Tour of the East: Java, Singapore, Ceylon, India
Authors: MARGARET ALLEN and denise Noack with Heidi Ing
In July 1930, Jack Mortlock, his brother, Ranson Mortlock, and E. E. Scarfe, the manager of their vast pastoral properties, left Adelaide for Sydney to embark on what they termed their ‘Tour of the East’. Their three-month trip would take them to Java, Singapore, Penang, Sri Lanka (Ceylon) and India. They travelled first class, stayed in grand hotels and acquired a significant amount of artworks, souvenirs and curios. Jack Mortlock had a movie camera and they made a film of the entire trip. The wealth of the Mortlocks made it possible for them to take such a tour in the depths of the Great Depression, when around a third of the South Australian workforce was unemployed and many others on reduced wages. In Sydney, they boarded the Nieuw Zeeland, a ship of the Dutch KPMS line, bound for Java.
Time led cultural map
At the end of this page is a TLCmap (time led cultural map), developed as part of the Martindale Hall ‘slow digitisation’ project.
J. A. T. (Jack) Mortlock made extensive diary entries for his tour of the East and this map has been developed from those diaries, from the information gleaned from the film made of the trip, and also from the itinerary for much of the India segment, which we discovered at Martindale Hall. We also linked some of the items purchased for the Hall to the places where they were acquired. Explore this interactive map to follow the journey and see the linked entries from these sources.
TLCMap is a set of tools that work together to map Australian history and culture.
Typically Australians travelled to Britain, Europe and to parts of the British Empire such as India and Fiji, so it was unusual that the Mortlocks’ tour started in Java, part of the Dutch East Indies. Perhaps their interest was sparked by the recent travel account of the R. J. Finlayson, a businessman in nearby Balaklava.1 Finalyson commented on ‘the fine nature of the roads … miles of macadamised highways constructed in the early days by slave or prison labour’. It is significant that John C. Van Dyke’s account of his travels there is in the Martindale library.2
The Mortlock party enjoyed visiting places that embodied British imperial power, victories and heroism. They visited the British naval base in Singapore, the Victoria Memorial in Calcutta (Kolkata) and the Memorial Well in Cawnpore (Kanpur), which memorialised the victims of the first War of Indian Independence (often known as the Indian Mutiny). They also visited the great monuments of Asian civilizations, such as Borobudur and Prambanan temples in Java, the Temple of the Tooth in Sri Lanka and the Taj Mahal and Fatehpur Sikri in India.
Having an eye for what they must have thought of as exotic and bizarre, they filmed a fight between a mongoose and a snake in an Indian market. They also recorded a bare-breasted woman they saw on the street of Mumbai (Bombay). They purchased the usual souvenirs and artefacts, such as a kris (dagger) and a leather lampshade in Java, a model of the Taj Mahal in India, and brassware in both India and Sri Lanka. In Mumbai they purchased some brightly coloured reproductions of Hindu gods. It is likely they bought these reproductions in a bazaar. While the Mortlock family may have found them curious, typically Hindu families would put them up in their homes to adorn a domestic shrine where they would perform puja, worship rituals.
These travellers, as white members of the British Empire, had great freedom to travel wherever they wished. Their easy mobility was in marked contrast to that of the Indians, Javanese, Malays and Chinese they encountered on their travels. Under the terms of the Immigration Restriction Act 1901, which codified the White Australia policy, such people were deemed ‘prohibited immigrants’. A few merchants and students were allowed to enter Australia. In addition, Indians and Chinese, and so on who had lived in Australia for at least five years, and who were seen as of good character, were able to enter Australia by means of a strictly regulated process of surveillance and control. The Australian state kept identification documents for such people, who wished to visit their homeland and to return to Australia. The surveillance and regulation was excessive and humiliating. Thus ‘coloured passengers’ were mustered on deck in each Australian port and had to submit to inspection by customs officers. Indian sailors (Lascars) and those from the various islands of the Dutch East Indies who worked on the Dutch ships were carefully watched and accounted for in each Australian port by customs authorities.
Jack and Ranson Mortlock and Ernest Scarfe were at ease travelling in a white colonial world. It seems that the only Indians, Sri Lankans and Javanese they spoke to were guides, shopkeepers or waiters. In 1923, S. K. Datta, an Indian nationalist, described the Australians he met on his tour of Australia as dull and ignorant about their regional neighbours. They had no idea and no interest that ‘the world of Asia so near their shores is in tumult’.3 This was true of the Mortlock party.
In 1930, anticolonial nationalist movements were gathering strength. Jack Mortlock commented, ‘We saw no actual riots but there was evident an undercurrent of feeling of hostility towards the Government and those engaged in preserving law and order.’4
Jack and Ranson Mortlock and Ernest Scarfe were at ease travelling in a white colonial world. It seems that the only Indians, Sri Lankans and Javanese they spoke to were guides, shopkeepers or waiters.
It is curious that included in the film they shot is footage relating to the Wadala Salt Satygraha, referred to by the British as the Wadala Salt Riots, which took place in Bombay between April and June 1930. This prolonged civil-disobedience action occurred well before the Mortlock party came to India and led to many arrests. The footage shows the supporters of Gandhi, in crowds of up to 10,000 people, going out to collect salt and being beaten very harshly by the British police, many of whom were on horseback. A recent study reports, ‘The volunteers suffered very badly at the hands of the police. Many were beaten with lathies [bamboo sticks].’5 It is not clear how this footage was obtained, but its inclusion in the film speaks to the perspective of the Mortlock party, which was clearly on the side of the British colonial government.
Certainly, the travellers did not engage with the peoples of the region, who were for them a spectacle. Commenting on the ‘racial’ diversity in Singapore, Jack Mortlock reported, ‘There is a mixed population … we counted 16 different nationalities … in an hour in the streets.’6
They returned to Australia with all their prejudices intact. ‘We were very pleased when we arrived in Fremantle to see our white people and to note the absence of the smells and sordid sights of “the East”.’7
“We were very pleased when we arrived in Fremantle to see our white people and to note the absence of the smells and sordid sights of ‘the East’.”
Time-led Cultural Map
Footnotes
- ‘A Trip to Java’, Wooroora Producer (Balaklava), 18 December 1924, 2. ↩︎
- John C. Van Dyke, In Java (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1929). ↩︎
- S. K. Datta, Diary, 1923, MSS EurF 178/57, Asian and African Collections, British Library, London. ↩︎
- ‘Back from the East’, Register News-Pictorial, 29 October 1930, 6. ↩︎
- Ankush L. Belvatkar and S. P. Shinde, ‘Wadala Salt Satygraha—1930’, Proceedings of the Indian History Conference 73 (2012): 616. ↩︎
- Back from the East’, 6. ↩︎
- ‘Back from the East’, 6. ↩︎