Australian space icon: Mr Squiggle, the Man from the Moon

The impact of the Space Age was not just in science and technology - it was also in popular and everyday culture. If you were a kid growing up in Australia from the 1960s until the the 1990s, you would have been familiar with a children's television icon: Mr Squiggle, the Man from the Moon. Mr Squiggle is a huge part of Australian television history, but I'm more interested in what the programme says about how space travel was perceived in the 1960s and after.

Squiggle basics

This is Mr Squiggle's theme tune:

Here's Mr Squiggle
With lots of fun for everyone
Here's Mr Squiggle, sing a happy tune
You can see we're as happy as can be
Mr Squiggle, the man from the Moon.

Mr Squiggle was the brainchild of political cartoonist and puppeteer Norman Hetherington. The pencil-nosed puppet's television debut was in 1959. At first Mr Squiggle was part of a six week stint on the Children's TV Club on the ABC, but soon gained his own stand-alone programme. Margaret, who married Norman in 1958, wrote the scripts for the show while Norman performed all the character voices. (Note that while Norman has his own Wikipedia page, Margaret doesn't).

Children would send in their 'squiggles', and Mr Squiggle used his pencil nose to make them into pictures, accompanied by a female sidekick. Other characters included Bill Steamshovel, Gus the snail, Merv Wallop and his nephew Wayne, Reg Linchpin, Doormat, the grumpy Rocket and a talking Blackboard.

Mr Squiggle lived at 93 Crater Crescent on the Moon and travelled to Earth every week in his rocket or by going for a 'space-walk'. He could also break out into gravity-defying 'space-walks' spontaneously in the middle of shows. Sometimes, if Rocket was very grumpy, Mr Squiggle would use an umbrella for the descent. 

The action takes place in a very ordinary, regular backyard, with gum trees, in the fictional location of Bandywallop. (The Collins dictionary defines Bandywallop as 'Australian informal: noun. An imaginary town, far from civilization'). There's a rainwater tank where Bill Steamshovel hangs out, and old, weathered yards surrounded by bush. I guess part of the appeal of Mr Squiggle, as we got so much US and UK children's television, was that it was set in Australia with Australian accents and culture. 

Mr Squiggle's female sidekicks were:

Miss Gina (Curtis) (1959-1960),
Miss Pat (Lovell) (1960-1975),
Miss Sue (Lloyd) (1975),
Miss Jane (Fennell) (1975-1986),
Roxanne (Kimmorley) (1986- 1989).
Rebecca (Hetherington) (1989-1999)

Notice a change? Somewhere in Miss Jane's tenure, those pesky feminists [sarcasm font] got in the ABC's ear about the sexism of the female titles, which classify women according to age, marriageability, and ownership by a man.  'A few years ago, the ABC told us to start using Ms instead of Miss,' Norman said in a news interview. 'But Ms Pat doesn't have quite the same ring to it, does it? It sounds like it's short for miserable. So since 1986 we've simply had Roxanne and now Rebecca.'

Miss Pat is the one I remember most. She was played by Patricia Lovell, who went on to become an influential movie producer (eg Picnic at Hanging Rock, Gallipoli).

Miss Pat helps Mr Squiggle out of his rocket

The science fiction writer Terry Dowling was a resident guest on Mr Squiggle, from 1979 to 1982. He wrote songs and performed them on the programme with his guitar.  Comedian and radio personality Mikey Robins played Reg Linchpin for a year in 1989-1990. The programme ended in 1999. 

Two books were spin-offs from the series. Margaret Hetherington wrote them, and Norman did the illustrations. They were Mr Squiggle and the Great Moon Robbery (1980) and Mr Squiggle and the Preposterous Purple Crocodile (1992). There was also a colouring book in 1989 - Mr Squiggle and His Rocket Activity Book. 

Mr Squiggle won Penguin awards in 1984 and 1989. He was the guest of honour at two science fiction conventions, and been part of two exhibitions at the Performing Arts Museum in Melbourne. The Mosman Art Gallery, in the suburb where Margaret and Norman lived, had an exhibition called Mr Squiggle: Who's Pulling the Strings? in 2005. In February 2019, the Royal Australian Mint, in collaboration with supermarket chain Woolworths, issued a special release of Mr Squiggle $2 coins to commemorate the puppet's 60th anniversary. They also held an exhibition to go with the launch.

I was living in Sydney when Mr Squiggle was on his 30th anniversary tour. I was determined to go. Me and my friends (who were mostly colleagues from the icecream shop where I worked part-time) were the only unaccompanied adults there!

Squiggle space

Space wasn't really the point of Mr Squiggle - after all, most of the action took place on Earth, in the bush setting of Bandywallop. Space was more the backdrop. All the same, it's an indication how deeply entangled space became with everyday life in the 1960s. Mr Squiggle was launched only two years after the first satellite reached orbit, Sputnik 1 in 1957. Many people were talking about lunar exploration being just round the corner, and indeed, in 1959, the USSR has a major success with the Luna 2 probe becoming the first human object to land on the Moon (or crash land, at any rate). In the meantime, the UK and Australia had already launched the first rockets from the Woomera launch range in South Australia.

In the opening sequence of the show, you didn't see Mr Squiggle's home on the Moon, at 93 Crater Crescent - just his rocket descending through the atmosphere. It was a ratty old rocket which had been patched up. Mr Squiggle was sealed inside as if it were a coffin; his tall pointed hat peeked through the nose cone and his pencil nose had a porthole allowing it to poke out too. While it's grey in the animation, the puppet rocket was a lovely shiny silver on set.

Still from the animated opening sequence

Rocket didn't speak, but conveyed his feelings through his whistle (which you can see on the side) and a blower of the kind you have at children's parties. Rocket's whistle calls resembled birds you might hear in the bush.

Children really believed that Mr Squiggle lived on the Moon - and, apparently, that Australia Post delivered there. The Mosman Art Gallery's exhibition, Mr Squiggle: who's pulling the strings?, showed an envelope addressed in a child's hand to 'Mr Squiggle, The Moon'.

Children have always had a special relationship with the Moon. A turn-of-the-century study looked at the feelings and beliefs of North American white children. Many felt the Moon to be very close, and they looked on it as a confidante who would keep their secrets. Many of them talked to the Moon or to the man/woman in the Moon. It was part of their universe in an intimate way. (You can find out more in my recent book).

It's interesting that we never see the Moon in the programme. Mr Squiggle is not the only inhabitant; after all, he has a suburban street address. Occasionally he would mention different activities such as cultural festivals (eg Settler's Week!) taking place there. There may have been a reason behind this. With so much lunar science going on, perhaps it was safer to avoid being locked into one vision of it. Perhaps it was preferable to leave the Moon in the children's imagination, as fluid and creative as their squiggles.

We might also ask what kind of being lives on the Moon. In Margaret and Norman Hetherington's vision, Mr Squiggle had particular characteristics. As Richard Bradshaw (2010) described it, he was imbued with 'the qualities of a blessed child: kindness, vulnerability and resourcefulness'. He was happy to ask Miss Pat or Miss Jane to hold his hand while he drew. The gentle Mr Squiggle was a contrast to the sinister space of Cold War politics and the shadowy aliens with their elusive UFOs.

Mr Squiggle was never presented as an alien. To the contrary: as Norman's friend, the cartoonist Steve Panozzo, remarked, Margaret and Norman 'even went to a science fiction convention as special guests because Mr Squiggle is considered Australia's first astronaut.' If Squiggle was the first astronaut, then the Bandywallop back yard was Australia's second rocket launch site, as Woomera had been operating for a decade already when Squiggle made his television debut.

Squiggle space vs real space

Rocket was very different to the sleek rockets colonising playgrounds in this period (Gorman 2017). The trend in the US to build metal rockets as climbing apparatus for children was brought to Australia in the 1960s and 'took off', so to speak. One of my favourite playground rockets is in Ulverstone, Tasmania (home of Tastrofest). This geocaching location has reconfigured the Ulverstone rocket as Mr Squiggle's back-up. I don't know how common this connection was, but at least one person made it.

Mr Squiggle's ramshackle rocket was also a contrast to the hi-tech missiles, sounding rockets and satellite launchers that made Woomera one of the busiest launch sites in the world throughout the 1960s. There was much overlap and category confusion between weapons and space rockets; my colleague Fraser MacDonald has argued that children's toy rockets do something similar in confusing the categories, a way of dulling the sinister aspects of this technology, inculcating them into a set of values.

Unlike the Cold War missiles of the time, Rocket was quirky and mostly harmless. 

While it doesn't emerge in the show, Norman and Margaret were certainly aware of the Space Age events unfolding around them. Norman drew a map showing Rocket travelling from the Moon to Earth and back again. In a 1989 interview by Melissa Jones in the Australian Women's Weekly, Norman said 'Did you know he has clocked up more interplanetary travel, with his backwards and forwards, than the American and the Russians together?'

The Apollo astronauts did not encounter Mr Squiggle's lunar suburb, but Mr Squiggle certainly noticed what they were doing to his habitat. According to Jones (1989), he was extremely concerned by the litter the astronauts left behind. Squiggle was an early space environmentalist. In an interview with journalist Clive Robertson on television that year, he alluded to the problem of space junk:

Mr Squiggle: 'Do you know, the traffic problems up there are something terrible.'
Robertson: 'What, the satellites, you mean?'.
Mr Squiggle: 'That's it! You never know who you're going to bump into. And they have parking meteors everywhere, and then there's the Milky Way - there's so much traffic it's turning sour!'

This was quite prescient - now there is a field called Space Traffic Management which is devoted to figuring out how to safely co-ordinate satellite launches and operations among the growing population of junk created from defunct and exploded spacecraft. This small exchange indicates that awareness about environmental issues in space were starting to seep into popular consciousness.

More than one character had a space connection. Talking and having attitude weren't the only characteristics which made Gus the Snail unusual: he also didn't have a shell. In the early shows, he had a television on his back in a nice meta sort of way. This was replaced with a flowerpot in later years.  But the idea that Gus had the capacity to pick up radio signals remained. He had a satellite dish and his own satellite, which could be used to communicate with Mr Squiggle on the Moon. The satellite dish looked like a colander painted silver with some knobs on it: more improvised, domestic-scale space technology.

The Australian space conundrum

Mr Squiggle is very typical of a theme I've noted in how Australians conceive space - as a backyard activity (Gorman 2011). It's low key, low scale. Although Australia was the third nation in the world to launch a satellite from within its own national borders, this achievement has never really been celebrated. In general Australians have been content to boast about collaboration with the US, particularly in the Apollo missions. Honeysuckle Creek tracking station and the Parkes radiotelescope were key facilities in all the Apollo landings from 1969 to 1972.  Their roles are conflated in the very popular film The Dish (2000). The dramatic re-entry of Skylab in 1979 is fondly remembered by Aussies, and celebrated in Western Australia - but few people know about the amateur Australis Oscar 5 satellite launched in 1970 (celebrating its 50th anniversary this year), or the second Australian scientific satellite, FedSat 1, launched in 2002. Until 2018, Australia didn't even have a space agency. The way I see it, there's something that makes us uneasy about high technology.

I guess what I find interesting about Mr Squiggle is that this theme of backyard space is already in place in 1959, and it never develops further. Squiggle doesn't get a bigger and better rocket. Miss Pat doesn't make a trip to the Moon. Events in Australian space aren't incorporated into the show, in the way that they were for US Sitcom I Dream of Jeannie (also very popular on Australian television). I don't want to speculate too much about cause and effect; but Mr Squiggle is an exemplar of this uneasy relationship: a reluctance to leave the bush behind. High technology is translated into something gentle and safe. Perhaps this is a form of risk aversion.

I'm not saying Australians were not interested in space - far from it. In the 1950s, there were speculations about commercial spaceports at Woomera and post delivered by rockets. People flocked to see full-scale models of Russian spacecraft at the Sydney Trade Fair of 1961. Children dreamed of being astronauts, and so did the grown-ups. Newspapers reported on scientific advances and space events all round the world. And every night, from the 1959 to 1999, Mr Squiggle brought a little bit of the Moon to Australian living rooms. Space was associated with humour, not a political existential crisis such as the US faced. Maybe Aussies were too complacent. I don't know. I've been tugging at this thread for a while now, trying to understand how Australia understood itself as a space identity.

But it's always possible that Squiggle would have rejoiced in recent developments, such as the establishment of the Australian Space Agency in 2018. He might have upped sticks from the safe old Moon and moved further afield too. 'If he [Norman] was doing it [Mr Squiggle] now, he’d go to Pluto or Mars,' Rebecca Hetherington told a reporter in 2016.

If Mr Squiggle made the bush backyard into a space scenario, he also followed Australian bush traditions in his residence at 93 Crater Crescent. I think his statement to Roxanne (1987) captures something very charming about life in our little neck of the solar system:

'That's one of the nice things about the Moon. It's always afternoon tea time'.

Fun Squiggle stories

In 1993, the musician Prince changed his name to a symbol. Some called him Mr Squiggle. Richard Wilkins relates an interview he did with Prince in 2003:

'What about when you changed your name? That was all a bit weird. What was that all about?' 'I was both having fun and at war with the record label. They said to me, "Prince is contracted to us. You can't change your name and just be somebody else". They owned me. That's when I came up with the symbol thing'. 'We used to call you Mr Squiggle', I told him. 'That's funny', he said generously and half-heartedly. He probably didn't get the connection, since Mr Squiggle was only on TV in Australia'.

In 2009, opposition politician Christopher Pyne used 'Mr Squiggle' to insult Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. The Prime Minister wasn't phased and commented: 'Many of us on this side of the House would always stand up for the integrity of Miss Pat and the entire crew out there on Mr Squiggle'.

PS: sorry about the weird font changes, I couldn't fix it!

References

Bradshaw, Richard 2010 Eulogy for Norman Hetherington 1921 - 2010. OPEN: Oz Puppetry Email Newsletter Issue 11

Gorman, A.C. 2018 Gravity's playground: dreams of spaceflight and the rocket park in Australian culture. In Darran Jordan and Rocco Bosco, ed. Defining the Fringe of Contemporary Australian Archaeology. Pyramidiots, Paranoia and the Paranormal. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, pp. 92-107.

Gorman, A.C. 2011 The sky is falling: how Skylab became an Australian icon. Journal of Australian Studies 35(4):529-546

Jones, Melissa 1989 Mr Squiggle chalks up 30 years. The Australian Women's Weekly p 65 (reproduced at http://members.optusnet.com.au/kringunny/squiggle.htm)

Solman, Peter 2010 Norman Hetherington Remembered. A personal recollection by Peter Soloman. OPEN: Oz Puppetry Email Newsletter Issue 11

Wilkins, Richard 2011 Black Ties, Red Carpets, Green Rooms. Chatswood: New Holland

Wilson, Peter J. and Geoffrey Milne 2004 The Space Between: The Art of Puppetry and Visual Theatre in Australia. Sydney: Currency Press

Cold War material culture: the script of Ice Station Zebra

A random thought today sent me in search of the screenplay of the 1968 classic film Ice Station Zebra. Years ago it did not exist on the internet, and I couldn't find it now either, not even on the American Film Scripts Online database - but I did come across this image of the actual script on a bookseller's website.

Image courtesy of Royal Books
http://www.royalbooks.com/

The script is described thus:

Revised draft script for the 1968 film. Copy belonging to an uncredited crew member, with notations in holograph pencil on the versos of pages throughout, mostly numeric notations, with a few pages noting on-the-set supplies, and some personal notations. 

Goldenrod studio wrappers, rubber-stamped copy No. 170, dated June 14, 1967, with credits for director Sturges, producer Martin Ransohoff, and writer Douglas Heyes. 189 leaves, with last leaf of text numbered 203. Mimeograph, dated variously between 4/28//67 and 6/30/67, with blue and gray revision pages throughout, dated variously between 6/27/67 and 7/3/67. Pages Very Good plus, wrapper Near Fine, bound with two gold brads.

Just incidentally, the script will set you back $1750.00 USD.  I was momentarily tempted, I have to confess.

Cold War, colonialism, and the meaning of space hardware.

Spacecraft are more than utilitarian objects that further industrial, environmental or military objectives. They can also be regarded as artefacts, the material record of a particular phase in human social and technological development. On Earth, the preservation of material culture is considered important at a number of different levels: because it tells a story that is different to that presented in written documents, because it supplements written history, because material culture is the repository of people’s memories, ideas, and attachments. Material culture both shapes the world and is shaped by it:

....the things which constitute our world, which direct its functions, in turn influence our most basic cultural assumptions. A society which has access to jet engines, fast cars, and an international mass media based on television, fax machines and the information super-highway views the world entirely differently from a society dependent on the bullock dray and sea mail. (Anderson 1997).

That people see the material culture of space exploration as important is demonstrated by the popularity of museums such as the National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC. More people visit NASM than any other Smithsonian Institution. They don't go to see photographs of space, or to read interpretations of space history on storyboards. Words are not unique, and they are cheap. So why are visitors drawn in such staggering numbers to this museum?

Because the NASM has on display a Gemini capsule, a section of Skylab, and an astronaut's complete moon-walking suit....it's the artifacts, stupid. (Smith 2004)

Skylab module in NASM.
Image courtesy of http://whizzospace.com/

At the Tidbinbilla Deep Space Communication Complex near Canberra, around 70 000 people each year come to the Visitor Centre to see a piece of the Moon and items of flown space hardware. The material culture of space exploration captures something that no written word can convey, and an object that has flown in space is perceived as more charged with meaning than a model, prototype or unflown spacecraft.

The material culture of space exploration is clearly seen as significant. However, its significance is often assumed to be self-evident. A well-used aphorism in the space community maintains that space exploration is the outcome of an innate human urge to explore. Thus, space objects are perceived to have a globally understood meaning that appeals to our common human nature (Gorman 2005). Just as the great navigators and explorers ventured out into unknown seas to discover the New World, so we have now left the cradle of Earth to satisfy a fundamental curiosity about our universe. This curiosity is one of the most commonly cited rationales for pursuing space exploration, far more palatable than the realpolitik of military and commercial dominance.

Another implicit and popular model for understanding the significance of space material culture is what I have called the Space Race model (Gorman 2005). In this formulation, objects and places have significance for their contribution to the Cold War confrontation between the USA and the USSR. This model focuses on these two states, ignoring the achievements of other countries like France, Britain, China, Japan and Australia in the development of space technology. It emphasises competitiveness rather than cooperation in space, and overlooks the contributions of and impacts on non-spacefaring countries, such as the colonial territories where potentially dangerous space installations were located. The relationship of space exploration to inequalities between the developed and developing world is unexplored, and indeed unproblematic, in the Space Race scenario, where US hegemony in space is assumed to benefit all.

The significance space artefacts might hold, therefore, is far from obvious.

Note: This is an excerpt from Gorman, A.C. 2005 The Archaeology of Orbital Space.

In Australian Space Science Conference 2005; pages: [338-357]. Melbourne: RMIT University

References

Anderson, M. 1997 Material culture and the cultural environment: Objects and places. Australia: State of the Environment Technical Paper Series (Natural and Cultural Heritage), Department of the Environment, Sport and Territories, Canberra

Gorman, A.C. 2005 The cultural landscape of interplanetary space.  Journal of Social Archaeology 5(1):85-107

Smith, Bill 2004 It’s the artifacts, stupid! Guest Editorial. The Mineralogical Record 35(2):106-107

 

October Sky: celebrate the launch of Sputnik 1 and World Space Week!

Sumen Rai made this awesome poster!

The giraffe on the Moon: Peter Cook and Britain's Cold War space programme

The comedian/satirist Peter Cook (1937-1995) made numerous references to Britain's Cold War space programme, some of which appear in an anthology of his work (Cook 2003).

The grasshopper is an interesting creature. It has a disproportionate leaping ability. It's the powerful hind legs that cause it. You can see them hopping over grassy terrain. That's why it's called a grasshopper. But it is its leaping ability that interests me. Do you know that if the giraffe had the same leaping ability, pound for pound, he'd be able to jump onto the moon and Britain would be the first in the space race? (Interesting Facts, from Pop Goes Mrs Jessop, Cambridge Arts Theatre, 1960)

Since 1946, Britain had been involved in a joint missile/space programme in partnership with Australia, based at the Woomera rocket range in South Australia. In the 1960s both nations were involved in the European Launcher Development Organisation (ELDO), aimed at putting a European satellite in orbit. By this time, however, only a few years after the launch of Sputnik 1 in 1957, it was becoming clear that Britain was probably not going to be a major player in space exploration. Hence Cook's gentle dig at Britain's technological capabilities ......

This one is from a parody of then Prime Minister Harold Macmillan (apparently quite shocking at the time as no-one had satirised a Prime Minister before!):

I then went on to America , and there I had talks with the young, vigorous President of that great country, and danced with his very lovely lady wife. We talked of many things, including Great Britain's position in the world as some of honest broker. I agreed with him when he said that no nation could be more honest, and he agreed with me when I chaffed him and said no nation could be broker. This type of genial, statesmanlike banter often went late into the night. Our talks ranged over a wide variety of subjects, including that of the Skybolt Missile programme. And after a good deal of good-natured give and take I decided on behalf of Great Britain to accept Polaris in place of the Skybolt. This is a good solution because, as far as I can see, the Polaris starts where the Skybolt left off - in the sea.

I was privileged to see some actual photographs of this weapon. The President was kind enough to show me actual photographs of this missile, beautiful photographs taken by Karsh of Ottawa. A very handsome weapon - we shall be very proud to have them. The photographs, that is. We don't get the missile until around 1970. In the meantime, we shall just have to keep our fingers crossed, sit very quietly, and try not to alienate anyone. This is not to say that we do not have our own nuclear striking force. We do. We have the Blue Steel, a very effective missile, as it has a range of 150 miles, which means we can just about get Paris. And by God we will.

(TVPM, John Golden Theatre, New York 1962)

The US president was, of course, John F. Kennedy. In 1962, he and Macmillan met in the Bahamas and as part of the Nassau agreement the UK agreed to replace the US's cancelled Skybolt missiles with Polaris missiles. Britain of course had cancelled its own intermediate range ballistic missile, the Blue Streak, in order to buy US products. Blue Steel was one of many missiles tested at Woomera. (And now, of course, it's better known as a "look" by model Derek Zoolander).

References
Cook, William (ed) 2003 Tragically I was an only twin: the comedy of Peter Cook. Century

Shades of Skylab: the re-entry of the UARS satellite, and the psychological effects of orbital debris

This Friday, debris from NASA's Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (UARS) is predicted to re-enter the Earth's atmosphere. Twenty six components are expected to survive, with a 1-in-3200 chance of hitting someone or something. Where it will re-enter is not precisely known. 

Artist's impression of UARS. Image courtesy of NASA

When Skylab was about to re-enter, there was a great deal of speculation and fear across the world. In the early days, NASA did not give much thought to managing public expectations, only establishing an information centre towards the end. Some thought that it was best not to give the public the impression that NASA was in control (only partially true) as it would reduce the blame if anything went wrong! People thought the world might blow up, or that the spacecraft would descend upon them in vengeance for their misdemeanours (see also my previous post here). Psychologist Talma Kushnir investigated how people in Israel perceived the risk.  This is how she summed up the situation:

The anticipation of the fall of Skylab was a worldwide event. Several features of that situation might have caused confusion and emotional arousal in at least part of the population. For example, catastrophes usually occur without prior notice, but in this case the whole world was alerted for weeks beforehand. While the fall was inevitable, its exact timing, location and consequences were unpredictable. For many people it represented a risk of unknown magnitude. The public was constantly bombarded by the mass media with bulletins of confusing information. Moreover, the information provided at the time was mainly probabilistic and varied from moment to moment, within and between available sources. On the whole, many individuals might have perceived the situation as stressful. (Kushnir 1982:85)

Among her conclusions were that 

1. The media played a role in exaggerating the risks; and presented statistics about the risk that were not very accessible;

2. Stress was higher among women, youth and uneducated people - the less education the person had, the more unrealistic their expectations;

3. Fear of science and technology may have contributed to higher levels of stress.

The gendered dimension is interesting here. Kushnir noted that:

in almost any sample, females are more likely to have less years of formal education and less knowledge of scientific and technological matters. These reasons may contribute to their stronger feelings of helplessness. (Kushnir 1982: 92) 

Moreover, they may also be more likely to express their anxiety than men (Kushnir 1981:112), thus skewing the results.

What was the ultimate result of Skylab's fall on public attitudes?  Back in the 1980s, Kushnir felt that Glass's gloomy prediction of 1970 had only been reinforced by Skylab. Glass argued that there would be:

more and more massive resistance to technological change. I predict in equal measure a growing hostility to science .... Hence the fifth .... limiting factor in the growth of science - the psychological resistance of and the restricted support by a population inadequately educated in the understanding of science and militantly opposed to it because of its identification with the technological annihilation of the human environment. (Glass 1970:75)

Sure, it's very Cold War, but one could argue that at least part of this prediction has been played out in subsequent decades. How will re-entries like the UARS, which are highly publicised across forms of media that didn't exist back in the 1980s, in an environment where the public are increasingly aware of the problems created by orbital debris, affect attitudes towards space industry, exploration and science?

You can watch the UARS tumbling in its decaying orbit in the video below, shot by Thierry Legault with a 14 inch telescope in France on September 15th.

References
Glass, B.  1970  The timely and the timelessness. New York: Basic Books 
Gorman, A.C. 2011 The sky is falling: how Skylab became an Australian icon.  Journal of Australian Studies 35(4): 529-546
Kushnir, Talma 1981 Anticipating Skylab: subjective probability of injury in relation to birth order, anxiety and affiliation.  European Journal of Social Psychology 11:109-113
Kushnir, Talma 1982  Skylab effects:  psychological reactions to a human-made environmental hazard. Environment and Behaviour 14:84-93

The heritage uncertainty principle: excavating air raid shelters from the Second World War

Hot off the press! Heather and I wrote this a couple of years ago, and finally it is out. Not particularly spacey, but there is some thematic overlap in the idea of bombardment and bunkers, which continue into the Cold War.

Yuri Gagarin's Australian story lost in space

On the eve of the 50th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s space flight, Flinders University space archaeologist Dr Alice Gorman (pictured) reflects on the significance of that feat – with an Australian twist.

Photograph by Ashton Claridge

“Australians were fascinated by the idea of the first man in space, if media coverage around the 12 April 1961 mission is any indication, and they remain so,” Dr Gorman said. Her survey of newspaper accounts reveals the official reception of Gagarin’s achievement was tempered by Cold War hostilities.

“Leaders all over the world were congratulating the USSR but Prime Minister Menzies wouldn’t. He made no public statement,” she said. “Journalists turned to scientists for comment, particularly at Woomera which had been the first tracking station to acquire Sputnik 1 in orbit. They didn’t manage to track Gagarin’s flight, however, which led some to speculate whether it really happened.”

Dr Gorman said a comment by prominent Australian physicist and nuclear scientist Professor Harry Messel reflects the mood in some circles. “There was an element of doubt in his comment: ‘If what the Russians claim is true, then it is a triumph over the free world…Scientifically, I’m happy; but from a Cold War perspective, I’m sad’.”

Menzies’ silence may have led to Moscow’s lack of response when an invitation was issued for Yuri Gagarin to visit the 1961 Sydney Trade Fair, which featured life-size models of several Soviet spacecraft. Gagarin bypassed Australia in his world tour that year.

Australian journalist and Communist sympathiser, Wilfred Burchett weighs into this story, too. “Burchett, whose passport was lost or stolen, moved his family to Moscow in 1956. He and Anthony Purdy were the only Western journalists allowed to have a face-to-face interview with Gagarin.

“They subsequently wrote a book together, Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin: First Man in Space.”

Dr Gorman stumbled across a photograph of Wilfred Burchett’s father, George, presenting Gagarin with a boomerang in Moscow.  The caption reads:

Mr George Burchett presenting Yuri Gagarin with a boomerang on behalf of Australian peace workers with the hope that he and his fellow compatriots in their journeying to the stars will, like the boomerang, always return to Earth safely and to a world at peace.

With human spaceflight programs increasingly under threat and technology able to accomplish many tasks remotely, Dr Gorman said it is easy to underestimate Gagarin’s feat. “Until Gagarin came down in one piece, we actually didn’t know if it was possible for a human to survive in space,” she said. “What is commonplace now was a mystery then. It was less than four years after the first satellite had been launched; can you imagine trusting your life to such untried technology! I think Gagarin demonstrated for the first time that we are all citizens of the cosmos; he was the first person to see the Earth from the outside.”

Story by Vince Ciccarello, Flinders University.  Published 7th March 2011

Consuming the Space Age: the cuisine of Sputnik

Ever since my esteemed colleague Dr Lynley Wallis made a special batch of cup cakes decorated with spacecraft to help me celebrate the 50th anniversary of Sputnik 1’s launch in 2007, I’ve had a bit of a thing for rocket cakes. They are a staple of children’s birthday parties and represent youthful dreams of being an astronaut – the feeling that anything is possible, our potential is infinite, and we can reach for the stars.  

Dr Lynley Wallis' special Sputnik cakes

The rocket cake is a charming example of the influence space exploration has had on terrestrial food.  This influence, it seems to me, falls into roughly three categories:

• Food decorated or shaped like spacecraft or celestial bodies.

•  Food devised to commemorate a space event

• Food from terrestrial places associated with space exploration

In this post, I want to consider the first category, in the form of food that evokes the Sputnik 1 and 2 satellites.  These recipes and dishes can be regarded as a sort of performance, half way between tangible and intangible heritage, as they exist only in the moment of their manufacture and disappear in the act of consumption.

The USSR’s successful launch of Sputnik 1 in 1957 caught the USA by surprise; and the reactions of panic have been well documented. Suddenly, the night sky was transformed from a serene celestial dome to a place of menace, from which unseen attacks could be launched on the capitalist world.  At the same time, there was tremendous excitement that the shackles of gravity had been broken at last and human dreams of space were about to be realised.

While the US military and government were grappling with the political implications of Sputnik 1, one of the ways in which ordinary people responded was to translate the body of the spacecraft into something familiar and edible.  The humble olive, with the addition of three or four toothpicks to represent antenna, became a symbol of the satellite.  This was an excellent garnish for a martini, sandwich or the quintessential American food, the hamburger.

The caption from this newspaper photograph reads:  

Not to be outdone – Harriet Phydros samples a Sputnikburger which an Atlanta café rushed onto the menu. It’s garnished with Russian dressing and caviar, topped by satellite olive and cocktail hotdog.  

The hot dog is a reference to Laika the dog, who went into orbit in Sputnik 2 later in 1957.  Despite Laika’s sad demise, the visual word play is appealing; but the “not to be outdone” requires further unpacking.  Does this imply that Harriet’s imminent consumption of the Sputnikburger will somehow restore the balance of power?  Or that eating it is a small conquest of space in its own right?  In any case, this potential weapon of mass destruction has become a commodity rather than a beacon of communist ideology.  According to Lisa Parks, ‘mainstream American culture commodified and domesticated Sputnik, positioning it within the discourse of American nationalism rather then leaving it to circle the earth on its own accord” (Parks 1995:16).

The toothpick antenna appeared in other Sputnik foods.  A photograph on the cover of a 1957 Life magazine showed a young woman about to tuck into a Sputnik sundae, surmounted by a ball of icecream studded with toothpicks.  A popular hors d’oeuvre of the 1960s featured cubes of cheese, fruit and sausage threaded on toothpicks, then stuck into oranges or melons.  Another version of the hamburger combined both concepts.  The top image below, from a book on children’s parties, shows a Sputnik cheeseburger (and other delicious space-themed party food).

Image courtesy of Amy Alessio at Vintage Cookbooks

And of course there were the Sputnik cocktails.  There are several versions of these floating around; this one seems to be the most common:

45 ml vodka

15 ml Fernet Branca (a bitter Italian digestive liqueur)

15 ml fresh lemon juice

1/2 tsp sugar

Shake all together and serve in a cocktail glass.

William E. Burrows, in his classic “This New Ocean:  The Story of the First Space Age”, described the USA’s reaction to the launch of Sputnik 1 as “the Sputnik cocktail: vodka and sour grapes” (Burrows 1998:187). The culinary metaphor continued: at the time, some US politicians, including Eisenhower, blamed the Soviet lead on the hedonist consumer lifestyles of Americans. As Burrows frames it, they effectively called upon US citizens “to push away their banana splits, hot fudge sundaes, malteds, cherry-lime rickeys, barbequed steaks, and hot dogs” (Burrows 1998:191), and make sacrifices in order to regain the upper hand in the space race. Capitalist ideology had been dealt a significant blow.

Sputnik-inspired food, however, meant different things in different places.  The journalist Fred Blumenthal, travelling though Asia following the launch, observed that

Sputnik just turned the East upside-down. As it did everywhere, I suppose it appealed to the imagination.  In the Philippines, the restaurants, movie houses and taxicabs were renamed Sputnik.  One restaurant even came up with a Sputnik sandwich, the feature of which was an olive with four protruding toothpick ‘antennae’.  More important was the diplomatic loss of face suffered.  In Hong Kong, Japan and the Philippines, there was a loss of confidence in the United States and, under the surface, a sort of secret glee that [it] had been toppled from the high horse (quoted in Dickson 2001:132). 

So here, the consumption of Sputnik was almost an act of resistance against US imperialist ambitions in that part of the world. We can see in these few examples that there was an ideological dimension to Cold War food, a literal internalisation of the values that Sputnik was felt to represent for its different audiences (not forgetting that Sputnik was also a sound ……). 

The culinary legacy of the Cold War in space, however, lives on in the 21st century.  Any dish which features long spikey things can be called a sputnik; I’ve seen potato sputniks, a scoop of mashed potato with carrot and cucumber sticks for antenna; and the famous exponent of French cooking, Anne Willan, created a baked Pineapple Sputnik with whole vanilla beans for antenna (Willan 2000).  The kohlrabi (a type of turnip) is frequently called the sputnik vegetable, particularly as its leaves are angled just like the satellite’s antennas.  I’m not a fan of anything turnippy; and I regret that I don’t like olives, as it’s hard not to appreciate the simple elegance of the olive sputnik.  But I think my summer will now feature many Sputnik cocktails ……..

References
Burrows, William E.  1999 [1998]  This new ocean.  The story of the first space age.  New York:  Modern Library
Dickson, Paul  2001  Sputnik.  The shock of the century.  New York: Berkly Books
Parks, Lisa 1995 Technology in the twilight:  a cultural history of the communications satellite 1955-58.  Paper presented at the 1995 Society for the History of Technology Conference, Charlottseville, VA
Vintage Cookbooks http://vintagecookbooks.blogspot.com/2010/08/sputnik-cheeseburgers.html
Willan, Anne 2000 From My Château Kitchen. Clarkson Potter/Publishers

Food for Thinkers is a week-long, distributed, online conversation looking at food-writing from as wide and unusual a variety of perspectives as possible. Between January 18 and January 23, 2011, more than thirty food and non-food writers will respond to a question posed by GOOD's newly-launched Food hub: What does—or could, or even should—it mean to write about food today? You can check out the conversation in full at GOOD.is/food, join in the comments, and follow the Twitter hashtag #foodforthinkers to keep up-to-date as archaeologists, human rights activists, design critics, and even food writers share their perspective on what makes food so interesting. 

A review of "Contemporary Archaeologies: Excavating Now"

Holtorf, Cornelius & Angela Piccini (eds.)  2009 Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang.

Reviewed 01 Dec 2009 by  Lawrence Moore

Contemporary Archaeologies is an interesting edited collection from mostly European contributors. The focus is on the ties between today’s changing conceptions of what archaeology is and the study and preservation of recent material culture and heritage. In the introduction editors Cornelius Holtorf and Angela Piccini argue that they are not trying to promote a new period of specialization but state instead that all archaeologies are contemporary because the past and present are conceptually combined (cf. Holtorf 2008). Archaeology is also viewed as an event within and a result of our contemporary world; hence the statement the book "marries archaeology in the modern world with the archaeology of the modern world" (p. 16). Holtorf and Piccini also present their introduction in the form of a dialog such that their individualism is apparent.

     The book is divided into four parts. Part one discusses the character of archaeology. Julian Thomas starts off by highlighting some of the main ideas developed in his Archaeology and Modernity (2004). To him archaeology "embodies and condenses the modern condition" and that it is unlikely that archaeology would have developed under other historical circumstances (p. 33). Thomas then describes the depth metaphor of archaeology--that time is stratified in layered containers--and parallels this with Sigmund Freud’s idea that the mind is stratified with the deeper layers tied to the past of the individual and the human species.

     Cornelius Holtorf follows with a discussion of archaeology within the Experience Society, his description of contemporary society’s emphasis on feel good experiences. He reviews how archaeology is often portrayed at theme parks and other themed contexts (cf. Holtorf 2005, 2007) and argues that archaeology is mostly in the storytelling business. Sarah May discusses the material culture that goes along with people’s interests in and dealings with tigers, and, this material culture is patterned depending on if the tigers are wild, performers in a show or zoo, or are pets. From this analysis she makes an important analogy between the conservation and rescue of tigers and archaeological sites. For archaeologists, the twentieth century has yet to be rescued; it is "wild and dangerous but powerful" (p.78).

     Part two discusses the need for and means of recording and preserving twentieth century heritage. Mike Pearson describes the contexts, assemblages, and formational processes of early expeditionary material culture found within Antarctica. After discussing the history of and artifacts associated with several expeditionary huts he concludes that this material culture could be displayed as a performance such that meanings are "successively presented, challenged, confounded, inverted, and reinvented" (p. 93).

      Next, Colleen M. Beck, John Schofield and Harold Drollinger describe their social and political experiences while investigating the Peace Camp adjacent to a federal nuclear testing and experimentation area in Nevada, United States. The Peace Camp has been regularly used since 1957 for numerous protests and confrontations. The Camp was surveyed and has hundreds of features and artifacts that can be mapped and analyzed, just as archaeologists study other encampments. As the land is administered by a federal agency federal laws about historic preservation and archaeology apply. Interestingly, these researchers were told by the agency archaeologist that their work was not archaeology and that the "protest site had no legal historical significance" (p. 104).

     Louise K. Wilson concludes part two with a discussion of recording Cold War era sites in England; she reminds us that sounds are artifacts. Her mission was to find new ways to attract visitors to these heritage sites and engage them in new ways. This leads to recording the sights and sounds of rocket testing and launch sites, especially of wind, weather, and sea. She also describes how some buildings are used by choirs for rehearsals as the acoustics are similar to churches and theaters. One sound she was interested in documenting was the throb of machinery; she was able to record a working centrifuge and then use the sound track within a dilapidated centrifuge building. A number of visitors were emotionally impressed with this experience.

     Part three discusses new dimensions of materiality. Mats Burström describes an old car dump and junkyard in Sweden, in use from the 1930s to the 1970s. The dump is referred to as a car cemetery and the property was the home of a thrifty old loner. Today, visitors are struck by the site’s austerity and quality of gradual disintegration; its decay is what makes it interesting. This quality stumps local heritage planners who are inclined to view the site as garbage, or, if it is to be called heritage, then they want to stabilize it, stopping the decay. After some conflict over this, the public has won out and the cars rust in peace.

     Jonna Ulin offers a family archaeology; she describes her excavation and memory-work of her grandmother’s home in Sweden. Her data consists of excavated material and her recollections from her childhood, as well as family secrets, stories and photographs. She is not interested in linear time but in the "space of the past" (p. 145). Alice Gorman completes part three while discussing the material culture of space exploration and the significance of the post World War II Space Race. Space industries both represent nationalist ideologies and agendas, and are the very instruments that reduce the economic relevance of nation states (p. 176). She concludes with a call for an inclusive view that takes into account all participants in the development of space technologies. 

     And finally, Part Four offers thoughts for the future. Angela Piccini explores the potentialities and limitation of archaeological practice and camera based technologies. She offers an open-ended essay about a walk down a gutter, her video of it, describing what she saw, her thoughts and memories, with a little commentary in between. For her, documenting the material culture of gutters and the recording of it is a performance. Cameras are used not to transmit knowledge but to be a creative treatment of actuality. Although certainly scripted, the essay appears as unscripted fragments of ideas stimulated from walking along a gutter.

     Paul Graves-Brown concludes the book with a discussion of privacy and individualism. He briefly reviews the literature about privacy and argues that the privatization of experience is important to archaeology because the organization of space changes along with the evolution of privacy. A key concept within modernity is this individualism/collectivism pairing. As the editors began with their individualism displayed it’s appropriate to conclude with this topic. 

     While this is not the first book to discuss the archaeology of the twentieth century I think it does push the discussion along quite well. I applaud these efforts because the century forces the profession to rethink its theories, methods, and overall intellectual perspectives. For archaeologists, it really is untamed territory. I laughed when Beck, Schofield, and Drollinger described their problems with a federal agency. They were told that what they were doing was not archaeology. New ideas are needed to tackle twentieth century material culture and if that means reinventing archaeology, that’s okay with me.

     To say that "archaeology-is-contemporary" and the "past-is-now" is certainly reasonable from this perspective. However, such statements are limited by the same constraints that the earlier conception (i.e. past, present, and future are conceptualized separately) had. Eventually, all concepts become stagnant and less useful. For now, the utility of these fresh ideas is bright but complicated.

     Those anthropologists and archaeologists who prefer rationalism and linear time will likely find the book uninteresting because it is fully spatial, non-linear, cyclical, and intuitive, consistent with the general trend of our feel good romantic society. Many progressive academics will likely be inspired by the book, and we can expect them to continue pushing the conceptual envelope well into the twenty-first century. Archaeologists in the compliance driven heritage industry will see the difficulty in applying the new ideas within a bureaucratic environment. 

     For many the future of archaeology is blurry because we don’t know what it will look like. If we adopt the idea that the future-is-now then we likely do know something: archaeology could become very much like what is presented in this book. This begs the question why the subtitle "Excavating Now"? Only one essay mentions this traditional archaeological activity. Is it possible that archaeologists will come to rely less on excavation and more on above ground material culture and landscape analyses? This is quite possible. More than most, Holtorf (2005, 2007) is well aware that excavation is a key element in defining "what is archaeology". Perhaps he and Piccini are telling us that the metaphor of excavation is more important than its actuality. 

     Level/Use: Suitable for graduate students, special study courses on theory, method, & intellectual trends. 

     References:
     Holtorf, C. 2005 From Stonehenge to Las Vegas: Archaeology as Popular Culture. Walnut Creek: Altamira Press.
     Holtorf, C. 2007 Archaeology is a Brand! The Meaning of Archaeology in Contemporary Popular Culture. Oxford: Archaeopress, and, Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press.
     Holtorf, C. 2008 The Past Is Now-an Interview with Anders Högberg. European Journal of Archaeology 11(1):7-22
     Thomas, J. 2004 Archaeology and Modernity. London and New York: Routledge. 

To cite this review, the American Anthropological Association recommends the following style:
Moore, Lawrence 2009 Review of Contemporary Archaeologies: Excavating Now. Anthropology Review Database. December 01. Electronic document, http://wings.buffalo.edu/ARD/cgi/showme.cgi?keycode=3412, accessed March 4, 2010.

---

The brumby and the bomb: archaeology at Maralinga

So much going on at the moment.  New Zealand's recent launch, new stuff in Australian space development and orbital debris mitigation, and many many thoughts that my three functioning brain cells are somehow managing to produce, despite the resemblance of the rest of my brain to lime jelly.

For yes, I am the nominal chief organiser of this year's Australian Archaeological Association conference, being held at Flinders University in less than a week.  This is an experience that I hope never to have again.

And no - just in case you were going to ask - I haven't written my paper yet.

BUT for your delectation, here is the abstract.

The brumby and the bomb:  archaeology at Maralinga

In the 1950s and 60s, Maralinga and Emu Field in South Australia were the site of a series of nuclear tests, controversial not least because of their effects on the Aboriginal people of the region.  Following the period of active testing, Maralinga Village was largely dismantled with buildings, equipment and materials sold and dispersed.  The “ground zero” areas were remediated in 1967, and in several phases between 1994 and 2000. 

With proposals to develop the tourist potential of Maralinga, the challenge is to represent what is no longer there.  The ground zeros are now marked by monuments, and warning signs, the pits of nuclear testing filled in and smoothed over by remediation.  However, despite this massive re-landscaping, the ground is still littered with the remnants of test infrastructure.  In places, vehicle tracks from the remediation phase survive, overlain by those of more recent visitors.  Among the more personal remains are “dinner camps” left from the 1950s survey by Len Beadell, and construction workers into the 1960s.  Ephemeral sites such as these have been the focus of a contemporary archaeological approach at other nuclear test landscapes, such as the Nevada Test Site in the US.  In this paper, I consider the potential of archaeology to inform the stories that can be told about this brief phase in Australia’s Cold War history.