Robert Haddon's views of Albany

While researching early images of King George Sound and Albany I stumbled across the work of architect Robert Haddon. He worked in Western Australia in the late 1890's for the Department of Public Works and painted a number of water colours of Albany and environs during this time. Later, he incorporated them into a series of calendar books which are held in the State Library of Victoria.  The images give us a glimpse of Albany just over one hundred years ago and his hand written 'notes of the day' give a fascinating peek into the mind of Haddon. Here are just a few of them, along side similar views today.

The Dog Head Rock, Albany W.A. 1896.

' "To forget" is as important an act as "to remember", for we sometimes cannot forget what we would, and often remember what were better forgotten.'

At Albany, W.A. 1896.


'If you purpose to strike hit the nail on the head every time; do not fatigue yourself with abortive effort.'

This is taken from further back 

The Post Office, Albany W.A. 1897.


'Beautiful building is Architecture, and the man who designs and plans and directs the technical and practical trades in the construction of such buildings is an Architect.'










As an architect Haddon argued for simplicity, balance and originality of design. He believed that a uniquely Australian architecture could be produced by the use of local materials and by sensitively responding to the environment and natural light. His paintings capture the time of transition between sailing ships and steamers, well before the huge diesel or gas/diesel powered ships we see today. Cars hadn't yet made their indelible mark upon the landscape and our lives,and trains were an important means of transport. Many of his paintings show pristine white beaches which can still be seen today in places where the land has been preserved from development.                

Now the home of University of WA Albany Centre

Sunset at Albany W.A. 1896.


'There is one hour of the day, one moment almost, when the exhaltation of the spirit is rendered most possible; it is the hour before the sunset, the moment before the close of another day at its passing.
Nature so often, in the sky, gathers up the full forces of her dramatic art at such a time. Then is the soul expanded, the heart enlarged, the spirit strengthened.
Then are we no longer men but Gods.
The limitations of time & space are forgotten, and with the fading of glorious light, we feel some of the exhaltation of eternity.'

Albany Harbour today

Here is a link to Haddon's calendar books through Trove.

Tracks in the desert

I have just finished reading Yiwara by Richard Gould (1969) and I found his writing thoroughly engaging. He spent about a year living with some of the last Gibson Desert Aborigines in 1966-67. Gould writes just at the time when the last remaining family groups were coming out of the desert to live in Mission and government settlements. His beautiful and sensitive descriptions of their daily life in the desert and clearly explain the inter-relatedness of the sacred nature of their lives and the practicalities of survival in a desert environment. One gets a sense of the environment too, as he walks us through the landscape, over dunes, up gullies, in among the mulga, as they collect plant food, hunt animals, make spears and attend to sacred rituals. However, there are some photographs in the book that could be of a culturally sensitive nature to some people. In the last chapter he describes how some of their customs that work so well in a desert environment, are ill adapted for dealing with the enticements and 'dissatisfactions' of living in a 'whitefella' world. He recounts some of the positive changes made as they adapt to the new situation as well as some of the negative fallout.


I was fascinated by the chapter on Artists and Monuments. Finding one of the sites mentioned by Gould, in this aerial view, made the story so much more real. It is an important ceremonial site at which the dreamtime Water-snake, Pimara, crossed the salt lake and turned into the large stone alignment visible in the view below. Pimara's spirit resides in freshwater springs nearby. Outside of this aerial view can still be made out the track across the lake that was used by those people travelling from the eastern side of the lake. The track was said to be originally made by the Pimara. According to Gould, the set up of aligned stones, artificial cave, springs and rocky promontory suggested a very sophisticated game trap. While there he saw emus and kangaroos travelling through the gaps, beside the artificial cave and on to the springs. In Gould's view, this site combines the sacred and the practical.

Aligned stones on Lake Moore

He finishes on a melancholy note by saying 'Today the Gibson Desert is the loneliest place on earth ... what can be lonelier than a place where people have lived their lives and then left forever ... '  Today, people do go back to reconnect with country and perform sacred duties. But I know it is not the same as living there - at the same time the world has changed and people have to be free to live the life of their choosing.

My sadness is for the country. I think it was Deborah Bird Rose who wrote that country that is no longer being looked after/lived in is called 'wild' or 'lonely'. It is not just the absence of the people, but it has become increasingly clear that the land was managed as well, with selective firing of the country, maintaining a mosaic patchwork of habitats and reducing the risk of wildfires. Slowly, slowly we are learning how to keep the country healthy today.

And in the end the beauty of the desert remains. As Nicholas Rothwell said in The Blast Zone, 'there's still the presence and the pulse of life - and life's faintest trace is always the most beautiful ... you scrape down, you find insects moving; you look about, you see the spores of lichen; you stay quiet, and soon enough there's some hawk that flies over you ...'

Sunshine or study - the spring dilemma

Spring. 

White fog enshrouded us this morning. 

Our valley was swallowed. 

Ghostly giants, karri trees, slowly reappeared as the rising sun dissolved the mist in an arc of rays.

Later blue skies and warm weather beckoned. Too lovely outside to be stuck inside tapping away at the computer, studying. I heard the sounds of baby birds being fed from somewhere in the dense shrubbery. Stopped to listen and pinpoint their position. The background hum of bees, making the most of the warmth and spring flush of nectar, was louder than the baby birds. Wattle birds zig-zagged between our garden and a giant karri, feeding their young up high, then diving down into the eremophila for nectar and insects. Extremely territorial, they chased away even the parrots that dared to get in their way. A frog started croaking, so probably more rain is on the way. That is the way of spring.

This is the hardest time of the semester to keep motivated, between assessments, between seasons, but what you put off now still has to be done later. So, back to it. Lieutenant Dale and his contemporaries... I wonder what it was like around here back then. When speaking of birds in his Descriptive Account of  ... King Georges Sound and the Adjacent Country  (published in 1834), he noted that 'the whole of the continent seems to be deficient in the feathered tribe'. When travelling through the bush, Dale said they rarely saw an animal. He suggested it may have been the fires killing off the young birds and animals in combination with egg hunting by the local tribes people. Or perhaps the birds were there but they didn't notice them?

Bilyuin Pool

Bilyuin Pool was a surprise.

 Too far south for reliable summer rains, too far north for reliable winter rains and too far inland for there to be much of a river. The country was so dry I imagined a muddy puddle rather than a pool.

Mulga

The long miles heading south from Newman had been interspersed by pulling over for wide loads. It became a game to see just big - part of a R9800 excavator pulled by two trucks coupled together - and wide - a haul pack tray covering both sides of the highway - they could get. The R9800 is an 800 tonne backhoe excavator with a bucket size of 42 cubic metres!

Wide load heading north

We travelled through dry and barren country, then turned north onto the Ashburton Downs Meekatharra road. The black red gibber plains were bare apart from scattered silver grasses and short spinifex growing in company with gnarled and sparse grey mulgas. Mining trucks belted down the road raising billowing clouds of red dust.

Bilyuin Pool - believe it or not there are campers in this photo

It was along here that we found a series of pools on the headwaters of the Murchison River, probably 400km inland. Long and narrow, shaded by tall white gums and visited by numerous birds. Downstream from our campsite, a string of campers hugged the shore amid the trees. Some in transit like us, and others set up for a longer stay.

Bilyuin Pool river gum 

My bird list was very long with a variety of water birds, parrots, honeyeaters, birds of prey and colourful robins and whistlers. In the late afternoon light we were entertained by red capped and hooded robins hopping around our campsite, feeding. 

Red capped robin

Cormorants basked in the warm sunlight on the bank of a pool, while spoonbills basked higher up on the limbs of a dead tree.

Spoonbills

The morning was very cold, the dawn chorus was raucous and a beanie and gloves a necessity. Long before the sun's rays hit the grasses I watched female robins and whistlers bobbing along the ground then leaping up to peck cold insects off the silvery grasses. Crows stalked haughtily on the ground pretending to ignore the diamond doves and muddies sharing the same space. 

Bilyuin Pool at sunrise

The galahs and twenty-eight parrots squabbled over nesting hollows and from the distance came the piercing call of the whistling kites as they roved from tall tree to tall tree.

Pair of galahs

The surrounding vegetation was mainly mulgas, eremophilas and cassias. We found signs of earlier settlement here, remnant fences, posts, hand made bricks and a hearth. There were signs of even earlier inhabitants in what appeared to be stone chips of spearheads and the like. 

Cassia

It was a beautiful spot, all the more so because it was so unexpected. 

Hooded robin

Seeing swans in black and white

I had to share these cartoons dating from the early days of British settlement of the Swan River Colony in Western Australia. They are funny and fascinating at the same time.

They show that the nature of capitalist enterprise was alive and well back then, along with a sense that those in positions of influence will try to get away with whatever they can - and that things don't always turn out as planned. Has anything changed? What I particularly 'love' about them is the depiction of the swans. The swans here are of course black - but to the British mind swans were white - and so black becomes white. Perhaps it is a window into the wrong-headedness of much of the early years of the colony. Seeing but not seeing, understanding but misunderstanding?? The swans don't look too happy either ...

Captain Dick Demi-Solde on a Wilde Goose Flight to the Swan River, 1829. by caricaturist  S. Stoutshanks, lithographer  Charles Ingrey, published in 1829.

The first image depicts the Duke of Wellington (Prime Minister of England) and is a criticism of the British Government over the establishment of the Swan River Colony.

Peel, Peel, Swan River Peel! Very Fine Peel! 1829. by caricaturist A Sharpshooter, published in 1829. 

The next two cartoons criticise the Right Honorable Robert Peel, who was Secretary of State (in England) and his cousin Thomas. These cartoons imply that Robert Peel influenced the decision to grant land to Thomas' syndicate of financiers who had tried to do a deal with the Government for a grant of prime land. However they failed to be allocated prime land as Peel's shipload of settlers arrived six weeks after the Government's stipulated deadline. They were allocated poorer land and eventually the whole scheme failed.

Cousin Thomas, or the Swan River Job [Plucking or Peeling], 1829 by caricaturist Robert Seymour, published in 1829.

All the images are from the National Gallery of Australia and are part of the Wordsworth Collection, purchased in 2010. Link to the NGA here.

The consequences of hot sweet tea

There is nothing quite like a steaming cup of hot, honey sweet tea. There is also nothing quite like the contents of that hot cup covering my study desk, my books and the floor. Just as I was about to get stuck into Kay Milton's  Anthropology, Culture and Environmentalism, you guessed it, my cup tipped over. Over everything. #@*! I was really looking forward to my first sip.

But ... while cleaning up I saw a family of fire tail finches feeding in the seeding grasses just outside my study window. Dropped the cleaning cloths and raced for my camera and managed to fire off a few shots before they took off. Thanks to the spilled tea. They are extremely shy and consequently very hard to photograph. With a new cuppa I set down to read again. Happy all round.

Fire tail finches

Milton was talking about environmentalism and comparisons that have been made between industrial and some non-industrial societies. Comparing the environmentalist models as practised by some (for instance) rainforest peoples who obtain most of their sustenance from the forest with minimal impact on the forest with 'the destructive and exploitative activities of commercial loggers, who clear large areas of forest just to remove a few commercially valuable trees'.

Red lobed wattle bird

Milton then goes on to say 'the reverence and respect which non-industrial societies are seen as treating their quarry species is contrasted with the apparently wasteful practices of commercial fishing and whaling, which can decimate whole populations and bring species to the brink of extinction'. This immediately reminded me of the debate going on currently here in Australia about the super trawler Margiris. The operating company is applying for a quota of 18,000 tonnes, which is half of the total allowable fishing quota for the whole of the Small Pelagic Fishery. The fish would be processed on board and most sold to markets in West Africa for $1.00 a kilo. They need to catch 15,000 tonnes just to break even. The West Africans used to have viable local fishing industries until super trawlers entered the scene, now their fishing industries are on the brink of collapse. It seems like a bad idea to me - the thin edge of a wedge.

Twenty-eight parrot

I have to admit the large scale industrialised practices of clear felling and huge scale fishing that sucks up tonnes of sea life in one scoop make me feel sick in the stomach. I find it hard to read the words and I mostly try not to think about it. Several times when reading some of Tim Flannery's books I have had to put them aside for a while before I could face reading further. To keep my conscience clear I only buy locally caught fish - caught in the inlet. To save trees, our furniture is pre-loved or made from recycled timber. I refuse to buy newspapers as I can't bear the thought of all that wasted timber for a day's read. Plus I plant trees. But I do at least have the opportunity to make choices ... many others don't. Whether or not non-industrial societies are as harmonious with nature as some would have us believe, it is the scale of industrial practices that is my concern. A lot of damage can be done in a very short time in the pursuit of a quick buck.

Fire tail finches

It is very easy to ignore it all when I look out the window and see a family of tiny finches nibbling on grasses.

All these photographs were taken this morning through my study window.
Super trawler debate on the ABC website.

Mad dogs and winter flowers

This morning we were working out on the Nullaki Peninsular, slowly freezing in the slushy hail and wind. It is totally exposed to the elements having panaramic views to the ocean and inlet - pretty to look at but just plain cold on days like today. Unfortunately a shed had its back blown off in a previous storm so it needed to be fixed. Miske very wisely stayed in the car - no mad dogs going out, only a mad Englishman and his wife!

Eucalyptus sp

I thought a little colour would be in order to counter the dark skies. I have been meaning to share some more images from the Pilbara, so here are some of the flowers we saw in July. The pale pink Eucalypt was growing in a gully - one pink among a number of creamy ones.

Many of these images show the special adaptations plants have made to the arid environment - silvery, hairy, waxy, reduced, protective and reflective from the heat and drying winds. Sometimes the flowers are tiny like the hairy Ptilotus below.

Ptilotus sp

The flowers themselves are quite happy to be colourful, and the birds and the butterflies love them.

Cassia sp

Solanum sp

Grevillea wickhamii

Acacia sp

Alogyne sp

Lesser Wanderer butterfly