September 2014

Volume 6 Number 3

On the cover

J.W. Power (1881–1943)
page in Norfolk Sketchbook 1930s
pencil, ink and colour wash
24.2 x 16.6 cm
Pictures Collection; nla.gov.au/nla.pic-vn6292751-s17

This work by J.W. Power appears in one of his numerous sketchbooks held by the National Library.

Perhaps the most successful expatriate Australian artist of the interwar years, Power’s art is little known, primarily because he lived and worked in London and Paris. As part of the group Abstraction–Création, Power was closely associated with other avant-garde artists of the period.

The Library’s latest exhibition, Abstraction–Création: J.W. Power in Europe 1921–1938, brings together, for the first time, Power’s sketchbooks from the National Library’s collection with his paintings from the University of Sydney.

Copyright and credits

The aim of the quarterly The National Library of Australia Magazine is to inform the Australian community about the National Library of Australia’s collections and services, and its role as the information resource for the nation. Copies are distributed through the Australian library network to state, public and community libraries and most libraries within tertiary-education institutions. Copies are also made available to the Library’s international associates, and state and federal government departments and parliamentarians. Additional copies of the magazine may be obtained by libraries, public institutions and educational authorities. Individuals may receive copies by mail by becoming a member of the Friends of the National Library of Australia.

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Contents

Abstraction–Création: J.W. Power in Europe 1921–1938

Pen to Paper
George Essex Evans

Colonial Mascots: Continuing a Regimental Tradition

Collections Feature
Australia’s Future on the Cards

The Australian National Review: A Brave Cultural Venture in an Embryonic City

In the Frame
‘Wizard of the Air’: Maurice Guillaux

Politically Speaking: Interviews with Parliamentarians

The East Indies: Hidden Reefs, Hidden Dangers and Alexander Dalrymple’s Response

Marcus Clarke, Communards and Convicts

Support Us

Friends of the National Library

The National Library Bookshop

Abstraction–Création:
J.W. Power in Europe 1921–1938

A.D.S. Donaldson and Ann Stephen examine the life and work of artist J.W. Power, the subject of the Library’s latest exhibition

J.W. Power was Australia’s most successful and accomplished artist of the interwar years. Today, however, his life and work are little known, chiefly because he worked in London and Paris. Deeply engaged in the art worlds of these cities, Power’s avant-gardism was unprecedented for an Australian.

It was in Paris—the famed Ville-Lumière—that Power studied, and it was there that he showed his work in step with the avant-garde of his time. From at least the mid-1920s, he maintained a studio in Montparnasse, what he later referred to as his ‘bolt hole’. He was represented by Léonce Rosenberg’s Galerie de l’Effort Moderne, then Galerie Jeanne Bucher, both important drivers of interwar modernism. Power was also a member of the artists’ group known as ‘1940’, and of the Salon d’Art Mural. However, his most important association was with the group Abstraction–Création, which he helped to found, with whom he showed, and in whose annual cahier he had his work reproduced and his writings published. Part insider and part outsider, Power moved freely within this milieu. For these reasons, his work can illuminate the relationships between Sydney and Paris, and between France and Australia: an exchange that goes to the heart of our modernism.

J.W. Power (1881–1943)
Detail from page in Norfolk Sketchbook 1930s
pencil, ink and colour wash; 24.2 x 16.6 cm
Pictures Collection; nla.gov.au/nla.pic-vn6292751-s17

Little is known of John Joseph Wardell Power’s early art career. Born in 1881, and given the names of both his surgeon father, Joseph Power, and his grandfather, the pre-eminent colonial architect William Wardell, he is said to have begun to draw as a boy. Among his 54 sketchbooks held by the National Library are two early examples, mostly of landscapes painted in Sydney at the turn of the century. Following in his father’s footsteps, he studied medicine at the University of Sydney, then continued his studies in Vienna and London, where he married Edith James in 1915. During the First World War, he served in the Royal Army Medical Corps. Perhaps affected by this experience, following the Armistice he abandoned a two-decade-long career in medicine for art.

Power’s only known war painting from these years, Ypres (c. 1917–1918) is an image of a single faceless figure standing sentinel, as if in mourning, amid ruins and acid-coloured mists. A memento mori to the devastation of trench warfare, aerial bombing and gassing, it is painted without conventional signs of patriotism. Quiet and reflective, its symbolism strikes a different note to Power’s post-cubist work of the 1920s; it was perhaps painted while he studied in the Paris atelier of Pedro Luiz Correia de Araújo. Power would later attribute his interest in the close analysis of composition to his teacher, writing in 1932 that ‘my own researches extend backwards for about 10 years. I was introduced to the subject by Senhor Pedro Araújo, a Brazilian artist teaching in Paris in 1920 … though I have confirmed and greatly extended it’. Araújo had briefly taken over the role of Director of the Académie Ranson from Maurice Denis in 1917, but left this position to set up his own school in the following year. Though little, unfortunately, is known about the Cariocan’s atelier in Paris, it was ‘the first to include a curriculum in the discipline of geometry’.

J.W. Power (1881–1943)
Ypres c. 1917
oil on canvas; 76.4 x 45.8 cm
Courtesy Australian War Memorial; ART19570

A formal photograph shows Power standing in a studio in the middle of the back row of a group of 11 students, who have apparently interrupted a life-painting class to pose for the photographer. The professor with a distinctive moustache, standing somewhat apart, arms crossed, beside the model, is French painter, sculptor and filmmaker, Fernand Léger. Power had moved, as did others who had studied with Araújo, to the Académie Moderne by 1924—although, at 40 (the same age as Léger), he was older than most. Remarkably, his drawings from that class survive and are among the sketchbooks held by the Library.

Fernand Léger’s Academie Moderne c. 1924
b&w photograph; 16.5 x 35.5 cm
Edith Power Bequest 1961, The University of Sydney, managed by Museum of Contemporary Art
PW1961.1176

Léger’s first year of teaching, in 1924, was a personal turning point, coinciding with his shift towards the purism advocated by Amédée Ozenfant and Charles Edouard Jeanneret, and the completion of the ‘plotless’ film Ballet mécanique. Léger attracted mostly foreign students who, as the art historian Gladys Fabre writes, ‘acquired through travel and training, a more open-minded attitude than their French contemporaries at the Beaux-Arts or Arts Decoratifs schools in Paris’. Power’s colleagues were mainly Scandinavians, all of whom became foundational modernist figures in the countries of their birth. One of Power’s drawings, Footballers (1924), a figure group with ‘the volumes treated as cylinders’, is an adaptation of Léger’s machine-like foot soldiers to civilian life. Power’s drawing was reproduced that year in the Bulletin de l’effort moderne, the influential art journal published by Léonce Rosenberg—Léger’s, and later Power’s, dealer.

Throughout the 1920s, when not in Paris, the Powers lived at ‘Therapia’, a house at Bournemouth, on the south coast of England, which Power considered initially as a retreat, but then a millstone, until its eventual sale in the early 1930s. Many of Power’s sketches are drawn on concert programs from Bournemouth’s renowned music festivals of the 1920s, which featured such musicians as Sibelius, Elgar, Holst and Bartok. His tightly ordered cubism of the late 1920s looks to the geometric work of Juan Gris, an artist Power admired, and whose Sorbonne lectures he refers to and may well have attended. In his correspondence, Power wrote that, when he was ‘too worried to draw or paint’, he would get ‘hold of an algebra book and a penny notebook & work at the Binomial theorem and exponentials’.

From his retreat on the south coast, it was to London that Power turned in embarking on a career in postwar Europe. In 1922, he was briefly a member of the 7 & 5 Society, a group that, according to the art historian Denys Wilcox, was the ‘cradle of English abstraction’. Power was elected a member of the more progressive London Group in 1923 and exhibited with that broad church of mostly British modernists annually (with the exception of 1926) until 1930. When Power held his first one-person exhibition at the Independent Gallery in London in 1926, The Sunday Times’ art critic, Frank Rutter, observed that Power’s paintings were aligned not with the work of British artists but with ‘the most advanced painters of Paris’.

J.W. Power (1881–1943)
Detail from page in Avignon and Paris Sketchbook 1930s
pencil and ink; 20.5 x 23.9 cm
Pictures Collection; nla.gov.au/nla.pic-vn6292743-s3

From 1926, if not earlier, Power maintained an apartment studio in Paris overlooking the Montparnasse Cemetery, just off the Boulevard Raspail. One of the most significant relationships marking Power’s first decade in Paris was the one with his gallerist Léonce Rosenberg, with whom he showed until 1933; he was even identified by the art critic and art historian Maurice Raynal as a member of ‘l’Ecole Léonce Rosenberg’. Rosenberg published 40 issues of the Bulletin de l’effort moderne (1924–1927), an important forum for avant-garde ideas in Europe. From Power’s letters, it is clear that he was commercially successful, and in fact became frustrated with the pressure his gallerist exerted. ‘Rosenberg is squeaking for more. I cannot produce rapidly & at the same time say all I want to say’, he wrote, ‘so we are constantly at loggerheads on this point’. Power was called to Paris by painter Auguste Herbin to establish the artists’ group Abstraction–Création, and it was through this group—devoted to abstraction and its quarrel with surrealism—that Power’s reputation in Paris in the interwar years was cemented.

Power had by then begun to collect contemporary Parisian art, and amassed a substantial library of art books and journals. Recalling his visit to Therapia in 1929, English critic Anthony Bertram remembered the interior being:

hung with paintings by the leading modernists of the day. This was unusual and a further demonstration of his interest in other people. Most artists that I have known have decorated their rooms with their own paintings.

The inventory of Power’s collection reveals that about a third of the works are from before 1920, including those by Léger, Ozenfant, Gris, Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, Diego Rivera and Louis Marcoussis. Sadly, this remarkable art collection was sold after the death of Power’s wife in 1962, though his art library, which included ten Picasso prints and Power’s sketchbooks, were given to the National Library by Edith Power’s niece.

LEFT J.W. Power (1881–1943)
Detail from page in Cubist and Figure Studies Sketchbook 1939
pencil, ink and colour wash; 22.8 x 28.8 cm
Pictures Collection; nla.gov.au/nla.pic-vn6294014-s25

RIGHT J.W. Power (1881–1943)
Detail from page in Miscellaneous Sketchbook 2 1930s
pencil, ink, pastel and colour wash; 18.5 x 27 cm
Pictures Collection; nla.gov.au/nla.pic-vn6293848-s19

Like many artists at this time, Power was interested in the relationship between colour and music, and drew inspiration from the stage, screen and other popular entertainment. A confirmed cosmopolitan, he was thoroughly versed in the history of art, both Western and Eastern. His many painted blooms are always fleurs du mal, while his ‘cowboys’ are steeped in the Parisian avant-garde and its taste for American culture. Paris had its own jazz age, with Josephine Baker as its star. The avant-garde’s take on American popular culture is evident in such works as the so-called ‘American Manager’ (complete with cowboy boots and megaphone) that Picasso designed for Erik Satie and Sergei Diaghilev’s production of the ballet Parade (1917), which launched cubism onto the Parisian stage, and Léger’s Charlot (Charlie Chaplin) marionette in the opening and closing sequences of Ballet mécanique. Power’s art always puts great emphasis on rhythm and movement. Late in life, he reflected on its centrality to his work, writing in his notebook that ‘art is the rhythmical expression (or statement) of feeling. Plastic art is the rhythmical expression of a plastic experience … No rhythm, no art. No feeling, no art’.

Abstraction–Création: J.W. Power in Europe 1921–1938 brings together, for the first time, the two major public holdings of Power’s work: his paintings from the University of Sydney, and his sketchbooks and library from the National Library of Australia. Through his bequest to the University of Sydney, Power sought ‘to bring the latest ideas about contemporary art to Australians’. The exhibition reveals how Power was engaged by ideas and was very much a part of the contemporary art scene of his time.

A.D.S. Donaldson is an artist, curator, art historian and lecturer at the National Art School, Sydney. Ann Stephen is an art historian and Senior Curator of the University Art Gallery at the University of Sydney

Abstraction–Création: J.W. Power in Europe 1921–1938 is on show until 26 October 2014

Pen to Paper: 
George Essex Evans

Portrait of George Essex Evans
opposite title page in The Secret Key and Other Verses by George Essex Evans
(Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1906)
Australian Collection; nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn230769

George Essex Evans was born in 1863 and spent much of his childhood in Wales. In 1881, he emigrated to Queensland and set up a farm with his brother. A riding accident meant that he was unable to undertake heavy manual work, so he became a teacher and, later, a public servant. He married in 1899 and settled near Toowoomba.

Evans contributed poetry, essays and criticism to Australian and English publications. He was agricultural editor for The Queenslander and also wrote travel books. From about 1883, Evans’ poems began to appear under several pseudonyms, including ‘Christophus’: the by-line used for the poem An Echo when it appeared in The Queenslander in July 1887. An extract from the poem is featured here, together with a manuscript from the Library’s collection showing Evans’ drafts of some of the lines. An Echo was later published under his real name in the collection The Repentance of Magdelene Despar and Other Poems (1891).

Patriotic poems, such as his prize-winning Ode for Commonwealth Day, a celebration of Federation, brought Evans to national attention. However, as issues such as nation building and federalism became less topical, the popularity of his work declined.

Evans died in 1909 in Toowoomba.

Manuscript of An Echo
in Papers of George Essex Evans
Manuscripts Collection; nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn2235411

An Echo

In the harmony of ages floating from the dreamy Past,

In the old romantic legends where the seeds of song were cast,

In the pleasant fields of Fancy, whence the flowers of genius sprung,

Can we find a path untrodden! Can we find a song unsung!

Lamps of Genius burning brightly thro’ the mists of bygone days,

With the light of strong endeavour over mingling with their rays;

Dreams of dreamers, chants of singers made immortal in their song,

With a soft and tender cadence, or a passion fierce and strong;

Like the chimes from distant belfries, like the restless winds that blow

Northwards with tempestuous fury, southwards musically slow;

Like the thunderous roar of breakers bursting on a rocky strand,

Or the rhythmic rippling river murmuring softly thro’ the land;

Sinking, soaring, swelling upwards sound their melodies sublime—

Sound the Voices of the Ages echoing thro’ the Halls of Time.

George Essex Evans (1863–1909)
An Echo in The Queenslander, Saturday 9 July 1887, p. 49
Newspapers and Microforms Collection; nla.gov.au/nla.news-article19925932

Colonial Mascots:
Continuing a Regimental Tradition

Over a century ago, the New South Wales Lancers set sail for England for training. They took some unusual companions with them, as Craig Wilcox reveals

Odd as it now seems, the first Australian soldiers to leave for the Boer War in 1899 left from England. They were cavalrymen, a hundred members of a proud regiment called the New South Wales Lancers, who had just spent six months at Aldershot, the British Army’s training ground. They had tried to acquire the arcane skills of mounted combat which, as amateurs from a land with no real army, they had little hope of learning back home. But the training went badly from the start. To the British Army’s mind, cavalry skills were based on how a soldier sat on his horse and controlled its movements. Soon after arriving, the Lancers were sent to learn to ride all over again and the experience humiliated them. They grew angry, the British Army grew embarrassed, and real training gave way to public exhibitions.

In truth, these displays were part of the reason for the venture in the first place. The Lancers were ambassadors from Britain’s loyal colonies. Their presence was supposed to help to bind the empire together, even to kick off interchanges between its regiments—though this was controversial. They were certainly there to advertise their colony in London, epicentre of empire and focus of Australian investment and trade. Charles Cox, the railway clerk from Parramatta who led the little squadron, was more than a captain. He was also an impresario, exhibiting an act that never failed to please the London crowd.

Captain C.F. Cox
page 527 in The Illustrated London News, 15 April 1899
Overseas Serials Collection; nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn759241

In New South Wales, the Lancers could seem a little affected, even somewhat English, with their cavalry airs, the sculpted scarlet lapels they wore in full dress, the rooster feathers that bobbed arrogantly from their slouch hats, the former Governor’s crest they wore as a regimental badge. They were not recruited from the rural workers said to be uniquely Australian. But once in England, almost any Australian became a son or daughter of the Bush, whether or not he or she could even act the part. It was sufficient to look it, and Cox’s men did so. They were tall and lean, or most of them were. Their uniform had some flash to it, but what stood out was its practical shade of brown cloth and its casual hat. The squadron embraced its Australian image in England, indeed shamelessly advertised it. Among its most successful advertisements were the two tame and timid animals it brought across the globe as symbols of wild Australia—and perhaps also proof that the men were real soldiers in a real regiment.

New South Wales Lancers, Who Left London on Oct. 10 for Service in South Africa
page 536 in The Illustrated London News, 14 Oct 1899
Overseas Serials Collection; nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn759241

British Army regiments began acquiring pets in the eighteenth century. They were typically found or rescued while on service in some far-flung corner of empire, brought back home, exhibited, indulged, had fun with; the 17th Lancers kept a bear from India which they fed with bread and milk, jam and fruit, and a pint of beer a day. Ethnic or geographic identities were preserved and advertised partly by keeping animals from a unit’s own region, hence the shaggy goats of Welsh battalions. When the Victorian Mounted Rifles came to London for Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee in 1897, they brought a kangaroo with them. In 1899, Cox’s squadron went one better and brought an emu as well.

If kangaroos and emus were often shot out of hand a century ago, they were also genuinely valued as quaint and curious stand-ins for the dangerous quadrupeds and raptors of most other lands—the lions, elephants and eagles so beloved of flag designers and armorial draughtsmen. ‘The emu and kangaroo are so built that they hardly fit into the heraldic atmosphere’, a Sydney politician would warn in 1912, ‘and I think we make ourselves ridiculous when we endeavour to carry on the traditions of the Old World with some of the wild creations of our Australian fauna’. Australians had been making themselves ridiculous for a century. By the 1820s the kangaroo and emu had been conscripted as armorial bearers to an unofficial, but enormously popular, coat of arms bearing a Southern Cross and the humble, hopeful motto ‘Advance Australia’. It was to bring this coat of arms to life that some Singleton folk gave their departing Lancers an emu on hearing that a young kangaroo was already recruited for the venture.

‘Ah’, laughed a Sydney newspaper on hearing of the gift, ‘they will doubtless astonish the natives, besides being handy in case of famine or ship wreck’. But would the natives really be astonished? ‘We are now so familiar with the name and form of the kangaroo’, a London newspaper had observed five years earlier, ‘not only from books, but also from the living specimens in travelling menageries, and the gardens of the Zoological Society’. But when the squadron landed, Londoners came forward nonetheless to peer at the curious pets in their wooden crates. At Aldershot, the kangaroo made a diverting spectacle, and some of the soldiers’ children, who lived in the military town, liked to feed the voracious and undiscriminating emu on grass and corn. Within a month, both animals were being applauded for their unlikely appearance at the Islington military tournament, where some Lancers put on their uniforms to play the part of colonial allies and others blackened their skins to play African enemies.

The Pet Kangaroo and Emu of the Corps
page 646 in The Illustrated London News, 6 May 1899
Overseas Serials Collection; nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn759241

The squadron was said to be fond of its pets. But animals could be treated as trophies in that stricter, less indulgent age than ours—exhibited more than protected. Then there were the practical problems of the long sea voyage to England and even longer accommodation in a strange land. Perhaps panicked by rough seas, the kangaroo fell down the ship’s hold, colliding with a sailor on the way. After swallowing a metal badge and a couple of small sponges, the emu had to be ‘immediately placed on the sick list’. At Aldershot, generally confined within small wire cages, the animals had a colder, wetter, more cramped, more frightening experience than their guardians did—hence the temporary kidnapping of one of them by a sympathetic British officer, who had a new cage built for it ‘in our garden where the kangaroo can get air & grass’.

There was no question of taking the kangaroo and emu back to Australia when the venture ended. Two years earlier, the Victorian Mounted Rifles had presented their kangaroo to the Queen after celebrating her diamond jubilee; Cox now offered his emu to the Prince of Wales. ‘He thinks’, a private secretary replied cautiously on the Prince’s behalf, ‘that for the moment and until he has had suitable accommodation prepared for the Emu at Sandringham, it had perhaps better be sent to the Zoological Gardens, Regents Park’. The famous zoo had been open to the public for the past half-century, and each year more than half a million visitors paid a shilling an adult, or sixpence a child, to see ostriches donated by a Lieutenant of the West African Frontier Force, a gnu given by a director of Consolidated Gold Fields, two zebras from the Emperor of Ethiopia, an elephant brought home from India—a menagerie of empire. The emu went into a cage labelled ‘The gift of the New South Wales Lancers upon their departure for South Africa’.

Robert Cruikshank (1789–1856)
Popular Gardens—Tom, Jerry and Logic Laughing at the Bustle and Alarm Occasioned amongst the Visitors by the Escape of a Kangaroo 1822 (1887 reproduction)
hand-coloured etching; 15 x 24.7 cm
Pictures Collection; nla.gov.au/nla.pic-vn4893028

The cage was likely to have been small, and to have offered little protection from wet weather and occasional cruelty from visitors. The kangaroo had better prospects, being a gift to Earl Carrington—the former Governor whose crest the cavalrymen wore. On his first morning, the animal lapped his customary cup of tea. He was free to roam in a large, well-fenced enclosure and, for better or worse, enjoyed the attentions of Carrington’s five-year-old son. It was hard, though, for Englishmen to credit the height a kangaroo could jump. He escaped two or three times, on one occasion flicking his powerful tail into the face of his pursuers. But captivity did not last long. At the turn of the century, around the time that Australians were celebrating Federation, the English winter claimed him.

Carl Linger (music, 1810–1862), C.J. Carleton (lyrics)
The Song of Australia (cover)
(Adelaide: S. Marshall & Sons, c. 1883)
Music Collection; nla.gov.au/nla.mus-an6488132

Within a decade, a symbolic kangaroo and emu would become bearers of an official Australian coat of arms. The reductive power of national iconography elevated these animals ever further in the mental menagerie of Australians, edging regional wildlife into the wings. The rooster feathers worn by the New South Wales Lancers eventually surrendered to the emu plumes that spread among the hats of the Australian Light Horse. In some English minds the surrender had occurred earlier. When Cox’s men left London for the Boer War, a reporter from The Pall Mall Gazette claimed to notice their ‘well-known headgear, with the perky emu cockade’.

Craig Wilcox’s latest book is A Kind of Victory (2014), published by NLA Publishing

Collections Feature: 
Australia’s Future on the Cards

By Linda Groom

In 1810, geography was a gratifying subject for the schoolchildren of France. Most of Europe was under French control. Although Great Britain had managed to resist Napoleon’s military might, a publication of that year, Sixth Game of Geography Cards (Sixième jeu de cartes géographiques), shows that Britain was being subjected to a barrage of French scorn. It was a geographic fact that British weather prevented fruit from ripening fully, and the people were unsociable and grossly indelicate about the means by which they had acquired wealth. This information was conveyed by Étienne de Jouy on the card for Angleterre in a pack of 48 flashcards designed for French children. He noted that the British despised all other races—except the French, whom they hated. And, in perhaps the unkindest cut of all, he wrote that Britain was ‘deprived of vines’. No elaboration was needed: French scholars of the tenderest age would instantly understand the dire nature of such a situation.

The 48 cards now reside in the Library’s Maps Collection, with an accompanying map of the world by Jean Baptiste Poirson. The involvement of de Jouy and Poirson indicates the importance of this publication. De Jouy moved in Napoleon’s circle and his writing was feted by the Institut de France. Poirson’s cartography was included in popular atlases and in the massive volumes documenting the voyages of explorer Alexander von Humboldt. Poirson’s accompanying map is a restrained echo of de Jouy’s views of the British. He has thinned Britain down to a scrawny island, half obscured by lettering.

Étienne de Jouy (1764–1846)
Sixième jeu de cartes géographiques 1810
card game
Maps Collection; nla.gov.au/nla.map-rm4622

Although, in his cartographic treatment of the Antipodes, Poirson has allowed Australia to retain a natural plumpness, the lettering on the map conveys his political views. The words ‘NOUVle HOLLANDE’ stride confidently across the Australian continent. In 1806, when Poirson drew the map, Holland was controlled by Napoleon’s brother, Louis. The prominence that Poirson gives to the link to Holland contrasts with the earlier division of Australia into the halves of Hollandia Nova to the west and Terre Australe to the east. This division had been made in 1663 by the French diplomat Melchisédech Thévenot, when it was in France’s interest to imply, through the neutral name of Southern Land, that eastern Australia was still available for claim. On Poirson’s map, the east coast is given the appellation N. Galles Méridionale, clearly stating France’s claim to the area. French cartographers—such as Louis de Freycinet in 1811—sometimes also labelled it Nouvelle Galles du Sud, refusing to use ‘New South Wales’ until well into the 1830s.

Napoleon’s passionate interest in educating the youth of France to become the future administrators of his empire is well documented. This map and card set is a testament to that passion, and an artefact from the decades when Australia may still have had a French future.

The Australian National Review: A Brave Cultural Venture in an Embryonic City

Patricia Clarke peruses the pages of a short-lived, but remarkable, Australian journal

This year marks 75 years since the demise of one of Australia’s most courageous cultural publishing ventures. The last issue of the monthly Australian National Review was published in Canberra in August 1939 on the eve of the Second World War. Surprisingly, at a time when Australia had no national newspaper, and when similar periodicals based in populous cities struggled to find a national readership, The Australian National Review had lasted for 32 months. Even more extraordinary was the fact that it had survived in the national capital, then a small city of only about 9,000 people living in a few scattered suburbs on either side of the meandering Molonglo River.

left Cover of The Australian National Review, vol. 1, no. 2, 1 February 1937
Australian Collection; nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn140992

right The Australian National Review, vol. 6, no. 31, 1 July 1939
Australian Collection; nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn140992

During its existence, the Review’s list of contributors included many of Australia’s most prominent citizens, including a former Governor-General and a former Prime Minister, ministers in federal and state governments, and leading lawyers, scientists, historians, churchmen, writers and poets. As well as holding all issues of The Australian National Review, the National Library also houses, in its Manuscripts Collection, the papers of many of these contributors.

The Australian National Review was a venture by three Canberra residents, entomologist Dr Robin Tillyard, journalist and author William Farmer Whyte, and retired public servant Jens Lyng. When they registered the Canberra Publishing Company in July 1936, their ambitious plan was to publish and distribute a monthly national periodical to encourage free and frank discussion of politics, sociology, economics, science, philosophy, history, literature and the arts. They aimed to stir Australians to engage in vigorous debate about the future in the uncertain climate of the late 1930s—as the shadow of Nazism and Fascism raised the threat of war.

The three founders came to Canberra from diverse backgrounds. Dr Robin Tillyard was an English-born scientist, the author of the authoritative The Insects of Australia and New Zealand, published in 1926. Leaving his position as Entomologist at New Zealand’s Cawthron Institute, he had moved to Canberra in 1928 to head the new entomology division of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), the forerunner of the CSIRO. He held the position of Chief Commonwealth Entomologist until 1934, when he resigned due to ill health but remained active in the Canberra community.

William Farmer Whyte, born at Bombala in 1877, began his career as a journalist at The Bombala Times, later editing two metropolitan dailies: the Brisbane Daily Mail, from 1918 to 1921, and The Daily Telegraph, from 1921 to 1923. When federal parliament transferred to Canberra in 1927, he established the Federal News Service in the press gallery, supplying articles on politics to country newspapers. A well-known Canberra identity, he continued running the Federal News Service until his death in 1958.

The third founder, Jens Sorensen Lyng, was a Danish-born intellectual who had established and edited periodicals in Australia and New Guinea. He also wrote two books on New Guinea and the first book on non-British immigrants in Australia, The Scandinavians in Australia, New Zealand and the Western Pacific. He was transferred to Canberra in 1928 in his position as Chief Draughtsman and Linguist in the Bureau of Census and Statistics and continued living in the city after he retired in 1933. (His son, Norman Lynravn, became a senior member of the library profession in Canberra.)

When the Canberra Publishing Company was established, with a capital of 5,000 pounds in one-pound shares, Lyng’s home in the Canberra suburb of Braddon was registered as the address. Early in 1936, he had written to Sir Robert Garran, Chair of the Canberra University College Council, seeking support for the establishment of a ‘high class national magazine’ in Canberra. Councillors commended the scheme but did not offer help. The idea, however, found an enthusiastic supporter in Tillyard, a member of the council. After enlisting the support of Farmer Whyte, the three began to plan the new periodical.

Before the release of the first issue, the organisers took several initiatives to generate publicity. These included sending leaflets seeking subscribers to all those listed in Who’s Who in Australia; approaching about 40 prominent Australians to write for the first few issues; and announcing a cover design competition with a prize of five guineas, which attracted more than a hundred entries from around the country. Publicity efforts continued throughout the Review’s existence. In June 1937, two women contributors, Miss E.M. Tildesley and Mrs Jane Clunies Ross, began a monthly radio session on 2UE Sydney, in which they discussed a topic that had appeared in the previous issue. Later, a national short story competition aimed to spread interest among writers.

The first issue, with a print run of 4,000, was published in January 1937 in a great burst of optimism and with an impressive list of contributors. A favourable leading article in The Sydney Morning Herald praising the venture led to a run on the journal and a further 1,000 copies had to be printed. Later in the year, The London Times also welcomed the new periodical, contributing to a growth in overseas subscriptions.

The first issue concluded with a commentary on topical events; a book review section conducted by Harold White, then deputy Commonwealth Librarian; a film critique section; and a list of recent publications. All became regular features. From the second issue there was also a lively correspondence section. In the first issue the editors announced an innovative idea encouraging the formation of reading and study circles to discuss themes raised in Review articles. The editors suggested that groups could be formed in country centres, small towns and city suburbs wherever there were at least six subscribers. Although this initiative was soon abandoned, it appears to have been an integral part of the initial vision.

Death of Dr. Tillyard
page 20 in The West Australian (Perth), 14 January 1937
Newspapers Collection; trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/41268133

The second issue led with the stunning news of the death of one of the founders and a coeditor, Robin Tillyard, in a car accident near Goulburn. The accident occurred while Tillyard was being driven to Sydney by his daughter, Hope (later Lady Hewitt), to arrange the printing of the second issue by Snelling Printing Works. He had spent his last day in Canberra editing the second part of his article ‘The Age of the Earth’, the first part having appeared in the first issue. Farmer Whyte continued as the sole editor.

As monthly editions appeared, the Review became an established vehicle for commentary on current international, political, social and scientific issues, and an outlet for poetry and short fiction. The contributors included former Governor-General Sir Isaac Isaacs; former Prime Minister J.H. Scullin; prominent politicians such as Sir Earle Page, Richard Gardiner Casey and Norman Makin; well-known public figures including Dr Ernest Henry Burgmann, Anglican Bishop of Goulburn, and James Ralph Darling, headmaster of Geelong Grammar School; economists, historians, scientists and writers; a folklorist, Bill Wannan; and esteemed poets such as Mary Gilmore, Roderic Quinn and Zora Cross, as well as others just beginning to be noted. The Australian National Review has the distinction of printing two of Judith Wright’s first published poems: Earth, in the April 1938 issue, and City Rain, in March 1939.

Governor-General Sir Isaac Isaacs Inspecting Mounted Troops c. 1935
b&w photograph; 20.5 x 14.3 cm
Pictures Collection; nla.gov.au/nla.pic-vn4227828

Many articles were concerned with problems unique to the immediate prewar era. Some expressed forward-looking views and some were surprisingly prescient. The March 1937 issue included an article by Jens Lyng attacking early closing laws for licensed premises entitled ‘A Plea for Commonsense. Why Not Experiment in Canberra?’. He cited the experience of his native Denmark which, he claimed, had transformed from a country of excessive drinkers into a much more sober place following the lifting of restrictions on the serving of alcohol.

While the Review maintained a high standard of contributors and continued to pay them at a reasonably generous rate, it was soon obvious that circulation projections had been too optimistic. By the middle of the second year of operation, the venture was in financial trouble. A public meeting held at the Hotel Canberra on 28 June 1938 expressed almost unanimous support for the continuation of the Review, together with recommendations for a new direction by the raising of capital and the appointment of prominent Canberra business figures to the board. These included newspaper proprietor, Arthur Shakespeare; engineering contractor, Warren McDonald; and the Director of the Associated Chambers of Manufacturers of Australia, Latham Withall. Newspaper journalist and author, Warren Denning, joined the editorial team and for some months he and Arthur Shakespeare took over editorial duties while Farmer Whyte was overseas. Later, bookseller Verity Hewitt joined the board and did much of the administrative work. With an increase in capital, and a renewed campaign for subscribers, the Review continued with a new confidence.

By the middle of 1939, however, the publication had accumulated considerable debts. Ominous signs that the world was plunging into war provided a convenient moment to announce that the Review would be suspended. Its survival for over two-and-a-half years, in a country that The Sydney Morning Herald at the time described as ‘a veritable graveyard of cultural publications’, and in a city as small and immature as Canberra in the late 1930s, is remarkable. Throughout its existence, it had promoted discussion on a wide range of issues and had encouraged and supported Australian writers.

Patricia Clarke has written extensively on women in Australian history and on media history. Her latest book, Eilean Giblin: A Feminist between the Wars, was short-listed for the 2014 Magarey Medal for Biography

IN A PREVIOUS ISSUE

From Pen to Paper: Zora Cross — June 2013

Find out more about the life and poetry of this Australian writer

In the Frame:
‘Wizard of the Air’:
Maurice Guillaux

PETER STANLEY TAKES A CLOSER LOOK AT PHOTOGRAPHS FROM THE LIBRARY’S PICTURES COLLECTION THAT REFLECT LIFE DURING THE FIRST WORLD WAR

In 1914, only four years after Australia’s first powered flight, aviation remained a wonder. In March that year, the French aviator Maurice Guillaux arrived by ship, with his Blériot monoplane and a team of mechanics, to demonstrate the possibilities of flying to large and appreciative Australian crowds.

A former wheelwright, a ‘debonair’ and ‘dapper’ little man (according to the many press reports of his exploits), Guillaux’s ‘fancy work’ thrilled crowds, his plane looping the loop (his trademark manoeuvre) and swooping on spectators, who ducked and cheered. Hailed as the ‘Wizard of the Air’ and the ‘Air Porpoise’, he became the first to fly a hydro-aeroplane from Sydney Harbour.

The possibility of war shadowed Guillaux’s exploits. He took the Minister for Defence for a flight over Sydney, joked with reporters about dropping bombs on Australia’s new fleet and predicted that the ‘next war’ would be won by the side best able to master air combat.

In June, Guillaux announced his intention of flying between Melbourne and Sydney, an unprecedented journey involving careful reconnaissance and the stationing of mechanics at several towns on the way.

Wearing a leather jacket and tricolour scarf over his street clothes, and carrying 1,785 postcards and messages from dignitaries in Victoria to their Sydney counterparts, Guillaux left Melbourne on the morning of Thursday 16 July 1914.

He navigated by compass and, more prosaically, by following the railway, flying via Seymour, Wangaratta, Albury and Wagga Wagga, stopping for the night at Harden. As he passed low over towns like Culcairn, bells rang and train whistles hooted, with school children and their teachers craning for a sight few had seen before. Delayed by wet weather, he lost a day, but took off for Goulburn, Liverpool and Sydney on Saturday 18 July, to be greeted by a huge crowd at Moore Park. (The Blériot monoplane he used has been preserved by the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney.)

Two weeks after his epic flight, Maurice Guillaux was injured in a crash, but he volunteered to serve as soon as news of the outbreak of war arrived in the first days of August. By early 1915, he was back in France testing new warplanes. In 1918, word reached friends in Sydney that Guillaux had been killed flying a new aircraft the year before.

First Flight from Melbourne to Sydney Showing Pilot Maurice Guillaux Standing on a Blériot Monoplane with a 50 Horsepower Gnome Engine, Wangaratta 1914
b&w photograph; 16.4 x 12 cm
Pictures Collection; nla.gov.au/nla.pic-vn3723553

Politically Speaking:
Interviews with Parliamentarians

Oral histories can capture the realities and nuances of political life that are rarely recorded in print, as Barry York discovers

What makes a parliamentarian? Why are some people ‘political’ and others not? Why do some join a party and seek nothing more than to work hard for its success, while others take the next step of nominating for leadership positions and seeking preselection? How do parliamentary processes actually work within the building? Does the parliamentary experience make politicians stronger or weaker in their commitment to democracy?

These are some of the important questions explored by the Old Parliament House Political and Parliamentary Oral History Project, which began in 2009 as a cooperative venture between the National Library of Australia and the Museum of Australian Democracy (MoAD) at Old Parliament House. It’s a great initiative, adding to an already significant collection, with a team of a dozen experienced interviewers recording men and women who were members of federal parliament.

The project also records interviews with ‘rusted-on’ party activists who never sought parliamentary careers. The ‘rusted-on’ category is particularly interesting in this century, when idealism and selflessness in the organisational party realm are no longer so apparent—at least in public perception. The ‘rusted-on’ interviewees remind one of an era when party memberships were much larger and members keenly gave up their time after work to support the party cause, a time much more reliant on wine-bottling and doorknocking. In this category, Aron Paul and Stephen Mills have recorded Labor, Liberal, National and Greens activists, while I had the privilege of speaking with 96-year-old ‘Labor man’ Andrew Moffat, whose activism began during the Great Depression. More interviews are planned with other activists, including individuals from the Australian Democrats and Democratic Labor Party (DLP).

Leonard Frank Reynolds (1897–1939)
Stanley Bruce, Australian Politician, Diplomat and Prime Minister (detail) 1920s
watercolour and mixed media; 38 x 28 cm
Pictures Collection; nla.gov.au/nla.pic-vn5018455

When the project began, the National Library already had a significant collection of more than 250 oral history recordings with politicians, built up over many years. One of the earliest is an interview recorded by Cecil Edwards in 1962 with former Prime Minister, Stanley Bruce. How incredible to hear the voice of a man who was born in 1883 and elected to the federal parliament in 1918! Moreover, Bruce was Prime Minister when the parliament moved from Melbourne to Canberra in 1927. Others of that vintage are Frank Forde, who was Prime Minister in 1945, and Norman Makin, who served from 1919 to 1963. Forde was interviewed by Mel Pratt in 1974, and Makin by Suzanne Walker in 1974 and by Garry Sturgess in 1980.

Hermann J. Asmus
Parliament House under Construction Viewed from Eastern Front Corner, Canberra c. 1925
b&w photograph; 15.7 x 20.4 cm
Pictures Collection; nla.gov.au/nla.pic-vn3113351

The Library is also the repository for the Parliamentary Library Oral History Project (PLOHP) which ran from 1983 to the early 1990s. More than 100 interviews in this collection are with politicians. The PLOHP inspired the Old Parliament House Political and Parliamentary Oral History Project.

Also worth mentioning is the collection of very substantial ‘reminiscential conversations’ which Clyde Cameron, who was in parliament from 1949 to 1980, had with his contemporaries, including John Gorton, Malcolm Fraser and Nancy Buttfield. There is also a substantial interview with Garfield Barwick, totalling over 94 sessions and 72 hours. This remarkable collection is gradually being made available online via the Library’s catalogue.

Canberra Parliament House Staff 1935
b&w photograph
Pictures Collection; nla.gov.au/nla.pic-vn6161823

MoAD’s oral history program is much younger than the National Library’s. It started in 1995 when the manager of Old Parliament House recorded an interview with a man who worked on the construction of the provisional Parliament House in the mid-1920s. Recordings were made with workers and staff who had toiled in the building when it was home to the national parliament: everyone from political staffers, attendants, Hansard workers and journalists, to police, hairdressers, drivers, tradesmen, librarians, waitresses and chefs.

With the opening of MoAD at Old Parliament House in May 2009, the focus changed and encompassed Australian democracy in general. The museum expanded the oral history program to include former parliamentarians and political party activists. This broadening of scope enabled the cooperative project with the National Library to be designed and instigated.

More than 80 interviews have been recorded so far and added to the Library’s existing collection. Over 70 are interviews with former parliamentarians who were in parliament between 1957 and the 1990s. Former Deputy Prime Minister, Doug Anthony, who held the seat of Richmond in northern New South Wales from 1957 to 1984, represents the earliest vintage in the project. At 15 hours in duration, his oral history is also one of the longest.

Geoff Pryor (b. 1944)
Joan Child, Madam Speaker of the House of Representatives 1986
pen, ink and wash; 26.1 x 30.1 cm
Pictures Collection; nla.gov.au/nla.pic-an23418709

About half of those interviewed were born in the 1920s and 1930s. Sadly, four of the former parliamentarians—Gordon Bilney, Joan Child, Ian Wilson and Michael Hodgman—have since died. Their stories and reflections live on in their own words, thanks to the Library and the interviewers, Rob Linn, Susan Marsden and Peter Sekuless.

Twenty-six of the interviews from this project are available in full as online audio via the Library catalogue, Trove and search engines such as Google. Interviews are made available in this way in cases where permission has been given, or where they are classified as ‘open’. Online interviews include conversations with Bill Hayden, Norm Sanders, Warwick Parer and Barry Jones; these join interviews which predate MoAD, such as the one with Frank Forde. Nowadays, each interviewee completes a rights agreement which allows them to impose restrictions on access. Access conditions are fairly evenly split between those with no restrictions and those that can only be accessed with the permission of the interviewee. A small number have other conditions such as ‘closed until 2035’.

Most source material about parliamentarians and parliamentary politics is print based, and this has generally meant that accounts of an individual’s life begin with election to parliament, when they start to receive publicity. Oral history is one way of rectifying this, through the creation of a spoken record that factors in earlier formative experiences and influences. The wonderful print and online publication known as Hansard reveals what is said in the House of Representatives and in the Senate—but what goes on for the parliamentarian outside the sittings? How does the parliament actually work in terms of daily grind, utilisation of spaces in the parliamentary building, and human relationships?

And what of the broader context? The interviews invariably throw light on this, in its social, economic, cultural and political dimensions. Inevitably, world events, as well as national ones, influence the parliamentarians, some of whom have amazing stories about travelling and meeting world leaders. The interviews reference Australian and global events from the 1940s to the 1980s.

The broad areas for discussion in each interview are: family background, formative years, employment experiences, marriage, politics, memories of the provisional Parliament House, parliamentary career, memories of prime ministers, transition to the new Parliament House, and retirement. Some interviewers, including myself, conclude each interview with a set of questions relating to the individual’s view of how democracy has developed in Australia since their time in parliament. One of my favourite concluding questions is: ‘How would you respond to a young person who asked whether they should pursue a political career?’.

I also sometimes ask about personal tastes: favourite books, music and film. While the question may seem trivial, I’ve found that the responses can help reveal the essence of the individual. Responses so far have revealed a range of musical tastes, from classical to rap metal.

As one of the project’s interviewers, I am always keen to explore how, if at all, a parliamentarian has been influenced by their parents’ politics and religious beliefs. I’m also interested in the role played by class origins. Generally speaking, a commitment to community or public service, and a desire to change things for the better, emerge as the principal motivations among those I have recorded.

Barry York
The Hon. Michael MacKellar Taking Part in an Oral History Interview 2010
photograph
Courtesy Museum of Australian Democracy at Old Parliament House

The project is throwing light on processes that, outside the parties, are little understood, including the all-important preselection. Processes change over time, and differ from party to party, but Michael MacKellar’s musings on his preselection by the Liberal Party in the 1960s provide an example of the insight that can come from reflection, and the engaging nature of the spoken word:

You would try to work out how the numbers were going, and if somebody told you they were going to vote for you, you were always very suspicious.

That was exactly the same in the party room as well. There was one famous occasion of the ballot in the party room. One member just stood for a seat, and his great mate said, ‘Look, you can count on my vote, of course’, and he only got one vote: his own. [Laughs.]

Another area of political life that is rarely recorded in print relates to the effects of a parliamentary career on marriage and family. The oral history interviews allow for each individual to talk about this issue and, in my experience, it has, for some, expressed itself as a lingering emotional matter. But that is what oral history, at its best, can achieve. In the relaxed, unhurried context of an interview, based on trust and goodwill, it is possible to reveal the subjective dimension that is not found in the official handbooks.

Dr Barry York is a historian at the Museum of Australian Democracy at Old Parliament House. Interviews in the Old Parliament House Political and Parliamentary Oral History Project can be accessed at nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn4701473. You can email Dr York at: Barry.York@moadoph.gov.au

IN A PREVIOUS ISSUE

Between Poetry and Prose: Oral History as a New Kind of Literature — August 1999

Barry York finds a poetic rhythm in an oral interview with Ted Bull, political activist

The East Indies:
Hidden Reefs, Hidden Dangers and Alexander Dalrymple’s Response

Colin Simpson examines the work of an English chartmaker

In the eighteenth century, a time of expanding trade with Asia, the hazardous waters of the East Indies presented a particular challenge for English ships. Asian seafarers, of course, knew their way. For the English, however, guidance of some form was essential if they were to navigate a path through the area’s 17,000 or so islands and reefs.

Help could come from various sources, including local pilots, sailing directions and navigational charts. Collecting and obtaining reliable data for the charts, and presenting it in a usable form for the increasing number of European maritime voyagers to the other side of the world, was difficult, both for the sailors and those who sent them forth.

To obtain observations for chartmakers, early eighteenth-century sailors had to do the observing themselves; in England there was no established national or international body to carry out or coordinate such work. Ships’ courses, landfalls, islands, currents, reefs, winds, coast profiles, harbour details and maps had long been routinely prepared by mariners, but the resulting manuscript information was not often shared—for commercial reasons, and because there was no coordinating body. By the beginning of the seventeenth century, the Dutch had established a quasi-official mapping authority, under the control of the Dutch East India Company, which prepared and issued sea charts to captains who were voyaging to areas of particular commercial interest, such as the East Indies. The English also had reason to act. From 1600, over a period of 230 years, 4,600 voyages set out from the River Thames. Of these, 231 ships were lost: wrecked, ravaged by storms, or destroyed in conflict. Reaching and navigating the East Indies required the following of a complex route and it was essential that the charts were updated as new information became available. The French, too, were aware of their charts’ inadequacies and, acting before the English, in 1720 established the Dépôt des Cartes et Plans de la Marine.

Watering Place at Java in the Streights of Sunda nineteenth century
oil on copper sheet; 17.7 x 25.3 cm
Pictures Collection; nla.gov.au/nla.pic-an2256909

Plate facing title page and title page in Le Neptune Oriental by Jean-Baptiste-Nicolas-Denis d’Après de Mannevillette
(Paris: Chez Demonville, Imprimeur-Libraire de l’Académie Françoise; Brest: Chez Malassis, Imprimeur-Libraire de la Marine, 1775)
Maps Collection; nla.gov.au/nla.map-ra49

By the second half of the eighteenth century, the English East India Company was challenging Dutch participation in Asian trade. English charts of the South-East Asian archipelago, however, were not up to the task. It was suggested that the Dutch charts that were available had been deliberately left inaccurate by the Dutch: better to lose a few Dutch ships than provide accurate charts for English or French trading rivals. In 1745, the Frenchman Jean-Baptiste d’Après de Mannevillette had made a contribution to overcoming these deficiencies with his atlas, Le Neptune Oriental. In England, chartmakers Mount and Page had published The English Pilot in 1784, but this was assessed by a contemporary as ‘only fit for … posterior uses’.

John Brown (artist, 1752–1787) and T. Blood (engraver, active 1814–1823)
Alexander Dalrymple, Esq., Late Hydrographer to the Admiralty 1816
stipple engraving; 9 x 7.3 cm
Pictures Collection; nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn4200297

Alexander Dalrymple, friend of Joseph Banks and briefly a rival to James Cook to lead the expedition to Tahiti to observe the transit of Venus, recognised the problem. As a young man, Dalrymple had spent time in Madras with the English East India Company. Sailing in South-East Asian waters, he had developed an interest in charting them and had put together an extensive personal chart collection. In 1772, Dalrymple, as a private citizen, published his first charts, which included coastal waters off north Borneo, an area he was later to champion as a possible centre for the expansion of English trade in the region. As it turned out, that honour was to go to Singapore, under the guidance of Sir Stamford Raffles. In 1774 to 1775, Dalrymple published A Collection of Plans of Ports in the East Indies, containing 83 plates and 172 pages of sailing directions and topographical descriptions. Few complete copies of the collection remain, but the National Library holds several composite atlases made up of Dalrymple’s many hundreds of charts, within which can be found more than half of the 1774–1775 charts.

Alexander Dalrymple (1737–1808)
Plan of the Coast and Islands Adjacent to Padang on the West Coast of Sumatra 1774
map; 31.3 x 18.7 cm
Maps Collection; nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn4612583

One such chart is titled Plan of the Coast and Islands Adjacent to Padang on the West Coast of Sumatra. The chart is basic. It is sparely engraved and has no latitude or longitude, but includes a scale in ‘nautic miles’. The data used in the chart’s preparation, as indicated on it by Dalrymple, comes from a Dutch manuscript received from a Chinese noquedah at Canton in 1764, ten years before. The tenuous provenance of the material for the chart suggests a lack of alternative sources which could be drawn upon and reflects the perceived need for a chart of this region. The willingness of English cartographers to use information sourced from Asia also indicates an acceptance by Europeans, and by the English in particular, of the knowledge and navigational competence of Asian seamen. Such expertise is often specifically acknowledged by Dalrymple on his charts.

Dalrymple’s charts began to appear at a time when the laissez-faire approach to printing and selling maps and sea charts was being overtaken by corporate involvement and government regulation. Typically, the date of printing and the necessary government approval is given across the foot of the chart. On the Padang chart it reads: ‘Publish’d according to Act of Parliament by A. Dalrymple 25 Feby. 1774’.

In 1779, Dalrymple acted as Hydrographer to the English East India Company (although never formally appointed to this position), to assist it in its attempts at regularising and improving the quality and reliability of charts. Dalrymple was employed as a private citizen by a commercial organisation—the British Government was still not directly involved. The approach he took was to examine ships’ logs, journals and charts. Within 12 months of commencing, he had examined more than 1,000. His task was daunting. He wrote that:

I have found Poetry the best relief to the Mind, in researches so fatiguing as investigation of Hydrographic Truth, amidst the variety of discordant authorities, all of them claiming implicit confidence.

It was a rare sea captain who allowed that his own navigational observations might be less than accurate.

Alexander Dalrymple (1737–1808)
Sketch Shewing the Cuddalores Track along the Coast of Borneo by A Dalrymple 1761; Chart of the Track of Ship Warren Hastings by John Pascal Larkins; Chart of Part of the Coast of Borneo with the Track of the Ship Henry Dundas by Joseph Lindley 1790; Chart of the Glatton’s Track along the East Coast of Borneo by William Macnamara 1787; Chart of the SE Part of Borneo Shewing the Situation of Some Dangerous Shoals by Lieut. John Shortland 1769–1806
five maps on one sheet; 56.4 x 66.9 cm
Maps Collection; nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn3674212

Dalrymple’s efforts may be gauged by examining his resulting charts. A large chart, 61 by 48 centimetres, dated 3 April 1795, shows the coastline off south-east Borneo, including the island today known as Pulau Laut. In preparing this chart, Dalrymple was faced with a difficulty. He had five different navigators’ observations of the coast from five ships, taken over a period of at least 29 years (two of the observations show no year), but no way of knowing which was the most accurate. Dalrymple addresses this problem by presenting the five charts, complete, in a reduced form on his composite chart. He does this by placing each coastline side by side, separated by a margin. He uses one latitude scale along the sides of the chart, thereby aligning all of the charts except his own, the oldest, from 1761. Other features, typical of charts of the time, can be seen—including details of the time at which observations were taken (such as ‘noon’, ‘6.h 30.m’), type of sea bottom (‘mud’, ‘sand dry’, ‘gravel and small shells’) and the sea-current directions. The many sea depths shown on the five versions are very similar, testament to the methodical dedication to the use of the lead line.

Dalrymple’s preparedness to use local names, usually Malay (the lingua franca for the region at that time), for topographic features, shows on this chart. Pulau Laut, literally ‘island sea’, has a non-English syntax; as well, Dalrymple employs a flexible orthography: he uses the spellings ‘Poolo’, ‘Pulo’, ‘Poolow’ and the abbreviation ‘Po.’. Dalrymple can be equivocal: on his own 1761 chart, for what is now ‘Balikpapan’—the name today used for both a city and a bay—he has ‘High Peak called by the Natives Baleekpappan’.

The British Government finally acted and, in 1795, Dalrymple was appointed the first Royal Navy Hydrographer. Dalrymple’s suitability for this post was not wholly without question. He was by then in his late fifties and was regarded as employing a slow, perhaps ponderous, approach to charting. However, by 1807 he had compiled a list of over 1,000 charts. He had taken what he saw as a principled stand by not including charts from the surveys of Frenchman Bruni d’Entrecasteaux, but was summarily overruled by a newly established chart committee. By then 71 years of age, he was further informed that ‘being fully aware … [of] your advanced period of life … [we] deem it expedient to remove you’. He died three weeks after this enforced retirement.

As recently as June 2001, a British Admiralty chart of Indonesian waters—between Sumatra and Singkep—warns mariners, in several places, of ‘uncharted dangers’. Explanatory text in the legend goes on: ‘The presence of uncharted coral heads cannot be discounted’. More than 200 years after Dalrymple took on the task of charting the East Indies, these unresolved dangers confirm the magnitude of the challenges he faced and met.

Col Simpson has a long-term interest in East Indies cartography, which he has been studying for over ten years

IN A PREVIOUS ISSUE

A Journey to the Dutch East Indies — September 2009

Martin Woods explains the importance of rare early documents relating to the exploration of the Dutch East Indies

Marcus Clarke, Communards and Convicts

The author of For the Term of His Natural Life had a real-life encounter with a convict escapee, as Barry McGowan reveals

That there can be any significant untold event in the short, but frenzied, life of Marcus Clarke, one of Australia’s greatest novelists and writers, is a matter of near astonishment. Clarke is best remembered for his convict classic, His Natural Life (later revised as For the Term of His Natural Life). It is not surprising, therefore, that the event concerns convicts. However, they were not from the British Isles but France: Communards exiled to the French colony of New Caledonia, off the east coast of Australia, following the suppression of the Paris Commune in 1871. The following story is based on the National Library’s extensive Newspapers and Microforms collections, and its holdings on Marcus Clarke and New Caledonia.

In April 1873, the steamship L’Orne, with its cargo of 500 French convicts on their way to New Caledonia, called into Hobsons Bay, Melbourne, for fresh provisions and medicine. Most of the prisoners had been afflicted with scurvy; the correspondent for The Argus, almost certainly Clarke, attributed this state of affairs to the emaciated state of the men on embarkation, and their reliance on salted provisions. The prisoners were confined to the main deck in apartments or cages—basically square wooden frames with vertical iron rods—and were ‘enjoying themselves in various fashions … even under the depressing circumstances of exile and sickness’.

The French Transport Ship—Caged Prisoners
page 65 in The Illustrated Australian News for Home Readers, 20 May 1873
trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/page/5734102

Despite the most vigilant surveillance, one of the Communards, Michel Seringue, managed to escape. Clarke, who later interviewed Seringue for The Argus, stated that Seringue had a strange notion that any man who ‘touched English soil’ would be free, and had made up his mind to escape when the ship reached Melbourne. In the early evening, he lowered himself over the side of the boat and, after resting for a while, swam towards the shore. On landing, some fishermen pointed the way to town, where he spent the night in an empty shed.

Later the next day, Seringue made his way to town again, meeting a local Frenchman whom he had seen on the Orne. The Frenchman disabused Seringue of the notion that he was free, and suggested he follow him to his home, which he did. Clarke, an acquaintance of the Frenchman, arrived sometime later. Seringue told Clarke that he had been a gunner in the French Navy and, after being forcibly conscripted into the Commune, had manned a battery behind a barricade, later fleeing to his uncle’s home, where he stayed until he was arrested. A socialistic government opposed to the Versailles-based government of France, the Paris Commune had been established after a revolt in March 1871 by a largely working class–based militia known as the National Guard. The revolt was sparked by the government’s ham-fisted attempt to disarm the National Guard following France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871.

Bruno Braquehais (1823–1875)
Barricade Voltaire Lenoir Commune Paris 1871
b&w photograph
Wikimedia Commons
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Barricade_Voltaire_Lenoir_Commune_Paris_1871.jpg

According to Seringue, 30,000 Communards were executed. Ten men would be taken from the prisons and, if their hands were black with powder, or their shoulders had a gunstock mark, they were shot. Ten more men would load the bodies into wagons before they, too, were despatched. Fortunately, by the time Seringue was captured this wholesale slaughter was over, and instead he was sent to Versailles for trial. Clarke remarked that, while he was not an admirer of the communists, he sincerely hoped that ‘the poor devil has seen the last of his troubles, and will be restored … to his uncle … and to his wife and child’. He refuted the claims in some papers that Seringue was ‘a ferocious and ruffianly fellow’, saying that he was, overall, decent and quiet, ‘remarkably athletic, and tolerably good-looking’. But the story of Clarke and Seringue does not end there. Following Clarke’s report, three letters from the Communards were published in The Argus. Two letters bemoaned the conditions on board the Orne: the generally cramped conditions, the poor food rations, lack of medicine, paltry wine provisions (and the gaolers’ constant attempts to steal the men’s wine) and the prevailing sickness. Another letter thanked the people of Melbourne for their sympathy, good feelings and friendliness.

LEFT Portrait of Marcus Andrew Hislop Clarke between 1860 and 1881
b&w photograph; 14.6 x 10.3 cm
Pictures Collection; nla.gov.au/nla.pic-vn3663411

right John Pyrke & Company
Michel Serigne, the French Communist 1873
carte de visite; 10 x 6 cm
State Library of Victoria; H96.160/2498

A few days later, Clarke wrote to The Argus, asking that a subscription list be raised for Seringue:

not because he is an escaped Communist prisoner, not because he has performed a daring and athletic feat, but simply because he is a fellow creature, who, without having done any very great harm in this wondrous world … is now among us without English, without money, without clothes, almost without friends.

The Escaped Communist
page 5 in The Argus (Melbourne), 25 April 1873
Newspapers Collection; trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/5852481

The editor agreed, and subscriptions totalling 9 pounds were received, some from people of French descent.

Soon after the boat’s departure, another letter reached the editor of The Argus. It had been found in a bottle on St Kilda Beach by the younger brother of Felix Meyer, a student of Wesley College. Felix translated the letter and sent it to The Argus. Apparently, the bottle had been thrown from the Orne as the boat left port and had floated ashore. The writer, ‘A Communist’, tried to evoke the sympathy of his readers by decrying the actions of the French army, which:

gorged itself for 10 days with blood and pillage; shooting men for wearing the trousers of the National Guard … killing the women who begged for their husbands’ lives, and sending the children to follow the fathers … they shot people in masses with mitrailleuses [machine guns] in all the barracks of Paris; in the irregular quarters of the city the ditches of the fortifications were turned into hecatombs of flesh, palpitating, and often yet breathing.

Felix Meyer was a dux of Wesley College in 1875 and later became one of Australia’s leading specialists in obstetrics and gynaecology. Interestingly, he also became a master of languages, a lover of books and learning, and a keen member of the Yorick Club, which Clarke had helped establish.

And what of Seringue? Fortunately for our waterlogged hero, he made good his escape. He was next heard of in September 1873, when he appeared in court claiming back wages from Ludovic Marie, a wine storekeeper of Bourke Street, Melbourne. By this time, he had changed his name to Seringe. After escaping from the Orne, he stayed at Marie’s shop, working without payment, and then for 30 shillings a week. For a time, he was used as a drawcard to attract customers to the shop. Marie stated that he had withstood the temptation to earn a large reward by giving Seringue up to the police. Later, he had also refused a large sum from a theatre company for Seringue’s ‘appearance on the boards’. Nevertheless, he was ordered to pay Seringue 30 shillings. Seringue’s subsequent fate is unknown, but most likely he returned to France.

More importantly, perhaps, what does this incident tell us about Clarke? His status as a ‘wild and Bacchanalian Bohemian’ and a ‘boy nuisance’ are well known and, according to one of his biographers, Brian Elliott, led to his public image as a ‘witty and lazy man who cared nothing for serious things’, a perception Clarke did little to dispel. But, as Elliott and others have remarked, there was a much more serious side to Clarke. He is better remembered as a ‘lover of life, an enemy to everything trite and dull, a witty writer and a brilliant representative of the colonial spirit in Australia’. In researching his epic novel, Clarke journeyed to Tasmania, where he pored over the prison records. At Port Arthur, he saw no beauty or ‘cheering picturesqueness’, only the ‘jetsam’ of the transportation system, the Bastille-like walls of the old prison and the ‘seamed and sullen faces’ of those who remained.

In the preface to the 1874 edition of His Natural Life, Clarke stated that his purpose in writing was to attract general attention to:

the inexpediency of again allowing offenders against the law to be herded together in places remote from the wholesome influence of public opinion, and to be submitted to a discipline which must necessarily depend for its just administration upon the personal character and temper of their gaolers.

He remarked that, although some of the events in the book were ‘tragic and terrible’, it was necessary to record them, for they actually occurred and, ‘if the blunders which produce them be repeated, must infallibly occur again’.

Clarke also commented on the French penal settlement at New Caledonia, which he predicted would repeat the brutal history of Macquarie Harbour and Norfolk Island. As a convict sympathiser, he would likely have been fascinated by the subsequent reports of Communards such as Henri Rochefort, and other convicts, escaping to Australia. Rochefort, a radical journalist, was a strong critic of the French Government and a staunch supporter of the Commune.

If he had lived long enough, however (he died in 1881 at 35 years of age), Clarke would have been appalled by the French Government’s decision to send repeat offenders to New Caledonia, with the prospect that these criminals would also end up on our fair shores. The French convict question soon became one of the issues of the day, and French intransigence on this issue met with howls of protest from the Australian colonies and official requests to have the measures rescinded.

The French Government remained unmoved by these protestations. However, Clarke had already had the last laugh. His decision to instigate a subscription fund for Seringue was both audacious and daring for, at the time, he was assisting a wanted felon and thwarting the operation of the French transportation system. It was a feat worthy of a round of drinks at the Yorick Club, if nothing else.

Dr Barry McGowan is a heritage consultant and historian, and a Visiting Fellow at the School of Archaeology and Anthropology and the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University