by Judy Powell
Eve’s father thanked her for sending a photo of The Mount but seemed confused. ‘What is it? Your house? Museum? Hotel? Then what has become of the Nicholson Museum? And when are you coming out to Cyprus?’21 Two years later he worried: ‘Why live in a 30 room house with 5 fires and chickens and ducks and four feet of water all round?’22 It all seemed a waste of a good education.
Jim commuted to and from Sydney. Sometimes he drove, often he took the train. Eve remained attached to the university but worked at The Mount and seldom accompanied Jim to Sydney. When apart, the postal service could scarcely keep up with their correspondence. ‘Darling, as you’re still here (whiffling peacefully), you really know all the news there is … Just time to sort out your pills before I wake you.’ Eve hid the letter in Jim’s razor case where he would find it when he arrived in Sydney.23 And Jim in Sydney wrote: ‘Darling, Just a note to say how very much I miss you and wish I hadn’t got to come down like this.’24
Gradually more and more work found its way to Bathurst, so much so that it became difficult to disentangle personal and professional effects. Library books and university files went to Bathurst. Much of the archaeological material arriving at the Nicholson was also sent to Bathurst to be housed in the ballroom at The Mount for processing and study. At last Jim had his ‘laboratory’ where students could work on archaeological material.
Life at The Mount was unconventional. To visiting students it was ‘pure heaven’, like something out of a novel by Evelyn Waugh or P.G. Wodehouse.25 A ‘gothic’ mansion of never-ending rooms and stairways, two sitting rooms with more books than the university’s Fisher Library, and an ‘old retainer’, Callan, setting the fireplaces in the evening. In the ballroom students could handle Bronze Age daggers and pottery sherds, or skulls from Jericho.
The house remained partly derelict well into the 1960s and visitors remember rain dripping into buckets in the ballroom. Bitterly cold in winter, Eve worked in the ballroom in gloves, rugged up in a coat and blankets. The open fires did little to heat the cavernous rooms. As she had in Cyprus, Eve asked local tradesmen to make drawing tools that she designed herself—a special frame to help her to draw large pots, knives for making plaster copies of coins.26 She taught students the basics of drawing but few could manage the concentration and single-minded focus. Years later Basil said that Eve was one of the three best archaeological draughtsmen he had ever known. She was meticulous but slow. She would not even begin a drawing unless she had a clear four hours to spare.27 This was rare, given her other duties.
Eve claimed responsibility for much of the unconventionality of the house.28 It was she who put the Red Polished Bronze Age pot in the bathroom for toothbrushes and she who insisted the baby orphaned lamb be kept warm in the room beside the kitchen. She ran the household with little domestic help, although for some time a Cypriot immigrant girl, Maroulla, cooked for them. Maroulla’s speciality was rabbit stew, Basil was a fair shot, and rabbits were prolific. Although unusual for a conservative 1950s Australian palate, anything was an improvement on Jim’s curries and haggis, which he insisted on preparing every New Year’s Eve. ‘A blackened monstrosity that nobody could eat. It was Medieval’, Basil recalled.29
Visitors arrived regularly for lunch or the weekend or for more extended periods. Jim charmed visitors and monopolised the conversation. Sometimes students visited with their parents, at other times in small groups. In later years postgraduate students might live there for weeks on end. Everyone was expected to become part of the household and to follow its daily rituals. Eggs for breakfast, soup for lunch, bountiful sherry, brandy and conversation before the evening meal, usually turkey. A story circulated that some of the turkeys on the menu had died of old age, but Eve strenuously denied this. Turkeys were ubiquitous. Eve raised them for the Christmas trade and made sure that university staff and friends were well supplied. Staff remember Jim and Eve descending on the university laden with turkeys and vegetables and homemade plum jam full of seeds.
Jim Stewart was wealthy, clever and spoilt, a short man with a tendency to grow fat as he aged, his ginger hair showing signs of premature balding and straggly wisps falling over the freckles on his brow. In any gathering people gravitated to him and convivial drinking lasted long into the night. Few could match his wit or his capacity for drink. He was happiest in conversation and loathed the diplomacy and bureaucratic manoeuvres that administration required, which was odd, given his obsession with lists and plans and detailed, often exaggerated, budgets. He was generous to friends, polite to those he respected, in particular older colleagues or family friends.
Eve came alive in the country. The Callans, father and son, were employed to manage outdoors and all the farming and grazing land was tenanted, but Eve was in charge of the turkeys. Her diaries detail her farming world—lambs bottle-fed, eggs collected, turkeys slaughtered, problems with poultry diseases. Basil’s wife Ruth, from a serious farming family in Queensland, thought it resembled a Victorian lady’s idea of a poultry farm.30
And then there were the cats. Jim loved cats. At Bellapais strays slipped into the storeroom and curled up in the Bronze Age pots dug from the tombs at Vounous. At Eichstätt long-haired cats warmed his bed and shared his food. Wherever he was, Jim fed homeless kittens. In Sydney Mrs S. Catty ruled the Edgecliff house. A thin grey cat with white Roman nose and cheeks, she curled across Jim’s shoulders in a photo that was one of Eve’s favourites. Both her kittens, Sir Marcus Bibulus and Corrie, were jet black.
A skulk of cats greeted visitors to The Mount and it is their presence that most people remember vividly. Like the fine gradations of servants in an English manor house, the cats formed a strict hierarchy. There were outside cats and inside cats, outside/inside cats and inside/outside ones. Students learned to prepare for the evening cry of ‘Cats’, when all work ceased and mountains of boiled rabbit were cut up and distributed amongst them. After dinner a similar cry went up and tea towels were exchanged so that those used to dry the cats’ bowls were not used on the human crockery.31
Mrs S. Catty’s son Marcus Bibulus, DD, Bishop of Ophir, was for many years the most senior indoor cat at The Mount and behaved accordingly. His photo is the only one from this period that is enlarged. An enormous black tom with a flick of white at his breast, he held himself with the air of noble lineage. He had sired many of the outdoor cats and a few of the indoor ones and took precedence over sundry waifs and strays at mealtimes.
A student remembered the Bishop of Bathurst arriving for lunch. ‘I don’t think you’ve met the Bishop of Ophir, have you’, Jim remarked casually as he ushered His Grace into the dining room. Puzzled at the idea that a small village outside Bathurst might boast such an appointment, the bishop shook his head: ‘I wasn’t aware such a person existed.’ Jim gestured to a large black cat overflowing the dining room chair at the end of the table. He made the introductions. ‘Meet Sir Marcus Bibulus, DD’, Jim said as he settled into the chair at the other end of the long table. Both purred as the Bishop feigned sophisticated amusement.32
Another visitor remembered enjoying coffee with Jim and Eve in the sitting room one afternoon. Marcus Bibulus entered and walked purposefully towards Jim, cocked his head in the direction of the door, and demanded Jim stand. As directed, Jim followed Sir Marcus, who led him to the gun cabinet in the hallway. With gun in hand Jim followed the cat through the front door, whereupon Sir Marcus stared in the direction of a brown snake coiled on the grass within striking distance of the turkeys’ wire pen. Having dispatched the snake, Jim returned to the house, locked the gun away and the two settled back in front of the fire in companionable silence. No one was surprised by the cat’s behaviour.33
Along with the bishop’s mother, Mrs S. Catty (aka Scatty), Lusagh the dog and the hordes of outside cats, Marcus Bibulus is immortalised in the preface to ‘The Early Cypriote Bronze Age’, Jim’s volume in The Swedish Cyprus Expedition, published in 1962: ‘Indeed I owe a great deal to my animals for distracting me.’34
From Nicosia, Basil sent greetings from everyone at the Cyprus Museum. He was welcomed into the small world of Cypriot archaeology and met the Megaws, Jim’s workmen from Bellapais—Costa and Tryphon, the latter whom he liked very much. Porphyrios Dikaios gave him a four-hour lecture tour of the excavations at Enkomi and together they collected sherds at Kalopsidha. While digging near Emba, Basil was horrified to discover that local women were employed, although he admitted that they were much more useful with a shovel than he was. He was thrilled to be entering a tomb for the first time. ‘I can see now why you are so fond of Cyprus’, he wrote to Jim as the island worked its magic.
Basil collected the gold coins that Petro had for Jim but he was unsure how to get them out of the country. When Dale Trendall later joined him, they decided it would be wise to leave the coins with Eve’s father at Tjiklos. Petro warned him that the authorities throughout the Near East were increasingly concerned about the export of gold. Basil apologised to Jim but said he had to be cautious: ‘if on some chance I was picked up during any of the eight frontier crossings, the loss of my scholarship … would be the least of the repercussions.’37
From Cyprus Basil and Trendall travelled to Beirut, Jerusalem and on to Ankara, where Seton Lloyd also warned them against taking coins out of the country.38 The mood was changing. Seton Lloyd was not even sure that Basil would be able to send pottery sherds back to Australia. It was all ‘a great pity’. Basil worked for Seton Lloyd on a survey of Anatolian pottery and had offers of excavation work at five digs. He admitted to a wonderful sense of ‘unreality in just skipping around the countryside’.39 He decided to work first with Lloyd and then with Joan du Plat Taylor at Myrtou and Terence Mitford at Kouklia. Jim deplored what he considered Mitford’s poor excavation standards and Basil assured Jim he would be careful not to ‘assimilate anything that smells of carelessness’. To Eve, on the other hand, he wrote that he thought both Mitford and his co-director, Harry Iliffe, were ‘being very careful’.40
At Myrtou Basil would be responsible for his own part of the excavation—Stephania. Sydney University provided funding in return for a proportion of the finds.41 Money also came from the Australian Institute of Archaeology but Beasley would later complain vigorously at the poor amount and quality of material he received.
At the end of 1951 Basil arranged for the shipment of material from Stephania. He sent fifteen cases to Australia and a further four to New Zealand. More sherds would follow. He and an English student, Hector Catling, were both sherd hunting and Basil collected over three hundred at the sites of Larnaca and Tekke.42 Excavators were impressed by Basil’s work, with Seton Lloyd keen to have him back the following year, as was Mitford. At the end of 1951 Kathleen Kenyon also offered him a place at Jericho and Max Mallowan invited him to work at Nimrud. It was hard to think about returning to Sydney with such invitations in the offing.
Marooned in Bathurst, Jim fretted and grew ill. He demanded Basil curtail his travels, return to Australia and complete his work on the Stephania material, which by then had arrived at The Mount. Basil came to dread Jim’s letters and pleaded for more time.43 Eve brokered a compromise and Basil finally returned to Australia in the middle of 1952, whereupon Jim promptly ordered him to visit his mother.44 At The Mount, Basil had learned to place a hand over his brandy but it would be years before he unwound the chains that bound him to Jim.
Delighted to have Basil back, Jim wrote to his friend Christopher Blunt in London.
We are inundated at the moment by pottery from Cyprus and Jericho and seem to have acquired, in a stroke, twice the total intake of the last five years. Fortunately Basil Hennessy has come back to us, after eighteen months abroad … He promptly celebrated his return by falling out of a tree and cracking his ribs and a fortnight later by electrocuting himself on the end of an electric lead; fortunately he seems to be able to take a terrific amount of punishment without loosing [sic] his normal cheerfulness. Work on the house jogs along and the new storerooms for the Jericho finds are nearly completed. With any luck we should have all the interior decorating finished by the end of the year.
There has been a very severe crisis in the University’s financial affairs and this has set our plans back by many months, as well as giving us a great deal of un-necessary extra work and a considerable amount of worry. However, the situation shows some slight signs of improvement and I hope that our scale of operations will not be seriously hampered. The general conception is that we shall be in Cyprus in 1954, and unless something serious intervenes, that should be a fairly safe arrangement. I do not know if Eve and I will be able to get to England in the course of that year, but we shall certainly do our best.
Lambing has started and is not going too well at the moment. Eve has two lambs, whose mother had to be killed, living in the house, so our evenings are filled with the bleatings of sheep. We have got our first batch of chickens and one of the turkeys has just been set in a nest of her own choice. The cats, needless to say, continue to flourish.45
When Jim and Eve first decided to move to Mount Pleasant in 1950, the university had agreed to fund limited renovation work so the house could be used as a temporary storage area for archaeological material arriving from Cyprus and the overflow from the Nicholson Museum. An urgent requirement was for a facility to deal with the Jericho material from Kathleen Kenyon’s excavations, which included human remains. This temporary solution became, for Jim and Eve, ever more elaborate and expensive. Rather than limit themselves to the initial university agreement of £5000, Jim and Eve took over managing the work and decided to take it to its ‘logical conclusion’. Jim and his father mortgaged their land and borrowed money to complete the work. Their idea was to lease the house to the university for 99 years with an implicit understanding that this would be converted to an outright grant. Jim hoped that his library and coin collection would go to Sydney University in due course but regretted that the land and house could not be an outright gift. His financial position was complicated and uncertain. Jim had a son. The land could not be granted, although he was prepared to give the house. The status of the library and coin collection remained in the air.
Jim’s plan was to create an archaeological centre to promote hands-on research. In one fell swoop The Mount would solve the problems of museum storage and working space and provide accommodation for students, staff and visiting scholars. Above all, it might solve the problem of a lack of technical support and training. Students would get their boots dirty. They would not simply sit in classrooms. The one glaring omission was that students would have no opportunity for fieldwork. Jim had little but scorn for the idea of Australian archaeology and field experience would have to wait until he could organise training digs in Cyprus.
; By the middle of 1952, and with Trendall’s initial support, Jim and Eve commenced a campaign to make The Mount a part of Sydney University. The Institute of Archaeology in London, created by Mortimer and Tessa Wheeler, began this way and perhaps Jim and Eve saw both the couple and their institute as models.
At the end of 1952 Jim presented the university with a proposal, together with pages of costings, site plans of The Mount and complex financial argument. The university would contribute £10,000 in exchange for a gift of the house at Mount Pleasant (valued at £35,000) and income from commercial rights to a quarry on the property (estimated at around £1200 per year) as well as Jim’s library and coin collection, to be sold at cost price. ‘The benefactors make one stipulation in regard to this matter’, Jim wrote, ‘—that their names are not publicly mentioned … They wish to see their own academic interests perpetuated, and regret that family considerations prevent the outright gift of the library and coins.’
Initially sceptical, Trendall agreed to support the proposal’s ‘bold vision’. He admired Jim’s courage and concluded that ‘the facilities in Australia are as favourable as any at a British University’. He asked the university senate to accept the offer in principle and appoint a committee to investigate. He went on to make it clear that he, too, would leave his library to the university and it could be housed at The Mount.
Two committee members visited Mount Pleasant and made their report early in 1953. It was businesslike and final. They reported that additional monies had been spent on The Mount without approval from the university, and argued that the university had no liability for these. They noted that Eve remained on the university staff, but expressed doubts that the work done constituted a full-time job. The cost of maintaining The Mount was considerable. It would be unwise, they said, to house some of the university in what was essentially the private home of a member of staff. Similarly it would be unwise to offer an Honours course reliant on a staff member’s personal library.46 The university was expected to pay off the mortgage, pay all outgoings, provide necessary staff, leave the Stewarts with the right to live there and continue in academic employment, and hand over complete control of the archaeological work to Jim and Eve. In other words, they argued, the proposal to ‘gift’ The Mount overstated the advantages and understated the disadvantages. It looked like a gift but was actually an offer to sell. They recommended that the offer be rejected, and that the University instead seek premises in Sydney to provide the necessary workspace and storage. They noted that Mr Beasley from the Australian Institute of Archaeology had already provided the university with £500 for the provision of ‘archaeological apparatus’ at The Mount. ‘Some difficulties have arisen because Mr Stewart wishes to spend these monies on carpets and bedroom furniture.’47