RAHS Subscriptions: Journals – Vol 110 Pt 2 December 2024

RAHS Subscriptions: Journals – Vol 110 Pt 2 Dec 2024 ABSTRACTS

RAHS Subscriptions: Journals – Vol 110 Pt 2 December 2024 ABSTRACTS

Liberty not Licence: The Hyde Park Riots of 1878

Jeff Kildea

In March 1878, two riots occurred in Hyde Park in protest against the anti-Catholic preaching of Pastor Daniel Allen, a Baptist minister who on Sundays held open-air services in the park. In the wake of the riots, mounting public opinion led the government to ban public meetings there. As a result, soap-box orators and open-air preachers relocated to the Domain, where they have continued to operate ever since. This article examines the Hyde Park riots in the context of the need to balance the right of free speech and the right of people not to be subjected to ‘hate speech’.

The News of War: How Australians learned that their nation was at war with Germany in August 1914

Lindsay Close

In August 1914, Australia stood half a world away from the rumblings of war in Europe. In an era before the internet, satellites, television and where telephone and radio were short-range communication devices, how did Australians discover that their nation was at war? This article examines the role that the telegraph played in disseminating the news that the conflict in Europe had started. It will also study the limitations of telegraph technology and the difficulties, such as censorship, print deadlines, ministerial errors and British Foreign Office mistakes that contributed to the delay of the Australian public getting the full and correct story.

A Retrospective of Military Law and Justice in the Australian Imperial Force

Des Lambley

Australian military law was comparatively sophisticated but a complicated dictum boiler-plated during Federation from the British laws. It had evolved throughout the modern history of war with an emphasis on discipline to ensure adherence to orders necessary to accomplish the Army’s given task. The physical environment in World War I and the stresses of the work caused many soldiers to break the rules. It was essential to have a system of laws enabling the offenders to be punished and set an example to others that orders were to be obeyed.

A ‘Nursery of Martial Law’: Proclamations of Martial Law in the Australian Colonies 1790–1853

Ben Hingley

Martial law was declared seven times in pre-Federation Australia, playing a part in some significant historical events. Yet very little has been written on the topic, and no comparative study has so far been made. This paper gathers, for the first time, brief accounts of all of the martial law events in the early colonies into one document and draws some initial comparisons. It will be seen that martial law was an adaptable doctrine. In the years between 1790 and 1853, it was used to fend off starvation, quash two rebellions, overthrow a government, and wage two wars against First Nations peoples.

Interpreting an Image: Did the Collector’s Chests become an embarras des richesses to Governor Macquarie because of their images of Christ Church Newcastle?

Sue Rabbitt Roff

There are several purported contemporary images of the first Christ Church to be built in Newcastle in 1817. But while the actual church building was deteriorating to the point that its superstructure of tower and steeple had to be radically shortened in 1825, the images sent to London by prominent members of the administration of Governor Macquarie grew increasingly imposing. Was this a concerted real estate rort to mislead potential free settlers and investors about the level of development achieved in the penal colony of Newcastle? This Interpreting an Image explores the evidence.

Book Reviews

Anne Sarzin, The Angel of Kings Cross: The life and times of Dr Fanny Reading (Judith Bonzol)

Hugh Tranter, Southern Signals: Stories of innovation, challenge and triumph in Australia’s communication history (Graham Shirley)

Rose Ellis, Bee Miles, Australia’s famous bohemian rebel, and the untold story behind the legend (Alice C. Paul)

John Cary, Frontier Magistrate: The enigmatic Foster Fyans (Mark Dunn)

Toby Raeburn, The Remarkable Mr and Mrs Johnson: Founders of modern Australia’s first church, schools and charity, and friends of Aboriginal people, 1788–1800 (Patricia Curthoys)

Cassandra Pybus, A Very Secret Trade: The dark story of gentlemen collectors in Tasmania (Don Garden)

Anna Johnston, The Antipodean Laboratory: Making colonial knowledge, 1770–1870 (Anne Coote)

Bronwyn Hughes, Lights Everlasting: Australia’s commemorative stained glass from the Boer War to Vietnam (Beverley Sherry)

RAHS Subscriptions: Journals – Vol 110 Pt 1 June 2024 ABSTRACTS

RAHS Subscriptions: Journals – Vol 110 Pt 1 June 2024 ABSTRACTS

RAHS Subscriptions: Journals – Vol 110 Pt 1 June 2024 ABSTRACTS

Lieutenant Charles Jeffreys and the Kangaroo: Was he totally unfit for command?

Ian Dodd

Governor Lachlan Macquarie expressed the opinion that Lieutenant Charles Jeffreys was totally unfit for command of the armed Colonial Brig Kangaroo. Earlier scholarly work has not challenged that opinion. This article examines previously unpublished records, mainly from the British Transport Commission, and some aspects of the voyage to New South Wales to determine whether Macquarie’s harsh opinion was justified.

Railway Navvies and Grog Shops 1878–85: Promoting Law, Order and Sobriety through Crown Land Management

Terry Kass

Riotous drinking and hard physical labour have been synonymous with the labouring workforce who provided the raw muscle for constructing public infrastructure during the nineteenth century. As a highly mobile workforce, navvies were difficult to control and the subject of widespread angst by middle-class observers. During the 1880s, in New South Wales, problems arising from heavy alcohol consumption by railway navvies inspired changes to Crown Lands legislation. Generally focused on managing the leasing and alienation of land, Crown Land administration was not aimed at policing public morality. Yet, the need to control access to alcohol for railway navvies initiated changes in Crown Land policy and administration with that objective.

Ion Idriess in the Torres Strait 1927: Headhunting, mass murder and castaway children

Rob Coutts

The inspiration for this paper was a rare book, Mer – Four Gospels, a translation of the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John into the Meriam language of the island of Mer in the Torres Strait. The book was published in 1902, after the introduction of Christianity to the Torres Strait in 1871. However, while researching the provenance of Four Gospels, a different book – Drums of Mer by Ion Idriess – became prominent. Drums of Mer purports to describe the pre-Christian Meriam culture of war, violence and head-hunting. Both books are discussed within the context of the island of Mer.

Stannumville

Leonie Bell

Many people are aware of the canvas and tin shacks that were erected by desperate people on the sandhills of La Perouse and Sans Souci during the throes of the Great Depression in the 1930s. Shanty towns such as these have a long history in Australia, particularly in pioneer and gold-mining towns in Victoria and New South Wales during the Gold Rush. These makeshift settlements often housed men in country areas where both jobs and housing were in short supply and times were tough. However, few will have heard of a NSW State Government scheme to house families in a purpose-built tent town during World War I. Canvas Town, sometimes referred to as Calico Town or Tin Town, and later known as Stannumville, was built 3.5 miles (5.6 km) from Sydney, about a mile south of Daceyville. It was constructed just off the western side of Bunnerong Road, between Gardiners Road and Maroubra Bay Road. Oddly enough, it does not appear on maps of the period, which were either printed before its construction or after its demolition. This made its precise location subject to speculation until the discovery of a hand-drawn addition to an existing Parish Map of Botany. This article examines why the government initiated the project, the living conditions in the town, and the reasons for its demise.

Interpreting an Image: George Augustus Robinson’s Yass to Port Phillip Road, 1840–1844

Bruce Pennay

A crude ink-sketch of Merriman, a Waywurru man, shackled around the neck, handcuffed and being dragged forward over uneven ground by an armed mounted policeman, is a graphic representation of the shortcomings of frontier justice in the early 1840s. This ‘Interpreting an Image’ untangles two stories of frontier justice with which the picture is intertwined in the journals of George Augustus Robinson, the Chief Protector of the Aborigines of the Port Phillip district of New South Wales. In doing so, it explains that the road between Yass and Port Phillip was a key part of a new ‘in-between’ frontier opened with the inland pastoral invasion.

Book Reviews

Bruce Short, Fever: the mysterious scourge of the 18th century (Ian Lowe)

Mark Hearn, The Fin de Siècle Imagination in Australia, 1890–1914 (Russell McGregor)

Shauna Bostock, Reaching Through Time: finding my family’s stories (Padraic Gibson)

Craig Wilcox, Australia’s Tasman Wars – Colonial Australia and Conflict in New Zealand, 1800–1850 (Samuel White)

J.M. Bennett AO and John K. McLaughlin AM (eds.), Cases for Opinion: A Bicentennial Miscellany (Jeff Kildea)

Alecia Simmonds, Courting: an intimate history of love and the law (Ian Dodd)

David Marr, Killing for Country (Bruce Pennay)

Phillip Deery, Spies and Sparrows: ASIO and the Cold War (Sue Tracey)

RAHS Subscriptions: Journals – Vol 109 Pt 2 Dec 2023 ABSTRACTS

RAHS Subscriptions: Journals – Vol 109 Pt 2 Dec 2023 ABSTRACTS

RAHS Subscriptions: Journals – Vol 109 Pt 2 Dec 2023 ABSTRACTS

Politics versus Justice: A fresh look at the third trial following the Myall Creek massacre of 1838

Jim Ritchie

This article revisits the trials of those accused of taking part in the Myall Creek massacre of 1838, in which at least 28 Wirrayaraay people, mostly women and children, were murdered. It closely examines the third trial, which involved four of those accused who took part in the massacre and explains why they escaped conviction, notwithstanding that seven of their fellow accused had been convicted and hanged following an earlier trial. The article also considers what became of Davey, a young Kamilaroi man, who was to be the main witness for the Crown in the third trial.

Quong Tart’s Neighbours: Cycling around the boundaries of exclusion and racism, 1880s–1900s

Marc Sebastian Rerceretnam

This article will look at the experiences of Mei Quong Tart (1850–1903) after he moved into the affluent Sydney suburb of Ashfield. While much has been written about his successes as a businessman, philanthropist, social advocate and Chinese community representative, there is little research relating to the social obstacles he encountered in his immediate neighbourhood and personal life. In the late 1800s, Sydney’s minority Chinese communities found themselves at the receiving end of political campaigns promoting their exclusion and the curtailing of their rights. In response, the Sydney-based Chinese community instigated campaigns and attempted to counter these negative initiatives. This paper will also look at Quong Tart’s use of popular sport to influence anti-Chinese public opinion in the late 19th century in light of the rise of anti-Chinese sentiment and movements to restrict their immigration and residency.

Angus Mackay and agricultural education in late 19th century New South Wales

Ian D. Rae

Angus Mackay (1830–1910) was a Highland Scot who came to the Australian colonies in the 1860s and spent nearly two decades in Brisbane. Arriving in Sydney in 1881 as an agricultural journalist, he was appointed to the Board of Technical Education and then as an instructor in agriculture at the Sydney Technical College, a position he held until 1897. He wrote books on bees, sugar cane, agricultural chemistry, and guides to agriculture in Australian settings, delivered public lectures and made professional conference presentations, making his career from informal advice to farmers to the inclusion of agricultural education in the state education system.

Chungking Follies: The supporting cast of the Chungking Legation, 1941–42

James Cotton

Sir Frederic Eggleston’s pioneering mission to Chungking (Chongqing) in 1941, accomplishing the opening of diplomatic relations with China, has received considerable scholarly attention. The main cast of characters is well known, Eggleston being assisted by Keith Waller and Charles Lee. This study shows that the contribution of other individuals made a significant impact on the Legation story, though their roles have been either neglected or overlooked. They included a former Shanghai policeman, a habitual criminal and confidence trickster, and a Russian-born linguist and secretary. In particular, in the early days of the mission — under dangerous wartime conditions — the role of Shanghai-born Edmund Burgoyne is shown to have been crucial for its establishment and initial diplomatic achievements. A review of their biographies leads to reassessment of the dynamics of the Legation in its founding phase.

RAHS Subscriptions: Journals – Vol 109 Pt 1 June 2023 ABSTRACTS

RAHS Subscriptions: Journals – Vol 109 Pt 1 June 2023 ABSTRACTS

RAHS Subscriptions: Journals – Vol 109 Pt 1 June 2023 ABSTRACTS

Touching hands with Anzacs: a re-evaluation of 1920s War Service Homes in NSW

Terry Kass

Australians make pilgrimages to Gallipoli for the dawn service and distant battlefields on Anzac Day or Armistice Day to commune with Anzacs. They often ignore evidence directly associated with Anzacs all around us, in capital cities, suburbs and country towns in the form of dwellings constructed by the War Service Homes Commission in the 1920s. This paper aims to provide a more balanced assessment of the work of the Commission than has been the case to date.

Beaumont & Waller’s Botanical & Zoological Gardens, at the Sir Joseph Banks Hotel, Botany Bay 1848–61

Mark St Leon

In 1848, William Beaumont, with the assistance of his business partner, James Waller, began to transform the gardens and grounds surrounding the Sir Joseph Banks Hotel at Botany Bay into a pleasure resort. The resort, named Beaumont & Waller’s Botanical and Zoological Gardens, would be quickly established as one of Sydney’s favourite outlets for public leisure and recreation. This article outlines its origins and development until its demise in 1861 in the context of early Sydney’s social and civic developments. The article concludes by identifying the resort’s three major legacies.

Ingleside Powder Works: ‘a curious colonial enterprise’

Keith Amos

The mysterious past of Ingleside Powder Works has never been fully explained due to conflicting interpretations about the motives of its 1880s designer and superintendent, Carl von Bieren. What brought him to Australia from the USA, and why did the works fail to produce gunpowder? This article contends the works were ostensibly built to produce explosives, but in reality, to facilitate an affluent lifestyle for the man who purported to be ‘Carl von Bieren’ and his supposed wife, Anna. Evident is a remarkable web of deceit spun by a 19th-century confidence man.

Thomas Wilson Esq and the natural history collections of First Fleet Surgeon John White

Matthew Fishburn

Thomas Wilson Esq, a Londoner, was the driving force behind the publication of three of the most important early Australian books, especially in terms of natural history: First Fleet surgeon John White’s Journal (1790), James Edward Smith’s Botany of New Holland (1793) and George Shaw’s Zoology of New Holland (1794). Although known to have joined the Linnean Society and to have employed the artists Sarah Stone and James Sowerby, Wilson has long been an enigmatic figure. This essay discusses the remarkable breadth of White’s collections on his behalf and reveals that Wilson was, in fact, a wealthy apothecary, not only a patron of White but an important supporter of Matthew Flinders, as well as being tangentially connected to two other surgeons associated with New South Wales, John Lowes and George Bass. Wilson was the central figure in an important professional network that was openly competing with the socially grander and far better-recorded coterie of Sir Joseph Banks.

RAHS Subscriptions: Journals – Vol 108 Pt 2 Dec 2022 ABSTRACTS

RAHS Subscriptions: Journals – Vol 108 Pt 2 Dec 2022 ABSTRACTS

RAHS Subscriptions: Journals – Vol 108 Pt 2 December 2022 ABSTRACTS

‘Extensive plans of immigration’: Governor Bourke and the beginnings of Australian assisted immigration, 1831-1838 – Richard Reid

In that 299-word encomium on the public statue to the colony of New South Wales’ first Irish governor, Sir Richard Bourke, outside the State Library is the claim: ‘He raised the revenue to a vast amount, and, from its surplus, realised extensive plans of immigration.’ At a time when convicts were arriving in Sydney in unprecedented numbers, the reference here is not to the transportation of felons but the early development of that large program of government-assisted immigration, which within virtually ten years, changed the demographics of the colony from one based on convicts, emancipists and their children to one increasingly based on free immigrants. This article examines the extent to which Bourke can be credited with that change. 

Bowral and the fraternity of ‘Noble Men’: Freemasonry in Bowral and the Southern Highlands of NSW – Alan Jacobs

Lodge Carnarvon is one of only two lodges that remain in existence in the Southern Highlands of NSW. The history of Lodge Carnarvon in Bowral is examined from its inauguration in 1888. Access to the internal records of Lodge Carnarvon and local newspapers enabled the author to make a detailed study of the membership, including demographics and professional backgrounds. The rise and fall of the membership of Carnarvon is placed within the context of the trajectory of all Freemasons under the United Grand Lodge of NSW. Lodge Carnarvon members exerted a decisive influence on the township of Bowral, but their membership of the fraternity usually was not disclosed or acknowledged. These men constituted the backbone of the business community and local government and helped to build the social capital of Bowral and its surrounds. In 1950 the Mayor (H.F. Venables) referred to one Carnarvon freemason (Joshua Stokes) as one of the Noble Four of Bowral. However, Stokes and the other Freemasons were not identified as members of the fraternity. Twenty-eight years later, the Shire President (Cr. Peter Reynolds) proclaimed that: ‘… members of the Council considered it an honour to accord to Lodge Carnarvon a civic reception in recognition of their support and involvement in the community for 100 years.’ 

Catholic Action, Sydney style: Catholic lay organisations from friendly societies to the Vice Squad – James Franklin

Sydney Catholics in the mid-twentieth century were organised into a large number of active and effective associations, from parish sodalities and professional guilds up to the Cahill government. Parish-based and larger organisations supplied a body of people accustomed to uniformity of beliefs and coordinated action in support of those beliefs, easily mobilised against Communism and in favour of Catholic moral and political positions. Pragmatic, informed by implicit moral views rather than explicit theory, and clerically controlled, Catholic Action in Sydney proved more able than its Melbourne counterpart in controlling the levers of political power. The Cahill government built on this organisational infrastructure to implement in law and policing a conservative moral agenda. 

Protection or Persecution? Victoria’s Chinese Protectors – Rob Coutts

In 1855 the Victorian Colonial Government appointed Chinese Protectors. Taken as a whole, from 1855 to 1863, the Protectorate belied its name, but conversely, it is suggested that the British humanitarian movement influenced its creation and early implementation. A distinction is made between the Protectorate’s administration before and after the 1857 Chinese Residence Act. This Act aimed to charge (only) the Chinese a fee to continue living in Victoria or leave the country. The proposal is that the Protectorate was created and implemented with humanitarian intent until the 1857 Act re-purposed it into an instrument of revenue collection and persecution. 

Thief or prostitute? Questioning the evidence against women transported to Australia – Kathrine M. Reynolds & Carol Liston

Accounts of women in Australia during the convict period are dominated by assumptions that many of the convict women had worked as prostitutes in Britain and continued to carry on their trade in the colony. The crimes that led to their transportation are overlooked or are assumed to involve prostitution. This paper investigates British sources about their crimes to understand the extent to which these crimes were associated with prostitution. Many of the women used the promise of sex to lure men into situations where they could be robbed. Building case studies around three convict ships, we trace the women’s crimes in Britain, seeking to determine if those crimes involved acts of prostitution and were the source of their designation as prostitutes.

RAHS Subscriptions: Journals – Vol 108 Pt 1 June 2022 ABSTRACTS

RAHS Subscriptions: Journals – Vol 108 Pt 1 June 2022 ABSTRACTS

RAHS Subscriptions: Journals – Vol 108 Pt 1 June 2022 ABSTRACTS

A Sojourn at Port Arthur in 1839: The eyewitness account of French explorer Captain Cyrille Laplace – Colin Dyer

The penal colony at Port Arthur had been in existence for less than a decade when Captain Cyrille Laplace paid his visit in February 1839 in the La Favorite. Already a very experienced traveller, this was his second round-the-world voyage, and his second visit to Tasmania. Laplace’s interest in correctional institutions led to visits to Hobart’s female convict prison and the Orphan School of New Town. In Volume 5, chapter 1 of the official account of his second voyage, Campagne de circumnavigation, Laplace describes in detail the changes he observed in Hobart since his first visit in 1831. This article includes the translation of these observations.
 

Canberra and the Frontier Wars – James McDonald

The nature of Aboriginal resistance in the Canberra district was different to elsewhere in New South Wales. Four factors affected how the Frontier Wars played out along the Molonglo: (a) the invasion followed the arrival of influenza and the small Aboriginal population had already been decimated; (b) Captain Bishop’s 1826 military expedition quashed a potential major rising; (c) Governor Darling was more intent than his predecessors on controlling the stockmen; and (d) relations with European pastoral workers in the district may have been less hostile.
 

Colonial Pioneers: The early industrial metal trades of Sydney, 1825-1875 – Harry Cole and Drew Cottle

Little has been written of Sydney’s early tradesmen. Although numerically insignificant in early colonial Australia, by the end of the nineteenth century one group of these tradesmen, the metalworkers, had become crucial to the local economy. The metalworkers were one of the ‘new’ trades that had emerged with industrialisation. This article sets out to place the new metal trades in the city’s early metalworking industrial landscape and offers a brief glimpse into the role played by the metal trades workers in the economic development of nineteenth-century Sydney. It examines the artisanal nature of their workplaces before the transition to larger-scale industrial production.
 

This anomalous community: Dungog Magistrates’ Letterbook, 1834-1839 – Michael Williams

This paper seeks to provide an overview and brief analysis of a rare convict period source that appears to have been largely overlooked by historians. The Magistrates’ Letterbook for the police districts of Dungog and Port Stephens, New South Wales, 1834-1839 is a single volume of the outward correspondence of Dungog-based magistrates at the high point of the convict system to local landowners, other magistrates, the Australian Agricultural Company, and to such Sydney based officials as the Superintendent of Convicts, the Colonial Storekeeper and the Colonial Secretary. The Letterbook, written mostly when Thomas Cook J.P. was Police Magistrate, provides an intimate snapshot of a period when such magistrates as Cook dealt with a vast range of matters and people, including local indigenous peoples, convicts and sly-grogers, bushrangers and landowners; all constituting a community perhaps rightly described at one point by Magistrate Cook as ‘anomalous’.