Monthly Archives: May 2015

Paedophile Priests and the Current Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse –

28 Thursday May 2015

Posted by in Royal Commission

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The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse has been proceeding around Australia for the last two years. What is striking, as Historian and Australian Research Council Fellow, Tim Jones notes, is that the authorities deny any knowledge of the level of sexual abuse occurring within the walls of their institutions, or in the case of Aboriginal Missions, from amongst the missionaries. The word of an Aboriginal person was not to be taken seriously in the nineteenth century and until, it seems, the Commission’s hearing in Darwin in September 2014. So too were the allegations of state children who suffered abuse at the hands of trusted priests and clergy whom they had been taught to revere.

Another vexed area is the management of allegations that reached the ears of police or government. Some instances were concealed as I suggest in this article  about the Aborigines Inland Mission. Of course the perpetrators were dismissed, but little was done for the children concerned and such matters were never discussed again, let alone recorded in any potential archive. The result, that subsequent generations of managers have been forced to defend the indefensible, is part of the tragedy that is unfolding.

In the last fortnight the Royal Commission has been hearing from residents of the Ballarat Catholic Boys Home in Victoria. The boys, it is alleged have been victims of a broader coverup by the Catholic Church which, as Tim Jones, shows in this item published in Melbourne’s The Age today, has begun to be reframed as ‘sin’ father than what it is, ‘a crime’.

The Radical Australian Journalist and the American Psychiatrist: Cyril Pearl Interviews Dr Anita Muhl – 1938

26 Tuesday May 2015

Posted by in 1930s

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Late in 1938 the American psychiatrist Dr Anita Muhl arrived  in Melbourne for a three year contract to teach and lecture about child development and children’s problems. It created something of a stir amongst Melbourne’s auxiliary ladies fundraising groups and the medical, teaching and welfare fraternities.  Her appointment was  something of a coup for her sponsor Una Cato, who undertook to fund Muhl for the entire period of her stay. Cato, whose father had made his fortune as a grocer, was dedicating her philanthropic effort to the psychiatric field.She later trained as a psychiatrist. Too.

Under the terms of her agreement and in accordance with legalities concerning the registration of overseas trained medical doctors, Muhl was not able to practise as a psychiatrist. Instead she took over the directorship of the “Association for the Understanding of Human Adjustments’ founded by Cato. She brought a library of books and journals  especially for her visit – even though war had been declared. Australian customs officials  confiscated these books  pending further inquiry. They were returned  after representations were made through the United States Embassy in Canberra.

Over the next three years Muhl’s  lectures and tutorials on human development were given to interested groups – legal, medical, nursing, teaching professionals; hospital auxiliaries, medical students and welfare professionals.  She was available to the general public through radio broadcasts, letters, newspaper reportage and, not surprisingly through the very well known women’s paper The Australian Women’s Weekly. The ‘Weekly,’ now part the National Library’s digitsied, online newspaper collection, TROVE provides a rich insight into contemporary issues about Australian family life. Amongst its reportage were items on child development, psychology and education, as well as broader political and social commentary on the issues of the day. It is not surprising that Muhl was profiled in an illustrated article published in November 1938.

What is surprising is the choice of author.To twentyfirst century readers the  journalist Cyril Pearl  seems an unlikely choice for a subject of this nature. His leftist views were known even then. He was about to  take up an appointment as the Editor of the Sydney Daily Telegraph and in this capacity  challenged the government on its censorship laws in 1942. His radicalism subsequently matured into membership of the Communist Party and, amongst other things the production of a body of writing about working class Australian culture. After his resignation from the Telegraph he pursued a career as a historian and writer. Pearl’s 1970 biographical study, Morrison of Peking, about The Times Peking correspondent and, from 1912 later political advisor to the newly formed Chinese Government, drew considerable controversy and the attention of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation ( ASIO). Pearl’s ASIO file reveals little other than the opinion of his comrades that he drank too much.

Pearl’s interst  may have been Muhl’s views on psychology as a tool for social change and, perhaps, the question about how it was that a ‘well bred’ American girl could come to hold the views she did and travel as widely as she did. Framing Muhl’s professional identity as a medical practitioner and psychiatrist  with contemporary notions of femininity: she was once a ‘little blue-eyed girl who  wanted to know how things worked’, he highlighted her own version of advocacy for social change. She became an adult woman with a distinguished career who, despite her achievements was’ still curious’ and ‘whose eyes were still blue’. It is the kind of stuff that would hardly go down well with feminists these days even though Muhl typified the ‘new woman’ of the twentieth century American middle classes. Like many of her contemporaries in the social columns of the daily papers, her life as a single woman, was centred upon home with her parents. She was educated, had travelled to exotic places about which she was prepared to lecture, but her identity and moral conduct also rested in this family circle. But her views resonated with Pearl’s vision for a better, and more just society. Pearl’s interest was in her committment to the  the use of psychology and psychiatry as part of a broader response to emerging social dislocation amongst young people in industrialised societies such as America and Australia.

Unlike a newspaper with a life of a day, the Weekly was distributed Australia wide with a potential life of more than a week as it was passed between family members, friends and relatives for reading. By the 1930s psychology was well established as a subject at university and teaching training colleges. Almost everyone had heard of Freud and the idea of the unconscious and whether they were conscious of it or not, the recasting of the child in psychological terms was well established. During 1937 the New Education Fellowship Conference had traversed the continent. The twentyone delegates had presented lectures in each of the capital cities. One of them, Susan Isaacs, the British Psychoanalyst and Educationalist, had been a key speaker, drawing large audiences to her lectures as well as a multitude of listeners to her radio broadcasts. Her message, that child behaviour is to be understood as a communication at an emotional level, was part of a broader psychological recasting of the nature of childhood and the responsibilities of education and parenthood. Anita Muhl’s visit, following so soon after this event, was important enough for wider reportage than the local metropolitan press. Perhaps Pearl held the view that Muhl’s Australian sojourn was part of this process of enlightenment.

REFERENCES

Anita Muhl, Correspondence, 1938-1942, State Library of Victoria, MS MS 11459

WORLD’S No. 1 School TO MEET. (1937, April 17). The Australian Women’s Weekly (1933 – 1982), p. 24. Retrieved May 26, 2015, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article52246132

Youth Saved From Life of Crime. (1939, January 28). The Australian Women’s Weekly (1933 – 1982), p. 14. Retrieved May 9, 2015, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article51591527

Cyril Pearl ( 1970) Morrison of Peking, Penguin Books.

Miss L’s Dream Diary – Seeking ‘Dr W’.

10 Sunday May 2015

Posted by in 1940s, Diaries and Source material, Refugees, WW2

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Once in a while in the business of researching and writing history a rare document emerges from the archive boxes. Such items are the products of serendipity; the result of a decision made by their author, or someone, that it should be preserved. Writing in the 1940s, the French Historian and then member of the Resistance, Marc Bloch, drew my attention to such moments. The archives we rely upon for historical understanding are built from such off-the-cuff decisions and accidents – and from the systematic collation of records that are part of bureaucratic life. To read the thoughts and ideas of people who were alive in times past is  to read of our formation. These thoughts and dreams, however recorded, are the beginning of understanding. Poetry, novels, theatre and art are their interpretation. So, too, is the writing of history.

Recently I was given a box of documents collated and packed by an elderly woman, whom I shall call ‘Miss L’. She has since gone into full-time care, her mind lost to Alzheimer’s Disease. It is clear Miss L thought carefully about what was to be kept and what was thrown away. Along with the usual documents: degrees, certificates, bank records, letters and photographs there are two diaries – both kept during the 1940s when she was consulting a psychoanalyst in London. One of them follows the course of her consultations with the analyst, referred to as ‘Dr W’. The other is a dream diary, a record of nightly dreams kept during this period. Most of these dreams hold  images of her daily life and interactions with members of her family and lovers. Others are threaded with images of death and violence at the hands of the Nazis in the years before the war broke out. In others, still, she is addressing ‘Him’, her analyst, on one occasion admonishing him for not listening. Sometimes she makes a joke of him, wondering whether psychoanalysis is of value – at least to the patient. Miss L has a story to tell and conflicts to unravel. She wants and needs him to listen.

Miss L is a German Jew. During her childhood she lived near Nuremberg, the youngest of a wealthy family. Her father, a merchant, had fought in the Great War and was awarded the Iron Cross for his services. Like many of his Jewish contemporaries who were similarly awarded, he believed this would protect him from the worst excesses of the Nazis as they came to power in the 1930s. Five days after Kristallnacht in November 1938, Miss L’s father took his own life. She and her mother escaped Germany early in 1939, eventually arriving in England after travelling through Switzerland.

Miss L’s dream diary reflects her larger internal process of emigration and resettlement, from danger to safety. She speaks to her analyst of leaving one country behind but, after several years, still not settled in another. Her dreams are of murder and death. It is not unlikely she was witness to such events, if she did not hear about them from others. She also dreams of losing her identity documents on a train a reference, perhaps, to a period where she was stateless.

After her arrival in London she  experienced rejection by members of the English Jewish community because of her German origins. ‘I was not served in a shop, she tells her analyst.  In later life she recalled how much more devastated she was by this rejection by the English Jews than she had been in Germany during the years when Jews were increasingly deprived of their rights, property and wealth. Miss L eventually anglicised her name and worked hard to become British – even more so than the British. She appears to have been very much helped by Dr W. For it was after her work with him that she went to university to study for a career that would help restore the family fortune lost to the war. Miss L did not necessarily aspire to Law but eventually made a significant contribution to it.

During her analysis with Dr W, Miss L recorded her dreams on a daily basis throughout 1944 into 1945. I will transcribe two: the first because it tells us just how much she had to bear. These were the experiences and memories from which she tried to protect her children. Earlier in the analysis she had dreamed of being told not to speak. But in her conscious selection of this document for the archive box, she has I believe, expressed the wish that these experiences be known. When I read this dream, I wept.

When I read the second dream for the first time I had the feeling I had read it somewhere before. Perhaps in a case study somewhere deep in the psychoanalytic literature…? I record it now because if I am right, this may identify Dr W. Perhaps someone else has read it, remembers it and may know where it has been published. Or perhaps I have imagined reading it.  Suffice to say it is Miss L’s dream.

Dream 1. Tues 2 May 1945.

[Two girls] have offended against some rule of their school and I am told they will both be executed for it. I think it is monstrous. I want to tell everybody about this and do something against it, but I  hear the headmistress did not waste a minute, and they are already dead. I meet a man who worked in my father’s office and he is coming from the execution. I go up to him and start crying but try not to. I say to him ‘I am sorry. I did not mean to cry, but this is just too much’.  I go out to see [a lady], she must be in despair [I think]. The girls were the only thing she had in life. I find her together with some other women each of whom has lost a son. She is quite calm. They all talk about their children.

Dream 2. Sunday 20 May 1945

Mother says we are going to buy some black material for a dress for me at a certain shop in Nuremberg. I am rather thrilled. I haven’t bought any material for years. I leave the house and walk along a street in Nuremberg. There is a beautiful warm shine of light from [ a building she names but is indecipherable]. Before it was bombed the light never shone right through. It is lovelier than ever.

Round the church and the street there are rows of dead bodies of American soldiers. Some are wrapped up in brown paper and string, they must be really dead. One who was lying against a house opposite the church gets up and shows me the way to the shops and I talk to him. I remember that I never told mother I was going out but when I get near the shop I meet her and my aunt with a man in a dark uniform. He has very dark deep set eyes and a rather taut face. He seems much more interesting to me than my guide , who is rather fat and jovial.

The War had ended on 8 May 1945.

References:

Marc Bloch,( c.1944).  The Historians Craft, Oxford, 1971.

Louise London, (2000) Whitehall and the Jews, Oxford, Oxford University Press.