Elizabeth David, in her wonderful 1977 classic English Bread and Yeast Cookery devotes quite a section to the making and baking of crumpets.  She concludes this with the following vital information:

As a last word on the common present-day usage of the word crumpet, I quote Philip Oakes writing in the Sunday Times of 6 October 1974. (His words may be useful to future students of slang.)  The subject is a play called The Great Caper by Ken Campbell.  The play, the author told Philip Oakes, “locates the crumpetstrassen of the world; thoroughfares where beautiful women can always be found . . . In London, King’s Road Chelsea is the crumpetstrasse of note.  In Munich it’s the Leopoldstrasse; in rome via Botteghe Oscure . . . In Copenhagen you should try yur luck on the Hans Christian Andersen Boulevard.”

Mr Campbell, added Philip Oakes, was not recommending pick-up points; he explained that the interest is purely aesthetic.

Tarquin O’Flaherty ended his last piece talking about how one became a navvy.  Here here talks of ‘the great test’.  ( And ends with a bit of music.)

The Great Test
You were required to consume two pounds of beef, drink a gallon of beer every day and buy your own uniform. The uniform was wonderfully distinctive. A first class pair of moleskin trousers was the first requirement. Then came  hob-nailed boots, double-canvas shirts, a  multi-coloured waistcoat and a velveteen coat. A good felt hat helped complete the ensemble, with a brightly coloured handkerchief stuffed in the pocket.

If you can imagine what it must have been like as the railway diggings surged forward. Hundreds of men, splendidly dressed, with money to spend and in fine physical shape would descend on the local town. Not to put too fine a point on it, but mayhem of all shapes and sizes was the direct result. There was dancing in the streets, appalling drunkeness, huge fights, usually amongst the navvies themselves and endless instances of ladies of the town being persuaded into the shrubbery by a dazzling waistcoat. In many instances, wives abandoned the marital bed, and moved lock stock and barrel to the diggings, and stayed there.

This of course, absolutely scandalized Victorian England.  The navvies didn’t go to church, had an indecent interest in strong drink and were possessed of unspeakably licentious habits. They didn’t wash, gave no thanks to god for their good fortune, used food money donated by the church to entertain girls, and sold their donated bibles for hard liquor. Churchmen despaired of them, were horrified by them, and gave thanks to the Almighty for the compensation involved in sending the railway across their land.

Nevertheless, this Godless, sub-human, drunken crew, when called upon, sailed all the way to Russia with a railway and rescued perhaps a quarter of a million soldiers from under Russia’s nose. This was at precisely the same time when British Army supply ships were either sinking, or failing to leave port, or landing at the wrong spot, or important people in Whitehall had to make important bureaucratic decisions while the flower of English/Irish/Scottish/Welsh manhood died of hypothermia and starvation. When the navvies had built the railway to Sevastopol, the army at Balaclava inexplicably refused to make use it after five in the afternnon or before eight in the morning!

The reality of this was that the navvies were treated  very well by the contractors and were fiercely loyal.

The Army, on the other hand, treated its soldiers like dogs. The reason why they had to be rescued was the soldiers were diseased, malnourished, almost out of food and ammunition and had no winter clothing. At the least excuse, at the slightest sign of insubordination, soldiers could be flogged to death or executed. The food was appalling and there was no esprit de corps at all. All that gung-ho stuff was invented afterwards by people on the sidelines. This is the reason why mutiny was so common in the army and navy.And why, even up to a short time ago, ‘cowardice in the face of the enemy’ was  enough to get you executed.

The usual levels of British hypocrisy and self-importance prevailed throughout the railway building period which began in 1822 and was, to all intents and purposes, over and done with by 1900.

It is impossible not to remember our amazing navvies. Their astonishing work, their ancient monuments, their  Stonehenge and earthworks are all around us and are huge in the landscape.  You just have to start looking.

Hammering the anvil with The Sensational Alex Harvey Band

Tarquin O’Flaherty continues his series not just on trains, but the men who built the lines on which they ran.  

There was an old American work song popular in the 1950’s called   “FIFTEEN TONS” (listen here)  a few lines of which went as follows;

‘You load fifteen tons, and what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt.
Saint Peter don’t you call me,’cos I can’t go-
I owe my soul to the company store.

The company store was alive and well on the railways in 19^th century Britain.  The run-of-the-mill contractor, instead of paying his workers with coin of the realm, paid them with vouchers or slips which allowed them to purchase the basic necessities, but only from ‘the company store’.  The contractors set their own prices and the navvies, particularly in remote areas, were left with little choice.  The food was of a low quality, the beer heavily watered, and the meat often poor or rancid.  It was not uncommon for navvies, having paid their debts, to be left with little or nothing.  Thus they began again, already owing money, and with increasingly little prospect of ever clearing their debts.

The contractor Peto detested the ‘company store’ or ‘truck’ system, as it was called in the UK, but he doubted the system could change because ‘… it had been the custom for the last hundred years, ever since they commenced making canals… and I think it requires a very strong hand indeed to bring about a transformation….’

In the 1850’s, Peto, as MP for Norwich, tried ‘…a very strong hand…’ again and again                                                                          to have the truck system outlawed.  Truck Acts were passed which might have achieved a great deal, but they were never enforced, and the truck system continued unabashed for many years.

So, who were ‘the navvies’?

Navvies were the men who did the blasting, tunnelling and bridge building, the dangerous work, and not exclusively on the railways.  There were reservoirs to be dug, locks to be constructed, and, as shipping increased in size, quay walls and harbour walls to be built and extended.  There was always work for a good team.  Essentially navvies were railway labourers who looked down contemptuously on lesser labourers.  They were not masons and bricklayers and carpenters but, none of these trades could have operated without navvy help.  They were men who, all day, could, at the bottom of a cutting, load up their wheelbarrows with rock, then have the wheelbarrow dragged up the incline by a horse drawn cable whilst the navvy gripped the handles and walked up the slope, to prevent the barrow from tipping over.  At the top he would tip the load out and return downhill. The navvy did this back-breaking work, hour after sweating hour.  When, to make the job easier, a four wheel truck was used,  the navvies took great exception, and would not allow this innovation at any cost. It was doing away with mens’ jobs and they wouldn’t hear of it!

So, how do you become a navvy?

Providing you could maintain this high level of work, and were prepared to live for months on end in remote encampments, it could then be fairly said that your apprenticeship was progressing well.

Then, the greatest test of all:

TO BE CONTINUED . . .  .

The conservative former minister Amanda Vanstone suggests the so-called rich get a pretty rough deal.  Executive director of the Australia Institute Richard Denniss take issue.

Australia’s richest seven people have more wealth than the bottom 1.73 million households combined. Most people think that’s a problem. Amanda Vanstone, on the other hand, seems to think the bottom 1.73 million should be thankful.

“The politics of envy”. This is Amanda Vanstone’s condescending dismissal of concerns over Australia’s rapidly growing gap between its richest and poorest citizens.

How often, she asks, have we heard that wealth inequality is growing and that something is wrong with this?  How often? One fewer times than necessary, it seems.

Vanstone says that 2 per cent of taxpayers pay more than 25 per cent of all income tax, and suggests this is something we should be grateful to the wealthiest for.

But the reason so few pay so much tax is that income inequality is so great. That is, 2 per cent pay 25 per cent of tax because 2 per cent earn so much more than the rest of us. The statistics she quotes is a symptom of income inequality, and the starkness of the figure reveals the starkness of the problem.

With a progressive income tax system such as ours, where those at the top end claim a larger and larger share of total income, it is inevitable that they will pay a larger share of tax. Is she suggesting that the wealthy should pay less tax as their share of total income rises?

“Make no mistake”, she continues, “we need Australians to get rich”.

Nobody became a teacher, police officer or nurse to get their name on the BRW Rich List. They’re not in it to “get rich”.  Is Australia really best served by having our daycare centre workers striving to be the next Gina Rinehart? Do we want teachers and ambulance drivers ruthlessly chasing wealth?

Vanstone relies on the stale class rhetoric of the 1980s when she claims that “since only about 45 per cent of the population pay income tax, it followers that, on average, taxpayers have to pay twice that amount in tax in order to fund welfare.”

Cue the pitchforks. Welfare queenism is alive and well, it seems.  Or, at least it seems that way, until you consider this significant addendum, curiously unmentioned by the columnist: almost half of the 7.4 million adult Australians who don’t pay tax are either retirees – who have worked and paid tax their whole lives – or students, who are soon to start working and paying tax their whole lives.

When Vanstone grumbles that taxpayers are being asked to “fund welfare” to the tune of “more than a month’s work for many”, is she suggesting that pensioners shouldn’t be supported in their old age?

Is she suggesting that students shouldn’t be supported in getting an education? It is strange that she forgets to tell us that university graduates go on to make substantially more income than those without a degree. And via income tax, they more than pay back into the system what they’ve received, as Education Minister Christopher Pyne is so fond of reminding us.

If we want a prosperous Australia, we want an equal Australia. Vanstone’s defence of the 1 per cent (or is it 2 per cent?) calls on all of us to focus less on the gap between rich and poor, and more on social mobility. We don’t want to attack the rich, we want to create more rich!

This ignores the fact that the two are inseparable. Nobel-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, Standard & Poor’s, and the IMF have all released research backed by rigorous analysis that demonstrates inequality hinders economic growth. It is now economic orthodoxy that too much inequality makes growth volatile and unstable.

But Vanstone is not really concerned about the economics. For her, this is an ideological issue, shabbily dressed up as an economic one.

Vanstone asks us to make a choice that doesn’t exist. We do not need to choose between taxing the rich more and having less rich. We don’t have to choose between having less inequality and having less total income. If anything, the opposite is true.

Shadow Assistant Treasurer Andrew Leigh reminded us in March that “Australia is a stronger nation when we act together than when we pull apart”. If this is true, Vanstone’s derisive and inflammatory rhetoric is out of step with Australia’s sense of the fair go.

The economic debate is over. If we want Australia to be a richer nation, we must also want it to be a fairer nation.

Richard Denniss, an economist, is executive director of The Australia Institute

First published in Fairfax Media

In today’s post Tarquin O’Flaherty continues his exploration of the building of railways in Great Britain (and the Colonies and the Crimea).  See the preceding Man as Machine post here. 

So, the building of the railways followed long established ideas.  To implement those ideas massive earthworks, tunnels, viaducts and bridges were required.  Contractors like Peto and Brassey realized very early on that the work was so huge, and good labour so important, that the only way to keep the best of the navvies was to treat them well, feed them well and pay them well.  This was precisely what Robert Owen had learnt at New Lanark.  The contractors were not, like a lot of factory employers of the period, deliberately aloof from the ‘common workers’.  Instead they made a point of getting down into the diggings with the navvies, listening to suggestions and, a great deal of the time, acting on those suggestions.  They knew the gangers and the people in the gangs and addressed them by name.  The contractors organised doctors and surgeons to minister to the sick and injured, and even a clergyman if the need arose.  If a man was crippled or killed, his wife and kids were cared for, and received a form of compensation.  This was highly unusual for the time.  Gradually, as time passed, both Peto and Brassey (amongst others), built fiercely loyal groups of navvies around them.

A great deal of the work was difficult and dangerous and carried out across relatively uninhabited country.  This meant that accommodation, food and drink had to be imported.  Where gangs of many hundreds were involved, toiling away in the most primitive and isolated of conditions, the contractors would arrange for animals on the hoof to be taken to the site, professionally slaughtered, spit roasted whole and divided up amongst the gang.  As near as it is possible to imagine, a complete catering service operated day and night at these more remote sites.  Demountable cabin accomodation was sometimes provided but more often than not the navvies threw up rough huts and shelters for themselves using any material they could find.  It would not take very long for a gang of two or three hundred men to provide temporary dry accommodation for themselves using mud, rock and stout tarpaulins.

If a tunnel were to be dug through a hill then the engineer would mark the route across the hill directly above the proposed tunnel. At several points along this route shafts were dug down, through the hill to precisely the point where the tunnel was to be excavated. These shafts, in some cases 600 feet deep and 25 feet in diameter, not only  provided access to allow the navvies to begin tunnelling but would eventually serve as tunnel ventilation shafts. Navvies were lowered into the depths by bucket, and drawn out by the same method.  Using a sledgehammer and a chisel as big as a crowbar, holes were driven into the face of the tunnel, the hole filled with gunpowder, and then rammed home.  The rammer, inexplicably, was made of steel.  Steel on rock produces sparks.  Men were blown up, maimed or blinded again and again until they eventually replaced the steel ramrod with copper.

There are countless stories of the travelling bucket being caught against the side, tipping the navvies out, and killing them, or tipping its material out and burying them.  Horrifying rockfalls were commonplace and, in the appallingly ill-ventilated depths, simple, suffocating lung diseases were not uncommon.  Men were also killed when explosive charges they had prepared exploded either accidentally or prematurely.

Somehow, surviving all this, the navvies built the railways.  They built gargantuan earthworks without the help of bulldozers.  All they had, and all they used, were picks and shovels, horses and carts. Without any of today’s equipment, they built tunnels and bridges, cuttings and viaducts,which are still robustly in everyday use today.  And out of all this back-breaking work came a fellowship, a rough freemasonry of men, a group of legendary characters who dressed distinctively, looked after each other and, when it came down to it, misbehaved to such an extent that questions concerning their lawlessness and immorality were asked ‘In the House’ (in the British Parliament).

TO BE CONTINUED . . ..

Our Dispatch today was first published on 25 April 2011.  Still the racist Intervention continues with white Australia’s complicity, the deliberate destruction of language is ongoing.  A look at Argentina.

Bom dia meus amigos,

The hornero is Argentina’s national bird.
http://youtu.be/jfLKgW4BFvM

Its status resulted from its amazing mud nest. Different from all other bird nests. The little boys of the Palomar of my childhood were obsessed with hunting birds and lizards withhondas (slingshots). I still bear a scar on one of my fingers from when the knife slipped when I was trimming a forked stick. Never but never however did we shoot horneros, nor damage their nests nor steal their eggs, we had too much respect for them. Horneros are not afraid of humans, they trust them. They have been shown much respect by humans.

http://youtu.be/Y8AeAfLFTSc

Warlpiri people are wary of kardiya (non-Aboriginal people). They say kardiya-kujaku or wail-pali (whitefellah)-kujaku to their children same as they might say maliki-kujaku (beware of the dog) or walna-kujaju (look out for snakes). They haven’t been shown enough respect by kardiya to trust them. Kardiya don’t respect their differentness.

http://youtu.be/97j4SgFBCVw

Many moons ago I read an essay by Stephen Jay Gould on the evolution of the Hershey Bar. On the basis of a graph plotting price and weight against time, he showed that in the future that wonder of all wonders would evolve: the weightless Hershey bar selling at (I forgot the exact price) say $4.57. A major evolutionary upheaval occurred when the Mars Bar was introduced to the North American market.

I am told that cane toads have to reach a certain size to become toxic. The introduction of the cane toad to Queensland resulted in the death of many snakes, big headed snakes that is, that were able to swallow the large toxic cane toads. Small headed snakes survived. In less than a century the average size of snake heads in Queensland was reduced considerably. Evolution can be much quicker than generally believed.

When the crown of thorns starfish colonized the Great Barrier Reef it caused untold damage, and continues to do so.

When I ordered a pizza in Argentina, much to my delight, I was brought an entirely different species of pizza than that I’d become accustomed to in Australia. This pizza had very thick melted mozzarella cheese on it. Absolutely delicious. When I remarked on this, I was told that if they’d put less cheese on it nadie va venir a comprarlas (no one will come to buy them). Me las hubieron tirado a la cabeza (they would have thrown them at my head) said the charming waitress. The species would have become extinct.

Several species of culinary crown of thorns are doing untold damage around the world. MacDonalds are as evident in Buenos Aires as in Sydney.

http://youtu.be/MTaJ7fmH9qE

When monolingual assimilationists colonized Australia, extinction of language species occurred at a rate faster than that suffered by the trilobites during the Cambrian period or the dinosaurs during the Cretaceous.

Of the more than 200 languages existing in Australia before the linguistic crown of thorns appeared on the scene, barely a few dozen survive.

Darwin’s The Origin of Species has been invoked to espouse the inevitability of species extinction.

http://youtu.be/faRlFsYmkeY

“Survival of the fittest” has been perversely used to rationalize and justify the injustices of colonisation, massacres and holocausts.

If only the “fit” survive at the expense of the “different”, the “varied” the “beautiful” and the “clever”, the world will become a dull place indeed, and only “fit” people to appreciate it.

http://youtu.be/UuZTqLW_MN4

On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (the original title of Darwin’s book) may well describe the principles that lead to the extinction of species, cultures and languages. THAT DOESN’T MAKE IT RIGHT, nor does it make it inevitable.

In Argentina the extinction of the thick melted mozzarella pizza was prevented. The predatory thin cheese pizza didn’t stand a chance: se los hubieran tirado a la cabeza.

The Northern Territory Department of Education’s “4-hours English only” policy, is the latest manifestation of the linguistic crown of thorns that has been devouring its way through the mosaic of languages that once covered the Australian landscape, se lo debemos tirar a la cabeza.

http://youtu.be/O1eOsMc2Fgg

Obrigado,

Franklin

In today’s post Tarquin O’Flaherty continues his exploration of the building of railways in Great Britain (and the Colonies and the Crimea).  See the preceding Man as Machine post here. 

The Industrial Revolution in England created miracles, profound change, great wealth and, turned the world upside down.  At the same time it created deliberate, industrial scale poverty.  There were so many people desperate to feed their families that employers exploited the situation mercilessly.  As we have noted previously, the social experiments carried out by Robert Owen at New Lanark and elsewhere proved beyond a doubt that treating workers humanely actually increased production in every factory where it was tried.  Despite this evidence, workers were exploited to such an extent that legislation became necessary, not to ensure that exploitation was minimized, but merely to ensure that the workers earned enough to eat just enough to be strong enough to go on working!

Whilst ‘The Workshop of the World’ was developing, companies were forming to build the railways.  A newly formed company, The Great Western Railway Co., for instance, first appointed an engineer whose job it was to work out the best route, decide what needed to be done, and be responsible for the whole shebang from beginning to end.  The company then asked for tenders, and a principal contractor was appointed.  The contractor then appointed agents who would take responsibility for the work on a particular section of the route.  The agents could then appoint sub-contractors to make cuttings, build bridges, drive tunnels and whatever else the work required.  The sub-contractors, in their turn, appointed an overseer or foreman, more commonly referred to as a ‘ganger’.  It then became the ganger’s job to hire the people who would actually do the physical work, the pick and shovel men, the navvies.

The work required of the navvies was difficult and dangerous. It also required an astonishing degree of physical strength, an attribute noticeably lacking in the malnourished wretches who clamoured for work whenever a new railway was being built.  Gradually gangs of individuals, ex canal digging ‘navigators’, farm labourers and men with natural strength formed the legendary gangs of men who would scandalize Victorian England for the best part of  the next eighty years.

England’s first railway, the Stockton to Darlington (1820) did not present its builders with an entirely new set of engineering problems.  The Romans, after all, had conducted water from A to B, through tunnels, along viaducts and cuttings nearly 2000 years earlier.  When English canal building began, the channels, tunnels and cuttings involved followed precisely the same principles as those used by the Romans.  They were simply much bigger!

In their turn, when the railways arrived, steam locomotives were so underpowered that the rails they travelled on had to be almost as level as water.  Hence Brunel’s ‘billiard table.’

To be continued . . . 

From Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu (reviewed here)

(Charles) Sturt’s expedition beginning in 1844, was hampered by the rigours of the environment.  It was so hot thermometers burst, screws fell out of boxes and the lead from pencils.

Sturt’s party reached Cooper’s Creek, in what was to become known as Sturt’s Stony Desert, where they were confronted by sand ridges thirty metres high.  They ploughed on enduring terrible hardships.  Sturt climbed one final dune and peered down onto the plain.  His journal records:

on gaining the summit (we) were hailed with a deafening shout by 3 or 400 natives, who had assembled on the flat below. . . I had never before come so suddenly upon so large a party.  The scene was of the most animated description, and was rendered still more striking from the circumference of the native huts, at which there were a number of women and children, occupying the whole crest of a long piece of rising ground t at the opposite side of the flat.

Sturt was looking on the dry floodplain of a river and he couldn’t understand how these people were able to survive.  Sick and weary and with horses stumbling with hunger, thirst and fatigue, strut was alarmed at coming so suddenly on so many Aboriginals:

Has these people been of an unfriendly temper, we could not in any possibility have escaped them, for our horses could not have broken into a canter to save our lives or their own.  we were therefore wholly in their power . . .but, far from exhibiting any unkind feeling, they treated us with genuine hospitality, and we might certainly have commanded whatever they had.  Seveal of them brought us large troughs of water, and when we had taken a little, held them up for our horses to drink; an instance of nerve that is very remarkable, for I am quite sure that no white man (having never seen or heard of a horse before, and with the natural apprehension the first sight of such an animal could create) would deliberately have walked up to what must have appeared to them most formidable brutes, and placing the troughs they carried against their breast, they allowed the horses to drink, with their noses almost touching them.  They likewise offered us some roasted ducks, and some cake.  when we walked over to their camp, they pointed to a large hut, and told us we could sleep there. . . and (later) they brought us a quantity of sticks for us to make a fire, wood being extremely scarce.

Sturt was doing it tough among the savages alright.  New house, roast duck, and cake!

Noted activist Gary Foley will give a public lecture at The University of Melbourne on Wednesday 15 October entitled ‘Tangled up in black’.
Below is the flyer and follow this link for booking and other details

PCBYCP has posted writings of Gary previously – listed here

Based on his award winning doctoral dissertation, Dr Gary Foley’s lecture will chronicle the development of the Black Power Movement within the Australian Aboriginal community and the 1972 Aboriginal Embassy. Focussing on a specific and under-researched period that was crucial in Australian history, Dr Foley challenges the prevailing academic understandings of this period and overturns many of the popular misconceptions. His research shows that as a participant and historian, an innovative approach can be found to reveal the achievements and legacy of Aboriginal activism.

Dr Foley’s dissertation is a seminal piece of Australian political history, unique in its autobiographical approach, and steeped in academic practice. It was awarded a Chancellor’s Prize for Excellence in the PhD thesis in the Humanities, Creative Arts and Social cluster in 2014.

Dr Gary Foley is one of Australia’s most prominent commentators and activists. He was born in Grafton, northern NSW of Gumbainggir descent. Expelled from school aged 15, he became an apprentice draughtsperson in Sydney. Since then he has been at the centre of major political activities including the Springbok tour demonstrations (1971), the Tent Embassy in Canberra (1972), the Commonwealth Games protest (1982) and protests during the bicentennial celebrations (1988).

Dr Foley was involved in the establishment of the first Aboriginal self-help and survival organisations including Redfern’s Aboriginal Legal Service, the Aboriginal Health Service in Melbourne and the National Black Theatre.

Most recently he has completed an outstanding report which was also the basis of a documentary on SBS TV and written and performed in his own one-man theatrical show at the 2011 Melbourne Arts Festival and the Sydney Opera House. He is the author of the forthcoming book An autobiographical narrative of the Black Power Movement and the 1972 Aboriginal Embassy and has been published in numerous journals including Griffith Law Reviewand the Australian Journal of Human Rights.

Dr Foley completed his Bachelor of Arts and then gained First Class Honours in History in 2002. Between 2001 and 2005 he was also the Senior Curator for Southeastern Australia at Museum Victoria. Between 2005 and 2008 he was a lecturer/tutor in the Education Faculty of the University of Melbourne. In 2012, he completed a PhD in History at the University of Melbourne.