Love's Obsession (13 page)

At nine in the morning and a week before Christmas, Jim Stewart strode along Manning Road toward the red brick buildings of Sydney University. Preoccupied with his precarious domestic situation, he bounded up the steps below the three-storey clock tower, scarcely noticing the elaborate turrets that erupted from the tower's roof. Sydney University was nearing its century and its Tudor Gothic architecture sat solidly out of place amongst the bustle of post-war mercantile Sydney. The buildings formed a square around a grassed quadrangle, itself dissected by cement paths. Jim turned left as he crossed the quadrangle and passed a group of students chatting in the shady stone colonnade. Outside, it was hot as a Cypriot summer.

He passed beneath the vaulted ceiling and turned right into the Nicholson Museum. The museum housed the largest collection of antiquities in Australia and had begun as a personal bequest from Sir Charles Nicholson—doctor, businessman, politician, collector and one of the founders of Sydney University. Jim and his sponsor Professor Dale Trendall planned to make the museum both a first-rate teaching museum and a vehicle for promoting the study of archaeology. It would be the centre of their empire. But would it serve?

Jim bent to inspect the dusty pots crammed into the wooden display cases and stepped around an Egyptian sarcophagus lying squarely in the middle of the room. In a back room he found more pottery—sherds and complete pots—and a peeling assortment of labels in varying stages of decomposition. One moth-eaten tag lay abandoned on a workbench: ‘10 pots from Amarna sent in 1920'.
25
Despondent, he sat in the cluttered museum office and wrote to Eve: ‘The Egyptian problem is quite overwhelming', he said. ‘I hate the muck and don't know much about it.
'
26
The bronzes from Iraq were ‘quite beyond repair, having been vilely treated first by Woolley during the Ur dig and not cared for at all since then'.
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How could he hope to transform the museum given its lack of staff and resources?

Jim had returned to Sydney to take up a position in the History Department at Sydney University and found an institution bursting at the seams. To assist with their transition to civilian life, the federal government had granted returned servicemen free entry to universities and at Sydney the student population exploded to nearly 10,000 as men rushed to seize the opportunity. This was the largest university in Australia, larger even than Cambridge or any major university in the United Kingdom. More graduates might mean more teachers and doctors for the booming post-war economy, but at least one professor moaned that administering his department had become increasingly like running a chain store.
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Like Trendall and many Australians in the 1940s, Jim believed that Australia had no cultural background of its own and must look to Europe to provide it. Almost as soon as he arrived, Jim joined Dale in a ‘begging campaign' to expand the Nicholson's collections.
29
Jim wrote to all and sundry, pleading for donations of pottery sherds or other artefacts to fill gaps in the collection and expand the museum's teaching capacity. Often they swapped objects. A.P. Elkin, Professor of Anthropology at the university, maintained a ‘bank' of Aboriginal flint tools, which were used as currency with overseas museums and archaeologists. Trendall explained the system to a journalist from the Sydney Telegraph: ‘I'll swop you seven nulla-nullas, three bark paintings, two corroboree records, an Arunta skull, and a didgeridoo for the shop-soiled mummy case, in good-condition.
'
30
This casual barter system easily came unstuck, as Jim explained in a memo to Trendall: ‘Owing to the stupidity of Australia House a set of gramophone records of aboriginal music destined for Madrid has gone to the Musée de l'Homme in Paris. I wonder if you could write to your friend in the Australian Embassy in Paris and ask him to negotiate an exchange of North African Stone Age material in return for these records.
'
31

More imaginative and unusual ways of funding the museum amused Jim. Dale, he explained to Eve, planned to profit from the black market connections he had made during the war, courtesy of his cryptographic work:

Unfortunately the Labour [
sic
] government has abolished giving knighthoods. Dale knows one person who would give us £100,000 with joy if he could get an honour to give a cloak of respectability to his wartime activities. Labour is about to nationalise the banks … and there are quite a few people who don't want the Commonwealth gov't to get a peep at the state of their bank balances. Dale hopes to cash in on that desire to reduce holdings in return for some recognition as University benefactors.
32

Jim had a further reason for urgently promoting the idea of an international museum.

Another war is coming, when nobody knows. In it Britain, Western Europe and the Mediterranean will be wrecked, utterly and completely. Even America and Canada will be severely damaged. We want to raise our standard of culture here to meet what will be (perhaps we are looking 50 years ahead, perhaps only 2), and we want a centre of research on which future generations can build—it could well be the only centre of archaeological research anywhere in the world. I want to lay down policies which will transcend personalities, and which will make the museum international. I want everyone to be able to come and work, and not be fettered by ‘rights' to material, and I want things so laid out that no personal twists can find play. In due course, if we get the museum, we shall ask other Museums to deposit material on loan, as a war insurance.
33

The Nicholson Museum, Jim and Trendall hoped, was to be much more than a simple collection of antiquities from the great European civilisations, with the Cypriot collection as its centrepiece. Just as he saw the museum acting as a cultural repository in the event of war and destruction in Europe, or planned an archaeological survey of Cyprus to meet political ends, he understood the educational role the museum might play within the university and the broader community of Sydney. He wanted the department and the museum to develop a symbiotic relationship, each contributing to the other in ways that would make the museum ‘a living organism rather than an antiquarian collection'.
34
It would certainly not be an art museum. The Friends of the Nicholson Museum, a student Archaeological Society, and the appointment of a school liaison officer formed a part of this strategy. The museum would become a place that lived, that welcomed school students and the general public and provided space for undergraduates to work.

Jim argued repeatedly with university administrators that archaeology, unlike other arts subjects, should be treated as a science; like a science, it needed laboratories in which to work. Storage space at the Nicholson was hopelessly inadequate and students had limited space for research (though, perhaps because of these very deficiencies they loved the informality of the museum and the romance of eating their lunch sitting on an Egyptian sarcophagus).
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Security was slack—in the study period before end of year exams, the door to the museum was simply left ‘on the latch' to allow students to work inside.

In Cyprus, Eve haggled with authorities over export permits for the antiquities purchased for the Nicholson. Both Jim and Dale were aware of changing moods in the Near East and understood they must move fast to get what they wanted. Post-war nationalist voices cried out against pre-war colonialism and called for bans on the export of national antiquities. Arne Furumark, who Jim had met in Sweden, wrote of the difficulties he faced on Cyprus, difficulties he was convinced were fuelled by resentment at the amount of material removed from the country by the Swedish Cyprus Expedition, even though at the time it was done legally. When an old friend from Turkey, Hamit Koşay, sent four large boxes of sherds to the Nicholson, Jim worried they might presage an imminent change in the Turkish Archaeological Law.
36

He stressed that Eve make sure pots sent from Cyprus were marked ‘of NO commercial value' so as to avoid close inspection,
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although at the same time he claimed to have contacts in the Roman Catholic Church that could ‘square customs'.
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Eve was uneasy with Jim's instructions and said so.
39
One of her purchases met with difficulties when Porphyrios Dikaios refused the necessary export permit. She apologised for her lack of diplomacy but told Jim that ‘he just kept saying he was doing his duty not letting anything he hadn't duplicates of out of Cyprus'.
40
When Peter Megaw returned from leave to find a high-handed letter from Sydney's Vice-Chancellor complaining that Dikaios had treated the university unfairly, Megaw wrote in fury to Jim, warning it would be a ‘nasty letter':

I should have you know that the scale of your purchases from the local market is embarrassing as we are bound in controlling the licensed dealers to have in view their connection between their trade and clandestine excavations … the point has been reached where your purchases must be regarded as a potential inducement to them.
41

The university withdrew its complaint.

Eve gently reminded Jim that his friends in Cyprus were helping and he should not take their help for granted. Petro Colocassides was still waiting for a reply to his letters; would he write to thank their friend Judith Stylianou for her work? ‘A nice, loving letter would be more helpful at this juncture', she wrote. ‘I'm just dead, and not in a fit state to haggle and argue.
'
42

Dale Trendall had negotiated with Walter Beasley in Melbourne over the terms of Jim's employment and almost as soon as Jim arrived, the arrangement struck trouble. Beasley had agreed to fund archaeological work in Cyprus in exchange for a share of the finds, but the Australian Cyprus Expedition was destined never to live up to its grand name.

Walter Beasley's Australian Institute of Archaeology was established to promote biblical archaeology and its overt aim was to use archaeology to authenticate biblical events. Archaeology was Beasley's means, but the end was not what Jim had foreseen. When he visited Beasley in Melbourne, Jim declared himself shocked at the cavalier way Beasley had dealt with the Vounous material he had received in exchange for partially funding Jim's excavations. In particular Jim complained that Beasley had split up material from the same tomb group, severing the connection between objects from the same context. Later Jim complained about the religious clauses in the institute's constitution, although previously he had no compunction about accepting Beasley's money.

Sydney University worried that the Department of Antiquities in Cyprus would make demands the institute could not fulfil and Jim quite rightly insisted that all excavated material must be treated scientifically—tomb groups kept together and objects properly curated. Jim's appointment was intended to provide Beasley's institute with precisely the professional expertise it lacked, but he seemed unwilling to give it. Dozens of letters about the institute's constitution flew between Sydney and Melbourne and serious discussions took place about creating a new institute with fewer religious clauses and conditions. In the meantime Jim alerted Winifred Lamb in Cambridge and Richard Barrett from the British Museum, warning them against Beasley's institute and its religious affiliations. Both were members of the British Institute at Ankara Committee and, grateful for his advice, promptly severed connections with the Australian Institute of Archaeology, thus directly affecting funding for work in Jordan. Beasley guessed at Jim's interference and became convinced that he was milking the institute while failing to fulfil his half of the agreement, that is, to provide technical support to the institute. Beasley knew and liked Eleanor and his religious sensitivities were undoubtedly shaken by Jim's own cavalier attitude to his family responsibilities and to other people's money.

Finance was a serious problem. From the start, the Professor of History, A.H. McDonald, worried about the scope of Jim's grand proposals. Why, he queried, did Jim need to excavate Medieval sites? What time would he have to devote to the university's museum? Beasley had promised £2000 toward the proposed expedition but Jim estimated that three years work would cost £11,558,43 equivalent at the time to twenty-three times the annual salary of a university lecturer. Where could this money possibly come from? Jim's elaborate lists and costings for the Australian Cyprus Expedition were all padded and in the end his tendency to exaggeration served him badly. He told the university that the Department of Antiquities in Cyprus had not only given permission to excavate but had made promises of in-kind support amounting to £6000 sterling. What he failed to mention was that these promises were all notional and that none of the work had begun nor would until the project eventuated.
44

In Cyprus, Megaw continued to back the proposed Australian Cyprus Expedition, but his doubts about its viability intensified and he was irritated by the way Jim pressed his case. As he had done when trying to get passage for Eve, Jim ignored official channels, convinced that personal political contacts would get quicker results. He cut corners. He wrote directly to the Colonial authorities rather than to the Archaeological Joint Committee. When the Colonial Office sought advice from the committee, the Director of the British Museum wryly observed that Jim Stewart was in effect asking the Cyprus Government to mount an excavation, only to then give Stewart both the management of and credit for it.
45

Together with the Vice-Chancellor and Professor McDonald, Jim and Dale worked the big end of town, hosting dinners and soliciting financial support from the business world. People expressed interest, but little actual money trickled in.

In the meantime Walter Beasley's letters grew more exasperated. As the project seemed increasingly doomed to fail, he lost patience with both Stewart and Trendall. He had paid part of Jim's salary, provided money for Eve's passage, money to transport Jim's personal library to Australia, money for a truck in Cyprus and would later give money to help to outfit Jim's Bathurst property at Mount Pleasant. Beasley was a businessman and this venture was not showing any potential return. While he retained his enthusiasm for archaeology and his reverence for archaeologists, he lost faith in Jim Stewart and Sydney University altogether.