Ned Kelly: Moldboards into Armour

19th Century Plough

     I'm one among millions of Ned Kelly fans. I suppose I've inherited the Larrikin gene from my father. In Australia I re-read Ian Jones' Ned Kelly: A Short Life, another piece of historical writing both detailed and balanced.

     It is Ned Kelly's creation of armour from moldboards that intrigues me. By 1870, ploughs were being manufactured in Melbourne, railroads were everywhere, and the strikes against factory working conditions were about to take place. Kelly engaged a blacksmith to fashion armor from plough moldboards like the one shown above. This anachronism produced an intimidating sight. In his armor, Kelly must have looked like a robot to the attacking policemen. In the wildness of the Australian bush, a strange mechanical presence.

     That's why Sydney Nolan's paintings of the Ned Kelly saga have a visual impact that a movie cannot. Ned's armour is broods over the pictures. Nolan had deserted the Australian Army when he undertook the series, which may explain his identification with his subject. That's probably another reason why I continue to find Ned Kelly and Sydney Nolan so intriguing.  My dad, the larrikin Croswell Bowen, was best known for his crime reporting and his biography of the outrageous Irish-American playwright, Eugene O'Neill. Did he feel quite guilty over his father's conduct in the Toledo, Ohio Bank Failure of 1931?

Note: I took the above photograph of an antique plough in Patterson, New York, about 3 months before I learned that the Kelly gang had fashioned their armour from similar ploughs!

     

Australia in Asia; Asia in Australia

Veranda, South India

Veranda, South Australia

     Arriving at our host's home in a suburb of Adelaide, I felt very much at ease. Craig and Maureen quite possibly have more books crammed into their house than we do in ours. On the coffee table, I spotted Alison Broinowski's The Yellow Lady: Australian Impressions of Asia. (1992) Turns out that Craig went to college with Dr. Broinoswki, a beautiful and brilliant blond, diplomat and an outspoken critic of Australia's participation in the Iraq War.

     A few years ago, I decided I couldn't wait until my next life to learn Chinese, so I began a crash course in Mandarin, Vietnamese, Japanese, Asian History, Asian Art, Asian-American Society and Culture, Chinese Calligraphy and Brush Painting. Two trips to China and others to Vietnam and South India and I'm still learning. Naturally, I dove into this book which promised to to clue me into the Australian experience of Asia.

     Broinowski's thesis is that White Australia could have developed its identity based on its location in the Eastern Hemisphere, or based on its history as a British Colony. Choosing the latter course meant that the Australian experience of Asia was mediated through European Centers. So for example, the architecture of bungalows and verandas, developed by the British to accommodate the climate of India was adopted by the British in Australia; its elaborate ironwork a Victorian echo, perhaps, of Islamic decoration. 

     In contemporary Australia, this makes for some curious moments. Puccini's Madame Butterfly was playing at the Sydney Opera House, Gilbert and Sullivan's  The Mikado in Adelaide. 

     The political and social consequences have been serious. It was observed that "Australian Nationalism is the chauvinism of a British imperialism, intensified by its geographical proximity to Asia." As in the United States, exclusionary laws were passed excluding Asians: "To say that most settler Australians did not welcome Asians as neighbors is an understatement."

     And yet. The reactionary John Howard's fourth term ended and in 2007 Kevin Rudd became Prime Minister. Rudd is the first Western leader who can speak Mandarin. A Sydney paper covers news such as the ability of an Australia law firm, RMB Partners, to draft wills that accommodate both Koranic and Australian law. The paper also features fashion articles on elegant Hijabs (headscarves).

     Proximity, that location factor, does make a difference. 21 years ago, Peter Wilson, a columnist for The Australian newspaper found himself teaching Australian rules football to students at Japan's equivalent of Oxford and Cambridge. (Or Yale and Harvard to us Yanks.) It changed his life, as it made him a "mate" to the Japanese players, something he'd learned was almost impossible for a foreigner in Japanese Society. On the other hand, the waters that Japanese whalers claim to be researching are Australian.

     I think the United States has a similar opportunity to have a fresh understanding of Asia. I had to chuckle when it turned out that both our cab driver going to the airport in Adelaide, and our cabdriver coming home in SFO turned out to be of Chinese extraction. I never lack for opportunities to practice Mandarin!

     

    

     

The Irish in Australia and the Irish in Croswell Bowen: Guilt, Shame and the Larrikin

The Scarborough of the First Fleet

     I first read Robert Hughes The Fatal Shore: A History of the Transportation of Convicts to Australia, 1787-1868 when it was published in 1986. I can't remember why I read it. In fact, I didn't remember much of what it said, I just remember thinking it very profound and bound to be influential. On New Years Eve in Sydney, I got to talking about it with Mary Lou Simpson of the South Australian Museum of Adelaide, and she was of the opinion that it is still one of the best books of Australian history. So I picked up a copy, and read it, as though for the first time. (Unexpected consequence of memory loss: everything old is new again.)

     When Hughes began about writing the book in the 1970s, Australians had long been embarrassed by the "convict stain" on the origins of their nation. Free settlers claimed respectabilty as British subjects. They laid it on thickly: plus royalistes que la reine, Hughes says. (I think they still do, with all that cricket and left hand driving.) 

Hughes' approach is what's now called subaltern history: he tried to see the system from below, in documents of the convict's voices. The Fatal Shore is exhaustive in detail, and for all I know, balanced in its analysis.

     One of Hughes' observations is that whatever the convict's crimes, even after completing his or her term of servitude, they and their families were harassed by the agents of "polite society," the police.   The Irish, who had comprised the largest, most cohesive group among the transported convicts, felt the brunt of this. This is the plaint expressed in Ned Kelly's "Jerilderie Letter," that tried to explain and justify his crimes.

     This got me thinking about the connection between guilt, shame and the larrikin figure. Are Irish Catholics, like my father, particularly susceptible to shame and guilt? Is larrikin behavior a manner of playing on or playing out, the shame and guilt at the role one's religion and the British government have given one? It was when he found himself, an Irish Catholic middle-western fish in the stultifying air of an East Coast WASP prep school, that he became self-conscious about his personality "tics." I think shrinks call that reaction formation. 

     A really good site to learn more about convicts in Australia, the History Wars and related topics is Convict Creations.

     

Larrikin

A Ned Kelly Icon

      I don't remember reading the term larrikin before I packed for Australia. It popped up when I was reading up on that iconic Australian figure, Ned Kelly. (Yes, the character portrayed by Heath Ledger in the 2002 film of that name.) Ned Kelly, the armor clad Australian Robin Hood, was a something of larrikin: 

 ...almost archly self conscious, too smart for his own good, witty rather than humorous,       exceeding limits, bending rules and sailing close to the wind, avoiding rather than evading responsibility, playing to an audience, mocking pomposity and smugness, taking the piss out of people, cutting down tall poppies, larger than life, skeptical, iconoclastic, egalitarian

 yet suffering fools badly, and above all, defiant...(as described by Australian historian Manning Clark)

     Most larrikin traits describe my father, Croswell Bowen, about whom I'm writing a book. Not surprisingly, given the history of the Irish as convicts in Australia, when it was a British penal colony, the term is thought to come from the Irish pronunciation of larking. As a behavour, it evolved, as Ned Kelly did, as a reaction to corrupt and arbitrary authority. Suddenly, I see my father, the Irish-Catholic, the larrikin, at Choate, that American model of an elite British school; I see the larrikin confronting Sinclair Lewis and the FBI. 

     A brilliant Australian scholar, Melissa Bellanta , writes about larrikinism and other Australian cultural phenomena. (Cate Blanchett fans should check out Melissa's review of Blanchett's performance as King Richard II, in the Sydney Theatre Company's War of the Roses, Pt. 1.) Bellanta has found that the larrikin type evolved and persisted in various Australian cities into the 20th Century. 

     I decided to conduct a little sociolinguistic research, asking everyone I met in Australia to define the term. From my small sample, it seemed that younger Aussies define larrikin differently than their elders. The young responded with synonyms like silly, joker; people my age i.e. early sixties, mentioned the transgressive nature of the larrikin. I'll leave it to the Australians to figure out what that means.

A Fraud? A Hoax? A Prank? A skirmish in the Culture Wars

     Keith Windschuttle is to the Australian Far Right as the late William F. Buckley was to America's Conservatives. He made his journal, Quadrant, a platform for world climate change deniers. Windschuttle precipitated a battle called the History Wars when he published The Fabrication of Aboriginal History. He denied the violence of Aboriginal vs. British conflict in Tasmania, attacking the scholarship of other historians. The second volume of The Fabrication... challenged the claims that the governments of Western Australia and the Northern Territory had systematically tried to "breed out the color" of Aborigines by forcibly taking children from their parents.

     Windschuttle has been hoisted on his own petard. In the weeks following the holidays, it emerged that Quadrant had published an article, "Scare campaigns and science reporting," on biotechnology and genetic engineering, without checking its authenticity. The article was a fabrication by a scientist, Dr. Sharon Gould, who wanted to demonstrate Windschuttle's acceptance of un-scientific science.

     Accusations, complaints of trickery, glee followed the revelation of the hoax, almost as much fireworks as New Year's Eve in Sydney Harbor. I'm impressed and inspired by Gould's clever method for uncovering Windschuttle's academic double standards. I can think of quite a few proponents of un-scientific science and un-historic history who merit the same treatment.

Thru the Looking Glass

     You think you know what I'm drinking, right? Caramel machiatto? No, it's a Flat White. (And a Lemon Curd tart. Don't go there.)  Here's the thing about Australia: it is easy to think you are in the United States of America, and you are not. 

     I've talked about language as a differentiation. Some social issues in the two countries have run roughly parallel courses. Do redefinition of gender roles, multi-culturalism and immigration sound like American hot topics of the last quarter of the 20th Century? True for Australia, too. (Please to remember that flaming Women's Libber: Germaine Greer: Australian!)

     According to Hugh MacKay's 1993 report, Reinventing Australia, the Mind and Mood of Australia in the 90s, these above were critical social issues for Australians between 1968 and 1993.

     Those decades saw a tremendous rise in the number of women in the workforce, to include 53% of all  married women in 1990. Aussie men were uncertain; hatred of women as a class and mock sensitivity being two responses that developed. Australia abandoned its "Whites Only" policy in 1968. This threatened the image of Aussie as pioneer, soldier and sportsman. Although Australia is one of the most urbanized places in the world, the fantasy of the "Real Australian" as a out-back bushranger promoted a craze for 4 wheel drive.

     However, Mackay claims that Australia leads the Western nations in the boldness of its multi-cultural initiatives. As migration to Australia has shifted from European to Asian, the white majority welcomes migrants, with the caveat "as long as they..." followed by a list.

     Migrants are welcome as long as they:

     *are prepared to embrace our way of life and its values

     *make learning English a top priority

     *not robbing jobs

     *not bringing their prejudices and conflicts into our country

     *assimilate and don't live in ethnic enclaves

     *import enriching culture; especially FOOD

Sounds familiar, no?

     Another familiar refrain: teenage binge drinking is rampant. In fact, Australian drug educators have concluded that this is a lost generation, in spite of a Federal Government campaign.

     But wait, there is one huge difference between Australia and the US:

The Australian Media loathe, despise, hate, disparage, denigrate, satirize etc. PARIS HILTON!

On the Post Colonial in the Post Colonial

Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art

     When I visited this museum, I realized that my time in Australia was going to provide a mirror to my current pre-occupation: trying to write a book about the intersections of my world with my journalist father's world of the 20th. My father participated in World War II as a photographer with the American Field Service Ambulance Corp at Tobruk in North Africa. He watched the British Empire begin to crumble. I went to Ecuador as a Peace Corps Volunteer. After I returned from the Peace Corps, I began studying Anthropology, just as the critiques of the colonial agenda of anthropology were beginning.

     This world class museum, located in the heart of Sydney, next to the transportation hub called Circular Quay, is featuring two brilliant exhibitions which reflect Australia's situation: historically European and geographically Asian. (The phrase is Alison Broinowski's; I'll be writing more about her in another post.)

     Simryn Gill is a Sydney based Malaysian artist. She works in a variety of media, including photography and found objects. Her work is both beautiful and thought provoking, as in a series of necklaces that resemble pearls or Hawaiian puka shells, but are actually beads made from the paper of her friends' favorite books. My favorite work was her treatment of a vintage 1950-1960 Time-Life series on countries of the world. She carefully gessoed or sanded away all of the text of each volume, leaving only the photographs, as the authors and editors had arranged them. The viewer has to reconstruct and may question the rationale for the visual content of this Cold War propaganda.

     On another floor was the astonishing work of Yinka Shonibare, MBE, born in England, raised in Nigeria. Shonibare styles himself a "post colonial hybrid." His work is vivid and disturbing. Headless life size mannequins form a series of tableau vivant of baroque and rococo paintings; their clothing is constructed of gorgeous African textiles. The period's decadence is made visible, yet its folly seems universally, endlessly human.

     Those who preceded my Dad at Tobruk, the generation of Australians who defended Tobruk for the British Empire, the famed "Desert Rats," are now few on the ground. In Sydney, in the Contemporary Art Museum, two brilliant artists offered meditations on all sorts of Empires.