Love's Obsession (29 page)

Judy Birmingham and Vincent Megaw, both appointed by Jim, arrived only months before his death.

Judy Birmingham was trained by Kathleen Kenyon, who believed that all archaeologists must learn their craft through their own landscapes. It was inevitable, therefore, that Judy would be drawn into archaeology in Australia. She founded the Australasian Association for Historical Archaeology and taught the first course in historical archaeology in Australia.

Vincent Megaw also believed that archaeology was a discipline, not a geography. He became interested in the pioneering work of Australian archaeologists like John Mulvaney and his research interests moved in that direction. He published The
Dawn of Man
in 1972, co-authored with Welsh-born Australian archaeologist Rhys Jones. Megaw was Professor of Archaeology at the University of Leicester for ten years (1972–82) and took up a personal chair at Flinders University in 1995.

Judy Birmingham and Vincent Megaw were only allowed to work on Australian archaeology projects during their holidays or in their spare time.

When the border between North and South Cyprus opened on 23 April 2003, Bellapais quickly became a major tourist destination. Visitors come to see the house where Lawrence Durrell had lived during the troubled years of the 1950s. Tourists can choose between two ‘trees of idleness' under which Durrell found inspiration and wrote
Bitter Lemons
. Tourist buses park outside and the abbey itself has been brought to life by music festivals. An expensive restaurant overlooks the plain below, with the abbey as a backdrop. The house where Eleanor and Jim lived and the workshop where they mended pots are difficult to identify.

The tombs of Vounous have been robbed for generations. Most recently, a Turkish Cypriot has robbed—or so he claims—dozens of tombs, removing thousands of objects. He has an intimate knowledge of the pottery of the Early Bronze Age on Cyprus and has been responsible, he proudly boasts, for ‘mending' many of the pots he has seen on display in museums. His career as a tomb robber came to an end when he was arrested taking one of the pots out of the country, but he escaped a jail sentence. Now he and his son run a pottery workshop, which I visited with an art lecturer. Father and son make exquisite copies of the pots once looted from the Vounous tombs. Now, the father puts his name to them and sells them as souvenirs. Recently the Centre for Traditional Crafts on the Greek side of Nicosia has signed a contract with him to supply pots for their display shop.

Ayios Philon, near the tip of the Karpas in northeastern Cyprus, still feels remote. The house where Joan and Eve, Judith and Kim lived is in ruins, the roof has collapsed, but the stone walls still stand. The view through what was once the front door has not changed—golden ripples on the sea as the sun sets, a harbour view little changed since Roman times. On the beach beside the ruined house is a six-room hotel, each room overlooking the beach where a broken rubber swan lies wrecked on the shore. When I visit, the Turkish proprietor and his family are welcoming. Their brochure speaks of the history and beauty of the place and at the reception a photocopy of Joan du Plat Taylor's article on Ayios Philon is pinned to the wall. At dinner a young Kurdish waiter complains about the ‘cold' English visitors and longs for the snowfields of his homeland. The Alsatian dog is tired of tourists and grumbles when his sleep is interrupted by the petting of strangers.

In Northern Nicosia the Kumarcilar Khan remains derelict. It has never been restored as Jim and Peter Megaw planned, but the nearby Büyük Khan has and is lively with tourist shops selling Turkish carpets and art works. Scaffolding suggests a similar fate awaits the Khan.

The village of Karmi is now known by its Turkish name—Karaman. After the expulsion of its Greek residents the village stood derelict until 1982, when foreigners were allowed to renovate the houses on renewable twenty-five year leases. English residents have restored the houses and made their presence felt. Outside the village store are English notices advertising jazz concerts and items for sale. Jim would have smiled at the notice announcing the ‘cat feeding roster' for the village.

Below the village, a rusted signpost points to the Bronze Age site of Karmi. The holes of emptied tombs dot the slope. One tomb entrance is protected by a rubble brick stone hut built over it. Within this hut, Mary Ann still stands guard at the tomb entrance, but there is graffiti on the walls of the hut and the floor of the tomb entrance is littered with cigarette packets.

On the opposite side of the island, near the town of Paphos, is another Karmi. Yiannis Cleanthous stayed in Bellapais for as long as possible after the Turkish invasion of northern Cyprus in 1974 but now lives in Kyrenia Street in the village of Lemba and his house is called ‘Karmi'. The house is not his—the original owners were Turkish—but he can live there as a Greek refugee from the north. Under an enormous mulberry tree we sit nibbling sweet biscuits and Yiannis leans forwards on his staff and his eyes light as he talks of Karmi and his beautiful Bellapais. He tells me about the time he met an Australian lawyer on Cyprus in the 1960s and they talked of the deteriorating political situation. The lawyer, just appointed to the position of Chief Justice of Cyprus—an appointment he was unable to take up—was Ken Jacobs. His wife, Eleanor, was Jim's first wife and mother of Jim Stewart's only son.

In 1964 the United Nations took control of the strategic plateau of Tjiklos and Eve's lawyer eventually persuaded them to pay rent. In 1974, during the Turkish invasion of northern Cyprus, the land was confiscated and occupied by mainland troops.

In 1985 Stuart Swiny from the Cyprus American Archaeo­logical Research Institute visited Eve at Wentworth Falls. They talked as they took Tammy for long walks in the bush. Eve began to think that here might be a suitable beneficiary. Previously, Basil had helped sort out her Egyptian property. As the proceeds of the sale could not leave Egypt she had donated them to the American Schools of Oriental Research. The institute was an affiliate.

In 1986 Eve's lawyer found a buyer for Tjiklos. Despite hopeful estimates that the property was worth over a million dollars, the land sold for only $US150,000.

Having failed to establish an Australian institute in Cyprus, Eve supported the Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute. The money from the sale of Tjiklos helped to purchase a building for the organisation in Nicosia. Students from all over the world stay there, in the J.R. Stewart residence. Inside the foyer, in the cool tiled entrance, visiting students collect the keys to their room in envelopes lying on the carved wooden trunk that once belonged to Tom Dray and sat on the floor at Tjiklos. Ornate carved wooden bookcases hold lace and souvenirs collected by Eve's aunts. A map on the wall of the director's office is of Cyprus. On the back, Eve's uncle wrote that it is a copy of a fifteenth-century map given to him by Zenon Pierides—the man whose chance meeting on a train led to the Swedish Cyprus Expedition.

From Kyrenia Castle, with a set of good binoculars, it is possible to glimpse abandoned houses on the plateau of Tjiklos. No binoculars are needed to see the massive statue of Atatürk or the billowing red and white flags of Northern Cyprus.

Jim Stewart's son Peter sold The Mount to the Morgan family in 1969 and, as the property would no longer be owned by a Stewart, Peter arranged for Jim's body to be exhumed and reburied in Wentworth Falls, beside his parents. One of the onlookers was a small boy, Christopher Morgan, who was ghoulishly delighted when one of the gravediggers lost his footing and stumbled, his foot puncturing the coffin. As an adult and a student of archaeology at Sydney University, Christopher remembered the event. The irony of Jim Stewart's own tomb being excavated was not lost on him.

Lymdale has been sold many times and the extensive property is now cut into different plots. All sign of A.A. Stewart's miniature train line and model-boat lake are gone, although both are recalled in the house's heritage listing.

Eve's house in Armstrong Street was riddled with termites when she died in 2005 and has been largely restored. I don't know if an apricot tree thrives in the back garden, or if the foundation deposits planted beneath it have been dug up and thrown away. Nor do I know if Tryphon's almond survives the bracing Australian climate, a climate similar to that of Cyprus but its opposite. Summer at Christmas, winter in July. Topsy-turvy, as Eve thought in 1947.

The cemetery in Wentworth Falls sits beside the busy Western Freeway linking Sydney with Bathurst. One large stone mausoleum dominates the cemetery. Jim's parents are both interred here. He and Eve are too.

Jim Stewart was a collector who saw archaeology as another way of collecting. He was a numismatist who saw coins as historical evidence. He was a thinker who seldom was prepared to put his broad ideas into print. Like so many archaeologists before and since, he was slow to publish and enjoyed the ‘dirt archaeology' of the field more than the analysis afterwards in the workroom.

The POW notebooks were written during years of forced solitude, but Stewart was gregarious and in normal life would rather entertain a group in conversation than sit in an office writing. After the war his thoughts curled in on themselves. Details devoured him and crippled his critical capacities. His return to Australia removed him physically from the landscapes and archaeology of the place he loved. Absent from them, he lost perspective. Even so, the posthumous publication of his volume for the Swedish Cyprus Expedition shows the breadth of his knowledge. As Hector Catling wrote:

the quintessence of Stewart's knowledge and understanding of his period, showing how fully alive it was in his mind … He understood that an archaeologist's duty includes reconstruction and interpretation as much as description and analysis.
10

Jim's reluctance to form conclusions without complete data was a flaw that Winifred Lamb had recognised as early as the 1930s. But archaeology does not deal with the finite. There will always be another excavation, new finds, a novel way of extracting information, radical methods for analysing data. His corpus would always prove elusive and the search for it was, in the end, futile.

In the late twentieth century the world of archaeology was growing and the amount of archaeological evidence to explore ever increasing. Long gone were the days when any single individual could collate all the evidence—even of a small sub-set of material—into a single publication, albeit a multi-volume one like the corpus. Trends in archaeology ebbed and flowed, the tide shifting from grand theories based on flimsy evidence to ever more specialised investigations of evidence extracted from smaller and smaller artefacts, and now finally resting on ancient DNA. The conflict between visions of the woods and the trees remains, but is played out in different ways.

In 2011 Sydney University's Department of Archaeology received a bequest of over $6 million. The money would endow a new Professor of Archaeology. The bequest came from the estate of Tom Brown, a lawyer who lived for most of his life in western New South Wales, and who had made an extensive collection of Aboriginal artefacts. Persuaded that removing artefacts from their context destroys valuable information, he enrolled to study archaeology formally at Sydney University.

When commenting on the bequest, Sydney University's Dr Ted Robinson lamented the fact that archaeology students were funded at a lower level than science students, despite the fact that ‘we need more than a pencil and access to a library … we do a huge amount of fieldwork, we need labs and we do a lot of archaeological science'.
11
It was an argument that Jim had made, unsuccessfully, many times.

Jim Stewart's attitude to cultural material is abhorrent to a modern archaeologist, but in 1961 when John Mulvaney conducted the ground-breaking excavations at Kenniff Cave in Central Queensland, he admits he knew few Aborigines and there was little interest in the way contemporary Aborigines might react to the excavation of their past. Few scholars were interested in who owned the past. It was scarcely even a question.

Hindsight can blind us to the past. It is all too easy to condemn the activities of archaeologists who knew nothing of and cared little about the people whose past was being excavated, destroyed, removed and studied. But we should be careful how we judge past actions.

In 2011, the Australian Archaeological Association had one thousand members. At the annual conference that year, in the provincial Queensland city of Toowoomba, one session was devoted to meeting the graduates. Over twenty archaeological consulting firms sponsored a cocktail party and new graduates were encouraged to ‘network in a relaxed environment with potential employers from the consulting, industry, heritage, government and education sectors'. The New South Wales Roads and Maritime Service was there, as were mining giants Conzinc Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton.

How will future archaeologists view the work of archaeologists today?

Jim and Eve Stewart loved Cyprus. They devoted their lives to studying its archaeology, but in equal measure they loved the island's landscapes and its people. Archaeologists never lose the thrill of reaching down to pick up a sherd left lying on the ground, the excitement of discovering how a landscape has formed over time, the challenge of piecing together the jigsaw puzzle of the past. All archaeologists come to respect the land they walk on. Jim and Eve Stewart were no different.

Wealthy, spoilt, difficult and brilliant, Jim Stewart charmed and inspired students and irritated university administrators. Distinguished by his encyclopaedic knowledge of Cypriot material, his archaeological and numismatic legacy is substantial − but marred by an acquisitive streak that sits uneasily with today's archaeological standards.

Eve ensured Jim's work survived and that his name lived in more than the memories of a small group of former students. Without institutional backing, with limited finances and alone in a dilapidated house at the edge of the Blue Mountains, she continued their work. Dogged and persistent, feisty to the end, she persevered.