Creating texture in writing and related matters: a note

While I claim to be a writer, my writing scope is really quite constrained, non fiction with an analytical and predominantly historical focus. I try to write with clarity, I try to be interesting, but my writing is still constrained by its form and purpose. I have also experimented with different forms with varying success including poetry (disastrous), short stories (just okay) and memoir (reasonable) as a way of varying my writing style. Because I lecture as well as write, the two forms are very different, I have acquired a certain facility in oral presentation.

I was reminded of all this listening to the ABC Radio National film critic Jason Di Rosso interviewing Italian-American film maker  Jonas Carpignano with a special focus on his latest film A Chiara. It was a good interview, but two things interested me in particular. 

The first was the way that Carpignano's three feature films all centred on different stories set in a single Calabrian town, Gioia Tauro. This is now Jonas's home town. In filming, he had to work in a way that would tell a story while being respectful of the local community. This required a degree of trust. I face something of the same problem, compounded by the fact that while  Carpignano's films are fiction, my writing often deals with living people or their families. 

The second was the discussion on film craft, the way in which Jonas's apparently free-flowing semi-documentary style concealed careful attention to detail in a structured approach designed to achieve his filmic objectives. In writing terms, I think of this as the creation of texture, the provision of the detail necessary to create a story.

In writing, in film, in plays, in art, indeed in all forms of performance, there is an interaction between the work and the audience. This is not a simple process. 

Consider a play. The playwright has an idea as to the story and the way it should be presented, but once completed it is out of the writer's hands. It will be interpreted by producer and cast in ways that may diverge from the author's intent. Then it will be interpreted again by the audience. Here there are in fact three works, the play as written, the play as presented and the play as interpreted by members of the audience. 

I sometimes call myself a public historian. By this I mean partly that I write from outside the academy, more that I am seeking to interest and involve a broader audience in the topics I select. Over the hundreds of columns that I have written, I am (if you like) trying to sell both history and the topics I am interested in. I regard my writing as successful it it gives my readers new insights, if it leads them to further reading or, perhaps most importantly, if it leads them to challenge me.  

Writing in this way I rarely use footnotes or identify sources, although in most cases I can if asked. This habit of mine appals some academic historians. They regard it as a professional breach. To some, the purists, the only genuine history is that based exclusively on primary sources. 

I really challenge this last view. I am fortunate to have a reasonable library including many older texts, most now consigned to the dustbin in our current digital age where only the most recent or most popular are regarded as worthy of  retention. Just because a book is older or in some way now old-fashioned does not prevent it offering insights in general or as an artefact of its time.     

I follow a somewhat different approach when writing as a professional historian, I am now seeking to advance knowledge of a particular topic. I still wish to interest, to explain, but I am now bound by the canons of history as a discipline. Here long ago I absorbed the simple message that knowledge is only knowledge if it is potentially refutable. If it cannot be refuted, at least in theory, it's more a matter of faith and belief. This means that I must present my evidence in ways that allow my evidence and arguments to be checked and challenged. 

 Looking back over my own writing, the type of issues referenced in this note have been a constant preoccupation of mine. Here are a few examples:

• Tuesday, January 22, 2008 History and the changing meaning of words   
• Wednesday, January 23, 2008 The changing meaning of words and the historian's craft 
• Thursday, January 24, 2008 Selection, perception and bias in the historian's craft
• Thursday, April 07, 2011 Problems with literature & locale

Bogged down in growing up in New England

This is your life, Channel 9, 1977. Peter Allen, Peter's Aunt Nancy, Clare Napier-McCann, Roger Climpson

Some years ago my old  friend and blogging colleague Neil Whitfield commented that he and I seem to have grown up in different Australia’s. The trigger for the comment lay in an exchange of experiences relating (among other things) to first exposure to things Asian.

Neil was right, of course. Australia is not and never has been uniform. There are many different stories depending on location, time, ancestry and family circumstances.  I mention this now because I have been bogged down in New England Travels. The current chapter, Growing up on the New England Tablelands is due for posting here tomorrow. I doubt that I will make it.

The piece was triggered by four autobiographical books that I had been re-reading, all set on the Northern Tablelands. The age of the writers vary, although all were born before the Second World War: Maslyn Williams was born in 1911, Judith Wright in 1915  Binks Turnbull Dowling in 1923, Judith Wallace in 1932. Three of the four became writers. The fourth, Binks Turnbull Dowling, was the daughter of a writer.

Each book describes different aspects of life during formative periods in the writer’s life. They are very different, but each tells stories of personal and family change set against a backdrop of major historical change. I thought that the piece would be doable, but then I added Peter Woolnough to the mix. Peter is better known as Peter Allen, the name he would adopt.

Peter was born in Tenterfield on 10 February 1944, but moved to Armidale with his parents soon after his birth. He lived there until his father suicided in 1958, after which his mother moved to Lismore. I did not know Peter, although he was only a year ahead of me at primary school. Now, digging down, I have found some wonderful stuff. But, oh, what to do?!.

I do need to finish what I'm doing at the moment, at least in working draft so I'm sticking to target. That has to be my priority. But then I feel another series coming on!

  .

The Kitchen Garden

I was flaneuring around Mosman, one of those leafy North Shore Sydney suburbs. looking at architecture and the pattern of life. The thing I most noticed was the absence of kitchen gardens. Houses had grown and gardens shrunk to mere decoration or, at best, extensions of indoor living. My mind was cast back…..

 In January 1885, Albert Wright purchased Kangaroo Hills, now Wongwibinda, in the Falls country east of Armidale.  It had been done in a rush.

They had been living at Nulalbin outside Rockhampton. The year before eldest son Bertie had died after a lingering illness. The death came as a shock, and Albert and wife May decided that they must find a home in a more temperate climate.

They left Nulalbin in December 1884 for Bickham, a Wright family home in the Hunter Valley. In early January Albert went north, buying Kangaroo Hill on the spot. At end January, the whole family shifted to the new property.

Establishing the kitchen garden

One of Albert’s first acts was to plant a large vegetable garden near the new house being built for his family. This was a common pattern on the properties around Armidale, for the kitchen garden and associated fruit trees were critical to the supply of fresh fruit and vegetables. It was a day’s ride to Armidale, so you could hardly buy there on a daily basis.

In the towns, people had more choices. Even so, most people had vegetable gardens, while much of the fruit and vegetables they might buy were grown locally. The Chinese market gardeners with their plots spread along the local creek were a common feature in most Northern towns.

Creating kitchen gardens was not always easy. The spring of 1885 was a very good one on Kangaroo Hill. Albert planted onions, cabbages, lettuces, pumpkins, beans and fruit trees. Then came that evil that those living in the New England high country know so well, a sudden frost. “It seems useless”, Albert wrote, “to try to grow anything in such a climate.”

Albert’s problems were not unusual. New England is marked by great variation in soils, temperature and rainfall from coastal subtropical to high country to semi-arid. The new settlers had to learn what would grow best, how to grow it. In many places, water had to be carefully rationed. Nevertheless, they persevered and finally succeeded. They learned how to  create micro-climates through location, wind-breaks and walls. They also learned when to plant things to best effect.

The importance of fruit and vegetables

The importance of fruit and vegetables in diet was stressed but not always complied with in a meat loving society. In 1893, Sydney doctor Philip E Muskett, one of the first Australian nutritionists, attacked Australians love of meat, tea and tobacco. Australians would be healthier, he suggested, if they ate more salads, drank more wine, substituted a small cup of coffee for tea and walked six or more miles a day. This advice was largely ignored.

The CWA (Country Women's Association) was more practical. Founded in 1922 to provide mutual support to country women often living in isolation, its long running cook book (it’s still in print) became something of a domestic bible. “Home is not a Home without a garden. Plant one, and it will repay you” it stated:

Every wise housewife knows the value of the kitchen garden. It is a money saver, and a pleasure at all times. Nearly all vegetables are of easy culture. All soup vegetables should be grown at home. It is a great comfort to slip out and cut your own home requirements in your own back yard."

This advice combined an appeal to domestic values with the idea of economy and good cooking. Those CWA ladies became considerable cooks, capable of cooking for often large numbers with the sometimes limited ingredients at hand.

Masterchef has been a popular Australian cooking show in which contestants compete by cooking particular dishes for judgement by an expert panel. Back in 2010, the challenge set for contestants in one show was to cook certain recipes from the CWA cookbook - scones, lamingtons, jam, a fruit cake - and then serve to 100 CWA ladies. An experienced CWA judge critiqued their efforts.

I was watching it with my family. Now we knew the CWA pretty well and had eaten a lot of country cooking. My wife also learned to bake from her nan. I guess because of all this, we had a feel as to what might happen.

These contestants had cooked in challenge after challenge, managing often complicated dishes that I could never cook. There had been individual failures, but overall the results had been good. This time, with few exceptions, they bombed big time. It's just not as easy as it seems.

As the contest proceeded, I noticed that eldest had got out the cookbook I gave her some time ago. “I feel like scones”, she explained. Mixing bowls and ingredients appeared on the coffee table. With guidance from her mum, the process continued.

After the show finished, we discussed it over scones, blackberry jam and whipped cream. Our feeling was CWA 8, Masterchef 2.

I digress, but they were nice scones!

Managing the kitchen garden

A reasonable size home garden could be a complex operation involving all the family.. Herbs - lavender, thyme, marjoram, mint, sage, parsley and rosemary - were usually grown near the back door so that they could be easily picked for domestic purposes.

Further out were the vegetables grown in cycles depending on the growing season. Standard vegetables included onions, carrots, potatoes, peas and beans, sweet corn, pumpkins, lettuce, sometimes garlic although its use was then less common, cabbages, cauliflower, tomatoes, lettuce, silver beet, beetroot, parsnips and turnips. The compost heaps could normally be found near the vegetable garden, carefully maintained to provide a steady stream of compost to the changing beds.

The garden nearly always included vines and fruit trees, with the mix varying depending on the climate. In the case of our home garden - a cool climate garden - there was the ubiquitous grape vine, three apricot trees, a rather superb plum tree, a fig tree, gooseberries, red and black currants, strawberries and raspberries. In warmer climates, you might find passion fruit and citrus trees.

Many gardens also contained a chook (hen) yard providing fresh eggs and the sometimes fowl for dinner. Some breeding their own chicks maintained roosters whose crowing could disturb the town neighbourhood. As a child, I hated discovery an embryo in the egg. The manure from the yard was collected and used to fertilise the beds.

Even in town, many families maintained a milker to provide milk, cream and butter. Staying at Glenroy, my aunt and uncle’s property at Kentucky south of Armidale, we used to get up early to go with Uncle Ron to see the cow milked. The milk would be brought back in a bucket and then heated gently to raise the cream that would be collected and used to make butter. In Armidale, mum would sometimes send us out to get fresh milk that came from a cow a few blocks away.

Then there were the flowers grown both for decoration and to supply cut flowers to the house. At home, they would be cut and then brought into the kitchen for trimming and placement in the multiple vases that Mum had placed on the kitchen table. I have some of those vases in front of me as I write, although I fear that my use of them is now, at best, irregular.

Harvest Time

The reliance on locally produced produce created a pattern of seasonal gluts and shortages. As children we knew every fruit tree in the immediate area, knew when they were coming into fruit. We also picked and ate from the garden, new peas, tomatoes, fresh beans and little cucumbers. No problem in getting children to eat fruit or vegetables Somehow things that we picked ourselves were just that much more satisfying.

For adults, hard work was involved. When produce was plentiful, people bottled, preserved or prepared for storage in cool, dry, dark places. It wasn’t just produce from the home garden. Fruit and vegetables now in abundant supply and therefore cheap were purchased or given by relatives or friends. There was a considerable bottling ritual, a production process. The bottles were sterilised, the fruit cooked, the tomato relish made, the jams created, providing a steady stream of produce for the rest of the year. Some of the tastes were wonderful. Many of us would kill today for a jar of Aunt Kay’s tomato relish!

From a kid's perspective, one of the greatest things about the home garden was the way it provided trees to climb, places to hide, spots to dig in or to build camp fires. We were expert in fires, how to start them in the best way, how to build fireplaces. Potatoes cooked in the ashes were eaten, charcoal and all, with butter with the melting butter running down fingers. Nostalgia!

Australia’s changing diet

There is an enduring myth that Australians only discovered nice food with the arrival of new migrant groups after the Second World War. This myth compares the perceived standard meal of meat and three over-cooked vegetables with the variety in Australian diet that we now have.

Like most myths, there is a kernel of truth. Many more food options are now available. In my own case, for example, olive oil has moved from something that was a medicine when I was a child to a cooking staple. I use more garlic, a greater variety of herbs. There is far more variety in salads, we use more lentils. These are all gains. That said, the history of Australian food is far more complex than people realise.

The Australian diet has changed many times since the European occupation of the continent, It has also varied from area to area. Take, as a simple example, the decline in the calories required to support daily activities.

At the end of the nineteenth century, men humped weights as a matter of course that would now be illegal outside gyms. On the female side, too, the eighty per cent of women without servants engaged in the sheer physical drudgery of maintaining households without those labour saving devices we now take for granted. Both men and women walked long distances as a matter of course.

As life became more sedentary, the required daily calorie intake dropped. My best guess, and it is only a guess, is that it may well have halved over the twentieth century. This led to changes in food tastes.

At the start of the twentieth century, cook books were full of cake and biscuit recipes. They ran for pages. There were hundreds of local variations. Cakes were eaten at meals, served to visitors, taken in packed lunches. By the end of the twentieth century, the cake was largely vanquished. This was partly due to greater choice in sweet things including ice cream, more to the decline in calorie requirements. Even the CWA cookbook, that bastion of cakes and baking, has dropped some of its traditional recipes, replacing them with low carb options.

Now, too, we waste more food. The earlier cook-books had many recipes to take advantage of left-overs. There were good, practical, reasons for this emphasis. Food took a much higher proportion of family income than it does today for most.

The roast chook became soup, the vegetables went into bubble and squeak, the roast lamb or beef was minced for a new dish. I still miss the cast iron hand-mincer I inherited from my parents. I don’t know what happened to its innards, they went missing in one of our many moves. It was actually much more efficient (and easier to clean) than modern devices.

Recognising that we clearly have more variety in food today, it is less clear that we eat better. The opposite may in fact be the case as preparation is replaced by convenience. Now we obsess about diet and dieting.

The emphasis on proper nutrition is not new. At least from the time of Philip Muskett in 1893 through the first CWA cookbook to the domestic science lessons, official pronouncements and cookbooks of the 1930s, the need for a balanced diet was recognised and emphasised. One result was a focus on the dreaded meat and three vegetables since that was an easy way to prepare standard balanced meal. Today we have gone further: we search for miracle diets that will somehow reduce our weight, avoid allergies and improve our overall health and longevity. And all with minimum effort!.

The many changes in Australian diet over the years partially reflects changing fashions and the availability of food stuffs, but also the tools available for cooking. Cooks have to match what they do to the available equipment. Thus the open fire and camp oven was replaced by the fuel stove and then the generally smaller gas or electric stoves better suited to the smaller kitchens in the growing urban areas. These had advantages, but also limited what could be cooked. Today, bigger kitchens are back along with a new range of BBQ equipment.

In our case, we had a substantial fuel stove that not only provided constant hot water but a substantial range of cooking options. It could be a bit cranky; you had to be able to judge the temperature, but that came with experience. The firebox was on the right. The temperature  of the whole stove could be controlled by varying the intensity of the fire through a combination of fuel and dampers. The hot air from the fuel box ran along the top of the stove to the chimney on the left.

A hot plate ran the length of the stove with heat gradually diminishing towards the chimney. This allowed food to be cooked and then moved to a cooler place to set or stay warm. The ever present kettle could be moved from the left of the stove to the hotter right where it quickly boiled. The oven was on the left with a warming oven below. This allowed food to be kept warm or plates to be warmed before serving. Later, my mother acquired an electric fry pan, a useful supplement when time was pressing.

The food we ate was influenced by what we had in the garden, what had already been harvested and stored. The standard main meal was two courses, three for bigger meals. The main dish consisted of a meat dish presented in different ways, usually with two to three vegetables drawn from the garden. Growing up in sheep country, sheep meat was a staple. Beef, the major meat across Australia was less common because it was more expensive.

This main meal; was followed by a desert often of bottled fruit, sometimes with fresh cream or (more rarely) ice cream. In some cases soup preceded the main meal.

The exact mix of main meals depended on what was available. Soups, stews, roasts and casseroles were common because these made best use of available produce. I still love the taste of fresh field mushrooms, of rich casserole sauce.

There was great variety in home made soups. Some soups like chicken, often made from the remains of a bird previously killed, were relatively light, as were the broths served to invalids. Some soups were major meals in their own right, served with crusty bread.

The pattern with other meals was a little different. Breakfast was generally a bigger meal than it is today. As children, we normally had porridge or wheat bix with hot milk followed by a hot meal, often bacon or some form of eggs. Later when things were busier, I would go outside and pick raspberries to bring back and crush with cream and sugar. Alternatively, I would pick a jar of preserves of the shelf or from the fridge and have it with cream.

Lunch, by contrast, was far more pedestrian depending on just what we were doing. In fact, lunch did not have a clear pattern because it varied so much. On Sundays then as indeed now, lunch was often a roast dinner. The Sunday roast remains an enduring tradition in many Australian households. Where, as in this case, lunch was actually dinner, tea was a relatively light meal.

There were then no school canteens, nor were there the bars and other convenience snacks that now dominate the supermarket shelves. School lunches were sandwiches, a piece of fruit, often a piece of cake, and a drink. Looking back at some of the reminiscences from the 1950s, the memory of soggy tomato sandwiches seems to be a constant theme!

There were other meals and snacks, of course. The pattern here varied from family to family depending on income and taste.

Then as now, busy parents sometimes resorted to the very quick and easy. This was where tinned food came in handy. Tinned spaghetti or baked beans on buttered toast or tinned soups with bread fingers.

The kitchen garden’s decline

The kitchen garden that used to be common in both city and country has been in sad decline. The gardening folk memories that we used to absorb from our parents have also declined as a consequence. The decline began slowly and then accelerated during the busy 1980s.

Walking around Armidale or Queanbeyan during the 1970s you would still see kitchen gardens everywhere. Queanbeyan, the NSW town just across the border from the Australian Capital Territory where I was then living, was a fascinating place with a large immigrant community that had come to work on the Snowy Hydroelectric Scheme or on the building of Canberra. They brought with them farming and gardening techniques from Eastern and Southern Europe where the home garden had been a way of life. This was industrial scale kitchen gardening where the garden and associated livestock provided much of the food over the year.

It also provided the base for a range of home made alcohols that could be a real trap if you were involved in local politics as I was at the time. That one drink for hospitality purposes could extend and be repeated on calls elsewhere, creating a degree of unsteadiness by the end of that day’s visits.

By 2000, the decline in the kitchen garden was largely complete. Many things contributed to that collapse. Neighbours and councils began to object to the noise and smells associated with the garden, including the omnipresent hens. Blocks became smaller, flats or townhouses more common. More people rented.. The supermarkets brought a wider range of cheaper foodstuffs, reducing the incentive to garden. Time became more precious as two income families tried to balance the demands of more complex lives.

Can the kitchen garden come back? I think not, although the increased interest in sustainability and the rise in community gardens does hold out some hope. The difficulty is that these things appeal to particular niche views and lifestyles whereas the old kitchen garden was an integral element in normal life. 

Note to readers: Every Wednesday I am going to bring up one draft chapter of New England Travels, the book I have been working on. Each chapter is self contained and varies in length from 500 to 3000 words. I am not including images. I will add those later. This chapter forms part of a bigger section entitled family life.   

Reflections on the art of flânerie

Note to readers: Every Wednesday I am going to bring up one draft chapter of New England Travels, the book I have been working on. Each chapter is self contained and varies in length from 500 to 3000 words. I am not including images. I will add those later.This chapter marks the start of a bigger section entitled people and place.   

Text

Flâneur – the stroller, lounger, saunterer

Flânerie – the act of strolling with all its associations

To be a flâneur is to idle without purpose, interested in what you find.

When practicing the art of flânerie, it is important to stop and observe. The pleasure lies in the discovery of the unexpected

 John Baxter’s book The Most Beautiful Walk in the World: A pedestrian in Paris introduced me to the concept of flânerie. Baxter, an Australian born writer, journalist and film maker, has lived in Paris since 1989. There, by accident, he became a guide taking walking parties on literary tours through the streets of a city that he had come to love. The book describes his experiences in that role.

I enjoyed it in part because I have been to Paris several times and so knew many of the places and some of the stories he wrote about. It’s a well written easy to read book. I was also interested in a professional sense since I see part of my role as a story teller.

Baxter used the concept of the flâneur to introduce his view of the pedestrian in Paris. I had not heard the term, although I later found it to be in widespread and growing use, especially in a travel context.

Wikipedia records that flâneur comes from the Old Norse verb flana “to wander with no purpose”. The term flânerie, strolling or idling, dates to 16^th or 17^th century France. However, it was in 19^th century Paris that the flâneur became a cultural icon, someone who wanders the streets as an observer and philosopher, an urban explorer, a connoisseur of the street. The concept spread to related activities such as photography, was applied in other fields including literature and became wrapped in social analysis and theories. It also spread to other places, including England and Germany.

In Germany, for example, the writer and translator Franz Hessel became one of the first exponents of the idea of flânerie, culminating in his 1929 collection of essays Walking in Berlin. Most essays describe a walk or an outing centred on a theme or part of Berlin. Hessel weaves history into his observations of people and place, capturing the rhythm of Weimar Berlin at a time of profound shifts in life and culture.

Today Hessel is probably best known as the inspiration for the character of Jules in Henri-Pierre Roche's 1953 semi-autobiographical novel Jules et Jim. This novel inspired the famous 1962 French New Wave romantic drama film of the same name directed, produced and written by François Truffaut. The 2016 release by Scribe of a new English translation of Walking in Berlin subtitled a flaneur in the capital may redress the balance by bringing Hessel to a wider audience.

Reading Baxter, I was immediately attracted to the idea of flânerie. It provided a perfect justification for my habit of just wandering, following my nose to see what I could find. It justified a sometimes insatiable curiosity that could verge on sticky-beaking. I was now engaged in a respected cultural practice! Most of all, I liked the idea of combining history with current observation.  However, I faced a problem in adopting the art.

The concept of idling, of strolling, of sauntering, of observing without fixed purpose or destination runs against a deeply held Australian cultural trait, the need to do something, to achieve something.

This need is embedded in us from childhood. We go to school to learn things, to meet required standards, to achieve and help the school achieve targets. Out of school, we engage in organised activities; our lives are a series of activities carried out at particular times for particular purposes. In adulthood, we try to practice the seven habits of effective people, we are told that we must practise continuous improvement, that we have to learn new skills, that we have to adjust to an ever changing world. At national level, governments constantly tell us that we and our children must work harder, must do better so that the country can do better.

.I am not immune to all this. The idea that I should go sauntering to see what I could find with no objective other than interest conflicted with my deep conditioning that I should be doing something productive. I knew that that view was silly, but I could not help myself. And yet, despite all this, for a time I became a most dedicated flâneur, wandering the streets with a camera looking for detail and stories. .

I think I was helped by the fact that I was doing it with a friend who shared my interests. Then with time I drifted away, although I introduced a remarkable number of people to the concept.

One of the reasons for my drift is that I started walking for exercise, itself a modern target oriented approach. This came about in part because work had a health program. I was given my own little step counter and was expected to enter my steps into a web site that tracked my path across the world.

This may be healthy, but it tends to defeat the point, the discoveries that can come from random idling. I find that when walking for exercise I have in mind distance and time, two things in direct conflict with the art of flânerie. What's worse, I tend to get very bored and thus stop walking! Even the desire to achieve a minimum number of paces (10,000 per day appears to have become an almost universal target) provides insufficient incentive. The irony, of course, is that I actually walked more as a flâneur than as an exerciser because I was simply more interested, was inclined to keep moving.

I really rediscovered the art of flânerie on my second trip to Copenhagen where eldest had moved for work. I was really on my own, had no things that I had to do and had lots of time. I knew the bones of the city quite well after the first trip . Now I decided to flesh out the details.

There is something enormously relaxing about heading out with only a rough idea of direction and time scope. I wandered almost at random, looking a the buildings and shops. Sometimes, I would find myself back at a familiar place and then wander around working out just how I had got there. Finally, I would head for home by the shortest route.

Suitable rewards add to the enjoyment of flâneuring. I found Copenhagen's Cafe Sommersko by accident. I had been wandering for well over an hour and felt like a coffee.

I was fascinated by the place. Obviously moderately posh, a restaurant at night, it was starting to fill with casually if well dressed young Danes. They knew each other, and hugged or kissed as they unfolded their outer street-ware to reveal the plumage underneath, ordering coffee and drinks.

Investigating later, I found that the Cafe Sommersko. was opened in 1976 to provide a place for the city's artists to meet, introducing a new cafe concept to the city. I must say they struck me as very well dressed artists!

I had enjoyed my coffee reward. It was time to move on to the next step in my exploration of Copenhagen, its life and people.

Since returning from Copenhagen, I have tried to maintain the practice of flânerie for practical as well as personal reasons.

As an historian, I know just how important it is to walk the ground. I studied ancient Greek history at school and university, but had no idea on key underpinnings until our 2010 visit to the Greek Islands. I was surprised at their small size, I had not properly realised the importance of water nor the importance of trade. The same holds with my studies on New England history. You cannot understand relationships or patterns unless you actually know the geography.

At a personal level, flânerie has given me many unexpected pleasures. It remains hard sometimes to actually stop and look, especially when travelling. I still find it hard to break from the need to do something, to achieve something, to get to a destination or objective. To just wander without defined purpose remains hard. I guess that I will have to keep working on that. 

New England Travels seminar paper

I have now posted to my history blog the paper I delivered  in the University of New England’s Humanities seminar series on 13 April 2018: New England Travels: journeys through space and time. The paper is a personal ramble through elements in New England's history.

Story of the Parthenon on the Hill.

On 19 February I give a preliminary report (First reflections on the opening of NERAM's permanent exhibition of the Hinton collection) on my visit to Armidale for the opening of NERAM's new Hinton exhibition.

I have now completed the footnotes etc for the public lecture I gave on Saturday 17 February as part of the opening celebrations and brought it on line on the history blog::Creating the Parthenon on the Hill; establishment and early life of the Armidale Teachers’ College.

The finalisation of lecture proved to be more time consuming than I expected. In addition to footnote checks and typo corrections, I then had to send multiple copies out. Still, its done and is now on-line as well.

Writing preoccupations - Vikings, History awards, Native Title, Roman villas and New England architecture

Today's Sunday snippets are a round-up of my own and other people's writing. I hope that you find something of interest.

An article in RT reports confirmation based on DNA analysis that the body found in a famous Viking burial site was female. Analysis of the skeletal remains had suggested this, but doubts were raised because of the perceived structure of Viking society. It is the first formal confirmation of the existence of a female Viking warrior. The RT article includes links to the scientific paper reporting the results. This is worth a read.

 This month's history carnival, the 168th,was hosted by Helen's ART and ARCHITECTURE mainly. Do have a look. My favourite among the posts mentioned, and I'm not alone here, is Laundry Methods During the American Revolution: The Really, Really Quick Version  

On 1 September I reported on Winners of the 2017 NSW Premier’s History Awards. The post includes the judges' comments on each award winner along with a link to the publisher. I heard an interview with Mark McKenna telling part of the story from From the Edge and I'm looking forward to reading the book. 

 My main post on the New England Australia blog during the week was The Western Bundjalung Native Title Decision

At Tabulam on 29 August 2017,around 400 people including traditional owners gathered in a crowded marquee erected on the local racecourse as a temporary courthouse to hear the consent determination delivered in the long-running Western Bundjalung Native Title case. 

After a Welcome to Country and traditional smoking ceremony, Federal Court Judge Jayne Jagot delivered her consent judgement. This granted the native title claim, legally recognising the rights and interest of the Western Bundjalung people as traditional owners of the land, including the right to camp, hunt, fish, gather resources and conduct their cultural practices on their country, as well as the right to be consulted on matters including mining applications on their land that affect the management of their land.

The post provides details and background on the decision. While it's mainly drawn from the media reports listed at the end of the post and is in that sense derivative, it took me a long time to write because I was trying to gather it all together to tell a story. I also wanted to add some links to things like the full decision.  

The photo from ABC Mid North Coast shows some of the elders at the hearing. If you look at the left hand side you can get a feel for the emotion of the day.

I was a bit nervous about this post as I am so often now on writing about Aboriginal history or issues. However, Michael Bennett,  the historian at NTSCORP Ltd who played an important role in collecting the evidence required to substantiate the case, said in a tweet: "Thanks Jim for your thorough and authoritative review". Needless to say, I was pleased. Outside his work for NTSCORP Ltd., Michael has been painstakingly putting together a history of Aboriginal trackers in NSW. You will find the results of this work at Pathfinders. The History of NSW Aboriginal Trackers.It's an interesting site and well worth a browse.    

I have another story to do on the latest Yaegl Native Title decision, the first to award title over ocean in NSW. Native title does not grant absolute rights, but it means that people can exercise traditional rights without restriction from State legislation. This has become a major problem in Southern NSW where the Yuin people have been restricted from fishing for private purposes on what was their land because of general restrictions and charges designed to protect fisheries and raise Government money. 

Meantime, the new discoveries keep rolling out. The fossil footprints of Trachilos date to c5.7 million years ago reports on one such discovery. As my regular history commenter Johnb says, it's exciting. The discoveries have turned our understanding of the deep human past and the evolutionary process itself on its head. Linear evolution has been replaced by possible multi-linear evolution from several sources. We have many more hominid species who may have or indeed did interbreed.  

One effect of this is that the entire conceptual structure underpinning, common ideas about race and evolution, that underpinned so much of nineteenth and twentieth century thinking has been swept aside. It survives today and remains important, but it can't survive in the longer term in the face of the growing evidence. 

Not all the discoveries relate to the distant past.We are finding new stuff all the time.This Guardian story,  Barn conversion leads to amazing find of palatial Roman villa, is an example. 

These discoveries don't necessarily invalidate previous historiography. Many now ignored histories that are seen as fuddy duddy, well past their use by dates, not reflective of "modern" thinking, actually contain great insights. Just because a person has worked from less evidence and from world views that many now reject does not mean that they are wrong on every point. Sometimes, having less evidence can be a real advantage. However, at the very least the new discoveries add texture and depth to familiar stories as well as writing new stories. It's an exciting time to be an historian. It's also a challenging one because so much more has to be fitted in. 

My core writing focus remains on New England Travels: journeys through space and time.  I am trying to use this as an integrating device across a range of my historical writing, ultimately leading to my full history of New England. 

I thought of titling this photo "You call that a verandah. This is a verandah!" This is the Croft, just outside Armidale. 

The linkage is that my latest historical research foray is architecture, including a new series on the New England built landscape and architecture in my Armidale Express column. These forays take time and put off actually finalising anything, but they do add to the texture and depth of the product. 

Mind you, I blame the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) for this latest foray because of programs like Grand Designs!

In my first column in the series (Architectural keys to past), I said in introduction. "The past lies all around us in the form of the built landscape. We see it, but then we don’t because it is so familiar to us." I think that's right. No matter where you live, the built landscape is both where you live now and an historical artifact.

In the series I am going from the Aboriginal built landscape right though to the most modern.  

This is a recent construction outside Armidale from architect Luigi Rosselli. The description reads: 

This hill top house is a concrete expression of Armidale ’s unique meeting of rural life and culture, “agri-culture”, a town with a university and many other cultural institutions. 

The clients seamlessly combine their flourishing agribusiness with their white collar occupations.  Gentlemen farming.   Their modern “Homestead” is located at the peak of the property overseeing the health of the cattle in the valley below. 

The 1000 metres of altitude are felt outside with cold winter fog covering the valley, whilst inside the house is a refuge enhanced by strongly integrated passive solar design principles.   The sheds and barns are located remotely. 

Keeping nature intact, the grassy slopes of the hill continue all the way up under the concrete platform.   The slab and the corrugated steel skirt under, are a protection against grass fires and conceal large water tanks.   The concrete and the tanks provide ample thermal mass to balance the temperature extremes that high country encounters.   The Interiors are an urbane and cultured refuge to a collection of art and indigenous artefacts collected in Africa and Asia.   There is no place for whips, saddles and country style clichés.

Now I happen to be rather fond of country style cliches and older styles such as this one, Woodleigh, also just outside Armidale. But the point about architecture and the built landscape is that it constantly reinvents itself, replacing what went before.

That replacement process can go too far to the point that it destroys the past beyond repair,  That has happened in Sydney to a significant degree to that city's permanent loss. But to the historian its all evidential grist to the mill.

I have sidetracked, something that I am prone to do. However, and just to finish this post, I have had a wonderful time searching the house sale notices looking for examples to illustrate various architectural styles and to trace changing patterns over time. I wrote about this in Using Domain or realestate.com.au as historical research tools.

Bogged down in writing

I have been bogged down on my major historical writing projects.

Back in November 2015 when Clare B and I reviewed my writing targets, we agreed that one simple way of getting a book ready quickly would be to consolidate and then edit the collected Belshaw's World columns written for the Armidale Express over the period 2009-2012. On 22 December 2015 I reported on Facebook:

I completed the consolidation process in the early hours of this morning, giving me a first draft of 120,000 words. A fair bit of editing is required to consolidate, improve English, add explanatory material etc. Writing a weekly column under deadlines does not always make for good English, while some columns would be far too obscure for general reading.. Still, this type of editing is a process I quite enjoy.

 So far so good, but I then became dissatisfied. I didn't think that the draft was of the right standard and required far more editing than I had expected. I still hadn't given up on the project, but ended putting it aside for the moment, returning to my two main writing projects.

The first is the history of Northern New South Wales, the broader New England, over the last 50,000 years. This is broken into four parts: an introduction to set the scene and to help integrate the entire book; Aboriginal New England up to 1788; Colonial New England; and then New England in the Twentieth Century.

Those who have followed my blogs will know from the occasional references to this project that it seems to have stretched on and on. I accept that I lack discipline, but I keep finding new topics, new themes, that demand to be included. I also keep finding gaps in my knowledge that I wasn't aware of and which now need to be filled.

The final book will, I hope, be all the better for all this. Certainly it will be very different from the original work as envisaged. The first outline had a strong political focus with the 150+ year fight for self-government as the unifying theme in the last two sections of the book. That's still there, but the book has become much more a social and cultural history.

One particular difficulty is the way the present keeps intruding on the past, forcing me to ask new questions, to decide on new questions of balance. One example here is the concern with child sexual abuse, for many of the issues raised at the Royal Commission relate to the Hunter and Northern Rivers, but came to light after my cut-off date.  A second example is the stolen generation. This had become a major issue by 2000 following the 1997 Bringing Them Home Report, but has continued to run since.

I need to reference both and especially the second, but how much to say, how much extra work to do? I could just reference the later work, but I have a particular problem with the stolen generation that makes me reluctant to do so because it is part of and indeed conflicts to a degree with a theme I already have in draft. I need to understand what has happened and I can't just rely on the report for that. The photo is of the Kinchela Boys' Home outide kempsey. .  

The second major project is New England Travels: journeys through space and time. I announced this project at the end of May 2014 -  New England Travels – journeys through space and time. I described the project in this way:

The working title is New England Travels – journeys through space and time. Part autobiographical memoir, part travel story, part history, my story meanders wherever it will take me. New England provides the unifying element, the frame if you like, but I am not restricted to that; the sands of Arabia, Lugard’s Nigeria, spying in Japan, boxing and boxing tents, life and death on the frontier, the rise and fall of dynasties and the strange by-ways of family life are already there, sketched on the canvas I have created; my choice now is to select. 

I am not being too ambitious. For the moment, I have an income to earn, other things to write. My writing target is 300 words per day. So far I am sticking to it, although it’s very early days. For the present at least, I am finding the process liberating, an anodyne to other frustrations that bedevil me. I know that the draft will change greatly as I write. Even now it has changed several times as I strive to capture the right words, to achieve the balance I want.

Mmmm. What I hadn't properly realised was the extent of new research required to deliver the project as defined. I was, in fact, trying to research two major if somewhat overlapping book projects at the same time. I simply couldn't achieve 300 original words a day.

It was this realisation that finally led to the decision to go for Belshaw's World as a way of  getting something out the door. Then after I put that project on hold at the first draft stage, an intense work period intervened, so I just jogged along trying to do some blogging while also pushing forward with some research on the history. As part of this, I actually developed a somewhat better research approach, if still a tad inefficient.

My weekly history column provided the next building block. A number of people suggested to me that I should publish the columns. Even though I already had the words for a book, I didn't think that was sensible because the columns were only 500 words. I thought that the result would be too bitsy. I was truly a puzzled panda.

In writing the columns, I had begun to experiment with series, groups of up to eight or nine columns grouped around a theme or story. Initially I just fell into the approach, but when I started to get good reader feedback I adopted it as a practice. There were some good stories too such as Camp Victory and the Casino Boys.

At this point things began to gell a little. I was doing research that could be used for both projects so long as I recorded the sources for the main history project. New England Travels emerged from the mists as a book of 90 to 100,000 words made up of a mix of short and longer pieces roughly grouped around themes combining existing and new material. Once I had a basic draft in place, then I could edit and rewrite to make it interesting to a general audience, not just those with an interest in New England history. Which brings me back to my opening graphic!

Its taken quite a while to get to this point and I am hesitant about attaching firm public deadlines to the project.

I am fortunate at this point that I have been given a window to write full time. Mind you, I am finding this quite challenging. Sitting there for extended periods with no direct human contact tends to send me quite stir crazy.

Still, I mustn't complain. I am making progress even if my regular blogging is down as a consequence.

.  

 

Dalwood House

My main post today is on the New England Australia blog, New England Travels - A visit to Dalwood part one.

Some time ago, I started writing New England Travels, subtitled journeys through space and time. Part history, part travel, part personal reminiscences,  the book gave me an opportunity to write beyond the usual confines set by the need to record sources, to sit within boundaries.

Like so many of my projects, it is only part written, but I decided that I should share some of the material via irregular posts.

Other recent Belshaw posts

My main post today, Policy, programs, control and complexity - ICAC on problems in NSW public policy and administration, was on the Managing the Professional Services Firm blog. It continues my series on problems in management and public administration in particular. This time, however, I am using ICAC analysis to support my point.

On other blogs, I updated my post, Warrumbungle Pilliga Fires, with some new material. Click though the links to the two posts on the fires and the Siding Springs Observatory. They make for fascinating reading.

I have continued bringing up my History Revisited columns from the Armidale Express, first with  History Revisited - just a bit of bull and then History Revisited - marching into town's heart. In doing so, I switched the blog for these column posts to my history blog. In a comment, Ramana was kind enough to welcome my return to posting on the history blog. Thank you, Ramana. I will try to do better.