The Interpretation Centre is Closed Part II: Night-time Mystery

"Daytime history, night-time mystery" is the slogan of PAHSMA's ghost tours. The didactic mission of the Interpretation Plan applies only between the opening hours of 9 am to dusk.

That's not the mystery encountered by every visitor to Port Arthur who attempts to comprehend Tasmania's brutal past within their present; it's the mystery of dark shadows gathering beyond the feeble fringe of light thrown by the lanterns, of odd patterings and scutterings in the boughs of the oak-trees, of spine-tingling shivers and pricklings at the back of the neck. At night the ruins speak a universal language that needs no interpretation.

In the aftermath of April 28 1996 Tasmanians publicly questioned the ethics of trading on former misery. Margaret Scott wrote of

 a gradual shift from the presentation of Port Arthur as the symbol of a system which helped to change Australian attitudes, a place in which we can make an imaginative contact with our origins, to a different kind of marketing ploy in which history is sanitised, slicked up and packaged as entertainment...Local residents whose forebears were convicts say very little but hint sometimes that this is because they feel that nobody will listen, that the district's major employer is out of their hands. 'You wouldn't have ghost tours of Anzac Cove', said one quite recently. Well, no. You wouldn't.

Since then 'dark tourism' has become an internationally recognised field of academic study, but the discussion seems to have lapsed in Tasmania. The ghosts of Port Arthur are raised and buried anew by each visitor who dares to look Tasmania's history squarely in the eye, and the tours provide employment, albeit casual, for Tasman Peninsula residents.

Ghost Tour at Port Arthur, (PAHSMA, Birch 2008)

 

 

I love to hate the ghost tours, but I do enjoy first-hand accounts of paranormal phenomena. Here's a premium selection:

• http://hobartghosts.com/  Great photos of orbs in Hobart's Penitentiary Chapel.

• http://royalderwent.com/ Intriguing mix of council reports, business listings and psychic investigations at Willow Court, New Norfolk. Posted by a local who's fascinated with the place (Jarvis, 2012).

• http://portarthurparanormal.wordpress.com/  Try a Port Arthur Paranormal Investigation Experience at only $125 a head.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

References
PAHSMA - photographer Simon Birch (2008). Ghost tour at Port Arthur. [image online] Available at: http://www.portarthur.org.au/index.aspx?base=5911.

Jarvis, N. (2012). Willow Court & Royal Derwent Hospital. [online] Retrieved from: http://royalderwent.com/ [Accessed: 5 Dec 2012]. Port Arthur Historic Site Management Authority (2010).

Port Arthur - Ghost Tour frequently-asked questions. [online] Retrieved from: http://www.portarthur.org.au/index.aspx?base=6611 [Accessed: 5 Dec 2012].

Scott, M. (1996). Toward a fresh apprehension of past and present. Island, (67), p.85.

The Interpretation Centre is Closed Part I: Future Ruins

...the advance of a true civilization is retarded by the fact of the non-existence in these Australian colonies of any monuments or visible records of the Past. In European countries, the face of the land is overspread with the suggestive vestiges of Ruin.

The Courier, 1857.

The Course of Empire: Desolation. (Cole, 1836)

In the nineteenth century 'ruin' described the moral failure of people, particularly women, or the financial collapse of companies, more often than it denoted a fallen building. Architectural ruins could be a warning, a sobering reminder of past follies. Historians documented the cyclical rise and fall of civilisations, and followers of Edward Gibbon attributed the decline and fall of the Roman Empire to the decadence of its citizens, enervated (and corrupted) by their wealth and luxury self-indulgent lifestyle.

Louisa Meredith was more concerned with aesthetics and associations with her former home in England when she gushed over a "moss-grown wooden water-mill...innocent of perpendicularity in any line about it...looking really ancient and venerable in a young land".

All buildings in these new countries are so completely the things of yesterday, and generally look so glaringly and obtrusively new and discordant amidst the surrounding scenery, that it is especially pleasant to see anything of human work which has really mellowed into something like an harmonious character, and so this crazy old weather-board mill won its way to our admiration.

At the time Meredith saw it, the Carrick mill was some 20 years old. It was replaced by a "tall, sharp, greviously-neat, new mill", which is still standing over 160 years later (Meredith, 1852).

Present-day ruin of our once and future chicken shed

When in idle fancy I dream about the future ruins of Tasmania, up there with the Marine Board building and the Hotel Grand Chancellor are the visitor and interpretation centres. If the aviation fuel runs out, if I have to retreat to the economic refuge of Victoria, there’ll be a touch of pleasure mixed with my concern as I view the satellite images of mossy guttering, gaping floorboards, drifts of disintegrating gourmet menus and mushrooms sprouting in swollen bundles of tourist brochures.

Forest Of Fungi (116/365)  (Leonrw, 2009, displayed under a Creative Commons license)

I don't like visitor or interpretation centres. I don't like the presumption that anyone who crosses the carpark into a national park is a foreigner in need of expert translation of the ecological or historical significance of the place. I object to being labelled a visitor in my own neighbourhood. (I’m not laying claim to all of Tasmania as my backyard - I draw a line north of Oatlands, and another somewhere south of Recherche Bay.) It's a weasel word that accustoms Tasmanians to facilities that benefit tourists at the expense of residents. The high capital investment required for the mounting of permanent exhibitions in interpretive galleries, however expertly and thoughtfully prepared, limits the space and funds available for temporary displays which can provide a fresh perspective on old favourite artefacts, buildings and landscapes. I do enjoy a well-ventilated toilet block, but I'd rather a homemade sandwich on a mountain-top than an artisanal ciabatta in a cafe, and the gift shop can go virtualise itself.

There are alternatives. 'Different Readings', an exhibition at the (then) Allport Library and Museum of Fine Arts, placed newly commissioned furniture within the period alcoves. MONA's optional 'O' commentary can be ignored at will, and revels in subjective 'Gonzo' as well as expert 'Art Wank' . Hobart's Domain and Sullivan's Cove podwalks, produced by TMAG and Heritage Tasmania, provide information on demand, bucking the trend for intrusive and verbose interpretation panels. Heritage professionals could take a leaf from the book of National and State Libraries Australia: the 'Enabling People strategy of the 'Re-imagining Libraries 2012-16' strategic plan promises that

We will provide opportunities for people to co-curate their online and documentary heritage and to contribute their knowledge and expertise...People are experts and creators, contributors and interpreters; they are the authorities on their business, their culture, their profession, their stories and their environment.

When I envisage a heritage site where user-generated content is rapidly uploaded to a socially inclusive geo-tag-enabled fluidly evolving mobile app, I could be channelling that self-acknowledged tourist Louisa Meredith:

The hills seem to heave with a deeply murmured eloquence, and we understand their tales of times gone by; the rivers roll along their volumed and rapid waters, and we hear in the mighty music, the voices of " men of olden days," who dwelt, fought, or died within its sound. We leave the scene of our day-dream, and journey far away; but memory has traced and treasured it; it is safely registered in undying freshness on her fair tablets, and ...[we] can at will gaze on the remembrance-picture.

 (Meredith, 1839)

References

Cole, T. (1836). The Course of Empire: Desolation. Oil on canvas. New-York Historical Society, Gift of The New-York Gallery of the Fine Arts, 1858.5. [image online] Available at: http://www.nyhistory.org/press/image-downloads/hudson-river-school-0 [Accessed: 4 Dec 2012].

THE COURIER. (1857, March 25). The Courier (Hobart, Tas. : 1840 - 1859), p. 2. Retrieved 26 Nov, 2012, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article2458544

Leonrw (2009). Forest of Fungi (116/365). [image online] Available at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/leonrw/3454980483/ [Accessed: 4 Dec 2012].

Meredith, C. (1852). My home in Tasmania, during a residence of nine years. [e-book] London: J. Murray. pp. 115-6. Available through: http://www.hathitrust.org/ http://hdl.handle.net/2027/uc1.b302964 [Accessed: 26 Nov 2012].

Meredith, C. (1839). The annual of British landscape scenery: An autumn ramble on the Wye.[e-book] London : W.S. Orr and Co. pp. 10-11. Available through: http://www.hathitrust.org/ http://hdl.handle.net/2027/wu.89096955836 [Accessed: 26 Nov 2012]. 

Nsla.org.au (2012). Enabling People | National and State Libraries Australasia. [online] Retrieved from: http://www.nsla.org.au/enabling-people [Accessed: 4 Dec 2012].

Test your memory

I play the card-game Memory to win, so I had shivers down my spine when I drew near to the end of Rememori, a version created by Christine Wilks (2011). Rememori is “a degenerative memory game and playable poem that grapples with the effects of dementia on an intimate circle of characters.” Try it out, if you're feeling strong.

If your own memory worries you, there are several clinically trialled tests listed at alzheimersreadingroom.com. They are described as self assessment tests, but note that they are not intended for self-diagnosis, and most are designed to be conducted by trained medical practitioners.

Memory's tricks have been given some colourful names: confabulation, cryptomnesia, fugue state, memory illusion, memory distortion, retroactive interference...sounds like a list of retronaut time capsules. The shiftiness and power of memory are discussed by Kotre (1995) in White Gloves: How we create ourselves through memory. 'Transmissive remembering' is used to "pass on to others one's cultural heritage or personal wisdom, or to bear witness to significant historical events" (p. 176). 'Life review therapy' for the elderly can improve health and well-being, even "bring a sense of integrity, coherence, and completion to one's life" (p. 178) but Kotre warns that

There are events in our lives that can never be undone, no matter how we rework them in our minds. There is damage that cannot be repaired, regrets that cannot be assuaged. Opening up what cannot be fixed may result in depression, guilt, anger, panic, and obsessive rumination... (p. 180).

Enough to give this prospective oral historian pause for thought! It seems that aged care professionals and oral historians have quite different agendas when recording senior citizens' reminiscences. Some guidelines for ethical practice are available from the websites of the Oral History Association of Australia and the US Oral History Association.

I grew interested in 'witness literature' as a genre when reading Murakami's Underground: the Tokyo gas attack and the Japanese psyche. That's led me to my current reading, The Studs Terkel reader: my American Century, and I've bookmarked the website of the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education for a time when I'm feeling particularly strong. The institute collects testimonies from survivors and witnesses of genocide, and makes them available for educational use in order to "overcome prejudice, intolerance, and bigotry—and the suffering they cause" (sfi.usc.edu, 2007).

References
Alzheimersreadingroom.com (n.d.). Test Your Memory for Alzheimer's (5 Best Tests) | Alzheimer's Reading Room. [online] Retrieved from: http://www.alzheimersreadingroom.com/p/test-your-memory-for-alzheimers-5-best.html [Accessed: 5 Dec 2012].

Crissxross.net (2011). crissxross: creative works by digital writer & artist Christine Wilks. [online] Retrieved from: http://www.crissxross.net/ [Accessed: 5 Dec 2012].

Kotre, J. N. (1995). White gloves: How we create ourselves through memory. New York: Free Press.

Murakami, H. (2003). Underground: The Tokyo gas attack and the Japanese psyche. London: Vintage. 

Sfi.usc.edu (2007). About Us | USC Shoah Foundation. [online] Retrieved from: http://sfi.usc.edu/aboutus/ [Accessed: 5 Dec 2012].

Terkel, S. (2007). The Studs Terkel reader: My American century. New York: New Press.

Time Travel

Jane held the charm out at arm's length, and Cyril solemnly pronounced the word of power.

As he spoke it the charm grew tall and broad, and he saw that Jane was just holding on to the edge of a great arch of very curious shape. The opening of the arch was small, but Cyril saw that he could go through it. All around and beyond the arch were the faded trees and trampled grass of the Regent's Park...But through the opening of it shone a blaze of blue and yellow and red. Cyril drew a long breath and stiffened his legs so that the others should not see that his knees were trembling and almost knocking together. “Here goes!” he said, and, stepping up through the arch, disappeared.

E. Nesbit, The Story of the Amulet.

Cyril's knees were knocking because he was about to leave Edwardian London for Egypt 6000 BC, through a magic amulet. I went weak at the knees in the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, standing before the very chair in which Lady Jane Franklin was carried (when the going wasn't too rough) on her overland trip to Macquarie Harbour. History is stranger than fiction, but both need strong characters. The feisty Jane and her husband John (midshipman at Trafalgar, governor of Van Diemen's Land and polar explorer) have inspired many works of art and literature. So it's a shock to be reminded that Jane Franklin was more than a fictional character - that she was once a living, breathing, sitting human being.

That shock of collapsing time, those moments of hesitation before Reason returns with the usual distinctions between past, present and future, are a form of time travel, according to Chris Wild of retronaut.co. His website is a collection of thousands of 'time capsules', images that could transport you back years, even centuries.

In this video Chris Wild starts off slowly, as if he has all the time in the world, but stick around for a handy tip on increasing your blog hits, a Victorian mechanical arm and, for those who remember the 80s, Nancy Reagan on Mr T’s knee.

Now you can call me nostalgic, but retronauts ain’t what they used to be. Thanks to the Internet Archive's WaybackMachine, you can still find the earlier website howtobearetronaut.com, and trace Chris's increasingly frantic attempts to classify his expanding collection. The category labels were colourful: 'Anachronisms/Future in the past/Aliens in vintage postcards', 'Duration/Exceptional survival/5000-year-old chewing gum', 'Time distortion/Method of wrapping carrier pigeons'. The repackaged website http://www.retronaut.co is way more sedate, ordered by date, place and format. My favourite 'ghosts of...' series, images merging old and recent photos of the same street, is buried deep. But my main gripe with the site is its scanty referencing - you have to take so much on trust.

So here's my own amply referenced time capsule: the only known photograph of Jane Franklin, visiting Yosemite, California, c.1861. Without her traveling chair: not being the nostalgic type, she'd left it behind in VDL.

References

Archive.Org (1996). Internet Archive: Wayback Machine. [online] Retrieved from: http://archive.org/web/web.php [Accessed: 21 Nov 2012].

The Lost Lectures (2012). Chris Wild: When is Now?. [video online] Available at: http://www.thelostlectures.com/864/chris-wild-when-is-now [Accessed: 21 Nov 2012].

Nesbit, E. (1979). Five children and it: The phoenix and the carpet; the story of the amulet. London: Octopus Books.

Potter, R. (2012). Only known photo of Lady Jane Franklin. [image online] Available at: http://visionsnorth.blogspot.com.au/2012/04/only-known-photo-of-lady-jane-franklin.html [Accessed: 21 Nov 2012].

Retronaut.Co (2012). Retronaut - Explore any time you like.. [online] Retrieved from: http://www.retronaut.co [Accessed: 21 Nov 2012].

Bold Claims

Great to see Bill Gammage's The Biggest Estate on Earth get extra attention last month, winning the Victorian Premier's Literature Prize for non-fiction. I felt as if I'd been stood on my head when I flicked through it. Gammage overturns the accepted wisdom of Australian environmental science that ecology, rainfall, slope and aspect are the major factors affecting the distribution of Australian plant communities. He argues that the mosaic of grassland, dense brush and rainforest encountered by early Europeans was the result of traditional Aboriginal land management practices. The dense forests championed by conservationists sprang up as Aboriginal groups were killed and dispersed during white occupation. The 1788 templates, as Gammage describes the mosaic of habitats, were applied across the continent and shifted across the centuries. Eucalypt branches were placed in grassland to reseed forest, invading rainforest margins were burnt back.

His bold claims are supported by a wealth of compelling evidence. Gammage has me looking with fresh eyes at explorer's journals, colonial landscape paintings, marsupial lawns, the branching patterns of eucalypts along the Channel Highway, and the chocolate lilies in my garden. The oddly disjointed descriptions of terrain in early travellers' accounts become explicable and forgiveable. Leichhardt on the Condamine River in Queensland in 1846, for example: “...these rich flats, which would delight the eye of cattle breeders, are limited toward the ranges by thick bricklow scrub. This scrub covers the hills to the southward, between the creek and a long range, and is interrupted by plains, almost entirely grown over by vervain...” (p.2). Gammage persuasively explains such abrupt transitions between vegetation types as the result of controlled burning, forming kangaroo traps, grazing grounds and yam plains.

Chocolate lilies thrive after fire, the tubers were once a staple food (Salleh, 2005). This is not a photo from my garden, where the lilies are being suffocated by Yorkshire fog-grass. Photo by dracophylla, displayed under a Creative Commons licence.

I was reminded of the bushfire in A Little Bush Maid, the first novel in the classic Billabong series. A swaggie is whipped from the squatter's homestead after asking for meat with his tucker, he sets the long autumn grass alight as he leaves. The heroine Norah saves the sheep; the swaggie gets three years in Melbourne Gaol. “...Three days after there came a heavy fall of rain...in no time the paddock was green again, and the fire only did it good in the long run” (Bruce, 1996, p.70-71). The swaggie isn't identified as indigenous, but I'm tempted to see him as an Aboriginal man cleaning up country.  

So The Biggest Estate is an exciting read, but does it stand up to scientific scrutiny? I expected to find some reviews challenging this cross-disciplinary work (Gammage is a historian), but the mainstream press has been mostly uncritical. Perhaps environmental scientists, engrossed in their detailed local studies, feel no need (or hear no request from arts editors) to publicly address such sweeping claims from the humanities camp? Only Blay (2012) and the academics over at theconversation.edu.au have come to grips with his argument. Gammage's assertions should prompt a nation-wide debate. They have implications for the significance assessment and management of state forests and national parks. He is now calling for more prescribed burning in forest reserves (Rintoul 2012).

The Biggest Estate on Earth also won the 2012 Prime Minister's Prize for Australian History. You can read the first chapter at http://arts.gov.au/funding/awards/pmla/2012/shortlists (plus the first chapters of 29 short-listed Australian poetry, history and fiction books).

References

Blay, J. (2012). Ours is a land shaped by licking flames. Canberra Times, 24 Mar. Retrieved from Newsbank database.

Bruce, M. G. (1996). A little bush maid. Pymble, N.S.W: Angus & Robertson.

Dracophylla (2012). Arthropodium strictum. [image online] Available at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/40325561@N04/4156653165 [Accessed: 4 Nov].

Gammage, B. (2011). The biggest estate on earth: How Aborigines made Australia. Crows Nest, N.S.W: Allen & Unwin.

Leichhardt, L. (1846), Journal of Dr. Ludwig Leichhardt's overland expedition to Port Essington, in the years 1844-45, revised by the explorer, and published with his sanction, 1846. Retrieved from http://acms.sl.nsw.gov.au/album/albumView.aspx?acmsID=430784&itemID=823670 [Accessed: 4 Nov 2012].

Rintoul, S. (2012). Burn-off debate relit as fire season hits. The Australian, [online] 20 Oct. Retrieved from: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/burn-off-debate-relit-as-fire-season-hits/story-e6frg6nf-1226499649424 [Accessed: 4 Nov].

Salleh, A. (2005). Aboriginal fire-farming has deep roots › News in Science (ABC Science). [online] Retrieved from: http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2005/06/22/1398157.htm [Accessed: 4 Nov 2012].

The past is near the surface in Tasmania.

Every time I dig in my back garden I unearth broken pieces of pottery.

I flinch when I hear them crunch under the spade, even though the crockery was thrown out because it was already broken.
And I might not look twice at a plate of the same pattern in an op-shop.