Podcast transcript
A profile of A. D. Trendall
Dr Gillian Shepherd and Dr Ian McPhee
Audio
You can also listen to the interview [MP3 21.8MB].
iTunes
Visit this channel at La Trobe on iTunesU.
Transcript
- Matt Smith
Hello, I'm Matt Smith and I’d like to welcome you to this La Trobe University podcast. Today we will be learning about Arthur Dale Trendall, known as A D Trendall or sometimes known as Dale to his friends. He was a New Zealand-born art historian and classical archaeologist and he lived from 1909 to 1995. He was a principal authority on the red-figure vases produced in the Greek colonies and native areas of south Italy and Sicily during the 4th and 5th centuries BCE. I thought I’d open this with a sound recording of him, courtesy of the University of Sydney. Just be warned it was recorded in 1977 so the quality is slightly dodgy.
- Dale Trendall
When I came to the University of Sydney in September 1939, just before the outbreak of the Second World War, I was what you might you might call a rather young and inexperienced academic. I came straight from a Fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge and had not previously held a formal teaching position in a university. I therefore had very little experience of departmental life in a university and I would like to say, during the first few months, how extraordinarily kind and helpful my senior colleagues in the faculty were.
- Matt Smith
To discuss Trendall, his life, his work and the sort of person he was, I have with me Dr Gillian Shepherd. She’s a lecturer in Ancient Mediterranean Studies and the Deputy Director of the A D Trendall Research Centre for Ancient Mediterranean Studies at La Trobe University. Also with me is Dr Ian McPhee. He’s the Trendall Centre’s former Director and he knew and worked with Trendall for around twenty years.
- Ian McPhee
Trendall was a New Zealander and his first degree was with what was then the University of New Zealand at Otaga, Dunedin, and he went from there to Cambridge and got a starred First in Classics, Archaeology. During his time there, he travelled in Italy and fell in love with Paestum. He was also influenced by the great British classical archaeologist J D Beasley who was interested in the figured vases that were produced in Athens, so Trendall became interested in the similar vases produced in southern Italy and Sicily in the classical period, during the fifth and fourth centuries. He worked on those throughout his life and he was the world authority on that subject.
- Matt Smith
What sort of era was he working in then? Was this the sort of era when there was only world authority on those kinds of subjects?
- Ian McPhee
It was a time in the 1930s when the colonial art of the Greeks in southern Italy and Sicily wasn’t highly regarded. It wasn’t an area that had been worked on by British scholars very much. He took it up, as I say, because he became interested in these vases which depict myths, depict scenes of daily life, the theatre and so on. It required someone who was willing to travel around the world to see these vases all over the world, and a lot of scholars were not either able or willing to do that, although in later years he had followers, other scholars who were working in the same area. He was really the person who pioneered very much that field.
- Matt Smith
What did this work entail? I get the impression that he worked a lot in the basements of museums, going through collections.
- Gillian Shepherd
Trendall was never a field archaeologist as such. He didn’t go out and dig up this material. So his work was mainly museum-based, indeed that would be looking at excavated material housed in museum storerooms and on display in museums. Also of course, a lot of this material had already been known for some time. Some of it, for example, might have been excavated in the 19th century. He also, I think, developed a real network of contacts in southern Italy, so that when new discoveries were made he would be called in to look at the material, to make the attributions to individual vase painters, and was very much involved in that as well. He studied the material but didn’t actually excavate it himself. So he was I guess a museum archaeologist in that sense.
- Ian McPhee
When the Naples Museum was re-done after the Second World War, he had considerable input into that, particularly in terms of the vase rooms. And I remember an occasion when an American scholar was seeking a image of a vase and the Naples authorities couldn’t find it, so they wrote to Trendall, in Australia, to ask him where exactly in the museum it was located.
- Matt Smith
Did he know?
- Ian McPhee
Yes. He drew a diagram with an x on it.
- Matt Smith
Where does his connection with Australia come from, because you’d assume researching that sort of background, the best place for you to be would be in Italy. So, why does he have such a long association with universities in Australia and being based here?
- Gillian Shepherd
Trendall, I suppose, found himself in a rather lucky position. He had been offered a Fellowship in Trinity College in Cambridge, which he was going to take up, and indeed did so, briefly, but when he was visiting his parents in New Zealand, and of course this is in the late 1930s, at a period when you came by ship – it was a long journey, all the way, and at the time, the Professor of Greek at Sydney University was Enoch Powell, who was of course a very well known classicist but also famous as a British politician. And he at that point left the Chair of Greek in Sydney to return to Britain, partly perhaps because war was looming in Europe, but also we believe, had been offered a position at Durham University at the time. Trendall, who was in New Zealand, was invited to make a detour to Australia on his way back and be interviewed for the Chair of Greek, at Sydney. He was offered it and he took it. And that was really what started his very long career in Australia. And he went from Sydney University to ANU and then eventually to La Trobe.
- Ian McPhee
He did consider living in, particularly I think, England or Italy when he retired and he retired when he was 60, in 1969, but by that time all sorts of tax implications and so on that really made it less inviting than it might have seemed.
- Matt Smith
In doing digging up on Trendall, I found a lot of references to his activities during the war and the fact that he got recruited as some kind of code breaker. How did he make that transition? Where did that come in?
- Gillian Shepherd
Trendall was invited in 1940 to become part of an informal group of cryptographers, people breaking Japanese codes, and that small group involved a bunch of academics, not just Trendall as a classicist but also another classicist and mathematicians as well, because the sorts of skills that you apply in maths and also to ancient languages like Greek and Latin, these very sort of diagnostic and analytical skills, are exactly the kind of skills you need for code-breaking. And they had some success. They broke a Japanese code called LA Code but it was still a rather informal set-up until 1941. And of course at the end of 1941 Pearl Harbour was bombed. And that changed the war very much. First of all it signalled Japan’s formal entry into the Second World War, and also with that, Australia’s strategic position changed very significantly. That resulted in Trendall and his team of code-breakers being formally employed, this time actually in Melbourne, to break Japanese codes. And they were established at a place just in Queens Road in South Yarra, called Monterey, it’s a block of flats that still exists, and they were part of something called FRUMEL which was the Field Radio Unit Melbourne, and it was one of two very important allied intelligence units in the Asia-Pacific area. The other one was in Hawaii. And they were based there, attempting to break Japanese codes, which they did, with much success actually. Famously, they deciphered a message from the Japanese Foreign Minister – he was based in Budapest and it was to his ministry in Japan saying that despite German concerns that the Allies could read Japanese messages, he thought that was very unlikely, because Japanese was such a difficult language. And of course Trendall and his team were decoding this message here in Melbourne.
The other message that they decoded was one that revealed that the Japanese could read Australian messages being sent in East Timor, and this was obviously a big problem. Not a huge surprise at the time, because Australian ciphers were relatively simple then, but Trendall really took up the baton with this one, and in fact he invented his own code to replace the Australian ones that had been broken. He called this Trencode and it was extremely successful because it was a code that was simple enough to be used readily in the field, but complicated enough so that by the time the message was decoded, the information that message contained was redundant, because the event had been and gone. We believe that Trencode was used by the Australian military from about 1942 to 1946. So it was a very successful and very long-lived code.
- Matt Smith
Did he ever get any recognition for these sort of activities? What did he think of it, after it all happened?
- Gillian Shepherd
Trendall himself was very reticent about his activities during the war. He was not keen to talk about them. He really only wished I think to discuss his academic work in south Italian vase painting. So there’s not a lot left in terms of his thoughts and his records of that period. But his services to Australia, partly for that, but also for his wider services to education, to the humanities, to the museums in Australia, were recognised when he was made an AC, Commander of the Order of Australia, and he received that honour in 1976. Now, it was an honour that was only invented or instituted if you like, in 1975, so Dale Trendall was one of the very first recipients of this great honour that Australia gave him, and of course it was an honour given to a New Zealander.
He also received many other honours throughout his life, including one from the Vatican.
- Matt Smith
He got knighted by them, did he?
- Gillian Shepherd
He did. He became a ... what is it? A Commendatore del San Gregorio Armeno. The Vatican awards are rarely given to non-Catholics and Dale Trendall was not a Roman Catholic and this was we believe, in recognition of his great services to Italian archaeology and Italian museums, including of course the Vatican museums, because he was very much involved with their collections of south Italian vases as well.
- Ian McPhee
He was also made a member of the Accadamia dei Lincei which is the Italian equivalent of the British Academy, or the Australian Academy of the Humanities and that was quite a rare honour.
- Matt Smith
Let’s go back into his academia work then. That was clearly the most important part of his life, what he was studying and researching and publishing. How prolific did he get during his career?
- Gillian Shepherd
He was enormously prolific. He wrote many articles, he published many individual pieces, and he also produced huge volumes that really account for most of the south Italian vases that we know of today. And his first great study was Paestan Pottery, which appeared in 1936 and that was followed by other enormous studies including the Lucanian and Campagnian pottery, the Apulian pottery, these names all reflect the five different local styles of pottery which Trendall identified in southern Italy, and also Sicily. He had a very busy academic life, not just in terms of academic work, but also his other academic roles, including for example Master of University House at ANU, and a lot of his really substantial works were actually produced in fact towards the end of his formal academic career, and in his retirement, notably of course that includes the volume on fish-plates, which he wrote with Ian McPhee and he was really extremely prolific indeed. And these books that he produced attributing, identifying, describing, cataloguing all these vases, are still absolutely fundamental to the subject. And anybody working in this area today will still have to refer to Trendall’s work on the subject.
- Ian McPhee
He believed very firmly in not depending solely on photographs but to actually see the work and so from 1950 for some forty years, until 1990, he travelled forth two or three months every year in Europe or America, to look at vases from Trondheim in Norway to Otaga, Dunedin in New Zealand and so on. And this was of fundamental importance for the work that he did. And in Italy they always used to call him the winter swallow, because that’s when he arrived in their country.
- Matt Smith
And at what point did he come to La Trobe University? What was his association with this place?
- Gillian Shepherd
Trendall had actually reached retirement point and he was invited by La Trobe University, which at that stage was just being created. It was a brand new university so we’re talking 1969, 1970, and he was invited to become La Trobe’s first Resident Fellow. That meant that he had an actual residence, he lived at La Trobe University, and he was given a large flat at the top of Menzies College, which housed not only his living area, but of course his very substantial library, his collection of antiquities, his art collection and also his archive of something in the region of 40,000 photographs of the south Italian vases. And this set-up that we now call the Trendall Centre, is an important research centre for La Trobe University how. Trendall bequeathed all this to the university upon his death, and it is an absolutely unique resource.
- Matt Smith
So Ian, is this around the time that you started working with him, when he came to La Trobe?
- Ian McPhee
I came in 1974 and worked with him for about twenty years until his death at the end of 1995, and that was quite an experience. It actually took me about two weeks after I had arrived at La Trobe before I got up the nerve to call him up. He worked probably six days a week, from 8 or 8.30 in the morning until about 5.30 in the evening, and even sometimes on Sundays. I worked often with him the whole day and then sometimes he would say, look, come and have a sherry on the balcony with me, or if it had been a particularly hard day, we’d have what he called knockout drops, and I won’t give you the recipe for that. But no, it was a pleasure. He could be difficult, as anyone who is highly intelligent and very driven in his work can be, but if you argued your point clearly and logically, then he respected that and even if he didn’t agree with you, there was no problem. And we became colleagues but also he was, in my case, very much a mentor to me, and it was just really a privilege to work with them. He was immensely knowledgeable, not just about south Italian vases, classical archaeology, but about things like Italian opera, fiction of the 19th century, detective fiction in the 20th century – there were few things that he didn’t know quite a lot about.
- Matt Smith
What did you publish with him, during that time?
- Ian McPhee
Well, we published a number of articles but in particular we did a book on a particular type of artefact that we call a fish-plate, a flat plate with a central depression that is decorated around the depression with fish. These plates begin about 400BC and last pretty much through the 4th century. They were produced both in Athens and then in many places in southern Italy and Sicily. Those had never been collected as a whole and examined and studied, so we did that. I did the attic and a little bit of the south Italian and he basically did most of the south Italian.
- Gillian Shepherd
The really important contribution that Trendall made was he organised if you like, this huge body of material, all these thousands of vases into a way that we could make sense of them. And that is in all sorts of ways, but particularly in terms of their chronology and also their areas of production and trade contacts and that sort of thing. And the sorts of systems and ways of understanding the material that he set up, are still the ones we use today.
- Ian McPhee
I think also that one should emphasise his important contribution to education in Australia, and in this regard, in particular, the development of collections of classical antiquities. In the 1950s, the National Gallery of Victoria, for example, wanted to sue the Felton Bequest to acquire a representative collection of outstanding Greek vases. And so they called upon Trendall and he was very much responsible for the quite magnificent collection that the Gallery has today. But it’s not just the National Gallery. I mean, he was also responsible for the Nicholson Museum, acquisitions there from 1939 until ’54, and many small university collections around the country owed a debt to his interest.
- Matt Smith
What kind of broader legacy has he left? It seems like he is the sort of person who had a big impact on the academic world, but also on individuals. So how is he remembered?
- Gillian Shepherd
I think that he is remembered perhaps indirectly through his impact as Ian has said, on museums and academia in Australia. He was very much involved with the humanities and education more generally. He also was involved in other areas that are not at all related to classical antiquity. He for example was the first Chairman of the Interim Council of what became the Institute for the Study of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. He also was on the committee for decimalisation, when Australia moved to the dollar. So he had this impact really right across all Australian society in a way that perhaps people are unaware of. And now I think his legacy particularly for La Trobe University is of course in the library and in this extraordinary resource of the archive, but also his huge contribution to south Italian archaeology, the way in which he really opened up a whole field of study, particularly through the vase paintings but of course that now links in with our much wider understanding of southern Italy and Sicily in antiquity, and although perhaps when he started, these areas were rather deemed as sort of colonial, in terms of the great Greek centres like Athens. That is not the case now. And these are very important areas of study and research.
- Matt Smith
Ian, how about on a person level, as in Trendall the person? What sort of lasting memories did he leave with people?
- Ian McPhee
Well, I think one of the benefits to La Trobe University of having Trendall here for so many years, was that over those years, because he was living at the very top of the south wing of Menzies College, he met and encouraged quite a number of young students. He would have them up and serve them dinner of an evening, and they would be amazed, coming into his flat, because it was for many of them, a completely new experience. Here was this eminent scholar, who was a very approachable person, and who was incredibly cultured, and yet would talk to them as ordinary human beings, so to speak, and so he had a quite remarkable influence, I think, on the lives of many young people who went through Menzies College and La Trobe University, during his time.
- Matt Smith
You spent a long time working with him. I'm sure you’ve got lots of good stories. Just tell me about an experience that you had with Trendall.
- Ian McPhee
There were interesting stories that I heard him relate, with a twinkle in his eye. One for instance during his time from Sydney when it was the beginning of the war years, and he had managed to obtain a vase from England, and the friend in England sent him a telegram saying “Dolon despatched. Have Python. Ten pounds” and he received a very curt request from the Australian military censor to explain this obviously coded telegram. Well, the Dolon Painter was a Lucanian vase painter and Python was the name of another south Italian vase painter, so it wasn’t coded at all. But it didn’t sound that way to the military.
- Gillian Shepherd
The other thing is the platypus thing I suppose.
- Ian McPhee
Well, this was the Australian police in Canberra. They had a new boat for Lake Burley Griffin, the water police, and they came to Trendall and asked him if he could recommend a name for the boat. He immediately suggested Platypus which of course is an Australian animal, amphibious and they still if I'm correct, use that as their symbol. But of course platypus in Greek means flatfoot, which is a slang term for policeman. That was intentional. That was definitely intentional. But I mean, that was the sort of quick wit that he had.
- Matt Smith
That was Dr Gillian Shepherd and Dr Ian McPhee, on the subject of Dale Trendall. And you can find out more about the Trendall Centre at latrobe.edu.au/trendall. And that’s all the time we have today for the La Trobe University podcast. If you have any questions about this podcast or any other, then send us an email at podcast@latrobe.edu.au.
Focused, Ambitious and Transformative ideas - 
