Journal of Australian Colonial History
Book Reviews
Vol. 4, No. 2, 2002
Robert Dixon, Prosthetic Gods: Travel, representation and colonial governance, UQP Australia Studies Series, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia: 2001. Reviewed by Julian Croft
Frost and Hamish Maxwell-Stewart (eds), Chain Letters: Narrating Convict Lives, Melbourne University Press, 2002. Reviewed by David Andrew Roberts
First a disclaimer. This book is the sort of book I wish I had written. It is based on four major subjects: Frank Hurley, Ion Idriess, Frank Clune, and James McAuley, and with three of them I have had some close contact over the years. I once edited some of Hurley's Antarctic footage from the Mawson expedition, in the course of which I spent an afternoon with him in 1961 not long before he died. I wrote the Australian Dictionary of Biography entries for Idriess and Clune, and I had often thought of some way of writing about them and Hurley as representatives of an early twentieth-century way of projecting Australian values on to a world already claimed by British and American imperial fantasies. McAuley, whose poetry and wit I admired but whose polemic I found uncomfortable, is a much more patrician example of the same Australian desire to claim frontiers beyond the apparently completed closure of the continent in white settlement. If I had attempted such a project, I suspect it might never have been completed, as the methodology I would have brought to it would not have contained the kind of insight which late twentieth-century cultural materialism and new historicism produces, and which I realise from Dixon's book is probably the best way of approaching the thesis I had in mind.
Dixon takes his title from Freud in Civilisation and Its Discontents in which he describes technological advances (the ship, the aircraft, the camera, microscopes and telescopes) as prostheses which enable Man to become 'a kind of prosthetic God'. Dixon uses this powerful metaphor as part of larger project to bring post-colonial theory and practice into inter-disciplinary studies, to show how his white traveller subjects were agents of modernity in Melanesia. As he says at the end of his Introduction 'I have argued that modernism produced an image of the colonial body defined by its capacity to incorporate mechanical prostheses — notably the aeroplane, the gun and the camera — and that these prostheses set it apart from the native body, which is required to be naked' (p. 19). The fact that the 'native' (a word which I was forbidden to use by the Department of Territories when I was in Nauru making a documentary film in 1961) in many colonial photographs are not naked but elaborately dressed and decorated demonstrates the blindness of white travellers to the cultural complexity which surrounded them. I suspect that this might have been truer of the 1930s than the 1950s and 1960s when film-makers in PNG such as Ron Maslyn Williams were painfully aware of that complexity and his complicity in bringing a destructive (as he saw it) modernity into its midst. It would be an interesting extension of Dixon's book to make a longitudinal study of colonial film-making in PNG to chart the change in attitude as the confidence in the power of western technological prostheses eroded as a result of sustained contact with human societies still living with stone-age technologies.
Dixon uses his methodology (a kind of cultural poetics) to read such phenomena as tropical medicine in Queensland and its agents JSC Elkington and Raphael Cilento, Hurley's involvement in the promotion of the Ross Smith flight from London, and his Pearls and Savages, as well as Idriess' Torres Strait books, and Frank Clune's two travel books on PNG. James McAuley is a more demanding task as the poet was also an agent of colonial administration through his long association with the Australian School of Pacific Administration as well as being an agnostic about the worth of Australia's contribution to colonial governance. In fact the development of McAuley's ideas about the evils of western modernity can be attributed partly to his exposure to Melanesian traditional culture as well as his disillusionment with Australian suburban modernity, as Dixon's chapter makes clear.
The theoretical underpinnings of this study are intriguing and original, and the development of them in case-studies of the chosen travellers illuminating, especially of the intersection of lines of cultural forces at play in Australian colonial experience in the 1930s. The most satisfying aspect, for this reader, is the firm empirical base on which the study is founded. His primary research into the traces of the lives and the products his subjects produced illuminates the wider issues in ways which high post-colonial theory does not. This is a bottom-up study — not a reading imposed from above to fit some pre-conceived paradigm of the colonial/imperial model of cultural discourse.
Despite the necessary theoretical dimension of the book, Dixon does not lose sight of the human dimension of his subjects. Elkington, Cilento, Idriess, and Clune are there in the flesh. As for Hurley, Dixon captures him very well, especially his Barnum and Bailey attitude to photography. Hurley confessed to me in 1961 that in order to sell his slide and movie show of Pearls and Savages to a sophisticated, cosmopolitan New York audience (far removed from Sydney's eager sensation seekers) he billed his show as his discovery of 'the lost tribe of Israel' in the semitic-featured tribesmen of the Papuan gulf. It worked like a charm, he said with satisfaction. Robert Dixon shows us the complex context which produced that work, and some of the ways in which it was propagated through the cultural web of its time.
Julian Croft
Chain Letters emanates from the 'Colonial Eye' conference that marked the formation of the University of Tasmania's International Centre for Convict Studies. It boasts an array of interesting and innovative chapters by fifteen leading and up-coming authors of convict history, literature and archaeology. It is a beautifully presented book; well illustrated and adequately indexed.
Chain Letters is about narrating convict lives — the stories convicts told of themselves, and the detection and pursuit of those lives by voyeuristic historians. The authors draw on a fertile assortment of texts, from the self-edifying Notes of an Exile to Van Diemen's Land (1846) by the American 'Patriot Exile' Linus Miller, to the plaintive pleas of Ellen Cornwall in a letter to her husband in Birmingham. Convict narratives are found in biographies that are ghosted or constructed upon the memories of old-timers, and in formal petitions begging clemency and favour. They are also elicited from more surprising places, such as the laden statements given to the muster master or the defiant announcements made from the scaffold, as well as body tattoos, love-tokens and museum artefacts.
On one level, the book discusses the authenticity and authorship of historical texts. In the case of the re-transported villain and quasi-celebrity, James Porter, this involved dissection of six markedly different auto-biographies! These are important endeavours, particularly with such significant texts as the ripping tales of 'Jack Bushman', whose 'Passages from the Life of a Lifer' can now be accepted as a reasonably authentic account of the career of the convict Thomas Brooks. The same procedures are employed by Hamish Maxwell-Stewart in a more problematic hunt for 'the invisible man' who in 1843 authored a handwritten 'Memoranda' describing life at Macquarie Harbour. Frost and Ballyn's extensively researched account of a Spanish convict and her biographer, James Cameron, illuminates the inaccuracies and inventions of the biography, as well as the real and surprising story of the true Adelaide de la Thoreza. Such 'empirical quarrying' (p. 32) will not be to everyone's taste. Nonetheless, flavoured by analysis that is mostly thoughtful and instructive, and riding the back of their remarkable subjects, the detectives lead us through some wonderful and exciting scenarios.
On another level, the discussion of convict narratives indulges a more imaginative and interpretative approach. Often some very skeletal, fragmentary evidence provides the platform for loquacious analytical digressions, moments where the authors risk 'reading too much into the evidence' (p. 206). Certainly this is warranted in some cases, as in the speculative reconstruction of the story of Alexander Anderson, who wore his narrative on his hand in the form of a tattoo, 'Oh my mother', a sorry reminder of his former accomplice in crime. One of the best contributions to the book by Ian Duffield provides a few samples (three Caribbean slaves and a Demeraran 'Mulatto' gentleman) from his research on the Atlantic African Diaspora. He posits the apparently nondescript and 'skimpy' (p. 133) remarks recorded in the convict indents as 'high-density micro-narratives' or 'brief, supercharged tales' (p. 135) that speak volumes about the convict's assertion of independence and individuality within the oppressive matrix of state power.
Similarly, in another excellent contribution, Tamsin O'Connor uses a mixed and seemingly disjointed collection of penal-station texts to weave an evocative study of the private and public struggles of convict life. Again, this will not appeal to everyone. These are essentially rhetorical exercises, constructing conceptual labyrinths that are at least partially synthetic and self-perpetuating. However, except in a couple of cases where the scholarly standards are more relaxed, the analytical and literary talents of the writers render the speculation lucid and stimulating.
The guiding theme behind the book is the desire to resurrect the convict voice — to defy the 'brutal impersonality' of administrative records (p. 136) by restoring the agency of the convict in historical writings and cultural memory — a true history from below-decks. The quest is poetically analogised with the convicts' own search for freedom, for it is often the case that the biographical narrative is deliberately subversive and self-empowering. Eliza Churchill 'bought her freedom with a convict narrative', rewarded with a conditional pardon for giving evidence to a committee on female convict discipline. The convicted lawyer, George Barrow, tested his depleted social-capital by declaring himself an educated and well-connected gentleman in a bid to obtain special treatment from the authorities (only to die unfavoured and unfeted in gaol a few years later).
The notion of convict agency being oppressed by a 'bureaucratic technology of power' (p. 119) is perhaps overstated. Were those convicts who preferred to remain quiet and undistinguished being subversive or acquiescent? At least one author paused to reflect on what his convict might think of being rescued from anonymity by prying, omnipotent academics: 'Surely, we would have merely substituted one act of incarceration for another' (p. 198). But then this is all a bit nonsensical because dead convicts are not likely to give a damn. In any event, the use of such angles to reinvent or reinvigorate convict literature is amply demonstrated in this volume.
Where Chain Letters is most successful is in giving flesh and humanity to the names that appear in muster lists. The book begins on a seemingly crass and sentimental note with a dedication citing the names of the numerous convict protagonists. But over the ensuing pages the names become characters, and by the end the reader is left with some impression of personality and predicament for each individual, so that the dedication list reads quite differently. Perhaps catching me in a weaker moment, the death of Ellen Cornwall's son on the floor of the Female Factory was genuinely moving, as was the lamentable fate of poor George Cooley, omitted from the list of pardons granted to the American Patriot exiles. I remain anxious to learn if Thomas Francis ever knew how much his wife desired to join him in NSW, or if Adelaide de la Thoreza's illegitimate boy was indeed the bastard son of her aristocratic employee.
Naturally, there is a considerable range and contrast of contributions. The methodologies vary from the creative and fictional approach of the novelist, Terri-Ann White (who searches for her Polish-born ancestor), to the characteristically tight, rigorous empiricism of Raymond Evans and William Thorpe. Yet all contributions are of appropriate standard and in my view the threads that bind them are strong enough. It might be noted that while some of these characters are typical convicts (urban labourers, military deserters etc), mere 'items in the sad ledger of despair' (p. 136), most are so exceptional as to seem unsuitable for arriving at any general approximation of the convict experience. Yet their aberrance demonstrates the diversity of convict character and career, the 'motley crew of the international dispossessed' (p. 135), an increasingly important idea in our understandings of colonial Australia.
There is, as one contributor notes, an endless reservoir of convict narratives ripe for this sort of treatment. The dusty crevices of my own study are full of them. I am indebted to Chain Letters for rousing me to re-read and interpret them in a different light.
David Andrew Roberts