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Dear Diary #1: Edward White (The Man of Space and Time)
Presenter: Dr Richard Gillespie
Further information and links: Astronomy — Gold — Science — Shrine of Remembrance
On the Beat #2: Murder in the Eastern Market
Presenter: Alexandra Roginski
Further information and links: Crime, Law & Order — Eastern Market — Phrenology
Looking for… #1: Jean Field
Presenter: Professor Andy May
Further information and links: Aboriginal Melbourne — Blackburn — Sir William John Clarke — Doncaster — Kew — Nunawading — Orchards — Suburbs and Suburbanisation — Sorrento — Sydney Road — Vermont
Credits
Series Host — Professor Andy May
Episode Presenters — Richard Gillespie, Alexandra Roginski, Andy May
Audio Engineer — Gavin Nebauer
Music — Andrew Batterham, ‘And there I was’; ‘Spring Music 3 Birrarung Marr’
Sound Effects Credits — bbc.co.uk — © copyright 2018 BBC
Narrations — Gretel Evans, Tom Ford, James Lesh, Henry Reese
Page Image Credit —Head of comet drawn by Samuel Calvert, The Illustrated Melbourne Post, 18 February 1865 (State Library of Victoria)
Audio Clip — Excerpt from Dudley Frederick Field as a major, 2/22nd Battalion, interviewed by Hank Nelson for The Keith Murdoch Sound Archive of Australian in the War of 1939-1945 (Australian War Memorial, S01044, licensed under CC BY-NC)
Transcript
Welcome to My Marvellous Melbourne, a podcast on Melbourne’s history with Professor Andy May and the Melbourne History Workshop.
We kick off this episode with a new segment—’Dear Diary’—in which we feature Melburnians who have kept a regular and personal record of events in their lives, that can tell us something about life in the city and the nature of historical change. Richard Gillespie will delve into the diary of Edward White, the man of space and time. Alex Roginski will continue our ‘On the Beat’ series with a story of a murder in the Eastern Market; and I’ll go looking for Melbourne writer Jean Field.
DEAR DIARY #1: EDWARD WHITE (THE MAN OF SPACE AND TIME)
Presenter: Dr Richard Gillespie
It is January 1853. The ship ‘Try’ sails through Port Phillip Heads, on its way to Melbourne, after a three-month journey from Bristol. As the ship makes its way into Port Phillip Bay, an intrepid immigrant has the best view. Dared by the crew, passenger Edward White, just turned 21, is inching his way along the rope leading between the two masts, near the topmost sail. It was a grand entrance to the settlement that would be his home for most of the next 60 years. White noted that evening in his diary that the escapade ‘tired me very much, and caused the captain to censure the mate for daring me to do it’.
This entry is just one of thousands of entries in Edward White’s diary, which he commenced on his nineteenth birthday in 1850, and maintained until his death in 1913. Each daily entry is brief — about 60 words or thereabouts, occasionally more, often less. The small, notebook-sized volumes remain with a descendant, but a typescript, in nine bound volumes, can be read at the State Library of Victoria.
At one level, the diaries are the detailed account of one man’s life in Melbourne, charting the daily events that cumulatively build a picture of his career, family life, and social milieu. But they are also more than that, for Edward White’s career was dedicated to charting the stars, calculating Melbourne’s precise location on the Earth, and linking Melbourne time to that of the rest of the world. He, more than any other single immigrant, was the observer who would fix Melbourne in space and time.
As commentators at the time noted, the Victorian gold rushes attracted an extraordinary number of educated and skilled immigrants. While the prospect of finding gold may have been the catalyst, they had skills and trades they could fall back on, should their digging go unrewarded.
White fits this mould. When he commenced his diary at 19, he was working as a mechanic and marine engineer in Bristol. His evenings and weekends were dedicated to a self-education program — the diary was clearly intended to mark his progress. White would read the newspapers and journals, and borrow books: Humboldt’s Views of Nature, Lardner’s History of Discoveries, Dempsey on Drainage, Herschel’s Astronomy; novels by Dicken; textbooks of algebra, French and Latin. He bought a telescope and navigator’s quadrant, made observations from his garden, and prepared a chart of the orbits of the planets.
By mid-1852, he was reading Chamber’s Guide to Australia, building a wooden travelling chest, and buying a pick, shovel and lantern to take to Port Phillip.
Characteristically, the voyage on the ship to Australia became an exercise in practical navigation. White made astronomical observations each day, then used these to calculate the latitude and longitude of the ship. The ship’s captain would have been using a chronometer to establish the ship’s longitude, but White used the earlier lunar tables method; he first observed the position of the moon against background stars, then made complex mathematical calculations in order to determine the ship’s position on the earth’s surface. This was an intellectual exercise that would set the course of his future career.
Arriving in Melbourne, White pitched a tent in Canvas Town, the makeshift settlement for new arrivals in South Melbourne. Discouraged by reports of the slim pickings on the goldfields, he found work in a store in Flinders Street. Sundays were spent in the tent doing mathematical problems. One evening, he returned to his tent to find everything stolen.
For the next five years, White led an unsettled existence, enjoying the freedom of changing jobs every few months. For a time, he tried his hand as a gold miner, with poor returns, but found better work as a mechanic, tending the steam engines being employed to crush the ore in the larger mines at Bendigo. Throughout it all, he found time to continue his education in mathematics and astronomy. He even took a week off, so that he could come to Melbourne, to read astronomy books at the University and Public Library.
Comets and meteors have traditionally been seen as foretelling significant events. Certainly, it was a comet that transformed Edward White’s life. The Great Comet of 1858 was one of the brightest and most beautiful comets of the nineteenth century. Observable over the course of several months, it prompted public interest around the world. White’s diary notes that he systematically observed the comet for over a fortnight, from the dark skies of Bendigo, then spent an entire Sunday analysing his data; that evening, he wrote a letter to the Melbourne newspaper, The Argus. His letter was published the following weekend.
Later that week, two soldiers appeared on the goldfields asking for White. Redcoats on the goldfields could only mean trouble; friends advised him to hide. Brushing off their concerns, White introduced himself to the soldiers, who handed him a letter from the Government Astronomer in Melbourne, Robert Ellery, who asked White to visit him and indicated a job may be on offer. Years later, reviewing his diaries, White underlined the day’s entry in red, for it marked the beginning of his long career as chief assistant astronomer at Melbourne Observatory in the Domain (now part of the Royal Botanic Gardens).
The diary charts White’s work at the observatory day by day. Given the mixture of night-time observations, daytime work in the office, and other government responsibilities, each entry is an amalgam of work and leisure throughout the day. White had one of two astronomer’s residences, adjacent to the Observatory and close to St Kilda Road. I find the rhythm and poetry of the entries entrancing:
18 June 1864, Saturday – ‘Weather fair, rain at night. Rose at 7, worked in the garden, went to the observatory, entered some transits, in the afternoon made some fixings for the fowl house, at 6 went to the observatory, observed some stars, left at 8, came home, read some of Coles’ Gardening in Victoria … went to bed at 11.15.
14 May 1873: ‘Weather fine. Rose at 5.50, went to the observatory, observed some transits, came home, read the Argus, went to the observatory, entered some transits, at 11.30 went to Melbourne to Fraser’s, bought a pair of vases for 2 pounds 15 shillings, returned, entered some transits and conversed with Mr. Todd [this was Charles Todd, the visiting South Australian astronomer and superintendent of the Overland Telegraph], observed a few transits, went with Mr. Todd to the Theatre Royal, saw Pygmalion and Galatea, left at 10.05, accompanied Mr. Todd to the Station, came to the observatory, observed some transits, left at 11.50, came home, to bed at 12.20.
Numbers mattered to White. Much depended on the accuracy of his astronomical observations. The precise measurement of stars as they touched the cross hairs in the observatory’s large transit telescope was recorded against an astronomical clock. Then each observation had to be adjusted for disturbances, such as the refraction of the Earth’s atmosphere, and the tiny perturbations in the Earth’s movement around the Sun. From these, White could progressively build a catalogue of thousands of stars; the Melbourne Catalogues, published every ten years, were celebrated internationally as the most accurate charts of the southern skies. White was made a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society in London for his achievement.
But these painstaking observations had a more practical aspect. They determined the latitude and longitude of Melbourne, which in turn were used as the basis for an accurate geodetic survey of Victoria, fixing the precise locations of survey markers across the colony. From these, government and private surveyors could divide up the colony, for the gazetting of crown land, awarding of pastoral leases, creation of Aboriginal reserves, and the sale of private land. There is a disturbing act of dispossession hiding behind those seemingly innocent columns of numbers.
Melbourne and the colony lived its days and nights by White’s time. Observatory Time was transmitted by dedicated telegraph lines from the observatory to public clocks at the Post Office, Town Hall and railway stations, then to every station throughout the colony. As telegraphic connections were made with other colonies and countries, local time and longitude could be mapped ever more accurately. From 1883, Melbourne was linked through Darwin and India to an international grid of space and time.
Not that White’s diary is solely confined to measurement. His courtship with Kate L’Oste is recorded, his marriage, then the births of his eight daughters and one son, their illnesses and achievements. Night-time observations of stars are interspersed with social evenings, games of whist, songs around the piano, visits to the theatre, meetings of the Royal Society and Alfred Hospital board, repeated visits to the international exhibitions, and attendance at garden parties at Government House, next door to the observatory.
But, all the same, there is a wonderful obsession with numbers and stars. White liked to take long walks on Sundays, timing each mile with his watch, as he passed the mile posts from Melbourne to Doncaster. On holiday with family at Sorrento, he took barometric observations as he climbed nearby hills. For 25 years he wrote the monthly ‘Astronomical Notes’ for The Australasian journal. One daughter was named Estella, as her birth coincided with a comet.
Edward White had a heart attack in January 1913, aged 81; his last diary entry was at the end of April, and he died three months later, at his home adjacent to the observatory.
White’s house was demolished in the 1920s, in order to build the Shrine of Remembrance. Appropriately, White’s astronomical observations formed the basis of the calculations to design an aperture in the roof of the Shrine, in such a way that a ray of light would fall on the Stone of Remembrance at exactly 11a.m. on the 11th November each year.
The observer of space and time left his mark on Melbourne.
ON THE BEAT # 2: MURDER IN THE EASTERN MARKET
Presenter: Alexandra Roginski
We start with gunshots. They reverberate through the upper storey of Melbourne’s Eastern Market. At a stall marked with icons of suns and stars and a head in profile, the air quivers with adrenalin.[1] A man aged in his forties lies motionless on the ground, blood from bullet and stab wounds seeping into his linen shirt and necktie.[2]
It is April 1899, an autumnal afternoon in one of Melbourne’s beloved amusement spaces, home to florists, fruit sellers, cycloramas, bird fanciers, photography studios and shilling mystics – gatekeepers of divination and character reading.[3]
The phrenologist Emery Gordon Medor has just fired his revolver into Frank Cartwright, aka Frank Stevens, actor and owner of the cyclorama, and his phrenologist wife Annie Cartwright, professional name Zinga Lee.[4]
The crime shocks Australia. Newspapers from the Clarence River to Kalgoorlie cry ‘Murder in the Eastern Market’, ‘Phrenologist runs Amok’.[5] The case hits all of the high notes of late-Victorian Gothic.
As with most murders, of course, we must scrabble in earlier times for motive.
Emery Gordon Medor was a phrenologist, a practitioner of the science of reading character and intellect from the shape of the head. Phrenology cascaded through public life in Australia from the early nineteenth century until well into the twentieth. The cranial science served as a frequent pastime of middle-class folk – including doctors and social reformers – but its itinerant popular lecturers and character readers scraped by in the margins of society. They shifted identities and forged unholy combinations of phrenology with other forms of divination. Various records suggest that Medor was born in the 1840s in either New South Wales or South Australia, although none of this is terribly reliable, and Medor was probably a stage name.[6] This man shambled into regional Victoria in the 1880s, lecturing on phrenology and offering private consultations filled with life advice.[7] He married, had children, abandoned them.[8]
Medor settled in Melbourne in 1890 and the Eastern Market drew him into its colonnaded embrace.[9] Originally a hay, corn and fresh produce market, the square bounded by today’s Exhibition, Little Collins, Bourke and Russell streets whirred from morning until night.[10] The new market buildings, completed in 1878 during the age of exhibition, rose up in neoclassical splendour.[11] During the day, sunlight poured through the market’s vaulted glass ceilings onto two levels of stalls and a fountain at the market’s heart. At night, electricity bathed Saturday-night hordes – respectable folk, as well as clusters of larrikins. It was a village of leisure within a city.[12]
For a decade, Medor trod the short path from his lodging house in Little Bourke Street to the south side of the Eastern Market, his frock coat perhaps flapping in the breeze, tall silk hat bobbing above the heads of passers-by. He was tall for the time, well fed, with a hook nose.[13] He read palms, heads and the stars from a stall divided into two rooms by a curtain of coarse red fabric. When not in his inner sanctum, he perched out the front of his stall, expounding his theories of the universe. Medor believed himself a cut above other fortune tellers. He was not an astrologer but what he called a ‘sidereal scientist’, a man of ancient wisdom who had supposedly predicted the London fires.[14]
Like many other phrenologists, who fussed over the legitimacy of their profession, even as they bundled it with thoroughly disreputable practices, he scoffed at the so-called impostors and quacks who told fortunes under the cloak of phrenology.[15]
He meant specifically the tenants next door, Frank and Annie Cartwright, who also peddled phrenology and physiognomy, as well as charging admission to a great panorama. Medor blamed his competitors for a slump in business. He thought Annie Cartwright scared away customers by lolling about outside in her ornate costume.[16] It was a perceived loss aggravated by the practical jokes played by his neighbours. With a small gang of acquaintances, they began to make sport of the resident eccentric. He detailed the injustices: a cross marked on his stall door, a stolen shutter, verbal abuse in the street. His tormentors set ragged boys with mangy dogs running through the stall. One night on Medor’s walk home, a man asked for matches and then grabbed him by the throat. He began carrying a revolver.[17] Medor’s neighbours failed to see what a country journalist had long ago perceived, that this was ‘one of the few men one would hesitate to play practical jokes upon’.[18]
Medor drank. In the late 1890s, he saw a Dr Stirling for iritis, or eye redness, the complication of syphilis, a disease known for unsettling the brain. ‘I came to the conclusion that he was a shingle short, on the border between sanity and insanity’, said the doctor.[19] Perhaps some of the supposed persecutions were untrue, or unconnected to the Cartwrights. Perhaps Medor misinterpreted their spirit.
By April of 1899, the City Council – which was trying to clean up the market – had a gutful of this demi monde of character readers and their grubby disputes. Fortune telling was illegal under vagrancy laws, seen as obtaining money under the false pretences of being able to predict the future.[20] The town clerk issued a notice to be circulated to tenant fortune tellers, warning that if they didn’t discontinue this practice they would have to vacate by May. The notice was due for posting at the time of the murder.[21]
In the week before the crime, Medor went on a bender. Returning to work at the end of this bout, he found a sign on his door, stating that the shop was ‘Closed, in consequence of the death of Venus’. His blood boiled, blood rapidly draining of alcohol.[22] On the afternoon of the tenth of April, he strode across the market to see a bunch of radishes affixed to his stall door. His tolerance frayed, he accosted Annie Cartwright, who lounged against the phonograph outside. He aimed for her heart with his revolver but caught her arm instead. She fled.[23] But Frank Cartwright soon ran into the stall. Medor’s shots to Cartwright’s head and right buttock felled him, and as he lay on the ground, the phrenologist stabbed him through the chest and began working on his neck with a blade.[24] It was then, as Medor commenced decapitation, that Barnet Freedman, the picture frame manufacturer, rushed in to disarm him, a tussle that would cost Freedman an eye.[25]
A coronial inquest a week later committed Medor to stand trial for murder, but the process would be delayed and complicated by the question of sanity. Medical men, and then jurors, could not agree. Was Medor mad? Was being ‘a shingle short’ sufficient to acquit someone of such a gruesome attack?
Madness was deduced from Medor’s physical state, his post-bender withdrawal, which one physician from St Vincent’s hospital dubbed an ‘acute alcoholic mania’ that predisposed him to react to even the slightest irritation. But the court also considered Medor’s faith in his own powers. For Dr Stirling, the commerce of mysticism could be excused as long as its practitioners understood that they traded in make believe.
His belief in astrology & demonology influenced me. As he made his living by the practice of astrology I would expect him to be candid enough to tell me he did not believe in it.[26]
After the first trial foundered in deadlock, a second jury in July found the phrenologist not guilty. But Medor became a guest of the governor for as long as the state deemed him in need of restraint.[27] He wasn’t sent to a mental asylum, though, but to Melbourne Gaol.[28] From this bluestone capsule, Medor wrote missives to a publican friend, asking for help in seeking a remission of incarceration.[29] These letters reveal a grandiose sense of self, and a failure to grasp the gravity of his actions.
It is a terrible thing to me, to have to remain in this place, among so many brutes in human form whose conversation is the abomination of abominations. I could not believe that man is so vile and fallen, if I did not hear him at his worst, as he is in this marvellous Melbourne.[30]
Medor suspected a conspiracy.
There is more at the bottom of this unfortunate affair than appears on the surface. The quack palmists and Phrenologists are not those only who are interested in my detention.[31]
Meanwhile, Annie Cartwright recovered from her gunshot wounds, and like any good phrenologist in a fix, took to the road, working under her stage name of Zinga Lee.[32]
Medor spent most of the next decade in Melbourne Gaol, before a transfer to the Bendigo Gaol in 1908.[33] In August of that year, a deputation of friends and fellow storekeepers visited Attorney General John Davies, pleading for his release. Davies rebuffed them. He said that seven doctors had assessed Medor over the past decade and declared him a danger to the community if appropriate precautions weren’t taken.[34] But the governor and the medical officer at Medor’s new home in Bendigo kept him under close watch.[35]
By May 1909, they deemed him mentally fit, and he stepped out through the gates of Bendigo Gaol, an elderly man, released into the care and supervision of friends.[36] Who knows if Medor’s sanity improved. How does one measure madness? Had he renounced the reading of fortunes? Was his fitful violence banished with his former, drunken self? Perhaps the gaol’s governor and doctor both thought him too harmless to worry about, sane or not.
Regardless, the blood had dried on the case, and maybe Medor won them over with a touch of Eastern Market magic, a conjuring trick in which reality could be moulded at will to recreate the past as you think it should be.
LOOKING FOR… # 1: JEAN FIELD
Presenter: Professor Andy May
What is that thing, that inspires people to write about a particular place, to put their musings on the page. Newcomers compare the towns they see for the first time to the towns they have known long before. Older residents are passionate and possessive, reminiscing about the olden days, expressing the warmth and depth of their attachment to a locality and its landmarks. Page after page from the early years of Melbourne’s settlement are filled with a sense of expectation, an aspiration for the future, with dissonance and delight in equal measure:
I was sitting writing a letter the other day and rose to peep through between the blind and window frame to see how the day looked out of doors when at the same moment a black horrible looking face suddenly came into very close proximity to mine but on the other side of the glass. It was that of an old native woman who activated by the same curiosity as my own no doubt wished to see through the same aperture what was inside.[37]
That’s a curious young man, newly arrived, looking out at Collins Street 175 years ago. I came across that diary in the late 1980s, and remember thinking that through that window frame of time, I knew as little about the writer as he did of the Aboriginal woman in the street outside.
A few years later I came across a slim little book called And so today by Jean F. Field, subtitled a ‘picturesque cavalcade of the years between’. Published in 1956, and dedicated to the Women Pioneers of the District, And so today sketched the early histories of Melbourne’s eastern suburbs in a little over fifty pages, covering Blackburn, Box Hill, Doncaster, Nunawading, Mitcham and Vermont. Here in six short chapters, Jean Field explored the early European occupation of these localities, the hamlets and the stock routes, the blacksmiths and prospectors, the Town Halls and traders, tracking the past along railway lines and old post and rail fences, through the cemeteries, the quarries and churches, to the landscape of the early postwar decades. Black and white photos of the largest lemon scented gum in Blackburn, apple orchards at Vermont, and an old wattle-and-daub homestead in Doncaster, gave a hint of something lost as well as something found.
Jean Field’s view of Metropolitan Melbourne in the mid 1950s staked out a territory of centre and edge, orchard and subdivision, the old and the new, the slum versus the suburb, the blandness of the plains against the promise of the hills, the weariness and disadvantage of the inner-city replaced by the dream of a better and more spacious future.
Our great city of Melbourne is like a large star with a solid centre and many points spreading out North, South, East and West, but the longest point of all thrusts out towards the blue Dandenong Ranges, an easy afternoon’s run in the car from Town. The lovely, undulating country of the lower foothills, with its many orchards and small farms, is rich and fertile … Apples and pears, lemons and peaches all grow in abundance. It is to this country that the City-weary, and the dreamer, the Artist and worker alike have turned their eyes and have bought for themselves blocks of land and built on them their dream home.
The uncanny way in which the human being turns his eyes to the hills, and the latent instinct which sleeps in all of us, to come, if we can, closer to nature, is being proved day by day, as more and more men and women prefer to strap-hang in trains and buses from the hills for as long as an hour, rather than live close to the City in flats and apartment houses. Lucky indeed is he who can say to his fellow worker, ‘I come from the Hills’.[38]
The things that impressed the visitor to these districts in the mid 1950s were the perfume of the gums, the sense of peacefulness, and the wonderful birdlife. Indeed And so today is not just a celebration of the early settlers, but is marbled if not with nostalgia or loss, then a certain sense of longing and threat. The paradox of the new suburbs, as Field saw it, was that the very qualities that made these undulating hills attractive to the inner-city dweller were obliterated in the process of suburban development.
It is sad … to see the orchards going one by one, subdivided into blocks of land, some of them only 50 feet wide; to see men having to leave one congested area only inevitably to live in another. The money-hungry and the grasping are always with us. ‘Closer Settlement’ the cry rather than ‘Let us Breathe!’ A beautifully timbered block is sold to a man who is uncivilised enough to carry the instinct with him to destroy before he can build, who clears his block of trees overnight, and then gloats to his friends that he is now living in the beautiful suburb of, say, Blackburn or Croydon. The man who sees in his gums only six months’ free firewood and not the blessing of a lifetime. Rather than cut these trees down, he should go down on his bended knees and thank God that he doesn’t have to live on the top floor of a 23-storied apartment house.[39]
‘Are we to make a desert of this country of ours’, she asked; if so, ‘we will be despised and hated by our descendants, who will rightly blame us for our lack of thought and perception and … sense of duty to those who will come after us’.[40]
There’s quite a spirit that animates this little volume, amid the rapid growth and the tensions of change, and the estate agents and spec builders supplying pent up post-war demand. There’s a wonderful eye for the hue and temper of the cultural as well as the natural world: the cliqueyness of Vermont, the Englishness of Doncaster, and Blackburn ‘the embodiment of everything Australian’.[41]
There’s also a profound sense of the efforts of the individual—her proud pioneer—in the face of the larger forces of history, of planning and change. And it’s a book with its boots in the places themselves, an early oral history as it were, as Jean Field sat down with the nonagenarians who could remember the very early days of white settlement, her informants the Livermores and Toogoods, the Thieles and Zerbes —old orchardist families and other long-standing locals who claimed a kind of primordial right of ownership over the spirit of these places.
You could understand why they felt that their way of life was imperilled. Melbourne’s population nearly doubled between 1947 and 1971, with the addition of one and a quarter million people, the highest inter-censual growth occurring in the period Jean Field was writing. In the immediate postwar years, the old industrial suburbs of the inner core—Brunswick, Collingwood, Fitzroy, Richmond, Port and South Melbourne—had stopped growing in population; some of the middle-distance suburbs like Hawthorn, Malvern and Prahran were actually in population decline; but at its circumference in the east and southeast, the metropolis was growing through the out-migration of young families from the inner suburbs.[42] It would be another generation before these interlopers could themselves be called the new suburban pioneers.
Imagine — Jean Field gently prods her reader — imagine as you stand on this regular footpath by this huge highway in this modernising suburb, what it used to be like.[43] We can read what she wrote, words on a page, but I wanted to know more about this intriguing Jean Field who came to write so keenly and poetically about a sweep of Melbourne suburbs. Who was this woman, so eager to ensure that the go-ahead and aggressive instinct for the future should be tempered with what she called ‘historic sentimentality’, an understanding of origins, an appreciation of individual effort, an awareness of legacy. Who was this writer who tempered her musings with a sentence from Psalm 121, with snippets of Buddhist philosophy, and with smatterings of Rabindranath Tagore. What was the face of this woman on the other side of the glass?
I started to look for other clues, reading the book in a different way.
There comes a time in everybody’s life when we stand still, as it were, and take stock of ourselves and our surroundings. A time when, if we are married, perhaps our children launch themselves onto the tide and leave us, a little perplexed, a little lonely, with an emptiness in our hearts and with time on our hands.[44]
Blackburn, she wrote, is the ‘home of the business man who, although he must be in his office at 9 o’clock each day, comes home with a sense of freedom, a sense of burden having been cast off, as he steps through the station gates’.[45]
Was Jean Field feeling a little empty, a little perplexed, in inverse proportion perhaps to the freedoms of her husband and her grown up children who had now spread their wings?
There’s something else of course that haunts this book, if we read it forwards rather than backwards in time from where we are. It’s the war. It’s actually even two wars.
Jean Field was realist enough to know that the subdivision of her idyllic country was inevitable, because, as she wrote, ‘so many sons of farmers and orchardists were either killed in the war, leaving a very heavy burden for the old folk, or because of the war, sought employment in the city and elsewhere’.[46] Her suburbs are the solace for the troubled souls returned,[47] those who have ‘a craving for the wide open spaces after World War I’,[48] where once more ‘a man can be himself in his own garden’.[49] The title of the book, And so today — whether consciously or unconsciously we can’t be sure — mirrors American poet Carl Sandburg’s eulogy to the unknown soldier in Washington after WW1.
Looking for Jean Field led me to scour online newspapers, electoral rolls and other records for clues.
In the 1950s, Jean Florence Field (home duties) and her husband Dudley (a manager) live in Nunawading. The couple first appear in Kew in the late 1930s, Vermont immediately after the war, Blackburn in the early 1960s, and later at Sorrento. Dudley Frederick Field was born in 1907 in Moonee Ponds and later lived with his parents in Kew before marrying Jean in 1932. When he enlisted in the Citizen’s Military Force in 1928, he was working as a salesman at Ball & Welch in Flinders Street: 5 foot 10 and a half, brown eyes and hair, Protestant, son of R.C. Field of Torrens Street, Canberra; a black and white mug shot showing Dudley’s dark complexion and short painter’s brush moustache.
There’s more about Dudley online—a catalogue entry for an album of Federal Capital Site photographs, owned by Dudley, with reference to his father Robert Charles Field who was Steward of the Commonwealth Parliament House Refreshment Rooms in Melbourne. Robert Field is listed as being a member of the Federal City Camp on Kurrajong Hill in 1909, a three-week survey to determine the future site of Canberra.[50]
Dudley, it turns out spent his war as a major in the 22nd Battalion — Hank Nelson interviewed him for the Keith Murdoch Sound Archive project, Australia in the War.[51] Suddenly, surprisingly, I heard Dudley’s voice from a room in Sorrento in April 1991, getting to Rabaul, evading the advancing Japanese, evacuation to Australia, secondment to the RAAF as their chief chemical warfare instructor, and his role as senior member of the Darwin War Crimes trials.
What was your personal reaction to the news that you were going to Rabaul and what was the reaction of the men?
I don’t know that there was any great … it’s difficult now to say. I mean the main thing, you were going to the war; you were doing something. There was quite a lot of disappointment that we were not going with the – over to the desert to join the rest of the boys. That was a very, very strong feeling which, of course, was there all the time.
Maybe Jean was in the room that day in 1991, reliving her husband’s war, her own years of isolation. But that’s definitely Dudley in her book, ‘the man who, with pipe in mouth and dressed in faded army jacket, will potter all the week-end amongst shrub and hot-house and let the rest of the world go by’.[52] I don’t think Jean begrudged him that.
The same day I heard Dudley’ voice online, I received a parcel in the post of two of Jean Fields other books that I had tracked down in second-hand booksellers catalogues.
If And so today was the celebration of the suburbs, These joyous sands (1959) was the city’s counterpoint — a history of early European settlement, the Sorrento convict experiment of 1803, the foundation of Melbourne, pioneering on the Peninsula and the early days of Dromana, Merricks, Mornington and Rosebud. We learn that Dudley had built a holiday house at Sorrento, and that Jean’s connection to what she called her ‘small paradise’ could be traced to when as an eight-year old girl she first went to Sorrento where her father rented then purchased a limestone villa, ‘Craigie’, facing the front beach. These were the times when annual summer holidays lasted from the middle of December until after Easter, when Jean’s mother would ship ahead the summer’s provisions, homemade butter packed between layers of salt in an earthenware crock, home-cured bacon and ham, and all the clothes, bedding and cutlery necessary for Jean, her father, sister Doreen, baby brother Robert, governess, maid and dog.[53] The Peninsula would steady her sense of self. In the early 1940s, with two young sons of her own and Dudley away at the war, ‘I turned’, she later wrote, ‘like a homing pigeon to the scene of the happiest days of my childhood’, despite ‘a gnawing loneliness which sometimes seemed as though it would engulf me’.[54]
The day I first heard Dudley’s voice, I saw Jean’s handwriting — the second volume in my package was a signed copy of Grey ribbon to the border (published in 1973). On the dustjacket, a map of the Hume Highway anticipated the book’s subject, an itinerary of the route when it used to run through Kilmore and Seymour, Avenel and Euroa, through Benalla, Wangaratta and Wodonga to the border. Dudley is acknowledged for typing the manuscript, her father as ‘a prince of story tellers, who in my youth gave me a life-long interest in Victorian history’. She wanted to excite her reader with yarns and stories as much as with facts and figures; starting from one or other of Melbourne’s early watering holes — maybe Macs Hotel in Franklin Street—stopping first at the Sarah Sands ‘at the gates of Melbourne’, then out through Pentridge, Campbellfield and Kal Kallo before the road begins to rise in the foothills of the Great Dividing Range.
There are further glimpses too into the landscape of Jean Field’s imagining, what she felt about why she wrote.
To say that this thing or that that was the dominating factor which led one of us to take a certain step in our lives would, I think, be wholly wrong. Rather let us say that a chain of events, dating back to our ancestors, influenced us to become what we are. The events are the milestones along the way, our inherent inclinations the finger-post pointing this way or that. Our lives the roadway, running in straight unrelieved lines, or twisting and turning up hill and down, leading us to heights unexpected, vistas unimagined or quagmires unpredicted, through vales of shadows and again through sunny patches.[55]
So Jean had travelled this road herself — that grey ribbon to the border of the old Route 31, but also the personal road, troubled by shadow as well as warmed by sun. Where, I still wondered, were her finger posts and inherent inclinations, what ancestors influenced her to become what she became? The book has a few more breadcrumbs on the trail — that she herself as a child lived on a property somewhere near this busy highway, on land first taken up by the pastoralist known as Big Clarke, who had claimed land at Sunbury in the mid nineteenth century.[56]
A fourth Jean Field book I read in the library — Waggon wheels thro’ the wild flowers (published in 1977), again dedicated to ‘Those unsung heroines of the Australian Bush The Pioneer Women’. This was a small study of the Grampians region, the Carter family of Glenisla Station, and the settlement of Hamilton, Horsham and Halls Gap. And in a footnote on page 19, a reference that finally gave me a solid clue: ‘The diary of my grandfather, William Adeney, describes a visit to Mr Ware’s station … in the 1840s, where he assisted in the treatment of sheep for scab’.[57]
With the Adeney surname, Jean Field’s ancestry and influences come further into the frame, and newspapers give us further glimpses of her life. Jean Adeney, born at the family mansion ‘Clifton’ on 16 acres fronting Cotham Road Kew in 1908, which stood on the site of the Cotham Private Hospital.[58] By 1912 her father Stanwell Alfred Adeney is listed as a farmer on the Melbourne Road on a property called ‘Stanton’ in Gisborne. Jean got her middle name from her mother Florence, and when she was a year old, her parents took her to visit Florence’s mother Elizabeth Rose in Bunbury, WA—just in time, as the old lady died a year later.[59] The Gisborne Gazette tells us that 8-year old Jean was elected treasurer of the local Children’s Red Cross,[60] and at nineteen visited her uncle in Bunbury, where she wore a smart flame taffeta dress with touches of gold to the local Rowing Club Ball.[61]
And what of her grandfather, William Adeney, who perhaps with his young wife Emily Day was the well spring of her pride in ancestors and her sense of history. Perhaps family stories were passed down to Jean about William and his own philanthropic father, a tailor of Sackville Street in London who was sub-treasurer of the London Aged Christian Society.[62]
William and Emily were married in Hawthorn in 1878—he just shy of 60, she not yet 20. In the 1840s William had taken up a run called Choclyn, on the eastern side of Lake Colongulac near Camperdown, first with sheep, then cattle after the foot-rot set in. A JP, appointed a Board Member of the National School at Timboon, and erstwhile President of the Camperdown Cricket Club, he eventually retired to the house in Kew, and was later remembered as ‘a good honest man, of a somewhat retiring disposition’.[63]
But to bring this story of faces and places full circle, it was William Adeney who was that young man who looked through a Collins Street window in 1843, at the Aboriginal face on the other side of the glass.
What did he think of the Aborigines? You can read his diary in the State Library of Victoria, and it includes accounts of frontier violence around Portland Bay and elsewhere, shepherds killed by Aborigines, the retaliation of ‘our half savagized country men who are often guilty of dreadful wrongs’, their victims’ skulls used as shaving boxes.[64] There are also family stories among descendants, of other diaries burned, in which William recorded prominent families poisoning local Aborigines.
In her writings, Jean Field treads lightly across the fraught historical frontier, though she sees Indigenous peoples as characters in a vanished past rather than active agents in a vital present. In the 1950s, And so today notes that Nunawading is an aboriginal name for ‘Ceremonial Ground’. The reader is encouraged to imagine the original beauty of a place scarred by the march of civilisation as she sees it, though there is little of the human cost.[65] By the 1970s she is less circumspect: Grey ribbon to the border recounts the Faithfull Massacre at Benalla in 1838:
The terrible retaliation of the white settlers against the aboriginals does not make a pretty story and some say it should be allowed to sink into oblivion, but here I disagree — too much has been told of the treatment of the black man towards the white, the spearing and stealing of cattle, etc, while on the other hand the treatment meted out by the white settlers to the aboriginal, has nearly always been soft pedalled.[66]
So there we are — there’s not much more I can tell you about Jean F. Field, home duties, of Kew, Vermont, Blackburn and Sorrento. Suffice to say that a death notice in the Herald Sun recorded her peaceful passing in 2000 at the age of 91, beloved mother, mother-in-law, grandmother, and great grandmother. How apt that the funeral service was held at the Nepean Historical Society Museum in Sorrento. I’m sure that family stories abound, but I’ve just skimmed the public record for tantalising traces. There’s Adeney and Florence Avenues in Kew, where the old Clifton estate used to be. Those four slim volumes that sought to honour past achievements; a few references in newspapers and other records; a few feelers put out to people who vaguely remembered an imaginative, determined, tiny, birdlike woman, Granny Adeney’s favourite granddaughter. As for the rest, there are just her words on the page:
Time carries us on relentless wings, and history links together the past and the present. Tomorrow becomes yesterday in a moment, and what we do today, whether it be good or evil, is irrevocable.[67]
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My Marvellous Melbourne is a production of the Melbourne History Workshop, in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Our thanks to Gavin Nebauer at the Horwood Recording Studio, University of Melbourne, and Andrew Batterham for our theme music. You can find episode notes, further resources, and contact details at our website:
mymarvellousmelbourne.net.au
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[1] A sketch of Medor’s stall door appears in the Weekly Times, 15 April 1899, 17.
[2] Post-mortem report, The Queen v Emery Gordon Medor, Criminal trial brief and related papers, 1899, Public Record Office Victoria, VPRS 30, Unit 1179, Item 224.
[3] These and other categories of tenants appear in the town clerk’s papers related to the Eastern Market for 1899 (PROV, Town Clerk’s Files – Markets, VPRS 3181, Box 565). See also: The Australasian, 6 April 1901, 43.
[4] The Cartwrights were frequently referred to as Frank and Annie Stevens by neighbours and reporters. ‘Zinga Lee’ was sometimes spelled ‘Zingalee’ or even ‘Zingaralee’.
[5] ‘Phrenologist Runs Amok’ became the headline in a syndicated story published in papers including The Daily News (Perth), 11 April 1899, 4, and the Emu Bay Times, 11 April 1899, 3.
[6] Medor’s prison record describes him as a native of New South Wales born in 1841 (No. 28816, Central Register of Male Prisoners, PROV, VPRS 515, Item 53). The police gazette notice published in 1909 at the time of his release notes a birth year of 1844 (Victoria Police Gazette, 27 May 1909, 224). In an 1897 interview, Medor declared himself to be John Brodie Gordon Pirie, “son of William Frederick Duncan Pirie, after whom Port Pirie in South Australia and Pirie street in Adelaide were named” (Table Talk, 10 December 1897, 9). However, this is at least a partial embellishment, as the town was named after the ship John Pirie, itself named in honour of Sir John Pirie, Mayor of London and one of the founders of the South Australian Company (‘Port Pirie: South Australia/Australia’, in John Everett–Heath (ed), The Concise Dictionary of World Place Names, 3rd edition, Oxford University Press, 2014, available online at http://www.oxfordreference.com, accessed 30 March 2018).
[7] Argus, 13 April 1899, 6.
[8] Wagga Wagga Express, 13 April 1899, 4.
[9] According to the Kalgoorlie Miner, he moved into his Little Bourke Street lodgings in 1890 (11 April 1899, 5).
[10] Colin Cole, Melbourne Markets, 1841–1979 (Footscray: Melbourne Wholesale Fruit and Vegetable Trust, 1980), 33–34.
[11] Illustrated Sydney News, 10 August 1878, 7.
[12] Illustrated Sydney News, 3 Jan 1891, 10–12.
[13] Table Talk, 10 December 1897, 9; Medor, Central Register of Male Prisoners, No. 28816.
[14] A description of Medor’s stall and business practice appears in ‘A Melbourne Nostradamus’, Table Talk, 10 December 1897, 9. The title ‘Sidereal Scientist’ appears throughout the reportage. See, for example: Age, 11 April 1899, 5.
[15] Weekly Times, 15 April 1899, 17.
[16] Ibid; Age, 11 April 1899, 5; Weekly Times, 22 April 1899, 12.
[17] Letter from Medor to Captain Evans (Inspector General of Penal Establishments) and Lieutenant Governor John Madden, Medor trial briefs; Age, 11 April 1899, 4.
[18] Yea Chronicle, 4 May 1899, 2.
[19] Testimony of Dr Robert A Stirling, Medor trial briefs.
[20] See: Alana Jayne Piper, ‘A menace and an evil’, Fortune-telling in Australia, 1900–1918, History Australia, 11, no. 3 (2014): 53–73.
[21] Correspondence from Inspector of Markets (7 April 1899), and formal notice from Town Clerk (8 April 1899), Town Clerk’s Files – Markets, Box 565.
[22] Alcoholic withdrawal became one of the leading explanations for Medor’s state of mind during the murder trial (Testimony of Dr Francis Morton, Medor trial briefs).
[23] Testimony of Annie Cartwright, Medor trial briefs.
[24] Postmortem report of Dr John Brett, Medor trial briefs.
[25] Testimony of Barnet Freedman, Medor trial briefs; Age, 12 April 1899, 7.
[26] Medical reports of Drs Stirling and Morton, Medor trial briefs.
[27] Verdict, Medor trial briefs.
[28] Medor, Central Register of Male Prisoners, No. 28816.
[29] Undated manuscript copy of letter to Frederick Kettle Senior, Medor trial briefs.
[30] Ibid.
[31] Ibid.
[32] Crookwell Gazette, 30 October 1900, 2; Geelong Advertiser, 16 February 1904, 3.
[33] Medor, Central Register of Male Prisoners, No. 28816.
[34] Argus, 25 August 1908, 4.
[35] Age, 20 May 1909, 5.
[36] Ibid.
[37] William Adeney, Diary, 1842-43. MS 8520A, State Library of Victoria.
[38] Jean F. Field, And so today…a picturesque cavalcade of the years between (Melbourne: The National Press Pty Ltd, 1956), p. 11.
[39] Ibid., pp. 11-12.
[40] Ibid., p. 30.
[41] Ibid., p. 33.
[42] Tony Dingle, ‘People and places in post-war Melbourne’ in Graeme Davison, Tony Dingle and Seamus O’Hanlon, The cream brick frontier: histories of Australian suburbia (Clayton: Monash Publications in History, 1995), pp. 27-40.
[43] And so today, pp. 31-2.
[44] Ibid., p. 9.
[45] Ibid., p. 25.
[46] Ibid., p. 57.
[47] Ibid., p. 53.
[48] Ibid., p. 40.
[49] Ibid.
[50] https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/Record/6386013
[51] https://www.awm.gov.au/collection/C240920
[52] And so today, p. 25.
[53] Jean F. Field, These joyous sands (Sorrento, 1959), p. 43.
[54] Ibid., p. 51.
[55] Jean Field, Grey ribbon to the border (Melbourne: The Hawthorn Press, 1973), p. 1.
[56] Hugh Anderson, ‘Clarke, William John (1805–1874)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/clarke-william-john-1902/text2247, published first in hardcopy 1966, accessed online 7 May 2018; Grey ribbon to the border, p. 6.
[57] Jean Field, Waggon wheels thro’ the flowers (Melbourne: The Hawthorn Press, 1977), p. 19.
[58] Miles Lewis, Melbourne Mansions index, http://www.mileslewis.net/melbourne-mansions.html
[59] West Australian, 27 January 1910, p. 5; West Australian, 27 February 1911, p. 1.
[60] The Gisborne Gazette, 6 October 1916, p.2.
[61] Bunbury Herald and Blackwood Express, 28 May 1928, p. 3.
[62]http://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/57cb2e92-608c-46ff-8388-e0e22d56eb46
[63] Camperdown Chronicle, 16 June 1932, p. 5 (http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article23364013).
[64] William Adeney diary, MS 8520A, State Library of Victoria, pp. 307, 309.
[65] And so today, p. 15.
[66] Grey ribbon to the border, p. 59.
[67] These joyous sands, p. 77.
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