Articles de revues sur le sujet « Hay War Memorial High School »

Dr. Peter E. Dresel was a highly respected pharmacologist who played a significant role in the development of this discipline in Canada. Peter immigrated to the United States of America from Germany at a very young age. After graduating from high school and serving meritoriously in the U.S. Army during World War II, he obtained his doctorate in pharmacology from the University of Rochester in 1952. After serving in several positions in the university and in the pharmaceutical industry, Peter was recruited in 1956 by Mark Nickerson to join the fledgling Department of Pharmacology at the University of Manitoba. Nickerson's wish to develop Peter into a neuropharmacologist was never fulfilled. Instead, Peter went on to become an outstanding cardiac pharmacologist who trained a number of students, many of whom hold prestigious positions in their field of research. Having helped shape the "Nickerson Era" in Manitoba and having established a name in the cardiovascular pharmacology scene in North America, Peter became the Head of the Department of Pharmacology at Dalhousie University in Halifax in 1976. For the next 12 years Peter showed his superb academic and administrative abilities in shaping a vigorous and productive department.Peter served The Pharmacological Society of Canada in many capacities. He was a Councillor (1966–1969), Secretary (1969–1972), Vice President (1974–1975), and ultimately President (1975–1977). In addition to serving on the editorial boards of several international journals and scientific review committees, Peter was very active in university affairs, serving in the Senate at both the University of Manitoba and Dalhousie. He was also elected President of the Associate of Academic Staff at the University of Manitoba.Peter will be remembered for his unique flair. Despite his flamboyance, he had the unique ability to make his students feel at ease. His wealth of life experiences enabled him to teach his students and colleagues more than just science. He was eclectic and provocative, loyal and compassionate. Peter was never afraid of facing a challenge, nor was he too big to admit mistakes. Above all, he was extraordinarily generous in speaking of the accomplishments of his students and colleagues. Peter Dresel lived his life to the fullest, and helped those who crossed his path to do the same. His attributes will be judged not only through his contributions to science, but also by the enrichment of all who were touched by his influence.It is only befitting to honor Peter Dresel with a Memorial Issue in this Journal, which he served so well as an Associate Editor. The response of former students and colleagues has been overwhelming, and we wish to thank them all for their contributions.

Croatian Memorial Documentation Centre of the Homeland War is a specialized archives and a scientific institution with the mission to collect, arrange, safekeep, professionally and scientifically research and publish archival records from the Homeland War. Apart from these main tasks, the Centre also engages in educational activities by organizing and providing lectures for elementary school, high school, university students and history teachers or by the engagement of its employees at the universities. Speakers will present these activities by giving examples of various types of lectures and describing methodology and contents. The authors present the theory of archival pedagogy and its development in Croatia, as well as examples of good practice in the Croatian archives. In Croatia, in the last couple of years, special attention has been given to archival pedagogy as a potential for the development of archival activities and the modernization of the archives. The Croatian Archival Society has an important role in promoting archival pedagogy and it encourages archivists to participate in educational activities. The authors will present educational activities organized by the Croatian Memorial Documentation Centre of the Homeland War. The Centre aims to follow modern trends in archive pedagogy and education by combining its two main activities - archival practice and scientific research. Special emphasis is given to the use of various categories of the Centre’s archival materials, such as official records, printed material, audio recordings, photographic material, maps, etc. in the lectures. Besides paper records, the Centre has a large collection of digitalized documents which are particularly useful and convenient to use in the lectures. The materials from the Collection of photographs and the Collection of video materials are most frequently used. Dealing with the original archival material, especially when it comes to photographs or video materials, students get the most precise frame of the past on the basis of which they then best develop their own critical thinking. In this way, archival practice illustrates the educational role of archives. Authors also deal with the question how and to what extent does the use of archival materials affect the students' understanding of the topic and inspires them to visit archives and to do their own research which also contributes to the popularization of archives and archival science.

Abstract As a Chinese-medium educational institution, Chung Ling High School (CLHS) in Penang enjoyed an illustrious reputation in the Malayan era. During the fall of Penang in World War II, the deaths of eight teachers and forty-six students from CLHS marked a painful episode in the history of Penang's intellectual community, manifested in their sense of trauma and reflections on the crisis of Chinese education. After CLHS was reopened during the postwar period, the school set up a committee to commemorate the sacrifices of its teachers and students through memorial services, erection of a monument, and publication of tribute books. Applying the theories of French historian Pierre Nora, this article discusses how the ensuing les lieux de mémoire (sites of memory) formed through the sacrifices of CLHS teachers and students, inscribing the plight of literary lineage and cultural severance, which in turn takes on the role of reviving and perpetuating the ethnic Chinese spirit. In this sense, the sacrifices of the CLHS teachers and students as “sites of memory” have become a part of the ethnic community's collective memory. When we examine how war memory texts are constructed, the CLHS tragedy embeds the connections between Chinese education and the ethnic sentiments of the Chinese community during the Japanese occupation.

Dr Norman R. James was a multi-talented, highly accomplished clinician, teacher and innovator broadly recognized on three continents. In the United Kingdom, he served in London's Emergency Medical Service during World War II and was dubbed “England's foremost exponent of regional anaesthesia”. In his native land, he was the first Director of Anaesthetics at The Royal Melbourne Hospital with many innovations to his credit including a serious effort to reform anaesthetic practice in Australia. Dr M. T. “Pepper” Jenkins, the charismatic founder of anesthesiology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School, recruited him to Dallas in 1960, where he taught the art and science of anesthesiology at Parkland Memorial Hospital until his retirement in 1974. He died in 1987 and is buried in Winnsboro, Texas. A brief story of his life and career follows.

Teaching about the Holocaust is mandatory in many societies. This prescription is justified by authorities with many reasons: educating pupils for a better understanding of human rights, peace, war, genocide, critical thinking, historical thinking, racism, etc. The Holocaust can carry a very strong moral and emotional charge. But why do teachers choose to teach about it when it is not compulsory? And how do they do this? Which resources do they use? What content is their teaching based on? This case study focuses on three high school history teachers in Quebec and explores their educational objectives in teaching the Holocaust and related pedagogical practices, including a field trip to the Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre.

In Memory of Helge Grell, 1925 - 2000By Jens Holger SchjørringHelge Grell’s life coincided with some decisive events in the history of research on Grundtvig and Grundtvig’s importance in theology and in the religious and national life in Denmark.When Grell took holy orders in 1940, the year of the occupation of the country by the German Wehrmacht, the depression and confusion over the loss of national independence led many Danes to search for a mobilization of new resources in the Danish people to avoid an internal breakdown. This found expression for example through De danske Ungdomsforeninger (Danish Youth Associations), a particular manifestation being Hal Koch’s famous lectures on Grundtvig and his work for Dansk Ungdomssamvirke (Federation of Danish Youth Associations). In the post-war years the discussion turning on Kaj Thaning’s interpretation of Grundtvig was the point of departure for much debate on the Grundtvigian heritage and in a wider sense the situation of the Danish national church. There was, in particular, Thaning’s protest against tendencies to allow a »pilgrim myth« to determine the understanding of the relationship between created human life and Christianity. Against this Thaning would stress the intrinsic value of created life with his programmatic emphasis on »Man first...«.The last decades of the twentieth century saw, with increasing strength, endeavours being made to apply an international perspective to the interpretation of Grundtvig.Helge Grell lived through all these phases, briefly outlined above, and each one of them came to determine in different ways his work as clergyman, as teacher in many different contexts, as lecturer in Grundtvig circles and participant in their activities, and as Grundtvig scholar. When Helge Grell’s life is considered within such an extensive framework, it becomes apparent that his many activities share an inner coherence. In retrospect, one senses an arch spanning the different aspects of his lifework and combining his practical activity with his work as a Grundtvig scholar. Likewise, when viewed in that light, there is an impressive unity in the books that Grell managed to finish in the last decades of his life, dealing partly with the relation between creator spirit and the spirit of the people, partly with Grundtvig’s travels to England and their significance, and finally with Grundtvig’s folk high school ideas and their realization after Grundtvig’s death.

A life of service to others ended on March 26, 2009, when professor emeritus George A. Warp of the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs of the University of Minnesota passed away at age 95. George was born on June 12, 1913, in Northfield, Ohio, and graduated from Bedford High School in Ohio. Prior to being associated with the University of Minnesota for the past 60 years, he graduated from Oberlin College, Case Western University, and Columbia University, earning degrees in political science, public administration, international administration, as well as law. George served briefly as a political science faculty member at the University of Minnesota, where he met and married his late wife, Lois, in 1940 before entering the U.S. Navy following the entry of the United States into World War II. His service in the Pacific theater led to his postwar appointment as a civilian advisor under General MacArthur in Japan from 1946–1948. Upon completion of that assignment, George returned to the University of Minnesota in 1948 as a professor of political science and served first as associate director and then director of the graduate program in public administration in the department's Public Administration Center until 1965 when the center became a self-standing unit of the College of Liberal Arts. He remained director through 1968 when the center was succeeded by the School of Public Affairs and recreated as the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs in 1978 as a collegiate unit named as a memorial honoring the late vice president and Minnesota's senator. George served as a professor and chair of graduate admissions until his retirement in 1982.

N.S. Korotkov was born in 1874 in the city of Kursk. In 1893, after graduating from high school, he entered the medical faculty of Kharkov University, transferred to the medical faculty of Moscow University, which he graduated in 1898 with a degree in medicine with honors. In 1900, N.S. Korotkov became a supernumerary order of a surgical clinic for a term. Further N.S. Korotkov became a doctor of the sanitary unit of the Iberian Red Cross community. For participation in this trip N.S. Korotkov was granted the right to wear the honorary sign of the Red Cross, and in 1902 he was awarded the Order of St. Anne of the III degree. Nikolai Korotkov again works as a supernumerary, since 1903 - a regular intern at the surgical clinic of Professor A.A. Bobrov, then a supernumerary resident at the surgical clinic of Professor SPPedorov of the Imperial Military Medical Academy.In 1904, in the St. George community of the sisters of mercy of the Red Cross Society, a sanitary squad was formed to be sent to the Russian-Japanese war, NS was appointed as the senior physician. Korotkov. Systematically listening to the vessels in the wounded, the young surgeon discovered five regular phases of changes in sounds during compression of the brachial artery with a Riva-Rocci cuff, which later formed the basis of his proposed method for determining blood pressure (Korotkov method). November 8, 1905 N.S. Korotkov for the first time made a historical report “On the issue of blood pressure research methods”. At the end of 1905, he left Petersburg for his parents in the city of Kursk. In 1908, N.S. Korotkov successfully passes the examinations for the degree of doctor of medicine and leaves for Siberia in the mines of the Lena gold mining association for the position of doctor at the Andreevsky hospital. In 1910, N.S. Korotkov defends his doctoral thesis on the topic: "The experience of determining the strength of arterial collaterals." Since 1914, N.S. Korotkov worked as a senior physician at the Petersburg Clinical Hospital. Peter the Great, and with the outbreak of World War I, a surgeon in the Charity House for Wounded Soldiers in Tsarskoe Selo. After the Great October Revolution until the death of N.S. Korotkov served as chief physician at the Mechnikovsky hospital in Petrograd. Nikolai Sergeevich died on March 14, 1920 and was buried in the Theological Cemetery of St. Petersburg. The exact burial place of N.S. Korotkova has not been established, in 2011 a cenotaph was installed on the site of the Military Medical Academy. The Korotkov method was the only official non-invasive blood pressure measurement method approved by WHO in 1935. In honor of N.S. Korotkova is named the street in St. Petersburg, the city hospital of Kursk, the Memorial Society in St. Petersburg.

That murmur, soon replies, “God doth not need Either man’s work or his own gifts; who best Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state Is Kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed And post o’er Land and Ocean without rest: They also serve who only stand and wait.”1 1John Milton, Sonnet 19 The COVID-19 Pandemic has brought out most of the best (and some of the worst) in us. Much has been said, shared, even sung about health care workers as frontline heroes. Whether we indeed form the frontline, or man the last line of defense, due credit is being given to all “front-liners” – essential-service workers, drivers and delivery personnel, security guards, the military and police who literally serve in the trenches of this invisible war. Indeed, it is heartening to read the inspiring messages, hear the encouraging words, listen to the uplifting (sometimes funny) music and songs, witness the moving memes and cartoons, watch the refreshing dances and tributes, and receive the healing blessings and prayers on various media and social media platforms. Indeed, we are motivated to continue to work, so that others may safely stay home. Some of us have even been called upon to die, so that others may live. But so much less is and has been said about those who make our battle possible, who selflessly and silently took it upon themselves to clothe us with personal protective equipment, feed us, transport us, and even shelter us as we engage the unseen enemy. It is these heroes I wish to thank today. I certainly cannot thank them all, but I sincerely hope that those I do mention will represent the many others I cannot. Early on, my brother Elmer Lapeña and his Team Twilight group of “golfing enthusiasts and friends” (“company owners, executives, managers, engineers, technicians, entrepreneurs, and expats in the electronics, semiconductor, metalworking, automotive, aerospace, and packaging manufacturing industries”) responded to the call for better protection for frontliners with door-to-door deliveries of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) to over 40 hospitals in the National Capitol Region, Rizal, Cavite, Laguna and Batangas including the Philippine General Hospital (PGH).2 On a personal note, Elmer and my sister-in-law Annette were closely monitoring our situation, going out of their way to obtain difficult-to-find PPEs for my wife Josie and myself, and our respective Departments of Family and Community Medicine (DFCM) and Otorhinolaryngology (ORL) at the PGH. For her part, our very dear friend Gigi Bautista Rapadas organized Project #HelpCovid19Warriors(HCW), to “go where the virus goes” and “help where help is needed and requested,” harnessing donations from ‘family, friends, and friends of friends” to procure PPE (as well as disinfectants, even canned goods) that were distributed “from Metro Manila to the provinces: Tuguegarao, Bataan, Bulacan, La Union, Nueva Vizcaya, Cavite,” moving from hospitals and health centers to correctional institutes.3 It is because of them that our PGH Department of ORL obtained very expensive but essential respirator hoods for added protection from aerosolized virus when conducting airway procedures, in addition to head-to-foot PPEs for use of the PGH DFCM in attending to PGH staff at the UP Health Service. Meanwhile, without fanfare, our dear friends Popot and Agnes (also my DLSU ’79 classmate) Lorenzana provided cooked meals for 1,000 persons daily. Working with on-the-ground social workers and with the 2KK Tulong sa Kapwa Kapatid Foundation, their Feeding Program “A thousand meals for poor communities” reached Payatas, Talayan, Pinyahan, Smokey Mountain, Maisan, Bagong Silang, Old Balara, Tatalon, Sta. Teresita, Sampaloc, and Sta. Ana, among more than 50 other communities. They generously responded to my wife’s request to provide meals for her community patients of the Canossa Health Center in Tondo. They have also provided meals for hospital staff of Amang Rodriguez Memorial Medical Center, the Medical City Hospital, Veterans Memorial Medical Center, Dr. Jose Fabella Memorial Hospital, Dr. Jose Rodriquez Memorial Hospital, Quezon City General Hospital, the San Lazaro Hospital, Valenzuela City Emergency and Lung Center of the Philippines. They continue this service which to date has provided for more than 32,000 meals, with corporate partners and private individuals joining the effort.4 Other De La Salle University (DLSU) College ‘79 batchmates who wish to remain anonymous obtained board approval of their endorsement to channel all the social development funds of their Maritime Multipurpose Cooperative for the next 3 years to the Philippine General Hospital. Adding their personal funds (and those solicited by their daughter and nephew), they took on the daunting task of sourcing and proving Powered Air Purifying Respirators (PAPRs) for our use. Another DLSU batchmate has been providing PPEs to various hospitals including PGH through their family corporation, Nobleland Ventures, Inc. Even their high school batch ’75 of Saint Jude Catholic School has donated boxes and boxes of PPEs to the PGH and other hospitals. Other DLSU ’79 classmates Bel and Bong Consing, and Timmy, Joy (and Tita Linda) Bautista have personally donated PPEs and funds for our COVID-19 operations, while classmate Fritz de Lange even sent over sweet mangoes for us to enjoy with our fellow frontliners. Generous donations also poured in from La Salle Green Hills (LSGH) High School ’76 friends Cris Ibarra, Norman Uy, Class 4E, and batchmates Tito and Pepper who wish to remain anonymous, as well as Menchit Borbon and her St. Theresa’s College Quezon City (STCQC) - Section 1 classmates. We even received overseas support from my LSGH 4B classmate Bingo Pantaleon from Yangon; my mom Libby, brother Bernie and Lilli, and friend Soyanto from Singapore, and sister Sabine from Germany. And how can we forget the regular frozen food deliveries of Jollibee chicken drumsticks and home-made Bulgogi and Tapa from our dear friends Ed and Aning Go? Perhaps the most touching gifts of all came from my eldest and youngest daughters Melay and Jica, who lovingly prepared and delivered much-appreciated meals to us, and middle child Ro-an, who with our son-in-law Reycay serenaded us with beautiful music that was appreciated by no less than Vice President Leni Robredo and featured by the Philippine Philharmonic Orchestra.5 Their musical fund-raising campaign started with another haunting piece featuring my sister Nina and brother-in-law Kiko.6 As if that was not enough, Ro-an bakes cookies to raise funds for our ongoing COVID-19 operations at PGH, while Melay and Jica keep asking us what we want to eat next. These three count among those who have least, yet “put in everything ” from what little they have.7 These are but a few examples of those known personally to me- my family and friends. And there are many more. In the same way, every other doctor and front liner will have their own stories to tell, of friends, family even mere acquaintances who have come out of the shadows to help, to care, to share in whatever way they can, in fighting this battle with us. Let this be their tribute as well. Those of us who serve in the Philippine General Hospital have been called People Giving Hope.8,9 I believe that we do give hope because others give us hope in turn. I like to think that the inscription in the PGH lobby “They Also Serve Who Care and Share” honors these others in a special way who go over and beyond the call of duty. With apologies to John Milton, our heroes go way over and beyond “they also serve who only stand and wait.”

Introduction Throughout the early and mid-twentieth century, cadet training was a feature of many secondary schools and educational establishments across Australia, with countless young men between the ages of 14 and 18 years of age undergoing military training, ostensibly in preparation for service in Australia’s armed forces upon their coming of age. Unlike earlier in the century, when cadet training was mandatory for all males within the relevant age range, during the Second World War cadet detachments could only be formed and maintained by secondary schools for pupils attending those schools. Additionally, the Australian Army provided so little financial support to school cadet detachments during the conflict that schools had to rely on the parents of their pupils to purchase their sons’ not inexpensive cadet uniforms, with a result that only a limited number of schools could afford to maintain a cadet detachment, and almost every schools that could do so made enrolment in their detachments voluntary for their pupils. Counterbalancing these material obstacles, however, was the threat of the ongoing conflict and the demands for trained soldiers both overseas and within Australia, which resulted in school cadet training becoming increasingly popular between 1939 and 1945, with many schools across Australia either establishing new cadet detachments or expanding their existing cadet detachments in order to contribute to their nation’s war effort. Not only did the Second World War increase the number of cadet detachments among educational establishments, but cadet training became more diverse and varied both within and between schools. Owing to their preoccupation with maintaining both the Australian Imperial Force and a defence force against a potential invasion of Australia, the Australian Army’s supervision of and contribution to cadet training became more sporadic than it had been in peacetime. As a result, school headmasters became increasingly powerful in their discretion to direct the cadet training that went on at their schools, with the Australian Army providing little to no input to or supervision of the day-to-day training at the myriad of cadet detachments across the nation. This state of affairs allowed schools, and the educators who ran them, an unprecedented amount of freedom to enact their own idealised version of military training through their cadet detachments, resulting in a diverse range of training syllabi, organisational practices, and uniforms. Unlike in other nations such as New Zealand, Australian schools’ cadet uniforms were not issued by the Australian Army, but instead were designed and purchased by the individual cadet detachments, with the Australian Army only providing official recognition and partial funding for the designs. Under this system, Australian schools designed a diverse range of uniforms for their cadet detachments, tailoring them to suit their individual conceptions of what cadet training should contain and how a cadet detachment should appear. This resulted in cadet detachments clad in uniforms that reflected the ideals of the schools to which they were attached, with the training practices and identities of a school reflected in the design of its cadet uniform. This article will examine two prevalent influences behind the design of Australian school cadet uniforms during the Second World War – the competing prioritisation of smartness and practicality, and the range of identities and loyalties which schools attempted to inculcate in their pupils. In the process, it will be argued that these variations in cadet uniform designs reflect the diversity of practices and ideology within male secondary education in Australia during the 1940s. Uniforms for Purpose Despite the limitations imposed by wartime shortages, a school’s priorities for their cadet training could still be expressed through their design of uniforms. For many, the range of priorities can be summarised as a split between smartness and toughness. Some establishments designed their cadet uniforms on traditional ideals of rigid sartorial orderliness, tailoring them to be pleasing to the eye when paraded in public. Others disregarded smartness in favour of hard-wearing uniforms more suited to rigorous physical training under a variety of climactic conditions, emphasising comfort and durability above appearance. Schools did not openly state that their choice of uniform was motivated by a desire to have their cadets appear impressive on the parade ground. However, many voiced their praise for their cadet detachments’ appearances in public parades. One example of this can be found in the June 1940 edition of Terrace, the magazine of Christian Brothers’ College Gregory Terrace, in which the cadet training column finished by proudly declaring that “the appearance of the cadets and their military bearing called forth expressions of praise from all who saw them marching in the Corpus Christi procession at NC” (“G.T. Corps Jottings” 5). Similar evidence of a school’s prioritisation of smartness and presentability in their cadet training can also be found in numerous contemporary descriptions of cadet training by the cadets themselves. One anonymous pupil at Sydney Church of England Grammar School described the hardships that the school’s cadets faced in maintaining their uniforms – a khaki combination of woollen slouch hat, tunic with brass buttons, brown leather ‘Sam Browne’ belt and trousers with a blue stripe down each leg. In a lengthy poem describing many aspects of school life, the pupil’s ‘Song of Shore’ described how “of each cadet the heart is set on being clean and smart; A fleck of dust, a speck of rust, will break his sergeant's heart” (‘A Song of Shore’ 131). These demands for cleanliness and smartness weighed heavily on a cadet, with the author lamenting how “he cleans his boots, he cleans his belt, he cleans his bits of brass: his Brasso goes to chapel and his Kiwi into class; but still they say, ‘Put it away! To Friday drill you go!’ And button-sticks in period six are dangerous things to show” (‘A Song of Shore’ 131). Given that this context of uniform maintenance is the only description of cadet training in this poem, the emphasis placed on sartorial orderliness at schools such as Sydney Church of England Grammar School was clearly strong enough to eclipse all other aspects of training in the eyes of those subjected to it. Uniforms designed to visually impress, however, often wore out quite quickly under the harsh conditions of cadet training. One cadet at Geelong College noted how after an afternoon of instruction on the school oval in “a comfortable spot in the rain and wind … my well-tailored uniform is sopping with either sweat or rain according to the consistent weather of these parts. My chin-strap has lost all its flavour and generally I feel most inefficient” (“Chank” 31). The short life of stylistically-prioritised uniforms was often exacerbated by the difficulty of obtaining replacement items of clothing under wartime conditions. In 1941, the cadet uniforms of Hale School, Western Australia – presented in fig. 1 and consisting of slouch hat, woollen khaki tunic, Khaki drill breeches and tall leather gaiters – had been reduced in number and quality to such an extent that one boy described the process of selecting uniforms at the beginning of each year as “scramble day”, when, “after trying on various clothing you begin to wonder how many deformed people were in the corps before you” (“Lance-Corporal” 96). The cadet elaborated by lamented how “pick[ing] out the right hat is like winning the Charities, and all you can do is to hope for the best next year” (“Lance-Corporal” 96), and “on being issued with your hat badge you will say confidently, ‘Well, at least this must fit.’ But don't be optimistic; it is sure to have the clip missing” (“Lance-Corporal” 97). The shortage of serviceable uniforms became so acute that by 1943 the annual ‘Cadet Notes’ article in the school’s magazine The Cygnet announced that “it would be greatly appreciated if Old Boys who have any part of a uniform, would make it available” (“Cadets” Cygnet 20). This sentiment was echoed the following year by an anonymous cadet’s cartoon (fig. 2), highlighting the deplorable state of the school’s cadet uniforms after so many years of use, with frayed hems, baggy seams, and, most significantly, a severe shortage of sizes which fitted the average cadet (“Uniforms for ‘B’ Company” 74). This, when compared with the formal photographs of cadets published by the school in an earlier edition of the Cygnet, seen in fig. 1, gives a clear indication of the disparity between the image that schools intended to project and the and that which cadets perceived. Fig. 1: Hale School cadet uniforms as presented by the school in 1939 (“Officers and N.C.Os.” 55) Fig. 2: Hale School cadet uniforms as perceived by a cadet in 1944 (“Uniforms for ‘B’ Company” 74) For many schools, however, the ideal cadet uniform was simple, easily-maintained and durable, often drawing inspiration from contemporary, rather than traditional, military uniforms. When designing a uniform for their newly-established cadet detachment in 1939, Brisbane Boys’ College stated categorically that “the first consideration was smartness” and that “the preservation of that smartness will be the duty of every cadet” (“Cadet Corps” 41). However, while other schools chose stiff and heavy woollen cadet uniforms, the committee appointed by the College to decide on a uniform opted for a light combination of felt hat, khaki drill jacket, and shorts, “similar in design to that of the Darwin Mobile Force”, a new Australian Army formation created the previous year intended to defend Australia’s northern coastline from invasion, “which looked so smart when that force marched through the city early in the year” (“Cadet Corps” 41-42). When further explaining their choice, the College argued that “shorts, we consider, are more serviceable for the Queensland climate” (“Cadet Corps” 42). Brisbane Boys’ College was not the only establishment to be impressed by new military formations and their heralding of a new form of warfare. Newcastle Boys’ High School’s cadet uniform deviated from those of other schools’ cadet detachments by including a navy blue beret in place of the ubiquitous felt ‘slouch hat’. This choice of headwear, coupled with the School’s unusual decision to replace the normal khaki items of clothing with a field grey battledress-style jacket and slacks, was so similar to that worn by the armoured divisions both in Australia and Britain that when the Newcastle Sun published a picture of four Newcastle cadets wearing their new uniforms, they jocularly warned their readers that “these are not members of the Tank Corps” (“High School Cadet Corps” 7). Evidently, while some schools opted for a more traditionally smart design for their cadet uniforms, others chose to emulate more modern military uniform designs, even to the point where their uniforms lost all similarity to those traditionally worn by cadet detachments in Australia. It was not through the emulation of contemporary Australian Army uniforms that schools implemented practical uniform components in place of stylish ones. When several independent Roman Catholic schools in New South Wales applied to form cadet units and intended to adopt cadet uniforms in a variety of colours with brimless, forage cap headdress, Australia’s Military Board directed Captain McConnel, the Staff Officer Commanding Senior Cadets for New South Wales, “to invite schools again to reconsider the uniforms they have submitted with a view to their adoption of the Australian Hat and Khaki materials” (McConnel 1). McConnel acknowledged that “particular uniforms are not stipulated”, but claimed “khaki to be most suitable and economical for field training while the Australian Hat gives greater protection from the sun”, which was a factor of “considerable importance” as “work in the open is one of the main objects of cadet training” (McConnel 1). However, despite McConnel’s emphatic pleas to the institutions to reconsider their uniforms, only two of the eleven schools chose to alter their uniforms to suit the Military Board’s recommendations. The remainder either compromised by retaining their forage caps but adopting McConnel’s recommendation of using khaki material for their uniforms, or, as was the case with Marist Brothers’ High School, Darlinghurst, wrote in response to McConnel’s letter stating that they found “no reason for altering the design initially submitted”, and persisted with their application (Frederic 1). This case demonstrates that while dispassionate logic could motivate schools to design practical uniforms resistant to the wear and tear produced by strenuous outdoor cadet training in the Australian climate, these considerations were often outweighed by the subjective ideological motivations behind educators’ desires to adopt attractively smart cadet uniforms that were expensive and ill-suited to physical training. Evidently, educators’ personal desires to make their cadets, and as a result their schools, appear impressively smart and orderly were a powerful motivation behind not only their choice of uniform but also their support for cadet training in its entirety. These motivations could and frequently did outweigh practical considerations, to the point where the appearance of a cadet detachment, and thereby that of the cadet detachment’s school, was considered more important than the training it provided. Uniforms as Identity The division between concepts of cadet training held by the Australian Army and the highly diverse forms of training practiced by individual schools extended beyond differences of opinion over the relative merits of smartness and practicality expressed by cadet uniforms. A cadet uniform not only reflected educators’ intentions regarding the contents of their training, but also reflected the values of the group identity they wished to immerse their boys in, and the overarching group to which this identity owed its loyalty. The best example of uniforms reflecting a cadet detachment’s loyalty can be seen in the widespread adoption of uniforms that emulated Australian Army uniforms almost exactly. Although Australian cadet detachments were not issued with official Service Dress uniforms until 1945, many detachments’ uniforms emulated the Service Dress’s design and material down to the ubiquitous wide-brimmed ‘slouch hat’ or ‘Australian hat’ worn by the Australian Army in both the First and Second World Wars. Brother RJ McCartney, “the nominal C.O.” of the cadet detachment at Christian Brothers’ College Ipswich, specifically described his detachment’s uniform to the Queensland Times in 1944 as “similar to that issued to Army personnel” after declaring that “the training [cadets] receive will be most useful to them should they join one of the fighting forces later” (“95 Boys” 2). The popularity of this design cannot be attributed solely to the arguments made by the Military Board for its practicality, and the symbolic power of these uniforms raised the cadet detachments from insular, extra-curricular organisations to a unified whole, connected to the Commonwealth’s war effort through their uniforms and the martial identities they espoused. Fig. 3: A contemporary drawing of Brisbane Boys’ College cadet badge from 1939 (“Cadet Corps” 42) Not all Australian educational establishments, however, chose to emulate the Australian Army uniform in their cadet detachments’ uniforms, with many adopting uniforms that emphasised school or local identities above national identity. Most schools expressed their local identity through the implementation of school colours in their hat bands or ‘puggaree’ or designed insignia for their cadet uniforms based on school insignia. The cadet detachment at Brisbane Boys College adopted a badge that was nearly identical to the College badge, seen in fig. 3, albeit with a crown in place of the book (“Cadet Corps” 42). This alteration brought the design into alignment with common practice in military insignia, but it could also be viewed as symbolic representation of the difference between the College and the cadet detachment – whereas the College’s primary objective was to educate, the cadet detachment’s objective was to instil a sense of patriotism and duty. The most prominent examples of schools deviating in this manner can be found among Presbyterian schools, many of which chose to emphasise their Scottish ancestry instead of their Australian nationality. One such school was Scotch College in Claremont, Western Australia, where in August 1939, after “several unsuccessful attempts to secure a uniform dress for the cadets”, “the corps fitted out with uniforms which made the boys look like trained soldiers … which consisted of a Cameron kilt, with a kangaroo-skin sporran, a khaki tunic and glengarrie [sic]” (“Cadets” Scotch 16), which gave the detachment the appearance of a highland regiment of the British Army. After being issued with their new uniforms and instructed on their wearing, an event that was satirically recalled later that year by a cadet asking the headmaster what was worn beneath the kilt, the cadets were addressed by the school’s headmaster Mr Anderson, who “mention[ed] the fine example set by our predecessors, which example, he knew, we would endeavour to live up to” (“Cadets” Scotch 16). A similar uniform was worn by The Scots College, Sydney, prior to and during the Second World War. The College’s cadet uniform, shown in fig. 4, was just as rife with Scottish motifs as the uniform of Scotch College, including a kilt which one anonymous cadet described as “eleven yards of pleats, folds, buckles, buttons and straps all mixed up” (“C.S.R., IVa” 91). The Scots College’s uniform incorporated more colonial aspects than their West Australian contemporary’s uniform, however, with the glengarry and khaki tunic replaced by a Blancoed-white pith helmet and dark green standing-collared jacket with hooks and eyes that, according to the anonymous cadet, “were typically scotch”, in that “they would not give in” (“C.S.R., IVa” 91). Despite the free issue of Service Dress by the Australian Army in 1945, the College maintained its distinctly Scottish cadet uniform, albeit with the pith helmet replaced by a glengarry cap. So strong was the College’s prioritisation of its colonial ancestral identity above any contemporary Australian national identity that the Sun newspaper described them as “Black Watch juniors” when publishing a photograph of them parading “in support of the War Loan Campaign” in October 1941, seen in fig. 4 (“Black Watch Juniors” 3). Although these schools formed the minority in espousing divergent local identities above a centralised national identity, is these exceptions to the broad consensus which reflect the diverse nature of not only cadet training but secondary education within Australia in the first half of the twentieth century. Furthermore, this diversity was only revealed due to the refusal of the Australian Army to issue free uniforms to cadet detachments, with the resulting absence of a centralised identity leading to a vacuum in which schools decided upon an identity with which to imbue their pupils through the medium of cadet uniforms. Fig. 4: The Scots College cadets parading through Sydney, as presented by the Sun (“Black Watch Juniors” 3). Conclusion The Australian Army’s refusal to issue a free, standardised cadet uniform to secondary school cadet detachments prevented many educational establishments from establishing their own cadet detachment. However, this policy allowed those schools that did establish a detachment to clothe their members in a manner that they believed would align with the school’s unique conceptions of both what cadet training should consist of and how a cadet detachment should be presented to the world. As a result of this freedom, Australian secondary school cadet uniforms were influenced by a wide range of practical and ideological factors, with a diverse range of uniform designs reflecting an equally diverse range of thinking around cadet training. Some schools preferred a cadet uniform to be tough and suited to strenuous outdoor use under harsh climatic conditions, with Brisbane Boys’ College modelling their uniform after the recently-formed Darwin Mobile Force and incorporating shorts and a wide-brimmed Australian hat of the type recommended by the Australian Army for its value in shielding its wearer from the sun. Other cadet uniforms, such as those adopted by many Roman Catholic schools in Sydney, emphasised sartorial orderliness and visual splendour, incorporating unusual colours and forage caps to showcase their cadets and their school while emphasising their institutions’ individuality, against the Australian Army’s recommendations for durability and practicality. Similarly, a school’s cadet uniform could reflect its ideological objectives, revealing the identity it aimed to immerse its pupils in. The wide range of schools’ cadet uniform headdress alone, from ‘slouch hats’ to glengarry and forage caps to pith helmets, reveals the many split loyalties and ideals held by Australian schools during the Second World War between imperial, national, local, and religious identities and ethos. However, despite Australian Schools’ diverse and meticulously curated choices in cadet uniforms, cadets’ contemporary descriptions of their uniforms reveal that the intentions behind the uniforms’ designs were often entirely lost on those who wore them. Many cadets overlooked the lofty educational and ideological intentions behind their educators’ choices and instead only took note of their ridiculous, impractical, and uncomfortable aspects. This difference in perception, with educators praising and pupils decrying their cadet uniforms, reveals the performative nature of the entire uniform design process, with schools designing their cadet detachments’ uniforms not for those wearing them but for any third party who might view them. As such, schools’ overtures regarding the practicality, smartness and identity of their uniforms were not the result of the schools’ established practices, but the values with which the schools wished to be associated, with cadet uniforms acting as the medium through which these values would be communicated to the wider world. Images “Black Watch Juniors in City Parade.” The Sun 10 Oct. 1941: 3. “Officers and N.C.Os. of the Cadet Corps, 1939.” The Cygnet: Hale School Magazine 19.3 (June 1939): 55. “Uniforms for ‘B’ Company. Only Two Sizes 2 Large OR 2 Small.” The Cygnet: Hale School Magazine 14.4 (June 1944): 74. References “A Song of Shore” The Torch-Bearer: The Magazine of the Sydney Church of England Grammar School 43.2 (1 Sep. 1939): 130-131. “Cadets.” The Cygnet: Hale School Magazine 13.3 (June 1943): 19-20. “Cadets.” The Scotch College Reporter 32 (Dec. 1939): 16-17. “Cadet Corps.” The Portal: The Magazine of the Brisbane Boys’ College Dec. 1939: 41-43. “Chank”; “A Day in the Ranks.” The Pegasus: The Journal of The Geelong College 37.1 (June 1946): 30-31. “C.S.R., IVa”; “A Bonny Wee Scotsman.” The Scotsman: A Record of The Scots College, Bellevue Hill, Sydney 32.3 (May 1946): 91. “G.T. Corps Jottings.” Terrace: Quarterly Review, Published by Christian Brothers’ College Gregory Terrace, Brisbane, Queensland 3.2 (24 June 1940): 5. “High School Cadet Corps.” The Newcastle Sun 4 June 1940: 7. “Lance-Corporal”; “Scramble Day.” The Cygnet: Hale School Magazine 13 (5 June 1941): 96-97. “95 Boys Receive Training in School Cadet Corps.” The Queensland Times 21 Aug. 1944: 2. Memoranda Brother Frederic to Captain McConnel. “Cadets – Educational establishments – Approval to form senior cadet detachments – Roman Catholic schools.” 7 April 1941. Australian War Memorial, Ref. AWM61 426/2/176. Captain McConnel to Director CBC Waverley, CBC Lewisham, CBC Darlinghurst, MBC Darlinghurst, MBC Randwick, MBC Kogarah, MBC Parramatta, MBC Church Hill, DLSC Ashfield, DLSC Marrickville, HCC Ryde, SJC Hunter's Hill. “Cadets – Educational establishments – Approval to form senior cadet detachments – Roman Catholic schools.” 13 March 1941. Australian War Memorial, Ref. AWM61 426/2/176.

The 1900s and 1910s were a prime era for the growth and empowerment of cadet corps within Australia. Private schools in particular sought to build on a newfound spirit of nationalism following the Federation of the colonies in 1901 by harnessing enthusiasm for the nation and British Empire, and by cultivating a martial culture among their predominantly middle-class students. The principal tool harnessed in that cultivation were the school cadet corps, and the most visible symbol of those corps were their uniforms. By focussing on the cadet corps in the private schools of Sydney during this era, this article will explore the emphasis placed on cadet corps uniforms and argue that uniforms were the central element used cultivate a sense of identity and esprit de corps. When considered within the context of broader cadet corps activities, this will further demonstrate the power of uniforms as an instrument of cultural inculcation. The Federation of Australia in 1901 ushered in a new environment of national defence anxiety amongst the new nation’s middle-class citizens. The drive to Federation itself had partly been fuelled by colonial concerns regarding defence, and, in the new century, the newly federated states sought to work together to allay their combined concerns (White 114). But government policies were only one of the many ways the middle class were preparing the nation. Within the education system, middle-class private schools became a key instrument in preparing middle-class boys for their future as leaders of the nation in politics, business, and, of course, in the military. Within those schools, the cadet corps were utilised to instil core middle-class values of discipline, self-sacrifice, and responsibility in boys. As early as 1900, Sydney Grammar School authorities were proposing the resuscitation of their cadet corps following the rise in military spirit due to the Boer War (The Sydneian "Editorial", 1). The subsequent growth in both national and imperial defence-consciousness over the following years resulted in 100 boys forming a petition requesting the formation of a cadet corps in 1907 (The Sydneian "The Cadet Movement", 12). Within a year, the boys’ request was granted. With this type of enthusiasm from boys, the cadet corps increased in strength throughout the private schools of Sydney during the 1900s. Where they had already existed, they now commanded greater prestige, and where a school previously had no cadet corps, one was soon formed. In 1911, Compulsory Military Training commenced in Australia for all youths aged between 12 and 26, with a view to creating a citizens’ militia. Thus, militarism was a marked element in the new nation’s first decade. The changing nature of society during the 1900s also led to changing images of the ideal citizen, and understandably, of the ‘ideal middle-class boy’. Martin Crotty argues that in the 1900s, Australian middle-class society stressed that ‘fighting for one’s country is the peak of personal achievement and the epitome of manliness’ (9). Crotty goes on to examine the perceptions of middle-class manliness throughout the 1900s and 1910s, where masculinity was defined as the soldier serving his country, and the ‘manliest’ thing a person could do was to fight and die in war. Within this context, then, it is no surprise that private school boys welcomed the cadet system openly and were prepared to adhere to the discipline and the drill that went with it without a fuss. At St. Ignatius College, the school magazine Our Alma Mater reported in 1909 that ‘with enthusiasm on the part of the Corps, and attention to details by the officers, both commissioned and non-commissioned, the College will be in possession of a really fine corps of the future defenders of the Commonwealth’. Cadets were seen as a partial answer to middle-class fears about the defence of Australia. The cadets would provide strong, disciplined, and willing officers in an army if it was needed for the defence of country and empire. It would also make decent men of the boys, curing them of the slothful habits of modern youth. The Newington reported during the first year of Compulsory Military Training that in a year’s time we shall see a great improvement in the appearance and physique of those who have never hitherto had any instruction in the art of bodily discipline and culture. The slouch and roll so much in vogue amongst a certain class of boys will have disappeared, we hope, and a manlier, firmer walk have taken their place. (December 1911, 171) The Newington succinctly conveyed the hopes of all the private schools of Sydney, irrespective of denomination. Much has been written about the history of the cadet corps within the Australian historical literature. Craig Stockings’s The Torch and the Sword remains a seminal work in the field due to its broad focus on the general cadet movement in Australia. Beyond this, most scholarly works focus either on a specific cadet corps, specific location or region, specific theme, or on a specific period.1 However, relatively scant attention has been paid to the importance of their uniforms, and when uniforms are mentioned, it is usually only briefly and in passing. Given the centrality of the uniform to the culture and identity of the cadet corps, this is a surprising gap in the scholarship that this article seeks to address. The military uniform is ‘a relatively recent phenomenon’ (Tynan and Godson 10). While uniforms appear as far back as antiquity, their widespread adoption over the last couple of centuries is due to a convergence of social norms and technology. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, the increasing numbers of public servants meant that more civilians were uniformed whilst performing their duties (Williams-Mitchell 61). Tynan and Godson argue that ‘as state, society and nation converged towards the end of the nineteenth century uniform became part of a modern culture increasingly concerned with regulating time, space, and bodies’ (Tynan and Godson 6). The development of a regular military occurred within this space and can be seen as of part of the development of the stable nation state (Hackett 61). Standardisation of dress for large professional armies was enabled by technological developments brought about by the industrial revolution. Mass production of apparel meant that uniforms could be quickly produced and at a lower cost. In addition, the social culture of the late Victorian and early Edwardian eras in the British Empire was reflected in the material culture of their uniforms. During the First World War, military uniforms tended to be influenced by civilian fashion, while during the Second World War ‘a much more systematic approach to military uniforms could be seen’ (Craik 49). Uniforms have a psychological and social significance beyond identity. Uniforms legitimise the power of both the state and of the person wearing the uniform. The uniform seeks to overlay the image of the institution onto the person, obscuring the individual beneath. Uniforms have a power beyond just the outward appearance, they also affect us as individuals, shaping ‘how we are and how we perform our identities’ (Craik 4). This was recognised by utilitarian reformers at the turn of the twentieth century who ‘saw in the military body an efficiency that could usefully be transposed to civil society’ (Tynan and Godson 11), thereby shaping the populace’s inner as well as their outer selves (Craik 4). Further uniforms are about appearance, maintaining high standards of dress and a sense of belonging (Williams-Mitchell 111). Uniforms are instrumental in the creation of an esprit de corps (Langner 126). Being in the military is seen as more than an occupation, it is a vocation (Hackett 9), and to don a uniform communicates one’s sense of purpose. Part of this is achieved through the maintenance and correct wearing of the uniform, the discipline involved setting a moral high bar for others to measure themselves against. The use of school uniforms, particularly within the private school system, had been established by the end of the nineteenth century. While the addition of a military uniform for student cadets may at first seen incongruous, there are clear reasons why these uniforms would be appealing. Up to and during the First World War, British army officers were ‘still the preserve of young men of good social standing’ (Hackett 158), an association which no doubt appealed to schools whose remit was to prepare young men for leadership positions within society. Further, military uniforms were traditionally seen as an inherently masculine dress, with a ‘close fit between the attributes of normative masculinity as inscribed in uniform conduct and normative masculine roles and attributes’ (Craik 12-13). In Australia, wearing the cadet uniform elevated the schoolboy to a member of the Australian defence force and he was treated as such (Wise 132). As a symbol of government, the uniform endows the wearer with the authority of that same government (Langner 124). Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the various cadet corps that emerged from Sydney’s private schools were formed to fulfil a variety of middle-class priorities. But by the 1900s, rhetoric had shifted to emphasise that the cadets were instilling discipline into boys and preparing youth for the defence of Australia and the British Empire. They were also used as a means to express school pride and identity. The stern militarism surrounding most of the cadet activities allowed the instructors to impress upon cadets values of discipline, duty, and sacrifice and to promote romantic illusions of warfare, and, above all, the idea that war was an adventure. Cadets were also taught that their training was preparation for war. Rifle practice, drill, skirmishes, camps, hiding behind trees and running around hills to attack the enemy from behind, using bushes as cover to sneak up on the enemy (all while in uniform) – these were the tactics of modern warfare. And cadets were left in no doubt that they would become the officers of the nation’s defence forces when needed. Throughout the conduct of all of their activities, the cadet corps uniform served as a constant visual reminder of that message. Boys generally wore variations of dark green uniforms with a slouch hat, and at times carried rifles with either blank or live ammunition, depending on their purpose. Some schools used ethnic and cultural traditions and social links in the formation of their cadet corps which was also reflected by varieties in their uniforms. For example, the cadets at Scots College were sponsored by the New South Wales Scottish Rifles (later the 30th Battalion, New South Wales Scottish) and based its uniform on that of the Rifles. It consisted of a slouch hat with a red hackle and blue and gold puggaree, a serge jacket in the Scottish tradition, and kilts from the early 1900s until all uniforms became regulated under Compulsory Military Training in 1911. From the time a boy put on his cadet uniform to the time he took it off he was treated as part of Australia’s defence force, and no longer simply a student at school. The uniform, then, became the prominent visual marker of that shifting role and identity. J. McElhone of St. Joseph’s College wrote in the school magazine in March 1911 that ‘when we don our uniforms, and are armed with rifles, we shall then commence to take a soldierly pride in ourselves’. While in uniform the boys were expected to act like soldiers, and their instructors (also in uniform) treated them much like soldiers, with high standards of drill, discipline, and order maintained. Indeed, throughout the 1900s, the cadet corps commanded as much prestige as the rugby and rowing teams. Cleanliness, discipline, and good order during public parades were met with salutations and praise. Success in competitions with other schools in shooting or tug-of-war or other cadet activities was similarly recorded with pride. As with rugby or rowing, the honour of the school was at stake, a matter reflected in Sydney Grammar’s ruminations over the re-formation of its cadet corps in 1907. One of the school’s primary concerns was the risk of losing the honour of the school by having an unsuccessful and ill-disciplined company. The Sydneian reported in August 1907 that if a new S.G.S Cadet Corps should disgrace itself in public by slovenly drill, as it certainly would, if recruited from the “wasters” and little boys, then the Trustees would be blamed for taking a hasty step without gauging the real wishes of boys and parents … . Any New Cadet Corps must maintain the fine traditions of the old one. It must be the pride of the School – our chief object of out-door interest. All sports must give way to it, rather than that the corps, once formed, should fail. By the early 1900s Newington College and the Kings School both had reputations for the quality and conduct of their cadet corps and it was this reputation that schools such as Sydney Grammar hoped to emulate with the formation of their own cadet corps. The ‘wasters’ and the ‘little boys’ were not required. The cadet corps would bring honour to the school, the nation and empire. The peak expression of this pride came in wearing their uniform for public ceremonies. For example, at St. Ignatius College, the cadet corps served as a funeral cortège for the funeral of a master, Fr. Patrick Keating, in 1913.2 The Newington cadet corps formed a Guard of Honour for the State Governor, Sir Harry Rawson, in 1905 (The Newingtonian, March 1905, 188). As the Guard of Honour the Newington College cadet corps’ duties were extended when they were required to fix bayonets in order to keep back the crowd from the main door of Sydney Town Hall where the Governor was inside (The Newingtonian, March 1905, 188). Whilst it may seem remarkable to have teenage boys keeping crowds back from the door with rifles with fixed bayonets, in the cadet corps of the 1900s this was expected when the circumstances required; the cadets were not looked upon as immature boys, but rather as responsible and disciplined soldiers, and they were thus treated accordingly. Great crowds lined Sydney’s streets to watch the Sydney private school cadet corps parade on special occasions, and, for many youth, being seen in uniform was an exciting and memorable experience. The experience of being one of the estimated eighteen thousand cadets who marched past the Governor-General, Lord Denman, on 30 March 1912 in Centennial Park, with parents, teachers, and government and military officials watching attentively would have been one of great pride (Naughtin 142). In formation at parades, the cadets were required to be in perfect order, buttons polished and shoes shining, as government and military officials inspected them and their uniforms. Boys without complete uniforms were not allowed to attend, as they would reduce the appearance of the company. Orders were given sharply by officers to fix and unfix bayonets, march in precise line, and perform specific manoeuvres, each carried out by the cadets, it was hoped, in unison. At times, the cadet corps throughout the private schools were addressed by the Inspector-General of the army, the Governor-General of Australia, or by their headmaster, each reminding them the responsibility that each one had to their cadet corps, to their school, and to their king and country. They were told that the many hours of drill required of them was teaching them the ‘very valuable and necessary lessons of life’ (The Newingtonian, December 1911, 171). They were told that to be effective soldiers they needed to be disciplined, do as they were told by their officers, and respond to orders swiftly. Thus, these cadets were learning not only the attributes of an officer, but of middle-class society in general: respect, presentation, and acceptance of the rules of society. The cadet corps uniform also helped reinforce notions of duty. Although, prior to 1911, the cadet corps were voluntary, private schools strongly urged all students to join as ‘no true Australian can fail to regard it as his duty to fit himself, as far as he is able, to be of service in the case of a call to defend his country’ (The Torch-Bearer, April 1908, 89). School magazines regularly reported on cadet activities throughout the 1900s and 1910s, including frequent references to the fine appearance. Certainly with boys practicing drill on football fields and outside class windows it must have been difficult for some of those boys who were not cadets not to notice, and be impressed by, the presence of one hundred of their fellow schoolmates carrying their rifles, in military uniform, and in perfect order. For the students who had joined the cadet corps this sense of duty became paramount. They were inundated with rhetoric praising their dedication to the cadet corps and the sacrifices they made by being a cadet. The Sydneian asked cadets to ‘consider your Corps first. It is your duty as “Soldiers of the King”’ (E.A.W. 19). The Torch-Bearer in April 1908 made a similar point: Every boy should remember that by becoming an efficient cadet he is carrying out a duty which he owes (1) to his country by rendering himself more capable of fighting in her defence. (2) to his school by helping to send out a corps that will do her as much credit as cricket and football teams and crews have done in the past. (3) to himself, by undergoing a training which will benefit him body and soul.3 Cadets absorbed this sense of duty, believing that they were honouring their school, their country, and the British Empire. Soldiers of the King they certainly believed they were, at least in the Protestant schools. The boys would be ‘toughened by a soldier’s hard training and learn to bear the pinch of sacrifice and bear it cheerfully’ (The Torch-Bearer, April 1911, 251), unlike their peers who had not joined the cadets who were regarded derisively as ‘civilians’ (The Torch-Bearer, October, 1908, 50). Thus, in an era of growing nationalism and militarism, the cadet corps of the private schools of Sydney grew as a symbol of middle-class values. The most immediate visual representation of that symbolism was the cadet corps uniform. When boys put on their uniform, they experienced a change in their demeanour, their identity, and their sense of duty. It had an instant impact on how they saw themselves, and how they were treated by others. These ideas were inculcated into boys throughout their training, and records from across the Sydney private schools suggest that the boys eagerly embraced those lessons. The cadet corps uniform, then, was a valuable tool in the moderation of behaviour and the instillation of core values. References Craik, Jennifer. Uniforms Exposed. Oxford: Berg, 2005. Crotty, Martin. Making The Australian Male: Middle-Class Masculinity 1870-1920. Carlton South: Melbourne UP, 2001. E.A.W. "The Cadet Corps." The Sydneian Dec. 1909: 18-23. Hackett, John. The Profession of Arms. London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1984. Langner, Lawrence. "Clothes and Government." Dress, Adornment and the Social Order. Eds. Mary Ellen Roach and Joanne Eicher. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1965. Naughtin, Michael. A Century of Striving: St. Joseph's College, Hunter's Hill, 1881-1981. Hunter's Hill, NSW: St. Joseph's College, 1981.. Our Alma Mater. St. Ignatius College magazine. Midwinter 1909. St Joseph's College Magazine. Mar. 1911. Stockings, Craig. The Torch and the Sword: A History of the Army Cadet Movement in Australia. UNSW Press, 2007. The Newingtonian. Newington College Magazine, Mar. 1905. ———. December 1911 The Sydneian. "The Cadet Movement - Past and Present." Aug. 1907: 7-14. ———. "Editorial: The Proposed Resucitation of the Cadet Corps." May 1900: 1-2. The Torch-Bearer. Sydney Church of England Grammar School Magazine, Apr. 1908. ———. Oct. 1908 ———. Apr. 1911 Tynan, Jane, and Lisa Godson. "Understanding Uniform: An Introduction." Uniform: Clothing and Discipline in the Modern World. Eds. Jane Tynan and Lisa Godson. London: Bloomsbury, 2019. White, Richard. Inventing Australia: Images and Identity 1688–1980. Routledge, 2020. Williams-Mitchell, Christobel. Dressed for the Job: The Story of Occupational Costume. Poole, Dorset: Blandford Press, 1982. Wise, Nathan. "The Adventurous Cadet: Romanticism and Adventure in the Cadet Corps of the Private Schools of Sydney, 1901-1914." Australian Folklore 29 (2014). Notes 1 For several key examples focussing on this period see Martin Crotty, Making the Australian Male; Thomas W. Tanner, Compulsory Citizen Soldiers (Sydney: Alternative Publishing Co-Operative, 1980); David Jones, ‘The Military Use of Australian State Schools: 1872-1914’ (Ph.D. Thesis, La Trobe University, 1991); John Barrett, Falling In – Australians and ‘Boy Conscription’, 1911-1915 (Sydney: Hale and Iremonger, 1979); Nathan Wise, ‘Playing Soldiers: Sydney Private School Cadet Corps and the Great War’ (Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society 96.2 (2010)); Nathan Wise, ‘The Adventurous Cadet: Romanticism and Adventure in the Cadet Corps of the Private Schools of Sydney, 1901-1914’ (Australian Folklore 29 (2014): 127-141). 2 St. Ignatius College Archives, photo ‘Fr. Patrick Keating’s funeral leaving St. Mary’s, North Sydney, for Gore Hill Cemetary, 1913’. 3 The Torch-Bearer, Sydney Church of England Grammar School Magazine, Apr. 1908: 90. The Torch-Bearer uses the double synonym that the cadet corps were both like a sporting team and a military unit. This supports an argument of D.J. Blair’s ‘Beyond the Metaphor: Football and War, 1914-1918’ in The Journal of the Australian War Memorial 28 (Apr. 1996) that sport, particularly team sports such as football, and war were very similar. Sport assisted in the creation of the ideal man, and one best suited for military training, as it enhanced values of ‘loyalty, courage, self-discipline, and teamwork’ that would be required in war. This argument is further supported by the competitive nature of the cadet corps as examined in chapter four.

In the last months of his life, 86-year-old Albert Facey became a best-selling author and revered cultural figure following the publication of his autobiography, A Fortunate Life. Released on Anzac Day 1981, it was praised for its “plain, unembellished, utterly sincere and un-self-pitying account of the privations of childhood and youth” (Semmler) and “extremely powerful description of Gallipoli” (Dutton 16). Within weeks, critic Nancy Keesing declared it an “Enduring Classic.” Within six months, it was announced as the winner of two prestigious non-fiction awards, with judges acknowledging Facey’s “extraordinary memory” and “ability to describe scenes and characters with great precision” (“NBC” 4). A Fortunate Life also transformed the fortunes of its publisher. Founded in 1976 as an independent, not-for-profit publishing house, Fremantle Arts Centre Press (FACP) might have been expected, given the Australian average, to survive for just a few years. Former managing editor Ray Coffey attributes the Press’s ongoing viability, in no small measure, to Facey’s success (King 29). Along with Wendy Jenkins, Coffey edited Facey’s manuscript through to publication; only five months after its release, with demand outstripping the capabilities, FACP licensed Penguin to take over the book’s production and distribution. Adaptations soon followed. In 1984, Kerry Packer’s PBL launched a prospectus for a mini-series, which raised a record $6.3 million (PBL 7–8). Aired in 1986 with a high-rating documentary called The Facey Phenomenon, the series became the most watched television event of the year (Lucas). Syndication of chapters to national and regional newspapers, stage and radio productions, audio- and e-books, abridged editions for young readers, and inclusion on secondary school curricula extended the range and influence of Facey’s life writing. Recently, an option was taken out for a new television series (Fraser).A hundred reprints and two million readers on from initial publication, A Fortunate Life continues to rate among the most appreciated Australian books of all time. Commenting on a reader survey in 2012, writer and critic Marieke Hardy enthused, “I really loved it [. . .] I felt like I was seeing a part of my country and my country’s history through a very human voice . . .” (First Tuesday Book Club). Registering a transformed reading, Hardy’s reference to Australian “history” is unproblematically juxtaposed with amused delight in an autobiography that invents and embellishes: not believing “half” of what Facey wrote, she insists he was foremost a yarn spinner. While the work’s status as a witness account has become less authoritative over time, it seems appreciation of the author’s imagination and literary skill has increased (Williamson). A Fortunate Life has been read more commonly as an uncomplicated, first-hand account, such that editor Wendy Jenkins felt it necessary to refute as an “utter mirage” that memoir is “transferred to the page by an act of perfect dictation.” Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson argue of life narratives that some “autobiographical claims [. . .] can be verified or discounted by recourse to documentation outside the text. But autobiographical truth is a different matter” (16). With increased access to archives, especially digitised personnel records, historians have asserted that key elements of Facey’s autobiography are incorrect or “fabricated” (Roberts), including his enlistment in 1914 and participation in the Gallipoli Landing on 25 April 1915. We have researched various sources relevant to Facey’s early years and war service, including hard-copy medical and repatriation records released in 2012, and find A Fortunate Life in a range of ways deviates from “documentation outside of the text,” revealing intriguing, layered storytelling. We agree with Smith and Watson that “autobiographical acts” are “anything but simple or transparent” (63). As “symbolic interactions in the world,” they are “culturally and historically specific” and “engaged in an argument about identity” (63). Inevitably, they are also “fractured by the play of meaning” (63). Our approach, therefore, includes textual analysis of Facey’s drafts alongside the published narrative and his medical records. We do not privilege institutional records as impartial but rather interpret them in terms of their hierarchies and organisation of knowledge. This leads us to speculate on alternative readings of A Fortunate Life as an illness narrative that variously resists and subscribes to dominant cultural plots, tropes, and attitudes. Facey set about writing in earnest in the 1970s and generated (at least) three handwritten drafts, along with a typescript based on the third draft. FACP produced its own working copy from the typescript. Our comparison of the drafts offers insights into the production of Facey’s final text and the otherwise “hidden” roles of editors as transformers and enablers (Munro 1). The notion that a working man with basic literacy could produce a highly readable book in part explains Facey’s enduring appeal. His grandson and literary executor, John Rose, observed in early interviews that Facey was a “natural storyteller” who had related details of his life at every opportunity over a period of more than six decades (McLeod). Jenkins points out that Facey belonged to a vivid oral culture within which he “told and retold stories to himself and others,” so that they eventually “rubbed down into the lines and shapes that would so memorably underpin the extended memoir that became A Fortunate Life.” A mystique was thereby established that “time” was Albert Facey’s “first editor” (Jenkins). The publisher expressly aimed to retain Facey’s voice, content, and meaning, though editing included much correcting of grammar and punctuation, eradication of internal inconsistencies and anomalies, and structural reorganisation into six sections and 68 chapters. We find across Facey’s drafts a broadly similar chronology detailing childhood abandonment, life-threatening incidents, youthful resourcefulness, physical prowess, and participation in the Gallipoli Landing. However, there are also shifts and changed details, including varying descriptions of childhood abuse at a place called Cave Rock; the introduction of (incompatible accounts of) interstate boxing tours in drafts two and three which replace shearing activities in Draft One; divergent tales of Facey as a world-standard athlete, league footballer, expert marksman, and powerful swimmer; and changing stories of enlistment and war service (see Murphy and Nile, “Wounded”; “Naked”).Jenkins edited those sections concerned with childhood and youth, while Coffey attended to Facey’s war and post-war life. Drawing on C.E.W. Bean’s official war history, Coffey introduced specificity to the draft’s otherwise vague descriptions of battle and amended errors, such as Facey’s claim to have witnessed Lord Kitchener on the beach at Gallipoli. Importantly, Coffey suggested the now famous title, “A Fortunate Life,” and encouraged the author to alter the ending. When asked to suggest a title, Facey offered “Cave Rock” (Interview)—the site of his violent abuse and humiliation as a boy. Draft One concluded with Facey’s repatriation from the war and marriage in 1916 (106); Draft Two with a brief account of continuing post-war illness and ultimate defeat: “My war injuries caught up with me again” (107). The submitted typescript concludes: “I have often thought that going to War has caused my life to be wasted” (Typescript 206). This ending differs dramatically from the redemptive vision of the published narrative: “I have lived a very good life, it has been very rich and full. I have been very fortunate and I am thrilled by it when I look back” (412).In The Wounded Storyteller, Arthur Frank argues that literary markets exist for stories of “narrative wreckage” (196) that are redeemed by reconciliation, resistance, recovery, or rehabilitation, which is precisely the shape of Facey’s published life story and a source of its popularity. Musing on his post-war experiences in A Fortunate Life, Facey focuses on his ability to transform the material world around him: “I liked the challenge of building up a place from nothing and making a success where another fellow had failed” (409). If Facey’s challenge was building up something from nothing, something he could set to work on and improve, his life-writing might reasonably be regarded as a part of this broader project and desire for transformation, so that editorial interventions helped him realise this purpose. Facey’s narrative was produced within a specific zeitgeist, which historian Joy Damousi notes was signalled by publication in 1974 of Bill Gammage’s influential, multiply-reprinted study of front-line soldiers, The Broken Years, which drew on the letters and diaries of a thousand Great War veterans, and also the release in 1981 of Peter Weir’s film Gallipoli, for which Gammage was the historical advisor. The story of Australia’s war now conceptualised fallen soldiers as “innocent victims” (Damousi 101), while survivors were left to “compose” memories consistent with their sacrifice (Thomson 237–54). Viewing Facey’s drafts reminds us that life narratives are works of imagination, that the past is not fixed and memory is created in the present. Facey’s autobiographical efforts and those of his publisher to improve the work’s intelligibility and relevance together constitute an attempt to “objectify the self—to present it as a knowable object—through a narrative that re-structures [. . .] the self as history and conclusions” (Foster 10). Yet, such histories almost invariably leave “a crucial gap” or “censored chapter.” Dennis Foster argues that conceiving of narration as confession, rather than expression, “allows us to see the pathos of the simultaneous pursuit and evasion of meaning” (10); we believe a significant lacuna in Facey’s life writing is intimated by its various transformations.In a defining episode, A Fortunate Life proposes that Facey was taken from Gallipoli on 19 August 1915 due to wounding that day from a shell blast that caused sandbags to fall on him, crush his leg, and hurt him “badly inside,” and a bullet to the shoulder (348). The typescript, however, includes an additional but narratively irreconcilable date of 28 June for the same wounding. The later date, 19 August, was settled on for publication despite the author’s compelling claim for the earlier one: “I had been blown up by a shell and some 7 or 8 sandbags had fallen on top of me, the day was the 28th of June 1915, how I remembered this date, it was the day my brother Roy had been killed by a shell burst.” He adds: “I was very ill for about six weeks after the incident but never reported it to our Battalion doctor because I was afraid he would send me away” (Typescript 205). This account accords with Facey’s first draft and his medical records but is inconsistent with other parts of the typescript that depict an uninjured Facey taking a leading role in fierce fighting throughout July and August. It appears, furthermore, that Facey was not badly wounded at any time. His war service record indicates that he was removed from Gallipoli due to “heart troubles” (Repatriation), which he also claims in his first draft. Facey’s editors did not have ready access to military files in Canberra, while medical files were not released until 2012. There existed, therefore, virtually no opportunity to corroborate the author’s version of events, while the official war history and the records of the State Library of Western Australia, which were consulted, contain no reference to Facey or his war service (Interview). As a consequence, the editors were almost entirely dependent on narrative logic and clarifications by an author whose eyesight and memory had deteriorated to such an extent he was unable to read his amended text. A Fortunate Life depicts men with “nerve sickness” who were not permitted to “stay at the Front because they would be upsetting to the others, especially those who were inclined that way themselves” (350). By cross referencing the draft manuscripts against medical records, we can now perceive that Facey was regarded as one of those nerve cases. According to Facey’s published account, his wounds “baffled” doctors in Egypt and Fremantle (353). His medical records reveal that in September 1915, while hospitalised in Egypt, his “palpitations” were diagnosed as “Tachycardia” triggered by war-induced neuroses that began on 28 June. This suggests that Facey endured seven weeks in the field in this condition, with the implication being that his debility worsened, resulting in his hospitalisation. A diagnosis of “debility,” “nerves,” and “strain” placed Facey in a medical category of “Special Invalids” (Butler 541). Major A.W. Campbell noted in the Medical Journal of Australia in 1916 that the war was creating “many cases of little understood nervous and mental affections, not only where a definite wound has been received, but in many cases where nothing of the sort appears” (323). Enlisted doctors were either physicians or surgeons and sometimes both. None had any experience of trauma on the scale of the First World War. In 1915, Campbell was one of only two Australian doctors with any pre-war experience of “mental diseases” (Lindstrom 30). On staff at the Australian Base Hospital at Heliopolis throughout the Gallipoli campaign, he claimed that at times nerve cases “almost monopolised” the wards under his charge (319). Bearing out Facey’s description, Campbell also reported that affected men “received no sympathy” and, as “carriers of psychic contagion,” were treated as a “source of danger” to themselves and others (323). Credentialed by royal colleges in London and coming under British command, Australian medical teams followed the practice of classifying men presenting “nervous or mental symptoms” as “battle casualties” only if they had also been wounded by “enemy action” (Loughran 106). By contrast, functional disability, with no accompanying physical wounds, was treated as unmanly and a “hysterical” reaction to the pressures of war. Mental debility was something to be feared in the trenches and diagnosis almost invariably invoked charges of predisposition or malingering (Tyquin 148–49). This shifted responsibility (and blame) from the war to the individual. Even as late as the 1950s, medical notes referred to Facey’s condition as being “constitutional” (Repatriation).Facey’s narrative demonstrates awareness of how harshly sufferers were treated. We believe that he defended himself against this with stories of physical injury that his doctors never fully accepted and that he may have experienced conversion disorder, where irreconcilable experience finds somatic expression. His medical diagnosis in 1915 and later life writing establish a causal link with the explosion and his partial burial on 28 June, consistent with opinion at the time that linked concussive blasts with destabilisation of the nervous system (Eager 422). Facey was also badly shaken by exposure to the violence and abjection of war, including hand-to-hand combat and retrieving for burial shattered and often decomposed bodies, and, in particular, by the death of his brother Roy, whose body was blown to pieces on 28 June. (A second brother, Joseph, was killed by multiple bayonet wounds while Facey was convalescing in Egypt.) Such experiences cast a different light on Facey’s observation of men suffering nerves on board the hospital ship: “I have seen men doze off into a light sleep and suddenly jump up shouting, ‘Here they come! Quick! Thousands of them. We’re doomed!’” (350). Facey had escaped the danger of death by explosion or bayonet but at a cost, and the war haunted him for the rest of his days. On disembarkation at Fremantle on 20 November 1915, he was admitted to hospital where he remained on and off for several months. Forty-one other sick and wounded disembarked with him (HMAT). Around one third, experiencing nerve-related illness, had been sent home for rest; while none returned to the war, some of the physically wounded did (War Service Records). During this time, Facey continued to present with “frequent attacks of palpitation and giddiness,” was often “short winded,” and had “heart trouble” (Repatriation). He was discharged from the army in June 1916 but, his drafts suggest, his war never really ended. He began a new life as a wounded Anzac. His dependent and often fractious relationship with the Repatriation Department ended only with his death 66 years later. Historian Marina Larsson persuasively argues that repatriated sick and wounded servicemen from the First World War represented a displaced presence at home. Many led liminal lives of “disenfranchised grief” (80). Stephen Garton observes a distinctive Australian use of repatriation to describe “all policies involved in returning, discharging, pensioning, assisting and training returned men and women, and continuing to assist them throughout their lives” (74). Its primary definition invokes coming home but to repatriate also implies banishment from a place that is not home, so that Facey was in this sense expelled from Gallipoli and, by extension, excluded from the myth of Anzac. Unlike his two brothers, he would not join history as one of the glorious dead; his name would appear on no roll of honour. Return home is not equivalent to restoration of his prior state and identity, for baggage from the other place perpetually weighs. Furthermore, failure to regain health and independence strains hospitality and gratitude for the soldier’s service to King and country. This might be exacerbated where there is no evident or visible injury, creating suspicion of resistance, cowardice, or malingering. Over 26 assessments between 1916 and 1958, when Facey was granted a full war pension, the Repatriation Department observed him as a “neuropathic personality” exhibiting “paroxysmal tachycardia” and “neurocirculatory asthenia.” In 1954, doctors wrote, “We consider the condition is a real handicap and hindrance to his getting employment.” They noted that after “attacks,” Facey had a “busted depressed feeling,” but continued to find “no underlying myocardial disease” (Repatriation) and no validity in Facey’s claims that he had been seriously physically wounded in the war (though A Fortunate Life suggests a happier outcome, where an independent medical panel finally locates the cause of his ongoing illness—rupture of his spleen in the war—which results in an increased war pension). Facey’s condition was, at times, a source of frustration for the doctors and, we suspect, disappointment and shame to him, though this appeared to reduce on both sides when the Repatriation Department began easing proof of disability from the 1950s (Thomson 287), and the Department of Veteran’s Affairs was created in 1976. This had the effect of shifting public and media scrutiny back onto a system that had until then deprived some “innocent victims of the compensation that was their due” (Garton 249). Such changes anticipated the introduction of Post-Traumatic Shock Disorder (PTSD) to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) in 1980. Revisions to the DSM established a “genealogy of trauma” and “panic disorders” (100, 33), so that diagnoses such as “neuropathic personality” (Echterling, Field, and Stewart 192) and “soldier’s heart,” that is, disorders considered “neurotic,” were “retrospectively reinterpreted” as a form of PTSD. However, Alberti points out that, despite such developments, war-related trauma continues to be contested (80). We propose that Albert Facey spent his adult life troubled by a sense of regret and failure because of his removal from Gallipoli and that he attempted to compensate through storytelling, which included his being an original Anzac and seriously wounded in action. By writing, Facey could shore up his rectitude, work ethic, and sense of loyalty to other servicemen, which became necessary, we believe, because repatriation doctors (and probably others) had doubted him. In 1927 and again in 1933, an examining doctor concluded: “The existence of a disability depends entirely on his own unsupported statements” (Repatriation). We argue that Facey’s Gallipoli experiences transformed his life. By his own account, he enlisted for war as a physically robust and supremely athletic young man and returned nine months later to life-long anxiety and ill-health. Publication transformed him into a national sage, earning him, in his final months, the credibility, empathy, and affirmation he had long sought. Exploring different accounts of Facey, in the shape of his drafts and institutional records, gives rise to new interpretations. In this context, we believe it is time for a new edition of A Fortunate Life that recognises it as a complex testimonial narrative and theorises Facey’s deployment of national legends and motifs in relation to his “wounded storytelling” as well as to shifting cultural and medical conceptualisations and treatments of shame and trauma. ReferencesAlberti, Fay Bound. Matters of the Heart: History, Medicine, and Emotions. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010. Butler, A.G. Official History of the Australian Medical Services 1814-1918: Vol I Gallipoli, Palestine and New Guinea. Canberra: Australian War Memorial, 1930.Campbell, A.W. “Remarks on Some Neuroses and Psychoses in War.” Medical Journal of Australia 15 April (1916): 319–23.Damousi, Joy. “Why Do We Get So Emotional about Anzac.” What’s Wrong with Anzac. Ed. Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds. Sydney: UNSWP, 2015. 94–109.Dutton, Geoffrey. “Fremantle Arts Centre Press Publicity.” Australian Book Review May (1981): 16.Eager, R. “War Neuroses Occurring in Cases with a Definitive History of Shell Shock.” British Medical Journal 13 Apr. 1918): 422–25.Echterling, L.G., Thomas A. Field, and Anne L. Stewart. “Evolution of PTSD in the DSM.” Future Directions in Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: Prevention, Diagnosis, and Treatment. Ed. Marilyn P. Safir and Helene S. Wallach. New York: Springer, 2015. 189–212.Facey, A.B. A Fortunate Life. 1981. Ringwood: Penguin, 2005.———. Drafts 1–3. University of Western Australia, Special Collections.———. Transcript. University of Western Australia, Special Collections.First Tuesday Book Club. ABC Splash. 4 Dec. 2012. <http://splash.abc.net.au/home#!/media/1454096/http&>.Foster, Dennis. Confession and Complicity in Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987.Frank, Arthur. The Wounded Storyteller. London: U of Chicago P, 1995.Fraser, Jane. “CEO Says.” Fremantle Press. 7 July 2015. <https://www.fremantlepress.com.au/c/news/3747-ceo-says-9>.Garton, Stephen. The Cost of War: Australians Return. Melbourne: Oxford UP, 1994.HMAT Aeneas. “Report of Passengers for the Port of Fremantle from Ports Beyond the Commonwealth.” 20 Nov. 1915. <http://recordsearch.naa.gov.au/SearchNRetrieve/Interface/ViewImage.aspx?B=9870708&S=1>.“Interview with Ray Coffey.” Personal interview. 6 May 2016. Follow-up correspondence. 12 May 2016.Jenkins, Wendy. “Tales from the Backlist: A Fortunate Life Turns 30.” Fremantle Press, 14 April 2011. <https://www.fremantlepress.com.au/c/bookclubs/574-tales-from-the-backlist-a-fortunate-life-turns-30>.Keesing, Nancy. ‘An Enduring Classic.’ Australian Book Review (May 1981). FACP Press Clippings. Fremantle. n. pag.King, Noel. “‘I Can’t Go On … I’ll Go On’: Interview with Ray Coffey, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 22 Dec. 2004; 24 May 2006.” Westerly 51 (2006): 31–54.Larsson, Marina. “A Disenfranchised Grief: Post War Death and Memorialisation in Australia after the First World War.” Australian Historical Studies 40.1 (2009): 79–95.Lindstrom, Richard. “The Australian Experience of Psychological Casualties in War: 1915-1939.” PhD dissertation. Victoria University, Feb. 1997.Loughran, Tracey. “Shell Shock, Trauma, and the First World War: The Making of a Diagnosis and its Histories.” Journal of the History of Medical and Allied Sciences 67.1 (2012): 99–119.Lucas, Anne. “Curator’s Notes.” A Fortunate Life. Australian Screen. <http://aso.gov.au/titles/tv/a-fortunate-life/notes/>.McLeod, Steve. “My Fortunate Life with Grandad.” Western Magazine Dec. (1983): 8.Munro, Craig. Under Cover: Adventures in the Art of Editing. Brunswick: Scribe, 2015.Murphy, Ffion, and Richard Nile. “The Naked Anzac: Exposure and Concealment in A.B. Facey’s A Fortunate Life.” Southerly 75.3 (2015): 219–37.———. “Wounded Storyteller: Revisiting Albert Facey’s Fortunate Life.” Westerly 60.2 (2015): 87–100.“NBC Book Awards.” Australian Book Review Oct. (1981): 1–4.PBL. Prospectus: A Fortunate Life, the Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Bloke. 1–8.Repatriation Records. Albert Facey. National Archives of Australia.Roberts, Chris. “Turkish Machine Guns at the Landing.” Wartime: Official Magazine of the Australian War Memorial 50 (2010). <https://www.awm.gov.au/wartime/50/roberts_machinegun/>.Semmler, Clement. “The Way We Were before the Good Life.” Courier Mail 10 Oct. 1981. FACP Press Clippings. Fremantle. n. pag.Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. 2001. 2nd ed. U of Minnesota P, 2010.Thomson, Alistair. Anzac Memories: Living with the Legend. 1994. 2nd ed. Melbourne: Monash UP, 2013. Tyquin, Michael. Gallipoli, the Medical War: The Australian Army Services in the Dardanelles Campaign of 1915. Kensington: UNSWP, 1993.War Service Records. National Archives of Australia. <http://recordsearch.naa.gov.au/NameSearch/Interface/NameSearchForm.aspx>.Williamson, Geordie. “A Fortunate Life.” Copyright Agency. <http://readingaustralia.com.au/essays/a-fortunate-life/>.

On 26 April 2002, in the German city of Erfurt, 19-year-old Robert Steinhäuser entered his former high school with two semi-automatic weapons. He killed the secretary, twelve teachers, two students, and a policeman before a staff member locked him in an empty classroom and he turned his gun on himself (Lemonick). Ten years later, I visited the city with the intention of writing a play about it. This was to be my fifth play based on primary research of an actual event. In previous projects, I had written about personal catastrophes of failed relationships, and reversals of fortune within private community groups. As my experience progressed, I was drawn to events of increasing complexity and seriousness. Now I was dealing with the social catastrophe of violent, deliberate loss of life that had affected the community on a national scale. I had developed a practice of making contact with potential participants, gaining their trust, and conducting interviews. I was interested in truth and authenticity and the ethics of writing about real experiences. My process was informed by the work of theorists Donna Haraway, Zygmunt Bauman and Roy Bhaskar. While embracing postmodern reflexivity, these thinkers nevertheless maintain the existence of a reality that operates independently of social construction (Davies 19). This involves a rejection of a postmodern relativism, in which “unadulterated individualism” (Bauman 2) leaves us free to construct our own worlds with impunity. Instead, we are invited to acknowledge that “we are not in charge of the world” (Haraway 39), and that we are answerable for our relationships within it. I intended to challenge postmodern notions of truth with work that was real rather than relative, authentic rather than constructed. I believed that a personal relationship between me and those who inspired my work was crucial. This relationship would be the ethical foundation from which I could monitor the value of my work and the risk of harm to those involved in the stories I chose to tell. I launched into the Erfurt project intending to follow my established process. But that didn’t happen. I went to Erfurt on the tenth anniversary of the event. I attended an official memorial ceremony at the school, and another service at the church which had been heavily involved in counselling the bereaved. In the evening I saw a theatre production at the Erfurt Theatre entitled Die Würde der deutschen Waffenschränke ist unantastbar (The Dignity of German Weapons Cupboards is Inviolable). The piece, by writer and journalist Roman Grafe, is based on interviews and contemporary reports about this and similar incidents around Germany. My intention had been to make initial contact with people and lay the ground-work for subsequent communication and interviews for my project. However, the whole time I was in Erfurt, I spoke to no one, apart from waiters, shopkeepers and a lonely sight-seeing chimneysweep who cornered me for a conversation in the cathedral. It’s highly likely I couldn’t have done the interviews the way I had planned them anyway. But the point is that, in Erfurt, I decided I wasn’t going to try. The work I had done in the past was always about uncovering an untold story. My drive to investigate and illuminate a story was directly related to how hidden, surprising, and unreachable it was. This was a big part of how I judged the value of what I was doing, despite the inherent inequitable power of the colonizing voice (hooks 343). My previous experience had been that the people I found wanted to speak to me because no one had ever asked them for their story before. I also believed in the value of unearthing a story for an audience who either didn't know about it, or wanted to know more. Neither of these applied in Erfurt. This event attracted enormous media attention. There are dedicated books, documentaries, YouTube shorts, essays, Masters theses, parliamentary reports, inquiries, debates, magazine articles, and newspaper reports. Many people, including survivors, the bereaved, professionals, and Robert Steinhäuser’s parents and friends, had already spoken. Inquiries for more information keep coming. The principal of the school has ring binders full of them and, even after ten years, they continue to stream onto her desk every week (Müller 165). When I was at the official memorial service at the school, I saw reporters and photographers hovering in the crowd, sneaking around to catch moments of grief. I was ashamed to feel that I was one of them. For all my noble aspirations, academic justification and approval by an ethics committee, the sheer volume of interest in this event combined with the ongoing pain of those involved made what I was doing seem grubby. The closest I came to a personal interaction was a pencilled note in the margins of a copy of Für heute reichts (Geipel), a hybrid narrative-style investigation of the event which I borrowed from the library. The copy had been underlined throughout. On page 230, the investigator of the story is warned away by a bereaved lawyer: Ich kann Ihnen im Moment niemanden von den Angehörigen sagen, der bereit wäre, mit Ihnen zu sprechen. (I can’t tell you any of the next of kin at the moment who would be prepared to speak with you.) Written underneath in pencil: Ich hab’s nie ausgesprochen und doch denke ich, ich redete ununterbrochen davon. (I’ve never said it aloud and yet I think I’ve talked about it continuously.) I took this as a warning: those who wanted to speak already had; those who didn’t, wouldn’t. And more importantly, it was painful either way. To comb over this well-mined ground yet again, causing even more pain in the process, seemed unethical to me. The risk of further harm was obvious. The stories that people had told were horrifying. At the centre of each of them: raw, hopeless pain. The testimonials all spiralled into a tunnel of loss, silence, death, and blame. They bristled with the need for community, to have been there, the indignity and pain of not being with their loved ones when they needed them. The painful, horrible, awful truth: there is nothing they could have done. As I sat in the memorial church service in Erfurt, I felt the depth of my own losses yawning inside me and I was almost engulfed with sadness. The vulnerability of my loved ones and my own mortality loomed so large that I had to consciously control myself and pull myself back from the brink. It’s that silent place of grief that Cixous identifies as both aesthetically compelling and ethically fraught (McEvoy 214). It’s the silence where death exists. This is where the people around me had been for ten years. I’ve been taken to that place so many times in the course of researching this event, and it was in the theatre that it was most intense. I sat in the theatre and experienced a verbatim monologue from a bereaved mother, performed by an actress sitting on the edge of the stage, reading aloud from printed sheets of paper. A fifteen minute monologue of how she found out about the shooting, the wait for more news, how her daughter's mobile phone didn't answer, how she found out her daughter had been killed when someone called her to offer condolences, what the days, weeks and months afterwards were like, the celebration of her birthday beside her grave. It was authentic, in that it came directly from the person who had experienced it. The ethical values of the theatre maker were evident in the unedited rawness of the piece and the respect it was given within the production. This theatre piece did exactly what I had thought I wanted do: it opened a real window into what happened. But it wasn’t satisfying to experience. It was just plain awful. What I have come to believe, as an artist wanting to interpret this event with integrity, is that opening this window into grief is not enough. The tunnelling spiral of pain, loss and blame goes nowhere but down. It’s harder to bear because the victims were young, and they were killed in an explosion of violence, at the imposition of a stranger’s will, in a place that was supposed to be safe. But when you strip away the circumstances, the essence of loss is the same, whether your loved one dies of cancer, in a car accident, or a natural disaster. It’s terrible, and it’s real, but it’s not unique to this event. If I was going to be part of a crowd picking over the corpses, then I felt I had to be very clear within myself why I had chosen these ones. I was staying in a monastery where two hundred and sixty-seven people were killed by a bomb while sheltering in the library during World War II. Stories of violent death and loss are everywhere. Feeling the intensity of that loss as though it’s your own isn’t necessarily productive. A few weeks before, I had passed the scene of an accident on the way to school with my daughter. A girl had been hit by a car and seriously injured. The ambulance officers were already there and they had put a cushion under the girl's head, and they were at the ambulance preparing the stretcher. The girl was lying in the middle of the road, alone and crying. As we passed and walked towards the school, girls were running from the front gates to join the expanding fan of onlookers standing there, looking, shaking their heads, agreeing with each other how terrible it was. I wanted to tell them to go away. It highlighted for me the deeply held response to trauma that my parents instilled in me: if there’s nothing you can do to help, then you have no business being there. Standing around watching turned the girl’s pain turned her into a spectacle. It created a bright line between the spectators and the girl, while simultaneously making the spectators feel as though they were part of her story and that they were special for witnessing it. They could go back to class and say: I was there, it was terrible. The comfort seems to be in processing sympathy into a feeling of self-importance at having felt pain that isn’t yours. I have felt the pain of the bereaved. I have cried for those who were killed. But my tears have not brought me closer to understanding what happened here. I had the same feeling of wrongness when I left the theatre as when I was escaping the crowd staring at the girl from the side of the road. Sharing the feeling of loss gave an illusion of understanding, solidarity, community and helpfulness that the spectators could then just walk away from and take superficial comfort from, without ever dealing with what I think is the actual reality of the event. In my opinion, the essence of this event does not lie in the nature of the violence and its attendant loss. What happened in Erfurt wasn’t an accident. These were targeted murders. The heart of this event is not the loss: it’s the desire to kill. This is what distinguishes this particular kind of event from any other catastrophe in which lives are lost. At its centre: someone did this on purpose. Robert Steinhäuser was expelled from school without any qualifications, so he was unemployable and ineligible for further education. He didn’t tell his family or his friends about the expulsion, so for months afterwards he lived a charade of attending school. When he attacked, he specifically targeted teachers and actively tried to avoid hurting students. (The two students who died that day were killed as he shot through a locked door.) According to the state government commission into the incident, Robert Steinhäuser’s transgression was an attempt to achieve recognition and public importance (Müller 193). It appears that he was at a point where he decided that the best thing or the only thing he could do was enact a theatrical mass murder of the people he thought were responsible for his misery. For me, focusing on the repercussions and the victims and the loss actually reinforces the structures that led Robert to make this decision: Robert is isolated, singular, and everyone else is against him. For many, this is seen as the appropriate way to deal with him. Angela Merkel, the conservative party leader at the time, said: Wer das Unverständliche verstehbar und das Unerklärbare erklärbar machen möchte, der muss aufpassen, das er sich nicht – zumindest unterschwellig – auf die Seite des Täters stellt und versucht, das Unentschuldbar mit irgendwelchen Umständen zu erklären. (Slotosch 1) (Whoever wants to make something that’s beyond understanding understandable and the inexplicable explicable has to be careful that he doesn’t—even unconsciously—stand on the side of the perpetrator and try to explain the inexcusable with circumstances of some kind.) According to Merkel, even to attempt to understand Robert is to betray his victims, and places you on the wrong side of the line that defines our humanity. Many of those who were directly affected by the event believe this as well. A recurring issue for many of the survivors and bereaved is the need to suppress the memory of Robert Steinhäuser. The school principal, Christiane Alt, said: Ich kann es nicht ertragen, dass er so postmortalen Ruhm auf sich zieht – das passiert immer wieder, nicht nur im Internet – und dass die Namen der Opfer ins Vergessen sinken. (Müller 160) (I can’t bear that he attracts such posthumous celebrity—it keeps happening, not just on the internet—and that the names of the victims sink into obscurity.) There is ongoing debate about the appropriateness of a seventeenth tribute: seventeen people died that day, only sixteen are officially mourned. There were sixteen names on the plaque at the school, sixteen candles on the memorial on the steps, and sixteen people were honoured and remembered in speeches. The voices of the perpetrators were unheard in the theatre piece. They were given no words and no story. It was only in the church that there was a seventeenth candle, on its own, to the side, in the dark. I have circled around this story for over a year and I keep coming back to Robert, however unwillingly. I am a dramatic writer. I write characters who take action. The German word for “perpetrator” is Täter. From the verb tun, to do. It means “do-er.” Someone who does something. It’s closer to our word “actor”, which for me reinforces the theatricality of the event as a whole. Robert staged this event. He wanted witnesses, as the impact of what he did depends on it. He even performed in costume. I am concerned that looking at Robert may actively reinforce the dramaturgical structure that he orchestrated, and thereby empower him and those like him. He wanted people to see him and know his story, and this is the only way he felt he could take control over it and face its indignity. I don’t want him to be right. All of this has left me in a very strange position. My own ethical process has actually collapsed beneath my feet. I had relied on giving a voice to those who wanted to speak—those people have already spoken. I saw value in uncovering a story that was previously unknown. This one has been examined many times over. I relied on personal, situated relationships between myself and those involved in the event. I have no such relationship. And if I did, what I see as an ethical response to this event—that is to try to understand Robert’s story—would actually be contrary to what many of those involved in the event want. I would run the risk of hurting those I most want to champion. It’s a risk I’ve had to run before. My last play was about a fifteen-year-old girl who had a sexual relationship with a teacher. I interviewed her and her friends, family, court officials, and also spoke to the teacher himself. The girl is highly intelligent and she had suffered terribly, but she could also be conceited and manipulative, and for me that truth was a crucial part of her story. I believed I got it right, but I also knew I ran the risk of hurting her, which of course I didn’t want to do. The girl came to see the play on opening night and I was absolutely terrified. We couldn’t speak, because she has to remain anonymous, but she thanked me via e-mail afterwards and told me that she felt privileged. She said that the play gave her experience a level of dignity that she would never have found otherwise. I was relieved, humbled, honoured, and vindicated. This is what I hoped for: a creative work about real events that was truthful and authentic, without being exploitative or hurtful. I had thought that the process relied on this ethical and responsible relationship. But the girl told me what she appreciated most was the energy and integrity with which I had dedicated myself to her story. This response has helped me to continue with my project. I am no longer sure of how to achieve an ethical, authentic artistic outcome, or even what that may be. But I still believe in my own capacity to ask questions with energy and integrity, and I hope that this will be enough. Because it’s all I have left. References Bauman, Zygmunt. Postmodern Ethics. Blackwell: Oxford, 1993. Davies, Charlotte Aull. Reflexive Ethnography: A Guide to Researching Selves and Others. Routledge: London, 2008. Die Würde der deutschen Waffenschränke ist unantastbar (The Dignity of German Weapons Cupboards Is Inviolable). Dir. Roman Grafe. Erfurt Theatre, 2012. Geipel, Ines. Für heute reichts (Amok in Erfurt). Berlin: Rohwohlt, 2004. Haraway, Donna. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Turning Points in Qualitative Research: Tying Knots in a Handkerchief. Eds. Norman K. Denzin, and Yvonna S. Lincoln. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira P, 2003. 21–46. hooks, b. “Marginality as a Site of Resistance.” Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures. Eds. Russell Ferguson et al. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1990. 341–343. Lemonick, Michael. D. “Germany’s Columbine.” Time 159.18 (6 May 2002): 36. Mcevoy, W. “Finding the Balance: Writing and Performing Ethics in Théâtre du Soleil’s Le Dernier Caravansérail.” New Theatre Quarterly 22.3 (2003): 211–26. Müller, Hanno, and Paul-Josef Raue. Der Amoklauf: 10 Jahre danach—Erinnern und Gedenken. Essen: Klartext-Verlag, 2012. Slotosch, Sven. “Das alte Lied, das alte Leid.” Telepolis 30 Nov. 2006. 7 Jun. 2012 < http://www.heise.de/tp/artikel/24/24101/1.html >.

1909–22: Turkey exterminated over 1.5 million of its ethnically Armenian, and hundreds of thousands of its ethnically Greek and Assyrian, citizens. Most died in 1915. This period of decimation in now widely called the Armenian Genocide (Balakian 179-80).1910: Siamanto first published his poem, The Dance: “The corpses were piled as trees, / and from the springs, from the streams and the road, / the blood was a stubborn murmur.” When springs run red, when the dead are stacked tree-high, when “everything that could happen has already happened,” then time is nothing: “there is no future [and] the language of civilised humanity is not our language” (Nichanian 142).2007: In my novel The Edge of the World a ceramic bowl, luminous blue, recurs as motif. Imagine you are tiny: the bowl is broken but you don’t remember breaking it. You’re awash with tears. You sit on the floor, gather shards but, no matter how you try, you can’t fix it. Imagine, now, that the bowl is the sky, huge and upturned above your head. You have always known, through every wash of your blood, that life is shockingly precarious. Silence—between heartbeats, between the words your parents speak—tells you: something inside you is terribly wrong; home is not home but there is no other home; you “can never be fully grounded in a community which does not share or empathise with the experience of persecution” (Wajnryb 130). This is the stubborn murmur of your body.Because time is nothing, this essay is fragmented, non-linear. Its main characters: my mother, grandmother (Hovsanna), grandfather (Benyamin), some of my mother’s older siblings (Krikor, Maree, Hovsep, Arusiak), and Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (Ottoman military officer, Young Turk leader, first president of Turkey). 1915–2013: Turkey invests much energy in genocide denial, minimisation and deflection of responsibility. 24 April 2012: Barack Obama refers to the Medz Yeghern (Great Calamity). The use of this term is decried as appeasement, privileging political alliance with Turkey over human rights. 2003: Between Genocide and Catastrophe, letters between Armenian-American theorist David Kazanjian and Armenian-French theorist Marc Nichanian, contest the naming of the “event” (126). Nichanian says those who call it the Genocide are:repeating every day, everywhere, in all places, the original denial of the Catastrophe. But this is part of the catastrophic structure of the survivor. By using the word “Genocide”, we survivors are only repeating […] the denial of the loss. We probably cannot help it. We are doing what the executioner wanted us to do […] we claim all over the world that we have been “genocided;” we relentlessly need to prove our own death. We are still in the claws of the executioner. We still belong to the logic of the executioner. (127)1992: In Revolution and Genocide, historian Robert Melson identifies the Armenian Genocide as “total” because it was public policy intended to exterminate a large fraction of Armenian society, “including the families of its members, and the destruction of its social and cultural identity in most or all aspects” (26).1986: Boyajian and Grigorian assert that the Genocide “is still operative” because, without full acknowledgement, “the ghosts won’t go away” (qtd. in Hovannisian 183). They rise up from earth, silence, water, dreams: Armenian literature, Armenian homes haunted by them. 2013: My heart pounds: Medz Yeghern, Aksor (Exile), Anashmaneli (Indefinable), Darakrutiun (Deportation), Chart (Massacre), Brnagaght (Forced migration), Aghed (Catastrophe), Genocide. I am awash. Time is nothing.1909–15: Mustafa Kemal Ataturk was both a serving Ottoman officer and a leader of the revolutionary Young Turks. He led Ottoman troops in the repulsion of the Allied invasion before dawn on 25 April at Gallipoli and other sites. Many troops died in a series of battles that eventually saw the Ottomans triumph. Out of this was born one of Australia’s founding myths: Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZACs), courageous in the face of certain defeat. They are commemorated yearly on 25 April, ANZAC Day. To question this myth is to risk being labelled traitor.1919–23: Ataturk began a nationalist revolution against the occupying Allies, the nascent neighbouring Republic of Armenia, and others. The Allies withdrew two years later. Ataturk was installed as unofficial leader, becoming President in 1923. 1920–1922: The last waves of the Genocide. 2007: Robert Manne published A Turkish Tale: Gallipoli and the Armenian Genocide, calling for a recontextualisation of the cultural view of the Gallipoli landings in light of the concurrence of the Armenian Genocide, which had taken place just over the rise, had been witnessed by many military personnel and widely reported by international media at the time. Armenian networks across Australia were abuzz. There were media discussions. I listened, stared out of my office window at the horizon, imagined Armenian communities in Sydney and Melbourne. Did they feel like me—like they were holding their breath?Then it all went quiet. Manne wrote: “It is a wonderful thing when, at the end of warfare, hatred dies. But I struggle to understand why Gallipoli and the Armenian Genocide continue to exist for Australians in parallel moral universes.” 1992: I bought an old house to make a home for me and my two small children. The rooms were large, the ceilings high, and behind it was a jacaranda with a sturdy tree house built high up in its fork. One of my mother’s Armenian friends kindly offered to help with repairs. He and my mother would spend Saturdays with us, working, looking after the kids. Mum would stay the night; her friend would go home. But one night he took a sleeping bag up the ladder to the tree house, saying it reminded him of growing up in Lebanon. The following morning he was subdued; I suspect there were not as many mosquitoes in Lebanon as we had in our garden. But at dinner the previous night he had been in high spirits. The conversation had turned, as always, to politics. He and my mother had argued about Turkey and Russia, Britain’s role in the development of the Middle East conflict, the USA’s roughshod foreign policy and its effect on the world—and, of course, the Armenian Genocide, and the killingof Turkish governmental representatives by Armenians, in Australia and across the world, during the 1980s. He had intimated he knew the attackers and had materially supported them. But surely it was the beer talking. Later, when I asked my mother, she looked at me with round eyes and shrugged, uncharacteristically silent. 2002: Greek-American diva Diamanda Galas performed Dexifiones: Will and Testament at the Perth Concert Hall, her operatic work for “the forgotten victims of the Armenian and Anatolian Greek Genocide” (Galas).Her voice is so powerful it alters me.1925: My grandmother, Hovsanna, and my grandfather, Benyamin, had twice been separated in the Genocide (1915 and 1922) and twice reunited. But in early 1925, she had buried him, once a prosperous businessman, in a swamp. Armenians were not permitted burial in cemeteries. Once they had lived together in a big house with their dozen children; now there were only three with her. Maree, half-mad and 18 years old, and quiet Hovsep, aged seven,walked. Then five-year-old aunt, Arusiak—small, hungry, tired—had been carried by Hovsanna for months. They were walking from Cilicia to Jerusalem and its Armenian Quarter. Someone had said they had seen Krikor, her eldest son, there. Hovsanna was pregnant for the last time. Together the four reached Aleppo in Syria, found a Christian orphanage for girls, and Hovsanna, her pregnancy near its end, could carry Arusiak no further. She left her, promising to return. Hovsanna’s pains began in Beirut’s busy streets. She found privacy in the only place she could, under a house, crawled in. Whenever my mother spoke of her birth she described it like this: I was born under a stranger’s house like a dog.1975: My friend and I travelled to Albany by bus. After six hours we were looking down York Street, between Mount Clarence and Mount Melville, and beyond to Princess Royal Harbour, sapphire blue, and against which the town’s prosperous life—its shopfronts, hotels, cars, tourists, historic buildings—played out. It took away my breath: the deep harbour, whaling history, fishing boats. Rain and sun and scudding cloud; cliffs and swells; rocky points and the white curves of bays. It was from Albany that young Western Australian men, volunteers for World War I, embarked on ships for the Middle East, Gallipoli, sailing out of Princess Royal Harbour.1985: The Australian Government announced that Turkey had agreed to have the site of the 1915 Gallipoli landings renamed Anzac Cove. Commentators and politicians acknowledged it as historic praised Turkey for her generosity, expressed satisfaction that, 70 years on, former foes were able to embrace the shared human experience of war. We were justifiably proud of ourselves.2005: Turkey made her own requests. The entrance to Albany’s Princess Royal Harbour was renamed Ataturk Channel. A large bronze statue of Ataturk was erected on the headland overlooking the Harbour entrance. 24 April 1915: In the town of Hasan Beyli, in Cilicia, southwest Turkey, my great grandfather, a successful and respected businessman in his 50s, was asleep in his bed beside his wife. He had been born in that house, as had his father, grandfather, and all his children. His brother, my great uncle, had bought the house next door as a young man, brought his bride home to it, lived there ever since; between the two households there had been one child after another. All the cousins grew up together. My great grandfather and great uncle had gone to work that morning, despite their wives’ concerns, but had returned home early. The women had been relieved to see them. They made coffee, talked. Everyone had heard the rumours. Enemy ships were massing off the coast. 1978: The second time in Albany was my honeymoon. We had driven into the Goldfields then headed south. Such distance, such beautiful strangeness: red earth, red rocks; scant forests of low trees, thin arms outstretched; the dry, pale, flat land of Norseman. Shimmering heat. Then the big, wild coast.On our second morning—a cool, overcast day—we took our handline to a jetty. The ocean was mercury; a line of cormorants settled and bobbed. Suddenly fish bit; we reeled them in. I leaned over the jetty’s side, looked down into the deep. The water was clear and undisturbed save the twirling of a pike that looked like it had reversed gravity and was shooting straight up to me. Its scales flashed silver as itbroke the surface.1982: How could I concentrate on splicing a film with this story in my head? Besides the desk, the only other furniture in the editing suite was a whiteboard. I took a marker and divided the board into three columns for the three generations: my grandparents, Hovsanna and Benyamin; my mother; someone like me. There was a lot in the first column, some in the second, nothing in the third. I stared at the blankness of my then-young life.A teacher came in to check my editing. I tried to explain what I had been doing. “I think,” he said, stony-faced, “that should be your third film, not your first.”When he had gone I stared at the reels of film, the white board blankness, the wall. It took 25 years to find the form, the words to say it: a novel not a film, prose not pictures.2007: Ten minutes before the launch of The Edge of the World, the venue was empty. I made myself busy, told myself: what do you expect? Your research has shown, over and over, this is a story about which few know or very much care, an inconvenient, unfashionable story; it is perfectly in keeping that no-one will come. When I stepped onto the rostrum to speak, there were so many people that they crowded the doorway, spilled onto the pavement. “I want to thank my mother,” I said, “who, pretending to do her homework, listened instead to the story her mother told other Armenian survivor-women, kept that story for 50 years, and then passed it on to me.” 2013: There is a section of The Edge of the World I needed to find because it had really happened and, when it happened, I knew, there in my living room, that Boyajian and Grigorian (183) were right about the Armenian Genocide being “still operative.” But I knew even more than that: I knew that the Diaspora triggered by genocide is both rescue and weapon, the new life in this host nation both sanctuary and betrayal. I picked up a copy, paced, flicked, followed my nose, found it:On 25 April, the day after Genocide memorial-day, I am watching television. The Prime Minister stands at the ANZAC memorial in western Turkey and delivers a poetic and moving speech. My eyes fill with tears, and I moan a little and cover them. In his speech he talks about the heroism of the Turkish soldiers in their defence of their homeland, about the extent of their losses – sixty thousand men. I glance at my son. He raises his eyebrows at me. I lose count of how many times Kemal Ataturk is mentioned as the Father of Modern Turkey. I think of my grandmother and grandfather, and all my baby aunts and uncles […] I curl over like a mollusc; the ache in my chest draws me in. I feel small and very tired; I feel like I need to wash.Is it true that if we repeat something often enough and loud enough it becomes the truth? The Prime Minister quotes Kemal Ataturk: the ANZACS who died and are buried on that western coast are deemed ‘sons of Turkey’. My son turns my grandfather’s, my mother’s, my eyes to me and says, It is amazing they can be so friendly after we attacked them.I draw up my knees to my chest, lay my head and arms down. My limbs feel weak and useless. My throat hurts. I look at my Australian son with his Armenian face (325-6).24 April 1915 cont: There had been trouble all my great grandfather’s life: pogrom here, massacre there. But this land was accustomed to colonisers: the Mongols, the Persians, latterly the Ottomans. They invade, conquer, rise, fall; Armenians stay. This had been Armenian homeland for thousands of years.No-one masses ships off a coast unless planning an invasion. So be it. These Europeans could not be worse than the Ottomans. That night, were my great grandfather and great uncle awoken by the pounding at each door, or by the horses and gendarmes’ boots? They were seized, each family herded at gunpoint into its garden, and made to watch. Hanging is slow. There could be no mistakes. The gendarmes used the stoutest branches, stayed until they were sure the men weredead. This happened to hundreds of prominent Armenian men all over Turkey that night.Before dawn, the Allies made landfall.Each year those lost in the Genocide are remembered on 24 April, the day before ANZAC Day.1969: I asked my mother if she had any brothers and sisters. She froze, her hands in the sink. I stared at her, then slipped from the room.1915: The Ottoman government decreed: all Armenians were to surrender their documents and report to authorities. Able-bodied men were taken away, my grandfather among them. Women and children, the elderly and disabled, were told to prepare to walk to a safe camp where they would stay for the duration of the war. They would be accompanied by armed soldiers for their protection. They were permitted to take with them what they could carry (Bryce 1916).It began immediately, pretty young women and children first. There are so many ways to kill. Months later, a few dazed, starved survivors stumbled into the Syrian desert, were driven into lakes, or herded into churches and set alight.Most husbands and fathers were never seen again. 2003: I arrived early at my son’s school, parked in the shade, opened The Silence: How Tragedy Shapes Talk, and began to read. Soon I was annotating furiously. Ruth Wajnryb writes of “growing up among innocent peers in an innocent landscape” and also that the notion of “freedom of speech” in Australia “seems often, to derive from that innocent landscape where reside people who have no personal scars or who have little relevant historical knowledge” (141).1984: I travelled to Vancouver, Canada, and knocked on Arusiak’s door. Afraid she would not agree to meet me, I hadn’t told her I was coming. She was welcoming and gracious. This was my first experience of extended family and I felt loved in a new and important way, a way I had read about, had observed in my friends, had longed for. One afternoon she said, “You know our mother left me in an orphanage…When I saw her again, it was too late. I didn’t know who they were, what a family was. I felt nothing.” “Yes, I know,” I replied, my heart full and hurting. The next morning, over breakfast, she quietly asked me to leave. 1926: When my mother was a baby, her 18 year-old sister, Maree, tried to drown her in the sea. My mother clearly recalled Maree’s face had been disfigured by a sword. Hovsanna, would ask my mother to forgive Maree’s constant abuse and bad behaviour, saying, “She is only half a person.”1930: Someone gave Hovsanna the money to travel to Aleppo and reclaim Arusiak, by then 10 years old. My mother was intrigued by the appearance of this sister but Arusiak was watchful and withdrawn. When she finally did speak to my then five-year-old mother, she hissed: “Why did she leave me behind and keep you?”Soon after Arusiak appeared, Maree, “only half a person,” disappeared. My mother was happy about that.1935: At 15, Arusiak found a live-in job and left. My mother was 10 years old; her brother Hovsep, who cared for her before and after school every day while their mother worked, and always had, was seventeen. She adored him. He had just finished high school and was going to study medicine. One day he fell ill. He died within a week.1980: My mother told me she never saw her mother laugh or, once Hovsep died, in anything other than black. Two or three times before Hovsep died, she saw her smile a little, and twice she heard her singing when she thought she was alone: “A very sad song,” my mother would say, “that made me cry.”1942: At seventeen, my mother had been working as a live-in nanny for three years. Every week on her only half-day off she had caught the bus home. But now Hovsanna was in hospital, so my mother had been visiting her there. One day her employer told her she must go to the hospital immediately. She ran. Hovsanna was lying alone and very still. Something wasn’t right. My mother searched the hospital corridors but found no-one. She picked up a phone. When someone answered she told them to send help. Then she ran all the way home, grabbed Arusiak’s photograph and ran all the way back. She laid it on her mother’s chest, said, “It’s all right, Mama, Arusiak’s here.”1976: My mother said she didn’t like my boyfriend; I was not to go out with him. She said she never disobeyed her own mother because she really loved her mother. I went out with my boyfriend. When I came home, my belongings were on the front porch. The door was bolted. I was seventeen.2003: I read Wajnryb who identifies violent eruptions of anger and frozen silences as some of the behaviours consistent in families with a genocidal history (126). 1970: My father had been dead over a year. My brothers and I were, all under 12, made too much noise. My mother picked up the phone: she can’t stand us, she screamed; she will call an orphanage to take us away. We begged.I fled to my room. I couldn’t sit down. I couldn’t keep still. I paced, pressed my face into a corner; shook and cried, knowing (because she had always told us so) that she didn’t make idle threats, knowing that this was what I had sometimes glimpsed on her face when she looked at us.2012: The Internet reveals images of Ataturk’s bronze statue overlooking Princess Royal Harbour. Of course, it’s outsized, imposing. The inscription on its plinth reads: "Peace at Home/ Peace in the World." He wears a suit, looks like a scholar, is moving towards us, a scroll in his hand. The look in his eyes is all intensity. Something distant has arrested him – a receding or re-emerging vision. Perhaps a murmur that builds, subsides, builds again. (Medz Yeghern, Aksor, Aghed, Genocide). And what is written on that scroll?2013: My partner suggested we go to Albany, escape Perth’s brutal summer. I tried to explain why it’s impossible. There is no memorial in Albany, or anywhere else in Western Australia, to the 1.5 million victims of the Armenian Genocide. ReferencesAkcam, Taner. “The Politics of Genocide.” Online Video Clip. YouTube. YouTube, 11 Dec. 2011. 6 Mar. 2013 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watchv=OxAJaaw81eU&noredirect=1genocide›.Balakian, Peter. The Burning Tigress: The Armenian Genocide. London: William Heinemann, 2004.BBC. “Kemal Ataturk (1881–1938).” BBC History. 2013. 6 Mar. 2013 ‹http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/ataturk_kemal.shtml›.Boyajian, Levon, and Haigaz Grigorian. “Psychological Sequelae of the Armenian Genocide.”The Armenian Genocide in Perspective. Ed. Richard Hovannisian. New Brunswick: Transaction, 1987. 177–85.Bryce, Viscount. The Treatment of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1916.Galas, Diamanda. Program Notes. Dexifiones: Will and Testament. Perth Concert Hall, Perth, Australia. 2001.———.“Dexifiones: Will and Testament FULL Live Lisboa 2001 Part 1.” Online Video Clip. YouTube, 5 Nov. 2011. Web. 6 Mar. 2013 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvVnYbxWArM›.Kazanjian, David, and Marc Nichanian. “Between Genocide and Catastrophe.” Loss. Eds. David Eng and David Kazanjian. Los Angeles: U of California P, 2003. 125–47.Manne, Robert. “A Turkish Tale: Gallipoli and the Armenian Genocide.” The Monthly Feb. 2007. 6 Mar. 2013 ‹http://www.themonthly.com.au/turkish-tale-gallipoli-and-armenian-genocide-robert-manne-459›.Matiossian, Vartan. “When Dictionaries Are Left Unopened: How ‘Medz Yeghern’ Turned into a Terminology of Denial.” The Armenian Weekly 27 Nov. 2012. 6 Mar. 2013 ‹http://www.armenianweekly.com/2012/11/27/when-dictionaries-are-left-unopened-how-medz-yeghern-turned-into-terminology-of-denial/›.Melson, Robert. Revolution and Genocide. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996.Nicholson, Brendan. “ASIO Detected Bomb Plot by Armenian Terrorists.” The Australian 2 Jan. 2012. 6 Mar. 2013 ‹http://www.theaustralian.com.au/in-depth/cabinet-papers/asio-detected-bomb-plot-by-armenian-terrorists/story-fnbkqb54-1226234411154›.“President Obama Issues Statement on Armenian Remembrance Day.” The Armenian Weekly 24 Apr. 2012. 5 Mar. 2013 ‹http://www.armenianweekly.com/2012/04/24/president-obama-issues-statement-on-armenian-remembrance-day/›.Polain, Marcella. The Edge of the World. Fremantle: Fremantle Press, 2007.Siamanto. “The Dance.” Trans. Peter Balakian and Nervart Yaghlian. Adonias Dalgas Memorial Page 5 Mar. 2013 ‹http://www.terezakis.com/dalgas.html›.Stockings, Craig. “Let’s Have a Truce in the Battle of the Anzac Myth.” The Australian 25 Apr. 2012. 6 Mar. 2013 ‹http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/opinion/lets-have-a-truce-in-the-battle-of-the-anzac-myth/story-e6frgd0x-1226337486382›.Wajnryb, Ruth. The Silence: How Tragedy Shapes Talk. Crows Nest: Allen and Unwin, 2001.

I remember the first time I saw a dead body. I spawned just before dawn; around me engines were clattering into life, the dim silhouettes of tanks beginning to move out in a steady grinding rumble. I could dimly make out a few other people, the anonymity of their shadowy outlines belied by the names hanging over their heads in a comforting blue. Suddenly, a stream of tracers arced across the sky; explosions sounded nearby, then closer still; a tank ahead of me stopped, turned sluggishly, and fired off a couple of rounds, rocking slightly against the recoil. The radio was filled with talk of Germans in the town, but I couldn’t even see the town. I ran toward what looked like the shattered hulk of a building and dived into what I hoped was a doorway. It was already occupied by another Tommy and together we waited for it to get lighter, listening to the rattle of machine guns, the sharp ping as shells ricocheted off steel, the sickening, indescribable, but immediately recognisable sound when they didn’t. Eventually, the other soldier moved out, but I waited for the sun to peek over the nearby hills. Once I was able to see where I was going, I made straight for the command post on the edge of town, and came across a group of allied soldiers standing in a circle. In the centre of the circle lay a dead German soldier, face up. “Well I’ll be damned,” I said aloud; no one else said anything, and the body abruptly faded. I remember the first time I killed someone. I had barely got the Spit V up to 4000 feet when out of the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of something below me. I dropped the left wing and saw a Stuka making a bee-line for the base. I made a hash of the turn, almost stalling, but he obviously had no idea I was there. I saddled-up on his six, dropping down low to avoid fire from his gunner, and opened up on him. I must have hit him at perfect convergence because he disintegrated, pieces of dismembered airframe raining down on the field below. I circled the field, putting all my concentration into making the landing that would make the kill count, then switched off the engine and sat in the cockpit for a moment, heart pounding. As you can tell, I’ve been in the wars lately. The first example is drawn from the launch of Cornered Rat Software’s WWII Online: Blitzkrieg (2001) while the second is based on a short stint playing Warbirds 3 (2002). Both games are examples of one of the most interesting recent developments in computer and video gaming: the increasing popularity and range of Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs); other notable examples of historical combat simulation MMOGs include HiTech Creations Aces High (2002) and Jaleco Entertainment’s Fighter Ace 3.5 (2002). For a variety of technical reasons, most popular multiplayer games—particularly first-person shooter (FPS) games such as Doom, Quake, and more recently Medal of Honor: Allied Assault (2002) and Return to Castle Wolfenstein (2001)—are played on player-organised servers that are usually limited to 32 or fewer players; terrain maps are small and rotated every couple of hours on average. MMOGs, by contrast, feature anywhere from hundreds to tens of thousands of players hosted on a handful of company-run servers. The shared virtual geography of these worlds is huge, extending across tens of thousands of square miles; these worlds are also persistent in that they respond dynamically to the actions of players and continue to do so while individual players are offline. As my opening anecdotes demonstrate, the experience of dealing and receiving virtual death is central to massively multiplayer simulations as it is to so many forms of computer games. Yet for an experience is that is so ubiquitous in computer games (and, some would say, even constitutes their experiential core) death is under-theorised. Mainstream culture tends to see computer and console game mayhem according to a rigid desensitisation argument: the experience of repeatedly killing other players online leads to a gradual erosion of the individual moral sense which makes players more likely to countenance killing people in the real world. Nowhere was this argument more in evidence that in the wake of the murder of fifteen students by Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado on April 20, 1999. The discovery that the two boys were enthusiastic players of Id Software’s Doom and Quake resulted in an avalanche of hysterical news stories that charged computer games with a number of evils: eroding kids’ ability to distinguish fantasy from reality, encouraging them to imitate the actions represented in the games, and immuring them to the real-world consequences of violence. These claims were hardly new, and had in fact been directed at any number of violent popular entertainment genres over the years. What was new was the claim that the interactive nature of FPS games rendered them a form of simulated weapons training. What was also striking about the discourse surrounding the Littleton shooting was just how little the journalists covering the story knew about computer, console and arcade games. Nevertheless, their approach to the issue encouraged readers to see games as having real life analogs. Media discussion of the event also reinforced the notion of a connection with military training techniques, making extensive use of Lt. Col. (ret) David Grossman, a former Army ranger and psychologist who led the charge in claiming that games were “mass-murder simulators” (Gittrich, AA06). This controversy over the role of violent computer games in the Columbine murders is part of a larger cultural discourse that adopts the logical fallacy characteristic of moral panics: coincidence equals causation. Yet the impoverished discussion of online death and destruction is also due in no small measure to an entrenched hostility toward popular entertainment as a whole, a hostility that is evident even in the work of some academic critics who study popular culture. Andrew Darley, for example, argues that, never has the flattening of meaning or depth in the traditional aesthetic sense of these words been so pronounced as in the action-simulation genres of the computer game: here, aesthetic experience is tied directly to the purely sensational and allied to tests of physical dexterity (143). In this view, the repeated experience of death is merely a part of the overall texture of a form characterised not so much by narrative as by compulsive repetition. More generally, computer games are seen by many critics as the pernicious, paradigmatic instance of the colonisation of individual consciousness by cultural spectacle. According to this Frankfurt school-influenced critique (most frequently associated with the work of Guy Debord), spectacle serves both to mystify and pacify its audience: The more the technology opens up narrative possibilities, the less there is for the audience to do. [. . .]. When the spectacle conceals the practice of the artists who create it, it [announces]…itself as an expression of a universe beyond human volition and effort (Filewood 24). In supposedly sapping its audience’s critical faculties by bombarding them with a technological assault whose only purpose is to instantiate a deterministic worldview, spectacle is seen by its critics as exemplifying the work of capitalist ideology which teaches people not to question the world around them by establishing, in Althusser’s famous phrase, an “imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of their existence” (162). The desensitisation thesis is thus part of a larger discourse that considers computer games paradoxically to be both escapist and as having real-world effects. With regard to online death, neo-Marxism meets neo-Freudianism: players are seen as hooked on the thrill not only of destroying others but also of self-destruction. Death is thus considered the terminus of all narrative possibility, and the participation of individuals in fantasy-death and mayhem is seen to lead inevitably to several kinds of cultural death: the death of “family values,” the death of community, the death of individual responsibility, and—given the characterisation of FPS games in particular as lacking in plot and characterisation—the death of storytelling. However, it is less productive to approach computer, arcade and console games as vehicles for force-feeding content with pre-determined cultural effects than it is to understand them as venues within and around which players stage a variety of theatrical performances. Thus even the bêtes noire of the mainstream media, first-person shooters, serve as vehicles for a variety of interactions ranging from the design of new sounds, graphics and levels, new “skins” for player characters, the formation of “tribes” or “clans” that fight and socialise together, and the creation of elaborate fan fictions. This idea that narrative does not simply “happen” within the immediate experience of playing the game, but is in fact produced by a dynamic interplay of interactions for which the game serves as a focus, also suggests a very different way of looking at the role of death online. Far from being the logical endpoint, the inevitable terminus of all narrative possibility, death becomes the indispensable starting point for narrative. In single-player games, for example, the existence of the simple “save game” function—differing from simply putting the game board to one side in that the save function allows the preservation of the game world in multiple temporal states—generates much of the narrative and dramatic range of computer games. Generally a player saves the game because he or she is facing an obstacle that may result in death; saving the game at that point allows the player to investigate alternatives. Thus, the ever-present possibility of death in the game world becomes the origin of all narratives based on forward investigation. In multiplayer and MMOG environments, where the players have no control over the save game state, it is nevertheless the possibility of a mode of forward projection that gives the experience its dramatic intensity. Flight simulation games in particular are notoriously difficult to master; the experience of serial death, therefore, becomes the necessary condition for honing your flying skills, trying out different tactics in a variety of combat situations, trying similar tactics in different aircraft, and so on. The experience of online death creates a powerful narrative impulse, and not only in those situations where death is serialised and guaranteed. A sizable proportion of the flight sim communities of both Warbirds and Aces High participate in specially designed scenario events that replicate a specific historical air combat event (the Battle of Britain, the Coral Sea, USAAF bomber operations in Europe, etc.) as closely as possible. What makes these scenarios so compelling for many players is that they are generally “one life” events: once the player is dead, they are out for the rest of the event and this creates an intense experience that is completely unlike flying in the everyday free-for-all arenas. The desensitisation thesis notwithstanding, there is little evidence that this narrative investment in death produces a more casual attitude toward real-life death amongst MMOG players. For example, when real-world death intrudes, simulation players often reach for the same rituals of comfort and acknowledgement that are employed offline. Recently, when an Aces High player died unexpectedly of heart failure at the age of 35, his squadron held an elaborate memorial event in his honor. Over a hundred players bailed out over an aerodrome—bailing out is the only way that a player in Aces High can acquire a virtual human body—and lined the edges of the runway as members of the dead player’s squad flew the missing man formation overhead (GrimmCAF). The insistence upon bodily presence in the context of a classic military ceremony marking irrecoverable absence suggests the way in which the connections between real and virtual worlds are experienced by players: as tensions, but also as points where identities are negotiated. This example does not seem to indicate that everyday familiarity with virtual death has dulled the players’ sensibilities to the sorrow and loss accompanying death in the real world. I began this article talking about death in simulation MMOGs for a number of reasons. In the first place, MMOGs are more commonly identified with their role-playing examples (MMORPGs) such as Ultima Online and Everquest, games that focus on virtual community-building and exploration in addition to violence and conquest. By contrast, simulation games tend to be seen as having more in common with first-person shooters like Quake, in the way in which they foreground the experience of serial death. Secondly, it is precisely the connection between simulation and death that makes games in general (as I demonstrated in relation to the media coverage of the Columbine murders) so problematic. In response, I would argue that one of the most interesting aspects of computer games recently has been the degree to which generic distinctions have been breaking down. MMORPGs, which had their roots in the Dungeons and Dragons gaming world, and the text-based world of MUDs and MOOs have since developed sophisticated third-person and even first-person representational styles to facilitate both peaceful character interactions and combat. Likewise, first-person shooters have begun to add role-playing elements (see, for example, Looking Glass Studios’ superb System Shock 2 (1999) or Lucasarts' Jedi Knight series). This trend has also been incorporated into simulation MMOGs: World War II Online includes a rudimentary set of character-tracking features, and Aces High has just announced a more ambitious expansion whose major focus will be the incorporation of role-playing elements. I feel that MMOGs in particular are all evolving towards a state that I would describe as “simulance:” simulations that, while they may be associated with a nominal representational reality, are increasingly about exploring the narrative possibilities, the mechanisms of theatrical engagement for self and community of simulation itself. Increasingly, none of the terms "simulation,” "role-playing" or indeed “game” quite captures the texture of these evolving experiences. In their complex engagement with both scripted and extemporaneous narrative, the players have more in common with period re-enactors; the immersive power of a well-designed flight simulator scenario produces a feeling in players akin to the “period rush” experienced by battlefield re-enactors, the frisson between awareness of playing a role and surrendering completely to the momentary power of its illusory reality. What troubles critics about simulations (and what also blinds them to the narrative complexity in other forms of computer games) is that they are indeed not simply examples of re-enactment —a re-staging of supposedly real events—but a generative form of narrative enactment. Computer games, particularly large-scale online games, provide a powerful set of theatrical tools with which players and player communities can help shape narratives and deepen their own narrative investment. Obviously, they are not isolated from real-world cultural factors that shape and constrain narrative possibility. However, we are starting to see the way in which the games use the idea of virtual death as the generative force for new storytelling frameworks based, in Filewood’s terms, on forward investigation. As games begin to move out of their incunabular state, they may contribute to the re-shaping of culture and consciousness, as other narrative platforms have done. Far from causing the downfall of civilisation, game-based narratives may bring with them a greater cultural awareness of simultaneous narrative possibility, of the past as sets of contingent phenomena, and a greater attention to practical, hands-on experimental problem-solving. It would be ironic, but no great surprise, if a form built around the creative possibilities inherent in serial death in fact made us more attentive to the rich alternative possibilities of living. Works Cited Aces High. HiTech Creations, 2002. http://www.bartleby.com/201/1.html Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Toward an Investigation).” Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. By Louis Althusser, trans. Ben Brewster. New York, 1971. 127-86. Barry, Ellen. “Games Feared as Youths’ Basic Training; Industry, Valued as Aid to Soldiers, on Defensive.” The Boston Globe 29 Apr 1999: A1. LexisNexis. Feb. 7, 2003. Cornered Rat Software. World War II Online: Blitzkrieg. Strategy First, 2001. http://www.wwiionline.com/ Darley, Andrew. Visual Digital Culture: Surface Play and Spectacle in New Media Genres. London: Routledge, 2000. Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone Books, 1994. 1967. Der Derian, James. “The Simulation Syndrome: From War Games to Game Wars.” Social Text 8.2 (1990): 187-92. Filewood, Alan. “C:\Games\Dramaturgy: The Cybertheatre of Computer Games.” Canadian Theatre Review 81 (Winter 1994): 24-28. Gittrich, Greg. “Expert Differs with Kids over Video Game Effects.” The Denver Post 27 Apr 1999: AA-06. LexisNexis. Feb. 7 2003. GrimmCAF. “MojoCAF’s Memorial Flight.” Aces High BB, 13 Dec. 2002. http://www.hitechcreations.com/forums/sh... IEntertainment Network. Warbirds III. Simon and Schuster Interactive, 2002.http://www.totalsims.com/index.php?url=w... Jenkins, Henry, comp. “Voices from the Combat Zone: Game Grrlz Talk Back.” From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games. Ed. Justine Cassell and Henry Jenkins. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT P, 1998. 328-41. Lieberman, Joseph I. “The Social Impact of Music Violence.” Statement Before the Governmental Affairs Committee Subcommittee on Oversight, 1997. http://www.senate.gov/member/ct/lieberma... Feb. 7 2003. Murray, Janet H. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. New York: Free, 1997. Poole, Steven. Trigger Happy: Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution. New York: Arcade Publishing, 2000. Pyro. “AH2 FAQ.” Aces High BB, 29 Jan. 2003. Internet. http://www.hitechcreations.com/forums/sh... Feb. 8 2003. Links http://www.wwiionline.com/ http://www.idsoftware.com/games/doom/ http://www.hitechcreations.com/ http://www.totalsims.com/index.php?url=wbiii/content_home.php http://www.hitechcreations.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;threadid=77265 http://www.senate.gov/member/ct/lieberman/releases/r110697c.html http://www.idsoftware.com/games/wolfenstein http://www.idsoftware.com/games/quake/ http://www.ea.com/eagames/official/moh_alliedassault/home.jsp http://www.jaleco.com/fighterace/index.html http://www.bartleby.com/201/1.html http://www.hitechcreations.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;threadid=72560 Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Mullen, Mark. "It Was Not Death for I Stood Up…and Fragged the Dumb-Ass MoFo Who'd Wasted Me" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 6.1 (2003). Dn Month Year < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0302/03-itwasnotdeath.php>. APA Style Mullen, M., (2003, Feb 26). It Was Not Death for I Stood Up…and Fragged the Dumb-Ass MoFo Who'd Wasted Me. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,(1). Retrieved Month Dn, Year, from http://www.media-culture.org.au/0302/03-itwasnotdeath.html

There have been a number of Australian memoirs written by adoptees over the last twenty years—Robert Dessaix’s A Mother’s Disgrace, Suzanne Chick’s Searching for Charmian, Tom Frame’s Binding Ties:An Experience of Adoption and Reunion in Australia, for example—as well as international adoptee narratives by Betty Jean Lifton, Florence Fisher, and A. M. Homes amongst others. These works form a component of the small but growing field of adoption life writing that includes works by “all members of the adoption triad” (Hipchen and Deans 163): adoptive parents, birthparents, and adoptees. As the broad genre of memoir becomes more theorised and mapped, many sub-genres are emerging (Brien). My own adoptee story (which I am currently composing) could be a further sub-categorisation of the adoptee memoir, that of “late discovery adoptees” (Perl and Markham), those who are either told, or find out, about their adoption in adulthood. When this is part of a life story, secrets and silences are prominent, and digging into these requires using whatever resources can be found. These include cookbooks, recipes written by hand, and the scraps of paper shoved between pages. There are two cookbooks from my adoptive mother’s belongings that I have kept. One of them is titled Miss Tuxford’s Modern Cookery for the Middle Classes: Hints on Modern Gas Stove Cooking, and this was published around 1937 in England. It’s difficult to date this book exactly, as there is no date in my copy, but one of the advertisements (for Bird’s Custard, I think; the page is partly obscured by an Orange Nut Loaf recipe from a Willow baking pan that has been glued onto the page) is headed with a date range of 1837 to 1937. It has that smell of long ago that lingers strongly even now, out of the protective custody of my mother’s storage. Or should I say, out of the range of my adoptive father’s garbage dump zeal. He loved throwing things away, but these were often things that I saw as valuable, or at least of sentimental value, worth keeping for the memories they evoked. Maybe my father didn’t want to remember. My mother was brimming with memories, I discovered after her death, but she did not reveal them during her life. At least, not to me, making objects like these cookbooks precious in my reconstruction of the lives I know so little about, as well as in the grieving process (Gibson).Miss Tuxford (“Diplomée Board of Education, Gold Medallist, etc”) produced numerous editions of her book. My mother’s is now fragile, loose at the spine and browned with age. There are occasional stains showing that the bread and cakes section got the most use, with the pages for main meals of meat and vegetables relatively clean. The author divided her recipes into the main chapters of Soups (lentil, kidney, sheep’s head broth), Sauces (white, espagnol, mushroom), Fish (“It is important that all fish is fresh when cooked” (23)), Meats (roasted, boiled, stuffed; roast rabbit, boiled turkey, scotch collop), Vegetables (creamed beetroot, economical salad dressing, potatoes baked in their skins), Puddings and Sweets (suet pastry, Yorkshire pudding, chocolate tarts, ginger cream), Bread and Cakes (household bread, raspberry sandwich cake, sultana scones, peanut fancies), Icings and Fillings, Invalid Cookery (beef tea, nourishing lemonade, Virol pudding), Jams, Sweetmeats and Pickles (red currant jelly, piccalilli) and Miscellaneous Dishes including Meatless Recipes (cheese omelette, mock white fish, mock duck, mock goose, vegetarian mincemeat). At the back, Miss Tuxford includes sections on gas cooking hints, “specimen household dinners” (206), and household hints. There is then a “Table of Foods in Season” (208–10) taking the reader through the months and the various meats and vegetables available at those times. There is a useful index and finally an advertisement for an oven cleaner on the last page (which is glued to the back cover). There are food and cookery advertisements throughout the book, but my favourite is the one inside the front cover, for Hartley’s jam, featuring two photographs of a little boy. The first shows him looking serious, and slightly anxious, the second wide-eyed and smiling, eager for his jam. The text tells mothers that “there’s nothing like plenty of bread and Hartley’s for a growing boy” (inside front cover). I love the simple appeal to making your little boy happy that is contained within this tiny narrative. Did my mother and father eat this jam when they were small? By 1937, my mother was twenty-one, not yet married, living with her mother in Weston-super-Mare. She was learning secretarial skills—I have her certificate of proficiency in Pitman’s shorthand—and I think she and my father had met by then. Perhaps she thought about when she would be giving her own children Hartley’s jam, or something else prepared from Miss Tuxford’s recipes, like the Christmas puddings, shortbread, or chocolate cake. She would not have imagined that no children would arrive, that twenty-five years of marriage would pass before she held her own baby, and this would be one who was born to another woman. In the one other cookbook I have kept, there are several recipes cut out from newspapers, and a few typed or handwritten recipes hidden within the pages. This is The Main Cookery Book, in its August 1944 reprint, which was written and compiled by Marguerite K. Gompertz and the “Staff of the Main Research Kitchen”. My mother wrote her name and the date she obtained the cookbook (31 January 1945) on the first blank page. She had been married just over five years, and my father may, or may not, have still been in the Royal Air Force. I have only a sketchy knowledge of my adoptive parents. My mother was born in Newent, Gloucestershire, and my father in Bromley, Kent; they were both born during the first world war. My father served as a navigator in the Royal Air Force in the second world war in the 1940s, received head and psychological injuries and was invalided out before the war ended. He spent some time in rehabilitation, there being letters from him to my mother detailing his stay in one hospital in the 1950s. Their life seemed to become less and less secure as the years passed, more chaotic, restless, and unsettled. By the time I came into their lives, they were both nearly fifty, and moving from place to place. Perhaps this is one reason why I have no memory of my mother cooking. I cannot picture her consulting these cookbooks, or anything more modern, or even cutting out the recipes from newspapers and magazines, because I do not remember seeing her do it. She did not talk to me about cooking, we didn’t cook together, and I do not remember her teaching me anything about food or its preparation. This is a gap in my memory that is puzzling. There is evidence—the books and additional paper recipes and stains on the pages—that my mother was involved in the world of the kitchen. This suggests she handled meats, vegetables, and flours, kneaded, chopped, mashed, baked, and boiled all manners of foods. But I cannot remember her doing any of it. I think the cooking must have been a part of her life before me, when she lived in England, her home country, which she loved, and when she still had hope that children would come. It must have then been apparent that her husband was going to need support and care after the war, and I can imagine she came to realise that any dreams she had would need rearranging.What I do remember is that our meals were prepared by my father, and contained no spices, onions, or garlic because he suffered frequently from indigestion and said these ingredients made it worse. He was a big-chested man with small hips who worried he was too heavy and so put himself on diets every other week. For my father, dieting meant not eating anything, which tended to lead to binges on chocolate or cheese or whatever he could grab easily from the fridge.Meals at night followed a pattern. On Sundays we ate roast chicken with vegetables as a treat, then finished it over the next days as a cold accompaniment with salad. Other meals would feature fish fingers, mince, ham, or a cold luncheon meat with either salad or boiled vegetables. Sometimes we would have a tin of peaches in juice or ice cream, or both. No cookbooks were consulted to prepare these meals.What was my mother doing while my father cooked? She must have been in the kitchen too, probably contributing, but I don’t see her there. By the time we came back to Australia permanently in 1974, my father’s working life had come to an end, and he took over the household cookery for something to do, as well as sewing his own clothes, and repairing his own car. He once hoisted the engine out of a Morris Minor with the help of a young mechanic, a rope, and the branch of a poinciana tree. I have three rugs that he wove before I was born, and he made furniture as well. My mother also sewed, and made my school uniforms and other clothes as well as her own skirts and blouses, jackets and pants. Unfortunately, she was fond of crimplene, which came in bright primary colours and smelled of petrol, but didn’t require ironing and dried quickly on the washing line. It didn’t exactly hang on your body, but rather took it over, imposing itself with its shapelessness. The handwritten recipe for salad cream shown on the pink paper is not in my mother’s hand but my father’s. Her correction can be seen to the word “gelatine” at the bottom; she has replaced it with “c’flour” which I assume means cornflour. This recipe actually makes me a liar, because it shows my father writing about using pepper, paprika, and tumeric to make a food item, when I have already said he used no spices. When I knew him, and ate his food, he didn’t. But he had another life for forty-seven years before my birth, and these recipes with their stains and scribbles help me to begin making a picture of both his life, and my mother’s. So much of them is a complete mystery to me, but these scraps of belongings help me inch along in my thinking about them, who they were, and what they meant to me (Turkle).The Main Cookery Book has a similar structure to Miss Tuxford’s, with some variations, like the chapter titled Réchauffés, which deals with dishes using already cooked foodstuffs that only then require reheating, and a chapter on home-made wines. There are also notes at the end of the book on topics such as gas ovens and methods of cooking (boiling, steaming, simmering, and so on). What really interests me about this book are the clippings inserted by my mother, although the printed pages themselves seem relatively clean and uncooked upon. There is a recipe for pickles and chutneys torn from a newspaper, and when I look on the other side I find a context: a note about Charlie Chaplin and the House of Representatives’s Un-American Activities Committee starting its investigations into the influence of Communists on Hollywood. I wonder if my parents talked about these events, or if they went to see Charlie Chaplin’s films. My mother’s diaries from the 1940s include her references to movies—Shirley Temple in Kiss and Tell, Bing Crosby in Road to Utopia—as well as day to day activities and visits to, and from, family and friends, her sinus infections and colds, getting “shock[ed] from paraffin lamp”, food rationing. If my father kept diaries during his earlier years, nothing of them survives. I remember his determined shredding of documents after my mother’s death, and his fear of discovery, that his life’s secrets would be revealed. He did not tell me I had been adopted until I was twenty-three, and rarely spoke of it afterwards. My mother never mentioned it. I look at the recipe for lemon curd. Did my mother ever make this? Did she use margarine instead of butter? We used margarine on sandwiches, as butter was too hard to spread. Once again, I turn over this clipping to read the news, and find no date but an announcement of an exhibition of work by Marc Chagall at the Tate Gallery, the funeral of Sir Geoffrey Fison (who I discover from The Peerage website died in 1948, unmarried, a Baronet and decorated soldier), and a memorial service for Dr. Duncan Campbell Scott, the Canadian poet and prose writer, during which the Poet Laureate of the time, John Masefield, gave the address. And there was also a note about the latest wills, including that of a reverend who left an estate valued at over £50 000. My maternal adoptive grandmother, who lived in Weston-super-Mare across the road from the beach, and with whom we stayed for several months in 1974, left most of her worldly belongings to my mother and nothing to her son. He seems to have been cut out from her life after she separated from her husband, and her children’s father, sometime in the 1920s. Apparently, my uncle followed his father out to Australia, and his mother never forgave him, refusing to have anything more to do with her son for the rest of her life, not even to see her grandchildren. When I knew her in that brief period in 1974, she was already approaching eighty and showing signs of dementia. But I do remember dancing the Charleston with her in the kitchen, and her helping me bathe my ragdoll Pollyanna in a tub in the garden. The only food I remember at her stone house was afternoon tea with lots of different, exotic cakes, particularly one called Neopolitan, with swirls of red and brown through the moist sponge. My grandmother had a long narrow garden filled with flowers and a greenhouse with tomatoes; she loved that garden, and spent a lot of time nurturing it.My father and his mother-in-law were not each other’s favourite person, and this coloured my mother’s relationship with her, too. We were poor for many years, and the only reason we were able to go to England was because of the generosity of my grandmother, who paid for our airfares. I think my father searched for work while we were there, but whether he was successful or not I do not know. We returned to Australia and I went into grade four at the end of 1974, an outsider of sorts, and bemused by the syllabus, because I had moved around so much. I went to eight different primary schools and two high schools, eventually obtaining a scholarship to a private girls’ school for the last four years. My father was intent on me becoming a doctor, and so my life was largely study, which is another reason why I took little notice of what went on in the kitchen and what appeared on the dining table. I would come home from school and my parents would start meal preparation almost straight away, so we sat down to dinner at about four o’clock during the week, and I started the night’s study at five. I usually worked through until about ten, and then read a novel for a little while before sleep. Every parcel of time was accounted for, and nothing was wasted. This schedule continued throughout those four years of high school, with my father berating me if I didn’t do well at an exam, but also being proud when I did. In grades eight, nine, and ten, I studied home economics, and remember being offered a zucchini to taste because I had never seen one before. I also remember making Greek biscuits of some sort for an exam, and the sieve giving out while I was sifting a large quantity of flour. We learned to cook simple meals of meats and vegetables, and to prepare a full breakfast. We also baked cakes but, when my sponges remained flat, I realised that my strengths might lay elsewhere. This probably also contributed to my lack of interest in cooking. Domestic pursuits were not encouraged at home, although my mother did teach me to sew and knit, resulting in skewed attempts at a shirt dress and a white blouse, and a wildly coloured knitted shoulder bag that I actually liked but which embarrassed my father. There were no such lessons in cakemaking or biscuit baking or any of the recipes from Miss Tuxford. By this time, my mother bought such treats from the supermarket.This other life, this previous life of my parents, a life far away in time and place, was completely unknown to me before my mother’s death. I saw little of them after the revelation of my adoption, not because of this knowledge I then had, but because of my father’s controlling behaviour. I discovered that the rest of my adoptive family, who I hardly knew apart from my maternal grandmother, had always known. It would have been difficult, after all, for my parents to keep such a secret from them. Because of this life of constant moving, my estrangement from my family, and our lack of friends and connections with other people, there was a gap in my experience. As a child, I only knew one grandmother, and only for a relatively brief period of time. I have no grandfatherly memories, and none either of aunts and uncles, only a few fleeting images of a cousin here and there. It was difficult to form friendships as a child when we were only in a place for a limited time. We were always moving on, and left everything behind, to start again in a new suburb, state, country. Continuity and stability were not our trademarks, for reasons that are only slowly making themselves known to me: my father’s mental health problems, his difficult personality, our lack of money, the need to keep my adoption secret.What was that need? From where did it spring? My father always seemed to be a secretive person, an intensely private man, one who had things to hide, and seemed to suffer many mistakes and mishaps and misfortune. At the end, after my mother’s death, we spent two years with each other as he became frailer and moved into a nursing home. It was a truce formed out of necessity, as there was no one else to care for him, so thoroughly had he alienated his family; he had no friends, certainly not in Australia, and only the doctor and helping professionals to talk to most days. My father’s brother John had died some years before, and the whereabouts of his other sibling Gordon were unknown. I discovered that he had died three years previously. Nieces had not heard from my father for decades. My mother’s niece revealed that my mother and she had never met. There is a letter from my mother’s father in the 1960s, probably just before he died, remarking that he would like a photograph of her as they hadn’t seen each other for forty years. None of this was talked about when my mother was alive. It was as if I was somehow separate from their stories, from their history, that it was not suitable for my ears, or that once I came into their lives they wanted to make a new life altogether. At that time, all of their past was stored away. Even my very origins, my tiny past life, were unspoken, and made into a secret. The trouble with secrets, however, is that they hang around, peek out of boxes, lurk in the corners of sentences, and threaten to be revealed by the questions of puzzled strangers, or mistakenly released by knowledgeable relatives. Adoptee memoirs like mine seek to go into those hidden storage boxes and the corners and pages of sources like these seemingly innocent old cookbooks, in the quest to bring these secrets to light. Like Miss Tuxford’s cookbook, with its stains and smudges, or the Main Cookery Book with its pages full of clippings, the revelation of such secrets threaten to tell stories that contradict the official version. ReferencesBrien, Donna Lee. “Pathways into an ‘Elaborate Ecosystem’: Ways of Categorising the Food Memoir”. TEXT (October 2011). 12 Jun. 2013 ‹http://www.textjournal.com.au/oct11/brien.htm›.Chick, Suzanne. Searching for Charmian. Sydney: Picador, 1995.Dessaix, Robert. A Mother’s Disgrace. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1994.Fisher, Florence. The Search for Anna Fisher. New York: Arthur Fields, 1973.Frame, Tom. Binding Ties: An Experience of Adoption and Reunion in Australia. Alexandria: Hale & Iremonger, 1999.Gibson, Margaret. Objects of the Dead: Mourning and Memory in Everyday Life. Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne U P, 2008. Gompertz, Marguerite K., and the Staff of the Main Research Kitchen. The Main Cookery Book. 52nd. ed. London: R. & A. Main, 1944. Hipchen, Emily, and Jill Deans. “Introduction. Adoption Life Writing: Origins and Other Ghosts”. a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 18.2 (2003): 163–70. Special Issue on Adoption.Homes, A. M. The Mistress’s Daughter: A Memoir. London: Granta, 2007.Kiss and Tell. Dir. By Richard Wallace. Columbia Pictures, 1945.Lifton, Betty Jean. Twice Born: Memoirs of An Adopted Daughter. Middlesex, England: Penguin, 1977.Lundy, Darryl, comp. The Peerage: A Genealogical Survey of the Peerage of Britain as well as the Royal Families of Europe. 30 May 2013 ‹http://www.thepeerage.com/p40969.htm#i409684›Perl, Lynne and Shirin Markham. Why Wasn’t I Told? Making Sense of the Late Discovery of Adoption. Bondi: Post Adoption Resource Centre/Benevolent Society of NSW, 1999.Road to Utopia. Dir. By Hal Walker. Paramount, 1946.Turkle, Sherry, ed. Evocative Objects: Things We Think With. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT P, 2011. Tuxford, Miss H. H. Miss Tuxford’s Modern Cookery for the Middle Classes: Hints on Modern Gas Stove Cooking. London: John Heywood, c.1937.

Introduction On Saturday 6 February 1954, on the third day of the Australian leg of their tour of the Commonwealth, Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, visited Sydney’s Bondi Beach. The specially-staged Royal Surf Carnival they witnessed—comprising a spectacular parade, surf boat races, mock resuscitations and even unscheduled surf rescues—generated extensive media coverage. Attracting attention from historians (Warshaw 134; Ford 194–196), the carnival lingers in popular memory as not only a highlight of the Australian tour (Conway n.p.; Clark 8) and among the “most celebrated events in Australian surf lifesaving history” (Ford et al. 5) but also as “the most spectacular occasion [ever held] at Bondi Beach” (Lawrence and Sharpe 86). It is even, for some, a “highlight of the [Australian] post-war period” (Ford et al. 5). Despite this, the fuller history of the Queen’s visit to Bondi, including the detailed planning involved, remains unexplored. A small round tin medal, discovered online, offered a fresh way to approach this event. 31mm in diameter, 2mm in depth, this dual-sided, smooth-edged medal hangs from a hoop on approximately 80mm of discoloured, doubled red, white, and blue striped ribbon, fastened near its end with a tarnished brass safety pin. The obverse features a relief portrait of the youthful Queen’s face and neck in profile, her hair loosely pulled back into a low chignon, enclosed within a striped symmetrical scrolled border of curves and peaks. This is encircled with another border inscribed in raised capitals: “Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. Royal Visit to Waverley N.S.W.” The reverse features a smooth central section encircled with the inscription (again in raised capitals), “Presented to the Children of Waverley N.S.W. 1954”, the centre inscribed, “By Waverley Municipal Council C.A. Jeppesen Mayor”. Figs. 1 & 2: Medal, c.1954. Collection of the Author. Medals are often awarded in recognition of achievement and, in many cases, are worn as prominent components of military and other uniforms. They can also be made and gifted in commemoration, which was the case with this medal, one of many thousands presented in association with the tour. Made for Waverley Council, it was presented to all schoolchildren under 15 in the municipality, which included Bondi Beach. Similar medals were presented to schoolchildren by other Australian councils and States in Australia (NAA A462). This gifting was not unprecedented, with medals presented to (at least some) Australian schoolchildren to commemorate Queen Victoria’s 1897 Diamond Jubilee (The Age 5; Sleight 187) and the 1937 coronation of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth (“Coronation Medals” 6). Unable to discover any provenance for this medal aside from its (probable) presentation in 1954 and listing for sale in 2021, I pondered instead Waverley Council’s motivation in sourcing and giving these medals. As a researcher, this assisted me in surmounting the dominance of the surf carnival in the history of this event and led to an investigation of the planning around the Bondi visit. Planning Every level of government was involved in planning the event. Created within the Prime Minister’s Department, the Royal Visit Organisation 1954—staffed from early 1953, filling positions from within the Commonwealth Public Service, armed services and statutory authorities—had overall authority over arrangements (NAA 127, 134). National planning encompassed itineraries, travel arrangements, security, public relations, and protocol as well as fly and mosquito control, the royals’ laundry arrangements, and advice on correct dress (NAA: A1533; NAA: A6122; NAA: A9708, RV/DD Annex.15; NAA: A1838, 1516/11 Parts 1&2; NAA: A9708, RV/CD; NAA: A9708, RV/CQ; NAA: A9708, RV/T). Planning conferences were held with State officials who developed State visit programs and then devolved organisational responsibilities to Councils and other local organisations (NAA: A9708, RV/DD Annex.2; NAA: A9708, RV/DD Annex.3). Once the Bondi Beach location was decided, the Surf Life Saving Association of Australia received a Royal Command to stage a surf carnival for the royals. This command was passed to the president of the Bondi club, who organised a small delegation to meet with government representatives. A thirteen-member Planning Committee, all men (“The Queen to See” 12), was appointed “with full power to act without reference to any other body” (Meagher 6). They began meeting in June 1953 and, soon after this, the carnival was announced in the Australian press. In recognition, the “memorable finale” of a Royal Command Performance before the Queen in London in November 1953 marked the royal couple’s impending tour by filling the stage with people from Commonwealth countries. This concluded with “an Australian tableau”. Alongside people dressed as cricketers, tennis players, servicemen, and Indigenous people, a girl carrying a huge bunch of bananas, and a couple in kangaroo suits were six lifesavers dressed in Bondi march-past costumes and caps, carrying the club flag (Royal Variety Charity n.p.). In deciding on a club for the finale, Bondi was “seen the epitome of the surf lifesaving movement—and Australia” (Brawley 82). The Planning Committee worked with representatives from the police, army, government, local council, and ambulance services as well as the media and other bodies (Meagher 6). Realising the “herculean task” (Meagher 9) ahead, the committee recruited some 170 members (again all men) and 20 women volunteers from the Bondi and North Bondi Surf Clubs to assist. This included sourcing and erecting the carnival enclosure which, at over 200 meters wide, was the largest ever at the beach. The Royal dais that would be built over the promenade needed a canvas cover to shield the royal couple from the heat or rain. Seating needed to be provided for some 10,500 paying spectators, and eventually involved 17 rows of tiered seating set across the promenade, 2,200 deckchairs on the sand in front, and, on each flank, the Bondi Surf Club’s tiered stands. Accommodations also had to be provided at selected vantage points for some 100 media representatives, with a much greater crowd of 50–60,000 expected to gather outside the enclosure. Four large tents, two at each end of the competition area, would serve as both change rooms and shady rest areas for some 2,000 competitors. Two additional large tents were needed, one at each end of the lawns behind the beach, fitted out with camp stretchers that had to be sourced for the St John Ambulance Brigade to deal with first-aid cases, most of whom were envisaged to come from the crowds due to heat stroke (Meagher 6–7). The committee also had to solve numerous operational issues not usually associated with running a surf carnival, such as ensuring sufficient drinking water for so many people on what might be a very hot day (“The Queen to See” 12). With only one tap in the carnival area, the organisers had to lay a water line along the entire one-kilometre length of the promenade with double taps every two to three metres. Temporary toilets also had to be sourced, erected, and serviced. Self-financing and with costs adding up, sponsors needed to be secured to provide goods and services in return for advertising. An iced water unit was, for instance, provided on the dais, without cost, by the ElectrICE Commercial Refrigeration company. The long strip of red carpet laid from where the royals would alight from their car right through the dais was donated by the manufacturer of Feltex, a very popular Australian-made wool carpet. Prominent department store, Anthony Horden’s, loaned the intricately carved chairs to be used by the Royal couple and other officials, while The Bondi Diggers Club provided chrome plated chairs for other official guests, many of whom were the crew of royal yacht, the S.S. Gothic (Meagher 6). Fig. 3: “Feltex [Advertisement].” The Australian Home Beautiful Nov. 1954: 40. http://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-2985285882. The Ladies Committees of the Bondi and North Bondi surf clubs were tasked with organising and delivering lunch and drinks to over 400 officials, all of whom were to stay in position from early morning until the carnival concluded at 5 pm (Meagher 6). Girl members of the Bondi social clubs were to act as usherettes. Officials describe deciding who would meet, or even come in any close proximity to, the Queen as “most ticklish” and working with mayors and other officials a “headache” (“Socialites” 3). In Bondi, there were to be notably few officials sitting with the royal couple, but thousands of “ordinary” spectators seated around the carnival area. On her arrival, it was planned that the Queen would walk through a guard of honour of lifesavers from each Australian and New Zealand club competing in the carnival. After viewing the finals of the surf boat races, the Queen would meet the team captains and then, in a Land Rover, inspect the massed lifesavers and greet the spectators. Although these activities were not contentious, debate raged about the competitors’ uniforms. At this time, full-length chest-covering costumes were normally worn in march-past and other formal events, with competitors stripping down to trunks for surf races and beach events. It was, however, decided that full-length costumes would be worn for the entirety of the Queen’s visit. This generated considerable press commentary that this was ridiculous, and charges that Australians were ashamed of their lifesavers’ manly chests (“Costume Rule” 3). The president of the Bondi Life Saving Club, however, argued that they did not want the carnival spoiled by lifesavers wearing “dirty … track suits, football guernseys … old football shorts … and just about everything except proper attire” (ctd. in Jenkings 1). Waverley Council similarly attempted to control the appearance of the route through which the royals would travel to the beach on the day of the carnival. This included “a sequence of signs along the route” expressing “the suburb’s sentiments and loyalty” (“Queen in the Suburbs” 4; see also, “The Royal Tour” 9). Maintaining that “the greatest form of welcome will be by the participation of the residents themselves”, the Mayor sought public donations to pay for decorations (with donors’ names and amounts to be published in the local press, and these eventually met a third of the cost (“The Royal Tour” 9; Waverley Council n.p.). In January 1954, he personally appealed to those on the route to decorate their premises and, in encouragement, Council provided substantial prizes for the most suitably decorated private and commercial premises. The local Chamber of Commerce was responsible for decorating the transport and shopping hub of Bondi Junction, with many businesses arranging to import Coronation decorations from England (“Queen in the Suburbs” 4; “The Royal Tour” 9). With “colorful activity” providing the basis of Council’s plan (“Queen in the Suburbs” 4), careful choreography ensured that thousands of people would line the royal route through the municipality. In another direct appeal, the Mayor requested that residents mass along the roadsides, wearing appropriate rosettes or emblems and waving flags (“Queen in the Suburbs” 4; “The Royal Tour” 9). Uniformed nurses would also be released from duty to gather outside the War Memorial Hospital as the royals passed by (“Royal Visit” n.p.). At the largest greenspace on the route, Waverley Park, some 10,000 children from the municipality’s 18 schools would assemble, all in uniform and wearing the medal to be presented to them to commemorate the visit. Children would also be provided with large red, white, or blue rosettes to wave as the royals drove by. A special seating area near the park was to be set aside for the elderly and ex-servicemen (“Queen in the Suburbs” 4). Fostering Expectations As the date of the visit approached, preparation and anticipation intensified. A week before, a detailed visit schedule was published in local newspaper Bondi Daily. At this time, the Royal Tour Decorations Committee (comprised of Aldermen and prominent local citizens) were “erecting decorations at various focal points” throughout the municipality (“The Royal Tour” 9). On 4 February, the Planning Committee held their final meeting at the Bondi Beach clubhouse (Meagher 6). The next day, the entire beach was cleaned and graded (Wilson 40). The afternoon before the visit, the Council’s decoration competition was judged, with the winners a house alongside Waverley Park and the beachside Hotel Astra (“Royal Visit” n.p.), one of 14 Sydney hotels, and the only one in Bondi, granted permission to sell liquor with meals until the extended hour of 11.00 pm during the Royal visit (“State House” 5). On the day of the surf carnival, The Sydney Morning Herald featured a large photograph of the finishing touches being put to the official dais and seating the day before (“Stage Set” 15). In reality, there was still a flurry of activity from daybreak on the day itself (Meagher 7), with the final “tidying up and decorating still proceeding” (Meagher 7) as the first carnival event, the Senior boat race heats, began at 10.00 am (“N.Z. Surf” 15). Despite some resident anger regarding the area’s general dilapidation and how the money being spent on the visit could have been used for longstanding repairs to the Pavilion and other infrastructure (Brawley 203), most found the decorations of the beach area appealing (“Royal Visit” n.p.). Tickets to the carnival had sold out well in advance and the stands were filled hours before the Queen arrived, with many spectators wearing sundresses or shorts and others stripping down to swimsuits in the sunshine (“Royal Visit” n.p.). With Police Inspector Michael O’Neill’s collapse and death at a royal event the day before thought to be the result of heat exposure, and the thermometer reaching the high 80s°F (low 30s°C), a large parasol was sourced to be held over the Queen on the dais (Meagher 8). A little after 3:15 pm, the surf club’s P.A. system advised those assembled at the beach that the royal party had left Randwick Racecourse on time and were proceeding towards them (“Queen’s Visit to Races” 17), driving through cheering crowds all the way (“Sydney” 18). At Waverley Park, Council had ensured that the waiting crowds had been entertained by the Randwick-Coogee pipe band (“Royal Visit” n.p.) and spirits were high. Schoolchildren, wearing their medals, lined the footpaths, and 102-year-old Ernest Dunn, who was driven to the park in the morning by police, was provided with a seat on the roadway as well as tea and sandwiches during his long wait (“Royal Tour Highlights” 2; “Royal Visit” n.p.). The royal couple, driving by extremely slowly and waving, were given a rousing welcome. Their attire was carefully selected for the very warm day. The Queen wore a sunny lemon Dior-styled cap-sleeved dress, small hat and white accessories, the Duke a light-coloured suit and tie. It was observed that she wore heavier makeup as a protection against the sun and, as the carnival progressed, opened her handbag to locate her fashionable sunglasses (“Thrills” 1). The Duke also wore sunglasses and used race binoculars (Meagher 8). The Result Despite the exhaustive planning, there were some mishaps, mostly when the excitement of the “near-hysterical crowds” (Hardman n.p.) could not be contained. In Double Bay, for instance, as the royals made their way to Bondi, a (neither new nor clean) hat thrown into the car’s rear seat struck the Duke. It was reported that “a look of annoyance” clouded his face as he threw it back out onto the road. At other points, flags, nosegays, and flutter ribbons (long sticks tied with lengths of coloured paper) were thrown at, and into, the Royal car. In other places, hundreds raced out into the roadway to try to touch the Queen or the Duke. They “withstood the ordeal unflinchingly”, but the Duke was reportedly concerned about “this mass rudeness” (“Rude Mobs” 2). The most severe crowding of the day occurred as the car passed through the centre of Bondi Junction’s shopping district, where uniformed police had to jump on the Royal car’s running boards to hold off the crowds. Police also had to forcibly restrain a group of men who rushed the car as it passed the Astra Hotel. This was said to be “an ugly incident … resentment of the police action threatened to breed a riot” (“Rude Mobs” 2). Almost everything else met, and even exceeded, expectations. The Queen and Duke’s slow progress from Bondi Road and then, after passing under a large “Welcome to Bondi” sign, their arrival at the entrance to the dais only three minutes late and presence at the carnival went entirely to plan and are well documented in minute-by-minute detail. This includes in detailed press reports, newsreels, and a colour film, The Queen in Australia (1954). Their genuine enjoyment of the races was widely commented upon, evidenced in how they pointed out details to each other (Meagher 8), the number of times the Duke used his binoculars and, especially, in their reluctance to leave, eventually staying more than double the scheduled time (“Queen Delighted” 7). Sales of tickets and programs more than met the costs of mounting the event (Meagher 8–9) and the charity concert held at the beach on the night of the carnival to make the most of the crowds also raised significant funds (“Queen in the Suburbs” 4). Bondi Beach looked spectacularly beautiful and gained considerable national and international exposure (Landman 183). The Surf Life Saving Association of Australia’s president noted that the “two factors that organisation could not hope to control—weather and cooperation of spectators—fulfilled the most optimistic hopes” (Curlewis 9; Maxwell 9). Conclusion Although it has been stated that the 58-day tour was “the single biggest event ever planned in Australia” (Clark 8), focussing in on a single event reveals the detailed decentralised organisation which went into both each individual activity as well as the travel between them. It also reveals how significantly responsible bodies drew upon volunteer labour and financial contributions from residents. While many studies have discussed the warm welcome given to the monarch by Australians in 1954 (Connors 371–2, 378), a significant finding from this object-inspired research is how purposefully Waverley Council primed this public reception. The little medal discussed at the opening of this discussion was just one of many deliberate attempts to prompt a mass expression of homage and loyalty to the sovereign. It also reveals how, despite the meticulous planning and minute-by-minute scheduling, there were unprompted and impulsive behaviours, both by spectators and the royals. Methodologically, this investigation also suggests that seemingly unprepossessing material remnants of the past can function as portals into larger stories. In this case, while an object biography could not be written of the commemorative medal I stumbled upon, a thoughtful consideration of this object inspired an investigation of aspects of the Queen’s visit to Bondi Beach that had otherwise remained unexplored. References Brawley, Sean. “Lifesavers of a Nation.” 3 Feb. 2007: 82. [extract from The Bondi Lifesaver: A History of an Australian Icon. Sydney: ABC Books, 2007.] Clark, Andrew. “The Queen’s Royal Tours of Australia Remembered: Reflection.” The Australian Financial Review 10 Sep. 2022: 8. Connors, Jane. “The 1954 Royal Tour of Australia.” Australian Historical Studies 25 (1993): 371–82. Conway, Doug. “Queen’s Perennial Pride in Australia.” AAP General News Wire 26 Nov. 2021: n.p. “Coronation Medals Presented to School Children: 6000 Distributed in Rockhampton District.” Morning Bulletin 12 May 1937: 6. “Costume Rule for Queen’s Bondi Visit.” Barrier Miner 18 Dec. 1953: 3. Curlewis, Adrian. “Letter.” Bondi Surfer: Official Organ of the Bondi Surf Bathers’ Life Saving Club 2.7 (1954): 9. Ford, Caroline. Sydney Beaches: A History. Sydney: NewSouth Publishing, 2014. Ford, Caroline, Chris Giles, Danya Hodgetts, and Sean O’Connell. “Surf Lifesaving: An Australian Icon in Transition.” Australian Bureau of Statistics Year Book, Australia 2007. Ed. Dennis Trewin. Canberra: Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2007. 1–12. Hardman, Robert. Our Queen. London: Hutchinson, 2011. <https://www.google.com.au/books/edition/OurQueen/DySbU9r0ABgC>. Jenkings, Frank. “Editorial.” Bondi Surfer: Official Organ of the Bondi Surf Bathers’ Life Saving Club 2.6 (1954): 1. Landman, Jane. “Renewing Imperial Ties: The Queen in Australia.” The British Monarchy on Screen. Ed. Mandy Merck. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2016. 181–204. Lawrence, Joan, and Alan Sharpe. Pictorial History: Eastern Suburbs. Alexandria: Kingsclear Books, 1999. Maxwell, C. Bede. “Letter.” Bondi Surfer: Official Organ of the Bondi Surf Bathers’ Life Saving Club 2.7 (1954): 9. Meagher, T.W. “The Royal Tour Surf Carnival Bondi Beach, February 6, 1954.” Bondi Surfer: Official Organ of the Bondi Surf Bathers’ Life Saving Club 2.7 (1954): 6–9. National Archives of Australia (NAA): A462, 825/4/6, Royal tour 1954—Medals for School children—General representations, 1954. National Archives of Australia (NAA): A1533, 1957/758B, Royal Visit, 1953–1954. National Archives of Australia (NAA): A1838, 1516/11 Part 1, Protocol—Royal Visit, 1948–1954. National Archives of Australia (NAA): A1838, 1516/11 Part 2, Protocol—Royal Visit, 1954–1966. National Archives of Australia (NAA): A6122, 1861, Government Heads of State—Royal Visit 1954—ASIO file, 1953–1958. Canberra: Australian Security Intelligence Organization. National Archives of Australia (NAA): A9708, RV/CD, Fly and Mosquito Control. National Archives of Australia (NAA): A9708, RV/CQ, Laundry and Dry Cleaning and Pressing Arrangements. National Archives of Australia (NAA): A9708, RV/DD Annexure 2, Minutes of Conferences with State Directors, 22 January 1953–14 January 1954. National Archives of Australia (NAA): A9708, RV/DD Annexure 3, State Publications. National Archives of Australia (NAA): A9708, RV/DD Annexure 15, Report by Public Relations Officer. National Archives of Australia (NAA): A9708, RV/T, Matters Relating to Dress. National Archives of Australia (NAA). Royalty and Australian Society: Records Relating to The British Monarchy Held in Canberra. Research Guide. Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia, 1998. “N.Z. Surf Team in Dispute.” The Sydney Morning Herald 6 Feb. 1954: 15. “Queen Delighted by Carnival.” The Sun-Herald 7 Feb. 1954: 7. “Queen in the Suburbs: Waverley.” Sun 21 Jan. 1954: 4. “Queen’s Visit to Races: Drive in Suburbs.” The Daily Telegraph 6 Feb. 1954: 17. “Royal Tour Highlights.” The Mail 6 Feb. 1954: 2. Royal Variety Charity. “Coronation Year Royal Variety Performance.” London: London Coliseum, 2 Nov. 1953. <https://www.royalvarietycharity.org/royal-variety-performance/archive/detail/1953-london-coliseum>. “Royal Visit to Waverley.” Feb. 1954 [Royal Visit, 1954 (Topic File). Local Studies Collection, Waverley Library, Bondi Junction, LS VF] “Rude Mobs Spoil Happy Reception.” The Argus 8 Feb. 1954: 2. Sleight, Simon. Young People and the Shaping of Public Space in Melbourne, 1870–1914. Abingdon: Routledge, 2016. “Socialites in for Rude Shock on Royal Tour Invitations.” Daily Telegraph 3 Jan. 1954: 3. “Stage Set for Royal Surf Carnival at Bondi.” The Sydney Morning Herald 6 Feb. 1954: 15. “State House Rehearses Royal Opening.” The Sydney Morning Herald 27 Jan. 1954: 5. “Sydney.” Women’s Letters. The Bulletin 10 Feb. 1954: 18. The Age 24 Jun. 1897: 5. The Queen in Australia. Dir. Colin Dean. Australian National Film Board, 1954. “The Queen to See Lifesavers.” The Daily Telegraph 24 Aug. 1953: 12. “The Royal Tour.” Bondi Daily 30 Jan. 1954: 9. “Thrills for the Queen at Bondi Carnival—Stayed Extra Time.” The Sun-Herald 7 Feb. 1954: 1. Warshaw, Matt. The History of Surfing. San Fransisco: Chronicle Books, 2010. Wilson, Jack. Australian Surfing and Surf Lifesaving. Adelaide: Rigby, 1979.

IntroductionFirmly located within the discourse of visible culture as the lofty preserve of art exhibitions and museum artefacts, the noun “curate” has gradually transformed into the verb “to curate”. Williams writes that “curate” has become a fashionable code word among the aesthetically minded to describe a creative activity. Designers no longer simply sell clothes; they “curate” merchandise. Chefs no longer only make food; they also “curate” meals. Chosen for their keen eye for a particular style or a precise shade, it is their knowledge of their craft, their reputation, and their sheer ability to choose among countless objects which make the creative process a creative activity in itself. Writing from within the framework of “curate” as a creative process, this article discusses how the state banquet for Queen Elizabeth II, hosted by Irish President Mary McAleese at Dublin Castle in May 2011, was carefully curated to represent Ireland’s diplomatic, cultural, and culinary identity. The paper will focus in particular on how the menu for the banquet was created and how the banquet’s brief, “Ireland on a Plate”, was fulfilled.History and BackgroundFood has been used by nations for centuries to display wealth, cement alliances, and impress foreign visitors. Since the feasts of the Numidian kings (circa 340 BC), culinary staging and presentation has belonged to “a long, multifaceted and multicultural history of diplomatic practices” (IEHCA 5). According to the works of Baughman, Young, and Albala, food has defined the social, cultural, and political position of a nation’s leaders throughout history.In early 2011, Ross Lewis, Chef Patron of Chapter One Restaurant in Dublin, was asked by the Irish Food Board, Bord Bía, if he would be available to create a menu for a high-profile banquet (Mahon 112). The name of the guest of honour was divulged several weeks later after vetting by the protocol and security divisions of the Department of the Taoiseach (Prime Minister) and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. Lewis was informed that the menu was for the state banquet to be hosted by President Mary McAleese at Dublin Castle in honour of Queen Elizabeth II’s visit to Ireland the following May.Hosting a formal banquet for a visiting head of state is a key feature in the statecraft of international and diplomatic relations. Food is the societal common denominator that links all human beings, regardless of culture (Pliner and Rozin 19). When world leaders publicly share a meal, that meal is laden with symbolism, illuminating each diner’s position “in social networks and social systems” (Sobal, Bove, and Rauschenbach 378). The public nature of the meal signifies status and symbolic kinship and that “guest and host are on par in terms of their personal or official attributes” (Morgan 149). While the field of academic scholarship on diplomatic dining might be young, there is little doubt of the value ascribed to the semiotics of diplomatic gastronomy in modern power structures (Morgan 150; De Vooght and Scholliers 12; Chapple-Sokol 162), for, as Firth explains, symbols are malleable and perfectly suited to exploitation by all parties (427).Political DiplomacyWhen Ireland gained independence in December 1921, it marked the end of eight centuries of British rule. The outbreak of “The Troubles” in 1969 in Northern Ireland upset the gradually improving environment of British–Irish relations, and it would be some time before a state visit became a possibility. Beginning with the peace process in the 1990s, the IRA ceasefire of 1994, and the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, a state visit was firmly set in motion by the visit of Irish President Mary Robinson to Buckingham Palace in 1993, followed by the unofficial visit of the Prince of Wales to Ireland in 1995, and the visit of Irish President Mary McAleese to Buckingham Palace in 1999. An official invitation to Queen Elizabeth from President Mary McAleese in March 2011 was accepted, and the visit was scheduled for mid-May of the same year.The visit was a highly performative occasion, orchestrated and ordained in great detail, displaying all the necessary protocol associated with the state visit of one head of state to another: inspection of the military, a courtesy visit to the nation’s head of state on arrival, the laying of a wreath at the nation’s war memorial, and a state banquet.These aspects of protocol between Britain and Ireland were particularly symbolic. By inspecting the military on arrival, the existence of which is a key indicator of independence, Queen Elizabeth effectively demonstrated her recognition of Ireland’s national sovereignty. On making the customary courtesy call to the head of state, the Queen was received by President McAleese at her official residence Áras an Uachtaráin (The President’s House), which had formerly been the residence of the British monarch’s representative in Ireland (Robbins 66). The state banquet was held in Dublin Castle, once the headquarters of British rule where the Viceroy, the representative of Britain’s Court of St James, had maintained court (McDowell 1).Cultural DiplomacyThe state banquet provided an exceptional showcase of Irish culture and design and generated a level of preparation previously unseen among Dublin Castle staff, who described it as “the most stage managed state event” they had ever witnessed (Mahon 129).The castle was cleaned from top to bottom, and inventories were taken of the furniture and fittings. The Waterford Crystal chandeliers were painstakingly taken down, cleaned, and reassembled; the Killybegs carpets and rugs of Irish lamb’s wool were cleaned and repaired. A special edition Newbridge Silverware pen was commissioned for Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip to sign the newly ordered Irish leather-bound visitors’ book. A new set of state tableware was ordered for the President’s table. Irish manufacturers of household goods necessary for the guest rooms, such as towels and soaps, hand creams and body lotions, candle holders and scent diffusers, were sought. Members of Her Majesty’s staff conducted a “walk-through” several weeks in advance of the visit to ensure that the Queen’s wardrobe would not clash with the surroundings (Mahon 129–32).The promotion of Irish manufacture is a constant thread throughout history. Irish linen, writes Kane, enjoyed a reputation as far afield as the Netherlands and Italy in the 15th century, and archival documents from the Vaucluse attest to the purchase of Irish cloth in Avignon in 1432 (249–50). Support for Irish-made goods was raised in 1720 by Jonathan Swift, and by the 18th century, writes Foster, Dublin had become an important centre for luxury goods (44–51).It has been Irish government policy since the late 1940s to use Irish-manufactured goods for state entertaining, so the material culture of the banquet was distinctly Irish: Arklow Pottery plates, Newbridge Silverware cutlery, Waterford Crystal glassware, and Irish linen tablecloths. In order to decide upon the table setting for the banquet, four tables were laid in the King’s Bedroom in Dublin Castle. The Executive Chef responsible for the banquet menu, and certain key personnel, helped determine which setting would facilitate serving the food within the time schedule allowed (Mahon 128–29). The style of service would be service à la russe, so widespread in restaurants today as to seem unremarkable. Each plate is prepared in the kitchen by the chef and then served to each individual guest at table. In the mid-19th century, this style of service replaced service à la française, in which guests typically entered the dining room after the first course had been laid on the table and selected food from the choice of dishes displayed around them (Kaufman 126).The guest list was compiled by government and embassy officials on both sides and was a roll call of Irish and British life. At the President’s table, 10 guests would be served by a team of 10 staff in Dorchester livery. The remaining tables would each seat 12 guests, served by 12 liveried staff. The staff practiced for several days prior to the banquet to make sure that service would proceed smoothly within the time frame allowed. The team of waiters, each carrying a plate, would emerge from the kitchen in single file. They would then take up positions around the table, each waiter standing to the left of the guest they would serve. On receipt of a discreet signal, each plate would be laid in front of each guest at precisely the same moment, after which the waiters would then about foot and return to the kitchen in single file (Mahon 130).Post-prandial entertainment featured distinctive styles of performance and instruments associated with Irish traditional music. These included reels, hornpipes, and slipjigs, voice and harp, sean-nόs (old style) singing, and performances by established Irish artists on the fiddle, bouzouki, flute, and uilleann pipes (Office of Public Works).Culinary Diplomacy: Ireland on a PlateLewis was given the following brief: the menu had to be Irish, the main course must be beef, and the meal should represent the very best of Irish ingredients. There were no restrictions on menu design. There were no dietary requirements or specific requests from the Queen’s representatives, although Lewis was informed that shellfish is excluded de facto from Irish state banquets as a precautionary measure. The meal was to be four courses long and had to be served to 170 diners within exactly 1 hour and 10 minutes (Mahon 112). A small army of 16 chefs and 4 kitchen porters would prepare the food in the kitchen of Dublin Castle under tight security. The dishes would be served on state tableware by 40 waiters, 6 restaurant managers, a banqueting manager and a sommélier. Lewis would be at the helm of the operation as Executive Chef (Mahon 112–13).Lewis started by drawing up “a patchwork quilt” of the products he most wanted to use and built the menu around it. The choice of suppliers was based on experience but also on a supplier’s ability to deliver perfectly ripe goods in mid-May, a typically black spot in the Irish fruit and vegetable growing calendar as it sits between the end of one season and the beginning of another. Lewis consulted the Queen’s itinerary and the menus to be served so as to avoid repetitions. He had to discard his initial plan to feature lobster in the starter and rhubarb in the dessert—the former for the precautionary reasons mentioned above, and the latter because it featured on the Queen’s lunch menu on the day of the banquet (Mahon 112–13).Once the ingredients had been selected, the menu design focused on creating tastes, flavours and textures. Several draft menus were drawn up and myriad dishes were tasted and discussed in the kitchen of Lewis’s own restaurant. Various wines were paired and tasted with the different courses, the final choice being a Château Lynch-Bages 1998 red and a Château de Fieuzal 2005 white, both from French Bordeaux estates with an Irish connection (Kellaghan 3). Two months and two menu sittings later, the final menu was confirmed and signed off by state and embassy officials (Mahon 112–16).The StarterThe banquet’s starter featured organic Clare Island salmon cured in a sweet brine, laid on top of a salmon cream combining wild smoked salmon from the Burren and Cork’s Glenilen Farm crème fraîche, set over a lemon balm jelly from the Tannery Cookery School Gardens, Waterford. Garnished with horseradish cream, wild watercress, and chive flowers from Wicklow, the dish was finished with rapeseed oil from Kilkenny and a little sea salt from West Cork (Mahon 114). Main CourseA main course of Irish beef featured as the pièce de résistance of the menu. A rib of beef from Wexford’s Slaney Valley was provided by Kettyle Irish Foods in Fermanagh and served with ox cheek and tongue from Rathcoole, County Dublin. From along the eastern coastline came the ingredients for the traditional Irish dish of smoked champ: cabbage from Wicklow combined with potatoes and spring onions grown in Dublin. The new season’s broad beans and carrots were served with wild garlic leaf, which adorned the dish (Mahon 113). Cheese CourseThe cheese course was made up of Knockdrinna, a Tomme style goat’s milk cheese from Kilkenny; Milleens, a Munster style cow’s milk cheese produced in Cork; Cashel Blue, a cow’s milk blue cheese from Tipperary; and Glebe Brethan, a Comté style cheese from raw cow’s milk from Louth. Ditty’s Oatmeal Biscuits from Belfast accompanied the course.DessertLewis chose to feature Irish strawberries in the dessert. Pat Clarke guaranteed delivery of ripe strawberries on the day of the banquet. They married perfectly with cream and yoghurt from Glenilen Farm in Cork. The cream was set with Irish Carrageen moss, overlaid with strawberry jelly and sauce, and garnished with meringues made with Irish apple balsamic vinegar from Lusk in North Dublin, yoghurt mousse, and Irish soda bread tuiles made with wholemeal flour from the Mosse family mill in Kilkenny (Mahon 113).The following day, President McAleese telephoned Lewis, saying of the banquet “Ní hé go raibh sé go maith, ach go raibh sé míle uair níos fearr ná sin” (“It’s not that it was good but that it was a thousand times better”). The President observed that the menu was not only delicious but that it was “amazingly articulate in terms of the story that it told about Ireland and Irish food.” The Queen had particularly enjoyed the stuffed cabbage leaf of tongue, cheek and smoked colcannon (a traditional Irish dish of mashed potatoes with curly kale or green cabbage) and had noted the diverse selection of Irish ingredients from Irish artisans (Mahon 116). Irish CuisineWhen the topic of food is explored in Irish historiography, the focus tends to be on the consequences of the Great Famine (1845–49) which left the country “socially and emotionally scarred for well over a century” (Mac Con Iomaire and Gallagher 161). Some commentators consider the term “Irish cuisine” oxymoronic, according to Mac Con Iomaire and Maher (3). As Goldstein observes, Ireland has suffered twice—once from its food deprivation and second because these deprivations present an obstacle for the exploration of Irish foodways (xii). Writing about Italian, Irish, and Jewish migration to America, Diner states that the Irish did not have a food culture to speak of and that Irish writers “rarely included the details of food in describing daily life” (85). Mac Con Iomaire and Maher note that Diner’s methodology overlooks a centuries-long tradition of hospitality in Ireland such as that described by Simms (68) and shows an unfamiliarity with the wealth of food related sources in the Irish language, as highlighted by Mac Con Iomaire (“Exploring” 1–23).Recent scholarship on Ireland’s culinary past is unearthing a fascinating story of a much more nuanced culinary heritage than has been previously understood. This is clearly demonstrated in the research of Cullen, Cashman, Deleuze, Kellaghan, Kelly, Kennedy, Legg, Mac Con Iomaire, Mahon, O’Sullivan, Richman Kenneally, Sexton, and Stanley, Danaher, and Eogan.In 1996 Ireland was described by McKenna as having the most dynamic cuisine in any European country, a place where in the last decade “a vibrant almost unlikely style of cooking has emerged” (qtd. in Mac Con Iomaire “Jammet’s” 136). By 2014, there were nine restaurants in Dublin which had been awarded Michelin stars or Red Ms (Mac Con Iomaire “Jammet’s” 137). Ross Lewis, Chef Patron of Chapter One Restaurant, who would be chosen to create the menu for the state banquet for Queen Elizabeth II, has maintained a Michelin star since 2008 (Mac Con Iomaire, “Jammet’s” 138). Most recently the current strength of Irish gastronomy is globally apparent in Mark Moriarty’s award as San Pellegrino Young Chef 2015 (McQuillan). As Deleuze succinctly states: “Ireland has gone mad about food” (143).This article is part of a research project into Irish diplomatic dining, and the author is part of a research cluster into Ireland’s culinary heritage within the Dublin Institute of Technology. The aim of the research is to add to the growing body of scholarship on Irish gastronomic history and, ultimately, to contribute to the discourse on the existence of a national cuisine. If, as Zubaida says, “a nation’s cuisine is its court’s cuisine,” then it is time for Ireland to “research the feasts as well as the famines” (Mac Con Iomaire and Cashman 97).ConclusionThe Irish state banquet for Queen Elizabeth II in May 2011 was a highly orchestrated and formalised process. From the menu, material culture, entertainment, and level of consultation in the creative content, it is evident that the banquet was carefully curated to represent Ireland’s diplomatic, cultural, and culinary identity.The effects of the visit appear to have been felt in the years which have followed. Hennessy wrote in the Irish Times newspaper that Queen Elizabeth is privately said to regard her visit to Ireland as the most significant of the trips she has made during her 60-year reign. British Prime Minister David Cameron is noted to mention the visit before every Irish audience he encounters, and British Foreign Secretary William Hague has spoken in particular of the impact the state banquet in Dublin Castle made upon him. Hennessy points out that one of the most significant indicators of the peaceful relationship which exists between the two countries nowadays was the subsequent state visit by Irish President Michael D. Higgins to Britain in 2013. This was the first state visit to the United Kingdom by a President of Ireland and would have been unimaginable 25 years ago. The fact that the President and his wife stayed at Windsor Castle and that the attendant state banquet was held there instead of Buckingham Palace were both deemed to be marks of special favour and directly attributed to the success of Her Majesty’s 2011 visit to Ireland.As the research demonstrates, eating together unites rather than separates, gathers rather than divides, diffuses political tensions, and confirms alliances. It might be said then that the 2011 state banquet hosted by President Mary McAleese in honour of Queen Elizabeth II, curated by Ross Lewis, gives particular meaning to the axiom “to eat together is to eat in peace” (Taliano des Garets 160).AcknowledgementsSupervisors: Dr Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire (Dublin Institute of Technology) and Dr Michael Kennedy (Royal Irish Academy)Fáilte IrelandPhotos of the banquet dishes supplied and permission to reproduce them for this article kindly granted by Ross Lewis, Chef Patron, Chapter One Restaurant ‹http://www.chapteronerestaurant.com/›.Illustration ‘Ireland on a Plate’ © Jesse Campbell BrownRemerciementsThe author would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their feedback and suggestions on an earlier draft of this article.ReferencesAlbala, Ken. The Banquet: Dining in the Great Courts of Late Renaissance Europe. 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When the National Trust was established in 1895 its founders, Canon Rawnsley, Sir Robert Hunter and Octavia Hill, were, as Cannadine notes, “primarily concerned with preserving open spaces of outstanding natural beauty which were threatened with development or spoliation.” This was because, like Ruskin, Morris and “many of their contemporaries, they believed that the essence of Englishness was to be found in the fields and hedgerows, not in the suburbs and slums” (Cannadine 227). It was important to protect these sites of beauty and historical interest from development not only for what they were but for what they purportedly represented—an irreplaceable repository of the nation’s “spiritual values”, and thus a vital antidote to the “base materialism” of the day. G.M. Trevelyan, who I am quoting here, noted in two pieces written on behalf of the Trust in the 1920s and 30s, that the “inexorable rise of bricks and mortar” and the “full development of motor traffic” were laying waste to the English countryside. In the face of this assault on England’s heartland, the National Trust provided “an ark of refuge” safeguarding the nation’s cherished physical heritage and preserving its human cargo from the rising waters of materialism and despair (qtd. in Cannadine 231-2).Despite the extension of the road network and increasing private ownership of cars (up from 200,000 registrations in 1918 to “well over one million” in 1930), physical distance and economic hardship denied the majority of the urban population access to the countryside (Taylor 217). For the urban working classes recently or distantly displaced from the land, the dream of a return to rural roots was never more than a fantasy. Ford Madox Ford observed that “the poor and working classes of the towns never really go back” (Ford 58).Through the later nineteenth century the rural nostalgia once most prevalent among the working classes was increasingly noted as a feature of middle class sensibility. Better educated, with more leisure time and money at their disposal, these sentimental ruralists furnished a ready market for a new consumer phenomenon—the commodification of the English countryside and the packaging of the values it notionally embodied. As Valentine Cunningham observes, this was not always an edifying spectacle. By the late 1920s, “the terrible sounds of ‘Ye Olde England’ can already be heard, just off-stage, knocking together its thatched wayside stall where plastic pixies, reproduction beer-mugs, relics of Shakespeare and corn-dollies would soon be on sale” (Cunningham 229). Alongside the standard tourist tat, and the fiction and poetry that romanticised the rural world, a new kind of travel writing emerged around the turn of the century. Through an analysis of early-twentieth century notions of Englishness, this paper considers how the north struggled to find a place in H.V. Morton’s In Search of England (1927).In Haunts of Ancient Peace (1901), the Poet Laureate, Alfred Austin, described a journey through “Old England” as a cultural pilgrimage in quest of surviving vestiges of the nation’s essential identity, “or so much of it as is left” (Austin 18). Austin’s was an early example of what had, by the 1920s and 30s become a “boom market … in books about the national character, traditions and antiquities, usually to be found in the country” (Wiener 73). Longmans began its “English Heritage” series in 1929, introduced by the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, with volumes on “English humour, folk song and dance, the public school, the parish church, [and] wild life”. A year later Batsford launched its series of books on “English Life” with volumes featuring “the countryside, Old English household life, inns, villages, and cottages” (Wiener 73). There was an outpouring of books with an overtly conservationist agenda celebrating journeys through or periods of residence in the countryside, many of them written by “soldiers like Henry Williamson and Edmund Blunden, who returned from the First War determined to preserve the rural England they’d known” (Cunningham 229; Blunden, Face, England; Roberts, Pilgrim, Gone ; Williamson). In turn, these books engendered an efflorescence of critical analyses of the construction of England (Hamilton; Haddow; Keith; Cavaliero; Gervais; Giles and Middleton; Westall and Gardiner).By the 1920s it was clear that a great many people thought they knew what England was, where it might be found, and if threatened, which parts of it needed to be rescued in order to safeguard the survival of its essential identity. By the same point, there were large numbers who felt, in Patrick Wright’s words, that “Some areas of the nation had been lost forever and in these no one should expect to find the traditional nation at all” (Wright 87).A key guide to the nation’s sacred sites in this period, an inventory of their relics, and an illustration of how its lost regions might be rescued for or erased from its cultural map, was provided in H.V. Morton’s In Search of England (1927). Initially published as a series of articles in the Daily Express in 1926, In Search of England went through nine editions in the two and a half years after its appearance in book form in 1927. With sales in excess of a million copies, as John Brannigan notes, the book went through a further twenty editions by 1943, and has remained continuously in print since (Brannigan).In his introduction Morton proposes In Search of England is simply “the record of a motor-car journey round England … written without deliberation by the roadside, on farmyard walls, in cathedrals, in little churchyards, on the washstands of country inns, and in many another inconvenient place” (Morton vii). As C.R. Perry notes, “This is a happy image, but also a misleading one” (Perry 434) for there was nothing arbitrary about Morton’s progress. Even a cursory glance at the map of his journey confirms, the England that Morton went in search of was overwhelmingly rural or coastal, and embodied in the historic villages and ancient towns of the Midlands or South.Morton’s biographer, Michael Bartholomew suggests that the “nodal points” of Morton’s journey are the “cathedral cities” (Bartholomew 105).Despite claims to the contrary, his book was written with deliberation and according to a specific cultural objective. Morton’s purpose was not to discover his homeland but to confirm a vision that he and millions of others cherished. He was not in search of England so much as reassuring himself and his readers that in spite of the depredations of the factory and the motor vehicle, it was still out there. These aims determined Morton’s journey; how long he spent in differing parts, what he recorded, and how he presented landscapes, buildings, people and material culture.Morton’s determination to celebrate England as rural and ancient needed to negotiate the journey north into an industrial landscape better known for its manufacturing cities, mining and mill towns, and the densely packed streets of the poor and working classes. Unable to either avoid or ignore this north, Morton needed to settle upon a strategy of passing through it without disturbing his vision of the rural idyll. Narratively, Morton’s touring through the south and west of the country is conducted at a gentle pace. In my 1930 edition of the text, it takes 185 of the book’s 280 pages to bring him from London via the South Coast, Cornwall, the Cotswolds and the Welsh marches, to Chester. The instant Morton crosses the Lancashire border, his bull-nosed Morris accelerates through the extensive northern counties in a mere thirty pages: Warrington to Carlisle (with a side trip to Gretna Green), Carlisle to Durham, and Durham to Lincoln. The final sixty-five pages return to the more leisurely pace of the south and west through Norfolk and the East Midlands, before the journey is completed in an unnamed village somewhere between Stratford upon Avon and Warwick. Morton spends 89 per cent of the text in the South and Midlands (66 per cent and 23 per cent respectively) with only 11 per cent given over to his time in the north.If, as Genette has pointed out, narrative deceleration results in the descriptive pause, it is no coincidence that this is the recurring set piece of Morton’s treatment of the south and west as opposed to the north. His explorations take dwelling moments on river banks and hill tops, in cathedral closes and castle ruins to honour the genius loci and imagine earlier times. On Plymouth Hoe he sees, in his mind’s eye, Sir Walter Raleigh’s fleet set sail to take on the Armada; at Tintagel it is Arthur, wild and Celtic, scaling the cliffs, spear in hand; at Buckler’s Hard amid the rotting slipways he imagines the “stout oak-built ships which helped to found the British Empire”, setting out on their journeys of conquest (Morton 39). At the other extreme, Genette observes, that narrative acceleration produces ellipsis, where details are omitted in order to render a more compact and striking expression. It is the principle of ellipsis, of selective omission, which compresses the geography of Morton’s journey through the north with the effect of shaping reader experiences. Morton hurries past the north’s industrial areas—shuddering at the sight of smoke or chimneys and averting his gaze from factory and slum.As he crosses the border from Cheshire into Lancashire, Morton reflects that “the traveller enters Industrial England”—not that you would know it from his account (Morton 185). Heading north towards the Lake District, he steers a determined path between “red smoke stacks” rising on one side and an “ominous grey haze” on the other, holding to a narrow corridor of rural land where, to his relief, he observes men “raking hay in a field within gunshot of factory chimneys” (Morton 185-6). These redolent, though isolated, farmhands are of greater cultural moment than the citadels of industry towering on either side of them. While the chimneys might symbolise the nation’s economic potency, the farmhands embody the survival of its essential cultural and moral qualities. In an allusion to the Israelites’ passage through the Red Sea from the Book of Exodus, the land that the workers tend holds back the polluted tide of industry, furnishing relief from the factory and the slum, granting Morton safe passage through the perils of modernity and into the Promised Land–or at least the Lake District. In Morton’s view this green belt is not only more essentially English than trade and industry, it is also expresses a nobler and more authentic Englishness.The “great industrial new-rich cities of northern England—vast and mighty as they are,” Morton observes, “fall into perspective as mere black specks against the mighty background of history and the great green expanse of fine country which is the real North of England” (Morton 208). Thus, the rural land between Manchester and Liverpool expands into a sea of green as the great cities shrink on the horizon, and the north is returned to its origins.What Morton cannot speed past or ignore, what he is compelled or chooses to confront, he transforms, through the agency of history, into something that he and England can bear to own. Tempted into Wigan by its reputation as a comic nowhere-land, a place whose name conjured a thousand music hall gags, Morton confesses that he had expected to find there another kind of cliché, “the apex of the world’s pyramid of gloom … dreary streets and stagnant canals and white-faced Wigonians dragging their weary steps along dull streets haunted by the horror of the place in which they are condemned to live” (Morton 187).In the process of naming what he dreads, Morton does not describe Wigan: he exorcises his deepest fears about what it might hold and offers an incantation intended to hold them at bay. He “discovers” Wigan is not the industrial slum but “a place which still bears all the signs of an old-fashioned country town” (Morton 188). Morton makes no effort to describe Wigan as it is, any more than he describes the north as a whole: he simply overlays them with a vision of them as they should be—he invents the Wigan and the north that he and England need.Having surveyed parks and gardens, historical monuments and the half-timbered mock-Tudor High Street, Morton returns to his car and the road where, with an audible sigh of relief, he finds: “Within five minutes of notorious Wigan we were in the depth of the country,” and that “on either side were fields in which men were making hay” (Morton 189).In little more than three pages he passes from one set of haymakers, south of town, to another on its north. The green world has all but smoothed over the industrial eyesore, and the reader, carefully chaperoned by Morton, can pass on to the Lake District having barely glimpsed the realities of industry and urbanism, reassured that if this is the worst that the north has to show then the rural heartland and the essential identity it sustains are safe. Paradoxically, instead of invalidating his account, Morton’s self-evident exclusions and omissions seem only to have fuelled its popularity.For readers of the Daily Express in the months leading up to and immediately after the General Strike of 1926, the myth of England that Morton proffered, of an unspoilt village where old values and traditional hierarchies still held true, was preferable to the violently polarised urban battlefields that the strike had revealed. As the century progressed and the nation suffered depression, war, and a steady decline in its international standing, as industry, suburban sprawl and the irresistible spread of motorways and traffic blighted the land, Morton’s England offered an imagined refuge, a real England that somehow, magically resisted the march of time.Yet if it was Morton’s triumph to provide England with a vision of its ideal spiritual home, it was his tragedy that this portrait of it hastened the devastation of the cultural survivals he celebrated and sought to preserve: “Even as the sense of idyll and peace was maintained, the forces pulling in another direction had to be acknowledged” (Taylor 74).In his introduction to the 1930 edition of In Search of England Morton approvingly acknowledged that a new enthusiasm for the nation’s history and heritage was abroad and that “never before have so many people been searching for England.” In the next sentence he goes on to laud the “remarkable system of motor-coach services which now penetrates every part of the country [and] has thrown open to ordinary people regions which even after the coming of the railways were remote and inaccessible” (Morton vii).Astonishingly, as the waiting charabancs roared their engines and the village greens of England enjoyed the last hours of their tranquillity, Morton somehow failed to make the obvious connection between these unique cultural and social phenomena or take any measure of their potential consequences. His “motoring pastoral” did more than alert the barbarians to the existence of the nation’s hidden treasures, as David Matless notes it provided them with a route map, itinerary and behavioural guide for their pillages (Matless 64; Peach; Batsford).Yet while cultural preservationists wrung their hands in horror at the advent of the day-tripper slouching towards Barnstaple, for Morton this was never a cause for concern. The nature of his journey and the form of its representation demonstrate that the England he worshipped was more an imaginary than a physical space, an ideal whose precise location no chart could fix and no touring party defile. ReferencesAustin, Alfred. Haunts of Ancient Peace. London: Macmillan, 1902.Bartholomew, Michael. In Search of H.V. Morton. London: Methuen, 2004.Batsford, Harry. How to See the Country. London: B.T. Batsford, 1940.Blunden, Edmund. The Face of England: In a Series of Occasional Sketches. London: Longmans, 1932.———. English Villages. London: Collins, 1942.Brannigan, John. “‘England Am I …’ Eugenics, Devolution and Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts.” The Palgrave Macmillan Literature of an Independent England: Revisions of England, Englishness and English Literature. Eds. Claire Westall and Michael Gardiner. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.Cannadine, David. In Churchill’s Shadow: Confronting the Past in Modern Britain. London: Penguin, 2002.Cavaliero, Glen. The Rural Tradition in the English Novel 1900-1939. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1977.Cunningham, Valentine. British Writers of the Thirties. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.Ford, Ford Madox. The Heart of the Country: A Survey of a Modern Land. London: Alston Rivers, 1906.Gervais, David. Literary Englands. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.Giles, J., and T. Middleton, eds. Writing Englishness. London: Routledge, 1995.Haddow, Elizabeth. “The Novel of English Country Life, 1900-1930.” Dissertation. London: University of London, 1957.Hamilton, Robert. W.H. Hudson: The Vision of Earth. New York: Kennikat Press, 1946.Keith, W.J. Richard Jefferies: A Critical Study. Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1965.Lewis, Roy, and Angus Maude. The English Middle Classes. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1949.Matless, David. Landscape and Englishness. London: Reaktion Books, 1998.Morris, Margaret. The General Strike. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976.Morton, H.V. In Search of England. London: Methuen, 1927.Peach, H. Let Us Tidy Up. Leicester: The Dryad Press, 1930.Perry, C.R. “In Search of H.V. Morton: Travel Writing and Cultural Values in the First Age of British Democracy.” Twentieth Century British History 10.4 (1999): 431-56.Roberts, Cecil. Pilgrim Cottage. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1933.———. Gone Rustic. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1934.Taylor, A.J.P. England 1914-1945. The Oxford History of England XV. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975.Taylor, John. War Photography: Realism in the British Press. London: Routledge, 1991.Wiener, Martin. English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850-1980. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.Williamson, Henry. The Village Book. London: Jonathan Cape, 1930.Wright, Patrick. A Journey through Ruins: A Keyhole Portrait of British Postwar Life and Culture. London: Flamingo, 1992.

On 12 March 2020, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte announced a lockdown of Manila to stop the spread of COVID-19. The cities, provinces, and islands of the Philippines remained under various levels of community quarantine for the remainder of the year. Under the strictest lockdown measures, known as Enhanced Community Quarantine (ECQ), no one aged below 21 or over 60 years was allowed out, a curfew was implemented between 10pm and 5am, and only one person per household, carrying a quarantine pass, was allowed to go out for essential items (Bainbridge & Vimonsuknopparat; Ratcliffe & Fonbuena). The policing of these measures was strict, with a heavy reliance on police and military to enforce health protocols (Hapal). In early April, Duterte warned that violators of the lockdown who caused trouble could be shot (Reuters). Criticisms concerning the dissemination of information about the pandemic were exacerbated when on 5 May, 2020, Filipinos lost an important source of news and entertainment as the country’s largest media network ABS-CBN was shut down after the government denied the renewal of its broadcast franchise (Gutierrez; “ABS-CBN”; “Independent Broadcaster”). The handling of the pandemic by the Duterte government has been characterised by inaction, scapegoating, and framed as a war on an existential threat (Hapal). This has led to feelings of frustration, anger, and despair that has impacted and been incorporated into the artistic expression of some Filipino creatives (Esguerra, “Reflecting”). As they did in the rest of the world, social media platforms became a vital source of entertainment for many facing these harsh lockdown measures in the Philippines in 2020. Viral forms included the sharing of videos of recipes for whipped Dalgona coffee and ube-pandesal on TikTok, binge-watching KDramas like Crash Landing on You on Netflix, playing Animal Crossing on Nintendo Switch, and watching Thailand’s Boys’ Love genre web series 2Gether: The Series on YouTube. Around the world, many arts and cultural organisations turned to online platforms to continue their events during the COVID-19 pandemic. #RomanceClass, a Filipino community of authors, artists, and actors who consume, produce, and enact mostly self-published English-language romance fiction in the Philippines, also turned to these platforms to hold their community’s live literature events. This article analyses this shift by #RomanceClass. It contends that, due to their nature as an independent, born-digital literary organisation, they were able to adapt swiftly and effectively to online-only events in response to the harshness of the Filipino lockdown, creating new forms of artistic innovation by adopting the aesthetics of Zoom into their creative practice (for example, name tags and gallery camera view). This aesthetic swiftly became familiar to people all over the world in 2020, and adopting digital platforms encodes within it the possibility for a global audience. However, while #RomanceClass are and have been open to a global audience, and their creative innovations during the pandemic have clearly been informed by transcultural online trends, this article argues that their adoption of digital platforms and creative innovations represented a continuation of their existing ethos, producing material explicitly intended for a Filipino audience, and more specifically, their existing community, prioritising community connection over any more expansive marketing efforts (McAlister et al.). The Live Literature of #RomanceClass The term #RomanceClass refers to a biblio-community of authors, readers, artists, and actors, all involved in the production and consumption of English-language romance novels in the Philippines. #RomanceClass began online in 2013 via a free writing class run predominantly on Facebook by author Mina V. Esguerra (for more on this, see McAlister et al.). As the community has developed, in-person events have become a major part of the community’s activities. However, as a born-digital social formation, #RomanceClass has always existed, to some extent, online. Their comfort in digital spaces was key to their ability to pivot swiftly to the circumstances in the Philippines during the lockdowns in 2020. One of the most distinctive practices of #RomanceClass is their live reading events. Prior to 2020, community members would gather in April for April Feels Day, and in October for Feels Fest for events where local actors would read curated passages from community-authored romance novels, and audiences’ verbal and physical responses became part of the performance. The live readings represent a distinctive form of live literature – that is, events where literature is the dominant art form presented or performed (Wiles), a field which encompasses phenomena like storytelling festivals, author readings, and literary festivals (Dane; Harvey; Weber; Wilson). In October 2019, we interviewed several #RomanceClass community members and attended one of these live reading events, Feels Fest, where we observed that the nature of the event very clearly reflected the way the community functions: they are “highly professionalised, but also tightly bound on an affective level, regularly describing [themselves] as a found family” (McAlister et al. 404). Attendance at live readings is capped (50 people, for the event we attended). The events are thus less about audience-building than they are community-sustaining, something which they do by providing community comforts. In particular, this includes kilig, a Filipino term referring to a kind of affective romantic excitement, usually demonstrated by the audience members in reaction to the actors’ readings. While the in-person component is very important to the live reading events, they have always spanned online and offline contexts – the events are usually live-tweeted by participants, and the readings are recorded and posted to YouTube by an official community videographer, with the explicit acknowledgment that if you attended the event, you are more than welcome to relive it as many times as you want. (Readings which contain a high degree of sexual content are not searchable on YouTube so as not to cause any harm to the actors, but the links are made privately available to attendees.) However, the lockdown measures implemented in the Philippines in 2020 meant that only the online context was available to the community – and so, like so many other arts communities around the world, they were forced to adapt. We tend to think of platforms like Zoom as encoded with the potential to allow people into a space who might not have been able to access it before. However, in their transition to an online-only context, #RomanceClass clearly sought to prioritise the community-sustaining practices of their existing events rather than trying in any major way to court new, potentially global, audiences. This prioritisation of community, rather than marketing, provided a space for #RomanceClass authors to engage cathartically with their experiences of lockdown in the Philippines (Esguerra, “Reflecting”). Embracing the Zoom Aesthetic: #RomanceClass in 2020 #RomanceClass’s first online event in 2020 was April Feels Day 2020, which occurred not long after lockdown began in the Philippines. Its production reflects the quick transition to an online-only co-presence space. It featured six books recently published by community authors. For each, the author introduced the book, and then an actor read an excerpt – a different approach to that hitherto taken in live events, where two actors, playing the roles of the romantic protagonists, would perform the readings together. Like the in-person live readings, April Feels Day 2020 was a synchronous event with a digital afterlife. It was streamed via Twitch, and participants could log on to watch and join the real-time conversations occurring in the chat. Those who did not sign up for a Twitch account could still watch the stream and post about the event on Twitter under the hashtag #AprilFeelsDay2020. After the event, videos featuring each book were posted to YouTube, as they had been for previous in-person live reading events, allowing participants to relive the experience if they so desired, and for authors to use as workshopping tools to allow them to hear how their prose and characters’ voices sounded (something which several authors reported doing with recordings of live readings in our interviews with them in 2019). April Feels Day 2020 represented a speedy pivot to working and socialising from home by the #RomanceClass community, something enabled by the existing digital architecture they had built up around their pre-pandemic live reading events, and their willingness to experiment with platforms like Twitch. However, it also represented a learning experience, a place to begin to think about how they might adapt creatively to the circumstances provoked by the global pandemic. They innovated in several ways. For instance, they adopted mukbang – a South Korean internet phenomenon which has become popular worldwide, wherein a host consumes a large amount of food while interacting with their audience in an online audiovisual broadcast – in their Mukbang Nights videos, where a few members of #RomanceClass would eat food and discuss their books (Anjani et al.). Food is a beloved part of both #RomanceClass events and books (“there’s lots of food, always. At some point someone always describes what the characters are eating. No exceptions”, author Carla de Guzman told us when we interviewed her in 2019), and so their adoption of mukbang shows the ways in which their 2020 digital events sought to recreate established forms of communal cohesion in a virtual co-presence space. An even more pointed example of this is their Hello, Ever After web series, which drew on the growing popularity of born-digital web series in Southeast Asia and other virtual performances around the globe. Hello, Ever After was both a natural extension of and significantly differed from #RomanceClass in-person live events. Usually, April Feels Day and October Feels Fest feature actors reading and performing passages from already published community books. By contrast, Hello, Ever After featured original short scripts written by community authors. These scripts took established characters from these authors’ novels and served as epilogues, where viewers could see how these characters and their romances fared during the pandemic. Like in-person live reading events – and unlike the digital April Feels Day 2020 – it featured two actors playing virtually side-by-side, reinforcing that one of the key pleasures derived from the reading events is the kilig produced through the interaction between the actors playing against each other (something we also observed in our 2019 fieldwork: the community has developed hashtags to refer specifically to the live reading performance interactions of some of their actors, such as #gahoates, in reference to actors Gio Gahol and Rachel Coates). The scenes are purposefully written as video chats, which allows not only for the fact that the actors were unable to physically interact with each other because of the lockdowns, but also tapped into the Zoom communication aesthetic that commandeered many people’s personal and professional communications during COVID-19 restrictions. Although the web series used a different video conferencing technology, community member Tania Arpa, who directed the web series episodes, adapted the nameplate feature that displayed the characters’ names to more closely align with the Zoom format, demonstrating #RomanceClass’s close attentiveness to developments in the global media environment. Zoom and other virtual co-presence platforms became essentially universal in 2020. One of their affordances was that people could virtually attend events from anywhere in the world, which encodes in it the possibility of reaching a broader, more global audience base. However, #RomanceClass maintained their high sensitivity to the local Filipino context through Hello, Ever After. By setting episodes during the Philippines’ lockdown, emphasised by the video chat mise en scène, Hello, Ever After captures the nuances of the sociopolitical and sometimes mundane aspects of the local pandemic response. Moreover, the series features characters known to and beloved by the community, as the episodes function as epilogues to #RomanceClass books, taking place in what An Goris calls the “post-HEA” [happily ever after] space. #RomanceClass books are available digitally – and have a readership – outside the Philippines, and so the Hello, Ever After web series is theoretically a text that can be enjoyed by many. However, the community was not necessarily seeking to broaden their audience base through Hello, Ever After; it was community-sustaining, rather than community-expanding. It built on the extant repository of community knowledge and affect by using characters that #RomanceClass members know intimately and have emotional connections to, who are not as familiar and legible to those outside the community, intended for an audience with a level of genre knowledge (McAlister et al.; Fletcher et al.). While the pandemic experience these characters were going through was global, as the almost universal familiarity with the Zoom aesthetic shows, Hello, Ever After was highly attentive to the local context. Almost all the episodes featured “Easter eggs” and dialogues that pointed to local situations that only members of the targeted Filipino audience would understand and be familiar with, echoing the pandemic challenges of the country’s present reality. Episodes featured recurrent themes like dissatisfaction with the government’s slow response and misaligned priorities, anger towards politicians exacerbating the impact of the pandemic with poor health and transportation policies, and recognition of voluntary service and aid rendered by private individuals. For example, the first episode, Make Good Days, an epilogue to Mina V. Esguerra’s novel What Kind of Day, focusses on the challenges “essential worker” hero Ben (played by Raphael Robes) faces as a local politician’s speechwriter, who has been tasked to draft a memorial speech for his boss to deliver in honour of an acquaintance who has succumbed to COVID-19. He has developed a “3:00 habit” of a Zoom call with his partner Naya (Rachel Coates), mirroring the “3:00 habit” or “3:00 Prayer to the Divine Mercy” many Catholic Filipino devotees pray and recite daily at that specific hour, a habit reinforced through schools, churches, and media, where entertainment shows allow time for the prayer to be televised. Ben and Naya’s conversation in this particular 3:00 call dwells on what they think Filipino citizens deserve, especially from local government officials who repeatedly fail them (Baizas; Torres). They also discuss the impact that the pandemic has had on Naya’s work life. She runs a tourism and travel business – which is the way that the two characters met in What Kind of Day – which she has been forced to close because of the pandemic. Naya grieves not just for the dream job she has had to give up, but also sympathises with the enormous number of Filipinos who suddenly became unemployed because of the economy closing down (Tirona). Hello, Ever After draws together the political realities of living in the Philippines during the pandemic with the personal, by showing the effects of these realities on characters like Ben and Naya, who are well-known to the #RomanceClass community. #RomanceClass books encompass a wide variety of protagonists, and so the episodes of Hello, Ever After were able to explore how the lives of health workers, actors, single parents, students, scientists, office workers, development workers, CEOs and more could be impacted by the pandemic and the lockdowns in the Philippines. They also allowed the authors to express some of their personal frustrations with living through quarantine, something they admit fueled some parts of the scripts (“Behind the Scenes: Hello, Ever After”). #RomanceClass novels like What Kind of Day all end happily, with the romantic protagonists together (in contrast to a lot of other Filipino media, which ends unhappily – for more on this, see McAlister et al.). Make Good Days and the other episodes of Hello, Ever After reflect the grim realities of pandemic life in the Philippines; however, they do not undercut this happy ending, and instead seek to reinforce it. Through Hello, Ever After, the community literally seeks to “make good days” for themselves by creating opportunities to access the familiar comfort and warmth of kilig scenes. Kilig refers to a kind of affective romantic emotion that usually has a physical manifestation (Trinidad, “Shipping”; “Kilig”). It does not have an equivalent word or phrase in English, but can be used as a noun to denote a thrilling state of excitement or as an adjective to describe moments or scenes that evoke this feeling. Creating and becoming immersed in kilig is central to #RomanceClass texts and events: authors attempt to produce kilig through their writing, and actors attempt to provoke it during live reading performances (something which, as mentioned above, was probably made more difficult in the one-actor live readings of the fully online Aprils Feels Day 2020, as much of the kilig is generated by the interactions between the actors). Kilig scenes are plentiful in Hello, Ever After. For instance, in Make Good Days, Naya asks Ben to name a thing he hated before the pandemic that he now misses. He replies that he misses being stuck in traffic with her – that he still hates traffic, but he misses spending that time with her. Escapism was a high priority for many people and communities creating art during the 2020 lockdowns. Given this, it is interesting that #RomanceClass chose to create kilig in their web series by leaning into the temporal moment and creating material specifically revolving around the lockdown in the Philippines, showing couples like Ben and Naya supporting each other and sharing their pandemic-caused burdens. Hello, Ever After both reflected the harsh reality in which the community found themselves but also gave them something to cling to in the hardest days of lockdown, showing that kilig could be found even in the toughest of circumstances when both characters and community members found themselves separated. Conclusion As a community which began in a digital space, #RomanceClass was well-positioned to pivot to an online-only environment during the pandemic, even though in-person events had become such a distinctive part of their community outputs. They experimented and innovated significantly in 2020, producing a range of digital outputs, including the Hello, Ever After web series. On the surface, this does not seem especially unusual: many arts organisations innovated digitally during the pandemic. What was particularly notable about #RomanceClass’s digital outputs, however, was that they were not designed to be marketing tools. They were not actively courting a new audience; rather, outputs like Hello, Ever After were designed to be community-sustaining, providing the existing audience comfort, familiarity, and kilig in a situation (local and global) that was not in any way comfortable or familiar. We Will Be Okay is the title of the second Hello, Ever After video, an epilogue to Celestine Trinidad’s Ghost of a Feeling: a neat summary of the message the episodes offered to the #RomanceClass audience through these revisitings of beloved characters and relationships. As we have discussed elsewhere, #RomanceClass is a professionalised community, but their affective ties are very strong (McAlister et al.). Their digital outputs during the pandemic showed this, and demonstrated again the way their community bonds are reinforced through their repeated re-engagement with their texts, just as their pre-pandemic forms of live literature did. There was kilig to be found in revisiting well-known couples, even in depressing circumstances. As the community engage together with these new epilogues and share their affective reactions, their social ties are reinforced – even when they are forced to be separated. References “ABS-CBN: Philippines’ Biggest Broadcaster Forced Off Air.” BBC, 5 May 2020. 22 Mar. 2021 <http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-52548703>. Anjani, Laurensia, et al. “Why Do People Watch Others Eat Food? 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