Music Review: Arcko Symphonic Ensemble, 2 June 2013, Fitzroy Town Hall

10 Monday Jun 2013

Posted by in western australia

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Two reasons for reblogging this: To introduce an interesting and well written blog/magazine reviewing contemporary arts in Australia. Secondly Nick Tolhurst’ thoughtful review of Arcko’s concert at the Fitzroy Town Hall about a week ago. I think I will go to the next one later this year.

weeringeditor's avatarWeering Review

Before beginning this review, be alerted to the next Arcko concert in the on the 19th and 20th October this year.  In line with Arcko’s mission of performing Australian works that have had very limited exposure, conductor Timothy Phillips is programming an all Australian program for string orchestra.  If the concert can be held in the Reading Room of the Fitzroy Town Hall it will be a knockout.  The acoustic of the Reading Room loves strings.  If you like string music, this is the place to hear it, especially with the top players Phiillips engages for his concerts

The recent Arcko concert was dedicated to Nigel Butterley AM, Arcko’s Honorary Patron and (I hope he doesn’t mind) one of Australia’s grandfathers of modern music.  We were fortunate to have Nigel Butterley at the concert to talk about each work as they were about to played.  A theme of…

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The History of Emotions

05 Wednesday Jun 2013

Posted by in History of Emotions, lectures, seminars

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I happened across this lecture, ‘The Disappearance of Emotion? Violence, Affect, and the Post-Traumatic Subject’ to be given by Professor Ruth Leys at the University of Melbourne on Thursday 6 June 2013. It is free to the public and, indeed, more details can be found here. Briefly, Leys is examining the ‘latest twists’ in affect theory today. Her question is this:- Where Freud’s libido theory was central to twentieth century, will the twentyfirst be ‘the century of the “post-traumatic” subject, whose affective indifference and profound emotional disengagement from the world mark him or her as a victim of brain damage’?

Freud, his work and the development of psychoanalysis during the twentieth century, is under increasing and critical scrutiny by researchers in the Humanities and Cultural Studies field. The ARC Centre of Excellence in the History of Emotions, a conglomerate formed by the Universities of Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney and Western Australia focuses on the way people thought and felt in Europe from 1100 through to 1800 and from thence to the way these patterns found their expression and continued formation in Australia during the subsequent 200 years until the early twenty-first century. How psychoanalysis emerged both as a framework for interpretation of these phenomena AND as a method of investigation into the individual mind as well as the social/nation/group is certainly part, but not all of, the Centre’s focus. It is certainly one of the aims of this humble blog.

Past events include a lecture by Philosopher Prof Louis Charland  from the University of Ontario at the University of Western Australia on 26 June 2012. Cribbing from the Centre’s newsletter which is also here Professor Charland addressed ‘lack of passion in Western psychiatry’ and ‘the fundamental roles of psychiatry pioneers Theodule-Arman Ribot, Philippe Pinel, Sir Alexander Crichton and Jean-Etienne Esquirol in that belief of passion in the genesis and nature of mental illness’. Prof Charland argued that passion needs to be reinstated back into Western psychiatry by first looking at the past lessons of history. There is a link to the lecture itself in the newsletter.

What impresses me is the generativity of this Centre and the potential for interdisciplinary collaboration and development of thinking and theory. At the Australian History Association Conference last year a keynote session concerned research into people’s responses to disaster, namely the Australian bushfires. Investigation into adolescent disorders in the seventeenth century by Ursula Potter from the University of Sydney has also led to a partnership with the School of Psychology and research into Anorexia Nervosa at that University. And indeed historians and cultural theorists will be continuing to investigate the development of psychoanalysis and psychology and its practitioners during the twentieth century.

That said, as I peruse the material on the ARC links I wonder where the  people who have devloped a vast expertise in emotions and emotional expression, at least during the twentieth century and beyond, have gone. They seem to be underrepresented, if at all. Surely there is scope for developing conversation with, if not a critical examination of these arenas by the very professional groups concerned -whether within their particular frames of reference or indeed, in partnership with scholars from the Humanities streams. We will wait and see.

 

Dual Training: Professional and Personal Insights

01 Saturday Jun 2013

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Since this blog is about the intersection between psychoanalysis and history as well as the history of psychoanalysis in the region, Lowenberg’s contribution is a useful one.

KPG's avatarUC-NCP IPC

A classic essay on the value of “dual” psychoanalytic and academic training by the eminent psychohistorian Peter Loewenberg—one of UCIPCs founding members and Professor Emeritus of History at UCLA.

Check it out!  Read the Entire Article Here

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Psychoanalysis and Biography – On Matthew Flinders, Regency Gentleman, Mariner and Explorer

18 Monday Mar 2013

Posted by in Narrative and Memoir, Sidney J. Baker

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Sidney J Baker, My Own Destroyer, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1962.

Biography, like History and Psychoanalysis, is fraught with subjectivity. It is an interpretation;  a meeting with peoples past where everything,  the unconscious constraints and restraints that are part of thinking and being, differ form the present. All that remains are  letters, and photographs. Some, preserved by chance, a result of being shoved into a drawer and forgotten, may turn up decades later.  We do not know what was left out nor what was invented. Then there are myths and legends which have been passed down generations.  Small stories and events, insignificant when they occurred, come to be symbolic of nationhood. Heroes and anti-heros imbued with super-natural qualities are its totems. We make history to suit our present proclivities and understanding. But we challenge the gods at our peril.I think it is like that for the explorer Matthew Flinders. Australian kids learn about him in primary school.  He is described as a brilliant navigator, a scientist, hydrographer, leader and respected  ship’s captain. Kids learn that in 1798 together with his friend, the surgeon George Bass, Flinders established there was a strait between mainland Australia and the island state, Tasmania.

In his biography of Flinders, published in 1962, Sidney J Baker traces Flinders’s naval career after his return to England in 1793 and back to Australia in 1794 where he met George Bass and, together with him, began exploring and charting the New South Wales coastline in 1795. Between them they established that Tasmania was separated from the Australian mainland by a strait – effectively cutting sailing time for ships voyaging from England and Australia. In 1801 a year after again returning to England Flinders’ credentials were strong enough for him to be given the captaincy of the Investigator. He had recently married, causing serious run in with authority when he risked his command to smuggle his wife on board  just before he set sail. It was against Admiralty policy. Given the choice, Flinders decided to sail  his wife – a story recorded – perhaps oversensationally – in Australian author Ernestine Hill’s biographical novel, My Love Must Wait. WE do not know what part his wife had in this decision. In 1802 at the age of 28  Flinders circumnavigated the Australian coastline in his ship the Investigator.Part of Flinders’s success was that he had beaten French survey ships which were also exploring the Terra Australis region at this time. When he set out to return to England in 1803 his charts were ready for publication. His carefully constructed  maps and charts were brilliant. They were used well into the twentieth century. So great is his reputation that his imprisonment at Mauritius by the French from 1803 to 1809, delaying his return to England and his wife is difficult to explain.”A mere glitch” many biographers imply as they skate across this  chapter from  Flinders’s life. It was just unfortunate, they sigh. He was a victim of the   British-Franco war and an intractable French governor.

You have to be game to wonder whether this was really the case.  Sidney J Baker, thinks not. Perhaps this is why his 1962 biography of Flinders My Own Destroyer,mined for its facts rather than interpretation finds its way into later works and bibliographies but in itself has faded from public view. Sidney J Baker was a philologist and journalist. New Zealand born in 1912, Baker was well acquainted with the works of Freud, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer in his younger years. Popularly renowned during the 1940s for his collections of Australian and New Zealand vernacular  Baker’s interest was in the way language reflected cultural identity. For settler Australians whose migration story was but several generations long Baker showed how English had become Australianised, reflecting a developing identity based on common experience of the Australian environment. In the early 1950s he was a regular book review columnist for the Sydney Morning Herald, an editor of the International Journal of Sexology and author of a number of scholarly articles on the relationship between language and psychology published in professional journals.

Baker drew on psychoanalytic theories to seek the person behind the myth. It marks a radical step in the genre. Baker’s understanding of psychoanalytic theory led him to the view that  the perceptions and fantasies within one’s internal world  find expression in relationships with others.It enabled him to ask a pertinent question: why was it that Flinders, who was very successful, who had ‘out-Crusoed Crusoe’ in his conviction that the ordinary middle-class life was not for him died largely forgotten at the age of forty, ill and in penury? Let us follow Bakers’ interpretation.

When Flinders landed at Mauritius in 1803 he was famed for his achievements. He was regarded as ‘brilliant, solid and trustworthy’.  His name,  known to governors and seafarers, was so well known that the French Governor of Mauritius could not believe that such a personage would land on his remote shores in search of a port for urgent  repairs to his ship, the Cumberland. Even if it took some time to verify Flinders’s credentials, even if the French were reluctant to release their prize, this does not explain why his imprisonment lasted as long as it did.

There is grim fascination in watching a man pull down a mountain of distress upon his head. Especially if he acts as though anguish is a fulfilment and he secretly does not wish to avoid it, unless it is too late. Especially when it seems that his whole life has moved relentlessly to a single moment when there is no longer a way out and that is what he chooses.

You will see this happen to Matthew Flinders. And you will feel that it was something that Flinders could have evaded with ease if he had wanted to. He had the skill, the knowledge, the sagacity. He had almost everything in his favour except the ability to distinguish generosity from weakness, and because of this blindness his life was destroyed.

These patterns were established early in Flinders’s life, according to Baker.  Born in 1774 in Donington, Lincolnshire, England,  Flinders  was named after his father, Matthew Flinders, a busy surgeon, described by Baker as a small man who had followed his own father into medicine. Young Flinders was expected to follow his father but his childhood reading of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe directed otherwise. Like Robinson Crusoe, young Matthew Flinders clashed with his domineering father’s wishes. He aborred his father’s conservative, safe middle-classness and desire that his son follow him into medicine. Like Robinson Crusoe  Flinders gained ‘a competent knowledge of the mathematics, and the rules of navigation [and] learned how to keep an account of the ship’s course, take an observation’. At fifteen he secured himself an introduction to a ship’s Captain, Captain Pasley, who found him a place on the HMS Alert when Flinders was fifteen. In 1790 Pasley took him under his own charge on the Scipio and thereafter arranged his transfer to the Bellerophon.  In 1791 Flinders found another patron in Captain Bligh of Bounty fame. This voyage on HMS Providence, to the South Seas was for young Flinders,  to ‘Robinson Crusoeland’. Bligh’s forceful personality provided Matthews with a father substitute, Baker says. Bligh took Flinders under his wing,  providing his brilliant young protegé with opportunities to develop navigation and scientific observation skills.

And yet something went wrong. There is nothing in the records to suggest exactly what happened during his time with Bligh. In a letter written in 1806 while imprisoned at Mauritius Flinders refers to Bligh’s ‘prepossession against me…’ and so did not feel able to seek Bligh’s support for his release. At that time Bligh was governor of New South Wales, a post he held until January 1808.  A second letter dated 1807 refers to Bligh’s ‘regard for me with an unfavourable eye’ (Baker,1962:7).  Having antagonized his mentor, perhaps even evoked his envy, there was no return – at least in Flinders’s mind. Baker is not so sure. This seems to have been Flinders’s imagining, his fantasy. Flinders, he wrote,

had been drawn to Bligh by his commanding manner; now he felt anxiety because he had flouted it in some way. This was in essence identical with the factors that were to provide the almost intolerable burden of distress which clouded the last quarter of Flinders’s life. Knowing as we do the forthright clarity of Bligh’s opinions (even allowing plenty of leeway for his peppery disposition) we would hardly expect him to usurp credit due to Flinders for his explorations around the coast of Australia [as Flinders also suggested]. As Bligh’s biographers have pointed out he had many failings but jealousy was not one of them.

We cannot have a great deal of confidence in Flinders’s perception of Bligh’s ill will towards him. After Flinders finally returned to London Bligh took him to see the Duke of Clarence, later King William IV ‘presumably in an effort to aid him'(Baker, 1962:8).

Flinders had an uneasy, if not highly conflicted relationship with authority figures  – a legacy of his relationship with his father, Baker says. During this voyage home in what turned out to be an unseaworthy ship, HMS Cumberland – the flaw in his character revealed itself.  Again.

The flaw in Flinders’s character was a tendency to underestimate authority together with a rigidity of outlook that neither understood impulsive generosity nor deemed it worthy of personal pursuit. Some people who have authority exercise it with an arid inflexibility. Others are given to the luxury of warmth and second thoughts.

‘Tragedy begins by treading softly’.Baker recounts that after sailing from Port Jackson ( Sydney) to Timor one of the Cumberland’s pumps failed twenty three days out. Heading for the Cape of Good Hope Flinders realised that she would  not make it unless the Cumberland was repaired. The most likely place was Mauritius, then known as the Ile de France. Flinders, not realising that there was a war between England and France put in, moored his ship and arranged to pay his respects to the French Captain General of Mauritius, Charles Decaen 

Decaen, a minor official in Napoleon’s army, stationed in a rather out of the way place was  conscientious in his duty to the French Empire.He hardly expected one of the stature of Flinders to land on HIS shores. He kept Flinders waiting for two hours.  Flinders’s travelling documents were out of date naming the Investigator as his vessel – not the Cumberland.’  This man who called himself Matthew Flinders was an imposter, Decaen concluded. He was a spy and would not hear Flinders protestations to the contrary.

Flinders was arrested later that night, his papers confiscated and a guard placed in his room. Further questioning occurred… Decaen’s attitude, insulting of Flinders’s integrity and honesty continued. And yet, despite this, the Captain invited Flinders to dine, a gesture of impulsive generosity, Baker asserts but one which Flinders neither understood nor had a place in his character for. He interpreted it as a sign of weakness and as a man of honor refused the invitation. It was the beginning of his downfall.  He  rejected Decaen’s authority – as well as any possibility of finding common ground.  He demanded his case be handled by the French government. The result was that Flinders remained on Mauritius for three years longer than other prisoners in Decaen’s charge. He returned to England in 1809. He was ill – and did not recover. He died in 1814.

So what happened? Psychoanalytic theory comes into its own here. Baker believed that Flinders’s early difficulties with his father provide the blueprint for interpretation.The resentment Flinders felt towards Decaen was out of proportion to the reality, Baker argues. It invoked his relationship with his father, was vexed, fraught with ambiguity and guilt. Flinders was never able to defeat his father nor find his own place in relation to him. Decaen, like Bligh, and like Flinders’s father, was small in stature. Both were in authority over Flinders.  He could not find a way to negotiate. That was his downfall.

Psychoanalysis, Children In Care and Government Policy, Melbourne,Victoria, 1957

26 Saturday Jan 2013

Posted by in 1950s, Government policy

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In my wanderings around Melbourne’s libraries I  have stumbled upon a slim volume with a long title: Child Care Staffs in Institutions: Report on Survey Undertaken for the Children’s Welfare Advisory Council To Determine the Need for Courses of Training. It is softcovered and 111 pages in length, including eight appendices of proposed trainings for mothercraft nurses and the staff of occupation centres. A list of some fifty odd institutions covered in the report heads the field: a mixture of government and religious based institutions, many run by Roman Catholic orders. The report was commissioned by the newly formed Children’s Welfare Advisory Council on 18 September 1956. Established simultaneously with the implementation of the 1954 Children’s Welfare Act the Council was intended to form a link between government and voluntary child care institutions: a way of getting religious and secular institutions on to the same page, maybe. Up until then the two groups had operated separately. Some were happy enough with the new arrangement. Others clearly were not: perhaps the level of co operation from these organisations – particularly Catholic run organisations – were indicative of resistance to the new order. The report was completed in 1957.The powers be thought the public should read it too, so it was  released the following year.

This report is a remarkable historical document – signalling a response to post-war developments in Britain where psychoanalytic clinicians began to articulate the needs of neglected and abandoned children in the light of their experiences with evacuated children. Britain’s 1946 Curtis Report, Children Without Homes, ( ‘Report of the Care of Children Committee’)  written by former University of Western Australia lecturer and then member of Anna Freud’s group, Ruth Thomas.

There had been problems getting it incorporated into British policies, a matter taken up in the House of Lords by Lord Iddesleigh who explained:

Many children were suffering quite unnecessarily because the adults responsible for their upbringing in the various homes and institutions were untrained. There was a most serious lack of trained child workers, and the Curtis Committee therefore established a sub-committee to investigate the whole matter of training. This committee reported, and its report was adopted by the main Committee. There are three recommendations in the Interim Report which appear to have a particular urgency. In the first place, there is the recommendation for the appointment of a Central Training Council of qualified persons representing various bodies engaged in the field of child care. The function of that Central Training Council was to survey the whole field of training, and to establish such facilities as they considered needful. 

Lord Iddesleigh, was worried about a lack of response to the Committee’s findings and that the report and the children would be  forgotten.

Criticisms made by the Curtis Report are very painful, and the revelations are shocking. It it one of the most distressing features of the local authorities’ administration of Poor Law children that very often they are kept in workhouses not for six weeks which I believe is the legal period-but for months and months and months. I do not think that I should be doing my duty if I do not read to your Lordships one brief description of the conditions that prevail in these workhouses. One paragraph in the Report says: “The smell in this room was dreadful. A premature baby lay in an opposite ward alone. This ward was very large and cold. The healthy children were housed in the ground floor corrugated hutment which had been once the old union casual ward The dayroom was large and bare and empty of all toys. The children fed, played and used their pots in this room. They ate from cracked enamel plates, using the same mug for milk and soup. They slept in another corrugated hutment in old broken black iron cots some of which had their sides tied up with cord. The mattresses were fouled and stained. On inquiry there did not appear to be any available stocks of clothes to draw on and it was said by one of the assistant nurses that ‘everything was at the laundry and did not come back.’ The children wore ankle length calico or flannelette frocks and petticoats and had no knickers. Their clothes were not clean. Most of them had lost their shoes; those who possessed shoes had either taken them off to play with or were wearing them tied to their feet with dirty string. Their faces were clean; their bodies in some cases were unwashed and stained.”

This was one of the worst cases, Lord Iddesleigh acknowledged… but coupled with Britain’s history of providing barrack type accommodation for children, his description underlined the depth of the problem. Trained people, he reckoned -(he believed this to be work for women) – would do much to move the situation beyond  what it then was.

It is a very frightening thought, my Lords, the extent to which the happiness of deprived children is confined to not very competent little clerks and minor officials, who are often over-worked, who are not specialists in their subject, and whose horizon is bounded by very petty departmental considerations.(Lord Iddesleigh, 12 December 1946, Session 1946-47,House of Lords Hansard,George VI year 11,853,Fifth Series, Volume 144, cc.882-908).

A decade later, in Victoria, Australia,  David Merritt took up the main thrust of the report as he developed his research project. He argued that the  main danger of institutional life was ‘lack of interest in the child as an individual’, and the tendency to ‘remote and impersonal relations’. The children ‘continually feel the lack of affection’, he continued. It was ‘in striking and painful contrast to the behaviour of a normal child of the same age in his parents’ home’.

Merritt echoes earlier commentary on destitute and state children. In 1909, South Australian writer and activist, Catherine Helen Spence, had made similar observations during the first interstate congress of workers amongst State Children. Her work, in turn, drew upon the work of Florence Davenport Hill whose writings on children living in orphanages and workhouses eventually published in her 1889 book Children of the State  – influenced the direction of government policy in New South Wales and South Australia.  Challenging contemporary eugenicist views of poverty and illegitimacy, Spence argued that that the quality of environmental provision was far more influential for the development of children into contributing members of society than genetic inheritance. She asserted that children who were boarded out, rather than institutionalised, generally fared better than institutionalised children, in the long term, as a result of the bond formed with their foster parents.  At the same congress, a delegate from the New South Wales State Children Relief Board also warned of the detrimental effect of institutionalisation on the individual development of the child.

Recognition of the value of boarding out, and of sustaining the bond between parent and child as much as possible, found endorsement in John Bowlby’s Attachment theory. Perhaps its research base, for Bowlby had assembled his evidence, enabled observations such as Spence’s and anecdotes such as Davenport Hill’s, to be elevated into something more scientific. The effects of maternal deprivation were spelt out afresh. Quoting from Bowlby’s Child Care and the Growth of Love ( Penguin, 1953), Merritt recorded,

The direct studies are the most numerous. They make it plain that, when deprived of maternal care, the child’s development is almost always retarded – physically, intellectually, and socially – and that symptoms of physical and mental illness may appear. Such evidence is disquieting, but sceptics may question whether the check is permanent and whether the symptoms of illness may not be easily overcome. The retrospective and follow-up studies make it clear that such optimism is not always justified and that some children are gravely damaged for life. This is a sombre conclusion, which must now be regarded as established. (Bowlby, 1953, pp.19-20, quoted in Merritt, 1956, p.14).

There was an additional warning: that the effects of deprivation arising from separation in the early years conceivably led to the formation of psychopathy and delinquency. Bowlby’s work had had its origins in clinical work at the London Child Guidance clinic. He had exchanged ideas with D.W Winnicott. It was taking time, but the swing away from views of delinquency as a result of genetic inferiority, to acceptance of notions child development contingent on parental availability and consistency, continued to gain ground steadily during the first half of the twentieth century.

What was required of institutional staff, Merritt concluded, was possession of the ‘qualities and abilities necessary to encourage normal development of each of the children in their care’. Drawing from the Care of Children Committee  Merritt listed the essential features of out of home care: (Note: Forgive the use of the masculine pronoun –  convention in 1956)

(i) Affection and personal interest; understanding of defects; care for his future; respect for his personality and regard for his self esteem.

(ii) Stability; the feeling that he can expect to remain with those who will continue to care for him until he goes out into the world on his own feet.

(iii)Opportunity of making the best of his ability and aptitudes, whatever they may be, as such opportunity is made available to the child in the normal home.

(iv)A share in the common life of a small group of people in a homely environment.

It would be interesting to see the working documents and correspondence that were part of the formation of this report; to turn the pages of the files, to note what was typed copy, what was not; to see what was said in the margin notes and asides, to observe the stuff of a busy day in public service. Who were the clergy who refused to participate, who decided that Merritt’s questionnaires were irrelevant  to their work? And who were the child care staff that became frightened that his questions masked criticism. Can we have  a sense of their ages? their years of experience? and indeed, of those who were kind and who were not? These questions belong to deeper documentary research than I can do here. We can only explore, with Merritt, some of the conditions he found in the institutions he visited and form our own questions.

David Merritt visited seventy-one institutions, each on two occasions. He interviewed staff and provided them with questionaires. He observed  the daily life of children living within the institutions: voluntary and statutory childrens homes, migration homes, babies homes, voluntary and juvenile schools, babies homes and homes for special categories of children: intellectually disabled, deaf and children suffering from spasticity. Accommodation ranged from a training farm accommodating six boys, but with but three resident at the time, up to a statutory institution with a capacity for 250 but actually accommodating 260. The most common type of accommodation was the dormitory style -with mass dining rooms. The largest dormitory was one for 50 boys. Merritt provided statistics and graphs. Of 3,204 state children in 1956 the majority -1500 – were boarded out in Children’s Homes. Only 449 were boarded out in foster homes with 129 placed without payment in foster homes. About 107 children were living in ‘Juvenile schools – having come before the courts -104 were placed in special schools in conjunction with the ‘Mental Hygiene’ department, 304 were living with relatives and the rest variously in live-in employment, hospitals, or were livingin institutions while they were treated for psychological problems.Material provision was high – fresh rooms, plenty of toys but inconsistent care.It appeared that a high proportion of children were ‘educationally retarded’, Merritt said. It was not clear whether this was a consequence of parental neglect or institutionalisation or a result of the frustrations encountered at school.

Merritt seems to have seen himself to be  faced with the problem of reconciling a system which lacked a framework for understanding the emotional, attachment needs of children and adults, with emerging ideas about the  needs of children in out of home care. At times Merritt was critical of the staff – his progressive views conflicting with the old school practicality.’Some staff members saw no problem at all – children were either “dull” or “bright” and that was that. Others were inclined to attribute poor school results to such things as ‘difficulty concentrating, sheer laziness or bad heredity’. He commented” ‘It would be true to say that a number of persons I interviewed failed to show an awareness of the needs of children in this area’.

There was failure to recognise or understand emotional disturbance in children. Merritt’s frustration is palpable when he writes of one person in charge of 100 children or more who claimed there were no emotionally disturbed children amongst them. Closer analysis revealed children from broken homes, that about 50 were wards of the state, some were illegitimate and others ‘she regarded as mentally retarded’. He continued”

When asked about the children’s behaviour she described temper tantrums, bed wetting, stuttering, wilful destructiveness, sulkiness and pilfering amongst the types of behaviour she encountered. That none of these children were emotionally disturbed and consequently had a special need for affection and understanding appears highly unlikely to say the least.

While not all institutions and staff groups were lacking in such understanding there was room for more concern for the emotional and environmental provision for children in care, Merritt concluded after his visits. In many instances  ignorance of the nature and stature of children’s’ needs, inadequate numbers of staff contributed to the malaise – a fact  noted by the British Care of Children Committee. There was a need to modify the organisational structure of such institutions, to train staff, to work to bring the situation in Victoria up to those standards practised in other parts of the world.

Despite resistance by some staff to scrutiny and training there was acceptance and a desire for change. There had been agitation in the press – about institutional conditions and about the lack of training amongst their staff. There were perceptions of abuse, that child welfare practices were not right.  In september 1952 Melbourne’s Argus newspaper had reported extensively on two fourteen year old girls had been incarcerated in the large Bluestone building Pentridge Gaol – a place for the worst criminals and the location of many executions.  That the rival Sydney press gloated that such an event as gaoling young teenage girls would not occur in its state rubbed salt into the wound.

By 1954 a new Children’s Act had been passed by parliament. Merritt’s report, drawing on the understandings provided by psychoanalytic theories and clinicians, promised much – and, at least professional training for staff. It was the beginning of a revolution.

An Update The Freud Conference At The Melbourne Brain Centre – 18 May 2013

24 Thursday Jan 2013

Posted by in Conferences and Lectures

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In a previous post about Melbourne’s annual homage to Freud, The Freud Conference  I mentioned that it was usually held at a place called ‘The Treacy Centre’, Parkville, in the centre of Melbourne.

This year, however, the venue is different. It will be at The Melbourne Brain Centre, Kenneth Myer Building, 30 Royal Parade, Parkville.

The Freud Conference has its origins in the Politics department at the University of Melbourne where a group of young intellectuals found a mentor in Professor Alan Davies ( Foo) and began to explore the application and influence of psychoanalytic theories and ideas upon the broader cultural context. That the Freud Conference welcomes attendance by anyone who has an interest in ways psychoanalytic theory intersects with our sociopolitical world is borne from these roots.

Advance notice for this year’s conference to be held on 18 May 2013 with guest speakers: research psychoanalyst Dr Nancy Hollander  and Australian barrister and human rights advocate Dr Julian Burnside,  can be found here.

The Melbourne Brain Centre itself is worthy of further exploration. As the largest brain research institute in the southern hemisphere it provides an umbrella for a number of organisations including….

The Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health

The Melbourne Neuroscience Institute

The Melbourne Brain Centre at the Royal Melbourne Hospital

as well as The Dax Centre which follows the work of Cunningham Daz  through ‘fostering understanding of the mind. trauma and mental illness through art and creativity. It houses Dax’s collection of artwork made by people who have experienced mental illness and trauma.

And of course there is a cafe and a branch of a favourite Melbournian browsing place Readings Bookshop.

 

 

The Springthorpe Memorial – death and mourning in nineteenth century Melbourne

03 Thursday Jan 2013

Posted by in John Springthorpe, Medical circles, Melbourne, pioneers

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I am reblogging this post by Janine, a fellow historian, about the Springthorpe Memorial which is found in a Melbourne Suburb – Kew. Springthorpe as I noted in my comments, was a leading medical practitioner in the Melbourne mental health field from the 1880s and among the ‘psychoanalytic pioneers’ identified by historian Joy Damousi in her 2005 book, Freud in the Antipodes. As Janine says, the memorial tells us much about the Victorian way of death and mourning – so sentimental to our twentyfirst century eyes and ears but perhaps this derogation of past attitudes is a product of current fantasies of invincibility, where science rules and death so often sooshed away.

residentjudge's avatarThe Resident Judge of Port Phillip

On a beautiful 24-degree summer afternoon, where more perversely pleasant to visit than a cemetery?  So off we went to Boroondara Cemetery in High Street Kew, primarily to see the Springthorpe Memorial which I’d seen many times in photographs but never actually visited.

Boroondara Cemetery was established in 1858 as a garden cemetery and, with imagination, you can just sense the Victorian conceptions of death and mourning that underpinned its design.  The original plan, since abandoned, was for curved paths and winding roads, but it nevertheless maintains its rather forbidding red brick perimeter wall, caretaker’s lodge with slate roof and a clocktower, and rotunda.  Its most famous monument is the Springthorpe Memorial, completed in 1907 after ten years’ construction and described in 1933 in The Age as “one of the most beautiful and most costly in the commonwealth”.

It was erected by Dr. John Springthorpe to commemorate his wife…

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Writing Psychoanalysis in the Twentyfirst Century – Book Reviews

23 Sunday Dec 2012

Posted by in Reviews, the psychoanalytic process

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Paul Williams, The Fifth Principle, London, Karnac, 2010; Scum, London, Karnac, 2013.

What happens within the mind of a child not only rejected by both parents but also the object of their abuse and denigration? How does a child muster the necessary resources to survive, to hold a part of themselves intact enough to question the world his parents have created for him – or her? A clinician working with someone who has had such a desperate struggle with parents past, whose derision has become the voice of truth; the voice that says how could you even think or believe you are worthy/can do/ will do/ will create/will live….? must listen to – and feel – such battering.  This is part of that child’s normal, even as it seems unintelligible, even as we seek for that elusive sliver of sanity, or moments of anger that harbour hope – so quickly wiped out in a veneer where nonchalant cynicism rules. How easy it is for clinicians, and others, to become engulfed with this, paralysed, entangled with the other, capitulating to the seductions of a false self, the performer whose smiles cover darkness… where, truth be known, dying, actually dying,  promises something better than this liminal inferno… Apparently.

Paul William’s The Fifth Principle  and Scum  are the first two books of a trilogy, an account of such a struggle. The books  take as their subject aspects of the author’s life, Williams explains in his preface to The Fifth Principle. The first covers the years between birth and the age of eight years of age. The second addresses adolescence. The third will be about adulthood. Williams, the author, is also a psychoanalyst, a former editor of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, and now, the back cover of The Fifth Principle tells me, dividing his professional time between private practice and the National Health in the UK. How he reconciles his subject  – drawn from himself – with his current position – adult, clinician and, no doubt, survivor, is a significant undercurrent.

It is misleading to consider the book ‘autobiography’ Williams says. The author, ‘and the individual written about, are not the same person… It is a piece of literature that furnishes an account of the methods of the mind in its efforts to prevail in oppressive circumstances. The author has undertaken, on behalf of the subject, to provide a faithful, intelligible rendering of unintelligible events’.

Of whom do we write when we write autobiography – or history? One’s self narrative evolves over time, even as one might fashion a particular story or myth about one’s formation from pivotal remembered moments. Even so, as Elisabeth, another member of the blog world writes in a reflection on self narrative, and indeed about Williams’s works, our inner lives are far more complex – ineffable. Memory, such as it is, is but one source in the re-membering of one’s self – a moment by moment process of reading and re-reading the past as it is woven into one’s self representation.

Is the psychoanalytic situation a place where we tell ourselves our story in the presence of another? Or is ‘psychoanalysis’ a joint construction, the creation of a third position born of the respective subjectivities of the patient/self and analyst? Or, perhaps, as well as, is the psychoanalytic situation a place where myth, the story told about oneself from childhood onwards, the story learned at the parental knee, is broken down into something rather more essential where, as Winnicott shows, the self’s origins,  patterned from the earliest maternal-infant relationship onwards, are revealed afresh?

Right from the start Williams takes the reader into experiencing:

How do you know which of your memories is the first? Mine seem to fluctuate, so I am never quite sure which, if any, is the earliest. Sometimes I can recall looking up at clouds, transfixed and alarmed by the vast, random movements. At other times, I remember feeling cold and still. I think I am lying in a pram, staring at what must be the sun, at dusk, slipping out of a darkening sky. “Just wait. If you wait, you will be carried into the gold”, a comforting voice says.      At other times, I can feel detached, drifting silently in space with no awareness of my body, and with a mind that seems to have seized, perhaps out of fear, although I don’t feel this. I am numb.  “There is nothing to do, nowhere to go”, is the refrain. I can’t say if this memory was an event, whether it came later, or who, if anyone, said it or anything like it.(TFP:11)

Williams the writer is the adult voice explaining to the child that once was – he was- …the mother/analyst mediating, detoxifying, transforming internal experiencing…

The discovery and knowledge of your terror – that all you have striven for may lead to abandonment and death- can, surprisingly, bring consolation and relief. Your fear is that all you hold dear can, if ignored even for a moment, draw you into annihilation. Ignorance of the lasting influence of this fear is by far the greatest obstacle to freedom.Once unmasked as a fantasy of disaster designed to remind us of, not free us from, the past, contemplation of the disaster becomes possible.(TFP:14)

The experiencing of the child ‘subject’ is given words, then meaning. We see that the Boy Williams has a refuge, ‘The Woods’ where he feels safe and secure. It is a memory, maybe, of something good and holding, where he recaptures some sense of his infant experience -Winnicott’s maternal-infant reverie, perhaps. At home though the child is caught in the crossfire between mother and father. Of his Father he writes..

...anything I said, especially if it contained enthusiasm, was the meaningless boast of a puffed up exhibitionist, a conceited mummy’s boy full of hot air…I took this judgement to heart, but did not properly understand until much later in adulthood when it occurred to me that this was precisely his view of my mother’s behaviour…. His accusation of falseness towards things I said had a confusing undermining effect on the way I came to view myself and on the way I thought about thinking. I believed that whatever idea came into my mind it was defacto, bogus -without meaning.(TFP:22).

Williams is unflinching, describing his father’s ‘reasonableness’, his undermining of his wife, Williams’s mother and his attacks on his son. There were his mother’s rages, her ‘nuclear explosions’ which seemed to follow moments of peace and calm. At the centre there were two small children, himself and his surviving sister, unseen and known by both parents, with nowhere to hide – or run. He and his sister were pests,Williams writes. He felt, ultimately, responsible for his mother’s behaviour and deeply ashamed at being a failure as a son.  From this he developed his first principle: “Everything I said and did was wrong” and from this the second, third and fourth principles… measures  to overcome what appears impossible to overcome. (p.24). This was a child who, at the age of four, felt death could be better than this. Carried through life, beyond the parental relationship, these principles developed to counter overwhelming experiences of anger and privation, resulted in the emergence of a person whose capacity to relate to self and to others was deeply disrupted. By the age of eight the child had ‘made a permanent break from almost everything human’. ( TFP: 76) Williams writes:

No idiom for living develops, and the infant comes to rely upon imitation, abandoning its own personality in favor of a performance that may last a lifetime, polished and honed as circumstances dictate (TFP:74.

The process of losing yourself to self deception takes a long time. What starts  out as  a struggle to survive overwhelming events by hollowing out the mind in search of a bearable reality, culminates in a dread of truth and allegiance to subterfuge as the mind is filled with illusions and lies. (TFP:77)

One only knows this when the lens has been cleared and the necessity for a false self begins to be relinquished, providing room for the emergence of the Fifth Principle – ‘Fuck ’em’!

Williams writes the second book in the trilogy Scum not just with in the voice of the subject, but that of the subject’s mind in his Adolescence, from the age of about twelve to twenty. This is an adolescent ‘without a mind’, he says. “Thinking founders, language does not stick, emotion becomes an arch-enemy’. He asks, ‘How do you write about such things when language – words, talking, writing – has failed’? ( S: Preface). In his solution, a flow of consciousness, we, the readers, are taken into the form of experience… a young person holding on, barely able if at all able to link words with events and feelings. We are taken into – inside – the child’s mind, behind his eyes, feeling disconnected, bewildered with him. Fears of breakdown loom, we watch in horror as the the boy’s mind darts back and forth in terror even as there is some hope.

What Bollas describes as the ‘Oriental mind’ or Joyce’s portrayal of Stephen Daedalus in his Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man may guide our stance. It is the form of experience, not, as in the previous work, its narrative, that is being realised, even if there is another, voice, the writer’s voice, guiding its direction. It works. Listen:

Why these words? How did they know when to stop talking know what to say next? Silence desk lids open – how? All this day every day no hope of work exhausted by noon fending off  thousand orienting disorienting events once twice caught sight of why they were there a shaft of dust sunlight painted a stripe across the room everyone settled at desks ready to begin   he   a   part   of  them   convulsed ribsknifed pressed out stone still awake out cold stabbed dying flesh pounded dust dust to dust crushing machinery oblivious to the fact the job long since complete donkey work rampant parasite contraption evaded by dissolving melting if this fails become an alien. (S:14).

Somehow the Boy Williams is able to hold on. There is a ‘romance’ with a teacher, a moment of hope for something different and desparate uncomprehending disappointment when that teacher betrays him.  And there is the French teacher, a quiet unassuming man, who enables the Boy Williams  to allow a new language  to enter his mind. He somehow able to respond to the French teacher’s attempt to help him, accepting an offer  to go to France to teach English to schoolboys. Here he  begins to glimpse his selfhood. His goodness – and life.  It is this teacher’s gift, the ability to see into the real soul of another, that enables the Boy Williams recognition that there is another way of being. Life saving.

In both books Williams reaches into that space to touch and describe a young person’s fearful tethering with life – so fragile, even as he acts living.  It is the therapist’s lot to know /experience this inner world well enough, fearlessly enough, to meet it, to form the capacity to reach an other who appears unreachable, who masks themselves with performance. Theirs is a false self designed to protect from cataclysm.

And the clinician who writes these books? And readers? There is the matter of defensiveness as Elisabeth points out in her blog cited earlier in this piece. Why does it matter whether  these books and writings are autobiography; that a clinician says out loud for everyone to hear: I know about this through living it?  Or that a reader sees her own story? Or is it that Williams ‘recognises’, if that is the word, that autobiography is ultimately fiction – an account of self but also a creation? Or is it an amalgam of self and many others – others known as their world resonates with that of the writer? Internal reality is complicated. The past (self) has its own subjectivity that cannot be revisited as it was, only as it is remembered. Even so, memory – and the truth of it – is notoriously unreliable, fraught with subjectivity, ultimately unknowable.

These quandaries  face us all as we attempt to relate to and understand an other – whether through literature, clinical work, or in our encounter with the mystery of another person. In both these superbly written books, Williams provides much to mull over.

References:

DW Winnicott, Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment

Christopher Bollas, China on the Mind, 2012.

James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as A Young Man, http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4217

“The Mental Life of Infants” – Dr Susan Isaacs’s Australian Tour, 1937.

09 Sunday Dec 2012

Posted by in 1930s, Conferences and Lectures, educational theory, Infancy, Susan Isaacs, western australia

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British Psychoanalyst Susan Isaacs, an associate of Melanie Klein, was one of fourteen international speakers – and one of two women in the list – in the New Education Fellowship Conference which proceeded around Australia from July to September 1937. After a stint in New Zealand, the Congress, hosting about 50 delegates from 15 countries was one of the largest Australia had seen. At this time the Fellowship, founded by the other woman delegate –  French born, English Educationalist, Beatrice Ensor in 1914 – had 51 national groups, including Japan, and published 23 magazines in 15 languages. The New Education Fellowship rejected discipline and drill methods of education. Rather it utilised ideas from Theosophy, Jungian Psychology and Psychoanalysis to stress the need for educationists to develop methods resonant with children’s’ developmental needs. The first session was held in Brisbane in early August 1937 before delegates returned to Sydney to convene from 9 to 16 August. The Conference then continued in Canberra from 18 to 21 August – an interlude before moving onto Melbourne for another strenuous period. Then it was to move onto South Australia and then Perth where Professor Robert Cameron was organising the event. The Federal Government underwrote the conference to the tune of 1250 pounds.

Isaacs combined her official visit with the opportunity to visit her sister in Sydney. It is clear, through perusal of newspaper reports of the Congress that Isaacs’s lectures – given at each port – were well regarded, attended and reported in each of the states. What is of interest is the differences between the east, where clearly Isaacs was the guest of women’s  organisations such as the National Council of Women in Sydney and the West – Adelaide and Perth where the organising committee was largely drawn from the University of Western Australia as well as the Educational and Maternal and Child Health Sector.

Isaacs was welcomed in Canberra  where she was a guest of the British High Commissioner and his wife, Sir George and Lady Whiskard. Clearly there was a desire, if not hunger amongst these Canberra people to learn from her. Isaacs’s lecture on Child Psychology was well patronized: by senior members of Canberra society, by mothers whose children were cared for in a crèche especially organised for the day, and by maternal and infant nurses who closed their centres to attend. Her lecture, pitched at the general public, reached for the link between emotional world of children and behavioural expression. The reporter summarised:

Isaacs referred to the enormous field covered by child psychology and the many intricacies of the subject.. There are many schools of thought in” child psychology and she stressed the need for a ‘balanced view-point and the danger of adopting a method of child training that was partial and extreme’.  Confining her remarks to the method.of dealing with the child under six or seven years, Dr Isaacs said that difficulties encountered in children in the form of temper were quite natural. In America, two groups of children had been studied from birth up to six years of age. One group had been referred to a child clinic, and the other not, but in both instances the same tempers and fits of screaming had been manifested. The displays of temper are caused by the intensity of feeling in the child – his unrestrained love and hatred – and as the child grows the difficulties become less intense.

For Isaacs – and the other delegates – there were luncheons in Sydney, lectures in Adelaide and at least one interview, urging that educationists linking play and emotional development with education and learning, published in the Melbourne newspaper, The Argus.

In South Australia the advent of the Conference coincided with the announcement by the Council of Mental Hygiene to establish an Institute of Medical Psychology and Child Guidance in Adelaide. It was to be located near the Hospitals, the Children’s Court and the Education Department – and would employ psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers. Again, the popularity of Isaacs’s lectures was marked. She spoke to packed auditoriums, her message: ‘the importance of understanding the mentality of children during the first two years of their life. The essential needs of the child, she said, were love and a feeling of security’.

Remarkably as South Australian audiences noted, Isaacs issued a challenge to the theory that a child had no mental life before the age of about two years emphasising both the importance of motherly love for the understanding of the child mentality and the vital part those early two years played in later life. These lectures provide a glimpse into the state of infant research and infant observations in the pre-war years. We learn from reading press commentary, from noting off the cuff remarks and explanations about research into the mental life of infants prior to WW2 and Esther Bick’s development of Infant Observation Seminars at London’s Tavistock Clinic a decade later.  Announcing plans for her attendance at South Australian leg of the conference a the editor of the Adelaide Mail wrote, ‘One of Dr. Susan Isaacs’ strong con victions is that in order thoroughly to understand the child we must observe him under conditions in which adult interference is reduced to a minimum’.

At the Conference proper, Isaacs stressed infant subjectivity: ‘A baby fed in a “stiff institution manner’ with a bottle lost a rich emotional experience which affected its after development’. Research amongst delinquent girls was revealing a common experience of  lack of love and affection during the first two years of life. It was during this period she continued, that the maternal infant relationship was central to the child’s intellectual and emotional development.

The lecture was also summarised by a reporter for the West Australian a week later.

“Too often the mental life of the infant of a year, or even two.years, is left out.of the reckoning and we are only just beginning to realise the importance of the mental development during the first two years of life. Delinquency, mental ill ness and crime which is apparent in after life often had its beginnings in this stage of mental development,” Dr. Susan Isaacs said. The reporter continued:-

Briefly tracing the course of infants’ mental growth and explaining the difficult ties met with when trying to understand their reasoning, Dr. Isaacs stated that a baby learnt by its own spontaneous efforts which took the form of play starting as early as the second month. Baby should, therefore, be given ample opportunities for play. In the same way speech developed from the first playful sounds until the child began to distinguish familiar and oft-repeated sounds, which we called words. The emotional development of the child was the next consideration. During the first two or three months baby’s feelings were complex and were expressed by sounds. During the first two months any strong effects-bright lights, loud noises, etc.caused discomfort. but after this such things attracted attention until by the end of the first year the causes of pleasure outnumbered those of discomfort. Another interesting change, which occurred at about five months, was the cause of crying. Up to this time baby cried chiefly because of physical unhappiness, but after this age social pleasures and displeasures came into the picture and baby would cry, for instance, when mother left him alone, or because he wanted to sit up and could not manage it. A child’s smile was another signpost of its mental process, Dr. Isaacs continued. Up to the age of 20 weeks the average infant would smile at anyone while from that age until about 40 weeks old they would smile only at intimates, after which they seemed to grow more delicately discriminating and smiled at those they considered  deserved the honour.

There was more. The reporter continued: Dr. Isaacs traced the causes of feeding difficulties, which were often bound up with a child’s emotions and fear of its own early biting instincts. Parents should recognise the amount of learning a child had to do, and introduce new foods and new methods of feeding slowly. Dr. Isaacs did not advocate forcing a young child to eat what was dis tasteful to it, the difficulty usually being overcome by presenting it in a different form.

The challenge now is to discover whether and how these ideas were developed within Australian culture.  Perhaps not at all. And indeed it was not until someone from Europe, in the form of the first Training Analyst, Clara Geroe both arrived from Europe and stayed to develop her work that a space was created for the development of these very rich ideas within an Australian context. Isaacs’s visit occurred during a period in Australian history when England and Europe were regarded as Home;  where  scholars and professionals travelled for the education they would bring back to the Antipodes. The role of the visiting scholar is far more problematic: evoking idealization on the one hand and, may be envy on the other.

References:–

The Argus ( Melbourne) 3 September 1937.

Canberra Times: 12 August 1937; 20 August 1937; 25 August 1937.

West Australian: – 11 September 1937; 20 September 1937.

Advertiser ( Adelaide) 26 May 1937; 6 September 1937.

The Mail ( Adelaide) 3 July 1937.

Sydney Morning Herald, 12 August 1937.

The Archbishop and the Queensland Girl…1916

06 Thursday Dec 2012

Posted by in 1910s, Australian History, Douglas Price, Queensland, Religious History, Reviews

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It looks tedious at first. Part of the dry stuff that goes into academic journals detailing nuances of cultural development and debate. Not that I object as such: I research and write history in my spare time. But the fight, in 1911 over doctrine between the Rector of All Saints Church in Brisbane, Douglas Price, and the Anglican Archbishop of Queensland, St Clair George Alfred Donaldson that threatened to diminish, if not extinguish Donaldson’s mission and authority is the stuff of drama and tragedy.The entire event was reported across the nation. It was the subject of a number of letters to the editor as observers struggled with the nature of Canon Law, the divinity of Christ and persons. For Price’s contention, that the divine rests within us all refused the divinity of God in and of itself. The Archbishop did not agree and asked for Price’s resignation at his own convenience. On 10 January 1911 the Sydney Morning Herald reported that the Archdeacon had stepped in to force Price’s immediate resignation.

Price was followed by a number of his congregation who eventually invited him to head a new church – the modernists. He eventually died in 1916. His followers attempted to keep the flame alive through a series of memorial lectures held between 1920 and 1924. After that he faded into obscurity.

Price was a writer, too. He published his sermons along with several novels in which he attempted to explore the mind of his subjects. One of a Crowd: The Story of a Queensland Girl Drawn Mainly From Life, published, it seems, just before his death in 1916, explores the nature of vocation and mission. It is a highly sympathetic portrait of a young woman finding her way – within herself – in contrast with those expectations of women were frequently limited to marriage and motherhood.  He begins with Karen Petri, a child orphaned and institutionalised at the age of five. But before this point she had already learned a central lesson as Price vividly portrays in this argument between two small children. Here he is also granting consciousness to small children – a new thing in those days – as well as his intention to study the growth of a young woman’s mind through her emotional experiences. Nature has its own place in Price’s work; its place is akin to Sophocles Greek chorus, explaining moods, moving the story forward. We live in relation to nature within and without. This is Price’s first chapter – in full.

It was her birthday, and she was three years old. The full tide of the day had come, and Noon, weary but victorious, lay basking in the garden, while the sun yawned lazily over the world, sleepy with sunshine, dreaming its dream of creaseless, incredible blue.

On this first day of her memories Karen Petri sat in the garden, all among the yellow daisies which June had dipped so lavishly in liquid gold. A little lizard, lithe and cunning, looked at her cautiously as it sunned its sacred body in the light. But she paid no heed to the lizard, she had something more interesting to do. She was singing softly to herself, and making imaginary tea in an old cracked teapot filled to the brim with sulphur coloured sand.

On either side of the teapot there were groups of quaint Chinamen everlastingly engaged in the drinking of invisible tea. Time wrote no wrinkle on their brows, nor as yet had aught disturbed the even tenor of their enamelled plasticity. Nevertheless, the Finger of Fate caught even now at the threads of their blameless existence.

Within the teapot’s glossy depths there was something cabalistic, occult; it was a well of mystery, lit by flashes of rare colour and richness of shade, with a glassy polish smoother even than the child’s own skin. Doubtless some fairy dwelt within this burnished cavern, by whose enchantments silver water was transmuted into amber tea.

Karen loved her teapot better than any doll, and upon rare occasions when she could surreptitiously fill it with real water her delight knew no bounds.

‘Tea, tea, beautiful tea,’ she  sang; and the breeze, drunk with pollen, caught her words contemptuously and scattered them into the air. Presently a step – O eyes of me! – a stranger: a small boy in a sailor suit, with a pink pugnose and a face flecked with freckles. His mother was calling on hers, and had bid him ‘run away and play’. He ran.

The gilded flowers beckoned him mysteriously, the brown bees sang their sweet songs of toil, the white fire fell from the sun, overhead a bird was calling to its mate; but the boy cared for none of these things.

He had secured a stone to sling at a butterfly when, suddenly he saw Karen. Their eyes met, and fell, and met again. Both were dumb, and the Spirit of Shyness sheltered them for a time. The Curiosity entered the garden, and whispered slyly to the boy.

‘What you got?’ he demanded.

‘Teapot’, she replied.

‘Give ‘um me’.

‘No’

‘Give ‘um me, I tell you. I’m older than you, an’ if you don’t I’ll grab it’.

‘You shan’t! You mustn’t touch it! Mine!’ Greed and fear began to form in their minds like hail in the heavens ready to fall.

The boy made a swoop, and Karen fled with her treasure clasped tightly in her hands.

In and out among the bushes he chased her impetuously, till her foot caught on a stone and she fell to the ground, winning scars on her forehead which she would carry to the grave. The teapot was shivered into nine hundred and ninety-nine pieces; its destiny was fulfilled and the Chinamen at last broke up their age-long party.

Then blood, screams, tears, hurrying footsteps and general consternation – while flowers looked coyly at the bees and the leaves murmured lovingly to the breeze, and the sun shone benignantly amid the everlasting splendour of the sky, caring no more for Karen and her woes than for the fly in the tent of the spider, or the bird in the clutches of the hawk.

”Tis ever so’. Even our prettiest dolls are stuffed with sawdust. We cling to things that make us happy till someone stronger than ourselves snatches them from us, or causes us to shatter them to bits.

Thus did Karen first encounter Ahriman, all beneath the shining of the sun.

Karen is orphaned and institutionalised – subject to the whims of adults for whom she works as a servant before she enters a convent – for a time. Her musical ability – her singing and playing the piano sustain her as she leaves the religious life and moves to the city to work and music lessons. Price reveals the human underside of the religious life – Karen is no more a servant to the Mother Superior and her assistant than she was before. After an overseas voyage to London with them she is sent back to Australia, alone, although she befriends the author on this return journey.  Finally there is love and marriage and retreat to an idyllic Garden of Eden island in Northern Queensland. Still, Karen struggles…

She had made so many changes, had been uprooted so often before, that she felt confident of being able to adapt herself to the new conditions. Love had brought her an immense happiness, but would it really solve the secret of life? Already she was conscious there was a great part of herself which she could not give to the impetuous Basil, and that with some of her sympathies and thoughts he would probably have but little sympathy.

This troubled her a good deal, for in the books she had read, love was pictured as leading to a perfect understanding, and she wondered whether she herself were at fault. The sacrifice of a possible artistic career had seemed to her no light thing, but Basil had waved it aside almost unfeelingly. He appeared, man-like, to regard himself as her deliverer, whereas to her it was an offering she had made solely for his sake.

But what did these things matter in the presence of the great dream of love? Doubtless they were not very important; nevertheless they were present as a slight dischord, like the occasional whizzing of the wire on the G string, when some masterpiece is played on the violin. Fortunately this feeling was only audible to herself. Never for a moment did she contemplate speaking of it to Basil.

Karen’s inner vitality remains hidden, even as she and her husband, explore the physical bounds of their small island. It is a ‘conceit’, a device among many that occur in this book as Price develops his theme – the nature of the divine within – that a storm occurs…when Basil, along with a group of Aboriginal fisherman, disappear in a huge storm while out at sea. Karen is left entirely alone. The dead body of a wood-pigeon washes at her feet.

Then it was that she  remembered her loneliness upon the island. basil, perhaps might never come back. At first she felt stunned and incapable of realisation. She almost wanted to laugh. 

Karen passes through periods  of fear, desolation. She is terrified her mind will give way before reaching the solace of tears before reaching a realisation, and perhaps Price’s central thesis:

Were all her prayers and her tears emptied into bottomless space, and cast like dead lumber into the abyss? No. No. She knew better than that. Somewhere she had read that the true God is within the wise man’s heart. If that were so, she must try to be brave, for help was within herself, she must not give way to outrageous fears.

With a great effort of the will she tried to control her mind. ‘Come, come’, she said to herself, “I will not be a fool. I will be brave and practical and wise. Whatever happens, I can face it calmly, and just now I was acting like a silly child’.

Almost immediately she became conscious of her strength, and though she still had to hold back her fears as with an almost physical force, she slowly gained the mastery over herself, and by sheer commonsense beat back the thickest battalions of dismay.

The power to help ourselves is ever within, That night she discovered her strength, Robbed of every other consolation, she found the spirit of true divinity in herself. It was then, in a sense, that she came of age; and she knew she could never again feel so helpless as hitherto. It is only in the soul that great things happen, and some of us have to be dipped in the deepest pits of calamity before we discover the fortitude of our real and innermost self. After that discovery we are never quite so feeble again.

Perhaps from the little we know of Price’s story this is autobiographical. Perhaps it is a sermon, veiled as a novel, designed for posterity, outside the censorship of the good bishop. Something beautiful shattered.