 Thank you so much for coming tonight. I'd like to welcome you on behalf of the Morrison Committee, the Georgie Morrison Lecture Series. It was established many years ago. It has a committee made up of colleagues from various branches of Chinese studies and China work here at the ANU. Myself, Jonathan Anga, and John Macon. I'm also representing the Executive Director of the ANU, China Institute, Richard Ruby, who will, in a moment, offer a vote of thanks to Linda and oversee a period of interrogation and questions. This is the 72nd lecture in the series. The Georgie Morrison Lecture Series was founded in 1932 by Chinese residents in Australia in collaboration with a number of key individuals here in Canberra. The residents of Chinese residents were in Melbourne and Sydney. But as the new capital was the focus of national attention at that time, I decided to establish a lecture series related to China and its importance in Australia, even back in the 1930s, here in Canberra. It is easy to forget now that the lecture series not only commemorated Morrison, who was well-known for his work on China, we'll hear much more about him in a moment, but also for his acute observations on Japan and its imperial ambitions in China itself. But the lecture series is also established to foreground the importance of Chinese in Australia and also to help the country confront and eventually deal with the white Australia policy. So it was very much aimed at trying to raise public awareness of things Chinese in this country are a very crucial period, a very long period in Australian history. It is hoped in particular that the lecture series would contribute to the cultural relations and understanding between Australia and China. Then, of course, it was the Republic of China. Now it's the People's Republic and what is called Taiwan. In particular, that there was a period in the 1930s of the time of heightened international tension. Even before the first lecture was presented on May 10, 1932, news of the series featured in China itself from March 17, 1932, one of the most important English language newspapers of the magazine, The China Critic, published in advertisement, introducing the lecture series. The China Critic was edited by Lin Yu-Tang, one of China's most famous 20th century writers and thinkers. And he was living in Amoy or Xiaoman at the time when The China Critic introduced a new series. In setting up the life of the man that the series was named after, The China Critic said that Mars was a correspondent in the momentous years that had covered the great scramble for territory in China and during the Boxer outbreak. One of our students here at the ANU, Will Simer, who's doing the anonymous thesis on the China Critic, managed to find that advertisement from 1932. It's a delightful detail that he gave Linda and Linda in turn past it on to me. Linda will be talking about George Morrison himself and his world and Linda herself, a novelist and a translator, a sign-a-log and a librettist. Yes, she's written an opera. An essayist and a raconteur, a journalist who became, for some long time, what the peaking people called Hu Tong Chuan Zhang, somebody who traveled around the Hu Tong of Beijing in search of friends, ideas, and stories because she was a correspondent in Beijing herself for some years. So she brings her own insights into the world of a man known as China, Morrison. Linda is a long-term collaborator with colleagues here at the ANU from her time as a Canberra resident and then as a visiting fellow in the Division of Pacific and Asian Studies, history, sorry. And she and I began as adversaries in our own lives, continued as partners and eventually rearranged ourselves as life friends and collaborators. Just as we contemplate the next year or so, the rise of the appearance of the Red Progeny that is the children of the revolutionary founders of the People's Republic of China coming into direct power, I recall that Linda and I first encountered each other in dealings with another member of the Red Progeny and that is the daughter of a guy called Ye Jianying, the founder of the People's Liberation Army, originally the Red Army. And Ye Jianying's daughter, Ling Zi, was a filmmaker who in the early, in 1980, made a film and asked me to help distribute the film in Hong Kong when she, Ling Zi, which is her pen name, Ling Zi's famous to those of you who are familiar with the Cultural Revolution as the key activist in what's called the United Action Group, Lian Dong, the group that managed to capture four of the leading party elders in 1966 and hold them hostage for some time. She and her colleagues naturally suffered for that, indignity to their old parents' generation elders. Ling Zi came to Hong Kong and she asked me to hang around when she was interviewed by foreign journalists, in particular this one pesky American who wanted to talk to her. And Ling Zi was very scared of saying something incorrect because if she got it wrong to be reported in Beijing her film would be banned from export. And that's how Linda and I, formerly met, before that we met at a Beijing opera performance, she keeps on reminding me. I mention Ling Zi also because Ling Zi has a relationship vaguely to the Morrison lecture and that is her half-sister or the rather adopted daughter of Ye Jinning, the founder of the PLA. Dai Qing is also a long-term collaborator and friend who's worked here at the ANU over many years. And Dai Qing herself as part of her project that John Unger and I were working on was in Australia in 2007 and she presented the Morrison lecture that year. And without much more or any more ado, I would welcome Linda to the stand. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you, Jeremy. And thank you all that just to clarify the thing about adversary when we met, I was the only foreign journalist that she'd agreed to be interviewed by and she had told Jeremy to protect her. So when I came into the hotel room where I was interviewing her, Jeremy was sitting there like this and he sat there like this only stopping sitting there like this to emit some sentence in perfect Chinese which completely intimidated me and I was on my best behavior as a journalist. That's how we met. Anyway, I would like to start by acknowledging the traditional owners of this land, the first Australians, whose cultures are among the oldest continuing cultures in human history. It's really a tremendous honor to have been asked to deliver the 72nd Morrison lecture to this eminent audience that includes so many sinologists, historians and others engaged with China. I'm aware that if the past is a foreign country, the traditional custodians of the land are historians and I know that novelists who claim a stake on the past may well be seen by these custodians as interlopers, invaders, even to use contemporary parlance, illegals. In my own work, I have trespassed on what may be for some members of this audience the most sacred ground of all, the world of George E. Morrison. My historical novel, The Most Immoral Woman, tells the story of Morrison's passionate and unconventional affair with Mae Perkins, an independent and wealthy young American Liberty in 1904. It's a tale that roams the landscape of a dynasty in decline, looks out over the battlefields of the Russo-Japanese War, and imagines a time when a woman's forthright sexuality could be considered far more shocking than any transgressions of empire. So I'd like to invite you into Morrison's world as I have conceived of it. 1862, that's the year Morrison was born. In 1862, Australia was a continent, not a nation. His birthplace of Geelong was part of the colony of Victoria, named after an English queen who was 25 years into her reign over an empire on which it seemed the sun could be relied never to set. Change was in the air. 14 years earlier, Karl Marx had written The Communist Manifesto. Darwin's On the Origin of Species had been in print three scandalous years and Baudelaire's Le Fleur de Mal, five. The final chapter of Dickens' Great Expectations had only come out the year before. Freud was five years old, Oscar Wilde, eight. Europeans had been living on this continent for less than 100 years. The plagues of smallpox and violence that they visited on the people whose land they occupied had fatally eroded an initial spirit of mutual accommodation. Although the so-called frontier wars had ended, massacres and mistreatment of indigenous people had not. A particularly shocking mass murder of aborigines occurred in Maryborough, Queensland, just two years before Morrison was born. The colonists' unease and fearfulness about the harsh Australian land itself had been brought to fever pitch the year before Morrison's birth when the expedition of Birkin Wills from Melbourne to the Gulf of Carpentaria and Coopers Creek ended in fatal shambles. Morrison's parents, the Scotsman, George Morrison, and his wife, Rebecca, had only arrived in Australia four years before the birth of their son. George Sr. founded Geelong College. It speaks of the standards of the times that not only did he see fit to boast that his borders bathed in the sea every morning, but also that, quote, each border has a separate bed. The border's families could afford such luxury. It was boom times in Victoria. In 1851, gold had been discovered at Ballarat and Bendigo. In the decade that followed, miners extracted some 20 million ounces of gold, one-third of the world's total output. Meanwhile, in that great land to the north, a five-year-old emperor, the Tongjir emperor, sat on the throne, overlooked by his mother, Sushi, the not-yet-all-powerful and her co-emperor, Su'an. Now, by the time of Victoria's gold strike, the typing rebellion had also begun to cut its murderous sway through southern China. Times were tougher than usual. When word of this miraculous new gold mountain, Xinjin Shan, percolated north to China, tens of thousands of mostly southern Chinese set sail for Australia. Organized, frugal, and hardworking, the Chinese gave the locals a run for their money on the gold fields. And as everyone knows, tensions erupted into conflict and violent anti-Chinese riots ensued. The most serious of these, lambing flat in New South Wales, occurred only one year before Morrison was born. Now, anti-Chinese sentiment in Australia wasn't simply the product of this competition on the gold fields. You have to look a little bit further back. Interestingly, in the 18th century, Enlightenment philosophers, such as Voltaire, had idealized China as possessing not just a brilliant civilization, but a system of government that being based on competitive civil service examinations and the ideal of a virtuous ruler was worthy of emulation. However, by the start of the 19th century, Sinophilia had largely given away to the sinophobic views of thinkers like Diderot and Montesquieu, who considered China a perfect example of a hopelessly despotic nation ruled by fear. What's more, as Colin MacKerris demonstrates in his book, Western Images of China, by then Britain had taken over as the West's leading source of images on China, and for the first time in history, the majority of those images were negative. Theories of race were steadily gaining credence in the West. These theories held that color, pink, obviously not included, was a marker of moral and other deficiencies. In his book, The Great Encounter of China and the West, 1500 to 1800, David E. Mangelo notes that, while in the 16th and 17th centuries, Europeans tended to refer to Chinese as having white skin. By the 18th and 19th centuries, the notion that they belonged to an inferior yellow race had taken hold. The fact that the Qing had only quelled the typing rebels with the help of a British military man, Major General Charles Chinese Gordon, reinforced impressions in the West of China as a barbarous, hapless nation that could only benefit from contact, even enforced contact with the civilized West. But if the West was kicking down China's doors, because this was, of course, also the time of the Opium Wars, it was balting its own. While Morrison was growing up, Australian legislators passed exclusion laws and imposed special taxes to defer, a desire to deter further Chinese immigration. Although in 1894, when Morrison himself first stepped foot in China, the White Australia policy was still a twinkle in Edmund Barton's eye, institutionalized racism against Chinese in Australia was well entrenched. And knowing this lets us truly appreciate the most frequently quoted lines from Morrison's 1895 book, An Australian in China. Those are, I went to China possessed with a strong racial antipathy to the Chinese, common to my countrymen, but that feeling has long since given way to one of lively sympathy and gratitude. Nevertheless, Morrison was very much a man of his age, and that was the age of empire. Between 1815 and 1915, Britain increased its empire by 26 million square kilometers of territory in Africa, Asia and elsewhere, claiming dominion over more than 400 million people worldwide. The French were on the march in Southeast Asia and Africa. A recently united Italy was seeking to expand its influence, as were Germany and Russia. It wouldn't be long before Japan post the Meiji Restoration joined in what was known as the Great Game. As a boy, Morrison loved reading the Illustrated London News. The subscription of the London Illustrated London News reached the family by female. His parents may still have had copies showing artists' impressions of the raising and looting of the Yuen Mi Yuen, or other scenes from the Obeam Wars, with which the British had punished China for its lack of interest in their nationally sponsored drug trade. Morrison liked the illustrations in this paper so much that said he put them up on the walls of his room when he was at school. At 16, his favorite book was Cumice and Magdala by the explorer H.M. Stanley. Stanley would go on to track down Dr. Livingston. Morrison would go on to find his ultimate literary hero in Rudyard Kipling, the prophet of imperialism, and the author of the iconic Jungle Book and Kim, among other novels of empire and poems, including Gunga Din and, of course, the White Man's Burden. It's easy in retrospect to see the falseness of notions of discovery when applied to long inhabited places, or to perceive how outrageous was the practice of exploration when it involved invasion and wanton souveniring. The actuality of bullying, invasion, and exploitation today make the official rhetoric of the British empire that it was a civilizing force sound hollow, but there's no, we have no indication, and I do not believe that Morrison was anything but sincere in his belief in that mission. So this is an attempt to look into his world as it was then. Now when he was still a teenager, Morrison tested his own endurance and metal in the bush, in the outback, and on the rivers of this continent, paddling the Murray solo in a canoe and retracing Birkenwill's fatal route. When he took off, it was a route as well, when he took off to see the wider world, whether it was to attempt to walk across New Guinea, try his luck as a physician in New York, or simply sample the carnal delights of Madrid. It was with the cockiness of youth, the confidence of the hero, and the knowledge above all that he was an Englishman, one of the world's ruling tribes. Morrison's ability to travel to such far-flung destinations as the British Isles, Jamaica, the US, France, Morocco, the Philippines, and of course China, was greatly aided by the technological advances in railways and steamships over the 19th century. The marriage of compound steam engines, steel holes, and screw propellers had whittled weeks and in some cases, entire months of intercontinental ocean voyages. Around the time Morrison was born, the Frenchman, Louis Vuitton, came up with another idea that would revolutionize travel, lightweight, stackable luggage. Previous to that, people traveled with round-top steamer trunks. They had to have curved tops so the rain would run off them. And Louis Vuitton came up with this great idea to make flat trunks, cover them with canvas and so on. People copied and have them stackable. People copied them, so he put on a stripe. They copied them again. He kept making his design more and more complex so that people wouldn't counterfeit them. We all know where a lot of counterfeit Louis Vuitton comes from, but that's how that happened. A few weeks ago, a friend traveling to China for the first time texted me from Shanghai to ask where she could buy deodorant. And I was able just to text straight back and say, find a manning or a cara for it. Now, in Morrison's day, you wouldn't want to have forgotten any necessity, whether it was your cap fork, your shaving kit, your rubberized raincoat, or your toothbrush. Well, especially your toothbrush. Until the late 1800s, they weren't even easy to find in the US. On the other hand, a toothbrush may have been the one thing you could safely count on getting in China. It's believed that like paper and gunpowder, the bristled toothbrush was invented in China, spreading to the West from there. Morrison, who has given us extraordinary access to his world thanks to the journals he kept almost to the day he died, would also have needed to pack a pot of ink, a supply of blotting paper, and spare nibs. At least he didn't have to worry about quills because metal fountain pens, which were painted in America in 1810, had come into mass production the year before he was born. As for clothing, it was an age when people dressed for dinner. And of course, if you're traveling for many months, you travel for all seasons as well. So you do need that stackable luggage. Even Morrison, famous for his relaxed, even bohemian approach to fashion, would have really had to pack as a presentable selection of colors and cuffs. Women's kits took a bit more space. A single outfit for a Western woman in the late 19th and early 20th century could consist not just of dress, half-mandatory gloves, stockings, garters, and shoes, but a top bodice and under bodice, gourd skirt, penny coat, corset cover, bust corset, chemise, and bloomers. If May Perkins... I love the thought of people having affairs in those times. Imagine getting all that off. Anyway, if May Perkins took a little piece of Morrison's heart when she finally returned to San Francisco at the end of their affair in June 1904, she could have stowed it in any one of her 13 pieces of luggage. A friend of mine, Paul French, also an author, actually found the manifest of the ship that she was on and passed that on to me. Then, of course, were the precautions one needed to take for health. Tuberculosis, cholera, malaria, dysentery, and rabies were rampant in many parts of the world and easily spread. Notions of hygiene were far from universal, and medical science itself was only just coming round to the idea that germs caused illness. Blood tests and antibiotics were things of the future. An 1890 guide for passengers on the Orient Pacific line of steamships advised all travelers to carry essential medicines such as potassium, ammonium, strychnine, morphia, caffeine, chloroform, and cocaine. This is before P&O. A man would also be well advised to pack condoms or riding coats, as they were nicknamed. The most common were fashioned from oiled and stretched lamb intestines. And I believe they were reusable. As I wrote in A Most Tomorrow Woman, while these were fairly reliable preventing what was known in polite societies in interesting condition, they didn't offer much protection from the pox. Syphilis and gonorrhea were pandemic in the 19th century. And I'm going to tell you something that I've never seen written about in any of the biographies, but given some of the revelations in his journal, it shouldn't be surprising that Morrison suffered from gonorrhea, describing both symptoms and cure in his diary in some detail as well. This was in 1904, by the way. But on his first trip to China, Morrison contracted bubonic plague, which was also pandemic at the time. There were lots of things you could get on the road. But one thing you couldn't take on the road with you, not easily anyway, was camera. Imagine that. Photography at the time was cumbersome. It was the province of professionals trained in the obscure alchemy of albumim emulsions and collodion processes. Kodak's moment, however, came in 1900 with the introduction of the $1 brownie camera, the first camera that was portable, affordable, and easy to use. Morrison would become an enthusiast. But for the first four decades of his life and travels, he captured his world in words. The publication in 1895 of an Australian in China made Morrison something of a minor celebrity. It's so impressed, the editor of the Times of London, Mobilee Bell, that Bell offered Morrison the job of correspondent for the Times. Morrison thought he was going to go to Siam, Thailand, but he ended up in China. Now Morrison, that was fine, Morrison trained as a doctor, had always wanted to be a member of what he considered the nobler profession. In fact, the noblest profession, which was that of the journalist. Steam-powered presses introduced early in the 19th century had enabled for the very first time the fast and inexpensive production of newspapers for a general readership. The recently deceased, little-born News of the World, founded in 1843, and probably not a great argument for the nobility of the profession, was one of these. One of these things that were called penny presses. Another, the New York Herald, had actually sponsored Morrison's hero Stanley on his quest to find Dr Livingston in exchange for exclusives on his progress. A separate technological development had an equally great impact on journalism. In 1844, Samuel Morse sent the first telegraph message in his own code of dots and dashes. It translated as, What hath God wrought? Then he sent a second. Have you any news? Telegraph technology meant that by the time Morrison met Moberly Bell, there was such a profession as the foreign correspondent. Morrison arrived in Peking for the times in 1897. The Chinese city, the Chinese capital, was a walled city rising out of kilometers of flat countryside like a magnificent medieval fortress, an impression strengthened every sunset when guards shut the nine gates of its broad walls. In the treaty courts and foreign concessions of Tianjin, Shanghai and Canton, Western architecture paved streets and go-downs, warehouses had begun to dominate the urban landscape. Peking, by contrast, was still essentially a Ming dynasty town with broad avenues and almost 1,000 hutong. Its central north-south axis was commanded by the Forbidden City. No buildings stood taller than the walls of the palace. Though atop the city walls where Morrison often strolled, it was possible to view the sea of golden tiles that decorated the palace roof sparkling at the heart of the graceful, grey, low-slung capital. The inner city, or Tartar city, as it was called after the Tartars, or Manchus, lived in Banuman. Though by the time Morrison arrived, the rules had bent slightly to allow some high-ranking Chinese and merchants to reside within as well. Han, Mongol, Manchu, all men shaved and plaited their hair in the Manchu style or risked losing their heads altogether. On the streets, curtain sedan chairs jostled for space with rickshaws recently introduced from Japan innovative peaking carts, as they were known to the foreigners, mule-pulled cabs that looked like miniature-covered wagons. South of Chenmen lay the walled area to which Han Chinese had been banished soon after the Manchus set up court in Peking. The Chinese city, as it was known in English, was famous for even more chaotic and colourful street scenes, thriving shops, restaurants, theatres and brothels. Of the late 19th century, the lively seediness of Tianqiao, the splendour of Mandarin's gathering for their dawn audience outside the Dukhuaman, the Gate of Eastern Splendour, not to mention the cultured, passionate dream of red chambers, lives of the extended families cloistered in their courtyard homes. But Morrison's contemporaries were not so lyrical in their assessment. Morrison's very good friend, Lady Susan Townley, in her memoir, called Peking quote, the dirtiest and most evil-smelling town in the world. Travellers who have experienced the odours and sights of such cities as Seoul, Baghdad and Constantinople easily give the palm to the capital of China. Another British diarist of the time declared that the Chinese city, South of Chenmen, is so squalid that with the exception of a single street, it has but less to Europeans. Now when Morrison joined the capital's community of 500 or so foreign residents, he became the first full-time journalist. He was the first full-time foreign correspondent in China. Unlike in the foreign concessions of the treaty ports, foreign residents of Peking lived under Chinese law without the protection of extra-territoriality. Nor, strictly speaking, were they allowed to trade most redevelopments, missionaries and scholars. They tended to live in and around the foreign legations that were not far from Chenmen. When the art eccentric such as the polyglot scholar and talented fabulous Edmund Backhaus chose not only to live apart but to wear Chinese clothes and adopt Chinese ways, this was called going native, not an entirely respectable destination. By the time Morrison arrived in Peking, the legation quarter boasted banks, bowling alleys, bicycle tracks, a dedicated post office and even a Swiss run hotel. At Kirill's shop the first foreign-owned store in Peking one could find anything from French champagne to darning cotton and saddles, because of course people rode places. You might also find Palace Unix and Mantru Noble Minnable among one's fellow shoppers. One reason such places were tolerated despite being technically illegal. Now it wasn't Tianjin Tianjin was far more glamorous than Shanghai at the time either way. But with the steady round of social lunches and dinners, picnics, receptions, amateur theatricals, race days, games of wits, tennis and billiards one British diplomat was able to remark without irony that it was possible to pass the summer in Peking quote and never leave the precincts of civilization. This civilization was served after a manner of speaking by its own newspapers as well. One, the English language North China Herald in an article published the year Morrison arrived in Peking. Like in the Chinese I'm not sure what the context was, to a creature halfway between the recently discovered Java man, Homo erectus and civilized man saying that when angry he became quote the very picture of an enraged anthropoid ape. So you've got racialist discourse in places like Australia but you also had it in China. Racialist discourse was just another thing like trade missionaries that seemed to follow the flag. My researcher for the book, for the novel in California made accounts turned up some very interesting background on that subject when she was looking into Mae Perkin's host in Tianjin, James Ragsdale, the unofficial American consul. Before arriving in China it turns out that Ragsdale had been an activist in the anti-cooling movement against Chinese immigration in California that paralleled the anti-Chinese campaigns in Australia. As publisher of the Sonoma County Daily Republican, Ragsdale editorialized that the Chinese were race which possessed quote, neither conscience mercy or human feeling. They were, he quote, he said monsters in human form cunning and educated and therefore more dangerous and vile. It's amusing to speculate what twist of fate landed James Ragsdale in China itself and I do speculate in my novel. Morrison, who readily availed himself of the social and other advantages of the Legation Quarter and eagerly absorbed and transcribed the foreign communities gossip, salacious and otherwise, preferred to live apart settling after 1900 in a courtyard house on Wang Fujian. There he enjoyed sharing the world of his servants who passed on stories to him of dealings with minor officials, scrapes with the law and news from relatives who worked inside the palace or lived in the countryside. He took a warm interest in their families and became close friends with his head man or head boy as he was called. It's hard today to appreciate the depth of the divide between foreigners and the people of China in Morrison's day. There was only limited socializing. Most meetings were held in the Zongli Yamen. One of the reasons for the limited socializing was really profound differences in the way people socialized. For one thing, Chinese and Manchus did not socialize in mixed company men and women together whereas Westerners were the opposite. So it was quite awkward on both sides. They really didn't, from all the evidence did not enjoy each other's cuisines. And if Chinese considered Western manners crude, Westerners tended to find the intricacies of Chinese social courtesies daunting despite, and thank you Jeremy for pointing this out, having a reasonably complete handbook in the missionary authored guide Ways That Are Dark from chapters on Chinese etiquette and social procedure. Of course the deepest obstacle lay in the fact that the very presence of foreigners in Peking was a daily reminder to its inhabitants of their country's weakness and humiliation. Now one of the most dramatic events of the late Qing occurred the year after Morrison arrived in Peking. The 31-year-old Guangxu Emperor endorsed a program to introduce Western inspired reforms to the country's ailing military, political and economic structures. After 104 days of these reforms the Empress Dowager, feeling threatened and under the influence of a conservative coterie within the court, took the extraordinary move of placing the Emperor under house arrest. She also ordered the detention and execution of the men who had advised him it's a very famous incident the Hundred Days Reform and its aftermath. Morrison had enthusiastically supported the reforms. He once described himself on the other hand as being, quote, impervious to all sentimental or personal considerations in his journalism yet he was hardly detached and in this case he even involved himself in an abortive plan to rescue one of the accused. He detested the Empress Dowager this man was then later he refused help and he was later ordered. Morrison detested the Empress Dowager for her role in the affair. He didn't like her before that anyway. And his journals are peppered with references to that odious woman and that awful harridan among other things. Morrison held strong opinions about people and never missed his words. He frequently branded his dinner companions dull dogs, damn fools women of his acquaintance those that were not squeezable that is squeezable could be gushing giddy, cranky or cackle headed and at least one Chinese official was a little more than a sleeve dog. Everybody knows sleeve dog? That's with big Chinese broad sleeves. You could keep your little pet inside your sleeve so it was an insult. Then there were the people Morrison really didn't like. Confirmed masturbators disagreeable brutes. The Belgians were on mass ill-disciplined socialists and likely to cause trouble and one wouldn't want to get Morrison started on the French, the Jews, the Russians or the Germans. Though he generally approved of the Japanese he also used the phrase anthropoid ape it must have been something about the post Darwinian era to describe a Japanese diplomat of his acquaintance. Even the fascinating English Arabist and travel writer Gertrude Bell wasn't spared. He said of her, she took the leg off an iron pot and she has the cheek of the devil. But few ever excited as strong a degree of antipathy in Morrison as the Empress Dowager he actually wrote in his diary in April 1899 that he had often wanted to see her killed he understood the feeling to be mutual after in the summer of 1900 her imperial guards not only failed to stop the murderous, xenophobic and anti-Christian boxer rebels from entering Peking but appeared to aid them in their campaign of slaughter and besiegement. Caught in the 55 day siege of the Legations Morrison took an active part in their defense and was badly wounded. Only the invasion of foreign troops ended the siege. Morrison lost his home in the conflagration. When it was all over the Empress when the foreign troops were coming into Peking the Empress Dowager and her court had actually fled the city. So when the whole thing was over the foreign troops led the looting of the abandoned temporarily abandoned forbidden city. Morrison while noting the incredible greediness of some others he partook of the spoils himself compensating himself for his losses and taking a bit of personal revenge on the Empress Dowager at the same time. Several years later the lines between personal and political partisan and observer would blur again in Morrison's world. He became so active in promoting Japan's interests in Manchuria and pushing Japan to attack Russian interests there and in Korea that in November 1903 he declared to a Shanghai colleague J.O.P. Bland that if she, Japan does not go to war then I personally will repine that my whole work in the Far East has been a failure. When the Russo-Japanese war finally broke out in early 1904 it was nicknamed for a time Morrison's war will return to the war in a moment but there was another battlefield that helped to define the changing changing landscape of Morrison's world women in the west had begun to fight for suffrage the right to own property and to live lives of their own choosing the creature known as New Woman was born. The most famous fictional incarnation of the New Woman was the Gibson girl the creation of illustrated Charles Dana Gibson in Collier's magazine in 1902 a wildly popular model of young active womanhood the Gibson girl combined elegance and femininity with athleticism, character and modernity then there was the real life Alice Roosevelt daughter of the American president Alice pretty and stylish was so famously wild firing pistols into the air at parties smoking cigarettes going to the bookies to place bets jumping into swimming pools fully clothed that her father once famously said I can either run the country or I can attend to Alice but I cannot possibly do well for all her gumption Alice herself could not have aspired to run the country women in America still didn't have the verge even in forward-looking America girls weren't encouraged to pursue education or career a young lady of good families first priority was to maintain what ladies magazines called the citadel of their chastity until such time as they could be marched across and I'm not making this up Hyman's altar by a suitable young man there was the marriage altar Hyman's altar there would be notices in the paper with who had gone Hyman's altar life was a bit different for the working classes the factories of the industrial revolution in England and the United States with their voracious need for labour produced a new class of independent working women those who took advantage of their freedom to live sexually liberated lives sometimes mixing with poets and painters were called grissettes in France for their grey characteristic grey frocks and were known in America as B-girls bachelorettes and bohemians on the whole however these kind of terrible creatures aside women were not believed to have much natural interest in sex and yet at the same time throughout the late 19th century and early 20th there was this huge cultural anxiety that the opposite might be true so there was this moral panic around infomania and it extended at times to corsets which supposedly overloaded the sexual organs with blood causing unnatural excitement the solutions for infomania ranged from the horrific confinement in asylums and clitoridectomies to the anodyne such as eating cornflakes for breakfast cornflakes were designed by the famously sexually repressed vegetarian Mr Kellogg as part of a diet to dampen the sexual urge think about that next time your breakfast my favourite of the remedies for infomania or the prescriptions is a warning by a 19th century physician that infomania could be caused by women putting their hair up in such a way that would exert pressure on their small brains and cause quote an unnatural flow of blood to the area of a mattiveness now Morrison as I've hinted had known more than a few resets wild girls and naughty wives to judging by his journals in his time but he had never encountered anything like the walking area of a mattiveness that was Miss May Ruth Perkins May whom he called Maisie rocked into Morrison's world in 1903 and into his bed in early 1904 his was not the only bed she was prone to visit with him and he via his journals with us her considerable record of conquest both past and concurrent Britannia would have been proud he was agonised and jealous but seemed willing to put up with May's antics so long as she kept him on her booty list his diaries revealed that he wrote to her often both letters and telegrams he was a tremendous correspondent and that's another reason there was so much about him and of course Lo Kui Min the late Professor Lo Kui Min had edited volumes of his letters which are great reading now he recorded his his sending of telegrams he recorded the content of the telegrams but all we know of the letters sadly is that they included one of the most melting love letters in his description that he ever wrote in his whole life my research assistant in California turned up stacks and stacks of love letters written to May by an impressive range of lovers before she arrived in China Morrison mentions her reading to him from such letters and the nosebleed it caused him but sadly it seems Morrison's own letters to her have been lost to posterity if anybody knows otherwise let me know while Morrison pursued May up and down the China coast and back and forth to Japan his colleague Lionel James chased a dream James was the time's star war correspondent and his dream was to revolutionize the whole way that war correspondence was done James, Lionel James had reported from a number of fronts including the Second War War in Africa where he was trapped in the siege of Lady Smith to fly on everything from pigeons to heliographs mirrors where he flashed little signals to get his dispatches from the battlefield to the press room the sheer physical challenge of getting a report from the field past military censors even if you weren't under siege and to a telegraph office meant that it could take up to a month before your report reached the newsroom now that he was being sent to cover the Russo-Japanese War which had broken out in a naval arena James had a better idea to employ the brand new science of wireless radio transmissions to make today's battles tomorrow's news now to do this you needed transmitters and receiving poles and all this transmitters were way too heavy there were massive massive big chunks of equipment you couldn't imagine a journalist following an army on a land campaign on his horse being able to take a transmitter which also required an operator and so on you also needed a mast for receiving the signals that was not too far away what happened with the Russo-Japanese War was that by breaking out in the form of a battle for control of Port Arthur that poured on the tip of the Manchurian peninsula of L'Ardon the battle was for Port Arthur because it was of huge military and commercial strategic importance because what was happening was the Japanese Navy was blockading and attacking the Russians at Port Arthur the scene of battle was relatively fixed and James had this idea put the transmitter on a boat sail it out into the battle report from there he persuaded his editors at the times to hire a boat called the Haimun ship it out pay for an operator and erect a mast in nearby Shandong at the British protectorate of Weihai Way there was one major catch the Japanese Navy had to agree or James's efforts would literally be sunk Morrison had respect and friends in high places in Japan the mission at many points seemed to hang on Morrison's ability to persuade both the Japanese and the wary British Admiralty to go back home that this was a good idea and in the end he failed but it gave him a lot of good excuses for following May because he was often given the excuse for getting somewhere where she was because of this mission in the end the times pulled the plug on what was an increasingly expensive and seemingly futile enterprise but as Peter Slattery shows in his fascinating 2004 book not such a fascinating title but a great book reporting the Russo-Japanese War 1904 to 2005, Lionel James's first wireless transmissions to the times the episode and the few dispatches James did manage to send is considered a landmark in the history of war correspondence in hindsight it's easy to see how the Russo-Japanese war which Japan won in 1905 paved the way for its full-scale invasion of China 32 years later Morrison wouldn't live to see that but he did come to change his opinion about Japan's likely role in the region as a positive force in 1911 the Qing dynasty was overthrown by republican revolution Morrison who considered himself a good strategic thinker enjoyed respect among senior Chinese officials and also believed himself a solid friend of China soon made what was respect possibly another questionable call leaving journalism for a career as a political advisor he first helped persuade the country's new and still fluid leadership that of all the candidates for the republic's first president Yuan Shikai alone could win the confidence of the foreign powers Yuan had been a tremendous innovator when he was a vice-roy of Zhili in Tianjin he brought in, he promoted girls' education modernized the police force modernized the postal service and all of this you can see where Morrison was very impressed with him anyway Yuan became president and Morrison an advisor another Australian journalist who had become passionately invested in the question of China's faith was W.H. Donald Donald drafted Sun Yat-sen's republican manifesto but like Morrison had little faith that Sun whom he called a fool in a letter to Morrison could run the country and Yuan's neo-imperial ambitions and excesses would soon leave Morrison doubtful that he had backed the right horse he eventually professed himself thoroughly disgusted with his job in early 1915 the Japanese presented to Yuan what are now known as the infamous 21 demands demands Morrison later characterized as worse than many presented by a victor to his vanquished enemy in the words of Morrison biographer the demands would have reduced China to a vassal state the Japanese warned Yuan not to disclose any details to Japan's alley Britain or there'd be war in the end Morrison who believed that disclosure was China's one safeguard persuaded Yuan to leak the contents of the document it was a decision of momentous consequence years later by mid 1919 long simmering Chinese anger at both Japan and the collusion of foreign powers against Chinese interests erupted in the patriotic and culturally charged May 4th movement now in 1912 after several more dalliances with other immoral women Morrison married his very nice young woman young secretary Jenny or Robin when Yuan when Yorchukai died in 1916 there was a rise of war lordism in China, China was fracturing the central government authority was collapsing China was very unstable and an increasingly dangerous place to be Jenny asked Morrison to move to England for the sake of the children's education and he agreed for the next several years Morrison maintained a punishing regime of travel writing and speaking around the world on behalf of the Chinese cause his health deteriorated steadily it had never been good it had been worsened by all of the things that he did the panic plague and so on on 27th May 1920 the 58 year old Morrison weak, jaundiced and suffering from acute pancreatitis picked up his pen for the very last time he wrote in his diary almost can believe death struggle began nine days later the year was 1920 that year the US constitution was amended to extend universal suffrage to women wireless radio signals had truly revolutionized journalism commercial radio was born also that year airplanes used to ferocious effect in the great war that had only ended two years earlier were poised to change the face of travel in Australia 1920 marked the founding of the Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services Qantas the League of Nations came into being the Russian Civil War ended women threw away their corsets and lifted their hemlines flappers, it girls and all that jazz would mark the decade known as the roaring 20s in China bound feet followed Manchu cues into extinction and in China too girls had begun to be educated in numbers a form of new woman arose there too it was also in China in 1920 that an inquisitive and strong mind in 26 year old provincial from Hunan read the communist manifesto one year later Mao Zedong would attend the first meeting of the communist party is it really possible to know Morrison's world Inga Klendinen in her quarterly essay the history question who owns the past disparaged the notion that a writer can through research or a series of experiential experiments truly understand what it's like to live in another era empathy, research and imagination do have their limitations in her view the novelist's only real defense of their trespass is the defense offered by Peter Kerry who when questioned how he could possibly know the mind of Kelly when he wrote his provocatively titled True History of the Kelly Gang he said I made it up Henry James once wrote to a woman author of historical novels the following you may multiply the little facts that can be got from pictures and documents relics and prints as much as you like the real thing is almost impossible to do and in its absence the whole effect is is not the representation of the old consciousness the soul, the sense, the horizon the vision of individuals in whose minds half the things that make ours that make the modern world were nonexistent you have to think with your modern apparatus a man, a woman or rather 50 whose own thinking was intensely otherwise conditioned you have to simplify back by an amazing tour de force and even then it's all huddle bunk with regard to Morrison and to most a moral woman I can say that I did my best to write a novel that allows the reader to experience a taste of Morrison's world and May's world as well as for the rest, like Peter Carey I made it up. Thank you very much Let's give a question first let me wonder while we're thinking what was it that led you to Morrison in the first place? Well like everyone I've always been interested in Morrison and I had Cyril Perrault's biography of him on my bookshelf I had read it in a huge detail but I'd read a lot of it and then stuck it on the bookshelf and found him quite interesting but I wasn't I put him in the back of my head I'd always thought well very interesting lots of things there maybe one day writes a novel I don't know it's such a big story then in 2004 another biography of Morrison came out a biography called at the time The Man Who Died Twice that unfortunate title has been changed I can't remember what it's called now but it's credited in A Most Tomorrow Woman for this reason I was asked by the age to review this book and as I was reading this very carefully this new biography I just got completely excited about Morrison I'm reading it and going oh my god I really really have to do something with Morrison I have to do something with Morrison then I came to the part about Maisie there were about three pages and I went oh my god that's my novel that's it, that's it I then finished that, wrote my review went straight to Cyril Pearl pulled it down, looked at Maisie just about the same information just about the same amount there was hardly anything known about May I started getting on the internet I started getting very obsessive I figured out who she was we only had some hints there were Governor of California and Republican State Senator his family papers were this is a long kind of tracking down but I found that the California Historical Society in Oakland which was at the time it was the Brooklyn of California which is a compliment Oakland which was where their family lived the library there for the California State Historical Society which is a large Clement Perkins papers so I corresponded with the librarians and I said is there anything there about the daughter and they said we can provide you this index and yes there's a couple of files of things of hers I said how can I, you know I was here and they said well we've got a list of people who might, you know we don't promote people but here's a list of possible researchers I haven't done the most perfect person made accounts she was just brilliant, she was incredibly interested in women's issues and all the stuff she did to these files and reported back right away saying gold, gold, gold because she found all of these love letters to May, she found letters from May's school mistress to her father and her father saying to the writing to May and to the mother because the father was always in Washington saying you know what are we going to do about her what are we going to do about her she doesn't go to school she wears her hair in bangs the fringe was an immigrant poor immigrant girl hairstyle designed to cover up scars from say chicken pox or something and it was a sign because working class girls were sexually liberated we all know they were sluts therefore if you wore your hair in bangs you were slut so the father agonizes about this puts exclamation points beside it in the letters we learn so much from this and then moving from there made a uncovered exposés on James Ragsdale's the Democratic press and it just kind of went on from there so I knew I had this great story a story that hadn't really been properly explored a story that had Morrison at the center this fascinating complex man we had so much of his voice in his letters in his diaries and also interestingly one of my favorite little things that I just found was Banjo Patterson met him and in Banjo Patterson's Happy Dispatches there's a part where he meets Morrison and Banjo Patterson must have had a tape recorder for a brand because they didn't have tape recorders in that time he throughout Happy Dispatches Banjo Patterson conjures up people so vividly with the way that they spoke and he has this whole conversation that he had with Morrison and his friend Molly knew who I also have in my novel and it was amazing because it filled in certain it was like his diary voice but it was a speaking voice so there was all this stuff and I just said oh this is it, this is why I have to write this but all this stuff I'm fascinated many of you may remember too that Banjo Patterson was also a war correspondent together with Winston Churchill during the war so there's another connection for you I see some hands going, I'll adjust them first Thank you Linda What do you know about Morrison's religious upbringing, the role of religion in his childhood and since the time of his world, the time of the missionary world could you tell us a little bit about his views on missionary? I had to cut that out just for time but I did have a whole thing because he grew up in a everyone went to church in those days people were, they had faith it was just, it was really automatic, I mean Nietzsche didn't come along until later on with his theories and so on so he was brought up in a fairly pious, normal Christian household from what I can see and when he went travelling I think it was his sister who gave him this tiny little psalm book which it's about, it's like half a match book size it's collected with all his other stuff in the Mitchell Library of New South Wales so he obviously carried that little book of psalms with him on his travels, he kept it for a very long time so it meant something but on the other hand he had no time for missionaries whatsoever because on his travels I think he wrote to his mother that they what did he write it was a really famous quote and it's just gone out of my head but it's something about the trouble that they I put it into a dialogue in A Most Tomorrow Woman but he really did not care for missionaries thought that they caused a lot more trouble than they did good, he had respect for individual missionaries he met who were trying to do something under really difficult circumstances in isolated posts in China's elsewhere but he would also write things, he met this girl in a missionary post in China who had he said he was just, it was horrible it was something like her greatest joy is to look up and think about Jesus and he was completely, she was pale and she was sickly and he didn't care for the missionaries on a number of levels but of course he had to associate with them often because that was just the nature of socializing in China at the time he could be quite scathing and he was very scathing about a lot of the missionary enterprises, on the other hand when the boxers had come in and attacked were attacking Beijing and Peking and they had they were massacring Christian converts everywhere and they had, there were a number of Christian converts who were holed up in one of the cathedrals, Morrison himself helped to ride to their rescue so he's a bit contradictory, as with everything else in his life, but I think on the whole he would have had a sort of a basic Christian belief, he was not from what I know a church goer in his later life but maybe he was when Jenny got to him but he he didn't really care for the missionary enterprise at all but, yeah Thank you Like, have you met Hazel Rowley's biography, Franklin No It covers the same period that late 19th century particularly at some of the same attitudes and the same sorts of changes that he did I mean it's a very good use of documents Oh great, thank you Linda, whenever Australia's relationship with China goes through a rough patch, for example at the time of the Stern-Hu crisis China kindly reminds us that we sent a boatload of troops who got as far as Tianjin at the time of the Boxer Rebellion Has Morrison come on to the Chinese radar, do we see them writing about Morrison at all? Yes, not in the way that the global times would probably notice but there's a little field of Morrison studies there's a few Morrison scholars the most prominent of them has actually done a period of time here at the ANU as a visiting fellow her name is Dou Kun and she's written several books, she's written a book about Morrison's role in Chinese politics she's written about Morrison she's also translated a number of the works on Morrison and Shen Jiawei who's an Australian artist a Chinese Australian artist Fujian Publishing House Fujian Educational Publishing House is extremely interested in the topic of Morrison and they've put out Dou Kun's books and a couple of others and Shen Jiawei edited a he edited two quite substantial volumes of Morrison's photographs from the Mitchell Library and those books are there would be I don't know that they were really edited to the best they could have been but there's certainly it's easier than going to the Mitchell Library and looking through the drawers which I've done as well so those things have been done in China and in the 1930s Wang Fujian was known as Morrison Street in English there's actually some old 1932 maps done in English by an English illustrator in Peking and it's listed as Morrison Street Morrison probably isn't so much on the radar now not in a big way but there is stuff and also I should mention Beijing which is the the television station CCTV documentary channel they a number of years ago they made a documentary and they interviewed Dou Kun they came here, they went to Jilong they did all that they did a lot and they interviewed me and this plays so much in China apparently that every so often somebody stops me in the street because they've seen me talking about Morrison on TV so I don't know I don't think he's big on the consciousness of the average Chinese he hasn't been buried either it was a four-part documentary it's actually quite good and you can still buy the big what used to be in Wang Fujian in what was Morrison Street in Beijing next I'm going to Beijing just to be mentioned that the Wang Fujian Street was known as the Morrison Street was it officially lived after and Morrison they don't buy and they've been speaking to people from what we know it was known by English speaking people I don't know that there was ever an English sign was there signs on the end and does it say Morrison Street there you go I knew who to ask the answer is yes this is exactly where it is near the McDonald's maybe just one more question that we should wrap up we'll be out there so you could talk to me out there too well yes we do did you visit Morrison's house in Wang Fujian which apparently was only demolished some years ago I think Claire went looking for it Doquan and I went around the area but we we didn't have any luck Claire has done something brilliant in the China Heritage Quarterly online so if you look up Claire Roberts you'll find her work on that the other tangible connection with Morrison I certainly have is that sadly Morrison had a wonderful library and when it came time to leave China he wanted to sell the library and he wanted to sell it to Australia and Australia was too skit and too short-sighted to buy it in the end he sold it to those pesky Japanese and if you go to study in Japan if you go as I did to do PhD research in Japan on modern Chinese history one of the places you go to is Toyo which is built around Morrison's library and many of the books still have his name played in them can I just add one little footnote on the missionary question is that one of the things Morrison collected assiduously or missionary histories, missionary pamphlets and missionary journals now before I ask you before I ask you to express your thanks once again I just want to say how grateful I am, how much I've learnt I thought I knew a bit about Morrison I've learned so much more and not just about Morrison and the one bit of advice I have for all of you when you go home tonight before you go to bed throw out your cornflakes and then download them please go ahead dear, thank you