stuff 'n other stuff

As I’ve said elsewhere, I’m no way a serious collector of nineteenth century postal ephemera, but I will admit to buying the occasional item now and then.

My most recent purchase was inspired by our recent trip to Port Lincoln in South Australia.

It’s an example of a postal cover – basically an envelope without its contents – sent from Adelaide to Port Lincoln in 1877, and it’s interesting because of the multiple postmarks on it – two on the front and two (unfortunately illegible) on the rear.

At the time, Port Lincoln had no rail connection to the rest of South Australia (in fact it never did – the Eyre peninsula rail network was never connected to the rest of the South Australian network) and was consequently very isolated. Mail from Adelaide would be sent by boat – often a sailing ship – across the Spencer Gulf to Port Lincoln for onward distribution, hence the multiple postmarks – the two on the front show when it was received and sorted for onward dispatch – September 28 1877, and the two on the rear the date it was received in Port Lincoln and then dispatched

Unfortunately the Port Lincoln postmarks are pretty much illegible, but I could convince myself the rightmost reads OC 3 77, suggesting that the letter had reached Port Lincoln four or five days after being posted…

We’ve had ourselves a road trip out west, as far west as Port Lincoln in South Australia.

It was really just a little vacation, but we had ourselves a good time and visited some interesting places along the way.

We began by driving down to Apollo Bay, where we celebrated my 69^th birthday with a walk along a (small, very small) part of the Great Ocean Walk track at Cape Otway, before driving on to Goolwa in South Australia via an overnight stop in Mount Gambier.

The day we drove to Goolwa was over 40C.

Rather than go direct to Goolwa, we looped down to Robe, and then along the wild, scrubby and desolate coast of the Coorong before reaching Goolwa.

Goolwa used to be a major paddle steamer port for the Murray river trade and a workaday sort of place, though it is rapidly gentrifying, with some nice old buildings and some excellent cafes.

In the nineteenth century people and goods would travel up the Murray on paddle steamers, and grain and wool would come back down the Murray to either Goolwa, or Morgan where they would be transhipped by rail to Adelaide, and while there is no longer a commercial railway service in Goolwa, the old railway line has been preserved as a heritage railway.

The mouth of the Murray was treacherous with sand bars, and Goolwa never became an ocean port.

The wharf area is being prettied up but there are still some nice old buildings like the chart room, and also sports a nineteenth century morgue, built in the 1880s to deal with drowning victims, which I was intrigued to see, as an unadorned example of a Victorian morgue.

Unfortunately it’s a bit neglected and access is difficult but I did get a look at the examination table by poking my camera through a hole in the shutters and taking some low light pictures.

From Goolwa, we drove to Glenelg, an iconic beachside suburb of Adelaide, where we stayed in a short term rental apartment.

It had been eighteen years since we last visited Glenelg and it had changed a lot with a new Marina complex and ocean front apartments but the old pier was still there as was the beach.

One of the advantages of Glenelg over other beachside suburbs in Adelaide is that you can get the tram Moseley Square at the jetty into the city centre making it easy to visit the South Australian Museum and the Art galley, which we did to visit the Galloway Hoard exhibition.

Being a sad anorak at heart I was on the lookout for colonial era relics like post boxes and was rewarded with one next to Moseley Square.

Unlike Victoria, where colonial period post boxes are quite common there seemed to be few colonial period boxes left in South Australia.

I was worried that the Moseley Square example was a dummy, but I did spot a rather more neglected example in Kingston Street in Burra, which looked as if it might actually be in use as a post box. Unfortunately I was driving when I spotted it, and is always the way could not stop easily, so no photograph I’m afraid.

After Glenelg we did a mammoth six hundred and more kilometre drive to Port Lincoln at the base of the Eyre peninsula, via Port Augusta and Whyalla.

Driving north out of Adelaide the country became increasingly dry, and about halfway to Port Augusta agriculture more or less disappeared with the grain paddocks giving way to dry semi desert scrub.

Port Augusta was once a port with grain ships sailing to Europe (shades of Eric Newby’s The Last Grain Race), and still has some nice old buildings in the town centre. The old wooden wharf is still there, although fenced off for safety reasons, and gradually being restored as a walking area beside the water.

From Port Augusta on past Whyalla across more scrubby desert and then gradually agriculture began to return, with large paddocks that had been growing grain and then on to Port Lincoln – which is actually where Eric Newby sailed to.

Port Lincoln is still a major grain port and the town is dominated by a huge silo and grain loading facility. Until a few years ago the narrow gauge railway carried the bulk of the grain, but that has now been abandoned in favour of massive grain trucks.

So why Port Lincoln?

Port Lincoln was as far west as we could go without the trip turning into something major as anything further would have taken us on a transcontinental trip across the Nullarbor to Perth. We’d already passed the junction where the highway to Perth split from the highway to Darwin on the western edge of Port Augusta.

Port Lincoln promised us relaxation and access to both the Lincoln and the Coffin Bay national parks.

While there, we swam at Tumby Bay, walked a little of the Investigator Track in Lincoln national park from Surfleet Bay to Spalding Cove.

Coffin Bay national park was a bit of a letdown as part of the park was closed for European Bee control measures. The township at Coffin Bay itself is in a pretty stunning location but seems to lack safe swimming beaches.

Port Lincoln itself is a working town, but the old wharf area has been prettied up and is now a recreation area with a shark proof swimming enclosure off the old jetty.

And then we were done.

We drove back retracing our route to Port Augusta and from there we drove on to Burra, an old tin mining town on the edge of the wilderness with some quite nice heritage buildings.

From there we drove on to Morgan and then Mildura in Victoria, before crossing into NSW for bit (the road on the NSW side of the Murray is better than the road on the Victorian side) before crossing back into Victoria at Robinvale and then on to Echuca, which was once a major paddle steamer port on the Murray.

After three long days of driving, we had a day in Echuca – which we kind of like despite its slightly cheesy aspects before driving home.

We’d done a tad over 4000km in around three weeks – roughly the same distance as London to Malaga and back, except of course there are no freeways on the route other than a bit out of Adelaide on the way north…

By pure chance, we were in Adelaide at the same time of as the Galloway Hoard exhibition at the South Australian Museum.

The Galloway Hoard is a collection of hack silver and other pillaged objects that probably came from the early Christian communities in south west Scotland – remember that Whithorn had been the site of an ecclesiastical settlement since the mid 400s CE and has been the site of a major archaeological investigation in the late 1980s.

There is an assumption that the hoard represents objects in some way connected with these communities, and it’s assumed that due to the presence of hacksilver they had been pillaged rather than hidden from pillagers.

The exhibition is quite small but contains the pectoral cross, some disc brooches and some of the hacksilver. Some of the rock crystal artefacts and a vessel that was found wrapped in textile are not original but in fact 3D printed replicas, perhaps because the originals were deemed too fragile to travel from Scotland.

It was the first time I had come across the use of 3D printing in exhibitions this way, and while a valuable technique to provide access to fragile objects, I felt that the mention of 3D printing and where it had been used in the exhibition should have been more prominent.

When we visited on a Friday lunchtime the exhibition was not too busy, apart from a school group, which gave us time to look properly at the items, unlike the scrum at the Dead Egyptians exhibition in Melbourne last year.

There are also some quite good an informative videos on the conservation of the hoard which are well worth sitting and watching.

At a bit over twenty dollars the exhibition is at the cheap end of the ticket costs for travelling exhibitions, my only complain being the use of TicketTek to manage online bookings when there are other providers known for better data security and lower fees.

While we were at the museum we popped next door to see the Renaissance Art exhibition, which was quite interesting and included some sixteenth century paintings I had not seen before, including one of Edward VI, and a rather nice one of the tax collectors office by Pieter Breughel the Younger that almost borders of caricature, but more importantly gives an insight into the business processes of early modern administration.

If you want to see the exhibition, be aware it closes on the 13th of April. The exhibition is free to visit.

A nice example of a preserved colonial era pillar box in Glenelg. The box is outside the library, not far from where the tram line ends in Moseley Square.

while obviously well loved by the local dogs it is a fluted design very similar to the British mid 1850’s PB1 design but with a horizontal letter slot like later British fluted boxes rather than the vertical one seen in earlier examples.

There is no obvious iron founders mark on the box so I can’t tell if it is a locally made copy of an English design, or if it was shipped all the way from the UK …

I’ve been spending a little more time on Katherine Scragg.

(And her name was Katherine not Catherine, despite the newspaper reports to the contrary)

I finally ran to ground a newspaper transcript of her deposition, which I won’t reproduce as it is fairly graphic describing the violence wreaked on Katherine and Grice’s attempts to pull up her dress.

Given that Grice was captured with his flies still undone, there can be little doubt as to his intentions.

However there are two interesting aspects to the deposition.

Like Fanny Elizabeth Bull, the railway company concerned (in this case the London and North Western Railway) provided a solicitor to support Katherine, suggesting that the railway companies often saw it as their duty to assist in a prosecution.

Secondly, there was a Ladies Only compartment on the train but Katherine was not sitting in it – she had been sitting in an ordinary third class compartment with other passengers, who unfortunately had all got off at a prior station leaving Katherine alone.

This did invite some comments along the lines of ‘she were asking for it, warn’t she’, and comments from the chair of the grand jury about women having to take responsibility for their own safety, but these didn’t go anywhere given the brutality of the attack and the fact that she had been sitting in a compartment with other passengers prior to Grice boarding the train – he could just as easily have leapt into a Ladies Only compartment occupied by a single woman.

Without access to the court transcripts, I can’t prove this but there seems to have been a recognition that providing Ladies Only compartments was not a panacea …

Eadweard Muybridge was undoubtedly a most peculiar man, but his huge collection of photographs of naked people doing quite simple things has proved an invaluable resource for studies of human locomotion.

His images also help give us an idea of how nineteenth century people did some quite ordinary tasks such as washing themselves.

Muybridge doesn’t have (as far as I can find) an image of someone using a hip bath but he does have this photograph of a naked woman helping another wash while using a bath not that different from the classic hip bath

which gives a general idea of how one might use a hip bath. I’ve also found a wood cut of a woman being helped to bathe by her maid

which is not dissimilar from Muybridge’s photograph, and reminding us that having a bath was not a totally private experience – there would have had to be servants to heat the water and sluice one down.

Bathing with a ewer and basin would have been a bit more private, as seen in this animated gif based on a Muybridge set of images of a nude woman washing her face

but even so someone would have had to heat the water in the ewer first showing how dependent the nineteenth century middle classes were on their servants.

(incidentally Muybridge’s models seem to have had fun doing the bath sequence – there’s a photograph of one woman pouring presumably cold water over the other closely followed by a woman jumping from the bath…)