American critiques of Australian racism: the KFC ad & the Hey Hey imbroglio

Not long ago I spent a stint of insomniac nights wandering through Joe Bageant’s Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches From America’s Class War, written in the last waning period of George Bush’s presidency. Honed from his  blog www.joebageant.com, Bageant’s style has a gonzo extravagance about it. He mixes political rants with gum-chewing sass. And as the subtitle of his book suggests, he does not mince words. (How many Americans would use the term ‘class war’?).

In spite of his deliberately intemperate style, Bageant in many ways treads a more nuanced political line than most well-off American liberals.  He writes about the people in the conservative and working-class American town in which he grew up – the sort of people derided as yokels and white trash by affluent Democrats – in a way that is at once scathing and affectionate. Bageant manages to excoriate the individualist politics and racist sympathies of his white working-class former neighbours, and at the same time to passionately deride the contempt with which middle-class West Wing-wannabes direct their way.

Something of the same nuance is in order concerning the response from certain sections of the American media to the racist faux-pas aired on Australian TV over the past few months. Yes: it was naively racist for a bunch of white-ish Aussies to black up for a nostalgic skit on the Australian variety show, Hey Hey It’s Saturday in October last year. And yes, the more recent KFC ad depicting an Anglo-Aussie cricket supporter winning over black West Indian spectators with a bucket of fried chicken – that was naively racist too. Racism can come from gauche stupidity as well as from malicious intent.

The blackface performers on Hey Hey It’s Saturday in Oct 2009, appearing with bozo host Daryl Somers

It is no longer widely remembered in Australia that audiences here once flocked to blackface minstrel shows back in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In these shows, black people were depicted as simpletons who thought of nothing but fried chicken and happy-go-lucky dancin’. Even though that racist caricature has not survived in popular memory here in the way that it has in the US,  where it originated (and even though there are obviously huge disparities with regard to the two countries’ histories concerning race relations), it was still stupid for Australian television to air material that brought those demeaning depictions to mind. But as for the chorus of denunciations about these incidents mixed with a sneering air of superiority from some American commentators – well, that deserves a rant worthy of Joe Bageant in my view.

After the Australian KFC ad was lambasted in the US, there were a whole range of comments by American viewers and talk-show hosts which served to juxtapose backwards Australian racism with soaring American progressivism:  “Yeah, coming from the same people who almost single-handedly wiped out the whole race of aborigines (sic). You people are the worst. I’ve had friends who visited Australia and they told me how it is over there”.

The same kind of commentary attended the Hey Hey, It’s Saturday imbroglio. On the TV talkshow The View, one of the co-hosts declared: ‘we are in what people like to call post-racial America right now… we are trying to grow as a country and that’s kind of a demeaning sketch that we would never do here anymore’. Other commentators emphasised that it was an American judge (Harry Connick Jr) who criticised the skit on air (‘thank goodness Harry Connick Jr was there to be the voice of reason’) and ended with a jibe at Australianness: ‘hey hey, we’re talking about kangaroo land, after all’.

A white reader of the Newsweek then cut to the chase. “Thanks Harry Connick, Jr. for showing the world that all whites are NOT racist buffoons’, she wrote. We see here that white middle-class American prestige is the real thing at issue so far as most of those objecting to the ads are concerned – something that would surely prompt a ‘here we go again’ from Joe Bageant were he to comment on these storm-in-a-teacup controversies. Methinks a little less ego-stroking and a little more humility from any non-blacks implicated in our racist histories, both American and Australian, would not go astray here.

 

The story of the stage-struck thief

The opening night of the former convict Robert Sidaway’s Sydney theatre was 16 January 1796. Edward Young’s The Revenge (1733) was performed that evening, with a gallery audience who paid in meat and flour rather than coin. The lead role of Zanga, the Moorish villain, was played by a convict actor, his face entirely smeared with burnt cork. Most likely Zanga’s costume was in the Elizabethan style, with a starched ruff at the neck and a great plumed hat and breeches. The evening’s costumes were supplemented by ’some veteran articles from the York theatre’, a patron observed.

The items worn by the convict actors in the The Revenge had probably been stolen from the York theatre and brought over in one of the early convict ships. According to theatre historian, Robert Jordan, a one-eyed caster of plaster ornaments called William Richards was serving a sentence in Sydney for the theft of costumes from precisely that theatre. This roguish Richards was listed as a member of Sidaway’s theatre company staff in early 1897, and as an actor there a few years later. Back in England, he had been convicted for the theft of ’sundry articles’ of theatrical attire, but was rumoured to have stolen much more:- to wit, a pair of scarlet morocco leather buskins, a pair of linen ruffles, three black feathers, a pair of paste knee buckles, and a fat silk sash.  Since convicts brought trunks of their belongings with them when they were transported, it is possible that Richards smuggled some of these items to the Antipodes.

An artful pair of buskins

William Richards appears to have become obsessed with stealing theatrical costumes well before the heist at the York theatre which caused his removal to Sydney. An announcement in the English Newcastle Covenant in 1890 declared that he was wanted for stealing items from the Manchester, Margate and Derby theatres as well as the one at York.  He was also found hiding in the Newcastle theatre with obviously suspicious intent.

As Robert Jordan says, it is unlikely that a fellow would steal theatrical costumes for their re-sale value. There were surely more profitable enterprises.  Richard’s thefts seem instead to have been motivated by a fascination with the stage. Here, then, was a man whose very transportation was caused by a passion for the theatre, and who likely took the proceeds of his theft to the colonies in the hope of pursuing that obsession anew. And here, too, was a fitting opening for a theatre built by a former convict: a play led by a convict actor decked out in hot items cunningly spirited across the seas from York.

Source: Robert Jordan, The Convict Theatres of Early Australia, 1788-1840 (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2003), 40-3, 247-50.

PS: Incidentally, Hazel Waters singles out The Revenge as a singular example of racism on the English stage in her book on that subject. A heavily-robed Zanga appears on its cover looking down viciously at his white foe:

 

Paying for the theatre in caper sauce

The first known theatre in Australia was in a converted tile shed in Brickfields, Parramatta, not far from the infant penal settlement of Sydney in 1793-4.

The best known of Australia’s early theatres, however, was built by the former convict baker, Robert Sidaway, and appears to have been located near a windmill at the Rocks, in view of the expanse of Sydney harbour  and the clutter of convict dwellings nearby. Sidaway’s theatre opened for business on 16 January 1796. It allowed patrons to pay for a ticket to the gallery not in one shilling coins, but an equivalent quantity of flour, or spirits, or meat. The English press had a hearty laugh at this when it found out:

‘According to a French journalist, admissions to the Theatre at Botany Bay are paid for either in money or eatables. For a leg of mutton you have free access to any place before the curtain, and if you add Caper Sauce you may take in a friend’ (Aris’s Birmingham Gazette, 24.9.1798).

In spite of the sarcasm, this practice was sometimes to be found in England’s smaller country theatres, including one in which the manager was paid in nothing but fish. Can you just imagine the brouhaha of bartering, the earnest pleas, the clouds of flour and stink of fish scales, and the frustrated crowds milling at the gallery door?

A playbill from Sidaway’s theatre dated June 1796, held at the National Library of Australia and displayed in larger format at Wikipedia.

Source: Robert Jordan, The Convict Theatres of Early Australia, 1788-1840 (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2003), 37

 

Off the blogging wagon

Well, now I know what it is like to well and truly fall off the blogging wagon. I have been writing the first few chapters of my manuscript on larrikins, and somehow it has made the blogging impulse go down the tube. Before I use another silly metaphor, I will say only that  one of my new year’s resolutions is to start posting again. Have just sent a review of Kath Leahy’s Lords and Larrikins (2009) to Theatre Review International and have been reading Robert Jordan’s The Convict Theatres of Early Australia (2002), both wonderful publications from Currency Press, and am itching to write about some of the characters who strut their pages.

Happy New Year, all.

 

Femme Fatale: The Female Criminal. A Review

A few years back now, I leafed through City of Shadows, Peter Doyle’s bestselling collection of Sydney police photographs, with a kind of uneasy fascination. Dating from 1912 to 1948, the photographs depict crime scenes in lucent sepia, their period fittings and unnatural stillness making them uncomfortably like an artwork rather than a documentation of bloody violence and death.

Doyle is just about to release a new collection, Crooks Like Us, which focuses much more on the mugshots taken by Sydney police in the same era: more shots of the razor-slashing prostitutes of the 1920-30s, more louche con-men and hard cases. These mugshots have the same sense about them as the crime scenes – that of hovering between retro artwork and gritty historical record, with touches of fashion photography thrown in: a horrible but beautiful and thus woozily fetishistic mix.

Many of the photographs used in City of Shadows and Crooks Like Us come from an archive held by the Justice and Police Museum in Circular Quay, housed in a sandstone building down by Sydney harbour which was once the Water Police Court. More such mugshots may now be seen in the Museum’s latest exhibition, Femme Fatale: The Female Criminal.

As exhibitions go, Femme Fatale is a small affair, comprising only two rooms. One of these is devoted to female abortionists convicted after botched jobs back in the day, which I walked through hastily, eyes only half on the walls. The other room alone is worth a trip to see, however: that is, if one is in Sydney, as I currently happen to be. Its eclectic exhibits include clay pipes used by convict women, trashy 1950s book covers, features on the underworld queens Kate Leigh and Tilly Devine, the leather dildo used by ‘the man/woman murderer’, Eugenia Falleni, and trailers from 1940s films starring – yes, femmes fatales.

The most compelling exhibit by far, however, is the series of mugshots of women imprisoned in the State Reformatory for Women at Long Bay (Sydney), taken predominantly in the 1920s. Every one of these photographs is immanent with imaginative suggestion. They were taken, I gather, when the women were first apprehended by police. Each includes a front-on shot, an oblique shot, and a full-length shot of the woman in question, standing against a curtain in her come-as-you-are street clothes.

Here is 19 year-old Annie Gunderson looking sullenly at the camera, for example, dressed in a rather luxuriant fur coat. One reads that she was imprisoned for stealing a fur coat from a department store – could it possibly have been the same one?! Here, too, is 20 year-old Jean Wilson, also committed for larceny. With her lovely dark eyes, fur stole and long white dress, she could be attending a studio photography session – until you remind yourself that she was probably hauled out of a police wagon only a short time ago.

As the inclusion of the fur coat and stole suggests, the State Reformatory photographs are a record (among other things) of low and flash female fashion in 1920s Sydney. There are plenty of cloche hats, high-heeled Mary Janes and drop-waist dresses a la Angelina Jolie in Changeling; plenty of bobs and hair done up with pins. The resemblance to a period film stops there, however, because there are other details which would not occur to current-day costumiers and make-up artists, and less still to Hollywood casting agents. Most of the women’s hair is dishevelled or badly cut. Most, too, look years older than their years. And the clothes, though in most cases making more than a stab at glamour, are almost all crushed and untidy. 19 year old Vera Purcell is dressed in a shiny coat which falls to her knees, for example – but the satiny material is greatly crumpled, almost ridiculously so. Others have high-heeled shoes with busted straps and dresses with wonky hems. Even the dark-eyed Jean Wilson, with her curled bob and fur stole, wears a dress that looks vaguely boxy, evidently inexpertly home-made.

The final note of Femme Fatale is struck by a notice containing contemporary statistics on female prisoners in New South Wales. While women make up only 7% of the state’s prison population, the number of female prisoners has apparently increased by 82% in the past ten years, with an average age of 33. Not only that: a full 50% of these women have a mental illness. That sombre and not at all glamorous fact is more uneasy to contemplate, perhaps, than all of the exhibition’s images combined.

You can see Femme Fatale at the Justice and Police Museum, cnr Albert and Phillip Sts, Circular Quay, Sydney, until 18 April 2010 (open 10am to 5pm on weekends only, and daily during Jan/school holidays). Peter Doyle’s Crooks Like Us will be launched at Gleebooks Katoomba in early August 2009.

 

A World of Popular Entertainments (A conference @ the University of Newcastle)

With the ushering in of winter comes conference season in Oz. Thus, I have been at Carole Ferrier’s Women Writers/Artists and Travelling Modernisms conference at UQ, and the University of Newcastle School of Drama’s A World of Popular Entertainments, this past week and more. Both were small, with no parallel sessions: by far the best sort of conference so far as conviviality and intellectual engagement is concerned.

At the World of Popular Entertainments conference in particular, we were taken by bus to the University campus, some distance from the clapped-out boarded-up civic centre of Newcastle, and everyone there spent two long days toegther, as if on a ship cut off from land, with Victor Emiljanow and the lovely circus historian, Gillian Arrighi, at the helm. It is a discipline, to listen to each other speak at such long stretches. But in this case, I think, something special emerged by the end of it, which is, of course – the possibility of that happening – why one subjects oneself to the discipline at all.

I collected a swag of emails from people to follow up, and whose work I hope to read more of in future. Among them were Kath Leahy, whose book on high and low performance styles on the Australian stage across most of the 19th and 20th centuries (aptly called Lords and Larrikins), is soon to appear with Currency Press. Also John Bennett, from Liverpool Hope University in the UK, who gave a  quietly inspirational paper on the hopeful political project in which he thinks popular theatre should be engaged. And Kirsten Wright, a Melbourne-based independent researcher, who gave a paper on the ‘tattooed Greek prince’, Captain Costentenus, who was shown in freak shows around America and Europe at the end of the nineteenth century (you can read more about him@ The Human Marvels, if so inclined).

I am still trying to get my land legs now, having returned from that time at sea.

 

City Traces

I’ve been going back to plenty of the classic Australian urban histories lately, to oldies-but-goodies such as Shirley Fitzgerald’s Rising Damp, Andrew Brown May’s Melbourne Street Life, Ronald Lawson’s Brisbane in the 1890s, & Graeme Davison’s voluminous back catalogue. It put me in mind to visit Julia Shiels’ Melbourne art-blog City Traces again.

Each of the natty yet poignant treats in the discarded series on this blog sums up what it means to be interested in urban history with a concision that never fails to please:

the city and its strangers#7 (Elizabeth St, Melbourne)

the city and its strangers#15 (Little Collins Street, Melbourne)

the city and its strangers#9 (Tattersalls Lane, Melbourne)

On Punt Road Hill

 

An 1880 art-and-obscenity trial: Ingres comes to Pitt St, Sydney

Hopefully, the Bill Henson imbroglio of 2008 is behind us in Australia now (for those who missed it: Australian police shut down the renowned artist’s shows at the rosylnoxley9 gallery last year, claiming that his photographs of teens sans clothes were child pornography).

I don’t have anything to say about that brouhaha that hasn’t already been said elsewhere. But I thought I would note an incident in Sydney in early November 1880, in which police once again stormed an establishment selling art, and in that case charged the dealer with obscenity.

The prosecution was for the exhibition of Jean-Auguste-Dominque Ingres’ La Source, a reproduction of which hung in the window of the dealer’s shop in Pitt Street, Sydney.

The Source (1856)

This painting had a ‘demoralising influence’, the prosecuting constable told the court, because ‘it represented the naked form of a woman’, and because it attracted large crowds of ‘the larrikin class’ – not only boys and young men, but ‘low, abandoned women and girls’ as well - who gathered to gaze at it on the Pitt Street footpath. This was, of course, the nub of the matter so far as he was concerned. The danger in 1880 lay with the inflammatory effects of female nudity on the lower orders, who would allow it to further demoralise themselves.

The charge in this case was roundly dismissed, you may be happy to know. Evidence in support of the dealer was given by a judge in the Art Section of the Sydney International Exhibition, who gave the usual testimony in such circumstances. He declared that ‘the indecency lay more in the mind of the critic’ than the painting itself, and that paintings of as much explicitness were available for view in the Art Gallery any day of the year. In spite of the contemporary panic about paedophilia and the very 1880s one about larrikinism, one is tempted to say, has really all that much changed?

 

Her ‘lily-white thighs’: Bawdy verses by the Cockatoo Island girls, 1873

One of the most striking documents I’ve found in my search for 19th-century larrikin girls thus far is a series of interviews with the bawdy inmates of Biloela, the Industrial School for Girls on Cockatoo Island, a site formerly worked by convicts in Sydney harbour.

Ruins of Biloela Industrial School today (taken from Arthur and Jenny’s photographic blog)

The interviews were conducted by a Royal Commission into Public Charities in 1873, and for all sorts of reasons they make for compelling reading. For a start, the girls had rioted just before the interviews took place. Most appeared with bruises and lacerations on their bodies (hips, breasts, faces, back) where they had been beaten by the Biloela superintendent, Mr Lucas – a man whom they had provoked by drawing filthy pictures in which he featured, er, prominently on the wall.

One of the things that struck me among the rest, reading these interviews, was the significance of singing to these girls. The girls ‘are constantly singing’, one of the matrons told the Commission. They used singing for emotional endurance and cultural sustenance; to kill time and entertain themselves. They also used it as a form of rebellion against the despised superintendent and his staff.

During the day, under the watchful eye of their superiors, the Biloela girls sang hymns as they went about their work. They also sang the kind of romantic songs taken up around the piano in family parlours and at concert recitals: songs such as the Scotch ballad, ‘Annie Laurie’, or the puff-piece, ‘Love Among the Roses’ (‘I felt the smart of Cupid’s dart; / Twas love among the roses’).

At night, however, when they were locked up in their dormitories at 6pm, the girls sang the latest songs they knew from the stage. Whenever a new girl came, the others begged her for all the latest hits, and then learned them as best they could. According to a policeman staged on Cockatoo Island, they also sang ‘blackguard verses’ – ‘beastly dirty songs’ which would never have been performed in a late-Victorian theatre. One of the girls’ verses had something in it about ‘lily-white thighs’, he said, and another was ’The Rolling Magazine’.

I haven’t been able to track down the lyrics for ‘The Rolling Magazine’ (if anyone knows them, I would love to know). But there are a number of old English broadsides containing the phrase ‘lily-white thighs’, and stridently unedifying they are too.

I can’t be sure that the song ‘The Cat’ was the one sung at Biloela, whose lyrics I include below. Still, one can well imagine this song (contained in an anon. broadside at the Bodleian Library) being sung by drunken seaman on the wharves near Cockatoo Island, or else in pubs or in brothels around Sydney, and learned by the girls that way:

By the light of a candle I happened to spy

A pretty young couple together did lie

Said Nelly to John if you'll pull up my smock

You'll find a young hen full as good as your cock.

Then Johnny kissed her and pleased her awhile
When he pulled up her smock it made him to smile
Instead of a hen it appeared like a cat
For there was her beard and her rough hairy back. 

Then Nelly she opened her lily-white thighs

John played with the cat till the bristle did rise

He stroked down the hair as black as a coal

She catched his finger right snap in her hole.

...Then Nelly she held him so fast by the back

While she wriggled her ass & cried push it in Jack

He pushed in with courage so stout and so strong

She smiled in his face crying, well done John.

I burst in to laughter and spoiled the fun

But Nelly kept crying push it in John

Then John fell a laughing at Nell on her back

And swore he'd no more be plagued with a cat.

Sources

Annie Laurie, Scotch Ballad: Music (1865): see it on the National Library Australia site here. (There are any no. of advertisements for recitals in 1840-60s Australia in which ‘Annie Laurie’ was performed, appearing in papers such as the Brisbane Courier, the Hobart Mercury, the West Australian, &c).

Love Among the Roses (c. 1871): also on the NLA website.

The Cat, lyrics on http://traditionalmusic.co.uk.

Report of the Royal Commission on Public Charities. Report No. 2, (1873-4) NSW Legislative Assembly.

I came across the above report in Noelene Williamson, ‘”Hymns, songs, and blackguard verses”: Life in the Industrial and Reformatory School for Girls in NSW, Part I, 1867 to 1887′, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society 67.4 (1982): 375-87 – an article which unfortunately doesn’t say anything much about the songs, in spite of the promise in its title.

Cathy Preston says that another old English ballad, ‘The Tying of the Garter’ was sometimes called ‘Lily-White Thighs’. The version she gives doesn’t actually contain the phrase, however – although it does refer to a maiden spreading her thighs: see Cathy Lynn Preston, ‘”The Tying of the Garter”: Representations of the female rural laborer in 17th-, 18th-, and 19th-century English bawdy songs’, Journal of American Folklore 105.417 (Summer 1992: 315-41; Cathy Lynn Preston, ed., Folklore, Literature and Cultural Theory: Collected Essays (Taylor and Francis, 1995), 69-70.

For another song with the phrase ‘lily-white thighs’, see ‘The Monk of Great Renown’ on this folkore site.

More info about NSW State Archives Records on Biloela can be found on the Archives website, here.

 

The Territories of Youth

I will be adding a fair few titles to my bibliography on larrikinism shortly. This is largely because I have been working my way through a fabulous PhD thesis by Simon Sleight from Monash University, called ‘The Territories of Youth: Young People and Public Space in Melbourne, 1870-1901′, a work oozing research leads and suggestions for secondary reading.

‘The Territories of Youth’ looks at the way young people used the outdoor spaces of Melbourne in the late nineteenth century. It has a chapter specifically on larrikins (soon to appear as an article in Australian Historical Studies) called ‘Interstitial acts: urban space and the larrikin repertoire’.

Sleight essentially shows that larrikin used vacant lots, marketplaces and street corners throughout inner Melbourne for the performance of rebellious youthfulness – something that obviously complements my own work on their interaction with theatrical and other performance genres, and the way this played out in turn-of-the-century streets. The article when it appears in Australian Historical Studies will be worth a read. The broader thesis also maps the trajectories of many working-class children through the streets of Melbourne, providing an intimate glimpse into their city at the time.

The reason I came across Simon’s thesis was that I fortuitously met him at the Menzies Centre for Australian Studies in London recently. He is planning future research looking comparatively at Melbourne and Liverpool delinquency at the turn of the twentieth century. And he has also directed me to the fabulous work of Andrew Davies, author of The Gangs of Manchester (the cover image for which appears above) and a soon-to-be-perfomed play on the subject, Angels With Manky Faces. (I’ncidentally, I’d never known until hearing this that the word ‘manky’, which I grew up using to mean ‘wonky’ or ‘wrong’, was an insult to the good citizens of Manchester).