by Judy Powell
On the opposite side of the island, near the town of Paphos, is another Karmi. Yiannis Cleanthous stayed in Bellapais for as long as possible after the Turkish invasion of northern Cyprus in 1974 but now lives in Kyrenia Street in the village of Lemba and his house is called ‘Karmi’. The house is not his—the original owners were Turkish—but he can live there as a Greek refugee from the north. Under an enormous mulberry tree we sit nibbling sweet biscuits and Yiannis leans forwards on his staff and his eyes light as he talks of Karmi and his beautiful Bellapais. He tells me about the time he met an Australian lawyer on Cyprus in the 1960s and they talked of the deteriorating political situation. The lawyer, just appointed to the position of Chief Justice of Cyprus—an appointment he was unable to take up—was Ken Jacobs. His wife, Eleanor, was Jim’s first wife and mother of Jim Stewart’s only son.
In 1964 the United Nations took control of the strategic plateau of Tjiklos and Eve’s lawyer eventually persuaded them to pay rent. In 1974, during the Turkish invasion of northern Cyprus, the land was confiscated and occupied by mainland troops.
In 1985 Stuart Swiny from the Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute visited Eve at Wentworth Falls. They talked as they took Tammy for long walks in the bush. Eve began to think that here might be a suitable beneficiary. Previously, Basil had helped sort out her Egyptian property. As the proceeds of the sale could not leave Egypt she had donated them to the American Schools of Oriental Research. The institute was an affiliate.
In 1986 Eve’s lawyer found a buyer for Tjiklos. Despite hopeful estimates that the property was worth over a million dollars, the land sold for only $US150,000.
Having failed to establish an Australian institute in Cyprus, Eve supported the Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute. The money from the sale of Tjiklos helped to purchase a building for the organisation in Nicosia. Students from all over the world stay there, in the J.R. Stewart residence. Inside the foyer, in the cool tiled entrance, visiting students collect the keys to their room in envelopes lying on the carved wooden trunk that once belonged to Tom Dray and sat on the floor at Tjiklos. Ornate carved wooden bookcases hold lace and souvenirs collected by Eve’s aunts. A map on the wall of the director’s office is of Cyprus. On the back, Eve’s uncle wrote that it is a copy of a fifteenth-century map given to him by Zenon Pierides—the man whose chance meeting on a train led to the Swedish Cyprus Expedition.
From Kyrenia Castle, with a set of good binoculars, it is possible to glimpse abandoned houses on the plateau of Tjiklos. No binoculars are needed to see the massive statue of Atatürk or the billowing red and white flags of Northern Cyprus.
Jim Stewart’s son Peter sold The Mount to the Morgan family in 1969 and, as the property would no longer be owned by a Stewart, Peter arranged for Jim’s body to be exhumed and reburied in Wentworth Falls, beside his parents. One of the onlookers was a small boy, Christopher Morgan, who was ghoulishly delighted when one of the gravediggers lost his footing and stumbled, his foot puncturing the coffin. As an adult and a student of archaeology at Sydney University, Christopher remembered the event. The irony of Jim Stewart’s own tomb being excavated was not lost on him.
Lymdale has been sold many times and the extensive property is now cut into different plots. All sign of A.A. Stewart’s miniature train line and model-boat lake are gone, although both are recalled in the house’s heritage listing.
Eve’s house in Armstrong Street was riddled with termites when she died in 2005 and has been largely restored. I don’t know if an apricot tree thrives in the back garden, or if the foundation deposits planted beneath it have been dug up and thrown away. Nor do I know if Tryphon’s almond survives the bracing Australian climate, a climate similar to that of Cyprus but its opposite. Summer at Christmas, winter in July. Topsy-turvy, as Eve thought in 1947.
The cemetery in Wentworth Falls sits beside the busy Western Freeway linking Sydney with Bathurst. One large stone mausoleum dominates the cemetery. Jim’s parents are both interred here. He and Eve are too.
Jim Stewart was a collector who saw archaeology as another way of collecting. He was a numismatist who saw coins as historical evidence. He was a thinker who seldom was prepared to put his broad ideas into print. Like so many archaeologists before and since, he was slow to publish and enjoyed the ‘dirt archaeology’ of the field more than the analysis afterwards in the workroom.
The POW notebooks were written during years of forced solitude, but Stewart was gregarious and in normal life would rather entertain a group in conversation than sit in an office writing. After the war his thoughts curled in on themselves. Details devoured him and crippled his critical capacities. His return to Australia removed him physically from the landscapes and archaeology of the place he loved. Absent from them, he lost perspective. Even so, the posthumous publication of his volume for the Swedish Cyprus Expedition shows the breadth of his knowledge. As Hector Catling wrote:
the quintessence of Stewart’s knowledge and understanding of his period, showing how fully alive it was in his mind … He understood that an archaeologist’s duty includes reconstruction and interpretation as much as description and analysis.10
Jim’s reluctance to form conclusions without complete data was a flaw that Winifred Lamb had recognised as early as the 1930s. But archaeology does not deal with the finite. There will always be another excavation, new finds, a novel way of extracting information, radical methods for analysing data. His corpus would always prove elusive and the search for it was, in the end, futile.
In the late twentieth century the world of archaeology was growing and the amount of archaeological evidence to explore ever increasing. Long gone were the days when any single individual could collate all the evidence—even of a small sub-set of material—into a single publication, albeit a multi-volume one like the corpus. Trends in archaeology ebbed and flowed, the tide shifting from grand theories based on flimsy evidence to ever more specialised investigations of evidence extracted from smaller and smaller artefacts, and now finally resting on ancient DNA. The conflict between visions of the woods and the trees remains, but is played out in different ways.
In 2011 Sydney University’s Department of Archaeology received a bequest of over $6 million. The money would endow a new Professor of Archaeology. The bequest came from the estate of Tom Brown, a lawyer who lived for most of his life in western New South Wales, and who had made an extensive collection of Aboriginal artefacts. Persuaded that removing artefacts from their context destroys valuable information, he enrolled to study archaeology formally at Sydney University.
When commenting on the bequest, Sydney University’s Dr Ted Robinson lamented the fact that archaeology students were funded at a lower level than science students, despite the fact that ‘we need more than a pencil and access to a library … we do a huge amount of fieldwork, we need labs and we do a lot of archaeological science’.11 It was an argument that Jim had made, unsuccessfully, many times.
Jim Stewart’s attitude to cultural material is abhorrent to a modern archaeologist, but in 1961 when John Mulvaney conducted the ground-breaking excavations at Kenniff Cave in Central Queensland, he admits he knew few Aborigines and there was little interest in the way contemporary Aborigines might react to the excavation of their past. Few scholars were interested in who owned the past. It was scarcely even a question.
Hindsight can blind us to the past. It is all too easy to condemn the activities of archaeologists who knew nothing of and cared little about the people whose past was being excavated, destroyed, removed and studied. But we should be careful how we judge past actions.
In 2011, the Australian Archaeological Association had one thousand members. At the annual conference that year, in the provincial Queensland city of Toowoomba, one session was devoted to meeting the graduates. Over twenty archaeological consulting firms sponsored a cocktail party and new graduates were encouraged to ‘network in a relaxed environment with potential employers from the consulting, indu
stry, heritage, government and education sectors’. The New South Wales Roads and Maritime Service was there, as were mining giants Conzinc Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton.
How will future archaeologists view the work of archaeologists today?
Jim and Eve Stewart loved Cyprus. They devoted their lives to studying its archaeology, but in equal measure they loved the island’s landscapes and its people. Archaeologists never lose the thrill of reaching down to pick up a sherd left lying on the ground, the excitement of discovering how a landscape has formed over time, the challenge of piecing together the jigsaw puzzle of the past. All archaeologists come to respect the land they walk on. Jim and Eve Stewart were no different.
Wealthy, spoilt, difficult and brilliant, Jim Stewart charmed and inspired students and irritated university administrators. Distinguished by his encyclopaedic knowledge of Cypriot material, his archaeological and numismatic legacy is substantial − but marred by an acquisitive streak that sits uneasily with today’s archaeological standards.
Eve ensured Jim’s work survived and that his name lived in more than the memories of a small group of former students. Without institutional backing, with limited finances and alone in a dilapidated house at the edge of the Blue Mountains, she continued their work. Dogged and persistent, feisty to the end, she persevered.
Appendix
The D.E. (Eve) Stewart archive—in praise of handwriting
Eve Stewart maintained meticulous files, but whether these were always kept this way—or whether they were neatened over time—is unclear. She filed letters, photos, Christmas cards and various newspaper clippings, telegrams and receipts according to the person to whom they were addressed or from whom they were received. Many of the folders had been reused—names crossed out or overwritten—and some of them were numbered, suggesting an attempt at categorising or cataloguing, but it’s impossible to know precisely. When I saw the files for the first time, the material within each manila folder had been arranged in chronological order, so I could read the stories easily from beginning to end.
Both Eve and Jim frequently kept carbon copies or duplicates of correspondence and correspondence files were not ‘static’ repositories. Many letters are annotated with comments. Important passages are boxed in red pencil. These highlighted passages are usually about promises made—particularly promises about publication or finalisation of reports—and the boxed details are quoted back in later letters.
Sometimes Jim and Eve wrote letters on the same day and about the same event—usually to their respective parents. Many of these simply recount events, but the different emphasis placed on such events gives an insight into their characters.
Most of Eve’s archive consists of the letters she and Jim wrote to each other and to people around the world. The breadth of material is significant, but the gaps are all too obvious. As a couple they were close and wrote to each other frequently when apart. When they were together there is of course no correspondence, so there is no easy way of re-creating details or emotions. Similarly, most surviving correspondence includes Jim or Eve as active participants. It is almost always polite. There is very little in the third person, no correspondence between people discussing Jim or Eve, making comments about them rather than to them. This correspondence might have been far less polite.
Sometimes even the paper tells a story. Just as Jim used cigarette packets as his writing material in the POW camp, Eve continued to use Sydney university letterhead paper many years after Jim’s death and long after her bitter feud with the university. Sometimes she crossed out the address; at other times she wrote on the back of the page. At the end of her life, nearly blind, she continued to write on an antiquated typewriter. Because typewriter ribbons were no longer available for her machine, she placed carbon paper between two sheets of plain paper. Unable to see what she typed, but hoping that the pressure of the keys on the carbon paper would transfer to the back sheet of paper, her typewritten letters become at times erratic and include frequent apologies.
Because of their joint obsession with stamp collecting, Jim and Eve usually tore stamps off envelopes, often removing the date stamp as well. This is particularly annoying in the case of letters from Eve’s mother, which are often undated. Where the letters remain in their envelopes, I was frustrated to find the date stamp is usually ripped off.
Parents today complain that their children have lost the ability to spell and that the world of SMS and text messaging has reduced the written word to a series of abbreviations. Eve’s adolescent diaries are full of similar shortcuts—B4, /,, @. She used abbreviations when she had limited space, as in the diaries, or when she was writing with haste or emotion, as in her letter to the Bishop of Norwich.
Today’s modes of instant communication—computers, photocopiers, fixed and mobile phones, webcams and social networking—make it difficult for younger readers to comprehend the difficulties that Jim and Eve faced. There was no phone at The Mount until the 1960s and Eve had no phone at Wentworth Falls until the 1990s. Everything that was written—lecture notes, research papers, correspondence—was handwritten or manually typed. There was no easy way to edit text—not even any white-out fluid. Manuscripts were typed and retyped, footnotes typed on a separate page and pasted to the bottom of foolscap pages of text. On the other hand, because of this sort of communication, much of it remains. Without easy communication by email or phone, Jim and Eve wrote letters—sometimes daily—to each other and to numerous people around the world. It is a remarkably comprehensive correspondence and gives a picture of the working lives of a close couple, their interests and professional connections. I often wonder if in the future we’ll be able to recreate the lives of people in similar circumstances, or will telephone calls and emails and computer files all be lost.
Jim and Eve were frequently irritated by the time delays that occurred when writing letters to people overseas and there were often misunderstandings and confusions. In 1947 Eve was in Cyprus, waiting to join Jim in Australia but unable to obtain passage on a ship. Their letters are numbered and frustration mounts when letters (with instructions, reprimands, apologies) arrive out of sequence. Jim used the same system of numbering in his earlier letters to Eleanor from the POW camp, and later in his letters to Basil Hennessy in the mid-1950s.
Until I started this research, I had never taken much notice of people’s handwriting, although as a teacher, I had been conscious of the extent to which illegible writing irritates the reader and can unnecessarily affect a student’s marks.
Most of the material I have read in the personal archive consists of letters, handwritten for the most part. Gradually I began to recognise a writer even before I saw their signature. I knew that O.G.S. Crawford and Hector Catling preferred to write on small pages, half a page turned sidewards so that it was wider than deep. Both of them had pretty awful handwriting but it was the two folders of letters from Judith Stylianou (née Dobell), the Byzantine scholar, that most daunted me. It took months before I dared tackle them, so convoluted was her handwriting and so idiosyncratic her spelling. I rejoiced when she used a typewriter. I had only just finished reading Miriam Davis’s biography of Kathleen Kenyon when I came across a receipt from the Institute of London. The signature was a thin spidery doodle and, while I struggled to read it, I remembered Davis’s comment about Kathleen Kenyon’s impossible handwriting—sure enough this was hers! I knew that Eve’s mother would cover every scrap of paper, writing sideways along the edges when she had finished the page. She always gave the day and date, but, because she wrote so frequently, seldom the year.
Eve kept a folder for each correspondent and the contents of each folder formed a sort of life. I saw handwriting deteriorate with age, growing larger as eyesight failed, and looping painfully with arthritis. Sometimes I would read a whole folder in a morning and watch someone age and fail before my eyes.
Handwriting is personal. We immediately recognise a letter from a friend or family member. Graphologists read handwriting and
believe it reveals our personality. Our signatures—even in the modern electronic world—are ours alone. We expect them to give us entry, permission, access—and to be in some sense proof of who we are.
Recognising handwriting is not the same as knowing a person, yet, after months of research, it is easy to fool yourself into believing that it is. I saw Eve’s handwriting where others did not. At Sydney University’s Nicholson Museum there is no record of Eve working there, although I know she was employed for a few years as a technical assistant. Looking through the museum files, I could see immediately where she had added a note to a document, or filled out a catalogue entry.
My first day in Nicosia during my first research trip to Cyprus was a Sunday and I strolled idly through the old city. I arrived at the museum before it opened and sat in the shady foyer looking at the painted ceiling, the massive doors with multiple locks and the museum attendants eating ice creams as they waited to begin work. The museum is an old-fashioned museum, crammed full of objects arranged chronologically. There are some written panels with limited explanations but, although unimaginatively displayed, I was relieved that it wasn’t full of elaborate interpretation and interactive displays aimed at competing with the internet and taking up space and money that could be devoted to objects and research. I immediately moved toward the Bronze Age displays, ignoring—as I generally do—the classical sculpture and overdrawn formal pots of the Classical period. I love Bronze Age Cypriot pottery. It is handmade and quirky, full of the individuality that made Jim’s corpus a futile attempt at imposing order.
Amongst the display of pots was a large but broken alabaster bowl in the centre of the cabinet. As I looked closer I gasped with a sort of personal and exclusive delight. On the inner rim was the pottery register number—and immediately I saw that it was in Eve’s handwriting.
Timeline