A life worth living - reflections on the sudden death of Will Owen

On 2 December, our fellow blogger Will Owen died unexpectedly in his sleep at his Chapel Hill North Carolina home. He was just 63. We had never met in person, but I felt that I knew him.

Will and I first interacted back in June 2007 when he commented on a post I had written on the Howard-Brough Aboriginal intervention in the Northern Territory, I hadn’t seen his blog, Aboriginal Art and Culture: an American eye, although by then it had been established for over two years. I looked, and it became one of my regular reads.

Later I nominated some of his posts for consideration by Club Troppo/On-line Opinion for the best independent Australian blog posts of 2008. There was some doubt as to his eligibility, but I thought that Will’s focus should make him eligible. I was pleased, and so was he, when his Basedow's photographs made the list. Later still, and rightly, the blog was selected for permanent retention as part of the National Library’s Pandora Archive.

While I knew of Will through his work on Aboriginal art, his main professional role was as a librarian. He began work at the University of North Carolina (UNC) Library in 1976 as a student assistant in the collection development department. At the time of his death, he was Associate University Librarian for Technical Services and Systems, a position he had held since 2011. He had also served since July as the Library’s interim Director of Human Resources.

In a tribute, Sarah Michalak, University Librarian and Associate Provost for University Libraries (UNC is a networked multi-campus institution) said that with Will’s passing, the Library and the field hade lost “one of the greats of librarianship and a leader whose accomplishments embody the best of the profession”.

Will believed that libraries should provide the broadest possible access to scholarly information. At a time when many questioned the value of the library catalog, he empowered his team instead to develop it as a sophisticated tool that would facilitate customized searching and would lead researchers directly to primary source material from the library collections.

At the time that Will became one of the Library’s first computer administrators in 1985, there were just a few computers in campus libraries, said David Romani, UNC Library’s lead systems administrator. “It was the two of us doing all of the technology,” he recalled, even to the point of removing ceiling panels and running cable for the first system of networked computers in Davis Library.

As technology became an increasingly prominent part of library work, Will became UNC’s first systems librarian and then head of the systems department. His guiding principle was always that the technology—and the technology department—should be a solid and reliable support that makes it possible for colleagues to focus on their primary mission of carrying out the work of the library.

It is clear from the many tributes that Will not only applied this principle in practice but was also an effective guide and mentor. “People valued his mentoring,” said Michalak, “because of the clear way he expressed himself. You knew that he really cared and that everything came from a grounding of integrity.”

Outside his professional work, Will was a man many of many interests. He already had an abiding interest in contemporary American art before seeing the “Dreamings The Art of Aboriginal Australia.” exhibition at the Asia Society in New York City in 1988.

The paintings, with their arrays of small dots, elaborate patterns in startling colors and puzzling iconography, took the lifelong art lover by surprise. “This is the first we knew it existed. I had no idea Australia’s Aboriginal people made art, much less crazy, beautiful art like this,” he said.

In 1990 Will and his long standing partner Professor Harvey Wagner (they had been together for 34 years at the time of Will’s death) visited Australia almost by accident.

Will had intended to use frequent flier miles for a European Christmas vacation with his partner. But by the time they made reservations at Thanksgiving, every seat was long since booked. Frustrated, they asked what was left. “I can get you on a plane to Sydney,” the agent offered. The surprise destination led the pair directly to a passion for Aboriginal art that has drawn them back again and again to Australia.

It was a day trip to the country west of Alice Springs that brought everything together. Piled into a Land Cruiser with five other passengers, Will listened, captivated, as their guide described Aboriginal culture and the complicated relationship at its heart between the people and the land. “It was so alien, so unlike anything that I’d encountered before,” he said. “I wanted to try to solve the puzzle, to understand these minds that saw the world in such a different way.”

He and Harvey began purchasing art, ultimately building one of the world’s largest private collections of Aboriginal art. This painting is by Kenny Brown, Tiwi Islands, Jilamara (Good Design), 2001. The image derives from ceremonial designs that mourners paint on their bodies.

Insatiably curious, Will began to read up on anthropology, history and art, seeking to understand. Eventually, he came to see his research and writing as a continuation of the efforts of the Aboriginal people themselves to explain their lives and their world.

“For more than 200 years, these people in Australia have been held up as the exemplar of the most primitive people on Earth,” he said. “In fact, their art – which is extremely popular, which the government has appropriated as a symbol of Australia – is the way in which these people have reached out across the racial divide, against bigotry, condescension and hatred to share what is theirs with the rest of us.

“Living in extreme conditions means that you have to share or else you die. Their art is the way they’ve chosen to share their culture with us.”

“Aboriginal people don’t own the land,” he explained. “The land owns them.” Each individual is tied to a particular piece of land – known as one’s country – by virtue of being born there, having family or family history there, or having ancestors buried there.

For Aboriginal people, the country is a living, sentient being. When they are away from it, “they worry for the country and the country worries for them,” he said. The paintings that had so intrigued Will were, in fact, the outpouring of a great deal of worry.

Will began blogging in 2005 as a way of keeping track of all he was learning. The posts covered not just art, but also history and culture. In addition to blogging, Will used various mechanisms to promote Aboriginal art, artists and culture speaking at events and providing expert advice.

He was among the contributors to Beyond Sacred: recent paintings from Australia's remote Aboriginal communities, edited by Colin and Elizabeth Laverty (Hardie Grant Books, 2008). Then in 2009 and 2011, Will and Harvey gave their entire collection to the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College. This made the Museum a centre for the study of Australian Aboriginal art in the US and provided a base for a major exhibition in 2012.

Truly, Will’s life was one worth living with multiple contributions across fields My commiserations to Harvey Wagner and Will's many friends.

Sources:

In Memoriam: Will Owen 

Librarian, long-time art lover finds new passion in Aboriginal art
.

Henry Wallis, George Meredith, Mary Meredith and The Death of Chatterton

This post is dedicated to Evan, 2tanners and kvd, inspired by a short comment stream on That Australian life - the Lamberts inspired by this remark of mine: "Growing up, I was attracted by the concept of the artist in the garret. It seemed kind of romantic. Certainly I wasn't put off by minor things like the cold! Now, older, I wonder a bit. There is a lot to be said for comfort and at least a degree of stability".

This photograph, the Death of Chatterton, is by the English Pre-Raphaelite painter Henry Wallis (1830-1916), I quote from the Wikipedia entry:.

Wallis is best remembered for his first great success, The Death of Chatterton, which he exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1856. The painting depicted the impoverished late 18th-century poet Thomas Chatterton, who poisoned himself in despair at the age of seventeen, and was considered a Romantic hero for many young and struggling artists in Wallis's day. .... He (Wallis) used a bold colour scheme with a contrasting palette and he exploited the fall of the natural light through the window of the garret to implement his much loved style at the time, chiaroscuro. 

So the painting captures the idea of the romantic but unrecognised artistic hero dying alone in his garret. In one of his comments, 2tanners took a very modern and prosaic view of the artist in the garret.

The artist in the garret implies mediocre commercial success (and therefore critical acclaim). Sometimes this can make you hungry in ways that don't involve food, and keep you there. Success can make you more casual about what you do. This isn't restricted to art, the saying "Stay hungry, or success will kill you" is a business mantra. 

*Starving* in a garret is a different thing, IMHO. To any self respecting artist, you do need to stay alive and feed your family (or contribute). I have two writer friends who thank their lucky stars for retail stores like JB Hi-Fi. They can work there to get through the lean times and are valued by their employers for their stability, lack of retail ambition (they don't want to join the managerial ranks) and knowledge of the product range. But they are writers, first and foremost.

Oh dear.It quite takes the romance out of it all. But where did the garret phrase come from. According to Victoria S Dennis, an English writer called Samuel Foote (1720-1777) summarised the life of an author as "Born in a cellar.and living in a garret".Foote was talking about writers, not painters.

In the 18th century the figure of the literary man living in poverty because his ideas were too unfashionable or politically unsafe to sell well was, according to Victoria, a familiar cliché. By contrast, during the same period the painter was seen as a craftsman who by definition worked for the rich, and therefore should make a comfortable living if he were any good. "The idea of the painter as a rebel genius who is poor because he only paints what inspires him and refuses to prostitute his gift by painting pictures people want to buy"  is, Victoria says. "a creation of 19th-century Romanticism."

Victoria did not know at what date the cliché came to be "starving" rather than just "living" in the garret. Her guess was in the second half of the 19th century. In the 18th century everyone knew that people only lived in garrets if they were too poor to afford anything better. "After the Romantics had made the idea of a delightfully bohemian life in a garret fashionable (in theory and in novels, at any rate), it became necessary to stress the idea of poverty."

Oh dear once again! I am clearly a romantic.In all this, there is a twist that does fit with popular images of the artistic life.

This is the painting of the English writer George Meredith painted in 1893 by George Frederic Watts.  In 1856 Meredith posed as model for The Death of Chatterton. 

In 1849,  Meredith had married Mary, a widow with one child. In 1853, a son (Arthur) was born to the couple.

Mary has been described as beautiful, intelligent, outspoken and ambitious. The marriage was apparently troubled. .Around the time that The Death of Chatterton was painted, Mary began an affair with Henry Wallis. In 1858, pregnant, she ran off with Wallis shortly before giving birth, leaving Arthur behind. It was a short relationship, with Mary dying in 1861.

Like many writers, Meredith seems to have drawn from his experiences in his writing. The collection of "sonnets" entitled Modern Love(1862) emerged, as did The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, his first "major novel". I haven't read the book nor indeed any of Meredith's writing, yet another gap in my knowledge! However, the novel's opening has been described in this way: "Sir Austin Feverel's wife deserts him to run away with a poet, leaving her husband to bring up their boy Richard. Believing schools to be corrupt, Sir Austin, a scientific humanist, educates the boy at home with a plan of his own devising known as "the System". This involves strict authoritarian supervision of every aspect of the boy's life, and in particular the prevention of any meeting between Richard and girls of his own age."

I don't think that Meredith believed in the principles involved, the book is in part a conflict between harsh principles and reality leading to apparently to an ultimate happy ending, but I was left with a strong impression of possible conflict between the serious self-focused Meredith and Mary's own strong personality.

In all this, after researching this post I was left dissatisfied. What happened to Mary's first child? What happened to the child born after Mary left to join Henry Wallis? How did Mary die? I would like to know more.

Update

Thanks to leads supplied by kvd, we have more information on Mary Ellen Meredith. This is a pencil drawing of Mary made by Henry Wallis around 1856.She was clearly an attractive woman. 

A piece by Elvira Casal in The Victorian Web provides more information on Mary and the various relationships, with a little more added in the text attached to the pencil drawing..

George Meredith met Mary through London solicitor  Richard Stephen Charnock who was active in literary activities. Meredith was in fact apprenticed to Charnock who encouraged Meredith's literary endeavours. 

Among the people in Charnock's circle, were Edward Peacock and his beautiful sister, Mary Ellen Nicolls. Mary Ellen Meredith was the widow of Edward Nicolls, captain of the HMS Dwarf, who died in 1844 while trying to rescue a drowning man in the Shanon Estuary in Ireland. All accounts agree that Mary had the lively intelligence and wit that was to characterize many of Meredith's heroines. Even though she was 7 years his senior and he was in no position to support a family, the couple married on August 9, 1849.

According to, Casal both were intelligent, demanding and impatient. Meredith may have greatly admired witty women as social companions, but did not find in Mary Ellen the uncritical support that he craved. For her part, Mary Ellen, needed more from the marriage than a self-absorbed husband who could not even earn a living. Frequent pregnancies and miscarriages cannot have added to the Merediths' happiness. Their one child, Arthur, was born on June 13, 1853.

Continued deterioration in the Meredith marriage culminated in Mary's 1858 elopement Wallis. While Meredith never forgave Mary, his books suggest that he seems to have understood what drove her to elopement. In 1861, Mary died from what was probably a form of Bright's disease. Despite his resentment over the desertion, George had grudgingly allowed Arthur to visit his mother, especially during her last days. 

That Australian life - the remarkable story of Jessie Litchfield

Very interesting piece on the ABC's Radio National Earshot program -
Holding a tiger by the tail—Jessie Litchfield.
It tells the story of Darwin based author and journalist Jessie Litchfield. She settled in the Northern Territory in 1908, and grew to love its frontier, masculine atmosphere and its unique mix of cultures. Jessie developed close contacts with local Aboriginal people. In 1930 she became the editor of the Northern Territory Times—one of very few women in Australia to hold such a position. Jessie’s news sense and her unbeatable local contacts and knowledge meant she continually scooped her male competitors with breaking news. Throughout her life she was a passionate defender of the Territory and its peoples.

Listening to the program, I found the descriptions of Territory life as interesting as Jessie's story. She was obviously a remarkable woman. She was not the only female country editor but, as Rod Kirkpatrick (the doyen of  the history of Australia's county press) notes, she was unusual in gaining the position in direct competition in a male world.    

You can listen to the program on-line; link above. I think, I'm not sure, that it's available internationally. Perhaps you might advise me if its not. You can also find out more about her from Barbara James' Australian Dictionary of Biography entry.

Biographical wanderings - introducing Archibald Clunes Innes

This is Archibald Clunes Innes, then a Captain in the English 3rd Regiment or Buffs. Study him, for you will be hearing more about him.

I have been sadly remiss in my writing on my main history project. I don't want to give up writing on politics or MOOCs or any of the many things that interest me. Indeed, I have an economics column due that must be written before the Australian election but won't be published until some time after, but must be current. That's kind of a challenge in itself! But I must move forward on my main projects.

I have decided to try an experiment. While still writing on other things, over the next week or so and across my blogs, I am going to focus on one man. 

Archibald Innes was, to my mind, a rather nice man, kind and courteous. These are qualities I value. He went bankrupt in 1852. But before he did, he built a business empire. The world of Archibald Innes is a world that few Australians know. It is a world that I find appealing in, at one level, for the same reason that I find Jane Austin appealing. It is about manners and style.

I am not going to say more tonight. I wish to write my Armidale Express column on one element of the life that surrounded that man. You will see that column much later. Now I am just staking the ground. I will use this post as an entry post for all my posts.Think of them as an experiment in biography, the way that a man or women can illumine their world.      

A simple tale - the story of Berardino Forlano

I am still waiting on some material to complete Neucleus days - Part One. In the meantime, I hate not posting. Yet my personal petrol tank is also running very low because of projects and deadlines. Given this, I thought that I would simply share with you in a series of micro-posts a few of the things I have noticed.

This is the photo of Italian Berardino Forlano taken just before his emigration to Australia in 1956. It is from his obituary, written by daughter Lina. You will find the obituary here.

It's a simple nice tale of an ordinary man, not ordinary to his family of course, but one that captures one of the many complex threads that make up modern Australia.

When you read the story, think of the turmoil of the Second World War. Think of those in Europe who went through that turmoil. Then, in Berardino's case, he went to work in the mines in Belgium.

From there, and luckily, to Australia. There he worked, married and raised  a family.

I have known many Italian migrants and children of Italian migrants.  I thought that Lina's story of her dad captured it all rather nicely. 

Musings on photos past 3 - James Pilkington Belshaw

I am absolutely awash with paper, photos and memorabilia of one type or another.

Over on the New England Australia blog, New England's Air Wars records one piece I found.

This first photo here is one taken of my father at Mayfield in 1926. He was then 18. I had to look Mayfield up. It is a small farming settlement about 35k from Ashburton on the Canterbury Plains in New Zealand's South Island.

One of the difficulties I face is simply organising the material to make sense of it. For the moment, it's still all very scatter gun.

 

The next photo comes from a post of Paul Barratt's, New England University Rugby Team 1939. Comments follow the photo. 

   Dad arrived at the newly established New England University College in 1938, the first staff member to do so. He had played Rugby at provincial level in New Zealand and became, among other things, foundation coach of the Rugby team.

Paul identified those in the photo as:  

Back Row: Lewis Border, Consett Davis, Max Hartwell, John Rafferty, Jim Belshaw (Coach), Alf Maiden, Les Titterton, Frank Rickwood, Ken James
Middle Row: Ralph Crossley, Paul Barratt, Pat Thompson, Alan Sutherland, Peter Durie
Front Row: Ed Scalley, Harry Savage

Paul's post includes details on the players. His father is second on the left in the middle row.

The next and final photo is a studio shot of Dad taken at Solomon's Studios in October 1942, so three years after the football team photo.

You can see what I mean by scattergun. I really need to spend more time organising the material before rushing to post.

In organising material, I am sorting by time, but also by country and particular family line.

I am also trying to add notes so that the photos make more sense.

People, biography & the New England tradition

In a post earlier in the week, Judith Wright, smoking, pokies, Armidale floods & policy misinformation (26 May), I said in part:

My train reading at the moment is Fiona Capp's My Blood's Country (Allen & Unwin), subtitled a journey through the landscapes that inspired Judith Wright's poetry.

Inspired by that book, I am working on a post for my New England History blog called multi-layered history. This centres in part on the way that the stories of major figures like Judith Wright actually become historical actors in their own right. From a purely personal viewpoint, there is a strange disconnect when people and areas one knows acquire an external independent life.

The post in question is simply called Writing multi-layered history. This post is a follow up muse on some elements of that post .

I am very fond of autobiography and especially biography as genres because they draw me into different worlds. I say biography first, because with autobiography the personal tone can put me off where I disagree with the person. For some reason, the life of an equally repulsive person is more palatable when told told in biographical form.

Very good biography stands on its own. You don't need to have any historical or personal knowledge of the subject to understand the book. It's a self-contained world. The skill involved in doing this is substantial. I stand in awe of the writing skills of some biographers. They are both good researchers and writers capable of creating a real story based on evidence.

While good biographies are self-contained, I do find that they draw me into wanting to know more. I start reading around the topic. I read Harrod's The Life of John Maynard Keynes while at school. This drew me into the world of Cambridge, the Bloomsbury Set and the Apostles. I maintained this interest for over ten years, then I stopped very suddenly and have taken no interest since. Almost overnight, I went from great interest to something approaching detestation.

In the end, the trigger was cumulative exposure through books and letters to what I came to think of as indulgent, self-centred and parochial little Englishness. This was too small, too narrow and too incestuous a world to maintain interest after a certain point. I suppose that I decided that they were not very nice people and I simply didn't want to know them any more.

I know that others will disagree with this perspective. I am just reporting a purely personal reaction. In a way I had become too close to them and their world, a little like living in the same village. Here you can see how local feuds begin. In my case, I had just had enough of Lytton Strachey in particular. Had we actually been living in a village, I think that I would have been very rude!

When I first became interested in Australian history there was very little around in the way of biography or autobiography. I did immerse myself in some things and especially some of the writers and painters, I read omnivorously, but there wasn't the type of depth that would give rise to the Bloomsbury style effect.

I am not saying that I didn't form views, but they were more about patterns than people. They also built on my very wide childhood reading.  I was a bookish child living in a world surrounded by books. I read anything I could get my hands-on, including children's books and popular fiction from both my grandfather's and parent's generation, as well as my own. This included a lot of Australian material, but was not limited to that. 

I was not reading critically, just for pleasure. Still, the sheer breadth of the reading provided it's own corrective. By the time I really became interested in Australian history, I knew a fair bit about differing patterns in society and life between different parts of Australia. I also slotted this into my perceptions of life and culture in other places. This was to affect my approach to Australian history in an odd way; I quickly became dissatisfied with the Australian history I did read because it didn't seem quite to fit with the immediate world I lived in, nor the patterns that had emerged in my own mind. It wasn't quite the same country, so to speak.   

I guess, too, that I just wasn't interested in emerging popular topics such as Ned Kelly or the Lawsons, mother and son.  They weren't especially relevant to the things that I was interested in. I read all of Lawson as a child, but that was Lawson the story teller or poet, not Lawson the man nor the world he lived in.

As part of my interest in Australian art and writing, I started collecting older Australian books and paintings during the 1970s. I also started my first and so far only major attempt at biography, the story of my grandfather. Both coincided with the dramatic increase in publishing on Australian topics that in some ways peaked around the 1988 Australian bicentennial. It's not that the total number of books is necessarily less, just that their range seems to have narrowed.

Writing my biography of the first part of Drummond's life meant looking at people. Now there were two problems.

The first was mechanical, simply keeping track. By the end, several hundred people were mentioned in the thesis, some many times. References to them were drawn from many sources, so there were inconsistencies. This plus things such as consistency in style, how to write per cent for example, had to be checked.

This is before modern word processing with its mechanical tools. In the final drafting stages, each person was recorded on a card to allow for checking, while an alphabetical list of styles was created.

While I have spoken of the thesis and it's aftermath before, I have never properly acknowledged the help I received. I was remarkably fortunate. We all knew that the thesis was a bit of a gamble. I was writing on a topic and about views that were even then increasingly outside the mainstream. The biographical form was seen by many as unsuitable for a PhD thesis. Then, too, I shifted the focus in part from Drummond's public life in politics and as a minister for education to Drummond in his role as a regional politician.

In retrospect, this was quite ambitious. I still had to deal with public life and to the same level of rigour, but I now had to write a regional history centred on the man and his interaction with an area he came to love.

I came back to Canberra from full time study at the start of 1983. Over the coming months, the thesis went through multiple drafts mainly written at night after my busy day as a senior public servant. Professor Colin Hughes, my Canberra supervisor, went through draft after draft with a red pen.

At home sitting in the backroom, my housemate Sue Rosly and her friend David went through the drafts, recording details of people on cards and identifying inconsistencies in detail and style. I wrote at the same time, answering queries as we went along. I cannot begin to say how important this was. The marking imbroglio that subsequently submerged the thesis, an imbroglio that still nags at me even though I know that I should put it aside, was a poor reward for their work. I remain incredibly grateful for their support.

My second problem lay in the fact that I knew or at least knew of so many of the people I was writing about. They weren't just names, but people who occupied a place in my mind based on contact and family stories.

Take Country Party politician Earle Page as an example. Page, for those who have never heard of him, was one of the founders of the Australian Country Party, Deputy Prime Minister and then Australian PM for a very brief period.

I don't remember that I ever met Page, although I almost certainly did as a child given his connections with my grandfather. But he was a figure in family conversation.

In December 1961, my grandfather fulfilled a promise and took my cousin and I on his last election campaign as member for New England. I was sixteen. In Tenterfield we received the news that Page had collapsed. My grandfather dropped everything and left for the Clarence to try to save the seat for his former mentor, while I hitchhiked back to Armidale.

When I came to write my biography, I knew Drummond's views on Page. I read them again in his letters and manuscript autobiography. I also knew some of Page's grandchildren; Australian poet Geoff Page was one, current NSW MP Don Page a second. Geoff went out with the elder sister of two of my friends, while Don and  I worked together on efforts to reform the Country Party. I knew, too, of things like the disputes over the writing of Page's autobiography, while Earle Pages' second wife Jean was good friends with one of my aunts. Then, too, I knew Ulrich Ellis, Page's long standing amanuensis.

My point in all this is that when I came to write about  my grandfather's life I had to filter my already formed views views on Page through the sieve created by the evidence. My views on Page are not the same as my grandfather's. I recognise that Page was a remarkable man, perhaps more remarkable than recognised today, but he had his major weaknesses. Drummond's idealisation of the man blinded him to them.

Now I want to link this muse back to my opening points.

Since I started writing my history of New England I have gone back in depth into the people of New England. Like the Bloomsbury Set but unlike my early experiences with Australian history, the people in my history of New England have become people, not just patterns.

Unlike Bloomsbury, this greater exposure has not alienated me. I am aware of their weaknesses, I dislike some of their views, but they are there as characters. Herein lies problems.

One problem lies in my recognition that I am dealing with people with living relatives who are still alive as people in popular consciousness. The things that I say may hurt or even have practical effects like affecting Aboriginal land claims. This does not mean that I should not be objective. After all, I try to consciously recognise my own family's weaknesses in my writing. However, it does mean (at least as I see it) that I should exercise a degree of restraint so long as this does not interfere with the history itself. I can't write just to grab attention and interest.

A second problem lies in the way that my characters have gained a life of their own in my mind and others. Judith Wright, to take an example from an earlier post, is not just a major Australian poet nor a New England figure, but is now an entity examined and counter-examined by many. You have Judith the person, Judith the historical figure, Judith the writer, Judith the symbol of causes; just so many Judith's!

In dealing with so many New Englanders like Drummond, Page or Wright and the interactions between them, I find that they become like characters in novels, people with lives of their own who dictate the story. I as writer am loosely in charge of a plot of many characters who have their own minds. This is not a problem in fiction, but is an issue in history.

Finally, and this is not really a problem from my perspective, there is the constant desire to bring a New England past alive that has in some ways become lost. I am not alone here.

As an historian, I suppose I write from a right wing perspective.

I need to be very careful in what I say here. I am not right wing in the way that term is often used today. I am not a neo-liberal, nor do I necessarily espouse current right wing nostrums. However, I do write about topics and past issues that are generally classified today as right wing. Further, I write about them from a sympathetic or at least understanding position.

All this comes about because of my role as a regional historian, someone concerned with the history and ideas of a particular area. Scratch a New Englander, and you will quickly find common attitudes that don't quite fit with "mainstream" thought.    

My blogging colleague Paul Barratt would be classified as a left winger. His support for the Greens, his pro-Palestine position, his media appearances including chairing the wikileaks session at the Sydney Writers' Festival, all place him on the left. He would, I think, classify himself as a left winger. Yet scratch Paul and he is a New Englander.

Like me, he has the same love of country. Like me, he thinks that the old Country Party was a good thing. Like me, he understands and supports Tony Windsor. Like me, he is a New England New Stater. Like me, he promotes the history and life of New England. Like me, he complains about the acceptance of currently common nostrums that prevent regional development. Yet we are very different.

People who come from our New England tradition don't easily fit in with current stereotypes. And that's part of the fascination of the writing that I, Paul, and others are now doing. We are mounting a challenge. And that's fun.                             

Ogilvies, Wrights, social change

I am not posting today in any substantive way because my writing obsessions are elsewhere directed.

In 1923: Classical Greek in the New England countryside I mentioned in passing that I was investigating one branch of the Ogilvie Family. The trigger here was Judith Wallaces' Memories of a Country Childhood (Queensland University Press, St Lucia, 1977).

I first mentioned this book back in May 2008 in Judith Wallace's "Memories of a Country Child-hood". In February 2009, an overseas blogger (Elise) started her review of the book in this way:

This was an absolutely enchanting book. It was lent to me by a friend, who thought I might like it. I am so glad she did! Otherwise I might never have discovered it.

The basic premise of the book is summed up in the title. Judith Wallace grew up on a sheep and cattle station near Glen Innes, in New England, New South Wales. (That's New England in Australia, very different to the American one!)

I'm really struggling for words right now - it's hard to find the right words to get across the haunting, sad, but magical atmosphere contained within the pages of this book.

In his Artful Histories: Modern Australian Autobiography (University of Cambridge Press, Melbourne 1996), David McCooey uses Judith Wallace’s book as one example in his study of Australian autobiography. He writes well, capturing the key elements of the book to place them in a broader context; ideas of place and time; the elegiac nature of accounts of place; the way time weaves itself through the narrative.

McCooey also makes the point that that “Australia’s geographical and geological immensity means that the term ‘Australia’ is at best a political claim and a cultural shorthand which stands for unity, but it is a unity best expressed by the topographical beauty of the map.” To his writers, regions become little Australias.

McCooey's point is one that I have made before. Australia's sheer size and diversity means that Australians' views of their own country are varied and partial, formed by the areas they know best. This becomes concealed under national generalities, constructs that are in fact artificial because they fail to recognise regional difference. This holds in public policy as well as history.

In my present writing, I am using Judith's book to illustrate social change in New England in the period 1950-2000. To do this, I have to place her in an Ogilvie family context.

For those reading this post in isolation from my other writing, the Ogilvies were one of New England's great pastoral dynasties. I spoke a little of their background in Saturday Morning Musings - New England's Ogilvie dynasty.

As with Australian writer Judith Wright, a member of a second New England pastoral dynasty (writer Patrick White was a member of a third), the loss of the family home and property was a devastating blow. Judith Wallaces' book ends this way:

The new owners (Ilparran had been sold) never homesteaded on Ilparran and the great house, still standing in spite of the sunken foundations, stares with blind eyes over the ravaged garden.

To the Ogilvies and the Wrights, their land was central. Beyond that, they followed different paths.

The Ogilvies looked to Sydney, England and beyond that Europe. Judith Wallace's mother created an English world in a New England environment. The house itself and the surrounding gardens created a self-contained world separate from the Australian bush.

This is not a criticism. I have little sympathy, less interest, in those whose obsession with the idea of Australian identify leads them to constantly juxtapose a sense of Australianess with England and Englishness. Things were as they were.     

The Wrights were far more localised.They identified with their local area. This I do find a good thing because it meant that the Wrights contributed directly to local development in a way that the Ogilvies did not. Again, this is not a criticism of the  Ogilvie family, simply a judgement on relative regional contribution.

I will finish there. This has become a somewhat more substantive post than I had intended!

A personal memoir on Mel Ward

Dear memory is an imperfect beast. I saw from the Sydney Morning Herald that Mel Ward had died and wanted to write a short companion piece to the obituary by David Jellie with Les Kilmartin. To do this I really wanted some dates to provide a framework, but could not remember them properly. A web search provided some information, but not the critical dates I needed. Very frustrating.

I won't repeat the whole obituary, but I do need to give you a few facts from it to set a context.

Melvyn Keith Ward was born on December 12, 1941, in Mackay, Queensland. A very bright man,he graduated from the University of Queensland in 1963 with a bachelor's degree in engineering with first-class honours and the University Medal in engineering.

In 1965 he joined the Telecom Research Labs, rising through the ranks to become Telecom's chief general manager In 1984 and then managing director. He left Telecom towards the end of 1991 to pursue board and community interests. This included board membership and then chair of the Australian ballet.

Mel's later period with Telecom was a period of fundamental change in the Australian telecommunications sector. I want to focus on this period.

My relationship with Mel was a professional one. I did not know him well in a personal sense, although I saw him quite often for a time. Balding, he was a very tall man with a slight stoop and a habit of leaning down slightly to listen. I found him very likeable, although he sometimes displayed impatience with views that he thought were silly. In my roles he was just pleasant to work with, very unlike some of the CEO bully types.

I first met Mel when I was Assistant Secretary, Electronics, Aerospace and Information Industries in the Commonwealth Department of Industry and Commerce, later Industry, Technology and Commerce. From memory, I think that he had just become Telecom's GM.

In my role, I was responsible for advising on industry policy towards a very broad sector that included telecommunications equipment. We also had a focus on integrating equipment and services. To our mind, the old and rigid division between manufacturing and services had been invalidated by technological and structural change.

As part of our industry development approach, we had sent a series of references to the Industries Assistance Commission on the broader electronics industry, including telecommunications equipment. This brought me in contact with Mel, for the local telecommunications equipment industry was critical to Telecom in its delivery of services.

Operating in a remote country with a small domestic marketplace and a population distributed across a vast continent, first the old Post Master General's Department and then Telecom had effectively developed their own industry policy. They needed a local industry that would meet their needs.

As the sole purchaser, their approach determined the structure of the local telecommunications manufacturing sector. There were good and bad aspects to this.

On the good side, PMG/Telecom had an industry totally focused on meeting their needs, that could support them. On the bad side, Australia had a largely overseas owned industry whose total focus was on meeting the needs of a single domestic customer.

From my perspective, this had to change. If we were to grow the electronics, aerospace and information industries, then we had to have global focus and global growth.

The strategic importance of the telecommunications manufacturing sector to Telecom meant that our activities as policy advisers were of considerable interest to the organisation, leading to a steady stream of Telecom visitors, including Mel.

Two things quickly became clear.

The first was the engineering and technical competence of Mel and, more broadly, Telecom as a whole. As a simple example,  the work Mel did led  in part to the world's first computer-controlled digital telephone exchange, built in Melbourne in 1974.

One day I would like to see a proper history of the Telecom Research Labs. In a small population country, the work done by the big labs - CSIRO, DSTO, Telecom Research Laboratories, the AWA Labs - was critical. Telecom's technical competence was important not just in local service delivery, but in the disproportionate contribution Australia made to global technological advance and to action in areas such as standards and standardisation within telecommunications. 

The second was Mel's and Telecom's commitment to local industry. It wasn't just a matter of organisation need, but an emotional bond. Herein lay a problem from our perspective.

By global standards, Telecom was a leading edge customer. However, the Australian industry was dominated by foreign owned firms. Telecom supported local industry, but was focused on its own immediate needs. This meant that the technological advances flowing from Telecom's work did not lead to a growing local sector servicing international markets. Instead, they facilitated global multinational growth. L M Ericsson's global success in digital exchanges rested heavily on Australia, but did not benefit Australia beyond the gains coming from the equipment installed here.

What we tried to do in response, and failed, is beyond the scope of this memoir, although I will return to it in another post. For the moment, I just note that Mel was prepared to discuss issue rationally, to listen to alternative views. Further, Telecom itself was prepared to do things, to make changes. This became an important element in our plans.

The strategic position that Mel faced as Chief General Manager and then as Managing Director was complicated in the extreme.

He knew that Telecom as an organisation had to make changes - from his appointment to his departure Telecom reduced staff from 93,000 to 69,000. He had to deal with staff and unions in making those changes. He knew that Telstra was facing fundamental global change. He also had to deal with politicians and public servants in Canberra, many of whom knew nothing about telecoms, but applied generalised economic nostrums independent of market and industry realities. It wasn't an easy job!

In the middle of 1987, I moved to Armidale to set up a business providing consulting, training and information services to the electronics, aerospace and information industries. In essence, I was putting my money where my policy mouth had been. I had said that these industries had a future in Australia. If so, I should be able to grow a business supporting them.

Once we started, Telecom quickly became one of our two biggest customers. For the record, I should note that I did not leave the Commonwealth Public Service with Telstra as a base customer. It took some time and a lot of investment in industry research before we gained our first contract with Telecom.

At our peak, we were doing work for five different units within Telecom, supporting a team of six full time staff equivalents, probably the largest telecommunications research group in Australia at the time. Our first and lead customer was Terry Cutler, then head of Telecom Corporate Strategy.

While we did a range of projects for Terry, our biggest one was the development of a qualitative model of the global communications environment. This involved an analysis of the strategic focus and investment patterns of the top fifty global Telcos, looking for common elements and key trends, then matching this with our general industry and economic analysis. Our focus was on the implications of convergence.

We got some things wrong, but we did accurately predict key trends within telecoms over the following fifteen years.

I didn't have a lot of direct contact with Mel over this period. However, I certainly understood the challenges that he was facing.

My last direct formal meeting with Mel came a little before his resignation.

Because of the work that I had been doing, a number of units asked me to be key note speaker at unit meetings. Here in discussion I found common and constant concerns among staff about Telecom's direction. I knew that some of this was inevitable, but there were also common threads that could be addressed.

While I was not now in direct contact with Mel, I rang him and arranged to see him in Melbourne for a briefing.

It actually wasn't  a very good meeting because I was focused on providing information, whereas Mel was thinking of responses. Further, he was operating under constraints. However he was, as he had been at the beginning, unfailingly polite.

Drummond as NSW education minister

Regular readers of this blog will know that I have been progressively posting my now somewhat ancient PhD thesis, a biography of David Drummond, on my New England's History blog.  I had been going to hold off any further comment here until the whole things was finished, but then I thought that Neil, Thomas, and Maximos62 might be interested.

I described Drummond's role as NSW education minister at the end of the 1920s in Drummond's life 5 - The Minister: 1927-1929. Now I have returned to this topic in Drummond's life 8 - Return to Education: the Minister 1932-1936. The next chapter will take the story through to 1941.

The reason that I mention this now is that is that many of the structural and policy frameworks that exist today and that current teachers know were, for better and worse, formed then.

Death of John Martin

I was distressed to learn of the death of John Martin. You will find  his obituary here.

While it is many years since we last had contact, John's death left me feeling quite upset. In this post I want to record why.

Towards the end of 1979 I was appointed Assistant Secretary Economic Analysis in the Department of Industry and Commerce.

The Minister, Sir Phillip Lynch, had been Treasurer. Part of our role was to give him the type of service he had previously got from Treasury, part to provide general economic and financial advice to the Department and to its outriders such as the Australian Manufacturing Council.

John was one of the Directors in my new branch in charge of the Finance Section. I wanted to start as AS in full control from the beginning, so in the weeks preceding my arrival John (he was acting A/S) arranged for me to get the pinks - copies of all written material (minutes, memos, letters) from the branch. I read these in detail and then rang John to ask questions. By the time I arrived, I felt pretty confident.

John himself was Director in charge of the Finance Section. This was responsible for advice on tax, business regulation and finance issues.

It was a busy section, for John was not only trying to push through tax changes that might assist industry, but was also advising on all the minutiae of proposed tax changes. Our job was to look at the industry implications. Remarkably often, we would find that the "purist" advice from Treasury or ATO was flawed because it ignored practical effects.

When I arrived, I found that the branch had serious staffing and morale problems. I had to focus on sorting these out, while still maintaining work flows. John's competence and calm demeanour was central to my ability to do this.

In writing John's obituary, David Humphries said:                  

John Martin was among the least flustered, most loyal, least judgmental, most generous men one could hope to call a friend. He brought these qualities, and abundant common sense and good intellect, to a lifetime of mostly public service, a role for which he was well fitted.

This is just the John I knew. He was one of those people that it was a joy to work with.

I know that those who worked for or with John will echo the sentiments. 

Saturday Morning Musings - Leviathan and the practice of history

During the week a colleague gave me John Birmingham's Leviathan: The Unauthorised Biography of Sydney to read. It's really well written, she enthused, more like a novel. I had had a stressful morning, and decided to treat myself at lunchtime by sitting down to a proper meal and a good read.

Birmingham does indeed write well.  The book opens with an interesting device, the story of a Vietnamese boat family. Good stuff I thought. Twenty or so pages later I shut the book and returned it to its owner, saying that it was a-historical and that I did not want to read it any more. This is most unusual. When I did a search on reader comments and reviews, I found that it was most often compared to Robert Hughes' The Fatal Shores, another of the few books that I have not been able to finish.

One of the problems I face with a book like Leviathan is that I actually read a lot of history. In doing so, I am always conscious of the need to understand the author's particular perspective. To me, reading history is a dialogue between the author, the evidence and myself.

One of the major difficulties in writing about the past is the way our own views of the world affect our judgments in ways often hidden from us. We simply cannot see or understand.

To be human is to make judgments. We do this all the time. Many of those judgements deal with the mechanics of day to day life. Will that light change, is an example. Others are judgements about likes and dislikes; do I dislike this? Still others involve judgements about values; is this a good thing?

To the degree that the historian's role is to explain what was, how it worked, what it meant, then his or her own mental framework creates a fundamental difficulty.

The fact that history is of some degree of the present has been well argued. The questions asked, the evidence selected, are all determined by the historian's interests and perceptions. To a substantial degree, history is no more than the past interpreted and re-interpreted in the light of current interests and mental attitudes.

What is, I think, less well recognised, is the obligation placed upon the historian to find a way of removing or at least penetrating the veil created by his or her own perceptions.

The fact that we all write about things that interest us just is. Otherwise why bother? But once we select a topic, we need to look at the evidence in an objective way. We also need to try to understand the sometimes subtle differences between the way people thought then and now.

This may sound terribly purist and perhaps it is. However, it reflects my own deeply held views about the practice of historiography.

I approached Birmingham's book in the wrong way. Thinking of it as history, I approached it wearing my professional hat. Suddenly, reading the material on London in the early part of the book, I thought oh oh, I've seen this before.

Yesterday on the bus I sat down beside a woman. I had seen her before on the bus and thought that I recognised her from many years ago. Excuse me, I said, but I think that I know you. She looked at me blankly. Aren't you LB? Yes, she said, but the blank look was still there. I'm Jim Belshaw, I said. Her face lit up. Good lord, Jim, I didn't recognise you. The last time I saw you, you had long black hair and a beard!

LB and I actually shared a room in the history department at the University of New England. I had come back to postgraduate studies in history after a longish break as an economist and senior public servant. This made me a little different to begin with. I approached my research and writing in a different way. Then, too, I was very interested in the philosophy and method of history, an interest dating back to the very high intellectual standard set by people like Ted Tapp who taught the philosophy of history course that was then obligatory for UNE history honours students.

Because I had been out of the history loop for some time, I set myself the task of reading the journals, looking especially at the theoretical and methodological stuff. Hour after hour I sat in the library reading eye-glazingly bad writing linked to concepts that had, to my mind, little to do with history. I realised that the intellectual debate had shifted in a very odd way to the imposition of intellectual constructs on history; the history had to be interpreted within those constructs.

In the Department itself, I found that the focus had shifted from method to topic. I was interested in the methods and associated philosophical arguments that applied independent of topic, but there was not much interest in this.

As I read the London section of Leviathan I was carried back to this period. This was almost classic underdog class analysis.

I am not opposed to the use of class based constructs. I use them myself, including especially Ron Nehl's analysis of the middling class. Ron, the Professor of Economic History at UNE, wrote from a marxist perspective. I found his ideas helpful and interesting just because of his different perspective. My problem arises where things are twisted to fit the construct.

I said that I read Leviathan from the wrong perspective. I simply did not pick up the clue in the title, "the unauthorised biography of Sydney". This is not history as such, rather the biography of a city. Without getting caught in the difference between history and biography, my point is that biography is a different craft. The rules are different. Further, in using the word "unauthorised" the author is very clearly signaling his intent.

So I will try the book again with my historian's hat at least partly off, looking at the book more as a yarn with Sydney as a person. 

Saturday Morning Musings - New England's Ogilvie dynasty

 

Tom Robert's 1894 painting of Edward Ogilvie, a key member of New England's Ogilvie pastoral dynasty.    

My new train reading is George Farwell's Squatter's Castle:The saga of a pastoral dynasty (Angus & Robertson; Sydney 1983).

This is the story of the rise of the Ogilvies, one of New England's great squatting dynasties. It is a very good book that brings people and events alive. It helps in reading to have some knowledge of history, but the book does not require this, nor does it require a detailed knowledge of Australia.

Consider this. It is Sydney 1824. The family has just arrived.

Everywhere these newcomers walked they saw colour; flowering shrubs, trees in blossom, gaudy parrots in cages outside cottage or shop doors, street stalls piled with nectarines, plums, peaches, oranges, limes. The way people dressed was flamboyant after England.

The book was first published in 1973. George Farwell was then 62. Three years later he was dead.

Born in Bath (England) on 3 October 1911, Farwell arrived in Australia in 1935. A professional writer, Farwell was one of those interesting and peripatetic writers who managed to make a living in that past Australia when markets were so much smaller, literary grants unknown. Still, at the end of his career, Squatter's Castle itself was written on a literary grant!

This book may not be counted as history in a formal sense, although it includes some footnotes. Rather, it is a literary work written by a craftsman who wished to entertain. It is all the better for that. That said, it creates a real challenge for someone like me.

At one level I wish to quote him. His description of the frontier war in the Upper Hunter in 1826 is, I think, the best such description I have read. He brings it alive. However, it is hard to quote him as a source in a professional history book when I cannot check his sources.

At a second level, the standard of his writing is a challenge in itself because it sets yet another standard to be met.

For a ten year old boy the sight was a traumatic one. Edward was to remember it all his life. A row of gibbets emerged from the drizzle as their launch passed down the Thames. Three shapeless figures there in chains on that raw late autumn morning, vanishing into the mist again. Thirteen weeks later, anchoring in Sydney Cove, the ship swung close to another gibbet; on Pinchgut Island, a few cable lengths away.

Farwell uses the voyage as a device to mark the distinction between an old and new land.

The Ogilvies - William, his wife Mary and their four children - sailed on the 400 ton convict barque Granada sent from London to bring eighty one female convicts to their new prison in Australia. There were nine other passengers.

To Mary and the children, ship life was a very different experience. To William Ogilvie, it was familiar. He knew this world well; he had joined the Royal Navy at the age of twelve, retiring from active service at the age of thirty two. The ship's Scottish commander, Alex Anderson, was a highly competent captain. The ship's surgeon who doubled as convict superintendent was another Scot, Peter Cunningham.

This was Cunningham's fourth voyage to New South Wales. He was an intelligent man with wide interests. His later book, Two Years in New South Wales, became an English best seller upon its publication in 1827 and remains the fullest contemporary account of life in the new colony during the period.

Cunningham's sense of irony made him an acute observer of the evolving and complicated nuances of social life in New South Wales; Sterling (English born) vs Currency (locally born); the Legitimates also known as Crossbreds who had come to Australia by force of law vs the Illegitimates, those who had come to the colony of their own free will; the Merinos whose blood was worthy of a stud book.  Each part of colonial society had its own structures, each applied a sometimes sardonic assessment to others. The result, Cunningham suggested, was a series of subtle grades as rigid as the castes of India.

Cunningham and the Ogilvies became friends, a friendship that was to last throughout Cunningham's life. His knowledge of the local scene was invaluable to the Ogilvies. He and William agreed to look for land together.

The land they chose lay in what is now the Upper Hunter. William called his place Merton after the village in England where Lord Nelson had built a house for his mistress to the scandal of English society and where the Ogilvies had lived just prior to their departure for New South Wales. To William with his naval background, Nelson was simply a great man.

At the time William took up his grant, he was undercapitalised. The grant itself, 2,000 acres (800 ha) was too small to be properly viable. Economic survival was a battle, one that many lost. As stock numbers built up, the family occupied new land beyond the grant, thus becoming squatters.

Stock and the management of stock was central. Land was cropped for grains and stock feed and gardens planted; this was both a Government requirement and a necessity to meet immediate needs. However, transport costs meant that there was little market for produce. Horses, cattle and especially sheep with their high value wool were the source of income.

Stock was in short supply. When Peter Cunningham and William Ogilvie arrived at King's Town (now Newcastle) on the Lord Liverpool's weekly service from Sydney, they found that there were no horses available. They walked from there to the Upper Hunter, walked around the area they saw as especially interesting, walked back to King's Town.

Everything revolved around stock. Sheep were purchased with a deposit, the balance to be paid with interest from the wool clip. Money was borrowed at high interest rates to buy stock. Managers were paid in part in stock. The cost of any lost sheep was automatically deducted from shepherd's wages. A careless shepherd could be brought before the bench and sentenced to flogging. Herds were carefully managed for future increase.

The Aborigines had a different view. The flocks and herds of the settlers were on their land. To them, they were another source of food. Two different perspectives that help explain frontier violence. The Aborigines speared stock for food, the settlers responded with sometimes violence to protect their livelihood. As the Aborigines came to comprehend this, stock were speared as conscious retaliation, economic warfare.

We can see a little more of this complex evolving mosaic if we look through the eyes of young Edward Ogilvie.

The ten year old Edward who travelled down the Thames past the bodies on the gibbet knew the quiet tenant farming world of Merton. Now he was thrust into the world of the convict ship, then the strange new world of colonial Sydney. Once the family moved to Merton, the world changed again. Now it was the battle to build a new life in an isolated world far removed from anything the family had known.

It seems clear that the children were involved in property work from an early age. There was no formal schooling. They were taught especially by Mary Ogilvie.

Edward was twelve when the frontier was broke out. He was home when a large party of armed blacks threatened the house. Mary Ogilvie was alone. The stories as to what happened vary. What is clear is that she persuaded the blacks to leave. What is also clear is that she was able to do so because the Ogilvie's had treated the local Aborigines well.

This is actually a pattern across colonial New England, one that fits with Aboriginal cultural structures. The Aborigines were selective. In retaliating against Europeans, they generally targeted those who had been insensitive and brutal. Young Edward himself had played with the local Aboriginal children and had learned to speak the local language.

Childhood was short in this world. The children all took on adult responsibilities at an early age. The boys had to learn to manage a largely convict workforce, one that was changing because the convicts sent to New South Wales were changing. There were more serious criminals, fewer petty offenders. At eighteen Edward reported a life for shirking his duties. The sentence was fifty lashes.

In 1840 Edward with brother Frederick was in the New England, the Northern Tablelands, looking for new land. The escaped convict Richard Craig had discovered a huge river, now called the Clarence, while living with the Aborigines.

Pardoned for the discovery, Craig was now taking a massive party from Falconer's Plains near Guyra on the Tablelands down to the Clarence following the seasonal routes he had learned while living with the Bundjalung.

The huge column moved out in order. First came Dr Dobie's cattle destined for Ramornie. The Mylne Brothers' cattle for Eatonsville followed. Dr Dobie's sheep came next, then drays, horses and a further flock of sheep. There were no roads. Craig's job was to get the column through to the Clarence down what had become known as Craig's Line though some of the most rugged country in New England. The resulting journey is an epic in its own right.

Edward and Frederick Ogilvie asked to join Craig's party. Denied, they pushed on as fast as possible with an Aboriginal and reached the Clarence at Tabulum ahead of Craig. Downstream Edward took up fifty-six miles (90 km) on both sides of the river and later named the runs Yulgilbar. By 1850 Yulgilbar was about 300 sq. miles (777 km²) and included Fairfield, a 100,000-acre (40,469 ha) cattle station in the mountains.

Not unexpectedly, there were again troubles with the local Aborigines. Edward quickly became fluent in the local dialect and at a parley explained that he only wanted the grass and gave them complete hunting rights on his run including honey.  

With success, Edward's direction changed. Father William had fallen in love with what is now Italy, something replicated by modern Australians. Edward did the same.  

In August 1854 Edward Ogilvie sailed for Europe. For two years he travelled widely. His Diary of Travels in Three Quarters of the Globe, published in London in 1856 under the pseudonym "An Australian Squatter",  describes his visits to the war front in the Crimea and his enchantment with Florence where he had his portrait painted by Pietro Milani shortly before his return to Australia.

In 1858 while in Europe Edward married Theodosia, daughter of the Reverend William de Burgh. He returned with his wife in 1859, now building what was to become known as Yulgilbar Castle.

I will leave the story at this point. I hope that I have interested you in the Ogilvies as a small part of New England's history.

Inverell, the Chinese and links to a past world

I have now completed two posts on my latest train reading: Train Reading - Elizabeth Wiedemanns' "World of its own: Inverell's early years" and then a fuller review in Book review - Elizabeth Wiedemann's World of its own: Inverell's early years 1827-1920.

There is some fascinating stuff in this book. As a simple example, how many Australian local histories have Chinese as a constant theme for more than fifty years?

In 1889, for example, the ringer of the Wallangra shed was Ah Pow. Ringer is the head shearer, Wallangra was a large sheep station near Inverell. Eight of the twenty shearers employed that year were Chinese.

As Elizabeth notes, Chinese names were evidently a problem for those of English origin. The list of employees at Wallangra in 1872 included Ah Sue no 1, Ah Sue no 2, Ah Sue no 3, Ah Nee, Ah See, Aquie no 2, Ah Fatt, Ah Yong , Ah Leep, Ah Hong, Ah Chong and Lee Chong!

Like so many New England things I write about, there is a family connection. The following photo from cousin Jamie's collection shows Great Aunt Ellie on a horse at Maxwellton.

In 1912, the newly married David Drummond (my grandfather) packed his new wife and possessions into a sulky at Arding near Uralla and drove to Maxwellton near Inverell where he had accepted a manager position on a share farmer basis. This meant that he was not paid a wage, but received a share of the return from the crop.

Maxwellton itself had been formed from the subdivision of Bannockburn Station a few years before, something that Elizabeth writes about in her book.

Prior to the opening of the railway in 1901, Inverell farmers were largely limited to local markets. The railway changed all this, supporting subdivision of the bigger grazing properties. 

The year is 1916. Ellie is wearing the heavy full skirts of the period.

Two of her brothers are serving overseas.

Will, a conscientious objector on religious grounds, still joined the military as a stretcher bearer because he felt he had to do his bit. He went ashore at Gallipoli in the first wave.

Morris, the head of the family following the death of father, mother and step-mother, had enlisted as well. "I feel it coming on like a cold", he wrote to Brother David.

He was to die in France the following year. His presence and magnetic personality came down through the years in the memory of his brothers and half sister.

The family agreed that David could best serve by staying on the farm. He was also very deaf, unable to hear well without a hearing trumpet.

Aunt Ellie idolised half brother Morris. He was and would remain, with justice, the ideal brother. When Morris left for France, he asked David to look after their sister. David did so.

The Drummonds were a long-lived family. Aunt Ellie was still alive when my daughters were young, creating a link from this 1916 photo to the Armidale of the late 1980s.         

Death of Alan Renouf (1919-2008)

I wanted to note the death of Alan Renouf so that I did not lose the link.

A former head of the Department of Foreign Affairs, Mr Renouf was one of those public intellectuals that used to be not un-common in the Commonwealth Public Service. I did not know him personally; he was already a senior figure when I first arrived in Canberra.

His daughter was one of the speakers at the Women on Boards conference dinner that I went to last Thursday night, the day his obituary appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald.