Getting sidetracked: the pleasurable distractions of research
Edel Wignell
Often when I go to the library to research, I'm diverted. Opening old newspapers and books, I find items which are fascinating, but useless. Headlines grab attention; reports, opinions, verse and advertisements seduce. Soon I'm laughing, intrigued and utterly distracted from my purpose. It's addictive!
Searching for information on bunyips, I scanned the letters of Victoria's first Lieutenant-Governor, Charles Joseph La Trobe (1801-75). I found the bunyip, but I continued reading, for La Trobe's letters are fascinating. Squeezed into each is a great deal of information on a variety of topics, including the fact that, in the 19th century, Australia was regarded as upside down at the end of the world. In a letter, dated 15 December 1840, to John Murray in London, La Trobe wrote:
Mrs Latrobe has not been over strong since her arrival in these regions of the globe, though enjoying good general health. I am not quite sure that standing with the head downwards (as you know we are all obliged to do here) suits the female constitution, though one gets wonderfully used to it after the first month's trial.
[L J Blake (ed.), Letters of Charles Joseph La Trobe, Victoriana Series No. 1, 1975,
The Government of Victoria, Melbourne]
Newspapers covered serious news in 'News of the Day' - long, dense columns of fine print with few paragraphs. The 'News in Brief' column - thirty or forty short items without explanation - must have provided great relief. As an example: 'Victoria, with about the same population as New South Wales, boasts 400 more tinsmiths.' (Narrabri Herald, 3 October 1883)
They were keen on statistics and comparisons in those days, too. Today such an item would be evaluated and explained, but then, all the reader could do was speculate.
'News in Brief' included a fair share of sexism. One can imagine approving nods from both male and female heads for the following: 'Fourteen fathers in Ormskirk have signed a pledge not to allow their daughters to take music lessons until they know how to make good bread.' (Narrabri Herald, 17 July 1886) Perhaps a handsome male music teacher had arrived in town and his young female students had been sighing and neglecting their domestic duties.
An item - not quite as sexist, but hinting - turned up when I was researching the Gog & Magog clock in the Royal Arcade, Melbourne. W H Newnham commented on the wares that were sold there, adding: 'It is the type of attractive arcade found in every city: the delight of wives and the despair of husbands.' (Melbourne: The Biography of a City, 1956, F W Cheshire)
Newspapers provided humour, too. Imagine the laughter, especially from the male readers, basking in anatomical certainty:
Considerable amusement was caused at the meeting of the Education Board by a lady teacher sending in her resignation 'owing to circumstances over which she had no control'. She was about to be married. (Narrabri Herald, 11 September 1886)
No prizes for guessing the gender of the members of the Board!
'Taxes on books' - a headline in 1932 - caught my attention. A deputation, which had waited on Prime Minister Lyons to ask for the removal of the duty on books, was 'well fitted to deal with the subject and went armed with many powerful arguments'. However, Mr Lyons was 'hard-hearted and, in the stand that he took, he told the deputation that he had the support of his colleague Mr Bruce...' 'At the present time the country wanted all the money it could get...', he said, presenting hard facts to back his decision.
The imposition of this tax resulted in the sum of ?130 000 being added to Council revenue, and he didn't hold out hope of easing the burden. Needless to say, the deputation was disappointed and, if the truth be told, not a little disgusted. (Australasian Pharmaceutical Notes and News, 10 March 1932)
Such items generate a feeling of d?j? vu.
Advertisements were a wonderful diversion, especially those for 'cure-alls'. Cures for bad backs, gout, 'women's disabilities' and other ills received much publicity. 'Toothache Permanently Cured' asserted an advertisement in Melbourne's Argus (16 May 1881). You never see a tantalising ad like that now, and you wonder why scientists go on searching when cures for all our ills had been found in the 19th century.
One of the pleasures of research is chancing upon familiar words with meanings which have gone out of use. The heading, 'Furious Riding' sprang from the pages of the Argus:
A fine of 20 shillings was imposed by the Mayor at the Police Court on Tuesday, on Christopher Webb, for furious riding; and a similar fine was imposed on John Hore on the complaint of Constable Brown, because Hore had driven his horse at a furious rate and beat it severely. (29 September 1853)
A different kind of horsepower has made such reports obsolete, but surely 'furious driving' would be much more impressive today than 'speeding'!
Another neglected word come to light in my bunyip research. Until the turn of the century, scientists expected to find Australia's water monster, the bunyip, a creature of Aboriginal lore. One of the earliest reports of sightings was made in a letter to the Sydney Gazette (27 March 1823).
One fine morning in November 1821, I was walking by the side of the marsh which runs into Lake Bathurst, when my attention was attracted by a creature casting up the water and making a noise... At the distance I stood (about 100 yards) it had the appearance of a bulldog's head, but perfectly black; the head floated about as though the animal were recreating itself...
These days, recreation is 'in', so why don't we resurrect the verb? 'I'm power-walking to recreate myself.'
Bunyip and Garfield are two small towns in Gippsland, not far from Melbourne, which have long shared a newspaper. I couldn't resist this fascinating and totally useless snippet of trivia from The Bunyip and Garfield Express:
A Frenchman has made a clock twelve feet high, entirely composed of bicycles or their component parts. The framework is a huge bicycle wheel, and twelve ordinary-sized wheels, fitted with pneumatic tyres, serve for the hours. The hands are of steel tubing, which is used for the framework of bicycles. The chimes are ordinary bicycle bells. (24 December 1920)
The item that impressed me most in more than twenty years of research appeared in the early 1980s when I was looking for information on swaggies - both swagmen and sundowners - for a collection. I discovered an anecdote gathered by the folklorist, Bill Beatty, and published in A Treasury of Australian Folk Tales and Traditions (1960, Ure Smith, Sydney).
Beatty wrote that, in the 1880s, a teamster left his family on his selection near Narrabri for a two-months season of wool-carrying in Queensland. They had enough provisions, but floods prevented his return. As the family would soon run out of food, the mother decided to walk with her children - a three-month-old baby, a three-year-old boy and a five-year-old girl - eleven miles to Narrabri. But a quarter of a mile from their home, the children were exhausted from trying to walk in the heavy, black soil, so she carried them one by one. Leaving the baby with the oldest child, she took the second as far as she could while still being able to see them. She returned for the baby and left her with the second child, then made a third trip for the oldest.
When the mother and children were picked up, just out of Narrabri, the mother was unconscious; she did not know how many days and nights the eleven mile trip had taken. In all, she had walked sixty-six miles, carrying children thirty-three miles of the way. Mother and children were cared for in the township, and all recovered.
The anecdote stayed with me, and I researched on and off for many years, hoping to find a primary source - but without success. I looked up the rainfall figures for the area and found that the two wettest years were 1886 and 1888, so I spent many days searching the Narrabri Herald, believing I would find the story. I found many descriptions of floods and 'boggings' in those wet winters, the details, such as sheep being swept into the tops of the trees along a creek, being useful later.
Next I wrote to the historical societies of the northern districts of New South Wales, but none was able to assist, so, eventually I decided to give the legend flesh and blood and a reunion with the father by writing it myself and setting it in 1886. The mother was the hero, of course, but straightforward historical stories of heroic women and men are not printed now, so I imagined the story from the point of view of the five-year-old girl whom I called Emily. I wrote it as a picture-story, but, at a publisher's suggestion, developed it into a junior novel. It is a tribute to the courage and endurance of the first European settler women and children of Australia.