Australia

• 2 Comments

•

Captain Thomas Atkinson of the Willunga Volunteers, c. 1870

A belated Anzac Day post.

Willunga is a small town in South Australia, not far south of Adelaide, not far from the coast. It was settled by Europeans in 1839, only a couple of years after the colony itself was established. It was a farming area, cattle mostly, and slate quarrying soon became an important industry. By 1860, it had its own militia unit: the Willunga Rifle Volunteers (or Volunteer Rifles, or Willunga Company -- the name varies from source to source). Why did a small country town need a defence force?

There are two reasons that occur to me. The first is, obviously, for defence. South Australia is a long way from anywhere, even the rest of Australia, so it's hard to imagine anyone invading it. But turn that around: it's precisely because South Australia was so far away from anywhere that South Australians felt the need to make some provision for their own defence. As a colony, South Australia was ultimately defended by Britain. But neither the British Army nor the Royal Navy had any units stationed there: the closest would have been in Western Australia or New South Wales (or, later, Victoria): a very long way indeed before interstate railways began to link up in the 1880s. (And even then each colony used its own gauge. The states still do.)
...continue reading →

• 6 Comments

•

The Royal Australian Air Force turns 90 today. It was officially formed as an independent service out of the old Australian Flying Corps on 31 March 1921 (making it three years less one day younger than the Royal Air Force). At first it was just the Australian Air Force: it didn't get the Royal prefix until August, thus becoming the familiar RAAF (usually pronounced 'raff').

Why did Australia plump for an independent air arm? It went very early for this: of the other Dominions, still largely dependent on Britain for defence, Canada waited until 1924, New Zealand until 1934 and South Africa not until 1951 1920. The major powers were similarly unhurried: Italy's air arm went independent in 1923 but France waited until 1933; the United States and Japan didn't do so until after the Second World War.

According to Alan Stephens, The Royal Australian Air Force (South Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2001), the prime minister, Billy Hughes, was particularly keen on aviation and pushed things along quickly. But there was no strategic theory of independent air power underpinning the precise form this would take. There was little concern about strategic bombing, hardly surprising as the arrival of an aeroplane from anywhere was front page news and potential enemies were many thousands of miles away. So the new air force was intended to be devoted to co-operation with the army and the navy, in support of Imperial defence and the Singapore strategy.

Interservice rivalry and finance were key to the RAAF's actual form. With limited funds available, a single service had the advantage of efficiency, avoiding duplication in flying schools, aircraft repair organisations and other overheads. It also meant that neither senior service would have to see its rival have control over the lion's share of aviation resources. They were happy to see a junior, weak organisation with little real independence, which could be relied upon to support them as needed.

One welcome and immediate result of the new service was jobs, as this list in the Mercury of 31 March shows. (Though there were complaints from ex-AFC men about the pay rates and conditions of employment.) Interestingly, among the usual propeller makers, cooks, machinists and so on, the RAAF declared that it had need of airship riggers and balloon basket makers. As far as I know, the RAAF never operated any airships (or balloons), but I would guess the idea would have been to use them for maritime reconnaissance and anti-submarine warfare.

Otherwise, the formation of the RAAF seems to have excited little interest in the in the Australian press (the most informative article I could find was from the Western Argus of 21 March). The British press paid even less attention: I found nothing in The Times, the Guardian or the Observer, and only one brief article in the 24 March issue Flight. Which strikes me as a bit odd, though perhaps it reflects the insubstantial nature of the shadow of the bomber (and military aviation in general) in Britain during the immediate post-war period.

So: many happy returns, RAAF -- at least until the end of war!

• 1 Comment

•

So, THATCamp Melbourne is over. It was pretty much as I expected, which is to say it was excellent. I'm not going to write a conference report (you should have been following #thatcamp on Twitter for that!) but two sessions did give me ideas for digital history projects I might like to do. One day. If I get the time.

One came out of the unofficial API Tim Sherratt reverse-engineered for Trove Newspapers. (Why the National Library of Australia won't release an official API is a bit mysterious.) He uses that to scrape Trove to do searches and display results which aren't possible with the interface offered by the NLA, such as plotting the frequency of Australian vs British/Briton. Are there any publicly accessible datasets which I use which could benefit from the same treatment? Yes, there are. The first one I thought of was the Flight archive, which is a great resource burdened with a limited interface. (But it's fantastic that it exists at all: Flightglobal is a commercial operation and they didn't need to open up their back issues like this at all, if they didn't want to.) I think this is easily doable. A second one is much more ambitious: The National Archives catalogue. It's frustrating that you can't do keyword search across their digitised collections; all you can do is search the descriptions in the catalogue, and these are by their nature limited. A scraper would help here. But the problem there is that you can't download documents directly, even when they are free; you have to add to a 'shopping cart', pay £0.00 for it and wait for an email to arrive. Possibly this could be automated; possibly not.

The other idea I had was to use SahulTime (or its eventual successor, possibly called TemporalEarth) to display the British scareship waves. SahulTime is something like Google Earth, but it allows you to map events/documents/people/objects in time as well as space. Matthew Coller, the developer, originally devised it to represent archaeological data on migration into Australia across the ice-age land bridge, but it is just as useful for historical data. So I could use this to show when and where the scareships were seen, showing how the waves started and evolved, with links to the primary sources. SahulTime is also good at displaying uncertainty in time, which is helpful where I have only vague information about when a sighting happened. The same could be done for uncertainty in space, though that's a bit trickier conceptually.

One day... if I get the time...

• 8 Comments

•

Later this week I'm going to THATCamp Melbourne. What's THATCamp, you ask? THATCamp stands for The Humanities and Technology Camp. It's an unconference devoted to exploring the ways in which the humanities and digital technology can work together. It is informal and collegial: attendees vote on the programme on the first morning. It's practical and hands-on: digital projects are often started during the camp, or tools written, or software installed. The first THATCamp was held at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University in Virginia in 2008; last year there were 17 held around the world, including one in Canberra. Melbourne's is being held at the University of Melbourne, where I work and near where I live, so it would be hard to justify not going!

But the truth is that I did have qualms, because I don't consider myself a digital historian. Sure, there's the blog. But that's about communication, not research; and research comes first. And apart from using digitised sources where possible, my research methods are quite traditional. I find sources, I read them, I compare them, I draw conclusions, and so on. I imagine Gibbon did much the same.

In some ways, this is surprising. In my day job I work in systems administration and IT support, so it's not like I don't know my way around computers. And before history, I studied astrophysics, which has long used digital technology as an integral part of its methods. Indeed, about the first thing you do when you start out learning how to do astrophysical research is to become familiar with the analysis software you'll be using. And my masters project was entirely computational: I wrote, tested and debugged code. (Written in Fortran 77, no less!) So I'm sure that, when I came to do my PhD, I could have handled a project which was much more digital and less traditional in its approach if I'd wanted to.

But that's the thing: I didn't want to. Why leave a career in IT for one in history (and I still hope that will happen) and do the same kind of thing, just for a different end? Fiddle around with Apache installs, write justifications for storage arrays, think about database structures. That's what I want to get away from. What I want to do is read old books, uncover forgotten ideas, meet interesting (albeit usually dead) people. (And tell the world about it, which is where blogging comes in.) I would guess that most historians have similar motivations. And that's the problem for digital history. The types of people who are attracted to doing history are not likely to be attracted to doing digital history. (I have similar reservations about Anthony Grafton's recent call for more collaboration between historians, in emulation of the sciences. We tend to play better alone.)

This is not because digital history has no value: it clearly has vast potential. But at the moment it still belongs to the hackers, those who enjoy creating visualisation tools and XML datasets. It won't realise its potential until every historian is a digital historian, and that won't happen until doing digital history is as natural and painless as... well, as natural and painless as doing traditional history is, anyway. The technology needs to adapt itself to the users, in other words, not the other way around. Well, in reality both will happen; but we aren't there yet.

That said, I'm still excited to be going to THATCamp, and to seeing all the cool ideas and smart people. And I do hope to get more involved in digital history myself, rather than maintaining my current watching brief. But you can understand why I haven't come up with a cool session idea of my own. Or perhaps you can't? Am I being too cautious, too reactionary, too -- dare I say it -- Luddite?

• 3 Comments

•

Glasgow Herald, 18 March 1941, 5

By recapturing from Italian forces Berbera, the capital of British Somaliland, a small part of the British Empire has been restored. Royal Navy warships landed Army troops at the port, suffering 'negligible' (Glasgow Herald, 5) casualties. RAF armoured cars assisted too.

This adds to the Allied offensive against Addis Ababa: 'British Empire troops are now steadily closing in on the heart of the Italian Empire from 13 points', according to a military representative in Cairo. The Herald noted that when the Italians attacked British Somaliland, they spoke of 'the "expulsion of the British from the Western shore of the Red Sea," and of the "enormous effect" it would have on the Arab world'. That was just seven months ago, so this effect didn't last very long.
...continue reading →

•

Times, 4 January 1941, 4

Though Bardia has not yet fallen, Australian infantry and British troops have broken through its perimeter and taken 5000 Italian soldiers prisoner in a dawn attack (The Times, 4).

The Australians, who hitherto had taken part only in small-scale raids, had the honour of leading the way through gaps caused first by our guns and then by our tanks.

The Allied front is now bulging into the town's defensive lines, and it seems only a matter of time until it falls (a period which 'depends entirely on the "guts" of the defenders', according to a 'military spokesman').
...continue reading →

• 1 Comment

•

Daily Express, 20 November 1940, 1

According to the Daily Express, the 'ever-increasing power behind Air Marshal Sir Charles Portal's master-plan for crippling Hitler's war industries' is beginning to yield results (1). The giant Krupp factory (nearly always rendered as 'Krupps' in the British press) at Essen had three 'sections [...] put out of commission', which must be considered especially impressive as it is 'officially stated' that they 'has been built underground because of their importance'. A big ocean liner, SS Europa, was damaged in an air raid on the Bremen docks. Other targets attacked recently include the oil industry at Hanover ('completely destroyed') and the Fokker aircraft factory at Amsterdam.

None of this helped London and the Midlands last night, which were heavily bombed last night. According to German radio, Coventry and Birmingham were said by German radio to be the targets in the latter, though this is not yet confirmed by the government. In one of the towns,

Practically every suburb was involved. Civilian homes were the main target, and several were wrecked before the attack slackened off shortly after midnight.

Damage to industrial buildings was reported to be small.

But 'Many casualties are feared in the two towns'.
...continue reading →

• 12 Comments

•

I've recently been reading Peter Ewer's Wounded Eagle: The Bombing of Darwin and Australia's Air Defence Scandal, which I found to be unexpectedly interesting, but not always in a good way. Wounded Eagle has much less about the Second World War than I'd thought: much of the early part of the book is taken up with a detailed analysis of the origins of the Empire Air Mail Scheme (EAMS) in the 1930s, and then there's a long account of the Royal Australian Air Force's pre-war procurement policy. There's a lot of interesting stuff here: one particular surprise for me was the accidental way in which British radar research was accidentally revealed to the Australian government by a young physicist returning home from studying at Cambridge. The Australians asked if this was true, and the British sheepishly said that it was and only then began sharing its data with the Dominions! Even more surprising, perhaps, is that the RAAF, having got its hands on some British radar sets in 1940, showed next to no interest in them. Only the Australian Army did anything with them, for use with coastal defence batteries.

Ewer's book is full of such pointed criticisms, and that's the problem. This polemic has two targets: the British, and pro-British Australian politicians. The latter are outside my area, though I'll talk about them later. But I like to think I know a bit about the British by now, particularly when it comes to aeroplanes, so let's start there.
...continue reading →

• 6 Comments

•

Phantom airships come and go, but sometimes they come again. According to the scattered accounts of the 1909 Australian wave I've seen (meaning Bill Chalker's The Oz Files and random internet sites), there was a late airship sighting on 25 October 1909 at Minderoo station in Western Australia. But I couldn't find that event in any newspaper report; instead I found one that took place on 25 October 1910. This means that it was not directly related to whatever caused the rash of scareship visitations in August and September 1909, whether that be astronomical or sociological or aeronautical or etc in origin, the Minderoo airship sighting was a separate event. And a very strange and interesting one too.
...continue reading →

• 4 Comments

•

What did the phantom airships mean to people at the time?

One thing is clear. The press very early on referred to the mysterious lights as airships, and it does seem that this was probably the most popular theory among those who saw them. But it was very far from a universal view. The 5 September 1909 sighting in Fremantle gives some idea of this. The account given in the Perth Western Mail on 11 September appears to be a first-hand description of the conversation between a number of eyewitnesses, arguing over what it is. (The tone is certainly one of amusement, but it doesn't seem to be made up.)

A Strange Luminary. -- "There's the airship! Who's a liar now, eh?" As he made the remark an excitable old gentleman waved his hands towards the sky, and in a little while some twenty persons were standing in Market-street, Fremantle, on Monday, shortly before 10 p.m. gazing interestedly heavenwards. The star was apparently undergoing a bewildering series of changes. From shining with great brilliancy it would suddenly grow dim and indistinct, only to shine strongly again in a few seconds. At times its light was completely lost for four or five seconds, 'It's caused by clouds passing over it," was the dictum of one of the bystanders, whose opinion was met with the retort, "Then why don't the other stars show the same variation?" "It's Mars nearing its period of occultation," observed a gentleman who subsequently expressed his indignation at this solution of the celestial phenomenon advanced by two elderly ladies. "It's my opinion," remarked one of the latter, with the warm approval of the other, "that things are getting too strong on this earth, and that light is placed in the sky as a warning to the world." This portentous theory did not receive the approval of the bystanders, who went their ways perplexed by the pranks of the planet whose light shone intermittently as if in mockery of the watchers below.

So the writer describes it as a 'star' or a 'planet'; the first person to remark upon it called it 'the airship'; another man specifies it as Mars (presumably meaning opposition instead of 'occultation'), and two women advance an apparently religious interpretation.
...continue reading →