Nicholas Hedges

Art, Writing and Research

Undermined

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During Walk No.4 I discovered a sign entitled ‘Undermined’ about the coal industry in Newcastle. Given the importance of coal to the area, I’ve reproduced the information below in its entirety.

‘Awabakal clans used Newcastle’s coal in their fires and ceremonies for millennia, and explain its origins in their ancient Dreaming stories. Europeans also sought this valuable substance, so when Lieutenant Shortland noted coal deposits here in 1797, shops were quickly dispatched to return quantities of coal to Sydney. In 1799 The Hunter exported a shipment of coal to Bengal, and Newcastle coal was later shipped to the Cape of Good Hope by the Anna Joseph.

During the early years of settlement, the Colonial Government declared Hunter River coal to be the property of the Crown and prohibited free individuals and companies from mining here. Convict gangs were obliged to work the coal seams and load the vessels.

In 1826 private enterprise was finally permitted to mine coal and the Australian Agricultural Company obtained the first lease. In 1831 the company sunk its initial shaft near the Anglican Cathedral and innumerable tunnels chasing the buried coal seams have since been excavated below Newcastle’s streets. The success of the Australian Agricultural Company soon attracted other companies and mining operations spread to the extensive coalfields of East Maitland in 1844.

Fast-loading steam cranes were installed at King’s Wharf in 1860. But the demand for coal still exceeded the loading capacity of the port so the Bullock Island mud flats were reclaimed and new coal loading wharves were constructed. In 1888, twelve hydraulic cranes were in position.

During the late nineteenth century, sailing vessels berthed two or three deep along the length of the Bullock Island dyke, creating a forest of masts, while hundreds of sailors of all nationalities flocked to the city of Newcastle on Saturday nights. Throughout the twentieth century, further developments in mining and loading saw Newcastle’s exports soar, and by 1907 coal shipments exceeded 4,500,000 tons.

The port of Newcastle has long been the economic and trade centre for the Hunter region. In the 1989-90 financial year Newcastle handled 68.2 million tonnes to become the world’s largest coal export port and Australia’s largest tonnage dock.’

Walks

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As part of my research during this residency, I’m undertaking a number of walks in and around Newcastle. During the walks, I write lists of observations; typically things which are seemingly insignificant or everday occurrences. Each walk is also recorded using GPS as are the number of steps using a pedometer.

The first two lists can be found via the links below:

Walk 1
www.nicholashedges.co.uk/lockup/walk1.htm

Walk 2
www.nicholashedges.co.uk/lockup/walk2.htm

Shepherds Hill

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Whilst on my walk today, I took some time to explore the concrete ruins of what I discovered was the Shepherds Hill complex, described on a plaque fixed to one of the walls.

The text of the plaque is as follows: 

The Shepherds Hill complex is unique to in Australia for housing, during 1942, all three services at one time. A fortress observation post (army) coordinated the guns at Fort Wallace, Fort Scratchley and Park Battery. A Radar station (RAAF) assisted in locating air and seabourne targets. A port war signal station (Navy) monitored shipping movements to identify if friendly or enemy. A directing station (Army) coordinated the coastal searchlights which were used to illuminate seabourne targets. The army also took over nearby houses as well as King Edward Park, closing it to the public.

The empty concrete rooms, all stopped up with bars are strangely enigmatic. Full of detritus, graffiti and fragments of rusted metal like fossilised bones, they’re also full of lines, the movements of people busy at the time of the second world war.

The steps that lead nowhere lead one nonetheless back to a time when they had a purpose, when they weren’t incongruous but rather banal and a part of everyday activity.

As I looked around the ruins, casting my eyes like the sonic pulse of a radar, I could imagine the individuals who once worked there, picking them out like blips on a radar screen. And it was interesting, given what I wrote about yesterday, that this space had once been used for the purpose of listening, just a few hundred yards from Yi-ran-na-li, where people haven’t listened enough.

Yi-ran-na-li

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At the end of Nobbys beach can be found Nobbys Island. Once a rocky outcrop, the island was joined to the mainland through work carried out by convict gangs between 1818 and 1846. In 1855, the quarried summit of the island (the rock of which had been used to create the pier joining the island with the mainland) was cut down from 62 metres to his present height of 28 metres. A sign near the island explains how the local Aboriginal people, the Awabakal, believe Nobbys Island was created in the time of the Dreaming by the great rainbow serpent as it pushed itself onto the land after it had dropped from the sky into the island. To read how it was mined for coal (after being surveyed by Lieutenant John Shortland who surveyed the bluff during the 1790s) and then – being a danger to ships – reduced by almost a third in height, makes one feel sorry, especially in light of the beliefs of the Awabakal people.

The importance placed on rocks by Aboriginal people is also described near Newcastle beach, where a sign describes Yi-ran-na-li, the Aboriginal name for the cliff which, the sign tells us, is known by them as being a place of silence and respect. The cliff was – or rather is – a sacred place and the sign itself something of an apologia, the text of which is worth repeating here in full:

“In the 1880s, John McGill, an Awakbal man, also known as Biraban (Eaglehawk) told the missionary Reverend Lancelot Threlkeld the story of Yi-ran-na-li whilst passing beneath the cliff one day.

‘There is a sort of scared place near Newcastle on the sea-beach, beneath a high cliff named Yi-ran-na-li, it is said, that if any person speaks, the stones will fall  down upon them, from the high arched rocks above, the crumbling state of which is such as to render it extremely probable, that the mere concussion of air from the voice would cause the effect to take place.

I was walking beneath the projecting rock and called loudly to McGill , who with other blacks, were with me. He instantly beckoned me to be silent, at which I wondered, a few small stones fell down from the crumbling overshadowing cliff at that moment, and they urged me on.

When we had passed out the precincts of the fearful place, I asked what they meant by commanding my silence, and pushing on so quickly without speaking? This elicited the tradition of the place as a very fearful one, for if any one speaks whilst passing beneath the overhanging rocks, stones would invariably fall as we had just witnessed.’ (Threkeld in Gunson 1974:65)

The large rock fall in 2002 perhaps marked Yi-ran-na-li’s final stand. It was a rock so large that we couldn’t ignore it. The rock was a statement about our inability to live within the constraints and sensitivities of place. Despite the removal of the rock and the total reshaping of the cliff face to make it ‘safer’ we should not forget the cultural belief of the local Aboriginal people that this place was to be feared and respected.

The cliff speaks to us with a wisdom that is thousands of years old. McGill knew this cultural wisdom but we have failed to listen, and today we still have so much to learn about the many other aspects of an endemic sense of place and about the environment we live in.

It is not too late to show the respect that Yi-ran-na-li deserves.’

The photograph below, shows Yi-ran-na-li today:

I was struck by the last paragraph admitting to the country’s failings as regard its indigenous population and their ancient heritage (although this is in no way only an Australian problem: America, Europe, and in particular Britain have shown throughout history a blatant disregard for the culture of those people on whose countries it has claimed dominion). As regards Yi-ran-na-li, how can such respect be shown when, as the text also describes the rocks – like Nobbys Island – have been reshaped? Should the fallen rock have been removed? Would it not have been a good idea to leave it as a reminder of cultural ignorance and its consequences? It seems to me there is a strong correlation between failing to listen and speaking when we shouldn’t. Also, the fact the sign contained a few typos didn’t really help as regards the sincerity of its message. I’ve no doubt that it is sincere, but small things like spelling the ‘thre’ undermines its message nevertheless.

My Residence

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I arrived in Newcastle, NSW yesterday afternoon after a 3 hour train journey from Sydney. The journey itself was pleasant enough, save for the moment a rather loud couple got on and upset the peacefulness of the carriage. She kept going on about how “it wasn’t against the law” in such a way as to suggest that whatever it was that ‘wasn’t against the law’ was in fact against the law and was, furthermore, something she had done. Her partner then proceeded to take off his t-shirt, flap it out as if shaking sand from a beach towel, before leaving it on the seat in front of him. There he sat in all his glory; no top, flabby, hairy and covered with tattoos. If this wasn’t bad enough (and believe me it was) he then proceeded to comment on the magazine he was reading. “You can see he’s a Beckham!” he kept on. “He’s just like his Dad.” Imbecile.

I moved upstairs and enjoyed a peaceful rest of the journey. Something I like about Australian train carriages is the way you can move the seat-backs, so that where you have two seats facing each other, you can flip the back of one so they become two seats facing the same way; very natty.

The journey to Newcastle takes one through some lovely scenery as well as that which isn’t quite as nice. Many of the towns we passed through seemed rather down at heel to say the very least, comprising a hotch-potch of painted sheds and shacks. Newcastle however, appears to be a very pleasant town which I will explore shortly.

The residency itself is at the Lock Up Cultural Centre which was once a police station. The Lock Up refers to the cells (including a very rare padded cell) and exercise yard which I will document later. My apartment and study is on the first floor and is very pleasant as can be seen in the photographs below:

The study.

The lounge area.

The kitchenette.

The bedroom.

Goethean Observation: Wolvercote Cemetery

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Part 1

Freshly dug earth, a small pile. A new name on a label planted in it. Twigs and pine cones scattered upon the grass. The wind blows through the trees. Something creaks. The traffic drones in the distance. Grave stones with their backs towards me. Slate-grey surfaces. Voices in the distance talking. Different shades of grey, marked with stains of age. An alarm sounds for a while then is quiet again. The birds chirping around me. The sun catches the top of a smooth marble gravestone. To my right beyond the neatly clipped hedges a burial is taking place – a wicker coffin, the same I saw in a hearse driving past as I walked here. An aeroplane flies overhead and marks its presence with its noise. A fly buzzes. To my right the gravestones show their names. Gold and black lettering in latin and hebrew alphabets. The coffin is lowered into the ground. A man walks past outside and a siren rips through the comparative calm.

Daffodils are growing. The mourners leave the graveside and hug each other.

In the ground, in the grass the plots of land are marked in different ways. Some are slabs of grey, flecked with stain of age and lichen. Green glass beads and bits of gravel, purple flowers or shallow depressions in the ground. Or of course the small mound of freshly dug earth. The mourners are shaking hands. Two men walk between the graves before me, looking for something. One of them yawns with his hands in his pocket. Looking at the back of the gravestones it is as if the graves have turned their backs to me. To find them I will have to walk between them.

The shapes and the heights of the graves are all quite different.

There’s a feather on the ground. Grey and white like the graves themselves.

On the slabs of marble, stone etc. which mark the graves, a pot of broken plant. Holes for putting flowers in. Stones left in memory. Two on one grave. Five on another. Some have none. Others have many more.

Names begin to talk. Dates. Occupations. Places of birth and death. Daisies and last years’ autumn leaves upon the ground. Flowers on one grave; a pot of lavender and white roses amongst them.

Flowers left on turned earth. A mug.
Physician.
Hamburg.
Deported to Riga. December 1941.
Cellist. Artist.
Social Anthropologist.
Geographer.
Moss grows on the glass beads of a grave.
The edges have fallen.
Names. Places and dates slowly melting into the bluish stone. The grass creeps over the edges.
Calgary.
Tartakov. Poland.
Holocaust Survivor.
Reflections of the trees in the polished marble slabs of the graves.
Teacher.
She graced the world.
Lavender growing marks another grave.
Orange lichen creeps up the base of a gravestone.
The stone slab of a grave has almost been swallowed by the grass.
Car doors close as mourners leave the cemetery.
A rose bush, cut back, climbs through a hole.
To so good a man no evil thing can happen.
Wloclawek, Poland.
Nikolai.
Prague.
Perished in Dachau.
Tachow, Poland.
And her family who died in the second world war.
Komotau.
Goerhau.
A small head stone barely poking above the ground.
His work lives.
Komotau, Czechoslovakia.
Who were put to Death in Poland in 1942.
Members of her family massacred in Poland 1942.
Victims of the Holocaust.
He made a new life in England.
A single stone on a grave.
Hamburg.
Komitau (formerly Bohemia)
Minsk.
Riga.
Uneven surface.
Painted stone on a grave.
An artists life.
Scratches on a grave.
Berlin.
My shadow upon the grass before me and as I stand and walk.
Como, Italy.
Swansea.
Cold wind begins to blow. Constant sound of traffic.
Faint names slowly disappearing into a grave.
Vienna.
Breslau.
Berlin. Vienna.
Pomorzany (Poland).
Skoczow (Poland).
Bratislava. Arch. and Eng.
Dried leaves crunch beneath my feet.
The ivy rattles on the tree trunk.
A train horn blows.
Graz (Austria).
Enkirch-Mosel.
Berlin.
A plant pot in its plastic.
A grave grown over with ivy etc.
A coloured windmill turns.
St. Petersburg.
Walking and looking back, the names become once again the plain surfaces of the stones.
A digger fills in a hole in the ground.
The diggers work is done.
Names all face the same way. Dates blur.
For many, the dates are carried everywhere by those who remember them.

Part 2

The following is a transcription of stream-of-consciousness thoughts spoken about the cemetery, considering the cemetery in both the past and the future as well as in the present. The images were made during the process as aids to thinking.

Looking at the cemetery today, not necessarily those graves in the Jewish section but the stones of those buried 50, 60 years or more, one sees how the names slowly recede back into the stone, how the edges of the letters are smoothed, covered over with lichen. How the front of the gravestones become no different to the back. The boundaries of the grave if they are marked with stone begin to collapse. The graves themselves begin to sink. One day the stones will fall and the grass will cover them over and perhaps all that will be left in years and years to come will be a shallow depression in the ground, something like a footprint at the end of one life’s journey.

Cemeteries are places where names go to die. When these names are lost from the stones, when the people that remember them are themselves gone, so we are lost to memory. All that is left to remember us is the ground itself, the world itself. We are that footprint on the ground and beneath the ground our remains live on. They decay, break down and every part of us carries on somehow. Looking at the trees in the cemetery one can see them as metaphors for those buried within. We are in a strange way like seeds in reverse – like an acorn. We begin at the top of the tree before the tree has even grown and we travel between villages and towns, in and around our home towns; every thought we have every connection we make grows its branches, the branches of the canopy until those branches become less and less, albeit thicker and thicker until we’re left with just the trunk marking a small spot in the round and beneath the ground the roots echoing the canopy itself. Perhaps in a way when our bodies decay when we’re broken down into atoms, that is what the roots somehow represent.

And when that tree grows its leaves, every year bears its fruit, we can imagine every place that person had been to, still bearing a trace – a living trace – of their existence. Looking around the cemetery, the Jewish part of the cemetery, one is struck by the places from which people have come, the journeys they have led often in tragic circumstances, which have led them to this small patch of ground.

As I was coming home on the train yesterday watching the landscape pass me by anonymously, one part blurring into the next as if rushing into the past, I saw a small pool of water surrounded by trees into which I threw my eyes imagining what it was like beneath the water’s surface, and there they remained for some of the journey. Whilst I saw the world whizzing by, my eyes were still. All sounds were gone as my thoughts and my eyes drifted beneath the water. And a day later I can still imagine them there the world seems not to have changed and yet a lot of things have happened since then.

One can almost imagine the bodies buried within the cemetery as being like that and the lives they led as being like the man on the train, that though they are still now, in the quiet and the dark, somehow the lives they led are still moving; between Berlin and the cemetery, Vienna and the cemetery, Poland, the Czech Republic, Russia, all the places from which they’ve come.

One can go back before the cemetery was even there when it was just another field, another plot of ground, perhaps it was farmed? I don’t know. Things grew in it of course, the grass grew, trees grew, every blade of grass was more a part of the world than any of these people. And yet within the ground now a wealth of experience has been poured into each of these little holes, experience that is full of happiness, tragedy. Thinking about the trees the branches separating off one should really think of them as one continuous branch that starts high above the ground and snakes its way downwards, every encounter is a knot making up the vast canopy of the tree until it reaches the soil.

When one’s in the cemetery one can’t help think of one’s own death and where we will end up, which patch of ground we will occupy and looking at any patch now one can think whether it will be the place where a life not yet even begun will be remembered by the earth long after the name has died. And in any patch of ground one can also think whether someone is there beneath, unknown, unseen of course, unknowable, but a person who’s left a mark somewhere in the world.

I can’t help but think of the battlefields of Verdun, where from the barren wastes whole forests have now grown, each tree in some way reminding us of the people that died, each branch part of the journey they made through their lives. There’s also the trees grown around sites of the Holocaust those planted to hide the places, those which have grown afterwards. Somehow they too serve to remind us of those lost on those small patches of ground.

There is a connection between this idea of small patches into which so much is poured so many thoughts, so many memories, love, anger, tragedy, laughter. One thinks of a town from which these people were from. Towns in Poland, Germany, the Czech Republic, Russia. One thinks of Vienna and it’s almost as if within that small grave, in that small hole in the ground the whole of that city has been poured. For every city, every place is defined by the people who lived there. So in many respects these are graves not only for people but for places.

Goethean Observation: 18th Century Glass Bottle

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Part 1

A vessel, translucent, whose surface is revealed by distortions, reflections and engravings. There is an opening at the top about 2cm in diameter and here the thickness of the vessel can be seen as being about 5mm.

The base of the vessel is not round but oval with flattened sides. The base is solid and about 1cm thick within which one can see tiny imperfections where the light is gathered.

Light from bulbs above, inside the display cabinet, grows around the neck and shoulders of the vessel revealing a dimple in the surface on the right. From the base of the neck (which is itself about 2.5cm in height) the pattern of the engraving on the front of the bottle begins, comprising feather-like curlicues, dots, dashes and small fine strokes. They form a kind of border, within which the words Thos Brown, Nenthead, 1769 have been engraved.

The lettering of the name is somewhat irregular and not central, as if the engraver was expecting an ‘e’ at the end of Brown. There is a space after the ‘n’ into which part of the pattern of the border has extended and part of which has since been scratched or worn away.

On the sides are engravings of birds. That on the right can only be seen properly whilst looking through the front of the vessel. On the back the engraved figure of a man can be seen with a rifle, standing on a patch of ground next to a tree. Looking at the figure whilst bending down slightly, one can again see small imperfections in the surface of the glass.

Within the glass are colours, reflected from the fabric of the display stand behind; blues and golds as well as the dark grey of the glass ledge on which the vessel is standing. There’s also the reflected light of a dish on the shelf below.

Even without touching the bottle appears heavy.

Part 2

Looking at the glass and its ‘time-life’ I see the bright glow of its beginning – a molten bulb of glass. I can hear the noise of the place in which it was made, the heat and other ambient sounds. Who made it? What were they thinking at the time?

There is a real sense of movement at the beginning; an urgency – a far cry from the static object sitting in the display case before me. One gets a sense of the physical process of its creation, the heat and the sweat. The molten glass needs to be shaped, partly through being blown – and while it’s in this state, the glass blower blows, turning the glass and shaping it until the form is fixed. This object then becomes the preserved breath of its maker. Cold and fragile.

The glass cools and loses its glow and colour, taking its shape from the borrowed light and reflections of that which surrounds it. What has been seen over the centuries, reflected and distorted through its surface? The interior of the workshop? Thomas Brown’s house? Back then, the light of an ordinary day in 1769 would have lent the vessel its shape. Today, mainly the glow of the electric lights reveal its form to visitors.

Next the bottle would be engraved. A conversation takes place between the engraver and whoever commissioned the engraving. Who was Thomas Brown? Is he the figure on the back of the glass? The engraver takes a note of the name. Did he make a mistake? Did he think it should be spelt Browne with an ‘e’. When would he have realised? Perhaps it’s not a mistake at all, just the way he did it.

The vessel would have been held in the engraver’s hand, its shape felt by him as he worked to write the letters. I can only guess at how it feels, through the engraver and the person who commissioned it, and finally the man himself. One can almost see his smile as he receives it. What was it commemorating? He would have felt its shape in his hands – the glass blower’s breath. He would have felt its temperature, its texture. What else did he feel at that moment? How did his clothes feel on his back? What did he see through the glass surface of the vessel? The floor? The faces of his friends? The walls and windows? The light of a day long since vanished like the glass blower, the engraver and Thomas Brown himself.

Part 3 & 4

The bottle is always borrowing from that by which it’s surrounded; gathering light in order to make itself visible.
It bends, distorts and refracts the present – gravity bending the light from a distant star.
Hot, molten, fluid becomes cold, fragile, solid.
Flesh becomes brittle.
The influence on the present day of a breath exhaled 250 years ago.
Exhale. Inhale.
A bubble.
An imperfection in the air, where time rather than light is gathered and held.
The past in the present.

Goethean Observation: Headington Hill Park

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This a transcript of my notes as they were written during the observation.

Part 1

This is a large area of grass with a large number of different trees at various stages of maturity. The traffic can be heard coming from the left and behind me some voices in the grounds of a large house, separated from the park by iron railings. The sound of the wind blowing through the trees is always apparent even though there is little wind today. The sound of birds too can be heard particularly in the grounds behind me.

The entrance to the park was through railings on the park’s NW side. The path runs down and around the perimeter of the park. Some of the trees have plaques planted beneath in memory of those who’ve died.

The path down which I’m walking cuts across a slope which runs down from the east (the house and grounds side) to the west. There are a number of seats alongside the path facing west into the centre of the park. There is the sense that there us kittle really to divide the grounds to the east and the park, save for the grass which on the slope to my left (east) has been allowed to grow. There are a number of weeds, daisies and shrubs.

The path turns to the south and runs alongside a busy road. The path runs between trees, the SW past another entrance to the park and an old stone building. The building has a kind of vestibule in the middle with a window at the SE end. There is some graffiti here such as ‘Don’t forget us’ written in felt-tip on the frosted glass. A sign reading ‘Ladies’ in the shape of an arrow points SE in the direction I am walking.

A few yards on more buildings are revealed, built around a small courtyard. These buildings look much older. On the western facade of one of them is a wooden sign on which the words ‘staff only’ have been written. A sign next to them reveal that the former toilets and dairy are to be sold off.

The side of the building is in part covered by ivy and the whole building almost looks to be sliding into the ground. The green paint of the windows is the same shade of green as the ivy.

The path slopes down. A man jogging runs up beside me. The trees are constantly chattering while the traffic flows up and down to my left.

Towards the bottom of the slope is another building standing behind a tall hedge on my left.

Past the small building, there is a large set of blue painted iron gates leading out onto the busy road. Either side of the gate, on two ornate posts are old-fashioned lamps.

Straight ahead, heading slightly SW is a gravel path which snakes away in a kind of elongated ‘S’ shape. To my right, heading in an almost westerly direction, the concrete path continues. Along this path there are fewer trees, but looking to my left, I can see that the gravel path is bordered on either side by a number of mature trees. Heading north along the path, I can see another road to my left.

On my right hand side are two mature horse chestnut trees. The leaves on one are speckled with rust coloured patches.

It is just past this tree, beyond the reach of its shadow, that to my right, towards the east, I can see how the ground undulates. This sense of undulation as I approach the second of the mature trees which again I think is a horse chestnut with rust/yellow coloured patches on the leaves. I’m not aware visually of a slop but I can feel that I am climbing.

Again to my right, just past the mature trees, I am aware of the undulating ground, though not quite as before.

Two large purple trees grab my attention along with the mature tree see just behind through the gap. This view feels very much as though it belongs to a garden.

To my left is the minaret of the Islamic centre. On my right a group of four saplings.

The purple trees cascade to my right and turning back to the path, it seems almost incongruous in these surroundings. Behind me, about ten yards, a gravel path leads NW towards the Islamic Centre. To my right the undulations become more pronounced. Besides another collection of brick buildings , these undulations are especially pronounced, particularly on the left hand side of the path.

A little further on, on the right hand side of the path there is a concentration of foliage in the shadow of a large mature tree. On the other side the ground seems to slop up back towards the house.

To my left the slope is increasingly pronounced running down towards a long stretch of flatter ground. From this area, which borders a footpath behind a line of railings, there is another profusion of weeds such as stinging nettles and doc leaves.

–

Back in the park, through the same gate, there is the sense of everything ‘sliding’ towards the west (at this point) – or towards the ‘city centre’. The same rumble of traffic – the same sound of the leaves blowing in the wind.

Where the path forks, I’m instinctively taken down the right-hand path, i.e. down the slope. A helicopter whirs overhead.

At the point in the path where I saw the ‘view’ of the two mature purple trees I leave and head towards them. In front of the left hand tree I can see three undulations – very shallow, but of equal size running east to west.

Walking between the two purple trees the feeling in the park at this spot is completely different. I notice too a ‘pattern’ of two more purple of copper trees ahead and a more mature tree – an oak – in the centre.

Walking between the trees, one of the undulations I saw before is clearly evident. It seems to peter out within about ten yards. There are a number of lumps and bumps at this point which are hard to pinpoint.

By the ‘top-left’ copper tree is a distinct depression.

Turning down it, one again finds the shallow humps which extend towards the house at the top of the area.

Returning to the gape between the purple trees, I feel a definite ‘step down’ into the hollow between two bumps. I decide to walk the route again.

Between the trees, I pick up a ridge on the right hand side and follow it towards the right-hand tree at the back. By the tree I find a ditch cutting across, leading towards a group of trees around which a large number of weeds, nettles etc. are growing. Standing beneath the tree and facing SW, I can see more of the ridge and furrows. Turning to face SE I see the ‘ditch’ running off which I decide to follow and notice that this ‘ditch’ seems to join up with another patch of dense undergrowth which I’ve already recorded.

Walking along it, between the patches of undergrowth, I’m made aware of how different the park feels – certainly compared with walking between the purple trees towards the house. There is it seems a correlation between this and the direction of the ridge and furrow, and the direction of the ditch and the path which I mentioned earlier.

As I walk from this undergrowth towards the path, I feel another dip running alongside the path on its SW side.

Part 2

The ‘natural’ direction of this place follows the direction from the windows of the house behind me to the city in the near distance. The trees in the grounds of the house and those in the park suggest the area was once joined – the railings running across it follow the ‘unnatural’ direction already mentioned. One can easily imagine the house, the full extent of its grounds with the views over the city.

Rolling back the time life of this area, the nettles and weeds disappear – the saplings are removed and the trees begin to slowly reduce in size. The sound of voices and of laughter behind me might well have been heard in the years before and the sound of traffic would certainly be absent. For a time at least it would have been altogether much quieter.

The trees shrink, the house disappears and the view across the city is clear. Sitting on the bench as I am – facing the city – there is the sense that this a place of views- of looking out. Behind the windows of the great house, those who lived and worked within would have once looked out across the city. Without trees, one is left with a ground which undulates in ridges and furrows one way and a few lines which cut across. They are almost like scars, gouged out of the ground.

This ‘natural direction’ is persistent and one day, the concrete parth which cuts across the park, along with the railings will disappear. People walk along them today just as people once walked along the ridges which lie across the grass.

The ridges and furrows one can imagine being created over a great period of time. As people walked up and down, the view was still there – how did it change.

I look at the dedication plaque in front of me. I wind back time – the person to whom it is dedicated lives again and is then nothing. The tree beneath which it is planted disappears. Appearing. Disappearing.

The plaque is dedicated to a certain individual, but in the ground, one gets the sense of the lives of many individuals. The milky sun above would have shone on them just as it does on me.

Leaving the bench I return to the spot between the five trees.

Looking back between the trees towards the city centre, I can see clearly the spire of St. Mary’s. Removing the trees, the whole city would have been visible.

Parts 3 and 4

Looking down towards the city, out from the city towards the house. The area is about looking out and being looked at. It is about looking and moving – up and down, over and over. It’s a place of directions, ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’; peaceful and less-so. A place in thrall to the city below.

Further Notes

Notes written the day after initial observation of the park.

Like a piece of paper or fabric, the area we know today as Headington Hill Park has a grain. This became apparent in the first instance at a point along the concrete path where, looking to my left, between two large purple/copper trees I saw a view which seemed to ‘belong’ to the a time when the park was a garden. Looking back up the path, the path itself felt incongruous. Leaving it and walking towards the gap between the trees my body felt different – my movement felt ‘freer’.

In front of the trees I could see the mediaeval ridge and furrow very clearly and beyond the trees I followed a furrow and noticed a long depression cutting across it, running in the same direction as the upper part of the path. Walking along it felt very different to walking up the ridge towards the house – just as tearing a piece of paper against the grain feels much different to tearing it with the grain.

Thinking about the ridge and furrow – one can imagine the area when it was ploughed with all the turned earth. It would have looked quite uniform in its appearance. Then as crops began to grow, a patchwork would have developed.

During the Civil War, this land would have been taken over my siegeworks. This movement up and down would have been cut off by the movement across it; which eventually would have carried on again after the war, eventually changing (as the area became a garden) from physical movement up and down, to lines of sight, up and down.

Goethean Observation: Apple Tree

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Part 1

Standing at the end of the garden, a gnarled trunk, deep grooves in the pale brown, in place almost grey, bark. The trunk is full of swellings near the ground. On the ‘front’ as I look at it, there is a hollow, a small hole a few inches across, with thick smoothed sides – above it on the left hand side, a branch sticks out at an angle of about 40 degrees. A few leaves remain on younger branches around it – this older branch ends after approximately two feet. From the newer branch hangs a wooden structure, small with wire sides (meshed). Above that and above the old, short branch is another wooden structure – a bird box on the side of which the grain is clearly visible.

The trunk bulges out towards the hollow and narrows again just above it, from where it rises up a few feet and then splits into two main branches. That which grows out to the left grows at an angle of about 40 degrees, almost parallel with the old branch below. There it turns up, as if it has been cut, moving at an angle of about 50 degrees. From here it splits into two further branches and from there too numerous to count. The other main branch (on the right) splits into five branches one of which has been cut short. On the trunk, growing from amidst the swellings are shoots of leaves. A yellow wire is wrapped around the trunk, running over the smooth edge of the hollow, hanging down to then disappear some four feet below, behind the tree.

There are many apples in the tree and looking around the base of the tree, a circumference approximately 50% bigger than the circumference of the canopy are a number of fallers; some whole, some smashed, some cut in half.

The leaves are green and shaped like stretched ovals, pointed at the tips. There are few leaves on the ground and only the tips of a few branches are bare. The canopy of the tree itself is quite spare, and is as much made from the colour of the sky as the colour of its leaves and branches. The branches move a little and the leaves are agitated, moving a little like rattles. There is a sound, as the leaves move, a rustling. The colour of the leaves differs depending on where they are in relation to the light, some are bright green, others are dark and almost the colour of the branches.

The apples hang above the ground, each with a dark patch in the middle. I can see more evidence of pruning in the branches.

Part 2

It’s difficult to say how old this tree is, but it’s easy to see how it came to be here. Around its base are numerous apples, inside each of which is the potential for more trees. It is hard to imagine, that this tall, robust, warty tree was once a hidden seed inside a piece of fruit – an apple, but somehow, an apple seed came to rest in the soil at this place and began to grow. At that time, one imagines that many of the houses around here would not have been here at all. The sounds would be completely different – I am struck as I write this by the sound of an electric saw, a distant aeroplane and the rumble of traffic – sounds which when this tree was a germinating seed in the ground would never have existed. I can hear the sounds of other trees stirred by the wind and know that such a sound would have been evident at that time, whenever that time was. This old tree then is very unlikely. How did that seed from which it grew come to rest here? There are no apple trees in the immediate vicinity that I can see, although they they might have been cut down in the intervening time – evidence of cutting on the tree observed shows that that is not at all impossible. Perhaps the seed was deposited there by an animal? What animals eat fruit? How far did the seed come, what is the physical connection between this tree and one elsewhere – or a space elsewhere where once the tree grew? As the tree grew from out the ground the chances of it developing must have been small – was it grown intentionally? By someone who lived in the area? Was this a garden back then? Or part of the countryside? Did people walk by here and pick the apples? Those which had fallen? When did the first apples begin to grow? After how many years?

How does a tree grow? Water and sunlight. I can see the ground around it into which it has sunk its roots and know that the ground has supported it for generations. But its being here tells me of the constancy of the world – the sun and the rain. I can through the sun and the rain, through the tree, know of a time and of certainty of that time even though I myself was nothing, not even as likely as the fallers from the young tree. Did people sit under its canopy if then it was not part of a garden. When was it enclosed? How were the definitions of the garden’s space defined? When?

What of the future? The branches will continue to grow, the apples will continue to grow and to fall. People will cut the branches who are not yet even as realised as the apple which has just this second fallen to the ground a few feet in front of me. The apple which has come to rest will be collected along with all the others – its flesh will be cooked once the skin is removed and the cores put in the compost – or into the rubbish, where the core itself will rot away and the seeds inside might have the chance to grow. Where will these seeds end up and should the seeds grow and the tree mature to become like the tree is today, then where will it stand, what will the world around it look like? Who will sit beneath its branches and who will even consider, as they sit beneath the branches in the shade that I saw the apple fall from which it would eventually spring? By that time, no doubt, I will be as hidden from the earth as I will be from their thoughts.

And what of this tree? Will it grow fatter and taller? Will the houses remain standing or will it outlive or outgrow the garden fence in which it has been kept/contained? One thing is for sure. The sun will rise and set, and the rain will still fall. The smaller trees in the neighboring gardens might have matured along with those in the grounds of the school behind. The vegetation of the garden might grow and in hundreds of years time, nothing might remain of the place in which I am sitting – place being the garden. Even the tree might one day wither and die. Its trunk become hollow. Perhaps it will be cut and its stump left exposed – and the rings counted by children who will point at a ring and wonder what year it was was – some time way back when. Some time, now.

Part 3

A movement pushing down and flowing upward . A movement which is sinking into the ground, pushing, seeking. Something moves back up through the trunk out into the branches. It reaches up. It reaches down and reaches up, it is pulling and pushing at the same time, collapsing and expanding, breathing. It’s a spring, a squeezebox, but one so slow we cannot see it move. The leaves are the feint sound of this movement. Up and down. Circular. The ground beneath; reaching towards where others have sprung.

All around the base are the tightly packed coils waiting to be sprung; each one a tiny clock, wound ready, a clock so small but its seconds are long, its minutes like hours and its hours stretched to cover the distance of a year.

Part 4

I breathe. Slowly. In and out. And with each breath expelled I reach towards the sky, I reach further than the tips of the smallest leaves by which I am covered. I extend further down in the cold, wet ground. I am only half seen, I am mostly invisible. I am never still. You cannot tell, but I am in a constant state of flux, moving up towards the sky, down deeper into the soil and out. I am never the same size. I am growing all the time, pushing myself through the leaves and the fruit, pushing through the fruit until they fall. And once on the ground I wait. I can feel just where I am in all my pieces. I am a set of contrasts. I am old yet new, older than you yet younger than you, yet even my youngest parts know far more than you’ll ever know, even my fruits will outlives you.

The ground is cold, yet I am warm. I can feel the heat from the sun towards which I stretch and unfurl even these parts I did not know I had and inside I am warm. The wind moves me, it gives me a voice. I do not creak and crack because I am forced to do so – I am talking. My leaves do not rattle or whisper because they are young, small and are easily moved by the breeze – it’s because I am talking.

I am never in one place, although it might appear that I am fixed. I am in many places at one and the same time. I am many years passed and many years in the future in a coil which slowly unwinds and unravels itself – the most complex mechanism of any clock you’ve seen. Idle hours spent beneath me pass in an instant. My memories are beyond your comprehension, I blink only in winter and when I open my eyes again, the world is already new.

Arriving in Port Jackson

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On 28th October 1828, the Marquis of Hastings sailed into Port Jackson after a 4 month journey from Portsmouth, England. Aboard was Stephen Hedges, the brother of my great-great-great-grandfather, Richard. Today, 172 years later, I took the Manly Ferry to Circular Quay in Sydney, sailing into Port Jackson also on October 28th. Quite unplanned, it was an interesting coincidence. Of course, the manner of our arrivals couldn’t have been more different. Economy class cabins may offer less legroom than business, but 22 hours on a plane with meals and entertainment certainly beats 104 days in a stinking hold fettered in chains.

As we travelled out of Manly, I noticed the clouds, one of the few things which, even though they’re ephemeral, are nevertheless, consistent over centuries. Clouds have interested me in relation to the story of Stephen Hedges ever since I read the meteorological charts of William Rae, the ship’s surgeon. The immediate landscape may also have changed (to say the very least) but the sky and the water below are little different to all those years ago.

To reach the Manly Ferry I had to walk along the Manly Coastal Walk as well as a few suburban streets, and it was whilst walking down those streets that I realised how different the birds sounded. Certain things weren’t so different as regards comparison with England, but the sonic suburban landscape was quite alien; birds seemed to make noises like someone twiddling knobs on an old analogue synthesizer. That’s not to denigrate Australian birdsong – just an interesting difference.

Also, as I walked down the road, I found myself experiencing a part of my past – not a specific part, but a sense of what a part of my past was like. I have very strong sense impressions of the summer holidays when I was about 6 or 7 years old; dry sand in the sandpit, the pattern of dappled sunlight on the pavement leading to the shops and the smell of creosote on the fence. In this far-flung street on the other side of the world, I found myself walking within that sensation, as if somehow, I was physically experiencing a memory.

Strolling along the Manly Coastal Walk, I saw and heard the sea lapping at the rocks and on the beaches, and I thought – as I’ve often thought before – how that very sound has remained unchanged for millions of years; a sound which, given the way that it’s inspired and beguiled humankind for centuries, seems intimately bound up with man, rather than something which existed long before Man had even evolved. I thought too how this place had for so long evaded explorers and yet it had always been there in all its vastness – the past as a foreign country; there but out of sight and almost unreachable.

Like many people around the world I have seen countless images of Sydney Opera House and the Harbour Bridge and yet, despite their status, I felt a small shiver as we sailed up and saw them appear in the flesh. I have seen them, but i hadn’t until today experienced them. The iconic shape of the Opera House defined the ‘presentness’of that moment in time, a ‘presentness’ shared by all those aboard the Marquis of Hastings in October 1828.

Although everything looked entirely different, the ‘presentness’ of that lived moment in time was just the same. I was arriving in Port Jackson, carrying with me all that had gone before, just as everyone onboard had done. Today they are names on lists and often very little more – lines drawn in water. But by following the line of the Marquis of Hastings and drawing our own, we come a little closer to making the men more than just names. They cease to be outlines, and instead become like countries.

The Road to New South Wales

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On Monday 28th January 1828, a sawyer by the name of Richard Burgess was travelling from Abingdon to Oxford with a cartload of bone for sale in town. On the road to Oxford, Burgess met with three men; Stephen Hedges – a young Abingdon man in his late teens, Henry Stockwell, originally from Aberdeen and a few years older than Hedges, and a man called John Harper. Hedges – described later by Stockwell as the ‘captain’ as regards the events about to follow – asked Burgess if he was going to Oxford and whether he’d carry a parcel for them. Burgess agreed, at which point Harper left the group, while Hedges and Stockwell continued on towards Oxford with the cart.

1875 Map of Radley showing Radley House

Radley House as painted by Turner in 1789

On the Oxford Road, near the lodge of what was then Radley House, Burgess was asked to stop. At first Burgess refused, but relented, stopping as he said later for about five minutes. At that time the house was owned by Sir George Bowyer (who in 1815 had been forced to sell its contents to help his struggling finances) and rented from him by a Mr. Benjamin Kent. When Harper arrived back on the scene with a bag, the three men went off into the gardens.

1875 Map of Radley showing the Lodge and Driveway of Radley House

After five minutes the men returned carrying the bag which Burgess described as being very heavy. What was in the bag, Burgess didn’t know, but given that Stockwell was carrying a piece of lead on his shoulder, it must have been obvious.

The road from Abingdon to Oxford. The parked car on the right marks the spot where Burgess stopped the cart.

A path next to the Oxford Road showing the parked car.

On the way into Oxford, the men – still travelling with Burgess –  met a Charles Jones whereupon, according to Burgess, they engaged in conversation. Burgess went on into Oxford, to Mr. Round’s wharf and near the gates set down the lead and delivered his cargo of bone for weighing. Half an hour later, Stockwell and Jones reappeared and put the lead back on the cart. Burgess asked him where they were going to take it, to which he was told to follow Jones.

Burgess followed Jones up the ‘City Road’ and near the Castle met with Hedges and Harper. They turned back through Butcher Row to the place where the lead was to be delivered, and here, for his trouble Burgess was paid sixpence.

The next day, on Tuesday 29th January, James Smith, servant to Benjamin Kent, discovered three ‘hips’ of the larder roof had been stripped of their lead. Two weeks later, on Wednesday, 13th February, Stephen Hedges appeared in Abingdon before the mayor  T. Knight Esq. on suspicion of stealing lead from an outhouse belonging to B. Morland Esq. (I’m assuming here that B Morland and B. Kent are in fact the same person). He was fully committed to the Bridewell whereas Stockwell and Harper were, at that point, still on the run.

Jackson’s Oxford Journal, Saturday 16th February 1828

Justice however soon caught up with them, and together with Hedges they were tried at the Berkshire Easter Sessions on Tuesday, 15th April. Stephen Hedges and Henry Stockwell were found guilty of stealing 154 lbs of lead. The sentence passed was transportation for a period of 7 years. The report in Jackson’s Oxford Journal makes no mention of Harper’s fate. Charles Jones was acquitted.

Jackson’s Oxford Journal, Saturday 19th April 1828

Having been convicted and sentenced, Hedges and Stockwell were taken to Portsmouth, and on Monday 28th April, received aboard the prison hulk York.

The system of prison hulks had been established by an act of Parliament in 1776 (following the declaration of American Independence which meant the loss of penal colonies there) to ease overcrowding in British prisons. Old warships moored on the Thames and those in other ports, were converted into prisons, and despite the terrible conditions suffered by the prisoners within, the system remained in place for another 80 years.

The prison hulk York from an engraving by E.W. Cooke. The National Maritime Museum, London.

The York, in which Hedges and Stockwell were incarcerated, was the eighth ship in the Navy to bear the name and had once been a 74-gun, third rate of 1,743 tons. Launched in 1807, she’d been posted to the West Indies where she was involved in the capture of the island stronghold of Martinique. She continued the war in the Mediterranean Squadron off Toulon and in 1819, returned to Portsmouth to serve as a prison hulk – home to some 500 inmates.

Entering a hulk was demoralising to say the very least. Prisoners were stripped of their clothes,  after which cold buckets of water were thrown over them. They received their slops and looked on as their own clothes were thrown into the sea – a baptism of their status as a convict and a ‘ceremonial drowning’ of their lives before that time. Finally, they were led into the darkest, foulest-smelling parts of the ship, to await their transportation – the last stage in the process of being forgotten.

The final column of the York’s Muster reads rather ominously: how disposed of?

And this is just what was being done with all the men and women sentenced in this manner. In this column, next to the names of Stephen Hedges and Henry Stockwell, are the words: 24 Jun ’28 NSW; NSW being their final destination – New South Wales.

The York’s documentation also tells us something – albeit somewhat succinctly –about Stephen Hedges’ character. Whereas other prisoners are described as being badly connected, not known here, orderly or good in gaol, Hedges is described simply as bad. To be fair to him however, he wasn’t described as being very bad, which was a term applied to a certain John Head, who was being shipped abroad for 7 years for receiving stolen goods.

Conditions aboard the York were appalling, and Stephen Hedges and Henry Stockwell had to endure them for 2 months before they left for New South Wales, Australia. Finally, on Sunday, 29th June 1828, they left Portsmouth on the convict ship The Marquis of Hastings never to see England, or their families, again.

List of prisoners embarked on the Marquis of Hastings, bound for New South Wales, 27th June 1828

The journey to New South Wales took them 4 months and onboard the ship, travelling with the crew and the prisoners was the ship’s surgeon William Rae, who, as part of his duties, kept a journal of illnesses and treatments suffered throughout the voyage.

The Journal of William Rae at the National Archives, Kew.

Given the length of the voyage, the appalling conditions and the terrible diet the prisoners (and indeed the crew) had to endure, it’s surprising that so few people passed through William Rae’s sick bay. In total, 17 people were in his care during the course of the voyage, of whom 13 were discharged cured and 3 discharged convalescent in Sydney. Only one person died –  from Hydrocephalus (water on the brain).

During the voyage, Rae made notes on the weather which, even in brief descriptions of the clouds, paints a vivid picture of the journey. For example: July 24th 1828. The ship was located at Latitude 10.2o N and Longitude 23.50o S. The temperature was 80oF with a light West-South-Westerly breeze. ‘Cloudy with rain’ Rae has added, in the column marked ‘weather for the day’.

We might not know how it feels to be fettered by the ankles and the waist, locked inside a cramped, stinking space with dozens of other criminals, but we all know the weather. When we read about the conditions suffered by the convicts, it always seems – so long ago did it happen – comparable to a fiction. Strong breeze, squally with rain however is just as much a part of now. When we look at a cumulus cloud as Rae had done, we can get a little closer to the plight of the convicts in the hold.

Plotting the coordinates of the voyage allows us to see the journey. The following stills are taken from Google Earth, in which I plotted Rae’s longitude and latitude.

Stephen Hedges would have had no idea what to expect in Australia, and the same could be said for most of those onboard. Australia itself had only recently emerged from the world of myth. It was still little more than an outline, a vast oubliette for the convicts on board.

On maps throughout the 18th century, Australia’s outlines slowly emerged, as various explorers happened upon her shores. It seems inconceivable that so vast a landmass could ever have been missed, but it just goes to show how big the oceans are by which it is surrounded.

The contrast between its (then) vague geography, its being a kind of oubliette and the realities of the present along with its unforgiving landscape, is something which interests me a great deal.

A map showing an as yet, unmapped east coast of Australia.

After four months at sea, bound for New South Wales, the prisoners disembarked at Sydney, on Tuesday, October 28th.

Stephen Hedges was assigned to James Bowman who’d been appointed principal surgeon for New South Wales after arriving on the John Barry in 1819. By 1832, Bowman had established a sheep run on more than 11,000 acres of land at Ravensworth, Patrick Plains. Hedges may well have been used to help construct it.

Detail from NSW 1828 Census, showing Stephen Hedges being assigned as a labourer to James Bowman at Patrick’s Plains.

On 24th December 1838, Stephen Hedges, now a free man, married Elizabeth Carter in Parramatta, New South Wales.

He died in Australia in 1885, at the age of 74.

Stephen Hedges

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On Monday 28th January 1828, a sawyer by the name of Richard Burgess was travelling from Abingdon to Oxford with a cartload of bone for sale in town. On the road to Oxford, Burgess met with three men; Stephen Hedges – a young Abingdon man in his late teens, Henry Stockwell, originally from Aberdeen and a few years older than Hedges, and a man called John Harper. Hedges – described later by Stockwell as the ‘captain’ as regards the events about to follow – asked Burgess if he was going to Oxford and whether he’d carry a parcel for them. Burgess agreed, at which point Harper left the group, while Hedges and Stockwell continued on towards Oxford with the cart.
On the Oxford Road, near the lodge of what was then Radley House, Burgess was asked to stop. At first Burgess refused, but relented, stopping as he said later for about five minutes. At that time the house was owned by Sir George Bowyer (who in 1815 had been forced to sell its contents to help his struggling finances) and rented from him by a Mr. Benjamin Kent. When Harper arrived back on the scene with a bag, the three men went off into the gardens.
After five minutes the men returned carrying the bag which Burgess described as being very heavy. What was in the bag, Burgess didn’t know, but given that Stockwell was carrying a piece of lead on his shoulder, it must have been obvious.
On the way into Oxford, the men – still travelling with Burgess –  met a Charles Jones whereupon, according to Burgess, they engaged in conversation. Burgess went on into Oxford, to Mr. Round’s wharf and near the gates set down the lead and delivered his cargo of bone for weighing. Half an hour later, Stockwell and Jones reappeared and put the lead back on the cart. Burgess asked him where they were going to take it, to which he was told to follow Jones.
Burges followed Jones up the ‘City Road’ and near the Castle met with Hedges and Harper. They turned back through Butcher Row to the place where the lead was to be delivered, and here, for his trouble Burgess was paid sixpence.
The next day, on Tuesday 29th January, James Smith, servant to Benjamin Kent, discovered three ‘hips’ of the larder roof had been stripped of their lead. Two weeks later, on Wednesday, 13th February, Stephen Hedges appeared in Abingdon before the mayor  T. Knight Esq. on suspicion of stealing lead from an outhouse belonging to B. Morland Esq. (I’m assuming here that B Morland and B. Kent are in fact the same person). He was fully committed to the Bridewell whereas Stockwell and Harper were, at that point, still on the run.
Justice however soon caught up with them, and together with Hedges they were tried at the Berkshire Easter Sessions on Tuesday, 15th April. Stephen Hedges and Henry Stockwell were found guilty of stealing 154 lbs of lead. The sentence passed was transportation for a period of 7 years. The report in Jackson’s Oxford Journal makes no mention of Harper’s fate. Charles Jones was acquitted.
Having been convicted and sentenced, Hedges and Stockwell were taken to Portsmouth, and on Monday 28th April, received aboard the prison hulk York. The hulk system had been established by an act of Parliament in 1776 (following the declaration of American Independence which meant the loss of penal colonies there) to ease overcrowding in British prisons. Old warships moored on the Thames and those in other ports, were converted into prisons, and despite the terrible conditions suffered by the prisoners within, the system remained in place for another 80 years.
The York, in which Hedges and Stockwell were incarcerated, was the eighth ship to bear the name and had once been a 74-gun, third rate of 1,743 tons. Launched in 1807, she’d been posted to the West Indies where she was involved in the capture of the island stronghold of Martinique. She continued the war in the Mediterranean Squadron off Toulon and in 1819, returned to Portsmouth to serve as a prison hulk – home to some 500 inmates.
Entering a hulk was demoralising to say the very least. Stripped of their clothes, cold buckets of water were thrown over the prisoners. They received their slops and looked on as their own clothes were thrown into the sea – a baptism of their status as a convict and a ‘ceremonial drowning’ of their lives before that time. Finally, they were led into the darkest, foulest-smelling parts of the ship, to await their transportation – the last stage in the process of being forgotten.
The final column on the York’s Muster reads rather ominously: how disposed of? And this is just what was being done with all the men and women sentenced in this manner. And written in this column, next to the names of Stephen Hedges and Henry Stockwell, are the words: 24 Jun ’28 NSW.
Conditions on the York were appalling but Hedges and Stockwell had to endure them for 2 months, until Sunday, 29th June 1828, when ‘at last’ they left England aboard The Marquis of Hastings. After four months at sea, bound for New South Wales, the prisoners disembarked at Sydney, on Tuesday, October 28th.
Stephen Hedges was assigned to James Bowman who’d been appointed principal surgeon for New South Wales after arriving on the John Barry in 1819. By 1832, Bowman had established a sheep run on more than 11,000 acres of land at Ravensworth, Patrick Plains. Hedges may well have been used to help construct it.
On 24th December 1838, Stephen Hedges, now a free man, married Elizabeth Carter in Parramatta, New South Wales.
He died in Australia in 1885, at the age of 74.

Landscape DNA: The Simultaneity of Stories-So-Far

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The Past is Time without a ticking clock. A place where paths and roads are measured in years. The Present is a place where the clock ticks but always only for a second. Where, upon those same paths and roads we continue, for that second, with our existence.

In 2006 I visited Auschwitz-Birkenau and since then have visited camps at Bełżec, Majdanek and Natzweiler-Struthof, as well as the battlefields of Ypres, Verdun and more recently, The Somme. All these sites present the visitor with numbers: 1.1 million dead at Auschwitz-Birkenau, 500,000 at Bełżec, 79,000 in Majdanek. At the start of the Battle of the Somme, on 1st July 1916, British and Commonwealth forces sustained 57,000 casualties, with almost 20,000 men killed in action on that day alone. These are all horrific statistics, but numbers rather than people and over the course of the last few years, I’ve looked for ways of identifying with the individuals behind the grim tolls. The tolls are only estimates, and the individuals to whom they allude have become themselves ‘estimates of existence’. Most have left nothing behind; no name, possessions, or photographs. Photographs, where they exist, are often nameless, names on graves are faceless, so how can we know them at all?

One of the most difficult things about my visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau was walking out the gate, performing an action that more than a million people could only ever dream about – if they had the time; most were killed within hours of their arrival. At Bełżec, the memorial to the dead is – in the main – a walk around the perimeter of where the camp once stood. During my visit in 2007, I recorded the walk using a GPS receiver and the fact that I, as an individual, one of several billion people on the planet, could be tracked in this place where half a million people perished, proved particularly resonant. The concept of walking as a means of remembering began to take hold in my work, evolving over time to become a means of empathising – in some small way – with those who’d perished.

In the book Walking, Writing and Performance by Deirdre Heddon, Carl Lavery and Phil Smith, artist Carl Lavery states the following:

“…pedestrian performance is a mode of resistance against the acceleration of the world, a desire, on the part of performance makers, to re-humanise space by encouraging spectators to experience the environment at a properly human pace, the bodily beat of three miles per hour. Implicit in this argument is the belief that walking is conducive to the production of place, a perfect technique for merging landscape, memory and imagination in a dynamic dialogue. Or as Michel de Certeau would have it: ‘The act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language…’.”

In the passage quoted above, I was struck by the idea, as Lavery puts it, of “encouraging spectators to experience the environment at a properly human pace.” Merging landscape, memory and imagination (for which purpose, according to Lavery, walking is the perfect technique) has become central to my work. It’s also something I’ve done quite naturally since I was a child. For me, places have always been a conflation of these things, and as such, quite unique to me.

When I visit historic sites, landscape, memory and imagination merge to create something akin to what others have termed post-memories; ‘memories’ of events of which we can have no real recollection – in particular events that happened before we were even born. How this happens is something which has interested me throughout my research. A kinaesthetic engagement with a place, and our sense of the present are, it seems, both important in this regard.

Finally in the paragraph quoted above, I was struck by the words of Michel de Certeau; the idea that ‘the act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language,’ reminded me very much of what I’ve read before in the work of Christopher Tilley, who in his book The Materiality of Stone – Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology, writes that ‘If writing solidifies or objectifies speech into a material medium, a text which can be read and interpreted, an analogy can be drawn between a pedestrian speech act and its inscription or writing on the ground in the form of the path or track.”

The idea of a path as ‘text’ is something which appeals to me; the notion that as we walk we ‘write’ ourselves in the landscape has a particularly poetic resonance. In his book Lines, a Brief History, Tim Ingold writes that “human beings leave reductive traces in the landscape, through frequent movement along the same route…”. The Old English word writan he tells us, meant to ‘incise runic letters in stone,’ and a  correlation can therefore be drawn between the act of walking and writing; a path is something written over years by many different people, incised into the landscape.

Just as when we speak we re-use the same words spoken over centuries – for example fragments of long forgotten conversations – so when we walk, we re-use fragments of other people’s ‘texts’, ‘written’ into the landscape. In this sense, we speak with our bodies words that other bodies have spoken or written before us. As Ingold notes: “retracing the lines of past lives is how we proceed along our own.”

In 2007, the year before she died, my grandmother told me about her childhood in Wales. The following is an extract from that conversation in which she describes her father, Elias Jones, who died in 1929, aged 47, as a result of working in the mines:

‘I can see him now because he went up our garden over the road and the mountain started from there up… and he’d go so far up and he’d turn back and wave to us…’

On visiting Hafodyrynys, the village where my grandmother grew up, I walked up the ‘mountain’ she’d described and followed the path my great grandfather would have taken to work in the mines at Llanhilleth. On top of the hill I turned and looked back down at the garden, imagining my grandmother and her siblings waving back at me from the past. Further on, I stood and looked at the view, rolled out all around me. A hundred years ago I thought, when I did not exist, he would have seen the very same thing. A hundred years later, long after his death, I found myself – through being in that place – identifying with him: I’d found him on the path – one which would in time lead to my being born.

Elias Jones, through frequent movement along that path had written himself into the landscape. A hundred years later, I was – through articulating my own presence through walking –  reading part of that text; speaking with my own body his simultaneous presence and absence. In many ways, I was speaking my own presence and absence too.

During that visit, I realised that as well as being a product of the ‘genetic text’ passed down the generations through a myriad number of genealogical lines, we are as much the consequence of pathways walked by every one of our ancestors. DNA is text – a kind of narrative sequence – and the paths which have led to our individual births are a vast text written across the landscape: self and environment, to borrow from Lavery, are umbilically connected.

People are therefore, in a sense, places, and in his book, Lavery quotes Mike Pearson, a performance maker and theorist who states that: “just as landscapes are constructed out of the imbricated actions and experiences of people, so people are constructed in and dispersed through their habituated landscape: each individual, significantly, has a particular set of possibilities in presenting an account of their own landscape: stories.”

Another passage in the book which interested me was that regarding the geographer Doreen Massey. Lavery writes how she offers a ‘conception of space that is interrelational, multiple and always under construction. In her book, For Space, she describes it [space] as ‘the dimension of multiple trajectories, a simultaneity of stories-so-far’.”

I like the idea of space being a ‘simultaneity of stories-so-far’, and it interested me insofar as it rang a bell with some thoughts I’d had previously regarding our own perception of the past. The following is taken from a piece I wrote on the nature of history:

The past is often perceived much like the strata of a rock-face, wherein successive layers of geological time can be seen. We see the past as being built from the ‘ground up’ day upon day, year upon year, century upon century, like bricks in a wall. The problem with this ‘model’ however is that it makes the past difficult to access, the lines dividing each and every moment become like barriers inhibiting our movement between one and the other, particularly where one part is stacked so far below our own in what we perceive as being the present day. Another problem with this way of perceiving the past is that the layers necessarily contain objects, buildings and landscape features which, because of their age, appear in several different layers almost as if they were different things. For example, an object made a 100 years ago, would appear in each of the layers in the diagram below (see Figure 1). It’s rather like someone creating an animation, who draws the same scene a thousand times because it appears in a thousand frames, rather than using the same picture throughout them all.

Figure 1

Whilst thinking about this and while considering the fact that any extant object, building or landscape feature, no matter what its age is always present, I realised that a better model for perceiving the past is one which turns the model above on its side – if not quite its head. Subsequently (see Figure 2), what we have is not a series of horizontal strata representing stacked moments in time (days, months, years, centuries etc.), but concurrent vertical lines, or what I have called ‘durations’ where each duration is an object, building or landscape feature and where the present is our simultaneous perception of those that are extant (of course, in the case of buildings, individual ‘objects’ can also contain many separate durations).

It was Bill Viola who said that ‘we have been living this same moment ever since we were conceived. It is memory, and to some extent sleep, that gives the impression of a life of discrete parts, periods or sections, of certain times or highlights’. Similarly we can say that every object, building or landscape feature has existed in one continuous moment and that it is to some extent the passing generations which gives the impression of the past as being a series of ‘discrete parts, periods or sections, i.e., the perceived layers or strata of our previous – first – model.

Figure 2

These ‘durations’ as I have described them, are indeed ‘stories so far,’ which move, as if they are being told, at the speed of walking – at a ‘properly human pace’ as Lavery puts it.

Returning to the idea of walking as writing, it’s true to say that we don’t always leave a physical trace of our presence when we walk – or at least a visible, physical trace. But, poetically speaking at least, we do leave something behind and this something is often augmented by objects, buildings or landscape features which are contemporaneous with past individuals.

Whenever I visit sites of historic trauma (death camps and the battlefields of World War One), even if they’re empty, I feel as if they’re full; not in a spiritual or pseudo-spiritual sense, but physically, as if they’re full of sculptures. Sculptor Antony Gormley describes his work as ‘confronting existence’ and that, in part, is what we do in places such as Auschwitz; death is, after all, another kind of existence. Walking itself is a means of confronting existence, being as it is a line drawn between absence and presence – just as I’d found in Wales.

“Part of my work,” Gormley writes, is to “give back immanence to both the body and art.” For archaeologist, Colin Renfrew, Gormley is “speaking of the existence of the individual, and the coming into being and self-awareness of the individual as the inhabitant of his or her body.” In reading these quotes, I began to see that the sites of trauma I’d visited, as well as those places relevant to my own family history, were full of what I can only describe as invisible sculptures – sculptures of absence, the physical presence/immanence of all who’ve gone before.

Gormley’s work comprises, in part, casts of his own body which reminds Renfrew of the bodies found in Pompeii; men, women and children frozen at the moment of their death almost 2000 years ago. Buried in ash, the spaces which had once contained their bodies remained after the bodies had decomposed, allowing archaeologists, to use them as moulds by pouring plaster into the cavities.

In light of this, I was reminded of the work of Christopher Tilley, who in his book, ‘The Materiality of Stone, Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology’ writes: “The painter sees the tree and the trees see the painter… in a manner comparable to that in which the mirror ‘sees’ the painter: that is, the trees, like the mirror, let him become visible: they define a point of view on him which renders visible for him something that otherwise would remain invisible – his outside, his physiognomy, his carnal presence… The trees and mirror function as Other.”

Just as the trees function as ‘Other’ therefore, so must the sun, the stars, the clouds, hills, mountains, the sea, rivers, the wind, the rain and so on. And in a sense, what Tilley is describing as Other, which ‘renders visible for him… his carnal presence,’ is a sense of being present in the present-day world.

In the book Walking, Writing and Performance, Lavery writes:

“…during… Mourning Walk I was aware of living more in the past than in the present. However at no time did this immersion in memory result in psychic saturation or disintegration. The natural world – the world of trees and stones – was stubbornly present and insisted on maintaining its autonomy and distance.”

When trying to access the past through walking, an awareness of the present – of being present in the world – is vital, and the natural world – the world of trees and stones – does that for us. Understanding the fact that the past was once the present, helps us in some small way to empathise with those lost to the past.

The present moment is a space, one which lasts only for a second – a space comprising the simultaneity of what Doreen Massey calls ‘stories so far’ or what I have called ‘durations’. And it’s in that space that life happens. Behind us and in front, beyond the physical boundaries of that second we are absent. The text is written, or yet to be written – the present being the moment of writing. Gormley’s sculptures then articulate this line between presence and absence, past and present.

In that space, in which we continue with our existence, we hear the birds, we see the sun, feel the wind and rain. In that space, all our hopes are held, all our fears and regrets. Into the space we carry our past in the form of memories. It’s the space of the everyday – one which we often take for granted. But it’s a space we share with everyone who’s ever gone before us.

Again, in his book, Lines. A Brief History, Tim Ingold tell us that:

‘…from late Antiquity right through to the Renaissance writing was valued above all as an instrument of memory. Its purpose was not to close off the past by providing a complete and objective account of what was said and done, but rather to provide the pathways along which the voices of the past could be retrieved and brought back into the immediacy of present experience, allowing readers to engage directly in dialogue with them and to connect what they have to say to the circumstances of their own lives. In short, writing was read not as a record but as a means of recovery.’

This paragraph has something in common with what I described earlier, the idea that just as when we speak we re-use the same words spoken over centuries – fragments of long forgotten conversations – so when we walk, we re-use fragments of other people’s ‘texts’, ‘written’ into the landscape. Walking becomes a means of recovery, where the past can be retrieved and ‘brought back into the immediacy of present experience’. As on the ‘mountain’ in Hafodyrynys, it’s  a means of engaging in a dialogue with those who’ve gone before us, and nowhere is this more keenly felt that in places of historic trauma.

It’s as if when walking through these places, we pick up – at random – the threads of other people’s texts. We tie them together, filling in the gaps with our own story. It’s rather like the film Jurassic Park, where dinosaurs are cloned using DNA extracted from mosquitoes frozen in amber. The gaps in the code are filled with modern frog DNA, creating a ‘modern’ dinosaur. Earlier, I stated that people were as much the product of places, and it figures therefore that places are as much the product of people; that the ‘DNA’ of any place comprises narrative lines laid down by everyone who’s ever been there. When we walk, we create new places based on the present day landscape. Our memory and memories, history and of course our imaginations all have a part to play. Within our imagination, we take with fragmentary strands of the landscape’s own ‘DNA’ (or history) and fill the gaps with our own presence and memory. These constantly created spaces (created then destroyed every second) are unique to us, and yet we share them, in that single moment, with all who’ve gone before us, not as part of a crowd, but as one body and mind.

The ‘stubborn’ presentness which Lavery describes is therefore vital to our empathising with the past, and in many ways the most terrifying thing at Auschwitz was the way the trees moved in Birkenau (Auschwitz II), simply because they would have moved that way during the Holocaust.

The writer Georges Perec once wrote that “the desire to find roots, the determination to work from memories or from the memory, is the will above all to stand out against death, against silence.”

I work from memories and the memory and I’m actively engaged in searching for my roots. Is this then a will to stand out ‘against death, against silence?’

Again, in Walking, Writing and Performance, Lavery writes:

“Is not all writing, all art, a response to a loss of some kind, an imaginative way of dealing with lack? …As I use it, the word recovery has nothing to do with re-experiencing the lost object in its original pristine state; rather, it designates a poetic or an enchanted process in which the subject negotiates the past from the standpoint of the present.”

This act of recovery is just the same as that which Ingold describes, where writing (in ancient times) was read not as a record but as a means of recovery. Walking as a means of ‘reading’ or ‘speaking’ the text of other people’s lives is a way of recovering a moment in the past; an ‘enchanted process’ to borrow from Lavery, where we ‘negotiate the past from the standpoint of the present.’

Empathy with the past therefore and in particular with individuals can be achieved, coming via a kinaesthetic response to the present mediated through memory and our embodied imaginations.

Lead Walk – Photos

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The following photographs were taken during a walk I made along the route as described in the previous entry Lead Walk – Maps.

The road from Abingdon, down which Richard Burgess drove with his cart of bones for delivery in Oxford.

It was near here, where the red car is parked – slightly hidden from view – that Stephen Hedges and his accomplices asked Richard Burgess to stop, before heading off to steal the 154 lbs of lead. From that moment on, Hedges’ fate – along with that of Henry Stockwell – was sealed.

The entrance to Radley House where the car is parked on the right hand side.

When there were no cars driving past – which didn’t seem very often – I would find myself imagining Stephen Hedges looking around him, just as I was doing. I’d see a bird against the clouds and for a second I was him, walking down the road with the horse and cart. I could almost hear their conversation, muffled as if I had an ear to the ground.

When I did imagine a moment in 1828, for some reason my mind returned to my childhood, to Risinghurst where my Nana lived. I wondered about Stephen’s past and his childhood.

I’ve no idea of course what the clouds were like above the road that fateful day, but with the document I have recording the clouds on the voyage to Australia, the fairweather clouds above seemed ominous.

It wasn’t the safest walk I’ve ever done. Walking has long been forgotten here. But empathising with individuals long since lost to the past can only be done at that speed.

A bin bag. It reminded me of the heavy bag Burgess describes. Little did he know it was full of lead.

A milestone – one you can see if you’re going slowly enough.

Bagley Wood. The same shape it seems as it was in 1828.

Lead Walk – Maps

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On the trail of my ancestor Stephen Hedges (my great, great, great, great uncle) I wanted to walk the route I think he would have travelled (along with Henry Stockwell, J Harper and the innocent Abingdon Sawyer, Richard Burgess) with the lead stolen from what was then Radley Hall or House. Below is a screenshot from Google Earth, showing the route as recorded on my GPS.

The following image is another screenshot from Google Earth, this time with a map of 1811 overlaid and the same GPS route placed over the top.

I was quite surprised how well they married up and below are the same two images combined. What is interesting is how the shape of Bagley Wood has hardly changed.

Mapping the Voyage of the Marquis of Hastings

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Below is a screenshot of a transcription I’ve made from the journal of William Rae, who served aboard the Marquis of Hastings in 1828 in the capacity of Surgeon. A PDF of the transcription is available here.

On August 16th, Rae states that the Island of Trinidad was in sight. But having looked at the route I’d plotted and then at the location of Trinidad I realised I must have made a mistake. However, on zooming in on Google Earth I found that the location plotted for that day was near the Trindade seachannel, and having searched for Trindade, discovered that on August 16th the ship was in fact in sight of Ilha de Trindade (see image below).

Prison Hulk – York

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Following his conviction at the Berkshire Assizes on 15th April 1828, Stephen Hedges was sent to Portsmouth to serve time before his transportation on the prison hulk, York, pictured below.

This HMS York was the eighth ship to bear the name, and was a 74-gun third rate of 1,743 tons. Launched in 1807, she was posted to the West Indies where she was involved in the bold capture of the island stronghold of Martinique. She continued the war in the Mediterranean Squadron off Toulon and in 1819, returned to Portsmouth to serve as a prison hulk. She was broken up in 1854.

Having researched Hulks, I found the following on the Southern Life website:

“Embarking on board the hulks was a very demoralising affair; the convicts had to climb labourously up with their irons still on, stripped of their clothes, had buckets of cold water thrown over them; were issued with slops, saw their own clothes thrown overboard; were re-chained and then sent down into the lowest deck of the hulk – the darkest and most foul-smelling part of the ship.”

There’s something horribly poetic in the action of throwing the clothes overboard. Roland Barthes, in his book Camera Lucida, said that clothes made a second grave for the loved being. In this case, we could say the grave was that of a drowned man; one made before the man had actually died. Of course in many ways it really did symbolise their deaths.

For a ship with such an illustrious past, there is something pitiful about her condition in the picture above. De-masted and with her sails removed, she has instead the regulation clothes (?) of the inmates to catch the wind. She is very much the outward appearance of those locked away out of view.

The Voyage of The Marquis of Hastings

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After my research in the National Archives, I took the document I’d discovered (the Surgeon’s Journal from teh voyage of the Marquis of Hatings’ 1828 voyage) and plotted the longitude and latitude references into Google Earth. Given that these measurements were taken in 1828, I wasn’t sure what the results would be, but having entered them, I was pleased with what I ended up with.

The voyage began on the 29th June 1828 in Portsmouth. The weather that day is described as ‘Dry, Cirrus, Cirrus Cumuli,’ and the temperature 74F. In reading these tiny details, the moment is straight away prised from the pages of history, as if a character from a fictional tale has, all of a sudden, become reality. They are small details but manage in their succinctness to paint a bigger picture.


Below is a screenshot from Google Earth showing the start of the voyage and the first 7 days of the journey.

One can only guess at what the prisoners must have felt leaving the country for what they surely knew would be the last time. Given the conditions some (including my ancestor, Stephen Hedges) had suffered on the prison hulks (the York in his case) it might have come as some relief that they were finally moving – not that the conditions would be be much of an improvement during the voyage.

Below are screenshots showing the route of the ship, with each yellow pin representing one day of the voyage.

Having mapped the journey in this way, and having read the descriptions of weather and  temperature, the voyage and indeed the ordeal of my ancestor’s Transportation suddenly became more real. It was as if beforehand, the world of 1828 was purely a fiction, and that the names of the towns, islands and landmarks – Portsmouth, The Lizard, Tenerife and Sydney for example – just happened to have the same names as those – unconnected – places in the present day. Suddenly, the world of the past and the world of the present had collided.

The image below shows the last leg of the journey.

The last entry by William Rae (the ship’s surgeon) is dated the 28th October 1828 and reads: ‘nearing the same (Sydney Cove) since the 23rd. Prisoners disembarked.

The National Archives

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I’d never been to the National Archives and had only ever seen it on TV, on Who Do You Think You Are. As I approached the doors, I could almost hear Mark Strong (who narrates the progarmme) say, “Nick is going to the National Archives to find some information on….”

So what information was I looking for? Well, I wanted to find something on the voyage of the Marquis of Hastings, the convict ship which took Stephen Hedges and 177 other felons to Australia in 1828. Having gone through all the first time procedures and having obatined my Reader’s Ticket, I consulted the catalogue and found two documents.

 
I only had time to look at one which was the Surgeon’s Journal (above) written during the voyage by William Rae. This sounded particularly helpful, and although my ancestor wasn’t one of the patients (fortunately for him of course), the document gives a great insight into the prisoners and their health – not least the conditions they must have endured.

Furthermore, the document contains a daily list of longitiude and latitude, wind direction and weather conditions which, for me, is just the sort of thing I wanted to know from an artistic point of view – especially as regards the weather and cloud formations.

I will transcribe some in due course and return to the Archives soon to look at the other documents.

© Nicholas Hedges 2024