My grandfather, Spencer Lowe, was a rather truculent character by all accounts well-versed in all the usual Edwardian chauvanisms. If it wasn’t a Catholic conspiracy it was a Jewish one. If not the children of Abraham, then it was something branded in the Asiatic mind that compelled the poor devils to tunnel under the very foundations of the Australian way. Etc etc. I never met the man, thus the avatar-like quality that will have to suffice until we delve deeper together. This is, after all, an essay/memoir, not a novel where character often hinges on prior (read authorial) knowledge. In his sole surviving diary, from a year that resonates with us now for all the wrong reasons, 1919, I seem to discern a restless inquiring mind contrapuntal as the age, a bright young man finding his way in a large forbidding, plague-bound city. Towards a singular enterprise and an enduring love.
My grandfather, it hardly needs be mentioned, hailed from a generation that had witnessed first hand the destructive effects of Edwardian chauvanism, and either despite or because of the fact he never saw active service, I get a strong sense from Spencer’s diary that as a young engineer he was bristling to be a part of the new world rising out of the ashes of the War. Science, afterall, builds bridges.
To choose just one example from the many anecdotes I have absorbed about the man, decades before they were even granted citizenship through a referendum in 1967, my grandfather had become something of an authority on Aboriginal lore and customs. Nothing effete here. I think he admired their consistency and spirit of endurance. And he hailed from the Hawkesbury (“Deerabun” to the Darug people), where his family had lived and thrived (he was himself one of eight children) for the best part of a century, and no doubt rubbed shoulders with the surviving members of the Darug who stubbornly refused to cede ownership of their land. Their war with the settlers and the British 46th regiment was long and gruelling and all but over by the 1830‘s, but perhaps their stories had seeped into young Spencer like the damp of the river valleys. Stories a homesick young man could carry with him to the big smoke. The great cities of this island have always been teeming with the homesick, and perhaps nowhere moreso than Newtown in the 1920‘s and 30‘s. Stinking hub of the workers’ paradise.
The Newtown my grandfather seemed so intent on making his home in the year of Versailles and the Spanish Influenza was a community sharply divided between the Protestant factory owning class and the rabble of Catholic and very Irish workers. A simplification, of course, but I am looking from a long way away. Strikes would have been commonplace, violence on both sides standard practice. There were many men still quaking from the horror of the trenches, to which many Irish Catholics had refused to go, thus only heightening the sectarian divide. I imagine the air of the place to have been thick with a dull horror and seething resentment as for many of the returned diggers a job in the factories of Alexandria, Erskineville and Zetland was as good as it was ever going to get. Suspicion and loathing of any type of authority would have crossed sectarian lines and been so deeply ingrained and visceral it would have made we 90‘s ferals blush. In my weaker moments I used to imagine the energy of those times had been absorbed into the walls of the many shared houses I lived in around Newtown in the closing decades of Spencer’s century, although if there were ghosts I was too busy to notice them.
As I mentioned earlier, I never met my grandfather. He died of cancer a few years before I was born, and although he was my father’s father, it was mainly through my mother that I got a sense of this spectral forbidding man. He was well-educated, having managed to see out the War years gaining a degree in engineering. And by all accounts he was someone who put great stock in the written word. Pedantic? Maybe just a little. He sought the fundamentals of things, sought to drill down to the bedrock of meaning, at least that’s the impression I have formed from my mother’s whisky anecdotes and the austere tone of his diary. He married a school teacher who I can only assume shared his passion for language because she was a high school English teacher, and the job was taken a bit more seriously back then. Somehow the two of them managed to drill Shakespeare into my father’s easily turned head. Although the Victorian copperplate in Spencer’s one surviving diary can be a little hard on my TV eyes, it has proved invaluable in piecing together a picture of the man and his shell-shocked times, so sadly analogous to our own.
This essay/memoir, call it what you will, is a three-pronged affair. There is the year of my grandfather’s diary, of course, and then the occassional detour into my own years in Newtown in the last two decades of the twentieth century, and then on to the present global pandemic, the closed down cinemas and pubs and face masks and hundreds of thousands of shattered lives that would have seemed eerily familiar to my grandfather. I first started writing about Spencer’s diary twenty years ago when my living in Newtown was the one fact other than the family name that linked us across the decades. Now, of course, we share the experience of global pandemic, and my Newtown has since been consigned to history just like his.
In 1919 Newtown was far and away the most important business district outside Sydney itself. It was incorporated way back in 1862, and by the time my grandfather arrived from a Hawkesbury village whose name he bore, Newtown boasted a population somewhere in the vicinity of 30,000. It boasted its very own daily broadsheet by 1863, known simply as The Newtown Daily, disseminated by an army of delivery boys who covered 180 miles of street and alleyway each morning to bring the news to approximately 12000 homes. Proximity sells. In fact, so successful was this newspaper (buoyed by the eagerness of local businesses to take out advertising space) that in 1921 the company that ran the press was floated on the local Stock Exchange. It seems Newtown has never been wanting for energy or enthusiasm, or an excuse to read about itself.
Or to sing about itself.
In 1923, the mysterious AF Lenertz published his song, Newtown is an Old Town (that I love). Note that word old. It isn’t just a rather naff play on words, although it is that too. AF was no Franz Schubert. The first line of the chorus croons: “There was a time when it was new, 'twas many years ago.” It seems that by 1923 Newtown already had a history that was palpable to the impressionable likes of Mr Lenertz. “Australia knows in many ways the fame of old Newtown.” This was 1923, but squint and you could almost mistake it for something written in 1993, by one of The Whitlams maybe after one too many at the Sando. “When folks strike trouble here’s a place they say won’t turn me down.” Already Newtown had developed a particular flavour we erstwhile 90's ferals would have recognised, its survival for the best part of a century nothing short of miraculous when you consider all the vicissitudes of a burgeoning metropolis like Sydney.
I don’t know how well Mr Lenertz’s song would have sold nation-wide, but you can be pretty sure it got a good airing around the pub uprights in Newtown. All the local shops would have stocked it and all the more prosperous shoppers would have bought it to belt out on their upright pianos in the front room. Newtown was, in my grandfather’s time as much as my own, that type of place, self-sustaining as any enduring community must be. In 1922, under the heading CHEAP, RELIABLE NEWTOWN, these comments were made about the place: “The residents are so well served locally by the numerous business places that they have no necessity to go outside.” The “nose bleeds” we used to call them. You suffered them to get to a beach, but otherwise why bother?
Before the redoubtable Spencer Lowe started up Newtown’s most successful and long-running bus service, Newtown had its trams. They went electric in 1900, and by 1922 the Newtown system (a strangely but characteristically self-contained system) boasted 420 staff, 107 rolling stock, and 43,000 miles traversed each week in the task of conveying 50,000 passengers to the city and surrounding industrial suburbs. One hundred of their “boys” enlisted into the first AIF, a pleasure my grandfather chose to forego for reasons of his own. Perhaps with a 65% casualty rate by war’s end he figured it a poorly managed operation.
In 1919, the year of my grandfather’s fledgling courtship of a certain Ms Ellem (my future grandmother whom I also never met), the world should of course have been heaving a collective sigh of relief at the curtailing of such odious percentages. But it wasn’t, or more to the point it couldn’t. The great influenza was busy taking more than twice as many lives as the war itself - perhaps 50 million in all. As of February 3 of that year the intrepid few who braved the streets of Sydney were obliged to do so with masks on their faces. Social distancing does not seem to have been the imperative as it has in the current pandemic, with our greater understanding of how viruses work. But then, like now, theatres, pubs, cinemas and shops were all shut down. Businesses went under through no fault of their own, and ship loads of returning diggers were quarantined at North Head - a dangerous turn of events considering the mutinous rumblings of 1917. Grandpa Spencer noted all this down with his usual alacrity:
January 28: Executive Council decided to close all churches, schools, theatres etc today. (This) business looks bad.
February 9: We all gathered...to meet Cleve (my great uncle returning from the Western Front), but owing to case of flu being on board she did not land. Our party...went to Mosman and tried to hire launch - but could not. We then went to Manly. Wes (another great uncle) and I got a large piece of paper and block typed 3883 LOWE and held it out the side and by use of glasses believe to have seen Cleve and he saw us. 3 boat loads left ship but were arrested.
February 11: Flu still kept well under here but Melbourne is having a severe time.
Sound familiar? Twice in a hundred years Melbourne has fared the worst of any Australian city under attack from an airborne virus. Whether through bad luck or bad management only time will tell.
All of this would have been quite an apocalyptic experience for a young and fairly sheltered man like Spencer. But my grandfather seems to have been an admirably single-minded individual. He needed to find work, and with that 65% ringing in his ears he must have been pretty confident of finding something, flu or no flu. It seems almost pre-ordained that he and Newtown should cross paths. With all those trams and trains and factories crammed into a few square miles, where else would a young engineering graduate wind up?
With the initial aid of two brothers, Wes and Malcolm, my grandfather set up an engineering business at the T-intersection of Swanson street and Mitchell road Alexandria. It must have done pretty well, because by the mid-1920's my grandfather had decided to pour all his money into buses. Not long after his favourite brother, Cleve, was demobilised, Spencer had secured the bus run from Newtown tram depot to points east - Maroubra, Coogee, the old showground, etc. Alexandria Omnibus Service, he originally called it. Lowe’s Bus Service it became in the late 1940's after another world war when my father took it over, after himself being demobbed from the Air Force, and Lowe’s Bus Service it would remain for the next 30-odd years. Route 355 is its hidebound successor. I’ve been told you could set your watch by a Lowe’s bus, and considering what I know of my grandfather and his pedantic son I don’t doubt it. The factory workers needed to know they would be able to clock in on time, needed to know they would make the pubs before six o’clock closing. The buses cut straight through the industrial heartland of Sydney. They were a godsend.
About a year before I left Newtown altogether for greener pastures in the mountains to the west, my father and I got a little cheery at the Kurrajong Hotel in Erskineville and went in search of a Lowe’s Section sign. I had spotted one from the back seat of the 355, but it took us well over an hour to find it in what really did by then seem the middle of nowhere. Which of course is why the company finally folded. The factories moved off shore and the people either died or moved away. Now they are back. But they never left Newtown, well at least not completely. Just as Alexandria and Zetland were becoming ghost towns, yours truly and hundreds like him were re-populating the dank workers’ cottages of Newtown, Enmore, Erskineville. Spencer Lowe may have turned up his nose at our dress sense, our music and our politics, but the romantic in me likes to think that he would have recognised the same urge in us as in him to build a community. There are seven suburbs within walking distance of King street, eight if you count Newtown itself: Alexandria, Erskineville, Chippendale, Camperdown, Newtown, Enmore, Stanmore, St Peters. Maybe Zetland at a stretch. You may require mechanised assistance to leave this crowded little ring, but within its boundaries you walk and can often find yourself doing so for no particular reason. To bump into people mainly.
I’ve roamed about its streets and lanes, I heard both laughs and sighs....
*
There is much in my grandfather that makes me want to keep digging. The truculence you already know about. The child of the Enlightenment and of Victorian certainities only ever so slightly rattled by global pandemic and war. But my grandfather was also an extremely generous man. Paternalistic but generous, as seems to accord with the spirit of the age. What sort of conditions he attached to these frequent acts of charity is a little difficult to gauge from the often terse, business-like entries in his diary. Money was passed with a nod and a wink like the blousy girl just come of age.
April 11: Preparing notice board (2 ply) for term’s notices. Lent Rossiter one pound ten.
Suffice to say, one pound was a fair swag of money back in 1919. This loan to Rossiter followed on from a five pound gift to a Miss Brooks at “the mission”. Neither Miss Brooks or the mysterious Rossiter pop up again in the diary, so it seems doubtful the loans were paid back that year. The notice board referred to was for the local Sunday school where my grandfather gave lessons every Sunday morning. His favourite disciple was Matthew.
The reason I can so confidently deduce the loans were not paid back is because my grandfather appears so meticulous in his diary entries. Every expense was chronicled as though we are dealing here with a jaded bankrupt.
March 22: Went to town at 10-30. Lunch at Mrs Harrison’s. Tennis in afternoon. Repaired net, put new posts on door. Very enjoyable afternoon’s sport. Tea at Newtown. Went to Petersham with Miss Ellem to see result of election.
March 24: Gave 3/- to Salvation Army.
Etc.
Spencer Lowe was a man obsessed with the minutuae. I strongly suspect his grandson’s great poetic sweeps of the hand would have left him cold. Maybe that’s why he didn’t join up like his brother Cleve. He either didn’t see the bigger picture, or he didn’t like the look of the ledger. It seems to be the proximate in all its delicious detail that held him. The Rossiters and Miss Harrisons of this world. Not those cartoon-like Clemenceaus and Kitcheners and all that talk of a community of nations. A community of abstractions, I can almost hear him grumbling. Patently absurd!
In that diary entry from March 22 just quoted my grandfather mentions repairing a net. In fact he seems to have gone one better than that and actually invented the net roller. Never patended it, of course. He simply saw a problem at his local tennis club and went about devising a better way of doing things. Either someone stole the idea or came up with it themselves eventually and now pretty much every tennis club in the world has one. If I didn’t know myself better I could get awfully bitter about those squandered royalties. As it is, I think Spencer’s rather dilatory approach saved me a lot of visits to rehab.
The one other item of note in this particular entry is the passing mention of a Miss Ellem. I have combed the diary from end to end, peered at the cramped frenetic copper plate for hours trying to detect the faintest hint of a heart beat skipped, or even a cheek slightly flushed. A hand gently held. But nothing gets through to me. One hundred years is a long time in anyone’s calendar, and perhaps this is where the first cracks begin to appear in my little shrine. Miss Ellem is my future grandmother, a striking statuesque woman of 20 with a passion for language I can only envy. As the months go by there is a slight easing of formalities in which the name “Miss Ellem” is couched, sounding between the tight rows of figures and appointments like a light curtain lifting in the breeze. But I feel like someone who has arrived halfway through a conversation concerning him. How did it get to here? Matters of the heart are a puzzle to me at the best of times. So much seems left unsaid. More nods and winks? Spencer was too much the gentleman for that.
August 29: Met Miss Ellem at night at Swan’s bookshop.
August 30: Went to Manly with Miss Ellem and Miss Longworth.
Was this Miss Longworth a friend or a chaperone? Or both? Ellem. Such a soft breezy sound. Almost a pity it would eventually be sundered by the gutteral Welsh of Lowe.
*
Names rub shoulders with ghosts in the eyes and ears of the human race. Gallipoli, for instance, was far and away the most resonant place name in white Australian history when Spencer was penning his diary. Crowded with fresh ghosts. Even now, bar the occassional pandemic, in order to make peace with these now ancient ghosts, tens of thousands of Australians (mostly young) make the pilgrimage halfway around the world to an unassuming beach with no surf.
Etymology operates on the simple premise that without words, but especially without names, human beings would have great trouble making sense of the world. We have in a sense added an extra layer to our earthly existence. It is one of the many symptoms of our special autism, and certainly one of its more potent and mixed blessings.
My generation grew up in one of the great eras of name-changing: post-colonialism. But of course that is itself just another name for a complex set of phenomena. Rock n’ roll is spawn of this era, and how many names are currently in circulation for that howling child?
Very few places still bear the names they were born with. We still have Athens, of course, and Rome and Alexandria. Baghdad, Paris, Moscow, Bangkok, London. Some but not so many. Names must not only sit with the place but with the people occupying that space at any given time. They, afterall, are the ones shouldering the etymological burden. Scotus, for instance, would probably not sit very well with the modern Irish whose island once went by that name. So, if I were to tell you that Newtown took its name from a corner shop, how many of you who know and love her would throw your chosen device at the wall?
True to the nature of all great cities, planning has always been anathema to Sydney. From its very inception all the way along to the year of Covid lockdowns, civic planning can best be described as either a knee-jerk reaction to some pressing problem (the Surry Hills slums) or, as in the case of the 2000 Olympics and the post-millenium Star Casino, a desperate need to show off. I am not necessarily saying this is a bad thing, just very Sydney. Ruth Park’s novel, A Poor Man’s Orange, brought the planners to the old Irish tenements of Surry Hills like a murder of crows, and I sense she has regretted those haunting visions of slum-life at Waterloo ever since. The book, though, was ripe to be written.
Newtown has stared down many an over-zealous planner through the years, but I think in the end it’s King street that defeats them. Tell a tourist jaywalking across that storied artery with its two lanes lost to parking that they are in fact crossing Australia’s Highway One and they’ll think you mad. But all great journeys have to start somewhere.
True to the sporadic growth spurts of Sydney herself, Newtown grew out of two distinct settlements - the older and far larger known as O’Connell Town occupying the rough square mile running from Missenden road down to Church street, the younger settlement (known early on in the 19th century as Devine’s Farm) occupying the area lovingly referred to by we 90‘s ferals as “the Bermuda Triangle” where the Town Hall, Bank and Oxford Hotels used to form a dubious axis spanning the railway bridge. Whatever money, brains or looks drifted into this triangle rarely made it out intact.
On 24th November 1832, the Sydney Gazette noted that “the neighbourhood about the spot known as ‘Devine’s Farm’ has obtained the name of New Town.” The name, as I mentioned, was lifted from John Webster’s store on the site of what is now known by a nice turn as Webster’s Bar. In 1838 the population of the Hamlet of Newtown was given as “877 Protestants, 364 Roman Catholics, one Pagan, one Jew, the first time the name Newtown had been employed in government registers. I am tipping the one Jew was a London cockney, the one Pagan Han Chinese.
Although I could be wrong about the Pagan.
The Cadigal were ‘pagan’, as were their neighbours to the west, the Wangal, the southern Gwiyagal, and the northern Camaraigal people. The Cadigal once occupied all the land from Port Jackson to Botany Bay and were probably the first people to have any significant contact with the First Fleeters. They probably numbered around 2000 in 1788, but very seldom did their full number gather in one place. On January 21, 1788 a marine recorded that:
The Natives here is very Affable, & Will Except of Aney thing, that You Will Give them, (Even take Aney that the (sic) Can Lay Hold of) -
As Geoffrey Blainey so archly observed in his book, A Land Half Won, the Cadigal must have been equally impressed by the white man’s propensity for taking whatever they fancied, although at first they seemed more concerned about protecting their fishing grounds than their land.
We have been supplied with plenty of anecdotal evidence that the Cadigal, along with every other tribe making early contact with the Europeans, were dumbfounded by European animals and especially by the way man and beast followed each other around. No doubt many serious faux pas were committed, as when one spear-carrying old man asked his English brethren whether that heifer in tow was his wife.
When the wheel first came to Newtown it had the Cadigal in throes of rapturous delight, touching it and speaking to it in an effort to divine its magic. Going on the evidence it would seem the wheel took the Cadigal’s approval to heart. I mentioned earlier some flippant anecdote of a tourist jaywalking on King street. Even in my grandfather’s time you would be taking your life in your hands jaywalking on King street. Don’t jaywalk on King street, unless it is three o’clock in the morning and you are very very sober.
The Cadigal were almost totally obliterated by the coming of the Europeans, despite the best efforts of enlightened governors such as Macquarie and King (after whom the street is named), but then you probably guessed that. Of course, the Aboriginal people have proved an incredibly durable, cohesive, and yes forgiving people. Definitely patient. But the Newtown area carries its fair share of ghosts from the era of pox and peppershot.
Returning to the subject of etymology, the word aborigine originally referred to the pre-Roman inhabitants of Latium. Ab origine, Latin for from the beginning. Another one of those Enlightenment overlays that seems to contradict the legal furphy of terra nullius, or empty land.
*
You may have noticed by now that order was the ruling obsession of my grandfather’s life. I get the feeling that if you asked him what sort of life he aspired to in 1919, the word “civil” would not have been far from his lips. But considering what the world had just done to itself, was it really still possible to continue leading a civilised life? Hindsight has little bearing here.
By civil I think my grandfather would have meant “civic”. He was a devout Baptist raised in the upper reaches of the Hawkesbury Valley where I doubt much of what we now regard as “civilised” would have reached by 1919, other than as a terse whisper. There had been quite a revival of religious feeling in the late Victorian era, all of which seemed tied to work, family and that paternalistic brand of charity we now find so irksome. Historians seem to agree this revival was partly a reaction to the “excesses” of the Enlightenment with its Cartesian scalpel slicing the human experience in half and its rather debilitating clockwork view of the world. Oh, and Darwinism. But of course being a recently graduated engineer made my grandfather very much a child of the Enlightenment, so here we find another contradiction. Or is it? As Einstein said, God does not play dice with the universe, implying the Supreme Being is also the Supreme Engineer. I think Spencer would have warmed to the sentiment.
It would be an interesting game to play: I say the word “civilisation” and you tell me the first thing that comes into your head. I don’t know you, of course, but I’ll wager nine times out of ten it would be an image rather than a concept.
According to the Macquarie Dictionary, “civilisation” is an advanced state of human society, in which a high level of art, science, religion, and government has been reached. I find this a rather sketchy definition, but then when I hear the word “civilisation” I instantly picture a banquet table, my girlfriend a mushroom cloud engulfing the Manhattan skyline.
I can’t pretend to know what image or concept would have entered my grandfather’s head at the mention of “civilisation”, but if an image I fancy it would have been something like a steel-arch bridge, if a concept something along the lines of “honour” or “charity”. My grandfather was already a member of the Freemasons in 1919; he taught at one of the local Sunday schools; he worked as a volunteer for some shady organisation known as “the mission”. Throughout 1919 he was forever donating his money or his time to someone or something. All worthy causes no doubt, but I can’t help the feeling that none were quite his by choice. The tennis club may be the exception to what strikes me as a life of pleasant enough obligations but obligations just the same. For a single man in his early 20's, my grandfather’s life seems unusually weighed down by obligations. Perhaps, though, that says more about me than him.
In 1922 a publication was released to commemorate Newtown’s sixtieth birthday. It comprises well over 200 pages crammed with facts and figures and faces from a vanished world. No mention of Spencer Lowe yet, but I seem to glimpse him at every turn. The business-like optimism of this publication is so in tune with my grandfather’s diary it seems almost uncanny. Take this little sweetener:
THE TECHNICAL COLLEGE
The ordinary Newtown resident would meet with a big surprise if he were suddenly placed into the large, lofty, brilliantly lighted Technical School connected with the Newtown Railway and Tramway Institute. It is hygienically (sic) constructed, and equipped in most modern manner.
***************
Perhaps this is an opportunity to refer briefly to the loyalty of the Newtown Tramway employees. Twenty-two percent of the boys enlisted during the war, and 5 percent gave their lives for their country.
Which is a record not easy to beat! (sic)
TOWN HALL
Added to the original Hall and building were a supper-room, kitchen, and “up-to-date” sanitary convenience, which made the Hall much more commodious and comfortable for public gatherings. Below these editions (sic) was added a new public lavatory (which is one of the best in the world).
To stretch the point a little (but I think you will see where I’m heading), this from Spencer:
April 19: Lunch at Mrs Harrison’s. Met with accident in morning. Iron handled screw wrench fell from beam onto my head. Tennis in afternoon. Brought mower back.
Nothing seemed to phase my grandfather. Not world pandemics or nasty cracks on the head. There was too much to do, too much to build, too much space to fill. He was in the midst of perfecting the grass catcher, in case you were wondering about the mower, which in due course would be fitted to lawn mowers all over the world. Although not by Spencer, who never seems to have heard of a patent office. So, I must work for a living.
Very little of this hidebound perspicacity and temperance seems to have rubbed off on my father, although he did possess the requisite backbone as a man of 20 freshly demobbed to rescue both business and family from penury. Suffice to say my father’s tastes were slightly more Epicurean than Spencer’s. Picture, for instance, the relief etched on the old punters’ faces as they boarded a pleasantly off-schedule Lowe’s bus one Easter afternoon. My drunk and already balding father behind the wheel, my yet-to-be godfather, Les, conductor’s hat cocked at a jaunty angle (my embellishment), taking people’s money with a glassy-eyed leer. By Cook Road both bus and conductor’s swag were full, but they repeated this fraud twice over before deciding they had enough for a slap up night at Checker’s night club in Goulburn street. If my grandfather ever got wind of this slick little scheme he never said a thing. The sentimentalist in me likes to think he was living out his less ordered side vicariously through his ratbag of an only son....
January 1 (1919): Visited Zoological gardens for first time. Stayed indoors at night. This book (the Collins Royal Diary) cost 4-0. During the evening I worked on plans of my concrete cottage scheme.
Besser blocks, as they were one day to be dubbed. In America.
But putting all frauds and lost patents aside, I believe something germinates between generations, especially the alternate ones, that seems to work on history like a search engine. The first founds, the second builds, the third squanders, I think the old aphorism runs. The business is no more, my grandfather is no more, and in many ways Newtown is no more - both his and mine. If the business had somehow survived I would have been writing a very different story of the place, although it is highly doubtful I would have found the time to write any story at all. The Byzantine historian, Anna Comnena, could chronicle her father’s achievements in her exquisite The Alexiad because she was banished from the legacy by her brother, John. Her father’s business would never be hers, so she was left free to speculate and, much to Edward Gibbons’ disgust, to play.
Faced with the world of 1919 I suspect I would have crumpled in a heap. 2020 has been trying enough, and I suppose if you substitute record-breaking bushfires for a world war you at least get a feel for what Spencer was dealing with on a daily basis. But Spencer was looking to fix things, to improve on what had come before, not mourn what was beyond repair. When his brother, Cleve, jumped ship with 1000 other quarantined diggers, Spencer’s only comment was disappointed. The first Armistice Day passes with barely a whisper about the ongoing crisis:
November 11: Attended Social at Miss Ellem’s at night. Told fortunes with mask on.
Ninety million people were either dead or in pieces, but Spencer figured he was no good to any of them swaddled in black crepe. What the broken world needed was a huge leap of faith and Spencer was one of those prepared to make it. I am hearing that word “truculent” again, but for all the right reasons this time. Newtown was making its own leap of faith, as it would 70 years later when the guts seemed to have been torn out of it. Like the fiery Anna Comnena, I am scooping up this book like a handful of leaves.
Nothing better encapsulates this enduring spirit of hope across the generations than these words from John Kennedy and the Love Gone Wrong, circa 1985:
On King street it’s another world
new day dawns in the heart of Newtown
outside the Coles’ New World
well I don’t need a travel visa
to get me to the Tower of Pisa
on King street, I’m a King!
*
Midway through the first Saturday afternoon of 1919, Sydney was battered by hailstones the size of cricket balls courtesy of a front rising from an unusually warm current in the Tasman Sea. There had been little or no warning. Metereology was still in its infancy. In fact the very term “front”, a pivotal one in the metereological lexicon, had only recently been borrowed from war terminology. A few minutes of spectacular sheet lightning against a backdrop of gun metal blue before the skies dumped their payload on Sydney - destroying homes and factories, killing horses, dogs and one or two hapless citizens. Quite an ominous way to ring in the new year.
In the Sydney Town Hall the ink was barely dry on a contract my grandfather had signed that very morning to run buses from Newtown to the eastern suburbs. He had just finished placing an order for windscreens at Reg Pickering’s shop in Annandale and was standing under the iron roof of his Mitchell road factory when the storm struck. Apparently the din was so monstrous that his hearing never quite recovered, but it doesn’t seem to have prompted any second thoughts about the new venture. Spencer’s eye wasn’t particularly attuned to omens. The experience did, however, affect him enough to prompt an unusual, albeit curt, reference to the war. In a few days’ time the Argyleshire would be docking in Sydney, and although his brother’s imminent arrival is only mentioned a few times in passing, I get the distinct impression this flurry of activity in the heat of January was no sudden whim.
The day before the storm, January 3, Spencer paid a visit to DW - G solicitors in George street where some documents were awaiting his signature. That night he would scribble faintly in his diary: Lowe’s Bus signed at 4.15. Now his brother had something to come home to.
Of course, Spencer’s was far from the first such venture in Newtown. Buses in one form or another had been run by private operators since Jemmy Richards conveyed passengers in the “Defiance” way back in the 1840‘s. This service ran four times a day to and from George street and cost 1/- per trip. Another service, dubbed “The Queen”, ran from the Cooks River in the south, but due to the parlous state of the roads, fares on both services were doubled after dark and services suspended intermittently throughout the 1870's.
In the far more prosperous and dynamic 1880's, with the convict years sealed up safely inside Ned Kelly’s tomb, one King street service was dubbed “The Honeypot” because it was so crowded on its morning and evening trips it resembled a pot of honey covered in flies. But trams were already supplanting buses, and by 1895 the track bound steam driven “toasters” were proving so popular that people clambered to mail their letters in the red postal boxes fitted front and back of the King street service. In 1921 it was suggested a tram service be installed direct from Newtown to Coogee so residents would have access to a beach, but the idea was quickly shelved. Perhaps my grandfather had already won the ear of someone at Town Hall, a knack my father would inherit in time.
February 14: Cleve came out of quarantine at 12.40 and was met at the Showground by Mother, Anna, Louise, Harrie, Uncle Alf, Auntie Em, and myself.
February 20: Cleared out workshop, finished tying up papers. Finished clipping grass at night (at the tennis club?), Cleve and Anna here to stay for a few days. Got innoculated at Water Police Court (second time 9th day).
For such a devout man, my grandfather seems to have lacked what I have always imagined is a requisite supply of Fatalism. I am not sure where I get this idea that devotion and fatalism are two halves of an enduring whole, but anyway the life’s work of my grandfather contains enough evidence to the contrary.
On Sunday March 2 the government lifted its restriction on public gatherings after an eight week hiatus. I imagine one half of Newtown crammed the churches the other half the pubs, with only the sick remaining indoors. My grandfather, of course, taught Sunday school where a certain Miss Ellem had volunteered to take one of the classes. The following day my grandfather was ill in bed but managed to haul himself over to Stanmore at 6pm to attend a “tennis court working bee” where the same Miss Ellem just happened to be present to donate a cheque from her employer. Spencer “came home very ill”.
Sydney was yet to see the worst of the flu, and the relaxation of restrictions may have been dictated less by health concerns than political ones. Understanding of how viruses worked was rudimentary. On Sunday April 6, for instance, Spencer noted with obvious frustration: Sunday school again barred....The evening tennis was restricted to 45 mins, everybody wearing masks.
But the worst would maniftest itself, naturally enough, in the winter months when tens of thousands were struck down. The virus seemed to take an almost perverse delight in attacking not, as with our current pandemic, mostly the elderly and infirm, but rather those aged 15 to 40 - an age group already decimated by the War. The strain was so virulent because it had managed to exchange genes between two viruses - one human, the other pig or bird - and this virus differed so greatly from the “parent” that it overcame all vaccines and natural antibodies, in fact managing to turn the body’s immune system against itself. In a few winter months of 1919 it claimed 6387 lives in Sydney alone, and claimed so many lives in the United States that the average life expectancy dipped by 12 years. Victoria and the United States have the dubious honour of faring badly in both pandemics. People drowned in their own blood. In Alaska whole Innuit communities were simply wiped off the face of the earth. Those apocalytpic visionaries, hangovers from the evangelical revival in the late Victorian era whose spirit my ancestors shared, must have thought all their prayers had been answered at once.
April 27: Mr Bell’s boys and 5 girls went with me to visit Mr Bell at his home. (He) looked very ill.
April 28: Visited hospital to see Mr Scott and Mr Power at night. Made arrangements (for wreaths).
May 1: Hand of Death on Ray Water’s mother. Bought wreath for 10/6. Put tender in for 4000 shackles. Went to church to give boys singing lessons. Worked overtime at night on Cross arms (re-boring).
June 18: Mrs White’s son died at 8.30.
June 19: Fred Yarrow died.
June 30: Home for lunch to see how sick people are.
My grandfather was very ill himself for the best part of March and early April with what I can only assume was a weaker strain of the virus. First mention of it is on March 4 when he writes in a ghostly hand: Ill all day. Bad night of it. Went to office one hour had to come home and straight to bed. All the same, on March 8 he attended the grand opening of the new tennis club at Stanmore and managed to struggle through one set against a certain K Barn. The next day he was back in bed again. This seems to have been the nature of the 1919 flu, attacking and receding in waves like a Great War battle. Sadly we are all too familiar with the trend one hundred years later. On March 15 Spencer mustered enough strength to go for a long walk with Miss Ellem. What they talked about through their cloth masks is a matter for them, of course, but the outing seems to have buoyed Spencer’s spirits significantly. In a markedly more robust hand he records: came home very tired after 6 sets in the afternoon. The next day he “appreciated Miss Ellem re: taking class”, he being once again too sick to attend. From now on, though, Miss Ellem’s name appears in just about every entry and my grandfather is soon back on his feet for good.
*
I haven’t lived in Newtown for many years now. This essay stems from a much longer and far messier project from the turn of the century melding memoir and fiction in a real hodge podge that I consigned to the bottom drawer pretty much the moment I finished it. I had discovered the diary while helping to pack up my parent’s house back in 1997 and made the rookie mistake of getting overexcited by the primary source. I thought tacking on a fictionalised version of my own story would help. It did not. What I needed was a hook, and this current pandemic has offered me one.
I lived in Newtown during one of its great periods of transformation, and I felt privliged to be there. We all did. We knew we were living through something special and I will treasure the memory of those decades for the rest of my life. But I am sure many who lived through that time with me will remember the less savoury side of life in 2042, all the same, how on certains days Newtown positively reeked of the mountains of rotting waste from the old landfill under what is now Sydney Park, the oxide plumes from what remained of the factories in Alexandria. How the acrid skies would be teeming with every species of winged scavenger, while the punks and skinheads could make life hell on the ground for anyone who strayed too far south into the precinct of beaten up old King street terraces. The skinheads because they seemed to hate anything that didn’t dance the pogo around their brittle egos, the punks because they insisted on rehearsing their three-chord wonders in leaky old shop fronts with all knobs turned up to 11. The Sandringham Hotel suffered plenty from both. For eighteen years it served up bands to the public seven nights a week with a Sunday matinee thrown in for good measure. I remember you there amongst that rag tag army of us perched around its old island bar mulling over such pocketbook epochs in the life of King street. I remember JC the pub dog listening attentively as though having his own place in the sun mapped out for him. The skinheads used to put their cigarettes out on that funny old man. Newtown has its dark side too.
When I first moved in to Newtown way back in the mid-1980's, renting was no real problem. Houses were cheap and plentiful, if a little run down. Flat mates were the real sticking point, but I doubt much has changed in that regard. There were just so many properties standing empty around Newtown, Enmore, Camperdown, St Peters that more than once I managed to haggle over the rent. Many people scratched their heads when I told them where I lived, as though I had pitched my tent in an old cemetery. I remember having to lie to taxi operators about my intended destination or look forward to a long wait for a cab. Newtown was something of a no-go area right up until the mid-1990's, a place of halfway houses, rag trade sweat shops and skinhead burrows. It was noisy and smelly and I loved it. We loved it. The community we felt like we were making from scratch.
One of the most infamous tools of the post-modern era, especially at the time I was first working on this essay, is the concept of appropriation. I am harking back to the 8-second sample trials of thirty years ago when musicians were at least given some legal flags to swim between. In art it was and appears to still remain the ability to talk your way out of a charge of theft. And literature is far from immune. A poetry colleague of mine was caught red-handed stealing other people’s work ten years ago and tried to employ the appropriation defence but failed to convince. I used to knock around with a girl back in my Newtown days who saw nothing wrong with exhibiting photographs of someone else’s photographs. She would buy an old magazine from the 1950's, let’s say, because to her even back then the 1950's may as well have been the dark ages, and for the very good reason that her existence as the woman I knew would have been all but impossible in either. She would flip through the images of this foreign world like a sparrow flitting over a brush fire. She would stumble on a photo of a platinum blonde, say, draped over the bonnet of a '56 FJ Holden and dutifully snap an image of that image. After applying a sepia tint she would frame this “work” and sell it under her own name. “Appropriation”, she called it. And I agree it is that, up until the point of sale.
However, her buyers seemed thoroughly convinced that they were buying an original work by an original artist, and I guess in the end that’s all that matters. You get softer as you get older. My friend was only too happy to take their money, of course. She needed it to buy more materials, pay rent etc. I would never have called her greedy, and she was certainly not sly. She really did believe that what she was doing was something new and original, which to my mind is enough at least to refute any accusations of deliberate deception.
But I only digress about my friend from twenty years ago because she strikes me as a kind of unwitting byproduct of our pre-pandemic obsession with acquisition and some attempt however lame to impose ourselves into times and places we may very well have no business being. It is too early to say if there really has been a paradigm shift in our collective thinking or whether the world is simply in a holding pattern, but at least we seem to be taking the time to look back at the race of magpies we had become and ask ourselves: is that really the best we could be? How many times have you heard a friend say: “I’ve discovered this great little bar”, or “I found this little out-of-the-way place”, as though nothing existed in that space until our own five senses encountered it? Then there’s that old baby boomer joke along the lines of, if everyone was at Woodstock who says they were at Woodstock then who was digging the latrines at Khe Sahn? Don’t worry, I’m building to a point I promise you. To have been involved in the unfolding of a great story is to have acquired some of its magic. And magic is something we all crave like oxygen. What appears to be different is the virulence of the impulse in the post-modern world. We all want to be part of something bigger than ourselves because events are making us feel so powerless and insignificant, except as another number on a grim tally. But maybe not something so big it buries us under a mountain of abtractions like, say, the death count of a global pandemic, or the modern state once again flexing its muscles as it had in my grandfather’s day. No, something smaller and in whose destiny we have more of a direct say. Tribalism by any other name.
That was, I believe, the very kernel of my relationship with Newtown (and perhaps by extension with the grandfather I never met) - a confluence of time and place and state of mind that made me the unwitting member of a tribe. I have never been very good at belonging, so this is a big thing for me to say, quite the 3 am confession in fact, so pay attention. What I am saying is that in a manner of speaking I appropriated Newtown, fused it onto my identity like members of an earlier generation fused theirs with Woodstock (or Khe Sahn, for that matter). I sought to acquire the magic of Newtown’s story, and I think for a time I succeeded. Afterall, would I be writing this essay if I hadn’t? And I can’t help wondering if my grandfather’s apparent need to belong, to engage with his community back in 1919, stems from the same deep-seated need as my own? There in a single sentence lies the whole raison d’etre of this essay.
*
Among a collection of framed photos that used to hang on my parents’ living room wall was a large sepia print of the Lowe clan assembled at my great uncle Harvey’s apple orchard in Lower Portland some time in the early 1920's. It sits on an overhead shelf in Suzie’s studio now, gathering dust a few metres below me as I write this in my loft study. Spencer stands erect and already balding a little, but a handsome man amongst a rather plain brood. Cleve sits cross-legged in front of him in army boots and de-mob suit unable to resist a faint mischievous leer at the camera, a bushy fringe growing out from the army haircut. He looks thinner than the others, but maybe that was just his build. Either way, he seems far older than his years. All the young men in the picture do, bar Spencer who gazes at the camera with a spark of youthful vigour and curiosity. Otherwise the clan all seem to be defying the damned device to capture them truthfully. Spencer is stood either by accident or design behind my great uncle Cleve’s right shoulder. Both seem to be looking through the camera rather than at it. An austere little gathering, to say the least. No children, no pets. Just Lowes and their frocked up spouses - eight of the fourteen the fruit of Ada’s stupendous loins.
I have always been a little intimidated by this photo (thus its current resting place), always suspected those Hawkesbury Lowes were gazing defiantly out at me, daring me to go one better than them, be tougher and braver than them. But I was not raised to be tough, despite my eight long years at Shore school. I was raised to be pretty much who I am. Independent, reflective to the point of distraction. Sentimental to the point of cloying. Who I am is certainly nothing those Lowes would have had much truck with, with the exception of Cleve perhaps. Cleve intrigues me. Five boys of fighting age and yet Cleve was the only one to go. And there he stands gazing out from amongst those stony-faced Lowes - the sad skinny larrikin.
It is my firm belief my sister and I were raised the way we were for a very good reason, and that reason is glaring back at me across a hundred years from some stony ridge in the upper Hawkesbury. There is just no love in that photo, no colour no joy, other than Cleve’s thin-lipped leer and a little play over Ada’s sweet old face. I get the distinct impression even the birds have taken flight. The nearest thing to love, as far as I can glean, is the proximity of Spencer to Cleve and that far away look in Cleve’s eyes. Because sorrow is a type of love, is it not? And Spencer strikes me as the only other one in that photo with any stomach for it. I think if I had been in Spencer’s place back then I would have found myself worrying a great deal about Cleve.
There may be another explanation for Spencer’s less defiant attitude towards the camera that warm Hawkesbury afternoon, his vague sense of inquiry at the process underway. Thanks to a certain Miss Ellem, my grandfather had developed an interest in the moving pictures, holding hands as the lights went down....
Oct 3: Went to Pictures with Miss Ellem. “Daddy Long Legs”. Got season ticket two pounds 2 shillings and threepence.
Oct 4: Gave season ticket back for alteration. It had 31-12-15 instead of 19.
Oct 15: Took Miss Ellem to Pictures at Hub at night.
The Hub still stood when I first started writing this twenty years ago, on Newtown Bridge beside the old Town Hall, empty and decaying after twenty years as a smut house. In 1920 it advertised itself as “the one and only continuous picture theatre in Newtown”, of which there were eight by then, all with a seating capacity well over the one thousand mark. They were affectionately known as “the flickers”, and Newtown took to them like few other places in the country. The flu closed them down intermittently all through 1919 and well in to 1920, but once the threat was over and the bans were finally lifted, people flocked back to them like battery hens to a nail hole letting in daylight.
I can still remember the fuss made when the twin cinema complex opened on the site of the old Coles New World made famous in the aforementioned song by John Kennedy and the Love Gone Wrong. A cinema in the heart of Newtown, people gasped, what a brilliant idea! I was one of them. Back then (some time in the mid 1990‘s) none of us had the vaguest inkling that Newtown was once able to accomodate 10000 movie goers at eight different cinemas. That’s more people than live in Newtown today. Obviously “the flickers” offered something to people they couldn’t find elsewhere. I doubt the Lowes would have approved of such frivolity. Cleve may have seen one or two dirty “flickers” in Paris during the War and let slip some careless remark in mixed company that damned cameras and their outpourings forever. But that is pure speculation on my part. Once again caricature taking the place of hard facts.
In the 1920's, when young lives were still hemmed in by a strict moral code despite the disruption of the War and the ensuing pandemic, the cinema offered a means of escape, a portal to another world free from care. Miss Ellem’s occasional visits to Spencer’s rented rooms were strictly monitored by the landlady Miss Harrison, and I can only assume that a woman as young as Miss Ellem still lived with relatives. So, the cinema became their haven from prying eyes and the sordid craven little minds of the wowsers. One more reason, of course, why the wowsers despised the cinema so much. It was a point of departure from their mean, blood-slaked, guilt-ridden world. But the roaring twenties were just around the corner, thank God. Without the dark oasis of the cinema they may never have happened at all.
My grandmother loved English, not just because of its dexterity and terse musicality, but for the very simple reason that the English spoke it. They had won the War, as was to be expected. Anyone who wailed about the cost was obviously not English enough. She was a very striking woman, with a high intelligent forehead, thin tapering neck, high cheeks, and narrow slightly Roman nose. She loved the English poets and the American cinema and my grandfather. What Ada made of her is anyone’s guess.
Ada was the forbidding matriarch of the Lowe clan who seems to hover over this narrative like the shadow of a hawk. My father and his sister Jenny were terrified of her. In every photo she wears a vaguely amused but also slightly defiant smirk, and for one who evidently mistrusted the camera so much there are a fair swag of photos of old Ada. I don’t think Spencer’s move to Sydney would have gone down too well with his mother, especially not with Cleve already away at the War. She sits like a veritable anchor straining against the prevailing tide, which Spencer with all his ideas and inventions and new found love of the cinema was more than happy to swim with. It was well and truly his century, afterall, the century of the engineer. If what I glean of Ada is anything more than mere caricature, Spencer would have spent a lot of time rocking the boat with one hand while trying to steady it with the other. Just so Ada could rest easy with her Victorian certainties intact. Somehow I see Miss Ellem slipping in to fill a void here - the Edwardian Anglophile with a passion for tennis and the American “flickers”, pretty and smart, with Spencer’s unwavering belief in the brave new twentieth century world. A civil enough girl, I can almost hear Ada grumbling, with one eye on the road that carried them all away.
As a child of six or seven I was taken (much against my will) to visit the remnants of these dour-faced old Lowes in the dank reaches of the upper Hawkesbury. Ada was well and truly dead by then, as were Spencer and my grandmother, and Cleve god rest his soul. Harvey still had his orchard, but he was getting too old to work it and was weighing up whether to sell it to my father. That was the ostensible reason for our visit to that odd corner of the world, but while there, of course, we were obliged to do the rounds.
In the tiny village of Lower Portland we visited the two surviving sisters, Melvie and Ruby, and their younger brother Harvey. The two women were spinsters, I think, and fussed over my sister and I in the sort of guarded insincere way of people who are little more than children themselves. Ruby’s claim to fame was driving her car off the other end of the Colo punt and living to tell the tale. She and Melvie ran the village post office and telephone exchange, listening in to private calls on the pretext of vetting any “foreigners”. The older brother, Percy, lived in an old shed by the river in order to “get away from the petticoats”, and where he kept a cow named “Strawberry” and about a hundred chooks he called by name at feeding time. These delicious morsels are all courtesy of my late mother who had a preternatural gift for embellishment. I remember watching Percy feed his chooks as I chewed my stale biscuit and sipped my watery cordial. I don’t think I have ever seen someone quite so barking mad or so terrified by his own relatives. He apparently shared Ruby’s gift for imaginative driving, although how he was ever allowed behind the wheel of a car beats me. At the tender age of 90 he rolled his old Scoda on a trip to see his sister in Scone, had it righted by some good Samaritan, and then kept on driving - only back the way he had come. Apparently he didn’t twig until the Hawkesbury came into view. All these people, I remember, exuded the soft camphor dankness of the river, that great catchment of wiry Lowes. Percy just smelled a little more so.
I can’t pretend to know what Miss Ellem made of these extraordinary people. I have only the barest sketch of her own family, and perhaps they were as strange as the Lowes (most families are if you dig deep enough), but not once does Spencer mention his future in-laws in all 365 meticulous diary entries, not even in passing. All I know is that Miss Ellem hailed from a Grafton brood of 8, a second or third generation Tory Scot. Not much more than a statistical smudge, really. It is a common enough precipice in any genealogy, but all the same a source of quiet despair and nagging guilt when you run up against it. As though you should have been paying more attention. Part of the modernist compulsion, I suppose, to sever all ties with the past almost as though our ancestors were some sort of canker whose values grate against our more refined millenial sensibilities. But I can tell you it is anything but liberating to encounter this sort of forgetting first hand. It is stifling, utterly stifling, and I really do blame myself for not having paid more attention to people who are no longer able to speak for themselves. Suddenly I find my life hemmed in where I expected the past to open like some greenhouse orchid. Whole lives gone, forgotten, without a single trace bar a few grainy photographs and some strands of DNA. And for me there is not even that dubious consolation. You see, my sister and I were adopted.
*
Spencer and I don’t share a bloodline. We never even met. At first glance it is a tenuous link. Spencer’s diligence sufficed for three generations. I am currently penning this essay in what is perhaps the final fruits of his labour, as I had no realistic hopes of ever purchasing a house without an inheritance. The first founds, the second builds, the third chronicles.
I am a solitary creature in the main, notoriously so amongst the Sydney literati, something of a contrarian, and I guess I may have passed for a larrikin in my grandfather’s day. I know that was my mother’s take on me, god bless her. Larrikin, according to the Macquarie Dictionary, is (formerly) a lout, a hoodlum. 2. a mischievous young person. ?[Brit. (Warwickshire and Worcestershire). The word is probably derived from the archaic colloquial larrup meaning to beat or thrash. I am not really prone to either, so maybe I flatter myself that I am really that spirited. My great uncle Cleve was most definitely a larrikin, the perfect foil for Spencer who, for all his managerial verve, seems to have possessed little talent for reading a room. In his diary people appear as merely one factor in an equation. Not once does my grandfather speculate on what the people he encountered from day to day may have been thinking or feeling. Mrs White, for instance, watching the flu take her son, or Ray Waters watching it do the same to his mother. To arrive at my conclusions about Cleve’s state of mind on returning from the War, I had to rely on family anecdotes which I then added to the few clinical incidentals recorded in Spencer’s diary. That Cleve was a larrikin seems beyond doubt. A true larrikin needs to be able to read people in order to be able to anticipate their reactions. Otherwise they’re nothing more than a nuisance.
In Cleve and Spencer we have to some extent the ying and yang of Edwardian provincialism. Or is it the Ego and the Id? I will leave that to the slightly more qualified. That they developed such an effective working relationship says a lot about the larrikin’s place in what was still a young and archly conservative provincial society. The War had pulled the scales from the eyes of many, while at the same time offering a young society a glimpse of its place in the world. There died a myriad, mourned Ezra Pound, And of the best, among them,/For an old bitch gone in the teeth/For a botched civilisation. The millions of disaffected were rubbing their eyes and slowly drifting to either the left or the right. Once again the similarities to our own time is surely a cause for concern.
Today an effective act of rebellion against the status quo requires direct engagement, not that brand of nihilistic detachment so beloved of the Romantics. There is nothing particularly noble or effete about direct action. It is up-to-your-elbows stuff. Greta Thurnberg may be the exception that proves the rule. What all activists share in the present day is a sense that time is running out. Security organisations around the world are trained to regard every single citizen as a potential terrorist without necessarily designating a cause. For instance, according to an Amnesty International report: The wording of the Hong Kong national security law asserts jurisdiction over people who are not residents of Hong Kong and have never even set foot there. This means anyone on Earth, regardless of nationality or location, can technically be deemed to have violated this law and face arrest and prosecution if they are in a Chinese jurisdiction, even for transit. Accused foreign nationals who don’t permanently reside in Hong Kong can be deported even before any trial or verdict.
Were this essay to ever see the light of day, in other words, I may find myself outlawed in the Middle Kingdom for simply pointing out the flaccid terminology in their legislation.
A larrikin like Cleve would not have stood a chance in such an environment, but sadly the Middle Kingdom does not have a monopoly on draconian laws. And I’m not so sure the relationship between citizen and authority was so very different in 1919, except that the potential “terrorist” may have been a bit more difficult to spot. Last year the Australian Federal Police raided the offices of journalists on two separate occasions for no greater crime than simply doing their job of bringing the powerful to account. As the old Chinese curse has it, may you live in interesting times.
*
Cleve enlisted into the first AIF on the ninth of March 1917. He returned to Australia on the twenty-first of December 1918, a total of twenty-one months and twelve days serving the interests of Empire and what passed then for the liberal order. Why he went at all is anyone’s guess, especially in 1917 when things were go so very badly for the Allies on every front, even in East Africa. But we probably shouldn’t overlook my great uncle’s larrikin streak, the thirst for a bit of larrup. The 1914-18 war seemed to hold an innate and often fatal attraction for the larrikin. By 1917, assuredly, many of his ilk had tired a little of the joke. Larrup had a sting in its tail. But being from the bush meant Cleve may not have been privy to the growing casualty lists in the Sydney papers. And there’s the chance that with many of his mates already joined he may simply have been bored and at a loose end.
So, in March 1917 Cleve joined the AIF as an infantryman just as the Tsar was busy looking for a new set of digs. His brother, Spencer, had won a place at Sydney University, but study wasn’t Cleve’s thing at all. After Major General Godley’s call for the formation of a Fifth Division, recruitment posters were beckoning the young and impressionable from every newspaper, magazine and store window. Miraculously, out of a brood of five boys and three girls, Cleve was the only one to sign up. Ada no doubt nipped any tart whispers in the bud about her stay-at-home boys, but all the same there was a perverse mathematics operating in families at the time that dictated sotto voce the fate of seventy million Cleves across the globe.
Cleve Lowe, infantryman no. 3883, stepped into this blind mellee with a fair idea, no doubt, of how many had already stepped in and how their absence was beginning to tear at the very fabric of the world he knew. But he went all the same. Cleve Lowe, infantryman no. 3883, sailed to Egypt with the 56th Battalion of the 14th Infantry Brigade of Godley’s 5th Division and was away 21 months and 12 days, not counting two agonising months in quarantine at North Head. Not one letter from him survives that I can trace. The whole sorry adventure has become so much food for the moths and the worms.
Under the command of Major General JJ Talbot Hobbs, Cleve’s 56th Battalion would have seen action in the Second Battle of Bullecourt where the 5th Division relieved the 1st against furious German counterattacks in early May 1917. It followed this up in September by turning an allied defeat into a major victory at the Battle of Polygon Wood where the Division’s memorial now stands. Mercifully Cleve’s name appears on no white cross there. He was an RTA (Returned to Australia), unlike many of the Lowes around him on the nominal roll in the digitised records of the Australian War Memorial who appear as either KIA (Killed in Action) or DOW (Died of Wounds by the end of 1921 which was the cut-off date for the widow’s pension). My limited military knowledge tells me a standard Australian Division in the World Wars consisted of 20,000 men. By war’s end the 5th Division had sustained 32,180 casualties, 20% of whom were dead. Quite a turnover of men for a war that, even by the end of 1917, still had only vague objectives.
Such statistics present a bewlidering anomaly to this novice historian. Because according to official estimates in the War Memorial records, between 1916 and 1918 on the Western Front alone the AIF sustained 387,433 casualties out of a total fighting force of just over 330,000. Yes, you read that right, and it goes without saying that not all members of the first AIF were posted to the Western Front, that the campaigns in Africa, Iraq and Palestine required thousands of men. So the anomaly grows even starker. What we are left with is a casualty rate somewhere in the vicinity of 120% after some rough adjustments. It can mean only one of two things: either that the figures are wrong, which after 100 years of endless scrutiny I am confident they are not, or more probably that the manpower crisis was so acute on the Western Front that the wounded were more often than not simply patched up and ferried back to the fighting. A macarbre treadmill. “Getting back to Blighty” almost seems like a death wish in the circumstances.
Cleve could only have been in the line a very short time before general mutiny broke out in the French sector to the south. Maybe he was still too busy finding his feet to catch on, but I figure if he was ready to break quarantine a year later in Sydney Harbour in plain view of family and friends, then the larrikin in him would have soon enough pricked his ears to the whispers. The recruitment posters in the general store at Lower Portland had been spouting a bald-faced lie. Nothing and no-one back home had left him with a snowball’s chance in hell of surviving any of this. Which, of course, was precisely the sort of talk people didn’t want to hear when the troops finally made it home in 1919. It didn’t help that they brought the flu back with them, but to those who had stayed at home the returned diggers seemed changed for the worse, brash and “bolshy”, their manners deserted them. They drank and they argued and they leered at the women. They screamed and shivered in their sleep and mumbled curses at everything they once held dear like fickle children being forced to play last summer’s games. Look long and hard enough into Cleve’s narrow eyes, even in that grainy old photo on the Hawkesbury ridge, and you will see all this and more. Within a year, two, three, once the flu had subsided and people could gather again, the entire continent was peppered with stone obelisks commemorating the “Gallant Fallen” as though the virus the troops had brought back with them had infected the very stone and brought it up in great welts. It seems the only way the Spencers and Adas and Miss Ellems of this world knew to make these broken men feel welcome was to remind them daily of the “cobbers” they had left behind.
*
When Newtown Public School first opened its doors King street was little more than a rutted dirt track known as the Cooks River road. It was often impassable to all but the single rider on horseback, and the wilds at its southern end where the famous smokestacks now stand had proved a popular hideout for runaway convicts and AWOL sailors for many years. In that distant year of 1863, 201 children were enrolled at the new makeshift school with an average attendance of 132. The world was still devoid of an Italy or a Germany, both still a jumble of bristling feudatories, and Karl Marx was still thumbing through papers halfway through a thirty year odyssey in the Reading Room of the British Museum. The Lords of England were still refusing their Queen’s request to make her husband King, and the British Army was in the throes of relinquishing the six colonies of this island (they were needed elsewhere). Fourteen years later the world finally had its Italy and its Germany, the Australian colonies had rated a mention in Das Kapital, and attendance at Newtown Public School had doubled in line with the marked improvement in educational standards right across the country.
In 1877, 3/4 of an acre was purchased from a Mr Newman for 1500 pounds on the school’s present site (now known as Newtown School of Performing Arts). Chances are this was the same Mr Newman who lent his name to the street running along the school’s northern perimeter and who himself ran a small school in Church street (then known as Camperdown Road). However, enrollment numbers continued to climb as a result of local growth and a government push on literacy. By 1880, 1,145 children were enrolled at the school, ten years later the figure had climbed to 1,659, and so on into the early years of the new century until by 1924 it was estimated that, if all the pupils stood together in the playground, each would have an area of 5cm by 8cm to themself
I believe I have three very good reasons for attributing this observation to my grandfather. Firstly, it is precisely the sort of take he would have on school overcrowding. Not the human element but the mathematical one. Secondly, the measurements are not imperial but metric, and Spencer hailed from a profession that secretly coveted the metric system. And thirdly, both Spencer and Miss Ellem taught at the school - she full-time, he every Sunday. As fate would have it, the school was officially listed as a Junior Technical School in - you guessed it - 1919. I have no trouble picturing my grandfather wowing a crowded class room of scab-kneed children with his latest gismo or, for that matter, taking to the playground with a French “yardstick”. Perhaps, after all, that was how he met Miss Ellem. In the musty corridors of Mr GA Mansfield’s imposing Victorian edifice, King street Newtown, a stone’s throw from the Sandringham Hotel from whence, 25 years ago, we could still hear the class room bells and ruefully raise our flat schooners to the solemn chinless man lowering the flag every day at 4pm.
Spencer had, by all familial reports, a natural gift for teaching, which I find surprising considering his lack of human empathy in the diaries, but perhaps he was buoyed by his sense of mission and his obvious talents as an engineer. By September word had spread to the Newtown School of Arts where he was invited to take a class in engineering and design.
Dec 27: School of arts at night. Introduced new indoor game.
The indoor game was CRIX, another Spencer Lowe brainchild from which I will never see a red farthing. He seems to have taken an unusually keen interest in the destiny of this particular invention and over a number of years cemented a deal with a manufacturer and even received the glowing endorsement of a young Don Bradman. But once again, what happened to the patent is anyone’s guess. As far as I can tell CRIX was an early version of indoor cricket complete with its own set of rules, bat size, stump height etc. But almost inexorably Spencer’s restless mind moved on to the next project. Miss Ellem, perhaps?
Unlike his brother Cleve, who married Anna just before his embarkation for Cairo, Spencer had still done none of the things expected of a fit young man in the early years of the twentieth century. All this furious activity, all this civic-mindedness, may be my grandfather’s way of compensating for that apparent lack, or perhaps he was just like that and I am reading too much into what after all is really none of my business. As I have already made pretty clear, not a single raw emotion is expressed in all 365 meticulous entries in Spencer’s diary, but what I think I have also made pretty clear is the ease with which a young man from the bush found his footing in the local community. Then as now, Newtown seemed to welcome input from all comers.
On October 29, exactly ten years before the Wall street crash and forty-five years before the advent of yours truly, my grandmother was admitted to hospital with some mysterious complaint.
Oct 29: Lunch at VWA. Tea at Railway. Went to hospital with Heather Ellem at night.
It has taken almost eleven months for Spencer to refer to his future spouse by her first name, but better late than never I suppose. Heather’s problems must have been pretty serious. Spanish flu, most likely. Then as now the effects of the virus tended to be amplified by any sort of underlying condition, and Heather Ellem sat in that age group that the 1919 virus seemed to take such perverse delight in attacking. Twelve days before this nasty turn of events, Spencer may have temped the gods somewhat.
Oct 17: Spent evening at Miss Ellem’s. Missed last train home. Bought ring for use when wanted. (My emphasis)
Spencer appears to have made up his mind. It was no longer a matter of if but when. My grandfather was not a man prone to rash decisions, and Heather Ellem was certainly not the type to be pressed into anything. The trains stopped running at ten.
My grandmother was in hospital for exactly a week. As far as I can glean from the experience of our current pandemic, a week is all you need to shake off the worst of it if you are young and relatively healthy and receive the proper care early enough. That said, as I write the current virus has just notched up its millionth victim, so maybe it’s not quite as simple as that. I am speculating all over the place here, because there is no mention in Spencer’s diary of what ailed the love of his life, not even what hospital she was admitted to, and certainly no reflection on how she may or may not have coped in a place that had taken on a whole new and more sinister context for soldier and civilian alike since the winter of 1914.
Despite keeping a diary that reads like a ledger book, I know Spencer loved and respected Heather Ellem, not just because they were married ‘til death did them part through all the trials of Great Depression and a second world war, but because of something Peter my father used to say almost without thinking whenever someone asked me as a shy little kid what I hoped to be one day: “He’d make a bloody great teacher,” he used to croak all misty-eyed to some distant point about a foot above my head.
*
Wedged into the top right hand corner of page 186 of the Jubilee Souvenier of the Municipality of Newtown (published 1912), above an advertisement for “AN Briggs The Model Coachworks”, and beside an advertisement for “The Newtown Chronicle and Lang Leader (The only printed paper in Newtown)”, sits a rather plain-looking advertisement for The Sandringham Hotel which boasts “The Best of BEER in Newtown”. The boast would seem risible by the end of the century.
According to council records the Sandringham would have been 42 years old in 1912. That would make it one of the oldest surviving pubs in Western Sydney. At the time of writing it has been converted into a cocktail bar and indoor mini-golf course for a mindset I am afraid I cannot even begin to fathom. When it first opened its doors to the dust of Cooks River Road, Newtown could boast twenty pubs, a fact that may explain why the Tooth family, famous Sydney brewers, are all buried in St Stephen’s cemetery just off King street.
By the late 1970‘s Newtown and its industrial satellites were emptying as the factories closed down and the people died or moved away. In 1979 Lowe’s Bus Service ceased operations after 60 years, and if there was barely a soul riding the buses there can’t have been many around to captain their glass canoes. Like every other business in the vicinity, the “Sando” was feeling the pinch, and eventually the pub was sold to some enterprising soul who opted to cater to the fledgling student and art community’s hunger for live music. And so the “Sando” legend was born on a couple of chunks of plywood and a clutch of stolen milk crates, a makeshift stage that each visiting performer was obliged to assemble themselves.
It was never a pretty place. The beer was flat, the service grudging, the PA likewise. It was absurdly small for such a legendary venue, and most of the floor space was dominated by a large island bar. There was next to no ventilation so that by nine at night summer or winter the steam from 200 sweating bodies would roll out the door like the tongue of some mythical creature. But drop by at four any afternoon and you would have witnessed a tribe gathering.
I have spoken a lot about community in this essay/memoir. It was important to my grandfather as he found his feet in Newtown, and it was important to his grandson seventy years later. People sometimes confuse “community” with “society” the way I imagine my grandfather confusing “civic” with “civil”. Once again I refer you to the Macquarie Dictionary where society is defined as: (1) “a body of individuals living as members of a community; (11) any community”. There are 13 definitions in all, many appearing to conflate society with community. But if the past hundred years have taught us anything it is that society is a body deriving both power and identity from an exterior and fundamentally abstract source. Community, on the other hand, draws its power and identity from within. Its “god” manifests itself from inside the circle. Thus the inspiration for my poem, “God Drinks at the Sandringham” and the ensuing song by The Whitlams. “God" was the tribe gathered around that island bar. For a while it paid my rent.
*
As I come to the end of this piece, reports have come through that the President of the United States is on a ventilator in John Reed Hospital, having tested positive for COVID-19 three or four days ago. He is in his 70‘s and overweight with a famously poor diet, so the doctors are justifiably concerned. Many of his aides and Republican colleagues have also succumbed to the virus after blithely ignoring all expert medical opinion (not to mention the mounting death toll) since March. The virus continues to claim anywhere between 5000 and 10000 lives a day across the globe, and if history is anything to go by we probably have another year of this. In 1919 President Woodrow Wilson, also ignoring expert medical advice regarding the flu pandemic, fell victim to the disease in Paris while attending the Peace Conference. Like the current President, Wilson failed to recognise the real and present threat the pandemic posed while his focus was trained on the War and the nature of the ensuing Peace. He survived, but 650,000 of his fellow Americans were not so lucky. Echoing the saner voices of 100 years ago, Democrat presidential hopeful Joe Biden is calling the wearing of masks an “act of patriotism” in the fight to defeat the current virus and save American lives. Now that the virus has found its way into the highest echelons of power, let us hope the powerful and priviliged begin to listen to the voices of reason, the scientists.
My grandfather, Spencer Lowe, married Heather Ellem in 1920. She continued teaching at Newtown Public School and Spencer continued to pour all his time and energy into Lowe’s Bus Service. In 1924 Heather gave birth to my aunty Jenny, and two years later my father Peter Spencer was born in Cambridge street Stanmore. Eventually Spencer’s business would fold at the height of the Great Depression and the family lived for a time on the enclosed verandah of my great uncle Wes’s house in Annandale. When my father finally got out of the airforce he grabbed a handful of mates and drove down to Adelaide where he purchased a fleet of Bedford buses the army no longer needed. Thus Lowe’s Bus Service was reborn in 1946 or 47.
I have no information at all on my great uncle Cleve, other than that he married Anna and that he was dead before I ever got a chance to meet him. Once again, I regret not having the presence of mind to ask more questions when I had the chance, but they are all gone now and it is just my sister and I left.
The community of Newtown as I knew it is no more. People buy what others have made and convince themselves they own it. But bricks and mortar does not a community make, and we are all of us simply passing through.
- © Justin Lowe 6/10/2020
Justin Lowe lives in a house called “Doug” in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney where he edits poetry blog Bluepepper. He is an internationally published poet and reviewer and has just released his eighth collection of poetry, Hall of Mirrors. He has also had poems put to music by such acts as The Whitlams and The Impossibles. His poems have most recently appeared in Meanjin, Blue Nib (Ireland), Stylus Poetry, Rochford Street Review, and Cortland Review (US).
Bibliography and notes for further reading:
1) Municipality of Newtown Jubliee Souvenir (sic), Published by Authority of the Mayor and Aldermen of the Municipal Council of Newtown, 1912. [https://www.newtownproject.com.au/jubilee-souvenir-1912/]
2) Diamond Jubliee Souvenir (sic) of the Municipality of Newtown (with which is included the important Districts of Enmore and King Street, St. Peters), 1922. [https://www.newtownproject.com.au/connections/jubilee-souvenirs/1922-2/]
3) 56th Australian Infantry Battalion References:
AWM4/23/73/1-23/73/39:56th Battalion war diary
Fletcher, Nick; Tibbitts, Craig, The Half Hundredweights: the 56th Battalion in the First World War, 1916-1919 (Australian Military History Publications)
4) You went there for the people and went there for the bands, The Sandringham Hotel - 1980-1998, Brendan Paul Smyly, Doctor of Philosophy, University of Western Sydney, Aug. 2010
5) Rock & Roll, debauchery and the Sandringham Hotel, by Poppy Reid, 2016, [https://redbull.com/au-en/the-wonder-years-of-the-sandringham-hotel]
6) Lenertz, AF (1891-1943), Newtown is an Old Town (that I love), Kia-Ora Song Co., 1923
7) Tim Freedman, Justin Lowe, God Drinks at the Sando, Black Yak Phantom, 1999
8) John Kennedy, King Street, Red Eye Records, Nov. 1985
There are also two wonderful online resources courtesy of the Commonwealth government that I highly recommend:
Trove [https://trove.nla.gov.au/]
The Australian War Memorial Archive [https://www.awm.gov.au/research/guide/service-records]
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