Adelaide (AKA 'Radelaide') has more to offer than transport museums, of course. On my last day there I had a look at the South Australian Museum, as well as some of the nearby sights. This copy of a Venus by Antonio Canova was apparently somewhat controversial when presented to the city in 1892, though she seems fairly demure today. Depending on the angle.
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After the AHA, I stayed in Adelaide for a few days to see the sights. I have a bit of a thing for maritime museums, so the South Australian Maritime Museum at Port Adelaide was an obvious choice. It became even more obvious when I discovered that the National Railway Museum and the South Australian Aviation Museum were both within easy walking distance of the Maritime Museum!
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Last week, the Australian Historical Association held its 31st annual conference, hosted by the University of Adelaide. The last time I was at an AHA was in 2008 (I didn't have to go far, since it was in Melbourne); it seems to have got bigger since then. Around four hundred delegates, if memory serves; up to nine concurrent sessions as well as three smaller, parallel conferences -- that's as big as history conferences get in Australia. If anything it was too big. There was an embarrassment of riches and it wasn't possible to see everything of interest; but that's to be expected (though it would have helped if the sessions were properly streamed by subject). The real problem with big conferences, I find, is that it makes the whole thing a bit fragmented. When you chat to someone in the coffee break, you probably haven't gone to many of the same sessions, let alone each other's. It's harder to get an overall sense of what's going on (though Twitter does help now). So I think I prefer the smaller, more specialist conferences and workshops. That said, it was still an absorbing week of history and well worth attending. Here are some of the highlights (for another attendee's perspective, see here, here, here and here).
There wasn't much aviation history going on, except for Erin Ihde's (New England) paper on Biggles in Australia -- which sadly I couldn't attend! But there was quite a lot of military history. Ashleigh Gilbertson (Adelaide) looked at the dedication the Tomb of the Unknown Australian Soldier in Canberra in 1993, and asked why then and not, say, in the early 1920s when the idea was first proposed. The usual answer, and one which I probably would have given myself, is that it had to do with Paul Keating's republican push, but Gilbertson argued that he played no part in the process. Instead it was a confluence of factors which made it possible by the early 1990s (for example, the principle in the world wars, that Australian soldiers would be buried near where they fell, was abandoned from Vietnam on). Christina Twomey (Monash) rather provocatively suggested that feminism 'saved' Anzac Day, which by the early 1980s appeared to be dying along with the diggers. But, she argued, feminist antiwar protests at Anzac Day ceremonies gave great copy to the press, which portrayed the women as extremists and fuelled the determination of veterans and their families to carry on. Caroline Adams (South Australia) looked at Australian nursing in the Boer War. It took some time for them to even be allowed into the rear area hospitals, and they also had a hard time enforcing modern aseptic discipline on the orderlies; but eventually they helped to increase survival rates in the wards. As these selections might suggest, the military history sessions were dominated by women (Yvonne Perkins noted that more than two thirds of the audience in one were female). Why this might be is an interesting question. Maybe it's the result of the turn towards war and society, but then the only paper on operational military history was given by a woman: Meleah Hampton (Adelaide) spoke about Australian infantry-artillery cooperation at Pozieres in 1916. She took as her title J. F. C. Fuller's dictum, 'artillery conquers and infantry occupies', but she showed what a difference discipline made to the infantry's success in following up the artillery's.
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So the Australian Historical Association conference is next week. My slot is on the Thursday, the session before lunch. I've written the article and as I predicted it was a tight squeeze. In fact I'm not sure if it's trying to be too much and consequently is not enough. But the good thing about this AHA/CAL bursary is that I'll have a writing mentor and two writing workshops during the conference to help me figure that out.
Now it's time to put the talk itself together. In fact I'm going to be boring and use the same plan for the talk:
That is, first explain about mystery aeroplanes, when they were seen, where they were seen, who saw them. Then explain them with reference to the context of 1918: the idea that a German seaplane had flown over Sydney in 1917, and the fear of an Allied collapse on the Western Front. And finally to show that what happened in Australia in 1918 was not unique to that time or that place, but was part of a Scareship Age.
Or maybe I'll swap 1 and 2 around. I don't know.
Incidentally, I've just put up a page listing my posts about mystery aircraft scares. I had intended this to accompany a post comparing the Australian 1918 scare to others, but was too busy writing the article. Numerous entries actually have no links; I'll try to fill some of those blanks in in future.
If the threat from Germans outside Australia during the First World War was small, the threat from Germans inside Australia was non-existent. There is no credible evidence at all of any espionage, subversion or sabotage activities by German-Australians. But you wouldn't know it from the way the Australian people and their government behaved. It's not an episode that does the nation credit.
Before the war, the German community in Australia was generally liked and respected. People of German descent numbered around 100,000 in 1914, out of a population of nearly 5 million. That's not very much in relative terms, though it did constitute the largest non-British ethnic group of immigrants. Most of the German-born had lived here for decades: they started coming in numbers in 1838, with the greatest surge coming in the gold rush years of the 1850s. So by the time Germany and Australia went to war, many German-Australians were third-generation and had never seen the country of their forebears. That's not to say they didn't have a distinctive culture: a majority of them were Lutherans, there were German-language newspapers, and they often clustered in 'German' districts and towns, especially in South Australia and Queensland. But the evidence is that they felt they were Australian, and while they were understandably distressed by the outbreak of war, most German-Australians wanted to do their part and were confused when other Australians turned against them.
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It's been more than two weeks since I've posted anything on my current mystery aeroplane research, but it's not because I haven't been working on it. In fact it is coming along pretty well. There are still some frustrating gaps in my understanding of the archival records, but the writing is coming along. I've written up the section about the aeroplane scare, and next I'll be doing the section on the German threat, as depicted above in a 1918 (?) poster by Norman Lindsay. So here's something about that.
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It has happened before that while I'm focused on some research topic but read something seemingly unrelated, that unanticipated connections serendipitously appear between the two. In this case it was while reading a collection of short stories by Arthur Machen, an influential writer of supernatural horror who wrote his greatest, and most disturbing, works in the 1890s.1 Many drew upon his Welsh heritage (he was born in and grew up near Caerleon; though I kept an eye out during my visit for his blue plaque I managed to miss it), particularly Celtic myths about the Little People which he used to create far, far darker things than most of the fairies fluttering around contemporary fantastic literature. Those were the stories I remember most from reading Machen as a teenager, and they do not disappoint now.
But this time around I was more intrigued by Machen's writing from the First World War, when he was a journalist for the Evening News, part of Lord Northcliffe's empire. Of these, 'The bowmen' (first published in September 1914) has gained some notoriety as the inspiration for the Angel of Mons which supposedly saved the BEF from disaster in its first major battle of the war. Machen story has not angels, but phantom bowmen from Agincourt lending their firepower to the British line as it repels a German attack (another story in this collection, 'The soldiers' rest', also evokes a supernatural link between the Tommy and his medieval predecessors). It was clearly meant to be read as fiction, but seems to have inspired the belief that something like it had actually happened during the retreat from Mons. Machen always denied that 'The bowmen' was anything other than fiction and tried quite publicly to refute the myths/rumours/urban legends his story had generated, but in the end the Angel wasn't going anywhere: people -- at least, some people -- wanted to believe in it.2
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So, to the mystery aeroplane sceptics. Again, there are some sceptical opinions to be found in the press and police reports, but relatively few. Very early on, the Age, one of Melbourne's leading newspapers, wrote on 25 March 1918 that
the defence authorities are inclined to laugh at the story told by Police Constable Wright, of Ouyen, that at Nyang on Thursday last [21 March] he saw two aeroplanes flying in a westerly direction at a high altitude. The constable insists that he was not mistaken, but the authorities, being able to account for the movements of all Australian aeroplanes, jokingly suggest that the constable's story is on a par with those told about the Tantanoola tiger.1
It did go on to say that 'the authorities very rightly recognise that it would be unwise not to investigate [...] and inquiries into the reported occurrence are being made by special intelligence officers'.2 This was true, though in the event the 'special intelligence officers' (actually Detective F. W. Sickerdick, Victoria Police, and Lieutenant Edwards of the Royal Flying Corps) weren't despatched from Melbourne until 13 April as part of a broad sweep around western Victoria interviewing witnesses and suspects which took several weeks to complete. The conclusion of Sickerdick's report was unsurprisingly negative:
In my opinion and from the observations taken and from information received, the opinion of the residents, and the country travelled through, I do not believe that aeroplanes ever flew over the MALLEE, and I believe the objects seen at different times and by different people, were either hawks or pelicans.3
What did Australians in 1918 make of the mystery aeroplane scare? What did they think the aeroplanes meant? This is a question I've already answered in part. There is evidence from the press that in the days before 24 April wild rumours were circulating that Australia was about to be attacked somehow by German raiders, perhaps even to the extent of a landing by enemy troops. These rumours were attributed (at least by the New Zealand press) to anxiety caused by the rash of mysterious aeroplanes seen primarily in Victoria, which were generally presumed to be flying from and hence evidence of said raiders. (The watershed I keep mentioning, the date when the press largely stopped publishing mystery aeroplane reports was 23 April, and this probably is not a coincidence if censorship was involved. Which, alas, I still cannot prove and may not be able to.) In my previous post I discussed some examples of rumours about mystery aeroplanes, which by their nature can give us insights into what people thought the aeroplanes were and what they were doing. James French's letter, for example, shows that he certainly believed that the mystery aeroplanes were connected with German raiders off the coast, but also that he thought they were cooperating with German spies and operating from hidden aerodromes.
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If the wave of reports of mystery aeroplanes after late April 1918 wasn't sustained by newspaper reports (i.e. because there were none) then how was it sustained? Why did people from all over Australia come to hold the same belief, that German aircraft were filling the skies? There are several possible explanations. One is that to interpret odd things in the sky as aeroplanes was simply obvious. But as I argued in the previous post, most Australians had never seen a real aeroplane before, so why would they start thinking like this now? A related explanation is that the press played a role in initiating the scare, but by the time it stopped reporting on the mystery aeroplanes it was no longer necessary: the idea had taken root and the scare was now self-sustaining. That is certainly possible. But there is another vector which, although often hard to trace definitively, did play an important role: rumour.
I don't think Australians are any more prone to rumourmongering than anyone else; on the other hand, we apparently did invent the bush telegraph. And there is some evidence for rumour in a number of the naval intelligence files contained in NAA: MP1049/1, 1918/066/378. Here are three.
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