The Vapour Trail

Bruce Scates’ A New Australia (1997) was the point of ignition for me way back at the beginning of my postgraduate work. He was writing about a group of radical activists in Australia during the 1890s: socialists, anarchists and single taxers. What amazed me was how evocatively he rendered their culture and daily lives. He described the sorts of rooms in which they met: the kind of achingly dowdy places still attached to union premises; coffee palaces or meeting-rooms attached to churches; and venues such as David Andrade’s Anarchist Bookery, vegetarian restaurant attached. He wrote also of the socials and picnics they held, and of the way reading was so thrilling for them. I still remember his description of the anarchist bootmaker Chummy Fleming, who had been confined to bed broken down after years of labour, and who picked up a book which went off like a detonation once he began to read. Scates wrote of utopian novels handed over back fences, and from person to person in circulating libraries, and of the giddy round of lectures and classes available for the autodidacts of the day. I felt almost as I knew these people by the time I finished the book.

One of the things that snagged my interest as I read A New Australia was a list Scates included of the titles Andrade sold at his Bookery in Melbourne’s Russell Street. In 1892, Andrade advertised the range of books available: ‘Literature upon Socialism (both Communist, Collectivist and Anarchist), Freethought, Spiritualism, Theosophy, Mesmerism, Chiromancy, Phrenology, Vegetarianism, Antivivisection, Hydropathy, &c’.  What a gloriously eclectic list, I thought (my friend C, who collects lists and generates kooky ones of her own, would surely warm to that one). And its eclecticism sums up so much of radical culture at the time, which linked the Land Question to Socialism to Mesmerism and to whatever form of divination Chironmancy involves. In England, the same motley of interests was apparent in radical circles. What about Alfred Russel Wallace, for example, whose earnest wackiness I find immensely endearing, who mixed his scientific vocation with a passion for land nationalisation, anti-vivisection, the conservation of Epping Forest, and the electrifying hush of the seance? 

Since I’m such a novice to the universe of research blogging, I’ve just spent some time trying to find inspirational examples. What I discovered: it’s a morass. I wandered about following other people’s blogrolls for a while, stared despondently at the thicket of titles on an academic blogs portal, and then picked a few to view at random. Most of those I stumbled upon contained what was to me disappointingly newsy things: ‘I’m off to do this today’, ‘oh, I’ve just been to this conference’, and so on.

My idea for this blog is that it will be less diaristic in tone and purpose, and styled instead as a series of sketches to give shape to my research. I want to be able to go back to the archived entires for a particular month, for example, and to find there a record of the bright things that grabbed me in my reading at the time. Or to be able to choose the category on medicine shows, say, and turn up various prompts to the sources and my immediate thoughts about them. And I also want to feel my way into the project through the process of quotidian reflection about it, recorded on something more permanent than the backs of envelopes or scrap-paper I otherwise accumulate.  

Here is Sharon Howard, an early modern historian, with sage commentary on the value of her own research blogging:

‘Blogging research lets you develop the very first drafts of ideas. Bits and pieces that don’t yet amount to articles (or even conference papers), but they may well do some day. And something else, sometimes: last year I was having trouble thinking up any new ideas at all, but blogging old ideas, often attached to new sources, meant that I kept writing, if only a few hundred words a week, without having to worry about it being original or impressive. And now, because it’s all archived and easy to find, I can look back over some of that work and see potential themes, little seeds of ideas that are worth working on, start to make them grow’.

Another memoir with snappy glimpses of nineteenth-century street life: Simon Hickey’s Travelled Roads (Melbourne: F W Cheshire, 1951).

Simon Hickey is a fellow of the same species as Augustus Peirce, though neither as itinerant nor as quick on the page. In the early 1900s he became a name in the Labor Party, growing (so it’s said) increasingly ’swarthy and rotund’. As a lithe boy in 1880s Mudgee, however, he started out as an apprentice in a saddler’s shop. Later, he engaged in an endearing motley of occupations before starting his own leather-goods concern: a shearer and a bartender in the dog days of the nineties, an unpaid editor of a paper for the Australian Natives’ Association. He was even, for a time, a performer of live advertisements for a hatter in Oxford Street, Sydney. This involved him cavorting on a verandah, dressed in a succession of animal suits to attract the Saturday-night shopping crowd.

As I said, Hickey’s memoir gives a fast series of insights into street theatre and life. He talks about wrestling competitions with a muzzled bear, and a fake exhibition of Vesuvial lava, and of a Melbourne freakshow exhibiting a ‘Japanese sheep’ and a midget 23 inches high. The capital cities were replete with ‘all manner of sideshows’, he writes. ‘An empty shop or vacant allotment in a front street would serve for a stand’. A spruiker would stand out front, sometimes with a boxing kangaroo or some other arresting creature for company, shouting come-hither extravagances to the passers-by.

In the new century, Hickey says, Federal election campaigns were themselves travelling sideshows. The elections ‘were regarded as great entertainment … They were free and there were no counter-attractions – pictures had yet to come’.

It’s always hard to say where it starts. For me, history is about what whets the imaginative appetite, and in the case of this project what’s got the juices flowing are the sounds and smells of the goldfields streets, the dust and the cooksmoke, the peddlars shouting, the clop of horse-hooves, general clatter and din.

Of a Saturday night in 1860s Bendigo, for example, the miners rolled into town dressed as ostentatiously as a sailor from a novel by Patrick O’Brian. They wore ‘white moleskin trousers with red sashes in which were stuch their pistols’ (so Augustus Peirce says, anyway). They hung about golloping oysters at Jim Clegg’s oyster-house, heading to the hotels, or clustering in the street drawing attention from passers-by.

When the inimitable Peirce breezed into Bendigo, he took up a job as an attendant in John Ely’s bowling alley and shooting gallery. All day there a cockatoo advertised the establishment, his foot tied (I imagine) to a fruit stand in the street, at which newspapers were for sale. On a Saturday night he would delight the brash knots of miners by screeching ‘Bendigo Advertiser!’, and then accepting a penny for the item in an upturned claw.

Was it a sulfur-crested cockatoo, I wonder? Were his white feathers dusty and picked out about the head, the old thing ill-used and looking it? Something about the familiarity of that bird makes Peirce’s description of the streetscape tantalisingly vivid and close – there he is, his talon reaching out for the coin – and that’s what the reading is all about for me just now.

In his charming memoir, An Actor Abroad (1880), the American actor Edmund Leathes describes a Melbourne medicine show. Sometime during the 1860s, a snake charmer came to Melbourne, he writes, ‘who advertised a wonderful cure for snake-bites’. Picture him in the nineteenth-century equivalent of a fake tan, kohl beneath the eyes, colourful tat tied turbanlike at the forehead, fingers gaudy with rings. This charmer rented one of the halls in town, and set out a Medusa’s array of venomous snakes in his nightly show. Before those assembled he would regularly induce a cobra to bite a dog or a rabbit, Leathes tells us. He would then apply his miraculous cure to the insensible animal, and in a short time it would revive. One night the snake charmer asked if a member of the audience wanted to be practised on in the same way. Extraordinarily, someone volunteered.  (Could this be true?). The punter was fresh-off-the-boat, Leathes says, as if this was enough to explain his credulity. He came onto the stage and was duly bitten and soon after died.

Before encountering the Wizard Oil Prince in the archives, I didn’t know there was such a thing as a medicine show. Now I’ve got hold of a copy of Ann Anderson’s Snake Oil, Hustlers and Hambones: The American Medicine Show (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co, 2000) and know vaguely more. The general gist: a bloke rocks up on a street corner with a cartload of bottles labelled ‘Panacea’ or ‘Miracle Cure’ or something like it. He commences to treat the passers-by to a show. Perhaps he sings to a small guitar, tells jokes, has a monkey with an accordion, a parrot screeching at his ear. At the end of his performance, he extols the virtues of his product and sells them to those gathered round. (Or not as the case may be: Augustus Baker Peirce said he tried his own medicine show after witnessing Weston do his thing on the Victorian goldfields. He hired a theatre, treated the crowd to his antics, but no one wanted to fork out cash for his cure).

What interests me about the medicine show is what it shows about the promiscuity of popular theatrical forms. As Anderson says, ‘medicine showfolk borrowed from any and all popular entertainment forms’ : banjo-picking, mesmerist displays, magic tricks, ventriloquism, comedy, melodrama, and more (pp. 11-12). That promiscuity makes this historical field both fascinating and difficult to think about clearly. So far I have this idea of writing about ‘mystic theatre’ as a catch-all term for the kinds of shows I’m interested in: mental telepathy displays, mesmerist exhibitions, levitation stunts, public seances, lectures on spiritualism, etc. But those shows all overlap profusely with a range of other performances. Fred Nadis has written about the American ‘wonder show’, for example, a sort of gee-whiz exhibition of popular scientific phenomena. Variations of so-called wonder shows were performed by ‘medicine showfolk’ , by impresarios doing stupid things with electricity, by the entrepreneurs of exhibition venues,  and also by exactly the people I’m interested in: the practitioners of mystic phenomena on stage. The same sorts of performances also appeared in the second acts of minstrel shows and the variety/vaudeville formats which eventually overtook them. And they also appeared in circuses and related freak shows. Coming up with a definition to cope with all that incorrigible overlapping of forms is proving a tricksy thing.

Other books from Anderson’s bibliography:

David Armstrong and E M Armstrong, The Great American Medicine Show (NY: Prentice Hall, 1991).

David Cohen and Ben Greenwood, The Buskers: A History of Street Entertainment (North Pomfret, Vermont: David and Charles, 1981).

Grete de Francesco, The Power of the Charlatan (New Haven: Yale UP, 1939).

Brooks McNamara, Step Right Up (NY: Doubleday, 1976).

Roy Porter, Health for Sale: Quackery in England, 1660-1850 (Manchester, Manchester UP, 1989).

Owen Stratton, Medicine Man (Norman: Uni of Oklahoma Press, 1989).

C J S Thompson, The Quacks of Old London (London: Bretano’s Ltd, 1928).

Bim Mason, Street Theatre and Other Outdoor Performances (New York: Routledge, 1992).

The figure of Frank Weston is everywhere in those 1860-80s papers I was reading in Mitchell: Weston, ‘the Wizard Oil Prince’ from America, as he dubbed himself. He advertised his Wizard Oil and Magic Pill panaceas everywhere in the theatrical journals, and ended up with his own theatrical company in Melbourne. Everything he did was infused with a Yankee genius for self-promotion. Augustus Baker Peirce even worked for Weston for a while, spruiking his cure-all Wizard Oil, before unsuccessfully trying to replicate Weston’s success by promoting a panacea of his own.

Weston claims to have been the first to bring the travelling medicine show from America to Australia: wonder how true that is?

From a pamphlet held by the State Library of Victoria, entitled:

Frank Weston’s Australian companion : a selection of valuable recipes for cooking, &c., with much information about horses, cattle, social, witty, and other important subjects.

If his memoir Knocking About (1924) is anything to go by, Augustus Peirce was a raconteur of that instantly recognisable nineteenth-century kind: a jack-of-all-trades switching jobs every few weeks, forever with dust or salt in his hair from travelling the roads or the sea, compulsive spinner of yarns and comedy. ‘From early boyhood’, he says, ‘I had been much given to singing, dancing, hanky panky stunts, and the like’.

After arriving in Australia from America in the early 1860s, jumping ship in Melbourne Bay and washing up on the beach at St Kilda, Peirce zigzagged constantly between Melbourne and the Victorian goldfield towns, with the occasional jaunt to New Zealand or elsewhere, and later ended up on the Murray River. Sometimes he worked as a painter of backdrops or builder of stage-sets for hotels or theatres, sometimes as a funny-man in a minstrel show or a two-bit member of a theatrical company, sometimes as a photographer or the seller of panaceas or meat for the local butcher. And he was handy with words as well as carpentry tools.

As a memoir, Knocking About is a joy to read. Street life in the gold era comes to life on his pages. You can almost feel the grit and the dust and hear the cartwheels turning, the hoarse voices of street-pedlars, the ‘roars of laughter’ in which theatrical crowds were always said to be indulging back then. He also seems irrepressibly optimistic, or at least energetic to me. Given how exhausting I’ve found moving just from one Australian city to the next, how was it possible for him (and the countless raconteurs like him) to lead such peripatetic lives, and to retain a general cheeriness throughout?

Second week of the postdoc: moving-from-Sydney-to-Brisbane chaos, a five-year old daughter to begin in school, first-day-at-school tremors for all of us, mildew on furniture the travel insurers refuse to fix, bike routes to navigate, to-do lists so long they trail off misty-like in the distance.  The first week I spent at Mitchell Library in Sydney, reading dusty theatrical newspapers and memoirs from the 1870s, paper crumbling to sepia-tinted vapour beneath my fingers, trying to get my head in gear.