history | The Australian Friend

Australian Friend 2012 – Living memories of an old Friend in a time of change.

1212 December 2012, Issue No Responses »

Nov 272012

Garry Duncan, Wies Schuiringa, Mark Johnson, New South Wales Regional Meeting; with contributions from past Australian Friend editors.

From humble beginnings with a difficult task in connecting Friends across a vast land mass in an age of slower moving transport, the Australian Friend set about creating a Quaker community in the Antipodes in 1887. This year has seen the Australian Friend move from the care of Queensland regional meeting to that of New South Wales. The other significant change for AF has been its launch onto the internet under the inspiration of Ian Hughes and a team of volunteers. Such a new forum has opened the possibility of the Australian Friend not only being more accessible to the Yearly Meeting – and primarily focussing upon the needs and interests of the meeting in a digital age – but also beyond it and, too, beyond Quakers.

The Australian Friend now continues to minister to its primary Australian Yearly Meeting audience, but in many ways is now also a vehicle of outreach far and beyond the Yearly Meeting. Now being online, as many people both nationally and globally who may be curious about Quakers can now access the Australian Friend as a resource, and also engage with the life and thought of the Australian yearly meeting.

Being online also means both opening and deepening Quaker thought and life to a larger and more enquiring global community of Friends, and that of the diverse world beyond Friends. With this in mind, the current editorial team has encouraged a broadening and deepening quality of articles from our contributors so to speak to as many readers as possible. From articles ranging from the more rigorous to the more ‘warming’, we hope that the breadth and depth of both our local and now international readership is engaged.

Several Brisbane Friends agreed to take on editing The Australian Friend in 2002. They had in mind a collective editorship, with a committee making decisions together and the individuals taking on the chores for different issues. That was a comfort to Duncan Frewin back then, since he hadn’t done much editing before, and watching very experienced editors like Susan Addison at work was a revelation. Working together like that was a good example of the ups and downs of any co-operative project. They came up with better ideas after the discussions, but group decisions take time. And time was a problem when articles arrived late, after the editorial meetings. Eventually cost pressures saw the AF reduce from five issues a year to four.

Editing turned out to be one of the pleasures of Duncan’s life: Writing an article is risky – you offer yourself, your thoughts and words to the world. If the right words come to you, they are a gift to the reader. So sometimes there was the pleasure of finding a gem of an article that spoke directly to me. But if the words weren’t just right, the thoughts come out skewed, and you can feel ‘exposed’. So then the pleasure was working with the author to make their ideas clearer to the reader, sometimes even discovering together what the kernel of the message really was. Always it meant making a deeper connection with the author. The other gift that the authors gave was the gift of trust – allowing us to meddle with their words in trust that our changes would be useful. For all that I am extremely grateful.

David Purnell and Christine Larkin remember when they took over as editors in the 1990s at the time the AF was produced five times a year in hard copy, and was still the main form of communication across the Yearly Meeting community:

This meant that it was the vehicle for (a) substantial articles on spiritual thought and Quaker concerns; (b) Quaker Service Australia stories from around the world and Indigenous Australia; (c) details of action taken for peace and social justice by YM officers and committees in relation to government; (d) notices about major events including Yearly Meeting, RM gatherings, and FWCC conferences; (e) a page for children and families; (f) poetry; (g) book reviews; (h) stories about the lives of particular Friends within the YM; and (i) changes of membership.

The timetable was tight. Each edition required choosing and assembling material by us as editors in consultation with a conscientious committee, getting it formatted by a trusty assistant (Peter Farrelly) and making sure it reached the distributor (National Mailing and Marketing) in time to be dispatched at the beginning of the relevant month. We managed to stick to this timetable despite some stressful moments. Occasionally this process was complicated by the need to include inserts (eg YM registration forms in September).

Overall enough material for the journal was received in a timely manner, although on occasion we did seek contributions on particular themes. There was a ‘letters to the editor’ section that ensured some feedback from readers, and provided the occasional challenge.

They were heartened to discover copies of the AF in the library at Swarthmore College when we spent time at Pendle Hill Quaker Centre in USA in 2000.

Charles and Elizabeth Stevenson edited the Australian Friend for seven years, 1989-1995. This was the period when computers were just coming into general use. Thus, almost all articles and news came through the post, hand written or typed. This meant much work for the editors in preparing camera-ready copy for the printer. The Australian Friend was then set up for the actual printing, after having been returned to us for checking. How elusive were those typing errors!

Elizabeth brought to the editorship an innovative mind. It was her idea to have a Junior Friends’ page, and also the popular “Know One Another” series. Like her grandfather journalist she was always “sharply on the watch” for news and articles. Perhaps the chief delight of editorship was the “wrapping up” evening when they folded and enveloped the Australian Friend, after which all our helpers, many of whom were young Friends, joined for a hearty meal in a nearby restaurant.

Back in the early 1980s David Evans embarked on an exciting adventure editing the Australian Friend. It featured Ruth Haig, Presiding Clerk for YM 1982 on the front cover of the first issue, with an added supplement written by Ngaire Thorp all about The Quaker Shop in Adelaide in the following July. Each issue was special and we now keep bound volumes of these AF’s on our library shelves.

The committee would meet in time for the next issue sitting around the table. The contributions, each in a manila folder, were passed around and the committee members would tick check boxes indicating, must go in, might go in, or not this time. The editor then worked out the details.

Handing over was an adventure in itself related to Quaker process. Thinking it was time to hand over after 3 years, I asked our Regional Meeting if anybody in Tasmania was interested. As there was no response I asked Yearly Meeting to find a new editor. At Yearly Meeting, a nominations committee representative asked Topsy Evans if she would be interested. Suddenly surprised and pleased she said yes. And so for another four years the production of the AF centred in our Evans home with a slightly modified committee.

Memories of the period when either David or Topsy were the Editors are still very warm. Those were the days when the AF had to be collated and stapled by hand, by willing and sometimes not so willing members of the family and friends who walked and walked around our dining room table in Hobart, picking up the pages in order, before stapling them. The stapled copies were then sealed with sticky tape, labelled, and sorted into postcode order on the floor, ready to be presented to the Post Office. It took several attempts for the first issue or two before the Post Office was happy with our sorting. They still remember the overwhelming sense of relief when we finally achieved the desired result. The really positive side of this labour-intensive process was that every copy brought to mind the person to whom it was to be sent and gave us a sense of knowing our readership in a personal way.

Ross Cooper recalls that in his case, he believes Friends did him a great favour in appointing him editor from 1974 to 1979 when he was new to Friends – it was a commitment that kept him coming and it made Ross the centre of a lot of love and attention which he needed then.

Ross was impressed by what he was told on the day he was appointed. First Julie Gee on the selection committee assured Ross earnestly that he wouldn’t be able to please everybody, and when he returned to his dormitory Alf Clarke, with whom he was sharing the room, told him emphatically that “Friends will work a willing horse to death!” Ross was also very struck by the way the Committee sounded out Maxine on his appointment because there would be “spill-over”, something that wasn’t done when Maxine accepted appointment as Presiding Clerk.

He saw the role as being the “servant” of the editorial committee who in turn were the servant of the Yearly Meeting, but soon realized that Friends liked to have one person responsible.

The previous editor, Diana Pittock was excellent in showing Ross the ropes and he was very impressed by the way she then backed out and didn’t try to interfere like some bleeding deacon. She left it to Ross and the committee. The Committee was fantastic and he remembers Mark Deasy as having a “rapier like editing pen” and others who excelled as sounding boards about what was to be prayerfully included and what was not.

In those days there was only one real controversy, and he remembers receiving many criticisms from including a reference to Gays and Lesbian Friends meeting at a forthcoming YM. It seemed perfectly reasonable to him since we also mentioned vegetarians to be meeting there and so on, but it upset quite a few Friends in remote places like islands around Tasmania he had never heard of.

The actual process of putting the issue “to bed” was always nerve-wracking, but serendipity-like he always got just enough copy and was able to lay it out and get it published just in time every two months.

Diana Pittock was asked to become editor of the AF after encouragement by Alastair Heron, the previous editor, with whom she co-edited a few issues during 1973, and then a couple with Erica Groom that year. It was a daunting task to focus on at first, with three small children and commitments in the community too, but with the support of Barrie Pittock she agreed and edited until March 1977.

The first issue followed the visit by Charlotte Meacham to Australia from FWCC at the invitation of Australian Friends to reflect to us the situation and needs that she observed in Aboriginal Australia. Her report, Listen to the Aborigines is still relevant today and we Friends realised then how little we knew from the Aboriginal perspective. This is still so now. It was also the time of the end of the Vietnam War, with the last US and Australian troops leaving; the fall of Saigon to follow in 1975. Peace issues were firmly supported by Friends of course. So such peace and social justice concerns were at the forefront for Friends and influenced the ‘A.F.’s content.

Diana did not always write a ‘commentary’, but as a Friend concerned with peace, Aboriginal and other social justice issues these tended to be aspects of Friends’ life and work that she noted for inclusion when relevant to Friends. Education, children and issues raised by Young Friends were also topics of note at the time.

Special issues were compiled. In September 1975, in International Women’s Year, a ‘women’s issue’ came together with contributions from over fourteen women Friends. It brought together women’s views on topics from peace and feminism to women in the Bible and Quaker history. Two issues, July and September 1976, were guest-edited by Young Friends and presented concerns in a fresh format. The response was the greatest the editorial committee had received and covered a wide range of views. One Friend lamented the emphasis on social justice issues and wanted more spiritual content, some delighted in the lively style and the illustrations while others found some of the language challenging. It is worth looking at what does arouse Quakers!

For the ‘A.F.’ there is always a balance of spiritual matters, Friends’ concerns and the ‘in-house’ matters of meetings and reports. Only so much can be encouraged by the editor who is largely dependent on the readers and contributors. However, the editor is influenced by what speaks to them in their Quaker life. It has been a rewarding time for all who have been editors over the years and the AF continues to encourage, challenge and bind Friends together in the life lived as Friends in the land down under.

Name changes:

- From 1887 until 16 February 1915 “The Australian Friend”

- From March 1915 until 20 October 1935 “The Australasian Friend” to show our closer links with New Zealand Friends and then “The Friend of Australia and New Zealand” until 20 December 1946.

-From 1947 onwards “The Australian Friend”

Membership numbers

1854: 284

1875: 373

1890: 517

1900: 504

1909: 551

1920: 654

1930: 783

1940: 632

1950: 711

1960: 824

1970: 976

1980: 1099

(2012): 944

Footprints.

From: The First Editor by Charles Stevenson

“William Benson, the first editor of the Australian Friend from 1887 – 1889 served the Society with great efficiency. He was a tall, commanding figure, “possessed of a natural courtesy”. He had the unique distinction of being clerk of three Australian Monthly meetings: Melbourne, Hobart and Sydney. This was because he managed local branches of a shipping firm. Moreover, he was clerk of the Melbourne Annual Meeting for eight years, clerk of two Australasian inter-colonial conferences of Friends in 1888 and in 1901. Not only was he involved in the selection of the first headmaster for Friends School, but it was he who, on behalf of the school committee, purchased “Hobartville” the Commercial Road site of the Friends School.

William Benson came out from England at age 19. He married Emma Elizabeth Mather of Hobart. William became editor again from 1914 – 1925 and Emma and the two daughters Dorothea and Margaret became subsequent editors from 1925 until 1946, apart from the period 1931-1934. William Benson thought the Australian Friend superseded the Epistles which Australian Meetings wrote to each other, a custom which he himself once called “epistle pelting”.

From: The Editorial by Topsy Evans

In the first issue of “The Australian Friend”, William Benson, the first editor wrote:

‘Union is strength, and if in ever so small a degree this little paper can take the place of the binding tie which knits together the weak, and separate sticks into a firm bundle, it will have found a sphere of usefulness which will more than justify the attempt.’ He saw the need for the little isolated groups of Friends in Australia and New Zealand to be aware of the “link of sympathy between us” which would give strength and encouragement to form a larger family of Friends so far from the parent body in England.

William Benson saw too, that if such unity were to be attained, Friends needed to be brought together in spirit and knowledge of each other. Travel was lengthy and expensive. The Australasian Friends’ Conference of 1901 was only attended by 19 as it was virtually impossible for the majority of Friends to gather together. In 1900 the membership was 504.

His courage in producing a subscription journal, with no financial backing other than the hope that a “Promoters Fund” would be set up (each individual Friend contributed about one pound) fills the present editor (Topsy) with admiration. The fact that he succeeded in this endeavour is a tribute not only to his courage, probable financial contribution and foresight, but also to his following of what must have been a clear leading of the spirit.

The subjects covered in the early issues have a surprising modern ring. One writer commented ‘The Society of Friends have done and are doing a good work in the peace and temperance causes, but why do they not take a greater stand against the evil of smoke?’ The controversy over the reading of novels was debated with a vigour that which sounds familiar to us in our concern over our children and the time they spend watching television. One Friend was ‘satisfied that it often has a lifelong and very damaging effect upon character, when not kept strictly within limits.’ Contributors to those early issues did not concern themselves with world poverty or personal relationships, neither did they have to consider nuclear war, AIDs or environmental problems, yet their insistence on being “involved” is still inspiring to us today.

Book Review, Gammage, Bill. The Biggest Estate on Earth (How Aborigines made Australia). Allen and Unwin.2011.

1212 December 2012 1 Response »

Sep 302012

Sue Doessel, Queensland Regional Meeting.

Bill Gammage is an unusual creature in this age of specialisation. He’s a historian who understands trees. In this book he reconstructs Aboriginal land management through a detailed study of both the historical record, and current vegetation patterns, interpreted through a knowledge of plants and particularly their sensitivity to, or need for, fire.

The historical record on which Gammage draws includes both written descriptions of many landscapes as first seen by Europeans, and the records left by the official artists. Again and again the written descriptions refer to, and the paintings depict, “park-like surroundings with extensive grassy patches and pathways, open woodlands and abundant wildlife” that evoked a country estate in England.

These early park-like paintings have often been dismissed as a superimposition of European expectations on a foreign landscape, but Gammage counters that the official artists were the photographers of their day, paid to be accurate, and that their depiction of Australia is consistent with numerous written accounts.

He supports this by explaining how Aborigines combined a detailed understanding of the life cycles of plants with the most skilled use of fire known anywhere in the world, to create the park-like land the early Europeans found. And he describes, with numerous photographs, how to understand (via the trees) the changes that have occurred since, such as grassland that became scrub in twenty years in Western NSW, dense forest near Canberra where once a horse could gallop, and clearings in rainforest from Tasmania to Cape York now reverting to trees.

Gammage argues that the Aborigines created not only a pleasant, park-like land, but an environment where food was reliable, plentiful, predictable, and easily harvested. This was done by choosing a feature like water, hill or rock, and laying out a “template” on or beside it, in which different plant communities alternated in ways that either made plants easily gathered, or animals easily hunted. For example, yam beds screened by thickets to protect them from fire, or grass “fingers” running into forest so as to provide cover for hunters when kangaroos were lured by the new shoots after this grass “finger”, (but not those adjoining) had recently been burned. The major tool in creating these templates was fire. Not the large, hot bushfires we know now.

The fires the Aborigines typically used were small, perhaps targeting only one tree, cool, and frequent. The templates prepared the land for day-to-day working, and were maintained for decades, or centuries. Put together, many templates make up a mosaic. Gammage argues that collectively the Aborigines “managed an Australian estate they thought of as single and universal” and that this was experienced as a spiritual obligation so strong that, for instance, during the attempted capture of the Tasmanian Aborigines, people continued lighting fires even when the smoke would give away their position.

The book describes how grass templates were “farms without fences”. Gammage quotes accounts of people scattering seeds and moving on, knowing that when they return at the appropriate time there will be a harvest. Far from being randomly wandering hunter-gatherers living on the edge of survival, Aborigines are revealed as intensively and intelligently managing land. “People farmed in 1788, but were not farmers. These are not the same. One is an activity, the other a lifestyle.”

This detailed book includes accounts of the templates the first Europeans found in all the sites that are now capital cities, and many, many other areas. Australia will never look the same after reading it. Nor will our history.

What means this whispering in the bottom of our hearts?

1209 September 2012 No Responses »

Aug 172012

Susannah Brindle. Victoria Regional Meeting.

Aboriginal people have taught me more about Australian history than ever I learnt at school or university. The real history, not the nationhood stories the media feeds us. Privately sceptical about the extent of the sufferings they told of–surely nothing could be that bad in this country–I went to whitefella literature to seek the truth and discovered that things had been that bad and, indeed, had been far worse. David Carline advised me to look into my family tree. “We know where we come from, but do you?” he challenged.

My family wasn’t unique. They were part of the early colonial history we like to tell each other with wonder and pride at the way they faced hardships and met the challenges of taming the wilderness they encountered. They covered up their convict stain with backbreaking hard work and respectable living, to become pioneer farmers, doctors, public servants, lawyers, and teachers and so on. They “helped to make Australia what it is today”.

They were the progenitors of the Second Nation Peoples that supplanted the First by virtue of a sort of evolutionary “right-ordering”. One of my great great grand uncles, a well-respected explorer of the upper Hunter Valley right through to Moreton Bay, systematically killed blackfellas in order to ensure sufficient pasturelands to feed the burgeoning colony. His brother, a hearty good-natured fellow, gave a string of horses to the young ringleader of the Myall Creek massacre, John Fleming, to make good his escape from justice. These brothers’ brother-in-law, my great great grandfather, helped raise the costs of legal representation for the others involved in the massacre.

My family and the Flemings had not only been neighbours on the Hawkesbury but were also connected by marriage. Helping each other out of a tight spot was what colonists did in those days. Fleming, a bounty on his head, galloped across the rugged sandstone country to the bosom of his family, lying low until the immediate brouhaha had subsided. Within a year his whereabouts were public knowledge but who with any sense would again stir the possum of whitefella conscience!

The bounty was never lifted but Fleming died, aged 78, a pillar of his community and church.

My family and their settler neighbours were as unremarkable in their everyday morality as they were in having “confused consciences”. The man whose legal services my great great grandfather took around the hat to pay for was Richard Windeyer, another Hunter Valley landowner. Regarded as highly principled and a learned barrister, Windeyer spared no effort in defending the Myall Creek murderers yet, barely four months after the trial, he helped found a colonial branch of the British-based Aboriginal Protection Society, the mandate of which was to create protective law reform for Indigenous peoples. Windeyer was strongly opposed to the notion that Aboriginal peoples had any right to land so it was with shocking self-disclosure that this eloquently persuasive speaker should conclude his public lecture On the Rights of the Aborigines in Australia with the now famous words:

How is it that our minds are not satisfied? What means this whispering in the bottom of our hearts?

This whispering in the bottom of my own heart grew louder recently when Dale Hess introduced me to an Aboriginal woman Elder and churchwoman who told me, in detail, about the iniquities of the Northern Territory Intervention and the proposed amendments to the Australian Constitution via a referendum scheduled for 2013. Like many whitefellas who have given themselves a sabbatical from uncomfortable Indigenous politics (something Aboriginal people can never do), I felt both ignorant and confused, so I did what I usually do in such instances and sought guidance from white literature. Victorian Friend Chris Hughes came to my aid with his copy of Sarah Maddison’s Beyond White Guilt which addresses “this whispering” head on.

Helpfully, and unavoidably confrontational, Sarah identifies “this whispering” as “collective guilt”, that profoundly uncomfortable feeling of being responsible for a wrong, a feeling which we prefer to deny, avoid and reject rather than experience and accept. She spares no effort in detailing the areas in which this unacknowledged guilt lurks, ready to paralyse our minds and warp our good intentions.

The wrong we whitefellas are in the presence of, of course, is that old chestnut–stolen Aboriginal land and the consequent illegitimacy of our nation. Our law is clear about theft: all stolen property remains stolen property no matter how long ago it was taken and all those who knowingly handle such property are legally responsible for returning it. There is, however, a single exception–the one that permits the Original Sin of our nation’s beginnings and sanctifies it because it happened two centuries ago. This inconsistency doesn’t seem to worry us.

I found Sarah’s point that “invasion is structure, not an event” and the words of Oodgeroo Noonuccal,

Let no one say the past is dead.

The past is all about us and within.

quoted at the beginning of her book, chillingly potent. Sarah shows how our past “casts a long shadow” and creates inescapable moral obligations for the present. Facing up to our collective guilt means examining the extent to which we feel solidarity with the crime (and with the society of settler-criminals like my ancestors) and accept as our moral right the stolen riches bequeathed to us by our colonial forbears.

This is a question for all non-Indigenes now–not just those whose ancestors number among the first wave of boat people, but those and the descendants of those who have, over the past two centuries, sought a new life in this country.

One of our much used excuses for not accepting our present responsibility to right past wrongs is that the moral understanding of yesteryear was different from that of the present. Sarah points out in her book that “morality” isn’t necessarily associated with “good”. The morality of my Hunter Valley ancestors and their contemporaries that has passed down to the present generation was one that presumed the superiority of western “civilisation” and underpinned the whole colonial project. It was a morality that encouraged “dispossession, forced migration, the chilling acceptance that Aboriginal people were a dying race and the callousness of policies of child removal”. It was a morality “psychically deformed”. It was, in fact, a genocidal morality and, by excusing it, we tacitly identify with it.

Sarah shows how our unacknowledged guilt will continue to cause us collectively (and individually) to look to government policies–like Intervention and expunging the racist bits in the Australian Constitution (to make us whitefellas feel better about ourselves?)–in the hope that they will fix up Aboriginal lives.

However, because we have not addressed the root cause of our guilt–our nation’s illegitimacy–any and all of our well-meaning attempts to better the lot of Indigenous peoples will founder as surely as they always have. I cannot escape the truth that we are now the knowing handlers of stolen property, and that our nation–my own “good deeds” and the hard work of my pioneer ancestors notwithstanding–is “rotten at root”; and that excusing any of our shameful history is something that, in the words of W.E.H. Stanner (1969), “sticks out like a foot from a shallow grave”.1

Sarah wrote her book in the hope that non-Indigenous Australians will focus less upon stories of the past and “think beyond the possible” into how we may make the history of tomorrow, today. She calls this “adaptive work” and suggests that we begin it by acknowledging Aboriginal Sovereignty which “does not need to be argued or proved, it just is…a constant, unavoidable and undeniable fact”. As long as we deny Aboriginal Sovereignty, we will continue to do damage to Indigenous peoples, and the genocidal crimes of the past will be perpetuated as the genocidal crimes we, as a generation, commit now.

Sarah grew up in white middle-class suburban ignorance as did I, so I felt she was conversing with me rather than accusing me. She came to her knowledge the hard way, through accepting her white guilt and living it with until it showed her how to act. Her passionate book is filled with the irrefutable–what is actually obvious to the Blind Freddy in all of us, had we the courage and honesty to admit to it.

Every moment of our life in this country presents us with the challenge to examine who we think we are in relation to what we now know about our “black” history. If we have the humility to engage in the adaptive work Sarah speaks of, I believe we can reenergise our souls and, who knows, create an as yet unimagined future for the world. In “this whispering in the bottom of our hearts” we may, indeed, come to recognise the voice of the Spirit.

Notes

W.E.H Stanner, After the Dreaming, Boyer Lectures, 1968.

47 Backhouse Lectures

1203 March 2012 3 Responses »

Feb 112012

Ian Hughes, New South Wales Regional Meeting

The James Backhouse Lectures were instituted by the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in Australia on the day it was established, January 1, 1964. They have been delivered during Australia Yearly Meeting in January each year, with a few exceptions to this pattern. The lectures delivered at Yearly Meeting have often not been readings of the published text, but this review deals only with published lectures (see note below). Most lectures (60%) have been delivered by Australian Quakers, and the lecturers from other parts of the world were selected and invited by Australian Quakers. This series of 47 James Backhouse Lectures may reflect some patterns in Australian Quaker thinking.

I read through the 47 lectures and noticed that some lecturers wrote about their individual spiritual experience, and others took a collective focus, or discussed the Society as an organisation. While reading the 1994 lecture, Di Bretherton’s phrase ‘action motivated by spirit’ leapt out to me as a theme, not only of her own lecture, but in the series as a whole. As I read the other lectures, I realised that while most lectures referred to both ethical action and spiritual reflection, each lecture had a main theme which was one or the other.

The main themes I identified were:

1. Spiritual reflection with a collective or organised, collective focus (14 lectures): This includes reflection on contemporary science, in which the traditional scientific principle of objective third-person verifiability is expanded to include inquiry into subjective experience. This includes inquiry into spirituality and related topics. I understand this category to refer to forms of living experimentally. Lecture topics I identified with this category are:

Reflection on The Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) as an organisation, 5 lectures (1980, 1982, 1985, 1993, 2010);
Reflection on comparative religion, 3 lectures (1974, 1997, 1998)
Reflection on science, including science and religion, 2 lectures (1966, 2008);
Reflection on evolution, 2 lectures (1964, 1987).
And one lecture each with the main themes of reflection on literature (1999) and reflection on collective worship (2009).

2. Spiritual reflection with an individual focus (9 lectures): This includes lectures with a main focus on the inner experience and spiritual life of Friends. In my understanding this category relates to individual experience of the light within.

Individual reflection on witness, by which I mean testimony or ministry about individual spiritual experience, 6 lectures (1971, 1972, 1973, 1978, 1981, 2004);
And one lecture each on individual reflection on the spirit (1965), on being present (1967) and on education (1968).

3. Action on social issues with an individual focus (23 lectures): by which I mean lectures which have as a main theme economic, political, and cultural or other action which individual Quakers could take to address significant social, ecological or other problems.

Action about race relations, including racism and Australian Indigenous affairs, 5 lectures (1969, 1991, 2000, 2001, 2006);
Action for peace at a national or international level, 4 lectures (1984, 1986, 1996, 2005);
Action about post-colonial issues, not including race relations, 2 lectures (1976, 1977);
Action about earthcare, 2 lectures (2007, 2011);
Action about feminist issues, 2 lectures (1983, 1989);
Action about Quaker Service, 2 lectures (2002, 2003);
One lecture each with a main theme of action in relation to national or military security (1970), ageing (1975), overpopulation (1979), conflict resolution (1988), Australian politics (1990) and international relations (1995).

The main theme of one lecture was ‘action and spirit’. In her 1994 lecture, Di Bretherton writes of a ‘synthesis of thinking’. She continues: ‘If, in the Quaker community, we allow a split to occur between those who are seen as spiritual and those who are seen as activists then we risk losing the core of our faith’. I interpreted this as a statement of a living theory of that both action and reflection are fundamental to Australian Quakerism.

When my coding of these themes was completed, I was surprised to count 23 of the 47 lectures as explicitly talking about ‘reflection’, and 23 as explicitly about ‘action’, with one lecture coded as explicitly about both ‘action and reflection’ . Of course, coding is arbitrary, and others may have coded differently, but in my reading, the lectures illustrate a striking balance between action towards social justice and reflection on spiritual lives.

As I read I noted references to previous Backhouse lectures. The number of references listed in each lecture ranged from 0 to 85. They covered a wide range of sources, including scripture, Quaker literature, scientific reports, poetry, novels, and more. From a total of 991 references, 27 (2.7%) were to previous Backhouse lectures. Thirty-five lectures (74%) did not refer to any Backhouse lectures, and 4 lectures (8.5%) referred to more than one. There is a trend towards more references in later years, but it is not clear to me that the Backhouse lectures represent significant input to Australian Quaker thinking. Further analysis of the reference lists could reveal that other sources (perhaps The Bible, or Quaker Faith and Practice published by Britain Yearly Meeting) have been strong influences.

Of the 47 lectures reviewed 19 (40%) were delivered by lecturers from overseas (7 from USA, 4 from Britain 2 from each of New Zealand, Papua New Guinea and South Africa and one each from Germany and Japan). Of the 28 (60%) Australian Lecturers, 6 were from each of Canberra and NSW Regional Meetings, 5 from Tasmania and from Victoria, 2 from each of Queensland and South Australia, one from Western Australia, and one lecture was delivered by Young Friends associated with various Regional Meetings.

Note:

There was no 1971 Backhouse Lecture, but an address given in place of the Backhouse Lecture has been included in this review. The tenth Backhouse lecture was delivered in August 1973, during the meeting of the Friends World Committee for Consultation, instead of 1974. The 1980 lecture was not published, but some Australian Quaker libraries have a photocopy of a typescript, which has been included in this review. At the time of this review, the 1992 lecture was not published and was not available to me. The full text of most James Backhouse Lectures may be downloaded from http://www.quakers.org.au/displaycommon.cfm?an=1&subarticlenbr=29

References:

Bretherton, D. (1994). As the mirror burns: making a film about Vietnam. Hobart. The Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in Australia Incorporated

The Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in Britain. (1995). Quaker Faith and Practice. London: The Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in Britain.

The Gardener’s Gamble

1109 September 2011 No Responses »

Oct 072011

Book review by Frances Parsons, Tasmania Regional Meeting.

The Gardener’s Gamble : a social history of Australia through the Dawson Family by Helen Laidlaw (2010, Cedar Ridge Books, Kiama) available from www.thegardenersgamble.com.au

Helen Laidlaw’s Th e Gardener’s Gamble is, as she says on the title page, ‘A Social History of Australia through the Dawson Family’.

‘The gambling gardener’ was her great, great, great grandfather, John Dawson,who with wife Mary and nine children came to Sydney on the Canton in 1835, hoping to improve their standard of living and social status. The experiences and rigours of that journey (in a purpose built migrant ship) and the enforced on-shore quarantine (because there had been smallpox on board) are recorded from the day they left England in the journal kept by John, the 15-year old son.

They were a literate family, and the author has been fortunate in having access to many journals, scrapbooks, collections of letters and photographs. The text has been enriched by frequent quotation from these and other primary sources, as well as by the many illustrations. Her research led her to archival material in State, University, newspaper, school, Quaker and town collections; glance at the bibliography and notes at the end of the book, before you begin at the beginning.

It took Helen 20 years to piece together. Despite the uncertainties, the accidents, illnesses and deaths, the family prospered, and there is much interesting detail about the way districts such as Camden and the Illawarra were settled, and about the role members of the family played in setting up hospitals, schools, agricultural shows, Blind Institutes and general social amenities. Even a bill of sale throws light on farm and household equipment.

The amount of work done by women is staggering. From 5am to 11pm they had the dairy herd to milk (twice), milk to set in pans for the cream to rise, butter making, (and marketing) the hens, lambs and pig pens to see to, household scrubbing and polishing, laundering, dressmaking, mending, gardening, and of course cooking, preserving and bottling the produce of the fertile soils of the farms which they leased until they could buy.

It was during this early period that the Quakers, Backhouse and Walker, visited the Australian colonies, and the Dawson family often attended Meetings for Worship arranged by them as they tramped the Illawarra, Jervis Bay, Shoalhaven and Camden districts. Backhouse had as secretary Abraham Davy, a reformed convict (whom Backhouse had possibly first met at Macquarie Harbour), who began to court Jane Dawson. This raised difficult questions for early Quakers regarding the status of emancipists and the role of ‘disownment’. Central to the difficulties was the question of ‘marrying out’ (i.e. marrying someone not in good standing in the Meeting). Friends from Hobart (the ‘Senior’ Meeting) came to Sydney to help sort out the problems. Among them were Robert and Joseph Mather. Abraham and Jane, impatient of the dissention, married in a Presbyterian Church in 1838 and not long after Abraham was ’disowned’. However, they remained in close contact with Friends and Davy exchanged letters with Backhouse for many years.

Another of the problems among Friends in Sydney was a split between a group of enthusiastic young Friends and the older, conservative Members. At one time, police locked the young group out of the Meeting House. About this time, another pair of Quaker missionaries visited: Joseph James Neave and Walter Robson, as did Francis Cotton of Kelvedon. Neave became enamoured of Helen Davy, daughter of Jane and Abraham. Their courtship was protracted as Neave wanted to complete his travelling in the ministry, but they were eventually married in Saffron Walden before returning to Sydney where they did much to revive the Meeting. Their eldest children attended the Friends’ School as boarders. Among the luggage of the Dawsons on the Canton was a cradle. Their own family was complete but they must have been looking to the future — there are 70 grandchildren listed in the family trees at the end of the book. As the author says in her conclusion The Grimsby Gardener’s gamble had paid off … within three generations the family included an architect, artists, bank managers, barristers, businessmen, chemists, doctors, engineers and a judge.

Chocolate Wars

1106 June 2011 No Responses »

Jul 072011

Book review by Roger Sawkins, Queensland Regional Meeting

Chocolate Wars: from Cadbury to Kraft: 200 years of sweet success and bitter rivalry by Deborah Cadbury Harper (Collins 2010 RRP$35)

Cadbury’s Milk Tray, Rowntree’s Black Magic, Kit Kat, Dairy Box, Aero, Smarties, Mars Bars, Milky Way, Maltesers, Bournville Chocolate Creams. If by now you are drooling and desperate for a taste of some of them, this book will at least tell you how they came about.

Deborah Cadbury’s history of chocolate making in her family starts with the Quaker families of Cadbury, Rowntree, and Fry in the eighteenth Century. She tells of the struggles to find a good recipe, first for drinking chocolate and then the hard eating chocolate that we can’t resist. In the process she also describes the Quaker ethical principles that guided the early chocolate makers. The book covers the concerns for the poor and underprivileged, worries about the accumulation of vast wealth and how it should be used, and the general ethics of being in business. Founder George Cadbury not only built his modern factory outside Birmingham, but also Bournville model village for the staff which now has 6,000 houses. He later gave his own house as the main building for what is now Woodbrooke College.

But all that came after a long and competitive struggle to find the best recipes for producing chocolate. The earliest problem was the fat in the chocolate beans, which meant they were mixed with potato flour, treacle, sago or even lichen (‘Iceland moss cocoa’). Some manufacturers added brick dust, vermilion or red lead for colouring. Needless to say, the results were not very popular! Finding the right process for treating the chocolate beans was a long and difficult process and sparked great rivalry.

It is not always a rosy picture. When George Cadbury finally managed to develop a ‘pure’ chocolate drink in the 1860s he raised Quaker eyebrows by advertising it! Full-page adverts in newspapers and posters in shops and on the sides of the horse-drawn buses; to some Quakers it seemed ‘slightly shabby and unworthy’.

But worse was to come. Joseph Rowntree in the 1870’s rented an office near his rivals and then advertised for staff. He interviewed applicants and even took them to his factory so that he could find out how they were producing their chocolate. An early example of industrial espionage, and from a Quaker!

Another ethical issue which exercised the minds of the Quaker chocolate families in the early twentieth century was slavery. They discovered that Portuguese- administered Angola, which was supplying them with a small quantity of high quality chocolate, was using slaves. After difficult discussions between themselves they decided they should continue to be involved so that they could put pressure on the Portuguese government. Not only was that unsuccessful, but it got them into further trouble. One of the daily papers exposed their involvement and accused them of getting wealthy on the backs of slaves.

Again their ethical principles were challenged, and they eventually decided to sue the paper for defamation. They won, but you’ll have to read the book to find out the rather unsatisfactory outcome.

Deborah’s well-written book brings the story up to date with the takeovers by Schweppes and Kraft and the demise of Quaker involvement — sad, but maybe inevitable in our ‘free enterprise’ world. It is probably disconcerting for many Quakers that the word ‘wars’ appears in the title of a book about part of our history. And to my mind it is a rather stronger word than the book justifies. However, Deborah Cadbury’s detailed explanations of Quaker history and ethics is admirable and a great read.

One final curiosity. In the US, the book’s subtitle is The 150-Year Rivalry Between the World’s Greatest Chocolate Makers. Perhaps the 50 years before non-Quaker Hershey became involved just don’t count over there!

Joseph Wood 1750-1821

1012 December 2010 No Responses »

Mar 152011

Book Review by Roger Sawkins, Queensland Regional Meeting

A Yorkshire Quaker; an introduction to his life, Ministry and writings

PAMELA COOKSEY

QUACKS BOOKS, 2010, £10, 110 PAGES, WITH COLOUR AND B & W ILLUSTRATIONS. AVAILABLE FROM FRIENDS BOOKSHOP IN LONDON, AND ALSO FROM AMAZON BOOKS.

In his three-score years and ten, Joseph Wood filled over 100 large notebooks with his beautiful copperplate handwriting. Together with over 600 letters he received, these papers were handed down through his family and are now being transcribed for publication next year in four volumes totalling over 1000 pages.

Pamela Cooksey first became interested in Joseph when researching the history of her house. She discovered that he had visited the then owner in 1778 and so decided to find out more about him. Using these papers, she has written this introduction to his life and it is an amazing window into Quaker activities and beliefs at the turn of the 19th century.

At the age of 17 Joseph decided to ‘submit himself to the will of the Lord and devote his life to serving Him’. He was recognised as a Minister by High Flatts Meeting at the age of 29 and spent the next 42 years travelling in the Ministry around the Midlands and North of England and Wales.

Joseph was a clothier, but did more than just arrange manufacture and distribution of clothing. He also had his own flock of sheep and a large household who looked after the business while he travelled. Following the death of his parents, sisters and brother, he thought of his household servants, housekeeper and husbandmen as his ‘family’.

He never married, explaining at the age of 52:

Marriage is lawful to all by the laws of man; but I believe not expedient to all. It is a comfortable state to those who are rightly joined together therein, and some are rendered more useful thereby. There are others who have been useful before, that have been little use afterwards; the necessary cares and concerns of their family preventing their growth and usefulness. It is far easier to keep the mind stayed upon the Lord whilst single, saith a worthy friend in his Journal; than when weighed down with the encumbrance of a growing family … And therefore I believe there are such in the present day as Christ foretold which hath made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake, believing they might from the situation Providence had placed them in be more useful in their day, age and generation.

He was not a wowser, however, and liked tea, coffee, rum, brandy, tobacco and snuff. In December 1816, he and Robert Shillitoe went on a ‘religious visit’ to 40 Public Houses in the Barnsley area. They recorded the names of each pub, and the name of its owner (which includes 8 women), although it is not explained what a ‘religious visit’ to a Public House entails!

He also writes of his beliefs, insisting on the total submission of the will to ‘the Lord’s will’, ‘the Lord’s way’ and ‘the Lord’s time’. He was concerned at ‘the ever-present threat of the Devil to the soul’ and the need to be ‘strengthened to resist the Devil and cause him to flee’.

Pamela Cooksey’s book gives a wonderful insight into the beliefs and activities of a very active British Quaker 200 years ago. Some aspects are substantially different from today, others are remarkably similar. Either way, the book is a revealing read.

A history of The Australian Friend

1012 December 2010 No Responses »

Mar 142011

By Charles Stevenson, South Australia Regional Meeting

The present editorial committee will lay down the task of producing The Australian Friend at the end of this year, and a new editor or editorial committee is yet to be appointed. A suggestion has been made to change it to an online journal within the next few years. So, it seems timely to reflect on the history of The Australian Friend to date.

The seed that developed into The Australian Friend goes back to the 1852-53 visit of Robert Lindsey who did much to encourage and develop Friends in Australia.

His report to Meeting for Sufferings led them to suggest to the various meetings in the Southern Hemisphere that they write epistles to one another. This idea was immediately taken up and its idea was best expressed by an Epistle from Tasmania Yearly Meeting dated 4th of 5th month 1856:

We should be glad to see the various meetings in this hemisphere more closely united in that bond of Christian fellowship which Epistolary communications are calculated to promote.

A far bigger step was an actual journal, long advocated from far distant Rockhampton. As with most Quaker ventures the time was not considered right, as Friends were too few in numbers.