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  • The Coachbuilder’s Column: Volume 15: Issue 8: 10th April 2025: the sharing of two opinion pieces -politics and literature.

    In this edition of the Coachbuilder’s Column, I’m wanting a couple of recent articles on two very different subjects – on international politics by former Australian prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull – and a literary article published by the State Library of Victoria concerning a new publication about the life of Australian author, Miles Franklin.

    1. FROM AUSTRALIAN FOREIGN AFFAIRS MONTHLY – VOICES FROM ASIA:  AFA Monthly [12/3/2025] – Voices from Asia  –  ‘What Albanese should do about Trump’ by Malcolm Turnbull

    Every day Australians’ news is dominated by Donald Trump, and every day we are reminded that the United States, under his leadership, is no longer committed to the values that our nations used to share.

    Australians used to fret that the United States would not come to our aid in times of peril. We have always gone to great lengths to remind the Americans of what compliant allies we have been, joining them in every war – even the most ill-conceived, like Vietnam and Iraq.

    But now the United States has a president who does not even pretend to care about alliances. He has threatened to pull out of NATO; he has threatened a NATO ally, Denmark, with sanctions if it does not hand over Greenland; and he has bullied and threatened Canada, a neighbour, calling on it to become the fifty-first American state.

    Trump has always admired Russian president Vladimir Putin. I saw that up close when I was in their company at G20 meetings. But now he has, effectively, switched sides and is doing everything he can to force Ukraine to submit to Russian domination. He humiliated Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office on 28 February, then suspended both military supplies to and intelligence sharing with Ukraine. In doing so, he made it much easier for Putin to kill Ukrainians and much harder for Ukrainians to fight back.

    Trump believes might is right: that American power should be used not to protect ideals such as democracy but simply to extort the best possible deal for itself. The more dependent a country is on the United States, the greater the opportunity for exploitation – as Ukraine, Canada and Denmark can each attest.

    What has been the response of our leaders? In a chorus of bipartisan gaslighting, we are assured that nothing has changed and the US alliance is as strong as ever. Behind the scenes it’s not much better: the consensus decision within government appears to be to hide under the doona, try not to attract the attention of this thin-skinned and vindictive president, and hope that in four years there is a return to normalcy.

    In 2016 Donald Trump did not expect to win and was not prepared to govern. He filled key posts with qualified people, such as Jim Mattis as Secretary of Defense, who sought to steer him towards more conventional policies. This time he is surrounded by people chosen for their loyalty and who share his ‘MAGA’ vision. Moreover, he now controls the Republican Party. There is no reason to assume that at the end of Trump’s second term (assuming he does not try to run for a third), the system will snap back to a conventional style of administration.

    Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, to his credit, has said he is open to Australian troops participating in a peacekeeping force in Ukraine, expressing solidarity with the European initiative led by British prime minister Keir Starmer and French president Emmanuel Macron. This at least represents a subtle divergence from Trump – which is more than can be said for Opposition leader Peter Dutton.

    But neither has acknowledged that Trump’s dramatic foreign-policy shifts have real implications for Australia and raise big questions.

    How should we defend ourselves if we cannot rely on the Americans?

    How should we advance our national interests in a ‘might is right’ world in which the United States’ foreign policy seems more aligned with Russia’s than with ours or our allies’?

    How can we best support friends and allies such as Canada when they are threatened and bullied?

    What are we to do with AUKUS? What is our plan B if, or when, the promised submarines do not turn up?

    In short, how do we stand up for Australia?

    Throughout his time in office, Albanese has been ultra-cautious – an approach that, coupled with his often, underwhelming advocacy, has created the impression that he is weak. To project strength, he needs to have something to say that shows Australia will not be bullied. What should he do?

    First, he should stop the gaslighting. He doesn’t have to criticise Trump or try to change him. But he should at least acknowledge what all of us can see: the United States is no longer committed to its allies, or to our foundational values of democracy and the rule of law. The United States no longer shares our commitment to the international rules-based order, which ensures that the strong cannot simply do as they wish while the weak suffer.

    Second, we need to review every aspect of our alliance with the Americans, and in particular AUKUS. Like the Europeans, we must start to make ourselves self-reliant. Albanese should make it clear that we must prepare to defend this country by ourselves. While we can always hope that the United States and other allies will come to our aid, we cannot assume they will. We should invest more in our defence, focusing on capabilities built in Australia; if that is impossible, we should at least ensure we have absolute sovereign control over them. In other words, they must be deployable without any other country’s consent.

    The government’s claim that the AUKUS submarines (if they ever appear) will be entirely sovereign assets is not credible. The much less complex F-16s operated by Ukraine have been, effectively, disabled by Trump’s withdrawal of technical and intelligence support. Even the United Kingdom’s nuclear fleet, and nuclear deterrent, cannot be operated without US concurrence.

    Third, Albanese should accelerate our advocacy for our values and interests with like-minded middle countries such as the United Kingdom, Japan and Indonesia. The Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership is a good model. But we have to stop seeing our relationships as a series of spokes leading to the hub of Washington DC; rather, they should be a mesh of alignments, especially in our region. That was my agenda as prime minister, but regrettably Scott Morrison reversed this and made Australia far more dependent on America, right at the time it was becoming less dependable. Albanese, fearing a political wedge on national security, adopted Morrison’s policies.

    Will a more independent Australia offend the United States? Will it result in tariffs, or in scornful social media blasts and patronising lectures from J.D. Vance? Well, it might. But what’s the alternative? Trump has made it very clear that the more dependent and vulnerable you are, the more he will exploit you. He is not an altruist. His slogan is ‘America First’.

    Above all we need to have an open and honest conversation about these issues. Right now, too many Australians – and not just politicians – are biting their tongues for fear of incurring the wrath of Trump.

    Immediately following an interview I gave on Bloomberg on Tuesday, Trump posted on Truth Social that I was weak and ineffectual and didn’t know anything about China – among other disparaging comments. He was apparently upset that I had made the obvious point that Trump’s chaotic bullying style of government creates an opportunity for China to be the reverse – consistent where he is erratic, respectful where he is abusive, constructive where he is combative. This would be a change from the approach that China took in the first Trump administration and would cause many countries which are not as closely aligned to the US as Australia is to move closer to China.

    This may be regarded as a penetrating glimpse of the obvious and is something I have said many times before, but Trump apparently saw it and fired back his personal abuse. That was surprising, but less surprising than the reaction from NewsCorp whose publications promptly said I had, by daring to speak my mind, torpedoed any exemption from steel and aluminium tariffs. It was disappointing to see the ABC taking the same line, effectively asking me why I didn’t self-censor for fear of offending the thin-skinned President.

    It’s time for our leaders, and all of us, to put Australia first.

     [Malcolm Turnbull was Prime Minister of Australia from 2015 to 2018].

    • From The Conversation: Books & Ideas, 14th March 2025

    Friday essay: Miles Franklin’s other brilliant career – her year as an undercover servant [by Kerrie Davies – Senior Lecturer, School of the Arts & Media, UNSW Sydney], published 14th March 2025

    In the Miles Franklin archive in the State Library of New South Wales there are two brown, cloth-bound volumes, titled, “When I was Mary-Anne, A Slavey”. The thick, handwritten pages are amended with glued paper inserts copied from the missing diary the author of My Brilliant Career kept for roughly a year between April 1903 and April 1904. In an accompanying summary, on which Franklin based her 1904 letter to the Bulletin about the experience, she wrote:

    Some people wonder what domestic servants have to complain about […] No one could understand the depth of the silent feud between mistress and maid without, in their own person, testing the matter …

    There is a picture of Franklin in the archive too, dressed in her “get up”: a black-and-white tunic and apron, with a lacy parlour cap pinned atop her piled-up brunette hair. The photograph, taken in a studio in Melbourne, is captioned “yr little mary-anne”. She beckons you into her impersonation.

    Along with the letters Franklin wrote or received during the year, the summary and photo authenticate her little known upstairs–downstairs experiment in Sydney and Melbourne, which she details in the manuscript. She cooked in flammable kitchens, plunged her hands into steaming washing up, and swept the dust that scattered behind her employers’ shoes.

    In today’s Instagram culture, it is improbable that a celebrity like Franklin could work incognito and not be recognised. But this was the Edwardian era of the early 1900s, when a photograph was a special occasion and names were known more widely than faces. Franklin loved that a lady she’d once met at a government reception unknowingly flung her coat at her when she opened the door, and that she stoked the fire while guests discussed My Brilliant Career.

    Aged 21, Franklin dazzled Australia with her debut novel. Published in 1901, My Brilliant Career inspired young women to write to her about their own frustrations and dreams. She denied her novel was autobiographical, to little effect. She was compared to novelist Charlotte Bronte and to Marie Bashkirtseff, the Russian–Parisian teen artist who declared in her memoir, “I am my own heroine”.


    Despite Franklin’s later fervent wish that My Brilliant Career’s heroine, Sybylla Melvyn, would be forgotten, the book endured. It became a feminist literary classic, and in 1979 a film, produced by Margaret Fink and directed by Gillian Armstrong. Today, her cultural touchstone continues with her bequest of the Miles Franklin Literary Award and recent stage adaptations of My Brilliant Career. The Stella literary prize is named in her honour, after her first given name, Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin.

    Franklin’s iconic success is, however, misleading. Like many authors, she experienced fame and acclaim, but minimal royalties, in part due to an unfair contract for colonial authors with her Edinburgh publisher, William Blackwood and Sons. Books were also a luxury during the punishing Federation drought, which lasted from 1895 to 1902.

    Franklin could have married. Her grandmother took every opportunity to remind her she was expected to wed. “Have you found anyone you like better than yourself?” she archly asked.

    Instead, she disappeared into undercover journalism.

    Franklin was likely inspired by the “gonzo” women journalists known as “girl stunt reporters”, who disrupted male-dominated journalism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

    To prove their journalistic chops, they risked their safety and health to go undercover and expose factory exploitation and illegal abortion clinics. Most famously, New York reporter Nellie Bly feigned hysteria to gain admission to the city’s public women’s mental health institution for ten days in 1887. Their stories captivated audiences, as much as their daring.

    American journalist Elizabeth Banks transported the trend to London, where she worked as a servant, leaving her poodle, Judge, with a friend. Her reports in “In Cap and Apron” for the Weekly Sun caused a sensation, and Banks’ memoir Autobiography of a Newspaper Girl was reviewed in Australia in late 1902 and early 1903.

    Apart from Catherine Hay Thomson’s investigation of Kew Asylum and Melbourne Hospital in 1886, the “stunt girl reporter” only noticeably appeared in Australia in 1903.

    That year, the fledgling New Idea magazine published a series of undercover articles, including about experiences such as working in a tobacco factory and applying for domestic service at an employment agency. Unlike Franklin, the New Idea journalist stopped there, while Franklin spent a full, gruelling year as a servant.

    The “servant question” was an ideal local investigation. The newly federated Australia was growing due to the wool industry – “on the sheep’s back”. But in the cities, factories were an alternative engine for young women’s employment rather than domestic service. Fretting “mistresses” complained about the dearth of remaining girls available.

    Servants retorted that if they were treated better, perhaps they would stay. One suggested scandalously that mistresses should give references about how they treat servants to prospective hires, pre-dating contemporary suggestions that owners and agencies should prove their fitness as landlords to tenants.

    The debate around “the servant question” exposed Australia’s myth of equality. Franklin’s family was no exception. While drought drove her parents off their farm, Stillwater, to a plot in Penrith (then a rural town outside Sydney), they were cultured and educated. Franklin’s wealthy grandmother ran a station in the Snowy Mountains, on which Franklin based the elegant homestead, Caddagat, in My Brilliant Career. A governess or nurse was acceptable, she wrote in her accompanying summary to her manuscript, but “a servant raised considerable horror among my circle”.

    Franklin was undeterred. As well as a new writing project, she needed money and a roof if she wanted to live in the city rather than at home. Suffragette Rose Scott, who called Franklin her “spirit child”, invited her to stay. But while Franklin appreciated the support, at times Rose was suffocating.

    Revealing the independent streak that would define her life, Franklin wrote, “it was imperative I get work to sustain myself”.

    Franklin’s real servant pseudonym was “Sarah Frankling”, a play on her middle name and her surname. “Mary-Anne”, at the time a well known slang name for servants, was only used for the manuscript, to hide identities.

    Franklin’s live-in domestic servant positions included kitchen maid, parlour maid and “general” servant. She worked in a terrace she dubbed a “cubby house”, an upmarket boarding house, a harbourside villa, a wealthy merchant home, and mansions in Sydney and Melbourne. Franklin stayed a maximum of two months at each post for a year in total, after which she planned to write.

    Senator and High Court judge Richard Edward O’Connor and his large family were her most high-profile employer. Their mansion, Keston, which is close to the prime minister’s Sydney residence, Kirribilli House, and the boarding house around the corner survive, as does the terrace, near Bronte in the city’s eastern suburbs. All are now apartment buildings.

    In the manuscript, Franklin recounts that she rapidly lost weight and felt her spirit become “suppressed” by the monotony and tiring nature of servant work. Depending on the number of staff and her duties, she hand-rolled heavy, wet clothes through a washing mangle; served pre-breakfast tea and toast in bed, which she thought was an obscene indulgence; cooked and served full hot breakfasts and dinners daily; waited on guests in the boarding house’s dining room, nicknamed “the zoo”; cleaned the guest rooms and parlours; and helped at high-society balls. She kept fires burning in winter and sweated through heavy housework and cooking in summer.

    The hours were brutal. She usually woke at dawn, and only finished after the evening dinners were served, or if she was a kitchen maid, after she cleaned the mess away. Not all her employers offered a luxurious whole afternoon off per week. She worked through burns sustained on the job, and was brought to tears by a mistress who ordered her to change her carefully arranged hair. The house’s Irish cook opined that the mistress was threatened by Franklin’s “toy figure” and “fairy face”.

    As the months passed at different employers, fatigue turned to anger, and loneliness to friendships with fellow servants. It is heartening to see a snobby young Franklin mature and change as she rubbed tired elbows with those she previously saw as beneath her status. She cheekily flirted with a lovestruck tradie, just as she traded Shakespearian quips with an intrigued young naval officer staying at the posh boarding house.

    When Scott learned Franklin was working as a servant, she chided her for not refusing the conditions as an example to others. However, Franklin knew any insolence or objection meant instant dismissal, ruining her research and current livelihood.

    Scott also misread Franklin’s long-term goal – writing the servant book. In her diary, Franklin recorded what she could not say out loud. She cynically noted that “to be sensitive would be unfortunate” for a servant. “The maid must not want for pleasure,” Franklin warned, “because she will have no time to gratify it”. Be presentable but not too pretty, she advised; be polite but not so fancy or fussy to refuse tiny, “ill-aired” servant quarters next to the laundry.

    The servant year confirmed her lifelong views of marriage as stifling. Echoing My Brilliant Career, Franklin vented her feminist frustration in the diary entries. She wrote of the terrace’s “Mistress”: “sooth, when a woman of ordinary intelligence gives the whole of her time, brain and energy to the running of a miniature establishment”.

    As for the husband, an irritated Franklin wrote that he was “boss of his own backyard and lord of his little suburban dining room”.

    Biographies of Miles Franklin have largely followed the traditional “cradle to grave” of her life, in which the critical servant year has been brushed over like a quick sweep of the biographical floor. One of Franklin’s first biographers, Marjorie Barnard, dismissed Mary-Anne as of little interest.

    Jill Roe, author of the epic biography Stella Miles Franklin, read the existing Mary-Anne draft manuscript, describing it in her book as Franklin’s “social experiment”. Yet even Roe is succinct about Mary-Anne, compared to other years in Franklin’s eventful life. Roe lists Franklin’s known servant employers, admires her pluck and commiserates over it not being published due to concerns she had defamed her employers. (Franklin’s pseudonyms for her employers were chiffon thin, so easily identifiable.)

    There were other intractable problems too with the manuscript, though Franklin may have edited another draft before submitting it for publication. The existing draft is overlong, unwieldy and inconsistent in its point of view. Franklin switches between “I” and later, “Mary-Anne”, as if she fully collapses into her servant life.

    Despite her failure to find a publisher for her manuscript, Franklin continued her journalism. She began writing for the Sydney Morning Herald, which suited her fast writing style, and helped her earn money with a pen.

    In 1908, Franklin joined the women’s trade union movement and advocated for working women, all the while working on her own novel, writing and resisting the status quo of the Edwardian era. She finally returned to literary acclaim with the award-winning All That Swagger in 1936, a colonial saga of a pioneering family, and another historical series she wrote under the pseudonym “Brent of Bin Bin”.

    Upon her death in 1954, tributes reported that “Australian literature lost one of its great figures”.

    Franklin’s investigation of the servant question now seems quaint. Appliances have changed from washing mangles and melting iceboxes to sleek stainless steel and glossy white machines that beep and hum in the background.

    Yet demand for service remains. “Servants” are still in our lives; they just answer to an app rather than a bell. They clean our houses while we are out, or they are chefs on call who cook meals delivered by mobile waiters on electric bikes and scooters who brave traffic as they dash to door to door. Uber and Dido chauffeurs compete to pick us up from wherever we happen to be.

    The exploitation remains, too. At the extreme, the Sri Lankan Embassy in Canberra has been ordered to pay $117,000 in back wages to its domestic servant, paid 90 cents an hour. More broadly, Fair Work last year moved to protect gig workers in the share economy, recognising its endemic lack of rights and risks.

    Since Franklin’s Mary-Anne, low-wage service work has been revisited periodically by writers interested in social justice. In 1933, inspired by Jack London, George Orwell chronicled the months he spent impoverished and doing menial jobs in Down and Out in Paris and London.

    In 2001, Barbara Ehrenreich published the acclaimed Nickel and Dimed, about working and living on minimum wage. Elisabeth Wynhausen wrote an Australian version, Dirt Cheap: Life at the wrong end of the job market in 2005. Alexandrea J. Ravenelle brought the history full circle in 2019 with her collected stories of 80 gig economy workers in her book, Hustle and Gig. All these authors had similar conclusions to Franklin: low-wage service work is grinding and exploitative.

    At its core, the servant question hasn’t changed at all since Franklin’s investigation over a hundred years ago.

    Miles Franklin Undercover by Kerrie Davies is published by Allen & Unwin

  • The Coachbuilder’s Column: Volume 15: Issue 4:  some early reading in the opening month of 2025.

    This selection includes the following publications.

    • ‘The Life and Times of King George VI’ [1895-1952] [pub. 1950s], and, Royalty Annual, No. 5 [pub circa 1956/57];
    • Watsonia: A Writing Life by Don Watson [2020];
    • The Ghosts of August, by Peter Watt [2024]; and,
    • On the Beach’ by Nevil Shute [1957].

    January

    This month, a couple of royalty books that have been sitting on my book shelves for decades, so I finally decided to have a proper read,  whilst trying to maintain a touch of fitness on the exercise bike!!

    ‘The Life and Times of King George VI’ [1895-1952], 160 pages, and up to 200 black & white photographs, set up and printed in Australia by The Herald and Weekly Times Ltd. The year of publication is uncertain, although I’m assuming it was in the middle to late 1950’s following the King’s death and the succession of Queen Elizabeth, his eldest daughter to the throne.

    I can’t recall how I came across this book which I’ve had in my possession for many years. I can only assume it was passed down to me at some stage by my grandmother prior to her death in 1980.  The book was actually a gift to one of the sisters of her father – Mrs Alice Rodgers [nee Jenkin] from a Howard Reed. Alice died at the age of 96 years, in 1969, so obviously she received the book most likely in the 1950s/1960s period.  I’ve been unable to find reference to this precise book on the internet, but basically, it is described as a pictorial record of the years of one who was a much-loved monarch in his time.  Within the 160 pages, every phase of the King’s life over 56 momentous years, is mirrored with nearly 200 vivid, photographs which were supplemented  by descriptive captions. One Internet Archive I came across, which appears to have the same ‘Appreciation’ of 6 pages at the beginning of the book, suggest it was published in 1946, which cannot of course be correct, with the King’s death and funeral in 1952 fully covered. I was not yet 6 years of age at that time, and cannot admit to any recalled knowledge of those events.

    In any case after the section entitled ‘An Appreciation’ written by a Malcom Thomson, the book is then introduced by a tribute by the then Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, The Rt Hon. Winston S. Churchill, O.M, C.H., M.P.

    The book cover leaflet provides the following description.

    ‘Here are scenes from King George’s childhood and early manhood, his years as Duke of York, world traveller, sportsman, devoted husband and father, happy Royal family pictures, memories of the funeral of King George V, the Coronation, Royal tour of Canada and USA, the war years, visits to blitzed cities, visits to war zones, Victory celebrations, Royal tour of South Africa, Princess Elizabeth’s wedding, Royal Silver Wedding, the Royal grandchildren, opening of the Festival of Britain. Finally, there are the impressive scenes of the lying in State and of the Royal funeral, including some of the most remarkable camera studies of our day. It is, in truth, a book to treasure for a lifetime’.

    So this book has lasted in my possession for a large part of my lifetime, and I can only hope that someone following me will regard it in that way, basically as a family treasure. I have a few books of that nature, including of course the Family Bible passed down through my grandmother’s family, and I do admittedly have concerns as to what will become of that and others of similar nature!!

    Royalty Annual No. 5:  published in 1957:  a gift from my father’s sister back in the 1950’s or thereabouts, the British Royal family of that time being much more highly regarded than is the case in 2024.  This was apparently the 5th such annual published since the start of the reign of Queen Elizabeth II in February 1952, basically a summary of royal occasions, family life etc during that period of around July 1955 to June 1956, filled with news about the British royal family, Queen Elizabeth, in particular, and the first chapter is titled, “Christmas at Sandringham. 

    The copy I have consist of 128 pages, with an original dust jacket, which is slightly damaged, though otherwise, the book is in good condition, the cover printed in Red cloth material with gilt lettering. It contains black and white photographic plates, and has detailed summaries of the many Royal activities, ceremonies, family lives and individuals over the period referred to. It was written and produced by Godfrey Talbot and Wynford Vaughan Thomas and printed by London Andrews Dakers Ltd. This particular edition is currently available on many of the relevant sites for around $AUS42.00.

    Amongst some of the topics covered are:

    • Homes and hobbies and historic public engagements of the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh and their relatives;
    • Tour of Nigeria & other travels;
    • Royal theatre-going, film and book tastes, and fashions;
    • The great houses of Windsor, Osborne and Sandringham;
    • Princess Margaret;
    • Trooping the Colour;
    • Royal Wales;
    • Educating Prince Charles;
    • Queen and Parliament;
    • Europe’s Royal families;
    • Her Majesty’s horses;
    • A Royal Duke at home; and so much more.

    The introductory paragraph on page 3 reads as follows.

    “Our fifth Royalty Annual appears in the fifth year of the reign of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second. In our first edition we reflected the confidence of the nation that our new Sovereign would maintain the tradition of devoted service to the State which was the driving force in the life of her father, King George VI. The whole world now knows how nobly the nation’s hopes have been fulfilled. Her Majesty has not been content merely to continue in the paths already laid down for her – admirable though they be.  She has struck out on her own policy and made a fresh appraisal of the relationship between the Crown and the People……She has travelled more widely and more swiftly than any other ruler in our history. She has put the stamp of her own vigorous personality on the new Elizabethan Age. That age now appears as one of speedy and exciting social and constitutional change….:

    22nd January

    ‘Watsonia: A Writing Life’ by Don Watson [published in 2020 a Black Inc pub], 561 pages.

    This book was a collection of essays, columns, op-eds, and occasional addresses by Don Watson, basically over the 40 years from 1980. Indeed, a wide Range of topics and subject matters included in quite an extensive collection. I purchased the book recently from a second-hand bookshop in Daylesford, Central Victoria.

    As Black Inc relate:

    Watsonia gathers the fruits of a writing life. It covers everything from Australian humour to America gone berserk; from Don Bradman to Oscar Wilde; from birds and horses to history and politics. Wherever Don Watson turns his incisive gaze, the results are as illuminating as they are enjoyable.

    Watsonia displays the many sides of Don Watson: historian, speechwriter, social critic, humourist, biographer and lover of nature and sports. Replete with wit, wisdom and diverse pleasures, this comprehensive collection includes a wide-ranging introduction by the author and several previously unpublished pieces. No other writer has journeyed further into the soul of Australia and returned to tell the tale.

    Rather ironic that one of the major articles [in fact a Quarterly Essay contribution] dealing with politics in the USA was discussing the pre-election campaigning for the 2016 election [Trump versus Hilary Clinton], ironic because we have just seen Trump re-elected, in 2025.

    The collection also included a very interesting piece about the US writer, Mark Twain.

    Artfully arranged, Watsonia showcases the many sides of Don Watson- historian, speechwriter, commentator, humourist, nature writer and biographer. It also features, as mentioned,  several previously unpublished lectures and a wide-ranging introduction by the author. This comprehensive anthology – replete with wit, wisdom and diverse pleasures – is essential reading [for a small minority I guess, I thoroughly enjoyed the variety of subjects in any case!!]

    Don Watson is the author of many acclaimed books, including Caledonia Australia, Recollections of a Bleeding Heart, American Journeys, The Bush, Watsonia and The Story of Australia.

    28th January 2025

    ‘The Ghosts of August’ by Peter Watt, published in 2024, 401 pages, another great contribution from Watt, at times a very moving and almost, emotional piece of reading! This was another inspiring and fast-moving contribution by Watt who has been publishing since about 1999, and who personally signed for me, one of his releases in 2008 at the Sunbury Library. The story [an ongoing one of the generations of the Steele family] is centred around the years of World War I, an historical novel, with fictional characters in the main, involved in factual events.

    Watt reminds us that while most attention on WWI for Australia revolves around Gallipoli or the Charge of the Light Horse Brigade at Beersheba, he, through his novels draws attention to events generally overlooked or forgotten aspects of our military history.  As he writes in his notes for example “…most are ignorant that a mere matter of weeks after war was declared in August 1914, we also undertook a coastal landing to our north. It was not a campaign on behalf of the British Empire but a pre-emptive  strike to defend our own eastern shores against the possibility of a German naval bombardment, as outlined in a prewar operational plan by the German Imperial Navy…..I have attempted to briefly describe what might be considered a skirmish, but it did cost the lives of Australian soldiers and sailors and the loss of an Australian submarine, the AE1, which was only recently discovered with its crew still entombed”.

    And further he writes: “An overlooked campaign fought in the deserts of Egypt and Palestine by the Australian Light Horse in company with the New Zealand Mounted Infantry and the British Yeomanry mounted troopers was critical to the eventual victory by the Allied forces, and yet most Australians only know about a charge at Beersheba”.

    Certainly, this book reminds us of the horrors of war as fought at Gallipoli, the western front, and in the deserts, and often doesn’t make for pleasant reading, as I guess the truth seldom does!. Peter Watt, amongst other sources, uses the direct experiences of Australian author Ion Idriess [whose many books I inherited from my late father] where Idriess recorded his personal experiences at Gallipoli and Palestine in his book ‘The Desert Column’, and Watt uses these experiences as told through the lives of his fictional characters.  Incidentally, Ion Idriess was wounded twice, once at Gallipoli and again in Palestine before he was discharged after the war.

    30th January

    Probably, as an after-thought, I should have avoided doing so, but I followed Watt’s book up with a quick read of Nevil Shute’s 1957 classic ‘On the Beach’ [a paperback edition by Pan Books of 267 pages] which was subsequently made into a movie in 1959, principally centred in Melbourne, and starring Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Fred Astaire and Anthony Perkins and directed by Stanley Kramer.

    Basically, as per the novel, in 1964, World War III has devastated the Northern Hemisphere, killing all humans there. Air currents are slowly carrying the radio-active fallout to the Southern Hemisphere where the occupants of Melbourne, Australia, will be the last major city on Earth to perish. The story covers the final few months in the lives of five people in particular as the final weeks and days are counted down. As suggested, in retrospect, in view of current world conflicts, etc, it might have been wiser to put this book aside, as the very nature of the topic was somewhat depressing, though not unexpected as I have watched the movie on a few occasions.

    A Wikipedia summary of the ‘film’ plot [in which there are subtle differences to the book, and my bracketed comments refer to some of those discrepancies] – however, this summary is a fairly succinct outline of the story, so I’ve copied that  version here.

    The American nuclear submarine USS Sawfish, commanded by Capt. Dwight Towers, arrives in Melbourne and is placed under Royal Australian Navy command. Peter Holmes, a young Australian Naval officer with a wife and infant child, is assigned to be Towers’ liaison. Holmes invites Towers to his home for a party, where Towers meets Julian Osborn, a depressive nuclear scientist who helped build the bombs, and Moira Davidson, a lonely alcoholic with whom Towers develops a tentative attraction. Although Davidson falls in love with Towers, he finds himself unable to return her feelings, because he can’t bring himself to admit his wife and children in the United States are dead.

    Meanwhile, a new scientific theory postulates that radiation levels in the Northern Hemisphere might have fallen faster than anticipated, suggesting radiation may disperse before reaching the Southern Hemisphere, or at least leaving Antarctica habitable [this theory is quickly discounted as misleading in the book version]. Soon after, the Australians also detect an incomprehensible continuous Morse code signal coming from the West Coast of the United States, where there should be nobody alive to send it. Towers is ordered to take the Sawfish, with Peter and Julian, to investigate.

    Arriving at Point Barrow, Alaska, the sub crew discovers that the radiation levels are not only highly lethal but higher than in the mid-Pacific Ocean, meaning the dispersal theory is incorrect. There will be no salvation from the radiation. Stopping next in San Francisco, Sawfish finds the city devoid of life. A crew member with family in the city deserts and swims ashore, so he can die at home.

    The submarine next stops at a refinery near San Diego, which has been pinpointed as the source of the mysterious Morse signals. A crew member discovers the power source is still running on automatic control. Nearby, a telegraph key has become entangled in a window shade’s pull cord and a half-full Coca-Cola bottle, and is being randomly pulled by an ocean breeze, causing the radio signals.

    Sawfish returns to Australia to await the inevitable. Towers is reunited with Davidson at her father’s farm. He learns that all US Navy personnel in Brisbane are dead and he has been given command of all remaining US Naval forces. Osborn, having bought the fastest Ferrari in Australia, wins the Australian Grand Prix [during the final weekend as the radiation begins to infiltrate the Melbourne area] in which many racers, with nothing left to lose, die in fiery crashes.

    Fulfilling Towers’ wish, Davidson has used her connections to get the trout season opened early. Towers and Davidson go on a fishing trip to the country. As drunken revelers sing “Waltzing Matilda” in the hotel bar, Towers and Davidson make love in their room [a bit of film levity here, with the book revealing no true intimacy between the two, as Towers remains true to his US family to the end , intending to ‘return home, and having purchased gifts for his wife and children with the support of Davidson]. ’Returning to Melbourne, Towers learns the first of his crew members has radiation sickness. There is little time left. Towers takes a vote among his crew [some of whom] decide they want to ‘ return to the United States’ to die. Osborn shuts himself in a garage with his Ferrari and starts the engine, to end his life by carbon monoxide poisoning. Others queue to receive government-issued suicide pills. Before they take their pills, Peter and Mary reminisce about the day they met, “on the beach.”

    Towers says farewell to Davidson at the docks. Choosing duty over love, he takes the Sawfish back to sea. Heartbroken, Davidson watches from a cliff as the Sawfish submerges. It is implied that Towers and Davidson ended their lives shortly afterward, although their deaths are not depicted onscreen. [In fact, Towers intends to sink Sawfish in Bass Strait just beyond the Heads, taking himself and his willing crew members down with the ship, while Davidson has driven at breakneck speed to reach the clifftops at Barwon Heads so that she can ‘be with Towers’ and ‘die with him’  – he had earlier refused her request to go with him on the Sawfish because it was against naval regulations]. 

    Within a few days, the streets of Melbourne are empty, silent, desolate and without any sign of motor vehicles, animal or human life.  A Salvation Army street banner, seen several times before in the film, reads: “There is still time .. Brother”.

    [Bill Kirk 31/1/2025]

  • The Coachbuilder’s Column: Volume 15: Issue 3:  26th January 2025: Some essential Australia Day reads as recommended by historians.

    The following article came from ‘The Conversation: Books and Ideas’ [a weekly online newsletter], dated the 24th January 2025, and provided the suggestions of various writers as to the most appropriate and essential reading recommended for Australia Day. I thought I’d like to share those ideas on this day.

    The Conversation asked some of our leading historians to choose an essential Australia Day read. Here are the works they consider crucial to understanding our culture and history.

    The Australian Legend – Russel Ward

    Russel Ward’s The Australian Legend (1958) has had some bad press over the years. Based on a PhD thesis about bush ballads, the book was a brief study of a figure Ward called “the typical Australian”. While Ward believed convicts, Irish, bush-rangers and gold miners had contributed something to the national image, he thought the pastoral worker, especially the shearer, was the quintessential national type. A white bushman as “the typical Australian” and mateship as his creed. Oh, dear!

    Needless to say, such arguments formed a handy target for critics as the 1960s and 1970s unfolded. Surely Australia was one of the most urbanised countries in the world, so what about city people? What about women? And what of Indigenous Australians? Were they simply to be written out of the national story by Ward, as they had been so often by previous historians? And wasn’t his bushman also hostile to Asians?

    Ward explained that he was exploring a national image, a stereotype, but one that had influenced how people actually behaved and how they thought of themselves. For that reason, the book remains essential reading for anyone wishing to understand this country. The image Ward examined remains alive within Australia, and perhaps especially beyond it as a resilient global image.

    [by] Frank Bongiorno, Professor of History, Australian National University; Distinguished Fellow, Whitlam Institute, Western Sydney University

    Näku Dhäruk: The Bark Petitions – Clare Wright

    For a book that challenges and deepens your understanding of Australia I would turn to Clare Wright’s new, compelling history of the Yirrkala Bark Petitions, Ṉäku Dhäruk. This is pacy, epic storytelling about beautiful bilingual documents formally presented by the Yolngu people of north-eastern Arnhem Land to the Commonwealth Parliament in 1963. The dramatic narrative unfolds month by month throughout one year; the book is cinematic in its evocation of land, weather, seasons, politics and people.

    How did the Australian government receive this respectful and deeply spiritual petition from a people who have always remained on their land and never ceded it to the invaders? I think readers know the answer, but as we reflect on our nation’s history, let’s consider paths not taken as well as opportunities that still beckon. Australia is a continental constellation of sovereign peoples whose histories deepen and enrich any understanding of the modern nation. This book takes you on a roller-coaster ride into another world, an Australia most of us hardly know.

    [by] Tom Griffiths, Emeritus Professor of History, Australian National University

    Truth: the third pillar, alongside Voice and Treaty, of the Uluru Statement from the Heart. We historians have been truth telling about colonisation for decades, and there’s no shortage of books that illuminate why 26 January is better known as Invasion Day.

    For this year’s dose of truth, I’d recommend a new release: Clare Wright’s Näku Dhäruk: The Bark Petitions, the third book in her Democracy Trilogy. In this rollicking read, Wright tells how the people of Yirrkala asserted their sovereignty against mining interests and birthed the modern land-rights movement. It’s a tale of resistance and survival in the face of dispossession, but also an extraordinary glimpse into the sophistication of Yolŋu culture and governance. We settlers should be so lucky to live alongside such wisdom.

    Yet the true history of this continent is not only contained in history books. Truth telling is sometimes more potent in the creative arts, and I have found First Nations poetry especially affecting. Two personal favourites are Natalie Harkin’s Archival-Poetics and Ambelin Kwaymullina’s Living on Stolen Land. Both remind us that the past isn’t past and – as Kwaymullina puts it – “there is no space of innocence”. Having reckoned with that fact, what will we each do next?

    [by] Yves Rees, Senior Lecturer in History, La Trobe University

    Mixed Relations: Asian-Aboriginal contact in north Australia – Regina Ganter

    This beautiful book (with contributions also from Julia Martinez and Gary Lee) turns the map upside-down, to examine the continent’s entanglement with Asia starting centuries before the arrival of the British. Looking north, it begins with Macassan trepang (sea cucumber) fishermen travelling south from Sulawesi each year to trade with First Nations Australians along the coast, from Western Australia to the Gulf of Carpentaria.

    Exploring the rich cosmopolitan exchange between Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, Malay and Afghan people across the country’s north, Mixed Relations is based on more than 100 interviews combined with extensive historical research. It explores topics such as pearling in the north of Western Australia, government “protection” of Aboriginal people from Asians, and the Asian culture of Darwin.

    These are stories that should be central to our national history. And especially precious to me is that Mixed Relations overflows with gorgeous images, bringing this past to life.

    [by] Jane Lydon, Wesfarmers Chair of Australian History, The University of Western Australia

    Words to Sing the World Alive: Celebrating First Nations Languages, edited by Jasmin McGaughey and The Poet’s Voice

    When Captain Arthur Phillip raised the flag of Great Britain at Warrane (Sydney Cove) on 26 January 1788, the invading nation dispossessed the original owners of more than their property. We often hear that the vast majority of the 250 Indigenous languages spoken prior to 1788 were “lost”.

    As those First Nations’ elders, writers and artists now engaged in the arduous, vital process of language revitalisation are at pains to point out, language wasn’t clumsily lost, like a set of car keys down the back of the couch. Language, like land, was stolen.

    Words to Sing the World Alive, is more than simply “a celebration of First Nations Languages”, as this beautiful, moving, important book humbly claims in its subtitle. It is a timely and necessary intervention into Australia’s exceptionally and stubbornly monolingual national culture.

    It shows us that if history is the lock, language is the key.

    [by] Clare Wright, Professor of History and Professor of Public Engagement, La Trobe University

    Winners and Losers – Stuart Macintyre

    In Winners and Losers: The Pursuit of Social Justice in Australian History (1985), Stuart Macintyre offers a thematic single-volume history of Australia since the British government established a penal settlement at Port Jackson. His theme is inequality – what inequalities people noticed and cared about, and what they did to overcome them.

    Macintyre devotes chapters to the struggles of convicts, small settlers, wage-earners, the unemployed, those not supported by wage labour, the school-aged, women and Aboriginal people.

    There has been no single agenda of social justice. Rather, in each of the chapters Macintyre discusses a particular set of reformers, each advancing a particular conception of a more equal Australia. Each movement shaped the state and established common expectations of what governments, if they are serious about a “fair go”, must do.

    The result is a compact, readable, evolutionary account of what Australians have come to expect a state to do for those it governs.

    [by] Tim Rowse, Emeritus Professor, Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University

    Deep Time Dreaming: Uncovering Ancient Australia – Billy Griffiths

    I first read Billy Griffiths’ Deep Time Dreaming: Uncovering Ancient Australia when it came out in 2018, and loved how it charts the recognition of Australia’s ancient history. It’s a story of how settler colonial Australia slowly realised that the continent’s human history didn’t begin with colonisation, but stretched over millennia, reaching into an expanse of time that seems almost unimaginable. “The New World had become Old”, he explains.

    When I returned to study last year, I read Deep Time Dreaming again and it was even better second time around. Griffiths’ book isn’t simply about ancientness, but about the nature of Deep Time itself, patiently explained by First Nations Knowledge Holders, he acknowledges, shared by communities, measured by science and humanities, and held in archives on Country. “Beneath a thin veneer, the evidence of ancient Australia is everywhere, a pulsing presence”, Griffiths writes. This is a book I’ll keep returning to and hope others do, too, on this significant weekend.

    [by] Anna Clark, Professor of Public History, University of Technology Sydney

    Australia – W.K. Hancock

    Although it was published in 1930, W.K. Hancock’s Australia remains essential reading for anyone interested in the dynamics that established Australian politics, economics and culture.

    Hancock dissects the key developments of early 20th century Australia, what he terms elsewhere the “settled polices”: White Australia, industry protection, and Australia’s unique system of industrial arbitration, all of them the product of Deakinite liberalism, established with the support of the Labor Party.

    These policies were inspired by a radical spirit and were meant to create a better Australia. They ultimately failed because they had unintended consequences, and because the “idealism” of Australians did not take account of the realities of the wider world. Protectionism led to industries becoming increasingly unviable without government support. The industrial system threatened productivity because it linked wage increases to rises in the cost of living, rather than increasing output. As for White Australia, Hancock commented that Australians put up barriers because they could not trust themselves to be just to people different to themselves; they believed that homogeneity was a precondition for a just society.

    Hancock’s Australia is still relevant today because it explains how a particular form of “cultural patterning” shaped Australia for a large part of the 20th century. Moreover, it is a wonderfully written book, full of wit, and a model for how to write good history.

    [by] Greg Melleuish, Professor of History and Politics, School of Humanities and Social Inquiry, University of Wollongong

    Ecstasy and Economics: American Essays for John Forbes – Meaghan Morris

    History has always been the glamour discipline of the Australian humanities. In this country, we have history wars, not criticism wars or philosophy wars. Our public intellectuals tend to be historians; works of history are the ones most likely to find readers beyond academia; the scholarly debates that erupt into public awareness are generally historical.

    History’s stature is evident in the ease with which one could fill a bookshelf with landmark volumes of Australian history – books that have changed how large and diverse readerships think about Australia’s past, and so understand its present and imagine its future.

    But by both professional training and personal inclination, I’m a particular fan of books that approach history more indirectly: books that look to artworks of one kind or another as what Theodor Adorno once called “the unconscious historiography of their epoch”. And here pickings are slimmer.

    One stand-out text that delivers on the promise of this approach is Meaghan Morris’s Ecstasy and Economics: American Essays for John Forbes, an extended reading of two poems by Forbes. When it was first published in 1992, it provided a singularly acute historical analysis of the Keating revolution and its implications for Australia’s place in the world. Three decades on, it offers an unparalleled insight into the libidinal machinations of neoliberalism – an era which, globally, appears now to have ended. Five stars.

    [by] Thomas H. Ford, Senior Lecturer in English, La Trobe University

    People Power: How Australian referendums are lost and won – George Williams and David Hume

    Australia has changed dramatically since 1901, but the constitution still reflects the 19th century language and ideas of its authors. In People Power, George Williams and David Hume have managed to turn referendum history into a page turner. Republished following the defeat of the Voice to Parliament in last year’s referendum, it is a fascinating account of why our current system makes it so easy for popular ideas to be defeated.

    The Voice in 2023, a republic in 1999, 4-year terms in 1988, these are all ideas most Australians supported, but a lack of bipartisanship followed by similar negative campaigns, unchecked disinformation, and the age old appeal to ignorance – if you don’t know vote no – saw each of them fail.

    This book reminds us that hope is not lost. Free of legal jargon, it offers practical measures that can return referendums to public ownership and make it more likely that good ideas will prevail over bad politics. Australia Day is an ideal time to consider what we want out democracy to look like.

    [by] Benjamin T. Jones, Senior Lecturer in History, CQUniversity Australia

    Finally, when asked to nominate a book I consider essential to understanding Australian history, a few come to mind. Clarrie Cameron’s Elephants in the Bush and Other Yamatji Yarns, Busted Out Laughing: Dot Collard’s Story, and Robert Merritt’s The Cake Man show the gentle strength and beauty of Aboriginal thought and language in the face of recent brutality. David Burramurra’s Oceanal Man: An Aboriginal View of Himself – an article rather than a book – shows the depth of history of the continent.

    The list of people continuing the storytelling tradition is long. You can’t go wrong reading the stories of Bill Neidjie or Charlie McAdam.

    I would nominate Why Warriors Lie Down and Die: Djambatj Mala by Richard Trudgen as essential to understanding how we got to where we are. The book clearly explains why resurgence is still possible. It is an outstanding representation of Aboriginal voices, and an example of the compelling storytelling that is still emerging from the ancient oral traditions of this place.

    [by] Lawrence Bamblett, Senior Lecturer, Australian Centre for Indigenous History, Australian National University