanelles and also to comment on the mail services and hospital care of Australian troops in Egypt.

The prime minister got more than he bargained for. The letter is a searing indictment of the cavalier British attitude towards the ANZAC troops and their suffering. Murdoch describes:

an atrophy of mind and body that is appalling … It is like the look of a tortured dumb animal. Men living in trenches with no movement except when they are digging, and with nothing to look at except a narrow strip of sky and the blank walls of their prisons, cannot remain cheerful or even thoughtful.

He characterises the British soldiers and territorials as ‘merely a lot of childlike youths without strength to endure or brains to improve their conditions’ and as ‘toy soldiers’. Printed as a cabinet paper and widely circulated, the letter caused great upset to the British establishment; they must have loved receiving the caustic observations of a ‘colonial’ journalist.

Keith Arthur Murdoch (1885–1952)
Gallipoli Letter to Andrew Fisher 1915
typescript and ink
manuscript material; nla.gov.au/nla.ms-ms2823-2-1

Reading the missive, today known as ‘The Gallipoli Letter’, one can imagine the bright, spirited, ambitious journalist who wrote it. Not yet 30 years old, Keith Murdoch penned the letter shortly after arriving in London to take up a new job—and he was angry. He had just witnessed the bloodshed and chaos on the Gallipoli peninsula, and his words were crafted to shock and provoke a response. They certainly did. The letter is in many ways an audacious piece of writing—8,000 words running to 25 pages of strongly expressed opinion which, in some places, distorts the facts for effect. In this age of tweets and doorstop interviews, where public attention is often distilled down to seconds, to encounter such a lengthy and well-meant diatribe is refreshing. Try to find the time this year to read Murdoch’s memorable letter online (nla.gov.au/nla.ms-ms2823-2-1) and then view it in the Library’s Treasures Gallery where it will be on display throughout the First World War centenary period.

Recently, and appropriately, the Library’s Gallipoli Letter was inscribed as Number 49 on the UNESCO Australian Memory of the World Register. The acknowledgement of this key item from the Library’s collection by UNESCO is significant. Being included on the register is the highest level of recognition for archival material and is part of UNESCO’s global effort to enhance awareness and support for the preservation of documentary heritage collections.

Just after Anzac Day this year, the Australian War Memorial installed a major commission, crafted by the Australian Tapestry Workshop in Melbourne and donated by the Geoff and Helen Handbury Foundation. Based on a painting by the artist Imants Tillers (b. 1950), the Avenue of Remembrance tapestry was inspired by Murdoch’s letter and commemorates both its centenary and that of the Gallipoli campaign. This layered and beautiful image invokes the stark wartime roads on the Western Front and the avenues of remembrance planted to honour the dead in postwar Australia. Words from Murdoch’s letter, and the names of places in which Australians served, richly cover the animated surface of the tapestry.

Australian Tapestry Workshop (tapestry maker) and Imants Tillers (artist, b. 1950)
Avenue of Remembrance 2014–2015
cotton and wool; 330 x 280 cm
Australian War Memorial; ART96799
Geoff and Helen Handbury Foundation

Tillers said of the image:

We all know that an ‘avenue’ is not only a regular planting of trees along a road, it is also more abstractly ‘a way to access or approach’ something—to an idea or even a memory. My Avenue of Remembrance is, I hope, a way or means to remember not only those young men who died but also the profound loss and grief experienced by their mothers, their fathers, their brothers and sisters. By their friends, by their communities. By our nation.

The Gallipoli Letter was given to the National Library in 1970 by Rupert Murdoch with other material from his father’s personal papers. You can find more information about the Keith Murdoch papers in the Library’s collection at nla.gov.au/nla.ms-ms2823.

Lost and Found on the Albert Hall Trail

Lenore Coltheart examines some photographs and concert programs that prove to be much more than just souvenirs

When Australian prime minister Stanley Melbourne Bruce opened Canberra’s Albert Hall in March 1928, he spoke of the new city as reflecting national ideals, with the Albert Hall its temple of arts and music. The National Library’s Manuscripts Collection holds rich resources on the histories of dance, music and theatre in Australia, but what do they tell us of whether Canberra’s Albert Hall met its lofty purpose? Making an Albert Hall trail through this collection leads bewitchingly from one treasure to another, so tightly associated is the building with the history of Canberra’s cultural, civic and community life.

Every investigation has its ‘person of interest’, and the name that regularly crops up in interviews about the Albert Hall is Ernie Sorensen, in charge there for 30 years and still vivid in the memories of concertgoers, dancers and organisers. He was warmly mentioned so often that this impression clothed the sparse facts which I gleaned from Commonwealth war and employment records and the occasional tantalising mention of him in departmental correspondence or Albert Hall administrative files.

In the Library’s Manuscripts Collection, by contrast, Himalayas of primary material threatened to bury the Albert Hall trail. Like other lost researchers there, I found a Sherpa, who pointed me in the direction of the papers of Faye Ahrens (nee Sorensen). This tiny treasure, deposited 30 years ago, proved to be a peak that disclosed the richest research terrain, revealing the deep texture of daily life lived in and around the Albert Hall.

Two small boxes house the photographs, news clippings, letters, invitations and programs kept by Ernie Sorensen’s wife, Sylvia, from the time of her arrival in Canberra in 1925 and, later, by the Sorensen daughters, Faye and Jill. An intriguing inclusion is several folders of older documents, originally kept by Sylvia’s mother Alice Norton, prominent in feminist reform circles in Sydney from the 1890s and a ‘grandmother’ of infant health and mothercraft in Canberra.

William James Mildenhall (1891–1962)
Albert Hall, Canberra c. 1932
b&w photograph | nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn785757

Family photographs show the bare paddocks that became Canberra, and the teams of master tradesmen, Ernie Sorensen among them, at building sites including Parliament House and Manuka Pool. Apprenticed as a plasterer at 13, ten years later Ernie Sorensen was a returned soldier and, in 1925, with seven-year-old son Don and new baby Faye, Ernie and Sylvia moved to Canberra. Unlike most of his colleagues, as the construction of Canberra wound down, Ernie Sorensen was not out of work for long. In the Depression downsizing in 1929 he was put in charge of the Albert Hall, as a combination caretaker-manager-handyman. He was 35 when he landed this job of a lifetime, with a house for the family in the then far-flung suburb of Ainslie. For ten years, he cycled to and from work, in all weathers and at all hours. In 1939, an Albert Hall cottage was built behind the Hotel Canberra, so handy that Don Sorensen could cycle to deliver his dad’s Sunday dinner, still hot from the stove.

The Sorensen sisters thus grew up with the Albert Hall. This was especially so for Jill, who was born in 1942. She recalls running errands back and forth, scurrying through a spookily empty auditorium to her father’s office upstairs or standing enthralled during rehearsals until, like her big sister, she began to appear on stage at Eisteddfodau. As programs for local productions show, Jill Sorensen appeared in the musical Salad Days at the age of 20 and, at 22, was producer of a very successful Oklahoma!.

LEFT Cover, gala play program, first anniversary of the opening of Parliament House, May 1928
RIGHT Cover, Florence Austral concert, August 1934
Faye Ahrens’ Collection of Theatre Programs for Albert Hall, 1928–1989 | nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn6539091

The oldest program in the Ahrens collection recalls the first play staged at the Albert Hall, produced by Dr Lewis Nott in 1928. The program for Australian soprano Florence Austral’s homecoming tour in 1934, the earliest concert for an international artist, shows she shared the stage with her husband, flautist John Amadio, as well as her accompanist, the legendary Raymond Lambert. Another Australian who performed at London’s Albert Hall before appearing at Canberra’s was pianist Eileen Joyce, star of the Australian Broadcasting Commission’s 1936 celebrity artist tour.

One of the first professional ballet companies to appear in Canberra was the First Australian Ballet, founded by Mischa Burlakov and Louise Lightfoot, an architect in Walter and Marion Griffin’s Sydney office. They had worked together on dances for Marion Griffin’s community concerts in the open-air theatre at Castlecrag, Sydney, and, in 1939, Burlakov brought Australia’s first full-length ballet production, his Lake of Swans, to Canberra. That historic program nestles with another simple document, the program of contemporary ballet performed the following year by the Viennese Ballet, the company re-formed in Sydney by Australian refugee choreographer Gertrud Bodenwieser.

Pages from Lotte Lehmann’s first Albert Hall concert, May 1937
Faye Ahrens’ Collection of Theatre Programs for Albert Hall, 1928–1989 | nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn6539091

That a side effect of Nazism was the enrichment of Australian cultural life has long been recognised, but there is a poignancy in this series of programs, a paper trail of Hitler’s march through Europe. Famed soprano Lotte Lehmann, transplanted from Vienna to New York, gave magnificent concerts at Canberra’s Albert Hall on her 1937 and 1939 Australian tours, declaring it ‘a beautiful hall to sing in’. In July 1937 the Budapest String Quartet appeared, violinists Josef Roisman and Alexander Schneider, cellist Mischa Schneider and viola player Boris Kroyt travelling on the ‘Nansen’ passports established by the League of Nations. The following month a newly stateless group, the Comedy Harmonists, appeared. The three Jewish members of the original sextet made the world their stage after they were forbidden to perform in Germany, and delighted audiences everywhere with the vocalists’ hilarious ability to imitate musical instruments.

RIGHT Cover, Rudolf Schock concert, July 1949
LEFT Choristers’ signatures, July 1939
Faye Ahrens’ Collection of Theatre Programs for Albert Hall, 1928–1989 | nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn6539091

The program for Arthur Rubenstein’s concert in August 1937 marks the acquisition of a concert-grade piano for the Albert Hall (the acclaimed pianist declaring the new Steinway ‘the finest piano in the country’) and the beginning of Ernie Sorensen’s legendary custodianship of the instrument. Also represented in this extraordinary sequence of programs are the best known of the wartime European expatriate musicians, the Vienna Mozart Boys’ Choir, stranded in Australia by the declaration of war the day after the final concert of their 1939 tour.

Some artists, like tenors Rudolf Schock in 1949 and William Herbert in 1950, dedicated the programs to Faye Sorensen, while Patrick O’Hagan signed his, in 1955, ‘To Ernie’ and Australian violinist Beryl Kimber, in 1959, simply ‘To Jill’.

Because of their distinct context, the programs of the Ahrens papers have a unique value, beyond being simply records of concerts, or famous signatures and personal dedications to the Sorensen family. For instance, advertisements appearing in the programs give us a picture of Albert Hall audiences and their world. Through the 1930s and 1940s, advertisements for pianos by Paling and Nicholson appear in the same programs as ads for the latest Victor, Westinghouse or AWA radios and record-players. In 1930, an electric record-player was a rarity in Canberra but by the end of the decade Albert Hall audiences would be tempted by Victor’s ‘Electric Phono-Radio Combination’ in five to eight valve versions, with an automatic changer capacity of eight records. Technological leaps were airborne too, with Qantas Empire Airways offering the ‘Kangaroo Service’, ‘a leisurely Flying Boat trip to London … or a swifter flight across half the world by speedy Constellation’ from 1947, just ten years after the first airmail service between England and Australia.

FROM LEFT Qantas advertisement, tenor Miklos Gafni concert, July 1947; Cigarette advertisement, violinist Jeanne Gautier concert, October 1939; Hickory advertisement, Australian soprano Marjorie Lawrence’s concert, 1939
Faye Ahrens’ Collection of Theatre Programs for Albert Hall, 1928–1989 | nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn6539091

We can glimpse an Albert Hall audience in even more intimate detail as advertisers tempt with post-Depression luxuries: a tin of Craven “A” cigarettes, a bottle of Chateau Tanunda brandy, a block of MacRobertson’s cherry nut chocolate. Images of lingerie, corsetry, cosmetics and hosiery also make a sudden, sometimes startling, appearance in
the concert programs.

Ernie Sorensen died in 1979 and Sylvia Sorensen three years later. By then, the Canberra Theatre and the Llewellyn Hall had replaced the Albert Hall as Canberra’s main performing arts venue. The collection represents this march of time with programs for the new venues in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as for the short colourful period in the 1950s when the first musicals filmed in technicolour had their own lavish souvenir programs.

In 2014 the Library’s Curator of Manuscripts, Kylie Scroope, contacted the family of Faye Ahrens to inquire about the originals of the photocopied programs deposited in the 1980s. To the delight of every future researcher, Faye and her sister Jill, both now in retirement, readily agreed to give the Library some 80 original programs they still held. With this new deposit there are some updates, like a March 1991 news cutting announcing the death in London of Eileen Joyce, tucked inside the program for her 1948 ABC concert at the Albert Hall. Similarly, an October 2003 newspaper article from Buderim, Queensland, about the death in her home town of Nancy Brown, nestles alongside the program for The Sentimental Bloke. Brown and her husband, Albert Arlen, made history with this world premiere at the Albert Hall in 1961.

LEFT Portrait, Comedy Harmonists, August 1937 RIGHT Cover, Australian soprano Marjorie Lawrence’s concert, July 1949
Faye Ahrens’ Collection of Theatre Programs for Albert Hall, 1928–1989 | nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn6539091

The theatre programs now added to the original deposit are the more valuable for being a personal aside to the National Library’s other collections, such as the PROMPT grouping of performing arts materials among which are the grander archives of more prominent people including Gertrud Bodenwieser, Gladys Moncrieff, Albert Arlen and Nancy Brown, C.S. Daley and Robert Garran, and photographs by Alec Collingridge, Richard Strangman, Fred Bareham and L.J. Dwyer.

Yet, like these important and better-known collections, the Ahrens papers interconnect, explain and enhance in symbiosis. With the addition of the original theatre and concert programs, the souvenirs of Sylvia Sorensen, her mother and daughters are an undeniable treasure.

Dr Lenore Coltheart is a historian and heritage consultant whose most recent book, Albert Hall: The Heart of Canberra, was published last year

IN A PREVIOUS ISSUE

‘Nurturing the Feeble Flame of Canberra’s Early Musical Life’ — June 2013

Jenny Horsfield examines Charles Daley’s invaluable contribution to Canberra’s musical culture

In the Frame:
Sheltering from Bursting Shells 1915

Peter Stanley takes a closer look at photographs from the Library’s collection reflecting life during the First World War

Turks opened a fairly heavy fire with artillery’, the war diary of the 8th Light Horse Regiment records laconically on 29 June 1915. The Light Horsemen—minus their horses—were holding the front line on Walker’s Ridge, Gallipoli, high above the Anzac battlefield.

In this extraordinary image, men huddle together in a rifle pit, or ‘funk hole’ as the soldiers called them, under shellfire. Dusty, and covered in dirt from shells exploding around them, they shelter from flying shards of shrapnel.

Probably snapped on Walker’s Ridge in June 1915, this is one of the most remarkable photographs among the thousands taken by Australia’s volunteer soldiers at Gallipoli. They were all taken unofficially—Admiralty photographers took the only official pictures there, including the notorious fakes that crop up again and again. This one is different: it is no fake. Although many Australian soldiers took photographs, very few of them were taken in action or under fire. To get this candid image, the photographer had to expose himself to shellfire.

Virtually every front-line soldier endured shellfire at some time, but hardly anyone had the presence of mind, the equipment, the skill, or the courage, to record an experience that was universal but rarely captured.

Who was the man who took the picture? He was James Pinkerton Campbell, a professional photographer of Malvern, Victoria, who volunteered for the 8th Light Horse in September 1914. He admitted to being 45 but was actually 50, married with grown-up children. A signaller, he clearly kept a camera with him throughout his service, as the album in the National Library’s collection testifies.

Soon after James took this possibly unique photograph, he was twice wounded by bombs and in August went to hospital in Egypt. There he remained for the rest of the war, working as a pay clerk and, in 1918, becoming the ‘Official Photographer to the AIF’. Though obscure compared to well-known names such as Frank Hurley or Hubert Wilkins, James Campbell achieved something that the giants of Great War photography did not. This photograph, memorably capturing dirt-spattered men cowering under fire, should be among the most celebrated images of Australians at war.

James Pinkerton Campbell (1865–1935)
Sheltering from Bursting Shells 1915
b&w photograph; 5.9 x 8.4 cm, nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn1504935

A Century of Peace Work

Kate Laing looks at an important organisation begun by women during the First World War

In 1931, an unprecedented meeting occurred in the Melbourne Town Hall. Convened by the League of Nations Union and the World Disarmament Movement, the gathering brought together politicians, leading churchmen, prominent citizens and the public to hear speeches about world disarmament. The lord mayor of Melbourne presided and the prime minister, J.H. Scullin, received a petition from members of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) who had paraded into the hall with a colourful banner.

Containing over 117,000 signatures, including that of Sir John Monash, the petition was acknowledged and signed by the prime minister. It was later to be shipped to Geneva to be added to the international petition, initiated by American activist Jane Addams, which ended up at several million names urging worldwide disarmament. Eleanor Moore, the international corresponding secretary of WILPF in Australia, sat on stage next to the prime minister, and both gave speeches to mark the occasion. According to Moore: ‘It was the greatest public gesture for peace and disarmament ever yet officially made in Australia’.

Portrait of Jane Addams c. 1928
sepia-toned photograph; 16.4 x 11.5 cm | nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn2353174

Such open declarations of peace and disarmament have been largely overlooked in public remembrances of Australia’s history, including its wartime history. In the past, as now, the nation was far from unified in its support for war. By understanding WILPF, we can rediscover the women with considered opinions on international relations who used the international arena as a platform for political engagement when the domestic sphere was still largely closed to their ideas. Their struggle for the rights of women and for women’s participation in negotiations about permanent peace also highlights women’s agency in fighting against war, which has often been understated.

The National Library has a wealth of material about WILPF and the wider peace movement in Australia. It holds the international papers of WILPF from Geneva, 1915–1978, on microfilm. National branch material from 1943 to 1988 can be found in the Manuscripts Collection, as can many of the personal papers of women actively involved in branch activities. There are also journals relating to WILPF, including Pax et Libertas, Peacewards and Peace and Freedom, all showing the depth of policy consideration and activity of the Australian branch.

FROM LEFT: Who’s Afraid of Disarmament?
(Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, 1977)
in Records of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, Australian Section, 1943–1998
Courtesy Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom | nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn1607690

Peacewards, vol. XIV, no. 8, 1 May 1931 | nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn860037

Peace; War against War 1924
metal badge; 3.3 cm diam. | nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn1130497

WILPF began in 1915 when more than 1,100 political women in the Northern Hemisphere convened a conference at The Hague in response to the devastation of the First World War. Their aim was to discuss the establishment of structures that would make permanent peace possible. Central to these discussions were well-known women such as Jane Addams and Emily Green Balch from America, both Nobel Peace Prize winners, and Dr Aletta Jacobs from The Netherlands. Australian women were not able to travel to The Hague, but followed reports of the gathering with interest. Two women’s peace groups formed in Melbourne were similarly motivated by the crisis of war: the Sisterhood of International Peace (SIP) and the Women’s Peace Army (WPA).

The SIP formed through the Australian Church led by the Reverend Dr Charles Strong, with committed pacifist Eleanor Moore leading the group. Around 1949, Moore published her account of the peace movement up to her death, The Quest for Peace, as I Have Known It in Australia. The SIP was explicitly internationalist and believed in arbitration and diplomacy as a way to avoid the devastation of war. Their founding philosophy was:

To promote mutual knowledge of each other by the Women of different nations, goodwill, and friendship; to study the causes, economic and moral, of war; and by every means in their power to bring the humanising influence of Women to bear on the abolition of war, and the substitution of international justice and arbitration for irrational methods of violence.

The WPA was formed around the same time by feminist politician Vida Goldstein and the Women’s Political Association. It was vocal in opposing conscription during the First World War and used its publication The Woman Voter to actively campaign against the war. The two groups worked together, but remained separate organisations to facilitate their different working styles. Both were also affiliated to the international organisation preparing for another conference at the conclusion of the war.

Phyl Waterhouse (1917–1989)
Portrait of Vida Goldstein 1944
oil on composition board; 45.5 x 37.6 cm | nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn358285

Eleanor Moore, Vida Goldstein and Cecilia John (also from the WPA) set sail for Europe in 1919 to participate in the women’s conference in Zurich. It took ten weeks to get there. Once they had arrived, Australian delegates reaffirmed their commitment to internationalism and pledged to campaign and educate for peace and freedom. The conference voted to adopt the name the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. In Australia, the WPA folded and the SIP became the Australian section of the newly named organisation.

Between the wars, WILPF in Australia focused on education and on studying the ‘causes, economic and moral, of war’. It held regular reading groups, lectures and general meetings where there was discussion of foreign policy. Branches were established in Newcastle, Rockhampton, Hobart and Western Australia. WILPF was active in collaborating with other peace groups such as the Melbourne Peace Society run by Dr Strong and the Australian Peace Alliance (APA). It participated in each of the interstate peace conferences convened by the APA, where many issues were debated, from the White Australia policy to the compulsory military training scheme. WILPF was interested in understanding the place of Australia in the world and was keen to engage in the pan-Pacific women’s conferences that were organised in Hawaii. In 1928 and 1930, Eleanor Moore joined the Australian delegation to the conferences, representing WILPF at the regional gatherings alongside other notable Australian women such as Bessie Rischbieth and Muriel Heagney.

Bert G. Covell
Delegates and Accredited Visitors to the First Women’s Pan-Pacific Conference, Honolulu 1928
sepia-toned photograph; 16.5 x 22.7 cm | nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn3279324

During the 1930s, WILPF turned to the disarmament petition that was presented by WILPF International to the Conference for the Reduction and Limitation of Armaments in 1932. Unfortunately, that conference failed and disbanded without any resolution, and the great hope and motivation that the peace movement felt in those years gave way to disillusionment. During the Second World War, international communications broke down and membership dwindled, causing the international office and national sections to reconsider their organisation. Nonetheless, WILPF regrouped, with Anna Vroland becoming the new secretary in Melbourne after Eleanor Moore’s death. In the 1950s, WILPF campaigned for Aboriginal rights. It also had a strong position against capital punishment and fought for civil liberties during the 1951 referendum to ban the Communist Party.

Atar Geneve
Petitions. Some of the 12 Million Signatures 1932
b&w photograph; 10.5 x 14.7 cm
State Library of Victoria, MS9377/PHO7

In 1960, Margaret Holmes, a respected and influential activist, held a meeting with Doris Blackburn, a member of parliament for the federal seat of Bourke from 1946 to 1949 and active member of WILPF in Melbourne since its founding, at which they inaugurated the Sydney branch. Branches also formed in South Australia and Queensland and reformed in Western Australia and Tasmania. From the 1960s, WILPF campaigned against American military bases in Australia and French nuclear testing in the Pacific; member Jean Richards flew to Paris to meet with French president Charles de Gaulle about the latter. Still with the emphasis on education, it printed pamphlets and journals to inform the public about these issues and kept up an extensive letter-writing campaign to members of parliament.

Telegram to Prime Minister Menzies 1962
in Records of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, Australian Section, 1943–1998
Courtesy Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom | nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn1607690

When Australia joined the Vietnam War, WILPF once again spoke out against conscription. It held regular vigils and demonstrations and supported conscientious objectors to military service. In 1986, the International Year of Peace, the vice president of WILPF, Stella Cornelius, was appointed director of Australia’s International Year of Peace secretariat by the government. In 1989, the twenty-fourth international triennial conference was held at Sancta Sophia College in Sydney. The Australian section hosted women from all over the world under the slogan ‘Women building a common and secure future’.

More recently, the international office of WILPF in New York, where Australian member Felicity Hill was director, lobbied for the United Nations to pass Security Council resolution 1325, adopted in October 2000. This groundbreaking resolution recognised the undervalued contributions women make to conflict prevention and reconstruction, and the unique and disproportionate impact of conflict on women. Since 2005, a network has been created called Young Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (YWILPF), which aims to bring young women’s voices into discussions about peace building. In April this year, 100 years on from its first meeting in 1915, WILPF hosted its anniversary conference at The Hague.

It Will Be a Great Day When Our Schools Get All the Money They Need and the Air Force Has to Hold a Cake Stall to Buy a Bomber
poster in Records of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, Australian Section, 1943–1998
Courtesy Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom | nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn1607690

This short history only begins to describe the many activities and members of WILPF over a century of organising in Australia. WILPF’s founding desire has been to understand the causes of war, not just to protest at the time of war. It has expanded its policy platform to campaign on all issues of inequality, understanding that conflict and violence thrive if inequities remain unaddressed. Its insistence on education has remained consistent. WILPF continues to prioritise programs against the glorification and romanticisation of war, believing that peace history should be promoted as part of the national story.

Kate Laing is completing a PhD in Australian History at La Trobe University, Melbourne. She was a summer scholar at the National Library in 2014

Who Was Usagiya?
A Publishing Puzzle

Emiko Okayama goes down the rabbit hole in pursuit of a mysterious Japanese publisher

Academic research is often like detective work: observing the scene carefully for clues, examining personal effects for evidence, checking piles of documents to find hidden messages and patterns, and following leads to unexpected discoveries. All are labour intensive and do not always result in closure, but the moment of solving a mystery is intensely satisfying and strangely addictive. Such was my experience at the National Library of Australia. This article is about my discovery of a Japanese publisher, Usagiya (Rabbit House), which rose to prominence and disappeared with little trace in the space of ten years.

During my residency at the Library on a Japan Study Grant in 2013, I came across a 16-volume novel printed in Japan. It was Nanso Satomi Hakkenden (Chronicle of Eight Dog Warriors), often shortened to Hakkenden, written by the famous nineteenth-century novelist Kyokutei (also known as Takizawa) Bakin (1767–1848). Unfortunately, four volumes (3, 6, 10 and 15) are missing, but it is still a substantial set. The original Hakkenden (1814–1842) consists of 106 booklets, each containing about 60 pages. Usually, a set of five booklets (which roughly equates to a ‘volume’) was published at the beginning of each year. This occurred almost annually for 29 years, by which time Bakin had lost his eyesight. The Library’s Hakkenden consists of bound volumes of the booklets. When and how it arrived at the Library is a mystery.

LEFT Volumes 1 and 20 of Hakkenden by Kyokutei (Takizawa) Bakin
(Tokyo Kyobashi-ku: Shiseido Tengu Shorin Usagiya Makoto zohan, c. 1886) | nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn1502797

RIGHT Advertisement for Usagiya in Asahi newspaper, 19 April 1887
nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn4465384

On the inside of the cover, the publisher is listed as ‘Usagiya’, but with no date of publication. The name was unfamiliar to me. The catalogue search at the National Diet Library (NDL) in Japan shows over 200 books published by Usagiya, but no record of Hakkenden. A further online search of European, American and Australian libraries returned no match. It is possible that the National Library of Australia is the only library in the world that holds Usagiya’s Hakkenden. An internet search of papers and articles returned only a handful of hits. There seems to be no record of Usagiya written by people related to the firm. This apparent lack of information about the publisher and the novel prompted me to explore further. I resolved to find out two things: the date of publication of the Library’s Hakkenden and the identity of Usagiya.

The volumes themselves hold some clues. The first is on the back cover, which contains the words ‘Usagiya’ (兎屋) and ‘tengu’ (天狗) (the latter translates as ‘heavenly dog’ and is a mythical creature with a long nose). The second is on the title page where three lines are written: ‘Kyokutei Bakin cho/Hakkenden/Usagiya zo han’ (Author Kyokutei Bakin/Hakkenden/Usagiya collection print). The third clue appears on the last page of the final volume (20); it lists 22 publishers and booksellers from Osaka, Kyoto and Edo. An address appears at the end of the list: ‘Tokyo Kyobashi-ku, Minami Nabe machi, Icchome/Shiseido Tengu shorin Usagiya zo han’. This indicates that the book is not an Edo release but a later publication, as the city of Edo changed its name to Tokyo in 1868. The three names for the publisher, Shiseido, Tengu shorin and Usagiya, were a mystery. Were they different names for the same publisher, or three different publishers?

FROM LEFT Detail of preface, title page and preface, and note between back cover and endpaper in Hakkenden, vol. 1, by Kyokutei (Takizawa) Bakin
(Tokyo Kyobashi-ku: Shiseido Tengu Shorin Usagiya Makoto zohan, c. 1886)
nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn1502797

A fourth clue is two red seals stamped on the first page of the text: one reads ‘kashihonbo’ (book vendor) and the other ‘Uchimura’, the name of a shop. Yet another clue lies in the second line of the preface where there is a character, 興, with one stroke missing. This is exactly the same character (but for the missing stroke) that is in the Edo version of Hakkenden held at Waseda University Library. This means that the National Library of Australia’s Usagiya Hakkenden was printed using the same woodblocks as the original Edo version.

The final clue is hidden between the backboard and endpaper (not entirely sealed) of Volume 1. The three-line note says: ‘bound 20 volumes/Daimaru yuta/ Taisho 8, September 21’. The meaning of the second line, ‘Daimaru yuta’, is not clear, but ‘Taisho 8’ is the date of purchase: 1919. This means that the book vendor, Uchimura, bought the 20-volume Hakkenden in 1919, almost certainly for the purpose of lending: the book’s pages have brown stains at their edges, and it was the practice of book lenders to dip the edges of books in persimmon dye to strengthen the paper.

The next step was to find out the exact date of publication. This required a newspaper search. The Library has online access to the Asahi newspaper database, Kikuzo; and Yomiuri newspaper database, Yomidasu. My search results showed that Usagiya had 377 advertisements in the Asahi between 1880 and 1889, and 439 in the Yomiuri between 1879 and 1889. Further, the Publishing and Advertisement Database for the Meiji Era at the National Institute of Japanese Literature (NIJL) records more Usagiya advertisements in other newspapers, including the Tokyo Nichinichi, Eiri Jiyu, Choya and Hochi, amounting to 424 advertisements between 1878 and 1889. Altogether, the number of Usagiya advertisements exceeds 1,200 in just over ten years, and some occupy whole pages.

Illustration in Hakkenden, vol. 1, by Kyokutei (Takizawa) Bakin
(Tokyo Kyobashi-ku: Shiseido Tengu Shorin Usagiya Makoto zohan, c. 1886)
nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn1502797

Among these are two advertisements for Hakkenden, on 23 May 1884 in both Asahi and Yomiuri newspapers. Usagiya advertised a new, four-volume Hakkenden in modern printing (movable type) with new illustrations, to be published in September. Another advertisement on 16 December 1885 revealed a limited deluxe edition of Hakkenden with 106 volumes for 30 yen: 1,000 copies in Japanese-style binding were to be published in January 1886. It also stated that ‘Usagiya spent a fortune to acquire the original woodblocks of the best book in Japan’. Of the two versions of Hakkenden, the Library’s version seemed to be the second, but I needed more evidence. The Jiji Shinpo newspaper provided it in a report on 26 March 1886: ‘The original woodblocks of Bakin’s 106-volume Satomi Hakkenden had been stored at the Izuichi shop. Recently Usagiya acquired them, printed and started to sell’. This confirms that Usagiya acquired the woodblocks, and published Hakkenden in 1886, and that the Library’s Hakkenden is almost certainly a bound version of this. Izuichi was one of the prominent Edo publishers that survived to the Meiji Era but declined soon after. That the woodblocks changed hands reflects a transformation of the publishing industry at that time, when traditional publishers were taken over by new ones with modern techniques.

My search for Usagiya through newspapers and library catalogues unearthed some other interesting facts, and Usagiya emerged as a fascinating figure and force in the Japanese publishing industry. The man behind Usagiya was Mochizuki Makoto, who used a range of names for different publications and purposes. For example, ‘Shiseido’ was used for practical guidebooks which he mainly wrote himself, ‘Hojoya’ for calligraphy books and ‘Kenkondo’ for Edo novels. Other names are ‘Usagiya Makoto’, ‘Usagiya Shoten’ and ‘Tengu Shorin’. This confirms that the two names (‘Usagiya’ and ‘Tengu’) on the back cover of the Library’s Hakkenden are in fact the same publisher.

Illustration in Hakkenden, vol. 1, by Kyokutei (Takizawa) Bakin
(Tokyo Kyobashi-ku: Shiseido Tengu Shorin Usagiya Makoto zohan, c. 1886)
nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn1502797

The first record of Mochizuki appears to be as a clerk at the Ministry of the Interior in 1875, but two years later his name vanished from the staff list. At about the same time, he started to publish his own books and in 1878 Usagiya’s name appeared for the first time. Usagiya quickly rose to the position of top-selling publisher, with a main shop in Ginza (Tokyo) and branches in Osaka, Hakodate, Nagoya and Yokohama, and was the first publisher in Japan to own a horse-drawn carriage. His career as a publisher lasted just over ten years, but has now largely been forgotten. What is remarkable about Mochizuki is his innovative ideas for sales and advertising. His sales tactics included: discounts for pre-publication orders; free gifts; book tokens; trade-ins; discount sales; branch sales; and closing-down sales, all of which were new to the era. In the pre-modern period, books were expensive and discount sales unheard of. Usagiya was a pioneer of mass-produced books, making them accessible to the general public.

Usagiya used advertising cleverly to whet readers’ appetites. He employed illustrations, especially of humanised rabbits, in advertisements, to great comical effect. He also used distinctive frames around advertisements so that they would stand out on text-only pages. Mochizuki himself sometimes appeared in the illustrations, depicted as a good-looking young man. He was also the first to use full-page advertisements for special sales, with hundreds of book titles and discount prices printed on the page.

Kunikazu Odake
Tokyo junikagetsu no uchi. Juichi gatsu (street in Ginza)
(Osaka: Shimizu Tsunezo, 1901) | colour woodblock; 30 x 22 cm
nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn4973023

The succession of discount sales, and sales wars against Osaka publisher Shinshindo between 1885 and 1888, and Sendai booksellers in 1886, severely damaged Usagiya’s reputation and finances. Usagiya’s last public appearance was in a brief report in the Asahi on 15 August 1889, which says: ‘Usagiya disappeared with a notice of “Closed for the day” on the shop door on July 12’.

The meteoric rise and fall of Usagiya represents the tumultuous transition of the publishing industry in early modern Japan. Although the name is often associated with cheap books and Mochizuki’s flamboyant lifestyle, many of his ideas were innovative and have remained the practice of others to this day. Some belated recognition of his achievement came a little over a century after Usagiya’s closure when Kokoku Hihyo Advertising Review, a major advertising journal, listed Mochizuki in December 1996 as one of 50 key figures who contributed to the Japanese advertising industry.

Emiko Okayama is an independent researcher specialising in Japanese language and literature. She was the Library’s 2014 Japan Fellow and 2013 Japan Study Grant recipient

IN A PREVIOUS ISSUE

The Graphic Novels of Kyokutei Bakin — September 2013

Emiko Okayama find parallels between two writers living worlds apart

Gifts from Friends

To mark their 25th anniversary, the Friends of the National Library have donated three striking paintings to the Library for its Main Reading Room. Sharyn O’Brien takes a closer look.

In 2015, the Friends of the National Library celebrate their 25th anniversary. The organisation has come a long way since its first official member, the late Right Honourable Gough Whitlam AC, QC, launched the Friends and delivered the inaugural Kenneth Myer Lecture on 5 April 1990. The Friends now have more than 2,000 members and provide an active annual program of events as well as supporting the Library through annual fellowships and other special projects.

At a function to mark the anniversary in April this year, the chair of the Friends Committee, Robyn Oates, announced that to celebrate the milestone the Friends would gift the Library two paintings by Indigenous Australian artists. With a combined value of $25,000, these were selected to be hung in the newly refurbished Main Reading Room. Helen Carroll, Manager of Wesfarmers Arts and Curator of the Wesfarmers Collection of Australian Art, helped the Friends to select these magnificent works. In addition, Wesfarmers also funded the purchase of a third painting for the Library.

All three works were specifically chosen with the Main Reading Room in mind. The aim is to bring light, warmth and energy to the space and to promote stillness and quiet reflection. They were also chosen to represent the range of traditional Indigenous practices that extend across the far north of Western Australia, through exemplary pieces by important artists.

Mabel Juli (b. 1932)
Garnkiny on the Hill  2013
natural ochre on canvas; 150 x 180 cm
Courtesy the artist

The first painting is natural ochre on canvas by Mabel Juli, entitled Garnkiny on the Hill (2013). Juli is an iconic East Kimberly Warmun artist. Her status as one of Australia’s most revered painters has emerged from a consistent and growing body of work that is informed by stories passed on to her from her family. Born in 1932 at Five Mile, near Moola Boola Station (south of Warmun), she was taken as a baby to Springvale Station, her mother’s country, and immersed in her heritage from a very early age. She is now recognised as an important law, culture and ceremonial figurehead, singer and dancer.

Mabel Juli recalls:

I started painting when the old girl [Queenie McKenzie] was here—she was the one who taught me to paint. She told me, ‘You try that painting’, and I started to paint. I was doing that Garnkiny [Moon Dreaming]; that’s the painting I started with because my mother and father told me that Ngarranggarni Dreamtime story. I was reminded of all those stories from my mum and dad—like Glingennayn Hill and the Old Woman Singing Out for Her Dog. Those stories come from my country. They used to take me out bush when I was a little girl—a good size—and they told me all about those stories. And I always remember those stories. I got ’em in my brain.

Juli’s paintings use precious natural earth pigments, which she digs from secret places shown to her by her family. Garnkiny on the Hill (2013) depicts a hill with the moon sitting in the east and lightly resting on top, in Mabel Juli’s country. It is dramatically set against a deep charcoal-black sky. It tells a story about the moon and a star and forbidden love—that of a young man who loved his mother-in-law. The young man was banished to the night sky where he became the moon. He appears every three days when he is reunited with his love, the woman with long black hair who appears as the star.

Minnie Lumai (b. 1940)
Yab-yab-gnerni-gnim (Sugarbag Dreaming)  2009
natural ochre on canvas; 130 x 125 cm
Courtesy the artist 

The second painting is Yab-yab-gnerni-gnim (Sugarbag Dreaming) (2009) by Minnie Lumai. Now in her late seventies, Lumai lives and works in Kununurra in the East Kimberley. Minnie Lumai’s paintings are vibrant and serene, perfectly balanced by a palette which is velvety and elegant. She is highly skilled at blending natural ochres to produce a range of soft shades—pale pinks, olive greens, mustard yellows, blue greys, purple mauves and crimson red browns.

Lumai’s country, within the Keep River National Park, is abundant with sugarbag—a wild bush honey and wax gathered from the hives of native bees. When Aboriginal people hunt there, they often look out for the sugarbag, which is a sweet refreshment as well as being a nourishing and crucial supplement to bush tucker. It is either boiled with water or simply eaten without any further preparation. When sugarbag wax is boiled it softens and is used in the production of spearheads, axes and dress items. The round honey sacs shown in Lumai’s painting hang from the trees, and honeycomb can be found in the ridges of this rocky country.

There are three levels of meaning in the work. It not only describes the sugarbag but is also a landscape painting. The circular shapes depict the rocky country and the Bullo River which eventually ends as a spring, shown as the smaller red and yellow shapes at the end of the river. The third interpretation is the Dreamtime story of how the plains and hills of this country were created by two kangaroos. Arguing over the prized bush honey and wax, the kangaroos eventually decided to divide the country into two parts, creating the stony hills and flat open plains.

Nora Wompi (b. 1935)
Kunawarritji  2012
acrylic on linen; 150 x 180 cm
Courtesy the artist

The third painting, Kunawarritji (2012) by Nora Wompi, was funded by a donation from Wesfarmers. Nora Wompi was born in 1935 in the Great Sandy Desert at Lilparu, living a traditional nomadic life until her early twenties. She has travelled the Canning Stock Route between the Pilbara and the Kimberley all her life. When she was younger, she and her brother would leave the family and take the long walk to Balgo to temporarily escape the harsh conditions of her traditional country.

Wompi’s artwork can be recognised by its beautiful pale washes of clotted creams and soft milky whites, pinks and blues. On occasion, she adds bold strokes of primary colour highlighting references to spirit men, spirit dogs, love magic and specific landscape forms.

In Kunawarritji she depicts her traditional country near the Kunawarritji Community (Well 33) along the Canning Stock Route, south-west of Balgo, a small mission settlement in far north Western Australia. The painting displays lineal patterns representing the tali (sandhills) that dominate this country. The circular shapes represent the scarce rock holes and waterholes dotted throughout the desert. According to the artist, this is good country for collecting bush foods, and Wompi celebrates its ability to give and sustain life.

These paintings are important additions to the Library’s cultural collection. Wesfarmers and the Friends of the National Library hope that they will give pleasure to readers and researchers for many years to come. We encourage you to visit the Library’s extended Main Reading Room to appreciate them in person.

Sharyn O’Brien is the Executive Officer of the Friends of the National Library. The Friends raise funds to support the work of the Library through membership subscriptions and a program of events throughout the year. For further information on how you can support the Friends, and also take advantage of the membership benefits on offer, visit nla.gov.au/friends

Since 2001, the Friends of the National Library of Australia Inc. have donated almost a quarter of a million dollars to support the work of the Library. Donations include:

contributions towards the establishment of the Treasures Gallery, earning the Friends Silver Treasures Gallery Partner status

$12,000 annually for a Travelling Fellowship for a Library staff member

$10,000 annually for a Creative Arts Fellowship

digitisation of a year of The Canberra Times newspaper

digitisation of documents relating to Australian Federation.