On this anniversary of 9/11, a friend and I found ourselves on a hill to the north of Canberra. Walking through the National Arboretum, we listened to a guide talk about the 94 forests of different trees planted at the Arboretum.

Our guide stopped in front of a modest tree, called a Chanticleer Callery pear. 

This pear tree, he told the group, had been planted in 2011. The U.S. Ambassador at that time, Mr. Jeffrey Bleich, had planted the tree to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

This type of pear tree, our guide continued, has a history. In October 2001, 9/11 rescue workers at Ground Zero found a Chanticleer Callery pear tree under the ruins. Its truck blackened, its roots and limbs snapped, the tree was alive, just barely. It was nursed back to health and later replanted in 2010 in the National September 11 Memorial, where it became known as the Survivor Tree. That tree, the guide concluded, and the one planted here in Canberra to commemorate that awful day are both symbols of hope.

My friend and I hadn’t spoken during the tour; no one knew we were Americans. And yet the guide had told the story thoughtfully, and the Australians had listened with respect and sympathy. What could have been a moment of alienation and separation, of feeling so far from home, was instead intensely moving because of the kindness and empathy of the people around us. Thank you, Australia.

How citizens go about protests can tell you a lot about their country. In an exhibit called Activism: Forces for Change in Canberra at the Canberra Museum + Gallery, I saw this:

It’s a float called Stop Arms for Export. Handmade from oil drums and metal swimming pool walls re-purposed from a dump, the float is 7 meters long (about 23 feet). It was used to protest defense companies coming to Canberra to show off their wares to the Australian Government in the Australian International Defence Exhibitions (AIDEX) of 1989 and 1991.

The 1991 exhibition drew around 2,000 protesters, leading to more than 200 arrests. As part of these protests, nine naked men hid inside the arm of the float. The plan was to rush the exhibition center’s main gate, and then the men (calling themselves Penises for Peace) would jump out inside the exhibition.

The police foiled their plan, diverting the float and then overturning it. The men spilled out and were promptly arrested.

The protests, however, were effective. Because of the disruption and bad publicity, local and state authorities refused to allow a massive arms exhibition in the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) ever again.

What did I learn about Australia from this local version of the Trojan horse? Its people will band together with their mates and find the quirky even in something they believe in passionately. 

​I grew up outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and whenever I feel a little homesick, I just go to my local Australian grocery store. The rows of Heinz products soon remind me of my hometown.

How did the H.J. Heinz company get all the way from Pittsburgh to Australia?

In 1869, using his mother’s recipe, H.J. Heinz started selling bottled horseradish from a pushcart on the streets of Pittsburgh. Other products soon followed, including sauerkraut, vinegar and pickles. Most famously, bottled ketchup and baked beans came a little later.

Those baked beans were Heinz’s entrée to the rest of the world. London’s famous store, Fortnum and Mason, became the first overseas sellers of Heinz products. The Heinz company introduced baked beans to England and marketed them heavily, eventually succeeding in making baked beans a staple of the British diet.

Heinz products came to Australia via American miners working in the goldfields in the 1880s. They shared Heinz foods with their Australian counterparts. Heinz representatives also held in-store demonstrations to introduce unfamiliar products like baked beans or India relish (a sweet mixture of pickles, celery, and spices).

​In 1935, Heinz’ Victoria factory began producing bottled horseradish, followed by baked beans and canned spaghetti.

​Heinz quickly learned to adapt to local tastes and change their products accordingly. The famous ketchup formula has different variations across the world. 

Heinz also purchased Wattie’s, a venerable New Zealand company, in 1992. 

​Today, Heinz products are sold in more than 50 countries, including Australia. Traveling around the world can still remind me of my hometown.

The Birds of Australia—a massive seven-volume work published between 1840 to 1848 and one of the most influential books about Australian birds—contains stunning illustrations by a woman named Elizabeth Gould … but you’d never know it. Her name doesn’t appear on the title page. The individual plates are credited only to “J & E Gould.” The “J” is John Gould, Elizabeth’s husband, a taxidermist and ornithologist. The book’s author, he took credit for each illustration, even though the work was his wife’s. She was reduced to an initial.

Born into a military family in England in 1804, Elizabeth was probably taught to draw and paint, skills that were expected of middle- and upper-class women of the time. At 22, she was working (unhappily) as a governess. Her brother, a taxidermist, introduced her to one of his colleagues, John Gould. They married in 1829 when they were both 24.

John wanted to write a book about birds from the Himalayas and informed a no-doubt-surprised Elizabeth that she would do all the drawings, paintings, and lithographs. She taught herself the new art of lithography while pregnant with their first child. Elizabeth designed and illustrated 80 lithographs of 100 bird species, all hand colored.

When the book was published, John listed only himself on the title page. In the preface, John noted her “well-known abilities” in “delineating these birds.” Although Elizabeth didn’t sign any of her artwork, each plate bears a small credit: “Drawn from nature on stone by E. Gould.” The book was a huge success, leading to another project on the birds of Europe.

Over the next five years, Elizabeth worked on the illustrations and created 448 plates for the book. She also gave birth to five more children, but only three survived.
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During this time, Charles Darwin brought back bird specimens from the Galapagos Islands, and Elizabeth created the illustrations to go with John’s text about the birds. One of these was of the famous Galapagos finches, referred to in Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Elizabeth’s name didn’t appear on any of the illustrations. 

Again, when Birds of Europe was published, Elizabeth’s name was not on the title page. Worse, each illustration now had John’s initials along with Elizabeth’s. He often claimed that she contributed only the lithographs, while he was responsible for the original art. Both contemporary sources and documentary evidence of the original sketches confirms his assertion was untrue.

With another successful book, John now wanted to tackle Australian birds. Elizabeth’s brothers both had farms in New South Wales, so the Goulds could base themselves there for the new project.

Elizabeth didn’t want to travel to Australia. The Goulds had four surviving children, and the plan was to take their oldest son (age seven) with them, leaving the three youngest children with Elizabeth’s mother. The idea of leaving behind her youngest child Louisa (only six months old) was extremely distressing, and Elizabeth nearly didn’t go. However, John insisted, so they traveled to Australia in 1838.

In her letters to her mother and diaries, she didn’t talk about her art. She missed her children and mother and was frustrated by the separation. She stayed busy, working on hundreds of drawings and paintings and learning about native plants as well as the birds. She worried about how many bird specimens her husband was collecting, calling him “a great enemy of the feathered tribe,” and wrote to her mother: “I hope he leaves some of the birds in the skies.”
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As a zoological artist, Elizabeth faced real challenges in the days before photography. Bird specimens to draw from were collected, killed, and stuffed. The resulting illustration was often stilted and unnatural, a style referred to now as “birds on a stick.” Their time in Australia allowed Elizabeth to observe and draw birds in their native habitat. Her art had to be scientifically accurate, lifelike, and beautiful—she achieved all three. 

​Elizabeth spent a little more than two years in Australia, returning to England in 1840. A year later, she died of puerperal fever after giving birth for the eighth time. Another artist had to finish the lithography from her drawings and paintings.

While John Gould never put her name on the title page of any of their books, he did name an Australian bird to memorialize Elizabeth, calling it the Gouldian Finch. He noted that his late wife had “laboriously assisted me with her pencil, accompanied me to Australia, and cheerfully interested herself in all my pursuits.” Ironically, even though he named the bird in honor of Elizabeth, he used only his surname.

​Today, although her husband is still sometimes credited for her work, Elizabeth’s enormous contributions are becoming better known through Her Natural History campaign, related presentations, and a novel written about her. The enormous breadth of her work can be seen in various archives, including this one of her lithographs, thanks to the Biodiversity Heritage Library. 

In the National Automobile Museum of Tasmania is a green 1974 Holden Monaro HQ GTS in completely original condition. Even though I know nothing about cars, it didn’t take long for me to recognize how special this one is.

To understand why, imagine a foggy night in early January 1975 on the Tasman Bridge in Hobart. In the Derwent River below, a bulk ore carrier, called Lake Illawarra, collided with several pylons of the Tasman Bridge. A large section of the bridge deck collapsed, falling into the river and onto the ship. The ship sank, and seven of its crew died. Four cars failed to stop in time, plunging into the river, killing five occupants.
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The green Holden Monaro was balancing precariously on what was left of the bridge.

Frank Manley was the driver of that new car. His wife Sylvia was with him, along with their daughter and her uncle in the back seat. As Frank later recollected, the lights had gone out on the bridge, so they thought there had been an accident. His wife realized the bridge was gone when the road’s white line disappeared. She yelled for Frank to stop, and he hit the brakes. 

“Next thing,” Frank remembered, “we dropped over, and the wife said, ‘Put her in reverse!’ And I said, ‘Bugger reverse, get out!’” Frank explained later, “The back wheels were off the concrete, off the bridge, and if I had put her in reverse, I think the vibration would have sent us the rest of the way off the bridge.”

Frank and his family escaped the car. Since the bridge collision had happened on a Sunday night, there was very little traffic, with few cars on the bridge. The disaster had cut the main artery to Hobart’s eastern suburbs, causing major disruption.​

The repairs to the bridge took nearly three years. It reopened in October 1977. Frank Manley continued to drive his Holden Monaro.
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Every museum is filled with objects that defied the odds, that lasted long enough to make it to a museum. This car, however, feels like a particularly lucky survivor.

The Kemal Ataturk Memorial recalls the heroism and sacrifices made by soldiers on both sides. Rather than demeaning adversaries or seeing them somehow as less than human, it asks us to instead acknowledge our shared humanity—a worthwhile thing to do on ANZAC day.

Unfortunately, the massive undertaking was a failure from the start. Even during construction, rabbits hopped around the fence, moving ever farther west. While the rabbit-proof fence may have been ineffective at stopping rabbits, it did serve as a landmark for three girls trying to find their way home.

The Aborigines Act of 1905 allowed the Australian government to forcibly remove indigenous children from their families and resettle them to assimilate into white culture. These children became known as the stolen generations. In 1931, Dolly and her younger cousins Gracie and Daisy lived in Jigalong, a settlement that had been established to maintain the rabbit-proof fence. The three girls had white fathers, and the government’s removal policy focused on "helping" those that were part-white by moving them away to  assimilate quicker. The three girls were torn from their families and moved to Moore River Native Settlement, around 1000 miles away from Jigalong. Dolly soon decided to escape, trusting in her bushcraft and ability to follow the fence to lead her and her cousins back home.

Author Doris Pilkington Garimara recounts the story of her mother Dolly’s epic trek in the book Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence. The book was later made into an award-winning 2002 movie by Phillip Noyce.

In societies where making sharp observations about one's leaders or protesting policies in writing landed you in trouble, in prison, or worse, cartoonists soon learned to express all that with images. The National Library of Australia's collection contains more than 14,000 editorial cartoons, and the best of them are on exhibit now. Running from 7 March to 21 July, the exhibition is called Inked: Australian Cartoons.  

As an American in Australia, it was a chance to learn more about a culture by understanding its cartoons. The exhibition includes cartoons that capture the beginnings of Australia at Botany Bay all the way up to those that comment on current events. Wandering through the galleries, I felt like an anthropologist happening upon dozens of tiny time capsules.

Early cartoons explored Great Britain's relationship with this exotic new land. In the cartoon on the left, British cartoonist John Boyne suggests in 1786 that the planned penal colony would be a fitting home for the Prince of Wales. Notice that the prince wears a jester’s cap and sits on a barrel of tokay, a sweet fortified wine. His mistress and two moneylenders bid him farewell. In one image, Boyne suggests the prince’s crimes: drunkenness and promiscuity with both women and money. In a later cartoon from 1868, William Wyatt memorializes the arrival of an important visitor to Australia. Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, was the first member of the royal family to visit. A bevy of exotic animals greet him, including a kangaroo, wombat, wallaby, and an emu. The British Lion stands behind the prince.

After Federation on 1 January 1901, with a new constitution and federal government, the young nation struggled to establish its identity on the world stage. During the World Wars, the new country identified with the image that was developing of the Australian soldier: brave, practical, down to earth, and suspicious of authority. 

In the second row above, cartoons comment on our obsession with technology, approaches to global warming, and the referendum on same sex marriage. Cartoonist David Pope found signs of life and optimism when Australia voted "yes" for same sex marriage late in 2017.

The exhibition was eye-opening. I could definitely do worse than studying cartoons to try to understand a country and its culture.

A recent post compared the government shutdown in the United States to Australia’s 1975 crisis over passing an appropriations bill. To resolve the crisis, the Queen’s representative, Sir John Kerr, who served as Governor-General, sacked Australia’s prime minister and put in the opposition leader to pass a bill before the supply (appropriations money) ran out on 27 November. When Parliament sought a no-confidence vote for the new prime minister, Kerr dissolved Parliament and called for elections. Kerr’s actions have remained controversial all the way up to today, and I noted there was a pending court case to make his communications with the Queen public, to determine to what extent Queen Elizabeth II was involved with her Governor-General’s decisions. Buckingham Palace has always maintained she knew nothing at all.

A court recently found that the palace letters between Kerr and Queen Elizabeth II will remain off-limits to the public. The decision has outraged many Australians and prompted more discussion about becoming a republic versus remaining a constitutional monarchy. This article explains the case and the constitutional ramifications of the court’s decision.

At a recent lunch with Australian friends, we commiserated over the U.S. government shutdown (now in its 33rd day with 800,000 federal workers still unpaid). One said, “We did this once too, you know.” And he shared with us the story of Australia’s 1975 government shutdown.

The Parliament of Australia consists of the House of Representatives and the Senate. In October 1975, the ruling Labor party had passed appropriation bills in the House of Representatives, where they held a majority. The opposition Liberal party, which controlled the Senate, refused to pass those bills. The Liberal party objected to what they saw as expansive spending, particularly since signs indicated the country could be moving into a recession. The Liberal party wanted Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, leader of the Labor party, to call an election for the House of Representatives. Instead, Whitlam planned to call for an election in the Senate, hoping to seize control there.

Meanwhile, because Australia is a constitutional monarchy, Parliament has another element: Queen Elizabeth II is the head of State. The Queen’s representative at the time, Sir John Kerr, served as Governor-General. Kerr negotiated with both parties and recognized that neither the Labor nor the Liberal party would give in. He also knew that the supply (appropriations money) would run out on 27 November. Prime Minister Whitlam’s planned election to break the Senate stalemate wasn’t until 13 December.

Kerr sacked Whitlam on 11 November 1975 and put Liberal party leader Malcolm Fraser in his place. Fraser quickly passed the appropriations bills in the Senate. Kerr released the following statement on 19 November 1975:

The Labor party, outraged by the change of government, sought a no-confidence vote against the new prime minister. No doubt exasperated, Kerr then dissolved Parliament. An election was held the next month, which resulted in Fraser and the Liberal party controlling Parliament with a large majority.

The resulting political turmoil from Kerr’s controversial actions has lasted many years, up until the current day. It is unknown how much Queen Elizabeth II was involved with her Governor-General’s decision. While Buckingham Palace maintains she knew nothing at all, there is a pending lawsuit to make her communications with Kerr public.

There has never been a government shutdown in Australia since. Those long-lasting reverberations from the 1975 crisis have convinced Australian politicians to never again hold appropriations bills hostage. There is an unspoken agreement between the parties that appropriations bills will always be passed, and Parliament will keep the government running.

Looking at our current crisis, I find myself wondering: Where’s Queen Elizabeth II and a Governor-General when you need them?