The Gate of the Year : The King’s Speech, Academy Awards, and the bookies’ odds #film #poetry

This post was originally published on The Trad Pad on  2 January 2011.  Happy New Year everyone ... particularly to those who did it tough this year.  Please take on board the thoughts of Minnie Louise Haskins

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Happy New Year! May the year be kind to you and bring you blessings, wisdom, peace, and prosperity!  The last day or two has exhibited some coincidence. Firstly, Hay Quaker published, in toto, the poem The Gate of the Year by Minnie Louise Haskins.

 Minnie Louise Haskins

Picture from here

I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year,
"Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown."
And he replied, "Go into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of God.
That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way!"
So I went forth and finding the Hand of God
Trod gladly into the night.
He led me towards the hills
And the breaking of day in the lone east.
So heart be still!
What need our human life to know
If God hath comprehension?
In all the dizzy strife of things
Both high and low,
God hideth his intention.

Perhaps readers have heard this poem, or part of it, before.  It was made famous by the Christmas Speech of King George VI delivered in 1939.  You can hear the actual speech – it is quite moving given it is made at the time of the first Christmas of World War II – here.

Picture from here

Secondly, I decided to get out of the house for the first time since  Christmas Midnight Carols and Eucharist at All Saints, Mitcham and go to see the much lauded movie, The King’s Speech. It is the story of the relationship between the Australian speech therapist, Lionel Logue, and King George VI.

The movie is being tipped as a frontline contender for an Oscar. In spite of competition from The Social Network in the bookies’ odds as set out here, it is hard to see how this movie could lose with its high proportion of former Academy Award winning actors.  The UK still produces the best actors – particularly in ensemble work as demonstrated in The King’s Speech – in the English speaking world.  However, it does an Australian heart good – particularly one coming from Queensland – to see and hear Geoffrey Rush mixing it admirably with such a talented cast. To think, this great man of Australian movies was growing up across Brisbane from me in the 1950s!
Those sitting around me in the packed movie theatre were clearly as impressed as I. 
I was however surprised at the ending. I don’t think, in such an historical movie, it is giving away much to describe the ending of this movie.  I thought the movie somehow would finish with the 1939 Christmas Speech. This is arguably the most famous, most remembered, and most quoted of all the King George VI’s speeches.  This doesn’t happen.  The movie concludes with the King’s Speech at the beginning of World War II.

Listen to the original speech here.

Musk Farm and Wombat Hill - great Australian gardens

Retronaut-ing

I have discovered this most wonderful site.  It is an adventure, a trip down memory lane (although some of the memories are much older than those reading this), a wonderful resource. Come be a Retronaut.

New for old - developments in photography

Kelmscott Manor: Attics  -   from here.

Kelmscott Manor –  this is where the picture is from – was the home of the wonderful William Morris.  The photo of the attic is from a story of interest to photographers everywhere.  Please go here.

Picture from here

Remembering Burke and Wills

To-day a memorial plaque will be officially launched to commemorate the departure, 150 years ago, of Robert O'Hara Burke and William John Wills on a journey of exploration.  The Burke and Wills saga is well embedded in the Australian consciousness - not least because it was an unmitigated disaster and an example of how not to conduct exploration in Australia.

I live in Melbourne and Burke and Wills are big here.  I sort of knew that before I came to live here.  However, I am frequently confronted by the mass adulation of the B&W pre-expedition and their memorialisation post-disaster.  There are statues here and there but I was really gobsmacked by a very, very large artwork at the State Library of Victoria which portrayed the adulation of the crowds of Melbourne as they farewelled these yet to be heroic men.

I hate to be a party-pooper but I am a North Australian living in exile in Melbourne and where I come from Burke and Wills are regarded as prize dills.  We don't think they knew very much.  We don't think they needed to perish.  We think they were amazingly arrogant and ignorant.  While they were doing a perish not too far away Aboriginal groups were thriving.

If any memorials are being built to Burke and Wills to-day they should be done in the context of the ignorance and arrogance of the post-1788 white settlers.

The State Library of Victoria is entering into the commemorations with an ongoing exhibition which began in  May and will run through to October this year under the title of Burke and Wills: Terra Incognita.  To-morrow and Friday there are workshops related to the exhibition from the Curator's viewpoint. Gerard Hayes will discuss items on display including contemporary portraits of Burke and Wills, their last notes and firearms used on the expedition.  Bookings for the workshops are essential.

And for everything you ever wanted to know on the B&W 150th, please go here.

Amazing grace and curious wainscotting

Miss Eagle went to a preview screening of Amazing Grace last night. I talk about it over here. At Q & A time with the Panel, one gentleman started to get picky about historical inaccuracies and had to be reminded - indeed, the reminders came from the audience - that it was, after all, a movie and there was a disclaimer in the credits explaining that there was some fictionalisation and some reworking of events for dramatic content.

Miss E's view is that she may have liked things a little better had it been a Merchant Ivory production. Not that there were not some good film settings of historic interest.

But you see, a few months ago Miss E picked up an interesting book at City Basement Books: Saints in Politics: the 'Clapham Sect' and the growth of freedom. Miss E thinks it would have been rather nice to see in the movie the following depicted in a nice Merchant Ivory sort of way:

After Henry [Thornton, Wilberforce's cousin] had married, his house at Clapham was the chosen meetng place of the broherhood, and his famous library, designed by Pitt, oval in shape, and "curiously wainscotted with books" became the G.H.Q. of the Clapham campaigns.

Now, dear Booklover, don't you get carried away into a wonderful imaginary place with that phrase - "curiously wainscotted with books". The Library was designed by a Prime Minister of England, William Pitt the Younger. Surely the house still exists. And, if so, surely The Library must exist.

Well, your correspondent did a search. Miss Eagle has found reference to the house which is now known as Battersea Rise House. There is even mention of The Library:

The Oval Library built in 1797 was reputably designed by William Pitt.

Such images as I can find of the house are poor quality. I can find reference to a photograph of a drawing of The Oval Library. But I would love to have seen it - if not the real thing, then a reconstruction of a magical place - so curiously wainscotted with books.

McMillan and the voices of history

My journey through Gippsland recently brought Angus McMillan into my consciousness. McMillan has an entry in the Dictionary of Australian Biography. One thing we know now is that there are many aspects, many voices to history. What we learn at school, or what is written in dominant histories is not the whole story. There is an old saying about history written by the victors. Angus McMillan was certainly one of the victors. He is a pioneer of white settlement only in Gippsland. Notice I added the word only. Settlers tend to just say that so-and-so was a pioneer. We forget or gloss over that so-and-so was a pioneer in one sense only. I first heard about Angus McMillan and his journey from Adrian on The Director. I found this interesting since there were other Victorian journeys by whitefellas but only Angus McMillan's is talked about in Gippsland to any extent. This is probably because it had and economic impact that was not present with the other journeys. The first seems to have been in 1797 when the Sydney Cove was wrecked on Preservation Island, part of the the greatest survival trek in Australian history. I am also aware of Thomas Walker's journey publish anonymously as A Month in the Bush Of Australia. Journal of one of a Party of Gentlemen who recently travelled From Sydney To Port Phillip - with some remarks on the present state of the Farming Establishments and Society in the settled parts of the Argyle Country. Catchy title, don't you think? The reason I know about this one is that my four-times great-grandfather Rear-Admiral John Gore gets a mention. And of course, there was Hume and Hovell but they didn't go to Gippsland. These are the histories of the victors.

But other voices are heard these days. One place to hear the other voice is at Krowathunkooloong, the Keeping Place in Bairnsdale. It was here I heard and read another side to the McMillan journeys: the deaths, even the massacres of aboriginal people that are ignored or glossed over. These were the deaths of people defending their land, their country. They are recorded and remembered there at Krowathunkooloong. There is an electoral district named for Angus McMillan but aboriginal people would like to see this name removed.

In recent years, there has been much debate within the ranks of academic historians about the extent of aboriginal deaths during the taking of land by white settlers. This debate has earned the name The History Wars. While the debate rages and even finds its way into print, one thing tends to be overlooked. Firstly, that some massacres are fairly recent and are within living memory or only a generation behind. Secondly, that the stories of these massacres have been handed down within families to whom they are relevant - both white and black although in many white families they are covered up. I used to live in Mount Isa in North West Queensland. The Kalkadoons, the original people, had some huge, and sometimes successful, battles with white settlers. They were true warriors. In very recent times, along comes Charles Perkins who became quite a controversial figure in modern aboriginal history. One thing that seems never to be realised is that Charlie was a descendant of those Kalkadoon warriors - and he was a fighter too. I once worked with his sister, Nerida, and I sometimes used to give his mother a lift home from the shops to her home in Sunset. These are the things - the stuff of a family's heritage - that are lost in the academic research. So I have a family tree which includes a crew member of The Endeavour and his son, also a naval officer and god-son of Sir Joseph Banks who came as a white settler to a land grant (stolen land?) at Lake Bathurst near Goulburn. The Perkins family has a family tree which includes a fighter for aboriginal equality and rights, as well as fighters for their land and their freedom.

So let the academics do their histories and argue and debate. But the stuff which gives flesh to the bones of an academic history lies in local and family histories and the energy and memory that sustains them.


Angus McMillan
Krowathunkooloong
Gippsland
Sydney Cove
Preservation Island
Furneaux Group
Bairnsdale
Mount Isa
Kalkadoon
Charles Perkins
John Gore
Sir Joseph Banks