I’D never heard of Bill Nix until one day recently when I stumbled upon a selection of his paintings on display at the old Mark Foy’s building (these days reincarnated as the legal eagle-infested Downing Centre). His one-syllable name rhymes with that of another, very different artist of a different era from Europe, Otto Dix, who was one of the principal dissident artists who visually chronicled the social and political decay of post-World War I Weimar Republic German society, and the scourge of Hitler and the Nazis.
Dix’s 1920 ‘The Skat Players’
Nix’s paintings behind the glass of Liverpool Street Mark Foy’s entrance have a unmistakable gritty realism to them and are of a different ilk, style-wise, to the unglamourised, intended-to-shock, expressionistic and surrealistic paintings of Otto Dix, depicting the grotesque, the deformed and the anguished denizens of interwar Germany. The collection of Nix’s work at Mark Foy’s, also unglamourised, adhere to a single theme, the depiction of work life at the long-disappeared Cockatoo Island shipbuilding industry. Nix’s group portraits of the workers, blue collar, office workers and other employees of Cockatoo Island between 1950 and 1980, contain an intimacy borne of personal experience…the artist worked on the island in the 1960s and 70s first as a errand boy, then apprenticed as a fitter-and-machinist and lastly as a draughtsman.
The artworks on display, all done in oil and charcoal on canvas, are a part of larger collection of Nix’s paintings and drawings entitled ‘The Boys from Cockatoo’, focusing on a range of work activities relating to the shipyard including catching the ferry to work, ship repairing and labouring, union meetings, blacksmith shop, the drawing office, the canteen, etc.
‘The Boys from Cockatoo’ series had its public debut in 2008 with a 20-painting exhibition at the Australian National Maritime Museum, which Nix later expanded on to add new works inspired by his memories of the variety of day-to-day routines undertaken by workers at Cockatoo Island.
Any Sydneysiders born in or prior to the 1890s would have been aware of the opening of Sydney Stadium. 1908 was the year this iconic boxing arena on the eastern outskirts of the city’s CBD first saw the light of day…literally saw the light of day as it was originally built as an open air stadium. The brainchild of promoter Hugh D McIntosh who constructed a ‘temporary’ outdoor boxing ring on the site of a former Chinese market garden in Rushcutters Bay to hold the world heavyweight boxing contest featuring Canadian title-holder Tommy Burns and Australian challenger “Boshter Bill” Squires. The fight was however just a warm-up for a legendary pugilistic bout in the same arena four months later between Burns and African-American fighter Jack Johnson. The fight garnered a lot of attention in Australia and internationally as Johnson was the first black boxer to contest (and win) a world title… and the heavyweight title at that!
The Australian press of the day predictably invoked the race card in the lead-up to the fight, racist descriptions of Johnson abounded, “coloured pugilist” was one of the few politer characterisations of Johnson (Bush Advocate, 28th December 1908). Burns’s thrashing at the hands of his much bigger black opponent—physically it was a real “David and Goliath” mismatch—prompted a backlash from white supremacists. Writer Jack London (ringside at the fight) put out the call for a “Great White Hope” to restore the white man to his ‘rightful’ place atop the professional boxing tree. The decisiveness of Jack Johnson’s triumph tapped into the prevailing currents of eugenic belief of the day, doing nothing to soothe anxieties about the “moral decay and decline” of the white race.
𝔖𝔶𝔡𝔫𝔢𝔶𝔖𝔱𝔞𝔡𝔦𝔲𝔪 (𝔓𝔥𝔬𝔱𝔬: 𝔑𝔞𝔱𝔦𝔬𝔫𝔞𝔩𝔏𝔦𝔟𝔯𝔞𝔯𝔶𝔬𝔣𝔄𝔲𝔰𝔱𝔯𝔞𝔩𝔦𝔞)
Stadiums Ltd
For almost its entire lifespan (from 1915 to its closure) Sydney Stadium was owned by Melbourne entrepreneur and gambling identity John Wren’s Stadiums Ltd…during that epoch the company enticed most of the top Australian professional boxers including Vic Patrick, Fred Henneberry, Dave Sands, Jimmy Carruthers and Tommy Burns (not the Canadian heavyweight champion) as well as renowned international prize-fighters such as Emile Griffith, Freddie Dawson and ‘Fighting’ Harada, to Sydney Stadium (‘The Wild Ones: Sydney Stadium 1908-1970’, Sydney Living Museums, www.sydneylivingmuseums.com).
“The old tin shed”
In 1912 the stadium was given a lid, an octagonal shaped roof of corrugated iron, and equiped for a capacity of 12,000 seated patrons. As the decades passed, hosting countless boxing and wrestling matches (in operation several nights a week at one point), it acquired the affectionate sobriquet “the old tin shed”❈. From the 1950s while boxing was still its core entertainment, the Sydney Stadium became a venue for popular music entertainers and television stars (eg, Frank Sinatra, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly and the Crickets, Walt Disney’s Mouseketeers, and so on⚘. This continued into the Sixties with “The Samurai” star Koichi Ose, and perhaps its pinnacle, the Beatles performing there on their 1964 Australian tour (‘Sydney Stadium’, Milesago – Venues, www.milesago.com; ‘World Heavyweight Boxing Championship Title Fight 1908’, Woollahra Municipal Council), www.woollahra.nsw.gov.au).
𓂀𝓣𝓱𝓮“𝓕𝓪𝓫𝓕𝓸𝓾𝓻” 𝓪𝓽𝓽𝓱𝓮𝓸𝓵𝓭𝓽𝓲𝓷𝓼𝓱𝓮𝓭1964
Leichhardt Stadium in Sydney’s inner west never managed to capture the limelight of Rushcutters Bay but was still very popular in its time, it’s Thursday night boxing events regularly ”packed to capacity” (‘Packing a punch’, James Cockington, 01-Jul-2009, SMH, www.smh.com.au). Leichhardt was Sydney pro boxing’s ‘Medina’ to Sydney Stadiums’ ‘Mecca’, together, this brace of stadiums was the home of professional pugilism in Sydney in the early to middle part of the 20th century. The suburban stadium on Balmain Road, Leichhardt, first opened its doors in 1922. The two Sydney stadiums featured many of the popular active Aboriginal fighters, typically stepping up from the touring boxing tents to try to earn their livelihoods inside their square rings, including Ron Richards, Jack Hassen, George Bracken, the Sands brothers and many more. Other names regularly featuring on Leichhardt Stadium’s draw cards included Jack Carroll, Jimmy Kelso, ‘Kid’ Rooney and Hockey Bennell.
‘Blood’ sports and ”show biz” mash-up
Like it’s older relative at Rushcutters Bay, Leichhardt Stadium’s “bread-and-butter” remained pro-boxing and wrestling. However, during the Depression, the suburban stadium, perhaps anticipating Lee Gordon, innovated by incorporating the prevailing popular form of stage entertainment…Saturday night featured a program of boxing contests intermixed with “Vaudeville entertainment” acts (‘Leichhardt Stadium. 1922.’, Sydney Morning Herald, 08-Dec-1930 (Trove); Milesago).
𝔖𝔬𝔲𝔯𝔠𝔢: 𝔉𝔞𝔠𝔢𝔟𝔬𝔬𝔨
ஓ๑ஓ
By the mid to late 1960s Australian professional boxing was in the doldrums and the stadium itself at Rushcutters Bay closed in 1970. Three years later the complex was demolished to make way for the Eastern Suburbs Railway. Leichhardt Stadium’s demise as a boxing venue occurred not long after in 1975.
Footnote: White City’s fleeting existence
In 1913 another landmark was erected in Rushcutters Bay, a 9-iron’s distance from Sydney Stadium. The White City Amusement Park, also built on former Chinese market gardens, was a precursor of Sydney’s better known Luna Park. White City offered pleasure-seekers a smorgasbord of lakes, canals, river caves, “pleasure palaces”, “fun factories”, the city’s first roller coaster and it’s pièce de résistance, a gigantic (Pennsylvanian-constructed) carousel. White City lasted less than four years before being burnt to the ground after a lightning strike in 1917 (‘Lost Sydney : White City Amusement Park’, Pocket Oz, www.visitsydneyaustralia.com.au). In the early 1920’s the White City tennis complex was erected on the site.
𓇬𓇬𓇬𓇬𓇬𓇬𓇬𓇬𓇬𓇬𓇬𓇬𓇬𓇬𓇬𓇬𓇬𓇬𓇬𓇬𓇬𓇬𓇬𓇬
❈ also known as ” the old barn”
⚘ expat American promoter Lee Gordon was the brains behind this move into pop music, bringing out big US bands, singers and duos for concerts at Rushcutters Bay, backed by Australian support acts
‘Coniston’ Ashfield, Bea’s first home (Source: hafs.org.au)
You’dbe hard pressed to come up with a personality that epitomised Sydney eccentricity more than the legendary Bea Miles who died in 1973. When the subject arises even today, so many Sydneysiders of a certain vintage have a Bea Miles anecdote to tell. Either it’s a chance (and sometimes disconcerting) encounter they had as a school kid–usually on inner Sydney public transport–with the larger (and louder) than life character herself, or one recounted to them by their mother or father. Such was her profile in this city that newspapers in the Forties and Fifties claimed that Bea (or ‘Bee’ as she later insisted it be spelt) was “more widely known than the prime minister” of the day. Bea’s popularity was rooted in that honoured tradition of Australian larrikinism, the unusual thing about this was that she was female※.
Early days, the athletic Bea Miles
Born into a wealthy merchant family, young Beatrice Miles was already exhibiting the rebellious nature that made her buck against the straitjacketed proprieties of conservative Sydney (and specifically North Shore) society, when the illness befell her that would profoundly change her forever. Contracting Encephalitis Lethargica at 21, Bea over time changed physically from a tall, trim and athletic young woman to a seriously overweight, matronly-looking woman.
(Photo: Daily Tele)
Going rogue
More immediately and crucially, Bea underwent a complete personality change, becoming totally disruptive, hyper-kinetic, manic and basically uncontrollable§. When her father couldn’t cope any more with her behaviour he had her committed to an asylum, she was shuffled around between psyche facilities in Gladesville, Kenmore (Goulburn) and Callan Park. After her last escape attempt a Sydney tabloid,Smith’s Weekly,ran a story which exposed Bea’s dire plight in the psychiatric gulag of Callan Park (with sensationalised headline “Mad House Mystery of Beautiful Sydney Girl”) which helped secure her release.
No fixed address
Unable to return to the family home in St Ives, Bea had a sojourn in Sydney’s Kings Cross where she mixed happily with the locale’s Bohemian artists and writers. After this she lived rough in Sydney, finding shelter where she could – a Rushcutters Bay stormwater drain, a cave above a Sydney beach, a park bench opposite Central Station, the steps of a church rectory, etc. Ratbags author Keith Dunstan called her “very nearly the first drop-out, the first hippie”.
Bea with men of the press, circa 1946
Enemy of authority, laws and law-enforcers, habitually disruptive public presence
Bea revelled in being controversial and confrontational, especially towards political and social authorities…abusing police, doctors and magistrates came instinctually to her, and she certainly had plenty of practice at it! By her own (not necessarily reliable) count she was “falsely convicted 195 times, fairly 100 times”…Bea defiantly refused to pay for public transport or to enter cinemas. Other offences earning her the ire of the law included swearing in public and vagrancy.
Bea’s recital services board
Bea Miles, literary orator Bea loved pulling stunts and making a spectacle of herself, some she did for the heck of it—like riding a man’s push bike through the streets while wearing a formal evening dress—other stunts were to earn money after her grandmother’s inheritance allowance dried up – on the street she would hold a sign up to passing punters advertising her declamatory services, for a set “schedule of fees” she would verbatim quote passages from Shakespeare.
Main Reading Room, NSW State Library (Flickr)
Rogue scholar
Under the rough edges of Bea’s (very) public persona, was a formidable intellect. She had excelled at school (Abbotsleigh Girls) and gained admission to medicine at Sydney University. In her post-illness nomadic years, the “wayward waif” as one article called her, never held a formal job and generally gave her occupation as ‘student’. Bea was a habitué of public libraries, especially the State Library in Macquarie Street¶…a life-long voracious reader and produced her own collection of writings, such as “Dictionary by a Bitch”φ.
Bea in the driving seat? (Photo: Daily Telegraph)
Scourge of taxis
The stunts Bea is best remembered and most notorious for involved her with taxis and their drivers. Her propensity for refusing to pay for taxi trips and commandeering taxis to demand that they take her to vastly distant locations has gone into folklore. Legendary instances of this were the 19-day taxi trip she took to Perth (fortunately for the female cabbie involved Bea paid her £600 for the assignment), as well as trips to Broken Hill via Melbourne and Adelaide). As is the way with legendary public figures, some of her outrageous taxi exploits were more urban myths than actual events, like the tale that used to circulate of Bea taking a taxi to Broken Hill and then on approaching the outskirts of the town she was supposed to have done a runner leaving the poor hapless driver fleeced of his massive fare. Bea’s most dramatic encounter with a cab, one that did happen, saw her respond to the driver’s refusal to take her by wrenching the door completely off the taxi’s hinges (she was a big woman!). This legendary “Bea-act” landed her in Long Bay Gaol for a spell (and a rest).
“Bee in charcoal”, Roderick Shaw (Source: portrait.gov.au)
Terror of trams
Tram drivers didn’t escape the attentions of Bea either…the popular press labelled her the “Terror of Trams” and on at least one occasion her antics flirted with real danger as one tram driver who refused to move until Bea paid the fare discovered. Bea, never one to back down, hijacked the tram, seizing its controls and piloted it to Bondi, even stopping to pick up passengers on route.
The Bea Miles “signature look”: The original “bag lady” apparel
Bea’s unorthodox ways made her a Sydney institution and an unmissable sight. Her irregular and unkempt mode of dress made her readily recognisable wherever she went…Bea’s regular ‘outfit’ described by the Sydney Morning Herald as a “down-at-heel uniform” of tennis shoes, white (or was it green) tennis sun visor and ever more scruffy overcoat. Always pinned to the overcoat’s lapel was a £5 note (Bea’s idea of countering any notion the police might get about arresting her for vagrancy).
Years of homeless living, sleeping rough, took their toll on Bea and in 1964 she was taken in by the Little Sisters of the Poor Home for the Aged in Randwick. Those last nine years of her life allowed Bea a clean, dry bed and gave the inveterate bookworm that she was joyous access to another library (borrowing an average of 14 books a week from the Randwick branch library).
(Sydney Morning Herald)
Footnote: Deviating from the mainstream, inheriting some of her father’s idiosyncrasies
Despite the love-hate conflict with her father and his eventual disowning of her, Bea gained quite a number of her radical and non-conformist predispositions and beliefs from him. In his own right, wealthy businessman William J Miles was also an individualist and an eccentric. Miles was a rationalist and a secularist (Bea herself was a staunchly committed atheist❡)… from him she also got her love of Shakespeare and her anti-British imperialist/strident Australian patriotism). In the late 1930s Miles’ odd brand of political extremism found its voice in The Publicist. Funded and edited by Miles, the journal advocated fascism (curiously in tandem with Aboriginal rights), wholeheartedly embracing German Nazism and anti-Semitism𝄢. Bea endorsed his pro-Aboriginal and anti-British stand but never enunciated far-right or racist sentiments during her life, although at the end she did express some views that inferred the supremacy of the “white race”.
♾♾♾♾♾♾♾♾♾♾♾♾♾♾
※ one of precious few non-male Aussie public larrikins, Dawn Fraser also comes to mind
§ though she still retained her sharpness of intellect afterwards
¶ until she was barred from the library in the late 1950s for being a nuisance (What, Bea?!? Never!)
φ example of an entry, “Duty: an excuse for showing unwarranted interference in somebody else’s business”
❡ there’s some dispute over whether her deathbed conversion to Catholicism was genuine or merely Bea’s way of thanking the church for taking her in off the streets in her twilight years
𝄢 it was a forerunner of the Australia First Movement. William’s dalliance with fascism prompted Cunneen’s assessment that, “with dangerous obsessions and money to spend, Miles represented an unstable element in Australian society”
ℼℼ~ℼℼ~ℼℼ
Articles and websites consulted:
Chris Cunneen, ‘Miles, William John (1871–1942)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/miles-william-john-7576/text13225, published first in hardcopy 1986, accessed online 27 October 2021.
Judith Allen, ‘Miles, Beatrice (Bea) (1902–1973)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/miles-beatrice-bea-7573/text13219, published first in hardcopy 1986, accessed online 27 October 2021.
Pip Wilson, ‘Bee Miles One of Sydney’s favourite individualists’, Wilson’s Almanac, 18-Feb-2012, web.archive.org
Robert Kaplan, ‘Miles From Her Father’, Quadrant, 07-Aug-2016, http://quadrant.org.au
From it’s founding in 1788 as a penal colony Sydney served as a destination for Britain’s burgeoning surplus of convicted persons up until 1850. One of the most distinctive episodes of the transportation history in the period involved the sojourn in New South Wales of 58 French Canadians from Lower Canada (today Quebec) in the early 1840s.Their crimes, having participated in revolts against the inequities of British rule in Canada in 1837 and 1838.
(Image: Canadian Encyclopedia)
Both Lower Canada and Upper Canada (present-day Ontario province) rose up against the prevailing political “stitch-up” in British Canada. Power in Lower Canada rested firmly in the hands of a English speaking merchant oligarchy known as the “Château Clique”Ⓐ, controlling the executive and legislative councils, the judiciary and the senior bureaucracy. An additional grievance of the Francophone discontents was economic – widespread crop failures in 1836/37 had forced many into subsistence farming. The Les patriotes movement under Louis-Joseph Papineau, repeatedly thwarted by the ruling aristocracy in it’s efforts to secure a better deal, took to arms. The rebels in Upper Canada led by William Lyon Mackenzie, similarly frustrated by the denial of political reform, followed the lead of Les rébelles francophones, declaring the “Republic of Canada”. Mackenzie’s forces were aided by the incursion of American volunteers from the borderland states, partly inspired by patriotism and partly by a sense of adventure and the desire to strike a blow against the thraldom of their northern neighbours by the British (Maxine Dagenais, ‘The American Response to the Canadian Rebellions of 1837-38’, The Canadian Encyclopedia, 09-Oct-2019, www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca). Both insurrections however were easily and comprehensively crushed by the superior British and loyalist forces…the principal leaders of the uprisings fled to the USA but some 29 of Les patriotes were executedⒷ.
Historic map detailing extent of Longbottom area (Source: docplayer.net)
Political prisoners removed to the remote Antipodes
A further 58 French speaking Canadian rebels from Lower Canada, originally intended for the “hell-hole” of Norfolk Island, were allowed after intercession by Catholic Archbishop Polding to serve their sentences in Sydney. The patriotes were assigned to the Longbottom Stockage (formerly the Longbottom Government Farm) in Concord (map), housed in crudely-built trenches on the present site of Concord Oval. The less skilled of the exiles found themselves in a quarry gang, tasked with the back-breaking work of breaking and carting rocks for construction of Parramatta Road. Others were employed felling trees and sawing blocks of wood for house construction or firing bricks for use in public works.
“Of good character”
The French Canadians political prisoners were far from the hardened criminals that could be found in much of Sydney Town at the time. In fact they had no previous convictions before being transported, some had been skilled rural artisans in Canada. By the account of no less than Governor Gipps himself, the exiles’ behaviour during their term of imprisonment had been ‘exemplary’, though unbeknownst to the authorities some of their number were also engaging in the odd illicit activity to earn a bit of money on the side, selling purloined wood, collecting oyster shells in nearby Hen and Chicken Bay to sell (Sheena Coupe, Concord – A Centenary History, (1983)).
Ticket-of-leave from Longbottom
The French Canadian exiles were deemed sufficiently responsible that by 1842 the government started releasing them from the stockade to live with ”respectable people”, working for food and lodgings. The political prisoners were then issued with tickets-of-leave into the community so they can earn wages. By the end of 1843, early 1844, the governor awarded free pardons to all of the exiles. 55 of the patriotes took the chance to return to Quebec (once they had raised the necessary passage – which took some up to four years as jobs were scarce in the 1840s Depression) and only one, Joseph Marceau, opted to stay, marrying an Australian woman and settling near Wollongong (two of the original exiled men died while in prison). With the departure of the Canadians the Longbottom Stockade fell into disrepair, its only practical use, a makeshift lockup for ”noisy drunks apprehended on Parramatta Road” (Coupe).
1890 map identifies “Longbottom Estate” (Source: Coupe)Reminders of the Canadien exiles’ presence
While nothing remains of the stockade (above ground anyway), the exiles are remembered in the Concord locale’s nomenclature – Exile Bay, Canada Bay, France Bay, Châteauguay Walk (named after Prieur’s village in Montreal), Marceau Drive. Bayview Park in Concord—where the French Canadians disembarked at the park’s wharf in 1840 on route to Longbottom Stockade—contains a monument to the exiles. First-hand accounts of the exiles
Three of the 58 transported Canadiens left accounts of their time in Sydney—Francois-Maurice Lepailleur, Léon Ducharme and Francois Xavier Prieur—the only transported convicts in 1840s Sydney who kept daily records of their experiences (Beverley Boissery, A Deep Sense of Wrong: The Treason, Trials and Transportation to New South Wales of Lower Canadian Rebels after the 1838 Rebellion , (1995)). Impression Bay Probation Station. North American prisoners did hard labour at the network of probation stations on Van Diemens Land’ (Image: UTAS)
American ‘Borderlander’ political prisoners in Van Diemens Land
The same ship that brought the Canadiens to Sydney, HMS Buffalo , also transported between 82 and 93 Upper Canada rebelsⒸ to the penal colony in Van Diemens Land. These were predominantly American ‘borderlanders’ who had invaded Upper Canada to ’liberate’ the Canadians from the British ‘yoke’. The American prisoners‘ experience ran parallel to that of their French Canadian counterparts but their suffering and hardship in the Van Diemens Land colony was much, much worse. Some of the US exiles like William Gates, Linus Miller and Benjamin Wait(e)Ⓓ later wrote accounts of their treatment in Tasmanian prison camps …chain ganged together, treated like slaves, subjected to draconian regimes of labour and living conditions (14 of the patriots died during the incarceration). And unlike the well-regarded Canadiens in Sydney the Americans were vilified by the local press as the epitome of disloyalty (“Americans of the lowest order”) (Carter, J. C. (2009). Most achieved their ticket-of-leave after three to five years although a few escaped on whaler boats ‘One Way Ticket to a Penal Colony: North American Political Prisoners in Van Diemen’s Land’, Ontario History, 101(2), 188-221. http://doi.org/10.7292/1065618ar).
Concord Oval: Longbottom trenches excavated in 1984 (Credit: Canada Bay Connections)
Endnote: Longbottom Stockage and surrounds encompassed a large area. The stockage itself sat on land which today is occupied by three recreational fields, Concord Oval, St Luke’s Park and Cintra Park.
꧔~꧔~꧔~꧔~꧔~꧔~꧔~꧔~꧔~꧔~꧔~꧔~꧔~꧔~꧔~꧔~꧔~꧔~꧔~꧔~
Ⓐ the equivalent dominant entity in Upper Canada was the “Family Compact”
Ⓑ the (failed) rebellions nonetheless indirectly led eventually to responsible self-government for the Union of the two Canadian provinces (as proposed by Lord Durham)
Ⓒ accounts differ as the number, possibly due to conflation as a number of other American prisoners arrived from Canada in 1839
Ⓓ Wait (or Waite) was Canadian by birth though his father was American and Wait on return lived the rest of his life in the US
Dix’s 1920 ‘The Skat Players’
The artworks on display, all done in oil and charcoal on canvas, are a part of larger collection of Nix’s paintings and drawings entitled ‘The Boys from Cockatoo’, focusing on a range of work activities relating to the shipyard including catching the ferry to work, ship repairing and labouring, union meetings, blacksmith shop, the drawing office, the canteen, etc.
‘The Boys from Cockatoo’ series had its public debut in 2008 with a 20-painting exhibition at the Australian National Maritime Museum, which Nix later expanded on to add new works inspired by his memories of the variety of day-to-day routines undertaken by workers at Cockatoo Island.
