John ‘Dagger’ Hughes, New York’s fighting Irish bishop

“Dr. Hughes, Bishop of New York / drawn on stone by Hoffmann from a daguerrotype.” Photo: Library of Congress

The extraordinary priesthood of Irishman John Hughes spanned almost 40 years through the entire time of the rise of American nativism. A quarter century of that time was as bishop of New York, the fastest growing city at a time of mass Irish Catholic immigration. Told time after time that the United States was a Protestant country, Hughes did more than most to prove it otherwise. While most Catholic bishops in America quietly accepted the status quo, Hughes took an aggressive stance, and he returned in kind what the nativists gave out, earning the enduring love of his parishioners. Hughes had long eliminated his Irish brogue and resembled more a well-tailored fighter than a clergyman, as biographer Richard Shaw said in Dagger John: the Unquiet Life and Times of Archbishop John Hughes of New York.

John Joseph Hughes was born in 1797 near Augher, County Tyrone. His parents Patrick and Margaret Hughes were small Catholic farmers who raised their four sons and three daughters in a mainly Protestant area. When third son John expressed a desire to join the priesthood, they allowed him to study until the age of 17 when a poor year on the farm forced him to return home and be apprenticed at Favour Royal estate to study horticulture.

After two children died, Patrick emigrated to America and rented a farm in Pennsylvania. He sent word back to Ireland and John arrived in America with the family in 1817. Hughes believed he was leaving the petty persecution of Catholics behind him. He remained in Baltimore with one of his brothers and used his gardening experience to get a job on a plantation. He was released at the end of the planting season and found jobs in Emmitsburg, Maryland, 30 miles from where his family lived.

Outside Emmitsburg was Mount St Mary’s Catholic college and seminary run by French priests John Dubois and Simon Brute. Hughes told them of his desire to become a priest but the school was overcrowded and Dubois turned him down. Hughes became a labourer in a nearby Catholic convent where he befriended the mother superior who supported his case to be admitted to Mount St Mary’s. Dubois finally agreed to hire him as a gardener and overseer of the college’s slaves in return for accommodation and occasional tutoring. Hughes kept his distaste of slavery to himself and eagerly took on the new job, studying at every opportunity.

A year later Dubois noticed the potential that the mother superior saw in Hughes and enrolled him as a full student in 1820, aged 23, ten years older than his classmates. Hughes was subject to teasing from students and treated with apprehension by teachers who were barely older than him. He had to look after the gardens and the slaves but his iron will made him stick at his studies. Under the tutelage of Dubois and Brute, he gradually transformed himself into a clerical leader at the school. In 1824 a new school building was destroyed by fire, sending the school into debt. Hughes and other seniors went on begging tours during summer recess, where he impressed anti-Catholics with the forceful defence of his religion.

In 1825 he was appointed deacon in Philadelphia where he found the church at war with parishioners. Belligerent Irish-born octogenarian bishop Henry Conwell constantly feuded with church lay trustees especially after he sacked controversial priest William Hogan. Trustees backed Hogan and Hughes arrived in Philadelphia to find his parishioners hated the bishop. Augustinian priest Michael Hurley encouraged Hughes to sermonise on real world events. When Conwell heard one of the young man’s sermons, he was impressed and took him on a tour of the diocese. The Armagh-born Conwell took a shine to the man from the neighbouring county and began to see him as a future bishop. After completing final studies at Mount St Mary’s he was ordained for the priesthood in Philadelphia in 1827, waved off by John Dubois, newly appointed as bishop of New York.

It was a difficult start to Hughes’s career as the internal war threatened to tear the church apart. When the irascible Conwell asked priests to back him sacking another popular rebel priest William Harold, Hughes initially declined to give support claiming he was new in the city but was pressured to give in. Conwell appointed Hughes parish priest of the cathedral of St Mary’s in place of Harold, but trustees backed Harold and would not pay the salary of Hughes or his assistant. Hughes worked on his own popularity as his confidence in his abilities grew. On Simon Brute’s advice, Hughes hit back saying that because parishioners would not fulfil their obligations, he and his assistant would return to their old parish, leaving St Mary’s without priests.

When reports reached the Vatican, Conwell was summoned to Rome while Harold was banished from Philadelphia despite appealing to US president John Quincy Adams. In 1830 Rome appointed Francis Kenrick coadjutor bishop to replace the ancient Conwell. Hughes put his head down and got on with administering to his flock. But he began defending Catholicism against attacks in the press, even anonymously rewriting the plot of an anti-Catholic fictional book. In 1829 he protested in his own name against an American article against Irish Catholic Emancipation just won by O’Connell. Hughes’s reputation as a preacher grew steadily and he was invited to speak in New York. He began to write incognito for New York’s paper the Protestant signing his missives “Cranmer”. The apparent anti-Catholic articles were popular but after a few months Cranmer told the opposition press he was Catholic and denounced the sponsors of the Protestant as “clerical scum”. The fight became ugly as Protestants accused a New York priest of being Cranmer and that priest hit back at the accusation, beginning an intra-Catholic spat. Hughes eventually backed off when reproved by his new bishop, Kenrick.

Though Kenrick and Hughes were never close, they respected each other and Hughes filled in for him when he became ill. Conwell was still making trouble and allied himself with the trustees of St Mary’s against Kenrick. Kenrick ordered Hughes to begin the task of building a new cathedral. With characteristic energy Hughes secured a vacant lot, an architect, and the money of a wealthy businessman who disliked trusteeism. He built St John’s which was consecrated in 1831. But Hughes was disgusted with Kenrick when the bishop accepted a demotion from Conwell, despite lacking authority to do so. Kenrick also backed away from using St John’s as his new cathedral. Hughes invited New York Vicar General John Power and the mayor of Philadelphia for the grand opening. Power used his sermon to attack Catholic enemies and the press blamed Hughes for the speech. When the Protestant eminence Rev John Breckenridge took Hughes to task, he ended up giving him widespread fame.

Like Hughes, Breckenridge was an attack dog for his religion, smearing Catholics at every opportunity in the press. When he offered to debate Catholic clerics, Hughes took the bait. Breckenridge wanted an oral debate but Hughes insisted it be conducted through the newspapers as he would not become a “theological gladiator for the amusement of an idle promiscuous, curious multitude.” With no Catholic papers to champion Hughes, he created his own, the Catholic Herald. The newspaper and the debate both began in January 1833. Hughes and Breckenridge argued over whether Jesus wanted his church to be Catholic or Protestant with, according to Shaw, a mixture of “heavy dogma and even heavier insults”. The debate raged on for months though neither man converted anyone to his cause.

When Breckenridge heard Hughes was going to give a lecture he decided to end the stalemate and take him on in person. Bishop Kenrick disapproved of the debate and forbade the Herald from covering it. Breckenridge accused Hughes of being a foreigner, compared Catholicism to malaria, and blamed it for the Inquisition and the backward state of South America. Hughes hit out at English anti-Catholic laws, which he escaped and had become an American “by choice”. When Breckenridge fumed about hypothetical Roman influence, Hughes pointed to real and recent nativist attacks such as Samuel Morse’s influential anti-Catholic polemic and Boston mobs burning down a convent. Lives were jeopardised, he said, for the crime of worshipping God “according to the dictates of conscience”. The scrapper Hughes won the debate, as one contemporary noted, not by being superior, but by dragging his adversary down to his level. When the oral and written debates were put into book form with the approval of both men, Catholics rushed out to buy it. Hughes became a household name across America.

Hughes was attracting attention in Rome. The Vatican plan to make him coadjutor bishop to his old boss Dubois in New York was leaked to the press, and in 1837 American bishops confirmed the plan. After 12 years in Philadelphia, Hughes, aged 40, was moving to America’s largest city. His appointment was not popular. New York Catholics had wanted the city’s Vicar General John Power to get the job when Dubois was originally appointed and now Power missed out a second time. Catholic editor of the powerful New York Herald James Gordon Bennett described Hughes’s consecration as bishop in front of the city’s poverty-stricken Irish as “pushing gold rings through pigs’ noses.” Hughes ignored Bennett and got to work, determined to build a new Catholic college and seminary in the growing metropolis. Though Dubois suffered several strokes he jealously kept leadership decisions to himself. Hughes could see the diocese heading towards disaster. As in Philadelphia he argued with trustees. When trustees failed to apologise for sacking a Dubois-appointed priest, Hughes threatened to shut down the cathedral parish and withdraw his priests. The trustees backed down, and Hughes began to assume control, though Dubois remained a thorn. The Vatican finally ordered Dubois to stand down, making it look like it was his own decision. In his three remaining years of retirement Dubois never forgave his successor, always calling him Mr Hughes.

Hughes consolidated power, publishing his edicts in the Freeman’s Journal, keeping Power as his Vicar General and purchasing a site near Harlem that became Fordham University. In October 1839 he travelled to Europe to find money to pay for his new prize. He met new pope Gregory XVI in Rome, the missionary-minded Leopoldine Society in Vienna, and convinced Parisian Sacred Heart nuns to open a school in New York. In London, he met Daniel O’Connell, whom he admired greatly, yet he took him to task over his criticism of slavery in America. Finally after an absence of 23 years, he returned to Ireland where he found “the stripes of their martyrdom were everywhere visible.”

Hughes returned to America with a new sense of purpose and a new war to face against nativists. Education in Manhattan was controlled by the unelected Public Schools Society which managed most government funding. They opposed funding for Catholic schools and ensured schools sung Protestant hymns and read from Protestant bibles while textbooks had an anti-Catholic bias. Irish and German Catholics kept their children away from schools and thousands of immigrant children roamed the streets. New York Whig governor William Seward wanted to change this situation, but Democrat Irish voters ignored him. When Hughes returned to New York, he demanded a “just proportion” of common school funds and began correspondence with Seward. The two men began a lifetime friendship.

While Seward urged reform of the school system, Hughes began to look at separate Catholic education. Hughes battled with the Public Schools Society in debates and in the New York capitol at Albany, using his caustic sense of humour to humiliate dour opponents. With elections coming, he endorsed independent candidates demanding change. Nativists were outraged but so were Democrats. Bennett dismissed him as the “Bishop of Blarneyopolis” and “Dubois’s gardener”. Though the Democrats won the election, those that opposed Hughes were voted out, and the bishop gained the reputation as an Irish Machiavelli, one ex-mayor calling him “Generalissimo”. Hughes privately admitted he went right to the edge of his “episcopal sphere”. Seward pledged to support Hughes’s changes to the school system in 1842 and later that year the first elected board of education ended the Public School Society’s monopoly. Yet in the moment of his greatest success, Hughes turned his back on public education and began creating his own Catholic schools, entrenching the idea of Catholic ghettohood within America.

In his letters Hughes signed himself off as✝️John. One non-Catholic correspondent interpreted the episcopal signature as “Dagger John”. The appropriately belligerent nickname stuck. Bishop Dubois finally died in 1842 and churlish Dagger John refused to lead the eulogies, claiming he did not know him well enough. It was not his finest hour, but there was no longer any doubt who was in control in New York. He travelled to Ireland in 1843 with Whig powerbroker Thurlow Weed and attended one of O’Connell’s monster meetings. He went on to Belgium where he was unsuccessful in getting financial help for his heavily indebted diocese and returned to America without funds.

Hughes walked into more Nativist resentment which became a political issue in the 1844 election. Nativist James Harper was elected city mayor and with violence on the rise, Hughes employed 3000 armed Catholics to guard church property. Religious rioting convulsed his old city of Philadelphia and churches were torched. Annoyed that Bishop Kenrick had fled the city, Hughes issued a blunt warning to Harper. “If a single Catholic Church is burned in New York, the city will become a second Moscow”. The Nativist press were infuriated and some even blamed Hughes for the Philadelphia violence. Nevertheless, it was enough for Harper to call off a Nativist rally planned for New York.

Hughes’ pugilism made him the darling of the Catholic people but the hierarchy preferred the conservative Kenrick, and they made him the new archbishop of Baltimore. Hughes quietened down in 1845 and he returned again to England, Ireland and France, “shopping for religious personnel”. He won commitments from the Sisters of Mercy and Christian Brothers to set up in New York and convinced French Jesuits to take over Fordham. He revisited his birthplace, conducting mass at Clogher as famine began to break out. Within two years hundreds of thousands of Irish would land on Hughes’ shore.

He returned to America as the Mexican War broke out and fielded an unusual question from president Polk: Could the church supply Catholic chaplains for the army? Yes it could, Hughes replied, and a grateful Polk invited Hughes to travel to Mexico to alleviate their fears that America wanted to destroy their religion. However the Nativist press looked in horror at this suggestion and Polk backed off.

Between 1840 and 1860 three million people emigrated to America, and 500,000 of them remained in New York, most of them Irish and destitute, congregating in crime-ridden slums of the Five Points. Numbers increased more still during the Famine, about 100,000 every year. This poverty-stricken invasion increased Nativist fears. Though the immigrants were nominally Catholic, Hughes believed they barely knew the rudiments of their faith, though “not by any wilful apostasy”. His job was to “knead them into one dough” and he organised financial deposits to Ireland, sponsored the Irish Emigrant Society, and helped charities and hospitals deal with the influx. During the election year of 1848, there was news from Ireland of the Young Ireland rebellion and Hughes contributed $500 to New York’s “Directory of the Friends of Ireland”. Hughes was distraught to hear the rebellion was crushed “not by the British Army but by a squad of policemen” and dismissed Young Ireland as “a set of Gasconaders”. He told the Directory to transfer his donation to the Sisters of Mercy to care for immigrant girls.

Thomas D’Arcy McGee was the first of the Gasconaders to arrive in New York after the rebellion. When McGee started a newspaper and blamed the church for the failure, Hughes called it “insidious poison” and banned Catholics from reading it. McGee accepted defeat and moved to Boston. Hughes was also suspicious when famous Irish priest Theobald Mathew came to town, due to the Protestant native of his temperance movement. Hughes laid down the law for Mathew not to work with the Nativists but to his surprise found him a humble man. The pair worked well together and Matthew’s extended visit was a success apart from wading into the growing slavery controversy.

As well as sparring with Bennett at the Herald, Hughes also jousted with New York’s other great newsman Horace Greeley of the Tribune, defending Pope Pius IX from accusations of cowardice after the pontiff was forced to flee Rome. Now in his fifties, the strain of his active and stressful lifestyle and poor diet were taking effect on Hughes and he was plagued by rheumatism. In 1850 he was promoted to archbishop of New York though fellow American prelates denied his wish to be made cardinal. Nevertheless at the height of his temporal powers, he went to the White House to meet Nativist Whig president Millard Fillmore (who ascended to the job after Polk died of cholera). Though America welcomed Hungarian patriot Lajos (Louis) Kossuth with open arms, Hughes took offence at Kossuth’s refusal to acknowledge Irish independence. “Smith O’Brien was as brave a man as ever Kossuth was, and Thomas Meagher was as eloquent; and these men were forgotten,” he said, referring to the Young Ireland leaders transported to Van Diemen’s Land.

Kossuth arrived in America on the same ship as exotic Irishwoman-disguised-as-Spaniard Lola Montez. Though she brought down the throne of Bavaria, and Kossuth failed to do the same in Hungary, he was greeted as the greater celebrity. Hughes had nothing to say about his nominally Protestant countrywoman, but he launched into attacks on Kossuth as a Red Revolutionary. Nativists were growing in confidence and attacked a Papal Nuncio on his visit to America; for once an ill Hughes was unable to defend him. Nativists organised politically as the Know Nothing party and won spectacular victories in the 1854 midterms, determined to prove America was a Protestant state. Hughes was up for the fight and clashed with New York State Senator Erastus Brooks over the wealth of the Catholic Church. When Brooks accused Hughes of being five times a millionaire, the archbishop sarcastically replied that Brooks had cheated him as one Know Nothing newspaper said he was worth $25 million.

Hughes need not have worried. The meteoric rise of the Know Nothings collapsed around 1856 as slavery became the major issue and northerners flocked to the new Republican Party. Fillmore was soundly defeated in the presidential election when he ran as a Know Nothing. Though a Whig, Hughes supported the successful candidacy of Democrat James Buchanan with his fellow Northern Irish background.

By now more Young Ireland rebels had landed on American shores. Meagher ran into trouble for comments supporting Kossuth. But it was nothing compared to the opprobrium fellow convict escapee John Mitchel faced when his new newspaper The Citizen attacked Hughes as a “bad prince”. Hughes kept a stony silence as Mitchel hung himself with pro-slavery utterances and left for the south where his extreme views were more welcome. Meagher stayed in New York and made peace with the archbishop assuring him of the duty he owed his religion and his country. Hughes was impressed with Meagher’s oratory and would eventually conduct the widower’s second marriage to a Protestant woman, and help her become a Catholic.

Hughes turned to his dream of building a grand new St Patrick’s cathedral to match those of Europe. He earmarked a site on Fifth Avenue but was frustrated by lack of funding and more pressing issues. In 1858 the time was ripe to lay a cornerstone. But after two slow years, workers went on strike and building halted until after Hughes’ death. It would not be completed until 1878.

It seemed this was his last hurrah and in fading health he asked Rome for a coadjutor. But there was one last crisis to deal with. America was about to go to war with itself. As a former slave master, he was sympathetic towards slaves but was wary of northern abolitionist demands to immediately end the peculiar institution. Hughes believed that while the condition of slavery was evil, it exposed Africans to Christianity. Where slaves were introduced, he told abolitionist critic Greeley, it did not require “they shall be restored to their primitive conditions.” It did not help that abolitionists were mostly Nativists while Hughes worried for his constituents if four million freed slaves suddenly descended on northern cities. As Shaw wrote, the immigrant Irish could not yet afford the luxury of fighting for the freedom of others.

In 1860 Hughes was bitterly disappointed when his great friend Seward was denied the Republican presidential nomination by little known Illinoisan Abraham Lincoln. Many supporters blamed Seward’s defeat on his pro-immigrant stance with Thaddeus Stevens pointing the finger at the friendship with Hughes. Lincoln’s subsequent election led to a wave of southern secession and Hughes felt the crisis was “the greatest torture” in living memory. Having travelled extensively in the south, he felt no animosity to southern states, and apart from Seward, he expected little from Lincoln’s cabinet. He dreaded a “most ferocious war that ever dismayed humanity.”

Yet when the South attacked Fort Sumter, Hughes, like most Irish Northerners, rallied enthusiastically to the Union cause. He displayed the stars and stripes outside his cathedral and assigned a chaplain to Michael Corcoran’s New York 69th Regiment though he sought to dampen expectations of a proposed all-Irish brigade. He told Seward that brigades based on nationality would create “trouble among the troops”. Nevertheless he supported Meagher’s Irish Brigade once Lincoln approved it in late 1861. Hughes denied support of the war meant support for abolition. He told war secretary Simon Cameron that would turn Irishmen away “in disgust from the discharge of what would otherwise be a patriotic duty”.

Lincoln and Seward decided to use their important Irish American ally more actively in the cause. They sent Hughes and Thurlow Weed on a diplomatic mission to England and France. Hughes agreed enthusiastically but was not welcomed in London. It did not help they arrived as Britain and the North seemed about to go to war over the Trent affair. The Times called Hughes “anti English” while Puritan American ambassador Charles Francis Adams gave him only eight minutes of his time. The ambassador to France was equally unhelpful while the French were openly sympathetic to the South. Even in Rome, the pope was frosty towards his combative cleric but Hughes had a more welcoming time in Ireland where he was treated as a visiting head of state. However he embarrassed the anti-Fenian Dublin archbishop Cullen by saying the civil war was a training ground for Irishmen “becoming thoroughly acquainted with the implements of war.”

Hughes returned home as an American hero in August 1862. Seward gave him a banquet in Washington, and being a Friday, the main dish was fish. Hughes called it “the most delicate compliment” he had ever received. In New York he appealed for more Irish volunteers to fight in what he had correctly predicted to be a ferocious war. But Irish recruitment was slow thanks to the bloody battlefields of Antietam and Fredericksburg. Discontent at Lincoln’s Emancipation Declaration was compounded by a new draft which wealthy non-Catholics could avoid by paying for substitutes. Hughes was in poor health by the time Irish Catholic anger erupted into the New York draft riots of July 1863, just as extensive casualty lists emerged from Gettysburg. Protests at a draft office turned violent and within days the city was alight, as what Shaw called a “pent-up volcanic force” spilled fire and blood across the city. Hughes was implored to stop the disorder among “his people.” He issued a vague statement deploring the violence but refused to blame the Irish. He placed posters urging New Yorkers to come to his residence where he would address them. Some 5000 people heard a visibly weakened archbishop say “I cannot see a rioter’s face among you”. It was his last public appearance. The riots ended only when the army arrived from Gettysburg to restore order.

As the war raged on into winter 1863, Hughes became bedridden with Bright’s Disease. His two sisters looked after him. Four days after Christmas he was told doctors had advised he should be anointed. “Did they say so?” he replied. It was his last words and he died peacefully on January 4, 1864. All bar the most fervent nativists mourned his passing. His old foe James Bennett called him one of America’s “purest patriots”. Over 100,000 crammed around the cathedral for his funeral where his successor, bishop John McCloskey quoted St Paul, “I have fought the good fight”.

Another biographer, John Loughery, wrote in 2018 that John Hughes deserved to be better known for what he accomplished in his time and for the issues his struggle raises. “A flamboyant, authoritarian leader, he had plenty of faults. He also had a clear-eyed sense of his mission,” Loughery wrote. “His goal was a people who saw themselves simultaneously as good Catholics, loyal Americans and proud Irish-Americans.”

Daisy Bates, the enigmatic Kabbarli of the desert

An independent Edwardian Irishwoman who lived 40 years in the desert with Aboriginal people a century ago should be a modern day heroine in Australia and Ireland, but Daisy Bates’ reputation remains troubled. The “Great White Queen of the Never-Never Lands” was a household name during the decades she spent in exile from European comforts at a remote railhead near the Western Australian and South Australian border, but extreme views on race damaged her reputation and only now is her vast ethnographic output getting deserved attention.

Daisy Bates (1859-1951) lived a vast life spanning a century of intense social change. She saw herself as a woman of science but her views on cannibalism, extinction and caste discredited her within the academic community. She lived a remarkable spartan existence in a hot desert tent for many decades. As the Irish Times said in October, “she grasped opportunities for reinvention with both hands and carved out a niche for herself, claiming her place in Australian folk history.” Bob Reece’s 2007 biography Daisy Bates: Grand Dame of the Desert remains the best text on her life and his research informs this article.

Bates’ 40 years in the desert is highly unusual but her backstory is also colourful. In 1936 as an old woman she told journalist Ernestine Hill of her upper-class Irish protestant background, a story almost entirely false apart from the setting. She was born Margaret Dwyer in Roscrea, Co Tipperary in 1859 to alcoholic Catholic shopkeeper James Dwyer and wife Bridget. Bridget died when Margaret was four and she was raised with siblings by maternal grandmother Catherine, from wealthier farming stock than the Dwyers. Catherine died four years later and Margaret was sent to Britain before returning to an uncle in Roscrea and educated by the nuns as an “orphan”.

After school she moved to England where she styled herself Daisy May O’Dwyer. In 1882 aged 22, she moved to Australia in a Queensland government free passage scheme for bonded farm labourers and domestic servants. She landed in Townsville and moved to a station near Charters Towers where she married horse boy Eddie Murrant in 1884 in an Anglican ceremony. “Breaker” Morant, as he later became famously known, was also an assisted immigrant and younger than Daisy. The courtship was swift but the marriage unravelled just as quickly. Eddie was arrested for theft of pigs and Daisy swiftly ditched him.

It was the first of three marriages in 12 months, none of which were formally divorced, though her serial bigamy was not discovered in her lifetime. After leaving Eddie, Bates went to Berry, New South Wales as a governess. On February 17, 1885 she married cattleman Jack Bates in Nowra. But when he went droving, she moved to Sydney and on June 10 she married Ernest Baglehole. Little is known of that relationship and within months she was back with Bates.

She gave birth to her only child Arnold Bates in August 1886 but showed little interest in her son or his father declaring she would never have sex with a man again, a promise she appears to have kept. For seven years she lived with pastoral families as a governess before heading alone to England in 1894 for five years. In London she worked on social campaigner W.T. Stead’s Review of Reviews, learning journalism which became a crucial source of income later in life.

She returned to Australia in 1899 to seek out Bates who was buying a pastoral property in north west Western Australia. Their reunion was unsuccessful but it was her first introduction to Aboriginal people who gave her a skin classification governing relationships. Daisy went to Perth where she was feted as a celebrity for her English experiences and her carefully cultivated exotic accent. She moved to an Aboriginal Mission in the Kimberley where she learned basic anthropological fieldwork. In Perth she heard about the rapidly disappearing Bibbelmun people of the south-west. She set up camp with them, and organised a corroboree for royal visitors in 1901.

Daisy earned money with freelance newspaper assignments and in 1904 was employed by the WA government to collect Aboriginal vocabularies. Queensland “protector” Walter Roth was hired to report on the condition of Aborigines in the west. Bates helped him but would not accompany him because the coastal route the government chose meant he would meet “the wrong kind of informants”. Instead she conducted a survey of the Bibbelmun language and read her first ethnological paper at Melbourne in 1905.

She believed Aboriginal people would become extinct due to their inability to cope with “civilisation”. She defended regulatory action which strengthened her position with the government though it compromised her academic integrity. By 1907 she was considered an expert and lectured on the “half caste” problem and keeping Aboriginal people from white influences.

She set off on an eight month journey to understand the social organisation of south west tribal groups and by 1909 her manuscript was a large treatise on every aspect of Indigenous life in the west. English social anthropologist Alfred Radcliffe-Brown found her work when he came to WA for research. Though he wanted to use her field notes, they fell out over her lack of interest in theory. They also quarrelled over the treatment of Aboriginal venereal victims. Radcliffe-Brown argued for quarantine lock hospitals on islands off Carnarvon while Bates said they were better off in their homelands.

In Perth in 1912, Bates got news that would set her life course. She was appointed WA’s unpaid and unsupported Protector of Aborigines at Eucla on the Great Australian Bight. She stayed at a sheep station but was drawn to tend the sick and noted “how quickly the natives have annexed me”. In 1913 she left the station to live under canvas at Fowler’s Bay and spent her days tending to the aged and ill, collecting dialects and customs. In 1914 she travelled to Adelaide for a science congress and was feted by women’s groups and journalists. She gave testimony to a government inquiry on Aborigines and was opposed to bringing them to missions or town fringe camps.

She sold the property she inherited from Bates and subsidised her income with articles for the Argus and the Australasian documenting her bush experiences. After a breakdown in 1919 she briefly worked as a matron in a soldiers’ convalescent home in Adelaide before moving to Ooldea Siding on the transcontinental railway, 200km from Fowler’s Bay. She remained there until 1935. Ooldea had a permanent underground aquifer and was an important crossroads for Aboriginal people as the site of initiation ceremonies and trade. A dozen white fettlers also lived here. Bates helped the Aboriginal women stay away from the sexual appetites and diseases of the rail workers.

Bates lived a penurious existence with no government support but refused charity. She kept apart from the fettlers and insisted Aboriginal visitors call out “Kabbarli” (grandmother) before entering her tent. Inside the tent she kept “the necessaries plus my MSS. and letters and Dickens”. She requisitioned a 500-gallon water tank to store her manuscripts. There was no toilet in deference to the natives who regarded fixed sanitary conveniences as disgusting.

She survived harsh hot summers and cold desert winters and a long railway strike which prevented supplies for many months, entrenching her anti-union stance: “the strike makers are as secret and deadly…as the monsters of the Inquisition”. She survived sandy blight which rendered her blind for three weeks in 1920 requiring a hospital visit to Perth. She also survived an Aboriginal “rebellion” of 100 hungry natives by calmly making tea and promoting the qualities of the shrewish wife of the rebellion leader who everyone hated. She wrote articles on infanticide and cannibalism which she said she encountered at Dampier Peninsula’s Beagle Bay in 1900. She also wrote that in 1908 at Peak Hill in the Murchison region Aboriginal women killed and ate newborns “sharing it with every woman in the group”. Experts believed she was misled by informants. Some thought she was sensationalising reports to improve newspaper copy. Her strong stubborn streak meant the more anthropologists challenged her, the more sweeping and exaggerated her claims became.

Her views on caste also attracted controversy. She banned half-caste babies from Ooldea camp and criticised a WA plan for a Central Australian Reserve preferring a “women’s patrol” to stop tribal people from entering settled areas. Her view was “the Aboriginal people are unmoral, the half-castes are immoral, and to breed our own coloured population…is an ugly reflection on all of us”. A mixed race delegation to WA premier Philip Collier denied Collier’s claim Bates was a saviour to the natives. “She is doing it for publicity so people may call her a courageous woman for living among the blacks. If she did not encourage them to cadge at Ooldea, they would fend for themselves”.

Undeterred, Bates collected and recorded the culture of the Ooldea desert groups. She remained a Christian though her bible was her revered Dickens collection. She found similarities between the Irish and Aborigines “being light-hearted, quick to take offence and quick to forgive”. As custodians died, they entrusted ceremonial boards and totemic stones to her and rare weapons made in the old way. She survived 16 years in the desert thanks to her intellectual interests and spiritual strength. She had a keen interest in the birds and animals that frequented the camp and sent specimens to London museums. In 1932 journalist Ernestine Hill told Bates’s extraordinary story to the world as “the Woman of Ooldea”. Hill noted the contrast of Bates’s upper class demeanour and her spartan desert existence. “A white woman voluntarily exiled from her own people for 20 years finds all her joy in writing the legends and the songs of the vanished tribes,” Hill wrote.

When the United Aborigines Mission opened a post at Ooldea in 1933 providing rations and medicine, Daisy could not compete. “Its coming has brought my work of investigation to a dead end,” she wrote. She received a CBE in the 1934 New Year’s Honours and moved to an Adelaide hotel to write her experiences in the desert for the Advertiser. Then 76 and with failing eyesight and health, she needed Hill’s help to put her manuscript to paper while syndicated articles about “Kabbarli” helped pay the bills. The first of 21 articles called “My Natives and I” appeared in 1936.

In 1938 her publisher suggested her manuscript be called The Passing of the Aborigines and she was delighted with the name. “I do sincerely hope that the fact of their passing will be understood and appreciated by Australians,” she replied. When it appeared in 1939, the reviews were mostly positive and the book became influential in setting a patronising tone to Aboriginal people. British writer Arthur Mee wrote in the foreword she provided “succour (to) a noisome race, melancholy in outlook and terrible in habits”. Bates’ reputation grew though her prediction of Aboriginal extinction was wrong as their dramatic decline in numbers levelled out. As Reece wrote about her attitude to “half-castes”, she was unable to blame the white men responsible for the “menace of colour” and took out her anger and frustration on their progeny.

In the late 1930s the elderly Bates returned to camp life at Pyap near Loxton on the Murray. She gave talks at the local school and showed the children how to make damper. But with few Aborigines to attend to, she moved to Wynbring Siding 160km east of Ooldea in 1941 aged 82. She wanted “the love and respect of those poor cannibals of Central Australia”. These people, she said, learned “there were two kinds of white women, our flotsam and jetsam eastwards and ‘Kabbarli’…and that is my lovely reward”.

Wynbring was even more remote than Ooldea with few trains, daily temperatures in the mid 40s, no post and unreliable water. Visitors from Ooldea trickled into camp but she was unable to care for the sick being old and frail herself. Theft was also an issue. She despaired Aboriginal people would never return to their “old quiet ways” and the elders had lost their power. In 1945 she was admitted to Port Augusta hospital where staff quickly tired of her Lady Muck attitude. She moved to Adelaide, “an eccentric institution” who was vain about her appearance but whose shortsightedness made her a traffic hazard. She died on 18 April 1951. Her funeral attracted less than 100 mourners. There was no one from Ooldea though she left her estate for their “relief of poverty and distress”.

As Reece concluded, time has not softened the impact of Daisy Bates’ distorted views on Aboriginal society and its future nor her rejection of Aboriginal part-descent. But there was no doubting her kindness to Aboriginal people and her ethnographic work has been crucial in WA native title claims as “an indefatigable recorder of what could be salvaged of the traditional culture”. Bates’ extraordinary story was one of singular courage and vision, however wrong-headed.

Remembering William S Burroughs

Twenty years after his death William S Burroughs still has the power to keep media writing about him. This week The News Hub recounted how Burroughs was arrested in France in 1959 for importing opiates into the country but he was released after trial. The reason? “Burroughs was excused and given a suspended sentence because his work ‘The Naked Lunch’ was considered to have too much artistic value to leave the man rotting in a Paris prison.” The French appreciated Burrough’s debauched writings, while his native America was “too caught up in Protestant predispositions to appreciate a great artist.”

The story is true, but it underestimates Burroughs’ intrinsic American-ness. In his biography “The ‘Priest’ They Called Him” author Graham Caveny said Burroughs was “as American as the electric chair”. William Burroughs was the grandson of William Seward Burroughs I who founded the Burroughs Adding Machine company. In 1885 the elder Burroughs patented the first workable adding and listing machine in St. Louis. His grandson William Seward Burroughs II was born in St Louis 29 years later in 1914 just as Europe was about to go to war. His father Mortimer Perry had no desire to join the family business and ran an antique shop. But family wealth gave young William a good education.

He went to John Burroughs school in St Louis. There was no relation nor was there an affinity and Burroughs the boy left Burroughs the school without graduating. He was sent to the private Los Alamos Ranch School for boys in New Mexico. In this rustic scout-like setting, Burroughs discovered sex and drugs. He was gay but was expelled for taking chloral hydrate, a sedative drug used for insomnia. Disgraced and back in St Louis he kept his head down long enough to finish high school and enrolled for Harvard.

He arrived there in 1932 at the bottom of the depression. There were 25 million unemployed and the US was deep in debt. He buckled down and got an arts degree in four years. In 1936 he did the Grand Tour of Europe. There he found homosexual freedom he could not find in the US. Nonetheless, he married Austrian Jew Ilse Klapper who needed an American visa to flee the Nazis. Klapper was living in London and her visa was about to expire when Burroughs saved her life. They married in Athens and then separated. She lived in New York until the end of the war and divorced Burroughs before settling in Zurich. They remained friends.

Burroughs returned alone to St Louis. His parents were distraught he had treated his wife so shabbily but did not stop his sizeable allowance. Burroughs mooched around following boyfriends until Pearl Harbor. He was drafted but his mother had him declared mentally unsuitable for military service. The punishment was a six month stint in a psychiatric evaluation unit. On the advice of someone he met there, he travelled to Chicago where men were scarce and jobs were easy to get.

He became a “bugman” for AJ Cohen Exterminators, an experience that informed his writing. The thrill of killing cockroaches quickly died and he followed a lover to New York. He settled in Greenwich Village and was introduced to a shy young Jewish boy from New Jersey named Allen Ginsberg. Through Ginsberg he became friends with Jack Kerouac. Kerouac and Burroughs were arrested when Lucien Carr, another friend, killed his male lover. Carr told Kerouac and Burroughs he had stabbed him after a row and dumped the body in the Hudson river. Burroughs advised him to find a lawyer. Carr turned himself in after two days and after plea bargaining down to manslaughter he served two years at a reformatory. Burroughs and Kerouac were charged for a failure to report a crime but released.

Burroughs had written sporadically but the murder spurred him into action. Ginsberg and Kerouac helped on his manuscripts. Burroughs experimented heavily with drugs and persuaded doctors to write morphine prescriptions. As the war ended, he got involved with another woman. Joan Vollmer was a Beatnik, a smart lady and a match for Burroughs. She knew he was gay but said “he made love like a pimp”. She was addicted to benzedrine. Their house was raided and Burroughs was given a four month suspended sentence for forging prescriptions.

He returned to St Louis and Joan deteriorated. Burroughs came back to her when he found out how bad her condition was. In 1947 they moved to a ranch in Texas where they took drugs unmolested. Joan gave birth to William Burroughs III that year. The Burroughs left Texas after he was arrested and lost his licence for having sex with Joan in his car. They moved on from New Orleans after police there took an interest in his drug habits.

They went to Mexico where their mutual self-destruction took a sudden turn. When drunk in their apartment, they decided to play William Tell. He placed an apple on her head but missed the apple and shot a bullet through her head. Burroughs was released on bail after 13 days and was told the trial for her murder would be a year later. Burroughs fled to New York.

The incident was the catalyst for literary greatness. “I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would have never become a writer but for Joan’s death,” he wrote. He quickly put out two novels about his main predilections: “Junky” and “Queer”. “Junky” was released in 1953 under the name of William Lee.

Burroughs travelled to Europe and settled in the Moroccan city of Tangier where he could indulge his taste in drugs and men. With Ginsberg’s help he published The Naked Lunch in 1959. It was banned in Britain (the Lady Chatterley’s Lover court case had yet to decide if it one could read it to one’s wife and servants). Burroughs said Jack Kerouac suggested the title. “The title means exactly what the words say: naked lunch, a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork.”

The non-linear story of sex and drugs was published in the US in 1962. Boston Police arrested a bookseller for obscenity when he tried to sell the book. It took two years for the trial to come to court. Norman Mailer defended the Naked Lunch speaking of “artistry… more deliberate and profound than I thought before”. In 1966 the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court declared the work “not obscene” based on criteria developed largely to defend the book. The case against Burroughs’s novel remains the last US obscenity trial against a work of literature.

Burroughs moved to Paris, home from home for American intellectuals. In an intense period he produced The Soft Machine (1961), The Ticket That Exploded (1962), and Nova Express (1963). By 1967 he was famous enough to merit a spot on the album cover of Sergeant Pepper. He returned to New York where he was the darling of a set mixing with Warhol, Basquiat and Ginsberg. Ginsberg also looked after Burroughs’ son. Father and son never got on and young Billy Burroughs turned his hostility into autobiographical published works. He was also drug dependent (probably since birth) and died of liver cancer in 1981. By now Burroughs was a giant of counter-culture. He released voice albums and starred in movies. In Gus Van Sant’s “Drugstore Cowboy”, he played himself in the role of Father Tom a defrocked priest and junkie.

In 1983 he moved to St Lawrence, Kansas, where aged almost 70, he bought his first and only home. David Cronenberg filmed the unfilmable Naked Lunch and Burroughs returned to New York occasionally to meet old friends. There weren’t many left, dying off due to their extravagant lifestyles but Burroughs seemed to outlast them all. Allen Ginsberg died in April 1997 and that was enough for Burroughs; he finally threw in his chips four months later. He was 83 and an opiate addict for the last 40 years of his life. Through his life he kept another addiction; that of guns, sleeping with one every night.

His reputation is mixed. Some like Mailer say he is one of the greatest and most influential writers of the twentieth century, but others found him over-rated. His impact across literature, art, cinema and music is undeniably vast. At the end of the Naked Lunch, still his best known work, Burroughs wrote: “The Word is divided into units which be all in one piece and should be so taken, but the pieces can be had in any order being tied up back and forth, in and out fore and aft like an innaresting sex arrangement.” As the Telegraph wrote, this aberrant perspective is perhaps the reason why his words were widely adopted.

Brand Branson

TWENTY-THREE Australians are among the 600 people who have stumped up $US200,000 each to be among the first space tourists with Virgin Galactic. The flights are expected to take place at the end of next year after Virgin test flights prove successful and the passengers undergo basic space training.

Flights on Virgin’s SpaceShipTwo will carry two pilots and six commercial passengers on a two and a half hour journey that will involve just six minutes of sub-orbital weightlessness 21,000m high. The idea is the latest brainwave of serial inventive British businessman Richard Branson who will be on the first scheduled flight with his family.

The entrepreneurial icon turned 62 in July but shows no sign of slowing down.

Where others see disaster, Branson sees opportunity. CNN called him part Warren Buffett, part PT Barnum and an “unflappable inventor and promoter”. He has interests on six continents, including airlines, express trains, mobile phones and credit cards.

Branson was always an independent sort. Aged 16 he set up a magazine to put out a student point of view. “I didn’t like the way I was being taught at school,” he said in 2006. “I didn’t like what was going on in the world, and I wanted to put it right.” Plenty of advertisers were willing to stump up to reach the cashed-up youngsters reading Branson’s mag and his career was up and running.

He advertised records in the magazine and started selling them himself at a London store at discounted rates under the brand “Virgin”. In 1972 he launched Virgin Records and was approached by a struggling artist called Mike Oldfield to listen to his demo. Other companies thought Oldfield’s instrumental work was unmarketable but Branson took a gamble. Oldfield’s Tubular Bells was the first record released by Virgin. The album took off after it was used as the theme music for the movie The Exorcist and by the end of 1973 it was a massive international success. Branson was always grateful to Oldfield and would later name one of his first Virgin America planes Tubular Belle.

Branson’s willingness to take a gamble paid off and he was at it again in 1976 when he signed the Sex Pistols. Johnny Rotten and his punk crew were controversial but they knew how to shift records. Though the band broke up before Branson made serious money out of them, they successfully changed Virgin’s old image as a hippie label. In their wake, he signed up XTC, The Skids, The Culture Club, The Human League, and Sting. Virgin’s income went from a loss of £900,000 in 1980 to a profit of £11 million in 1983. In 1992 Branson sold the music label to EMI for £0.5 billion.

By then, Branson had expensive airlines in his firing line. In his autobiography Losing My Virginity he explained why. “My interest in life comes from setting myself huge, apparently unachievable challenges and trying to rise above them,” he said. “From the perspective of wanting to live life to the full, I felt that I had to attempt it.” Just as his assault on the expensive record industry worked, the over-regulated airline market was also ripe for picking.

His Virgin Atlantic Airways was followed by Virgin Blue in Australia in 2000. Virgin Blue took full advantage of Ansett’s collapse a year later to become the country’s second largest airline. Internationally there was Virgin Trains and Virgin Mobile and even Virgin Comics as Branson spread his net far and wide. Meanwhile there was a succession of world record attempts, film appearances and humanitarian initiatives as Branson the man competed with Branson the brand.

He was knighted in 2000 for “services to entrepreneurship” and he now gets rock star treatment wherever he goes. Last year, stadiums in Sydney and Melbourne were filled with people who forked out $300 a ticket to attend a “financial education summit” where Sir Richard was the star speaker. At an age when many are reaching for the pipe and slippers, Branson is still reaching for the skies and beyond.

100 Years On: Douglas Mawson and Australian identity forged in the Antarctic

Today, Prime Minister Julia Gillard invoked “the spirit of Mawson” when she visited the University of Tasmania’s new state-of-the-art Marine Research institute. The site will open in 2014 and Gillard timed her visit to celebrate Douglas Mawson’s 100th anniversary as leader of Australia’s first Antarctic exhibition. Gillard said the facility committed Australia to the Antarctic in “a history 100 years old but with a great future in front of it.”

Mawson was a great Australian scientist and explorer. Gallipoli is where the newly-formed white commonwealth of Australia was supposedly forged. But Mawson’s adventure a year earlier did much also to put a young nation on the map – and expand Australian thinking about the map and its place on it. His 100th anniversary celebrations in the Antarctic were delayed a few days due to bad weather.

Like most Australians of the era (the Irish excepted), Douglas Mawson considered himself an Englishman. Mawson was born in Shipley in 1882 of gritty Yorkshire stock. His family were cloth merchants who moved to Sydney when Douglas was a toddler. He was educated at Rooty Hill and at Fort Street Model School. He attended the University of Sydney at the turn of the century. While Australia federated and fought the Boer War, Mawson studied mining engineering. After graduating he was appointed junior demonstrator in chemistry at the university. He did a six month geological survey of the New Hebrides (Vanuatu) under the island’s deputy commissioner Captain E. G. Rason. Mawson’s The geology of the New Hebrides was one of the first major works of its kind on Melanesia.

He was appointed lecturer in mineralogy and petrology in the University of Adelaide and became interested in South Australia’s glacial geology. Mawson came up with new classifications for the mineralised Precambrian rocks of the Barrier Range. In November 1907, Ernest Shackleton met him in Adelaide. Shackleton was leader of the British Antarctic Expedition heading south. He wanted to be first to the South Pole, which did not interest Mawson particularly. Yet Mawson wanted to explore the glaciations of the southern continent. Shackleton was impressed and made him physicist.

By March 1908 Mawson was on top of Mt Erebus volcano in the first group to climb Antarctica’s highest peak. While Shackleton and his team pressed onto the pole, Mawson and Edgeworth David travelled 2000km to be the first to reach the south magnetic pole. They survived the return trip despite lack of food, exhaustion and Mawson’s fall into a deep crevasse. Shackleton failed in the main expedition and they returned to Australia chastened, but with Mawson’s reputation enhanced.

Back in Adelaide, he heard Scott was planning another assault on the pole. Mawson asked for a ride to explore the coast west of Cape Adare. Scott refused but invited him to go to the pole with him. Again, that did not interest Mawson so negotiations foundered. After Scott left in 1910, Mawson launched his own Australasian Antarctic Expedition.

He set sail in December 1911 and made three crucial stops in the name of Australia. At Macquarie Island he established a base where they were the first to relay radio messages from the Antarctic. Then he established a Main Base at Commonwealth Bay and lastly he founded a Western Base on the Shackleton Ice Shelf. All three sites were dedicated to science.

The Commonwealth Bay base was ready by February 1912. Mawson explored east Antarctica but two fellow explorers died on the harsh journey. Though Mawson was seriously debilitated, he cut his sledge in half, discarded everything except geological specimens and records and dragged them 160km back to base after 30 days. He was forced to stay the winter and continued explorations to 1913.

Back home in 1915, Mawson told his story in The Home of the Blizzard. It was a sensational read but the Great War preoccupied Australia and Mawson did not get the credit his extraordinary adventures, exploration, innovation and scientific work deserved. Mawson served in the war as embarkation officer for shipments of high explosives and poison gas from Britain to Russia.

After the war he worked for the White Russians then returned to the University of Adelaide to spend 30 years researching South Australian Precambrian rocks of the Flinders Ranges. He collected so much data from his polar trip, it took him 30 years to complete his Scientific Reports in 22 volumes. He led two more southern journeys for the British, Australian and New Zealand Antarctic Research Expedition in 1929-30 and 1930-31, both sea-based only. His mapping was crucial to the Australian Antarctic Territory Acceptance Act of 1933 and the Australian Antarctic Territory three years later.

Mawson retired to Melbourne in 1952 and died of a cerebral haemorrhage at his Brighton home on October 14, 1958, aged 78. Australia’s first permanent Antarctic base was established at Holme Bay in Mac Robertson Land, after Mawson convinced foreign minister Doc Evatt to set it up. The base was founded in 1954 and named for Mawson. It was a deserved honour for a man many see as the greatest polar explorer. By 1984, Mawson’s reputation was secured with his place on the $100 Australian note. You could put your money on it: Mawson was a great Australian who always put science first.

David Bowie turns 65: A personal recollection

 

My first memory of David Bowie is when I was a young teenager at the house of two older cousins. They influenced my early musical tastes which featured artists as diverse as Mike Oldfield, Steve Hillage, Rory Gallagher and Rush. Among the collection was a strange looking LP with an unforgettable cover photo.

There was a man and a woman naked from the chest up, the man with big bright red hair staring pensively straight into the camera while the woman, her head resting gently on his shoulder, seemed forlorn. The album was called “Pinups” and the artist was “Bowie”. I didn’t know whether “Bowie” was him or her or both of them but wanted to know more. Her face was familiar but it was his voice that transfixed me from the first listen.

My cousin told me the man was David Bowie and she was the model Twiggy, whom I remembered seeing on television. Why was she on the cover, I asked? My cousin didn’t know. It would be many years before I found out why though I figured Bowie had a thing for “Twig the Wonderkid” who he name-checked in Drive In Saturday on the album Aladdin Sane. That album and Pinups were released within six months of each other in 1973 when I was nine years old.

It was probably around 1978 when I first heard his music and saw his astonishing different coloured eyes. The following year I got my first summer job porting cases around Tramore’s Grand Hotel for ten quid a week. I stayed at my auntie’s in Tramore and for the first time in my life I had spending money. All that summer I spent my wages on David Bowie’s back collection. I immediately loved them all.

Space Oddity (1969) featured the hit single of the same name. The tune was instantly familiar from radio but I never realised it was the same guy who did the album cover with Twiggy. There was The Man Who Sold the World (1971) full of raucous rocking anthems and the album Roy Carr and Charles Murray said in “Bowie: An Illustrated Record” (1981) where the Bowie story really began. The cover art of Bowie in a dress was too much for 1970s Catholic Ireland (as it was for Protestant Britain) and we had to make do with the “leg up” photo from the Ziggy era.

Hunky Dory (1971) was a personal favourite. While cycling in the countryside near Waterford I would sing loudly each song in the order they appeared on the album, with nearby cows bemused by my squealing out every moment of “Oh You Pretty Things“.

Next up was Ziggy Stardust (1972). While this was the album – and the persona – that made Bowie a household name, it was never one I particularly loved. I thought the concept album idea boring and none of the songs haunted their way into my conscience as did his other albums. I liked the instruction on the cover “To be played at maximum volume” but I never risked the wrath of mum and dad by complying.

The 1973 albums were my entry point to Bowie. I didn’t know Pinups was an album of 1960s covers and even when I heard Ray Davies blast out “Where Have All the Good Times Gone?” my first reaction was the Kinks did a great cover of Bowie’s record. The other 1973 album Aladdin Sane, however, was pure Bowie and utterly haunting from the first listen. I was entranced by Bowie’s apocalyptic vision from the subtitle of the title song Aladdin Sane (1913-1938-197?) expecting World War III to break out any day. But it was Mike Garson’s piano in the final track Lady Grinning Soul that penetrated deepest with Bowie crooning “She will be your living end” grinning its way into my soul. It’s still my favourite Bowie song.

Then it was Diamond Dogs from 1974, another overrated album by my lights. I was never a huge fan of the singles Rebel, Rebel or Diamond Dogs though I loved the epic sweep of the Sweet Thing trilogy. Young Americans from 1975 was more to my liking. His “plastic soul” sounded anything but plastic and the influence of John Lennon and Luther Vandross made this a very classy sounding album. Bowie’s voice adapted to any style.

Station to Station (1976) was another departure and another Bowie character, the vampire-like Thin White Duke. Bowie was a heavy cocaine user during this period and it drives on the pulsating title track that opens the album. The first few minutes of that song are unforgettable as the train build up speed slowly with a droning guitar before the thin white duke’s voice brings this massive song home with an up tempo conclusion. Well, if it’s not the side-effects of the cocaine, I’m thinking that it must be love.

It took me a while to love the 1977 albums Low and Heroes. Bowie was in Berlin under the influence of ambient musician Brian Eno. Low was well named, the pain of Bowie’s splintered personal life brought out in songs like Breaking Glass and Always Crashing in the Same Car. The instrumental side two was difficult listening but rewarding. Heroes followed a similar trajectory with side one distilling in lyrics Bowie’s drug-crazed agonies while an instrumental side two explored the same concepts in music.

Lodger (1979) came out as I was seriously getting into Bowie. It was more upbeat than the previous two and minus the instrumental frenzies but it was still a dark record. Boys Keep Swinging got Bowie back in the British charts but there was not much singles joy in this platter. The Lodger was not really at home in this music but his travels around world music did give him a better feel for disco he would exploit in the early 1980s.

That decade started with Scary Monsters and Super Creeps which was the first Bowie album I bought as soon as it came out. I was a bit disappointed. The album was successful and the singles Ashes to Ashes and Fashion put him at the top of the charts. Yet I was expecting a bit more. It was another change of musical philosophy, but it just seemed to fall short. Maybe I was just being precious because everyone liked Bowie at the time. Listening again to It’s No Game (Part 1) recently, it is a classic track with Michi Hirota singing the song in Japanese and Bowie spitting out the translation in English as if, as Carr & Murray said, he was “tearing out his intestines”.

My love affair with Bowie ended in 1983 with Let’s Dance. Sooner or later Bowie would release a disco record and this was it, and a great success. By 1983 I was a know-all 18 and getting into more obscure music. Listening to Wire, the Virgin Prunes and the young Matt Johnson (The The), I was unimpressed by Bowie’s dance sounds. The title track was playing in every disco in the world that summer and I loathed it like I loathed Thriller which came out around the same time. I didn’t buy another Bowie record for 20 years.

Around 2005, all his back collection of CDs was selling at $10 a pop in Brisbane record stores. In a fit of nostalgia I bought all the albums from 1970 to 1983 and fell in love with his early music again. I bought Heathen (2002) but because it had no 1970s or 1980s memories to weave on to, it never impinged on my conscience. But Bowie’s voice, dexterity and mastery of various genres makes him a musical genius of the highest order. Happy 65th birthday, David.