The year 1913 is having a moment, and just in the nick of time, too.
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In the lead-up to Canberra's Centenary next week, with the year – or least that crucial date, March 12 – at the top of everyone's minds, it's odd to think that the actual year 1913 has long been lost in the muddy mists of World War tragedy. Or is it obliterated by the clarifying shine of post-war optimism? Whatever the case, 1913 never stood a chance against what came shortly afterwards.
And, as a new exhibition at the National Museum of Australia shows, it's a shame, because 1913 was, in fact, a year full of promise for Australia. We look back now at Canberra's opening ceremony, with all its ad hoc pomp and uncertain grandeur, and we feel sorry for those bright-faced people celebrating a new beginning. We feel sorry for them because they don't seem to know what's coming. How poignant is that ceremony, with all the young men in uniform and on horseback? In two years, many of them will be dead, wounded, or facing imminent fear of both on the battlegrounds of Europe.
But this year, 100 years later, is the perfect opportunity to forget about the retrospective shadow cast by 1914. Glorious Days, which opens at the museum tomorrow, shines a light on an overlooked page in Australia's yearbook.
After all, says museum director Andrew Sayers, the naming of Canberra wasn't “poignant” for the people who lived at the time.
“They didn't know what was coming, and they had this tremendous optimism about the future, and a tremendous sense of optimism about Australia and its particular policies and its particular lifestyle and potential,” he says.
As the exhibition shows, there was too much happening to worry about a looming war that seemed remote. Australians were learning to rollerskate, drive cars and learn the tango. They were reading, breathlessly, reports about the first expedition to Antarctica, celebrating the arrival of the country's very own navy fleet, and watching some of the world's first feature-length movies.
And they were watching, excitedly, as a new as-yet-empty city was about to be officially named. They sent in suggestions – Federalia, Pacifica, Wattleford, Perfection. The names spoke of a brave new world of utopian ideals. And these ideals, in turn, belied an insecure young country working hard to carve out a place among the world's most powerful nations.
It was just one of many significant events in what turned out to be a typically busy year for pre-war Australia, but the ceremony for the naming of Canberra encapsulates, in many ways, the hopes people had for the future.
“It's that sense of idealism which clusters around Canberra as an ideal city for an ideal society,” Sayers says.
“I love that footage – I love the provisional nature of it. Everyone standing around and saying, 'What's next?' People are standing around and they're looking at their programs, it's got a wonderful organic kind of flow to it.”
Exhibition curator Michelle Hetherington says even the fact that Canberra was in an empty, greenfill site chimed with the feeling of the time.
“They wouldn't have to deal with the entrenched mistakes of the past, and I think that's how they felt about Australian society, too. They weren't going to have to deal with the entrenched class privilege of somewhere like Britain, the entrenched racial problems that they saw in the USA, because they assumed Aboriginal people were going to be dying out,” she says.
“They just thought, 'We have a blank slate', in a way.”
When it came to staging an exhibition about 1913, the museum had originally thought of looking at the year in an international context. But as Australia today looks ahead to four years of centenaries relating to battlefields, now is the time to look at the country outside the context of war.
“This story puts the Canberra story into the national context. We realised that there were enough really interesting stories in Australia . . . which seem to have a contemporary resonance 100 years later,” Sayers says.
While modern Australians were busy enjoying everything the so-called civilised world had to offer, they were also concerned about the development of the Northern Territory and border protection. There was, Sayers says, a sense of fatalism about indigenous culture, and anxiety about the environment.
“There were grand plans for the Murray Darling, and in the exhibition there's a wonderful map of the survey of the Murray which was done in 1913, which became a part of government policy with respect of water allocation,” he says.
“It's fascinating to reflect on the fact that some of the things that people were anxious about in 1913, we are still grappling.”
Back then, Australians were both progressive – women had the vote, universal education was a real possibility – and generally racist. The White Australia policy was in full swing, and Asia, to the north of our unprotected coastlines, seemed to simmer as a generalised threat of the unknown. Australian art was broadly conservative, leaning towards the pastoral and away from the decadent. If you were a budding artist, London, not Paris, was the place to be.
It was a year that, today, is difficult to pin down.
Hetherington recalls the initial searches through the museum's collection for items relating to 1913, and coming up with an odd collection. It was difficult to know where to begin with an exhibition about an overlooked year.
“We started trying to find if anybody had actually done a survey of the year 1913 in Australia. Often there are some really good studies that just give you an idea of where to start. We couldn't find one. And if there's one out there, I missed it,” she says.
“One of the most useful things was the Commonwealth Yearbook, which is huge, over 1000 pages long, and mercifully online.”
The book was put together by Australian statistician at the time, one G. H. Knibbs, who drew on the most recent official census from 1911 to give an overview of everything that was happening in the country. Hetherington says it put a positive spin on this tiny population of fewer than ?5 million people, with a view to increasing it – “like a giant sales prospectus for Australia”.
Newspapers, too – made accessible through the National Library's digitisation project – made for fascinating reading.
“Given that what we're trying to do with this exhibition is recapture life as it was being lived in the present tense in 1913, the newspapers are the most fantastic resource available, because they give you a thorough indication of people were reading about, talking about, worried about or excited about,” she says.
“Once we had that as a great resource, we found that couple of major themes presented themselves in the exhibition.”
Sport and leisure – the tango, the cars, the rugby and rollerskating, fashion and frivolousness – take up the first part of the exhibition, which is arranged like a street, one that curves so that you can't see what's in the distance.
Nation-building is also a big theme, with the country heading into an election. Prime minister Andrew Fisher spent the first half of the year travelling up and down the country, attending openings and launches, including Canberra's official naming ceremony.
“There were all these wonderful things happening which were the culmination of three years of Labor Party determination to change Australia,” Hetherington says.
“Nation-building was really important. And then we kept on finding people talking about how Australia was the 'social laboratory of the world', and I thought that is actually fascinating. Women and the vote. Changes to education, changes to health, changes to housing, it's almost utopian. It's this sort of sense that there's nothing Australia cannot achieve.”
But, she says, other things about that time have been overlooked or “forgotten”?.
The White Australia Policy, formally adopted in 1906, was in full swing. “In 1913, Australia's non-indigenous population took enormous pride that their country was a white bastion of civilisation out in the Pacific and Asia,” she says.
“They really saw 'white' as a moral quality, and consequently they felt that here, in this wonderful new land with unlimited potential, the potential for the perfection of the white race was at its most likely to happen. It's scary stuff, but everybody believed it!”
Indigenous Australians were, by then, looked on with distant pity, barely included in the official census and regarded as a soon-to-be-gone race.
“I think it's absolutely something that we need to face, the casual racism. [White Australians then] are the product of their time, just as we are of our own,” she says.
“We need to look back and see – have we changed, are we any better, are the attitudes that we hold equally offensive? Will we be embarrassed by them 100 years from now?
"That's one of the things we can do with these sorts of exhibitions.”
The exhibition also focuses on the state of indigenous culture in 1913, with a set of bark paintings that had been commissioned by the then director of the Museum of Victoria, Baldwin Spencer, between 1912 and 1914.
“They were being collected as evidence of a dying culture, even scientific resources, really ... This passed for anthropology and a scientific approach,” she says.
“We look at these now and see artworks, absolutely beautiful artworks.”
The road leads into the 1913 Australian art world, in a time when photography was taking off, and there was not yet a perceived distinction between decorative art and fine art.
The next stop is the great Australasian “empire”, and Australia's relationship with Papua.
“Part of being a white nation on the outskirts of what they considered the uncivilised world was that we had the responsibility to look after those less fortunate than ourselves – to bring them the benefits of civilisation – and the first people who were going to benefit from that were the Papuans,” says Hetherington.
“So Australia in 1906 agrees formally to take over the protectorate of Papua from Great Britain, and the Australians felt that this was really important, it showed our maturity as a nation, and that's one of the things that comes through – Australia is endlessly looking for validation of its significance as a nation – sport, going off to battle, having a navy, having a colony.”
The first Lieutenant-Governor of Papua, Sir Hubert Murray, spent 30 years there collecting items for the Official Pa-puan Collection, which would later be acquired by the National Museum in Canberra, and which form part of the exhibition.
“The other side of that Australasian Empire is our activities in Antarctica, which were somewhat purer in their aims, and that was about using science as a way of justifying Australia's 'seat at the table', as it were, with the big boys,” Hetherington says.
While the famous Robert Falcon Scott dominated the headlines that year as the story of his death broke in February, the exhibition instead focuses on Douglas Mawson, who would make it back from Antarctica by December.
Although war was not cold reality, the issue of defence was another headline dominator in 1913. With the arms race gathering speed in Europe by 1911, Australia had finally secured its own naval fleet?. Its arrival on October 4 was declared a public holiday?. A newspaper at the time declared that even if nothing else had happened in 1913, the arrival of the Fleet had made it great.
The exhibition finishes at the movies, with a mini-cinema showing news reels and contemporary films.
“It ends, in theory, on this really fascinating note, and it shows how Australia was connected to the world by the media,” she says.
“But as you then turn to go out, there's this huge image of a troop ship from 1916, and all the streamers and people waving, and it's at that point, if you hadn't realised already, that you see that this extraordinary year was not even a memory – people had actually put it out of their minds.
“People have to know, but the great thing was avoiding having that hindsight destroying your pleasure of the exhibition,” she says.
In other words, Gallipoli will get its day in two years. Let's push away those shadows, just this year, and think about a country whose residents thought little of the harsh judgments of time.
Glorious Days: Australia 1913 opens at the Na-tional Museum of Aus-tralia on March 7 and runs until October 13. Ticket prices apply.