Royal Historical Society of Victoria

Tales from the MacRobertson International Air Races
2021-03-12 - 2022-03-17 | RHSV, Gallery Downstairs, 239 A'Beckett Street, Melbourne, VIC, 3000, Australia
To celebrate Victoria’s centenary in 1934, Macpherson Robertson sponsored a great air race from England to Melbourne. There were originally 20 entrants of which only 12 arrived in Melbourne. The British winning entrants took a whisker under 3 days, the last plane to arrive took some 4 months.
The Royal Historical Society of Victoria is mounting an exhibition which takes a close look at the entrants in the races (there were two races run concurrently – a speed race and a handicap race) including the Dutch entrant, the Uiver. The Uiver (stork) is the most famous of the entries even though it came second. It was forced by bad weather to make an emergency landing in Albury where the locals used the town’s lights to spell A L B U R Y in morse code and then created a make-shift aerodrome on the racetrack using car headlights to con the plane down. Macpherson Robertson always maintained that the Uiver, a commercial KLM flight that went to Batavia in the Dutch East Indies with a little extra hop to Australia, came closest to his ideal as Robertson sponsored the race to encourage commercial flight not speed.
The first aircraft to finish was the De Havilland DH-88 Comet Grosvenor House, a specially- designed racing aircraft flown by Charles W. A. Scott and Tom Campbell Black. Both pilots were much feted in Melbourne. Photos show a handsome pair being mobbed by thousands. The adulation didn’t last, Campbell Black was killed by a plane propeller just 2 years later and Scott suicided.
Harold Brook was the pilot with the least experience – barely the minimum 100 hours. He had a paying passenger, the 28-year old Miss Ella Lay, who knitted her way to Australia. She was a pilot herself and the only woman to travel the full race distance from Mildenhall in England to Melbourne. Ella stayed on in Melbourne, took up nursing, and in 1941 enlisted in the Australian Army Nursing Service in the very building where the exhibition is being held (the former Army Medical Corps Drill Hall). Ella died in 2005, aged 99. The Times printed her obituary.
The race generated many more fabulous stories including C. J. “Jimmy” Melrose who at 21 was the youngest pilot and one of the few Australians. Jimmy was funded by his mother and his De Havilland Puss Moth was christened My Hildergarde in her honour. He too died, too young, just two years later in a plane crash.
The last plane to arrive was piloted by Ray Parer and Godfrey Hemsworth and funded by New Guinea miners. Another entry was owned by well-known Australian pioneer aviator Horrie Miller who at the time was managing director of MacRobertson-Miller Aviation. He engaged James Wood and Don Bennett to fly the race however they came unstuck in Aleppo. As Bennett wrote in his autobiography, they “… hit the ground with a fair wallop and the undercarriage collapsed; down she went and the nose went in as we whipped over on our back. I was in the tail of the machine and my velocity from one end of the cabin to the other was remarkable. Even more astounding was the degree of “concertina-ing” of my body which took place at the far end.” That was the end of their race.

Bory Latour-Marliac – the source of water lilies before and beyond Monet
2021-07-07 18:00 - 20:30 (Australia/Melbourne) | ZOOM, Join from anywhere in the world
Long before Mendel’s work was known, Bory Latour-Marliac (1830-1911) engineered daring water lily couplings with consummate skill, meticulous care and acute observation. His previously unrecorded letters reveal a horticultural world wide web into which he launched his finest hardy hybrids. From the outset he corresponded with Japan, South-East Asia and the United States. The earliest international recognition of his hybrids came in the form of a gold medal at the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris attended by millions including Monet. Monet had moved to Giverny in 1883, his first order to Latour-Marliac in 1894 for a range of water and bog plants included lotus and water lilies. It could be argued that the plants from Latour-Marliac’s nursery were the genesis of Monet’s creation of a unique water landscape, now much imitated and copied – how many ‘Monet’s Garden’ installations have you seen? Caroline Holmes will use this presentation to navigate primary sources and delve the depths in an exploration of the history, science, networking and sheer pleasure of Latour-Marliac. The good news is that like Monet’s garden, the Latour-Marliac nursery thrives today. This presentation includes immersion in Monet’s monumental water lily panels at Paris’s Musée de l’Orangerie painted and donated by him to reflect on and commemorate the appalling loss of life during World War One. Today we can follow in the footsteps of both Monet and Latour-Marliac taking their visitors to their respective ponds in Giverny and Le Temple-sur-Lot to admire and discuss their blooms.
Date: Wednesday July 7th
Time: 6pm
Venue: Online
Price: $12 AGHS & Friends RBGV members, $15 non-members
Trybooking link – https://www.trybooking.com/BQWPH
Booking note: If you choose to attend online a Zoom link will be sent to you separately after bookings close
Caroline Holmes is a Garden Historian, author of 12 books including ‘Monet at Giverny’ and ‘Impressionists in their Gardens’. She was keynote speaker at the International Water Gardens Conference held at Giverny in 2019. Course Director for University of Cambridge ICE, accredited lecturer for The Arts Society and has spoken on every continent except Antarctica. Her design consultancies range from Human Renaissance gardens surrounding Notre Dame-de-Calais to devising the planting for The Poison Garden within The Alnwick Garden in Northumberland. Academic but not dry, she likes to sift the humour from the humus. www.horti-history.com

History of the Spencer Street Bridge
2021-07-08 17:30 - 19:00 | RHSV, Gallery Downstairs, 239 A'Beckett Street, Melbourne, VIC, 3000, Australia
History of the Spencer Street Bridge
Have you ever noticed the Spencer Street Bridge? Arguably nondescript, this dependable 1930 structure has a backstory of political infighting, pioneering technology and an unexpected obstacle pre-dating the bridge by several millennia. City of Melbourne local history librarian Fiona Campbell will lead a visual journey through the design, construction and significance of this enduring bridge.
We are delighted to partner again with Engineering Heritage Victoria to present this talk by Fiona Campbell, Local History Librarian at East Melbourne Library and bridge enthusiast.
Fiona graduated from Monash University with a Bachelor of Arts in 1994. Majoring in French and English literature, she also studied visual arts, Australian architecture and linguistics. From 1995 she studied horticulture at Burnley College (University of Melbourne) while working in retail nurseries and discovering an enduring interest in botany.
Led by an innate love of libraries and information, in 2002 Fiona undertook the Diploma of Library and Information Services at Swinburne University of Technology, which happily landed her in public library employment from 2003. She secured her current position of Reader Services and Local History Librarian at East Melbourne Library in 2007, and obtained the Graduate Diploma in Information Management with Distinction at RMIT in 2009. Specialising in local history has enabled Fiona to develop her inner history detective. Her work includes management of archival collections, responding to local history enquiries, events programming and resource training. She works to increase cultural and heritage awareness in the community by inspiring interest in our local stories and promoting the wealth of freely available resources.
Since 2018 she has been preoccupied with researching the history and construction of the Spencer Street Bridge and she is currently working on a book about the history of the bridge which she hopes to have published in 2021.
Refreshments from 5:30pm – 6pm
Lecture 6pm – 7pm
Photo caption: Spencer Street Bridge in 1930 (State Library of Victoria)

Searching for a Hero - an Ancestral Journey
2021-07-11 14:00 - 16:00 | Ellis Cottage, 10 Nillumbik Square, Diamond Creek, VIC, 3089, Australia
Searching for a Hero – an Ancestral Journey
An online enquiry from overseas, through Ancestry, leads to an incredible voyage of discovery, not only via online, but through exploration and travel to unexpected and distant places.
A talk by Jan Bailey (BA Hons Archaeology University of Melbourne, Grad Dip Ed La Trobe University)
$10 per person with homemade afternoon tea
Venue: Ellis Cottage Barn
RSVP 4th July to elliscottage@gmail.com
