URL originale : https://books.openedition.org/pup/21609

Linked by the Sea. The Twinning of San Francisco and Sydney in Vernacular Tradition and Public Commemoration
p. 81-92
Résumé
« “Reliés par l’Océan” : le jumelage de San Francisco et de Sydney dans la tradition vernaculaire et dans la commémoration publique »
L’accord de jumelage passé entre les municipalités de San Francisco et Sydney en 1968 et l’ouverture de « Reliés par l’Océan », une aile du musée national de la Marine à Sydney offerte en cadeau à la nation australienne par le gouvernement des États-Unis pour le bicentenaire de 1988, sont la consécration civique de cette tradition vernaculaire qui fait de San Francisco la « cité sœur » de Sydney partageant un héritage maritime et culturel commun, deux grandes villes rapprochées au lieu d’être séparées par le Pacifique. Selon une tradition qui remonte au XIXe siècle, les deux villes seraient des cités autonomes, des postes avancés du monde anglophone et de ses institutions politiques, mais également des ports d’entrée aux finistères du Nouveau Monde, riches en ressources naturelles et séparées de la mère patrie par la « tyrannie de la distance ». Cet article examine comment la célébration et la commémoration publiques du jumelage s’appuient sur le mythe populaire ainsi que sur une projection anachronique de l’alliance australo-américaine, avec une tendance à mettre en exergue les liens commerciaux et militaires – les Ruées vers l’or, l’ère des clippers, la Grande Flotte blanche, les alliances des deux guerres – au détriment d’autres expériences communes moins narratives : les migrations transocéaniques, notamment en provenance de la Chine, mais également la route des réfugiés, qui traversait le continent américain dans les deux sens, vers l’Europe à l’époque des colonies pénitentiaires, et vers l’Australie pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale, ainsi que le flux continu de voyageurs et d’idées (républicaines, nationalistes, internationalistes, syndicalistes au travers du Pacifique – autant d’épisodes dans un mouvement de va-et-vient transnational complexe.
Texte intégral
1In Australia’s memorial geography, a focal point for public recognition and commemoration of the transpacific link between Australia and the United States has been the Australian National Maritime Museum in Sydney. Built close to the site of the First Fleet’s final anchorage off Sydney Cove, the Museum was a joint federal and state project conceived as part of the redevelopment of Darling Harbour. Construction work began in 1986 on the initiative of the first Labor government of Bob Hawke and the museum was opened in the final months of the fourth Hawke ministry on 29 November 1991. Of the museum’s six galleries, the last–the Linked by the Sea Gallery, which commemorates US-Australian maritime links–was the US Government’s $5 million gift to the Australian nation on the occasion of the 1988 Bicentenary celebrations. The USA Gallery was dedicated on 1 January 1992 by President George Bush Snr and Hawke’s successor, Labor Prime Minister Paul Keating. In showcasing more than two centuries of shared maritime heritage across the Pacific Ocean, the Gallery has consistently focused on Sydney’s shipping links with the American west coast ports, particularly San Francisco. The location and the designation of the Gallery are significant in terms of commemorative politics. Australia’s national memorials, including the Australian War Memorial (which like its maritime equivalent is also a museum and archive) are centred on Canberra, and while there are precedents for the siting of national monuments outside of the federal capital, such as the National War Memorial of Victoria, the choice of the state capital of New South Wales harks back to the 19th century conception of the province as a nation within the state. The objection that Canberra was never a viable alternative because it is landlocked and unsuitable for a maritime museum does not stand up to scrutiny: France’s Musée National de la Marine is housed in the Palais de Chaillot in Paris (albeit with a constellation of coastal branches, including Brest and Toulon). The National Maritime Museum is located in Sydney because that is where the sea-borne settlement of Australia began, and the geography of the choice alone implies that non-European maritime history is of marginal concern. The location recognises Sydney’s primacy as the site of the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788, of the founding of the first European settlement and subsequently of the first self-governing colony, but also of Sydney’s status as Australia’s most populous city as well as its economic and cultural capital, all titles it has historically competed for with its meridional rival Melbourne1.
The Gallery’s opening was the second act in a formal twinning process which began with the signing of the San Francisco-Sydney sister city partnership in 1968, under a program of global cooperation at municipal level initiated by the Eisenhower Government in 1952 as an integral part of post-Marshall reconstruction policy. San Francisco was Sydney’s first such partnership. At an interval of twenty years, these two intiatives gave international recognition and civic consecration to the vernacular tradition whereby San Francisco and Sydney are twinned cities with a shared maritime and cultural heritage, brought together rather than separated by the broad expanse of the Pacific.
2According to this tradition, both cities have been seen as “city states” or “limpet ports2,” English-speaking outposts of European settlement and liberal democracy, clinging to the coastline of New Worlds sparsely populated by nomadic indigenous peoples, rich in natural resources and separated from the mother country or metropolitan centre by thousands of miles of ocean and wilderness (the terms are often interchangeable if we consider early 19th century representations of the interior, the Prairies or the Outback, as an inland sea). Among the iconic landmarks of vernacular twinning, the most commonly cited are: the Golden Gate Bridge and Sydney Harbour Bridge (with its somewhat less romantic moniker, ‘the Coathanger’), the capacious natural harbours of San Francisco Bay and Port Jackson (of which Captain Arthur Phillip noted in his journal, “here a Thousand Sail of the Line may ride in most perfect Security3”), the gay communities of Castro Street and Oxford Street, the fashionable dockland precincts of Fisherman’s Wharf and Darling Harbour, even the leftist city bookstores, City Lights and Goulds’ Books, Newtown.
3Public commemoration and celebration of the sister city link have tended to emphasise trading and military ties: the Gold Rushes, the Clipper routes, the visit of the Great White Fleet in 1908, and the transpacific alliances in two world wars, prolonged by the Cold War and consolidated through the ANZUS Treaty (1951). Keynote exhibitions held at the National Maritime Museum have typically inscribed the Sydney-San Francisco / New South Wales-California links within a broader Australian-American axis reaching back to the mid-19th century. Gold Rush The Australian Experience (12 April 2001-22 July 2002) examined the transpacific mining boom precipitated by the the Australian and Californian gold rushes of the mid-19th century; Patriotism–Persuasion– Propaganda The Art of WWII Posters included striking propaganda images of the Australian-U.S wartime alliance (25 July 2002-8 February 2004); Scrimshaw– Art of the Whaler recalled the presence of American whalers in Australian waters at the height of the 19th century whaling industry (19 March 2004-25 April 2006); Clipper Ship–Greyhounds of the Sea, looked at the contribution of American clipper ship technology to the disenclavement of Australia and the shrinking of distance between the Old and New Worlds (25 May 2006-24 June 2007); Great White Fleet–US Sea Power on Parade 1908 celebrated the 100th anniversary of the American Fleet’s visit to Australia as the signal moment in the establishment of the Australian-American alliance and the emancipation of Australia from reliance on the British Royal Navy for its defence (14 August 2008-30 January 2009).
4In keeping with the prevalence of war history in modern narratives of Australian nationhood, the celebration of Australian-US military ties has been a prominent feature of the Gallery, exemplified by one of its permanent exhibits, the USS Canberra’s Ship’s bell. The bell was presented by President George W. Bush to Australian Prime Minister John Howard on 10 September 2001 at a ceremony held in Washington to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the ANZUS Treaty, signed in San Francisco on 1 September 1951. The USS Canberra was commissioned in 1943 in homage to the Australian cruiser HMAS Canberra which had been sunk a year earlier in the course of the Battle of Savo Island, an episode of the Guadalcanal Campaign fought between the ships of a combined Australian-American force and the Japanese fleet. Through a tortuous process of agency initiated by one of the surviving officers of HMAS Canberra via the Australian Embassy in Washington, the bell was retrieved from a packing case in the Naval Warehouse in Williamsburg, transported to the Naval Yard in Washington and ceremoniously promoted to symbolise the ANZUS Alliance during John Howard’s first offical visit to the USA under the new Bush administration, coincidentally on the eve of the events of 9/11 which would give that alliance renewed military significance. The Canberra’s bell once again became the focus of the Australian-U.S. alliance on 6 September 2007, when George W. Bush came to the Australian National Maritime Museum in the company of Senator George Brandis, Australia’s Minister of Arts and Sport, to view the bell on display in its new home in the course of a return visit to Australia seen by some political commentators as an overt gesture of support for John Howard’s Liberal-National coalition government in the run-up to the federal elections of November 20074.
5The persistent focus on trading and military links skates over alternative spaces of cultural interface, shared experience and reciprocal influence: the transoceanic flux of travellers, mail and migrant labour; or the refugee routes from postwar Europe via America to Australia; or the wider, relentless flow of political ideas and their advocates–republican, nationalist, internationalist, gay, syndicalist–across the Pacific, in a see-saw, sustained and often unrecorded exchange. “What is not told” and we might add does not enter within the remit of the USA Gallery, as Sydney councillor Phillip Black has noted, “is the strong gay links” between the two cities: it was San Franciso gay activists who inspired the first Sydney Gay Mardi Gras in 1978 and the guest of honour at the 6th SGMG was San Francisco supervisor and gay activist Harry Britt, who replaced Harvey Milk after his assassination in 19795.
Economies of Distance
6The stark facts of “the tyranny of distance” are these: ‘only’ 7,413 miles or 11,930 kilometres of ocean separate San Francisco from Sydney, compared to the 10,562 miles or 16,998 km separating Sydney from London. Yet these are distances as the albatross flies: the real sailing distance to the eastern seaboard of Australia along the Great Circle Route from London is 20,000 km via the Cape of Good Hope without sight of landfall. (Blainey, 1983: 71) The First Fleet took more than 8 months to travel that distance, although with a month spent resupplying at Rio de Janeiro and another at Cape Town, actual sailing time was 6 months. By the mid-1850s, the Gold Clippers had reduced the sailing time from Liverpool to Melbourne to 74 days, with one ship claiming to have made the passage in as as few as 67 days and claims to 400 nautical mile ‘runs’ in a single day abounded. (Blainey, 1983: 34)
7In 18th to mid-19th century maps of the globe, Australia is tenuously connected to Europe by two thin black lines–the shipping routes from the mother country via the Cape of Good Hope and the Roaring Forties, or round Cape Horn through the high Antarctic latitudes–whereas by the latter part of the 19th century the principal routes of communication, for passengers and mail alike, lay across North and Central America, via New York, the Isthmus of Panama or San Francisco. The Cape of Good Hope was the convict route, from the year of the first settlement at Port Jackson (1788 to the abolition of convict transportation to New South Wales fifty-two years later. This was a voyage with stigma attached, arguably up to and including the £10 Poms of the 20th century, although many of them would travel via the Suez Canal. Ships on the Cape Horn route had to brave some of the roughest seas on earth and sail into the face of the contrary trade winds. The alternative American route offered greater speed, safety, comfort and opportunities for tourism. Thus, by the mid-19th century, San Francisco had become a way-station in the Grand Imperial Tour and a half-way house in the journey ‘back home’ to the British Isles for Australians: in Charles Dilke’s words, it was “one of the main stations on the Anglo-Saxon highway around the globe.” (Dilke, 1889: 227) By the late 19th and early 20th centuries (and perhaps a good deal earlier) the city had become a port of refuge for radicals and unionists.
8Before the transcontinental railroad was completed (1869) and before the Panama Canal was opened (1914), San Francisco was closer to Sydney than to New York: “In the year of the Forty Niners the fastest vessels sailed from Sydney across the Pacific to San Francisco in 10 weeks.” (Blainey, 1983: 139) That was three weeks less than the quickest passage from New York to San Francisco via Cape Horn by sailing ship. When the Gold Rush began in January 1848, Sydney quickly became a supply centre for San Francisco, “exporting everything from pickles to prefabricated houses.” (139) Australia also exported people to California, by one calculation 2 in every 50 of her population. The gold rushes began a symbiotic relationship between California and New South Wales. San Francisco and Sydney were both golden cities, which expanded exponentially with the influx of goldseekers and their attendant service industries: the population of San Francisco leaped from 459 in August 1847 to 5,000 in July 1849, and to 25,000 by December 1849. Out of a total population in San Francisco County of just 36,000, it has been estimated that “by the end of May 1851, some 11,000 Australians had migrated to California: approximately 7,500 from Sydney.” (Ricards-Blackburn, 20) On the other side of the Pacific, in spite of the exodus of settlers to the Ophir and Victoria goldfields, Sydney’s population nearly doubled over the decade 1851-61, from 54,000 to 96,000, most of the increase being attributable to immigration; the overall population of the Australian colonies more than doubled over roughly the same period, from 405,000 in 1850 to more than 1 000 000 in 1858. It has been argued, notably by Blainey, that this growth was fuelled not by several rushes, but by a single rolling Rush which swirled around the Pacific Basin over five decades, beginning in California in 1848, spreading to New South Wales and Victoria in 1851, extending to Queensland and New Zealand in the 1860s, and eventually reaching the Yukon in 1897. Thousands of Australians crossed the Pacific to join the California Gold Rush, some of convict origins becoming notorious among the criminal fraternity of San Francisco as the ‘Sydney Ducks’ or ‘Sydney Coves’. Robert Hughes notes that while the exact origin of the term is unclear, “they were viewed with extreme suspicion by Americans.” (653) Nonetheless, the term quickly captured the literary imagination and their exploits, real, alleged or invented, generated a substantial body of fiction and non-fiction, down to and including Eric Baume’s eponymous novel. (Baume, 1944)
The Revolving Door of Transpacific Movement
9The movement was reciprocal: Edward Hargraves, who began the gold rush in New South Wales (1851 was a veteran of the Californian goldfields and was inspired by that experience to search for alluvial gold west of the Blue Mountains where shepherds had previously picked up traces of gold in the quartz. The English-born Hargraves had failed to find gold in California in two years of searching, but because he had lived in New South Wales and was familiar with the topography beyond the Blue Mountains, he returned to Sydney with the intuition that the geology of the Bathurst region some 160 miles west of Sydney would be gold-bearing. On making the find, Hargraves declared to his companion: “This is a memorable day in the history of New South Wales. I shall be a baronet, you shall be knighted and my old horse will be stuffed, put in a glass case, and sent to the British Museum.” (Hughes R., 561) This was in February 1851. By June 1851, gold had been discovered in Victoria, northwest of Melbourne. By the end of that year, Victoria was beginning to overtake New South Wales in prosperity and together they were challenging California as the world’s primary gold producer. Indeed, Geoffrey Blainey surmises that gold might have been discovered earlier in New South Wales had the diggers not deserted Sydney for California.
10A typical account of the revolving door of transpacific movement is to be found in the experience of Captain Benjamin Franklin Pond, who sailed from New York to San Francisco, “the Eldorado of the West,” via the Isthmus of Panama in January 1849 to join the goldfield at Sutter’s Mill; a journey of 6,000 miles which took four months to complete in the days before the railway was built. In 1853, Pond purchased a ship in partnership with others, the Julia Ann, which he commanded through four voyages between San Francisco and Sydney, carrying passengers and supplies to the Australian goldfields in Victoria and New South Wales, before it was wrecked on a Pacific atoll in 18556. The wealth generated by the rushes was as much to be found in the secondary and tertiary industries and the maritime links which grew up to service them as among the fortunate few who actually struck gold.
11The golden quadrangle which linked California, New South Wales, Victoria and later New Zealand in the mid-19th century is well-documented and has been the object of fixed, travelling and virtual online exhibitions at the Australian National Maritime Museum in Sydney. Recent research has studied Chinese migration to the goldfields and to the golden cities either side of the Pacific. (Chen, 2000 George Parsons (Macquarie University has been examining the seamens’ unions and international syndicalist links in the early 20th century, the IWW or Wobblies and the Longshoremen in the Sydney and San Francisco docklands. His preliminary findings suggest that both organisations gave protection to sailors who jumped ship or dockworkers in conflict with their employers, by spiriting them away to the other side of the Pacific and offering them safe haven, until the fuss died down. In the wake of this informally-operated system of sanctuary came opportunity for the spread of radical political ideas.
12One of the consequences of “the world rushing in” to San Francisco from 1848-49 onwards following the completion of Pacific discoveries in the 1840s and the California gold rush, was that “subsequent maritime travel accounts became less expeditionary reports than personal narratives. They were published by the dozen [...].” (Kowalewski, 901) I would like to focus attention on a representative sample of three first-person narratives of the Sydney-San Francisco link, from the the mid to late 19th century. Taken together, they offer a markedly different account of transpacific relations to the narratives commonly promoted by the National Maritime Museum’s USA Gallery. I shall consider them in chorological rather than chronological order: the journey from and the journey to San Francisco.
San Francisco on the Imperial Highway
13The first leg of Charles Dilke’s passage in Greater Britain: A Record of Travel in English-Speaking Countries During 1866 and 1867 (1869) was from the Atlantic across the United States, and the last and first landfalls in his transpacific voyage were San Francisco and Sydney7. A Cambridge graduate and barrister who planned to enter Liberal politics (he sat in the House of Commons as Member of Parliament for Chelsea from 1868-86, Dilke first “followed England round the world” from 1866-1867 on an imperial Grand Tour which took him across America, Australia and India, on a voyage “which he hoped would yield material for his work on radicalism and his interest in ideal commonwealths8.” In Dilke’s vision, America is part of “a Greater Britain” because it is English-speaking, governed by English laws and its people are of English heritage: “In America, the peoples of the world are being fused together, but they are run into an English mould.” (Dilke, 1869: 1) His description of the passage to San Francisco and Sydney is of interest for two reasons: for its account of the Sydney Ducks and the image of the Australian in post-gold rush San Francisco (Dilke’s account comes ten years after the events); and because the Greater Britain idea is strained to breaking point by the confrontation of Dilke’s expectations with the cosmopolitan quotidian of the growing city.
14In California and San Francisco, Dilke sees “the rise of a New English country.” (Dilke, 1869: 190) For a New Yorker, Dilke reports, “Californians are called the scum of the earth, yet their great city is the best policed in the world.” (Dilke, 1869: 190) Best policed, because of the successive Committees of Vigilance of 1851 and 1856 which Dilke praises as a model of grass-roots democracy and citizen activism. The first target of the Vigilantes had been the Sydney Ducks or Coves (otherwise known as Hounds or Regulators), the “convict party” (Dilke, 1869: 192), “emancipists” from Sydney, or “old lags” (Dilke, 1869: 191) from Norfolk Island who were concentrated into a quarter known as “Sydney Town,” “which soon became what the Bay of Islands had been ten years before.” (Dilke, 1869: 192)9 The Vigilance Committee’s announced objective was the break-up of the Australian criminal gangs. Two presumed Australian thieves arrested in February 1851, tried and condemned to hang by an ad hoc court, were found to be innocent and reprieved in extremis within two hours of their execution10. The first hanging, in June 1851, was of an alleged Sydney felon by the name of Jenkins, a suspected bank robber, who had been caught attempting to dispose of a stolen safe. Other hangings followed. Instructions were issued to “seize all persons suspected of being ‘Sydney Coves’ and reship them to New South Wales.” (Dilke, 1869: 196) In a bitter historical irony, the summary justice dealt out to the Australians included transportation: “by an uprising of the American citizens of San Francisco, in response to a proclamation by T. M. Leavenworth, the alcalde, twenty of the most notorious among the “Hounds” were seized and shipped to China: it is believed that some were taken south in irons, and landed near Cape Horn. “Anywhere so that they could not come back,” as my informant said.” (Dilke, 1869: 192) It must have seemed to Australian migrants to San Francisco in the gold rush years that the waters of the Pacific were not broad or deep enough to wash out the stain of Sydney’s convict origins.
15In the first phase of “lynch law” in San Francisco, violence was directed primarily against the Australians drawn to California by the gold rush. In the second outbreak, arbitrary transportation was again resorted to, but this time the target shifted to political corruption and the hanging victims included Irish migrants. Perhaps displaying English prejudice towards the convict origins of Australian settlement11, Dilke approves mob justice as “justified by the exceptional circumstances of a young community” and as a demonstration of “the singular power of our race for building up the machinery of self-government” (Dilke, 1869: 199-200) (he is alluding to the 1856 Committee of Vigilance and its political offshoot the People’s Party, which broke the hold of the Democrats on the city and held power until 1867). The violence encountered by Australians in San Francisco in 1851, and again in 1856, should be read as part of a broader, Pacific-wide phenomenon of discrimination against and persecution of immigrant miners on and off the goldfields. In a reversal of misfortune, the fate of the Sydney Ducks in 1851 would later be shared by Chinese migrant workers in 1861 at the hands of Australian miners in the Lambing Flat Riots in central New South Wales, which in turn would lead to the restrictive legislation of the Chinese Immigration Restriction and Regulation Act, 1861. It is highly unlikely that the Australian miners in San Francisco were all ex-convicts: transportation to New South Wales had ended in 1840, although it continued in Tasmania and on Norfolk Island until 1852, and extensive free emigration had begun two decades earlier in 1821 under Sir Thomas Brisbane’s administration. Contemporary accounts suggest that by 1849, only 1.4 % of the inhabitants of New South Wales were convicts still under sentence, although many more were emancipists. (Hughes W, 105-06) Dilke’s Greater Britain thesis sits uncomfortably with the demographics of San Francisco post-Gold Rush, in the twilight of the late mid-century. The author reports that “San Francisco is inhabited, as all American cities bid fair to be, by a mixed throng of men of all lands beneath the sun”, including Australians, Polynesians, Chilians, and Chinese, of whom the latter are said to be the most numerous, while “New Englanders and Englishmen predominate in energy” (Dilke, 1869 vol I 214), an energy which he attributes to the temperate climate as a determinant of national type. Which leads Dilke to bend his theory to breaking point in attempt to fit the empirical evidence: “in San Francisco–where all the foreign races are strong–none is dominant; whence the singular result that California, the most mixed in population is also the most English of the States.” (215) Arriving in Sydney via Wellington, Dilke is faced with a further challenge: the capital’s reputation as “a convict city”, a prejudice “not borne out by the countenances of the inhabitants nor by the records of local crime.” (Dilke, 1869, vol. II: 13) In more than doubling the population of Australia, the gold rushes had diluted its convict identity with a wave of voluntary immigration12. Dilke’s account concedes that for the Australian states to become a partner in Empire, their emancipation from the stigma of the convict past needs to be acknowledged.
Counter-narratives
16Two further narratives of the period which describe the outbound journey from Sydney to San Francisco are illuminating for the insight they offer into the movement of political and religious figures and ideas across the Pacific. The first by former convict, John Mitchel, Jail Journal–Five Years in British Prisons, published in New York in 1854, is part of the canon of Irish nationalism. A member of the Young Ireland movement, Mitchel was arrested and tried for seditious treason in 1848 and sentenced to 14 years of transportation. He was deported to the prison hulks in the penal colony of Bermuda and from there to Van Diemen’s Land. On that voyage he began writing his Jail Journal in which he expounds a radicalised nationalism. In 1853, he was spirited out of Van Diemen’s Land by sympathisers via Sydney– “I have no notion of describing Sydney. A seaport town of 80,000 inhabitants, and there an end.” (Mitchel, 348)–and made his escape to the west coast of America. In the penultimate chapter of the Journal, Mitchel reaches San Francisco, where his “Out-of-Jail Journal begins.” (Mitchell, 357) For the Irish nationalist, San Francisco is synonymous with safe-haven; the “Gate of Gold” is a gateway to freedom. Mitchel and his companions spend three weeks in California in November 1854, during which they are the guests of the city, they are feasted by the Governor at a state banquet, they are “surrounded by troops of friends,” spend a week on an old comrade’s ranch at San José and visit the Santa Cruz Gap. They leave on a steamship bound for New York by the Nicaragua route, having made “hundreds of new friends.” (Mitchel, 357)13 The Journal comes to an end in Brooklyn. The ‘View from the East’ as an escape route is one that the Australian National Maritime Museum has begun to explore, hosting a travelling exhibition from Western Australia Escape Fremantle to Freedom which was displayed at the USA Gallery from 9 August 2007-25 November 2007. It describes the escape of a group of Irish Fenian prisoners from Fremantle Prison in 1876 to New York with the help of the Clan na Gael, the American Irish Republican Brotherhood.
17Both Dilke and Mitchel’s accounts predate the opening ofthe Transcontinental railway in 1869. The third narrative, Brief Notes of the New Postal Route from Sydney to England, by San Francisco and New York; As Also of the Return Route by the P. & O. Company’s Line from London by Venice and Suez, published in 1875, postdates that opening. Its author, John Dunmore Lang (1799-1878), was Sydney’s first presbyterian minister and a prominent figure in New South Wales politics14. He travelled to San Francisco on the first leg of the new postal and passenger service from Sydney to London, on a combined transpacific and transcontinental route inaugurated in December 1873. Lang embarked on the mail steamship Cyphrenes at Port Jackson on 11 April 1874 and arrived in San Francisco on 21 May 1874, a passage of 40 days, calling at Hawaii on the way to embark 700 tons of Hawaiian sugar for San Francisco. He reported: “San Francisco is an immense mart of commerce. It has whole lines of streets worthy of any city in the old world [...]” (Lang, 28); “as much business [is] done in San Francisco in a day as there is in Sydney in a week.” However, “[the architecture and] the environs of San Francisco are tame and uninteresting compared with those of Sydney, and many of the second rate houses are build of wood, in consequence of a severe shock of earthquake having been felt some years since.” (Lang, 29) Dilke had found Sydney’s brick architecture uninviting in 1866-67. Invited to preach by a Presbyterian Minister in San Francisco, Lang recognises familiar faces: a family who belonged to his own congregation in Sydney and “who had gone to San Francisco during one of the rushes to California.” He makes a visit to Oakland, then a wealthy suburb, then boards the train for the 3,000 mile journey to New York in a Pullman sleeping car, stopping for breakfast, lunch, tea and dinner at hotels along the route. An advocate of land reform, he notes that “there is much fine land and many well-cultivated farms on both sides of the route to Sacramento” and beyond (Lang, 29); the American desert he reports as “similar to the Australian south-western interior... sheep could graze it.” (Lang, 30) Making a detour to Salt Lake City, Lang meets Brigham Young. (Lang, 31-33) The meeting is cordial in spite of doctrinal differences and he reports Young to be “much gratified at passengers by the mail from our remote colonies coming to see him.” (Lang, 32) He expresses admiration for the settlement of the city in the wilderness (Lang, 32, but also voices the firm conviction that Mormonism “will die out.” (Lang, 33) Lang’s journey to London by the new Pacific and overland American route was his last visit to England. A tireless educational reformer and immigration promoter, he was almost certainly motivated by the desire to advertise a safer and speedier emigrant route to New South Wales. While in London, he published the fourth edition of his history of the colony. His travel sketch demonstrates that there was still an Australian and Presbyterian presence in San Francisco a generation after the California gold rush. Both Lang and Mitchel were republicans and their ringing endorsements of San Francisco and the Californian hinterland hold out the prospect to their readers, however remote, of an alternative commonwealth15.
18For a period of some sixty-five years between the beginning of the Californian Gold Rush (1848) and the opening of the Panama Canal (1914), the Sydney to San Franciso sea-link, aided by advances in steam and later diesel engine technology, brought the two “limpet ports” on opposite shores of the Pacific Rim as close together in sailing times as London and Sydney via the Suez Canal (1869), and closer than New York and San Francisco. During that long maritime window of opportunity, the two cities exchanged first a surge of miners, money and merchandise, and later a constant flow of mail, passengers, curious travellers, escaped prisoners, refugees from justice or oppression, striking seamen and, most importantly of all, ideas. The window did not close with the inauguration of the Panama route to the eastern seaboard of the United States and onwards to Europe, but the opening narrowed on the eve of the First World War and further still with U.S. isolationism in the inter-war years, only to be thrown open dramatically by the the events of December 1941; by which time the link was as much airborne as seaborne. All isolation is relative. If cultural links distort distance, war collapses it, masking its texture and its asperities, until the hiatus recedes to reveal older routes, broader networks and deeper patterns of connection.
19The American ship which carried John Mitchel’s family across the Pacific to San Francisco in 1853 was none other than the Julia Ann, the ship purchased and captained by former California prospector Benjamin Franklin Pond to supply the New South Wales gold rush, sailing on its return, “ballast” leg from Sydney, carrying its clandestine passengers–knowingly or unwittingly?–to freedom. The embedding of the fugitive narrative within the commercial, of stories of escape within stories of trade, underlines the persistence of informal links and peripheral circuits outside the mainstream patterns of maritime trade and migration across the Pacific, from the mid-19th century and deep into 20th, to the threshold of the age of air travel and beyond.
Bibliographie
Works cited
Books consulted or cited
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Kowalewski Michael in Jennifer Speake (ed.), Literature of Travel and Exploration – An Encyclopedia, vol. 2 G-P, New York, Fitzroy Dearborn, 2003, p. 901-902.
Lang John Dunmore, Brief Notes of the New Steam Postal Route from Sydney and New Zealand to London, by San Francisco and New York, Sydney, William Maddock, 1875, 65 p.
Larrowe Charles P., & Harry Bridges, The Rise and Fall of Radical Labor in the U.S., New York, Lawrence Hill and Co., 1972, 404 p.
Lyons Martyn & Penny Russell (eds)., Australia’s History: Themes and Debates, Sydney, University of New South Wales Press, 2005, 197 p.
Mitchel John, Jail Journal: Five Years in British Prisons, New York, The Citizen, 1854, 370 p.
Rawls James J. & Richard J. Orsi (eds.), A Golden State: Mining and Economic Development in Gold Rush California, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1999, 313 p.
Schreuder Deryck M. & Stuart Ward (eds.), Australia’s Empire, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008, 419 p.
Articles consulted or cited
“A Case of Mistaken Identity”, Trewman’s Exeter Flying Post or Plymouth and Cornish Advertiser, Exeter, England, Wednesday May 15, 1867, Issue 5268, p. 6.
“Advance Australia”, The Bristol Mercury and Daily Post Mercury, 24 October 1896, p. 3.
“Australia”, Daily News, London, England, Friday, November 16, 1855, Issue 2963, p. 5.
“Foreign Intelligence”, The Ipswich Journal, Ipswich, England, Saturday June 1, 1850, Issue 5795, n.p.
“From Sydney to England, via San Francisco”, The Brisbane Courier, Wednesday 26 July 1871, p. 3.
Hink John W. Jr., “The Irish in the San Francisco Bay Area”, Léirmheasanna Reviews, Muse, 2005, p. 153-155.
Ricards Sherman L. Jr. & George M. Blackburn, “The Sydney Ducks: A Demographic Analysis”, Pacific Historical Review 42, February 1973, p. 20-31.
“The Flag of Distress”, The Newcastle Courant, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England, Friday June 29, 1877, Issue 10566, p. 6.
Tyrrell Ian, “Peripheral Visions: Californian-Australian Environmental Contacts, c. 1850s- 1910”, Journal of World History - Volume 8, Number 2, Fall 1997, p. 275-302.
Internet sources consulted
Australian Dictionary of Biography:
Dilke, Sir Charles Wentworth (1843 - 1911)
http://www.adb.online.anu.edu.au/biogs/A040070b.htm?hilite=Dilke.
Accessed 13/11/2008.
Lang, John Dunmore (1799 - 1878) http://www.adb.online.anu.edu.au/biogs/A020069b.htm. Accessed 13/11/2008.
“Autobiography of Captain Benjamin Franklin Pond”, http://www.anmm.gov.au/site/page.cfm?u=887. Accessed 13/11/2008.
“Searching for the USS Canberra’s ship’s bell”, http://ahoy.tk-jk.net/macslog/Ships Bellandvisiting Washi.html. Accessed 13/11/2008
Notes de bas de page
1 Melbourne has also been described as “a second San Francisco” in the days of the gold rushes. (Blainey, 1983: 202)
2 Blainey argues that Australia was colonised through “limpet ports”, like Sydney, where settlement clung to the coast, dependent upon maritime trade, while the interior was considered inaccessible or inhospitable. (Blainey, 1983 71-98)
3 Letter from Arthur Phillip to the Marquis of Landsdown, July 1788, MLMSS 7241, NSW DET, 2007.
4 http://ahoy.tk-jk.net/macslog/ShipsBellandvisitingWashi.html. Accessed 13/11/2008.
5 Phillip Black, “San Francisco-Sydney: The Value of Sister Cities”, Bay Area Reporter: http://www.ebar.com/common/inc/article_print.php?sec=pride&artic. Accessed 13/11/2008.
6 Excerpts from the autobiography of Captain Benjamin Franklin Pond: http://www.anmm.gov.au/site/page.cfm?u=887. Accessed 13/11/2008.
7 Interest in Dilke’s political travelogue and its sequel Problems of Greater Britain (1890) was rekindled by Niall Ferguson’s discussion of the author’s radical nationalism and British race patriotism in Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World. (Ferguson, 246-51)
8 Sir Charles Wentworth Dilke (1843-1911), Australian Dictionary of Biography: http://www.adb.online.anu.edu.au/biogs/A040070b.htm?hilite=Dilke. Accessed 13/11/2008.
9 Dilke is referring to the lawlessness of the port-settlement Russell on the Bay Islands, the infamous “Hell Hole of the Pacific”, which was one of the pretexts for the Treaty of Waitangi and the assertion of British sovereignty over first North Island, then South Island New Zealand.
10 ‘A Case of Mistaken Identity’, Trewman’s Exeter Flying Post or Plymouth and Cornish Advertiser, Exeter, England, Wednesday May 15, 1867, Issue 5268, p. 6.
11 Such cultural prejudice was to prove persistent. At the height of WWII and his strategic dispute with Australian Prime Minister John Curtin, Churchill was heard to complain that Australians were of “bad stock.” (Schreuder & Ward, 303)
12 “When news of the richness of the goldfields finally reached Britain, the common vision of Australia as a land of punishment was replaced by a vision of a land of reward.” (Blainey, 1983 141)
13 “The San Francisco Irish were not only much nearer the top of the social pyramid than in other communities; they were also interacting with groups with which the Irish seldom came into contact in the East.” (Hink, 155)
14 Presbyterian clergyman, politician, educationalist, immigration organizer, historian, anthropologist, journalist, gaol-bird and, in his wife’s words engraved on his statue in Sydney: “Patriot and Statesman”. Australian National Dictionary of Biography, http://www.adb.online.anu.edu.au/biogs/A020069b.htm. Accessed 13/11/2008.
15 On September 9 1850, California became the 31st State of the U.S.A.
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