Digging Up a Past

by John Mulvaney

Overview

Known as a historian, conservationist, leading public intellectual, and, most famously, the “father of Australian archaeology,” John Mulvaney is renowned for uncovering the depth of Australian human prehistory. This insightful and illuminating memoir traces Mulvaney's life from his childhood in rural Victoria to his revelatory excavations in central and northern Queensland and his securing of Australia's first World Heritage listings. Digging up the layers of his past and cataloguing the artifacts with the historical rigor and humanity that have defined his remarkable professional life, Mulvaney exposes the personal details of his struggles to have his work recognized and tells the stories of the inspirational people he has met along the way.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781742240688
Publisher:	UNSW Press
Publication date:	05/01/2011
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	382
File size:	9 MB

About the Author

John Mulvaney is an archaeologist and the coauthor of The Archaeology of Australia's History. He also became an executive member of the Australian Institute for Aboriginal Studies and was the chief Australian delegate to the inaugural United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization meeting in Paris.

Read an Excerpt

Digging Up a Past

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By John Mulvaney

University of New South Wales Press Ltd

Copyright © 2011 John Mulvaney
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-74224-068-8

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CHAPTER 1

A COUNTRY YOUTH

In 1925, the year of my birth in the south Gippsland town of Yarram, Vere Gordon Childe, one of Australia's most influential expatriates, published his pivotal The Dawn of European Civilisation. The Dawn was an archaeological landmark; it synthesised Europe's human story before the Romans and set a new standard and interest in prehistory. In 1969, I published The Prehistory of Australia, the first account of Australia before the arrival of Europeans. Unlike Childe's European story, my attempt had little influence on white Australian understanding of the Indigenous past. Four decades later, the mists of ignorance and prejudice are dispersing.

The following recollections, which combine family happiness and fulfilment with a varied and rewarding career, are only as reliable as my memory. Albert Facey stole my title, for mine has indeed been a fortunate life. For decades I have found quotable wisdom in Sir Thomas Browne's 1658 meditation on death and burial on Hydriotaphia, Urne Buriall. As he reflected, 'Tis opportune to look back on old times, and contemplate our Forefathers'.

My father, Richard, migrated to Australia from Ireland in 1908. He married my mother, Frances Siegenberg, on Boxing Day 1924. Born on 26 October 1925, I was the eldest of their five children. From 1924, Dad taught at State School No. 1, Alberton. The school's singular number followed the 1872 Victorian Education Act, when the prime alphabetical classification went to 'ALB'. Its actual centenary was 1958, when I was honoured to speak at a ceremony on behalf of my late father, who had taught there for an eighth of the school's history. Also present was the Victorian director of education, Major-General Alan Ramsay, godfather to my wife, Jean Campbell. The ceremony was marred by the fact that, en route to Alberton, our baby daughter Clare was carsick over Jean's best dress, so the celebrity luncheon beforehand had its moments.

Opening in 1892, Alberton State School was a towering redbrick edifice of pseudo-gothic architecture consisting of an enormous room divided by a partition for infant classes. Then populous, Alberton soon lost its demographic and commercial battle with Yarram, which became the railhead. Like Alberton's elaborate Victoria Hotel, erected during the late 1880s and optimistically equipped with 27 guestrooms and an attractive wrought-iron tracery balcony, the school was designed for extension. The school and adjoining house were demolished some years ago, while the hotel survives, starkly shorn of its balcony, and with a hideous 'modernised' ground-floor interior.

For ten shillings weekly, which was deducted from my father's annual salary of about £250, we lived in the red-brick schoolhouse (demolished in 1999, previous to my return visit to inspect it). Its central corridor gave access to three rooms set on either side. This passage was heavily curtained beyond the front rooms, presumably allowing gloomy privacy in the living areas down the passage. A front verandah that was covered with climbing roses darkened the already confined and cold front rooms. The lounge walls were covered with a flowered wallpaper in shades of black, grey and pink, which did nothing to brighten the room behind the obligatory blind; illumination was provided by a kerosene lamp. With the spacious school grounds and a gorse-covered paddock adjoining our house, where pupils left their horses, we were as isolated from neighbours as was any farmhouse.

By the time that we departed Alberton at the end of 1936, I had two brothers, Richard Francis (born 1930) and Joseph (1934) and two sisters, Frances (1935) and Mary (1936). As I was five years older than Richard (always known as Dick), to a large extent I amused myself, especially by reading. For some years, until he left for grade 7 at Yarram, my playmate was Ron May, whose family lived in an old house with a verandah on three sides and cypress trees around the fence. Their mulberry tree was a feature in season. Sometimes I stayed there overnight and enjoyed reading from a series of illustrated Bible storybooks.

Christened Derek John, people then knew me as Derek, or more usually Derry, a name that I detested. It was an unusual name so, in those times, rural kids made fun of it. I made it clear to my parents that I did not like being called Derek and wanted to be known as John. From the date that we moved to Rainbow, I became John. Why my parents named me Derek I have no idea; all the names of my siblings have family associations, as does John, which was the name of my maternal grandfather.

Noting the equipment and parental effort needed to entertain my grandchildren, I marvel at the simplicity of our childhood amusements, and the expectation by our parents of our self-reliance. We had devoted parents, but we largely entertained ourselves. Normally, a few wooden boxes or tea chests were arranged into a house or a ship, supplemented by elementary toys. We did not even own a tricycle for some years. When my parents visited neighbours for afternoon tea, it provided a welcome break. It required a walk, of course, because my parents never owned any form of transport.

I was largely responsible for the domestic upheaval of leaving Alberton. By 1937 I had completed grade 6 and required secondary education, but no transport was available to facilitate my attendance at the Yarram school, only eight kilometres distant. So, my father sought promotion to Rainbow, 650 kilometres away in the Mallee. Its Higher Elementary School assured my education to grade 10.

My parents had been happy in Alberton, where that conservative community had accepted them as friends. The move proved unfortunate for my mother's health; summer heat, combined with housework and caring for three infants that were born since 1934, placed undue strain upon her heart. Across the 17 years left to her until her bedridden death in 1954, she was frequently hospitalised. Probably, access to current medical expertise could have prolonged the quality of her life beyond her meagre 59 years.

My father was born in Navan, Ireland, in 1887 and, following some years in a seminary, he migrated to Australia in 1908. He joined the Victorian Education Department and, after brief training in Ballarat, he taught at various one-teacher Mallee schools until his marriage at the relatively late age of 36. From 1916 he served in the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) in France and, while troops were waiting for embarkation home at Le Havre, he was promoted to sergeant and taught French to the troops.

Dad proved an unorthodox teacher. Presumably because he spent a few years training for the priesthood, he was fluent in Latin and French, qualifications hardly needed amongst Alberton's 30 or so pupils. Most of them left school in grade 8 at the then legal age of 14, equipped with a Merit Certificate. Even that was hardly needed for those whose future involved working on the family farm. Dad taught all classes from grades 3 to 8, while a young, inexperienced 'sewing mistress' cared for the infants.

My memories begin around 1929, a year before I started school. A year here or there scarcely mattered, however, for our social conditions then were those typifying rural life for decades past. I am very familiar with the many now exotic and obsolete rural appliances traversed in Geoffrey Blainey's Black Kettle and Full Moon (2003). With hindsight, it was an uncomplicated, routine existence and expectations differed vastly from modern assumptions. Yet, life progressed happily enough.

Except for Bland's overcrowded and aromatic wooden general store, with a single hand-operated petrol pump outside, the nearest shops were in Yarram. Kerosene lamps supplied home lighting. The copper not only served to boil clothes, but it heated water to be bucketed into the metal bath. Naturally, it proved preferable and more usual to wash hands and feet inside the house in a basin, with water drawn from the black kettle on the wood-fired kitchen stove. Out the back, under a huge cherry plum tree, stood the dunny.

I ventured daily to Harper's farm for a billy of milk and an occasional sixpenny jar of cream. This latter was kept fresh by a drop of iodine – quite often more, for Dad was heavy handed. At times, the iodine flavoured the cream and what it did for the consumer's health is unexplained. Still, goitre was a common local ailment, so the iodine may have proved beneficial.

The butcher, baker and an occasional fishmonger all drove their respective unrefrigerated horsedrawn carts to the front gate. There, the butcher carved the required meat, while fish were selected from a box that was packed with ice. Strangely, we always lacked that rural standby, a Coolgardie safe. Our meat was stored in a wire-mesh meat safe suspended from the ceiling which, like the doily-covered milk jugs, stood near the open pantry window. Three rainwater tanks in that wet and windy climate sufficed for water, although 'grey' water from washing often sustained garden plants.

Dad was a keen gardener, both at home and around the school through the gate in the dividing fence. He gardened perpetually with great success, flowers usually winning over productive vegetables. I was always expected to help him, despite my contrary wishes at times. I am grateful to him now, because gardening has become my lifetime leisure interest.

Helpful neighbours, particularly the Tuckey family, sometimes drove Mum and me to Yarram for shopping. I remember this with some pain, because I so often required a visit to the dentist. 'Gas' used for extractions always made me ill for a day or two. Miss Crombie, the dentist, was a family friend, already venerable because she was one of Victoria's earliest female qualified dentists. More pleasurable was an ice cream, served in a glass dish at D'Astoli's Café. Quality service did not save them, however, when Mussolini entered the war and their shop was attacked, even though D'Astoli's son was in the AIF. The Yarram Co-op was a huge store, or so it seemed then, with canisters of dockets and money speeding along overhead wires to the cash desk. It had a tea room on the first floor. The co-op delivered orders weekly, always a treat because of the gratis bag of boiled lollies.

The Tuckeys' farm sustained a large Ayrshire dairy herd. Their old wooden house was completely covered, roof included, in faded red paint, and hidden by a cypress hedge. It proved a modern marvel despite its exterior. Their electrician son, Charles, generated their own electricity (one benefit from bitter winds) and they milked their cows with machinery. A great asset was a huge short-wave wireless set; I recall hearing Bradman score 304 runs at Headingley in 1934, while the elders played bridge. Cornish-born, the Tuckeys subscribed to Punch, which entertained me when my parents visited them for tea. But best of all, their red spoke-wheeled Lancia transported us to Yarram, as though in a racing car.

Sometimes Charlie Tuckey took me to Yarram's new Regent Theatre, where I was enthralled by The Last Days of Pompeii, amused by Mussolini's posturing on newsreels, laughed at Laurel and Hardy, but was psychologically disturbed by Boris Karloff as The Mummy. Thereafter, that mummy haunted gloomy corners in our house, together with an aggressive gorilla, a terror that I conjured from an image viewed in a book at Tuckey's.

Leisure time for my parents involved card playing. Friends visited regularly from local farms, together with Yarram professional people such as Miss Crombie and Dr Rutter, our family doctor. They played bridge or solo, my parents descending to euchre only when visitors lacked higher refinements. Around 11 pm they were regaled with a splendid supper. Mother was an excellent and celebrated cook and the quantity and quality of food was much enjoyed. Even during the card game, a plate of homemade sweets sat on the table. Meantime I played or read in the gloomy corner by the fireplace, presumably imbibing my lifetime aversion to cards, while reading in the shadows ensured that I wore glasses before my tenth birthday. And I remember my visit to Melbourne for eye testing – Aunt Rose took me to the King's Theatre to be intrigued by Dante the Magician, Aunt Adelaide took me to the Capitol Theatre to see Bing Crosby in Mississippi. It was the grandest building I had ever seen. I would like to say that was my introduction to heritage, but I did nothing when the vandals moved in to destroy the Capitol in the 1960s.

I enjoyed reading and often reread my few books, Grimm and Anderson being favourites. Fortunately, my parents bought me comics, beginning with Bubbles and Tiger Tim, graduating up to Triumph and the Pilot by 1935. Friends lent me Pals and Chums – vast volumes of British adventure set in miniscule print. All these comics portrayed such a different lifestyle (and different schools!) that for me their present was indeed a foreign country, but one to be desired and envied. When I reached Britain in 1944, I had been so preconditioned that I felt that I had come to my spiritual home.

I must have been aged about four when Aunt Olive passed on five bound and illustrated tales, which my cousin Bill Carroll had outgrown. They provided The Picture Story of ... Dutchy Rabbit, Freddy Foal, Guinea Pig, Huntsman Noah and Cock Robin. The complete series included Naughty Neddy, which I have spent a lifetime unsuccessfully seeking in second-hand shops. Published in Glasgow by Millar and Lang, the books must date from around 1920. I read them so often that I knew them by heart. Later I read them with nostalgia and verve to my own children, who seemed interested. I have them before me now, disappointed that my grandchildren find them boring, even though they purport to be written by 'Cousin Ken', and they have an Uncle Ken.

Our life was enriched during 1935 when, through Tuckey initiatives, we acquired a battery-powered wireless and an aerial that extended 30 metres from the chimney to a tall post. The ABC radio station at Sale provided most of the listening, but the clarity of reception across Bass Strait from Burnie in Tasmania offered alternatives.

My birthday present that year was a small-wheeled (24 inch) second-hand bike. This allowed me adventurous rides to Yarram for which I became useful to my mother and father as a shopper and also as the selector of books from the two commercial lending libraries that were located within Anderson and Knox newsagents on the main street. My parents read avidly, my father sometimes consuming a detective story overnight. I got to know their favoured authors – the covers helped – and it assisted Dad's selection criteria to provide 'Crime Club' titles.

During our Alberton years, vacations seemed rare. I recall three joyful Christmas holidays at Port Albert, where we rented houses between (probably) 1931 and 1933. This meant the excitement of watching the New Year's Day regatta on the harbour. The first occasion was memorable for our means of transport; together with our luggage we scrambled onto the tray of a horsedrawn wagon, with time to enjoy the scenery on the eight-kilometre journey. Then, sheer delight, our rooms were above the bakery (built in 1856), with the constant aroma of baking bread.

Port Albert during the 1930s visibly boasted its former prosperity, its impressive structures then largely derelict. Decaying piers and sunken wrecks marked the shoreline, while buildings which are heritage properties today were then sinking into ruin. Yet, some Alberton families maintained joyful holiday shacks on a foreshore eroding ever closer to their destruction. We sometimes were taken for a day's drive to the Christensens' neat cottage, next to Stockwell's amazing accretion of timber and galvanised iron. These have all long disappeared. Rutter's boat shed remains, but only the ghost of his large yacht, Mystery, is housed there. Rutter sailed around Cape Horn in a windjammer and I remember his lantern slide lecture in the Port Albert Mechanics Hall on the thrills of the voyage, probably in 1932. I wandered often to a sandy bluff east of the shacks and jumped over the small cliff, with only screeching seagulls around. No trace exists of this happy spot today as it has eroded, like the foreshore where the cottages stood. Our Port Albert holidays ended by 1934 – presumably because the rapid increase in our family made it too difficult for our mother. I cannot recall the entire family ever again going on a vacation.

The Depression must have dominated those lean 1930s, just as it ravaged Port Albert. Our Alberton house was close to the recreation reserve, which was frequented by swagmen seeking shelter in its shed. They seldom passed without knocking on our door requesting 'work'. Despite their numbers they were never turned away, receiving a meal and a coin for some nominal task, such as chopping wood or sweeping out the open brick drains.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Digging Up a Past by John Mulvaney. Copyright © 2011 John Mulvaney. Excerpted by permission of University of New South Wales Press Ltd.
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Table of Contents

Contents

Foreword by Tom Griffiths,
Acknowledgments,
1 A country youth,
2 RAAF service,
3 History recollected, 1946–51,
4 An archaeologist abroad, 1951–53,
5 Dawn of Australian archaeology, 1954–64,
6 Adventures in archaeology, 1965–69,
7 Globetrotting,
8 1971–76 in retrospect,
9 Museums and heritage,
10 An English interlude, 1976–77,
11 A surfeit of committees,
12 A Harvard year, 1984–85,
13 A rewarding retirement, 1986–89,
14 The Australian Academy of the Humanities,
15 Conferences and travel,
16 Confrontations,
17 Years with Jean, 1995–2004,
18 Coda – archaeological retrospect,
Bibliography,