Birthdays, King and tragedy in Sydney, and a special magic among family, friends and machines

In the item that preceded this one - Simon says be social - I was thinking about the family and the loss of social interaction amid television, CDs, and computers, and I still am, though the subject is richer and more nuanced than I first thought. What I'm talking about is Charles Dickens and Martin Luther King, and Robert A. Olson, and a woman named Eliza Dunnithorne who lived sadly in Sydney so many years ago and the magic between Australia and Europe and the USA and Old Sturbridge Village and the Web and . . . well . . . things are happening so fast and it's hard to really understand what it all means to me, or to the rest of the human race.

The social interactions continued last weekend at the end of Mattie's birthday party when a few of us sat on the stairs and listened to Margaret play the piano. (Of course the birthday party was very social, but these happy, interacting children also spend hours each day sharing their lives with images on a screen.) Anyway, Margaret has renewed the lessons she first took as a child and is becoming quite good - well good by family standards and that's part of the point. What she played we might hear played on a CD by the world's best - or one of the best - pianist. And in doing so we gain something in quality and lose something in simply being there - and in having the listening surrounded by love and joy and all the subtleties of live, social interaction rather than canned, anonymous, performance.

Is this a loss?

It's 4 am on a rainy Saturday morning and while folks in the nineteenth century visited one another with incredible regularity, I think they would find this particular moment a hard time to feel close to others. Yet at this moment I feel a connectedness with people neither seen nor heard, some of whom are half a world away - and, I guess, decades or more than a century away in time. And it's not just in my imagination or memories. it's here, in this machine. The very act of writing this is part of my social interaction with people I never see - Dom and Daphne in Australia, and a talented magician - Robert A. Olson - who performs as the author, Charles Dickens, and I assume lives in New England. And none of this social interaction would be taking place without the aid of the modern technology of the internet, not to mention digital cameras.

And it started because Dom was telling me the story of a huge, entrancing mural on a Sydney street. It is a piece of illegal street art painted a decade ago over the course of just two evenings - and it was painted by a murderer. The mural is of Martin Luther King and besides the magnetism of the image, it is intriguing because of the story behind it.

Dom started this particular train of thought back in April when he wrote:

On the infrequent occasions that I drive through Newtown, I am always wonderstruck by an outstanding street mural to Martin Luther King.

Little did I know that it has a fascinating history.

Newtown is a very old quarter of Sydney... the new town that grew up after the original town of Sydney burst its seams.

The story he was referring to was detailed in a Sydney paper and can be found here, but the image with the story didn't carry, for me, the intensity of which Dom spoke. So over the course of time Dom took some pictures of the mural, sent them to me, and I've included one with this item. There is something enigmatic - or extremely complex and for me magnetic - in the expression on King's face as depicted by this artist. It awakens in me all the confusion, pain, and glory of that era. Add to that the fact that the artist himself has a remarkable story to tell - in a nutshell, he is now in an English jail. He had fled England, having murdered someone. He had come to Sydney and among other things painted this mural, before returning to God and England and surrendering himself. But there are many more fascinating details not pertinent here. If you do read the story linked above, I asked Dom to translate the Australian for me - his answer was:

Cr = councillor
busker = street musician

That said, he also responded:

Pity the news pic was poor. When I have a chance, I'll go and take a pic or two for you. I'll probably have to go by train... parking is impossible in Newtown. But I also want the pic for my archives. Have to get it before commercial greed has it defaced or something.

You see it's all wrapped up in urban renewal and/or urban creep and sprawl and the desire to preserve the good that is already there. But all of this lead to magic and a fascinating Dickens aside as Dom wrote:

King Street, Newtown, is a segment of National Highway 1, which runs via the coast along a large chunk of east and south Australia. In the last century (century before last, actually) King Street had a well-known mansion known as Camperdown Lodge. It was home to the Dunnithorne family. The daughter of the family, Eliza, fell in love with a handsome local. He proposed, she accepted, and a grand wedding was planned. All the notables of Sydney were invited, as well as local residents. It was to be THE society wedding of the year.

On the wedding day, the guests were all assembled in church, the parson was ready with a great sermon, and the bride was dressed and ready. She waited, and waited, and waited… but the groom never turned up. Shocked, embarrassed and humiliated, she returned home and froze the house forever. The great wedding breakfast setting was left exactly as laid out. The house was darkened with drawn curtains. By her orders, all items in the house -- furniture, wall pictures, floor rugs -- were never to be moved. And she herself lived in her wedding dress.

These dramatic happenings were taken up by Charles Dickens and turned into the story of Miss Havisham in Great Expectations.

Eliza Donnithorne's grave stone is here.

The churchyard also contains the grave of Anna Bishop. She was an English opera singer who, though married, ran away with the rougish Nicholas Bochsa to Australia. The husband she deserted, Sir Henry Bishop, was the composer of "Home, Sweet Home."

My knowledge of local history is so good because I accompany Daphne's Distance Education School's history excursions. I am the unofficial photographer. Because so many of the kids enrolled in the school are sick, the history department creates virtual excursions. Those kids who can't attend the excursions in person can do so virtually on the internet. Daphne creates the virtual excursions mostly from the photos I take. Mine is the lesser task!

Whew! So there I was, moving from Martin Luther King, murdered in our deadly Sixties, to a murderer turned muralist, to a trip back in time to discover the inspiration of one of my favorite 19th Century author's Charles Dickens. But Dickens had no Internet, so how, 150 years ago, did he stumble across this story about poor Eliza? Of course, I also have a view of Australia as quite primitive in the 19th century and the story reflected a level of social sophistication I didn't know existed in Sydney then. I said as much in an email to Dom, mentioning that Bren and I, a year or so ago, had a wonderful experience at Old Sturbridge Village as a man impersonating Dickens put on a magic show.

That lead Dom to respond:

Have a look at: http://tinyurl.com/dw29

The Head of History at Daphne's school said that Dickens was friends with Carolyn Chisholm, one of the prominent women of Sydney at that time, and he could have learnt of Eliza Donnithorne from Carolyn.

I had no idea that Dickens was a magician also. He certainly worked magic with words. Coincidentally, you wrote on 9 June which is an anniversary of Dickens' death. He died on 9-june-1870 (or so I learnt from a sign in a bookshop window I passed an hour ago).

Well Dickens magic, as displayed in the Old Sturbridge performance, had really amazed me, so I wanted to quickly prove my point - only the web didn't cooperate. Every time I searched for "Dickens" and "magic" or "magician" I came up with stuff like "the magic of his writing," or references to a magician in one of his novels. I even went to a thick Dickens biography and could find nothing in the index about magic. But I was sure the show I saw was based on real knowledge of Dickens. Not being able to find anything under "Dickens impersonator," I sent an email to Old Sturbridge Village, asking for the name of the performer.

The next day I heard by email from the performer himself, Robert A. Olsen. So I sent him the material Dom had sent me about the origins of Great Expectations. He responded today:

Thanks for the info on the Australian "bride". Dickens must have used this for his book, as it is too close to the book to be a coincidence.

I first discovered the magic of Dickens, from a book written by a noted Magic Collector, James Findlay, who lived on the Isle of Wight. It was at BonChurch, on the Isle of Wight, that Dickens gave a long show for his son's birthday. He must have had a written, or printed program, which does not survive. However, his friend Foster wrote it all down, which included the 6 magical effects that he did and what must have been Dickens's amusing liner notes for each effect.

He did that show in the guise of Rhia Rhama Rhoos, a fictional Indian magician. Some of his letters talk about he and Foster buying up the effects of a Magician. Foster was to do the Magic Lantern show and Dickens to do the conjuring.

There was a magic shop in London in the 1840s, and Dickens was supposed to have been a customer. The W.H.M. Crambrook Company was established in 1841 in London, as purveyors of magic effects and equipment. Crambrook‚s Catalogue was first published in 1843. It constitutes the first English language catalogue ever printed and was released, according to the author, "In compliance with the wishes of several gentlemen, and being anxious to please my numerous patrons , " among whom were Charles Dickens.

There are bits and pieces of the magic in his letters. I have read through two of his biographies, one by Foster. As time permits, I plan to expand the magic into a one man show, "Conversations and Conjuring with Charles Dickens".
I am glad that you enjoyed the show and hope that you my be able to see a full version of it at some future time.

I hope he tells me when that will be - I'll be there! Not simply because I found his performance fascinating, but because it all brought back to me that "very social time" known as the 19th century. You see, we didn't see this performance in a theater. Instead, Bren and I were in a centuries old tavern eating a meal of the sort that might have been consumed in 1840, while sitting before a huge stone fireplace with a bunch of other "travellers" we didn't know.

And there was "Dickens," a fellow traveller, touring America and sharing his frustrations with publishers, and all the time performing amazing magical tricks, engaging several of the other guests. I'm no expert judge of conjurors. What i can tell you was there was a magic about this performance - the entire ambiance - that went beyond the slight of hand and acting skill of the performer. It was simply wonderful to be there - to share this with strangers and with one you love - and to be transported in time.

I feel a little of that magic whenever I experience a live performance from someone whose heart and hands are in what they are doing and who is close enough to touch, as well as hear and see. We humans have these brains that are so good at multi-tasking - at what computer folks call parallel processing. We're consuming so many things at once from so many inputs and I think all that is wrapped up in these social events.

And so, yes, I yearn for simpler times and a simple nostalgic way. And at the same time I am fascinated by this machine that I use now and by the way it has extended my social reach into so many interesting worlds. I can only live today - but I can certainly learn from yesterday. I want more of these "very social" interactions - and I want more of all that this machine can yield, as well.

Posted by Greg Stone at June 14, 2003 07:04 AM