The National Library Magazine

Volume 5, Number 1, March 2013

The aim of the quarterly The National Library 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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Chair: Mr Ryan Stokes
Members: The Hon. Dick Adams MP, Ms Glenys Beauchamp PSM, Ms Jane Hemstritch, Dr Nonja Peters,
Senator Gary Humphries, Professor Janice Reid AM
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Senior Executive Staff

Director-General: Anne-Marie Schwirtlich
Assistant Directors-General, by Division:
Innovation and Resource Sharing: Marie-Louise Ayres
Collections Management: Amelia McKenzie (acting)
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Commissioning Editor: Susan Hall
Editor: Tina Mattei
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© 2013 National Library of Australia and individual contributors

ISSN 1836-6147
PP237008/00012

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

ON THE COVER

Ballroom Dancing, Canberra  c. 1942
b&w photograph; 15.5 x 20.6 cm
Pictures Collection
nla.pic-vn4612440

Greg Power (b. 1974)
Dancing at Academy Nightclub, Canberra  2012
digital photograph
Pictures Collection

Canberra resident Jean Whatman remembers Canberra in the 1940s:

One of the things I did after I left school was volunteer at the Services Club or ‘Rec Hut’ as we called it. Our job was to serve the service men and women when they came in for an evening meal. Later in the evening there’d often be a dance. We young girls were allowed to attend provided we’d washed up and everything was clean. It was great fun. I had a few boyfriends there but then they’d be gone and you’d find another one. Nothing very serious. We just loved dancing and in uniform they looked great!

To find out more about how Australia’s capital city has changed over the last 100 years, read the article.

Contents

Canberra: Then and Now

Geoff Page reflects on what Canberra means to him

The Dream of a Century: The Griffins in Australia’s Capital

Christopher Vernon takes us on a tour of the Library’s latest exhibition

Siam and the Sun King: France’s First Embassy to the Thais

Andrew Gosling explores the links between France and Siam during the reign of Louis XIV

A Grand Café

by Ian Warden

The Treasure of the Surat Basin

Luke Keogh travels to Queensland in search of stories about coal seam gas

The Noble Brotherhood of Oars

Robert Holden reveals two books recently acquired by the Library

‘Back to’ Celebrations in Australian Towns and Suburbs

Geoffrey Burkhardt looks at the where, when and why of Australia’s ‘Back to’ celebrations

The Secrets of Syd the Showman

Nigel Starck investigates the mystique of a master mind-reader and finds a clue buried deep in the Library

Support Us Friends of the National Library

The National Library Bookshop

Canberra Then and Now

Geoff Page reflects on what Canberra means to him

THE CONTEMPORARY IMAGES OF CANBERRA WERE PHOTOGRAPHED BY STAFF FROM THE LIBRARY’S DIGITISATION AND PHOTOGRAPHY BRANCH

Molonglo River in Flood, Canberra 1956
b&w photograph; 16.5 x 21.8 cm
Pictures Collection
nla.pic-vn4801902

Aerial View of Capital Hill and Lake Burley Griffin 2012
digital photograph
Pictures Collection

Like most Canberrans today (with the exception, I guess, of the Ngunnawal people), I came here from somewhere else. Like most of us, I really enjoy the city. Why is this so, when Canberra has changed so much since I first arrived in January 1964?

In the mid-1960s my vocation as a poet was just beginning to develop and, perhaps for this reason, I found Canberra’s planned aspect—its curves and triangles, its nature reserves and open perspectives—very attractive, even reassuring. The city was all so nicely understated (to me, at least, another poetic virtue). Back in the mid-1960s, we Canberrans also took a certain pride in our Art Deco buildings—Albert Hall, the old Capitol Theatre in Manuka, Hotel Canberra, Old Parliament House—and, of course, the Sydney and Melbourne buildings in Civic. There was an architectural coherence about the place and it had, even by then, somehow acquired a 1920s patina.

I remember a few well-spaced and well-patronised pubs, a single café (the Blue Moon in the Sydney Building), a couple of single-screen cinemas and the Starlight drive-in. The sixties was a boom period and Canberra, its suburban housing, in particular, was expanding rapidly. There were some suburbs, we were told, where the birthrate was ‘higher than Asia’s’.

I think it was not until the 1980s, though, that Civic expanded to include many of the multistorey buildings that make it look more like a ‘proper’ CBD rather than an unusually well-planned inland town that, inexplicably, has a few rather impressive 1920s buildings. There was a sense of Canberra’s having ‘arrived’—whether our local curmudgeons liked it or not.

Bill Pedersen
Kindergarten Children Being
Escorted to Bus for Home 1957
b&w photograph
Pictures Collection
nla.pic-vn4590018

School Children Boarding the Bus 2012
digital photograph
Pictures Collection

After nearly 50 years, I’m still content to live in a city which so many outside it have dismissed as not having a ‘soul’ or have denigrated for being too ‘bureaucratic’. Is this city of 360,000 the same one of 40,000 that I first encountered? I’m reminded of the ancient philosophical conundrum: ‘Is a wooden boat whose owner has, over time, replaced every plank of timber in it still the same boat?’

Having lived here since 1964, I think Canberra certainly does seem to be the ‘same boat’. The changes may have come in bursts but their impact has been cumulative. Over time, I have been forced to realise that, while I wasn’t paying attention, the city has almost reinvented itself. Despite its great expansion in population and occupied hectares, Canberra has continued to be a city of moderation—not too big and not too small (a kind of ‘Goldilocks effect’ perhaps). Not too close to the interstate metropolises but not too far away either. A place where you can drive to many of the things you might well enjoy in Sydney or Melbourne—and take only 20 minutes to do so, then park without difficulty.

I also enjoy, like so many others, our four distinct seasons—with a number of less obvious ones in between. Despite the misunderstood frigidity of our winter, Canberra’s climate—along with all the pleasures of its via media—is one of the main reasons why, as a teacher and a poet, I’ve so much enjoyed living here.

GEOFF PAGE is a Canberra poet. This article and his poems on the following pages are taken from NLA Publishing’s Canberra: Then and Now, marking the city’s centenary

Ballroom Dancing, Canberra c. 1942
b&w photograph; 15.5 x 20.6 cm
Pictures Collection
nla.pic-vn4612440

Dancing at Academy Nightclub, Canberra 2012
digital photograph
Pictures Collection

Ballroom Dancing Circa 1942

The flash that night was not enough;

a magnifier brings them closer.

We see a little of the faces,

a woman’s flickered apprehension,

a uniform with three wedged stripes,

a show-off grinning for the camera,

floral ballgowns, charcoal suits,

the balding departmental head

with wife, it seems, a few years older.

It’s mainly young but not completely.

A patriotic charity.

We’re shown a fraction of the crowd;

the band, of course, we don’t quite hear

Mrs Edwards Orchestra

was extant at the time. The dance?

A quickstep or a foxtrot surely,

hands around a waist or shoulder.

The date is vague but we surmise

that Singapore’s already fallen,

that Midway is some distance off.

There is a nervousness tonight

no sort of music can assuage.

The old-time niceties of courtship,

are set aside somewhat. The war’s

arrived with all its disregard—

and home front chances, seen and seized.

One smile looks a little drunk,

a junior clerk, a two-bob lair,

but so far all is decorous;

the decencies are well-preserved.

The Japanese in ’37

were not so formal with Nanking.

Somewhere, later on tonight,

there’ll be some things not meant to happen,

decisions rushed or brushed aside,

events with no quick explanation,

regretted or not quite disowned

next morning in the hostel mirror,

examining a stain of grass

or holding up a ruined stocking.

Secrets that will not stay secrets

require particular solutions

of which a war is only one—

the posting north, the sudden transfer,

the name seen later, ‘Killed’ or ‘Missing’,

the anonymity of cities

where all the streets are rich with strangers

and futures that can be erased.

William James Mildenhall
(1891–1962)
Manuka Swimming Pool 1930s or 1940s
b&w photograph
Pictures Collection
nla.pic-an11030057-329

Manuka Pool 2012
digital photograph
Pictures Collection

Detail in a War Museum

Behind a door that reads STAFF ONLY

there is a corridor of them,

mannequins unclothed and leaning

awkwardly along a wall.

Jaws set square, hair trimmed to sail

eyes sky-blue with resolution

it seems they're almost ready now

wanting only fresh khaki

some slight adjustment of the limbs

and lastly orders—which war to

go back to? which war yet to come?

R.C. Strangman
Australian War Memorial c. 1940
b&w photograph; 16.6 x 11.9 cm
Pictures Collection
nla.pic-vn4660686-s213

View from Mount Ainslie 2012
digital photograph
Pictures Collection

L.J. Dwyer (1892–1962)
Blue Moon Cafe, Civic 1953
b&w negative; 10 x 12.5 cm
Pictures Collection
nla.pic-vn4768704

The Barracks LAN Games & Internet Cafe, Civic 2012
digital photograph
Pictures Collection

Busful of Widows National Library

A wind off the mountains

has swept the marble clean.

In coats of muted gaberdine

and scarves against the wind

they move in twos and threes

towards the door,

not saying much.

Reg and Fred and Olley

are spaces in a bed,

an ache that fades like anaesthetic,

a space in the memory.

Freedom it seems

is made up of absence

and a landscape on the move

through glass. Busfuls

at this moment

are fanning out from Sydney

nosing up mountains

or skirting the coasts.

A fringe of grey

escapes the wimpled scarf.

Best years of my life, says one,

have been since Dougie died.

A quick look up

at Grecian columns

then in

through automatic doors.

Obscure and perched in polaroid

the driver scans his paper

and still an engine rumbles on

conditioning the air.

R.C. Strangman
The National Library, Canberra c. 1940
b&w photograph; 6.8 x 8.4 cm
Pictures Collection
nla.pic-vn4660686-s205

National Library of Australia 2012
digital photograph
Pictures Collection

THE DREAM OF A CENTURY

The Griffins in Australia’s Capital

Christopher Vernon takes us on a tour of the library’s latest exhibition

Walter Burley Griffin (1876–1937)
Canberra: Plan of City and Environs (detail)  1916
linen-mounted map; 67.7 x 66.7 cm
Maps Collection
nla.map-nic11

Marion Mahony Griffin and Walter Burley Griffin Gardening in the Backyard of ‘Pholiota’, Heidelberg, Victoria  1918
sepia-toned photograph; 10.3 x 6 cm
Pictures Collection
nla.pic-an24429941

A century ago, Australia ceremoniously began the construction of its national capital. Since then, many hands have shaped Canberra. None, however, are more important than the contributions made by the capital’s original authors, Walter Burley Griffin (1876–1937) and Marion Mahony Griffin (1871–1961). The National Library of Australia’s exhibition, The Dream of a Century: The Griffins in Australia’s Capital, explores the story of Walter’s and Marion’s efforts to realise their prizewinning design.

Walter first learnt of Australia’s imminent Federation while a university student between 1895 and 1899. Divining the need for a new national capital, he then resolved to build it. Unknown to him at the time, it would be a lengthy wait, during which he would monitor the press vigilantly for word from Australia. At last, more than a decade later, the opportunity to design Australia’s capital city finally arrived. The announcement of the design competition for Canberra (yet to be named) must have been a dreamlike experience. Near the end of 1911, in the depths of a frozen Chicago winter, Walter and his new wife and professional partner Marion put their heads together and poured their creative energies into recording a shared vision for the city. Their victory the next year would immerse them in Australia’s capital building enterprise; their association with Canberra would span the next eight years, alter the course of their lives and bring them both joy and despair.

The exhibition showcases material drawn from the office records of the couple’s trans-hemispherical practice in the United States of America (1899–1917), Australia (1913–1935) and India (1935–1937). In 2006 the Library acquired these documents from the children of the Griffins’ Australian partner, Eric Milton Nicholls (1902–1965). Astonishing in size, scope and complexity, the Nicholls Collection covers some 40 years and comprises over 2,500 items, including a diverse range of original drawings, maps, blueprints, photographs and lantern slides of the Griffins’ public and private works. Although the Griffins’ Australian oeuvre is the most comprehensive, the Nicholls Collection also documents their American work and swansong Indian projects. The collection includes preliminary sketches, scrawled annotations on maps and drawings, typescript lecture and essay drafts, correspondence, newspaper cuttings, travel expense receipts and all manner of paperwork from an architectural office. This seemingly ordinary ephemera puts a human face on the legendary designers and offers insights into the workings of their creative process.

Walter Burley Griffin (1876–1937)
General Plan of Plantings, Northern Illinois State Normal School  c. 1906
photographic reproduction; 33.4 x 29 cm
Pictures Collection
nla.pic-vn3703966

The Dream of a Century is chronologically and thematically organised into six sections. Visitors can retrace the Griffins’ circuitous journey from Chicago across the globe to Australia, then on to India and lastly the return to Canberra. ‘Prelude to a Dream’, the opening section, contextually considers Federation as the genesis of the idea of erecting a capital for the new nation. It next takes visitors to the Griffins’ native Chicago, then an epicentre of architectural innovation. After identifying the couple’s intellectual mentor, Louis Sullivan, and their famous employer, Frank Lloyd Wright, this section focuses on the Griffins’ own diverse American work.

Walter Burley Griffin (1876–1937)
Townsite ‘Idalia’, Lee County, Florida  1911
b&w reproduction; 22.5 x 18 cm
Pictures Collection
nla.pic-vn3603884-s222

Having gained familiarity with Canberra’s American backdrop, visitors will next enter ‘The Dream’. This section is devoted to the competition and interprets the couple’s winning design, emphasising its symbolic content. ‘The Dream’, however, also records a nightmarish interlude. Although the Griffins had won the competition, the Minister for Home Affairs, King O’Malley, notoriously set their plan aside and replaced it with the government’s Departmental Board plan, a composite of features ‘cannibalised’ from other competition submissions. Indeed, when Canberra’s construction began in 1913, it was to the Board’s, not the Griffins’, layout. Upon learning of the substitution, Walter voyaged alone to Australia, determined to persuade the Australian Government to restore the couple’s design. He ultimately met with success and was appointed Australia’s Federal Capital Director of Design and Construction before departing for Chicago.

View of Harry Gunn House, Chicago, from the Garden  c. 1906
b&w photograph; 12.5 x 17.5 cm
Pictures Collection
nla.pic-vn3603884-s246

Walter returned to Australia with Marion in 1914. Working from the Federal Capital Office in the temporary national capital, Melbourne (neither Walter nor Marion ever lived in Canberra), Walter now set out to orchestrate Canberra’s realisation—or so he thought. Bureaucrats would soon begin to thwart his efforts. ‘The Reality’ surveys the Griffins’ initiatives to bring the city Marion so beautifully portrayed into reality. Indeed, many are familiar with her exquisite and, consequently, often-reproduced competition renderings; their visual allure is no less so today than it was for the adjudicators in 1912. Then, as now, final presentation renderings were made to persuasively ‘sell’ a design and Marion’s were certainly successful at this. By marked contrast, this section of the exhibition illuminates a selection of ‘working drawings’, until now known largely only to scholars. These comparatively ‘gritty’, fine-grain, detailed and by no means beautiful documents were the sort required to actually construct the city. They record, for instance, the detailed layout of Canberra’s streets and suburbs. It is also not widely known that Walter’s work in Canberra was only a part-time job. His contract required him to allocate only half of his time (but undoubtedly all of his heart) to the capital; he devoted the remainder to private practice. ‘The Reality’ also provides an overview of this work, highlighting the couple’s tour-de-force, Café Australia (now long demolished).

Walter Burley Griffin (1876–1937)
Canberra: Plan of City and Environs  1916
linen-mounted map; 67.7 x 66.7 cm
Maps Collection
nla.map-nic11

Walter Burley Griffin (1876–1937) and Marion Mahony Griffin (1871–1961)
Reverend Cheok Hong Cheong Dwelling, Castlecrag, Sydney  c. 1927
lithograph, watercolour and gouache on silk sateen; 119 x 52.9 cm
Pictures Collection
nla.pic-an23594241

Bureaucrats eventually succeeded in undermining Griffin’s efforts and, in 1921, the government abolished Walter’s position. ‘The Aftermath’ chronicles Walter’s exit, effectively ‘forced’ from the national capital enterprise. Despite this demoralising outcome, Walter and Marion chose to remain in Australia to further their private work. By the mid-1930s, they had built works in the Australian Capital Territory, New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia and Victoria. ‘The Aftermath also focuses on the couple’s ‘utopia-esque’ masterwork, Castlecrag, near Sydney. There, he Griffins rehabilitated and conserved bushland site, folding roadways and dwellings into the contours of the Castlecrag promontory: the landscape was given primacy and architecture receded in deference to the natural world. Castlecrag residents themselves he Griffins at last realised the ideals effectively rejected at Canberra.

As the stranglehold of the Great Depression tightened, however, commissions for new work dwindled. Through channels cultivated by an Australian friend living in India, Walter won a commission to design a library for the University of Lucknow. As this substantial new job required his presence on site, Walter travelled to India in 1935; Marion joined him the next year. As surveyed in ‘Indian Swansong’, the couple soon developed a flourishing practice. On 11 February 1937, however, fate intervened and Walter died of peritonitis.

Profoundly bereaved, Marion returned to Australia some months after her husband’s death. Finding life too difficult at Castlecrag without him, she soon decided to return to Chicago. Before doing so, however, she wished to see Canberra for one last time. ‘Coda’ concludes the exhibition and recounts Marion’s farewell visit to the national capital, symbolically her final Australian act.

Emphasis that Walter’s design approach at Canberra was that of a landscape architect—is talents as such were fundamental to the couple’s competition success—pervades the entire exhibition. The Griffins’ vision was holistic and comprehensive; they sought to design not just isolated buildings but also the wider garden surrounds, parklands and suburban communities. The fact that Walter is largely unknown as a landscape architect reflects the ephemeral nature of gardens and other designed landscapes—most of his landscape compositions no longer exist, although many of the exhibition’s photographs spectacularly reveal their original splendour. The Griffins’ pursuits as landscape architects and, more broadly, their esteem for the natural world led them to become avid bushwalkers. The exhibition features a selection of the documentary photographs the couple shot while on botanical expeditions throughout eastern Australia. Like their designed counterparts, some of the landscapes they captured on film have since been altered, making the significance of these images multifaceted.

Marion Mahony Griffin (1871–1961)
Botanical Catalogues  c. 1916
Manuscripts Collection
MS9957

Of all the ephemera drawn from the Nicholls Collection, an array of meticulously crafted booklets is especially resonant with, and attests to, the value the Griffins awarded the capital’s landscape. Early on, Walter resolved to embellish the national capital with native flora but he soon experienced difficulty. ‘Information about Australian flora’, Marion wrote in 1916, was ‘almost impossible to get’. There were ‘botanical books of course’, however, ‘it was not possible to get much for landscape work from them’. Unlike today, interest in the native flora was then chiefly limited to scientific or economic concerns. To remedy this, she compiled her own lists of native plants, indexing them according to ‘different growth requirements, [such] as soil, moisture; heights and shapes of growths colour of flowers, foliage, berries and barks’, producing what amounted to a series of horticultural catalogues. The hand-bound volumes feature Japanese-inspired paper cove and are significant as works of graphic art, as well as for the horticultural knowledge they encapsulate.

Walter Burley Griffin (1876–1937)
Stamp on verso of Canberra: Plan of City and Environs  1916
linen-mounted map; 67.7 x 66.7 cm
Maps Collection
nla.map-nic11

Along with its landscape emphasis, there is another important dimension to The Dream of a Century. The exhibition considers the capital’s design to have been an unequivocally collaborative project and values Marion Mahony Griffin as Canberra’s co-author, not merely ‘the hand that held the pencil’. Walter himself made a similar public attribution. The ‘ideas of his plan’, he explained in 1913, were ‘much more than half due to his wife’ and ‘she ought to have much more than half the credit for winning the competition’. Within this context, one of the items to be displayed is a reproduction of a revised Canberra plan, rubber-stamped and hand-annotated on its verso: ‘Federal Capital Office Melbourne. Plan Received from Mrs Griffin’. Marion’s activities, despite conventional wisdom to the contrary, were not confined to private practice; she, too, undoubtedly had a part in Canberra’s making.

Although Walter and Marion Griffin were unable to fully realise their vision for Canberra, the national capital endures as a monument to these remarkable designers. The Dream of a Century: The Griffins in Australia’s Capital offers an unprecedented opportunity to become immersed in the American couple’s vision for an Antipodean arcadia, one no-less compelling over a century later.

CHRISTOPHER VERNON is the guest curator of The Dream of a Century: The Griffins in Australia’s Capital (8 March–10 June) and Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture in the Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Visual Arts, The University of Western Australia

SIAM AND THE SUN KING

France’s First Embassy to the Thais

Andrew Gosling explores the links between France and Siam during the reign of Louis XIV

Life and Activities in Siam: Obtaining a White Elephant
card; 7 x 10.5 cm
(Germany: Liebig’s Fleisch-Extract,  c. 1885)
Asian Collections
nla.pic-vn4807002

In the late seventeenth century, France and Siam were allies. Early European travellers used the name Siam for the kingdom now called Thailand, as well as for its then capital, Ayutthaya, upriver from Bangkok. As they do today, the people of the country referred to themselves as Thai.

The National Library of Australia has a significant collection of original publications from this era, as well as recent works in Thai, English and French. The collection covers the diplomatic, commercial, religious and military links between France under Louis XIV (1638–1715) and Siam under King Narai the Great (1633–1688). Narai ruled from 1656 to 1688, a high point of the Ayutthaya period (1350–1767). Louis was known as the Sun King for the splendour of his long reign.

Scribes recorded every word and action of the Siamese monarch, while his diplomats in France kept exhaustive notes. However, much of this has been lost, with few early Siamese documents surviving the tropical climate, insects and war, particularly the Burmese sacking of Ayutthaya in 1767. This makes contemporary French and other foreign sources particularly valuable.

The French were latecomers to Siam. Portugal had sent an ambassador there as early as 1511. Within a century, the Dutch and English began trading in the kingdom. It took until 1662 for members of the French Society of Foreign Missions to arrive in Ayutthaya, followed in 1680 by merchants from the French East Indies Company based in India.

Norbert Nagel
Ruins of Ayutthaya, Thailand,  3 August 2009
Reproduced under Creative Commons licence: creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

Louis XIV’s first embassy to Siam in 1685–1686 was preceded and followed by Siamese missions to France. At the time, an ‘embassy’ meant a visit by envoys to a foreign country, not a permanent presence there. Louis had several reasons for sending two ships across the world filled with gifts, diplomats, missionaries, attendants and crew. One reason was that the French sought more trade with Ayutthaya, then a cosmopolitan commercial centre. Also, Louis and Narai both wanted to counter the Dutch, the dominant European power in South-East Asia at the time. To this end, the French diplomats sought an alliance, dealing mainly with Narai’s Greek-born chief adviser Phaulkon, who was pro-French. Another reason was that Louis had been advised, quite wrongly, that Narai was ready to become a Christian.

Ambassade Française à la Cour Du Roi de Siam in Le Magasin Pittoresque,
volume 8, January 1840
(Paris: Jouvet, 1833–1900)
Rare Books Collection
nla.cat-vn930149

Although France’s embassy failed to convert the King or to improve trade links, the voyage has been called the best documented of the seventeenth century. The Library holds no fewer than five published accounts by members of the mission, including the three major works which appeared soon after the event: by the Ambassador, the Chevalier de Chaumont (d. 1710); the Coadjutant Ambassador, the Abbé de Choisy (1644–1724); and the Jesuit missionary, Guy Tachard (1651–1712).

The Library holds the English translation of Chaumont’s account in Aspects of the Embassy to Siam 1685 and is now acquiring the original 1686 French edition. The Ambassador, a high-born, pious military man and a former Protestant who had converted to Catholicism, wrote a short, rather dry book. Its most striking feature is the list of lavish presents from King Narai to the French monarch and his family.

In contrast, Choisy’s Journal du Voyage de Siam Fait en 1685 et 1686 ( Journal of a Voyage to Siam 1685–1686) is a delightful piece of travel literature in diary form, filled with lively detail. Choisy was well-connected at court and persuaded Louis XIV to appoint him Coadjutant Ambassador, even though the King grumbled that he had never heard of such a title. In part, the journey was penance for Choisy, notorious as a gambler and transvestite, but it was also a good way to escape his creditors. The Library holds the second Paris edition of 1687, later French editions, a modern English version and a Thai translation. Choisy’s description of Ayutthaya is worth quoting:

The pagodas are all gilded, and there are at least as many as there are churches in Paris … I am never tired of admiring this very large city on an island surrounded by a river three times bigger than the Seine, full of French, English, Dutch, Chinese, Japanese and Siamese vessels and an uncountable number of barges, and gilded galleys with sixty oarsmen.

King Louis XIV of France Receives Siamese Envoys in Voyage de Siam, des Pères Jésuites, Envoyez par le Roy Aux Indes & à la Chine: Avec leurs Observations Astronomiques, et leurs Remarques de Physique, de Géographie, d’Hydrographie & d’Histoire by Guy Tachard (Paris: Arnould Seneuze et Daniel Horthemels, par Ordre de sa Majeste,  1686)
Rare Books Collection
nla.cat-vn848748

In the Jesuit collection, the Library holds the original 1686 Paris edition of Tachard’s Voyage de Siam, des Pères Jésuites, Envoyez par le Roy aux Indes & à la Chine (A Relation of the Voyage to Siam: Performed by Six Jesuits, Sent by the French King to the Indies and China). Despite the title, Tachard did not accompany his fellow Jesuits from Siam to China. There are also English and Thai translations and a 1687 Amsterdam edition in French. Tachard’s detailed account stresses the religious aspects of the embassy and urges greater efforts to convert the Siamese. Both the Paris and Amsterdam editions are richly illustrated.

Tachard’s book drew on the writings of another Jesuit, Joachim Bouvet (1656–1730), whose Voiage de Siam (Voyage to Siam) was not published until 1963, from a manuscript held by Cornell University. The fifth account held by the Library is by Claude de Forbin (1656–1733), the Ambassador’s lieutenant, who stayed on to work for Narai after the embassy departed. His book did not appear until 1729. The Library holds an English translation, The Siamese Memoirs of Count Claude de Forbin.

Vincenzo Coronelli (1650–1718)
Route Maritime de Brest à Siam, et de Siam à Brest, Faite en 1685 et 1686 Selon les Remarques des Six Pères Jésuites, Envoiez par le Roy de France en Qualité de ses Mathematiciens dans les Indes, et la Chine
colour map; 42.8 x 71.5 cm (Paris: Chez J.B. Nolin Rue S. Jacques à l’Enseigne de la Place des Victoires, avec Privilege du Roy,  1687)
Maps Collection
nla.map-rm3121

These volumes are complemented by an original 1687 coloured map by famous Italian cartographer Vincenzo Maria Coronelli (1650– 1718). Route Maritime de Brest à Siam, et de Siam à Brest, Faite en 1685 et 1686 (Sea Route from Brest to Siam and Back in 1685 and 1686) shows the voyage of the embassy’s ships, the Oiseau and the Maligne. The Library purchased it from a London map specialist in 1996.

While the French were in Siam, an embassy arrived from Shah Sulaiman, the ruler of Persia (Iran) from 1666 to 1694. Ibn Muhammad Ibrahim, its secretary, compiled a record of the mission, Safinah-i Sulaymani (The Ship of Sulaiman). The Library has obtained modern English and Thai translations, based on a manuscript held at the British Library. The descriptions of the elaborate ceremonies and highly respectful treatment of the diplomats show remarkable similarities to the French accounts. Narai seems to have convinced both embassies that their nations enjoyed a special relationship with Siam. Ibrahim wrote that Siam’s king ‘was secretly devoted to Persia and has cherished hopes of effecting friendly contacts with our royal court’. When asked the purpose of the embassy, the Persian said, ‘increasing goodwill and strengthening the foundations of accord’, a bland reply worthy of any modern diplomat.

On the subject of religion, Chaumont showed little interest in Siamese Buddhism. Tachard gave a more detailed, if hostile, description of local religious practices, fearing that many Siamese were becoming Muslims. Choisy was more tolerant of Buddhism. He also seemed unconcerned at the prospect of the Persians converting Narai to Islam. He joked that there should be a trial by battle between the Catholic and Muslim diplomats to win over the King. Later he wrote: ‘it is said in some books that the Persians look like the French; we could have struck an alliance with them, and they would have given us Shiraz wine to drink’.

The French Embassy Embarks on Royal Siamese Barges in Voyage de Siam, des Pères Jésuites, Envoyez par le Roy Aux Indes & à la Chine: Avec leurs Observations Astronomiques, et leurs Remarques de Physique, de Géographie, d’Hydrographie & d’Histoire by Guy Tachard (Paris: Arnould Seneuze et Daniel Horthemels, par Ordre de sa Majeste,  1686)
Rare Books Collection
nla.cat-vn848748

Elephants played a major role in Siamese diplomacy. The French took part in royal elephant hunts, describing in detail how female elephants were used to lure wild males into a trap where they could be held and trained. Ibrahim provided an almost identical description of an elephant hunt. In a rare expression of personal feelings, Chaumont complained that sitting on an elephant was ‘very uneasy and incommodious. I would rather ride ten leagues on horseback than one on these animals’. According to Choisy, Siam’s gifts to France included two small elephants, which were left behind as there was no room on board the ship. The Persians were also promised elephants but none arrived.

King Narai of Siam Seated on His Elephant (detail) in Voyage de Siam, des Pères Jésuites, Envoyez par le Roy Aux Indes & à la Chine: Avec leurs Observations Astronomiques, et leurs Remarques de Physique, de Géographie, d’Hydrographie & d’Histoire by Guy Tachard (Amsterdam: chez Pierre Mortier,  1687)
nla.cat-vn3042432

Not all visitors liked the unfamiliar food. Forbin referred to ‘rice and ragouts … which no Frenchman, who was not used to that sort of cookery, could fancy’. On the other hand, Chaumont enjoyed mango, pineapple and papaya, while La Loubère, leader of the second French embassy to Siam, remarked that his men loved rice dishes and hated having to eat ship’s biscuit again on the return voyage.

There is a surprising twist to this tale. Before storming the Bastille on 14 July 1789, the Parisian revolutionaries lacked heavy weapons. In the words of historian Thomas Carlyle: ‘His Majesty’s Repository, what they call Garde-Meuble, is forced and ransacked … Two silvermounted cannons … an ancient gift from his Majesty of Siam to Louis Fourteenth … go trundling, on an errand they were not meant for’. Chaumont’s list of Narai’s gifts begins with two ‘cast iron cannon six foot long, hammered cold, set out with silver, mounted on their carriages, garnished also with silver’. The King of Siam’s present to Louis XIV played a small part in the French Revolution.

The Library, with Australia’s largest Thai collection, continues to acquire works about the early Franco-Siamese relationship. They include Thai and Western language reprints, translations and new titles.

ANDREW GOSLING, the Library’s former Chief Librarian, Asian Collections, is the author of NLA Publishing’s Asian Treasures: Gems of the Written Word (2011)

IN A PREVIOUS ISSUE

Indonesia before Independence: Through the Kern Collection

Andrew Gosling follows the career of civil servant and academic Rudolf Kern, whose lifelong interest was the Dutch East Indies

* December 2009 nla.gov.au/pub/nlanews/2009/dec09/indonesia-before-independence.pdf

A GRAND CAFÉ

Margaret Baskerville, Brilliant Australian Sculptor, Completing One of the Column Features for Café Australia, Melbourne  1916
b&w photograph; 10.2 x 7.6 cm
Pictures Collection
nla.pic-vn3603884-s164

By Ian Warden

It can break a sensitive Australian’s heart to think of the beautiful and important buildings demolished and scrapped in the days before we were more heritage conscious. The National Library of Australia’s wealth of pictures and artefacts of Walter Burley Griffin’s and Marion Mahony Griffin’s unique but now long-lost Café Australia is intriguing to look at but bring, too, some grief that the café is gone.

It opened in Collins Street in Melbourne in 1916 but, by the late 1930s, was transformed and spoiled. In its original, no-expense-spared form, as commissioned by owner J.J. Lucas and created by the Griffins, it only survived until 1920. In that year, Lucas began a series of alterations that undid most of what the Griffins had imparted to what one newspaper once called ‘the handsomest café in Australia’.

When you hold in your hands the Library’s precious copy of a Café Australia menu (believed to be from the opening day of 25 October 1916), it is poignant to think that diners who held it were able to ogle the eccentric splendour that surrounded them. They enjoyed a privilege we can never have. The Library’s photographs of the building give some sense of it all, especially when accompanied by Griffin’s biographer Alasdair McGregor’s noble attempts to do it justice in words:

Escaping the hubbub of Collins Street, one entered a sequence of spaces sighing with the tranquillity of a forest garden. Potted plants abounded but this was no fussy neo-Victorian palm court. Landscape was made internal, it was where nature metamorphosed into architecture.

Walter Burley Griffin (1876–1937)
Original Facade Plan for Café Australia, Melbourne  1915
blueprint: 38.6 x 57 cm
Pictures Collection
nla.pic-vn3661926

Marion’s considerable influences on the café’s design included commissioning Margaret Baskerville to make relief sculptures of the goddesses Echo, Persephone and Daphne. The goddesses emerged, naked, from pillars in the cafe’s Fountain Court and were also used in the menu design.

The menu, though a little faded now and not as golden as it must have been when new, is still an elegant artifact. In gold and ivory, the goddesses are standing waist-deep in fields of golden grain, their modesty maintained, just, in the reliefs and on the menu, by the adroit placements of ears of grain.

When diners at last tore themselves away from the spectacle of their surroundings (which included, in the Banqueting Hall, Bertha Medfield’s mural Dawn in the Australian Bush) to look at the menu, what did they find? One thing was a handwritten page of dishes of the day with a typed sheet of more dishes fixed on top. As if dashed off in a tearing hurry (in the famously frantic behind-the-scenes ambience of the restaurant industry), the typed sheet has some sweet, document-humanising spelling mistakes, such as ‘Mulligatummy’ soup and ‘tapicoa’ custard.

Entirely by coincidence, this writer examined the menu while feeling peckish. Working in one of those corners of the Library where scholarly silence is fiercely cultivated, peckishness blossomed into embarrassing tummy-rumbling hunger. However, this did enable an empathy, across the years, with patrons who tumbled into Café Australia more because they were on Collins Street and were hungry than because the establishment was famous (and notorious too, for critics of its design were scathing) as a work of art.

Through my blushes, I noted that the dishes on the menu are quite orthodox in spite of the exotic standards of the café in which they were served. But there are four crayfish dishes and many styles of oysters (the latter including Angels on Horseback 2/6). Turtle soup comes in both Mock Turtle 1/0 and Real Turtle 2/0. Unfashionable today, kippers (smoked herrings) feature prominently and there is forbidding Chicken en Aspic for 3/0. With an abundance of roasts and grills, vegetarians are not pandered to in the way they would be if a modern Lucas opened a twenty-first-century attempt.

Interior View of the Banquet Hall with Balcony and Mural, Café Australia, Melbourne  1916
sepia-toned print; 15.4 x 20.3 cm
Pictures Collection
nla.pic-vn3698616-s5

Whatever they ate, diners surely found their surroundings more memorable than the food. From fountains playing in ponds emblazoned with burnished gold tiles and replete with gaudy, well-fed fish, to amberhued ceiling glass patterned in the shape of arching fern fronds … Café Australia was rich in every detail.

These riches though, achieved at the breathtaking-forthe-time cost of £50,000, were short-lived. In a letter in 1926, Walter Burley Griffin reported the café ‘mutilated by the local painters and decorators’. By the late 1930s, a melancholy McGregor records, all the ‘gloriously original detail’ was gone, leaving only ‘the ribs of the great vaulted ceiling and the balcony of the Banqueting Hall’.

Opening Night Menu at Café Australia
menu; 26.8 x 32.9 cm
Pictures Collection
nla.pic-vn3660541

THE TREASURE OF THE SURAT BASIN

Luke Keogh travels to Queensland in search of stories about coal seam gas

The first coal seam gas wells in Surat Basin were positioned close to the Roma–Brisbane pipeline. Originally laid in 1963 so that Roma Conventional Gas could supply Gibson Island Fertilizer Factory, the line is now used to transport coal seam gas to Brisbane.
Courtesy Luke Keogh

They say in tara, if you drink from the Wambo Creek you never leave. Between floods and getting cattle out of a bog, Wayne Dennis has had more than a mouthful from the Wambo. As a young man, this third-generation farmer poured himself into Moorilda, the family farm that sat on the banks of the Wambo in Tara, south-west Queensland. After a few difficulties he moved around, saw the country but always kept coming back. Now in his sixties, he lives on a place not far from where he grew up, a few miles south on the Wambo. land, as he sees it, ‘is going to be like a porcupine—there’s going to be little gas heads everywhere and pipelines everywhere and we’re not going to be able to run our stock’.

Eliminate that Dirty Grate … Sack Your Axe!
Gas Industry: Trade Catalogues
Ephemera
Ephemera Collection
nla.cat-vn4667586

Two years ago Wayne Dennis knew two things about gas in the Tara district: the Wambo Creek exploration well was drilled in the 1960s and the clearing he drives along most days to go and poison the wattle, that keep sucking back, is an old exploration seismic line gas miners put through the back of his place in the 1980s. These days, as the ‘Lock the Gate’ protest sign on his front gate suggests, he has closed off his land to coal and gas explorers.

Wayne is one of the few landholders in the district who have not let coal seam gas explorers onto their properties. Although the stories of his neighbours tell him he made the right decision, he is also realistic about the future. The

For two days, I waited on Wayne’s veranda to record his oral history. Maybe his life story appeared so common to him that he thought it was not interesting enough to enter the National Library of Australia’s collection. But there is something dramatic about where the story will end—the future is uncertain. Rapid development of the Australian landscape for coal seam gas is bringing wealth to state governments and mining companies but having consequences for people on the land like Wayne and his neighbours Rod, Linda, Kevin, Fred and Dorothy, whom I also interviewed.

Landscape and the longevity of the people dispossessed is often forgotten in moments of rapid change. Whether people like gas or not, its presence in the rural eastern Australian landscape is so widespread, so rapid and so divisive that it has fractured the procession of rural life, like an earthquake when geological time explodes into human time.

All the people interviewed for the Library’s new Coal Seam Gas Oral History Project are third-, fourth-, even sixth-generation landholders. The land was their grandfathers’, that went to their fathers and then to them—that was how life went. It is their land because they know the gullies and ridges, the creek crossings and plains, the dozers that opened the dam and the axe that felled the tree which now suckers. They know it because their grandfathers yarned to them about it on Sunday afternoons. ‘The land is history,’ Wayne tells me in the interview.

Choose, Save, It’s Natural, Gas  1998
Gas Industry: Trade Catalogues Ephemera
Ephemera Collection
nla.cat-vn4667586
Courtesy New South Wales Department of Trade and Investment

The Surat Basin is what the geologists imagine and label the rocks that underlie Wayne’s place. The other major basins where coal seam gas will be produced in Australia are the Bowen and Galilee, also in Queensland, and the Sydney and Gunnedah, in New South Wales. Most of the gas, though, will come from Queenslan

Spend a day leafing through the Library’s collection and you will realise that coal seam gas has been around for nearly four decades. Coal seam gas arrived in Australia in 1976–1977, when Houston Oil and Minerals completed four wells in Moura. The project was abandoned after poor gas flows but the first wells were followed by more test wells and pilot programs across eastern Australia. Production commenced in February 1996, when Moura’s open-cut coal mine supplied gas to the Queensland gas pipeline.

Despite the theatrical conflict played out today between coal and gas industry representatives, historically coal, gas and coal seam gas industries have always been one big unhappy hydrocarbon family. If society had an image of coal implanted on their mind as a dirty faced miner coming to the surface from the bowels of the earth, then gas was always the clean-cut younger brother.

Understanding the rise of coal seam gas in Australia is also about seeing the culture of ‘natural’ gas across the globe. It started in the home with the gas oven and ended with the blue gas flame superimposed on a sunflower. For coal-rich states, like New South Wales and Queensland, abundant coal reserves could be got at and supplied as a cleaner, greener fuel. Coal seam gas appeared as better than a free gift from the sun.

Following production from sites in the Bowen Basin, the Surat Basin emerged as the next coal seam gas target. In 2000, the Powder River Basin in the United States was in the throes of a major gas play; there, the Jurassic coal was a lot like that in the Surat, and gas miners put two and two together.

Esko Parviainen
Rig on the Moonie Oil Field in Queensland  1968
b&w photograph; 11.5 x 9 cm
Pictures Collection
nla.pic-vn4589973
Courtesy Australian News and Information Bureau

Treasure. In late 2000 the Argyle field was the first significant development. Gas flowed in excess of one million cubic feet per day. The Walloon Coal Measures, the target in the Surat, were gas-saturated, permeable and high in methane. The Walloon is also part of the Great Artesian Basin.

There were good gas shows from all the wells put down but drilling got a little more difficult as the program progressed. One well, only 200 metres from Wambo Creek, was full of water and, at some points, the roughnecks were unloading over 340,000 litres of water per day. In another of the wells, drilled in 2001, there were reports of gas migration flowing from behind the casing of the hole to the surface. It took until 2011 to stop the gas leak and abandon the hole.

Natural Gas Takes Care of Your Environment and Takes Care of the Environment  c. 1995
Gas Industry: Trade Catalogues Ephemera
Ephemera Collection
nla.cat-vn4667586
Courtesy New South Wales Department of Trade and Investment

In the decade following the first success at Argyle, hundreds of gas fields popped up over the Surat Basin, in places like Margaret and Celeste, which follow the snake of Wambo Creek and its subsidiaries. The Argyle field now has at least 160 wells and the gas company owns the pastoral property where the gas production takes place.

Wayne takes me to meet his neighbours Rod and Kevin Steinhort. As the recording machine rolls, the Steinhorts’ history passes quickly. Most of the knowledge about their family is better-known by Rod’s wife, Linda, than by the brothers. But when we get to the present, the future, the gas, they have much to say. ‘The biggest impact in this district, ever’ is how they describe it. Their experience is immediate; you can almost hear the change, as both Linda and Rod explain the ‘beehive’ of noise on their property when a well is going.

Wayne on the Mesa showing his country.
Courtesy Luke Keogh

Ownership, control and uncertainty are big issues for people on the land. If you travel from the Steinhorts’ property along the Wambo there is a small but always watered offshoot, the Twenty-Six Mile Creek. Wayne’s best mate Fred has a place on this creek. Fred and his mother Dorothy have had good relationships with the gas companies so far but they remain uncertain about the future of their land. He always thought he would die on his place but, as he says, ‘as far as I’m concerned I’m staying here but I just don’t know’.

The history of coal seam gas in Australia is quite different to these oral stories. Trawling the archives, all that can be found are tiny, year-by-year decisions. Coal miners and gas prospectors looking for the next energy play, state governments looking for royalties, the federal government looking for clean energy, drillers, geologists and lawyers keeping themselves in work—they all contribute. Like the pockmarked landscape they created, jot all these decisions down and they make a long list over four decades. Rarely, if ever, was the effect on people, like Wayne, Rod, Kevin, Linda, Fred or Dorothy, mentioned. It was always the immediate future—development, jobs and profit.

‘Everything is Either Grown or Mined’ Bumper Sticker
Ephemera Collection
nla.cat-vn1073254
Courtesy Minerals Council of Australia

There is a moment in B. Traven’s classic novel The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, when one miner says ‘the mine may give out, but the land will last forever’. I thought a lot about the land in the weeks I spent in Tara and reflected upon it more in the months I spent at the Library. Then I wondered about stewardship and could not get Wayne’s voice out of my head. After he described the future landscape as the porcupine country, he said, ‘Then when it’s all rooted, who’s going to look after the country then? All us old farmers will be dead’.

LUKE KEOGH is an environmental historian. In 2012 he was a Harold White Fellow at the Library and a Carson Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, LMU, Munich. The Library has a rich collection relating to coal seam gas. The full oral history interviews and a ‘favourites list’ of relevant coal seam gas collection items can be accessed through the Library’s catalogue

The Noble Brotherhood Of Oars

Robert Holden reveals two books recently acquired by the library

Gibbs, Shallard & Co.
Sculling Match on the Thames, June 27 1878, Joseph Henry Sadler, Champion of the World, Versus Edward Trickett, of New South Wales (detail)
lithograph; 51.5 x 71.5 cm
(Sydney: Illustrated Sydney News, August 1876)
Pictures Collection
nla.pic-an9778108

England, 1908. It is the optimistic opening decade of a new century but the heyday of an Edwardian summer will not last. Many of the finest young men of this generation from Britain and its empire will meet an untimely end on the battlefields of Europe or Gallipoli. How bravely they will go forth, vaunting and describing their determined efforts in terms of sport and teamwork. They might well have imagined that Britain’s sporting prowess would see them through to a final and glorious goal. As if to herald that prowess, this year of 1908 marks the start of two series of monumental sporting surveys, both of which will extol the pre-eminence of the British lion on the sporting field.

Copies of both these major works were recently acquired by the National Library of Australia. Neither was recorded in Australian National Bibliography 1901–1950 and this omission is significant because both works contain detailed reference to Australian sportsmen and to Australian sporting records. Before their acquisition, the Library’s search database, Trove, listed only a single copy of one of the works and two copies of the other in Australian collections. None of these entries would have alerted anyone to their unique Australian connections.

Rudolph Lehmann’s The Complete Oarsman is presented in plain blue cloth as part of a series on various British sports that ran to at least ten volumes. The success of its coverage was such that a third edition was called for in 1924. Its Australian connection? A chapter with the less-than-engrossing title of ‘Rowing Style in other Countries’ which is largely devoted to rowing in New South Wales.

Frederick Septimus Kelly (1881–1916)
Diaries of Frederick Kelly,  Oct. 1907–Nov. 1916
Manuscripts Collection
MS 6050
Courtesy Carol Jones

There is more. The very next chapter, ‘Sculling’, is contributed to by a celebrated son of Australia, Frederick Septimus Kelly (1881–1916). Kelly’s eight diaries, covering the years 1907 to 1915, were acquired by the Library in 1979, complementing Kelly’s music manuscripts acquired in 1972. Thereafter, the diaries became the focus of Thérèse Radic’s major study Race Against Time, published by the Library in 2004.

Before Radic, any posthumous fame ascribed to Kelly rested largely on his association with poet Rupert Brooke and Kelly’s firsthand account of the wartime burial of the beloved poet in April 1915. Together, they were part of a companionable band of Argonauts—officers from the Royal Navy’s Hood Battalion. All hailing from the playing fields and college rooms of Oxford and Cambridge, their similar cultural values and social backgrounds made them instantly compatible. While Kelly was scholarly enough to read Homer with Brooke as their ship sailed toward the Greek isles, he was also light-hearted enough to wring music out of the sea-worn ship’s piano. It was reported that he even tried, though none too successfully, to elevate the musical taste of the ship’s stokers by leading them down the winsome ways of English folk songs. Sadly, by the end of the war, only two from this group were still alive—Kelly was not one of them.

Radic’s edition of Kelly’s diaries primarily presented the pianist and composer as someone who counted the leading social, political and musical figures of the day among his acquaintances, including Percy Grainger, Maurice Ravel, Pablo Casals and Edward Elgar. Now, by the acquisition of these two volumes, the Library is able to enhance Kelly’s profile on a different front.

Frederick Septimus Kelly (1881–1916)
Song Sketch Book,  November 1909
Music Collection
nla.ms-ms3095-8-3

It was during Kelly’s teenage years at Eton College that his dual passions for music and rowing arose. Both passions dominated his years at Oxford University in the first decade of the twentieth century and it was there that his particular skill in sculling was first shown. Indeed, by 1908, the compiling author of The Complete Oarsman described Kelly as a ‘master of the art’. That mastery is further revealed in the chapter that Kelly wrote for the book—not only in text but also in ten photographs illustrating 12 sculling positions, all surely posed by the master himself.

By the end of July 1908, Kelly was to eclipse even this praise. He would be part of the eight-man crew that rowed Britain to a gold medal in the 1908 Olympic Games (the 4th Olympiad), held in England. Kelly’s status would then see him celebrated as nothing less than the undisputed champion sculler of Britain.

As significant as it is, the modestly presented volume of The Complete Oarsman pales besides its newly acquired ‘companion’, Yachting and Rowing, which weighs in at a staggering 5.6 kilos. It was published in 1916 and, at volume 4, was also part of a multivolume series, issued under the general title of British Sports and Sportsmen, of which the Library holds ten volumes.

Sculling No. 1. Forward Position, Sculling No. 6. Half-Way Through Stroke and Sculling No. 12. Coming Forward in The Complete Oarsman, by Rudolph Chambers Lehmann (London: Methuen & Co.,  1908)
Australian Monograph Collection
nla.cat-vn5816776

Portrait of Frederick Kelly in British Sports and Sportsmen: Yachting and Rowing, compiled and edited by the ‘Sportsman’ (London: J.G. Hammond & Co. Ltd.,  1916)
Australian Collection
nla.cat-vn5816793

Bibliographically, this survey of British sporting history, which is unsurpassed for its time, remains something of a mystery. The series began in 1908, the same year The Complete Oarsman was published, and may have continued, sporadically, until 1933. Not all the volumes are dated and it is unclear how many folios complete the set: at least 13 and perhaps as many as 15 were published. To complicate matters further, there were two variant editions: one, grandly called the Royal Edition, was limited to 250 sets presented in full leather and gilt binding; the other, attired in more workaday cloth, was limited to 1,000 numbered sets. Either presentation was a remarkable publishing achievement.

Yachting and Rowing takes a staggering 522 pages and 59 full-page and countless vignette photographs to cover its topic. Australians are mentioned along the way, particularly champion oarsmen, including scullers. These include such world champions as Peter Kemp, Henry Searle, James Stanbury, George Towns, Edward Trickett and, of course, Frederick Kelly. Their roll call might be a surprise to most Australians today. However, as early as 1876, the first Australian to win a world title in any sport (Trickett) did so in sculling. Thereafter, until 1907, seven New South Welshmen held the world sculling championships for most of those years. It has understandably been claimed that sculling was the most popular sport of all in Australia prior to World War I. Yet even in this august company of champions, the text celebrates Kelly as possessing ‘the most truly accurate blade work’ of any sculler and of having ‘no superior among amateurs’.

Almost all of these Australian sporting champions are honoured in the folio with full- or half-page photographic portraits; Kelly’s diaries, in fact, record the very day on which he was interviewed for inclusion in the work. It occurred on 19 November 1909 and is given no more than a passing line: ‘interviewed for an hour in the morning [by] a representative of British Sports and Sportsmen’. The full-page, three-quarter photographic portrait of Kelly is complemented by a further three smaller photographs. The result is a singular work: nothing else published in Kelly’s all-too-brief lifetime details his sporting career more.

It is here, surely, that we should ask why, if Kelly was being interviewed in 1909, was Yachting and Rowing not published until 1916? The publisher’s preface clearly explains:

The publication of an important work on sport at a time when the country is in the throes of the greatest war the world has ever known, may to some appear inappropriate. As, however, the arrangements for publishing the ‘Yachting and Rowing’ volume for British Sports and Sportsmen and the collection of the necessary material had been well advanced by the summer of 1914 … it was decided after serious consideration to issue the work.

Could any epitaph ever do justice to the loss of an extraordinary Australian like Kelly? Perhaps the editor of The Complete Oarsman, describing the perfect unison of a rowing team, provides the best finale to Kelly’s story. The editor pictured ‘men moving in a gallant harmony of united effort … [with] proud demeanour … and ardour tempered b discipline’. He saw all of this culminating in the making of a ‘noble brotherhood of oars’. It surely, and prophetically, encapsulates the abiding virtues which Kelly and his fellow soldiers took with them from the sports field to the battlefield. This was Kelly’s brotherhood, which would achieve an apotheosis on the battlefields of the Western Front.

The Beginning of the Fourth Modern Olympiad: The King Opening the Olympic Games in The Illustrated London News,  18 July 1908
Overseas Serials Collection
nla.cat-vn759241

ROBERT HOLDEN is a Sydney-based curator, reviewer, librarian and lecturer, and the author of 30 books

IN A PREVIOUS ISSUE

Race Against Time

Thérèse Radic studies the diaries of Frederick Septimus Kelly to estimate the expatriate Australian's achievements in music and sport

* October 2004 nla.gov.au/pub/nlanews/2004/oct04/story-3.pdf

'Back To' Celebrations In Australian Towns And Suburbs

Geoffrey Burkhardt looks at the where, when and why of Australia’s ‘Back to’ celebrations

Charles Louis Gabriel (1857–1927)
Ladies at the Platform at the Railway Station, Gundagai, New South Wales  c. 1910
b&w glass negative; 10.1 x 12.6 cm
Pictures Collection
nla.pic-an8526479-658

Books and brochures published for ‘Back to’ town and village celebrations are sometimes overlooked by local history enthusiasts. In the 1920s and 1930s, many civic authorities in Australian suburbs and country towns organised ‘Back to’ functions and events, such as Back to Gundagai, Back to Whyalla and Back to Box Hill. These public civic celebrations, with their attendant publications and programs, constitute an important but often little-acknowledged expression of Australian local history appreciation, particularly from the 1920s to the 1950s. The National Library of Australia holds many examples of this category of local history writing. What were the motivations for these civic celebrations? Are there characteristics common to ‘Back to’ celebrations? What is the contribution of these events, especially the official publications, to the recognition and recording of Australian local history?

These formal festivities, which continued for a week in most instances, acknowledged the role of pioneers and settlers in a town or district. For example, the official title of the ‘Back to’ celebration in Keyneton, South Australia, was Back to Keyneton: Reunion of Past and Present Residents of the District. The introduction to the official souvenir booklet of the Back to Gundagai Week states: ‘To the Pioneers of Gundagai: We of Gundagai must ever treasure the memory of those stalwart pioneers through whose efforts Australia has developed’. The subtitle of the Back to Coolamon Week booklet is Souvenir, Being a Record of Much of the Coolamon Shire from the Coming of the First Settlers in 1853 to the Present Day.

Front cover of 145th Anniversary, 1788–1933: Back to Parramatta Oct. 26th to Nov. 4th
(Sydney: The Harbour Newspaper & Publishing Co. for the Committee of Management of the ‘Back to Parramatta’ Celebrations, 1933)
Australian Collection
nla.cat-vn681897

One of the major factors prompting such celebrations was the official recognition of a town or district’s centenary or jubilee. Sometimes it was the celebration of the first discovery or settlement in the district, for example 145th Anniversary 1788–1933: Back to Parramatta, October 26th to November 4th. Alternatively, the jubilee of the foundation of a municipality or shire might be the inspiration, such as Back to Gunnedah Week, 30th September to 6th October, Gunnedah Municipal Jubilee 1885–1935. Other special events in a district also provided the occasion for a ‘Back to’ celebration, as was the case in Grafton, New South Wales, when the first bridge over the Clarence River was officially opened, the title of their souvenir booklet being Back to Grafton Week, July 16–23, 1932: Official Souvenir to Commemorate the Official Opening of the Clarence River Bridge by His Excellency the Rt Hon. Sir Isaac Isaacs. The encouragement of tourism to a district was sometimes also a motivation for civic authorities to organise these events, hopeful of attracting former residents back to the district.

D. Macdougall Back to Box Hill Easter 1935: Official Programme and Brief History
(Box Hill, Victoria: Back to Box Hill Executive,  1935)
Australian Collection
nla.cat-vn1542308

Some of the characteristics of these celebrations are reflected in a sample from over 200 ‘Back to’ souvenir books and programs held in the Library. One of the earliest such Australian ‘Back to’ celebrations was held in October 1920 with the Back to Goulburn Centenary Celebrations. It is significant that it was not until the 1920s that ‘Back to’ celebrations became a feature of official civic organisations in Australian towns and suburbs. This is understandable, as it would be unexpected for a district to hold such a celebration during the course of the First World War. Prior to 1914, especially in the latter decades of the nineteenth century, many districts were still in the stage of urban expansion and population growth, when individuals and families may have been more concerned to put behind them memories about the hardships of their pioneering lives.

These celebrations were much more common in country towns than metropolitan suburbs. The most popular times of the year for these celebrations were Easter week and a week in October. A sampling of ‘Back to’ publications suggests that these events were most common in the states of New South Wales and Victoria, which is understandable given that these two states were the most populous.

Where programs were published in official ‘Back to’ booklets a number of common features and events are evident. It was usual for a well-known dignitary or politician to officially open the celebration. For example, Back to Box Hill was officially opened by the state governor, Lord Huntingfield, at a town hall function. A formal ‘Back to’ ball or formal dance was often held during the week of celebrations. In Gundagai, New South Wales, this function was called the ‘Old Time Ball’.

E.B. Wichert
The Silver Mirror: The Official Souvenir of the Back to Broken Hill Jubilee Celebration September 5–12, 1933
(Broken Hill, New South Wales: ‘Back to’ Broken Hill Celebration Committee, 1933)
Australian Collection
nla.cat-vn1721810

Back to Gundagai: Official Souvenir and Programme, 23rd to 30th Nov., 1932
(Sydney: Journey Graph Publicity Co., 1932)
Australian Collection
nla.cat-vn1671062

Back to Gunnedah Week, 30th September to 6th October, 1935: Gunnedah Municipal Jubilee, 1885–1935
(Gunnedah, NSW: Northern Daily Leader, 1935)
Australian Collection
nla.cat-vn391072

Leonard Robjohns
Back to Keyneton, Wednesday, November 11 till Sunday, November 15 1936: Souvenir Programme, Together with a Short History of Keyneton
(Keyneton, SA: The Committee, 1936)
Australian Collection
nla.cat-vn198278

A special annual district show was often arranged by the local agricultural society. The Keyneton celebrations included a special centenary flower show. The Back to Kyabram A.H. & P. Society annual show was followed by an evening Mardi Gras. A reunion luncheon or official dinner for local district pioneers was a common event as was a local sports carnival entertainment. The Creswick ‘Back to’ celebrations included a district Carnival Day consisting of a fire brigade event, athletic events, mounted events, maypole dancing, fancy marching, callisthenics, school children’s events and cooking competitions. These types of functions were sometime held in conjunction with a concert featuring a special brass band presentation such as that organised at the Back to Gundagai Week.

A street procession of bands, floats and vehicles was also a common event. At Gundagai, the program included a procession of vehicles, including bullock teams, buggies and old motor cars. School reunions were a feature of many ‘Back to’ programs, an example of which is to be found in the Back to Kyabram celebrations. The formalities included a rollcall of former students who were present at that school reunion. Visitors as well as ex-students were welcome. At Creswick in 1921, the first night’s program included a Smoke Night Dinner and Re-Union of Old Grammar School Boys in the school hall. Two days later, there was a scheduled reunion of past and present students of Creswick State School No. 122. Other ‘Back to’ events included race meetings organised by local jockey clubs, as may be seen in the programs for Creswick and Gundagai. The unveiling of a pioneers’ monument or centenary column in the town park or gardens was sometimes included in the program of events for the celebration.

When assessing the contribution which ‘Back to’ celebrations made to local history, one is most conscious of the tangible manifestations of the event, such as the construction of pioneers’ monuments, the compilation of pioneer registers, the publication by the local district newspaper of a special ‘Back to’ supplement and especially the publication of a souvenir booklet. There may have been less-tangible outcomes of these celebrations, such as the generation of public and individual interest in the history of the district. This heightened historical awareness may have contributed to the formation, at a later stage, of a district historical society, a local history museum, or the movement to preserve some of the historically significant architecture in the district.

Riders in Street Procession, Swan Hill Centenary Celebrations  1936
gelatin silver print; 7.8 x 10.3 cm
Courtesy State Library of Victoria, H99.128/15

In many instances, the publication of a souvenir booklet is the only compilation of the district’s local history to have been undertaken up to that time. Many of these celebration booklets represent the initial attempts by civic authorities to publish the local history of their district. Even today, some of the publications stand as examples of the very few extant local histories of a district, as is the case with small villages and districts, such as Bill’s Gully, Yanipy and Tarnagulla in Victoria. Many ‘Back to’ publications emphasise the role of particular pioneer families and first settlers. For example, the Back to Cooma celebration booklet includes a 14-page pictorial section titled Pioneers’ Portrait Gallery containing the photographs of 54 early settlers of the district.

Pioneers’ Portrait Gallery in Back to Cooma Celebration, 20th February to 27th February,  1926
(Sydney: Direct Publicity Co., 1926)
Australian Collection
nla.cat-vn1024348

A brief description of the local agricultural and industrial activities of the district is also a common feature of these publications, particularly those of mining districts, such as Broken Hill, whose publication, The Silver Mirror: The Official Souvenir of the Back to Broken Hill Jubilee Celebration September 5 to 12, 1933, contains a section on the history of the local mining industry. Descriptions of a district’s or town’s local institutions, such as churches, hospitals, schools, council chambers, sporting clubs and facilities, local banks and business houses are often included in ‘Back to’ booklets. Some emphasise the importance to the district of the beginning of local transport and communication, as in the case of the Gundagai booklet, which includes a section on the arrival of the railway and the opening of the railway station, and Grafton’s ‘Back to’ souvenir, which celebrates the official opening of the Clarence River railway/roadway double deck bridge. Quite a number of ‘Back to’ souvenir booklets contain as an insert the official program for the celebrations. Examples include Narrabri Jubilee Celebrations Back to Narrabri Week September 4th to 10th, 1933 and Back to Box Hill: Easter 1935, Official Program and Brief History.

Was the ‘Back to’ phenomenon just a passing fad of civic authorities in the first half of the twentieth century? To the contrary, as there is evidence of a number of ‘Back to’ celebrations being held in the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and as recently as 2009. While most ‘Back to’ celebrations were held during the 1920s to the 1950s, it is interesting to note that some towns and districts held a second ‘Back to’ celebration during the latter half of the twentieth century. Wagga Wagga held three ‘Back to’ celebrations during the century, in 1927, 1956 and 1970.

GEOFFERY BURKHARDT is an education historian with an interest in Australian social history

THE SECRETS OF SYD THE SHOWMAN

Nigel Starck investigates the mystique of a master mind-reader and finds a clue buried deep in the library

Sydney Piddington (detail)  c. 1979
gelatin silver print; 24 x 19 cm
Courtesy Robyn Piddington and the State Library of Victoria, mp019454

Portrait of Sydney Piddington
b&w photograph
Courtesy Robyn Piddington

Sydney piddington devised a ‘mind-reading’ act during World War II, baffling audiences in their millions—and never revealed just how he did it. Today, the only clue can be found in a letter held by the National Library of Australia.

As Sergeant Piddington, of the Royal Australian Artillery, he fought at the disastrous Battle of Muar River on the Malay Peninsula, joined the retreat to Singapore and became a prisoner of war at the surrender in February 1942. He was despatched to Changi, where he proved to be a courageous and resourceful operator of clandestine radio receivers. His sleight of hand—polished as a pre-war conjuror in Sydney—was magically effective when components had to be hidden during surprise searches by the guards.

Broadening his repertoire, Piddington explored the rarefied field of telepathy; it would bring him international celebrity status. In company with an Artillery comrade, Gunner Russell Braddon, he developed an act that helped to relieve the monotony of prison life. Their commander in captivity, Lt Col. Frederick (later, Sir Frederick) Galleghan, subsequently reflected on the initiative: ‘I know of nothing that kept the men’s minds and their mental capacity more agile than the contribution to their welfare made by Piddington’. In front of an audience of fellow prisoners, Piddington would ‘project’ images and thoughts towards Braddon: colours, shapes, cards, names and addresses.

Braddon, who established himself as an author following the war, has captured in his book The Piddingtons the controversy that ensued, with fierce disputes erupting over the question of whether or not there had been the exercise of a sixth sense: ‘[We] were delighted when, after our first show in the T.B. hut, we left about ninety skeleton-like men roused to such a pitch of bitter argument that their eyes flashed again and their poor, fleshless chests swelled with fury’.

Ronald Searle (1920–2011)
Sydney Piddington and Russell Braddon’s Telepathy Act in Changi
Courtesy Ronald Searle and the Sayle Literary Agency

Portrait of Lesley and Sydney Piddington  1950s
b&w photograph; 13.9 x 8.8 cm
Pictures Collection
nla.pic-an24353731

Released from imprisonment after Japan’s capitulation, and inspired by the reaction to his wartime act, Piddington took it to radio, television and the vaudeville circuit. In 1946 he married the Sydney actress Lesley Pope, an original cast member of the ABC drama series The Lawsons. Lesley Piddington now became her husband’s telepathy partner. Their program made its début on Sydney station 2UE in July 1947, achieving such immediate popularity that stations in Melbourne and Brisbane also awarded contracts.

On the strength of that response, the couple ventured overseas. This initiative was typical of the energy and confidence, verging on audacity, that Piddington would display throughout his career. He had an unfailing ability to sell himself.

That quality was complemented by his appearance. Tall, slim, with well-defined cheekbones and impeccably groomed hair, he dressed with meticulous care and an eye for prevailing fashion, from the fedoras and double-breasted pinstripes of the 1940s to the flares and sideburns of the 1970s. Yet, his speech was mildly afflicted by impediment in delivery: a hesitancy that, on occasions, could lead to a stammer when confronted by the harder variations of consonant. Russell Braddon, as scriptwriter and manager for the duo from 1949, concocted a remedy for this intermittent frailty; he would devise a narrative that studiously avoided words beginning with ‘p’.

After auditioning successfully in London for the BBC, the Piddingtons presented a season of eight radio broadcasts in July and August 1949, followed by another three in 1950 and three more on television. Extending considerably the mechanisms engineered in Changi, Braddon sent Lesley Piddington to a variety of inventive locations: into Sir Walter Raleigh’s cell at the Tower of London, underwater in a diving bell at a naval depot, and 15,000 feet above Bristol in an aircraft. Whatever the degree of physical separation, she appeared able to ‘read’ with a consistent degree of accuracy the messages projected by her husband from the BBC studio.

London Palladium Poster for ‘The Piddingtons’
b&w photograph
Courtesy Piddington family

British listeners in their millions were intrigued, especially when Lesley would deliver a line from a book selected apparently at random by a member of the studio audience. The chosen passage was written on a blackboard by one of the celebrity guests acting as a judge but at no time was it read aloud by Syd himself. Their act had an unusual quality, in its intimate and seemingly unrehearsed nature; an understated sincerity, devoid of slick ‘game show’ patter, protected them from violent accusations of fakery. It was hard for listeners and theatre patrons to dislike the Piddingtons, even if they did suspect the entire affair was indeed a trick. Debate on that matter became a considerable chattering point in the public domain. Among the more fantastic theories was the notion that a Morse link had been established through dental implants.

Russell Braddon (1921–1995)
Letter to his mother, 6 September 1940
ink
Papers of Russell Braddon, 1943–1995
Manuscripts Collection, MS 10015
nla.cat-vn4179416
Courtesy Patricia Burgess
(Braddon)

Can We Transfer Thought? (detail) in The Sydney Morning Herald,  19 April 1954
Newspapers Collection
nla.news-article18421201

Capitalising on the controversy, the Piddingtons appeared at British provincial theatres, topped the bill at the London Palladium and made tours of Austria (playing to British military audiences), South Africa, Rhodesia and Australia (an eightweek Sydney season and a month’s run in Melbourne, in 1951). From recordings, it is apparent that word-cues were employed in ‘transmitting’ colours and shapes. But the more complex aspects, especially those requiring identification of sentences chosen from a book, continued to defy explanation. The Piddingtons maintained the mystique: when interviewed over the decades, they would—gently but resolutely—supply evasive responses.

Russell Braddon died in 1995 and his surviving correspondence is held by the Library. Writing in 1949 to his mother back home in Brisbane, he supplies that one brief, but convincing, clue as to how they employed so-called ‘thought waves’. Braddon tells her:

Every day some paper or other says ‘This is how it’s done: it’s all a wicked joke’. I then have to work out a test that makes that theory look absurd and the Piddo’s (bless their lazy souls) then have to learn the necessary … [I] must think up some incredibly complex stunts to stonker the terribly cunning Fleet St. men. Amazing thing is of course that the one thing they haven’t thought of is a memory system—they’ve considered little wireless sets in teeth, strapped to thighs, behind the ears … [We] have accordingly been searched, all of us, before shows by doctors, dentists, Scotland Yard men and even journalists—strangely enough, no wireless sets or transmitters or Morse keys.

The following month, in a letter from righton, he adds:

Syd … learnt all that was written & was excellent: Lesley learnt all the books & things she had to do & was excellent.

It appears feasible, therefore, that by drawing on her technique as a professional actress, Lesley memorised he complete text of the book used in hose imaginative stunts devised by Braddon. Then her telepathy partner, Syd, used coded dialogue to guide her to the right page and line number. In the verbatim record of their Tower of London exchange, for example, it appears that some words have a forced, pre-determined presence: the use at critical stages, for instance, of complete’, ‘sympathy’, ‘co-operation’ and ‘now’. There is reason to believe that they served as pointers. It was a fiendishly demanding mental exercise perhaps, but demonstrably not thought transference.

Hugh Ross Williamson, Captain Taprell Dorling and Lesley Piddington in the Tower of London
in The Piddingtons by Russell Braddon
(London: Werner Laurie, 1950)
Australian Collection
nla.cat-vn2059399

Heard on disc today, the show is remarkable for its periods without any dialogue at all: there are interludes of 15, even 20, seconds when Syd is purportedly ‘sending’ a selected passage of text to Lesley. Speaking recently on ABC radio, the present-day mentalist Philip Escoffey suggested that ‘a lot of the coding was in the silence’. The Piddingtons enjoyed such a refined degree of understanding, he said, that they ‘could distinguish between quarter-second intervals’.

They retired from show business in 1952. Syd worked for a leading theatrical impresario for two years, then returned to Australia for a career in sales management, eventually as chief advertising manager for Fairfax newspapers. He and Lesley had three children, before their marriage was dissolved in 1966.

Dennis Price (observer), Sydney Piddington and the Rev. Sir Herbert Dunnico (observer) in the BBC studio during the Tower of London broadcast
in The Piddingtons by Russell Braddon
(London: Werner Laurie, 1950)
Australian Collection
nla.cat-vn2059399

Ever the showman, however, he launched the act again following his marriage to Robyn Greig, a public relations consultant. Together, they took it to the New South Wales club circuit. Piddington’s energies were further displayed in publicity engagements enlivened with a touch of stage telepathy for the retail corporations Lend Lease and Myer and for Singapore Airlines. After persuading his aviation client to part with a pair of round-the-world tickets (first class, naturally), Piddington posed for the assembled press at the newly constructed Changi International Airport, shovel in hand. He had turned the first sod some 40 years earlier, he told journalists, when forced to dig an airstrip for his Japanese captors.

‘In Town Tonight’ with Compton Mackenzie
in The Piddingtons by Russell Braddon
(London: Werner Laurie,  1950)
Australian Collection
nla.cat-vn2059399

Piddington’s final years were cheered by the arrival of a fourth child in 1986 but severely shadowed by illness. Following surgery for cancer of the larynx, he lost the ability to speak; his young son would accompany him to a café, near their home in the Blue Mountains, and help with the coffee order. Following his death, on 29 January 1991, the secret of his telepathy technique has never been disclosed, nor—apart from that one hint in the Library’s collection—even remotely detected. In life, he had simply thrown the onus of proof onto his audiences. ‘There it is,’ he would say at the end of each performance. ‘You may believe it, or you may not. You are the judge.’

DR NIGEL STARCK teaches creative writing at the University of South Australia

IN A PREVIOUS ISSUE

Be the Life of the Party. Learn a Few Magic Tricks

Philip O’Brien explores the world of magic through magic apparatus catalogues from the early to mid-twentieth century

* June 2010 nla.gov.au/pub/nlanews/2010/jun10/07-Magic-Tricks.pdf