Brrr!

 Ever since Christmas we've had hot, sometimes unpleasantly hot, dry weather, and being a bit of a dag at heart I've spent most of the time wandering around in a pair of battered shorts, thongs, and an equally worn and battered t-shirt.

But no more. This morning, when I got up just after dawn for my weekly 10km bike ride, it was chilly a 4C, and a definite shock to the system.

The ride itself was quite beautiful, with an almost full moon hanging in a pale blue early morning sky, and I was warm enough once I got going, but I did appreciate having the heating on at home and a hot shower afterwards.

It's just nature's way of reminding us that autumn's not that far off and that colder weather is on the way ...

Tomatoes and artefacts

 Last week was another very hot week, so hot that I skipped going down to Lake View.

On the basis of the previous week, the building would have retained the heat and be incredibly stuffy, and with no wind or fans to circulate the air no way to try and cool the building.

After Sunday's heavy rain, this week was a different story and I managed quite a productive session cataloguing the Henry Handel Richardson artefacts on display in the study. There's nothing super amazing - mostly things like books given as presents to her sister

which shows that Henry was more that a pseudonym, and that she referred to herself as Henry even to family members.

Driving down to Lake View wasn't without incident, as I came over a slight rise there was a big wallaby - so big I thought at first it was a kangaroo - sitting in the middle of the road thinking wallaby thoughts, as they do.

I slammed on the brakes and stopped about five metres short of it. It looked around, looked at a car that was coming in the other direction which had also had to do an emergency stop, and then hopped lazily off into the surrounding native bush.

Fortunately, here was no such excitement at the  Athenaeum the previous Friday.

The building has the benefit of air conditioning, so last Friday was the first full session back working on sorting out the catalogue and preparing material for upload to Victorian Collections, which is going to involve an audit of the book collection - which might be fun.

J has been working on something that will probably end up as something like a radio play with her drama group - no costumes, no props, just some spotlights - and asked me if I had any examples of nineteenth century reporting of  assaults to get an idea of the language and euphemisms used.

This set me off following the case of Fanny Elizabeth Bull who was attacked while travelling home in August 1885 in London.

Sadly, these cases were all too common, and were not just a British thing, but occurred in Australia as well, as in this case reported in the Sydney Daily Telegraph in 1887

However, the Fanny Elizabeth Bull case is more fully reported on - perhaps because she was a governess - and give us an insight into how things worked at the time.

In Victorian England, the victim of an assault had to mount a private prosecution, which meant that the victim was subject to cross examination by the assailant or the assailant's lawyers, who invariably tried to make out that the woman concerned was a person of loose morals.

This of course meant that women were reluctant to take men to court in sexual assault cases, because of the long term risk to their reputations.

I've written previously about how, in a case in rural Angus (in Scotland), the judge shut down any discussion of the sixteen year old victim's character. In this case we can see how the victim was persuaded, with promises of support from the railway company,  to take the case forward to the central criminal court in London, even though the assailant had pleaded guilty in a lower court, where he would receive a harsher sentence.

(Not all such cases ended well, I also came across the case of Harriet Daniels from Ruabon, who had her prosecution of her alleged rapist thrown out - why is a bit of a mystery as the newspaper reports of the time seem to clearly suggest that she had been raped while travelling in a first class railway carriage.)

After spending time researching Fanny Elizabeth's court case, I felt a need to try and find out a little of the shape of  her life, so that she was more than just a name.

This turned out to be more difficult than I thought, mainly because the UK censuses are paywalled.

I tried various workarounds but in the end the simplest solution was to use our local library's subscription to Ancestry to search for her in the UK census records.

Not only was this a success, it also put me in touch with the local family history community.

While I was at it I tried using the free search facility at  UK census online to find Harriet, or at least give me some clues as to where to look. This wasn't a great success. There's no Harriet Daniels listed in the 1891 census returns for the pre 1974 counties of Denbeighshire, Merionethshire, Montgomeryshire or Flintshire, or the adjacent English counties of Cheshire or Shropshire.

In the 1881 census, there is a Harriet Daniels listed as living in Merioneth

who is listed as being a 21 year old servant. None of the press reports give enough detail to confirm that this is the same Harriet Daniels, and as domestic servants sometimes moved about checking the census records on Ancestry probably wouldn't help much.

I'm guessing that after her failed case she left the area for somewhere, such as Liverpool, Birmingham or Manchester where no one would know her and she could start anew.

Gardening wise, I have not done that much other than concentrate on keeping plants alive in the searing heat, watering and sprinkling every evening.

After our possum incident, the possums gave us a wide berth for nearly a week, which let us harvest three or four kilos of tomatoes - basically as many as we could eat, before the possums came back and relieved us of our unripe and damaged ones.

We still have some small late tomatoes which have yet to start ripening, so we're hoping that having stripped our plot, they'll move on to somewhere else, and we'll get some late tomatoes.

And, we finally got our first zucchini!

Which was good, but I'm worried that it might be due to a lack of bees to pollinate our plants - we're getting plenty of male and female flowers, but no zucchinis....

Vegetables and possums

 Netting the vegetables to deter the possums worked - almost.

Last night, when we were getting the cats in from their outdoor cat run we heard something crashing around in the vegetable patch.

The cats were alert and clearly ready to go and deal with whatever was the source of the noise.

Well, we didn't let the cats investigate, but we donned head torches and went and had a look ourselves.

It was a possum, which had somehow got under the net and tangled itself up in an attempt to steal some tomatoes, so we lifted the net and gently swished the tomato plants with some garden canes to encourage it to escape.

It didn't, it tried to hide and tangled itself up even more, so we ended up pulling the net off the tomatoes to encourage it to let go and free itself, which it did, eventually.

Reluctantly, because we want our tomatoes, we've removed the net because we don't like the idea of an animal being trapped overnight. 

Still, I think that possum had such a fright it won't be back - I can imagine back at possum central it telling its friends that it got stuck in a strange restraining net and some very odd bipeds with lights shining on their heads came and poked it - almost a possum alien abduction story.

However, the possums obviously havn't stolen everything, when I was taking the net off I found this ginormous patty pan that both we and the possums had missed ....

Tomatoes

 

Well, we've finally beat the possums to the tomatoes - the first of the season. No zucchini as yet, but here's hoping!

Another hot week

 The weather continues to be stupidly hot, too hot to get any serious gardening done in the afternoons, which will mean a lot of weeding as soon as things cool down a bit.

The zucchini are refusing to produce anything other than flowers, and as for the tomatoes, I have a sad story.

The crop was developing quite well and I was thinking that I should net them as some were beginning to colour up. 

Unfortunately I left it a day too long, and when I went to net them, the damned possums had got there first and stripped the riper ones. Fortunately I'd planted two varieties, one slower ripening than the other, so hopefully they'll start to ripen in the next week or so.

It's not all gloom though, the chilis are doing well and the possums, after an experimental nibble give them a wide berth.

The hot weather of course meant another early start to get anything done at Lake View before it became too hot. Like last week I was up before the sun, and pulling into the car park just on eight while it was still cool.

Unfortunately, unlike last week the building had stayed hot and stuffy as we'd had a warm night, so it was not the most pleasant experience.

I've started work on the study, which is a bit of a shrine to Henry Handel Richardson, and full of memorabilia, despite her connection with Chiltern being tenuous - she only lived there for eighteen months as a child, although Chiltern served as an inspiration for her description of gold field settlements in Australia Felix, the first part of the Fortunes of Richard Mahoney trilogy.

Still, I had a minor triumph.

Among the memorabilia was a tarnished brass medallion. 

In the photograph, the 1990s handwritten description is quite legible, but that's because I played around with the image - the ink has faded quite badly in the original. 

I was fairly certain that the last line read [...]nior Pianoforte Scholarship, but I was not sure.

Henry Handel Richardson was sent as a boarder to the Presbyterian Ladies College, then as now the most prestigious girls' school in Melbourne, where her experiences formed the basis of her novel 'The Getting of Wisdom'.

Long story short, the Presbyterian Ladies College is a wealthy institution, and wealthy enough to maintain its own archives section, so I emailed them in the hope of them being able to confirm the scholarship details.

And they went above and beyond, not only confirming that the scholarship was for Senior Pianoforte, but including an account from the school magazine of 1896 describing a performance of her prize winning cantata based on Tennyson's Sea Fairies.

The concert was also reported in the Age and the Argus, so it was obviously a newsworthy event within the circle of the great and the good of Melbourne at the time.

As I've mentioned elsewhere, while I'm not really a collector, I am intrigued by the use nineteenth century people made of postcards, and have been slowly assembling a small collection of examples from colonial Australia.

My latest acquisition is this rather nice 1898 example from South Australia

addressed to an O.N. Rosenhain Esq in Balaclava, which is of course a suburb of Melbourne.

I thought I might make a start on transcribing it - transcribing old post cards lets me practice my skills in reading nineteenth century handwriting - useful for family history research and the rest, but when I flipped it over to scan the message side of the post card, I got a surprise

it was in German!

Well, in a sense that's not surprising - at the end of the nineteenth century perhaps ten per cent of of the population of South Australia were of German heritage, and there was a reasonably large population of German heritage in Melbourne.

While we now think of Balaclava as an area with a large Orthodox Jewish population, most of them arrived in the 1930s and 40s - before then Balaclava was not particularly anything, just another moderately well to do suburb of a growing city.

But I must admit that it reminded me that while we tend to think of late colonial Australia as an Anglo Irish monoculture, that in fact developed later with the racist 'White Australia' policy - at the end of the nineteenth century Australia was quite diverse, even if new immigration was beginning to be restricted to those of 'desirable' heritage ...

 

Stupidly hot

 It was forecast to be stupidly hot down at Lake View this afternoon - something around 38C, not the best conditions to be working in an old uninsulated brick building with a tin roof, so I was up at six this morning, even before the sun was up and on the road down to Chiltern by 0730.

The building had cooled overnight, which meant that even while it heated up outside - it already felt hot by about 10am, it wasn't too bad at first.

I managed to get done what I wanted to get done - finally finish with documenting the surgery, and then document the nineteenth century prints in the central corridor.

By about 1.30pm it was stupidly hot outside and the building, while cooler, was getting hot and stuffy, so I decided to quit while I was ahead and head home for a cool shower and cooler drink.

That leaves me only the study and the outside kitchen to do, which makes me feel that the end's in sight for this particular project ...

Creaking back into normality

 If you ever want to invade Australia, do it in early January, when it seems like almost the entire country is on holidays.

When I was working, I never got into the holidays-in-January thing - it always seemed like an excellent time for major hardware and software upgrades - there was no one there to notice if you went over time, and then you could have time off in early autumn when the weather was still pleasantly warm and most places were fairly quiet - apart from the Labor day weekend that is.

Now I'm retired, we still prefer to go away in early autumn, so I've been down at Lake View, working on the displays of early medical instruments, and my nemesis, the Victorian hat box

This one was made of leather and designed to carry a top hat - one a little like the one worn by Churchill at the Sidney Street siege in 1911

this particular hat box came with a provenance, which is good, but unfortunately the provenance was wrong, not only did the supposed maker of the hat box die in 1814, when the hat box was supposed to date from 1825 or thereabouts.

I suspect that, like most other leather hat boxes for top hats it in fact dates from the 1850s when the top hat was popularised by Prince Albert as in this 1870's example, complete with hat, from the Netherlands

Unfortunately the hat box at Lake View is not in the best condition and  is too fragile to open up to look for a maker's mark inside, so its date of manufacture will remain a mystery for now.

The original ownership of the box is not in doubt, and I suspect the story of its provenance has been garbled as it passed down through the family.

Interestingly, despite its original owner being Australian, and someone who died in 1909, it has a fragmentary Great Western Railway luggage label to Oxford on it

And that's another little puzzle.

The original owner was a wealthy grazier, who like many nineteenth century members of the squatocracy, never really considered themselves Australian and retired back to England to die.

However the puzzle is that stylistically, I would guess the use of a sans serif font would date the label to the 1920s, and not the Edwardian period.

I doubt that anyone would have gone to the trouble of sending a hat box, or indeed other personal effects back to Australia, so I am guessing that the original owner never took it with him and passed it on to a family member, and the GWR sticker is the result of one of the original owner's descendants taking the hat box with them on a trip to England.

But it’s not all been puzzles and fonts.

Up on the Athenaeum we've been working on the historic book collection and working out a methodology to improve the data quality, something which I find both intellectually demanding but strangely stimulating, but then I've always been a bit odd...