Love's Obsession (15 page)

Both Trendall and Jim Stewart were committed to the idea of a grand museum for Australia and began to think that Sydney University, without sufficient funds, was not the answer. Jim believed, as usual, in personal connections, so they went directly to the top.

In a proposal sent to the Prime Minister they argued that ‘Australia is not yet old enough to have developed its own cultural traditions and the history of the country has made it the heir of European and Near Eastern culture to an even greater extent than the United States of America'. The Department of Archaeology and the Nicholson Museum should, they argued, remain within Sydney University, but the model they proposed was more independent, along the lines of the government-funded research institution, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO). While the university provided only £1250 towards the Department of Archaeology's maintenance budget, Jim's proposal contained detailed figures for a new museum costing over £29,000 and included three lecture rooms, a sitting room, drawing office, library and darkroom. He estimated they would need a staff of twenty-two, including a carpenter, librarian, technical assistants and lecturers. Two postgraduate scholarships would offer travel allowances. Jim envisaged an organisation that, true to form, gave him maximum independence and minimum administrative responsibility, and his direct appeal to someone in power rather than a formal request through official channels was one he had used before.
65

Old fashioned and connected through wealth and property, Jim favoured agreements made with a handshake or by word of mouth, choosing influence with individuals over written agreements between institutions. Old World methods. The New World of committees and memoranda and applications to a research council was beyond his understanding and beneath his contempt.

The Acting Prime Minister, Sir Arthur Fadden, returned the proposal to Sydney University's Vice-Chancellor, noting firmly that the approach was out of order and should have gone through normal channels. The Vice-Chancellor, Sir Stephen Roberts, placed the proposal and memo on file adding ‘Trendall told Stewart he gave it to me just before he left. I certainly have not seen it, and knew nothing about it'.
66

While he struggled with a new teaching load, efforts to build up the Nicholson Museum's collection and his own domestic crisis, Jim continued research. ‘Intellectually I was at my best in Bavaria [as a POW]',
67
he told Eve, and the pent-up energies of his prison years were unleashed in Sydney. The most pressing need was for a new edition of the handbook for the Nicholson Museum.

In 1947 the first edition was only three years old but out of print and out of date. A second edition, published in 1948, was completely revised and reflected both Stewart's and Trendall's interests and the changing focus of the museum's collections. Jim rewrote the Near and Middle East sections, while the Egyptian section was abridged (neither was particularly interested in it). Part 2 was devoted to Cyprus, Crete and Mycenae. Jim of course wrote the enlarged Cyprus section and Trendall prepared the sections on Crete and Mycenae with Jim's help. Trendall completely rewrote Part 3, devoted to Greek pottery. The section on Greek and Roman ‘daily life' remained unchanged and the section on ‘inscriptions' was slightly revised. All sections included recommended readings and folding maps were included for reference to sites. The handbook remained in use in at least one American university well into the 1960s,
68
and Arne Furumark told Jim that he was going to convert his ‘truly excellent handbook' into a textbook for his students.
69
Four leather-bound copies were made: for Stewart, Trendall, the Vice-Chancellor and, perhaps to his bewilderment, the King of Sweden. A further eight presentation copies were bound in green cloth.
70

A year later Jim had nearly completed his study of the Lusignan coinage of Cyprus, although the work lapsed for want of a publisher and because it did not fit his teaching or departmental direction. Jim asserted his belief in the need to expand the teaching of archaeology into later historical periods and always hoped to excavate a Medieval site on Cyprus, but it was a vain hope. Coins were a sideline to his academic position and a pursuit largely unknown to his university colleagues. He often turned to the Medieval period as a pleasant break from other obligations. ‘Coins are a relaxation,' he told his friend Albert Baldwin, ‘but I don't look at them unless someone like yourself or Philip Whitting asks questions'.
71
Although he accepted an invitation to write a chapter for a book on the history of the Crusades and continued to promise to do so, nothing eventuated and the episode remains an example of his appetite for taking on too much and failing to deliver.

In 1950 his and Eleanor's volume on Vounous was published in Sweden.
72
It had been a long time in the making, interrupted by war, imprisonment, separation and the move to Australia. Jim claimed at various times that he had lost notes during the war, although elsewhere he said that the bulk of the manuscript had been completed by 1939. He posted a copy of the handwritten manuscript to Stockholm late in 1946, together with most of his research material. Initially Jim dedicated the volume to ‘all those, named and un-named, Cypriot and English, Australian and Swedish, who have helped us' but later changed this to more diplomatically acknowledge their major sponsor, Sir Charles Hyde, owner of the
Birmingham Post
.
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The publication attracted mixed reviews. Many thought it an exemplary work,
74
but others criticised the failure to include general observations in addition to the data relating to each tomb. Still more complained that the pottery categories used in the text relied on a future, unfinished, and incomplete corpus, which Jim had hoped to publish, but as it consisted of thousands of ring-bound pages, it was beyond the financial resources even of the Swedes.
75

The Cyprus Museum's Porphyrios Dikaios had excavated at Vounous and knew the site well. While acknowledging the ‘careful and conscientious work', the ‘meticulous presentation of the results' and the ‘excellent presentation' of the volume, Dikaios regretted the failure to include any analysis: ‘Every field-report should be accompanied by a chapter, however short, giving the summary of the excavator's position on the various problems elucidated or presented by his excavation.' More significantly he disagreed with Jim's explanation of the features of particular tombs, noting his use of ‘meagre evidence' and of dubious stratigraphic interpretation.
76

Eve's work in the Karpas was also published that year. Unlike Jim and Eleanor's Vounous, Eve and Joan du Plat Taylor were particular about noting which institutions received which tomb groups of objects. Jim's failure to do the same was criticised by one reviewer
77
and would come to haunt Eve's later work.

Scholars today are expected to publish in fully refereed journals and it is a rare academic who ventures into more popular forms. This was not how it worked in the 1950s. Jim offered to publish other people's work, wrote brief reports for university publications and contributed to general works like the Cambridge Ancient History. He happily shared material; late in 1951 he offered to hand over all his notes for the Cypriot section of the proposed History of the Crusades to someone else ‘if it could be of any conceivable use'.
78
There were, in any case, fewer journals than today—although Jim certainly could have published more than he did. His obsession with completeness crippled his ability to test-fly ideas.

The idea of a corpus of Cypriot pottery first came to Jim back in 1935 when he and Eleanor visited Australia to prepare for their Turkish trip. Initially Jim saw a corpus as little more than a visual ‘aide memoire' for use while travelling. In time he felt the need to include every known Cypriot pot into a system that would make sense of the Early Bronze Age on Cyprus. If Dale Trendall was working on a
Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum
, an international project to document Greek vases, then the idea was not of itself unusual.

Winifred Lamb had warned Jim about his perfectionism and pondered the question of academic caution. ‘At what stage in one's mental development,' she asked, ‘does one get that sense of caution, that almost legal craving for proof upon proof?' Important though it was, she pointed out that in scholars like [Sir John] Myers and [Professor Henri] Frankfort they were perhaps ‘all the more brilliant and suggestive because they let themselves go; they must be read with many grains of salt, but if that precaution is taken they do good to one'. Although she did not presume to place Jim in either category, she planted the idea that brilliance requires a leap of faith, an escape from caution. Perhaps it was a warning Jim was unable to heed.
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Some people are lumpers; some are splitters. Lumpers see the big picture, splitters see the detail. Lumpers look for similarities, where splitters look for difference. Both seek truth, but where a lumper sees a forest, a splitter sees each individual tree. Different personalities are attracted to each approach and either view can distort reality if taken to extremes. Those who look for the one big picture fail to see the complexity and variety of details under their nose; those who only sniff the flower close at hand know nothing of the forest in which it is thrives.

Archaeologists look for meaning through patterns, but patterns can become an end in themselves. A joke persists of an archaeologist explaining the concept of typology to his students. He shows how it was possible to sort buttons into a range of types. Some buttons have one hole, he explains, some two and some four. They might be round, ovoid, square or be polygonal in shape. Buttons are made of plastic or metal or bone and these attributes can all be cross-referenced. ‘A one-hole plastic polygon button forms one type', he said and asked the students to name other possible types. A bemused student raised a hand. ‘But they're only for keeping trousers up, aren't they?'

Jim was a splitter who happily got lost in the detail.

Chapter 7
Mount Pleasant, 1951–54

Since adolescence Jim had known that he would inherit property in Bathurst, to the west of Sydney − not just the estate of Mount Pleasant, but a quarry and a house in ‘horrid Scottish Baronial of the late 70s'. The Mount was, he told Eve, an ugly folly and when he inherited he thought they should blow it up.
1
In 1950 Jim and Eve drove up to Bathurst to visit his aunt and consider their future. Eve revelled in the countryside, delighted to leave Sydney behind, and as they drove through the townships of the Blue Mountains Jim told her stories of his childhood.

As sandstone gorges drew Eve's gaze, Jim explained that the Stewarts were one of the oldest families in colonial New South Wales and part of the establishment. In 1825, fewer than forty years after the arrival of the First Fleet, a Scot, William Stewart, was briefly Lieutenant-Governor of the new colony; the following year Governor Darling granted him vast swathes of farming and grazing land around Bathurst. Popular myth had it that Stewart rejected the offer of land in the settlement of Sydney, instead asking for all the land visible from Mount Pleasant, the highest point near Bathurst. According to local legend Stewart was buried standing upright on Mount Pleasant, surveying the acres he was granted.
2

William Stewart's son James had extravagant tastes and a sad family history. After the deaths of his three young children at Strath, the homestead his father had built at Bathurst, he constructed a massive Scottish baronial mansion, The Mount, of granite reputedly quarried from the land where the building now stands. Family myth had it that the house was modelled on Sir Walter Scott's shooting box in Scotland.
3

Jim's father, Albyn Athol (A.A.), was an engineer and businessman;
4
as a second Stewart son he was not in the direct line of succession. A.A. was accident-prone. He spent three years at The Leys School in Cambridge, where he distinguished himself by a series of sporting accidents.
5
He trained as a naval engineer and joined the Navy, but was thrown across the engine room during gun trials and damaged his hand. Invalided out, he joined the Merchant Navy and led an adventurous life that involved shooting hummingbirds with a blowpipe on the Amazon and narrowly escaping imprisonment by the Turks for shooting ducks on the Black Sea.
6
On returning to Australia he developed a successful business career, with interests that ranged from sand and gravel to shipping and hospitality. He owned properties in the best parts of Sydney.

Florence Morris, Jim's mother, was South African and said to be a descendant of the landscape painter Landseer.
7
An only child herself, she married Albyn in a society wedding at The Mount in 1899. It was fourteen years before she gave birth to Jim on 3 July 1913.

A year before Eve's birth, and on the other side of the world, Jim Stewart had entered the New South Wales equivalent of Hampshire gentry. Although his childhood began in Australia, his world would have been familiar to Eve. As children, both lived with affectionate but restrained parents for whom money was often a substitute for personal contact. Both were only children, self-contained and selfish, spoiled and solitary. But there were subtle and significant differences. Although Jim and Eve both came from wealthy and well-travelled families, a son was always more secure than a daughter, whose future relied on the circumstances of her father or husband. Where Eve learned to blend into the background, Jim wanted to be centre stage. He had the confidence and self-assurance to step onto it.

As an adult Jim liked to tell everyone that his mother had little interest in him and when asking friends if they had seen him around, added ‘if you do find him, whatever he's doing, tell him not to!
'
8
Perhaps with good reason. As a child Jimmy was a short skinny boy with unruly ginger hair and a tendency to fidget. He was quick to laughter but equally quick to irritation. He loved to play tricks.

Eve had already heard some of the stories and smiled as she listened once more. When Jim was five the Stewarts lived in a house at Elizabeth Bay on Sydney Harbour, close to where A.A. moored his boat. One day Jim was sent into the garden to play while his mother entertained guests at a tea party. He pointed the garden hose through the drawing room window, turned it on, and kept the women penned in a corner for five minutes. According to Jim, his mother spanked him and his father gave him five shillings! Some years later he blacked out a section of the Sydney suburb of Parramatta by throwing an S-shaped length of fencing wire over one of the electric light wires.
9
He spent a great deal of time with the next-door neighbours, always leaving his hat behind as an excuse to return. He was at his most charming and cherubic when about to commit one of his more dastardly deeds. But he was always forgiven. You couldn't be angry with Jimmy for long—and didn't he know it!
10

In spite of his protestations, Jim was closer to his mother than he admitted. From the age of six he lived with her in the village of Wentworth Falls, a place he remembered with great fondness. Straddling the road from Sydney to Bathurst, Wentworth Falls is one of a string of small communities in the Blue Mountains, a temperate retreat for the well-to-do from the urban crush of a sweltering Sydney summer. Jim's mother owned a house there, Lymdale.
Jim's father took only limited interest in his wife. She was independently wealthy and they seldom lived together. In the 1920s many of the locals assumed that the Stewarts were ‘covertly separated'.
11
Beside his business interests, A.A. developed a passion for collecting. Model-building was popular in the 1920s and 1930s: in Sydney alone there were four hundred members of model-building societies. As an engineer, A.A. had a particular interest in models of stationary engines, of the type used to power various industrial processes.

At Lymdale A.A. gave full rein to the fascination with engineering models that developed into something of an obsession and as a wealthy businessman he could indulge this obsession. He joined the miniature model group and progressively acquired a collection that rivalled any in the world.
12
Although ostensibly bought as toys for his son, he only ever gave them to Jim for a short time before taking them back. He bought land adjoining Lymdale and built a complicated railway system for model trains, some of which had carriages large enough to carry six passengers. He added a western extension to the house for displaying static models and in the ‘garden' constructed a specially designed tank for testing model boats. His father had a genius for improvising and ‘making do', Jim told Eve as they drove past Wentworth Falls, adding that ‘only a practical engineer like my father could have made such a horrid series of additions to a house'.
13
Eve smiled and thought of her own father's obsession with building.

During the 1930s A.A. was a member of the Technological Advisory Board of the museum attached to the Sydney Technical College. For years, regular discussions of the board stressed the need for a specialised museum of technology of a type then fashionable throughout the British Empire. A.A. was an active board member and suggested approaching the government to take over the Queen Victoria Market building in the centre of Sydney. He personally lobbied the Premier of New South Wales.
14

At the same time that he was a member of the board of the museum, he began selling his personal collection of models to the museum, seemingly blind to any conflict of interest. Although he donated five models, the remainder were sold and today form an important part of the collection of the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney. Jim absorbed his father's passion for collecting. As a child he loved to lie on the grass, reading about coins and the stories they whispered of the distant past. But it was one thing to read the stories. Far better to own the coins themselves. Jim took Roman coins to bed instead of teddy bears, holding their history in the palm of his hand. This acquisitiveness was never to leave him.

In the 1920s the sea voyage from Australia to England took several months. Ships travelling at a leisurely pace took extended shore visits at Bombay, Aden and Port Said. Porters struggled with large cabin trunks and passengers dressed for dinner. Much of Jim's early childhood was spent moving between Europe and Australia with his mother or father. Years later, in letters to friends, he fondly recalls places they visited and hotels where they stayed. They wintered on the continent and took summer holidays in Ireland, Scotland or Scandinavia. His formal education was disjointed—no record exists of school attendance until the age of ten. He attended two schools in England and one in Australia between the ages of ten and fourteen,
15
but schooling was only the formal part of a broader education he obtained as he travelled across the world in style. By his late teens Jim was familiar with much of Europe. It is doubtful he had much idea of how ordinary people lived.

From 1927 to 1930 Jim attended The Kings School at Parramatta in Sydney, the oldest independent school in Australia and a school that remains one of the country's most expensive private schools for boys. It has a long tradition of sports and military cadets and the school magazine devotes considerable space to both. As is the way with school magazines, they also include student poems and essays, along with regular contributions from old boys. These paint a picture of the sort of life Jim was living, the life of the well-travelled wealthy upper classes. Articles provide regular glimpses of this life: ‘When last in Cairo', ‘While travelling by ship in Norway', ‘I make my debut at Balliol' and ‘Life in Paris'. To many of the boys and most of the masters, England, rather than Australia, was ‘home'.

Each year he was at The Kings School, Jim wrote for the school magazine: two travel articles and one book review. The pieces are well written and largely free of purple prose, although the odd ‘smote' and ‘affrighted' slips in, as they do when you are young and mimicking your masters.
16
‘A Trip through the Southern Highlands' describes travelling by road, presumably with his mother, to Edinburgh. At Loch Lomond ‘the day was still and broken only by the voices of the woods [but] … soon the van of the picnic brigade hove in sight, and with their arrival the prospect was not so pleasing'.

The next year Jim described his first visit, aged thirteen, to Rome the ‘eternal city'. Anticipation of the visit was somewhat dampened on first impressions: ‘It is hot and dusty in the summer, and crowded with an apparently aimless wandering mob, in which every twentieth man seem to be an official … The civilian population is motley and noisy.' Finding the tourist pace of the Cook's guide too fast, he and his mother returned to the Vatican (‘interesting to the student of art'), the Forum (‘a hopeless tangle to the uninitiated', which ‘appealed to me more') and the Catacombs, which he found the most fascinating. At thirteen it is not surprising that he was transfixed by the gruesome skeletons and phials of ‘red coloured liquid'. Their visit also took in Frascati (‘a sleepy little village, chiefly known for its wines and beautiful scenery', which ‘plays the same role as the Blue Mountains towns in New South Wales as a week-end resort') and Ostia (‘the ‘Manly' of Rome'). They ended their visit, as all good tourists must, by throwing money into the Trevi Fountain to ensure their return and to follow tradition, ‘a tradition that the fountain cleaners are only too ready to perpetuate'.
17

School life was not all work. In his first year, Jim had success on the running field (third in the 100 yards, but first in the 440) and was a successful third witch in the performance of
Macbeth
performed to raise money for the Parramatta Hospital Fund. Together with the two senior witches, they were, according to the review in the school magazine, ‘in action, in voice, and in every respect … witches realistic enough to give every one nightmare [
sic
].
'
18

Jim and Eve drove past Wentworth Falls and Katoomba and west to the central Bathurst plain. The trees, bent low against the wind, resembled the drooping pines in the Troodos Mountains and in the centre of the town of Bathurst Eve observed more parallels. A memorial to the Boer War had been dedicated by Lord Kitchener, whose map of Cyprus remains one of the great legacies of the English occupation of that island. Eve told Jim how much her father enjoyed poring over his copy as he decided which property to buy next; together they wondered if they would ever own their own place on Cyprus.

Bathurst is an old settlement, the first major city along the Great Western Highway, which leads westward from Sydney into the New South Wales outback. When the first English settlers sailed into Sydney Cove in 1788 they clung to the coast, a convict settlement run by a maritime force that relied on the sea for supplies. Although they explored areas along the coast to the north and to the south, travelling inland was impossible because of the impenetrable semi-circle of sandstone that surrounded Sydney, the Blue Mountains. With few horses and no bush knowledge, the tiny convict settlement on Sydney Harbour hovered at the edges of a land they knew little of and had not even begun to understand. When three European explorers found a path through the Blue Mountains in 1814, they came to a high country of rolling plains and deep alluvial soils. When Governor Macquarie visited the settlement a year later the town of Bathurst was proclaimed.

Today Bathurst sits in a pastoral landscape of rolling paddocks and sheep grazing in geometric willow-edged fields. It is a low landscape, open to a vast sky, a landscape of muted colours and rounded, gentle shapes—clouds billowing and rolling above meadows of closely cropped grass. Winters are bitter. Little breaks the wind as sheep huddle against fences close to the ground. Lambs die easily in these winters and the trees lean away from the winds that return each year.