Eureka to the Diggers

by Thomas Keneally

  The establishment of a flying corps in Australia began in October 1912 when orders were placed for two BE (Blériot Experimental) -2As, two French Duperdussin aircraft, and a Bristol Box Kite. Though primitive by later models, the Australian Flying Corps was acquiring the most up-to-date equipment available. It was, in its first year of existence, more technologically modern than it would be for most of its peacetime existence thereafter.

  LIVE SHOWS AND FLICKERS

  As Federation arrived, there were five boys in the Tait family in Richmond, Melbourne. Was it Federation that helped spark entrepreneurship in men such as them, canny children of a Shetland Islander who combined a capacity for bespoke tailoring with a passion for the theatre? If so, it was exactly the result Deakin had hoped for. Charles Tait, the eldest of the theatre-struck brothers, began work in 1879 at the age of eleven as an usher at Saturday night concerts in the Exhibition Building, the Athenaeum Hall and the Melbourne Town Hall. His younger brother, John, studied as a lawyer’s clerk but gave it up to manage Nellie Melba’s return tour of Australia in 1902. Nevin Tait also began with solid employment with a financier but by the time of Federation was working for J.C. Williamson’s theatrical company.

  In 1902 John, Nevin and Frank founded J & N Tait, and Nevin went to London to attract a number of famous artists to tour Australia, including the Welsh Male Choir, the violinists Haydn Wood and Mary Hall, and the renowned actress Dame Clara Butt and her husband Kennerley Rumford. Other excursions would net John McCormack, the fabulously loved Irish tenor, and the equally adored Scots music hall comedian Harry Lauder. Thus Australian theatre audiences were knitted into the entertainment stream of the larger English-speaking world.

  Then, in 1906, the brothers produced the first extended narrative film in the world. The Story of the Kelly Gang, directed by Charles Tait, caused a sensation by running for an entire hour. Most of the film was shot on his wife’s family property at Heidelberg, but it was in other ways as well a family affair. His wife played Kate Kelly, his children, his brothers and their children all took part. The production cost £1000, but the film was said to have returned the company at least £25 000.

  Throughout, they eyed their rival, James Cassius Williamson. J.C. Williamson was an American who had come to Australia with his wife Margaret Virginia Sutherland in a play named Struck Oil in 1874. They went home afterwards but returned with the Australian rights for HMS Pinafore. Williamson, with partners Arthur Garner and George Musgrove, formed a theatrical company that took over the Theatre Royal in Melbourne and which was often accused of swamping a healthy Australian repertory system. In 1886 they opened the luxurious Princess Theatre in Melbourne with The Mikado, and they brought the superstar Sarah Bernhardt to Australia in 1891. Williamson’s wife, an entrepreneur in her own right, still acted under the name of Maggie Moore, and travelled to America a great deal, to the extent that she became estranged from James Cassius. He obtained an injunction against her in 1894 to prevent her from reviving Struck Oil with her new lover, Harry M. Roberts. Williamson himself was living with another woman (an actress, Mary Weir), and in 1899 Maggie divorced him and in 1902 married Harry Roberts in New York. But Maggie would perform again for some years in Australia under the aegis of her former husband’s company. She famously kept a menagerie at her Rose Bay house. In 1925, when she went to live with her sister in San Francisco, she was run down by a cable car, underwent a leg amputation and died.

  Meanwhile Williamson and J & N Tait were between them responsible for the visits of all the stars—as well as the Melbourne-born diva extraordinaire Nellie Melba, they contracted Russian singer Feodor Chaliapin, violinist Jascha Heifetz, pianist Ignacy Jan Paderewski and dancer Anna Pavlova, along with the native-born and eccentric composer-performer Percy Grainger. They also signed up local talent—the Geelong boy John Brownlee, for example, who had been discovered in 1922 when Melba heard him sing Handel’s Messiah at the Albert Street Conservatorium in Melbourne.

  Raymond Longford, born in 1878, was the son of a warder at Darlinghurst gaol. Though a seaman holding a third mate’s ticket, he had an impulse for theatrical performance. After beginning his career in an English theatre in India, he came back to Australia to tour country towns with humbler theatrical companies than those of the Williamsons and the Taits. He was tall, had long features and a fine voice.

  Lottie Lyell, the daughter of a Balmain estate agent, wanted to join the company Longford worked for, the Popular Dramatic Organisation, and in about 1906 her parents placed her in his care; he was a man who could hypnotise parents as well as daughters. Lottie had great vivacity and natural gifts of stagecraft and her oval face and large eyes were considered exemplars of beauty for her time. In 1911 Longford and Lottie met Cosens Spencer, a former rail splitter and drover born in England, who began screening moving pictures in New South Wales under his reversed name, Spencer Cosens. He had married a Scots girl, Mary Huntley, who became his chief projectionist and business partner. In 1905 they opened the Great American Theatrescope at the Lyceum Theatre in Sydney, and it became a permanent picture theatre from June 1908. It was Spencer’s company which commissioned the young Raymond Longford to direct films. Longford made the business of being a film director a profession instead of a sideline. (In this case too it will be necessary to go beyond 1920 to deal with the entirety of his career.)

  He had already acted in a number of Cosens’ films, including Captain Midnight and The Life of Rufus Dawes, based on Marcus Clarke’s novel His Natural Life, but now he directed Australia Calls, a film depicting invasion from Asia, in which Lottie starred. Indeed she acted only in films he directed and was by now his de facto wife. Longford made the first version of The Mutiny of the Bounty in 1916, and he and Lottie were surprised that their 1918 film, The Woman Suffers, was banned in New South Wales. The triumph for both of them was The Sentimental Bloke, made in 1919, in which Lottie played the Sentimental Bloke’s girl, Doreen. She then played Nell in Longford’s Rudd’s New Selection. In the early 1920s Longford and Lyell formed their own production company, but Lottie was already suffering from ‘the white plague’, tuberculosis, and after working on The Bushwhackers in 1925 she died at the age of thirty-five. The company absorbed Longford’s fortune but he continued to direct for wages through the 1920s and into the era of the talkies. His last film as a director was in 1934, though he appeared as a minor character in the films of others until 1941.

  He was the first director to find himself fighting for a quota system to ensure a just distribution of Australian-made films. He would claim before a 1927 Royal Commission on the moving-picture industry that though the outstanding figure in the business, he had been subjected to persecution by the distribution combine Australasian Films. But he would have to leave that unwon battle to later filmmakers, for World War II saw him working as a tally clerk on the Sydney wharfs. When he died in 1959, his second wife organised his burial in the same grave as Lottie Lyell.

  GOD’S WORD IN THE NORTH

  In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, missionaries had begun to move into remoter Australia, in a process hard to narrate meaningfully unless, as with early films, we take the story to the end of the 1930s. When Robert and Frances Wilson, a Presbyterian missionary couple, appeared in their lugger in Port George near Derby, Western Australia, in 1912, the Worora people, according to their oral tradition, had a debate which echoed that held in the Sydney basin 124 years before. An elder named Ambula argued for killing them, but another, Indamoi, cried, ‘No! They are not trying to harm us. They do not hunt our food. They have given us food and gifts. We have nothing to fear from them.’ By the 1920s more than twenty Christian missions had been founded in northern Australia. The arrival of such missionaries was based in part on the idea of rescuing Aboriginal peoples before the impact of European settlement could destroy them. It was also, of course, to evangelise. At worst this involved a belief that the natives were vessels for noxious spirits an
d satanic traditions, and that the vessels must be cleansed and refilled with Christianity’s decent oils.

  The latter was often a problematic process. The Jesuit mission at Daly River in the Northern Territory was flooded out three times, and finally abandoned in 1899. At Beagle Bay in the Kimberleys, Spanish and French Trappist monks set up a mission in 1892. They founded a school and conducted classes in French, since the monks did not know English, and in the Nyul-Nyul language. Daisy Bates visited this mission and said that its condition seemed hopeless, given that the gardens, once dug, were smothered by native bushes, and the paperbark huts fell down in storms. But she was astounded to hear natives singing Gregorian chant. The Trappists tried to run the mission while keeping to the severe rules of their order—silence, unless they were engaged on missionary work, a plain vegetarian diet, and meditation and the singing of the Office from 2 a.m. till dawn, followed by a full day of work. In the case of the Beagle Bay mission the monks’ diet consisted of pumpkin and rice and beer they brewed from sorghum.

  The Trappists were joined by a former Broome policeman, who would become Brother Xavier, but all his rigour, and that of the other monks, could not prevent girls being traded to Filipino luggers which put into the bay. Ultimately, in 1901, due to the ageing of the Trappist community, they handed the mission over to the Pallottine Fathers, founded by St Vincent Pallotti, an order whose rule of life was less rigorous.

  German-born Father Francis Gsell, future Bishop of Darwin and member of the Sacred Heart Order, established the mission at Bathurst Island, off the coast of the Northern Territory, in 1911. He had the wisdom to try to ‘learn gradually their habits and customs so as to penetrate into their minds without hurt or shock’. Disturbed by native polygamy, he claimed to have bought more than thirty wives to save them from the practice. He declared in the end that after thirty years he had not made a convert.

  When the Benedictine monks settled at Draper River in the Kimberley in 1908, although they hung presents and food in the trees, which were always taken overnight, no Aborigine came in to talk to them until 1912. In 1913 the mission was attacked by the local natives and two friars were wounded by spears. Right through World War I the Benedictine monks maintained their presence, but chiefly by turning their mission into a fortification. There was similar hostility in other places. In 1917 the Reverend Robert Hall, a Presbyterian missionary from New Zealand who had served two years on Mornington Island, where he worked with his wife Catherine, was speared by a native named Burketown Peter.

  Some Aborigines were attracted by the claim of missionaries that they had special powers. The Benedictines at Draper River were able to cure cases of the skin disease yaws, and their supplies of food made them a desirable stop on the general circuit of Aboriginal life. Gradually the mission became a welcome sanctuary for those in trouble. These included men under the threat of tribal vengeance, young women escaping punishment for unfaithfulness to an aged husband and those fleeing from pastoralists or their stockmen. Slowly there was a ‘coming in’ to the mission.

  Some missionaries tried to adjust the Christian message and endeavour to fit it to Aboriginal requirements. At the Trappist mission, Daisy Bates was surprised to see a girl of about twelve married to a much older man according to the Catholic rites—such marriages were normal in Aboriginal society, and it was better in the monks’ view that they occur according to the sacrament and within a framework of monogamy. Robert and Frances Wilson, at Kunmunya, consulted with the Aborigines over marriage law problems, and their successor, a remarkable Ulsterman named Robert Love who served there from 1915–1940 and translated two of the Gospels into Worora, declared, ‘In this mission we will never tolerate paternalism. These people are our equals in intelligence and our superiors in physique.’ Some missionaries saw that to have Aborigines queuing up for food each day was degrading, and George and Jessie Goldsmith of the Methodist mission on Goulburn Island introduced a cardboard money system to allow Aboriginal members of the mission to buy food and goods of their choice from the store, and to cook it themselves.

  Not all were as liberal-minded. Since missionaries understood that the older people were unreachable, they concentrated on the children, and enclosed dormitories for the children were a common feature of missions. If the parents protested at being separated from their children they were threatened with the withdrawal of rations. But in some cases they were happy to leave their children at the mission in the dormitory in the belief that they would be well fed. Dick Roughsey, a twentieth-century Aboriginal leader, remembered being put into the dormitory at a Presbyterian mission in the Gulf of Carpentaria. ‘Then one morning I stood waiting under the dormitory, held back only by the enclosing wire netting, while my parents, also crying, vanished into the bush on the way back home.’ The dormitories were run according to strict regimens, and although some skills such as mining, engineering, carpentry and shearing were taught to the boys, there was nowhere close by where they could seek a job based on these skills.

  There were instances of severe discipline. The Anglican Reverend E.R. Gribble used pack drill to punish boys at Yarrabah in Queensland, until he was withdrawn in 1928 for fathering a child to an Aboriginal girl of the mission. He was also irregular with his financial bookkeeping, contemptuous of Aboriginal culture and had an obsession with sexual morality. He had, however, two years before sent the world news of a Forrest River massacre of natives by police.

  Some were more liberal than others in permitting traditional culture to operate alongside the Christian and European virtues they were preaching. The Trappists and the Pallottines at Beagle Bay tried to end Aboriginal ceremonial. Trappist Father Alphonse had manhandled an elder at a ritual war ceremony in an attempt to stop it occurring, without understanding that such an assault was worse than any ritual bloodletting. The attitude of the Pallottines changed through the work of Father E.A. Worms, a member of their order who happened to be an internationally respected anthropologist and who arrived at Beagle Bay in 1930 to study the ceremonies of the Yaoro. Of these he wrote, ‘Aboriginal religion penetrates all facets of life and has little to fear from distinctions which are both abstract and disunitive, and which we with a philosophical education often make.’ That is, Aboriginal religion was inherent in the daily practices of the Australian Aborigines, of whom he would ultimately show a knowledge of twenty-six language groups. Long before, in 1914, the Ulster Presbyterian Robert Love wrote of a ritual cleansing and feeding ceremony carried out by the Worora warriors to welcome visiting tribesmen and saw a connection between this and Christian sacraments, and indeed the Last Supper.

  The liberal-minded missionaries, however, remained in a minority. Indeed, missionaries were often driven not by a Father Worms or Robert Love-style respect but by their belief that a great imperative existed that their dogma replace all tribal darkness. They were yet another European legion, but empowered by a general benevolence rather than by a Snider rifle. This difference meant little to Aborigines who suffered on individual missions, who lost pride, who were bullied. The contrasts between missionaries remained, and wisdom came at its own pace to the missionaries. Dr Charles Duguid, a veteran of the Medical Corps in the desert battles of World War I and a lay moderator of the Presbyterian Church in South Australia, came to Ernabella in Central Australia and was appalled by the mistreatment of Pitjantjatjara men and women on surrounding pastoral runs and reserves. With his wife Irene he opened a Presbyterian mission in 1937 and ran it on the principle that there should be no intrusion on the traditional way of life and that, except for the Presbyterian stricture that corroborees not occur on Sundays, no compulsion. The local language should be spoken, and responsibility for managing the community’s business should be passed to the people who came to the mission. Even as late as the 1930s such ideas were considered revolutionary, but they had an impact on the Ernabella people, who requested that on his death (which did not come until 1971) Duguid’s body be buried in their midst. />
  UNFEDERATED AT PLAY

  Australian Rules football, operating in Victoria as a device for civic and tribal identity, did not attract widespread support in New South Wales and Queensland, though the game did take hold in Broken Hill and along the Riverina. It is often argued, though there is no ultimate explanation, that the increasing eminence of Melbourne made this further form of Victorian inventiveness unwelcome. As Federation came, and Melbourne people looked forward to the first Federal Australian Rules season, New South Welsh people looked forward to a season of rugby.

  The first Australian rugby club, based on the running game then played at Oxford and Cambridge, had been founded at Sydney University in 1864, and a Southern (New South Wales) competition was formed at the Oxford Hotel in Sydney ten years later with the Wallaroos, Balmain, University and Waratah the foundation clubs. In this game the emphasis was not on goals kicked but on tries scored. On that basis, in 1882 the first Queensland–New South Wales match was played—a son of the Irish political convict Kevin Izod O’Doherty played for Queensland. Two years later a New Zealand team toured Australia and won all its matches. In 1899 when a British rugby team toured, and played a test series against Australia, highly nationalist Australian supporters filled the venues, though Britain won the series. The high water mark year for rugby was in many ways 1907—crowds for each match in a series against New Zealand were always in excess of 30 000 and reached 52 000 in Sydney. But a rival league was about to arise.

  The issue had already been raised in rugby clubs in England, especially in the industrialised north, that men injured in games would lose pay while they were recovering. The Rugby Union offered no injury compensation to such men. In 1895 at the George Hotel in Huddersfield, a Northern Union, which took account of the fact that most of its players were not Oxbridge gentlemen of independent means but rather miners and mill workers, was formed. It proposed paying allowances to rugby players to cover their potential injuries. This Northern Union, abhorred by British rugby officialdom, departed the official union in 1895 and became the Rugby League. The number of forwards in the new game was two less than in rugby, allowing for more open, running play and, it was hoped, fewer injuries. A brisk process known as the play-the-ball replaced the endless rucks and mauls of the Rugby Union form of the game. Since most rugby players in Australia were working-class men, the principles of the British Rugby League appealed to them. The crowd of 52 000 who had seen them play the rugby test against the New Zealanders in Sydney made them aware that someone was making a lot of money out of their efforts.