Voyaging in a New World

Castaway

Robert Macklin, Hachette Aust, 2019

“Truth is, there are not enough black armbands in Christendom to acknowledge the terrible carnage wrought by the bullets, poison and despair that our First Australians suffered.”

Robert Macklin, Author’s Note xiv.

As a child, like so many, I was enthralled by the Swiss Family Robinson and Robinson Crusoe. When I discovered that there was a book about my own family being ‘crusoes’ on a remote island,  my fascination with the ideas of islands, remoteness and survival became more personal. But unlike the subjects of the first two books, my family were not castaways or shipwrecked. In 1878 they chose to be landed on the island, unaware that the stores for which they had paid the ship’s captain, were rotten, mouldy and inedible. They expected the captain would return in six months, as promised, with more stores and a way off the island if that’s what they wanted. He didn’t and they were forgotten. So in that sense they were castaways, stranded with six small children, with no means of escape and few resources other than their own knowledge and skills, much of which they had learned from Maori peoples from their years in New Zealand. On the island there were no indigenous people to give them sanctuary. 

• 

  Sketch by Roger Denly, Auckland, part of the cover of the 1957 UK edition of Crusoes of Sunday Island by Elsie K. Morton

• 

  My great-great grandparents with 9 of their 10 children in 1886. My great-grandmother Bessie is standing next her father at the back. (Family collection).

So a book entitled Castaway by the writer of Dark Paradise (2013), his book on Norfolk Island I had read some years ago, attracted me. Not only did I learn about the castaway but I also entered a world, both physical and imaginative, another far north (see my earlier blogs on the far north of Scotland), this time in the southern hemisphere. People in the know have been talking about Indigenous land management practices for many years–fish traps, agriculture, fire management– but since the horrific bushfires of 2019-20 and the publication of Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu (Magabala Books, 2018), finally this seems to be taken more seriously. Since returning to Australia after so many years in UK and Europe, I find myself needing to find out more about the often contentious hidden history of this land, particularly as successive Federal governments are dragging their feet in terms of the constitutional recognition the Indigenous people are asking for.

Twenty years before my great-great grandparents stood on the beach watching a retreating ship, sailor Narcisse Pelletier, 14, was cast onto a beach by a vengeful crew after a shipwreck off the coast of New Guinea in 1858. As he was on watch at the bow when the three-masted barque Saint-Paul struck a rock, he was held to blame. Narcisse was from Saint-Gilles in the Vendée, on the River Vie on the west coast of France and had been at sea for two years, first as a cabin boy then as crew. The Saint-Paul, with a cargo of Bordeaux wine for the men of the British Empire, went first to Bombay then onto Hong Kong. After unloading the remainder of the wine, the ship left Hong Kong with a ‘cargo’ of 317 Chinese miners enroute to the gold fields of Nouvelle Hollande. Disaster struck as the ship took a short cut south through island chains off the eastern tip of New Guinea. In a thick fog no one saw the dark mass of rock to port until it was too late and they were hard aground on the tip of a coral reef, 3000 kilometres from shipping lanes or civilisation. They abandoned ship, salvaging what they could and three boats. The crew and the Chinese were ferried to what became known as Ilot du Refuge. A late night attack by a party of Melanesians and a search for water took them to the bigger Rossel Island where they were again attacked. Captain Pinard then decided to take the longboat and crew under cover of darkness and leave the Chinese to their fate. (When a rescue voyage arrived more than seventy days later, only one of the 317 Chinese had survived, some dying of starvation, the rest falling victim to the formidable chief of Rossel Island, Muwo, a psychopath with an insatiable appetite for human flesh). 

• 

  Cape York

• 

  Lockhart and Night Island

• 

  The tribal lands of the Night Islanders

After twelve days and 1200 kilometres, the crew in the longboat grounded on a white sand beach on the eastern side of northernmost part of Australia, Cape York. After four days of searching for water and food, the injured Narcisse, sleeping from exhaustion and thirst, was left behind by the vengeful crew. The longboat was gone. Expecting to die, he lapsed into unconsciousness only to be woken by a trickle of water on his parched lips. Three dark brown faces were bending over him, speaking softly. 

He spent the next seventeen years living with the people who rescued him, the Night Island People or the Uutaalnganu. Narcisse became Amglo, learned their ways, their language, their songs, dances and stories. He was initiated into the tribe as a warrior and hunter and made his own weapons and tools. In the fascinating story Macklin weaves based on interviews with Narcisse after his return and other contemporary accounts, Amglo was given one wife, a warrior’s widow, then a second younger wife. He fathered several children and provided for his family. With the men, he hunted dugong, crocodile, turtle, cassowary. He learnt to build shelters and double outrigger canoes, fought bravely against neighbouring Sandbeach tribes over grievances and submitted to their law and to punishments for wrongdoing, trial by ordeal. Until, seventeen years later, the crew of a pearling vessel came ashore in search of water and spotted him, a white man, among ‘savages’. He was kidnapped at gunpoint, and the ship sailed off, leaving a family and a people to mourn him and Amglo was forced to become Narcisse again.

• 

  Narcisse with his cicatrices and piercings from his time as an Uutaalnganu man, Dix-sept an chez les savages by C. Merland, E. Dentu, Paris 1876 (from Macklin)

• 

  Narcisse in western clothes after his capture. Only his earlobes show his time as an Uutaalnganu man, State Library of Queensland, undated (from Macklin)

• 

  Phare de l’Aiguillon, 10 kms from Saint-Nazaire. Narcisse was lighthouse keeper here from 1876 (from Macklin)

• 

  Map showing location of the lighthouse near Saint Nazaire and Saint Gilles where Narcisse was born. By 1890 Narcisse was living in Nantes where he died in 1894.

He was brought back to France and to his astonished family in Saint-Gilles, where he became a short-lived sensation. His return isolated him, emphasising how little understanding European peoples had for ‘savages’ and ‘heathens’. Unable to fit in and to return to his former life, he was made to undergo exorcism by the local priest. Finally it was all too hard—both for him and for his family. He took a position as a lighthouse keeper in Saint Nazaire and married a local seamstress, Louise Désirée Marbileau, 22. There were no children. We can only imagine how Narcisse coped with the contrast between his communal life with the Night Island people and the isolated life of a lighthouse keeper. He suffered a complete mental and physical breakdown and died at 50.

Robert Macklin intersperses the story, of Narcisse-Amglo’s life with the history of the Frontier Wars, particularly in the region that officially became Queensland in 1859. For much of the twentieth century, and for many non-indigenous Australians, this was a silence in our history. The writer Robyn Davidson, whose 2700 kms trek from Alice Springs to the West Australian coast in the mid-1970s with four camels was immortalised in her book Tracks (1980), recalls her first meeting with an Indigenous Australian. ‘Like most Australians, I had never spoken to, walked past, seen an Aborigine. I had read about their culture in books; they were as remote from me as the ancient Greeks.’ (Robyn Davidson, ‘Alice Springs’ 1989 in Travelling Light, 2017 p93). Growing up in Sydney and country NSW, I also never knowingly met any Indigenous Australians. My great-aunt gave me books by a Mrs Aeneas Gunn about shy Aboriginal servant girls and stockmen on outback stations but this was as outside of my experience as Baroness Orczy’s stories of the French Revolution which also came from my great-aunt. In fact my first conscious encounter was as a teacher in inner-city Sydney where I taught a number of girls from Indigenous families. Even then I remember my discomfort in teaching Australian history to Indigenous students, focussed as the curriculum was in telling the British story of the ‘discovery and settlement’ of the Great South Land. The Indigenous Australians were included as a sort of Stone Age, nomadic prelude to Australian history. At that time, no school history textbook mentioned massacres, nor the Native Police in their true form, nor any sustained resistance. It seemed after 1788, aside from a few named individuals like Baneelon or Bennelong, and engravings of ill-dressed groups of Aboriginal people sitting in the dusty roads of early Sydney, often drinking, the Indigenous people quietly faded away and mostly disappeared except for an occasional disturbance on the streets of Redfern. Then in 1988, the year of the bicentennial of the arrival of the First Fleet, Indigenous Australians defiantly made their presence felt in Sydney. They had of course always been there but many of us did not have eyes to see or ears to listen. And so began the battles for truth-telling, recognition, land rights, reconciliation and treaty. The Lost Generation, the forcible removal of children from their families, the impact of the missionaries, the deaths in custody, the riots and tragedies all brought this shameful history into the public realm. Unseemly disputes over numbers here in 1788, of how many were killed, of how many massacres, of what constituted genocide, of how long indigenous people had been here, raged among academia as the History Wars, then Prime Minister John Howard and conservatives dismissing attempts to rebalance the conversation as ‘black armband history’. Henry Reynolds was quoted as responding, ‘better a black armband than a white blindfold’ (Bratlinger). Shamefully more than thirty years later, the battles are still being fought. Macklin’s stories of the Frontier Wars, based on Henry Reynold’s groundbreaking research (one 2000 work is entitled ‘Why Weren’t We Told?’) and others, of the killing fields of the Queensland frontier, are vitally important to our national conversation.

From The Narrative of Narcisse Pelletier in the Brisbane Courier, Monday 24 May 1875, page 3

Simon Winchester in an interview for his new book Land, How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World, talks about the Mohican people who had originally occupied the land he owns in Wassaic, Massachusetts. In their world it was not possible to own land–hunt, gather, use, improve, yes–but not possess. This collision between British and Europeans’ proprietary attitude to land ownership and the notion of being of the land but not possessing it, shaped what happened in Australia as well. Sixty-six years after James Cook took possession in the name of King George III of the east coast of this newly-charted territory in 1770 and forty-eight years after the eleven ships of the First Fleet anchored at Sydney Cove in January 1788, the British Government officially declared Australia as ‘terra nullius’, conveniently asserting that the land belonged to no one prior to the British Crown taking possession. This ‘story’ ‘nullified at least 60,000 years of attachment to the only country the indigenous people knew’. Think about that. The oldest sustained civilisation on Earth, confirmed by newer DNA studies (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/dna-tests-suggest-aboriginal-australians-have-oldest-society-planet-180960569/ accessed 2 Feb 2021)  20,000 years before Homo Sapiens crossed from the continent to what we now call Britain. In one declaration by a foreign power, Indigenous Australians lost all rights to country, trespassers on the land to which they and their ancestors belonged. Using ‘othering’ language all too familiar to us today, dehumanising the Indigenous people as ‘vermin’, ‘heathens’ and ‘savages’, from 1840s in what became Queensland, would-be landowners, settlers and officials waged a frontier war, driven by an insatiable need to possess the land. A triumvirate of Native Mounted Police recruited from southern Aboriginal nations captained by British officials, missionaries and colonial governments ‘destroyed the cultural foundations of the Aboriginal people’. Men with educations from Charterhouse, Eton, Westminster School, Britain’s best universities and the British Army or Navy—Thomas Brisbane, William Denison, George Bowen, Robert Herbert, John Jardine, Frederick Wheeler—used familial connections and colonial service, some as vice-regal governors and premiers, as pathways to wealth and position in Britain and Australia. Like the families who made enormous wealth and gained their political positions through the British Slave Trade, these men and others generated wealth, power and influence from their advantageous positions and connections in the colonial service. They either ignored, tacitly condoned or actively colluded in what was done.

The British had perfected the art of divide and conquer, ‘exploiting inherent differences between individuals, language groups and nations’ in Ireland, the Indian sub-continent, North America, the African continent and China. The notorious Native Mounted Police were a manifestation of this, based on ‘the sepoy and sowar armies of British colonial India, the Cape Regiment in South Africa and the Malay Corps in Ceylon (Sri Lanka)’. The men were recruited from tribes and language groups far away, and used against other Indigenous peoples. Those who didn’t abscond ‘were utterly corrupted by their part in the murderous catalogue.’ For more research on this see https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-07-24/native-mounted-police-indigenous-history-aboriginal-troopers/11296384

Native Mounted Police with Snider Enfield rifles at Coen, North Queensland, ca 1896
(Queensland Police Museum – from https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-07-24/native-mounted-police-indigenous-history-aboriginal-troopers/11296384)

British journalist Cal Flyn in her 2016 book Thicker than Water, History, Secrets and Guilt: A Memoir found her Scottish Highland bible-reading ancestor’s murderous assaults against the Gunai people of the Gippsland plains in Victoria followed the same pattern. Descend before dawn with shotguns, pistols and swords on sleeping peoples, mass killings, arsenic in handouts of flour and sugar and fruit puddings laced with strychnine, poisoned water sources, reprisal after reprisal with little or no action taken by authorities. The official term used was ‘dispersal’ of all those who impeded or came between the newcomers and their land and the fiction perpetrated that this was ‘Crown Land’ being settled, and no territory was being conquered. 

After Narcisse was forcibly taken from the Night Island People by the white crew of a pearling lugger in 1878, the front line of the Frontier War continued moving north. In 1924 the combined forces of the ‘white invaders’ reached the Sandbeach people— three ‘kingdoms’ of the Umpila, Kuuku Y’au and the Uutaalnganu (Night Island) people. Backed by the Queensland government, an Anglican mission was established at Lockhart River, in the centre of the Night Islanders’ territory. These clans who had lived in harmony with the sea and the land for tens of thousands of years, competing with each other, were undermined and their culture destroyed. The missionaries  followed a well-worn path of combining enticement with Western food, ‘only one jealous God’ Christian evangelism,  and the notion of ‘shame’ against nakedness. Enticing remaining tribespeople to move into the mission by ‘commandeering the children’, banning of their languages and separating children from their parents deliberately undermined spiritual, tribal and familial culture. The three distinct fighting tribes were forced together and combined as one. The mission was finally closed in 1967 with historical connections ‘irrevocably disrupted’.

At the end of the program Richard Fidler on ABC Radio National’s Conversations asked Macklin whether researching and writing this story had changed him.

‘I was changed in the same way I was changed when I recently went to Uluru, there is an enormous upwelling of belonging to an Australia that we almost lost. The British history of Australia has dominated education for the last two hundred years and at last it seems to me … that we are starting to learn the real Australian story. … It fills me with great shame as a whitefella, at what was done and a sense of the possibilities of just how wonderful it will be when we are a republic and we’ve drawn a line under this colonial horror and we can all be Australians together’

ABC RN Conversations podcast 26 June 2019.

Reading List

Bratlinger, Patrick “Black Armband” versus “White Blindfold” History in Australia: A Review Essay. Paper given at Transnational Seminar, October 15th, 2004, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, downloaded from https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/4813658.pdf on 4 Feb 2021

Davidson, Robyn, Travelling Light, ETT Imprint, Exile Bay 2017

Flyn, Cal, Thicker than Water, History, Secrets and Guilt: A Memoir, William Collins, London, 2016

Macklin, Robert, Castaway, Hachette Australia, 2019

Reynolds, Henry, Why Weren’t We Told?, Penguin Australia 2000 

Reynolds, Henry, The Other Side of the Frontier, NewSouth, Uni, NSW 2006

Reynolds, Henry, The Whispering in Our Hearts Revisited, NewSouth Uni. NSW 2018

Winchester, Simon Land How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World, William Collins, London 2021

Podcasts

ABC RN Conversations with Robert Macklin podcast, 26 June 2019 

ABC RN Late Night Live interview with Simon Winchester, 5 February 2021

Voyaging in Unfamilar Territories

“Illusions mistaken for truth are the pavement under our feet. They are what we call civilisation.”

The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver

Many years ago when I was working in historic houses in Australia, I observed a pre-school group being taken around Vaucluse House, on Sydney’s outer harbour. Bought in 1827 by William Charles Wentworth (of crossing the Blue Mountains fame), and much altered and added to by the family over 50 years, the house and grounds became a museum in 1915. The house’s public rooms were full of Victorian furnishings and decorative objets d’art, particularly the drawing room. This roped-off room was stuffed with burgundy red upholstered chaise longue and low chairs, delicate papier-mâché chairs, occasional tables, piano, every surface filled with aspirational objects – stuffed birds under glass domes, ticking gilt clocks, figurines, brass and silver candelabras, etc, thick woven carpets on the floor and heavy curtains framing French windows looking over an exquisite garden down to the harbour. As the guide encouraged the small children to look and talk about what they could see, one little curly-haired girl whispered, puzzled: “everything’s missing in this house”. She elaborated – no power points, plugs or light switches, no TV or video, no toys, no books, no newspapers or magazines, no electric lights, nothing that she would take for granted in a living room. There was no toilet, bathroom, kitchen as she would understand it, no appliances. There was no sign of habitation or of the people who might have used this room. William and his wife Sarah Morton Cox (isolated all her life from ‘polite’ Sydney society because she was the daughter of convicts and had borne William two children outside wedlock before he married her) had ten children. There was no sign of the servants and convicts who toiled and cleaned. I have always remembered this little girl’s “emperor’s new clothes” view of the recreated world we were gazing at – it was so upside down, so truthful, so looking through different eyes. http://sydneylivingmuseums.com.au/vaucluse-house

Ten years later, in 2004, I was hesitating outside Kalmar Castle in Sweden, having seen so many cold, draughty castles, empty whitewashed spaces, ammunition, cannons and cannon balls, pikes and staffs and armorial displays or lavish recreations of interiors in UK that yet another castle did not appeal. But what I found inside was so exciting, challenging and provocative that I have never forgotten it. Contemporary artists had created installations using sound, objects, fabrics, light, furniture, voices – in various rooms – the nursery, a dining hall, kitchens and cellars – which engaged and provoked visitors as they moved through the spaces inhabited once more by people and the stories of their lives. Wandering through the castle was a journey of discovery as you never knew what you would find in the next space. In the former 19th century women’s prison, life-sized dramatic and shocking black and white photographs brought the visitor face to face with named women and their stories, with historic cases and punishments from archives from 15th – 19th century. The disturbing and powerful image of one woman fighting with her hands raised, being buried alive after being found guilty of adultery stays with me still as does another of a woman hunched over, forced to carry two huge heavy stones hanging from each shoulder for weeks as a punishment for theft.
http://www.kalmarslott.se/english/kalmar-castle

I remember these two examples particularly as they each challenged, questioned or explored how visitors perceive what they are presented with in historic houses and buildings. In Vaucluse House the child could find little familiarity or relevance to her life. Watching from a barrier, there was no opportunity for her to directly experience, explore and connect with the house she was visiting. At Kalmar, aspects of Swedish-Danish history and life were suggested or interrogated through creative, momentary art installations which both delighted and surprised visitors. And the terror and resignation captured in photographs of women’s faces remain with me still, providing a direct emotional connection between me and their stories.

The past months I have been thinking a lot about relevance and meaning, value, “truth” and illusion in the way we approach heritage and history, spurred on by two conferences on opposite sides of the world: Re-Imagining Challenging Histories in Cardiff in June and the combined National Trusts and ICOMOS (Aust) People’s Ground conference in Melbourne, Australia in early October. Both offered much food for thought as I prepared a paper for the second one. Speakers in Cardiff reflected on the silences in our historic sites and challenged received ways of interpreting and communicating history. Where was interpretation of the bitter long-running quarry workers strike among all the splendour of Penrhyn Castle, a “19th-century fantasy castle” in Gwynedd? Why did some visitors to Southwell Workhouse leave thinking that treating poverty by reintroducing workhouses for the poor and those on benefits was an acceptable solution now? How were the stories these places were presenting relevant or even “truthful” today? Why are many historic buildings and houses still in the business of creating illusions about the “civilised” past? To what extent are our shared illusions about the past responsible for the uncomfortable places we find ourselves in at the moment?

As part of the Melbourne conference, I attended a workshop run by Franklin Vagnone, from New York. As I had worked in house museums in NSW from 1989-1997, the title of his recent book, The Anarchist’s Guide to Historic House Museums, intrigued me. Anarchy and historic house museums? The workshop at the National Trust’s Rippon Lea did not disappoint and again the ideas of value and relevance came to the fore in Franklin’s discussion and inspired some radical questions. What happens if you open all the doors, take down the ropes and barriers and let people go where they will? What happens when you invite people to communicate what they like and don’t like about the way a house is presented and say what they would do if they were in charge? What happens if you have tea and sandwiches in the drawing room, sitting on the furniture and let people inhabit spaces as they were meant to be inhabited?

As workshop participants we were given labels and invited to write down our responses to spaces, objects, furnishings, rooms etc and leave the labels in situ. Part of the fun was reading other labels that had already been left by earlier workshop participants. I wandered along corridors, opening closed doors, discovering narrow back stairs, cluttered attics, broom cupboards, storage under stairs, empty rooms and staff spaces and opened drawers and doors, trunks and wardrobes. I wandered into what appeared to be the Sargood family’s former nursery, silent and cold, the toys displayed in glass cases like so many Victorian children’s corpses all dressed up for display. I felt nothing but a sense of dread.

Later as we sat in the drawing room sipping tea and eating sandwiches, we discussed the experience and our responses. Given NT’s and other historic house organisations’ usually reverential approach to house museums and the families (but not the servants) who inhabited them, and the sacrosanct nature of the interiors and furnishings, this was brave of the National Trust and I hope that it found Franklin’s approach as refreshing as I did, offering new opportunities for future directions.

I am left with many unanswered questions – Do we just accept unquestioningly a curatorial view that these interiors are worth keeping, pickled in aspic, soaked in formaldehyde, frozen in time, telling stories that are so far removed from our experiences now? Are visitors doomed to be always voyeurs, traipsing around with guides, guide books or audio, through a static landscape, or could they become active participants in creating relevance for themselves and others? Could they become part of a conversation between the house and its caretakers and the public? How could these places begin to move beyond the illusions they create and support about life and people in the past and start to explore the at times uncomfortable truths about these pasts?

To be continued

Decay and Resurrection? Voyaging in Hull 3

Fresh from an extraordinary two day conference in Cardiff, “Re-imagining Challenging Histories”, a stimulating conversation between academics and heritage professionals about spaces and silences, I headed again to Hull. I have been grappling with Brexit and its implications and I know Hull voted overwhelmingly to leave, possibly a modern incarnation of its historical tendency to defiance. For those who don’t know, in 1642 the Governor of Hull, Sir James Hotham, refused to open the Beverley Gate to Charles 1. This is widely regarded as one of the trigger points of the English Civil War. More on Beverley Gate later. William Wilberforce, the parliamentary abolitionist, was born and lived in Hull and the Cod Wars are part of its story. Hull has its own Daily Mail, and its own white telephone booths. It also has its own City of Culture 2017, the reason for my journey.

On Saturday night 2 July a French performance group were to close the Yorkshire Festival and open the first Amy Johnson Festival with Plas des Anges, promised to be a spectacle Hull would never forget. As part of the HLF team working with the Hull 2017 team, I was invited to participate and a spectacle it truly was. As night softly descended on Queens Gardens, activity on top of various tall buildings surrounding the gardens indicated something was about to begin. For over an hour we were spellbound watching white-clad “angels” moving along very high wires strung between buildings, showering us with a snow storm of white feathers as ethereal music filled the night. A huge white zeppelin of a cherub, guided by tall poles, loomed slowly over our heads, coloured spotlights changing it from bright white to electric blue and back. Breathtaking yet sinister, its slow pace in contrast to the flying angels who moved and danced and dangled from the overhead wires. As the performance came to a climax, a blizzard of feathers covered the ground all around us and children and adults alike scooped up armfuls and tossed them over their heads with delight. Hull was littered with feathers for days and we kept finding them in clothes and bags and along the footpaths and river where we walked. Such beauty momentarily transformed Hull and a transitory magic brought smiles and laughter to its people. That this beauty came from Europe seemed not to be noticed.

The next day we walked through the building site that is Hull’s central streets at the moment and were brought face to face with the site of the Defiance – the remains of Beverley Gate, uncovered by archaeologists in 1986. You might think that the site would have been cherished, a symbol of how Hull has regarded itself as standing apart, as different. But behind temporary wire barricades, the steps and remaining footings and structures of the gate and the Victorian bridge which crossed the link between the former Queens Dock to the Princes Dock and thence to the Humber, was a site of decay and neglect – rubbish, bottles, filthy peeling interpretation panels, a veritable ‘skip’.

Further research showed that it had been like this for at least four years, possibly more. A local councillor quoted in Hull Daily Mail said it was a disgrace in 2014 and declared, “If this was in any other continental European city, they would be having King’s Head Days or Defiance Days with bands marching, flags flying and people in historical costumes. As it is, we’ve just got a big hole in the ground”. So at some point Hull was regarded as a European city by its inhabitants, even if holding a King’s Head Day was seen as a good idea for a celebration!

 

A walk around the city and along the River Hull towards the oddly-named quiet and deserted High Street enroute to the Museum Quarter (see my earlier blogs on Hull) was interrupted by another wire barricade blocking off the path. A man in a vicar’s dog collar and his lady companion lifted up the barricade and encouraged us to crawl through and we then repeated the favour for another group of people trapped by the wire. Our small act of defiance! We explored the interestingly engineered Drypool Bridge, and discovered a rather rusty iron plaque which obviously once marked something that Hull wanted to remember but is now only forgotten.

In 1888 something to remember, in 2016 forgotten

Drypool Bridge

Drypool Bridge

Visiting Wilberforce House where William was born told us much about him but I looked in vain on the ground floor for a mention of any other abolitionists. I did finally find Thomas Clarkson, Olaudah Equiano, Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, Hannah More and others upstairs along with a rather oversized rendition of Clarkson’s famous chest. In this he collected and carried the wealth and skills and natural products of the African continent throughout England for years trying to convince British citizens and politicians that Africa offered far more attractive (and moral) opportunities than the slave trade.

Model of Clarkson’s chest. Smaller, original one is in Wisbech Museum.

Clarkson was an East Anglian, born in Wisbech, educated at Cambridge. He carried out the major research into the evils of the trade, risking his life to get the evidence needed to provide Wilberforce with credibility in parliament. Clarkson lived and died in Playford near Woodbridge, Suffolk. His brother John was responsible for bringing the free former enslaved Africans from North America to Freetown, the first governor of Sierra Leone and is buried in St Mary’s churchyard in Woodbridge where I currently live. The idea that Wilberforce singlehandedly ended the British slave trade is one of those enduring myths of British history which the Wilberforce House, despite its refurbishment and new exhibitions for 2007, does not actively dispel. A futile search for a cafe on Sunday in the Museum Quarter was another disappointment. The Museum Quarter consists of three museums side by side and a beautiful park-like garden and backs onto the River Hull. It was a shock to discover there was no cafe and the attendant apologised for the lack of a vending room which had existed but was no longer in operation. A room with vending machines wasn’t quite what I had in mind so I was not dismayed by its closure. Thinking that Hull needed to hurry up and think about meeting the needs of the anticipated thousands who were going to arrive in 2017, and presumably would require cafes and non-pub food on a Sunday, we repaired to the nearby Sailmakers Arms for a cold drink. 

We walked north of the High Street and found Blaydes, yet another impressive former merchant’s house and office, alongside another derelict dock, white feathers settling among red poppies on the wasteland. There is something very sad about all this dereliction. Many of the empty sites are car parks but none of them that we saw had become community gardens or parks or even temporary allotments or wild green spaces.

The white spots are feathers!

The people have not reclaimed their city. I was struck by the evidence of how wealthy Hull had been and how poor it is now in so many ways. What happened in between? Wars, depression, loss of industry, declining fish stocks, containerisation, urban planning disasters, Thatcherism, banking disasters, and finally Austerity. This is the austerity agenda in action, piled onto decades of urban decay and industrial decline. I thought of Westminster, George Osborne and Brexit and the famous lines from Shelley’s poem Ozymandias, “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” Can Hull City of Culture 2017 in some small way compensate Hull for the last 100 years? Could some of these small white feathers among the red poppies symbolise a possible future where beauty and magic, dreams and prosperity, make “Hullness” possible once more?

Voyaging with Volunteers

This month we have had Volunteers’ Week and it seems appropriate to highlight and acknowledge the role of ordinary (extraordinary) people who labour long and hard to save, salvage, protect and preserve heritage precious to them and their local areas.

The past few weeks I have been working with groups of volunteers in Scotland and Northern Ireland who are doing just this. In one case the heritage was threatened by local authority’s tendency to demolition by neglect, in another by careless and directionless failed private ownership, in the third case, “inevitable progress” and a blindness to the future value of remnants of past technology. In all three cases, volunteers have worked indefatigably to secure the building, the grounds, the ship and the locomotives and rolling stock for the future and then to apply to the Heritage Lottery Fund for the money to be able to share that heritage with other people. The value of the work these people do cannot be over-estimated. Without them, much of the local heritage of the UK would be lost forever.

When I first visited Whitehead, between Carrickfergus and Larne, County Antrim, three or four years ago, the site was a collection of sheds and tracks filled with rolling stock and railway paraphernalia and weed-infested backyard littered with rusting metal.

On my recent visit, the activity in the Whitehead engineering workshops is impressive, the apprentices and volunteers readying the site for its public opening later this year.

Since the 1960s extraordinary restoration work has been carried out in the unheated, uninsulated sheds, and volunteers worked on carriages and locomotives in very primitive conditions. As the local foundries closed down all over Northern Ireland, they set up their own, as heavy engineering workshops modernised or shut, they bought machinery and equipment from clearing auctions. And perhaps most wonderful of all, this voluntary group kept steam trains running on the mainlines throughout Ireland including the Portrush Flyer. Now with funding from HLF and Europe and the Northern Irish Tourist Board and others, the Railway Preservation Society of Ireland is about to open a heritage engineering and railway centre where people can see conservation and restoration work in action: heavy machinery dating from the glory days of British engineering in use, locomotives, diesel and steam, running and static, carriages, the older timber ones built like coaches, the cranes, wheel drop, forge and foundry in action, see the locomotives being turned on the newly installed turntable, smell the grease, hear the steam, the hammer, shunting, and of course ride on the trains.

 

All of this has been achieved by dedicated teams of volunteers who would not let Ireland’s steam and railway heritage disappear and the interpretation on the site will celebrate their extraordinary achievement by featuring them and their stories.

The same commitment was responsible for saving the 1953 paddle steamer Maid of the Loch from the scrapyard when she was left to rot. Sadly many of her fittings and equipment were stripped and stolen, as her owners, a private English-based company, went into receivership. The last paddle steamer builder on the Clyde, equipped with a massive steam engine and boilers to drive her two paddles, she was first built, then dismantled and transported piece by piece overland to Loch Lomond where she was reconstructed and operated on the loch until 1981. Having rescued her from the scrapyard, the volunteers have been opening her to the public on her pier at Balloch, using her for events and functions. Now the volunteers want to get her steaming again around Loch Lomond.

First they needed to get funding to restore the steam-driven Slipway and Winch House in order to slip her to determine the condition of her riveted steel hull. With that project successfully completed, they are in the process of developing their final application to the HLF to make this dream a reality. In glorious sunshine two weeks ago, we held our meeting on deck to discuss and plan the work they need to do (to conserve and restore the ship and the paddle wheels, to fit a new boiler, to engage people, schools, families, students in the project) to ensure a successful outcome.

The third project, the saving and restoration of Moat Brae, a Georgian townhouse on the River Nidd in Dumfries, is another triumph for a group of determined local people. Once a private house, then a nursing home, then derelict and threatened with demolition, part of the original garden had already been sold off for building housing.

But the empty boarded-up shell of the house with what was left of its river-side garden, overgrown and impenetrable, held a special story. Here J.M. Barrie had visited as a child, played and adventured in the garden with the children of the house. Like them, he was a student at Dumfries Academy next door. It was at Moat Brae that he experienced the wonder and freedom that became Neverland and Peter Pan. It was this connection and this story which meant Moat Brae should not be lost. Local people got together and saved the house and what was left of its grounds, raised money to replace the roof and secure the building. Then they set out to get HLF and other funding to realize their ambition of a Centre for Children’s Literature and a place where children and their adults could dream, play and adventure again. With funding secured, they are now ready to make that happen. In the meantime they have been using the building as place for their communities to visit, and the day I was there, displaying amazing students’ work from Dumfries and Galloway College. 

Voyaging in Hull’s Maritime Past 2

There were once huge docks in and around the centre of Hull – The Dock (built between 1775-8) was the largest dock in the country. Renamed Queen’s Dock in 1854, it closed in 1930, and was filled in and grassed over as Queen’s Gardens. Junction Dock (1829) was renamed Prince’s Dock in 1854 and closed to shipping in 1968.  Since 1991 it has housed a futuristic shopping centre. Humber Dock (1807-09) closed in 1967 and with Railway Dock (1846) later became part of Hull’s marina where at least boats can still float and enter and leave from and to the mighty Humber River.

A day’s meetings focussing on City of Culture partnerships, programmes and priorities over, I headed for the former 18th and 19th century docks, retracing my steps through building works, following a maze of orange cones, past the ornate Italianate Maritime Museum and Civic Hall and the classic facade of the Ferens Art Gallery, alongside the former Queen’s Dock, now Gardens.

Queen’s Gardens

Hull Maritime Museum

The painted facade of the pub was inviting but I wanted to get to the Humber before it was too dark. I found the Prince’s Dock, now the Princes Shopping Centre, a huge silver building apparently floating in the dock. Hull does seem to have an awful lot of shopping centres, despite the huge number of closed and empty traditional street fronting shops. No doubt this is connected!

I spied masts ahead and like a homing pigeon, drawn to boats and water, I crossed a very busy main road and found myself at the marina, the former Dock and still attached to the Humber. The black lightship was moored alongside and barges, yachts and motor boats of all shapes and sizes sat quietly at pontoons inside the mighty walls of the dock. Captured in a glass case, a single beam engine sat quietly contemplating its fate like a stuffed bird under glass, its immense unmoving wheel an exhibit rather than a living breathing engine.

The inevitable maze of cones, dug up streets and fenced off footpaths appeared again as I walked past bars, a few eateries and mostly empty umbrella covered tables towards the river. The entrance to the brown sluggish Humber from the dock was lined in curving mud banks. I walked along the river towards where the Hull flows into the Humber, the huge silver prow of The Deep dominating the east bank.

The Deep and the entrance to the River Hull

An elegant verdigris sculpture by an Icelandic sculptor gazed up into the sky from the west bank and empty pontoons reached out into the river. As the Hull rushed into the Humber, the mud-stained rivers mingled created disturbance on the surface and a sense of conflicting movement.

An A4 sheet of paper in a plastic sleeve attached to the railing caught my attention and I stopped to read it. Entitled The Lincoln Castle docking at Minerva Pier in 1977, it depicted the same docks I could see from the promenade in 1977 with a paddle steamer coming alongside. The text explained that the writer, a newcomer in 1977, had not realized that this was one of her last voyages, the ferry being replaced with the new bridge. Despite a campaign to save her, the beautiful and elegant steamer which used to connect the two shores was dismantled in Grimsby as recently as 2010. So much for maritime heritage. The page ended with a web address and a note to the reader, to leave the image there for others to see or an invitation to take it home and the lines “Our streets, our public spaces, are there to daily celebrate that we are not alone in this world, a place where we talk, we laugh, we enjoy, we cry, we joke with strangers … Let (sic) keep them out of private and corporate control.” I was heartened to see and share this unsolicited fragment of “visitor generated content” as it is known in the museum and gallery world and the small piece of Hull’s lost heritage which I had stumbled upon. Someone cared enough to display this and share it and I appreciated that. I later looked up Pablo Luis Gonzalez and he is a Hull-based photographer http://www.pablo-luis-gonzalez.uk/about/

I turned to follow the West Bank of the Hull River back towards the building sites that dominated the surroundings and again discovered something wonderful – a huge stone and brick-lined dry dock reminiscent of the ones at Garden Island in Sydney Harbour.

But inside the remains of rusting lock gates, a huge new concrete wall shut it off from the waters of the Hull. And upon new pillars rising out of the dirty water lying in the bottom of the dock, an enormous timber stage with rising tiered seating levels was being constructed. Artist’s impressions on a developers’ sign showed the entertainment and performance space surrounded by green planting in the dock and I consoled myself with the thought that at least the dock would still be there and had not been destroyed. A new Digital Quarter was being built all around, a symbol of Hull’s hopes for a more prosperous future.

Skirting more cones, piled paving and rubbish, I walked through a small street of what looked like former interesting shops and galleries back to the marina dock. A restaurant 1842 in a Victorian warehouse caught my eye and the menu appealed and again I had found serendipitously another of Hull’s maritime treasures. A quirky restaurant and wine bar was in the former Ropery built in 1884 to serve Hull’s shipping industry, humming with groups of people enjoying excellent food and good wine. Under its chandeliers and huge black and white industrial photographs, I reflected on the day’s meetings, and the programme of contemporary cutting edge art, performance and cultural spectacles being planned for 2017. Was there room in all this culture, national and international, for Hull’s past, for the shadows and stories of defiance, war, fishing and maritime tragedies, for white telephone boxes and whaling, for activists and merchants, philanthropists and dockers, Hanseatic and Baltic connections, for buried Tudor military installations and lost Victorian splendour? For language and dialect, secret places and community, for local stories, for “Hullness”? I hope so.

Voyaging in Hull Part 1

“Behind her domes and cranes enormous skies/of gold and shadows build; a filigree/of wharves and wires, ricks and refineries,/her working skyline wanders to the sea.”

This week I spent whatever time was available outside meetings, wandering around Hull, Larkin’s “lonely northern daughter”, getting to know a city that has had much bad press. Hull is about to become the 2017 City of Culture, the second UK city after Derry/Londonderry (Glasgow and Liverpool were European Cities of Culture, a different programme altogether).

When I left the York train at Hull Station on Sunday night, I was greeted by a bronze statue of poet and former Hull librarian, Philip Larkin in full flight for a train at Whitsun, his words inscribed in slate circles in the paving and in the timber seats on which passengers waited for their trains.

Being on Turkish time after travelling straight to Hull from Antalya after sailing from Cyprus to Finike, I was up and out well before breakfast. With a very inadequate map from the hotel, I headed in what I hoped was the direction of the Hull River. Hull is somewhat lacking in street signs and as all of the streets in the centre are building sites, this wasn’t as easy as it sounds. With the help of a friendly man in hard hat and fluoro orange work gear (I think most of the population of Yorkshire is employed on digging up and repaving Hull at the moment), I worked out where I was and then stumbled with delight into the Land of Green Ginger – the mysterious and intriguing name of a street, the origin of which no one seems to know.

Instinctively I followed narrow cobbled streets and lanes until I saw a bridge ahead and then under my feet in an open space, the words mizzen, top gallant, royal, thwart … As anyone with a passion for maritime heritage will know, these are the names of sails and parts of sailing ships. A small open space had been landscaped to appear as a horizontal sailing ship with sailing language in bronze lettering in the order in which the parts of the sails or ship occur, from royal to keel. It was subtle – probably far too subtle for anyone who knew little of maritime language or heritage – and a couple sitting drinking coffee on a bench were astonished when I started photographing the ground! There was a garishly-coloured interpretation sign nearby, completely at odds with its surroundings, which did explain the space and its heritage but no one was stopping to read it except me.

I found myself on the River Hull in a space designated “The Museum Quarter” but apparently I was at the back entrance of the quarter as from the river, it looks like a series of empty buildings, a vision gone wrong.

Among surviving warehouses, now student accommodation with peeling woodwork and a planning application to replace wooden window frames with PVC in a listed building, was a typical late 20th century building, all dark brown bricks and large span empty V-shaped windows. The backdoor covered space provided night shelter for a bearded man and his black bin bags. Between two warehouses, behind a locked gate in a landscaped space and car park, stretched huge beams on iron columns; another warehouse, the charred black beams presumably indicating the building’s fate.

The River Hull itself at low tide is brown muddy like so many east coast tidal rivers and sticking out of the mud was a wellington boot, the remains of bicycles, traffic cones and shopping trolleys, a dead bird and quite a lot of other rubbish. Two mud-covered articles of clothing were lying on the boardwalk, an intriguing mystery possibly linked with the wellington boot! Across the river another building was being demolished while others still standing, were no doubt awaiting the same fate. Beyond the flood barrier, where the Hull meets the Humber, the shining silver walls of The Deep, Hull’s successful millennium aquarium, loomed up like the prow of a spaceship. In contrast the Arctic Corsair, tied up alongside the boardwalk, looked rather abandoned. A sidewinder trawler built in 1960 by Cook, Gemmel & Welton Ltd of Beverley, she broke the world record for the landing of cod and haddock from the White Sea in 1973. In 1999 she became a museum ship, the last survivor of Hull’s massive “Sidewinder” trawling fleet. She does look rather sad these days, possibly the inevitable result of becoming a museum ship and requiring more attention and money than most local museums can spare.

The man with the bin bags passed by me, moving out onto the river bank and stowing his bags beneath a footbridge. It was only when I passed Drypool Bridge that I discovered the High Street, the public face of the Museum Quarter with a series of museums including Wilberforce House, the Hull and East Riding Museum and Streetlife, the Transport Museum. The High St must be the quietest High St in the country – I seemed to be the only thing stirring at 8am. I would be in meetings during the museums’ opening hours so they will have to wait til my next visit.

Wilberforce House

Drypool Bridge

I headed back through cobbled lanes towards my hotel near the station, passing through the Queen’s Gardens. Until 1930 this was the first mighty Victorian dock to be constructed in Hull. From the top of his column, Wilberforce looked down upon the gardens and I passed a sitting bronze figure, entitled “mankind under threat”, to which some local ‘artist’ had added features.

I passed Hull’s distinctive white phone booths and couldn’t help but notice the numbers of post WW2 commercial buildings standing empty with prominent For Sale, Redevelopment Opportunity signs – in some streets these were more numerous than any other signs. I wondered if the promises of  the City of Culture project would make a real difference to Hull, its people and prosperity.

Voyaging Far North 2

Private history or public history?
Small local museums are both repositories of local memory, artefacts and documents and community storytellers. As I wander Helmsdale, my base for the first two nights of my Caithness and Sutherland visit, I am reminded also of how inaccessible and hidden so much of this history is.

Driving up to Helmsdale on the east coast from Inverness means crossing Moray, Cromarty and Dornoch Firths, place names that resonate with anyone interested in maritime matters.

Helmsdale itself is a product of the infamous Clearances, planned to provide accommodation and employment to those evicted from their lands to make way for sheep. In the early 19th century as the Duke and Duchess of Sutherland “improved” their estates for productive and profitable sheep farming, their tenants were evicted from the straths and glens and moved to planned settlements on the coast such as Helmsdale.  Many went to Canada and other parts of the New World. Between 1813 and 1819, more than 1,500 people were forcibly moved from Strath of Kildonan and by 1831 there were only 257 people left.

Later Helmsdale was a herring port and the village population grew to several thousand during the herring fishing season. Local families provided crews for the herring boats and the trade supported coopers, curers, blacksmiths and labourers. Women gutted and packed the herring and sold it around the district  from creels on their backs. The earlier inner harbour and single lane stone arched bridge further upriver gave way in the later 19th century to a man-made outer Harbour and more recently, a flying modern metal span tying southern cliff top to town. This magnifies the intrusive sounds of huge trucks as they hurtle down through the town and over the bridge and changed the place and landscape for ever. Local people told me that an ancient castle ruin, shown in old black and white photographs standing on the cliff top, was destroyed to make way for the bridge.

I stay in the old Customs House at the end of the outer harbour, a generous B&B run as B&Bs used to be when I first came to UK: a shared bathroom down the hall, fresh milk brought up to the room, conversations with Mrs Macdonald and a fabulous breakfast with no irritating portion control packets. Mrs M’s father and brother were herring fishermen, owning their own boats and her house is lined with photographs and memorabilia of a lost world. She would like to see a monument or memorial of some kind to the fishermen and their fleets such as stand on other harbours up and down the coast but is not sure how to go about getting such a thing.

 

In the morning from my bed I watch the sun rising over the harbour, the snow on the far southern shore of the firth glittering in the distance. Bunillidh, the last boat to fish out of Helmsdale, stopped  in the mid 1990s. Only a few small fishing boats stacked with lobster and crab pots are against the Harbour wall. At times they head out through the narrow entrance, a few men busy with lines and pots.

High above the small town an impressive stone war memorial towers over the landscape, out of all proportion to the surroundings. Built in 1924, it commemorates the 38 men from the parish who died in WW1 and 16 men in WW2.

At some angles the poignant memorial to the Clearances becomes visible also above the town. The Clearances Memorial itself has a history. The 10 feet high bronze “Exiles” statue was funded by a Canadian millionaire who left Sutherland and made a fortune in South Africa.  He originally envisaged a 30 foot family of emigrants atop a 90 foot plinth, towering over the landscape, complete with visitor centre but due to lack of financial support, his plans never eventuated. It was to be a response to the huge and controversial statue of the Duke of Sutherland which towers over the neighbouring town of Golspie.

 

But there is little  information for visitors unless they can visit Timespan, the impressive heritage centre beside the river. Timespan has limited opening hours out of season and has been closed on both of my visits to the area which tend not to be in the tourist season. I am sure it tells wonderful stories but I wonder should access to the stories of place and people only be available to those who can visit a “Heritage Centre” in season?

On both my visits I wander the shore in the early morning before breakfast. Like so much of the UK coastline the beach is filled with rubbish of many materials and a lot of plastic – some obviously dumped here from the land, some washed up.

I can’t resist picking up sea glass, marbles and pottery sherds, an obsession of mine for many years. I eat in the Bannockburn Arms most nights, chatting to the landlady who moved here from Brighton 12 years ago. People talk to you here, other diners in the restaurant (all visitors from somewhere else) and drinkers in the pub. They all know the Flows Country project, the reason I am here, and are interested in its progress. With pubs and shops closed, they are hoping it will bring more trade to this quiet, somewhat forgotten town.

As I walk down to the river under the stone arched bridge, I think of Mrs Macdonald’s wish to have a memorial to the herring fishermen she remembers at the harbour. As Alex Salmond said in 2007 at a ceremony in Helmsdale to remember the Clearances, “this statue is not only a reminder of the Highland Clearances, but a great example of the skill and vision of those who remain”.  Perhaps the monuments are not only testament to the pain and poignancy of the Clearances and the Great War but also symbolic of how selective the history is that we choose to commemorate. Those who remain might well believe that their more recent history, instead of being hidden and private, is worth the public telling.

I hope Mrs Macdonald gets her monument to the generations of men and women who worked the herring. And perhaps seeing such a memorial would remind us that the herring disappeared along with jobs and a way of life. Just as with the degraded blanket bog of the Flow Country, there are lessons we can take for our own times from this.

 

Voyaging Far North 1

Forsinard – the Flow Country

Over the years several people have asked me to write about the projects and the places I visit as part of my freelance work. Having completed, for the time being, the posts connected with my research and the 38th Voyage in 2014, I am changing my focus to a different kind of voyaging.

Consulting for the Heritage Lottery Fund and others provides wonderful opportunities to travel to some very beautiful and sometimes remote parts of Britain as well as for engaging with the people who work with heritage as staff or volunteers and are passionate about what they do.

I have just returned from travelling in the highlands, peatlands and coastal districts of the far north of Scotland in Caithness and Sutherland. At Forsinard I explore the extraordinary world of the Flow Country, Europe’s largest blanket bog and a hugely important carbon store, with its wealth of mosses, insects, plants and wildlife. I walk out to the stunning and sculptural watch tower along the new boardwalk rippling like a pale carpet over the peat bog and its pools.

The rich warm colours of the bog astound me – an artist’s palette of russet, lime, gold, ochre, crimson, dark plum, burnt sienna. Jewel-like dragonflies hover above the dark waters and the calls of invisible meadow birds – skylarks, meadow pippets – intrude on what would otherwise be the deep silence of the place. From the tower you can appreciate the extent of the bog, its intricate patterns and colours laid out like a glorious patchwork quilt. We talk about whether the tower needs interpretation for visitors. In many ways the surroundings are so breathtaking that words seem unnecessary. Then again, opening people’s eyes to the beauty and the complexity of what they are seeing – once regarded as bleak and useless waste land – is important in the wider scheme of things. Listening to the land is a powerful experience but at times we need trained ears to hear!

One of the project staff is responsible for working with landowners and managers to communicate the importance of conserving the peatlands in their natural state. This often means undoing or modifying practices encouraged and funded by past governments like bog drainage and planting thousands of conifers. As we talk about his work, I become more aware of just how painstaking and challenging undoing mistakes of the past can be. Draining the peatlands to create grass and heather growth for sheep, grouse and other economic uses and planting conifer plantations means disturbing the delicate balance of the bog, drying out and degrading the peat and ultimately creating conditions where carbon will be released. He shows me the myriad of GIS mapped drains up and down the peatlands and explains the intricacies of decision-making to determine whether they can be blocked again and how and where so the bog will return to a healthy state. I am impressed by how technology can be used to both record and explain what happens and why.

Heading further north, the next morning I drive along single track roads from Helmsdale through Kinbrace and across the awe-inspiring landscape to Syre and up Strathnaver, the valley in which the Naver river flows. For many miles the only other signs of life are a red Royal Mail van, men filling potholes along the narrow track, and hundreds of deer and stags almost camouflaged in the red-gold landscape.

In the river valley, I keep stopping for large black shiny SUVs carrying fishing rods and men in the universal “hunting, shooting and fishing” uniform and one lone Tesco delivery van. As I turn onto the main road along the north coast from Tongue to Thurso, a vivid blue sea sparkles among the gold-black fields and green-black cliffs. There is so much beauty in this northern landscape.

Later I join a workshop in a primary school in Thurso run by the Flow to the Future project’s learning officer and volunteers, where P5/P6 students  are getting their hands dirty comparing ph levels and drainage-water holding ability in sands, potting mix, clay and peat. Relating this to their study of the causes of climate change and understanding the process of decomposition, using maps of the world, photographs and small national flags, they consider the planet’s variety of climates, wetlands, desert, peatlands. Using local to teach global is vital if today’s young people are going to make a difference for the future of the planet.

I visit a small volunteer-run local museum in a former church in a small dispersed settlement on the north coast. They need funding for repairs and refurbishment of the building and its interior and we meet with the volunteers and part time staff to discuss a way forward. Like so many small volunteer-run museums, they lack funds and resources and access to professional expertise. At the same time the museum plays an incredibly important role in their local communities, a focus for meeting people in an isolated place, a welcome for newcomers, a place to explore stories and the history of the local area, to contribute, to communicate, to learn and to share that learning. When we start exploring the variety of engagement with the community and the opportunities the museum provides, the discussion became very animated. One volunteer talks about how the museum has “saved her life”, offering her a focus, company and inspiring her interest at a very bleak time in her life. She is now undertaking a museum studies course and is a passionate advocate for what might be possible. Another who moved up from England, explains how she knew no one and the museum gave her an instant community and offered new friendships and connections. Talking about their vision for what the museum could be rather than focussing simply on the repairs and building issues hopefully will give them access to what was missing in their application for funding.

While the building has significance in connection with the Clearances, the museum is not the building! Many museums are hampered by the box they inhabit, whether it be an historic but redundant church, school, cottage, or country house. Having to fund repairs, display collections and engage with modern visitors and groups in entirely unsuitable conditions or spaces makes their job so much more challenging. Too large collection items – transport vehicles, agricultural machinery, furniture and maritime objects – shoulder display cases with small and delicate items up against walls and into corners. Poor and damp climactic conditions make paper-based and photographic items curl at the edges, or mean only scans or photocopies can be displayed, and fluorescent tubes glare down on items that shouldn’t be so exposed. Steps and narrow doorways create accessibility issues and volunteers have to make cups of tea in tiny dark sub-standard basements and protect all supplies from visiting vermin. Specific collections built up by an interest group and donated to the museum at some point in the past end up taking up valuable public space even though few visitors may share that interest.

Should a museum focus so much on the box it exists in by historical accident however well-meaning, and is now limited by, or should it re-invent itself as a community space? If it is housed in a listed building which is entirely unsuitable for housing a museum, what other options does it have? Should it reconsider its collection and make some hard decisions about the significance or otherwise of all this “stuff”? These are difficult questions and I am not proposing to answer them here but working so much with small groups of hard-working volunteers committed to conserving and communicating their past for the present and future, I can’t help but feel that some more radical solutions might be considered.

I was hoping that I might see the northern lights for the first time but it was not to be. But for my final evening in Thurso, the sunset and its reflection on Dunnet Head more than made up for the disappointment.

From the Bounty to New Bedford – a remarkable whaler man Part 1

In the New Bedford Whaling Museum, Massachusetts, there is a gallery of intricately-carved objects made by whaling men. Among the scrimshawed and carved teeth and bone, needle cases, babies’ rattles, serated pie-cutters, umbrella handles and walking sticks, there is a wooden inlaid jewellery box with a mother-of-pearl heart-shaped key hole, topped with a small reclining dog carved from whale “ivory”.

Detail of the reclining dog carved in “whale ivory” and the inlaid wood. New Bedford Whaling Museum, New Bedford.

Jewellery Box made by Christian on the ship California c1870s-1880s for Captain G.F. Brightman’s wife Lizzie. New Bedford Whaling Museum, New Bedford.

Carved whale tooth attributed to George Parkin Christian. Australian national Maritime Museum

Across the Pacific Ocean in the Australian National Maritime Museum in Sydney, there is a scrimshawed whale tooth signed “Christian” showing a harpooner standing in a whaleboat about to fling his lance at a surfacing sperm whale. Behind these two artefacts is the story of a remarkable man, George Henry Parkin Christian.

The scrimshawed whale tooth signed “Christian” with other whaling artefacts displayed at the Australian National Maritime Museum, Sydney.

Much has been written about whaling shipowners, captains and even captain’s wives (who often accompanied them to sea) but much less about whaling ship crew. Master mariner and whaler man, Christian’s life spans three Pacific islands – Pitcairn, Norfolk and Raoul/Sunday, New Zealand, the east and west coasts of America and Greenland and the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Three generations of my family knew Parkins, as we called him, and my research aims to reconstruct his challenging and adventurous life, from his birth on Pitcairn Island in 1853 to his death on Norfolk Island in 1940 at the age of 86. So far I have discovered a wealth of new stories and connections and a lot of contradictions and puzzles.

As a child I was intrigued by the long wooden handled metal spike in the mahogany and glass cabinet in my grandparents’ dining room in Sydney, Australia, sitting curiously among pieces of carved ivory, Royal Copenhagen china plates, transparent Belleek cups and saucers, intricate enameled birds, Argentinian silver, miniature Chinese vases and other souvenirs of their travels. The spike looked out of place – rough against their delicacy, practical against their decorativeness, a tool to be held and used rather than displayed. This marlin spike was no souvenir however, but a gift to my great grandmother Bessie Bell and her family from the whalerman my family knew as Parkins Christian. The spike was a tangible link to my island ancestors, whose story ranked alongside Swiss Family Robinson, Robinson Crusoe, Treasure Island and all the adventurous Enid Blyton books I read voraciously as a child.

New Bedford Whaling bark California

Parkins had first met my great grandparents in the late 1870s when he came ashore on Sunday (Raoul) Island in a whaleboat from the New Bedford whaler California. Seventy years later, Bessie recalled the tall, darkly handsome man with the “luminous eyes and rich colouring” of his “Tahitian forebears”. He became the children’s hero and best friend for years to come. The night after the California sailed, Bessie’s father Thomas told them the story of Fletcher Christian, the mutiny on the Bounty and the settlement on Pitcairn Island. Not uncommonly, he muddled the generations, with Fletcher as Parkins’ grandfather rather than great-grandfather. Parkins told the young Bells nothing of this dark chapter in his family history, holding them spellbound instead with stories of the Great White Whale, Moby Dick “that bit whaleboats in half and crunched them to pieces in his awful jaws”.

Parkins visited the island several times in the 1880s, moving from the California to other ships and kept in touch with the family for many years. Bessie remembered his visit on the Costa Rica Packet in the late 1880s “the most famous of the veterans of the early South Pacific whaling fleet still under sail”. With a group of sailors, he loaded the whaleboat with kumaras, yams and other produce to carry to Sydney, their destination port, promising to return the next day for more. But unbeknownst to the Bells ashore, some of the crew mutinied while the ship was still anchored off Sunday Island and Christian was viciously attacked. The ship sailed directly for Sydney and according to Bessie’s memoirs Christian never visited again. He joined the Charles W Morgan when she called at Norfolk Island in 1894 and served as first and second mate almost continuously on the ship until 1913 both out of New Bedford and San Francisco. His last recorded whaling voyage was as First Mate on the New Bedford schooner A.M. Nicolson from 1914-16.

George Henry Parkin Christian or Parkins Christian as my family called him. He gave this photograph to my grandfather.

My grandfather Leslie Dyke, Bessie Bell’s second son. He left New Zealand, where he was born, for Australia in 1928. He is holding the marlin spike, a gift from Parkins Christian.

After that he returned to Norfolk Island where he helped build, then captained the Resolution, a schooner built by the islanders in a bid to trade directly with New Zealand. He was then 72 years old and still described as “of massive build” by a local newspaper. My grandfather Leslie, Bessie’s second son, recalled meeting Parkins in New Zealand. His mother had asked him to return the marlin spike as she believed Parkins had only left it for safe-keeping. Parkins  told him to keep it on condition he didn’t sell it to any Bounty treasure hunters! After my grandfather’s death, my mother passed the spike onto me. It is one of my most treasured possessions!

More on Parkins Christian in my next blog.