Belshaw’s World: the Hugh Frewen story

Note to readers: This post appeared as a column in the Armidale Express on Wednesday 4 February 2009. I am repeating the columns here with a week's lag because the Express columns are not on line. This column is in fact a shortened version of a much longer post - Saturday Morning Musings - Hugh Frewen: a New England story 

I first met Captain Hugh Frewen (or Cappie as he was known) in the early sixties. I specially remember him from New State Meetings and from our car drive on Sydney. There he stood out in his tropical drill suit, frail but still erect.

I had no idea of his history. It was only later that I found out the full story following a very popular BBC TV series that told the story of his mother's family.

Frewen recorded his own story in Imogene an odyssey (Australasian Publishing Company, 1944). It is the story of a man who wandered the world from his birth until his arrival in Dorrigo and New England where he was to spend the rest of his life.

The forest melts as we o'ertop the crest,
Yielding to homely scenes and paths we know,
While grassy uplands open to the west,
The rolling hills and downs of Dorrigo;

Our story begins in 1849 with the marriage of the New York financier Leonard Jerome and Clarrisa (Clara) Hall. The couple had four daughters, one of whom died young.

Leonard Jerome was a financial robber baron who speculated in stocks and had interests in a number of railroads, making and losing several fortunes. However, he was very much a New York person, content to fund his wife's interests.

Clarrisa was different. According to one tart biographer, her sole goal was for her daughters to marry nobly and lucratively. In 1867 she and the girls sailed for Paris where, she believed, the Court of Napoleon III would inevitably fulfil her most ambitious social fantasies.

Following Napoleon’s fall in 1870, Clarissa took the girls to London where they cut a swath through society.

The beautiful Jennie married first. On 15 April 1874, she married Lord Randolph Spencer-Churchill at the British Embassy, Paris. Their first son, Winston Churchill, was born in November 1874, making him a somewhat premature child if my maths is correct!

Then on 2 June 1881, Clarita (Clara) married Moreton Frewen at Grace Church New York.

Moreton became known as Mortal Ruin because of his habit of borrowing and losing money on grandiose schemes. This included a Wyoming US cattle venture where he is reported to have arrived with 16,000 pounds, leaving owing 30,000 pounds!

Rudyard Kipling observed of Moreton Frewen that he lived "in every sense, except what is called common sense, very richly and wisely to his own extreme content, and if he had ever reached the golden crock of his dreams, he would have perished".

Hugh Frewen was born in 1883, growing up in the old manor house of Brede Place, a house that his mother somehow managed to keep despite the family's financial tribulations. This was a world that mixed access to the old European aristocracy with the embarrassment of a father who sometimes could not pay the school fees!

From 1906 to 1909 Frewen was private secretary to Sir Percy Girouard, the Governor of Northern Nigeria, and then a little late political officer in charge of a Nigerian hill station. However, he had to resign from the Colonial Office when his concerns about what he saw as British profiteering on Nigerian currency issues, concerns that he raised with his father who was then a British MP, led to the appointment of a Royal Commission.

On February 21 1914, Hugh married donna Maria Nunziante, daughter and co-heiress of the Italian Duke of Mignano. They had two sons before the marriage ended in divorce in 1922. Hugh then married Rosalind Jones, a marriage that brought three further sons and two daughters.

Hugh served throughout the First World War, including the Gallipoli Campaign. Following the war, he ended up as a special services officer in Iraq. This was not always easy.

Here for a little while did I contrive
To measure wits with Oriental wiles
(my predecessor had been burnt alive).

Like many English men of the time, he had a great love and respect for the Arab.

Thine are the manners of an earlier day
Thy nature decorous as ours uncouth,

His support for the Arab position led to another falling out with elements of the imperial system when he took the side of King Feisal against the British High Commissioner, Sir Percy Cox.

He resigned, and began the wanderings that were to bring him finally to Dorrigo and to our meetings.

New England Australia - most popular posts 7

Time for another look at what is popular on this blog. I try to do this regularly because my stats package is limited to the last 100 visits. However, it is over six weeks since my last review.

With 19 visits, The Poetry of Judith Wright - South of My Days was first by a country mile. Then came a group of four posts. In descending order:

• Fossicking in New England
• New England Story - Stockton Beach
• Australia's latest population statistics 2 - the macro numbers
• The Poetry of Judith Wright - Bora Ring

This was followed by four posts with three visits each:

• Secrets of New England - along the Fossickers Way Day Two
• Death of New England Writer Eric Rolls (1923-2007)
• Peter Allen, Armidale and Claire and Eileen Napier - an attack of nostalgia
• University of New England's Mary White College celebrates 50 years

Then came no less than six posts with two visits each:

• New England Australia - a few inland pubs and clubs
• TAS (The Armidale School) Band - 1901
• Judith Wright's "For a Pastoral Family" - and "Skins"
• Northern Tablelands-North West: Big Sky events summer calendar December 2008 - February 2009
• New NSW Population Projections 2006-2036 - New England's projected position
• Sons of Mathew 2 - Charles Chauvel (1897-1959)

In all, a varied mix.

Round the New England Blogging Traps - 4

This post will actually come up a little after its formal publication date. I started it, but then got side-tracked. 

In my post Can we form a New England history group? wondered about the possibility of forming a group focused on the understanding and promotion of history in the broader New England. This post was triggered in part by  LIVING IN THE NORTH, a post by Lynne Sanders-Braithwaite.

I have really been enjoying Lynne's blog. I discovered it through Neil's Google Reader series. In my own little blogging world, Neil is something of a leader. We may not agree with Neil on particular issues, but his innovative approach to blogging as a form of expression influences us all.

Returning to Lynne, her recounting of the experience of Peter Knox struck a real cord. If we cannot count on New England's universities to help record our history and experience, then who can we count on? I think that we have to do it ourselves.

Over on Jock's blog, Jock Laurie as President of the NSW Farmers' Association continues to present a country viewpoint. The blog is worth reading.

 NEWCASTLE AU. CITY PHOTOS PLUS HUNTER VALLEY AND BEYOND is running a series of photos on gardens around Newcastle.

Still in Newcastle, Newcastle Green's councillor Michael Osbourne is protesting about the proposals to cut the rail link into central Newcastle.

I am not in a position to comment on all the detail. I can only say as as non-Green outsider that I think that the move would probably be a serious error.

I am short of time, so will finish here. But first a plea.

If you live in the areas I call New England - Hunter Valley to the Queensland border - and want your bog to be included in this weekly review, please let me know!       

Can we form a New England history group?

There is so much that we do not know about New England. This photo from Gordon Smith shows a tree from which the bark has been cut, almost certainly by New England's Aborigines.

Now that you have looked at the photo, are you interested in joining a New England history group? By this I do not mean a Tablelands' group, but one that covers the whole area from the Hunter to the Queensland border.

It seems to me that in the years I have left, I am going to be able to barely scratch the surface. I need help.   

Belshaw’s World: Access Economics feeds the herd instinct

I felt quite flattered to have attracted a response from one of the Express’s better known letter writers. Like any writer, I want to be read. And Dr Fidlon clearly read my column on the wonders of blogging.

I wasn’t quite sure how to respond. In the blog world, this would be a comment to which I would respond with a comment. If I thought that the comment was especially important, I would add a postscript to the main post alerting readers to the comment.

A column is a little different because of space limitations. Should I then respond through a letter to the editor?

I might do that in future. For the moment, I thought that I should just note that my interest in the hoax played upon Keith Windschuttle lay in the process that led to the discovery of Katherine Wilson as hoaxer, not the fact that Keith Windschuttle was the victim.

I watched Australia just before Christmas. There is a spectacular stampede scene where cattle being driven to Darwin are deliberately spooked by the bad guys. Once started, all the cattle go with the herd in a blind panic.

The release of the latest report by Access Economics on the Australian economy made me quite angry because it played to the herd instinct. And we don’t have a little kid to stand in front and bring the mob to a halt.

I have a deal of respect for Access.

Sometimes known as the Treasury in exile, the firm was founded by former colleagues from the Australian Treasury. Their economic reports go into the board rooms of all the big firms in the country. Their reports also attract media attention, a great deal of media attention if, as appears to be the case here, they carefully craft their words to attract that attention.

The single message that came through the media reporting was that the Australian economy was buggered. Access says so.

I had the distinct feeling watching Access's Chris Richardson on TV that the size of the media firestorm was creating a degree of discomfort. He did make the point in a kind of sub-text that the Australian recession was going to be far milder than that experienced in some other countries, but this was swept away in the response to the headline statements.

A line by Australian poet John O'Brien (P J Hartigan) has entered the popular language: "We’ll all be rooned," said Hanrahan, "Before the year is out."

The problem with the actions of Chris Hanrahan Richardson and his colleagues lies in the concept of a self-fulfilling prophesy. If all of Access's clients accept the reported Access headlines without looking at the detail, then their responses may indeed bugger the Australian economy.

For some time now I have been making two key points about the global economic position.

The first point was that conventional consumption stimulus measures were unlikely to have the desired short term effects given the crash in confidence and because they did not address global structural issues that had helped trigger the crash. At best, as has happened in Australia, they can have a cushioning effect.

The second point was that it would take time for structural imbalances to correct and for longer term investment measures to start feeding into the system. The challenge was to manage through to the recovery point.

In all this, it remains true that Australia is in a remarkably good position to ride through the storm. Further, there were clear signs that a degree of local confidence was returning. Indeed, if you drop below the screaming headlines, even Access is actually forecasting a recovery.

The key requirement at a time like this is to keep a cool head. This applies to business and to Governments. Here the Rudd Government has already displayed something of a tendency to shoot from the hip, to try to do too much too quickly.

Keeping a cool head is far from easy when a firm in Access’s position plays for short term publicity in the way it did.

For length reasons, I will defer both my usual question and the answer to the last question to my next column.

Note to readers

This column appeared in the Armidale Express on Wednesday 28 January 2009.

Round the New England Blogging Traps - 3

I have decided to standardise on either Saturday or Sunday to do my round-up of New England  blogs. Doing this weekly forces me to do my blog review. This is actually quite hard because otherwise I get sidetracked.

Woodford Dale Public School lies to the north east of Grafton on Woodford Island near the Clarence River. The school has just begun its own blog, still a rare event for a NSW primary school. My thanks to North Coast Voices for alerting me to this.

Moving north, LYNNE SANDERS-BRAITHWAITE  has been mourning a lost love. I can understand this. I was also pleased to see Lynne's praise for Centrelink at  Murwillumbah.  

Last year I ran a series of workshops around NSW for community housing managers on new rental approaches. Centrelink presented at each workshop. This led me to write  Praise for Centrelink and then a little later, In Praise of Centrelink Mark Two.

In the second post I mentioned the second Grafton workshop. There the Murwillumbah Centrelink office was partially featured, so I felt an immediate connection to Lynne's comment.  

Gordon Smith on lookANDsee has returned to the New England National Park. This photo shows the Lyrebird Walk.

I am still puzzled as to the reasons why the sheer beauty of the New England countryside is so poorly recognised.

Over on Media Hunter, Craig Wilson in Loss of Localism mourns the changes to Newcastle's radio 2HD that have effectively destroyed local content. I remember 2HD because I used to listen to it while visiting Newcastle.

Craig is dead right. Driven by economics, the loss of localism is a real problem. The media ceases to represent the people it serves.  

Over on The Marketer, Craig's work partner Gordon Whitehead had  the quire remarkable story of Hyundai Motor America's offer to their customers. If the customer loses his/her job within one year of purchase, they can return the car. Talk about a recession beater!

On Art News Blog, Australian painter Dion Archibald (the photo shows one of his paintings) has a disturbing story, Paris Street Painters Lose to Cheap Chinese Paintings. 

Those who have been to Paris will remember the small stores along the river. Many, me included, have bought a painting of Paris to remember the experience. But made in China?

Moving north to Bellingen, Pip Wilson continues to provide  strange facts and anniversaries from our past.

And, finally, Armidale romance writer Bronwyn Parry is struggling to finish her latest book. I know how she feels!    

Belshaw’s World: why are we crushing our schools?

We presently live in a measurement obsessed world, a world of inputs, outputs and outcomes, of key performance indicators. This is a world of league tables, of standardization and uniformity, of professionalisation and accreditation.

We live in a world obsessed with risk avoidance with its associated concepts of informed consent, duty of care and risk management or mitigation strategies.

I was a strong supporter of the education reforms that began in 1988 spear-headed by Commonwealth Education Minister Dawkins because I saw them as a way of freeing up the education and training sector.

I still support many of the concepts. However, I now think that the practical effects have become quite pernicious.

Over the last few years of my daughters’ schooling, I watched what I saw as the erosion of the ethos of their school with sadness and a degree of anger.

This process stands out in my mind as a series of events.

The circulars from the school telling us of new Government requirements increased. We were required to provide new information and sign new forms.

The range of activities open to our daughters began to contract because of perceived risk. We went to our first information session on a forthcoming excursion.

A confused parent said to me “well, that was a waste of time. We know all that. Why are we here?”

“It’s got nothing to do with us”, I replied. “It’s for the school’s legal protection, so that they can say that we have given informed consent.”

Teachers began to complain privately about the new loads placed upon them. The school suddenly demanded that parents sign in at the office before going onto school grounds.

Those of us at the school all of the time for meetings or to attend sporting events simply ignored this. However, I noticed that new parents were beginning to comply.

New security cameras were introduced, followed by guards. Then came a new central security system with various alarms and self locking doors. Lock down and lock out had arrived.

This was being done, the school explained in a circular, “for the protection of your daughters.” You could be forgiven for thinking that the school had a significant security problem. It did not.

Fees continued to rise faster than inflation to pay for the new administrative staff required to meet increasing Government reporting requirements, as well as all the new security arrangements.

On legal grounds, the school decided that it could no longer coordinate the preparation of the traditional year 12 annual. The students would have to do this for themselves.

At eldest’s year 12 formal in 2005, students were banded with hospital style bands that allowed those over 18 to buy single drinks. Parents were allowed to have wine on their tables.

Two years later youngest’s year 12 formal was held at a posh Sydney hotel.

The event had to be completely dry for all. There were the usual pre-formal parties. However, upon arrival at the hotel, the kids were not just bag searched but also breathalysed. Any recording a positive reading were not allowed to enter.

Parents went ballistic. The security guards explained that they had no choice; they must comply with new NSW Government legislation.

By nine o’clock most parents had adjourned to the bar. By 11.30, half an hour before the official close, the ball room was empty as kids moved off to the after-formal parties.

Last year to the fury of my daughters and their friends, the school abolished muck-up day. This had been a pretty mild affair run under tight controls. Even this was now seen as too dangerous.

I could, perhaps, live with all this if the standard of education had improved. It declined, crushed by the growing burden of compliance and risk avoidance.

To answer my last question.

New England’s first major airline was, appropriately, called New England Airways.

Formed by George A Robinson, the Lismore headquartered company began a bi-weekly Lismore-Brisbane service in August 1931. This was later extended to a Lismore-Sydney service, creating the first Brisbane- Sydney service. The company grew to be one of the first national carriers.

Now for my next question. What is the connection between Dorrigo, cattle ranching in Wyoming and the imperial courts of Europe?

Note to readers

This column appeared in the Armidale Express on Wednesday 21 January 2009. This post brings my columns up to date with exception of the column appearing in today's Express.

In future I will publish them on a Wednesday, thus lagging them by one week after publication.

Belshaw’s World: The wonders of blogging

Australia has a long history of literary hoaxes.

Five months in the making, the latest sting was carefully planned. Would Keith Windschuttle as editor of Quadrant accept a bogus article on genetic engineering carefully crafted to appeal to his perceived prejudices?

The answer was yes. Bait taken, the on-line journal Crickey then revealed that it was a hoax.

The bloggosphere, along with many journalists from the conventional media, went wild. Who was the fictitious Sharon Gould who had written the hoax article?

In long comment streams, the bloggers compared notes, using hints in the article to check previous writing. This literary detective work allowed them to quickly zero in on a former blogger and free-lance writer called Katherine Wilson. Finally, Crickey revealed that the author was indeed Katherine Wilson.

Those of you who are interested in finding out more can follow the links through in this post of mine - http://belshaw.blogspot.com/2009/01/sunday-snippets-blogging-meander.html.

Why do I mention this? Well, blogging has changed from its original meaning of web log, a personal diary, to part of main stream journalism. In doing so, it has become a critical personal and professional tool.

Just to put all this in perspective, I am not an A-list blogger, one of those who generate huge traffic volumes. Even so, last year my blogs received over 53,000 visits. The stories I wrote have been picked up by fellow bloggers in many countries and lead, among other things, to this column.

A test before I go on. How many of you know that there is an Armidale based photo blog that has been classified by Australia’s National Library as worthy of permanent preservation in their electronic archive? The answer is Gordon Smith’s lookANDsee - http://las.new-england.net.au/.

I love Gordon’s blog and, with his permission, use his photos to illustrate stories.

Blogging is constantly evolving.

The supply of free platforms such as Google’s blogger supported rapid growth to the point that there are now more than seventy five million blogs worldwide. As you might expect with such a huge number, the standard is quite variable. Further, there is a high churn factor with new blogs starting all the time, others stopping. Burn-out is common.

The idea of community is central to blogging.

Each long-running blog gathers its own readership. This is generally small, with most blog traffic generated by search engines. However, these small communities are overlapped and linked because bloggers tend to cluster, drawn together by some shared interest. This creates what I call the village – you have your own personal friends, but then there is a much bigger group that you know or know of and sometimes chat to.

Like any village, there can be wars – flame fights that can get nasty. There are also the normal legal risks that apply to any form of publication. This has led to the development of what we can think of as blogging manners, a set of rules designed to aid polite discussion.

Blogging is a remarkably useful way of keeping in touch. Unlike the conventional search engines, Google blog search allows you to search for posts on topics by date. With such a large number of bloggers worldwide, new developments get picked up very quickly.

Over the tumultuous days of October, I followed the global financial crisis quite closely. To do this, I used conventional web sources such as media and official sites. However, I also used blog search to find out breaking developments from different parts of the world. This was actually far faster than the conventional resources.

In all this, how does New England rank in the blogging world? Not well, I fear.

So far I have identified just thirty three blogs across the broader New England. Some such as Gordon’s are very good, but many are barely updated.

This is a far smaller number than I would have expected, given the area’s population. To my mind, it is a symptom of a broader problem, the area’s failure to use the internet in an effective fashion. However, that’s the subject for another column!

To finish with my usual question. What was the name of the first major airline established in New England? Again, I am talking broader New England. And, no, it wasn’t East West Airlines. That was the second.

Note to readers

This column appeared in the Armidale Express on Wednesday 14 January 2009

Round the New England Blogging Traps - 2

It has been quite a while since I did a New England blogging round up. Far too long in fact.

Tim Christie from Newcastle seems to have been on blogging leave. However, a little while ago he had a rather nice story of a tour of South Australia. This photo of a SA vineyard is an example of the great photos illustrating the story. 

Still in Newcastle, there was a great post on Mulubinba Moments. Updates from this part of the world is simply a report of domestic life and travels, but a very good one.

Michael J Bayly's The Wild Reed is a US based blog written from a Roman Catholic perspective with a special focus on gay issues. I have included it as New England blog because Michael is from Gunnedah.

In this context, a return visit to Gunnedah triggered My "Bone Country", an extremely good nostalgic look at Gunnedah past and present. The post begins with a quote from Rosanne Cash's Western Wall.   

Red dust settles deep in my skin.
I don’t where it starts or where I begin.

Gaye has decided to put her nature blog Hunter Valley Backyard Nature largely on hold for the present. However, she is maintaining her personal blog journal, Snippets and sentiments. This has some very good posts set against a Hunter Valley background.

Rugby League fans should not miss Kurt Gidley's blog simply entitled Kurt Gidley.  Kurt has just been on an overseas trip, lucky bloke, that he obviously enjoyed.

On 18th Century Historical Trekking,1700-1760 (Australia), Keith Burgess has entered a video phase. This is the place for you if you want to know how to make 18th century chocolate or, alternatively, shoot with a muzzle loading musket!

If historical re-enactments do not appeal, try soaring with Jenny's Blog. I see from one post that there were 22 glider launches on one day. Not bad.

I have barely scratched the surface. In future, I will try to do these blogging round-ups on a weekly basis.  

Belshaw’s World: City Spending, Country Saving

This business of writing a weekly column is proving harder than expected.

In blogging, length depends upon purpose. In a column, the length is fixed.

In blogging, if you make a mistake you can correct it. In a column, the mistake is there in cold print for all time, or at least until all copies of the paper decay!

I mention this because in my last column I referred to Kate Henry from Kentucky when I meant Kate Hedges. I emailed Kate as soon as I realized my error. She was, I am relieved to report, very forgiving.

I think that part of my problem was that I was thinking of one Ken Henry at the time, the head of the Commonwealth Treasury. Why? Well, that brings me to the subject of this post.

As you all know, we have just come to the end of a long boom. One feature of that boom was a sharp decline in the savings rate in western countries including Australia. We stopped saving and started spending.

To manage this we borrowed. We could do this because asset prices – real estate and shares in particular – kept rising. This allowed us to increase personal debt.

Our increasing spend meant that we were spending more on goods and services from other countries than we were selling to them. As a consequence, the balance of trade in goods and services in most western countries went into deficit.

This deficit had to be funded by international borrowings. The global trade surplus countries, China in particular, lent us the money we needed to buy their goods!

This had to end and explains why this global economic downturn is so severe. We are paying for our own excesses.

But who in Australia spent and who saved? The following table shows Australian states and territories ranked by their net contribution to the balance on goods and services in 2007-2008. All figures are in $Am.

	Exports	Imports	Balance
WA	68,821	27,337	41,484
South Australia	10,338	7,342	2,996
Queensland	35,346	32,361	2,985
Tasmania	3,640	692	2,948
Northern Territory	4,544	2,581	1,936
ACT	4	14	-10
Victoria	20,539	56,058	-35,519
NSW	30,096	75,907	-45,881

Interesting, isn’t it? All of Australia’s growing private overseas borrowings went to support Victoria and especially NSW. And that means Melbourne and Sydney.

Every Australian economic crash since at least the 1890s has been associated with metropolitan over-spend.

That spend brings more people to the metro cities because that is where the money is.

As the boom ends, some people leave. Emigration from Sydney always increases during the city’s downturns. Yet the sheer concentration of economic activity in Sydney provides a base for the next leveraged upturn as things improve. It seems that we cannot help ourselves.

During the week I had an email from Jack Arnold. Both of us believe that a New England new state is still part of the solution, although we disagree on boundaries. I want the Hunter and Newcastle in, Jack disagrees.

In replying to Jack, I made the point that one of our problems was that since the referendum loss in 1967 we had lost the very intellectual framework required to discuss issues such as new states. Everything has become localized, fragmented, expressed in terms of narrow outputs.

I will deal with this in more detail in later columns. Immediately, I want to answer the question on six New England films.

At random, they include Sons of Mathew (1949), Captain Thunderbolt (1953), Smiley (1953), The Shiralee (1957), Smiley Gets a Gun (1958), Koya No Toseinin (The Drifting Avenger) (1968) and Bootmen (2000). And that’s only a start.

How many did you recognize?

Note to readers

This column appeared in the Armidale Express on Wednesday 7 January 2009