by Judy Powell
Discussions dragged on for months. Students, fearing there would be no Honours year as promised, petitioned the Vice-Chancellor. Jim’s solicitor wrote to the university but the university’s decision was final.
Put in simple terms it was an offer to sell to the University Mount Pleasant house and the quarries … for the sum of £10,000. The University did not wish to have Mount Pleasant on these terms … The University, I think, did not want to buy Stewart’s house or any other house at Bathurst for £10,000 or at all … The University wishes the work of the Nicholson Museum and the Department of Archaeology to be carried on in Sydney and not in Bathurst … the Senate’s decision is simply that if the University of Sydney provides courses of study in Archaeology it wishes to do so in Sydney not elsewhere.48
What Jim wanted, the university believed, was to have all benefit and no responsibility. It was the Cyprus Survey and the Australian Cyprus Expedition all over again. Bathurst locals thought it a cunning ploy to get someone else to take over the management of what most of them considered a white elephant.49
By the end of 1953 Jim and Eve realised, with bitterness and regret, that there was little more they could do. Jim’s lawyer explained to the university committee that he had endeavoured to counsel Jim and assured the university that he ‘was never in doubt’ as to the sincerity of Jim Stewart’s offer.
In 1954 Jim lamented what he saw, melodramatically, as the destruction of the department. Seven years earlier he had returned to Australia hoping to lead an expedition to Cyprus. When this failed, he transferred his energies into the Mount Pleasant project, but this too had failed. Early in 1955 archaeological material began to be relocated to the Golden Grove, an empty pub in the inner-city suburb of Darlinghurst, which Sydney University planned to use as a storehouse for the Nicholson. Eve would not agree to move to Sydney and Jim would not want her working ‘in a slum’.50
Jim planned to take a sabbatical year and wrote gloomily and self-indulgently to Peter Megaw:
It is all very sad, for it marks the ruination of eight years very hard work and the virtual termination of a department which has never had a fair chance to stand on its feet. I have this year off and Basil Hennessy is taking my lectures as a temporary appointment … Eve will presumably resign very shortly.
Chapter 8
Travels, 1955–56
The SS Oronsay lay at anchor at Suez, waiting in line to enter the canal. Sharing a beer in the ship’s glass-windowed lounge, Jim and Eve sat quietly, both lost in thought. Eve recalled family camping trips through the Egyptian desert as a child, her mother swathed in a long fur coat, her father at the wheel of their open-top car. How quaint it all seemed now, another world. When she had left Egypt as a child, she never expected it would be so long before she returned. Jim had met his company near here in 1941 and, in 1947, had passed through with Eleanor, both in sad and sullen silence.
At dawn Eve rose to watch the sun lighten the pink cliffs at the edge of the Eastern Desert, which seemed to rise directly out of the blue waters of the Red Sea. Later she sat with Jim as the great ocean liner entered the canal behind a group of tankers and freighters. A young boy leaned over the railing and shrieked with delight at his first site of a camel. Eve thought it possible to forget you were on a ship, the canal so narrow it gave the impression of sliding in graceful silence over the land. On one side of the liner was nothing but sand and on the other, a fringe of cultivation.1
Eight long and messy years after arriving in Australia, Eve mentally replayed the mad rush to finish work and her excitement at preparing for the trip back to the world she had left behind. Optimistic and upbeat, she hoped that if all went well they would bring back enough ‘loot’ to impress doubters and win over Sydney University. They might, she thought, get their institute after all.2 Although on leave from his job at Sydney University, Jim had obtained official support for these planned excavations from Melbourne University, although Melbourne gave little by way of financial backing and Jim seems to have covered most of the expenses himself. Plans that had once been attached to an Australian Cyprus Expedition now came under the aegis of the Melbourne Cyprus Expedition.
As she folded their clothes and packed suitcases in the cool Bathurst evening, Eve marvelled at how long it had been since she’d travelled. Although relieved to turn their backs on Sydney and their failed plans, leaving The Mount was not easy. They fussed over the house, worried at the decline in wool prices and A.A.’s health, and fired off detailed instructions to Basil.
Remember to smooge the house cats (Pooh, Bub, Fiz, Tabitha, and Chilly), try to coax Chilly back in to the drawing room, remember to shut the china cupboard doors as the cats are always anxious to explore, here is a list of hens to be eaten off, remind Callan to keep the lambs indoors during winter.3
In Sydney they boarded the Oronsay and were shown to their cabin. Built only four years earlier, the ship had become a regular visitor to Sydney Harbour as it plied the route between Australia and England; from September to December, in the off season, ‘boomerang’ trips were relatively cheap. When the liner berthed at Melbourne, Eve visited distant family and Jim renewed relations with Walter Beasley. After years of tension, he was surprised to find Beasley so affable, although still—he thought—‘utterly incompetent in Archaeology’. Jim felt sure he could easily get a job in Melbourne if he wanted.4 In Adelaide they paid a visit to fellow coin collector, Sid Hagley.
From Adelaide they sailed into the rough seas of the Great Australian Bight. White-faced passengers kept to their bunks or dragged themselves on deck to gaze dolefully toward the horizon as the ship rolled and bucked. Eve was a good sailor but suffered from a bout of food poisoning.
Although the Oronsay was new and luxurious, a boomerang ticket was not the sort of travel either Jim or Eve was used to. By 1955 Australians enjoying the country’s post-war prosperity were sailing for England in ever greater numbers at the same time as Europeans were hoping to emigrate. Travellers would normally take passage on a one-class tourist ship but were able to buy cheap tickets on the Oronsay in the off-season. ‘You ought to see the yokels’, Jim commented to Basil.5
Only in their early forties, both Stewarts were uneasy in this more open and democratic post-war world, and Jim for one pronounced himself disappointed with the failure of passengers to dress for dinner, which was especially galling because he surprised himself by fitting into his dinner jacket. ‘Afraid the old Malaga spoilt me for ships’, he told Basil. ‘Now one lays out one’s own clothes and cleans one’s own shoes. I suppose one must adapt oneself to the flitter and bustle of sewer rats’, but it made him feel ‘less sociable and more inclined to retreat within my own boundaries’.6 Jim was prepared to concede that the ship was efficient and well run, although it reminded him of a ‘highly painted platinum blonde, hair probably not the same colour all over’.7
Eve described shipboard life to her mother. Their starboard cabin had no porthole but was handy to bathrooms and the steward’s pantry. For meals they sat at the Chief Engineer’s table with an elderly couple from the Midlands and four New Zealanders.8 By the time they left Fremantle the boat had its full complement of passengers: 750 in their class and 750 travelling ‘tourist’.
As the liner steamed north across the Indian Ocean, pods of dolphins surfed the bow wave and passengers moaned about the heat. Jim complained about the quality of the food:
The white fish is undoubtedly whale for nothing else could masquerade under five different names. It poisoned me last night, so now I’m living on fruit juice as being reasonably safe. But the ship is not crowded and one has plenty of free space. More people are dressing for dinner now, thank God. Service is quite good apart from the cabin. I’ve been feeling too tired to do much work.9
A delegation of academics returning from a Vice-Chancellors’ meeting in Sydney was on board and Jim took the opportunity to lobby them. He was unsurprised when their ideas, as he relayed them to Basil, agreed with his own. In general, he said, they declared
Sydney University badly in decline, mentioning in particular the Nicholson Museum. They resented the fact that neither Jim nor Basil had been asked to show them around the museum and the person deputed to guide them was ‘considered amiable but third rate. I have spoken strongly on the subject’, Jim added, in case Basil was in any doubt.10
They went ashore at Singapore. Eve wore a long-sleeved blue suit with buttoned jacket and pearls, brooch and narrow-brimmed hat. She grabbed her brown leather handbag and urged Jim, dressed in an expensive but rumpled grey suit and a wide silk tie, to hurry as they made their way down the gangway. As they posed for the photographer at the bottom of the descent, Jim squinted into the tropical sun.
At Colombo, which they knew better than Singapore, they again went ashore, but the prices shocked them as they combed the markets. ‘Coins were quite ruinous, silk was limited, moonstones quite ridiculous.’11 They didn’t bother to go on any organised tours, but succumbed to purchasing stamps for their collections, and despite the prices, Jim picked up a silk shirt and Eve a silk petticoat.12
Familiar with sea travel and not interested in social activities, neither engaged in shipboard life. They followed their normal routines. Eve worked editing the first volume planned for publication by the Melbourne Cyprus Expedition. This was not a work of archaeology but a work reflecting Jim’s medieval interests, a 1938 translation by Richard Dawkins of a medieval manuscript ‘The Chronicle of George Boustronios’, a Hellenised Frenchman living in Cyprus in the fifteenth century. While Eve worked, Jim rested. They went briefly to the ‘Red Sea Races’ held on deck, where wooden horses ran along tracks raised on trestles, but after watching two contests, decided to place their bets more reliably on the cold beer in the lounge bar. A man from the Australian Broadcasting Commission was an excellent pianist and the younger passengers sang along to songs that, to Eve’s surprise, were the old familiar ones such as ‘It’s a long way to Tipperary’. A fancy dress ball attracted Eve’s interest. She thought the men more imaginative dressers: ‘one very tall, thin man was a palm tree & a fat one was a stuffed olive.’ But, she wrote her well-travelled mother, ‘I don’t have to tell you about shipboard life’. Mostly they kept to themselves.
This short visit to Egypt was made easier by Eve’s father, who gave them £300 towards expenses and arranged a flat for their use. The flat, in the suburb of Zamalek, was owned by an English couple who had recently bought the Dome Hotel in Kyrenia and were holidaying in Europe. A neighbour arranged for a car and driver and Jim soon befriended an upstairs neighbour’s Siamese cat. He was amused to see that it gained access to the roof via its own personal ladder.
For Eve the trip to Egypt meant she could finally deal with the piles of boxes left by her family at Boulaq Dakrur. How strange to return now, middle-aged and married. Ahmet, their driver, drove her through the suburbs of Cairo, along a hideous new dual carriageway, past rows of shops and ugly blocks of flats. Her childhood house was no longer in the countryside; suburbs crept right to the doorstep. Although the house was shabby, the plaster peeling, the garden was the same and the gardener met her at the front door. He showed her the family trunks stored in the garage and with a sigh, she realised the job would take more than one day. The once-precious family memorabilia looked sad and shabby after all these years. She sorted through books, threw away most of the mysteries, tossed out her mother’s battered straw hat, but kept both her teddy bears. Then she found herself in a photo album stored in the great trunk. There she was, standing dutifully, weighted with a heavy silk kimono and holding an open fan ‘à la Japonaise’. In another she posed in the garden. She remembered the heavy white coat and ankle-length boots and the veiled hat she was made to wear as protection from the flies. Yet another showed the very teddy bear she was holding in her hands. She stroked his now flat and lifeless fur. She and Jim nearly argued over what to ditch—useless ‘bric-à-brac’ from the 1920s, he said. She was relieved that her mother couldn’t see the desolation.13
Jim’s friend, the London coin dealer Albert Baldwin, had written to introduce him to dealers in Cairo and Alexandria and Jim tracked down coinage. Not just his favourite Lusignan coins, but other Crusader coins, and Roman, Venetian, and Islamic ones as well.14 They visited museums and libraries and lunched at Gropis, just to boast they had been there. Jim thought the Cairo Museum and library a disappointment, but was charmed by the Coptic Museum. ‘What we liked best was a 6th century painting of a delegation of rats, waving a white flag and carrying flasks of wine and goblets, making overtures to a cat’.15 Often Eve strolled by herself through the city she had once loved. She set out alone to relish the fresh dates and figs in the street markets, leaving Jim to solve his arcane pottery puzzles. In the evenings they enjoyed their balcony amid the pot plants on the balustrade, morning glory climbing up its pillars. A charming place to write letters, or for a pre-dinner drink.
Jim wrote to his father extolling the virtues of Egyptian scholarship, the friendliness and courtesy of everyone they met, and his surprise at the popularity of the nationalist leader General Nasser. The city delighted him: ‘more modern than Sydney, and much better shops’, and he admitted they were both putting on weight.16 To Basil, however, Jim lamented how out of touch and isolated he had become in Australia: ‘one can’t possibly carry on archaeology at Sydney in vacuo, without very close contacts in the East … To work only from books is really quite hopeless.’ They met the Egyptologist Labib Habachi and Jim considered him charming, perhaps because they agreed on the internationality of culture. Both thought that museums should have the chance to acquire objects unfettered by questions of national ‘ownership’. They had long discussions on historical questions—the Hyksos in Egypt, Albright’s dating—and on donkeys.17 Jim was flattered that Egyptian scholars greeted him as a Medievalist. Professor Mustafa Ziada from the Department of History knew of Jim’s work on the Crusades and the Lusignan rulers of Cyprus and agreed with Jim that archaeology should reach out to the Medieval period, but knew nothing of Jim’s work on Early Bronze Age Cyprus. ‘Is this the onset of charlatanism?’ Jim asked Basil. ‘Perhaps it’s a good thing I have no vanity to feed, or at any rate not much.’18 They dined with Professor Ziada at Heliopolis and Jim mused about living in Egypt.
In only a little over a week they amassed quantities of books, all of which had to be checked through customs. Eve and Jim made endless trips to the post office with boxes of books that were wrapped and tied, but later unwrapped for customs. Fortunately a one-eyed customs officer recognised one of the volumes in the pile: ‘Ah … Tennyson’, he sighed, and stopped checking at box number three. There were twenty-eight!
Their last day in Egypt was at ‘Port Bloody Said’. Jim had a further nineteen boxes of books to post and lost his temper with the customs officers, who he was convinced expected bribes. ‘Venereal whores in whom Nasser should take an interest’, Jim quipped to Basil, in a reply to a letter containing the latest gossip from Sydney on the fate of archaeology at the university.19 The news from Sydney contributed to his anxieties and he collapsed on the Esperia, vomiting, bleeding and generally feeling like he’d been kicked by a horse. Jim had to be helped ashore in Beirut.
Most of the archaeologists they planned to visit in Lebanon were away, but they drove to the site of Byblos—a glorious jumble of tombs from the Late Bronze Age beside a Roman theatre, with a tangle of house foundations of all periods in between. What a stratigraphic nightmare, Eve thought. Their guide was patient when he realised that this odd couple were more interested in the burials below the Neolithic house floors than the impressive Roman theatre above.20
At last they landed in Cyprus. It had been eight years since they had left. Both they and the island had changed. Eve’s father Tom sent a car to collect them at Limassol and drive them north. Many more lights dotted the flat lands around Nicosia and the dark hills along the road to Kyrenia. Just after midnight they arrived at Tjiklos to find Tom Dray asleep on a sofa in the lounge room.
Tjiklos, Eve to
ld her mother in England, had become quite a colony, with houses springing up on the plateau and a growing population of English residents. She reported on those her mother knew: Wing Commander Hubbard was back in his house and slowly going senile; Miss Darcy had moved down to town and an American now lived in her house; Mrs Duckworth was increasingly blind; Mrs Wallis has gone quite ‘queer’ and played bridge all day; Mrs Worcester, too, had been ‘difficult’ before she died; Polyxenos sent her best wishes. Tom had converted three army huts built during the war into houses and Jim and Eve stayed in one of these. Eve wished she knew more Greek so she could chat to Christallou who lived with her husband and three children next door. Tom Dray, although now seventy-five, couldn’t stop building. This time it was a house above a water tank, although heart problems kept him in bed once a week.
On that first morning they went to Nicosia to hire a car. The city now engulfed the nearby village and spread into the countryside. Ledra Street, within the Medieval walls, had been transformed by rebuilding. Tryphon met them and they visited Petro Colocassides, who, naturally, had coins for Jim to inspect. They visited the museum, where Porphyrios Dikaios greeted them and cheerfully showed off the new storage and work areas. After a long day they returned to Tjiklos to find that a small Morris car had been delivered and Tom Dray’s cat had already adopted them.21