Water Wars - the Darling floods

This rather impressive photo from the Adelaide Advertiser shows the impact of flooding in western New England and Southern Queensland now sweeping down the Darling River. The photo is one of a gallery of fifteen.

The floods are big news in South Australia with a concerted campaign to try to force release of water. In just the one issue of the paper there are multiple campaigning stories: see here, here as examples.

I have a rather different view.

We speak of the Murray Darling basin as though it is a single entity. The common phrase Murray-Darling River system is an example. It is not, for there are in fact two quite distinct systems.

The first is the far larger Murray River system, the second the smaller Darling River system. The difference in scale between the two is shown by the map, the Murray at the bottom, the Darling on the left running to the top.

Discussion on the "Murray-Darling system" is driven by the Murray. South Australia's water problems are linked to the continuing drought along the Murray.

The difficulty that arises is that when the Murray is dry, the water in the smaller Darling has to be shared not just by those in the Darling River catchment area, but also those drawing from the Murray below the junction with the Darling.  

This creates a basic asymmetry. If the Darling is dry, those in the Darling basin receive no benefits from any flows on the Murray. If the Murray is dry, those in the Darling can lose water to support those on the Southern Murray.

I recognise that I am simplifying. Still, the practical effect is that those along the Darling can lose out. We have seen this already.

If, as argued, the continent becomes drier, the relatively higher water resources in Northern NSW will be increasingly demanded by those in the drier south. The votes are in the south.

Northern NSW does not have its own political entity. There is nothing to offset the political pressures that will come from the south. The North must lose.               

Belshaw's World - Christmas Musings

Note to readers: This post appeared as a column in the Armidale Express on Wednesday  30 December 2009. I am repeating the columns here with a lag because the Express columns are not on line. You can see all the columns by clicking here

A newspaper column is meant to be a static thing. In fact, the combination with my blogs makes it all wonderfully interactive.

As I write I have just received an email from John Caling. One of John’s friends in Armidale kindly sent him a copy of my column on Armidale’s Greek cafes.

John, a member of the Sourry family, sent me material on the family with a small correction to the information from John Hamel that formed the core of my post.

I am going to add John C’s information and then recirculate. If I do this and then lodge a copy with the Heritage Centre, we have a record that people can turn to.

If you are from one of Armidale’s Greek families and would like your story included, please contact me.

On a related matter, John C and I were in the same class at Armidale Dem. You can always tell an older Armidale person – they always talk about Dem!

A while back, Bruce Hoy sent me a photo of our fifth year class and I wrote a bit of a story about the year on one of my blogs.

Bruce’s dad was the mechanic at New State Motors, the Holden dealers. His older brother, along with others including John Hamel, was in the Armidale High Leaving Certificate of 1953 that featured in Don Aitkin’s What was it all for?, a book that I have referred to before.

Quite often, I would go up to Bruce’s place in the morning. Spade in hand, we would go down to Dumaresq Creek just below his house and build dams and other civil engineering works!

Not allowed today, of course. Probably not then. However, I still remember the thrill as we broke the dam and the water rushed down the creek!

Returning to the photo, memory is an imperfect beast. I simply cannot remember all the people in the photo Bruce sent me.

If you were at Dem in our year and can help with names and stories, please email me and I will send you the photo. I thought that I might do a story on our class.

Turning to other matters, this time last year I spoke of Christmas in New England, of the return of those away from home who came back to be with family.

As a child, Boxing Day was the most boring day of the year.

The lead up to Christmas was always exciting, as was Christmas Day itself. Then came this day when nothing seemed to happen. We might go for a picnic, but it was all very anti-climatic.

As I grew older, and especially after I left home, my views changed. Boxing Day was still quiet, but it was also the start of a very pleasant period.

Each place has its own rhythms. Armidale is no different. Once the University and school break begins, the city goes quiet. But that is only on the surface.

Some of those returning to Armidale for Christmas leave immediately, more stay until New Year.

This is the time for visiting, for playing golf or tennis, for catching up with those that you have not seen for twelve months.

Now that this after Christmas period is no more for me, I look back with a degree of nostalgia.

None of us can go back. But at least the contacts keep the memory alive.

Armidale Kempsey Road Passing Cars 1920s

Following Armidale Kempsey Road Bullock Drays 1920s, another photo from John Caling, this time a family shot on the Armidale Kempsey road on the way to holiday at Port Macquarie.

If you click on the photo you will get far more details. I would be interested in your comments because I think that there is some fascinating stuff in the detail.  

Armidale Kempsey Road Bullock Drays 1920s

John Caling kindly sent me these photos of the Armidale-Kempsey Road in the 1920s. If you click on them, they blow-up to a larger size.

The first photo shows a bullock dray hauling timber turning one of the narrow bends.  You can get a feel for size and the degree of difficulty involved.

The next photo shows, I think, the same dray around the bend. Again, it gives a feeling for size.

New England Story - new states, archives and the preservation of our past

By one of those accidents I so love about blogging, some did a blog search on Armidale. This led me to Paul Barratt's Jim Belshaw on Leslie Hubert Holden, a rather nice response to a post I had written. It also lead me to Archives Outside, a very good blog on archives across NSW.

Now I am often very critical of the what I see as the nonsense coming from the Sydney Government. But here I have to give credit where it is due. Our friends at the NSW State Archives have created a very good blog indeed for all those interested in regional history.

The photo of the New England flag comes from  “This is all very silly” : An interesting start to a regional archives, a post by William Oats on the  creation of what was, I think, the first regional archives in NSW. Dear the story took me back.

I quote:

In 1947, the Warden of the New England University College (NEUC), Dr Madgwick wrote to the Under Secretary of Justice of NSW stating ‘This was all very silly.’ He was referring to a decision that records located in the Armidale Court House could only be researched by NEUC staff and students  at the State Library in Sydney( over 500 kilometres away). Local access to historic records was forbidden.

The desire to preserve local and regional records was not new, reflecting a long-standing sense of Northern NSW or New England consciousness. To understand this, we need to look at some history and especially the the campaign to achieve self-government for the North and the way this interacted with other things.   

To set something of a context for this, the next photo from the same post shows a New State Float at Newcastle in 1963.

This was towards the height of the third wave of agitation to achieve self-government: the first took place in the 1920s, the second the 1930s, with the third starting following the end of the Second World War. During the second wave, the name New England was adopted as the preferred name for the new state. These waves set a context for the story that follows.

The story really begins in 1927.

The announcement in December that year that a Teacher’s College was to be established in Armidale, the first decentralized education institution, was not welcomed by all. According to CB Newling, the newly appointed principle, the Armidale proposal met active hostility within the Sydney press, among city interests and within the NSW Department of Public Instruction.[i] Perhaps most importantly, potential students fearful of the likely standards of the new college, were reluctant to leave Sydney for the bush.

The College had some powerful supporters who were fully aware of these reservations.

To David Drummond as Minister and also local member, the College was a chance to establish a country college for country kids. The College was also intended as one key building block in the creation of the infrastructure required to support a Northern State.

To S H Smith as head of the Department, the College was a chance to put his own ideas into practice.

Smith was then in his early sixties[ii].Handsome and intelligent, with a commanding presence and a beautiful speaking voice, he was also shy, fussy, sensitive and vulnerable to personal attack. A man of limited formal education, Smith had entered the teaching service in 1879 as a pupil teacher, and had worked his way up though the ranks, becoming Under-Secretary in 1922 upon the retirement of the famous Peter Board. There were those who affected to despise Smith because of his lack of formal education; Smith knew this and, sensitive on this point himself, was deeply wounded by it. Drummond’s awareness of his limited own education, he had left school at twelve, probably helped him to manage his new Permanent Head. Certainly he understood Smith, and the two men became close.

Smith had clashed with Professor Alexander Mackie, the head of Sydney Teachers, College and the stormy petrel of NSW education. Mackie, a brilliant Scottish-born academic, had come to Sydney in 1906 to head the newly established Sydney College. He was a man of strong views who believed that that the main emphasis in teacher training should be academic, that the independence of Sydney Teachers’ College must be preserved, and who had little time for financial or other constraints on his activities[iii].

Smith took a different view. Bound up in the day-to-day problems of State education, he regarded the College’s job as training those teachers the Department required in the way the Department required. Smith also disagreed with Mackie as to the most desirable form of teacher training: while not opposed to academic training, Smith thought that Mackie’s academic bias meant ill-trained teachers, and instead supported a more vocationally-oriented training.

These differences in approach would have made for difficulties anyway, but their personalities compounded problems. After Smith made a surprise inspection of Sydney Teachers’ College in 1927, Mackie wrote to him that such inspections could ‘only be done competently by a person with the necessary qualifications.’ He went on: ‘The inspection of highly qualified specialists on the College staff should be entrusted to men and women with similarly high academic qualifications and with extensive experience of College work.’[iv] Nor surprisingly, Smith found this letter ‘offensive’[v]. For Smith’s part, he later commented sarcastically to Drummond that Mackie had ‘that type of mind which is usually associated with the Scottish metaphysician.’[vi]

The combination of committed Minister and Under-Secretary would have been irresistible in any case. However, they were joined by two other men.

A W Hicks, the very able local inspector who became a key Drummond aide and who would later occupy senior positions in the Education Department, took care of local logistics, while C B Newling as the College’s first Principal provided very strong leadership. Newling’s authoritarian style, his nickname was Pop, would not be acceptable today but was critical at the time.

In combination, these men were determined that the venture would succeed. Drummond in particular pushed construction forward as fast as possible with almost obsessive attention to the most minor details, from the type of tap to be used in the washroom to the way in which pines should be planted in the playing fields.

The result was a magnificent building (photo).

It is in the focus on details of the College and in the associated attempts to gain political support that we can see the Northern influence.

The Northern press had welcomed the College’s establishment, looking forward to the establishment of a Northern university.[vii] For his part, Drummond matched the press comment with a carefully marshaled public relations exercise. The Mayor of Armidale, Morgan Stephens (another new state supporter), was asked to organize a dinner to mark the opening of the College: the dinner should be attended not only by people from Armidale, but from the North in general to mark the fact that this was a Northern occasion[viii].

Drummond’s move was both political and ideological. The ideology lay in his deep belief in the North and of the role of the people of the North in deciding their own future.

The same belief is shown in his request to the Department to obtain pictures for the proposed College gallery from the NSW Gallery, pictures that would illustrate among other things the history of the North.[ix] On that same day, he asked that a similar request be made to the National Museum for specimens for the College Museum. These should include ‘specimens definitely granted to the College to hold in trust for the people of the Northern Districts for all time’ and also ‘specimens which are intimately connected with the natural development and pursuits of the district’[x].

In 1938 after a final, sometimes desperate battle, the establishment of the Armidale Teachers' College was followed by the establishment of the New England University College. From the beginning, the new institution saw its role in part in terms of the promotion of New England and the recording and preservation of the area's heritage. Dr Madgwick's 1947 request for local access to historical records fits exactly within the New England tradition.

I won't spoil your enjoyment of Simon's post by providing the later history including the photos of University Archivist Alan Wilkes crossing streams on horse-back, a remarkable sight for anyone who knew Alan! I would add, however, that the University's role in the preservation of regional knowledge and history has been absolutely critical to the very survival of that knowledge and history. This is yet another story that deserves to be told.   

---

[i] C B Newling, The Long Day Wanes, L F Keller, Hunters Hill, 1973, p66ff.

[ii] The description of Smith is largely drawn from a letter Drummond wrote to Elizabeth Campbell on 1 March 1965. Copy in Drummond Papers, University of New England Archives, A248/1087/6.

[iii] Material on the relations between Smith and Mackie is drawn from E S Elphick, Armidale Teachers’ College: Its Background, Foundation and Early Years, Litt.B thesis, University of New England, 1972, pp70-94. Smith’s views of the clash between himself and Mackie are set out in his minutes to Drummond of 17 November 1927 and 18 September 1928. These minutes (contained in Drummond’s Ministerial Letter Book, Drummond papers, University of New England Archives, A248/Vol.2133, p6 and pp 44-47) give a clear picture of Smith’s attitudes and personality.

[iv] Mackie to Smith, 4 November 1927. Cited Elphick, op cit, p82.

[v] Smith to Drummond, 17 November 1927. Ministerial Letter Book, op cit.

[vi] Smith to Drummond, 18 September 1928. Ministerial Letter Book, op cit

[vii] See, for example, Northern Daily Leader, 29 December 1927.

[viii] Drummond to Morgan Stephens, 27 January1930.

[ix] Drummond to Department, 21 February 1930. Ministerial Letter book, p105.

[x] Drummond to Department, 21 February 1930. ibid, p106-107.

New England Story - Leslie Hubert Holden and the DH 61 Giant Moth Canberra

John Caling kindly sent me this photo taken by Leslie Henderson, his mother's step-brother and a keen amateur photographer.

John wrote:

Hi Jim,

The above attachment is a scan of a pic of a de Havilland DH61 Giant Moth taken at Armidale. I am afraid I do not know where or when. My Mum told me that this was the first passenger aircraft to land in Armidale. I do know that QANTAS purchased two of these aircraft but withdrew them from service in 1935 because of unreliability problems. These two aircraft operated out of Longreach so the one in the pic is obviously not from QANTAS.

The picture made me curious. If you look at the clothes, you can see it's quite early. Men's hats remained relatively constant. However, the women's and especially the girls' hats suggest late twenties or early thirties. So I started doing some digging.

The plane in question - VH-UHW - was purchased by Leslie Hubert Holden in 1928.

L H Holden was very much in the tradition of the early fliers well summarised in the song:     

Those Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines.
They Go Up, Tiddly, Up, Up.
They Go Down, Tiddly, Down, Down.

According to Carl Bridge's entry In the Australian Dictionary of Biography, Holden enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force in May 1915 and went to Egypt as a motor driver. In December 1916, now in France, he was one of the first batch of 200 volunteers to train in England for the Australian Flying Corps.

Carl suggests that Holden's mechanical sense and his calm but adventurous nature made him a natural pilot and he quickly won his wings as a lieutenant. Flying a D.H.5 in No.2 Squadron, A.F.C., he saw the first Australian air action of the war over St Quentin on 2 October 1917.

Throughout the battle of Cambrai in November he strafed the enemy front line from a height of fifty feet (15 m); three of his machines were 'written off' under him. In one encounter, the famous von Richthofen fired at him from below; the bullets ripped up through the floor and tore his leggings. Holden nursed the badly damaged plane home, losing a wing on landing. His ability to return alive in wrecked aeroplanes earned him the nicknames of 'the homing pigeon' and 'Lucky Les'.

After returning to Australia in June 1919, he became Sydney manager of Holden's Motor Body Builders, the Adelaide company formed by his uncle H. J. Holden, with his son (Sir) Edward W. Holden. However, bitten by aviation bug and with financial support from friends, he bought a D.H.61 biplane in 1928 which he named Canberra.

Flying the Canberra, Holden operated charter flights from Mascot, Sydney. In April 1929, he was engaged by the Sydney Citizens' Relief Committee to fly to north-western Australia in search of (Sir) Charles Kingsford Smith and Charles Ulm who had disappeared while flying to England. Holden found them on a mud-flat on the Glenelg River near the Kimberleys and returned a hero. However, when newspapers accused Kingsford Smith and Ulm of a publicity stunt, the Sydney committee refused to cover his expenses!

In 1926 gold was discovered at Wau in the then Australian mandated territory of New Guinea. A rush began. Attracted by the aviation opportunities, in September 1931 Holden and the Canberra made what was probably the first flight from Sydney to New Guinea to begin a successful air-freight business.  

Returning to the Armidale photo, if we look at the dates it must have been taken between 1928 and the September 1931 flight to New Guinea. My feeling is that the photo may actually have been taken on the flight to New Guinea.

In 1932, Holden returned to Sydney to purchase extra aircraft and to form Holden Air Transport.  Tragedy now intervened.

In September 1932 Holden joined a New England Airways plane in Sydney to fly to Brisbane. He was killed on Sunday 18 September 1932 when the New England Airways Puss Moth crashed near Byron Bay.

This was not quite the end of the story. In New Guinea, the locals raised 25,000 pounds to continue Holden Air Transport.

And what happened to the Canberra itself? On 2 November 1934, it hit a building in Rabaul and was destroyed by fire.

Notes:

This story is drawn especially from Carl Bridge's entry on L H Holden in the Australian Dictionary of Biography. The Australian National Library has a number of photos of the Canberra. A fascinating picture of aviation in New Guinea at the time can be found here. You can see a Holden Air Transport badge featuring the Canberra here. The De Haviland archives have details of the fate of all DH planes. For posts on New England aviation including New England Airways click here.      

Belshaw's World - Ampol, New States and Soccer

Note to readers: This post appeared as a column in the Armidale Express on Wednesday  23 December 2009. I am repeating the columns here with a lag because the Express columns are not on line. You can see all the columns by clicking here.

I noted with pleasure the decision by Northern NSW Football to reintroduce our own state knockout cup. However, it carried my mind back to the past.

A while back, I was doing some research on the Walkley Awards.

Named after Sir William Walkley, the Walkleys are Australia's top journalism awards. My father-in-law, Jim North, was president of the Australian Journalists Association. The AJA founded the awards, and I just wanted to look at their history.

The research reminded me of a New England linkage and a possible explanation to something that has always puzzled me.

Born in New Zealand, Sir William founded what would become Ampol Petroleum.

While Ampol has faded from the scene now, it was one of Australia’s major petrol chains, proudly asserting its Australian ownership in opposition to the dominance of foreign oil companies.

Now how does this link to New England and to soccer?

In 1961, the New England New State Movement launched Operation Seventh State, a major fund raising campaign to support a new self government drive. I acted as an usher at the launch, wearing my first ever suit borrowed from my Uncle Jim.

Our target was to raise 100,000 pounds, a very large sum in those days. We were successful, leading to a very major campaign culminating in the 1967 self government vote.

As part of the campaign, the Movement decided to mount a major car drive on Sydney. The aim was to flood Sydney with thousands of demonstrators in the domain matched by press advertising. We did indeed do this.

Because it was a car drive and demonstration, the decision was also taken to swamp parking spots around the Domain even though this would incur fines.

The drive was organised with military precision by a team headed by General MacDonald from Wallabadah Station as marshal.

To get to Sydney for the demo, I decided to hitch-hike. Arriving at Maitland late in the afternoon, I realised that I was not going to make Sydney until late. I also had not arranged anywhere to stay.

Checking the train time tables, I found that there was an early morning train to Sydney. I decide to take this.

With that settled, I wandered down to Maitland’s main street and went to the pictures, spending the rest of the time in the Railway Station waiting room. Then, in Sydney, I shaved and washed at Central and on to the demo!

This was, in fact, my second New State demonstration.

I organised the first at the request of ABC Four Corners to provide them with some TV footage. They were doing a story on the New State Movement and needed visual material.

Hastily grabbing a dozen or so friends, we prepared placards and marched up Beardy Street shouting slogans in front of the cameras. I thoroughly enjoyed it!

So what's the linkage in all this with Ampol?

While we were asked not to talk about it, and no-one did, Walkley’s Ampol provided free petrol to cars participating in the New State Drive. As I remember it, the company also offered to pay the parking fines.

The answer to the thing that had puzzled me?

A little later, the Australian Soccer Federation acted to separate New England from NSW, creating a Northern NSW State League.

This survives to today. Only in soccer does New England have a state presence.

I never knew how this happened.

Now that I have read Sir William's ADB entry, I suspect that I have the answer. He was a major driver in the Australian Soccer Federation.

This is my second Christmas as an Express columnist.

Last year I had just started. Now I seem to have settled into it.

I know that some readers at least enjoy my ramblings. That’s why I continue.

To you and yours, I wish you a merry and safe Christmas and a great new year. Let’s see where 2010 takes us!

Belshaw's World - picture a place where the message mattered

Note to readers: This post appeared as a column in the Armidale Express on Wednesday  16 December 2009. I am repeating the columns here with a lag because the Express columns are not on line. You can see all the columns by clicking here.

I have always been fascinated by the way people think.

Sometimes this has been useful. You cannot sell consulting services nor bring about effective change if you not understand the thoughts and feelings of those you are dealing with.

At other times, this fascination has been a dratted nuisance. When working professionally, fascination with the way people think may be useful, but if and only if it’s controlled. Become distracted, lose sight of the main objective, and things can crash and burn.

Pretty obviously, getting to understand the way people have thought in the past is important in writing history. It is also very hard to do because the present creates a sometimes unseen and often impenetrable barrier to that past.

Today we live in a world of what I call visual wallpaper. Images submerge us to the point that they blur; only the striking stand out and then only for a short while.

In these circumstances it is easy to forget just how recent this emphasis on the visual is.

The world's first illustrated weekly, the Illustrated London News, began in 1842. The first crude colour printing dates to 1843, the first photograph appeared in a newspaper in 1880. This is all very recent.

When visual images were rarer, they had far greater power.

Colour reproductions of contemporary French painters greatly influenced the Australian impressionists. The fact that the colours were in fact slightly wrong was neither here nor there.

I don’t know about you, but I now find the constant emphasis on the visual increasingly bland and boring.

The modern Government “policy” document - I put policy in inverted commas because many contain very little policy – with its generally pastel colours and obligatory photos – is instantly recognisable and just plain dull.

I had cause to look at one of these the other day. Stripped of its photos of happy people, design elements and multiple headings, the actual word count was about the length of this column.

This emphasis on the visual has begun to affect the way we think in a variety of ways.

To begin with, in a world of Photoshop and edited images, we no longer trust the visual in the way we used to. The photo that once was a photo is now a creation.

The process of distrust is slow but cumulative.

A month or so back I used a striking photo to illustrate a story. One of my readers pointed out that the photo had been Photoshopped. He was right.

In this case it didn’t matter to the story, but I was still cranky because I had failed to pick it up. It increased my distrust of the visual.

Don’t get me wrong, by the way. I actually like some elements of the emphasis on the visual because it provides new ways of explaining things. It’s just that, for the present at least, it’s becoming an increasing impediment to real thought.

I discussed some of this in an earlier column on the twittering of English.

In a professional sense, a lot of the work that I do requires me to go to the heart of a matter whether it be a policy or a commercial issue. Time is money, and I need to do this as quickly as possible.

The need to strip out the visual is therefore an added nuisance.

I have absolutely no problem with the use of the visual to aid marketing or to provide entertainment. But when words themselves are the core explanatory vehicle, then visual wrapping can actually impede real understanding.

Maybe you think that I am being too harsh? Well, let me encourage you to try an experiment.

The next time you go to a presentation, a conference or information session where visual aids are being used, focus on the words.

Try to find one simple thing that you do not understand. Then ask the presenter to explain it. You will be surprised as to how often you throw them completely!

A happy Christmas to all

I am leaving today for Mt Hotham for a Drummond family Christmas. This is the first time for a long while that this side of the family has got together and I am looking forward to it.

I will not be able to post. When I get back after Christmas, I will bring the latest Express columns up and then resume normal posting.

I have enjoyed this blog over the year, even if posting has sometimes been a little irregular. I have also enjoyed the interaction with readers and fellow bloggers including Gordon, Lynne and Paul. All three have led me to write posts, something important in maintaining a blog as a living animal.

I look forward to continuing and broadening interaction in the new year.

To all my readers, may you have a very happy and safe Christmas and a succesful new year.

Northern NSW State Cup revived

One of the interesting side effects of our campaign for self-government for New England was a decision by the then Australian Soccer Federation to give us our own state soccer organisation. While the new state movement is presently quiet, Northern NSW Football has continued as its own state organisation. 

I see that Northern NSW Football has decided to introduce a State 'knockout' Cup competition for next year, the NNSWF State Cup. I do love the fact that New England still has its own state in soccer!

The competition is open to all men's Northern NSW Football Premier competition clubs and senior zone member clubs. Given New England's size, the competition will be divided into two pools, the Northern Pool and Southern Pool.

The Northern Pool will comprise of club teams from Mid North Coast Football, North Coast Football, Northern Inland Football and Football Far North Coast.

I wish them every success.