Sunday 27 January 2019

Neva shipwreck women commemorated in art


This month in Tasmania the loss of over 200 transported women is being commemorated as never before - through textile art, specifically seaweed garments as memorials. 
Hobart-based artist and psychiatrist Catherine Stringer has done some wonderful maritime art. 
And now she is remembering the convict  women, babies and children who died in the 1835 shipwreck of the Neva. Her show, Sea Stories, is  at the King Island Cultural Centre. https://kingisland.tas.gov.au/wp-content/uploads/Artist-Statement-Sea-Stories.pdf


Skins and clothes


Catherine has put together here the Neva Reliquary and another sequence of art works: The Seal Woman.
She says: "The Neva Reliquary... is my personal response to this tragedy. The work was initiated during a residency at the King Island Cultural Centre in 2011, when I first started experimenting with making paper from the local kelp and subsequently other seaweeds. 
"I became increasingly drawn to the Neva story, feeling a connection with these women, particularly as many of them were mothers, like me, and moreover 28 of them shared my name, Catherine.
"I have developed and refined my papermaking techniques during the past five years to create these garments for selected Neva passengers. They are all made from seaweeds gathered from the Cape Wickham area.
" I have made a small size garment to represent each of the 28 Catherines, and life size garments for each of the Catherines who were children. 
"I have also made a cloak for the youngest convict, Ester Raw, who was only 14. She had been sentenced to seven years transportation for stealing a cloak.
"The six surviving women each have a Survivor’s Cape, which incorporate some shore plants as well as seaweeds.
"The Seal Woman series developed from {thinking about the story that a "woman could slip easily from seal to human form by removing her sealskin. One day her sealskin was stolen by a fisherman ...  She ended up marrying the fisherman...
"but she always yearned for the sea. After many years the woman found her sealskin and returned to the sea, where she had [a further] seven children. She was thereafter torn between two families, two worlds.
"The Neva story and the Seal Skin story are linked by similar themes - mothers and their
children, separation, loss, grief and transformation, and of course their connection with the
sea. 

The Neva - and Elizabeth Fry


Of the 241 people on board when the  three-masted barque which left Cork harbour for New South Wales all but 17 died. 
The small ship, owned by Moates, a Shadwell firm, had previously been used for carrying troops, meaning it would not be in a salubrious state. 
It was on its second convict voyage when it hit the submerged Harbinger Reef north of King Island, four months after setting forth. 
On May 13 1835  the ship sank and is now seen as the second-largest maritime disaster in Australian history. It's one of the worst convict ship disasters. 
The survival rate was 3 per cent for the convicts but 35 per cent for the crew  - which has to indicate malpractice and selfishness in evacuation procedures. There was no chivalry as with the famous Birkenhead Drill of 1852, two decades later, when the Women and Children First procedure was used.

It's common to assume that the disaster is barely known because it involved 'just convicts' and 'just women', allegedly many sex industry workers drunk on a broached barrel of rum.
Actually, If you know your history of women's penal reform, another explanation is more likely.  I suspect that the silence was diplomatic; the authorities didn't want any more public outcry at this major moment in policy on imprisonment. 
When the Neva sank prison reformer Elizabeth Fry (pictured left) had been pushing improvements for over two decades.
 She had:


  • urged that transportation should be abolished
  • inspected hundreds of convict ships
  • founded the British Ladies' Society for Promoting the Reformation of Female Prisoners in 1821
  • visited women prisoners in Ireland  in 1827 
  • actually been to the ship before, for its previous convict voyage, and offered the men comforts - probably bibles, blankets and eating utensils


Transportation was to be outlawed as a punishment  only two years later, in 1837. 
The Neva tragedy still reminds us today about the continuing burning issues such as: the morality of exporting unwanted people; under what conditions should people be imprisoned; and should imprisoned women, especially mothers, be treated more humanely?

 

Sunday 13 January 2019

Women in the geography of Liverpool’s Malay seamen





Tim Bunnell, guest contributor to this blog, is the author of From World City to the World in One City: Liverpool through Malay Lives, 2016 (https://tinyurl.com/Malay-Liverpool). He is a Professor in the Department of Geography at the National University of Singapore.

Women and children connected with Malay seafarers celebrating New Year at the
 usually all-male Malay Club, Liverpool, c1970. Photograph courtesy of Abdel Rahim Daud.
'Why did Malay ex-seafarers like you settle in Liverpool and other British port cities in 1940s, 50s and 60s?' I asked Mat Nor, the president of Liverpool’s Malay club.
He gave an unequivocal answer: 'Women!' 
That may not be surprising to readers of this blog. 
But in 2004 I was only at the beginning of my 'Malay Routes' research project on historical seafaring connections between the great imperial port city on the Mersey, and British Malaya plus neighbouring parts of Southeast Asia.

Mat Nor (centre) in 2004 with three other Liverpool-based Malay ex-seafarers,
discussing their history with the author (far left).
Mat Nor’s response importantly nudged me away from any simple economistic idea that Malays were there for work in Merseyside’s 1950s mini Golden Age.
Mat Nor (Mohamed Nor Hamid), who’d arrived in 1952, age 19, was adamant:'I don’t care what the people say, all the Malays stay in Liverpool through women.' 
Intimate relations developed into more permanent liaisons in many other port cities.But Mat Nor was convinced that there was something particularly 'powerful' about women in Liverpool.
Some of Mat Nor’s contemporaries estimated that there were 'hundreds' of Malay seamen in the city in the 1950s. That may have been an exaggeration but certainly Liverpool was home to more Malay seamen at that time than any other British port.


FROM MALACCA TO TOXTETH (LIVERPOOL 8)
Originally from a coastal village outside Malacca, Mat Nor had arrived as a sailor on the Cingalese Prince. The Furness Withy cargo ship was typically crewed by a mix of British, Indian and Malay crew from Topass to Bhandary, Quarter Master to Cassab.[i]
Mat Nor (far left) on board the Cingalese Prince, c1952.
From the docks Mat Nor headed straight to the house of his uncle Ben Youp in Toxteth (or what locals today refer to as “Liverpool 8”). Ben Youp had married a local woman, Priscilla. Mat Nor hoped to stay with them.
As it turned out, Ben Youp was away at sea and the household-cum-lodgings that Priscilla headed at 144 Upper Huskisson Street was full. Mat Nor was able to stay next door at number 142 with another Malacca man who had also married locally.
Mat Nor became part of the next generation of Malay seamen to marry and settle down in the Liverpool 8 area. He and Margaret Lacey married in May 1959 and they were still living at 142 Upper Huskisson Street – the area today occupied by the Liverpool Women’s Hospital – when their first child was born. 
The family eventually moved to Wendell Street, off Smithdown Road in Liverpool 8. 
Like so many seafarers, having a wife and children led Mat Nor to stop working at sea. He subsequently became a crane driver on the docks.

A CLUB MOSTLY FOR SEAMEN

The Malay Club in Liverpool. On his 75th birthday, the late
Fadzil Mohammed from Johor (left). He worked for the 
Straits Steamship Company
 and settled in Liverpool, as did Ngah Musa (far right).  Picture courtesy of Paul Fadzil.
By this time in the mid-1960s, a Malay club was up and running in another part of Liverpool 8. Malay seafarers pooled contributions to buy a house on Jermyn Street as their new clubhouse after an earlier club run by Johan Awang had closed down. 
For the most part, the new club at 7 Jermyn Street was a male space – where locally-based and visiting Malay men met to socialize. But some Liverpool-based men took their children along to visit, especially at weekends. 
The club was also used as a venue for parties during special occasions. At new year and at hari raya (a celebration at the end of the Muslim fasting month), wives and girlfriends made the club into more than merely a male space.
Jean and Bahazin  at a party
at the Malay Club circa 1970.
Photograph courtesy of Abdul Rahim Daud
The first president of the club was Bahazin Bin-Kassim from Kuala Kangsar, Malaya. He married a local woman, Jean, and they lived next door to the club at number 5 Jermyn Street with their son. 
The family also took in Malay lodgers, both resident ex-seamen and visiting seafarers. 
Among them was Ben Youp who outlived Priscilla and became a regular fixture at the club. 
The Malay Club, Jermyn Street. Next door: Jean and
Bahazin Bin-Kassim's home.






Until it closed in 2008 Jermyn Street thus became the centre of Liverpool’s increasingly dispersed Malay community, comprising not just (ex)seafaring Malay men, but also their local children, girlfriends, wives and widows.  

 ‘LOCAL’ WIVES
Female partners of Liverpool-based Malay men had varying degrees of local historical attachment and belonging. Some, such as ‘Filipina Alice’ clearly had far-flung ancestral connections of their own. 
Alice welcomed Malay seafarers to her house on Greenland Street even before her husband, Johan Awang, opened Liverpool’s first formal Malay club (the precursor to 7 Jermyn Street). 
Visiting Malays enjoyed fragrant spicy chicken made with fresh-killed hens from the backyard of Alice and Johan’s home. 
Some of the white women who made Liverpool an attractive place for Malay men to sojourn or settle were also members of cosmopolitan dockside communities. 
The famous  Rialto ballroom, once the site of mixed race dancing.
Pictured here after the 1981 race riots.
These were English, Irish or Scottish women who would happily go to the Locarno and Rialto ballrooms despite the huge stigma that elsewhere was attached to any woman seen with a man with darker skin. 
Women from other parts of Liverpool who entered into 'interracial unions' with men from Malaya (as with men from China, Somalia, the Caribbean or West Africa[ii]) effectively entered another social world in the city, although they did not usually convert to Islam.
They were hitching their fortunes to someone othered racially, culturally and (in the case of Muslim Malays) in terms of religion.
So the seemingly straightforward term ‘local wife’ obscures the significance of the journey that some women took in marrying a Muslim Malay seafarer or having his children.
Priscilla and Ben Youp’s daughter Joan found out little about how her parents met except that they were married after just six weeks of a 'whirlwind romance'. 
Their decision resulted in Priscilla Youp being disowned by her (white) Protestant parents. Priscilla’s journey into non-white and not necessarily Christian 'other Liverpool' was one from which there was no return.[iii]

Malaya to Liverpool - and back:  a complex matter. Advertisement from 1961
by one of the main shipping lines sailing to Malaya  with passengers.

PULANG
In contrast to these wives, some of the seafaring Malay men who had traveled thousands of nautical miles from the Malay World region in Southeast Asia to form local families in Singapore did get to go back home (pulang). 
After ‘Filipina Alice’ died in Liverpool in the late 1970s, for example, her widower, Johan, moved back to Malacca, where he passed away. 
Ben Youp did not return to Malacca as a widower when Priscilla died. However, their Liverpudlian children and grandchildren sustained postal connections with Youp’s extended family in Malacca for decades before ever setting foot in Malaysia. 
Mat Nor was among the younger generation of Malay ex-seamen who visited Malaysia regularly while remaining based in Liverpool. His first trip back, together with his wife, Margaret, and their four children was to visit Mat Nor’s elderly mother in Malacca in 1978.
Other Liverpool Malay seamen had left behind not only their mothers, but also wives and children. 
Kahbir Bjatia’s highly acclaimed 2018 Malay language movie, Pulang, (pictured) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eiFWYHLz5ok) is based on the true life story of a 1960s seafarer whose wife and four year old son remained in Malacca. 
He died in Liverpool without her.
“Left behind” children and spouses are an important social and economic phenomenon in their own right. 
Today many Southeast Asian people who travel overseas for work leave behind husbands and children. 
While seamen from Indonesia and the Philippines continue to be in demand globally they are greatly outnumbered by female domestic workers.

 PUTTING WOMEN AND OTHER MEN IN THE PICTURE
Tim Bunnell: Hoping that future
scholars will do research into the
lives of partners and children of
 Malay seafarers. 
 


Women came to feature much more prominently in my research than I had envisaged. 
This partly corrected my initial male-centred framing, although the lives of the women and children of Malay Liverpool are clearly deserving of further scholarly attention. 
Perhaps someone reading this guest blog entry will be inspired to delve further into that.



However, is there something else that should be made visible, to unsettle the normative idea of seafarers’ homosociality and heterosexuality? 
The two principal characters in the 1998 film about Malay mobility, Dari Jemapoh ke Manchester, (https://iffr.com/en/1999/films/from-jemapoh-to-manchester) hint at latent homosexuality.[iv]
Mafiz is in search of his seafaring father whose last contact with rural Jemapoh was a postcard sent from Liverpool in the 1960s. 
Yadi clearly has a crush on the superstar Manchester United footballer, George Best, and becomes jealous of the female friends that Mafiz makes as they try to make their way to England.
The implication of this, of course, is that there were surely also some seamen from Southeast Asia who stayed in Liverpool because of other men.

 Tim Bunnell, January 2019. 
 http://profile.nus.edu.sg/fass/geotgb/stf_geotgb.htm




NOTES
[i]
See for example the 1941 crew list for the former ship of that name: Cingalese Prince, https://uboat.net/allies/merchants/crews/ship1119.html, accessed 12 December 2018. Three of the men who died aboard that ship when it was torpedoed in September 1941 were, like Mat Nor, born in Malacca.
[ii] See Diane Frost’s book, Work and Community among West African Migrant Workers since the Nineteenth Century (Liverpool University Press, 1999).
[iii] The term “the other Liverpool” is taken from Tony Lane’s book, Liverpool: City of the Sea (Liverpool University Press, 1997).
[iv] See: Benjamin McKay (2011) “Taking identity on the road: two recent Malaysian films”, in Yeoh Seng Guan and Julian C.H. Lee (eds), Fringe Benefits: Essays and Reflections on Malaysian Arts and Cinema. Petaling Jaya: Strategic Information and Research Development Centre, pp. 3-29.