Tag Archives: Australia

THE ORGY THAT WASN’T

March 31, 2025 By in Human transportation, MYTHS AND THEIR MAKING Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

The women convicts of the First Fleet’s Lady Penrhyn went ashore at Sydney Cove on February 6, 1788. Most had seven or fourteen year terms and there were a few ‘lifers’ among them. The surgeon aboard the former slave ship that had brought them to the ends of the earth, Arthur Bowes Smyth, wrote ‘The Men Convicts got to them very soon after they landed, & it is beyond my abilities to give a just discription [sic] of the Scene of Debauchery & Riot that ensued during the night.’ According to subsequent writers, a wild orgy of rum, sex, storm and lightening followed, a fitting act for the foundation of a colony of convicts.

Popular as this story has become, in one version or another, historians have found little evidence of it ever happening. Bowes Smyth was nowhere near the scene of the alleged orgy, he was on the Lady Penrhyn quite a long way out in the harbour. None of the other keen diarists of the First Fleet, such as officers Watkin Tench or Ralph Clark seem to have noticed the orgy either. They certainly did not mention it in their accounts, an unlikely omission, especially for Ralph Clark who believed women convicts were all ‘damned whores.’

Why Bowes Smyth believed that ‘Debauchery & Riot’ occurred as soon as the women set foot in New South Wales is worth considering. He was certainly glad to see the women leave the ship: ‘we had the long wish’d for pleasure of seeing the last of them’, he wrote. The Lady Penrhyn’s voyage from England had been tedious and troubled with illness, lack of food and indiscipline. Many of the women were prostitutes and suffered from venereal disease. Although attempts were made to keep men and women separate, cohabitation quickly became commonplace. In April 1787, a month or so before they set sail for Botany Bay, five women were chained up for having relations with crewmen. There is no record of the sailors being punished.

During the voyage seventy year-old Elizabeth Beckford died of ‘dropsy’, or oedema, her bloated corpse buried at sea. She was not the last. Jane Parkinson died as they sailed from Cape Town to New Holland, as Australia was often known. Off Van Diemen’s Land the lumbering transport was lashed by a storm so fierce that the women fell to their knees praying for deliverance. Short of food once again, the Lady Penrhyn finally made Botany bay in late January 1788, only to discover that Arthur Phillip had decided the place was unsuitable for settlement. He had departed for Port Jackson.

By the time the Lady Penrhyn finally anchored in the great body of water that would become known as Sydney Harbour, the 101 women and more than 70 male crew and Marines had been cooped up on the thirty by eight metre vessel, in some cases for over a year. The women were flogged, chained, punished with thumb screws and had their heads shaved bare. Bowes Smyth wrote in his journal:

‘I believe I may venture to say there was never a more abandon’d set of wretches collected in one place…The greater part of them are so totally abandoned & callous’d to all sense of shame & even common decency that it frequently becomes indispensably necessary to inflict Corporal punishment upon them…’[i]

The doctor was clearly not well disposed towards his female charges. When he finally did ‘see the last of them’ he was predisposed to assume that they would behave in what he considered their typically debauched manner. Bowes Smyth was a product of his time and circumstances, as were all those who arrived on the First and subsequent fleets. 

The double standard that masqueraded as respectability and punished only women for acts that involved a male partner continued in the colony. Four of the convict women of the Lady Penrhyn became the de facto partners of officers and the Judge Advocate. Esther Abrahams and Lieutenant George Johnston began what would become a lifelong relationship during the voyage. They did not marry for another quarter of a century. 

Bowes Smyth also recorded an incident when one of the sailors was caught in the women’s tents. His hands were tied and he was publically drummed out of camp to the tune of ‘The Rogue’s March’, a ceremony used for dishonorable discharge from the army and usually followed by a flogging.

These more domestic relationships and official attempts to maintain propriety are not the stuff of myth. They lie forgotten in history while the more salacious story lives on. Historians have been trying to scotch the orgy myth ever since one of their own mistakenly set the yarn spinning in 1963. Manning Clark wrote of it though soon withdrew the assertion after a more careful look at the available evidence. But it was too late. The lewd rumour neatly captured popular views of early colonial society and the image of degraded convicts that had grown up over the generations. ‘The orgy that wasn’t’ gathered further currency from a procession of later writers and television shows repeating and embellishing the alleged scene.[ii] A yarn of ribald abandonment still resonates with a common view of the founding of Australia. No matter how often and convincingly historians demolish the myth, many still prefer to believe it.

From Great Convict Stories https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/books/9781760527488

[i] Arthur Bowes Smyth (Smythe), ‘A Journal of a Voyage from Portsmouth to New South Wales and China. 22 March 1787–12 August 1789’. Mitchell Library.

[ii] See Grace Karskens, ‘The Myth of Sydney’s Foundational Orgy’, 2011, at the Dictionary of Sydneyhttp://dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/the_myth_of_sydneys_foundational_orgy, accessed August 2016.

THE FLYING DUTCHMAN DOWN UNDER

October 30, 2024 By in MYSTERIES, supernatural Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

The Flying Dutchman by Albert Pinkham Ryder c. 1887 (Smithsonian American Art Museum)

The legend is first recorded in 1790, but it was already old in sailors’ lore. Undoubtedly the most famous nautical yarn of all, the enigmatic tale of the Flying Dutchman is known around the world. And the spectral sailing ship has been sighted in many oceans, including in Australian waters.

At first, the story was a short yarn about a distressed Dutch ship seeking safe harbour at the Cape of Good Hope during a raging storm. A pilot to guide the vessel to safety was not avail­able and the ship was lost with all her crew. Ever since then, the glowing apparition has been seen during stormy weather. Sighting the Flying Dutchman was considered to be an omen of doom.

The Cape of Good Hope was a regular port of call for ships on the Australian run from Europe and although the legend was initially a Dutch story and largely restricted to sailors, it flowed into the broader community in the late eighteenth century. One of the earliest accounts is that of the ‘Prince of Pickpockets’, George Barrington, on his way to serve a sentence in Australia in 1795. Barrington’s version of the story is a little more elaborate than the basic legend (though he was a notori­ous confidence trickster with a silver tongue): 

. . . it seems that some years since a Dutch man-of-war was lost off the Cape, and every soul on board perished; her consort weathered the gale, and arrived soon after at the Cape. Having refitted, and returning to Europe, they were assailed by a violent tempest nearly in the same latitude. In the night watch some of the people saw, or imagined they saw, a vessel standing for them under a press of sail, as though she would run them down: one in particular affirmed it was the ship that had foundered in the former gale, and that it must certainly be her, or the apparition of her; but on its clearing up, the object, a dark thick cloud, disappeared. Nothing could do away the idea of this phenomenon on the minds of the sailors; and, on their relating the circumstances when they arrived in port, the story spread like wild-fire, and the supposed phantom was called the Flying Dutchman. 

Barrington did not see the apparition, but he met a sailor who did. About 2 a.m. he was woken by the boatswain ‘with evident signs of terror and dismay in his countenance’ and begging for a drink of spirits. The man claimed to be ‘damnably scarified’ because he had just seen: 

the Flying Dutchman coming right down upon us, with everything set—I know ’twas she—I cou’d see all her lower-deck ports up, and the lights fore and aft, as if cleared for action. Now as how, d’ye see, I am sure no mortal ship could bear her low-deck ports up and not founder in this here weather. Why, the sea runs mountains high. It must certainly be the ghost of that there Dutchman, that foun­dered in this latitude, and which, I have heard say, always appears in this here quarter, in hard gales of wind.

After a few deep draughts, the boatswain ‘grew a little composed’, admitting that he was prone to seeing ghosts. Barrington went on deck with him to see for himself but ‘it had cleared up, the moon shining very bright, and not a cloud to be seen; though, by what I could learn from the rest of the people who were on deck, it had been very cloudy about half an hour before, of course I easily divined what kind of phantom had so alarmed my messmate’.

A more respectable figure who did see the Flying Dutchman in Australian waters was no less a personage than Prince George of Wales, destined to be King George V. Sometime before dawn on 11 July 1881, while travelling through Bass Strait, the prince (or his brother travelling with him) recorded:

At 4 a.m. the Flying Dutchman crossed our bows. A strange red light as of a phantom ship all aglow, in the midst of which light the masts, spars and sails of a brig 200 yards distant stood out in strong relief as she came up on the port bow. The look-out man on the forecastle reported her as close as on the port bow, where also the officer of the watch from the bridge clearly saw her, as did also the quarterdeck midshipman, who was sent forward at once to the forecastle; but on arriving there was no vestige nor any sign whatever of any material ship was to be seen either near or right away to the horizon, the night being clear and the sea calm. Thirteen persons altogether saw her . . .

Just over six hours later, the sailor who had first reported seeing the Flying Dutchman fell to his death from the foretopmast and ‘was smashed to atoms’.

Another Australian connection with the Flying Dutchman comes from John Boyle O’Reilly, the famous Irish rebel. While being transported with his fellow Fenians to Western Australia in 1867, O’Reilly wrote a poem for the ship’s newspaper. The poem uses the Flying Dutchman tale to give expression to  O’Reilly’s forebodings at what was going to be a long exile from his homeland: 

They’ll never reach their destined port 

They’ll see their homes no more, 

They who see the Flying Dutchman 

Never, never reach the shore. 

Since then the legend has grown, gathering more detail and depth through endless accounts, books, films and artworks that feed from it. The Flying Dutchman soon fused with another piece of world folklore known as the ‘Wandering Jew’. This is said to be a man who refused to help Christ bear the burden of the cross as he struggled towards his crucifixion. In a bit of Old Testament revenge, the man was condemned to wander the Earth forever in eternal life. In the Flying Dutchman version, the captain of a Dutch merchantman attempting to enter Table Bay was frustrated by a change in the wind. The captain swore to be eternally damned if he did not enter the bay and that he would sail these waters until Judgement Day. He did not and he does. 

In another version it is said that the crew of the Dutch ship committed some atrocious crime and are condemned to never enter a port and must voyage onwards until their penance is done. This echoes a theme of Coleridge’s famous poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1797–98). A few years later the arch-romancer Walter Scott made the Flying Dutchman a pirate ship, in which guise the tale may be most familiar to modern audiences in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies.[i]It’s not surprising that such a compelling legend is told again and again and that the cursed ship has been seen even in Australian waters.

[i] George Barrington, A Voyage to Botany Bay, with a description of the country, manners, customs, religion, &c. of the natives, sold by H.D. Symonds: London, 1795. 

Prince Albert Victor and Prince George of Wales, The Cruise of Her Majesty’s Ship ‘Bacchante’ 1879–1882. Compiled from the private journals, letters, and note-books of Prince Albert Victor and Prince George of Wales, with additions by J. D. Dalton, Vol. 1, Macmillan and Company: London, 1886, p. 551. 

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ANZAC: THE BIRTH OF A NATION

November 11, 2018 By in MYTHS AND THEIR MAKING Tags: , , , ,

 

Sandakan Boyup Mar 25 056

Sandakan death march memorial, Boyup, Western Australia

 

This post briefly outlines the origins, development and significance of the Anzac legend for Australians[i]since 1915. The initial reception of Anzac as symbolizing ‘the birth of a nation’ is followed by an outline of the development of the concept during the First World War and over the decades since. The current identification of Anzac with popular perceptions of national identity is briefly highlighted and the article concludes by noting the early and continuing legislative proscriptions surrounding the use of the term ‘Anzac’ and its continuing acceptance by many Australians as the central element of national identity.

Introduction

Although the Anzac tradition originated in 1915, there was little serious scholarship on the subject until the 1960s.[ii]  Since then there has been ongoing interest by historians, anthropologists, sociologists and creative artists.[iii]While Anzac was widely said to be losing its popular appeal from the late 1960s, in the late 1980s and early 1990s there was an unexpected upsurge of community interest in the Anzac tradition – or ‘legend’, ‘myth’, ‘spirit’ – it is called all these things – and scholars have sought to understand this.[iv]Today, Anzac is very much a popular Australian institution and observance, with thousands of Australians journeying to sites of related significance around the world to commemorate its day or to visit the places in which it was created and developed. It has been described as a secular national religion,[v]an indication of its cultural power. As well as having a popular dimension, Anzac has long been the subject of political and official interest, intensively so in the lead-up to the centenary of the Gallipoli landings in 2015.

‘The Birth of a Nation’

Anzac has become a central aspect of Australian national identity and military history since the term was coined in 1915. An acronym of ‘Australian and New Zealand Army Corps’, the exact circumstances of the word’s origin are murky, with claims for its invention made by and for Sir William Birdwood (1865-1951), General Sir Ian Standish Monteith Hamilton (1853-1947) and a Lt A.T. White RASC. Whoever invented it, the term rapidly came into wide use during the Gallipoli campaign.[vi]It has remained in both official and popular parlance ever since.

The term moved beyond its origin as a military and clerical convenience to become a signifier of Australian nationhood and cultural identity in association with the reception of the Gallipoli landings from April 25, 1915. A combined Australian and New Zealand force began landing on the Gallipoli peninsula at the start of the ill-fated Dardanelles campaign at dawn on April 25. Although under British control, this was the first large-scale military action of the Commonwealth of Australia, formally constituted from a number of separate colonies in 1901. When press reports of the achievements of the Australians and New Zealanders reached Australia, they painted a glowing picture of courage and sacrifice expressed in the conventional views of the time about nationhood and military glory. On May 8, 1915 Australian dailies published a report of the Gallipoli landings by the English journalist Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett (1881-1931). He had witnessed the landing from a ship out at sea but nevertheless provided a laudatory report that read, in part:

‘There has been no finer feat in this war than this sudden landing in the dark and the storming of the heights, and above all, the holding on whilst reinforcements were landing. These raw colonial troops in these desperate hours proved worthy to fight side by side with the heroes of Mons, the Aisne, Ypres, and Neuve Chapelle. …[vii].

It was another nine days before Australia heard from the official war correspondent, Charles Bean (1879-1968). His account had been held up by military red tape but it confirmed the glory already admired by Bartlett. All the more so as Bean took part in the actual landing: ‘They all fought fiercely and suffered heavily; but considering that performed last Sunday, it is a feat which is fit to rank beside the battle of the heights of Abraham.[viii]

An Australian public, largely eager for news of their troops generally received these glowing accounts rapturously. The idea that this event was the real ‘birth of a nation’ was immediately established in the public discourse and organisations and communities began searching for ways to signify the moment and the meanings they attributed to it. To some extent, pre-existent attitudes derived from the pioneering era, including an emphasis on masculine prowess, manual labour and anti-authoritarianism, provided a cultural basis for the reception of the Gallipoli landings.

Soon, groups and committees in suburban and regional Australia embarked on memorial projects to mark the magnitude of the landings and the new concept of Anzac. A memorial was erected in South Australia in 1915. Early in 1916 an ‘Anzac Cottage’ was erected on donated land and with donated goods and labour in a Perth suburb through the efforts of the local council. It was for a returned ‘Anzac’ and his family to dwell in.[ix]Soon, a ‘homes for heroes’ movement was in full swing in many parts of the country, together with a wide range of usually patriotically inspired activities in support of the Australian troops, inspired by widespread commemorative sentiment. This was fuelled by pride in the reported actions of Australian troops, by personal and family mourning and by many community activities in support of the war effort by churches, charities and other groups.

As the war progressed and casualties mounted on the Western Front and in the Middle East, these meanings of Anzac became increasingly acute. More and more families lost loved ones, became involved in the ever more intense war effort and, like all civilian populations of the various theatres of combat, became enmeshed in the new realities of total war, even if in Australia’s case, at a considerable distance from most of the fighting.

Development through the Great War

A central figure of the Anzac tradition soon evolved in the shape of the civilian foot soldier, known from 1917 as the ‘digger. Roughly synonymous with the French ‘Poilu’ and the British ‘Tommy’, the digger is an idealised Australian infantryman who conflates the tough but usually compassionate soldier and the mythic aspects of the bushman and larrikin. The bushman image derives from the frontier pioneering experience and is a stereotype white, male manual bush worker of independent spirit. These attributes are overlain with those of another stereotypical Australian figure, the larrikin. Primarily a phenomenon of developing cities from the mid-nineteenth century, the larrikin image was that of a rough, fun-loving and irreverent working class male youth.

While the realities of the bushman and larrikin figures were often less than positive, their romanticised attributes quickly became fused in the digger image, particularly through popular literature, illustration and in folklore. The outcome was a characteristically ambivalent figure who was not a soldier yet fought hard and well; did not take military rank and hierarchy very seriously and was more than a bit of a gambler, brawler, drinker and womaniser.[x]Despite these pardonable blemishes, the digger was a genuine ‘rough diamond’ who represented and actualised all that was believed to be best about the typical Australian character. The essential equation was simple but powerful: the digger was Anzac and Anzac was the Australian spirit, ethos and identity.

In the unprecedented experience of total warfare, arguably sharpened by the effects of large distance, Australians remaining on the home front immediately sought to find ways to recognize and to commemorate the sacrifice of their ‘boys’ in faraway Europe and the Middle East. The first attempt to publicly acknowledge the significance of the Gallipoli landings took place on October 1915 when the South Australian (Labor) government decided to change the Labour Day celebration into ‘Anzac Day’. This was followed in 1916 by official commemorative events in London, among serving Australian troops abroad and around the country in citizen-generated memorial services, marches and related events. In 1917, 1918 and 1919, April 25 was increasingly observed at home and abroad. Through these acknowledgments, the digger became an increasingly potent symbol of Australia and its most cherished ideals, aspirations and myths.

The loss of over sixty-one thousand soldiers and the wounding of almost 170 000 more had an especially broad impact in Australia. Very few families were unaffected by these tragedies and, in many cases, the ongoing burdens of repatriation. While the digger was in his contextual origins a military figure, his links with the legend of the busman and the larrikin and his primarily civilian status (all Australian troops were volunteers), also made him a civic figure. In essence, a culture hero whose warrior features dovetailed with the contemporary need for a heroic national stereotype.

This figure conveniently combined the young country’s need for military glory with existing popular notions of national and cultural identity, derived from historical experience and folklore. In his official and military guise, the digger appears as a tough, no-nonsense soldier exemplifying the Australian versions of combat courage, loyalty, sacrifice and duty. In his folkloric form, the digger is an offhanded, anti-authoritarian rascal, uncaring of military discipline and etiquette and with the attitude of an average ‘bloke’ just getting on with the job of fighting wars on behalf of the national population rather than the generals and the politicians.

Since the Great War

In the immediate postwar years, Anzac evolved into Australia’s most important cultural discourse. Once politicians – at first slowly – realised this, the tradition became politicised. It evolved along with the modes of commemoration felt to be appropriate for the observance of Anzac Day as a national public holiday, with the building of the elaborate shrine and museum known as the Australian War Memorial. Returned soldier organisations, notably the entity now known as the Returned and Services’ League (RSL), also played a central role in the evolution of Anzac, particularly in controlling participation in public observance of the tradition and in proselytizing a particular version of it in schools, the community and, for a considerable period, among state and federal governments.[xi]There has also been ongoing military interest in a valuable symbol of fighting spirit, mobilised again in World War 2 and in every conflict in which Australia has since been involved. Despite the official appropriation of Anzac, it also – incomprehensibly and regrettably to some[xii]– remains a popular manifestation of national sentiment.

Despite ups and downs in Anzac Day attendances and numerous controversies in the years since, Anzac has generally retained this popular understanding and appeal, reinforced through school curricula, the annual observances on 25 April, the central institutional presence of the Australian War Memorial and endless speeches, articles, books, films, television shows and other effusions. Anzac Day has become a de facto national day for many, perhaps most Australians. While these developments have expanded and intensified since the end of the war, the basic significance of Anzac was initiated between 1915 and 1919, by which time Australian troops had been finally repatriated.

Because the casualties and aftermath of World War 1 had such a deep impact on Australian society, a large number of Australians with no direct connection to the experience of World War 1, or even World War 2, have discovered links with these pasts through the burgeoning family history movement. An Anzac ancestor has become as prized an antecedent as a transported convict in the popular discourses of national identity.

Conclusion

The intriguing ambivalence of Anzac has been briefly outlined here, mainly in its origins and the first few years of its existence. A full appreciation of its significance for Australians requires a longer view than can be given within the chronological framework of the First World War. However, the importance and continuing power of this cultural tradition can be indicated through some actions of the Commonwealth government. From 1916, the term ‘Anzac’ was officially protected from unauthorised uses for commercial, partisan or other unsuitable purposes. This legislation has been amended from time to time since, always with the intention of strengthening it.[xiii]Anzac thus remains an official term and concept as well as a popular focus for what many Australians continue to understand as their national identity. And it remains controversial.[xiv]But despite the best efforts of historians and other scholars to divest Anzac of its considerable mythology, broad community acceptance of these myths ensures its continuing touchstone for a particular but potent idea of Australian cultural identity.

 

Selected Bibliography

Beaumont, Joan: Broken Nation: Australians in the Great War, Sydney, 2013.

Butler, A.G: The Digger: A Study in Democracy. Sydney 1945.

Cochrane, P: Simpson and the Donkey: The Making of a Legend. Melbourne 1992. New edn. 2013.

Ely, Richard: The First Anzac Day: Invented or Discovered? in: Journal of Australian Studies17 1985.

Fewster, Kevin (ed):Gallipoli Correspondent: The Frontline Diary of C.E.W. Bean. Sydney 1983.

Flaherty, C. & Roberts, M: The Reproduction of Anzac Symbolism, in: Journal of Australian Studies24, May 1989.

Gammage, Bill: The Broken Years: Australian Soldiers in the Great War. Canberra 1974.

Gammage, Bill: The Crucible: The Establishment of the Anzac Tradition, 1899-1918, in McKernan, Michael  & Browne, Margaret (eds), in: Australia Two Centuries of War and Peace. Canberra/Sydney 1988.

Gerster, Robin: Big-Noting: The Heroic Theme in Australian War Writing. Melbourne 1987.

Inglis, K.S: The Australians at Gallipoli, parts 1 & 2, in:  Historical Studies14:54, 1970 – 14:55 1970.

Kent, David: The Anzac Book and the Anzac Legend: C.E.W. Bean as Editor and Image-maker. Historical Studies21:84, April 1985.

Robertson, John: Anzac and Empire: The Tragedy and Glory of Gallipoli. Port Melbourne 1990.

Peter Stanley: Bad Characters: Sex, Crime, Mutiny, Murder and the Australian Imperial Force, Sydney, 2010.

Thomson, Alistair: Anzac Memories: Living with the Legend. Melbourne 1994.

Winter, Dennis (ed):Making the Legend: The War Writings of C.E.W. Bean. St Lucia 1992.

 

References

i Used here in the lower case form that denotes the term’s distinctiveness from its originating upper case acronymic form of ‘ANZAC.’ Some argue passionately that the word should always be completely capitalised, another indication of the importance of all things ‘Anzac’ in Australian society.

ii Anzac is also important for New Zealand history and culture, if in a less acute form. See Hopkins-Weise, Jeff: Blood Brothers: The Anzac Genesis. Kent Town SA 2009.

[iii]Inglis, Ken: The Anzac Tradition, in: Meanjin24 1965; Serle, Geoffrey: The Digger Tradition and Australian Nationalism, in Meanjin24:2 1965.

[iii]There was some anthropological ethnography of Anzac Day observances in the 1970s and 80s, see Kitley, Philip: Anzac Day Ritual, in:Journal of Australian Studies4, 1979, pp. 58-69; Sackett, Leigh: Marching into the Past: Anzac Day Celebrations in Adelaide, in: Journal of Australian Studies17 1985; Peter Weir’s film Gallipoli(1981), the play The One Day of the Year (1958) by Alan Seymour, among many lesser-known artistic representations and productions.

[iii]Scates, Bruce: Returnto Gallipoli: Walking the Battlefields of the Great War. Melbourne 2006; Seal, Graham: Inventing Anzac: The Digger and National Mythology. Brisbane 2004; Seymour, Alan/Nile, Richard: AnzacMeaning Memory and Myth. London 1988. Scates, Bruce et al: Anzac Day at Home and Abroad: Towards a History of Australia’s National Day, in: History Compass10: 2012, 523–536. doi: 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2012.00862.x.

[iii]Shaw, Brian: Bush Religion: A Discussion of Mateship, in: Meanjin Quarterly12:3 1953; Inglis, Ken, assisted by Jan Brazier:  Sacred Places: War Memorials in the Australian Landscape, Carlton, Vic. 1998; Seal, Graham:Anzac: The Sacred in the Secular in Paranjape, Makarand (ed), in: Sacred Australia: post-secular considerations. Melbourne, 2009.

[iii]See Bean, C E W (ed): The Anzac Book, p. ix; Joan Hughes (ed): Australian Words and their Origins. Melbourne 1989.

[iii]Ashmead-Bartlett’s dispatch was published in Australian newspapers from 8 May, 1915.

[iii]Bean’s report was transmitted through the Prime Minister’s Department in The Commonwealth of Australia Gazette39, 17thMay 1915 ‘… published for general information.’

[iii]Seal, Graham: Remembering and forgetting ANZAC Cottage: interpreting the community significance of Australian War Memorials since World War in Bennett, et al (eds), in: People, Place and Power: Global and Regional Perspectives. Perth 2009.

[iii]Stanley, Peter: Bad Characters: Sex, Crime, Mutiny, Murder and the Australian Imperial Force. Sydney 2010.

[iii]Hills, L: The RSSILA. Its Origin, History, Achievement and Ideals, Melbourne, 1927; Kristianson, G.L: The Politics of Patriotism: The Pressure Group Activities of the Returned Servicemen’s’ League. Canberra 1966; Ross, Jane: The Myth of the Digger. Australian Soldiers in Two World Wars. Sydney 1985.

[iii]Lake, Marilyn et al: What’s Wrong With Anzac? The Militarisation of Australian History. Sydney 2010.

[iii]See Anzac Day Act 1995 http://www.comlaw.gov.au/Series/C2004A04877and Protection of the Word ‘Anzac’ Regulations http://www.comlaw.gov.au/Series/F1997B02175, which also contains some details of previous legislation governing the use of the word ‘Anzac.’

[iii]Brown, James: Anzac’s Long Shadow: The Cost of our National Obsession. Melbourne 2014.

 

GREAT CONVICT STORIES

December 15, 2017 By in REVIEWS, NOTICES AND THE LIKE Tags: , , , Leave a comment
 Here’s the cover and Prologue from my just-released new book, Great Convict Stories:
 
 
 
 
LASHLAND
I saw a man walk across the yard with the blood that had run from his lacerated flesh squashing out of his shoes at every step he took. A dog was licking the blood off the triangles, and the ants were carrying away great pieces of human flesh that the lash had scattered about the ground. The scourger’s foot had worn a deep hole in the ground by the violence with which he whirled himself round on it to strike the quivering and wealed back, out of which stuck the sinews, white, ragged, and swollen.
The infliction was 100 lashes, at about half-minute time, so as to extend the punishment through nearly an hour. The day was hot enough to overcome a man merely standing that length of time in the sun, and this was going on in the full blaze of it. However, they had a pair of scourgers who gave each other spell and spell about, and they were bespattered with blood like a couple of butchers.’