by Judy Powell
From Australia, Basil sent Jim and Eve regular updates. One event at The Mount he feared might worry Jim: ‘Your father fell down the stairs at the Mount on Xmas Eve while chasing a possum. He broke a rib and was in St Vincent’s here until four days ago. He was quite wonderful and must be very tough.’55
Jim didn’t doubt his father’s robust good health, but warned Basil that A.A. might not just be after possums. ‘I’m suspicious when I hear he was getting the gun to shoot possums inside the house—that is sheer lunacy and worried me, for it would do hundreds of pounds worth of damage … How are the cats?56
From Paris Jim wrote to Basil with details of baggage that could be expected to arrive in Sydney. This was on top of the twenty-three boxes already dispatched from Egypt. This consignment included ‘7 cases pottery, 1 small box of stone and bronze objects, 3 gold headbands, 2000 ancient coins—all from Cyprus, no commercial value, usual formula about display and teaching and research purposes. Also 1 small parcel of ancient pottery and metal objects from Lebanon—same guf’.57 How many of the objects were for the Nicholson and how many for his personal collection at The Mount remains a mystery. In Jim’s mind the two were inextricably entwined.
From Sydney, Basil kept Jim up to date with university gossip. All sorts of backroom deals were playing out, and Dale Trendall—now at the Australian National University—made a special visit to discuss the future of archaeology with the Vice-Chancellor, Professor Roberts. Basil thought the university a ‘cess pool’ and felt that, in the end, a new independent institution might remain the only way ahead. But he knew Jim too well and warned: ‘please, when you return be careful of the corns on which you tread; for a lot of the toes around this place are very sensitive.’58
News from Basil was compounded by the twists and turns in Basil’s own plans, caught as he was between a love of archaeology and responsibilities to his family. Jim found it impossible to follow ‘the wanderings of his brain. It exhausts me’.59 One minute Basil was living in Bathurst, the next in Sydney; for some time he studied law, at other times found himself working in the Toohey’s Brewery or investigating business opportunities. He told Jim he had finished writing up the result of the dig at Stephania, but then admitted it was not ready for publication.60
Basil’s problems lay with the precarious state of archaeology as both a subject and a department at Sydney University. Unlike Jim, Basil could not afford simply to follow his whims. He had a wife and children, and although Ruth’s property kept them from penury, Basil took his family responsibilities seriously. Jim had no understanding and little sympathy for these dilemmas. He complained about Basil’s indecision and worried that he would be returning to an ‘administrative muddle’.61
If Basil were to leave, Jim decided Hector Catling would be a suitable replacement, but whether Catling could be persuaded to leave England was quite another matter.62 Jim had met Catling in Cyprus, where he was working on a systematic survey of Cyprus, the sort of survey Jim had once hoped to conduct himself. Hector joined Jim and Eve on an excursion along the northern coast investigating sites. Jim was unaware that one event in particular disturbed Hector. Jim—a collector—had bought a pair of Roman coins, which he had made into earrings for Elektra Megaw. She adored them and loved wearing them, but the potential conflict of interest in the wife of a Director of Antiquities wearing coins of possibly dubious origin disturbed Hector and infuriated Peter Megaw.63 Caesar’s wife, Hector thought, should be above suspicion.
In Paris Jim and Eve boarded the train for Copenhagen, from where they would travel on to Stockholm. Although Jim had flown as a young man, he used planes infrequently, preferring the leisurely pace of ships and trains. Anyway, on occasions his doctor forbade him to fly on the grounds of fragile health. Jim was violently ill travelling through Germany. Hamburg station brought back memories of his last visit there, fifteen years before, and he had to force himself to be polite to the ‘Huns’.64
In Copenhagen they visited the museum. Eve particularly liked the Eskimo collection and they were shown around by Hans Helbeck, who remembered Eve fondly from his time at the Institute of Archaeology in London. He thought Jim and Eve a companionable couple, and tried to imagine them in the ancient house they had described to him—full of turkeys and cats. A natural depressive, like Arne Furumark, perhaps he saw a fellow sufferer in Jim.
Paul Åström met them in Stockholm as planned. Tall and handsome, Paul was twenty-six and brimming with enthusiasm for Cypriot archaeology. He had assumed responsibility for writing the Middle Cypriot section of the Swedish Cyprus Expedition, and was looking forward to working with Jim, who was to publish on the earlier period. Their research would, inevitably, overlap. Jim had invited Paul to Mount Pleasant to enable their close collaboration, and Paul and his girlfriend arranged to sail back to Australia with Jim and Eve. Eve was amused but flattered when his girlfriend, who spoke little English, curtseyed on meeting them. She was young and pretty, slightly built, but feisty and determined. Eve remembered all her life this first meeting with Laila Haglund.
They drove to Uppsala to visit Arne Furumark. Eve escaped the endless talk of pottery and took Paul and Laila to the cinema.65 In what spare time she had, she continued work on the Achaean coins but looked forward to England and family reunions. They planned to stay for a time with Eve’s mother at Milford-on-Sea and Jim would meet other family members, although only briefly. Eve remembered her cousin Giles’s attempt to engage Jim in conversation, but Jim had no interest in small talk. If the discussion wasn’t about archaeology he could be infuriatingly imperious and aloof.66
By the time Jim and Eve boarded their ship for the return to Australia, the political situation on Cyprus had deteriorated, as Andreas Stylianou wrote to explain. Two of their workmen at Vasilia—George Vasiliou and the Turkish Muktar—had been wounded in a knife fight and others in the village had been beaten up and had broken limbs and other injuries. Andreas felt vindicated. ‘Perhaps you will realise now why I was so worried during the excavation … Well I am glad it did not happen then and the excavations were not the excuse for the fight!’67 A few months later, the situation worsened, with reports of regular kidnappings and tit-for-tat reprisals. Jim began to have real concerns for Eve’s father, who lived on remote Tjiklos. Would Tom come to Australia, he wondered?68
The return to Australia saw a veritable retinue on board. Jim and Eve were joined by Eve’s mother Margery, together with ‘our Swedes’, Paul Åström and Laila Haglund. Steaming down the west coast of Greece, Jim thought of the sixteenth-century battle at Navarino and wondered if one day the wreckage of this event would be visible from a plane flying overhead. He was in a querulous mood and speculated that the uncomfortable weather they were experiencing might be the result of atomic testing.69 At Patras, Greek migrants joined the ship and Jim complained to his father that they were ‘a dirty scruffy lot of evil-looking rogues’. He was shocked to find them travelling first class.70 The luggage Eve had left on Cyprus had been held up by a strike and when they arrived at Port Said, ‘tired after a hectic scramble’, they had no summer clothes!71
Both Jim and Eve were ill during the voyage, perhaps the result of overwork and strain. Even so, they made themselves work during the mornings; there was always something pending. Duty and obligation fought with their obsession with detail and precision. One or other had to be sacrificed if the work was ever to end.
Eve looked forward to Mount Pleasant and to spending time with her mother. Jim was torn. He loved The Mount and his cats, but the trip reminded him of all that he had lost by leaving Europe. ‘The utter barbarism of Australia will be hard to bear now’,72 he told Basil. The messiness of Near Eastern politics contributed to his depressed and dispirited mood. ‘The wogs are fortifying the canal,’ he told Basil, ‘but it doesn’t look remotely like war yet or for a long time to come. If Israel is bankrupt, so is Egypt’.73
When their ship was involved in a mid-ocean collision with a tanker it simply underlined his foreboding.<
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Chapter 9
Mount Pleasant and Sydney, 1957–60
Jim and Eve returned to Australia in the middle of 1956. They had been away just under a year and returned with mountains of books and artefacts and promises they were unlikely to keep. This was Margery Dray’s second visit to Mount Pleasant, the first for Paul and Laila.
At The Mount the household rituals resumed. The cats were Jim’s domain, the turkeys Eve’s. Sheep farmed by tenants underpinned the whole enterprise. Wool prices in Australia remained high during the 1950s and the price of wool loomed large in much of Jim’s correspondence and his elaborate plans for archaeological expeditions.
Paul Åström was tall and elegant, an urbane young man who found himself flapping like a fish out of water in this strange new world. For a Swedish archaeologist from Lund, daily life in the Bathurst countryside was certainly novel. Paul attempted to make sense of it in a short essay ‘Glimpses from Australia, the great sheep-country’. ‘In Australia, they do not have shepherds but the sheep walk around on their own’, he was surprised to report. He described shearing sheds and wool classing at the Sydney auctions and was astounded to discover that there were more than one hundred million sheep in Australia—yet only nine million people! Searching for comparisons, he thought the unshorn sheep looked somewhat like haystacks or perhaps English judges. After shearing they were etched with red cuts and scratches. At a wool auction in Sydney he sat listening to the bids, but commented that ‘an outsider hasn’t a chance of understanding or following them; it feels like sitting in a room full of yapping puppies’.1
Jim and Paul spent their days deep in discussions on Middle Cypriot pottery, the subject of Paul’s doctoral dissertation. They developed a close friendship, although Jim happily declared Paul ‘useless in daily life’.2 Meanwhile trestle tables in the ballroom groaned under pot sherds laid out in messy piles. Born north of the Arctic Circle and attuned to solitude, Laila Haglund found pleasure in Eve’s calm and restful companionship as they sat for hours mending and drawing pots. Laila found an aptitude for technical drawing but was careful not to become just one of Jim’s assistants. Eve, for her part, enjoyed teaching Laila—everything from technical drawing to an appreciation of children’s literature. On one occasion a goose laid eggs but abandoned them and Eve persuaded Laila that she could hatch them herself. For several nights Laila went to bed nestling a goose egg in her bra and Eve was pleased to be proved right when a small gosling hatched. The landscapes and countryside suited Laila and she was keen to explore this new country. Basil’s wife Ruth brought her a pineapple and mango from North Queensland to taste and investigated rules on the export of native plant seeds to Sweden.3 As Laila walked the paddocks around Bathurst, she was struck by the numbers of stone tools lying in the fields. Jim airily dismissed them. She wondered whether anybody was interested in Australian archaeology.
Eve had looked forward to showing her mother her Australian life, but soon after their return from Europe, Margery fell critically ill. She was eighty. Eve and Laila took turns nursing her, the doctor prescribed medicine but there was little he could do. All who knew her adored Margery, and with her death Eve lost both her link to childhood and the person who loved her most. From England, Margery’s sister Ethel wrote sadly. ‘She must have come to tell me herself … I was sitting in my bed reading and suddenly found myself crying tho’ not knowing why. Just [about] the time she died.’4 From Cyprus, Tom replied to his daughter’s sad letter: ‘poor mother she never had much of a life and you were her only joy.’5 Eve was grateful that her mother had not suffered and arranged for her mother’s ashes to be returned to Bisterne, to the family cemetery, where she would lie beside the infant son whose death after only a few days had made her so protective of Eve.
In April 1957 Professor Gordon Childe, recently retired as Director of the Institute of Archaeology in London, returned to Australia. He was the most important theoretical archaeologist of the twentieth century and had not been back to Australia for decades.
Jim Stewart had known Childe in London. In fact it was Childe who had warned Jim that his plans for excavating tombs on Cyprus in the 1930s were misguided. They shared a nationality and a love of the Blue Mountains, but little else. Childe was avowedly Marxist, whereas Jim was decidedly conservative.
Childe was sixty-five, a solitary character, with a wizened face made uglier by thick round spectacles, and many thought him aloof, when he was simply shy. He enjoyed company but was used to his own. He visited Jim and Eve Stewart and stayed for a week in May and again in September. Laila found him captivating. They talked for hours about archaeology, sitting up long after Jim and Eve had retired for the night. Childe was amused by Laila’s habit of smoking a pipe.
When not at Mount Pleasant Childe often stayed at the stately old Carrington Hotel in Katoomba. Basil Hennessy would drive down from Bathurst with books from Jim’s library and frequently joined Childe bushwalking in the surrounding Blue Mountains, nervous at his tendency to walk too close to the edge of the sheer gorges. Although Gordon Childe had no personal interest in Australian prehistory, declaring it ‘boring unless you are a flint fanatic’,6 he tried to persuade Basil Hennessy to abandon Near Eastern archaeology and move into a scholarly area not yet treated seriously at any level of Australian life. Childe also tried to persuade Laila, and with more success.
Gordon had renewed his interest in geology and told the receptionist at the Carrington Hotel that he planned to write a book on the subject. On the night of 19 October 1957 Australia was in the midst of the spring racing season. Tulloch, most loved of Australian racehorses, had easily won the Caulfield Cup and was on track to win the Melbourne Cup. Talk in the bar of the hotel was mostly of the race, but a group of loud drinkers also had fun directing their taunts at the odd and ugly man drinking at the bar. Gordon moved away to chat with the receptionist. During the conversation he offered her his typewriter, that most personal of a writer’s items. He insisted and she finally accepted, putting it into the hotel safe. The same day he wrote a letter and posted it to his successor at the institute in London, Professor Grimes.
On 20 October he drove to a famous walking spot and continued on to Govett’s Leap. He took off his hat, pipe, mackintosh and spectacles, stepped back and fell from the cliff face. In the letter written to Grimes, a letter he asked not to be opened until 1968, he wrote that ‘Life ends best when one is happy and strong.’7
When news of his death reached England, gossip gripped the archaeological world. Was his death deliberate or an accident? The editor of Antiquity, O.G.S. Crawford, told Jim that a ‘chorus of laments’ showed how much Childe had been liked.8 Jim Stewart wallowed in gloomy fantasies and in a letter to Hector Catling said that Childe was murdered by ‘a certain political party’, adding that an attempt had also been made on him and Eve ten days after Childe’s death.9 Eve long maintained that Childe’s death was accidental and Basil and Laila agreed, none of them able to reconcile suicide with the cheerful, energetic and forward-thinking person whose company they had so enjoyed.
Paul and Laila decided to go their separate ways. Laila would remain another year at The Mount but Paul sailed for Europe in December 1957. He remained forever grateful for the opportunity to stay at Mount Pleasant and remembered Jim and Eve fondly for the rest of his life. Almost as soon as he boarded his ship, he and Jim began a detailed correspondence. Long lists of questions and answers—technical points on pottery typologies and relative chronologies—travelled between Sweden and Australia. Time delays were frustrating, misunderstandings unsurprising.
Their easy face-to-face conversation became less affable with distance. Disagreements were inevitable. Although Paul’s English was excellent, he knew that careful editing would improve it and sought Eve’s help. She reworked his sentences while Jim took time to guide, bully and berate Paul on the more technical aspects of his thesis. Paul worried that both Jim and Eve were spending too much time on his work, although he continued sending long lists of
questions and sought Eve’s editorial advice. He knew that Jim was frequently sick and hoped his demands did not contribute to this. Jim assured Paul that it was a pleasure to help him but that they couldn’t do everything.10
Paul suggested Jim might fly to Sweden to act as one of his thesis opponents. Jim was flattered and eager to go, but in the end Gjerstad considered it an unnecessary expense. Jim complained that he had been misled and felt he had been made look foolish in academic circles. ‘I had set my heart on coming to Sweden,’ he told Paul, ‘I don’t like getting my plans upset. At the present moment small annoyances are apt to set me off.’11 In any case, doctors had warned against air travel so the trip would have been impossible.12 Paul supported the grant of an honorary doctorate for Jim, but warned it might prove difficult, pointing out that the decision to grant such a distinction would have to wait until his book appeared,13 a less than subtle hint that Gjerstad was becoming anxious that Jim’s Swedish Cyprus Expedition volume, promised a decade ago, might never eventuate.
Jim was ill for much of 1957. Conflict threw him into physical paralysis and he told Paul that on one occasion, when he threw a visitor out of the house for ‘unmitigated rudeness’, he was ‘only semi-conscious’ and for the next three days Eve had to help him bathe and dress.14 At one stage his doctors thought he might die15 and Jim came to believe it as well. Unable to travel to Sydney to lecture, a loyal Basil once again stood in for him, but the university was irritated. Jim was seldom well enough to work and Basil might be forced to seek more secure employment—his latest idea involved working on Ruth’s family cattle property in Queensland.
Convinced he was doomed to an early death, Jim wrote himself a new role, believing he should now act as a ‘guide to other people, an organiser rather than an executive’. But, he added, ‘other people have to be willing to be guided’.16 Paul wrote about his personal problems and Jim attempted fatherly advice. ‘My first marriage,’ he admitted, ‘was an awful failure, and much of the blame lies on me because I put my career and my work first and my wife second. That broke my heart and has darkened all my life since’.17 He had learned through experience that a wife was an equal and advised Paul to learn this lesson as he had: ‘I am not ashamed to admit my youthful errors.’18 He had come to realise that the things most difficult to obtain are worth most.