Category Archives: ALLSORTS

AUSTRALIA’S NATIONAL JINGLES  

November 13, 2025 By in ALLSORTS Tags: , , Leave a comment

What do ‘Waltzing Matilda and the ‘Aeroplane Jelly’ song have in common? They are both advertising jingles. 

Most Australians know both songs, but few know that ‘Banjo’ Paterson’s poem, set to music by Christina Macpherson, was barely heard of before being used as an advertisement for ‘Billy Tea’ early in the 20th century. The musical come-on has been with us ever since.

While Chesty Bond, the Arnotts’ parrot and the swaggy facing out the ‘roo on the Billy Tea packet are well-known visual icons of national identity it is the catchy musical icons of Australian commercial culture that we can’t get out of our collective mind. The immortal melodies and deathless lyrics associated with ‘Mortein’, ‘Vegemite’, ‘Milo’, ‘Mr Sheen’ and, flying highest of all, ‘Aeroplane Jelly’ are our catchiest carols of consumerism. They have called us to corner shop and supermarket for generations. They are household brand names and elements of that shared soundscape that is as much a part of the Australian way of life as the bush, the beach and the Holden car. We may not know all the words but when we hear ‘The Aeroplane Jelly Song’ or ‘Happy Little Vegemites’ we immediately think of the products they purvey. 

One of the most famous Australian products is a sticky black substance made from the leftovers of beer brewing. Long-owned by the American food giant, Kraft, Vegemite has for almost as long been widely acknowledged as the essential Australian foodstuff. Who has not been a ‘happy little Vegemite’, a phrase so powerful that it has entered our folk speech as a term for contentment?

We’re happy little Vegemites, as happy as can be

We all enjoy our Vegemite for breakfast, lunch and tea.

Mummy says we’re growing stronger every single day

Because we love our Vegemite, We all enjoy our Vegemite,

It puts a rose in every cheek.

A simpler but no less effective musical come-on for a foodstuff was the jingle for the egg, malt, milk and almost everything else beverage marketed as ‘Milo’. While the advertisers of Milo did not claim to put ‘a rose in every cheek’, their drink was said to make a ‘marvellous’ ‘difference’. In just what way Milo was ‘marvellous’ and in what way(s) it was ‘different’ were not examined. But never mind, it had a catchy tune:

It’s marvellous what a difference Milo makes

Milo is best.

The most famous of all our pop anthems must be the ‘Aeroplane Jelly Song’. This ditty has been in our audio consciousness for well over half a century. Like Vegemite and Milo, it exhorts us to consume for our dietary well-being. 

I like Aeroplane Jelly

Aeroplane Jelly for me.

I like it for breakfast, I like it for tea,

A little each day is a good recipe.

The quality’s high, as the name will imply;

It’s made from pure fruit, that’s one good reason why

I like Aeroplane Jelly,

Aeroplane Jelly for me.

But after the Milo, the Aeroplane Jelly and the Vegemite had been consumed there was a problem. What to do with the empty containers and dirty dishes? Sticky jars of black goo, globules of jelly clinging to bowls and Milo-encrusted cups had to be swiftly dumped or washed for fear of those other Australian icons, the bloody flies. 

Vegemite solved the problem brilliantly by making the container a drinking glass. But this option was not available to the packagers of other foodstuffs, so the perennial problem of flies was exacerbated by garbage bins full of empty food containers. Fortunes were made by those  smart enough to market fly-killing insecticides. None was more famous than the household name of Mortein. 

To get us to buy their product and mercilessly cut down the fly menace, Mortein’s advertisers came up with the repellent cartoon character of Louie the Fly, whose song was a kind of antipodean ‘Hernando’s Hideaway’. Louie was a noisome beast of unfly-like size who lived on filth and rubbish, dripping black trails of disease across our TV screens, originally in black and white, more recently in full colour: 

I’m Louie the fly, Louie the fly

Straight from rubbish tip to you

Spreading disease with the greatest of ease

Straight from rubbish tip to you.

I’m bad and mean and mighty unclean

Afraid of no-one –

‘Cept the man with the can of Mortein

Hate that word, Mortein, Mortein

Poor dead Louie, he couldn’t get away (Louie the fly)

A victim of Mortein;

Mortein.

The last section was Louie’s musical epitaph, sung in dirge-like tones. The viewers were left in no doubt that the great home insecticide would do its work well, protecting us from the consequences of our consuming and our cast-offs.

One of Mortein’s competitors was ‘Flick’, also a household name for many years. Just as Mortein protected the family from disease-carrying flies, so Flick undertook the defence of the home’s physical structure against the invasion of natural pests. Whiteants (or termites), wood borers and silverfish were the villains of the Flick jingle: 

If there are whiteants in the floor,

Borers in the door,

Silverfish galore

Get a Flick man, that’s your answer

Remember, one Flick and their gone.

As well as our fascination with incineration and liquidation in the effort to protect family and home, we also worried about protecting ourselves from dirt. Cleanliness was not only next to Godliness, it cost so the advertisers assured us, next to nothing to attain. And it could be done in a jiffy.

The strangely small, balding Mr Sheen appeared in the early years of telly and has returned from time to time, ever since. Mr Sheen cleaned your furniture in the twinkling of an eye – ‘it only takes one spray; to wax and polish it away’

Oh, Mr Sheen, Mr Sheen

You’re the quickest waxing trick we’ve ever seen

It only takes one spray; wipe it over right away.

Wax and polish as you dust with Mr Sheen…

Excavating these musical icons of Australian commercial culture encourages some interesting speculations about our deeper concerns. Our pioneering ancestors feared the great unknown emptiness, its savagery and what they thought of as the strangeness of its animal and human inhabitants. In the age of consumption these paranoias have remained in our commercial culture. Protection from insects, dirt and poor health is a continual theme in these ditties. 

As well as these cultural condoms we have sought to draw around us, Australians have been obsessed with foods that do us good and with avoiding the consequences of the filth resulting from our cast-offs. We have consumed concoctions as odd as the residue of beer-brewing, malted eggs and sugared gelatine. When we have finished eating and drinking, we have been concerned to clean up after ourselves, to make the grot disappear in the twinkling of an eye.

There are important differences between the visual and the musical icons of Australian commercial culture. The manly Chesty Bond, the stubborn Billy Tea swaggy and the bold colours of the Arnotts’ parrot suggest virility and confidence. But many of our most characteristic advertising ditties imply that we are really a nation of ‘Ovalteenies’, worried about our health and frightened of a bit of dirt and a few flies. Perhaps, in the slogan of another famous commercial of the past, Chesty Bond likes nothing better than ‘a cup of tea, a Bex and a good lie-down’?

THE LADY ON THE SAND

June 8, 2025 By in ALLSORTS Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Rose Marie Pinon, later de Freycinet, Paris, 1812, aged 17. From an engraving of the original portrait in the possession of Baron Claude de Freycinet.

The slight figure boarding Louis de Freycinet’s Uranie hardly attracted a second glance. Ship’s boys as young as ten were not uncommon in the early nineteenth century. But this ‘boy’ was the beautiful wife of the captain dressed as a man. The year was 1817 and 23 year old Rose and 35 year-old Louis had just married. It was a truly romantic marriage for love. Rose was a commoner and de Freycinet an aristocrat. So helplessly in love were the couple that they could not bear to be separated and Louis broke every rule of the French navy to have her with him on what they knew would be a very long journey.

De Freycinet needed to modify his ship to cater for a female passenger and it was not long before word escaped ashore, causing great official consternation. But by then Uranie had sailed. The story delighted the French public and the de Freycinet’s became celebrities in their absence. The authorities decided to allow the romantic voyage to proceed. They were bound for the great south land via the Cape of Good Hope and Mauritius on a round-the-world voyage of scientific discovery. 

A year after leaving France the expedition anchored in Shark Bay to conduct scientific observations and map the area. But Rose’s husband also had some unfinished business in this part of the great south land. In 1802 de Freycinet had been with the Baudin expedition when they discovered the plate left by Willem de Vlamingh to mark his visit to the unknown land in 1697. De Freycinet and other officers wanted Baudin to remove the plate and take it back to France. But Baudin refused. De Freycinet swore that he would one day return and take the plate. His justification for doing this was ‘that such a rare plate might again be swallowed up by the sands, or else run the risk of being taken away and destroyed by some careless sailor, I felt that its correct place was in one of these great scientific depositories which offer to the historian such rich and precious documents. I planned, therefore, to place it in the collections of the Académie Royale des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres de L’Institut de France …’ [i], which he duly did. The plate immediately disappeared and was not seen again until 1940 when it was found in the basement of the Académie, reportedly in a box of old junk.

Rose kept a journal of her travels, recounting the sights she saw and the adventures she experienced with her husband. She also wrote many letters home. Her first view of New Holland, as the west coast of Australia was known at the time, did not impress her. She saw a ‘low and arid coast’ with ‘nothing in the sight to ease our minds, for we knew we would find no water in this miserable land…’ She would later go ashore with Louis and spend a few nights under canvas but‘That stay on land was not a pleasant one for me, the country being entirely devoid of trees and vegetation…’ In the cooler part of the day she collected shells and read in her tent.

Here Rose had her first contact with Indigenous people. She went ashore in a small boat but was unable to land because the water was too shallow. A couple of sailors had to carry the captain’s wife to the beach in all her finery. When they reached it a group of ten or so Aborigines approached, making strong signals for the intruders to return to their ship. ‘I was afraid, and would willingly have hidden myself’, she wrote home. The Aborigines retreated, leaving Rose, Louis and some officers to picnic on the beach beneath a canvas shade they had brought from the ship along with food. This they supplemented with some local oysters ‘far tastier than all those I had, sitting at a table in comfort, in Paris.’ 

What the people of the region might have made of this strange scene is not recorded. They may have thought that the strangers picnicking on their beach, Rose in her fashionable finery and the sailors in their colourful uniforms, did not present a very serious threat. In any case, just a few days later, friendly contact with the locals was established when they exchanged some of their weapons in return for tin and glass trinkets. Not likely to have been a fair exchange, setting the tone for much that was to come.

The French sailed north to Timor, then to the Moluccas, the Carolines, the Marianas and the Sandwich islands. In November 1819 they arrived in the growing colony at Port Jackson. Here the de Freycinet’s were welcomed enthusiastically by almost everyone. The Governor sent a military band to play them along the river to meet him at his Parramatta residence. There were endless parties and the French were provided with a house and facilities to pursue their scientific work. But on their first night in the house they were robbed of their silver service, table linen, the servants’ clothing and other items. Rose wrote home: ‘You know the purpose of this colony and what sort of people are to be found here in plenty; you will therefore not be astonished at this misdeed: might one not say it is roguery’s classic shore.’

Rose departed on the Uranie on Christmas morning. Aboard were two merino rams, adding to the black swans and emus they had already collected on their journey. Also aboard was a convict stowaway suffering the effects of too much Christmas cheer. He was handed over to the pilot but when they got out to sea another ten escapees were found. They joined the crew and one lady on board as they set a course for the Falkland Islands in search of an abandoned French settlement. 

Here the Uranie was wrecked, though the expeditioners managed to save their notes and around half of their samples. They eventually made it back to France where Louis was court martialled for losing his ship. He was cleared of the charge and then feted for his scientific achievements. Rose and Louis were a celebrated couple until Rose died of cholera in 1832. Louis died in 1841. The de Vlamingh plate was gifted to Australia in 1947. [ii]

[i] De Freycinet, Voyage Historique, Vol. I, 449.

[ii]  Marc Serge Rivière (trans & ed), A Woman of Courage: The Journal of Rose de Freycinet on her voyage around the world 1817-1820, National Library of Australia, Canberra, 1996, pp. 51-52.

AUSTRALIA’S GREATEST STORIES

December 2, 2024 By in ALLSORTS, folk humour, Folk Traditions, TRADITIONAL STORIES Tags: , Leave a comment

OUT NOW IN PRINT AND E-BOOK

Tall tales and colourful characters, from ancient times to today; these are the stories that reveal what makes us distinctively Australian.

Some of the world’s oldest stories are told beneath Australian skies. Master storyteller Graham Seal takes us on a journey through time, from ancient narratives recounted across generations to the symbols and myths that resonate with Australians today.

He uncovers tales of ancient floods and volcanic eruptions, and shows us Australia’s own silk road. He locates the real Crocodile Dundee and explores the truth behind the legend of the Pilliga Princess. He retells old favourites such as the great flood at Gundagai, the boundary rider’s wife and the Australian who invented the first military tank, and presents little known figures like mailman Jimmy, who carried the post barefoot across the Nullarbor Plain, architect Edith Emery and Paddy the Poet, as well as the unusual sporting techniques of the Gumboot Tortoise.

These yarns of ratbags, rebels, heroes and villains, unsettling legends and clever creations reveal that it’s the small, human stories that, together, make up the greater story of Australia and its people.

THE SONS OF FREEDOM MEET THE SAMURAI

July 22, 2022 By in ALLSORTS, Human transportation Tags: , , Leave a comment
Japanese drawing of one of the Cyprus convicts

The stench from the ship was ‘unbearable’. But the Samurai disguised as a fisherman had no choice but to board the strange vessel that appeared near Mugi on Shikoku Island in January 1830. Japan was closed to foreign shipping and the local authorities were anxious to know what had just arrived on their shores.

The secret Samurai took careful note of what he saw and heard. The ship was crewed by a rag-tag bunch of foreigners with long noses, strange gaudy clothing and a small object they stuck in their mouths, lit and inhaled. They had a dog that the Samurai thought did not look like food and were clearly in some distress, pleading for water and firewood, though not food.[i] An alcoholic drink was offered, though the Samurai declined and went back to report to his commander. After considerable discussion, the Japanese decided that the men on the strange ship were pirates and should be destroyed.

In fact, the men were escaped convicts. They had mutinied aboard the brig Cyprus in Recherche Bay, Van Diemen’s Land, five months earlier. The overcrowded brig was carrying around thirty ironed prisoners to the dreaded Macquarie Harbour penal station but became storm bound for a week during which the convicts plotted a mutiny. Four were able to seize the ship. They unchained their fellow transports and then sent ashore any who did not want to join them, along with the soldiers, sailors and civilian passengers. Forty-four were cast away on the beach and later rescued through the bravery of one of the convicts marooned with them. One of them was a convict named William Pobjoy, who had deserted the mutineers in favour of the castaways. He would play a crucial role near the end of an epic tale.

The eighteen convicts still aboard the Cyprus sailed boldly into the Pacific Ocean for a life of piracy and plunder. Their only experienced sailor was a man who named himself for a free-flying bird, William Swallow. His real name was William Walker, though he had a long list of other criminal aliases and a colourful record. Born in 1792, Walker was transported for stealing, arriving in Van Diemen’s Land in 1829. The records describe him as nearing five foot nine inches in height with brown hair, blue eyes and a small scar across his nose and chin. He was married with three children.[ii] He escaped back to England, where he was eventually recaptured and tried under an alias, escaping a likely death sentence for returning from transportation. Back in Van Diemen’s Land, he again attempted to escape, for which crime he was being sent to Macquarie Harbour aboard the Cyprus.

Now William Swallow and his companions were praying for the Japanese to stop firing on their bedraggled vessel. They had been given a few days to leave but a lack of wind prevented their departure. This delay gave the Japanese time to confirm that the ship was British, and so, a legitimate target. Their warning ‘hail of cannon and musketoon balls’ became a fusillade of cannon balls aimed at the waterline. Two smashed into the ship. There was nothing for William Swallow and the other convicts to do but pray. Their prayers were answered when the Japanese decided to help them out with some advice about the weather and winds, allowing them to set sail and drift away to sea. After dusk the Japanese heard the strains of ‘a strange pipe and singing’ from the Cyprus as it floated away to China.[iii]

Without much experience as navigators they managed to reach China, losing only one man overboard. Three more departed the crew and in February 1830, the remaining mutineers scuttled the Cyprus and took to the ship’s boat with the aim of pretending they were shipwrecked sailors. The authorities in Canton believed their lies and the convicts scattered. Some headed for America never to be heard from again, but Swallow and three others sailed for England. 

While they were in transit, news of the mutiny on the Cyprus reached Canton and one of the convicts who had remained there confessed to the crime. A fast ship carried the news to England and when Swallow and his accomplices arrived there six days later the authorities were waiting. Swallow managed to escape but was later recaptured. Not only did Swallow tell convincing lies about how the other fugitives had forced him to sail the Cyprus, but Pobjoy was now in London and prepared to testify against them. Two of Swallow’s accomplices were hanged but he escaped the noose by convincing the court that he acted under intimidation and navigated the ship to save himself. He was found not guilty of piracy and sentenced to serve out the remainder of his sentence. For the third time, he sailed to Van Diemen’s Land and arrived at the destination of his original voyage – two years late. He died in 1834 at another notorious prison a few years after returning to penal servitude. William Walker alias, among other names, William Swallow, was laid to rest in an unmarked grave on the Isle of the Dead, the Port Arthur cemetery.

The sensational story of the mutiny and subsequent voyage of the Cyprus inspired a defiant ballad that vividly put the prisoner’s point of view and added another item to the clandestine traditions of convict underculture. 

Come all you sons of Freedom, a chorus join with me, 
I’ll sing a song of heroes, and glorious liberty. 
Some lads condemned from England sail’d to Van Diemen’s Shore, 
Their Country, friends and parents, perhaps never to see more.

Unlike the official view of the escape, the convicts knew Bill Swallow and his runaway mates had indeed made it to Japan:

… For Navigating smartly Bill Swallow was the man, 
Who laid a course out neatly to take us to Japan.

These triumphant verses of convict revenge concluded:

Then sound your golden trumpets, play on your tuneful notes, 
The Cyprus brig is sailing, how proudly now she floats. 
May fortune help the Noble lads, and keep them ever free 
From Gags, and Cats, and Chains, and Traps, and Cruel Tyranny.[iv]

Even as late as the 1960s an elderly Tasmanian could sing a version of this ballad to a visiting folklorist and it can still occasionally be heard today performed by revival folksingers. It was one of many similar ballads in the underground repertoire of convicts.

From Condemned: The Transported Men, Women and Children Who Built Britain’s Empire

Book Details

[i] They had plenty, as the Cyprus was provisioned to supply the penal station.

[ii] ‘William Swallow’, Convict records at https://convictrecords.com.au/convicts/swallow/william/119608, accessed April 2019, citing Australian Joint Copying Project. Microfilm Roll 89, Class and Piece Number HO11/6, Page Number 538.

[iii] Joshua Robertson, ‘Australian Convict Pirates in Japan: Evidence of 1830 Voyage Unearthed’, The Guardian, 28 May 2017 at https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/may/28/australian-convict-pirates-in-japan-evidence-of-1830-voyage-unearthed, accessed August 2018.

[iv] John Mulvaney, The Axe had Never Sounded: Place, People and Heritage of Recherche Bay, Tasmania, ANU E Press, c. 2007.

JACK – A TRUE TALE

May 21, 2021 By in ALLSORTS Tags: , Leave a comment

Jack was the last child born into a working-class family of Canterbury, England in 1929. There were two older brothers and three older sisters. According to family recollections, the boy was a bit of a handful for his ageing parents and seems to have been mostly reared by his sisters.

Jack playing at his flat in Bromley, c. 1980s.

The pivotal moment of his life came in late May and early June 1942, the Luftwaffe firebombed Canterbury Cathedral and parts of the ancient city. This brutally pointless act was one of the barbarisms known as the ‘Baedeker Raids’. The complete destruction of Coventry cathedral is nowadays the best-known consequence of these raids and was revenged several years later in equally brutal act of revenge by the allied firebombing of Dresden in 1945.

In Canterbury, fortunately, the damage was much less severe, largely through the bravery of the volunteer firewatchers who waited on the roof of the great monument, picking up and throwing down to the ground enormously dangerous phosphorous firebombs, often as their fuses were burning. The night sky around the cathedral and the city was ablaze with bright chandelier flares and the incendiary bombs that followed them down. 

On every night of the raids, young Jack rushed to the bottom of the garden of the family terrace home, transfixed by the flames, the noise and the anti-aircraft fire. They said he was never quite the same again.

In August the following year, Jack was placed on probation for stealing money. He was subsequently referred to a child guidance clinic but by October 1944 he was held at the Philanthropic Society’s Approved School at Redhill, again for stealing money. After finishing school, he worked in various jobs as a labourer, errand boy and lift porter. 

In November 1946, he enlisted in the RAF as an Aircraftman, stationed at Cottesmore Royal Airforce Station, Rutland. Eighteen months later, while on leave, he was arraigned at the Kent Assizes. Jack had been arrested for setting fire to the Canterbury Probation Office and, in a separate incident, a motor car.

It turned out that Jack had already torched four other targets in Canterbury and another four at Cottesmore, including a Nissen hut used as a cinema and a firing range. He was pronounced insane and admitted to Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum in July 1948. Today, he would probably be diagnosed with autism. Jack was nineteen years old.

According to the sparse records released by Broadmoor, Jack weighed eight stone seven pounds and was five feet seven-and-a-half inches tall on admission. He had fair hair, hazel eyes and was described as ‘pale and thin.’ He went to Block 7 for patients under close supervision. Here, he was diagnosed as schizophrenic, together with a ‘disordered personality’ and learning disabilities. Family members were allowed to write and visit and, from 1949, began regularly petitioning for a discharge, unsuccessfully. 

In 1951, Jack went to Block 5 for convalescing patients and by 1955 he was declared free of mental illness, though still suffering from an unspecified personality disorder, seemingly due to his occasionally disruptive behavior and a lack of insight into his crimes. Discharge requests continued to be denied as he was thought to be a high reoffending risk. 

A new Mental Health Act began in 1959, allowing for tribunals to assess discharge requests. Jack’s first two tribunals were unsuccessful, but in 1966 the third recommended a discharge to a local hospital. This was overruled by the Home Office, though he was moved to the ‘parole block’ that year, where he began to join in communal and constructive activities. He contributed to the hospital’s newspaper, the Broadmoor Chronicle, and took a very active and vocal role in the Broadmoor cricket team. 

Up to this point, Jack had worked mainly as a cleaner, now he was employed in the handicraft room and became a member of the block committee. He continued his interest in bowls, table tennis and gardening, as well as cricket, and was an excellent self-taught pianist. In the parole block he became known to his fellow inmates by the nickname ‘Rasher’, possibly because of his fondness for bacon.

After another tribunal, Jack was finally discharged – with conditions – into the care of family members in October 1968. Courtesy of the Home Office, he had done his twenty years. But Jack was still not completely free, there were five years of monitoring conditions attached to his liberty.

He was sent to a clerical position at the Southern Electricity Board but left after a few months to take up a succession of jobs as a labourer, car cleaner, then a short stint at Woolworths, all punctuated by periods of unemployment. In September 1971, Jack joined the Civil Service as a messenger. His discharge conditions ended in December 1974, and Broadmoor had no further hold on his life. He moved out from the family and lived independently from that time onwards, mostly in Bromley.

Despite the bonds of affection, Jack’s relationship with the family had been severed by prison and was strained in freedom. He rarely attended family gatherings, though he was a surprisingly cheery jokester. Slight, sharp and faintly bird-like, he chain-smoked – rollies, not tailor-mades – a habit he picked up in Broadmoor. Jack was a self-taught master of the piano keys and had an encyclopedic knowledge of his passion, the cricket. He dressed neatly, lived an austere life and died alone in 1993. 

Jack, probably in his back yard at Bromley. The upturned horseshoe on the brick wall is for luck.

KING OF THE CANNIBAL ISLANDS

April 6, 2021 By in ALLSORTS, lost treasures, MYSTERIES, MYTHS AND THEIR MAKING Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

Hokie Pokie Wankie Fum – The King of the Cannibal Islands by William Heath, published by Thomas McLean
hand-coloured etching, published 22 July 1830. 10 1/8 in. x 14 1/4 in. (256 mm x 362 mm) plate size; 11 in. x 16 5/8 in. (279 mm x 422 mm) paper size. Bequeathed by Sir Edward Dillon Lott du Cann, 2018. National Portrait Gallery. Used with permission Under CC Licence.

*

Oh, have you heard the news of late,

About a mighty king so great?

If you have not, ’tis in my pate?

        The King of the Cannibal Islands.

So began a broadside ballad of the early nineteenth century, a song that would live on in popular culture for generations. Herman Melville knew it, fragments ended up in a mid-twentieth century children’s rhyme and it became a popular folk dance tune. 

Who was the King of the Cannibal Islands’, and why was such an inane piece of doggerel so popular for so long?

According to the song, the King was  

‘… so tall, near six feet six.

He had a head like Mister Nick’s,

His palace was like Dirty Dick’s,

‘Twas built of mud for want of bricks,

And his name was Poonoowingkewang,

Flibeedee flobeedee-buskeebang;

And a lot of Indians swore they’d hang

The King of the Cannibal Islands.

Hokee pokee wonkee fum,.

Puttee po pee kaihula cum,

Tongaree, wougaree, chiug ring wum,.

The King of the Cannibal Islands.[iv]

The initial cause of the song’s composition was a grisly tale of shipwreck and mystery.

After transporting a cargo of convicts to Sydney Cove in 1809, the Boyd under Captain John Thompson sailed from Sydney in October that year. Aboard were around seventy passengers and crew, including a number of Maori, one a chief’s son named Te Ara. Thompson was keen to obtain some kauri spears to add to his cargo of seal skins, coal, lumber and whale oil. Te Ara recommended Whangaroa where his people lived and where he assured Thompson there were excellent stands of kauri.

The Boyd moored and Te Ara went to greet his kin after a long absence. The Maori came aboard the ship and relations were cordial at first, until Thompson took a small boat party ashore to search for spears. They never returned. The Whangaroa Maori clubbed and axed them all to death. The Maori then rowed out to the Boyd and began to massacre those aboard, dismembering the victims while a few survivors watched in horror from the rigging. 

At the end, only five of those aboard the ship escaped the butchery, aided by Te Pahi, a visiting Maori chief from the Bay of Islands apparently shocked at the scene.  One survivor was later killed, leaving Ann Morley and her baby, a two-year-old Betsey Boughton and cabin boy Thom Davies in dangerous captivity.

What caused such brutal events?

At some point before the Boyd reached Whangaroa, Te Ara was lashed to a capstan and either flogged or threatened this punishment by Captain Thompson for his refusal to work his passage. He protested that he was a chief’s son and should not be so basely punished but was mocked by the sailors and denied food. This was a loss of face among his people triggering an obligation to take revenge. [i] A dreadful vengeance it was.

According to the rescuers under Alexander Berry who arrived at the scene in December there was evidence of mass cannibalism. As Berry later wrote: ‘The horrid feasting on human flesh which followed would be too shocking for description’.[ii] They also found the charred remains of the Boyd, apparently blown up when the Maori tried unsuccessfully to make use of the muskets and gunpowder aboard. The flames ignited the whale oil and the ship quickly burned and sank, a number of Maori, including, including Te Ara’s father, dying in the conflagration. 

Assisted by Maori from the Bay of Islands, Berry secured the safe return of the four survivors as well as the government despatches and private letters carried by the Boyd. Betsey was in a poor condition, crying ‘Mamma, my mamma’.[iii]After threatening the killers with a murder trial in Europe Berry relented, avoiding further bloodletting, though so great were tensions in the region that a planned mission settlement was postponed for several years.

Berry took the remaining four survivors on his ship. They were bound for the Cape of Good Hope but suffered storm damage and eventually ended up in Lima, Peru. Here Mrs Morley died. Davies went to England aboard another ship and the two children went with Berry to Rio de Janeiro and then to Sydney.

Meanwhile, news of the massacre, cannibalism and capture of the survivors fuelled darker emotions. Men from a small fleet of whalers attacked Te Pahi and his people. This seems to have been a complete misunderstanding of the massacre as Te Pahi by most accounts tried to help the Europeans. Berry may have confused the similar names of the two chiefs in his account of what had happened. Up to 60 Maori and one whaler died in this misguided act of revenge. Te Pahi then attacked the Whangaroa Maori and died from wounds dealt in battle.

In later life, Thom Davies returned to New South Wales where he worked for Berry but was drowned on an expedition to the Shoalhaven River with Berry in 1822. Betsey Broughton married well, living until 1891. Mrs Morley’s daughter eventually ran a school in Sydney.

As the story of the Boyd massacre became more widely known in Britain and beyond, it encouraged both shock and humour. The grisly tale of blood, betrayal, cannibalism and survival fuelled the growth of a ‘savage natives’ stereotype that would become the stock in trade of rip-roaring adventures and south seas island concoctions for decades to come. Pamphlets appeared, warning people against migrating to such dangerous places. Popular comic songs like ‘The King of the Cannibal Islands’ were based on this and other colonial encounters, reflecting European attempts to process such dramatic cultural and social differences through absurdity.

By Louis John Steel (1842-1918) – Unknown source, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5661558

[i] New Zealand History, ‘A Frontier of Chaos? The Boyd Incident’, https://nzhistory.govt.nz/culture/maori-european-contact-before-1840/the-boyd-incident

[ii] Augustus Earle, A Narrative of Nine Months’ Residence in New Zealand in 1827, Whitecombe & Tombs Limited, London, 1909, chpt 11 at http://www.gutenberg.org/files/11933/11933-h/11933-h.htm#CHAPTER_XI, accessed November 2016.

[iii] Alexander Berry in The Edinburgh Magazine and Literary Miscellany, volume 83, 1819, p. 313.

[iv] Eric Ramsden, ‘The Massacre of the Boyd’, The World’s News, 29 April 1939, p. 6, http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/137004962?searchTerm=last%20convict%20expiree%20dies&searchLimits=l-australian=y|||l-format=Article|||l-decade=193|||sortby=dateAsc|||l-year=1939|||l-category=Article , accessed February 2021.

[v] National Library of Scotland, http://digital.nls.uk/broadsides/broadside.cfm/id/16439, accessed November 2016.

BLOOD CURDLING OATHS AND DIABOLIC RITUALS – FOLK SECRET SOCIETIES

December 27, 2020 By in ALLSORTS, supernatural Tags: , , , Leave a comment

Source: BBC History of the World at http://www.bbc.co.uk/ahistoryoftheworld/objects/5NtZ_LVYSCKfUCkwRXmPmg, accessed December 2020 (site no longer maintained), with this caption: ‘… This unique rolled painting with its carrying case, was used to initiate new members with illegal oaths administered with a Bible and pistol. The Tolpuddle Martyrs were prosecuted after asking a sign painter to make them a similar image. The skeleton, sun, moon, hour-glass and scythe were familiar to all working people as symbols of their hard lives and mortality. The painting is believed to originate in the West Midlands, but was discovered in 2004 in Colorado, USA…’

Secret societies of one kind or another have been around forever. Familiar examples are the various form of Freemasonry to which many people – mainly men – have belonged over many centuries. Although its origins lie in the trade secrets and self-protection needs of stone masons, the modern Freemason’s movement has long been a highly formalised and respectable organisation, with ‘temples’ in plain sight and making considerable contribution to the betterment of society.

But there are other types of secret society with similar origins yet much more covert and basic than the masons. These take the form of groups that started to form in the eighteenth century to protect occupational secrets, help each other out and generally protect their members from employers and others with more money and power than themselves. Possibly devolutions of medieval craft guilds, these societies operated covertly within the lower levels of rural and, to some extent, urban society, employing secret passwords, initiation rituals and oaths of loyalty unto death. The ‘Miller’s Word’ and, later, the ‘Horseman’s Word’, were among these folkloric keepers of secrets and traditional wisdom that gave them, it was believed by some, magical powers. 

“So help me Lord to keep my secrets and perform my duties as a horseman. If I break any of them – even the last of them – I wish no less than to be done to me than my heart be torn from my breast by two wild horses, and my body quartered in four and swung on chains, and the wild birds of the air left to pick my bones, and these then taken down and buried in the sands of the sea, where the tide ebbs and flows twice every twenty four hours – to show I am a deceiver of the faith. Amen.”[i]

Among their other useful purposes, these societies functioned as basic trade unions for their members, protecting their privileges and standing – and so their wages and conditions – within the rural occupational hierarchy and providing some group solidarity when required.

Interestingly, one of the famed early attempts to form a rural trade union at Tolpuddle in Dorset, also featured lurid initiation rites. These seem to have been similar to the secret oath taking of the Words, with the addition of some more theatrical elements, such as the display of a skeleton. Other early attempts to form a trade union, in this case by the bricklayers of Exeter, could involve ritualistic paraphernalia and covert as described by the police who arrested the men at the Sun Inn, Exeter in 1834:

Upon entering the room we found a great number of persons present, I believe about sixty. We found also in the room the articles now exhibited which consisted of a figure of death with the motto, ‘Remember thy latter end’, two wooden axes, two drawn swords, two scabbards, two masks, two white garments, a Bible, a book marked ‘A’ and diverse papers. “When I came into the room, several of the men – I saw three or four – appeared to have been blindfolded and I saw them pulling the handkerchiefs, with which they had been blinded, from their eyes.”

In another troubled context, convicts on Australia’s notoriously brutal Norfolk Island were said to have formed a secret fraternity known as ‘The Ring’, which policed relations between the gaolers and the gaoled and dealt out justice to any who broke the rules. They too were said to have colourful ceremonies and chilling oaths, including this one:

Its initiations involved drinking blood, accompanied by a dreadful oath of eternal loyalty. When the Ring decided to meet, word went through the prison that no non-member, including guards, should enter the prison yard. The leader, known as ‘the One’, entered the yard first and faced a corner of the wall. He was followed by the Threes, Fives, Sevens and Nines, each arrayed in a semi-circle behind him. All were masked. Satanic prayers were intoned:

Is God an officer of the establishment?

And the response came solemnly clear, thrice repeated:

No, God is not an officer of the establishment.

He passed to the next question:

Is the Devil an officer of the establishment?

And received the answer–thrice:

Yes, the Devil is an officer of the establishment.

He continued:

Then do we obey God?

With clear-cut resonance came the negative–

No, we do not obey God!

He propounded the problem framed by souls that are not necessarily corrupt:

Then whom do we obey?

And, thrice over, he received for reply the damning perjury which yet was so true an answer:

The Devil–we obey our Lord the Devil!

And the dreaded Convict Oath was taken. It had eight verses:

Hand to hand, 

On Earth, in Hell,  

Sick or Well,  

On Sea, on Land,   

On the Square, ever.”   

And ended — the intervening verses dare not be quoted —   

” Stiff or in Breath,  

Lag or Free,  

You and Me,  

In Life, in Death,   

On the Cross, never.”  [ii]

A cup of blood taken from the veins of each man was then drunk by all.

After these rites were performed, the Ring would conduct their business. Usually it was a trial and sentence of suspected collaborators among the convict population or of any of their gaolers who showed an inclination to be lenient to the prisoners.

Most of his comes from later fictioneers, such as ‘Price Warung’ (William Astley) and Marcus Clarke and is obviously gussied up to chill their readers. Historians have queried whether there ever was a ‘Ring’. Probably. Prison gangs are, and were, commonplace. Was it ever this gothic? Highly unlikely. But the documented existence of the secret societies of millers, horsemen and early trade unionists, with their traditional skills, self-protection and folk magic, suggest that the existence of such groups was possible.

The beliefs and the needs behind such organisations were powerful enough to create and maintain them, often over considerable periods of time, at least in the occupational if not the penal contexts. It is thought that the Horsemen’s Word was still well entrenched in parts of Scotland and East Anglia until the 1930s, by which time, of course, their competitive advantage had disappeared with the mechanisation of pretty well everything and the fading of the horse from serious work.

Printed in 1834 by E.C. Tufnell, one of the Factory Commissioners in Character, Object and Effects of Trade Unions. It is believed the Tolpuddle men used a similar form of initiation. Source: Graham Padden, Tolpuddle: An historical account through the eyes of Georges Loveless compiled for the Trades Union Congress, p. 11.

[i] Neat, Timothy (2002). The Horseman’s Word: Blacksmiths and Horsemanship in Twentieth-Century Scotland. Edinburgh: Birlinn.

[ii] Marcus Clarke For the Term of His Natural Life, first published in serial form in the Australian Journal between 1870-1872. ‘Price Warung’ (William Astley), wrote a number of related stories based on interviews with convicts, beginning with ‘The Liberation of the First Three’ in his Tales of the Convict System, Bulletin Newspaper Company, Sydney, 1892.