CHAPTER SEVEN - Research UNE

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                                                      CHAPTER SEVEN

            SHAPING NEW WORLDS WITH OLD IMAGES

     When John Richardson bought John Moore's store and flour
mill and moved to Armidale in 1872, he brought with him his wife,
twenty years younger than he, and a young family consisting of
seven surviving children. His eldest son, Robert, was 22 years of
age. Although other sons would choose to join their father in his
retailing business, Robert turned to writing children's books, most
of which were published in London and Edinburgh where he lived
through the 1880s and early 1890s. His career was blighted by a
lack of talent. Nonetheless an independent income kept that harsh
reality at bay. But he was not so lacking in ability that he failed to
see his own limitations. By the time he wrote Ad Musam, a poem
which served as his obituary in the Bulletin, he was resigned to his
critics' opinions and addressed the Greek muse of poetry somewhat
bitterly:

    Yet others get the gift and win thy love;
    They get the gift while I but stand and wait;
    They enter calmly through the enchanted gate
    That leads unto the mystic Dellian hill . .
    And I but linger in the valleys chill,
    With timid groping feet, and as I pass
    Gather some withering leaves of wayside grass,
    And hear through the hushed twilight faintly falling
    The voices of my happier brothers calling,
    And watch afar with aching, dazzled eyes,
    Clear peaks that climb into the lucent skies
    By shining paths my feet will ne'er surprise.'

Robert Richardson died of gastric catarrh in Armidale in 1901 aged
fifty. He was unmarried.

     Richardson set his stories in the Australian bush, which he
described in English terms for his English readers — too full of
wildflowers, rills and rivulets to ring true, a benign wilderness
where children got lost. The bush was a counterpoise to the city.
Man made the city but God made the bush. The bush was moral,
the city slightly damned. There was always the hint of the
bushman ethos in Richardson's writing.

1    'Robert Richardson', Bulletin, 19 October, 1901, the Red Page.
184
    Richardson wrote with moral intent.           His characters were
always worthy, in gender specific, class specific, and racially
specific ways. Boys played practical jokes, contrived adventures
with ghosts and treasures, and, when older and beyond the age of
crying, always went into the bush armed. They encountered exotic
animals, marvelled at them, described them, gave thought to God's
creation, then killed them. 2 Girls were often ill, which is what
brought them to the bush in the first place — for the air. When
confronted with the need to be heroic girls became selflessly
devoted, risking their own well-being to protect younger brothers
and sisters. They always took much longer to recover from their
ordeals, going down the path of pitiful wasting before turning the
corner towards robust good health. 3 Lost children ultimately owed
their lives to the bush skills of gentle, 'civilised' Aboriginal
blacktrackers like Black Harry and Tommy Sundown. 4 Even
bushrangers were prone, at times, to outbursts of decency.5
Everyone was basically good and did what goodness expected of
him or her. Respectability ran amuck through Richardson's novels.

    Robert Richardson carried messages from one generation to
another. He showed his young readers what life ought to be like.
His novels encouraged girls to develop roots and boys to develop
wings. He showed both boys and girls that the Empire was good;
that civilisation was good; that a simple life in a simple setting was
good; and that good boys and good girls grew up to be good men
and women. He shaped ideals that were transportable across time
and space, the ideals of a generation in love with righteousness.

    The medium for Richardson's message was children's literature,
but on his death certificate, his occupation was recorded as
journalist. In a sense that Richardson appreciated, the author and
the journalist were interchangeable. 6 Both dealt in moral messages.

2 Robert Richardson, The Hut in the Bush: A tale of Australian adventure,
  Edinburgh, Oliphant, Anderson & Ferrier, 1883.
3 Robert Richardson, A Little Australian Girl; or, The Babes in the Bush,
  Edinburgh, Oliphant Anderson & Ferrier, n.d.
4 Loc. cit., and Robert Richardson, Black Harry; or, Lost in the Bush,
  Edinburgh, Oliphant Anderson & Ferrier, c. 1894.
5 Robert Richardson, 'Interview with a Bushranger' in Mrs A Patchett
  Martin (ed.), Under the Gum Tree:Australian "bush" stories, London,
  Tischler & Co., 1890, pp.183-196.
6 Robert Richardson, 'The Literary life', in Cosmos: An Illustrated
  Australian Magazine, 19 February, 1897, pp.290-291.
185
So too, of course, did the churches, the schools and the law courts.
Education, religion, the press, popular literature and the law were
the main purveyors of Victorian ideologies.?

     In the power imbalances of colonial society, ideologies were
important. They were effective in legitimising the structures of
power and the strategies of the powerful. At the same time, they
provided those who needed to resist with a god and arbiter to
whom they could appeal. Ideologies spoke of class and race, gender
and marital status. They provided an embellished overlay for basic
human interactions. Ideologies were also at the core of personal
identity which has always been defined in terms of difference — of
some sort of superiority. Ideologies provided a surplus of meaning
to categories such as worker, wife, woman and whore. However,
any analysis of ideologies is problematic.

     In the first place, ideologies did not coincide clearly with power
structures. There was not, in colonial Armidale, an ideology for
power and another ideology that ran counter to it. It would be
wrong to assume that there were fixed interests on the one hand
and definite discourses representing them on the other. 8 In fact,
certain ideologies were employed by people with quite
contradictory interests. From diaries, letters, newspapers and court
transcripts it is clear that both men and women resorted to the
discourse of respectability within the context of gender struggle.
Men tried to assert their dominance, and women tried to control
men through reference to notions of respectability.

7 Many writers seem to use 'ideology' and 'discourse' almost
  interchangeably. See, for instance, Scott Lash, 'Coercion as Ideology:
  The German case', in Nicholas Abercrombie, Stephen Hill and Bryan S.
  Turner (eds), Dominant Ideologies, London, Unwin, Hyman, 1990, p.93.
  and Nicholas Abercrombie, Stephen Hill and Bryan S, Turner, T he
  Penguin Dictionary of Sociology, (second edition), London, Penguin,
  1984, pp.118-119. However, Foucault himself, as well as some of his post-
  structuralist followers, sought to keep the terms quite separate because
  they had quite different agendas to those who wrote in the 'dominant
  ideology' debate. See M. Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected interviews
  and other writings 1972-1977 (C. Gordon ed.), Brighton, Harvester Press,
  1980. Nonetheless my preferred term is 'ideology' not in the sense of a
  carefully constructed system of rigid political and economic beliefs but
  an interlocking set of precepts and conditioned responses by which
  people bond together and exclude others in their daily interactions.
8 Stewart R. Clegg, Frameworks of Power, London, 1989, p.154.
18
     Furthermore there was no clear dominant ideology where
ruling ideas could be easily associated with ruling classes. Nor was
it easy to accept a concept of hegemony with the powerful
explanatory potential which Connell and Irving sought to realise.9
Such concepts leave little room for explaining change in social
relationships over time. Such concepts also overemphasise the
deliberate intent of the middle class and fail to recognise the
uneasy impact of dominant ideologies on the supposed dominant
class itself.

     That much said, there is no need to go to the opposite extreme
of seeing ideologies as masses of floating discourses spontaneously
combining and re-combining without reference to material
constraints or structures of class, gender or race. 10 People were
engaged in struggle. They formulated their interests according to
those ideologies most readily acceptable to their condition in life.
They bonded with people similarly positioned and excluded others.
Many propertyless male workers valued displays of physical
prowess and bush know-how and despised the new chum, the
milksop, the city swell and the bookish pedant. In an entirely
different lifestyle, Caroline Thomas drew strength from quasi-
Christian respectability, admired skills in music and home
decoration, and appreciated sensible conversation tinged with
affability. She set herself against rough manners and moral
turpitude and only tolerated those of her circle, like Dr West and
the Marshes of Salisbury Court, whose conversation she found
frequently 'stupid'.   Clearly ideologies were related to those social
structures around which people built their lifestyles. Power
imbalances and material inequalities were important contributing
factors and it is quite easy to see their relationship to ideologies. To
this extent it is possible to speak of predominant ideologies 11 while
avoiding the more rigidly structuralist concept of a dominant
ideology.

9    R.W. Connell, and T.H. Irving, Class Structure in Australian History,
    Melbourne, 1980, pp.22-24.
10 S. Hall, 'The Problem of Ideology: Marx without guarantees', in B.
    Matthews (ed.), Marx: A hundred years on, London, Lawrence and
    Wishart, 1983, p.79 quoted in Clegg, op. cit., p .180 .
11 The word 'dominant' suggests an overwhelming advantage based on
    power. It is synonymous with 'ruling'. 'Predominant' however, suggests
    a narrower advantage over other contenders, It suggests a recent
    ascendancy and recognises the existence of close challengers.
187
     The rise and fall and the metamorphoses, of predominant
ideologies were evident in colonial New England and can be related
in part to demographic changes. If there was a noticeable gender
imbalance in central New England throughout the late nineteenth
century, then that imbalance was slight when compared to the
gender profiles of the European population in the 1840s and 1850s.
In 1846 there were 622 adult men for every 100 adult women in
the New England Pastoral District and by 1851 the imbalance was
still extraordinarily high with 354 men to every 100 women. The
convict proportion of that population was significant, with convicts
making up 42 per cent of the population of New England in 1841
and 13 per cent of the population in 1846, six years after the
official end of transportation. Almost half of the 1846 population
were ex-convicts freed by servitude. 1 2

     Thirty five years ago, Russel Ward described the emergence of
a special ideology from this unusual population mix. He examined
the demographic profile from every angle, emphasising convict
origins, Irish infusions, the native born chrysalis and the
transmutation of these elements into something new in the
remoteness of the pastoral outback. He explained the power of a
new ethos by pointing to the peculiar levelling effect of the
Australian condition where social fluidity and the pervasiveness of
the convict system routed the old world order of deference and
obeisance, of ranks and degrees. In the tradition of nationalist
history he revealed the Australian Legend and explained its genetic
make-up claiming, in a sense, to have discovered the basic DNA of
Australian culture. 13 He emphasised what was essentially new as it
emerged from Australian ballads and poetry and played down the
fact that this 'new music' contained many old songs.

     In emphasising the convicts, the celts, the currency lads and
the bushmen Ward failed to see the full importance of the gender
imbalance that was such an obvious characteristic of colonial
populations. Certainly, he recognised that there was a shortage of

12 Abstract of the Returns of Population . . . of New England, New South
     Wales Census of the Year 1841, Archives Office of New South Wales, X947;
     Census of the Population of New South Wales, Supplement to NSWGG, No.
     92, 3 November, 1846, pp.1327-1379; and Census, Supplement to NSWGG,
     No. 128, 7 November, 1851, p.11.
13   Russel Ward, The Australian Legend, (illustrated ed.), Melbourne, 1978,
     pp.66, 136.
188
women particularly on the pastoral frontiers and claimed that this
led to an increase in bush drunkenness and to a greater intensity of
mateship bonding, occasionally mutating into sodomy in the
backwoods bush huts. 14 But he did not see that his bush ethos, his
nomad tribe, his Australian Legend was essentially a masculinist
construct. He saw men being convicts, men being Irish and men
being bushmen, or gold miners or Anzacs. But he did not see men
being men. In searching for the unique, he did not see the typical.
Men were constructing masculinities and given a peculiar
combination of time and place, the result in nineteenth century
Australia was bound to be different. But the difference was no
more than a variation on a theme. Not surprisingly, writers have
found many of the supposed traits of the typical Australian evident
amongst progenitor groups such as the wandering poor of the
streets of London. But the tendency amongst Ward's critics, has
been to describe class traits not gender traits and certainly not
masculinist traits.15

     Ideologies of masculinity have come only recently onto the
agenda for historical investigation. Early accounts have focussed on
the 1890s and the dichotomous struggles between the bushman
hero and the emasculated bread-winning domestic man, the
symbols of more abstract masculinist and feminist political
discourses . 16 Such dichotomies were soon under attack for
oversimplifying the issues, debates and diverse arguments of the
nineties . 17 Granted that there was diversity and that men
throughout the nineteenth century expressed their masculinity in
different and changing ways, it should be realised also that
masculinist constructs were built upon the same basic foundations.
As was shown in Chapter Six, the Victorian era, before the passing
of the Married Women's Property Act of 1893, represented the
apogee of the economic domination of women by men.                         All
ideologies of masculinity must be seen as emerging from this

14  Ibid., pp.124-130.
15 M.B. and C.B. Schedvin, 'The Nomadic Tribes of Urban Britain: A prelude
    to Botany Bay', in John Carroll (ed.), Intruders in the Bush, Oxford, 1982,
    pp.82-108.
16 Marilyn Lake, 'The Politics of Respectability: Identifying the
    masculinist context', in Susan Magarey, Sue Rowley and Susan Sheridan,
    Debutante Nation, St Leonards, 1993, pp.1-15.
17  John Docker, 'The feminist Legend: A new historicism?' in Susan
    Magarey et al., op. cit., pp.16-26.
189
economic, political, legal and customary domination. This was a fact
about the Victorian social world that had profound consequences
for the character of men.18

    The construction of masculine ideologies naturalised male
domination. The valorisation of male sexuality was part of this
process. Male discourses of sexuality prevailed and, in so far as
they gave expression to male interests, those interests became
privileged, validating male power. 19 The valorisation of male
sexuality was embodied in the penis which symbolised male
strength, prowess and barely controllable urges. Strength and
prowess were good, aggression, unfortunately, was only natural.
This became the mythology of every day life for countless men and
women. Man the hero, the hunter, the competitor, the conqueror
became the ubiquitous subject of narratives and scripts for living.
Under stress, the performance of these scripts could become
aberrant.

    The very establishment of New England as a pastoral district
and the appointment of Commissioner Macdonald and his border
police to that district in 1839 had followed one of the most
notorious outbreaks of uncontrolled masculinist aggression in
Australia's early history. The massacre at Henry Dangar's Myall
Creek station and the systematic extermination of Aborigines along
the upper Namoi and Gwydir River valleys of northern New South
Wales has been a particular focus of historians since the mid 1960s.
The fact that such a crime was so well documented was unusual in
Australia's history. The saga of Myall Creek, with the violent
preludes, the massacre of at least twenty eight men, women and
children, the arrests of the perpetrators, the two trials of those
charged with murder and their public executions in Sydney has
been fully told, the most recent narrative being part of a massive
work on frontier violence in northern New South Wales in the late
1 830s. 20 Most attention had been directed at the wider context of
the massacre and convictism and racism were seen as the main

18 Tim Carrigan, Bob Connell and John Lee, 'Towards a New Sociology of
    Masculinity',in Harry Brod (ed.), The Making of Masculinities, Boston,
    1987, p.64.
19  Arthur Brittan, Masculinity and Power, Oxford, 1989, pp.54-55.
20 Roger Millis, Waterloo Creek, Ringwood, 1992.
1 90
forces which shaped these frontier murders. 2 '           However, one
historian found such explanations valuable but incomplete. Michael
Sturma, in trying to explain what precipitated these men to violent
action, analysed more immediate contextual features such as the
remoteness of the frontier, the lack of normal social constraints, the
physical dangers and the frustrations and subsequent aggressions
of those who saw themselves in a war-like situation. 22 Quite
effectively, Sturma drew parallels between the massacre at Myall
Creek and the massacre at My Lai in 1968 during the Vietnam War.

     Sturma seemed to be moving towards a masculinist context for
the Myall Creek massacre without articulating such a concept.
Recently a letter came to light written by Dangar's station manager
at Myall Creek, William Hobbs, who clearly stated that the victims
'were principally women and children'. 23 Masculine sexual imagery
was strongly associated with the Myall Creek massacre. From the
beginning, there was a sexual dimension to the relationship
between the Weraerai people and the stockmen at Myall Creek.
The massacre itself was not a spontaneous occurrence but a well
planned exercise by intentionally armed men who spent days
seeking their victims and knew precisely what they were going to
do. In the language of that time and place, 'a drive was on'. In the
lead up to the massacre there was plenty of time for fantasising
and sharing fantasies. At Myall Creek the victims were bound with
rope to increase their helplessness. They were marched to the
killing field. The bloodbath came as a climax to days of purposeful
activity.   The weapons of death and mutilation were phallic —
cutlasses and sabres which could thrust and penetrate. Only two
shots were fired.      The decapitated bodies were thrown into a
triangle of logs and burnt, swallowed up as it were.               In the
aftermath of the massacre there were isolated killings of more
Aborigines found in the vicinity.           Then for three days the

21 See, for instance, Norma Townsend, 'Masters and Men and the Myall
   Creek Massacre' The Push from the Bush, No. 20, April, 1985, pp.4-32;
   R.H.W. Reece, Aborigines and Colonists, Sydney, 1974, pp.140-174; and
   A.T. Yarwood and M.T. Knowling, Race Relations In Australia: A history,
   Sydney, 1982, pp.106-107.
22 Michael Sturma, 'Myall Creek and the Psychology of Mass Murder',
   Journal of Australian Studies, No. 16, May, 1985, pp.62-70.
23 William Hobbs to E.D. Day, Esq., 9 July, 1838, (photocopy), New England
   Historical Resources Centre, Myall Creek file.
191
murderers went on a binge of drinking and singing at a nearby
station. Thus their deed was valorised.24

      Myall Creek was an ejaculation of male violence. It was an
expression of extreme masculinism. Racism and convictism and the
stress of the frontier go part of the way towards explaining it. But
a masculinist context is needed to complete the picture. Beyond the
exultancy of an hour or so of consummated aggression, in the
preliminaries and the afterglow of murder, the men deceived their
consciences with euphemisms. They spoke of 'looking after the
blacks' and having 'settled the blacks'. In other times and places
Nazi murderers would refer to sonderaktionen (special. actions), U.S.
Army spokesmen in Vietnam would refer to 'population control'
and 'free-fire zones' 25 and in the 1990s, rabid Bosnian irregulars
spoke of 'ethnic cleansing'. This is the language of a masculinism
which transcends time and place, which links Myall Creek to
countless other such atrocities across New England, across Australia
and across the world. Racism, convictism and other constructs
interlocked, but masculinism was the common gene.

      Extreme physical violence derived from the more common
need of many men to feel powerful. The power motive was central
to constructions of masculinity. It boiled down to a striving to have
an impact on others and on the environment. 26 The power motive
was enhanced by an awareness of the capabilities of the male body
and the skills to which it could be attuned. The power motive was
also enhanced by the consumption of alcohol, especially socially and
competitively. 27

      Although there is a complex set of reasons which must be
employed to explain alcohol abuse, including sex-based biological
factors 28 and other social explanations such as peer pressure and
'drinking for consolation', 29 it is clear that gender, class and ethnic
factors determine levels of social drinking. Power relations theories

24    Millis, op. cit., pp.274-321.
25    Sturma, op. cit., p.68.
26   Hilary M. Lips, Women, Men and Power, London, 1991, p.37.
27    Ibid., p.41
28    Perry Treadwell, 'Biological Influences on Masculinity', in Harry Brod,
      op. cit., p.276.
29   Margaret Sargent, Drinking and Alcoholism in Australia, Melbourne,
      1979 (1987), pp.78-100.
192
are significant in making sense of the culturally-based data. 3 0
Drunkenness had the effect of freeing a man to feel powerful
through fantasy. 31 Thus people who had little power, such as
working class and underclass males, might adopt a lifestyle where
drinking was an important factor, the more so if it was encouraged
and rewarded by peers. The psychological importance of alcohol
can be demonstrated by the early history of white Australian
communities in the nineteenth century. Notwithstanding all the
basic human needs and fundamental social wants imperilled by
remoteness and harsh conditions, there was always an ample
supply of alcohol on the frontiers and in the bark-roofed towns.
The demand was obviously great and methods were devised to
overcome the enormous problems of supply. For men without the
status of property and material possessions, drinking was a great
leveller. It provided self-esteem on the cheap. The pub became
associated with concepts of working class egalitarianism, and, in
terms of this study, the Australian habit of the 'shout' was
described in Armidale as early as 1880.32

    The typical pattern of consumption was 'binge drinking'. It
came to be associated with many working class groups. The ritual
of the 'shout' determined that the pace of drinking would be as fast
as the fastest drinker and to this extent a type of prowess came
into play. Railway workers were notorious for 'knocking their
cheques down'. The editors of the Uralla Times described the
pattern of drinking as it unfolded in their town in 1882:

    Monday last was pay day on the railway works at Uralla and the
    town for the nonce assumed a somewhat busy appearance. At
    night the seven or eight drinking places were literally besieged
    by the 'representatives of bone and muscle' who during the
    evening consumed enormous quantities of 'soft and hard tack' and
    at the same time rapidly dissipated their hard earned money.
    However, although there was considerable talk during the
    evening, the worshippers of Bacchus kept themselves sufficiently
    within the pale of the law as not to call for police interference, the
    men as a rule being a very orderly set. Their chief aim seems to be

30 Margaret Sargent's work quoted immediately above is a sophisticated
    version of a power relations theory. However, it is a structuralist
    approach based too fully on dominant groups, dominant ideologies and
    rigid social structures. The impression is often given of a middle class
    with a single-minded purpose in deciding upon and employing
    strategies for dominance and control.
31  Lips, op. cit., p.41.
32 AE, 19 November, 1880, p.2.
193
     how much beer they can dispose of in the shortest possible time,
     and their efforts in this respect are generally pretty successful. 3 3

This was public drinking — prowess drinking — by men with few
material assets to otherwise mark their status. The pubs were a
venue for the working class and publicans often showed an
allegiance to the working man as evident in 1889 when Mrs Slough
of the Star Hotel organised subscriptions in aid of the men on strike
at Moses' Boot Factory.34

     But it must be borne in mind that drinking was a favoured
pastime of many in the middling class as well, although the
drinking habits of these people tended to be more private. Clerk of
Petty Sessions, Sydney Blythe, did his drinking at night in the Court
House. One evening in November 1870, inspired to great thoughts
by a bottle of cognac shared with a friend, Blythe committed his
reflections to parchment:

     Can the men who find this drink their twelve glasses of grog a day
     — I doubt it — We can — The name of my eldest son is Edward Vyner
     — Louis Napoleon is kicked out of France by the Germans and Paris
     we hear is bombarded
     My friends whoever you may be who find this, rest assured that
     the world has wagged before your time, and that nothing is
     certain but Death
     For and on behalf of my numerous creditors
                                                            Sydney Blythe 3   5

When the bottle was drained, the parchment was inserted and both
were hidden under the floor boards of the Armidale Court House,
then undergoing renovations. A little over one hundred years later
Sydney Blythe's time capsule was discovered. In that one moment
in his life, warmed by good brandy and friendship, he was induced
to strut before posterity and tell us of his prowess at drinking a
skin full, fathering a son and thumbing his nose at those most
powerful figures in his life, his creditors.

     Another significant focus for the expression of male prowess
was the horse. Although riding was not restricted to men, the
discourse which surrounded the horse was definitely male

33   Uralla and Walcha Times, 8 November, 1882.
34   'The Local Boot Strike', AE, 24 September, 1889, p.3.
35   Armidale Folk Museum Collection, quoted by Lionel Gilbert, An Armidale
     Album, Armidale, 1982, p.71.
194
terrain . 36 When women rode, they rode graciously. Men rode
boldly. Women rode side-saddle, men straddled their horses, the
power of the animal locked firmly between their legs. As one
correspondent to the Armidale Express, stated in a letter in 1878
protesting the inclusion of prizes for ladies' horse jumping at the
local Pastoral and Agricultural Society show:

     Ladies are not destined to seek fame and money rewards, by
     publically excelling in bold achievements, such as flying on
     jumping horses over barriers . . . Would that the courageous
     young lady riders would consider that not boldness, but modesty,
     and the charm of female grace and dignity, will entitle the
     humblest dweller in a bush home to be deemed a lady, in the true
     sense of the word. And, besides that, performances in the ring on
     jumping horses competing for a public prize are — to say the least,
     as far as women are concerned, unaesthetic, and sure to cause a
     stigma on their womanly good sense which a £5 or £10 note, or a
     trophy, and the admiration of a crowd, cannot counterbalance. 3 7

The editors of the Armidale Express agreed.

     The horse was a metaphor for virility in the same way that, in
later generations, the automobile would be. The horse was a
subject of conversation through which men could bond with each
other. Horses, for instance, were at the centre of all the activity
leading up to and following the Myall Creek massacre. On the night
after the killing the stockmen had sat around 'romancing' and
'talking about their horses and which was the best racer and so
on'. 38 On the pastoral stations the horse and its trappings were the
quintessential status symbols. As one old timer wrote:

     In the old days the squatters dressed very little better than their
     men . . . The only way you could tell a squatter from his men, was
     he was better mounted than his men, riding a more showy horse
     and polished stirrup irons, also bridle bit . . . In the old days
     stockmen used to look after their saddle and bridle taking a pride
     in looking after them. 3 9

     Men like Thomas Warre Harriott, Commissioner for Crown
Lands for New England in the late 1860s, thought constantly about
his horses which figured prominently in the diaries he kept during
his years at Armidale.        In fact we get more of an insight into

36   Davidoff and Hall op. cit., p.171.
37   'Correspondence', AE, 29 March, 1878, p.4.
38   Quoted in Millis, op. cit., p.299.
39   William Telfer Manuscript, Mitchell Library Mss, A 2376, quoted in John
     Ferry, Walgett Before the Motor Car, Walgett, 1978, p.54.
1 95
Harriott's relationship with his horses than into that with his wife.
An obsession with horses could well drive husbands and wives
apart but in other family situations horses could bring fathers and
sons together. Henry Arding Thomas of Saumarez had a somewhat
uneasy relationship with his eldest son Willie, an indifferent
scholar. But it was horse riding which brought them together. By
the time the boy was eleven, he was riding out most days with his
father, which made Caroline Thomas 'so thankful that Willie [had]
the opportunity of being so much with his dear papa'.40

     However, the real celebration of the horse took place on the
race track. Just as Armidale was liberally stocked with alcohol
from its inception, so, too, was it graced, from the early 1840s, with
a racecourse on the flat land to the east of the town which the
Anaiwan called Alperwan. The annual and holiday races became
the major social events on the calendar bringing hundreds of people
into the town, and we have a description of such a race gathering as
early as 1843. 41 By and large the horses were owned by squatters
from the region who competed on the more formal, organised level.
However, between races, there was opportunity for young men to
test each other out on the race track. The results were sometimes
fatal as when young William Allingham, son of the storekeeper,
miller and squatter of Gara, Edward Allingham, was killed in 1868
in an impromptu race with his friend E. J. Clerk and young solicitor,
William Proctor. 42 The death registers in the Armidale Court House
record many deaths of young men as the result of horse accidents.

     As well as hard drinking and hard riding, fist fighting
completed the masculinist trilogy in colonial Armidale. Many men
felt it necessary to defend their honour or assert their power
violently. The three facets of masculinism could all be represented
in one afternoon. At the mid-year races of the New England Jockey
Club in 1880, Michael Shea, Thomas Burnham and James Moore, son
of merchant John Moore, were all arrested for a boozy brawl at the
racetrack.    The magistrates despaired of the fact that such

40 Entry 3 February 1868, Carolyn Thomas Diaries (transcribed by Ann
     Philp), typescript, New England Historical Resources Centre.
41   Diaries of A.M. [Baxter] Dawbin, Dixson Library (Sydney), MSS Q181,
     quoted in Gilbert, op. cit., p.15.
42   'The Late Fatal Accident', AE, 18 April, 1868, p.3.
196
behaviour was common amongst young men at race meetings. 43 As
always, the young men pleaded, by way of justification, that a
matter of honour had been at stake.

     Fighting in the name of honour was evident amongst males
across all classes in colonial Armidale. It was honour which
sparked a fight between Henry Arding Thomas and his overseer
Angus Macinnis in 1857 within months of Thomas's purchase of
Saumarez Run. In this dispute, codes were adhered to with the
issue of a formal challenge by Macinnis and the arrangement of a
date and time for a fist fight. In due course, honour was satisfied
and Thomas acquired a black eye. 44 In 1866, James Mulligan Jnr,
whose efforts in the name of righteousness on board the immigrant
ship which brought him to Australia were described in Chapter
Two, brought two men to court for assaulting him. It was not the
first or last time Mulligan stood in front of a court as a result of
being involved in a brawl. Mulligan's sense of honour was as
sharply honed as his sense of righteousness. He loved to fight the
good fight — literally. On this occasion Mulligan, an Irish Protestant,
came to the aid of his Irish Protestant friend John McLean who was
being beaten up by two men of a counter persuasion, incensed
because McLean had called them 'damned papist dogs'. All
involved had been drinking at the Royal Hotel run by James
Mulligan Senior.45

     This small encounter demonstrates that ideologies, in this case
religious ideologies, were not just casts loosely fashioned from
reality to provide ornaments for living. They were much more than
this. They were moulds for shaping personalities. They became
part of a person's self-structuring.       For many people ideologies
were worth fighting and dying for. By the late 1860s, James
Mulligan had moved on to Queensland. For many years he was a
publican in the far north. He died in 1907 at the age of 70 from
complications arising from injuries he received in a brawl outside

43   AE, 4 June, 1880, p.6.
44 Entries, 21 December, 1857 and 5 January, 1858, Caroline Thomas Diaries.
45   James Mulligan Jnr v. Michael Cannon; and James Mulligan Jnr v .
     Christy Byrne, AE, 1 September, 1866, p.2.
197
his hotel in Mount Molloy. On this last occasion he had gone into
battle in aid of a woman who was being beaten.46

    The masculinist ideology with its hard drinking, hard fighting,
hard riding and, indeed, hard swearing, was in its ascendancy in the
earliest days of colonial Armidale when gender imbalance was at its
greatest. It was an ideology with particularly strong class
overtones. Prowess, in all the forms described so far, was centred
on the male body. Status went to the strong, the young, the skilled
and the intimidating. There was no particular status accorded
wealth or property neither of which could find visible expression in
frontier New England beyond the ownership of livestock. Thus
masculine prowess was an ideal which found particular favour
amongst the propertyless working class. The initial thrust to dent
the armour of crude masculinism came just before Christmas in
1849 when the Crown sold the first allotments of land in the town
of Armidale. Landed property now became a basis for status. New
people with new aspirations came to Armidale. With the advent of
resident squatters and an urban middling class of young
entrepreneurs their wives and growing families, of people such as
Caroline and Henry Thomas, John and Sarah Moore, Robert and
Fanny Perrott, and Sarah and Joseph Scholes, crude masculinism
came under sustained attack.

    The new ascendancy belonged to the ideology of respectability
— a complex array of values and images, loosely grouped but tightly
understood. Indeed, the success of respectability as an ideology
was due to that very complexity. Discourses of gender and class
were interwoven.     Respectability was essentially a middle class
ideal oriented towards the family as the foundation of morality and
property as the basis of status. But the respectable shunned
conspicuous consumption in favour of a sober enjoyment of modest
wealth and a pride in passionless thrift. To this extent it was not
impossible for many people beyond the middle class to become
respectable. Respectability had something substantial to offer men
and women of the middle and middling classes as well as some
women and men of the working class.

46 Lynette F. McClenaghan (ed.), From County Down to Down Under: Diary
    of Jas. Vn. Mulligan: 1860, Armidale, 1991, introduction (n.p.)
198
    Respectability took men in hand and sought to re-teach them.
The essence of masculinity was no longer prowess. The emphasis
was no longer on the male body but on the male character. At the
highest level of manliness there was a reinvention of Camelot. In
early nineteenth century England there had been a revival of
chivalry — a medieval notion twisted into a Victorian idea1. 47 It
was no coincidence that the noble protector and gallant knight
reemerged in England at the time when women were forced into a
greater dependency on men than had ever existed previously.

    During Victoria's reign great icons to the courage and character
of men were fashioned and paraded, especially before children.
There was the story of the sinking of the troop ship Birkenhead,
when a company of British soldiers on board helped women and
children into the few life boats then stood back in parade ground
formation on the deck of the stricken vessel and, never breaking
rank, went down with the ship. 48 There was the charge of the Light
Brigade, the glorious death of General Gordon at Khartoum and the
heroic defence of Rorke's Drift during the Zulu Wars. Another of
these icons to imperial valour was the siege of the British Residency
at Lucknow in 1857 where Caroline Thomas' sister Cordelia, wife of
Henry Thomas' half brother Captain Lancelot Thomas, was one of
the victims. If it was any consolation to Caroline and Henry, the
fate of their siblings was part of one of the great stories of Empire.
Tennyson wrote a poem where the harrying thought for the
defenders at Lucknow was the fate of the women and children:

    Frail were the works that defended the hold that we held with our
    lives
    Women and children amongst us, God help them, our children and
    wives!
    Hold it we might — and for fifteen days or for twenty at most
    'Never surrender, I charge you, but everyman die at his post!'4 9

    The Cassell Company published the eighth volume of its
Illustrated History of England in 1861, giving prominence to the
Indian Mutiny. From the siege of Lucknow the editors derived the
image of brave officers and men refusing to be intimidated by

47 Mark Girouard, Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman,
     New Haven, 1981, pp.90-92.
48 Mark Girouard, The Return to Camelot, New Haven, 1981, pp.8-13.
49 Alfred Lord Tennyson, 'The Defence of Lucknow', in Tennyson: Poems
    and plays, London, 1965, pp.482-484.
199
enemy shot and shell, and, at the height of the bombardment,
walking across the exposed parade ground of the residency
compound rather than running to take cover. Casualties, of course,
were fearful but courage never flinched. 50 Central to most of these
stories of valour were women cast in the ornamental role of
desperate supplicants in need of protection. Not surprisingly,
General Gordon at Khartoum and the 24th Regiment, South Wales
Borderers, at Rorke's Drift were defending a motherland, not a
fatherland.

     The focus in Australian historiography on the apotheosis of the
bushman in the 1890s has blurred these other heroes whom
colonial Australians were prone to worship. The heroes of the
Empire figured in school texts, often illustrated by representations
of heroic paintings such as Thomas Barker's Second Relief of
Lucknow, 1857 or Napier Hemy's The Wreck of the Birkenhead.51
One of the main features of Booloominbah, the grand mansion built
by Frederick White on the outskirts of Armidale in the mid 1880s,
was a magnificent stained glass window above the main staircase,
featuring the life and death of General Gordon of Khartoum. 52 Even
in Armidale it was not difficult to find people who were personally
touched by these great events of Empire. The children of Henry
and Caroline Thomas would have had a proud boast for their
governess whenever they turned their textbooks to the siege of
Lucknow where their uncle had fought and their aunt had died.
Henry Dumaresq, the first squatter of Saumarez, had been a
veteran of Waterloo. Arthur Berckelman of the Armidale Police
had fought with the 17th Lancers during the Crimean War, being
present at the charge of the Light Brigade 53 and District Surveyor,
John Sofala Chard, who lived in Armidale in the 1880s and 1890s
had a cousin who had been a hero at the defence of Rorke's Drift.54
For a generation of Australian middle and middling class boys born

50   Cassell's Illustrated History of England (9 Vols), Vol. VIII, London,
     Cassell Petter & Galpin, 1861, p.475.
51 H.O. Arnold-Forster, The Citizen Reader for the Use of Schools, London,
     Cassell and Company, Limited, 1886, pp.120-122;and 131-137. An
     Australian edition was first prepared by C.R. Long, Inspector of Schools
     in 1906.
52 Bruce Mitchell, House on the Hill: Booloominbah home and university,
     1888-1988, Armidale, 1988, pp.24-25; and 27-29.
5 3 'Obituary: The Late Mr. A. Berckelman', Hawkesbury Herald, 22 January,
      1904, p.12.
54    Uralla and Walcha Times, 9 July, 1884, p.2.
200
near the end of Queen Victoria's reign, these were the images and
ideals which would impel them towards Gallipoli and the Somme.

    These cultural heroes and the chivalrous ideals they embodied
were the foremost echelons of respectability. They had dethroned
the man of muscle and installed the man of morals. But there was
more to the concept of respectability than high heroics.
Respectability was the discourse of everyman.

    Respectability subsumed a variety of complementary
ideologies, including domesticity, femininity, masculinity, beauty
and romantici sm. 5 5 These ideologies were ascendant in early
nineteenth century Britain when they were clearly associated with
Evangelicalism and the rising capitalist middle class. Many of the
values and images of these interlocking ideologies can be seen in
colonial Armidale where newspaper articles, obituaries, tombstone
inscriptions and speeches at valedictory and testimonial dinners all
gave expression to the collective notions of respectability. Above
all, the central organising concept underscoring middle class
respectability was the 'separate spheres' of public and domestic life.
New roles, giving central importance to the family, were written for
women and men. However, men had a life in both spheres, women
in only one. Where such discourses held sway there was little room
for Russel Ward's Australian legend and its singular emphasis on
the single male.

    A respectable man's sense of worth derived from his skill at
manipulating the economic environment, and being able to support
a family. The old idea of 'making one's fortune', like Dick
Whittington, depended to a large degree on luck. This common
phrase indicated a world that was barely controllable, where fate
ruled. But fate was losing its substance. Of course there was still
the allure of luck. The gold fields and tin mines of New England
tempted many a man to risk a small fortune to snare a large. But
the hope of making one's fortune was giving way to the more sober
ideal of achieving one's goals. The language of success was
beginning to change. Men were no longer blessed with success, but
achieved success. Obituaries sketched a man's achievements rarely

55 Davidoff and Hall, op. cit., and Catherine Hall, 'The Early Formation of
    Victorian Domestic Ideology', in S. Burnam (ed.), Fit Work for Women,
    London, Croom Held, 1982.
201
making any reference to the generosity of his father or the good
fortune of inheritance except in cases like that of Edward Baker
who spent the last forty years of his life living off a 'nice fortune
from a relative in the old country'. 56 But Edward Baker was the
exception to prove the rule. He was noted for his eccentricities, for
being a man who held to breeding and rank, for being a man who
believed in Church and King and the free-born rights of an
Englishman, for a man who set his face against democracy, for being
a man of the eighteenth century rather than the nineteenth.

     To aim for achievable goals was to lay some claim to the future.
Respectable Victorian men began to see themselves in charge.
Building societies, oddfellow societies and insurance companies
were all expressions of the belief that a feral future could be tamed.
Never short of a 'sensible admonition' the editors of the      Armidale
Express   urged fathers to 'teach [their] boys to look up and forward,
never down and backward'. 57 Their model of the sensible young
man was John Glass, son of one of the oldest families in the
Armidale district, a young man who had trained in a local bank and
who was promoted to his first managerial position in the distant
town of Walgett. Unfortunately he died there of chronic diarrhoea
at the age of 26 in 1877. He was unmarried. The       Express made his
short life into something of a paragon paying tribute to his
'proverbial forethought' in insuring his life with the Australian
Mutual Provident Society for £500 and leaving a will.58

     The media, comprising newspapers, magazines and popular
literature, were only one institution pressing for the adoption of
respectable behaviour in the public world of men. Financial
organisations could be quite insistent on certain standards of
behaviour expected of potential borrowers. Banks maintained a
formal surveillance of local communities and especially of middling
class entrepreneurs. In 1856, when the Australian Joint Stock Bank
opened a branch in Armidale, not only did the directors appoint a
manager but also a local patron, Richard Hargrave, squatter of

56   'God is love', AE, 18 November, 1902, p.4.
57   'Sensible Admonition', AE, 30 July, 1870, p.2.
58   Minute, 25 April, 1864, Minutes of the Board of Directors of the
     Commercial Banking Company of Sydney, Vol. 4, 22 April 1864 - 6 July,
     1866, National Australia Bank Group Archives; and AE, 20 April, 1877,
     p .4.
202
Hillgrove and Member of Legislative Assembly. 59 The Commercial
Banking Company of Sydney and the Bank of New South Wales
which opened branches in Armidale in 1864 and 1868 respectively
did not formally seek local patrons but nonetheless valued the
opinions of private correspondents who were encouraged to write
to the directors on local matters affecting the bank and its
customers. 60 Managers and local patrons as a rule of thumb wrote
reports to the directors on the businesses of all debtors with
overdrafts of more than £400.61

     Certainly the public behaviour of clients, beyond the testimony
of their balance sheet, was of interest to the banks. Branch
managers of the Commercial Banking Company of Sydney were
urged to take into account the personal character of applicants for
wool liens 62 , and, where actual correspondence regarding clients
has survived, the character of the client certainly played a part in
determining bank action. 63 Learning whom to trust was regarded
as 'the leading subject of the [bank manager's] daily education' and
the key to the mastery of that lesson lay in building up a network
of respectable informants who could report on the financial
respectability of others.64

     But it was the bank staff who experienced the most careful
surveillance, candidly expressed by one exceptionally well known
banking publication as 'espionage upon the private conduct' of
officers. 65 There were some salient lessons from Armidale. In

59   Minutes, 9 September, 1856 and 4 June, 1858, Minutes of the Board of
     Directors of the Australian Joint Stock Bank, Westpac Archives, A-3/39.
60 Minute, 7 October, 1864, Minutes of the Board of Directors of the
     Commercial Banking Company of Sydney, Vol. 4, 22 April, 1864 - 6 July,
     1866, National Australia Bank Archives
61   Op. cit., A-3/57, Minutes 23 September, 1870 and 15 November 1870, for
     instance.
62 J.B. Calden to the Manager, Armidale, 1 February, 1882, Circular Letters
     from Head Office 1878-1885, Commercial Banking Company of Sydney,
     National Australia Bank Archives.
63 R. McDonald to A.J. Cope Esq., solicitor, 15 April, 1884, Manager's
     Letterbook, Commercial Banking Company of Sydney, National Australia
     Bank Archives, ff. 109, 116, 121-122.
64 George Rae, The Country Banker„ London, John Murray, 1885, pp.1-13.
     It was reported to me by Mr Bernard McGrath, Chief Archivist of the
     National Australia Bank Archives in Springvale, Victoria that this book
     was provided to each branch manager of the Commercial Banking
     Company of Sydney in the 1880s. Ultimately the publication ran to at
     least seven editions between 1885 and 1930..
65   Ibid., p.181.
203
1865, a few months after Edward Baker was encouraged to
correspond with the Board of the Commercial Banking Company of
Sydney on branch matters in Armidale, the directors learned that
the local manager, Mr Adams, had been seen on occasions playing
billiards. Despite Mr Adams's contrition and his promise to give up
'so inordinate a partiality' to which a 'degree of disrepute attached',
he was removed from his position four months later. 66 In 1869 Mr
Larnach, the manager of the Bank of New South Wales in Armidale
was dismissed from his position, despite his being a nephew of one
of the bank's London directors, for exchanging abusive and
intemperate letters with Mr Sheridan the manager of the rival
Commercial Banking Company of Sydney. Mr Sheridan, in his turn,
although not dismissed, had inflicted upon him the punishment that
the 'remembrance of his injudicious correspondence [would ever
be] in the minds of the Directors' of his bank.67

     Certainly the Bank of New South Wales tried to recruit locally
only those lads of 'respectable parents', 68 but, even so, in 1873
complaints were made by an Armidale correspondent about the
'private habits' of the staff of the bank, and the matter had to be
dealt with by the general manager. 69 By the mid 1870s, Shepherd
Smith, the well known general manager of the Bank of New South
Wales in Sydney, had issued rules and regulations governing the
conduct of staff in their working and leisure hours and these
regulations were tightened and made more proscriptive over the
next twenty years. No staff member of the bank, wherever located,
could play billiards, gamble, associate with persons of questionable
character, be guilty of intemperance, live beyond his means,
frequent a public house or reside or board at a hotel or inn. By the
1890s no officer on a salary of less than £200 per annum could
marry without the consent of the Board of Directors. 70 There may

66  Minutes, 7 October, 1864; 21 February, 1865; and 7 July, 1865, Minutes of
    the Board of the Commercial Banking Company Sydney.
67 Shepherd Smith to Donald Larnach, 3 December, 1869, General
    Manager's Private Correspondence, Westpac Archives, GM/1/3; and
    Minute 3 December, 1869, Minutes of the Commercial Banking Company
    of Sydney.
68  J.R. Hill to the Manager, Armidale, 24 October, 1868, Armidale Branch
    file for the Bank of New South Wales, Westpac Archives, 2/9/1.
69 Minute 22 August, 1873, Minutes of the Board of Directors of the Bank of
    New South Wales, Westpac Archives.
70 Bank of New South Wales, Rules and Regulations to be Observed by the
    Officers of the Bank of New South Wales, Sydney, John Sands, 1876, p.4;
204
have been a celebration of the bush legend in the Bulletin in the
1880s and 1890s, but the heroic bushman would never have got a
job in the bank. Still the bushman was probably assured knowing
that, happily, he would find no place amongst those born to be men
and condemned to be clerks.

    This sketch of the public profile of respectable man has been
juxtaposed with the earlier sketch of the man of prowess. There
was clearly a class difference between the man of prowess who
essentially lived without property and respectable man whose
virtues were founded largely on a modest to comfortable amount of
wealth. That juxtaposition is necessary to point out what
respectable man was, and was not. It was the man of prowess who
became the man of legend, the Bushman, the Lone Hand, the Digger.
These figures came to represent something that was distinctively
Australian and therefore historians in the nationalist tradition paid
them much attention. Respectable man, on the other hand, was not
particularly Australian. But he did represent a major life style
image for many Australian men. Nor was respectable man the
servile, house bound, emasculated creature which the Bulletin
portrayed and lampooned. Rather, respectability was in large part
a male construct which pushed aside aristocratic notions of
breeding, lineage and ordered estates and shunned working class
ideals based on physical strength, skill and bluster. Respectability
was ideally suited to an ascendant middle class, but had a wider
appeal to many men in the middling class and some men in the
working class and was more international than parochial.

    The juxtaposing of the man of prowess and respectable man
calls forth another juxtaposition — that between respectable man
and respectable woman. There was no doubt that respectable men
and women should be married. The family became the basis of
respectability and the centrepiece of conservative, middle class
imagery. Roles of mother, father, husband and wife were carefully
refined, and in analysing these new Victorian constructs historians
have sought to answer the question of the extent of the active
involvement of women in shaping the ideology of domestic
respectability.

    and Bank of New South Wales, Book of Rules, Regulations and
    Instructions, Sydney, John Sands, 1897, p.5.
2 05
     Writing in the tradition of dominant ideologies, ruling elites
and social engineering, Anne Summers depicted respectable women
seeking a token status in an oppressively patriarchal society by
adopting the role of God's police. 71 She argued that the socially
engineered ideology of respectability was at least an improvement
over earlier convict based constructions and women made the most
of it. Over a decade later, Marilyn Lake interpreted gender
relationships in late nineteenth century Australia quite differently.
She saw a modestly effective struggle by feminist activists to
counter the images and the ideology of raw masculinism as
eulogised by the national press and particularly the          Bulletin.
Although Lake acknowledged a convergence of various interests in
the refinement of domestic man, she basically saw a gender
struggle between misogynists and feminists — a struggle for the
hearts and minds of men. By the 1920s according to Lake, the
feminists had won . 72 To a considerable degree, men had been
domesticated.

     Although Lake's work sparked a debate about the
interpretation of gender relations in late nineteenth century
Australia, that debate, as always, seemed to centre on the
masculinist image of the heroic bushmen and the over-emphasised
influence of the   Bulletin. 73   Rather, the question which should be
raised concerns the extent to which men created roles for women or
women created roles for men within the late Victorian family.

     There is no doubt that there was a struggle to shape the roles
within the family. The extreme positions were represented by
those who advocated the untrammelled freedom of men who
wanted to be nothing more than married bachelors and those who
championed the emancipated woman, self assured, outgoing,
publicly active, and usually depicted as an American aberration.74
But it must be borne in mind that this struggle was waged across a
male terrain. As has been established clearly in Chapter Six, the

71 Anne Summers, Damned Whores and God's Police, Ringwood, 1975,
   pp.292, 294 and 313.
72 Lake, op. cit., p p .11-15.
73 See Docker, op. cit., pp.16-26;
74 For an example of the latter extreme see 'An "Emancipated" Woman', AE,
   30 September, 1871, p.3.
206
gender structure of Victorian society produced contours of power
which gave all the strategic advantages to men.

     Clearly, many of the images of women being constructed in
colonial Armidale validated male power and naturalised male
dominance. Because male lusts were believed to be barely
controllable, and because there was an underclass of women who
catered to those 'natural passions', respectable women had to be
ever vigilant of their virtue for fear their social standing would be
compromised. Once the antithetical divide between proper conduct
and scandal had been crossed, there was no return. Community
scorn made sure of that. Armidale was a town terrorised by gossip.
So distressing had the situation become that on Quinquagesima
Sunday 1889 a pastoral letter from Bishop Torreggiani devoted
entirely to the subject of malicious gossip in the community was
read in all Roman Catholic churches in the diocese of Armidale and
was subsequently published in the         Armidale Express.75

     The story of Miss Frederick illustrates the fragility of a young
girl's reputation. Miss Frederick was the 17 year old daughter of
coachbuilder James Frederick, and amongst her attributes was a
fine singing voice. She was a member of the Church of England
choir in 1876, when the cathedral designed by John Horbury Hunt
was new and strikingly impressive in what was still a stringybark
town. Miss Frederick was not the first or last person to discover
that solemn occasions in solemn settings sometimes provoke an
attack of 'the giggles' in young people. One Sunday in June Miss
Frederick laughed in church. Compounding her misdemeanour, she
was alleged to have passed a paper and, during the offertory she,
like some others in the congregation, refused to stand up. Her
father disapproved of such innovative rituals and told her not to do
so.   Consequently, Miss Frederick was dismissed from the choir
without warning and without explanation. At the next parochial
meeting she had a champion who took up her cause and debated
the issue with the Bishop 76 and from there the matter was reported
in the press and argued even further in subsequent weeks in the
letters to the editors. 77 Although matters of doctrine were involved

75   'Pastoral Letter', AE, 8 March, 1889, p.7.
76   'Church of England', AE, 23 June, 1876, p.6.
77   Letter from W.C. Proctor, AE, 30 June, 1876, p.6; and letter from 'Fair
     Play', AE, 7 July, 1876, p.4.
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