The other side of No Man's Land: Arthur Wheen World War I hero

Arthur Wheen was the most daring, resourceful signaler in the 1st AIF. His extraordinary exploits in the epic Battles of Fromelles, Polygon Wood, Villers-Bretonneux and Peronne are told here. After the war Wheelan went on to have a career as a Rhodes scholar. In 1929 he became the first and best translator of Remarque's classical German war novel All Quiet on the Western Front that became an international bestseller and a Hollywood film in 1930. On the other side of No Man's Land Wheen's experience paralleled incidents in the book. In the midst of the horrors of Fromelles, Wheen showed conspicuous bravery in laying and repairing telephone lines under extremely heavy fire. At night he volunteered to search for the wounded and showed fine courageous spirit in rescuing many under intense machine-gun and rifle fire. He wrote: 'The Morning Star is quenched with blood'

Children and the Australian seaside: a paradisiacal childhood?

In Australia the ocean beach with its splendid expanses of golden sand and swirling waves rushing shorewards was considered an ideal place for children to be, especially in the summer. For the suburban family the seaside was a site for the inculcation of 'the spirit of play' as well as healthy development in children. The beach was a treasured store of memories in adulthood and an important metaphor for the conduct of living joyfully. Coastal recreation coloured the Australian imagination decisively. This paper examines notions of national identity and the nature of Australian childhood through an interdisciplinary study of historical, literary, artistic and popular media sources about Austalian beach culture in the first half of the twentieth century. Consideration will be given to juvenile and adult literature concerning the beach as part of the landscape of the human condition, in novels, poems, biographies and memoirs. The beach as a place for therapeutic treatment of children on mass will also be explored as a part of the public health movement in the early twentieth century. The notion of the superiority of growing up in a seaside suburb during the period will be examined. The presentation of children in seaside landscape in art forms, especially paintings and photographs, will also be explored for their defining qualities about ideals of physical development and beauty in new nationhood

Arthur Upfield and Philip McLaren: pioneering partners in Australian ethnographic crime fiction

In the still developing genre of Australian ethnographic crime fiction that goes beyond mere thriller writing, two authors stand out on an international scale: Arthhur Upfield (1890-1964) and Philip McLaren (b. 1943). Such was the success and huge popularity of his books in the United States, especially in the 1940s and 1950s, featuring his Aboriginal detective Napoleon Bonaparte, that Upfield was the first foreign writer admitted as a member of the prestigious Mystery Writers Guild of America. He was a pioneer in two interrelated ways: first, he was the First Australian writer to place an Aboriginal character as hero rather than victim; and second, he is regarded as the first writer of 'ethnological crime fiction' (Ramsland and Ramsland, 2009, p. 113). After a thirty-year gap, Philip McLaren, an indigenous contemporary writer, came to the fore with a fresh voice, one that arose out of the Aboriginal cultural renaissance of recent years. With a number of well-received novels, he has mapped out the route for a militant postcolonial discourse based on insider perspective

Alexander Smith RN (1812-1872): Antarctic explorer and goldfields commissioner

This article explores the multifaceted naval career of Alexander John Smith who joined the Royal Navy in 1826 and gradually rose through the ranks to become a commissioned officer. Childhood, family and location influences are considered to show how he made such a career choice. The narrative aspects of this study outline his professional and personal life until his death at the age of fifty-nine in 1872 in the colony of Victoria. Emphasis is placed on his shipwreck experience while first assigned to the Navy’s South American Station; his eventual selection, personal observations and experiences as first mate aboard HMS Erebus during the famed James Clark Ross Antarctic Expedition of 1839-1841,1 and his subsequent career as a Goldfields Commissioner at Castlemaine after his resignation from the Navy. Here his extensive naval sea experiences stood him in good stead, especially in the administrative leadership and control of unruly diggers on the goldfields (rather like the rough-and-ready turbulence of ordinary seamen who required strict direction). His naval training and experience at sea helped to shape his personality, character and attitude – he was profoundly a man of the Empire. His contributions to the infant colonies of Tasmania (Van Diemen’s Land) and Victoria are touched upon. The wider context of English social class conventions, the Antarctic environment and land locations for a sailor of the Royal Navy in Hobart, Tasmania and Castlemaine, Victoria, are etched into the background of an extraordinary, but historically neglected life. This study is based on the Mitchell Collection of the State Library of New South Wales, Sydney and the La Trobe Library in Melbourne, drawing from a number of nineteenth and twentieth century key printed and manuscript sources on Antarctic exploration and the Victorian gold rushes. Extensive use has been made of Alexander John Smith’s extant correspondence between 1830 and 1872, less than a month before his death. Smith reflected on his experiences during his sea voyages and his time on the gold fields in letters sent to members of his family in England between 1830 and 1872 (now held in a private collection of a descendent). These letters bring to life the adventure into the Antarctic in the extreme dangers of the pack ice and his insightful eye-witness accounts of the colourful gold rushes of the 1850s where he witnessed the temporary miners’ camps becoming a township. On the way there, he provides a rare contemporary picture of day-to-day life in and out of the Castlemaine Commissioners Camp

The myth and reality of Point Puer

While childhood history is neglected, troubled childhoods and the disenchantment of the child’s world have long been themes in Australian literature. They were glanced at in Marcus Clarke’s 1874 novel 'For the Term of His Natural Life', in his treatment of boys at Point Puer, Port Arthur. Clarke took his readers back to Port Arthur, that atypical penal institution of the convict era. Its buildings were designed to impose classification and solitary confinement to evoke the reformist notions of the modern penitentiary. The intention was to re-shape the criminal mind. Clarke stresses the futility of Point Puer’s original plan of repressive and harsh discipline, and rightly so. Yet there was the other side of the coin. After Governor Arthur’s departure in 1836, a more re-educational approach was pursued. It was never fully successful, but it did provide a capable form of trade-training in pursuits that could have led to the economic workforce of the developing colonial economy. Clarke’s novel has become an all-pervading phenomenon. Through other fiction, non-fiction, school history texts and feature films, the legend that he created has lasted to the present day. The novel has remained a source to be mined and plundered. Its latest manifestation arrived in Choe Hooper’s thriller 'A Child’s Book of True Crime' set on the modern-day Tasman’s Peninsula. The legend of Point Puer and its suicidal boys that Clarke created on a few pages remains a beacon that blinks intermittently, but ever so brightly in popular culture

Re-assessing Arthur W. Upfield's Napoleon Bonaparte detective fiction

Although on the margins of Australian literary circles during his lifetime, Arthur William Upfield produced over thirty novels and several articles. Twenty-nine of his novels, published in England, Australia and later in America and Canada, have as their protagonist Detective Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte, an Aborigine of mixed descent, who unravels through his superior sleuthing the most difficult mysteries that others are unable to solve. Most of these crime stories have been re-published (and re-published) and translated into at least fourteen languages, the first being German, and French the most recent. Our aim here is to re-assess Upfield's 'Bony' series, and to demonstrate that to dismiss these stories is to lose a valuable, if controversial, contribution to Australian literature. Narrative, dialogue, characterisation and landscape are aSpects that will be considered in assessing the (author's) creative process. Moreover, we shall suggest that as a series, they demonstrate the historicity of a disappearing culture. In this way, we hope to determine which of these aspects ensure the series' continued appeal, especially in France

Mad Dog Morgan: an unjustly dismissed bushranger classic

On 27 October 1975, 26-year-old Philippe Mora, who had had recent international success with his two compilation documentaries Swastika (1974) and Brother Can You Spare a Dime (1975), began to film his first feature length dramatic film, Mad Dog Morgan, based on the life of the bushranger and outlaw Daniel 'Mad Dan' or 'Black Dan' Morgan

Barney Kieran, the legendary 'Sobraon Boy': from the mean streets to 'Champion of the World'

This article explores the remarkable career of Bernard Bede (Barney) Kieran, known in the Australian sporting press of the time as 'the Sobraon Boy'. He was born in Sydney in 1886, grew up in the mean streets, was imprisoned aboard the industrial training ship Sobraon and, at the zenith of his sensational world record-breaking swimming career, died suddenly on 22 December 1905. He was only nineteen and was mourned by the public as one of Australia's first sporting icons to be cut down tragically in his prime. Incorporated in this study is the forgotten tragic sporting saga of the first great Australian twentieth-century swimming hero and its connotations of muscularly-based youth reclamation. Consideration is given to the social context, the growing popularity of swimming in the early twentieth century, Sydney and the widespread newspaper coverage of his career and death which helped to create the formation of the tragic sporting hero of Australian myth

Behind stone walls: destitute children and the Randwick Asylum

It is an irony that the handsome golden hued Paradise sandstone buildings of the austere Randwick Asylum remain, but the battalions of destitute children once housed there have long since departed; disappearing into humble positions in the city or the bush of colonial and fin-de-siècle New South Wales. The place was nearly emptied of them by April 1915 when the ANZAC landing at Gallipoli was taking place in the first years of the Great War. The Asylum's remaining charges were then re-housed in government cottage- style settlements or boarded-out with foster parents. By the following year, the buildings were again being filled, this time with the war wounded from the disastrous campaign in the Dardennelles. Under the provisions of the Federal Defence Act, 1915, the buildings and lands of the Randwick Asylum were requisitioned until 1919