tales from urban dilettantia

Note:  The first map has had a Voronoi diagram constructed over it, using places one can get a drink around here as the initial set of points. You can read more about Voronoi diagrams here.

013 – Very Rough Voronoi Diagram of Where One Can Get a Drink Around Here

014 – Some Crimes

…you had such a vision of the street, as the street hardly understands… – T S Eliot, Preludes

011 – Dogs I Have Seen on this Saturday Morning

012 – Invisible Stars Above the Street, 10:30am on a Sunday

* Technically, the Sun is visible and the planets aren’t stars.

Whilst I have momentum, here are three more maps of the street.

008 – Things I Can See from Where I’m Sitting

009 – Some Businesses Operating Between 1910 and 1915

010 – Heritage Listings, Drawn in a Hurry

Here is the beginning of a tiny, tiny map project for tiny, tiny corners of time, in which  a piece of Beaufort Street is drawn over and over again. It’s sketchy. It’s arbitrary.  It’s subject to error and to change. It’s home.

001 – Streets

Just the street names and outlines; making a peculiarly conventional assumption that street outlines make a good base map, this is the base map.

002 – On the Ground

There are a lot of utilities down there.  To be honest, I’m feeling a little bit more sympathy for the people who accidentally cut through lines.

003 – Mentions in The Mirror

The Mirror was a dreadful paper that was around in the 1930s.   It appears to have specialised in dodgy competitions and always-amusing tales of sexual assault.

004 – Beaufort Steet Blogged

Fond memories of the Beaufort Street Bloggers.

005 – Time Travel

First they came for the trams.  Then they came for the trolley buses.  Soon they’ll come for you.

006 – Legible Tags

Whatever one’s opinion on tagging, YERN and TAPE and HUTONE are a part of us all. 

007 – Lies

The above is pretty much all fraudulent.

So that’s the ongoing mini-project of the moment, in lieu of actually working on the much bigger Secret Mapping Project of Procrastination, or indeed any of my other art or local history projects.

I’m really enjoy this growing collection of maps upon maps, each so different in form and meaning.   The complexity of street’s story grows with each drawing, and the scope for making yet more representations is immense.

I’m going to go for a walk up the road on the weekend and make a map of Dogs I Have Seen.  You’ll like it.  The dogs are excellent around here.

* A small correction from Michael, who notes that the #66 bus is now a Limited Stops route rather than an Express.  Thanks Michael!

Once upon a time, this particular time being the night of 26th of June 1936, or perhaps the early morning of the 27th, Henry William Griffiths of Maylands kills his family one by one, with fishing line and an axe. Then he half fills the bath and locked the bathroom door. Finally, he tidily sits down in the water still wearing his pants, shoes and socks, and cuts his own throat.

The newspapers of the day provide detailed coverage,  both in the aftermath of the discovery, and following the inquest.  The journalists at The Mirror supply a wealth of particularly heart-wrenching details, publishing photographs of boggle-eyed children staring at the Griffiths house (‘kiddies gaze at house of awful tragedy’), the Griffiths’ toddler (‘bonny kiddie murdered today’), and the family dog (‘the only one left’).  (I am later unsurprised to see the long-defunct Mirror described as ‘the “scandal sheet” of its day, dealing with “juicy” divorce cases and the like.‘)

Various acquaintances assure the press that Henry and Kathleen were a happy couple, adored their children, gave no clue at all that anything was wrong. (People tell the right lies after a death, and apparently even more of the right lies after four.) But of course, it all comes out at the inquest. Henry had spent time in Heathcote Mental Hospital. He was reportedly convinced the CIB and Taxation Department were recording his conversations, that the Government thought he was an international spy, and that his wife (who tactfully told people he was ‘worried about business matters’) had been conspiring against him.

The family publish death notices in the papers . Many of the notices are loving, even of Henry. They bury Henry and Kathleen side by side in Karrakatta Cemetery, one of their sons with each of them.

It is June 2012. I am at the cemetery. It is a damp, grey day and the section numbering on the map isn’t matching the numbering in my notes. I wander around lost for an hour and a half before I find them.  I’ve brought flowers with me, and I stay to weed the plot.  Afterwards, I travel the two suburbs north to see the house, and return to take a photograph on a bright sunny afternoon some months later.

*

I first come across this story while idly browsing Trove, and nearly pass on by, but for a peculiar inconsistency. The papers give the address as Wellington Street in Maylands, and one goes so far as to give the house number, 34. Curious to see whether the house has been swallowed up in the suburb’s inexorable gentrification, I pull up the address on Google Maps’ Street View.

Or rather, I try. There’s no such street. I poke around the obvious places first – councils, government, the old Road Board – but there’s nothing online indicating the street ever existed, no record of it being renamed.  Suddenly, I’m interested enough not to let this one go.

To trace this story back to its beginning, I need a different approach; to go back to someone, something, a source that that recognises the address. I need to find something capable of pulling up memories of web of streets eighty years gone.  The answer, it seems, is in the very place I found the story. The newspapers of the time hold knowledge; each birth and death, each celebration and each crime, each council decision, each wedding, each story worth a scattering of words. And, because Trove – by its nature – knows everything the newspapers know, I go foraging amongst its memories.

Slowly, from advertisments, stories and random fragments, the area around Wellington Street begins to resolve. Wellington Street near Beaufort Street. Wellington Street intersecting with York Street. Wellington Street on the route of the long-gone #18 tram. Trams.  I visit the State Library at lunch to check some books on history of Perth’s tramways, quite certain at this point that at least one of them will have a useful map. No luck. Tram enthusiasts and local history websites likewise yield nothing. One last roll; Google’s Image Search. And there, a photograph of a heritage map displayed in the East Perth Train Station – a map showing the tramlines. It’s too small to make out the street names and I’m ready to make the trip over to East Perth to look for myself, but I don’t need to – a little more digging, and I’m looking at a high resolution version on Flickr. Formerly Wellington Street. Now the last block of Stuart Street in Bayswater.

Much closer, I track up and down the block in Street View. I think I’ve found the house a couple of times, and then wonder if it was demolished to make the small park nearby. I don’t realise yet that I’m largely focusing on the wrong side of the road. This isn’t going to work; finding a house that looks a little like the right house isn’t enough.  One workers’ cottage looks rather too like another workers’ cottage.

Helpful as the internet has been, this is something more specialised. This is the State Library’s moment. I search the catalogue and find that the library holds a collection of aperture cards showing local real estate developers’ promotional plans from around 1890 to 1940. At this point, I don’t even know what an apeture card is. I ask at the desk and the woman looks surprised and takes out a shoebox-sized container  from underneath the desk.  In the shoebox is their entire collection.

The aperture cards are frustrating. Well actually, they’re fascinating, but none of them quite hit the geographic area I’m chasing. I check and double-check all of the cards for Maylands, Mount Lawley, Falkirk, Inglewood and Bayswater. Just before closing time, I zoom in a little harder on a particularly detailed image I’d bypassed the first time around, and there it is. Wellington Street. Numbered lots, even. Numbered lots with boundaries matching those I can see on Google Maps.

So it is that I learn Wellington Street has become the western extension of Stuart Street, and that number 34 has become number 108. I compare the photographs from 1936 to the image from Street View. There have been some changes over time, but it’s the house.

This is how I come to be lost and then found in the cemetery on a damp, grey day. This is how I come to be sitting in a small park in the rain, near an innocuous cottage not unlike every other cottage in the street.  This is how I come to be wandering along a laneway in the bright winter sun, on my way to see a house that – in all honesty – is merely a house for all that has happened there. And this is how I come to be writing a story of maps and mysteries, while quietly wondering at the story of a bad death.

 In Loving Memory of Harry and Kathleen who departed this life suddenly, June 27th 1936.  Aged 34 years and 4 months & 32 years and 11 months.  Darling son and daughter-in-law of Ada M. Mulligan.  ”So deeply mourned, so sadly missed.”

*

See A House on Highgate Hill for more local history from Perth’s inner-north.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been having a ridiculous amount of fun with The National Library of Australia’s Trove database.  In addition to the archive of photographs, letters, audio and other historical records, it also contains a vast library of newspapers going back well into the 1800′s.  The most exciting thing about this is that the library has used text recognition software to make all of the articles searchable, and crowd-sources corrections where the text recognition hasn’t property transcribed an article.

Among other things, it occurred to me to run a search for my address.  The Family Notices section of The West Australian was particularly fruitful, yielding notices of births and deaths that had occurred at the property dating back many years, and the classified advertisements indicated that the front room had been repeatedly rented to various boarders. (“Well Furnished Front Bed-sitting Room, tea and toast, suit gent, 7/6.“  I resent the present lack of a tea and toast service.)

After an hour or so of reading, I came across a newspaper article reporting on an inquest into the death of an elderly lady in my cottage in 1950.  Apparently Florence (76) lived alone and hadn’t been seen for several days, so neighbours alerted a local police constable living nearby. Upon looking through the windows he discovered Florence’s body in the sitting room, with a bottle of kerosene and matches nearby.   The coroner determined that she had died from smoke inhalation and burns while treating the floor for white ants.

As a relatively unsqueamish amateur historian, I had a look around for evidence of the fire.  And behold, in my living room, there were some scorch marks indicating an accelerant pattern (why yes, I have been watching those dodgy crime docos again), as well as a section where the floorboards had been replaced, so now I know which window the constable looked through and found Florence’s body.

As it happens, the Metropolitan Cemeteries Board in Western Australia also has an excellent online database and I was able to look up the location of Florence and her husband Albert’s grave in Karrakatta Cemetery.  And so, last weekend, I headed over to Karrakatta accompanied by fellow local history enthusiast angrygoat with a bunch of flowers to see where she was buried.  We found the grave easily thanks to the excellent online lookup, and were pleased to see that the plot had not yet been renewed, and that the original headstone was still in place.  It looked like it had been a very long time since anyone had tended the plot, so it was rather nice to visit and leave some roses.  (We also had a lovely walk through the rest of the cemetery, and were interested in the way various cultural groups had very specific types of memorial; we particularly liked the section near the entrance to the war graves lawn where all the plots had been decorated with pot-plants, homemade markers and borders from the hardware store.)

Some further investigation of newspapers and genealogy sites via Google filled in Florence’s background and family history, which I’ve footnoted due to length and detail.^[1] It’s not particularly readable, but it’s a good illustration of the wealth of historical information accessible online.

While trawling through the Trove database, I’ve also discovered the most fascinating things about my local area – some sad, some creepy, but many amusing and interesting.  If you’ve got a spare hour, I heartily recommend checking it out; it’s a great example of a library utilising technology and provides easy access to a wealth of information which would otherwise be unsearchable and only stored physically on microfiche.

^[1] Florence was born in Menindie (now Menindee) in New South Wales in 1876 and her sister Matilda (Till) was born in Wilcannia in 1877.  She also had a third sister, Mabel Maud, born in 1880.  In 1892, her widowed mother (a midwife) made the journey to Perth with her daughters, where she married her second husband, a tailor named William, and had two more children – Arthur (1886) and Willis (1891).

William, had been one of 254 convicts transported to Western Australia in 1867 on the Norwood.  He was convicted in Shrewsbury at the age of 25 years for a term of 10 years, for the crime of rape.   In May 1881, three and a half yards of dark tweed were stolen from William’s tailoring shop, with Michael Ennis reported as a suspect.  William moved his tailoring business from William Street to premises on Barrack Street in 1895.  He died in Fremantle in 1903, was described as ‘husband of Mrs Weeks, Nurse’ and is buried in Fremantle Cemetery.

Sarah Jane testified in 1888 at an inquest in Perth into the death of an elderly woman  who had lived with she and her husband, and was killed in a hit-and-run accident by a man riding a horse in Perth ‘at a needlessly rapid pace through the street on a dark night’.  Sarah Jane died in 1912 in Northam, leaving her daughter Matilda a sum of 34 pounds and fifteen shillings in her will.

It appears that Florence fared better than her sister Matilda who married a Queenslander of German descent named Frank, and they settled in Narrogin in the Western Australian wheatbelt.  Frank was a Roman Catholic – Florence and Matilda appear to have been from an Anglican family.  He and Matilda had eight children, and she died in 1932 in the local hospital at the age of 56, after drinking caustic soda.  Frank died in 1943.

Mabel Maud married a widower named William and moved to Galena, near Geraldton where she was a stepmother to William’s children from his first marriage and mother of her own.  After William’s death, she married Joseph and they moved into my neighbours’ cottage where Mabel Maud and her husband both died in 1947.  She seems to have been a well-liked lady, with bereavement notices in the newspaper from friends as well as family.  Florence’s half-brother Arthur appears to have lived at the same address, where he died in 1949.

Willis lived in Merreden and York, and died in 1961 in Subiaco, having married a man named James in York (the Western Australian one, not the English one) in 1911.  James died five months after his wife.  They had seven children and two of her sons died during the Second World War, in Papua New Guinea and Crete respectively.  In 1951, James retired from his position as a fireman for the WA Government Railways, and applied to the magistrate for his tenant to vacate his house in Subiaco, as he would have to quit the railway cottage in which they were residing at the time.