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Houdini over Australia

18 March 2010 in 1900s, 1910s, Aircraft, Australia, Periodicals, Videos by Brett Holman | 4 comments

Harry Houdini is still famous as a magician and escapologist, but he was also a pioneer aviator. One hundred years ago today, on 18 March 1910, he carried out the first powered, controlled flight in Australia, at Diggers Rest, near Melbourne. This testimonial from witnesses appeared in the Melbourne Argus, 19 March 1910, 18:

To Whom It May Concern.

Diggers’ Rest,
near Melbourne,
18/3/1910.

We, the undersigned, do hereby testify to the fact that on the above date, about 8 o’clock a.m., we witnessed Harry Houdini in a Voisin biplane (a French heavier than air machine) make three successful flights of from 1min. to 3½min., the last flight being of the lastmentioned duration. In his various flights he reached an altitude of 100ft., and in his longest flight traversed a distance of more than two miles.

(Signed)
HAROLD J. JAGELMAN, Kogarah, N.S.W.
ROBERT HOWIE, Diggers’ Rest.
A. BRASSAC, Paris.
WALTER P. SMITH, 4 Blackwood-street, North Melbourne.
F. ENFIELD SMITHELLS, care of Union Bank, Melbourne.
RALPH C. BANKS, Melbourne, motor garage.
FRANZ KUKOL, Vienna.
V. L. VICKERY, Highgate, England.
JOHN H. JORDAN, 11 Francis-street, Ascot-vale.

Houdini was on a tour of Australia, and the flight was undertaken to generate publicity for him. But it wasn’t undertaken on a whim: he bought and flew the Voisin in Germany the previous year, and had it crated up and shipped out to Australia.

This film shows Houdini on a later flight over Sydney, probably from Rosehill Racecourse. (My first YouTube upload; I took it from Hargrave.) After leaving Australia, he never flew again.

As with any aviation first, there are other claimants for the title of first to fly in Australia. Colin Defries, for example, demonstrated powered flight, but not controlled flight, in Sydney on 9 December 1909: he got up into the air but crashed it. Defries was British; the first Australian to fly (and in an Australian-built aeroplane too) was John Robertson Duigan, later in 1910. David Crotty, a curator at Museum Victoria, discusses some of these issues here; Scienceworks has just opened a new exhibition featuring some artifacts from Defries’ aeroplane (its engine was dumped into Port Phillip Bay to avoid import duty!)

I tend to favour Houdini’s claims, but that may be because Diggers Rest was my first hometown :) Celebrations are being held there this week — the Festival of Flight — including flying displays and (appropriately) magic shows.

A war artist in the family

3 January 2010 in 1940s, After 1950, Art, Australia, Family history, Pictures by Brett Holman | 6 comments

Kamiri Searchlight (1945) by Eric Thake

The war artist is Eric Thake (1904-1982), and the family is mine, although only in the extended sense: Thake’s grandparents, John and Sarah (née Prentice) Thake, were my great-great-grandparents. It was only a couple of weeks ago that my mother found this out. My paternal grandmother (who was born a Thake) did maintain that he was related, but how exactly was unclear, and his middle-class life in suburban Melbourne seemed a long way from her family on the Murray. But she was right!

Thake is a moderately important Australian artist: as one indicator of this, the Art Gallery of New South Wales holds 131 of his works in its collection. He worked in a number of different media: watercolours, photography, sketches, linocuts. In later years he even designed stamps, including a series to mark the anniversary of the first flight from Britain to Australia. He started out as a commercial artist in the 1920s, but also began to make a name for himself in less practical forms of art, including surrealism: in 1940, the director of the National Gallery of Victoria denounced Thake for being ‘too modern’! Perhaps his modernity was why the Royal Australian Air Force selected him in 1944 to be an official war artist. He had already shown some interest in the technology of flight, for example in this surrealist work entitled Archaeopteryx (1941):
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The great air race

23 October 2009 in 1930s, Aircraft, Australia, Blogging, Civil aviation, Periodicals by Brett Holman | 8 comments

The air power race. Great Britain also ran. Saturday Review, 15 December 1934, 514

It’s the 75th anniversary of the MacRobertson Trophy Air Race. More specifically, it’s the 75th anniversary of the day the race was won, 23 October 1934. The winners were C. W. A. Scott and Tom Campbell Black of Britain, who took just two days and twenty-three hours to cover the 18200 km from London to Melbourne. They flew in a de Havilland DH.88 Comet, named Grosvenor House, a beautifully streamlined twin-engined monoplane which was specially designed for the race. So a triumph for British aviation, then?

Well, if you’ve been reading the debate on a recent comments thread, you’ll know it’s not quite as straightforward as that. Scott and Black did win, but in second place was the Dutch-owned, US-designed Uiver, flown by K. D. Parmentier and J. J. Moll. True, it took 19 hours longer to fly the race route (albeit with an emergency stop at Albury, on the NSW-Victoria border). But that’s pretty impressive when you consider that Uiver was a Douglas DC-2 — an airliner, not designed for speed but for economy and payload. It even carried passengers for most of the race, and made many more stops than required by the race rules, as it was also blazing an air route for KLM. The Dutch actually won the race on handicap. Third was another American airliner, a Boeing 247D. The fastest British equivalent in the race was a New Zealand-owned DH.89 Dragon Rapide, which took nearly two weeks to complete the course.
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Not all of me shall die

6 September 2009 in 1910s, 1920s, Art, Australia, Pictures by Brett Holman | 3 comments

1888 Building - Gryphon Gallery

I recently attended a function in the Gryphon Gallery of the 1888 Building at the University of Melbourne, where there’s a local war memorial I missed out on when I last wrote on the topic. It was dedicated in 1920 in what was then the Teachers’ College, and takes the form of three stained glass windows. The central window — seen above and below — depicts an Australian soldier, rifle to the ready, bayonet fixed. He represents all those former students and staff members who served in the Australian Imperial Force (including at least two women).
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An airminded surprise

1 September 2009 in Aircraft, Australia, Pictures by Brett Holman | 4 comments

An airminded surprise

While walking home tonight I saw something unexpected.
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A dispatch from Harvard by the Yarra

3 August 2009 in Australia, Contemporary by Brett Holman | 6 comments

[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]

‘Harvard by the Yarra’ is actually the University of Melbourne, Australia (the Yarra being the major river hereabouts, though the university is not actually anywhere near it). Some wag coined the phrase to describe (and deride) the aspirations implicit in the Melbourne Model, a radical overhaul of undergraduate teaching announced in 2007. Instead of many specialised undergraduate courses, there are now (or soon will be) only six, which will be more general and will serve as feeders for professional postgraduate courses. So whereas students used to be able to enroll in a law or medicine degree straight out of high school, for example, they now must complete an undergraduate degree first. This is more like the US tertiary education system than the British one, which provided the model for the first Australian universities in the 19th century. Hence ‘Harvard by the Yarra’.

But there’s another similarity to Harvard. Melbourne, like most Australian universities is publicly-funded. However, like Harvard, it is a (relatively, in Australian terms) old and prestigious institution, and so it has also attracted a (again, in Australian terms) large endowment from various benefactors. You might think that this is a good thing to have in a global recession, but apparently not. A slump in the value of the university’s investments combined with several other factors (for example, the loss of fees from local students) has lead to a budgetary crisis, and an announcement by the vice-chancellor of a plan to cut 220 full-time equivalent jobs over the next few years, about 3% of the total workforce, to fall on both academics and administrative staff.

This doesn’t come at a good time for the Faculty of Arts, which has already been struggling to deal with its own deep budget deficits over the last couple of years. This is partly due to curriculum changes imposed by the Melbourne Model, but also to a shift in the way funds are allocated by the university. There has been much publicity about this in recent months, as Arts tried to reduce salary expenditure by encouraging academic staff to take early retirement or go on long-term leave without pay. It’s lost about 65 academics through these measures. The School of Historical Studies, where I completed my PhD studies, has been the focus of much of this attention. What was perhaps the leading history department in Australia is being slowly strangled by the need to do more with less. And with the recent spate of bad news, a recovery in the near future seems unlikely.
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Slap the Jap and make the Hun pay

28 June 2009 in 1910s, Australia, Books by Brett Holman | 2 comments

[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]

Or, Australia strides onto the world stage.

Today is the 90th anniversary of the signing of the Versailles Treaty and thus of the Covenant of the League of Nations (which formed the first thirty articles of the Treaty). This was a fateful moment, with heavy consequences for those who lived through the next quarter-century. But as all of that is well-known (and still debated), I want to draw attention to something that isn’t: Australia’s role in the Paris Peace Conference, which formulated both the Treaty and the Covenant. While Australia had existed as an independent nation since 1901, most Australians would consider the ANZAC participation in the Dardanelles campaign in 1915 to be its true coming of age. Australian forces went on to serve with great distinction on the Western Front, Palestine and elsewhere, a shedding of blood which earned Australia a place among the peacemakers in Paris. But what use did Australia make of its first opportunity to influence the future of the world?
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Why we fought?

22 June 2009 in 1940s, Art, Australia, Maps, Periodicals, Pictures by Brett Holman | 6 comments

KEEP IT WHITE / Argus, 9 December 1941, p. 4

The editorial cartoon from the Melbourne Argus of 9 December 1941, the issue which reported the Japanese landings in Malaya and air raid on Pearl Harbor. I guess it’s nice to know I can still be surprised, though, of course, there’s really no reason why I should have been.

Bluff and bluster

16 June 2009 in 1930s, Australia, Books, Civil defence, Periodicals by Brett Holman | 5 comments

Here are a couple of interesting but spurious claims about new weapons from 1939, which I’ve come across in my recent reading.

The first is from the Melbourne Argus of 19 January 1939. It’s very brief, no more than a simple statement that the Soviet Union has announced that it has developed a death ray. This prompted a response on 20 January (p. 10) from T. H. Laby, Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Melbourne. (I attended many a physics seminar in the Laby Theatre, back in the day.)

“Over and over again claims have been made to the discovery of a death-ray, and there has never been any substance in them,” he said. The whole electromagnetic spectrum, from the longest wireless waves to the shortest X-rays, is known to physicists, and none of them could be used as death-rays at any intensity at which it is possible to produce them.

Laby allowed that X-rays and sound rays (the latter not, of course, electromagnetic waves but pressure waves) could in theory be used to kill, but not in practice. He was right to be sceptical of the Soviet claim, although there is always the possibility of something new coming along to confound elderly but distinguished scientists (as actually happened with the laser in 1960). And the report from Moscow was so sketchy that all he has to go on is the term ‘death ray’, which as I’ve said before doesn’t mean its primary effect was to kill directly. As for the report itself, who knows whether the Soviets actually made this claim officially, or whether it was garbled or not. But in such uncertain times, a little misdirection about defence capabilities couldn’t hurt a friendless country.

The second dubious claim was made by H. G. Wells in an article for the London Daily Chronicle of 6 March 1939, which was reprinted in his Travels of a Republican Radical in Search of Hot Water. Having returned to Britain from a visit to Australia, Wells notes that

War does not come. That is due to the spreading realisation that the catastrophic anticipations of London, Paris, Berlin and indeed most places, being turned into gigantic holocausts, shambles, heaps of ruin and so forth have been much exaggerated.1

I’d agree with Wells that there was such a ’spreading realisation’, but the main reason he gives for this is surprising: it’s the invention of the ‘air-mine’, which seems to be carried by balloon:

The air-mine is a small, unobtrusive floater carrying a high explosive charge, detonators and suitable entanglements, that can be set to drift at any height. And it just drifts about with the wind. It is not merely unobtrusive but, as armaments go today, relatively inexpensive. You can send these things up in shoals, in clouds, in curtains, and aerial mine-sweepers have yet to be invented.2

I don’t know where Wells got this from. As far as I know, the British had no such device (although experiments were carried out with something similar during the war, at Frederick Lindemann’s insistence). Maybe it was a rumour put about by somebody official in order to boost confidence in air defence? If so, it looked like it worked on Wells, though it hardly made him look on the government with favour:

The fact remains that it is possible to cancel out the air, and that this present waste on excavations, tin-pot shelters and the like is either bare-faced jobbery or patent imbecility ….3

So there are two odd claims, both false and (maybe) both propaganda. Both certainly forgotten today.

  1. H. G. Wells, Travels of a Republican Radical in Search of Hot Water (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1939), 68-9.
  2. Ibid., 69.
  3. Ibid.

Official historians behaving badly

29 April 2009 in 1910s, After 1950, Australia, Books, Film by Brett Holman | 17 comments

A belated Anzac Day post.

Here’s C. E. W. Bean, the official historian of Australia’s involvement in the First World War, on why the infamous Suvla landings on 6 August 1915 didn’t cut the Gallipoli peninsula and open the road to Constantinople:

The reasons for the failure, which affected the fate of the Australian and New Zealand forces more profoundly than any other episode in the campaign, may be laid bare by future historians, probing unflinchingly for the causes. Many of the Anzac troops, on whom it left an enduring impression, attributed it partly to the senility of the leadership, partly to the inexperience of the troops, but largely to causes which lie deeper in the mentality of the British people. The same respect for the established order which caused Kitchener to entrust the enterprise to unsuitable commanders simply because they were senior, appeared to render each soldier inactive unless his officer directed, and each officer dumb unless his senior spoke. The men had doubtless the high qualities of their race, among them orderliness, decency, and modesty; they could follow a good leader anywhere as bravely as any troops in the Peninsula. But an enterprise such as that of Suvla demanded more than the ability to follow; it required that each man, or at least a high proportion of the force, should be able to lead; and the necessary quality of decision, which even a few years’ emancipation from the social restrictions of the Old World appeared to have bred in the emigrant, was — to colonial eyes — lacking in the Suvla troops. Moreover a large proportion of the new force had come straight from the highly organised life in or around overcrowded cities, and as a result they lacked the resourcefulness required for any activity in open country. They lacked also the hardness to set a high standard of achievement for themselves, while that demanded of them by the regimental and brigade staffs was — to put it mildly — inadequate for one of the decisive battles of the war. Further, though many reports had been heard concerning the excellent physique of the New Army, the standard in that respect was very uneven. There were in reality two well-defined types, the officers as a class being tall and well developed, but a majority of the men cramped in stature, presumably as the result of life in overcrowded industrial centres under conditions not yet operative to any marked extent in the great cities in Australia.

Hmm, so it’s the fault of the British soldier for being ‘cramped in nature’ and lacking in ‘resourcefulness’ and ‘hardness’, unlike the strapping young colonials, of course. At least Bean allows himself an out, in the form of ‘future historians’. One of these historians, Robin Prior, argues that — contrary to received wisdom — the primary aim at Suvla was actually just to set up a supply base for the northern Allied forces, which it did successfully. Any advances across the peninsula were secondary to this, and in any case were never likely to amount to much given the geography, the forces available and the operational plan. Which last, as it happens, was partly authored by Captain Cecil Aspinall, who later wrote (as Aspinall-Oglander) the British official history of the Gallipoli campaign, where he was quite happy to blame the commander on the ground, the elderly but inexperienced Lieutenant-General Sir Frederick Stopford, for the ‘failure’ of his plan.

Something for me to bear in mind when I talk to my students in a few weeks about the (brilliant but misleading) 1981 film Gallipoli. Especially the scene where the radio operator at the Nek, where waves of Australian soldiers have been uselessly slaughtered in assaults against Turkish trenches in support of the landings, reports that the British at Suvla have met no resistance but, instead of advancing inland, are ’sitting on the beach drinking cups of tea’. Peter Weir probably can’t be blamed for portraying the British military, officers and other ranks both, as incompetent when even the official historians are happy to do the same.

See C. E. W. Bean, Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918, volume 2: The Story of ANZAC from 4 May, 1915, to the evacuation of the Gallipoli Peninsula, 11th edition (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1941), 715-6; Robin Prior, Gallipoli: The End of the Myth (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2009), 207-9.

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