The feeling in the streets

Going to see Dracula at the Dock Street Theatre and then walking back through the darkened, gaslit streets kind of gives a flavour to Charleston.

I was more impressed, however, by the fact that the first play produced here, at America's oldest theatre, was George Farquhar's The Recruiting Officer. I read this on a sign further up Church Street the next day.

It says here (second paragraph) that one of the earliest occupants of this house had written the prologue for that Dock Street Theatre production.

Coincidentally, The Recruiting Officer was the first play produced (by a cast of convicts and guards) at Sydney Cove in 1789. How interesting that this play, a satire on authority, was such a favourite in both early colonies.

Does it say something about our common attitudes to authority? In both countries I think people would agree we have a common disrespect for power. But the circumstances suggest subtle differences too. Australia's production took place in the context of a penal colony, arguably a precarious situation for those in charge. Yet the governor, Capt. Phillip, was comfortable enough to let it take place. And to this day, Australia's leaders tolerate a very knockabout sort of, well, 'knocking'. Perhaps while Americans fear government (you get the impression sometimes that tyranny is only a president away; despotism always a possiblity; gotta keep a hold on our guns), Australians have a rougher, more familial disrespect for their leaders. Australian politicians will never be tyrants; but they'll always be 'slackarses who don't do what we pay 'em to do'.

Breaks to new mutiny?

 Two households, both alike in dignity,
In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.

 - Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet: prologue

At Manassas, site of the first Civil War battle

we met a woman who said she reckons another Civil War is coming, 'the way this country's going. It's getting worse by the day.'

I didn't ask her to elaborate. I made certain assumptions. We were in Virginia, which has always resented the federal government. We were in an historic downtown which looked reasonably prosperous. When you run into someone in a CBD who says what she said, they're usually railing about federal taxes (well, taxes state and city as well, but the feds cop it). And we're in an environment where the other side's motives are always purely venal and evil ('the Tea Party are stupid'; 'the Occupy Wall Street people are a mob', although they're actually unhappy about many of the same things). This is a superstition maintained on both sides of politics of course - it is no longer the case that people can concede that both sides have something to offer and that each falls short - so I figured I didn't need to query further.

We are now in Charleston, nine hours away by train from 'Orange Cones; No Phones' and signs of Fall - changing colours, squirrels getting busy carrying oversized nuts, pumpkin lattes...

We've put away winter clothes for now

I wonder if the unhappiness that is expressed to us is at root a symptom of the tectonic plates of American tribalism shifting; the distrust and absolutist opinions a natural consequence of a society opening up its former divisions, an anxiety about the fact that new and more people are these days, as they once sang in the fields round here, 'gwine to sit down at de welcome table'.

Notes on the State of Virginia

Excuse the Jeffersonian title, but after a visit to Richmond, I am wondering what I might say in a modern-day version of the Notes.

Clearly the history of the place is overwhelming. Richmond is virtually the historical navel of the country. Go down to the water's edge (to the banks of the James) and, not only do you get a sense of the bridges that once carried Confederate troops over it, but you read that Richmond (Powhatan) was the navigable limit of the James reached by Captain John Smith in 1608.

Go out to Hanover Tavern, half an hour away - Hanover for George I, by the way - and you read how in 1781, Lord Cornwallis and General Washington missed each other here by a matter of days, only to turn east a mile south of here and meet for the final showdown at Yorktown. Stuart rode around McClellan's forces stationed here at Hanover Courthouse in 1862.


In Richmond, capital of the old Confederacy, I also get a sense of having stepped into the other side of the great debate (to coin a phrase for the Civil War). Am I imagining it, or do I now really get a sense of what the South must feel, just from wandering around, adopting an awed attitude to DC (the monolith up the road), or from walking along Monument Ave, that grand thoroughfare, and seeing the statues erected to J.E.B. Stuart, Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis and Stonewall Jackson in the late 19th century?

It is hard to believe the South lost, or that these men were 'in rebellion', so highly are they honoured. And at first I thought it was sympathy for the underdog that had possessed me. 'He lost his life defending the South', read a headstone in Hollywood Cemetary, and I thought, 'That's it. You automatically admire those who are defending their land against the invader.' Except that, then I reminded myself that the South fired first. The strength and persuasiveness of this 'homage' says something about the power of the mere act of 'veneration'. You don't even have to agree with the honoree to be affected; the veil of romanticism has been created.

I kind of get it - States' Rights. If you think of the states as separate countries, it makes sense. No wonder so few Americans have passports - California, Maine, Louisiana, Wyoming... are sufficiently different to sustain interest. When Jefferson said, 'my country', he mostly meant 'Virginia'.

And this was the experiment in government the Virginians wanted to make - 'separate countries' loosely bound by a few, undeniable but limited, continental concerns. As a Virginian explained, to Virginians the federal government may only exercise the powers specifically delegated to it under the Constitution. (I haven't yet asked a Virginian why a Virginian, Washington, accepted Hamilton's definition of implied powers. And the John Marshall House was shut when we were there,

so I didn't get a chance to hear how the guides presented the longest-serving Chief Justice's work, which basically, in most of his judicial decisions, cemented a stronger union.) But the looser form of federalism is meant to work. Is it the case that it hasn't been allowed to? And is there a resentment that it was Virginia, so slighted, that produced four of the country's first five presidents? (In Fredericksburg, we saw James Monroe's 'town plot'.)

As I say, I kind of get it - States' Rights. 'So do I', said an African-American woman we met, 'but to me it means "Jim Crow".'

But yet, I liked Richmond. It has leafy, walkable suburbs, with cafes.

It has villages and cinemas. When we were here in 1996 the city seemed very run down, and yet there is renovation everywhere.

There is history galore.

Jefferson modelled this, the Capitol, on the Maison Carree. Here former vice president Aaron Burr was tried (by John Marshall) for treason. Here, Lee received his commission.

 Parts of it reminded me of Melbourne: Royal Parade...

or Sydney Road, Coburg or North Carlton. Perhaps it's not a superficial comparison. At first I put it down to the presence of a university. Find a nice village here in the States, and you're bound to find a university - Berkeley, San Luis Obispo, Princeton, Chapel Hill...But beyond that I put it down to old English ideals of town living - harmony, community...

Of course, as long as you weren't a slave. But visiting here has made me want to look deeper into this. What makes Richmond tick? And what is a true history? And now something else occurs to me. Jefferson, who owned property in slaves, specifically omitted 'property' when he copied George Mason's list of 'unalienable rights' into the Declaration.

Let's not forget they were farmers

Of course, the founding fathers were also - a lot of them - slaveowners, but I have always appreciated the fact that they understood harvests, tides, seasons, flowerings. Most were farmers.

I find it moving that there are still native trees on Mt Vernon that were planted by George Washington himself.

And I've always been touched by the passages in the founders' letters where they discuss farming and husbandry among affairs of state: a new crop rotation method, a new form of plough, Jefferson discussing the form of government in a letter to Washington and then informing his fellow Virginian that 'asparagus has just come to table' (out west, in the Piedmont).

The fact that the founders were farmers tells us a lot about the country they envisaged. They managed little fiefdoms. Washington was so traumatised (not too strong a word I would suggest) by the inability of the individual states to reliably finance the continental army during the Revolution that he urged a strong central government, but should we temper that knowledge by acknowledging also that they probably saw life on this broad continent as a series of little settlements?

And as for Jefferson's ideal of agrarian democracy (a piece of land for each man to work - as he scribbled on a piece of paper that is now in the Library of Congress), if people had actually achieved it, might we have continued to adhere closer to a remembrance of the natural world? On the other hand, could every individual in today's 300 million-strong population have 'a little farm to work'? And did Native Americans appreciate the idea that they should be taught agriculture in order to be able to work smaller plots of land, surrendering their vast domains for Europe's starving thousands?


We went out to Mt Vernon (Washington's home), and I sat on the porch.

In 1798 Washington wanted John Marshall (the future Secretary of State and future Chief Justice) to run for congress. Marshall was unenthusiastic; he had just begun his law practice. Washington worked on him at Mt Vernon for several days to no avail. On the final morning of Marshall's stay, he came to say goodbye to the general on this porch. Washington, who had a great sense of theatre, had put on his full dress uniform. It instantly said to Marshall, I could have stayed here in my favourite place on earth, but I have always put service of the nation first. It worked. Marshall ran for election.

The view you see from here today is essentially what Marshall and Washington would have seen.

The Maryland shore is virtually untouched. You can see it through the colonnade. The swamp oak in the foreground below dates from 1770.

According to one of the guides, in the 1950s, Maryland wanted to put an oil refinery opposite; it was Maryland, their land. But the Ladies Committee of Mt Vernon lobbied the federal government and the government acquired the land. Today it is a federal reserve. Because of that you can just about see what Washington and Marshall saw on the opposite bank for the entire turns of your heads. Just as well for tourists these days that the 1950s federal government took Washington's more continental view.

A European note

As an Australian who has worked in classical music, I have long been fascinated with the intersections of indigenous cultures with the European tradition. The meeting of German and Arrernte cultures at Hermannsburg in Central Australia is a case in point.

In North Carolina, I have been intrigued by Old Salem, just south of the Winston-Salem CBD in the Piedmont area.

The town was founded in the mid-1700s on land granted to followers of Jan Hus, who, several decades before Martin Luther tacked his petition to the door of a church, was burnt at the stake for rebelling against the Roman Catholic church. His followers, Moravians, had originally been offered sanctuary in Germany by a Count Zinzendorf. Hence, the people who turned up in America to take up land offered to them by Lord Granville, were German speakers. But what struck me as a familiar concordance was meeting the guy there at the Moravian Music Centre who has just finished co-editing the third volume (there will be four) of Records of the Moravians among the Cherokees. I dare say the Moravian missionaries could speak Cherokee, just as the German Lutheran missionaries at Ntaria (Hermannsburg) spoke Arrernte. As I say, this conjunction has a familiar ring to someone who has studied the history of Central Australia.


Even to this day, Old Salem, has a strong German flavour. The Moravians still own many of the buildings; there are plaques all over the place marking where people like Schober, Shultz, and Winkler once lived. (Very Meistersinger-ish, even the architecture in places).

Of course, I am always also in awe of people such as the Lutherans and Moravians who could live in remote places like this in those days. The green woods of North Carolina are seen as scenic and beautiful in these comfy air-conditioned and wi-fi days, but they would have been fearful wilderness then and Old Salem a cultivated patch hacked out of a new and alien world. I guess I must have a fascination with Europe off-centered.