Australia

This year, because I don’t have enough to do I’ve joined the editorial collective of the Melbourne Historical Journal. Here’s the call for papers for Volume 36:

Call for Papers

Submissions Due: 1st June 2008

Published since 1961, Melbourne Historical Journal (MHJ) is a refereed journal for the publication of Australian and Aotearoa New Zealand postgraduate work in history. It is open to new approaches and aims to present original postgraduate work to a wide and responsive readership.

Journal articles should be between 5000-7000 words and constitute an original piece of research. Manuscripts should not be under review or scheduled for publication by any other journal, and should be substantially different from other published work. The collective asks that all manuscripts conform to the MHJ style guide.

Articles submitted for publication pass through a two-stage process of review. First, all articles are read by the collective, which decides whether or not to send the article to be refereed. Then articles are sent to two referees who are experts in the relevant field of historical inquiry. If both referees agree that the article is of a standard worthy of publication then the article is accepted.

Articles and queries may be submitted to MHJ via email at mhj@unimelb.edu.au.

Admittedly, not very much!

I’m giving a talk at 4pm, next Friday, 16 May 2008, in the Fritz Loewe Theatre at the School of Earth Sciences, University of Melbourne. The title is “Facing Armageddon: Britain and the Bomber, 1908-1941″ and it will be a broad overview of my thesis topic. It should be fun, for me at least — it’s the department where I’ve worked for many years as the IT manager, so it will nice (and perhaps challenging) to try to explain to all the geologists and climatologists exactly what it is I’ve been doing these past few years. Thanks to Malek Ghantous of the Earth Sciences Postgraduate Group for the invite and for organising this — it’s the first, and quite possibly the last, time a poster has been made to advertise a talk I’ve given!

If anybody local has nothing better to do on a Friday afternoon, you’re more than welcome to attend the talk (and enjoy the refreshments afterwards). Perhaps just drop me a line first, though, so we can anticipate any massive surge of interest (ha!) There’s a map showing where Earth Sciences is after the jump. (The lecture theatre is on the 2nd floor, right near the main entrance, just past the disused theremin/mural …)
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Source: Department of Veterans’ Affairs, Australia.

I was remiss in not mentioning the 12th Military History Carnival at Thoughts on Military History when it took place last month. My eye was drawn to ExecutedToday.com’s post about Harry ‘Breaker’ Morant and Peter Handcock, the Australian soldiers executed in 1902 for killing Boer prisoners-of-war. There’s still a debate about whether Kitchener issued an unwritten order to take no prisoners, meaning that the Australians were made scapegoats as a sop to either the Boer government (i.e. so it would consider peace) or to the British public. It seems unlikely to me, on the face of it, or at least unnecessary — it’s not like similar, illegal but tacitly accepted, acts were unknown in the later wars of the twentieth century.

By chance, I caught an episode of the excellent (but cancelled) Rewind the other night which dealt with the Breaker.¹ The transcript is online, and is worth a read: it does poke some holes in the scapegoaters’ arguments.

1. Rewind dealt with various mysteries and puzzles from Australian history. I missed it when it originally aired, which is a shame. It was different to most other history programmes in that it wasn’t afraid to present the viewer with primary source texts to support (or refute) an argument, or indeed to go digging around in archives for clues. I nearly stood up and applauded when, in a segment on the death of Billy Hughes’s daughter, the reporter said ‘So where to look for proof? Well, one obvious place is the National Library to look through Billy Hughes’s private papers’!

This has been all over the news here today, though I suspect interest is somewhat less outside Australia: the wreck of HMAS Sydney has been found. On 19 November 1941, Sydney was returning to Fremantle, Western Australia, after escorting a troopship north to Sunda Strait. It encountered the German commerce raider Kormoran somewhere out in the Indian Ocean, and a battle ensued. When the engagement broke off, both ships were mortally wounded. (Kormoran’s wreck was itself found only a few days ago.) About 320 out of Kormoran’s crew of nearly 400 were eventually rescued, but there were no survivors at all from Sydney. Its 645 dead represent the Royal Australian Navy’s greatest wartime loss.

The press reports seem to follow the same line — a 66-year old mystery solved. The location of the Sydney’s wreck was unknown because no radio signal was ever received from her during or after the battle, and the Kormoran’s lifeboats had drifted a long way before rescue. But that’s actually only part of the mystery. The real mystery — or at least the one which is the real reason for the long-standing interest in finding the wreck, and for the accompanying conspiracy theories — is how did a modern warship like Sydney come to be sunk by Kormoran, a converted merchantman?

This does seem strange, on the face of it. Sydney was a modern Leander-class light cruiser, commissioned in 1935. It was much faster than Kormoran (32 knots to 19), more heavily armoured, and more powerfully armed. Kormoran was on its first (and only) cruise: in nearly a year’s sail from Germany it had encountered nothing more fearsome than defenceless merchantmen. Sydney, by contrast, had previously had a successful career in the Mediterranean. In particular, in the Battle of Cape Spada in July 1940 she led a British destroyer squadron (correction: flotilla) into action against a pair of Italian light cruisers, which fled before her. Sydney’s accurate gunnery disabled the Bartolomeo Colleoni, which was then despatched by torpedoes from the destroyers. It doesn’t seem credible that the proud victor of Cape Spada could be sunk by a lowly commerce raider.

Except, that is, if you look a bit more closely:
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A curious snippet from Margaret MacMillan’s account of the Paris Peace Conference, Peacemakers (2002):

Why not give it to Hughes of Australia, suggested Clemenceau.¹

The ‘it’ was Heligoland, a small island in the North Sea, off the north-western coast of Germany. For most of the 19th century it had belonged to Britain, which swapped it for Zanzibar to Germany in 1890 — when relations between the two countries were still friendly. But then the naval arms race started up, and Heligoland became a handy place from any attempt by the Royal Navy to approach the German coast could be interfered with. Which is why, in Paris in 1919, the question arose of what to do about it.

The Admiralty naturally wanted the island back, but presumed that the Americans would object. In the end, the compromise solution adopted was to destroy all of its fortifications. Presumably Clemenceau’s suggestion was that Australia, as a nation almost as far away from Heligoland as possible, be given a Mandate over Heligoland (to add to New Guinea and Nauru), so that neither Britain nor Germany would have control over the disputed territory. I don’t know how seriously he meant it, or whether it ever had a chance of getting up. But in my mind’s eye I could see Australia dominating the North Sea from its Heligoland base with our single battlecruiser … well, no. But what would have happened if Australia had been given a Mandate over Heligoland?

Well, for a start, I don’t think Australia would have been exactly regarded as a disinterested party by Germany: British Empire and all that. In practice, there probably wouldn’t have been much difference between Australia governing Heligoland and Britain governing it: precisely because we were so far away from Europe, we had nothing to gain from it and nothing to lose, except perhaps in terms of our international reputation. I don’t see any reason why we wouldn’t use it to benefit our friend (and protecting power), Britain, in whatever way they wished.

What use would it have been to Britain? MacMillan notes that the coming of the aeroplane was another reason why Heligoland seemed newly valuable. She doesn’t explain, but seems to imply that this is because of their potential use as airbases for offensive action. I doubt that it would have been of much use for Britain in this way — it was too small to have a really big airbase (only 1 sq. km!) to be very powerful, and too close to Germany (only 70 km away) to survive for long.

But what Heligoland might have been very useful for was as a RDF (radar) station, to give Britain early warning of an incoming knock-out blow. It was actually ideally placed for this purpose.

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1. Margaret MacMillan, Peacemakers: The Paris Conference of 1919 and Its Attempt to End War (London: John Murray, 2002), 187.

[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]

The Honourable Kevin Rudd, MP, Prime Minister of Australia, apologises to the Stolen Generations, House of Representatives, Canberra, 13 February 2008:

Therefore, for our nation, the course of action is clear, and therefore, for our people, the course of action is clear: that is, to deal now with what has become one of the darkest chapters in Australia’s history. In doing so, we are doing more than contending with the facts, the evidence and the often rancorous public debate. In doing so, we are also wrestling with our own soul. This is not, as some would argue, a black-armband view of history; it is just the truth: the cold, confronting, uncomfortable truth — facing it, dealing with it, moving on from it. Until we fully confront that truth, there will always be a shadow hanging over us and our future as a fully united and fully reconciled people. It is time to reconcile. It is time to recognise the injustices of the past. It is time to say sorry. It is time to move forward together.

To the stolen generations, I say the following: as Prime Minister of Australia, I am sorry. On behalf of the government of Australia, I am sorry. On behalf of the parliament of Australia, I am sorry. I offer you this apology without qualification. We apologise for the hurt, the pain and suffering that we, the parliament, have caused you by the laws that previous parliaments have enacted. We apologise for the indignity, the degradation and the humiliation these laws embodied. We offer this apology to the mothers, the fathers, the brothers, the sisters, the families and the communities whose lives were ripped apart by the actions of successive governments under successive parliaments. In making this apology, I would also like to speak personally to the members of the stolen generations and their families: to those here today, so many of you; to those listening across the nation—from Yuendumu, in the central west of the Northern Territory, to Yabara, in North Queensland, and to Pitjantjatjara in South Australia.

I know that, in offering this apology on behalf of the government and the parliament, there is nothing I can say today that can take away the pain you have suffered personally. Whatever words I speak today, I cannot undo that. Words alone are not that powerful; grief is a very personal thing. I ask those non-Indigenous Australians listening today who may not fully understand why what we are doing is so important to imagine for a moment that this had happened to you. I say to honourable members here present: imagine if this had happened to us. Imagine the crippling effect. Imagine how hard it would be to forgive. My proposal is this: if the apology we extend today is accepted in the spirit of reconciliation in which it is offered, we can today resolve together that there be a new beginning for Australia. And it is to such a new beginning that I believe the nation is now calling us.

Sometimes, history doesn’t need to be sought out. Sometimes it comes to you.

Sources: Parliament of Australia (text), trimba (image).

Weddings Parties Anything, “A Tale They Won’t Believe”:

I have previously explained the relationship of this song to aviation history (well, it’s pretty slender, to be honest), here.

Though the Weddoes split up a decade back, they’re embarking on a reunion tour around Australia, which is very exciting news — particularly since I’ll be seeing them at the good old Corner Hotel in April! They’re also playing, oddly enough, one show in London, on 25 April. They’re sensational live, so why not mark Anzac Day in true Aussie style (i.e., rocking your socks off and, optionally, getting simultaneously smashed)? All the details are here.

Chonk on!

While missing out on a Clio may have been entirely predictable, having a post included in On Line Opinion/Club Troppo’s exhibition of the best Australian blog posts of 2007 was completely unforeseen! It’s a very pleasant surprise, and the exposure is nice too (On Line Opinion has something like 145,000 readers a week, according to Wikipedia). My post is here; all of the best posts are listed here.

I have to say, though, the post in question is not something I would have picked for my best of 2007: I don’t think it’s particularly well-written or insightful. Commenter Pericles would seem to agree: ‘What a strange piece. I had thought that the practice of delving into the past and finding odd observations about “overseas” had long passed its use-by date’. Arrrgh — and here was me thinking that anything that the proper study of history was anything and everything that had happened in the past for which records still exist. Why do I never seem to get these memos? Is there some mailing list I should be on? It’s especially bad news for historians of Tocqueville and the like. And somebody should tell George Simmers that his examination of D. H. Lawrence’s opinions of Australians ‘is an entirely pointless exercise, and a stunning waste of your time and mine’, since Pericles uses that very example for our instruction. Anyway, thanks, Pericles, for letting me know — won’t happen again.

Yesterday (New Year’s Eve), the temperature here in Melbourne reached 41 degrees Celsius (that’s just under 106 Fahrenheit for those of you in the United States and Belize) — the hottest day of 2007, as it happens. The overnight minimum was 30 degrees (86 for those of you etc), which I think is higher than all but a few days I experienced in the northern summer just past. Today is predicted to be another 40 degree day, though at least a weak change is predicted for the afternoon. Even now (a bit after 11am), it’s nudging 38 outside. Inside, my little flat at the top of my building is disgustingly hot and I can’t think, so I’m going into town to work at the State Library instead, which should be nice and cool. (I do have a sadly-neglected desk in the department, in an air-conditioned room, but they’ve changed the building entry codes or something and I don’t think I can get in.)

But what of the future? All else being equal, as global warming begins to take hold, and the average temperature rises, we will see more days like today and yesterday, and hotter days too. So more and more poor postgraduate students like me, who can’t afford to live somewhere cool, will tend to gravitate towards the SLV. Eventually, a point of no return will be reached: so many postgrads will have gathered there that the mass of the combined SLV+postgrads aggregate will be enough to form a black hole. Then, even if they do finish writing their theses, how will their examiners read their theses? If Hawking is right, they’d have to wait until the black hole had evaporated before the outside world could know what they had written, which of course is no use to them anyway.

So, ultimately, as far as the outside world is concerned, the number of new PhDs being produced will drop to zero. This pattern will recur all around the planet. Australia and other hot countries will succumb first. Countries with colder climes will last longer, but they will fall too, eventually. So historical research will one day grind to a halt. This is the tragedy of global warming!

See, told you I can’t think in this heat. I’m off to the library.

I spotted this ironic fusion of a peace symbol and a B-52 in the city¹ earlier in the year, and luckily it was still there when I went back with a camera this week.
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1. That’s Melbourne, not London …

No, really.

You have sat here too long for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!

Leo Amery (paraphrasing Oliver Cromwell’s dismissal of the Rump Parliament), in reference to Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, 7 May 1940.

The grave of Pte John Joseph Mulqueeney, in Courcelette British Cemetery, Somme, France. He was killed on 17 August 1916 near Mouquet Farm.

I am extremely grateful to Steve John for providing me with this photograph.

This week I attended the bi-annual departmental Work in Progress Day, where postgrads give talks on their research. I wasn’t presenting this time around (I did earlier this year) but it turns out that two of my fellow students are also fellow bloggers! (Which, as far as I know, makes a total of three for the department, including myself.)

One I knew about already, actually: David Llewellyn’s Australia Felix. He’s doing his PhD on the influence of utilitarianism in Australian political life — for example in the genesis of the Australian constitution. His paper, which is online, takes in Aeneas, Madame de Stael, Gallipoli, Chartism and of course Jeremy Bentham. By taking as a touchstone a novel by Henry Handel Richardson, it also gave me flashbacks to English lit in high school, where I was forced to read The Getting of Wisdom. Which in retrospect wasn’t a bad book, but at the time I had a very low tolerance for any novel without spaceships or elves in it, so a coming-of-age novel set in a private girls’ school didn’t exactly cut it! Do check out David’s website and blog though.

The other blog is Megan Sheehy’s History and Web 2.0. Her MA topic is on the use of Web 2.0 tools by Australian historians, and her paper was specifically about the use of YouTube. Megan also has a post about her talk, but even better (and rather recursively!) she has put a two-part video of it on YouTube (part one, part two).

Above is the first part: you can see me arriving late at -8:37, but it’s worth watching the rest of it too :)

WHAT AUSTRALIA WOULD BE LIKE UNDER HUN RULE. — An original recruiting poster which was used with great success in South Australia. Tasmania, it will be noted, becomes Kaisermania, and the idols of the Huns have provided other place-names.

This is from the Daily Mail, 3 July 1917, p. 8, and would appear to be a South Australian recruiting poster, showing how the map of Australia might be redrawn if Germany won. Australia itself becomes “New-Germany”; Perth becomes Tirpitzburg; Adelaide, Hindenburg; Brisbane, Bernhardiburg; Sydney, Nietscheburg [sic]; Tasmania (not Hobart), Kaisermania; and, most appropriately from my point of view, Melbourne would be renamed Zeppelinburg!

I don’t think much has been written on German plans for Australia in the event of victory in the First World War, probably because the Germans themselves gave very little thought to the place. However, it seems unlikely that Germany would have wanted to take over Australia lock, stock and barrel; better to turn us into some sort of client state instead. They’d probably have wanted to take a few of Britain’s colonial possessions in the area, and perhaps would have insisted upon reparations or favourable trade terms. And our battlecruiser HMAS Australia — which caused von Spee such headaches in 1914 — would no doubt have had to go. No independent foreign policy, perhaps (not that we had much of one as it was!) But we probably wouldn’t have had to go so far as to need to translate such phrases as “don’t come the raw prawn with me, mate” into German — fortunately!

This idea that we had to fight Germany in France in order to prevent the Kaiser’s victory parade down Swanston St had obvious potential as a motivational device, and was used in stories and films as well. Did people really believe it? The Daily Mail said that the poster had ‘great success’, so perhaps they did.

Songs of Australia: the landscape, the country and the city.

Icehouse, “Great Southern Land”.

Standing at the limit of an endless ocean
Stranded like a runaway, lost at sea
City on a rainy day down in the harbour
Watching as the grey clouds shadow the bay

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In my recent post on the Imperial War Museum I remarked upon the commemorative function of the museum, or rather the apparent lack of it. So I was interested to come across this comment made in 1922 by Major-General Sir Frederick Maurice (he of the Maurice Affair), explaining what he thought the true value of the IWM was:

We of the generation who fought have in this matter grave responsibilities; we have to think not of ourselves but of our children and our children’s children. The memorials to our dead now to be found in nearly every town, village and parish, with their simple record of sacrifice, will do much, but the effect of these memorials will become every year less poignant. The War Museum impresses the mind in another but not less direct way. I have talked with numbers of people who have told me that on seeing it they, for the first time, began to understand the nature of trench warfare on the Western Front. The devastated areas in France and Belgium are rapidly ceasing to be devastated. Within a generation the area of the trenches will have much the same appearance as have the Roman and British camps on Salisbury Plain. The cemeteries will remain, but they are not in our midst. To refuse to have a permanent and national memorial of the nature of the Great War because to many of us it evokes memories which are terrible and terrifying is to give way to unmanly sentiment and to do a grave wrong to the generations to come after us.¹

(The context here was that the IWM was then housed temporarily at the Crystal Palace, and it had been proposed to move it to the Imperial Institute, where Imperial College is now. The Institute protested about this, and in turn somebody, somewhere seems to have taken this as a pretext to argue against the idea of having a war museum at all, because (a) the weapons were nearly all out of date; (b) the British Museum and the Committee of Imperial Defence already had books and records about the war; and (c) local war memorials were a better ‘record of the sufferings, sacrifice and achievements of the war’.² Maurice was, obviously, trying to knock this idea on the head.)

In an age when everyone, more or less, has seen Gallipoli or Blackadder goes Forth or both, it’s easy to forget that there was a time when the general public did not have much of an idea as to what trench warfare was actually like. So in educating the public about the war’s realities, it was in fact serving a memorial function: this is how your father lived, this is how your sweetheart died.³ I think my observation, or rather lack of observation, about the IWM’s non-commemorative nature was based upon the assumption that its museum functions were something fundamentally apart from its memorial aspects, which of course doesn’t make much sense if you think about it. The whole purpose of the museum, founded in a time of war, was to make sure that future generations would remember what had happened. And of course the choice of what is exhibited in the IWM, what wars are featured and whose stories are told, is an exercise in (necessarily) selective memory.

So the Imperial War Museum itself, just by existing, can be said to serve the memory of those who served. On the other hand, it is still true that the Australian War Memorial (and note it is called a memorial, not a museum) was clearly designed in a different way, with a part of it expressly set aside for commemoration. The creators of the IWM and of the AWM chose different paths but that doesn’t mean they were starting from different assumptions.

1. Observer, 11 June 1922, p. 7.
2. Ibid.
3. Maurice probably would have approved of the Trench Experience, then.

This post relates to my trip to Europe in July-September 2007.

[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]

One interesting minor theme of my recent museum visits here in London has been, I suppose, the popular origins of wargames (as opposed to the intellectual origins): I’ve been coming across a number of games, produced in the first half of the twentieth century and aimed presumably at children, which represent war in some way. War games, but not yet wargames. So for example, one exhibit in the Science Museum’s aviation gallery was a First World War-era board game called Aviation: The Aerial Tactics Game of Attack and Defence. The board represents the sky, and the pieces are aircraft and squadrons. Here’s the box:

According to the caption, it was published around 1920, and the cover shows ’stylised First World War tanks and Handley Page H.P. 0/400 [sic] bombers’. It doesn’t look particularly like an O/400 to me; the corresponding game-piece is just called a Battle Plane (and the “tanks” are actually anti-aircraft guns on tank chassis, very advanced!)
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The big trip to the UK looms. It’s my first and I’m greatly looking forward to it — all the more so because I have long been fascinated by the place and its history. Although I can’t say it was always my plan to do a PhD in British military aviation history, looking back, there were some clues:

Go ahead and laugh! This is a drawing I did when I was 9 or 10. It shows a Hawker Hurricane,¹ specifically PZ865, “The Last of the Many”, the final production unit. I proudly showed it to our neighbour across the road, who (as I recall) had been in the air force in the war (which back then, meant the Second World War). All I can remember of his reaction was that he said the nose was too long for a Hurricane, and well, he was right :)
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1. As the cunningly-drawn faux brass plate at the bottom informs the viewer. LOL.

Around Easter, I happened to have a camera on me when an airship was passing overhead, and managed to take a couple of pictures before the camera batteries died. But they didn’t look quite right, and eventually I realised that it was because the airship was too red. Everybody knows, at least subconsciously, that airships are always silver grey; in fact, they probably should be photographed in black and white. So I used Photoshop to turn the airship into grey and the photograph into black and white. It looks much better now!

The black line could almost be a bracing wire on some Sopwith biplane, straining to reach the raider. Sadly, it’s just part of the tram power distribution system.

This is very cool: the Australian War Memorial, Australia’s foremost military history museum, seems to be getting into blogging in a big way! Today, there was an announcement on H-War (and Victoria’s cross? is already on the case) of a group blog running in conjunction with an exhibition about Australia’s participation in the big Western Front battles of 1917: To Flanders Fields, 1917. It’s maintained by a group of AWM curators and historians: Peter Burness, Craig Tibbitts, Shaune Lakin and Anne-Marie Condé.

That’s all I was going to mention, but I noticed that the AWM has set up a subdomain called blog.awm.gov.au, which suggested that there might be other AWM blogs out there. Now, that page is completely blank, so I used my Google-fu to see if I could find anything else using that domainname. And there are four more blogs! Focus: photography & war 1945-2006; Gallipoli Battlefield Tour 2007; George Lambert: Gallipoli & Palestine Landscapes; Lawrence of Arabia & the Light Horse. All of them accompany AWM exhibitions, except for the Gallipoli tour one, obviously. Presumably they won’t be updated after their associated exhibition ends, but then there’ll be other blogs to replace them.

The AWM is to be applauded for this. They all look very interesting and are already well-established, with posts on a variety of intriguing topics, with some fantastic illustrations to boot (drawing on one of the Memorial’s strengths there). A lot of effort has been put into them and it shows. But I wonder why I haven’t come across any of these blogs before? Partly it’s because I don’t visit the AWM homepage often enough — they’re all listed there quite prominently (so much for Google-fu!) But another part of the answer would seem to be that the AWM’s bloggers haven’t tried to hook into the rest of the historioblogosphere — there are no links to other blogs in their sidebars or posts (that I could see anyway). Whether this is by design or by accident I can’t say — I can see why they’d want to focus on their own content — but I think they’re missing out on promotional opportunities by neglecting the social networking aspect of blogging. Hopefully a bit of linkage in their direction will show them what they are missing.

I don’t want to end on even that slightly sour note, as I do think this is really exciting, so I’ll point to one post by Anne-Marie Condé which caught my eye. It’s about the Australian War Records Section, formed in London in May 1917, effectively the origins of the AWM itself, and features some photographs and artefacts associated with it, such as a 1918-pattern pair of anti-gas goggles and a stuffed carrier pigeon. There’s also some more good news: the AWM is digitising the war diaries of Australian Army units involved in the various wars of the twentieth century. The project is only its early days, but this is going to be a tremendous resource for historians and genealogists. I was disappointed, though, to discover that war diary entries don’t begin with sentences like ‘Dear war diary, today we launched another futile assault against Turkish positions at Lone Pine …’ :D

It’s not often that I happen across a discussion of knock-out blow novels outside specialist literature, so I was interested to see that Gideon Haigh (probably best known as a cricket writer, but also a fine essayist) talks about Nevil Shute’s What Happened to the Corbetts (1939) in the current issue of The Monthly. The article itself (which is not online; a precis of sorts is available from the Sunday Telegraph) is about On the Beach, published fifty years ago this month: ‘arguably Australia’s most important novel’¹ since it was the first really popular novel to deal with nuclear war and human extinction, selling 4 million copies worldwide.

In retrospect, 1957 was a hinge point in the Cold War, when passive resignation about nuclear arms began yielding to alarm and horror. It was the year that the CND was founded in Britain and the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy was established in the US; it was the year that the National Council of Churches warned that the arms race might “lead directly to a war that will destroy civilization”. In 1955, fewer than one-fifth of Americans knew what fallout was; by 1958, seven in ten were saying they would favour a worldwide organisation to prohibit nuclear weapons.

How many people during that transition read JB Priestley’s ‘Russia, the Atom and the West’ in the New Statesman? Or heard the Nobel-winning chemist Linus Pauling rail against nuclear arms? And how many read On the Beach? Nevil Shute’s novel was the great popular work on the gravest matter besetting civilisation.²

Haigh is right to see that the two books have a great deal in common.

What Happened, like On the Beach, is a conventional novel on an unconventional, very nearly taboo, subject: the civilian experience of war, with its trials of disaster and displacement. It is not, however, an anti-war novel. To write against war when its coming was inevitable would have struck Shute as pointless posturing. He was arguing not for peace but for preparedness, to ready Britons “for the terrible things that you, and I, and all the citizens of the cities in this country may one day have to face together”. On the novel’s release in April 1939, a thousand copies were distributed to workers in Air Raid Precautions. It was “the entertainer serving a useful purpose”.³

But I don’t know that I agree that the subject of the ‘civilian experience of war’ was ‘very nearly taboo’. There were plenty of novels dealing with this subject written in the 1920s and 1930s, at least as it related to aerial warfare. It’s just that virtually all of the others were sensationalistic trash in comparison to What Happened to the Corbetts, as I have previously argued.⁴ Otherwise I like Haigh’s take on it.

And what happened to Nevil Shute? After moving to Australia in 1950 and buying the country’s first dishwasher, and writing a few more books, he died in 1960. And after that?

The decline of Shute’s reputation is unremarkable: it simply attests the perishability of popular art. Shute sold 15 million books in his lifetime, but he aspired to neither literary immortality nor critical approval: “The book which thrills the reviewer with its artistic perfection will probably not be accepted by the public, while a book which the public value for its contents will probably seem trivial and worthless artistically to the reviewer.” His obscurity also reflects the contours of the book market: the middle-class, middlebrow novelist of ideas is a discontinued line.⁵

Still, he wrote one book of almost geopolitical significance; that’s more than most writers can aspire to.

1. Gideon Haigh, “Shute the messenger: how the end of the world came to Melbourne”, The Monthly, June 2007, 52.
2. Ibid., 53.
3. Ibid., 47.
4. Haigh has clearly benefited from reading Paul Brians’ Nuclear Holocausts: Atomic War in Fiction, but doesn’t seem to have any comparable sources for the knock-out blow literature. That’s ok, but you know, he could have asked me!
5. Haigh, “Shute the messenger”, 46.

During the Second World War, several million foreign servicemen and -women were stationed in Britain for varying periods of time. These included many Australians, for most of whom it was their first glimpse of Britain.¹ In 1940, one of them described his impressions of the mother country in an article for the Spectator entitled “An Anzac on England”. His name was Sydney Melbourne (although for some reason I strongly suspect this was a pseudonym), and he was probably serving with one of the Australian Army units diverted to Britain after the fall of France.² So to mark Anzac Day, and this being a British history blog, here’s what one wide-eyed colonial had to say about Pommyland. And it mostly wasn’t flattering!

The first thing which struck him was the shocking waste of good farming land.

Why is so much land that is obviously fertile lying idle in farms of 1,000 acres and even larger? Why are so many patches of scrub and useless bushes left uncleared? We [Australians] can respect good timber — that is always an asset — but stunted copses and brambles are an eyesore which no good farmer should tolerate a day longer than he can help.³

According to Sydney, in the Antipodes (he fraternally provided some examples from New Zealand) settlers fought hard to cultivate land much more marginal than that which was left unused in Britain, and despite droughts and fires exported their produce overseas and made a good living. He praised Hitler’s agrarian policy, which utilised German land more fully and reduced the need for imports, and was puzzled that the British preferred the picturesque over the productive, `the dangerous result of a short-sighted policy […] beauty will not feed a nation’s workers (or employ them), and in these times efficiency is a more valuable asset than is scenery’. There’s no question that Britain in 1940 was underutilising its land, since during the war it made strenuous efforts to increase the area under cultivation, so as to reduce the need for imports (and hence vulnerability to U-boats). But from the perspective of 2007, in the middle (or, hopefully, near the end) of the worst drought on record, it seems strange to boast of how intensely Australia uses even marginal land: it’s precisely this sort of behaviour that has landed us in the current fine mess.
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1. Including two members of my family.
2. The main units were 18th Brigade and 25th Brigade, which at around this time were put together to form the bulk of 9th Division.
3. Sydney Melbourne, “An Anzac on England”, Spectator, 20 September 1940, 289. Unless otherwise specified, all quotations are from this source.

It’s always interesting to see echoes of the golden age of aviation in today’s pop culture. At the Avia-Corner, Scott Palmer ends an update on the search for Amelia Earhart with a related music video: Amelia Earhart versus the Dancing Bear, by The Handsome Family. Well, I’ll see his ‘aviatrix lost at sea, never to be found’ and raise him the ‘mother proud of [a] little boy’.

This aviatrix is Amy Johnson; I’ve written about her in relation to this song — The Golden Age of Aviation by the Lucksmiths — before. But I like it so much, it deserves a second airing.
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The Australian International Airshow 2007 took place last week, at Avalon near Melbourne. All I saw of it was a C-17, a F-111 escorted by two Hawks, four F/A-18s in a diamond formation, and a few helicopters (Tigers?) — presumably all RAAF/ADF aircraft — which buzzed the City and inner suburbs earlier in the week. I did go to the 2003 air show — info and pics here and here — and got to see a variety of interesting aircraft — a B-1B, a Meteor, a Canberra, a Global Hawk, even a flying Blériot replica. And fell in love with Connie, like everyone else who saw her.

One of the highlights was the First World War display, involving a Fokker Triplane, a Sopwith Camel, an SE.5a and a Nieuport 11 (and several chronologically-challenged Tiger Moths and maybe some others). Naturally they put on a mock combat, something these old warbirds do best — yeah, seeing and hearing F-15s scream low over the runway is a thrill, but 2 seconds later and the plane is gone, or else up high in the sky and you have to reach for your binoculars. Biplanes fly low and slow — so everyone can follow the action — but are also very maneuverable — so are fun to watch. Plus there’s that whole “knights of the air” thing going on. Anyway, the climax of the display was an attack on a balloon — I think it was supposed to be an observation balloon, but my memory is fuzzy and I’m not sure if it was in the air or still on the ground. Of course the attack is successful and the hydrogen goes whoosh! and there’s a nice big explosion.
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Jörg Friedrich’s book The Fire: The Bombing of Germany, 1940-1945, was first published in Germany in 2002. In 2006, it was published in an English translation (by Allison Brown) by Columbia University Press. The Fire consists of seven sections: Weapon, Strategy, Land, Protection, We, I and Stone. These chart the development of aerial attack on Germany during the Second World War, the counter-measures undertaken by authorities, the experience of those under attack and the destruction wreaked upon cities and culture. The book received extensive publicity when it came out in Germany: according to the Columbia blurb, it features ‘meticulous research’ into a strategy the wisdom of which ‘has never been questioned.’ At the end of last year, we — Dan Todman and Brett Holman — received unsolicited copies for review. Despite some anxieties about the implications of such a marketing strategy (for the profession as a whole and for individual careers), we decided to collaborate on a review in the form of a conversation, which we’ll post at Airminded and Trench Fever and highlight at Cliopatria and Revise and Dissent.

Dan Todman: It’s very clear from the way this book is presented and the way it has been publicised that it’s meant to be contentious. If we start with the moral aspect of strategic bombing — a key area for recent literary and philosophical debate by writers such as W. G. Sebald and A. C. Grayling — there are times when Friedrich comes close to saying something explosive in his treatment of German civilians as innocent victims. Yet he always backs off from the logical endpoint of his argument. Here is Friedrich describing the essential randomness of bombing for “terror”:

The annihilation principle does not ask such questions. Not until it is too late does everyone know that they can be struck. Terror does not seek to achieve anything; its regime is absolute. It comes out of the blue, needs no reasons, atones no guilt. Its success might be unconditional subjection, but even that does not end the horror. It makes no deals; its resolve is inscrutable and its aim, absurd.
…
… there was no correlation between the annihilation of the Jews and the annihilation by bombs. And no analogy. And death by gas will not create one. (296)

Ultimately, even in his epilogue written for the English translation, it seems to me that Friedrich makes a moral judgement on bombing only by implication.

Brett Holman: He does always seem to step back from the brink when he is about to actually come to a conclusion. (I say “seem” because he very often uses such flowery, allusive language that I sometimes find it hard to work out what he is saying.) And yes, that epilogue was disappointingly tame — it was his chance to explain the purpose of The Fire to a readership very different to the one it was originally written for.

But the whole tenor of the book does lean towards the Germans-as-victims side of things. Or what is much worse, suggesting that area bombing is equivalent to the Holocaust — despite his explicit denial of same in the above quote. I’m not the first person to notice that he often uses words like “crematorium” when describing the effects of incendiary bombing, which is perhaps apt but certainly unfortunate in this context. At one point Friedrich calls 5 Group ‘No. 5 Mass Destruction Group’ (306), which I thought was perhaps a mistranslation. Judging from Jög Arnold’s H-German review, it may well be — he translates the original German as ‘group of mass extermination Nr. 5′, which is even worse! To me, Friedrich’s choice of words seems very pointed, and very telling.

It’s also odd how the victims of Allied bombing always seem to be nuns and children, never Nazi officials or Gestapo agents. (Which, by the way, echoes wartime propaganda — critics of which cynically marvelled at the amazing accuracy of the enemy’s unguided bombs in seeking out orphanages and nursing homes.) Never does he admit that any hits on factories, or disruption of production due to loss of workers or infrastructure had anything more than a minor, temporary effect. The impression I got from reading The Fire was that bombing didn’t help the Allies win the war at all, and only killed innocents.

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And marble, and granite, and wood …

I wrote recently that every town in Australia seems to have a war memorial. Here are some examples, photos I took over a three day period without going too far out of my way. This post is image-heavy, but everyone has broadband now don’t they?
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