stuff 'n other stuff

‘Seven Colonies’ was a phrase used in nineteenth century Australia and New Zealand to refer to the six Australian colonies and New Zealand in the run up to federation, which formed a little squabbling group of British polities a long way from any other British colony.

I wanted to try and gain some sort of handle on how popular the phrase was.

If you search Trove for occurrences of the phrase in newspaper articles you get over four and a half million hits suggesting that the phrase was reasonably popular.

Using QueryPic to make sense of the data you end up with the following chart

where the phrase becomes increasingly popular in the run up to federation, and then rapidly drops out of use especially as it became clear after 1907 that New Zealand was unlikely to ever federate with Australia.

The New Zealand data gets drowned out by Australia, but graphing the data from New Zealand separately one ends up with much the same curve

showing that by 1910, the phrase had more or less dropped out of use in New Zealand as well.

So what other evidence do we have?

Postcards for one.

Prior to the early 1890’s the header strap on prepaid penny postcards issued by the colonial post office in Victoria looked like this

While after the early 1890’s they looked like this

quite explicitly saying that they were valid for use not only within Victoria but also for mail to the other Australian colonies plus New Zealand.

I havn’t been able to find images for postcards from WA, Queensland or NSW, so I can’t say if they also included a similar strap line, but South Australia and Tasmania did not

but as smaller colonies with smaller volumes of mail it’s possible they simply didn’t bother reprinting the card blanks. After all everyone knew the validity of penny postcards, didn’t they?

Interestingly, New Zealand also made the validity of their penny postcards explicit

However, this story is slightly complicated by the advent of the Imperial Penny Post – a movement from 1898 onwards to introduce a flat rate of one penny (or the equivalent in local currency such as Canadian dollars and Indian rupees) to send a letter or postcard anywhere in the British Empire.

Australia never adopted the Imperial Penny Post, but New Zealand did from 01 January 1901, much to the chagrin of the Argus.

Even though the Imperial penny post as such ended in 1918, its ghost hung around to the early 1960’s when it was still cheaper to send a letter or postcard from England to a Commonwealth country than a neighbouring European country such as France …

I was reading about the history of the gold rush in Otago in the 1860s, and the author consistently referred to the seven colonies – basically the six colonies of colonial Australia plus New Zealand.

And certainly in the 1860s the seven colonies formed a little British community trading and squabbling among themselves with little industry to speak of – most manufactured items were imported. For example Australia didn’t get round to making making its own glass medicine bottles until the early 1870s, and glass beer bottles were also usually imported from England until around the same time.

Incidentally, even though glass bottle manufacturing started in the 1870s, the import trade continued – when the Fiji went down in 1891, part of her cargo was glass medicine bottles imported from Germany.

Now, in 1889, when Henry Parkes gave the Tenterfield oration, he urged the seven colonies to form a federation, and indeed right until the 1920s there was an assumption that New Zealand would some day join Australia – its why Canberra Avenue in Canberra was originally going to be named Wellington Avenue and why it passes the suburb of Manuka. Its also why there’s still a reference to New Zealand joining in the Australian Constitution.

Well, New Zealand never did, and became a successful nation in its own right, rather than ending up as a second Tasmania.

Today, the idea of New Zealand joining Australia seems a bit odd, but in Parkes’ time it kind of made sense, and part of reason is to do with railways, or rather the lack of them.

When Parkes gave the oration in Tenterfield, Tenterfield was on now abandoned main line to Brisbane – there was no coastal railway line, and most of the coastal communities of New SouthWales were reached by sea from Sydney – it’s why small places like Tathra on the south coast still sport impressive steamship wharves.

Melbourne and Sydney had been linked by rail only a few years before as had Melbourne and Adelaide. There was no direct Sydney Adelaide line via Broken Hill until the 1920s, and in Queensland the Far North line to Cairns was not completed until around the same time.

There was no railway line across the desert to WA and the line from Adelaide to Darwin was stalled at Alice Springs, and remained so until the early 21^st century.

Travel between the big cities of Australia – which all lie on the coast more or less was by ship. Cargo mostly moved the same way, in part due to the break of gauge between the different colonies’ railway systems – bulk items sent by ship from Melbourne to Sydney say did not need to be transhipped on the border at Albury.

And in such a world of sea based transport it probably seemed eminently sensible to consider New Zealand as an extension of Australia – the journey from Sydney to Auckland or Wellington was no longer than that to Hobart, or indeed from Brisbane to Cairns.

Now of course, we are oriented to land transport and we see the difficulties of a sea based world, but in the nineteenth century a sea based journey was sometimes the only choice and considerably more comfortable than a slow, jolting, steam train.

In 1953 L P Hartley wrote The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there, something doubly so when dealing with two quite different and alien cultures – Tsarist Russia and Meiji Japan.

Winston Churchill, always one for a good line, described Russia as a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma, when talking about the Nazi Soviet pact of 1939. No one really understood the decision making processes that went on in Stalin’s Soviet Union.

The same can be said of Tsarist Russia, which was equally an autocracy, and where a ruling court of favourites made decisions without scrutiny.

Nineteenth century novels, such as those of Tolstoy and Chekhov might give us the illusion of understanding Tsarist Russia, but actually we don’t.

Doubly so for Meiji Japan. A ruling court, a set of governing cliques of aristocrats and military men (the two were basically synonymous) and a constitution modelled on that of Prussia with a rubber stamp parliament.

Also, as few westerners spoke or read Japanese what went on in Japan was utterly unknown in the west – in fact I’ve seen it suggested that the Japanese military had no real need of ciphers and codes as no one much outside of Japan could read Japanese.

Not actually true, the Japanese did in fact use codes to encrypt their diplomatic correspondence.

Now, I was looking for some images to illustrate a post about the Russo Japanese war at the start of the twentieth century.

I personally consider the Russo Japanese war an important event as

1) it marked Japan’s rise as a significant military power

2) it was the first time in recent history that a non western army defeated a European army

3) disillusion with Russia’s military failures in the East led to the 1905 insurrections throughout Russia

Japanese artists produced a number of woodblock prints depicting the war. They also produced a number of shunga. Shunga is a style of Japanese erotic art printed on woodblock and typically depicting two people copulating.

I’m not prudish about sexual matters, but because some people might find some of the images disturbing I’ve put together a little Google Docs file that describes the images and includes links to the wikimedia commons images. If you don’t want to look at the images, don’t click on the links.

The first image shows a Japanese officer copulating with a woman of European origin. There’s no way to tell from the image whether the sex is consensual or not. However, when I found a second image showing a Japanese soldier penetrating a Russian soldier I began to wonder if the first image had also been drawn to express Japanese dominance over Russia.

But then, I found another two equally explicit images of Japanese officers having sex with Japanese nurses, I began to question my initial reaction.

While the second image, that of a Japanese soldier buggering a Russian soldier, is clearly supposed to express dominance, I’m not sure about the first image, it could be consensual or non consensual, and given the other images I simply don’t know if it was normal in Meiji Japan to express dominance via sexual acts, it could simply be a bit of exotic erotica.

I’m also aware that I have some of my own baggage here. Some of my family were imprisoned by the Japanese when they occupied Singapore. The men and women were separated, and one of my aunts who survived the war was never right in the head afterwards. Bad, traumatising things had obviously happened to her, but what I don’t know.

And because of this, I don’t know how to process the image. Equally, I’m sure that had Russian soldiers captured Japanese nurses, they would have treated them brutally…

Tasmania.

For reasons too complicated to explain in an opening paragraph, we were going to Tasmania for a few days.

I knew nothing about Tasmania – I had never been there and my ideas, such as they were, had been formed from a mixture of gardening and wildlife shows, a grim historical drama, and a couple of crime shows suggesting that Tasmania was the psychopath capital of the world and that you were likely to be dragged off at random into the forest to be murdered and disembowelled, and that your remains would never be found having been crunched into unrecognisable fragments by a horde of Tassie devils.

Nevertheless we went.

Driving off the overnight ferry in the early morning gloom to be confronted with a sign touting the Devonport Axe man Museum, I began to wonder if perhaps we might have made a mistake coming to Tasmania – maybe it really was full of axe murderers.

We’d hoped to find somewhere open for coffee and breakfast, but no, everywhere was closed so we drove on towards Launceston.

I remembered that I had made (and forgotten) a thermos of coffee for the journey before leaving home the day before, so we pulled off the Midland Highway at Westbury – a nice, very English looking place with a church on the green and normal people walking their equally normal dogs – not a psychopath to be seen, but who knows – we’ve all seen Miss Marple dramas and what goes on behind closed doors in quaint English villages.

We were in search of a toilet, and despairing of finding an open cafe, decided to stop to see if the coffee was still warm.

It was, surprisingly so, so we sat in the early morning chill on the green and drank our coffee, and munched on a couple of muesli bars. It might not have been the greatest breakfast in the world, but after having been woken at quarter to five to disembark from the overnight ferry, it did the job of making us feel human and that Tasmania might not be so bad after all…

So why were we in Tasmania?

A holiday. J had booked for a ten day artists workshop in Tasmania, but rather than fly there and back alone, we decided that we would have a few days in Tasmania before J’s workshop and that I would take the car back alone, along with J’s outdoor gear and anything else she didn’t need for the workshop, meaning that hopefully her luggage would come in blow Qantas’s 23kg weight limit.

So, off we went on the ferry travelling overnight. The whole overnight experience was not wonderfully comfortable, even though we’d booked a cabin.

When we were boarding we noticed that some travellers were taking their own pillows. At first we thought that an eccentricity, but the we discovered the provided pillows to be thin, as were the doonas. We ended up folding the single thin pillow provided over on itself to get something more comfortable – and I normally sleep with a single thin pillow.

Lesson learned – if we do it again pack an air pillow each.

So, after a less than restful night – being woken at 0445 didn’t add to the experience we drove on to Launceston where we were going to spend a couple of days.

We were of course far too early to check in to our hotel so we drove to George Town for brunch. No where was doing brunch so we settled for some chicken salad rolls and take away coffee and sat beside the statue of Matthew Flinders and his cat, and were promptly subjected to an attempted mugging by a local feline, who was prepared to fight off the seagulls if we dropped any chicken.

After our brunch of sorts we drove out to the lighthouse, and then back to Launceston to check in to our hotel and collapse for a bit after our early start.

The next day we explored Launceston and visited QVMAG – actually just the art gallery in the old building. The next day was simply hot, so we just walked round the waterfront and back through the town – and then we were off to Coles Bay for the weekend – it was the Labour Day weekend so the area was busy but we’d managed to book a quiet AirBnB a little bit out of town on an arm of the sea, and we birdwatched, walked on the mudflats and relaxed and read books one afternoon when it rained gently.

While it was still shorts weather it was noticeably cooler than Launceston – the weather was breaking us in gently for our next stop, Hobart, which was actually cold with a wind that came out of the Antarctic – that said we had a good time, visiting the Tasmanian museum and strolling around Salamanca and the waterfront. Our day in Hobart happened to be my 68^th birthday, so we treated ourselves to a decent meal out.

Our final stop was Port Arthur, where again we had an AirBnB overlooking the water – loved the location but the weather was still chilly, and one night it had the impertinence to rain quite heavily, however the rain cleared in the morning, in fact our last day, when we had planned to visit the historic site.

I was disappointed in the site. A little too Disneyfied for my taste with boat trips round the bay, and having seen Norfolk Island, I thought it a bit less interesting.

To be fair, it’s not totally the site’s fault. Abandoned in the 1860’s, apart from the Lunatic Asylum, the site was sold off in bits and pieces.

The main penitentiary was mostly destroyed in bushfires at the end of the nineteenth century, as were some of the other buildings that had fallen out of use. The staff and officers’ houses, which by then were privately owned mostly survived, but as they were people’s private residences they were inevitably chopped about a bit with a room added there, or a wall taken out to make a larger parlour.

The heritage people have been gradually buying back the properties and restoring them where possible, but they don’t quite have the feel of Quality Row at Kingston on Norfolk Island.

It’s not possible normally to visit the prison graveyard – the Isle of the Dead – although you can see it from the boat trip round the bay. Unlike Norfolk Island there’s no family history centre on site to help people researching any of their ancestors who might have ended up in Port Arthur.

Equally I came away feeling that they could have made more of the remains and the museum presentation could be better – for example what NSW have done with Trial Bay provides more historical information plus an engaging visitor experience.

That said, it’s worth visiting if you get the opportunity.

And then we were done.

A long drive to Winnaleah to drop J off, followed by another two and half hours to the ferry terminal.

Rather than another overnight sailing, I’d decided on a daylight crossing, which meant I needed to be at the ferry port by something like six thirty in the morning.

So, while it would have been nice to stay with J at the workshop for a night, it would have meant setting off at around three in the morning, I settled for a night in a motel and a microwave curry.

Driving towards Devonport as the sun was going down I was startled by something with three very bright lights coming towards me on the wrong side of the road – at first I though it must be some massive potato digging machine or the like, but in fact the railway line parallels the road in places and in fact it was a Tasrail freight train – well they only have freight trains in Tasmania – heading south.

The daytime crossing was tedious, in the way a long flight is tedious. I’d hoped we might see a whale or two, but no, all we saw was the ferry’s sister ship heading in the opposite direction. Mostly I contented myself with rereading Shōgun – an ideal book for a long journey and looking out the window.

The ferry was late in to Geelong, but it didn’t matter, I’d already decided not to drive back after such an early start, and had booked into a motel for the night.

The next day I was up before dawn to get clear of Geelong before peak hour started in earnest, and I had a slightly surreal experience.

I was sitting on the toilet and idly gazing out the window as one does, when a V/line commuter train went past about 50m away. The motel toilet window had one way film on it so it’s not as if anyone would have been able to see anything but it was odd to be sitting on the loo watching a train go by.

Then a long drive home, stopping to buy supplies at Wangaratta. The heat wave had begun to break but Wang felt steamy and humid, the way Bangkok or Singapore does after rain. I managed to beat the rain home and unload the car before it started.

The garden had suffered in the heat, but no irreparable damage…

I’ve been trying to pull together some family history stuff to try and see what use farming folk in in the late nineteenth century made of the railways in rural north east Scotland.

(digitised 1920 Ordnance Survey map of St Cyrus – National Library of Scotland)

In the mid 1860s my great to the whatevers acquired the lease of a farm at Scotston which was adjacent to the newly built branch line from Montrose to Inverbervie, and I’m guessing that they would have used trains from St Cyrus station to Montrose rather than the North Water Bridge station simply because, while further it is a more level road, a consideration when produce had to be hauled by cart, or people had to walk to the train – remember that the safety bicycle was not in common use to the 1890’s and even then they may have preferred a more level route.

The railway line closed in the 1960’s and I can just remember  the last steam freight trains puffing their way laboriously along the line.

The line was engineered to avoid steep gradients as much as possible but there was no avoiding crossing the North Water (sometimes called the North Esk) which ran through a steep valley before flowing into the sea.

In the late 1700’s a stone road bridge was built crossing the river at right angles but that involved a relatively steep descent  and ascent up the other side – for years there was an original Royal Scottish Automobile Club sign on the Montrose side of the bridge warning of the steep descent and sharp curve at the bottom of the hill.

Steam trains of course don’t do sharp descents and curves, so the builders of the Bervie railway built a rather impressive stone viaduct over the North Esk – it’s still there and now forms part of a cycling route.

Sometime before the 1979 Scottish referendum, someone graffitied the bridge with the slogan ‘Scotland Free or a Desert’ – a slogan originating from the 1820 Radical War and later reused during the Red Clydeside period in Glasgow at the end of world war one. The quote ultimately derives from Tacitus – they hae makit ae desert and hae callit it peace.

(image of graffiti cropped from https://canmore.org.uk/collection/1959169)

The graffiti was there for years, and while researching the use of the railway I idly wondered if it was still there.

It was certainly there in the 2000s and I remember pointing it out to J when we went down to St Cyrus beach – a wild dramatic beach a little like some of the more remote beaches in Victoria – to do a little bird watching (utterly unsuccessful) and take a look at the eighteenth century graveyard.

Strangely, for such a well known local landmark, it proved almost impossible to track down recent images of the graffiti – even Canmore, which includes images showing the graffiti into the early part of this century does not mention it, and web searches do not bring up links to images on Facebook and Instagram – I can only guess that the graffiti disappeared sometime before the rise of Facebook and Instagram, perhaps removed during restoration works…

There’s a genre of Australian crime fiction known as ‘outback noir’.

And, since I discovered that my local library was stuffed with outback noir books, I’ve read rather a lot of it as my bedtime reading to help me turn off and relax before going to sleep.

Set in small isolated rural communities of country Australia, the stories can be quite formulaic:

– the lead protagonist is someone with some connection with the law, an ex-cop, a lawyer, or a journalist.

– for some reason they come back to some outback community they had some past connection with such as a funeral, to care for a parent with dementia, to sort out a deceased estate

– somehow they become involved in a murder, investigation, such as finding a dead body while jogging

– the local police are either disinterested, corrupt, or obstructive, and do not seem the least bit interested in the protagonist’s statement

– something happens that seems to connect the current investigation to a previous murder

– complications arise due to sexual shenanigans within the community – it can even include a hint of incest

– someone in the police eventually takes the protagonist seriously, and the case is resolved, and everyone lives unhappily after.

While formulaic, in the hands of a skilled writer it can become something else. Part of the charm can come from the writer’s ability to evoke the feeling of these small places left behind by climate change, by rural depopulation, which increasingly seem to have less and less in common with the big east coast cities, and more importantly can tell us something about life outside of the cities, about the suicides and farm foreclosures, the devastation caused by the droughts, the agricultural engineering businesses just hanging on and surviving by supplying under the counter tractor parts, and about the young kids who can’t wait to get away to Sydney or Melbourne.

Not all outback noir sticks to the formula. Most do, but some are different, a lesbian roadtrip to escape the law, a failed search for a prospector’s lost stash, but all tell us something about Australia, and how its changing.

About the impact of mining in the Kimberley and how suddenly in the middle of nowhere there’s a bunch of guys with money to spend, and being young men mostly want to spend it on booze and sex, and its impact on remote indigenous communities.

At its best, outback noir gives stories that help explain about what is happening out there outside of the east cost capital bubbles

When I was little, I wanted to be an archaeologist.

I really did.

I remember that when I was about eight we had a school inspection and one of the things that the inspector asked kids to see if they understood that there were opportunities was what they wanted to be.

The primary school I attended was socioeconomically mixed, so there were kids who wanted to be postmen, kids who wanted to be accountants, as well as the more predictable doctors, nurses, truck drivers and so on.

When asked, I said I wanted to be an archaeologist, something that produced a stunned silence. In early nineteen sixties Scotland not even middle class kids became archaeologists.

And while I did want to be an archaeologist, there was no understanding in my family, in my school, of how you became an archaeologist. A nuclear physicist or a neurosurgeon, yes, but an archaeologist, no.

So I didn’t become one. Over the years I’ve done bits and pieces with archaeologists, but the nearest I’ve ever got to archaeology was the documentation of Dow’s pharmacy.

In part, the reason why I wanted to be an archaeologist was an obsession with Roman history.

Again in the sixties there was no Roman history or archaeology in Scotland. That’s of course not quite true, but it is true to say that there was no real understanding of the Roman engagement with Scotland.

Apart from some bits of the Antonine wall and few marching camps found by Ordnance Survey surveyors in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, there were no visible remains, nor was there much in the way of textual sources other than Tacitus.

The odd hoard of Roman silver had been found by people investigating Pictish hillforts, but that just helped reinforce Tacitus’ (and other writers’ ) stereotype of the Picts as wild hairy uncultured woad painted barbarians.

The fact that the Picts had left little in the way of apparent remains other than a few incomprehensible carved stones didn’t really help, which resulted in a view about the Picts not dissimilar to colonial views about indigenous Australians – not people you’d have round for afternoon tea.

So, what we had was a situation not dissimilar to the situation in England and Wales a century earlier.

Little in the way of apparent remains and some fairly minimal textual sources.

There was one difference though.

People did know that the Romans had been in England and Wales, and so local antiquarians expected to identify Roman sites, and even investigated them reporting their findings in the learned journals of the day.

This also meant that when large scale industrial and railway construction began in the nineteenth century, people were not surprised to find Roman sites and particularly cemeteries.

Lying on the edge of Roman settlements, cemeteries were more likely to be found by railway construction works as most railway lines were routed outside the medieval core of towns which themselves had grown up over Roman settlements – Roman remains in towns were more likely to be found when installing gas, water and sewage pipes.

And on the back of this local antiquarian and field clubs became involved documenting and recording Roman finds.

In Scotland, substantial towns did not really develop until the middle of the medieval period, meaning people installing drains were more likely to find medieval cess pits than mosaics, which while equally valuable, were considerably less glamorous and hence less likely to attract the attention of local antiquarians.

And hence, due to the lack of apparent remains and textual sources, the history of the Roman engagement with the peoples north of Hadrian’s wall was sketchy in the least.

It’s different now of course, and I’m sure that if any eight year old was to say they wanted to be an archaeologist, people would know now how to encourage them, and also, simply because there is more archaeology around, would, when they were older, recommend placements on archaeological digs etc.

Like a lot of people I became interested in the whole retro photography thing during the pandemic, but I’ve got to admit that while I’ve had a couple of false starts, I really havn’t done much with it.

I’ve some working cameras, a box full of 35mm film, and a couple of experimental days out, but that’s about it.

However, more recently, I became interested in the idea of half frame cameras, and, yes, I ended up buying one online from a used camera dealer in Adelaide.

Doing this was actually tremendously useful as it helped crystallise my thoughts around the elephant in the room – film processing.

I’d already decided that I wouldn’t bother with the whole enlarging and printing thing, and simply have my films processed and scanned.

One of the results of the retro photography boom is that there are a number of companies that will, for a fee, process and scan films. The only problem is that as half frame photography was always a minority sport, which means that a lot of labs – who of course simply feed the exposed films through an automatic developing machine, and then a custom scanner are not set up for handling half frame media.

Given that you can buy plastic half frame cameras from Amazon and others for something between fifty and a hundred bucks, you might have thought they were more geared up for handling half frame media, but no.

Now, as I’ve written before, I used to do my own film processing as a geeky teenager, and I used to have a basic lab setup with a blackout tent, but I realised that I don’t need a lab, all I need is a change bag – basically a light proof bag in which you put the exposed film cassettes and the developing tank, and then by touch you unwind the film from the cassette into the tank spool, and then close up the tank

Simple, no need for a tent or a lab, even though I’m sure that a certain amount of swearing will be involved the first few times.

Then it’s simply a matter of adding the chemicals, stirring and agitating, and you have a set of negatives.

It turns out it’s possible to buy a tank and all the required flasks and stirrers, not to mention special squeegees for drying the film as a package, and again to buy the chemicals as a package.

As with all these things, the startup cost is not exactly cheap, but the more one does it, the cheaper it gets.

The going rate for having a film processed and scanned is something between twenty and twenty five dollars and the startup cost for home processing is something like $250, so do it often enough it’s cheaper to do it at home and also possibly more fun.

You will notice however that I havn’t mentioned scanning, and that’s for a reason.

Commercial labs will scan every image, which of course includes all the duds.

You can buy a home film scanner, in fact I already have a basic one, bought to rescue some family pictures where we still had the negatives but not the original prints, but again they are designed for full frame film.

The alternative is to use a light box and a digital camera (or even your phone) to take a picture of the negative and then process it using Gimp – this gives you more control over the image, and by using a mask – basically a bit of card with a rectangular hole the correct size blank out the rest of the backlighting – and yes, capitalism being a wonderful thing, you can even buy light boxes with mounting brackets for doing this very thing

So, I think I can make this thing work, and more importantly, have fun along the way