Leigh Straw, The Worst Woman in Sydney: The Life and Crimes of Kate Leigh

(NewSouth Books, July 2016, pp1-266 RRP $29.99)

Many Sydneysiders will have heard of Kate Leigh; sly grog seller, drug peddler, madam and a leading underworld criminal entrepreneur in the 1920s and 1930s, and indeed beyond.  During her long life she received 107 criminal convictions, served thirteen gaol terms and was rarely out of the newspaper headlines. Despite this notable criminal record, Leigh’s reputation oscillated between being labelled ‘the worst woman in Sydney’ to a perception of her as a benevolent sly-grog seller and for many in East Sydney, a community hero and matriarch. Her notoriety has been popularised in Larry Writer’s book Razor and has loomed large in TV’s highly acclaimed Underbelly series. Today, café Sly at her former residence at 212 Devonshire Street in Darlinghurst pays a lasting tribute to this notorious Sydney woman. In The Worst Woman in Sydney: The Life and Crimes of Kate Leigh, the historian and author Leigh Straw has written the first biography of Kate Leigh. It is a fascinating read and in my opinion, utterly unputdownable - I read the entire book one rainy Saturday afternoon. Straw tells Leigh’s full and fascinating story – from her early wayward life in Dubbo to the confines of the Parramatta Industrial School for Girls and how she subsequently became a leading underworld figure on the mean streets of East Sydney. This is the ‘warts and all’ story of a seedy, sinful Sydney where sly grog, prostitution, cocaine, violent razor gang wars, police corruption, and grinding poverty characterised the lives of many people in the early twentieth century. It is also the tale of a poor girl made extremely rich through enterprising audacity and cunning, however ruthless, cruel and criminal she had to be to earn the dubious title of ‘the worst woman in Sydney’.  And yet, Kate herself resented this reputation and in her own community, she was deemed to be ‘the matriarch of Surry Hills’. Many saw her as providing a valuable community service by selling sly grog to the still thirsty after public houses were closed at 6pm.  She was also held in high esteem for paying fines for people who could not afford to, warning youths about ‘the folly’ of crime and prostitution, whilst her annual Christmas parties for the children of the local area were legendary for their lavish generosity. It is a complex, colourful and somewhat discombobulating life story. By the end the reader is left with a somewhat ambivalent impression. Was Kate Leigh a success story – the quintessential ‘Aussie battler done good’? Was she a generous and benevolent community member? Or was she merely a ruthless vicious woman who broke the law and ran an extensive criminal enterprise with standover men and an iron will? (She was herself handy with her fists and not afraid to use a loaded shotgun on more than one occasion.) Between each chapter Straw has skilfully woven ‘interludes’ into the book; scenes from Kate’s life, told from Kate’s perspective. In utilising this narrative technique, the author admits that she wanted to bring Kate to life for the readers and to show her as more than just a sensationalised underworld crook. Rather, we get to know her motivations and her perspective of her life together with her own sense of place within the East Sydney community. It is a technique which clearly works well, (and hence the aforementioned discombobulation.) At times the book repeats information and reiterates similar phrases and themes. There are notes at the end rather than footnotes/endnotes throughout the book which some more academic minded readers might find displeasing.  However, overall it is meticulously researched, engaging, lively and highly readable. The Worst Woman in Sydney will appeal to a wide ranging audience and especially to readers interested in popular crime, female crime, and the dirty, nitty gritty history of Sydney’s underbelly in the twentieth century. Dr Catie Gilchrist April 2016 https://www.newsouthbooks.com.au/books/worst-woman-sydney/

• Why did the fleet came to be known as ‘the death fleet’ and what the implications were for the new colony?
• Why did The Lady Juliana have the lowest death rate?
• The fleet brought the three people to the colony who were to have a huge historical impact on the colony – who were they?
• Exactly where did the fleet land the convicts in Circular Quay?

You can listen to the podcast of the segment here: LISTEN NOW. The Dictionary of Sydney is grateful to the Australian National Maritime Museum for their assistance in increasing our coverage of the Second Fleet.

Ultimo Presbyterian Church World War I Roll of Honour, Nicole Cama 2015

Anzac Day commemorates all those who have served and died in war and on operational service. I recently published three articles in the Dictionary of Sydney about a World War I honour board, which was found in a church attic in Ultimo. I spoke to Mitch on 2SER Breakfast about some of the stories of the men of Ultimo and surrounds, who served during the war.

For decades a wooden World War I honour board lay in the small attic of what is now Mustard Seed Uniting Church in Ultimo. Made in 1916, it features 36 names, 26 of which have been identified with reasonable certainty. Twenty-two of those were under 25 years old and at least eight misrepresented their age in order to enlist, with the two youngest being 16 and possibly 15 years old. The majority of these men lived in the vicinity of the church where the honour board was unveiled, however, some also lived in Pyrmont and Glebe.

One of the youngest, Walter Thomas Carlisle, followed his four older brothers to war. The Sydney Mail published a photograph of the 16-year-old soldier reporting he had been ‘wounded’. In reality, he was in a French hospital receiving treatment for venereal disease. Albert Edward Doling lived above his father’s hairdressing and tobacconist saloon on Harris Street. According to family legend, Doling was punished by his superior officers because he objected to the ‘inhumane treatment’ of soldiers suffering from shell shock. Doling would later be awarded a Military Medal for ‘unselfish devotion to duty’ as a stretcher-bearer during the Battle of Menin Road in September 1917. For the rest of his life, he suffered insomnia and digestive problems as a result of being exposed to gas warfare.

But there are also stories of those who never made it home. There was 32-year-old Stewart Jamieson McLeod, who fought in what has become known as the 'worst 24 hours in Australian military history', the Battle of Fromelles, in July 1916. His division suffered over 5,500 casualties in one night, with 2,000 declared dead or missing. McLeod survived this battle to be killed in action a month later. His wife later donated a French souvenir embroidered handkerchief her husband had sent, to the Australian War Memorial.

There was George Albert Foster, who lived with his parents around the corner from the Ultimo church and received several gunshot wounds in France in May 1917, dying two days later. His relatives, friends and neighbours posted a lengthy tribute in the Sydney Morning Herald, his mother posting: ‘My boy is dead, the cable tells me. / No more his native land he'll see / But when the war is over / Still I dream he'll come to me.’

John Alexander Newcomb was 17 years old when he enlisted. He was wounded during the Battle of Menin Road and convalesced in England until his health declined and he was sent back to Sydney, where he died over a year later at Randwick Military Hospital. His family were issued a Next of Kin Plaque, known colloquially as a ‘Dead Man’s Penny’, now in the collection of the War Memorial.

The war stories of these men merely scratch the surface of a much bigger picture. We may yet discover what life was like for the men who returned to Sydney, with their traumatic memories and broken bodies, to find their names inscribed on a wooden board in a small church in Ultimo.

Read my original articles in the Dictionary of Sydney: The Ultimo Presbyterian Church Roll of Honour, Returned Soldiers on the Ultimo Presbyterian Church Roll of Honour and The Fallen on the Ultimo Presbyterian Church Roll of Honour.

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If you missed today’s segment, you can catch up here via the 2SER website. Tune in 2SER Breakfast with Mitch Byatt on 107.3 every Wedensday morning at 8:20 am.

Addresses of men listed on the Ultimo Presbyterian Church Roll of Honour at the time of their enlistment 1914-1918

The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, 11 May 1816, p2

This Sunday 17 April 2016 marks 200 years since the Appin massacre, when at least 14 Aboriginal men, women and children were killed by soldiers under the command of Captain James Wallis, as part of a military reprisal raid ordered by Governor Lachlan Macquarie. I spoke about this dark moment in our history with Mitch on 2SER Breakfast. Associate Professor Grace Karskens describes where the massacre occurred as the section of land between the Georges and Nepean Rivers toward the deep end of the Cataract River in the country of the Muringong people of the Camden area. The onset of the Appin massacre can be traced back to 1814, when three veteran soldiers shot and killed a Gandangara boy who was with a group taking maize from a field on a settler’s farmland. A soldier was speared in return, who then died and was mutilated. A chain of revenge attacks followed: settlers attacked a camp of sleeping people, killing and mutilating an Aboriginal woman and three children who were the family of two Gandangara warriors. In revenge for this killing, a stock keeper and his wife and the children of another settler were killed at Bringelly. Governor Macquarie intervened, visiting the area and deciding that Aboriginal payback justice had been undertaken and ordered both sides to cease further reprisals. But the violence continued, with incidents of farms being robbed, people being ambushed and speared and settlers responding armed with muskets, pistols and pitchforks. Macquarie ordered three groups of military personnel to comb the countryside to track down, capture or kill Aboriginal people, with no distinction between ‘friendly’ and ‘hostile’, women and children. The bodies of those slain would be hung up in the trees ‘in order to strike the greater terror into the survivors’. One party combed the Hawkesbury, while another group went through Camden and killed two Aboriginal warriors and took a boy prisoner. Captain James Wallis’ group marched to Appin. In the early hours of the morning of 17 April 1816 they encountered a camp of Aboriginal men, women and children and immediately opened fire. Some ‘fled over the cliffs’ and died as they fell in the gorge of the Cataract River. Others were wounded or shot dead. Among the 14 dead was an old man, women and children. Two warriors, Durelle and Cannabayagal, were also killed and were strung up in trees. Reports about the massacre published in the Sydney Gazette quote Macquarie, who said: ‘several Natives have been unavoidably killed and wounded’ because they had not ‘surrendered themselves on being called to do so’. One Aboriginal man, William Byrne, would recall almost 90 years later what he witnessed as a boy that day - that three bodies, not two, had been strung up in the trees and the heads were cut off and brought to Sydney ‘where the government paid 30 shillings and a gallon of rum for each of them’. In 1991, the National Museum of Australia received three skulls which had been at the University of Edinburgh for 175 years. One of the skulls belonged to Cannabayagal, and the other two possibly to Durelle and an unnamed woman. Karskens quotes National Museum curator, Mike Pickering, who said the skulls serve ‘as a reminder that the events of the past echo to the present’, and they do so today, almost exactly 200 years on. There will be a memorial service conducted by the Winga Myamly Reconciliation Group at Cataract Dam picnic area, Appin this Sunday, 17 April 2016 at 11am. The exhibition With Secrecy and Despatch, which was assembled by Aboriginal curators, Tess Allas and Steven Loft, and includes works by Australian and Canadian artists will be open at Campbelltown Arts Centre until 12 June.

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If you missed today’s segment, you can catch up here via the 2SER website. Tune in 2SER Breakfast with Mitch Byatt on 107.3 every Wedensday morning at 8:20 am.

Jeannine Baker, Australian Women War Reporters; Boer War to Vietnam, NewSouth Books, 2015, pp 1-259, ISBN 9781742234519, RRP $39.99

  ‘I have never been asked to march in an Anzac Day march. Men war correspondents have marched – but I think they’ve forgotten that there were women.’

Pat Jarrett, accredited war correspondent, World War II  

In Australian Women War Reporters Boer War to Vietnam, historian Jeannine Baker uncovers the remarkable and largely untold story of Australian and New Zealand women war reporters. It opens a fascinating window into an unknown part of our war-time history. Indeed, as the book’s media release pertinently asks, ‘Why do Australians know the names of Charles Bean, Alan Moorehead and Chester Wilmot, but not Agnes Macready, Anne Matheson and Lorraine Stumm?’ The book introduces us to a robust cast of female pioneers and charts their brave and varied experiences as war journalists, together with their long slow struggle for acceptance and equality. Although female journalists have been guaranteed equal pay for equal work since 1917, many women remained confined to lower status work such as writing for the women’s pages and special interest columns. And for women war correspondents in particular, the military authorities, the government, newspaper editors and other male journalists had various reasons for restricting female war writers. Women’s perceived vulnerability and their need for male protection were often cited as reasons why women war reporters were sometimes refused permission to report directly from the theatre of war. Others believed they would simply be a distraction to the troops. Concerns were also raised over issues of propriety and modesty, given the lack of showers and toilets for women in war zones. They were thought to write differently too, too emotional and passive for the heroic and muscular job of war correspondence. Indeed, perhaps the main battle they fought was simply against the entrenched gender ideology of the day and the perception that war was a thoroughly male domain. Men fought wars and male journalists reported on battles; war was no place for women – unless they were nurses. However, as this book reveals there were indeed many fearless and audacious female journalists who found themselves in the midst of war and its aftermath. And although many did report from the ‘side-lines’ - from the camps of starving internees, the hospitals full of wounded soldiers and the bombed out cities of Europe, Japan and elsewhere - these were still palpable scenes of danger, devastation and despair. And, as Baker rightly acknowledges, they also form part of the human story that is a vital part of conflict reporting - as much as the military battles do. I will briefly mention some of these remarkable women – just as a tiny snapshot into some of the extraordinary lives charted in this book. Agnes Macready, a Sydney nurse and journalist, went to South Africa two weeks after the outbreak of the Boer War. For two years she wrote regular articles on the bloody conflict for the Sydney paper Catholic Press. Likewise the journalist Edith Dickenson also covered the Boer War as ‘lady war correspondent’ for the Adelaide Advertiser and the Adelaide Chronicle. Dickenson’s journalism would later reveal the horror of the conditions inside the British concentration camps. Sydney born Anne Matheson was working as a journalist in London in the 1930s and 1940s. She reported on Czechoslovakia’s capitulation to Germany in 1938 and described the tumultuous scenes on the streets of Prague. She was one of the first women to land in Normandy after D-Day. Women journalists, of any nationality had been barred from accompanying the troops carrying out the D-Day landings. However Matheson arrived four days later and wrote a series of Normandy articles for the Australian Women’s Weekly. Later in 1945 she visited the destroyed cities of Cologne and Nuremberg as well as the liberated Buchenwald concentration camp. Back in Sydney, Lorraine Stumm was a journalist for the Sydney Daily Telegraph and the Sunday Telegraph magazine. Stumm was commissioned by the London Daily Mirror to serve as their reporter in Japan and South East Asia. From Manila she covered the harrowing story of a group of Australian army nurses captured in Rabaul in January 1942 and interned in Japan for more than three years, who were now about to return home. Together with a group of other journalists, Stumm flew over Hiroshima and Nagasaki six weeks after they had been decimated. Despite all her experience of wartime reporting, she wrote of the devastation as a ‘shocking thing’ and that it was ‘the most terrible disaster the world had ever faced and who knew what the after effects would be’. In the final chapter, the book briefly charts the experiences of Australian women reporting from later conflicts – Korea, Vietnam, the Soviet Union, Afghanistan, Gaza City and Iraq to name just a few. Unlike the other chapters which are richly detailed, the final chapter is an all too brief roundup of these conflicts and the role of female reporters. It left this reviewer wanting to read much more. This is not necessarily a criticism of the book; rather it is confirmation that much more needs to be written on this fascinating and until now, surprisingly under-researched subject of Australian women war reporters. This book has been meticulously researched with the trained eye of a professional and accomplished historian. It is also sympathetically written. It will appeal to a broad and varied audience, particularly readers interested in the history of war, women, gender relations and the history of Australian journalism. Dr Catie Gilchrist February 2016 https://www.newsouthbooks.com.au/collections/september-2015-non-fiction-titles/lead-titles/australian-women-war-reporters/    

Garry Wotherspoon, Gay Sydney: a history (NewSouth Books, 2015)

ISBN 9781742234830 RRP: $29.99

Garry Wotherspoon’s excellent new history of Sydney’s gay life is very much more than a mere updating of his ground-breaking 1991 history City of the Plain. Much of City remains, but things have moved a long way since 1991 and Gay Sydney reflects this. The original material has been re-written and recast, incorporating more recently published research, and made less ‘academic’, thus making it more accessible to those who will most want to read it. And, of course, events and developments of the last quarter century are given the prominence they deserve. Not only is it a complete revision and updating, but it is enlivened by accounts of the author’s personal experiences to illustrate some of the points being made. So it is both a properly documented and serious history, and at the same time a personal history by one who lived through much of it and had the initiative and the capacity to record and analyse it. He says “I was a participant in many of the events of the late twentieth century ... part of my own story is interwoven throughout this history ...” Looking back, it is astonishing that so many things which were inconceivable in 1990 are now common-place and mainstream. Consider same-sex adoptions and fostering, same-sex civil partnerships (though not marriages – yet), openly gay people holding public office, and the NSW Police Force joining in the annual Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras parade which they tried so brutally to crush in 1978. City of the Plain, written in the midst of the AIDS crisis, ended with a brief Epilogue on “The Impact of AIDS”. This has been expanded to a major chapter on the effects of AIDS on gay Sydney ­– both catastrophic and community-building – and a discussion of the concurrent history of the long battle for homosexual law reform. As AIDS became accepted as a public health issue rather than a ‘gay’ disease, so society’s attitudes towards gay people had to change and mature. With AIDS also affecting heterosexual people it became everyone’s problem rather than just ‘their’ problem and stronger ties were forged between the gay and straight communities in a common fight to support those affected and to find a cure. The gradual acceptance of gay people as part of the mainstream of society has not been without its strains, especially for some in the gay community. “Have we come to the stage where we are being seen as ‘just like everybody else’?” asks Wotherspoon. If so what does that mean for a ‘gay identity’? Many older gay activists are unhappy that gay life has become assimilated into the mainstream. What happened to the revolution? But the majority, who were not at the forefront of gay activism, are simply getting on with ‘normal’ life in the suburbs, enjoying acceptance and a sense of security which they never had before. Can gay culture survive integration? Because there will always be some who dispute our legitimacy and deny us acceptance and respect there will likely always be a need for older gays to act as mentors, role models and supporters for the next generations. Wotherspoon’s thoughtful insights into these issues in his last chapter are worth the serious consideration of all who are part of gay Sydney, or who care about it. Regrettably, unlike City of the Plain, Gay Sydney lacks any illustrations which could have given an added interest and context to many of the events described. Otherwise it is a handsomely produced book, well indexed, with a bright and arresting cover which, hopefully, will draw attention to itself in the bookshops and say “buy me”. While Gay Sydney is primarily one person’s interpretation of events, that person was actively involved in many of the events it records. Wotherspoon’s training as an academic historian allows him to step back and record and document, but his personal experiences along the way enable him to inject real life into the story of the journey from a hidden and illegal past to Sydney’s gay world of today. We are in his debt. https://www.newsouthbooks.com.au/books/gay-sydney/ Neil Radford 2016

Harry Rickards c1867-72, Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW (a4361049 / P1/1449)

Sydney had a vibrant theatre scene in the late 19th century. And one of the most famous entrepreneurs was Harry Rickards. http://dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/rickards_harry Harry Rickards was a popular performer in music halls in London before touring the colonies in the 1870s and 1880s. He was considered a great comic singer and performed Cockney character costume songs and also adopted the persona of the 'swell' man-about-town. We have several great photographs of Rickards in the Dictionary showing him in character. http://dictionaryofsydney.org/image/60377 http://dictionaryofsydney.org/image/60529 - this one has a great moustache!! Rickards settled in Sydney with his second wife Kate, an acrobat and trapeze artiste, in 1892. They leased the Sydney Opera House - no, not our modern one but a 19th century theatre in the heart of the city at King & York Street - and put on a season of Rickard's New Tivoli Minstrel and Grand Speciality Company of Forty Great Artists. (Try saying that quickly!) After a successful season, he leased the Garrick Theatre in Castlereagh Street between King and Market Streets, renaming it the Tivoli. The Sydney Tivoli Theatre, became and remained the Rickards' flagship theatre. As a producer and entrepreneur, Rickards encouraged local acts and performers, while also bringing international acts to Sydney. In April 1910 he brought the famous escapologist Harry Houdini to Sydney. The act included three Sydney carpenters and joiners challenging Houdini to escape from a box constructed by them.

Challenge to Houdini April 1910, State Library of Victoria (Alma Conjuring Collection POSTERS 93.2/72)

Over time Rickards limited his own time on stage, to concentrate of developing the Tivoli vaudeville touring circuit. According to the biography in the Dictionary, written by the late Ailsa McPherson, Rickards was a well-liked man, debonair, portly in later life, good-natured, generous and benevolent by action and reputation. He was also notoriously unpunctual and rather gushing in manner. He died in 1911 in London and his remains were brought back to Sydney, where he was buried in Waverley Cemetery. Another interesting theatre biography written by Ailsa is probably someone you've never heard of: Alfred Clint. http://dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/clint_alfred He was a talented artist who made his living and his reputation as a cartoonist and scenic artist in the Sydney theatres. Scenery and props is something we often don't think about, but they are integral to the success of any theatre production. Ailsa McPherson makes the point: "The art of the scene painter was a valued one in the nineteenth century, and the practitioner had a gruelling apprenticeship of seven to nine years in the theatre. These artists were expected by their audiences to fulfil a growing public desire for verisimilitude in theatrical representation in contrast to the stylistic images of previous theatre fashion. Victorian audiences wanted naturalistic stage action and enterprising local managers wanted local colour. Thus the scene painter provided a visual performance. The artists worked on site, often in hazardous conditions, using tall ladders and a bosun's chair to cover large hanging canvases. These giant pictures were for many viewers, particularly in colonial society, the only way to experience paintings first hand, before there was easy access to public art galleries." Alfred Clint arrived in Sydney in 1869 and he was immediately appointed scenic artist at Sydney's Prince of Wales Theatre. Clint also worked at the Royal Victoria, Her Majesty's, the Opera House and the Criterion, where his history painting of the landing of Captain Cook at Botany Bay formed the act drop at the theatre's opening. Clint was highly successful and his sons also became painters. He died in 1923. These are just two of the articles written by Ailsa McPherson on theatre life in Sydney for the Dictionary of Sydney, which we will look at later in the year. http://dictionaryofsydney.org/contributor/ailsa_mcpherson Ailsa died after a short illness in early March, and we wanted to pay tribute to her great support of the Dictionary and her extensive knowledge of Sydney's theatre history which she shared so generously. We will miss her greatly. Vale Ailsa, and thank you.

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If you missed today’s segment with Lisa & Mitch, you can catch up here via the 2SER website. Tune in 2SER Breakfast with Mitch Byatt on 107.3 every Wednesday morning at 8:20 am for more Sydney history!

   

Letter of eligibility for Saiyid Mahomet Shah Banuri for Certificate of Exemption 1904, from the Correspondence of the Collector of Customs relating to Immigration Restriction and Passports) Source: National Archives of Australia SP42/1, C1905/3746 Page 28 of 29

It was Harmony Day last week, which aims to celebrate Australia’s cultural diversity. The focus on Muslims in the media in recent years has often centred on the development of Islamic extremism. Yet Muslims have long been a part of our history and a culturally diverse part of this city's demographic makeup, as Garry Wotherspoon notes in the Dictionary of Sydney. I spoke about the history of the Islamic community in Sydney with Mitch on 2SER Breakfast this morning. Some of Australia’s earliest visitors were Muslim fisherman from Macassar in the Indonesian Archipelago, and sailed to the country in search of sea slugs from about the early 1700s. There is evidence of Muslim crewmen on board colonial ships, such as John Hassan who was in Sydney in 1795. The Islamic day of mourning and commemoration for the death of Imam Hussein, Ashura, has taken place in Sydney since the earliest years of colonial settlement. The city’s earliest newspaper, Sydney Gazette, described the ‘Eastern splendor and magnificence’ of the week-long festival in March 1806. In the 1870s, Muslim traders set up their place of worship in Haymarket. However, the emergence of more culturally diverse communities in the city caused tensions and culminated in the development of the ‘White Australia Policy’ which officially passed in 1901. By 1921, there were almost 3,000 Muslims living in Australia and very few in Sydney, the numbers falling from 393 in 1901 to 147 in 1921. As immigration restrictions and obstacles were dismantled, the city saw an increase in its Muslim population. During the 1970s, refugees from the Middle East arrived following civil war in Lebanon. The city’s Muslim population comprised a range of ethnic groups, with the largest groups being Lebanese and Turkish. Support groups and organisations formed, such as the Islamic Council of NSW, which was established in 1976 and was open to all Muslims, regardless of ethnicity or race. Mosques and community organisations played, and continue to do so, an important role in the life of Muslims in Sydney. Today there are around 120 mosques in Sydney, such as the Gallipoli Mosque in Auburn which draws the city’s Turkish Muslim community, and the Smithfield Mosque, which draws the city’s Bosnian Muslims.

Photograph of school librarian at Malek Fahd Islamic School, Greenacre 2004, by John Immig. Source: National Library of Australia nla.pic-vn3256002

Today, Muslims comprise about 3.4% of Sydney’s population. Muslims in Sydney are ethnically, linguistically and culturally diverse, and have come from more than 120 countries. Just like many others who have come to this city from across the globe and faced the challenges of thriving in a new environment, Muslims have made a vital contribution to this city’s vibrant multicultural life.

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If you missed today’s segment, you can catch up here via the 2SER website. Tune in 2SER Breakfast with Mitch Byatt on 107.3 every Wedensday morning at 8:20 am.

wp-image-12160https://home.dictionaryofsydney.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/SideShowAlley1957.jpgSideshow alley at the Royal Sydney Easter Show 1957 By Raymond Morris. Contributed by National Museum of Australia [Slide 164, via NMA's Flickr set] (Raymond Morris Collection, courtesy of the photographer)600386/> Sideshow alley at the Royal Sydney Easter Show 1957 By Raymond Morris. Contributed by National Museum of Australia [Slide 164, via NMA's Flickr set] (Raymond Morris Collection, courtesy of the photographer)

What are your favourite memories about Sydney's Easter Show? The District Exhibits? The Grand Parade? Sideshow Alley? Or is it just horses, cows, the little ducklings and perhaps sore feet? The Sydney Royal Easter Show is a tradition that has continued for generations. The  show in Sydney traces its roots way back to 1823 when an agricultural show was held at Parramatta. But it really got going from the 1850s. It started to attract large numbers when it moved to Prince Alfred Park in 1869 and became the iconic event Sydneysiders know and love when the Agricultural Society of NSW moved the show to Moore Park Showgrounds in 1882. Do you remember the Moore Park Showgrounds in full swing? Many younger Sydneysiders wouldn't because the RAS went to their new digs at Homebush back in 1998. So this is the 19th year it has been at Homebush. Many of the iconic elements of the show have a long tradition: The Grand Parade dates from 1907 - so it's been going for over 100 years; and the wood chopping - one of my favourite events - dates back to 1899. There are so many different aspects to the show: industrial prowess and invention, agricultural prosperity, demonstration and harvest, education and carnival. The show attracts a diversity of people - its where the city meets the country. And all classes mix at the show. One of my favourite images dates from 1940 and shows a range of people sitting on a kerb resting their feet at the show. A little boy is going through his show bags - which includes, you'll notice, a cadbury's chocolate show bag.

wp-image-12157https://home.dictionaryofsydney.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/PeopleResting-EasterShow1940.jpgPeople resting at the Royal Easter Show March 1940. By Sam Hood. From the collection of the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales [a4423006 / ON 204 Box 87/99] 400405/> People resting at the Royal Easter Show March 1940. By Sam Hood. From the collection of the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales [a4423006 / ON 204 Box 87/99]

The mixing of social classes is the theme of Miles Franklin's novella Sydney Royal: Divertissement, a rollicking tribute to the human dramas of the show as expressed through a cast of strong-minded children and the luckless adults they drag into their adventures. Franklin's characters are satirical representations of Australian society, from the vice-regal family, the sideshow operators, the working class from Woolloomooloo, and the country 'woop' from Woop Woop but all are swept up together at the Royal Easter Show. The novella as published in 1947 also includes two poems by Miles Franklin: 'Ballard of Sydney Royal' and 'The Fortune Teller's Song. Sadly, I'm not going to get to the show this year, but I am going to read Miles Franklin's novella and look at all the fabulous photographs of the show in the Dictionary of Sydney, starting with Kate Darian-Smith's article. It's almost as good as being there... now, if only someone would get me a Bertie Beetle bag my show experience would be complete! Listen now If you missed today’s segment, you can catch up here via the 2SER website. Tune in 2SER Breakfast with Mitch Byatt on 107.3 every Wedensday morning at 8:20 am.