The first Coogee shark net, December 1922 by AE Foster, Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW (ON 30/Box 55 No 675)

It's summer, and for many of us, that means swimming in the sea. There has been a long tradition in Sydney of enclosing ocean bathing areas a nets to protect bathers from sharks, but the consequences of decisions about shark nets that were made in the 1920s and 1930s are still being felt today.

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Initially these enclosed areas were only in Sydney Harbour itself. The western foreshore of Woolloomooloo Bay, for instance, has had a variety of swimming enclosures from the mid 1820s. The Municipality of Manly has offered safe sea bathing in their Manly Cove baths since 1892. Other municipalities offered ocean rock pools. The idea of the shark net enclosure became more formalised in the 20th century as ocean bathing became more popular. Randwick Council first experimented with a shark net in 1922 following a fatal shark attack at the beach. The suburb made headlines around the country with its 'shark-proof fence' and the promise of 'safety-first surfing'. Unfortunately the net, which was to stretch almost all the way across the bay was damaged by heavy weather before its official opening. Oceanside amusements stepped up a notch when the Coogee Pier was opened in July 1929. Extending for 183 meters into the sea, the pier incorporated a 1,400 seat theatre, a ballroom for 600 dancers and an upstairs restaurant seating 400 people. More importantly for swimmers, a shark net was added a few months later. Supported again by the local council, it was designed by surf shed manager Frank O'Grady and cost 6,750 pounds to build. The net stretched halfway across the bay and was attached to one of the pylons of the pier. Mayor John Jennings hoped the net would finally 'conquer the dreaded shark menace'. The opening of the netted swimming area was a grand affair and coincided with the unveiling of Giles' Ocean Baths and new surf sheds. The opening in November 1929 attracted a crowd of 135,000 people and was promoted as part of a 'Come to Coogee Week'. Admission to the netted swim area and surf sheds was set at one penny, in an attempt to help defray the vast costs. Within four months, the number of bathers enjoying Coogee surf had reached 800,000.

Panoramic view of Coogee on the day that the shark net was opened, 16 November 1929 by EB Studios, Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW (SPF/1141)

  Floodlights were also installed and the novelty of night surfing brought even more crowds of surfers and spectators to the beach. It is said that night surfing attracted 20,000 to 30,000 a night - photographs by Sam Hood certainly show a packed beach. The first night surf carnival was held at Coogee on 27 February 1930.

Huge crowd at Coogee at night c1930s by Sam Hood, Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW (Home and Away 7707)

Coogee Pier only lasted a few years; victim of heavy seas, it was demolished in 1934. The shark net continued to be maintained through the 1930s but fell into disrepair in the early 1940s and was dismantled when no metal could be sourced for its repair during World War II. By this time however, the state government had implemented a wider program. Following a recommendation from the New South Wales Government's Shark Menace Advisory Committee, beaches from Port Hacking to Broken Bay were meshed in October 1937. This is the program that still controversially runs today. Today 51 beaches between Newcastle and Wollongong are netted. It is, according to researchers at the University of Wollongong, the world's longest running lethal shark management program.   Some other links to explore on the Dictionary: Coogee, by Catie Gilchrist: https://dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/coogee Living with sharks on the Georges River, by Sharon Cullis: https://dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/living_with_sharks_on_the_georges_river The Battle of Berry's Bay - a battle with sharks in Sydney Harbour 7 March 1886  https://dictionaryofsydney.org/media/3875     Dr Lisa Murray is the Historian of the City of Sydney and former chair of the Dictionary of Sydney Trust. She is a Visiting Scholar at the State Library of New South Wales and the author of several books, including Sydney Cemeteries: a field guide. She appears on 2SER on behalf of the Dictionary of Sydney in a voluntary capacity. Thanks Lisa, for ten years of unstinting support of the Dictionary!  You can follow her on Twitter here: @sydneyclio Listen to Lisa & Alex here, and tune in to 2SER Breakfast on 107.3 every Wednesday morning at 8:15-8:20 am to hear more from the Dictionary of Sydney.           

Barmaids serving customers in the Newcastle Hotel 1968, National Archives of Australia (A1500, K19075)

In honour of Clive James who died this week, today we're going to peek inside the doors of one of the Sydney establishments that helped him along, the Newcastle Hotel on George Street.  

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Like the Newcastle Hotel, writer and critic Clive James has been gone from Sydney for quite a while, but he always maintained a strong connection. The self-described Kid from Kogarah, possibly the best known of the southern suburb's cultural exports, left for London in the 1960s. Prior to his departure, he had been part of the artistic and intellectual movement called the Sydney Push. The Sydney Push, named in an ironic acknowledgement of the 19th century 'pushes' or gangs that menaced Sydney's streets, was a group of intellectuals and artists that had formed in post World War II Sydney. After the upheaval of the Depression in the 1930s and the war in the 1940s, Australian society had become more stable in the Menzies era of the 1950s. Various left leaning and libertarian groups came into existence in reaction to what was perceived as a more bland and boring culture. As is the way with any good intellectual group, they started to squabble, splits occurred between factions, and eventually the Push came into being as a broader artistic group. The Push included writers, artists, academics, journalists: people like Clive James, Frank Moorhouse, Wendy Bacon, Robert Hughes, George Molnar, Bob Ellis, Richard Neville (of OZ magazine), Germaine Greer and Martin Sharp among others. One of the Push's preferred drinking dens was the Newcastle. The Newcastle, on the southern corner of George Street and Essex, towards the Rocks, had initially been a wharfies and workers pub. Erected on the site of an earlier hotel in 1914, by the 1920s it was already becoming part of Sydney's artistic scene. The offices of book publisher Angus & Robertson were nearby, as were the Bulletin, the Julian Ashton Art School and Smith's Weekly. From these the Newcastle, one of the closest pubs to all of them attracted a diverse mix of intellectuals and bohemians.

The Newcastle Hotel, 2 January 1957, photo by Cec Lynch, Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW, courtesy ACP Magazines Ltd (ON 388/Box 043/Item 059)

The scene was helped in no small part by the publican, a man named Jim Buckley who helped the local artists by staging exhibitions of their works on the walls of the front bar, even buying some for the hotel to help them out. His wall of ‘dud cheques’ spoke loudly of his generosity, accepting cheques from the struggling writers and artistic drinkers to help them out even though he probably knew their money was no good. Buckley also allowed women to drink in the front bar, rather than the Ladies Lounge which was the norm for Sydney pubs at the time. This added to the bohemian atmosphere, something so normal now that it is difficult to imagine it ever having been different. Although the Push pushed hard to challenge Sydney and Australia’s dullness, it was not enough to hold many of its better known members. Clive James, Germaine Greer, Richard Neville and Robert Hughes all moved on to England or America in the early and mid-1960s. The Newcastle moved on too, demolished in 1973 to make way for Sydney’s ever growing skyline. Head to the Dictionary to read more about the Newcastle Hotel in Frank Moorhouse's article here.        

The Stranger's Guide to Sydney,, courtesy Mitchell Library, State LIbrary of NSW (DSM/981.1/W)

We've all used a tourist guide when we've visited a new city. They can help us orientate ourselves, to find the landmarks we want to see, and understand the locals. But have you ever wondered about Sydney's first tourist guides? I recently had the joy of delving into James Waugh's The Stranger's Guide to Sydney that offered visitors walking tours of Sydney in the mid 19th century.

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James Waugh was a stationer and bookseller who migrated to Australia in 1840 and by 1851 had set up his own bookselling business. He soon realised there was a market for guides of the city and published the first edition of the The Stranger's Guide to Sydney in 1858, and then a second edition in 1861. The guidebook could be bought from Waugh's bookshop at 286 George Street, on the corner of Robin Hood Lane, for the price of 2s 6d. He wrote in his preface that he was inspired to write the guide because of a gap in the market: 'The want of a cheap and portable Guide, for the use of strangers visiting Sydney, induced the Publisher to get up this little work'. These historic tourist guides contain all sorts of observations about Sydney, its buildings and how locals lived. Unusually, he arranged all the key information into a series of four walks. He included a map of the city and a directory of the various streets and public building. They are an amazing source for the urban historian. Waugh's second edition almost doubled in size, and as well as the walks included a listing of favourite pleasure excursions in the neighbourhood, and some practical timetables for coach and steam transport. Can you believe it? Walking tours of Sydney from 1858 and 1861. Waugh deliberately arrange his guide with a series of walks 'in order that those who have but a short time to spend in town, may have an opportunity of seeing as much of it as possible'. I believe these are among the first self-guided walking tours to be published in Sydney. Waugh's guide presents a landscape that is at once familiar to the contemporary reader and oddly different. And it was this sense of the strangely familiar - the discordant memory of the city - that inspired me to re-present Waugh's walk for a 21st century audience. We wanted to re-envision Sydney through Waugh's eyes. The result is a new walk devised for smartphones on the City of Sydney's Sydney Culture Walks app for mobile devices: The Stranger's Guide: Sydney 1861.

A spot of cricket in Hyde Park, Hyde Park, Museum, Darlinghurst Gaol, Sydney Grammar School, Burdekin's and Lyons' Terraces, 1842 by John Rae, Dixson Galleries, State Library of NSW (DG SV*/Sp Coll /Rae/19)

Here are some of the acute observations that Waugh made about Sydney in 1861:

• he notes the protracted construction of St Andrew's Cathedral (doesn't every big build run over time?): 'When finished St Andrew’s Cathedral will be an imposing structure. The patience of many has been wearied out from the length of time it has been in building. Of late, however, it has gradually been verging towards completion.'
• there were once three mail deliveries a day!: 'There is a delivery three times a day, viz at 9am, 1 and 4pm; but on extraordinary occasions such as the arrival of an English Mail, a delivery takes place as soon after as possible.'
• when young Sydneysiders were after a spot of cricket, they descended upon Hyde Park: 'It is now the resort of the youthful inhabitants for the favourite and healthy game of cricket, and the number who may be seen engaged in this sport, on a pleasant day, is truly astounding.'
• inebriated Sydneysiders kept the courts busy. Waugh noted of the George Street Police Office and Courthouse: 'A court is held daily, and were it not for drunkenness, the parent of every vice, we venture to affirm there would be little to be brought before its jurisdiction.'
• parliamentarians grandstanded and waffled on, even in 1861. Waugh recommended: 'the stranger should by no means leave Sydney without visiting this House of Representatives, and listening to the specimens of colonial eloquence which it nightly pours forth'.

Let James Waugh be your guide as you travel back in time to 1861 and be a stranger in your own city. Our modern version of his walk starts at present-day Sydney Town Hall and ends at Customs House, but all the landmarks along the way are from 1861, illustrated with contemporary watercolours, etchings and photographs. It's Sydney like you've never seen it before. You can download the Sydney Culture Walks app for free here:  www.sydneyculturewalksapp.com  

Map from the 1861 edition of The Stranger's Guide to Sydney, courtesy State LIbrary of NSW (DSM/981.1/W)

  Dr Lisa Murray is the Historian of the City of Sydney and former chair of the Dictionary of Sydney Trust. She is a Visiting Scholar at the State Library of New South Wales and the author of several books, including Sydney Cemeteries: a field guide. She appears on 2SER on behalf of the Dictionary of Sydney in a voluntary capacity. Thanks Lisa, for ten years of unstinting support of the Dictionary!  You can follow her on Twitter here: @sydneyclio Listen to Lisa & Sean here, and tune in to 2SER Breakfast on 107.3 every Wednesday morning at 8:15-8:20 am to hear more from the Dictionary of Sydney.                           

Explorers Tree, Katoomba c1890, courtesy Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW (PXA 1031, 25)

On the southern side of the Great Western Highway just west of Katoomba is a colonial relic known as the Explorers' Tree. But you would be forgiven for not recognising it as a tree. Today all that remains is a concrete stump on a rubble stone podium.

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The stump is the remains of a tree supposedly marked with the initials of Gregory Blaxland, William Lawson and William Charles Wentworth when they crossed the Blue Mountains in 1813. However, while it was common for explorers to blaze or mark trees as they ventured off their maps into uncharted territory, there is no evidence these three men marked this tree. The explorers' journals never mention carving or marking trees and the following year as William Cox constructed the road through the Mountains from 1814-15, there was no mention of it in his journal either. The first mention of the tree in the published record did not occur until over 50 years after the crossing. The Reverend William Woolls from Parramatta wrote to the Sydney Morning Herald about eucalyptus trees and in doing so, commented on a blackbutt tree ‘which the late Mr W Lawson cut his initials with a tomahawk in 1813... This interesting tree, so intimately connected with the first expedition over the Blue Mountains, is standing on the side of the Bathurst Road at the summit of Pulpit Hill.’ Mythology around the tree was further fuelled during the 1870s and the 1880s with illustrations, sketches and photographs appearing in newspapers. A  stone wall was erected around the tree to protect it but smothered and killed it by 1903. Meanwhile the plaque installed on the podium was found to have an inaccurate inscription suggesting Pulpit Hill was the ‘farthest distance reached’ by the explorers in their first attempt to cross the Blue Mountains. Nonetheless its role as a symbol of colonial enterprise was celebrated in the Centenary of the Crossing in 1913 when the stump was decorated with streamers and banners.

The postscript describing the 'Explorers' Tree' in Rev Woolls letter on The Genus Eucalyptus, Sydney Morning Herald, 26 Aug 1867, p2 via Trove

Further calamity ensued for the blackbutt when the top half of the tree that had been sawn off and erected in the foyer of Mark Foy’s Hydro Majestic Hotel at Medlow Bath as an historic relic in about 1904, was then destroyed by a bush fire in 1923. Anxiety around the tree’s condition saw more correspondence to the newspapers. The editorial of the Blue Mountain Echo on 6 July 1928 bemoaned the ‘rotting stump, standing mute sentinel beside the smooth face of the Great Western Road' as 'one of the most precious heirlooms of our race ... [and]... no reasonable effort should be spared to perpetuate it.’ A suggestion to make a cast of the remains of the tree and install it in the Katoomba Town Hall led nowhere, but a decision was made to pour concrete into the hollowed stump and brace the remaining bark with metal bands. In subsequent decades the stump has borne arson attacks and car collisions into the base of the podium, severely testing the endurance of this relic.

The Explorers' Tree, Katoomba c1910, courtesy Mitchell Library, State LIbrary of NSW ([PXA 635/381)

It has also weathered protests.

One week before the Australia Day 1988 bicentenary celebrations, an Aboriginal Flag was painted on part of the stump reminding visitors that there was a deep time dimension to Australian history not recognised by the colonial story of exploration, and it is this perhaps that is the most enduring legacy of the tree, not as a marker of exploration itself, but as a canvas for how Australians wanted to depict their history, and how as our national narratives shift ‘previously venerated sites are marooned'.

  Notes:   Lavelle, Siobhan. A tree and a legend: the making of past and place in the Blue Mountains, New South Wales [online]. Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, Vol. 89, No. 1, June 2003: 1-25. Availability: <https://search-informit-com-au.ezproxy.sl.nsw.gov.au/documentSummary;dn=200306258;res=IELAPA> ISSN: 0035-8762. [cited 20 Nov 19].    

Detail of a tourist map from 1909 showing the Explorers' Tree, courtesy National Library of Australia (MAP RM 2468 (Copy 1))

Minna Muhlen-Schulte is a professional historian and Senior Heritage Consultant at GML Heritage. She was the recipient of the Berry Family Fellowship at the State Library of Victoria and has worked on a range of history projects for community organisations, local and state government including the Third Quarantine Cemetery, Victorian War Heritage Inventory, Museum of Australian Democracy at Eureka (M.A.D.E) and Mallee Aboriginal District Services. In 2014, Minna developed a program on the life and work of Clarice Beckett for ABC Radio National’s Hindsight Program and in 2017 produced Crossing Enemy Lines for ABC Radio National’s Earshot Program. She’s appearing for the Dictionary today in a voluntary capacity. Thanks Minna! Listen to the podcast with Minna & Alex here, and tune in to 2SER Breakfast on 107.3 every Wednesday morning to hear more from the Dictionary of Sydney.                               

           

Cathy Perkins, The Shelf Life of Zora Cross

Monash University Publishing, November 2019, 285pp (inc Index), ISBN (pb): 978-1-925835-53-3, RRP: $29.95

‘£20 and you shall have her’ (p.60). This financial exchange in 1917 between Sydney bookseller James Tyrell and publisher George Robertson sealed Zora Cross’s fate. Her collection of 50 sonnets, Songs of Love and Life, would now be published and marketed by the respected Robertson, rather than printed as a cheap paperback. Given that these candid and passionate poems were written by a female in 1917 – a time when women were often thought to endure sex, not desire it (‘lie back and think of England’) – Zora certainly benefitted from having her provocative, some might say salacious, sonnets published by a respectable publisher. How is it that this ‘diminutive little woman’ who sits nervously ‘on the edge of her chair’ and looks ‘like a Sunday school teacher’ came to write passionate love sonnets? (p.60) And how is it that this once celebrated author of 11 published books and countless magazine columns, articles and poems, who was likened to Shakespeare and Sappho, is now forgotten? In The Shelf Life of Zora Cross, we join Cathy Perkins on her personal quest to discover this prolific, neglected, Australian writer. Perkins has done the hard work for us – transcribing Zora’s hand-written letters, and analysing and organising her voluminous correspondence, published works and rejected manuscripts into a coherent narrative. Through it, we discover the unconventional, original and irresistible Zora Cross. As well as being a writer, Zora was a school teacher, actress, editor, vaudeville singer and mother. She was intensely patriotic and romantic. At the beginning of the First World War she travelled the east coast of Australia entertaining troops as a singer and comic actress. Little did her admiring audience know that she was six months pregnant. Her son was born in August 1914 when she was 24 years old and initially cared for by Zora’s mother. Three years later, her collection of erotic sonnets caused a sensation. Soldiers took her book of sonnets to the Front and a second reprint was required. Reading this biography, one senses that the author knows Zora intimately. In the introduction and epilogue, Perkins uses first person voice to explain her inaugural encounter with Zora and how it bewitched her into a journey of inquiry that resulted in a Master of Philosophy thesis (at the University Sydney under the supervision of Mark McKenna) and this biography (published by Monash University Publishing). The origins of the book as a history thesis are evident in the meticulous research and referencing. Perkins makes it her mission to understand how and why Zora came to be an author and poet. Zora came from ‘literary stock’ and won her first prize for a published work at the age of nine years. The prize of two shillings worth of stamps (which would enable the writer to post about 20 standard letters) was all the encouragement she needed. Zora wrote regularly, becoming a ‘cornerist’ – a regular contributor to the Children’s Corner pages of the Australian Town and Country Journal, which was edited by Ethel Turner (author of Seven Little Australians). I was intrigued to learn of the young ‘cornerists’ and how they commented on each other’s submissions and enquired after each other, much like you could on Twitter today. Perkins crafts the story of Zora’s unconventional life into ten roughly chronological chapters. These are sub-titled with the name of a person, usually a literary figure, who is significant in her life. It is through Zora’s correspondence with editors and writers like Ethel Turner, Bertram Stevens (The Lone Hand), David McKee Wright (The Bulletin) and Mary Gilmore that we learn much about Zora’s influences and motivations. Fortunately, their personal papers, or the business archives of the company they worked for, have been preserved by institutions such as the State Library of New South Wales. Given that so much business is transacted via email, SMS and online messenger applications today, I doubt if Perkins could research this book had Zora lived 100 years later. The level of intimacy that Zora achieves with her correspondents through only an exchange of letters is extraordinary. I have written elsewhere about the power of personal letter writing and Zora employs the medium to its full emotional extent. For example, once George Robertson had decided to publish Zora’s collection of risque sonnets, he began editing it with a vengeance. Zora wrote to him: ‘I used to dream night after night that you were chasing me through interminable forests with commas and semicolons like awful hatchets’ (p.64). Before she had even met David McKee Wright, editor of the literary pages at The Bulletin in 1916, she wrote to him describing a dream she’d had where they ‘were bathing – a la Adam & Eve – on the Cairns beach [. . .] clad in nothing but one’s own hair’ (p.148). Wright would become her partner of eight years (they couldn’t legally marry as they were both already married), father of her two daughters and step-father to her son. Perkins quotes extensively from Zora’s letters, poems and manuscripts. Many sentences are constructed by intermingling the two voices, which in the hands of a less accomplished writer could have been very clunky. For me, as a reader, I enjoyed the prose most when the two voices were kept separate and Perkins was free to provide her own interpretation of Zora’s extraordinary life in her own words. Perkins is loyal to her subject and her admiration of Zora shines though. I particularly enjoyed the subtle digs at Norman Lindsay, who refused to provide eight illustrations for Zora’s book of sonnets, believing that women could not write ‘passionate literature’ because their spinal cord was not connected to their productive apparatus! (p.61). The cover of The Shelf Life of Zora Cross is as beguiling as its subject. It features a studio photograph of Zora taken in 1919 when she was 29 years old. As the structure of the book is not strictly chronological, I thought it would benefit from a timeline that plots Zora’s important life events and literary achievements. Similarly, a map might help international readers, as well as Australians who are not familiar with the geography of the east coast, understand the distances Zora traversed as a ‘common vaudeville singer’ and with her family of origin. The Shelf Life of Zora Cross will interest lovers of Australian history, literature, feminism and publishing. Cathy Perkins has resurrected Zora from her forsaken literary grave with a book which is compelling and astute.     Reviewed by Alison Wishart, November 2019 Visit the publisher's website here.      

Girl with birthday cake c1953, by Max Dupain, courtesy Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW (ON 559/Box 9/705)

This week the Dictionary of Sydney is celebrating 10 years since it went live! I am continually amazed by the content and connections in the Dictionary and the light it sheds on Sydney's history, so this week I thought I'd share a few links to some of my favourite entries and images that you can discover in the Dictionary. There are so many more though, so let us know some of your favourites too!  

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  The first entries I've chosen to talk about today are about three of the people on the Dictionary:

• Henri L'Estrange Aeronaut and funambulist, L'Estrange was one of the daring performers attempting unheard-of feats in Sydney during the 1870s and 1880s. Though not always successful, his exploits were usually both exciting and spectacular
• Biddy Giles Biddy Giles was an Aboriginal woman who had extensive knowledge of Dharawal land from the south side of the Georges River to Wollongong and was a well known guide for settlers.
• Violet McKenzie Florence Violet McKenzie was an electrical engineer who taught thousands of women, and soldiers, to use radio for signalling, founded the Wireless Weekly and pioneered technical education for women.

Harry Rickards on the cover of sheet music of 'Where is my Nancy?' c1880, courtesy Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW (MUSIC FILE/HUN)

and then three different, perhaps unexpected, aspects of Sydney's history that our great contributors have written about:

• Public lavatories The provision of public toilets says a lot about the cultural history and gendered values of society.
• Reading the Roads Lines to regulate traffic were the first messages to appear on the paving, and as motor vehicles became faster and the traffic became denser the number of regulatory marks grew. By the end of the century, the streets were covered with a vast lexicon of lines, signs, symbols and sentences that road users needed to memorise.
• Stained Glass Sydney has a distinguished share of Australia's rich heritage in stained glass and the Dictionary of Sydney is a great way to view them.

With over 1000 entries on the Dictionary there are lots more to explore, so head to the Entries tab (here) to browse and search them all. You can even sort them by the date they were published! I also have some favourite images among the many thousands on the Dictionary, and the ones here showcase the range of subjects the Dictionary covers, from the quintessential to the curious. Click on the images to be taken to where they sit in the Dictionary and explore the connections around them.

• Harry Rickards on the cover of sheet music of 'Where is my Nancy?' c1880, courtesy Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW (MUSIC FILE/HUN)

Wonderland City, Tamarama c1900, courtesy Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW (PXA 584/75)

Sheet music was central to the dissemination of popular music in Sydney throughout the 19th century and early 20th century before the advent of radio. And Harry Rickards was a theatre owner and comedian who built a theatre circuit in Australia (the Tivoli circuit) and brought many legendary variety artists to Australia. And gee, what can you say about that moustache (even if it is part of the costume)!!

• Wonderland City, Tamarama c1900, courtesy Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW (PXA 584/75)

A different time and era. This was an aquarium and amusement park in the valley of Fletcher's Glen at Tamarama beach.

Women's liberationists storm the roof at the Bidura Shelter for Girls in Glebe on International Womens Day 8 March 1974, courtesy Australian History Museum at Macquarie University (Image 42000127)

• Women's liberationists storm the roof at the Bidura Shelter for Girls in Glebe on International Womens Day 8 March 1974, courtesy Australian History Museum at Macquarie University (Image 42000127)

Bidura was a two storey Victorian house on Glebe Point road. From the 1920s the house was used as a girls' home and children's court. In the 1970s Bidura and the Shelter, along with Parramatta Girls' Home and Hay Institution for Girls, were targeted by Bessie Guthrie and activists from the Women's Liberation movement for abuses against young women.

Flyer for Bray's Museum of Island Curios c1891 Courtesy City of Sydney Archives (26/248/408)

• Flyer for Bray's Museum of Island Curios c1891, courtesy City of Sydney Archives (26/248/408)

Bray's Museum of Curios was a private natural museum and associated business dealing in colonial, ethnographic and natural artefacts established by James Bray, initially in his home at 84 Forbes Street Woolloomooloo in 1884 and subsequently at 12 Queens Place (now Dalley Street) near Circular Quay in 1886.

• After a surf at Palm Beach, a sun bath c1926-1928, By Gladys E Moss, courtesy State Library of Victoria (H2010.190/21)

  After a surf at Palm Beach, a sun bath c1926-1928, by Gladys E Moss, courtesy State Library of Victoria (H2010.190/21)

Beach culture is central to Sydney life and this captures the moment in the 1920s when beach swimming during the daylight was becoming acceptable.     The Dictionary is made up of contributions and support from hundreds of people and organisations, making it the wonderful collaborative history resource it is today. Thank you to everyone who has helped the Dictionary come this far! We're especially grateful for the support of the City of Sydney, the Dictionary's main sponsor between 2006-2016, and to the State Library of New South Wales, another of our founding partners, which has given the Dictionary a new home in recent years.   Dr Lisa Murray is the Historian of the City of Sydney and the former chair of the Dictionary of Sydney Trust. She is a Visiting Scholar at the State Library of New South Wales and the author of several books, including Sydney Cemeteries: a field guide. She appears on 2SER on behalf of the Dictionary of Sydney in a voluntary capacity. Thanks Lisa, for ten years of unstinting support of the Dictionary!  You can follow her on Twitter here: @sydneyclio Listen to Lisa & Alex here, and tune in to 2SER Breakfast on 107.3 every Wednesday morning at 8:15-8:20 am to hear more from the Dictionary of Sydney.         

Zora Cross 1919, courtesy Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW (PXA 690/3)

Today on 2SER Breakfast, Tess talked to historian and author Cathy Perkins about the Australian poet and journalist Zora Cross. Now largely forgotten, in the early 20th century she was wildly popular.

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Zora Cross’s poetry collection Songs of Love and Life caused a sensation when it was it was published by Angus & Robertson in Sydney in 1917. She was declared a genius, ‘a new star on the literary horizon’, and applauded for writing openly about sex from a woman’s point of view. Songs of Love and Life would be reprinted three times and sell about 4,000 copies, a significant number in a population of five million. Soldiers took it to the trenches, and the publisher George Robertson believed the author would endure as a household name alongside the Shakespeare and Rossetti.

Cover of Songs of Love and Life, 1917, artwork by Norman Lindsay

I first encountered Zora Cross in 2008, working as an editor at the State Library of NSW. In a book of letters to and from Robertson, I learned that Norman Lindsay had refused to illustrate Songs of Love and Life on the grounds that women couldn’t write love poetry because their ‘spinal column’ wasn’t connected to the ‘productive apparatus’ (although he did produce a cover design). I was intrigued by the book’s success in the face of Lindsay’s dismissal. I found that the State Library held hundreds of personal letters by Zora Cross. Corresponding with leading literary figures of the time — including authors Ethel Turner and Mary Gilmore — she captured her obsessive struggle to write and to be published, through financial hardship, personal tragedies and two world wars. Zora Cross was born in Brisbane in 1890 and moved to Sydney as a teenager. During her childhood she published thousands of words in the ‘Children’s Corner’ of the Australian Town and Country Journal, edited by Ethel Turner. She worked as a primary school teacher in inner Sydney schools, and a vaudeville actress in Brisbane, before turning to writing full time. Following her success with Songs of Love and Life in 1917, she wrote another poetry collection, an acclaimed elegy for her brother who died in World War I and one of the first introductions to Australian literature. Her novels set in Queensland were published in London, and under the pseudonym Bernice May she wrote a series of interviews with other women writers of the 1920s and 30s for the popular magazine Australian Woman’s Mirror.

Zora Bernice May Cross, poet and writer 1927, portrait by May Moore, courtesy Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW (P1/C)

From 1919 Zora Cross lived at Glenbrook in the lower Blue Mountains, where she raised three children and worked as a freelance writer. Although her fame diminished after World War II, she continued to write poetry for major journals and newspapers. Towards the end of her life, Zora Cross was thought to be among the leading female Australian poets of the early twentieth century. But after she died in 1964, she was treated coolly by the literary historians that followed. In the late twentieth century, many Australian women writers were rescued from obscurity, but Zora Cross wasn’t among them. Her classical style of poetry was long out of favour, and the extent of her feminism could only be seen through the sum of her work, much of it hidden away in newspapers and magazines. But Zora Cross filled the archives with evidence of her daily life and professional ambitions. These letters allow us to get closer to her than to many writers whose work better withstood the past century’s literary assessment. Her poetry and fiction, unpublished work, manuscript memoirs, letters and journalism offer a distinct and complex picture of Australian life and publishing history.       Cathy Perkins is the editor of SL magazine at the State Library of NSW. Her new book The Shelf Life of Zora Cross is published by Monash University Publishing. You can follow her on Twitter here. Cathy will be talking about her book at the State Library of NSW at 12.30pm on 7 November with curator Sarah Morley (click here for details and to make a booking) and at Gleebooks at 6pm on 18 November with the ABC's Kate Evans (click here).         Listen to the whole conversation between Cathy and Tess here, and tune in to 2SER Breakfast on 107.3 every Wednesday morning at 8:15-8:20 am to hear more from the Dictionary of Sydney.   This is Tess Connery's last week as host of 2SER Breakfast, so on behalf of all of the Dictionary presenters and listeners, we'd like to thank her for so many delightful Wednesday mornings and great conversations, and to wish her all our very best for her next adventure in media. Thanks for everything Tess!    

Siobhán McHugh, The Snowy: A History (Anniversary edition)

Paperback, May 2019, NewSouth, ISBN: 9781742236223, 368pp., AUD$34.99

This month marks the 70th anniversary of the Snowy Mountains Hydro Electric Scheme, the largest engineering project in Australia. This anniversary edition is updated from the 1989 original by its author, award winning writer, audio producer, oral historian, and academic Siobhán McHugh. In the 1990s McHugh spent almost three years conducting hundreds of oral history interviews with migrant workers and personnel involved with the Snowy Scheme, which would later become a radio series for the ABC and documentary. Their stories are skilfully woven throughout, together with research expertly examining both the triumphs and tragedies of the scheme - there were 121 officially recorded deaths (the youngest aged only 16 years old) during construction and unknown numbers of injuries. Key players including the role of the Australian Workers Union, politicians, and the arrival of the American construction companies that would radically change the civil engineering procedures of the scheme are also looked at. McHugh’s writing, particularly viewed in light of recent anti-immigrant sensibilities, is as much a celebration of these hardworking men and women who came from all over the world looking for ‘a better life’ and the positive and lasting contributions of migrants to Australian society, as it is about this extraordinary feat of civil engineering. It’s this love song for the people that built the Snowy that really brings the enormity of it to life. The Snowy broke records and helped create a truly diverse and multicultural Australia – for 25 years (1949 – 1974) a hundred thousand men and women from as many as 70 countries were involved in carving out the Australian Alps, bringing irrigation to the inland and providing energy to the East Coast. This edition notes the political and environmental changes affecting the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Authority in the 21st century, and its historical impact today. Review by Maria Savvidis, October 2019 Visit the NewSouth Books website here.

David Hill, Convict Colony

Allen & Unwin, 2019, 356 pp., ISBN: 9781760528669, p/bk, AUS$32.99

David Hill's new book Convict Colony is positioned as a story of a settlement that survived against all the odds, covering the first thirty years of the colonisation of New South Wales . The work is predominantly celebratory. Hill outlines how a British plan to send a bunch of crooks, some overseers and a few extras to the far side of the world—which must have looked like pure madness once detailed on paper—was put into action. Hill also unpacks some of the major challenges that faced those on the First Fleet as well as the men and women who arrived on the ships that followed. The compression of so much tragedy and trauma clearly highlights how survival must have surely been a surprise for some of the colonisers in the first three decades from 1788. Hill is an extraordinarily compassionate writer and works to humanise the ambitious, the emotionally distant, the loyal, the poor, the social climbers. The men and women who descended on the Southern Continent were certainly not without their faults and all had to overcome circumstances and character flaws (of themselves and others). Governor Arthur Phillip, for example, is presented in a balanced way. He is a 'surprisingly tolerant' leader but a man who could not live up to his own expectations; he believed that only 'two crimes warranted the death penalty', murder and sodomy, but such resolve would not last and the first man hanged in the settlement was Thomas Barrett, just over a month after setting up camp, for stealing food (pp.23, 91). And—while Hill offers an endorsement of Governor Lachlan Macquarie that is possibly too enthusiastic to suit all readers, referring to him as 'the Father of Australia' (p.273)—he does not shy away from acknowledging that there are some figures who cannot be redeemed, describing my least-favourite First Fleeter, Major Robert Ross, as 'cantankerous and opinionated … disliked even by his own officers and men' (p.37). Indeed. The focus of this volume, as noted, is on the 'success story' of the colony. Of course, the First Nations peoples were desperately hoping that the plan would fail, and the impact of colonisation upon the traditional owners of the land is not ignored. Hill makes this point and returns to it regularly, situating what was inflicted upon Aboriginal Australians as part of a pattern of Britain’s colonial expansion and a sense of entitlement to lands and resources beyond the borders of the small island off continental Europe: White settlement in Australia was to have dire consequences for the Indigenous population, just as it had in other places where European colonists had dispossessed local peoples of their ancient lands, driven them from their traditional sources of food and exposed them to devastating diseases to which they had no immunity. (p.113) Hill consistently selects meaningful quotes to drive his narrative forward, deftly integrating his voice with the voices of those who were involved in establishing the colony of Sydney, expanding its reach and transforming a prison with no walls into something far more sophisticated than could have been imagined in the early days of crude huts and starvation. In this way, the text is more like a conversation lifted from the past. This, combined with Hill’s ability to strike the right balance between enough detail to make people and places real, but not so much as to overwhelm the reader, makes for an engaging and thoughtful tale. The story of modern Australia has been told many times, but this should not dissuade readers from picking up Hill’s iteration of an important period in this shared history. There are detailed notes, a bibliography, a good selection of illustrations and an index. Those who have enjoyed Hill’s other works of history will appreciate Convict Colony, while those who are reading Hill’s storytelling for the first time, will surely go and seek out his earlier titles. Reviewed by Dr Rachel Franks, October 2019 For a preview of the book or to purchase online, visit the publisher's website here.