Silencing of politics
Picture a theatre performance about words at risk, in a space once occupied by hidden women, during a time of heightened historical, political and cultural conflict.
I’ve been thinking about the politics of silence and the silencing of politics, but what does it mean? To borrow the words and the method of Joan Didion: ‘I write … to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.’
St Martin’s Youth Arts Centre recently staged an original play called, The Word which had the byline: Who is in control? The promo instantly drew me in.[1] There were promises of ‘abandoned archive’, ‘fragments from the past’, ‘scattered pieces of truth and memory’. Furthermore, the performance was set in a space of the former Magdalen Asylum at Abbotsford Convent, the very place that housed my grandfather’s aunt when she sought refuge, effectively shutting herself off from the world, for reasons lost to history.
By stepping through the gates of the high walled Catholic institution, my grandfather’s aunt, Mary Ann McLellan (nee Meagher), a thirty-three-year-old woman, newly married of only three weeks, sought to live within the confines of the Good Shepherds Convent as a penitent asylum seeker in 1894. She stayed until her death in 1914. My grandfather, Jack, first learnt of his aunt’s existence in 1985, when he was nearly eighty years old, through my parent’s family history research. An enduring, unanswered question remains, was the silence surrounding his aunt deliberate or accidental? You can read more about her story here.
When Weinberg became Wattle and Catholics need not apply
Jack, was born in 1905 in a large Catholic family as the youngest of eight with sixteen years between him and his eldest brother. He was nine years old when World War One was declared in 1914, ten years old when his eldest brother enlisted in the War and eleven years old when the Hawthorn Council adopted a motion to rename his street, Weinberg, to remove the ‘alien origins’[2].
Jack’s eldest brother, Leo Carden Meagher, was posted in the 6th Field Artillery Brigade in the second division artillery in 1916. Leo sent a postcard of the French town, Amiens to young Jack, addressed to ‘Ikerrin’ Weinberg Road, Hawthorn. In a telltale sign of War, the postcard was annotated, “Censored”.
Postcard, Amiens – La Rue de Noyon, France, addressed to Master Jack Meagher, c.1916
Weinberg, a German and Jewish-Ashkenazi surname meaning vineyard, was wiped off Melbourne’s metropolitan map and changed to Wattle, erasing the early presence of a German settlement that had developed in the 1850s on the block between Power Street and Glenferrie Road (Crown Allotments 45 and 46). German settlers planted vineyards on the ‘charming and wooded heights of Hawthorne’[3] close to a ‘network of streams that once wound its way through the Hawthorn area…provid[ing] both water and locations for campsites’ for Aboriginals of the Woi Wurrung language group on Wurundjeri Country.[4]
Reminiscences in the newspapers about the history of the German settlement, suggested a private laneway stretched between Glenferrie Road and Power Street and locally became known as German Lane after a long funeral procession was allowed to pass through, before being officially gazetted and named Weinberg Road.[5].In 1858, James Bonwick waxed lyrical in his description of Boroondara, describing a woman working in a vineyard on the land in the vicinity of Weinberg Road,
Why, it is the good old man’s Frau, anxious to do her part in the garden by which they make their bread. Did she not do the same for him some thirty years ago in the German Fatherland? While plucking her grapes at Hawthorne, do her thoughts never travel Rhineward? Does the heart, which never grows old, still love to dwell upon the courting days among the vines and linden trees of the Land of Song?[6]
However, sentiments shifted in wartime and one report under a headline of ‘Enemy Names in Melbourne’ noted ‘various ways have been adopted in Victoria to show, if not what can be called patriotism, at least a desire to get rid of any suggestion of German influence.’[7] At the time, a lone councillor on the Hawthorn City Council, argued there were ’better ways of fighting Germany than changing street names’.[8]
‘Othering’ from a Catholic perspective
Julianne Schultz, in her book The Idea of Australia: A search for the soul of the nation, captures the intergenerational impacts of casting a nation as an alien. ‘The pattern was repeated 21 years later when Germany again launched another even more catastrophic war, and another generation became enemy aliens in Australia, their names anglicised, and those under suspicion interned alongside those of Italian and Japanese heritage.’[9] She went on to say ‘if there was an ‘other’ in those still bitterly sectarian days, they were Catholic, people who also had their own schools and tribal alliances.’[10]
In the press, the Catholic and Irish were openly discriminated against and derided. Esteemed professor in Catholic and Irish history, Patrick O’Farrell, noted an example from the Sydney Morning Herald in 1883, ‘Irish Australian it cannot be, because an Irish Australian is a creature of whom we cannot possibly conceive. He is or he is not one of us…’, O’Farrell explained,
‘To the Herald, “us” means Australians of English origins, of fervent Empire loyalty – and Protestant religion. Such attitudes, powerful and widespread (which became particularly strident and hysterical during the First World War) amounted to the demand that the Irish reject their consciousness of distinctive national origins and their differing religion or, in other words, abandon their identity.’ [11]
Politically, Catholics were advocating against exclusion from public life,[12] and whilst the diocese was setting up parishes, building churches and schools, the laity were establishing organisations that catered to community needs whether it be intellectual, social, educational or benevolent institutions.[13]
Magdalen Asylum, Abbotsford c.1880? (H4461)
In my parents and parents-in-law’s generation, family stories passed on or derived from their family conversations, knowledge and or experience, spoke often of job advertisements with disclaimers ‘No Catholics need apply’, or knowing the organisations who employed Catholics, such as McEwans. The explicit exclusion of employing Catholics or Irish people is easily verified in digital archives and history books. Brenda Niall wrote in her biography on Archbishop Daniel Mannix, ‘Job-hunting in the desperate Depression years showed many Catholics that it was best to keep quiet about their religious affiliation and to hope that their Irish surnames wouldn’t count against them.’[14]
Politics of Silence
Silence may have been the only way for some to bring in an income to support their families. For others, public protest or declarations against War was a matter of conscience and a necessary stand against the status quo to make a difference, no matter how inconsequential. Jack’s second eldest brother, Lux, who had initially considered heading to Europe in the very early stages of World War One, but was possibly dissuaded by his father to stay. Lux demonstrated his views publicly, as this newspaper report on Conscientious objectors in Hawthorn in The Age on Tuesday 24 October 1916, attests:
J. L. Meagher, who described himself as a journalist, stated that his objection to bearing arms was not a matter of conscience, but of principle. He objected wholly to taking human life except as a measure of justifiable defence in the last resource. To show that his convictions were not put forward as a mere excuse to avoid enlistment, he stated that he had studied for ten weeks to fit himself for service in the Army Medical Corps, where he could be employed in saving life, and not taking it.’[15]
The exemption was refused, with presiding magistrate, Mr W. Dickson PM saying, ‘there was little doubt that applicant would be found work in a non-combatant capacity.’[16]
Targeted persecution also played a part in the silencing of politics and the politics of silence. Brenda Niall turned her expertise in biographies to writing her family history through the story of her maternal grandmother. Both her maternal and paternal uncles along with her father attended Xavier College and at least two uncles and her father entered the medical profession, one of whom, John Niall, was in the same year at Newman College as Jack’s brother, Lux Meagher.
The general attitude at Xavier College, she described, was to promote the war as a noble service to king and empire.[17] This was consistent with the fervour gripping Australia at the time, and a shortage of doctors prompted Melbourne University to stipulate that medical students, ‘once enrolled…were not allowed to change their minds and join the armed forces.’[18] One of Niall’s uncles, Pat Gorman, just prior to leaving Xavier to commence medicine, was ‘accosted in the street by a young woman who gave him a white feather.’ A silent gesture that needs no words, but is fully understood within a deeply polarised political environment, as a deliberate insult intended to mark a person as a coward for not going to the war.
The white feather: a symbol a representing cowardice or conscientious pacifism and used as propaganda.
Silencing of politics
There is nothing that is not political. Everything is politics. – Thomas Mann, The Magical Mountain, translated from German in 1927.[19]
Leo, Jack’s brother, introduced his daughter, Patricia Meagher to Felix Venn Brown, the son of a friend he had served with in the 6th Field Artillery Brigade. Patricia married Felix in 1946 and moved to Sydney. Felix’s sister, Janet Venn Brown, spent more than 46 years living and working in Italy as an artist. Prior to moving to Italy, Janet worked at Ure Smith publishers*, so was well versed in the power of the written word..
Whilst living and working in Rome, Janet turned to the power of words to maintain the legacy of her Palestinian partner, Wael Zuaiter.
Janet Venn Brown, Room in Nablus II, 1985.
On the evening of 16 October 1972 in retribution for the 1972 Munich massacre, Wael Zuaiter, was assassinated. He was 38, a leading intellectual in Rome, translator, writer, lover of classical music, and a tireless advocate for his homeland, Palestine. He was highly respected amongst his friends and acquaintances and betrothed to Janet after a seven-year relationship.
Numerous testimonies assert Zuaiter’s innocence, as too his personal views against all forms of violence. Journalist Aaron J. Klein, who had extensive access to Mossad and Israeli intelligence officers during the research for his book ‘Striking Back: The 1972 Munich Olympics massacre and Israel’s deadly response’, concluded the assassination of Zuaiter was a mistake.[20] Regardless of whether this extrajudicial assassination is retrospectively considered a mistake, death is the ultimate form of silence.
Janet, determined to maintain Zuiater’s legacy and memory, not only used her art, painting landscapes and interiors in Palestine, Yemen, Syria, Iraq and Egypt, but resumed her vital skills in publishing to edit and publish a book, ‘For a Palestinian: a memorial to Wael Zuaiter’, in 1984. In her editor’s note, Janet wrote, ‘Most of the martyrs of this world, throughout history and in our own times, remain unknown or, at best, are soon forgotten.’[21]
The State Library of Victoria’s copy of Janet’s book is virtually untouched. The spine is smooth and without any indentations or wrinkles. I asked a librarian how many times this book, now forty years old, had been retrieved from the library’s stacks. The library’s current record system, which is unlikely to be accurate given data migration over the years, shows just two loans, one of which was mine. [22]
For a Palestinian: A Memorial to Wael Zuaiter edited by Janet Venn-Brown
Looking at the instances of silence and politics in my family history buried in the archives, untouched, uninterrogated, and unremembered shows layers upon layers of politics of silence, and the silencing of politics. However, despite un-retrieved books, and ‘fragments from the past’, the archives have not been abandoned, and can tell us about the ‘scattered pieces of truth and memory’ that have been left behind for us to make sense of the world we live in.
As the actors performed in the old laundry space at the Abbotsford Convent, I felt the weight of time: the before, now and after. Perhaps the young actors had the answer all along when they called out, “the word is a vessel” and “you’ll see, when all is fought, it’s the ink that seeps in”.
*Janet Venn Brown was responsible for spotting a manuscript that went on to become an Australian classic, which features in this post, Suburban Dreams and local lingo.
Endnotes
[1] St Martins Youth Art Centre, ‘The Word: Who is in Control?’ Program brochure, 2024.
[2] ‘News in Brief- Victoria – Metropolitan’ in Weekly Times, Sat 20 May 1916, p.24. https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/129480509
[3] James Bonwick, A Sketch of Boroondara, J.J Blundell & Co., Melbourne 1858, p.5 https://viewer.slv.vic.gov.au/?entity=IE4744263
[4] Gary Presland, The Place for a Village: how nature has shaped the city of Melbourne, Museum Victoria, Melbourne,2009, p.205.
[5] From “Weinberg” to “Wattle” in The Graphic of Australia, Friday 19 Jan 1917, p. 2. https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/153078944
[6] James Bonwick, op cit., p.7
[7] ‘Enemy Names in Melbourne’ in The Herald, Thursday 3 February 1916, p.8. https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/242336264
[8] Victoria Peel, Deborah Zion, Jane Yule, A History of Hawthorn, MUP & City of Hawthorn, 1993. P.163.
[9] Julianne Schultz, The Idea of Australia: A search for the soul of the nation, Allan & Unwin, NSW, p.40.
[10] Schultz, op.cit., p.40.
[11] Patrick O’Farrell, ‘The Irish and Australian History’ in Quadrant 22(137): p.27, 1978.
[12] Patrick Morgan, Melbourne before Mannix: Catholics in Public Life 1880-1920, Conor Court Publishing, 2012, p.128.
[13] Morgan, ibid., pp.1-6.
[14] Brenda Niall, Mannix, Text Publishing Melbourne, 2015, p.288
[15] ‘Conscientious Objectors in Hawthorn’ in The Age, Tuesday 24 October 1916, p.6. https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/155068119
[16] Ibid.
[17] Brenda Niall, Can you Hear the Sea? My Grandmother’s Story, Text Publishing, Melbourne, p.163.
[18] Niall, ibid., p.187
[19] Thomas Mann and H.T. Low-Porter, The Magic Mountain, 1927, p. 515 https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.2424
[20] Peter Manning, Janet Venn-Brown: life in art, NewSouth Publishing , NSW, pp.145-146.
[21] Janet Venn-Brown, For a Palestinian: a memorial to Wael Zuaiter, London; Kegan Paul International, 1984 p.ix
[22] State Library Victoria, verbal advice 28/9/2024
