Transnational Ties

Australian lives in the world

Table of Contents

Preliminary Pages

Introduction

Mapping transnational lives

Archival fragments

1. The Old Commodore: a transnational life

2. Biography and global history

Methodological considerations
Biography, historiography and global history
The comparative model

3. ‘A fine type of Hindoo’ meets ‘the Australian type’

The ‘manly Sikh’
The ‘effeminate Bengali’
Restrictive legislation and masculinity
Good citizens
Conclusion

4. A British prince and a transnational life

A British prince
National ties
The Royal Navy
The Melbourne Club
Conclusion

5. Enacting the international: R. G. Watt and the League of Nations Union

Introduction
‘Idealism, energy and persistence’: making space for the international
‘A fiery orator’: finding a voice for international awareness
‘Let’s imagine Geneva’: evoking the international
Conclusion

6. Love, loss and ‘going Home’: the intimate lives of Victorian settlers

7. A journey of love: Agnes Breuer’s sojourn in 1930s China

A sensational story
Australian wives in China
Agnes and William
A Chinese holiday
Transnational families
Family
White Australia
Personal journeys and public scrutiny
Postscript

8. Life stories, family relations and the ‘lens of migration’

9. ‘I’m not a good mother’: gender expectations and tensions in a migrant woman’s life story

10. First love and Italian postwar migration stories

11. The Pacific as rhizome

12. A transnational imagination: Alfred Deakin’s reading lists

A fin de siècle imagination
Conclusion

Imagination

13. From cosmopolitan romance to transnational fiction

14. Paris and beyond

Challenge
A shared past
City spaces
Two weddings and a proletariat
Conclusion

15. Australian ‘immersion’ narratives: memoirs of contemporary language travel

Bouras, A Foreign Wife
Turnbull, Almost French
Mateer, Semar’s Cave
Conclusion

16. America and the queer diaspora: the case of artist David McDiarmid

Nomadic subjectivity and the city
Art, sex, politics and America
America as fantasy
McDiarmid’s ‘America’ and gay liberation
The imagined city
Art and sex
Before Mayor Giuliani’s ‘zero-tolerance’ New York
‘America’ and cultural excess
Ecstasy and utopia in McDiarmid’s New York work
Conclusion

Objects of displacement

17. Living in a material world: object biography and transnational lives

Object biography
Object biography and Australian Journeys
Object biography: Guna Kinne’s Latvian national dress
Dàn tre bamboo musical instrument created by Minh Tam Nguyen
Conclusion: objects make a transnational life

Contributors

The Editors
Contributors

Illustrations

Figure 1.1: Billy Blue, The Old Commodore.
Figure 2.1: Eyre and Wylie, one of his Aboriginal companions.
Figure 2.2: Edward John Eyre, 1865, the year of the Morant Bay rebellion.
Figure 2.3: Edward John Eyre c. 1900
Figure 3.1: Otim Singh, an Indian man in business, Kingscote, South Australia.
Figure 4.1: HRH Prince Alfred, KG, Duke of Edinburgh in naval uniform.
Figure 4.2: The Governor’s Ball at the Exhibition Buildings, The Royal Party Dancing the Scotch Reel, 27 December 1867.
Figure 4.3: A Saylore on Horse-backe, ye Adelaide Troops are reviewed bye a Prussian Colonel, 1868.
Figure 5.1: An earnest group: Ray Watt is second from the right in the front row among the delegates at the League of Nations Union Annual Meeting and Conference in Canberra, 28-31 January 1938.
Figure 6.1: Murndal Homestead. Samuel Cooke inherited it from his uncle Samuel Pratt Winter in 1878.
Figure 6.2: Niel Black, who was born in Argyllshire, Scotland, shared a love of Scottish regalia with Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh.
Figure 6.3: Emu Creek, c. 1880, near where the manager of Glenormiston Station, before Niel Black purchased it, led a massacre of the traditional custodians.
Figure 6.4: Glenormiston Homestead in 1868. Niel Black waits in Scottish regalia to greet Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, during the duke’s Australian tour.
Figure 7.1: Agnes and William Lum Mow, with baby William, Shekki, August 1932. Agnes Breuer told Australian reporters that William Lum Mow’s Chinese wife was ‘furiously jealous’ of this photograph (Telegraph, 4 October 1932). She sent the picture to her parents from China and it was published in the Daily Mail on 26 September 1932 under the heading ‘A cheerful couple’.
Figure 7.2: ‘Water Front, Shekki, Canton, June 1932’, taken during Agnes Breuer’s visit to China.
Figure 7.3: Thomas Lum Mow (front) in the Lum Mow family store, Townsville, c. 1931.
Figure 7.4: Agnes Breuer (back centre) and William Lum Mow (back left) picnicking with friends in Townsville, c. late 1931.
Figure 8.1: ‘Nomads on the Move Again’: modern migrants. Since the 1960s migrants have tended to see themselves as inherently mobile and transnational.
Figure 9.1: ‘The end of a perfect birthday’ (caption in photograph album). Dorothy Wright reading to her children, Nicholas and Bridget, at home in Hornsby Heights, Sydney, on Bridget’s first birthday, 25 March 1961.
Figure 9.2: Caption in Wright photo album, 1960: ‘Under our gum tree. 13 weeks old (not the gum tree or Dossie).’ Dorothy wanted to show off her new baby in this photo, which she sent to family in England, but the look on her face hints that all was not well.
Figure 9.3: ‘Dorothy on beach by the surf’ (caption from family photograph album), Hawks Nest, March 1963.
Figure 10.1: Italian migrants at Broken Hill mines, 1953.
Figure 10.2: Il Salotto di Lena.
Figure 11.1: Henry Alexander Wickham.
Figure 11.2: (Andre) C. H. Wright, bromeliaceae Bromelia magdalenae, 1923.
Figure 12.1: Alfred Deakin with book in hand.
Figure 13.1: Jean Devanny, 1920s.
Figure 14.1: Christina Stead, 1940s.
Figure 14.2: Eleanor Dark, ca 1945.
Figure 15.1: Cover, John Mateer, Semar’s Cave: an Indonesian Journal.
Figure 16.1: David McDiarmid, Alphabet City, 1983–84.
Figure 16.2: David McDiarmid, Juicy fruits: Ralph, Joe, Frank…, 1978.
Figure 16.3: David McDiarmid, Disco Kwilt, c. 1980.
Figure 17.1: This Latvian national dress was made and worn by Guna Kinne (nee Klasons) in Latvia, Germany and Australia in the second half of the twentieth century.
Figure 17.2: The front and back of the jacket made by Guna Kinne, and the pattern book illustrations used to trace the designs.
Figure 17.3: Guna Kinne wearing her Lativan national dress in Wangaratta in 1955.
Figure 17.4: The bonnet from Guna Kinne’s national dress.
Figure 17.5: Good Neighbour Council group in their national costumes waiting to greet Princess Alexandra, in Wangaratta, 1959.
Figure 17.6: Guna Kinne wearing her Latvian national dress in Melbourne in 1970.
Figure 17.7: The dàn tre, a 23-stringed bamboo musical instrument.
Figure 17.8: Minh with the dàn tre at his home in Sydney, March 1990.