Once was a Smart State: Intellectual Leaders in Queensland
1859-1989
A Typology of Thinkers and their Interrelation in Queensland History
The Passion & Reason for War & Peace 1914-1919 Scatterplot Matrix
| Name | Belief Scale | Socio-Political Scale |
|---|---|---|
| Emma Miller | 2 | 1 |
| David Garland | -2 | -1 |
| Arthur Davis (Steele Rudd) | -1 | -2 |
| Mabel Forrest | -2 | 0 |
| Elton Mayo | 1 | -1 |
| John Fihelly | 2 | 0 |
| Frankie Payne | 0 | 0 |
| Margaret Thorp | -2 | 1 |
| Meta-Belief | Scale Value | Definition |
|---|---|---|
| Ritualist | -3 | Belief is unquestionable as to be unimportant |
| Fideist | -2 | Belief is more considered |
| Believer | -1 | Ordinary Range of Belief |
| Unclear | 0 | As of the current date in the research, there is not sufficient information |
| Agnostic | 1 | Ordinary Range of Doubt |
| Skeptic | 2 | Doubt is more considered |
| Nihilist | 3 | Doubt is unquestionable as to be unimportant |
| Social-Political | Scale Value | Definition |
|---|---|---|
| Anarchist | -3 | Hegemony of Egoism |
| Liberal | -2 | Liberty of Personal Choice |
| Conservative | -1 | Liberty of the Traditional Community |
| Unclear | 0 | As of the current date in the research, there is not sufficient information |
| Socialist | 1 | Equity for Communities |
| Communist | 2 | Equity for the Masses |
| Totalitarian | 3 | Hegemony of State |
This is my second run at a scatterplot matrix, and as such the conclusions drawn are tentative. I have deliberately published before the optimal level of research had been reached, as another experiment in the process. Feedback from specialist Queensland historians on the assessments made is my aim. I am actually requesting dissent from the judgements, in order to refine further work in building models and maps.
It is important, though, to note the approximation and representative nature of these diagrams (See comments at Scatterplot Matrix).
For explanation of the Scatterplot Matrix structure, including axis measurements, see Scatterplot Matrix.
Emma Miller (1839–1917)
Unionist and Pacifist Theorist, Socialist
Belief (X) Scale Value: Skeptic
Emma Miller’s political life was directed in the direction of skepticism, challenging the dominant narrative of capital, in defence of the interests of labour. In 1891, she gave evidence to the royal commission into shops, factories and workshops. Miller was also a staunch secularist, and as part of that outlook she campaigned for free speech in the period 1914 to 1916.
Socio-Political (Y) Scale Value: Socialist
Miller was the first woman to travel west organizing for the Australian Workers' Union and was the first woman member and a life member of the Brisbane Workers Political Organization (President in the period 1903-1917). These are organisations within the broader socialist movement of the nineteenth century. Miller championed equal pay and equal opportunity for women and was foundation President of the Woman's Equal Franchise Association (1894-1905); wider enfranchisement was espoused as a principle of socialism, although shared also as a tenet of social liberalism. It is said that Miller admired William Lane, the leading Australasian socialist writer of the day. Miller believed that the basis of the labour movement was industrial. On her death, Miller was the heroine of the Queensland labour movement, with the flag on the Brisbane Trades Hall flying at half-mast and the Australian Meat Employees' Union conference being adjourned.
David John Garland (1864–1939)
Canon, Anglican Church, and Military Chaplain
Belief (X) Scale Value: Fideist
Garland had demonstrated fideism, the epistemological view which maintained that faith is independent of reason, and faith is superior at arriving at particular truths, through his conventional-but-very forthright roles in the Anglican ministry. It is said that he was unhappy with Bishop George Frodsham, in his role of archdeacon of North Queensland in the period 1903-1907. Frodsham was a perhaps a more cultural figure than Garland, but both vigorously promoted the cause of religious instruction in state schools. Garland became the force behind the Queensland’s Bible in State Schools League. Although Canon Garland was able to mix the spiritual and the secular in his many public broadcasts and speeches, as the primary architect and originator of Anzac Day ceremonies and rituals, Garland, was creating a very exalted civic religion, one where Australia’s war justification in the ANZAC mythology when without question.
Socio-Political (Y) Scale Value: Conservative
Garland’s noble desire in the ANZAC Day commemoration was a preservation of memory and honour of the war dead among Australian and New Zealand servicemen. Typical of Anglican clergy of the day, Garland welded Anglo cultural values of duty to country and monarch into their religious worldview. The Great War was a battle to save the British Empire from the evils of Prussian militarism. There was a one-sided conservatism in this perspective, as Garland shared the common view in Queensland that British militarism was an extension of muscular Christianity and important means to defend the God-sanctified Empire.
Arthur Hoey Davis (1868–1935)
Author of Short Stories, Novelist
Belief (X) Scale Value: Believer
There are no doubt traces of skepticism in the satirical references of the Steele Rudd literature. There was also one episode in Davis’ life which profoundly affected his worldview. As under-sheriff in 1902, Davis had to give the signal at the hanging of Patrick Kenniff. His action disturbed him greatly and he subsequently opposed to capital punishment; he described the remorse in The Miserable Clerk (1926). Davis had conviction, and he also had a mythic love for the Queensland bush, perhaps remembrance of his own youth. As a literary writer, of course, Davis in his nom de plume does not speak plainly of what he believes, but he is the sounding board for common belief of rural Queenslanders in the early twentieth century.
Socio-Political (Y) Scale Value: Liberal
Davis’ reversion to capital punishment must share in the basic principle for the liberty of life; allowing criminals convicted the mercy and freedom for serving life, or a term of life, incarceration, rather than the loss of life. Rudd’s literary life centred upon his independent business as a promoter and producers, which accumulated in the bankrupted Steele Rudd Productions Pty Ltd. Davis, divorced, socially-drinking, a skillful hack-writer living in hardship, was typical of the socially liberal Bohemian members of the literati.
Mabel Forrest (1872-1935)
Novelist and Poet
Belief (X) Scale Value: Fideist
It is said that fidelity and betrayal in love were recurrent themes in Forrest’s fiction. Her own marriage with John Frederick Burkinshaw ended in divorce on the grounds of his 'adultery, desertion and cruelty' in April 1902. It is claimed that she expunged the experience of her first marriage in the marriage with John Forrest, which began in the same year as the divorce was granted. The romantic experience had a powerful influence in Forrest’s lyric poems. The Green Harper (1915) is a collection of poems and short stories telling fairy stories, an escapist and idyllic world where deceit and violence flares up and quickly dissipates. The horrors of the outside world was safely framed in mythical belief, simplifying complex problems down to child-like colourful imagery. The Wild Moth (1927), made into a popular film by Charles Chauvel, takes the narrative of escaping to illusory and romantic places to the adult level. A young country woman has her adventure in the big city. Exploited by the evils of modernity, the heroine is rescued by a young suitor from unwanted attentions. Faith is restored in romantic love.
Socio-Political (Y) Scale Value: Unclear
Although it is said that Forrest documented the matters of modernity, taking up issues such as city planning, and describing the growth of suburbs (in her Streets and Gardens, 1922), there is no clear socio-political statement. Further research is required.
George Elton Mayo (1880–1949)
Professor of Philosophy and Business Management Theorist
Belief (X) Scale Value: Agnostic
It could be argued that Mayo was a believer in managerialism, and might be a fair alternative in positioning Mayo. However, Mayo was motivated to heal the worker’s mental health by challenging beliefs which are at the root of abnormal social psychology. In his first book, Democracy and Freedom (1919), Mayo’s lifetime solution was for workers to remove the philosophic mists in their thinking which led to “an aggravated partisan hostility” of class warfare. He presents an agnostic stance toward the prevailing ideologies of the labour movement.
Socio-Political (Y) Scale Value: Conservative
It would be unexpected that an author of a book on democracy and freedom, and a major theorist in business management, is positioned as a conservative, and not a liberal. It reflects a pattern in western countries where leaders of organisations which supposed to espouse liberalism are, in fact, much more aligned to philosophical conservatism. In his first book, Democracy and Freedom (1919), Mayo, stated that the function of the State, in relation to combining ancestral tradition and self-development, is that of moral control. Mayo’s managerialism was aimed resolve industrial unrest in a vision of social cohesion. It was an outlook of a machine-like hegemony in the Rousseauian General Will – the unwilling workers would be forced to obey the general will; they will be "forced to be free." (Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The Social Contract. Book I, Chapters 6-9).
John Arthur Fihelly (1882 –1945)
Journalist and Political Theorist
Belief (X) Scale Value: Skeptic
Fihelly’s critics would describe him as a cynic rather than as a skeptic. Some had said that the Queensland Labor politician had no genuine working-class sympathy. A more charitable view would address Fihelly’s better judgements, and in this regard, as a Queensland Government Minister and an Irish-born migrant with the convictions of the Irish Republicans, he was immersed political skepticism, although perhaps somewhat hypocritically. Fihelly denounced the British Government, to which he had certain parliamentary obligations to serve under the Australian constitutional arrangements at the time, at the Queensland Irish Association in September 1916. He received the censure of the Queensland Governor Sir Hamilton John Goold-Adams who, as was Fihelly, was born in Cork, in southwest Ireland. Interestingly, although Fihelly’s personal behaviour was politically embarrassing, he enjoyed the confidence of Queensland establishment to serve as Acting Premier upon the occasion of the State Reception of the Prince of Wales in 1920. It was said that his performance of the official duty was impeccable.
Socio-Political (Y) Scale Value: Unclear
As noted above, although Fihelly well demonstrated the convictions of the Republicans in Ireland, his political roles in Queensland are viewed by many in a cynical light. He was, perhaps, the archetype politician.
Frances (Frank or Frankie) Mallalieu Payne (1885–1976)
Artist – Illustrator, Painter
Belief (X) Scale Value: Unclear
There is not sufficient biographical information to hand to make a judgement at this time. In the context of the Q ANZAC 100 paper, the aim was make Frankie Payne, as an illustrator in 1915, a representative thinker for Queensland society, denoting the Proustian extraordinariness in the ordinary affairs of staying in normalcy.
Socio-Political (Y) Scale Value: Unclear
See above comment.
Margaret Sturge (nee Thorp) Watts (1992-1978)
Quaker and Pacifist Theorist
Belief (X) Scale Value: Fideist
Thorp’s (Watts) leadership in the Queensland Society of Friends (Quakers) demonstrated the same fideism as Garland, but at the opposite end of the political and theological scales. Thorps’ parents, James Herbert Thorp, medical practitioner, and his wife Anne Sturge, née Eliott, were sent by the Society of Friends in England to advise Tasmanian Quakers about the consequences of the Australian Defence Act of 1909. Thorp’s Christian socialism does give Thorp’s beliefs a rationalist direction, but her political works were more often than not in areas where the perceived masculine characteristics of logic and argument were predominant. Thorp served with Quaker teams under the British Red Cross Society in Germany and Russia (1920-1921). She was an executive member of the Young Women's Christian Association, and a founder and President (1923-28) of the City Girls' Amateur Sports Association in Sydney.
Socio-Political (Y) Scale Value: Socialist
Biographer Hilary Summy articulated Thorp’s Christian Socialism, and Ray Evans sees in Thorp, “an important interlinking of the religious and secular pacifist movements”. However, Thorp’s role as a welfare worker, in many important capacities, placed her in a cross-section of liberal, conservative, and socialist perspectives. Her later work, as the New South Wales’ Executive secretary of the New Settlers' League of Australia, and the Quaker Service Council, had bi-partisan support, although Thorp was strongly critical of the Vietnam War while seeking adoption in Australia for Vietnamese orphans. However, much of Thorp’s life and work was outside of the conservative Queensland society. Thus in the context of Thorp’s Queensland phase, which focused on her role as a co-founder and the Secretary of the Queensland branch of the Women's Peace Army, the description “socialist” is more apt.