The Time Traveller's Riff

I have been thinking about the transient nature of social institutions - the way we seek our entertainment, commemorate our dead, travel around our city - all are subject to fashion. In the 1930s we flocked to elaborate picture palaces but 3 decades later most were demolished or converted to other commercial uses. Between the world wars we replaced many of our simple, poignant early memorials with big enduring edifices modelled on the obelisks and pyramids of the ancient world. In the 1950s we ripped out the tram network that had served the city & suburbs effectively for years and introduced greenhouse gas belching buses, and so on. As I've mentioned, I was distressed to learn that Sydney's Town Hall and Central Railway Station are built over graveyards where convicts, free settlers and Aboriginal people (above) were buried. Scant attempt was made to relocate remains or headstones or even to chronicle the names and other details of those disinterred or simply submerged.

Anyone who has read this blog knows that I am not religious so my objection isn't that such redevelopment disturbs 'hallowed' ground a la Poltergeist (the 1982 Steven Spielberg film where a house is haunted and finally subsumed because it is built over native American burial grounds). Although the fact that respect for ancestors is common to most cultures suggests it really is something the human psyche requires. What really pisses me off is that we have casually eroded so much of our history. First we (Europeans) decimated traditional Aboriginal lands and then we razed the evidence of our own early settlement. The monument in Rookwood Cemetery (right) to those whose 'resting' place was once the old Sydney Burial Grounds (where Sydney Town Hall now stands) records the name of the serving mayor of the time but not those of anyone whose grave was disturbed. The siren song of progress coupled with shame or indifference about humble or criminal origins prevailed. Were there historians then who thought the manner in which these building projects were executed a bit rash? Were there any - apart from the clergy - who raised the alarm some 100 years later when Camperdown Cemetery was resumed as public park land and its headstones crowded around the newly erected walls of St Stephens to crumble away?

Browsing the pictorial archive sites is a form of time travel. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up when I found the pictures of my childhood haunts that I wrote about in my last posting. The same thing happened when I found the Tivoli shots and the 1953 photo (below) of a tram running alongside Belmore Park (following the same route as the modern light rail I pass every day). I am not quite sure why. I wasn't born when the pictures were taken and, despite attending the odd political rally there, wasn't really familiar with Belmore Park or Hay Street until recently. I think it is the idea of 'those feet in ancient times' having trod the same pathways that I tread today and the reverberation of all those other presences that awakens a sense of awe and wistfulness in me.

The book The Time Travellers' Wife powerfully evokes our bittersweet relationship with the past. I suppose it is a paradox: all that we know, all that is familiar, everyone we love, only exist and have meaning for us because of what went before. As Henry DeTamble the time traveller of the novel's title learns when he repeatedly revisits the scene of his mother's death, we can not intervene to change the past. There really is no point crying over spilt milk but by viewing it from the different standpoints in our lives we can better accept the spillage. And, without being completely deterministic about it, there are certain inevitabilities about our lives and our task, should we choose to accept it, is to discover and enrich the events that will befall and have befallen us.

Time and chance happeneth to all people - Eric Bana as Henry DeTamble fades when his past self briefly visits his wife and child after the death of his contemporary self.

I guess you could call me a bit of an obsessive. Time travelling is what I am doing this month, maybe next month it will be all human rights as I work with my daughter on 'our' To Kill A Mockingbird assignment. Now there's another deservedly revered novel...

Shooting (and surfing) the past*

I have been living in the past recently or, more accurately, I have been indulging in trips back and forth between the present and the early, mid and later 20thC.

It started with my discovery of my local council's photographic archive, spread to exploring the City of Sydney Pictorial Archives and thence to looking on the 'net for images of locations that are significant to me from my UK childhood (such as the one at left of The Kursaal amusement park, Southend-on-Sea). This posting is really an excuse to share some of them with you, dear reader.

Southend-on-Sea was the favourite seaside haunt of my Essex born and bred grandmother (whom we always called 'Nanny'). My sisters and I spent many happy hours in her company visiting the rides and stalls at The Kursaal and walking through
the landscaped parkland that I now learn is (Pythonesquely) called The Shrubbery .

The Shrubbery was the site of an eccentric precursor to the modern theme park, Never Never Land (see picture right). Never Never Land was nothing to do with Michael Jackson but was, to quote the Southend History website:

...truly a mystical place, a land of mythical castles, goblins, dragons, fairies and lights in the trees, and even a magical model railway with stations and mountains and bridges. The model castle was at the entrance and it had lights in the windows and a little rowing boat crossing the lake at the bottom. It was worth the price of pennies at the turnstiles to get in. During the 1950s, Never Never Land packed in thousands of adults and children each year...

Apparently business trailed off during the 1960s but that's when my siblings and I were Never Never Land enthusiasts. I have vivid memories of the animated illuminated models of fanciful creatures and the miniature train that traversed the cliff side terraces. I recreated the latter back at home forming chairs and cushions into carriages, populating them with my sisters, dolls and teddies and pouncing on Nanny as soon as she got home from work, insisting she don her special Never Never Land jacket and board the train to imaginary stations with names like 'Knives & Forks' and 'Eggs & Bacon'!

The other seaside setting for our youthful walks with Nanny were Lytham St Annes/Blackpool (home of it's own famed illuminations). The Esplanade at St Annes is pictured left in the early 20thC. The little shelter with the dragon on top it was still the when I visited in the 1980s (below right) but its setting was rather less exotic than I remembered. The pseudo Chinese lakes and garden beds surrounding the shelter seemed much more modest, and of course smaller, than they had seemed to me as a 5 year old (or whatever I was when I first encountered them).

What did impress me was that they and so many other sights and locations I remembered were intact and cared for, and in some cases even restored! A derelict 16thC church on the hill outside our village of West Horndon became something of an obsession with me in 1967-68 (the two years prior to our emigration). It was rumoured to have connections with Henry IV and Anne Boleyn and housed tombs of local aristocrats, the Tyrells, from the period of its origin. I did a school project on the church, named All Saints, East Hornden (pictured below as it was in the 60s), replete with copies of inscriptions from the tombs and brass rubbings.

Remembering it as totally disused, populated by sparrows and pigeons, its pews, rafters and bell tower steps all liberally coated with their droppings, I was astonished and very moved to find it in use for concerts and cultural gatherings (rather than for worship) when I visited in 1984.

I have also been tempted to seek out old photographs of sites closer to home, my current home, Sydney's south-western suburbs, and to my work, in the Haymarket. A plaque on the building where I work at 323 Castlereagh Street states that it is the former site of the Adelphi and Tivoli theatres although I've discovered that the Sydney Tivoli actually had its first incarnation at 79-83A Castlereagh Street where Skygardens now stands . A colleague tells me that state rail employees still refer to the part of the line just before Central that passes our building as 'the Tivoli Junction'.

In the photo above you can see the 'Tivoli' sign on the right. The mass of trees is Belmore Park then Central railway station is in the background. The Tivoli met the fate of most early 20thC theatres of ceasing to show live performance and being converted to a cinema, then, with the advent of television, ceasing operation altogether. It was demolished in the 1960s.

From the 1920s onwards most Sydney suburbs had at least one picture theatre. Some, like Campsie and Earlwood in the Canterbury area where I live, had several. My last indulgence for this posting is to show you two local extant cinema buildings that somehow escaped the tide of progress. I have also been looking for the locations of others that didn't survive at all or have done so in a drastically unrecognisable state. However that, and some information about Sydney's predilection for building over its cemeteries can wait for another posting!

Above left: The Orion at 155 Beamish Street, Campsie, built 1936 now a 'community function centre' and home to a local amateur theatre group. Above right: the old Mayfair, at 324 - 330 Homer Street, opened 1927 and closed 1958, now a Greek deli & wine outlet. Pictures from Pictorial Canterbury website

* this posting's title with apologies/acknowledgements to the excellent 1999 Stephen Poliakoff television series.

Suffer the little children*

Paedophilia must to be the west's favourite focus for moral outrage in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. We're talking the epoch that brought us the Mi Lai massacre, the Bosnian war, Daniel Pearl's kidnapping and murder, the Tutsi/Hutu slaughter, 'nine eleven'... you get my drift. I am not trying to trivialise child sexual abuse. Exploitation of and cruelty towards children is reprehensible, indefensible, sickening. It's just that righteous indignation about alleged interfering with kiddies seems to be the cause celebré for so many, including a fair share of misogynist, racist, callous reactionaries who don't normally give a hoot about human rights.

My attention has been drawn again to the topic by the current outrage over the pontiff's seeming complicity in covering up sexual abuse of children by the clergy in Ireland and Germany. Both atheists and disaffected believers are decrying Ratzinger and the priesthood (or selected members of it) for the blind eyes they have turned. But, at the risk of sounding cynical, should we be surprised? Sexual abuse thrives in institutions where there is a massive power imbalance and no avenue for victims to be believed, comforted and supported.

Allan Innman, cartoon originally published in the newspaper of the University of Mississippi, The Daily Mississippian, 2003

Perhaps one of the reasons I did not react to the incidents of abuse in David Hill's 'The Forgotten Children' (which we have just read for book group), with shock and horror (apart from the fact that they are quite sloppily and sketchily reported) is that the only surprises for me were (a) that it wasn't rifer than his account suggests and (b) that there was ever a time or a society that thought the odds were on a kid's side if you ripped him/her from family, friends and familiar environment and sent them to be 'cared for' by unqualified Imperialist exiles, nursing frustration over their lacklustre military careers, thousands of miles from scrutiny. It is a recipe for bullying and abuse!

My book group has also just watched Pt 1 of 'The Leaving of Liverpool' to more fully bring alive for us this sorry exercise in British-Australian child development via 'centres of care'. That 90s miniseries isn't set in secular Fairbridge Farm School like Hill's book, but in St Bedes - a (fictional, I think) centre run by the St Vincent de Paul brotherhood. Of course child molestation and rape occur, hard on the heels of verbal and psychological abuse and thwacking a boy hard enough across the head for him to lose his hearing (that incident back in the British orphanage).

One of our members who is from Chile expressed her disbelief that families could so readily submit to fragmentation without resistance - it would never happen, even amongst the poorest in Chile she feels, family and community bonds are too strong. Another, of Eastern European Jewish background, wondered at the notion typically identified with English Victorian society that children 'should be seen and not heard' suggesting that view inevitably ignores children's need for love and silences their voices when abuse occurs. We also talked about parallels with the Australian government's systematic removal of Aboriginal children of mixed race from their homes and families. There was no pretence there that the children were orphans or abandoned as was argued in the case of the British kids. Once institutionalised the treatment was similarly brutal with the added abuse of trying to expunge all cultural, linguistic and spiritual ties with their communities. Given the importance of land and kinship in Aboriginal culture it is hard not to see the practice as the attempted eradication of an entire people as has been claimed.

So, in complete contradiction of John Howard's view that we can not be held accountable for the actions of previous generations, we are ALL complicit. So alienated was British-Australian society in the 1930s-70s from an appreciation of the crucial role played by family and community in nurturing a healthy, happy child, that we gave policies and practices that included the most appalling neglect, isolation and exploitation a free reign.

The church is an archaic institution - is it any wonder that denial of the rights of children - no longer condoned by our secular society - has flourished for so long within its walls?

*Matthew 19:14 - I know this quote is misinterpreted constantly and that 'suffer' means 'allow' in this context, but its an irresistible title for this post.