Speaker by Various Artists

The Museum of Jurassic Technology

My sister got me a tshirt from there.

I get letters (well, email, these days) all the time. I just hit delete.

One person's occupational hazard is another person's museum exhibit.

They had more time in those days. Although I suppose these things are relative.

Boom!

The correspondence of Alice reminds me of a lady who used to send faxes to a television programme I worked on. (About once a year she'd ring up to get the fax number, which always prompted a "Do we have a fax machine?" panic.) The lady always wanted to appear on the TV show to talk about her theories which involved Barack Obama, Winston Peters, Bill Gates, Work & Income, her local DHB and Oprah and she'd fax in long hand-written explanations of her theories. The faxes always ended up in the recycle bin, but I always found something really lovely in her writing, and it's the same sort of spirit that Alice put into her letters. They're quite serious, intended for a serious audience, so it's fitting that they should be taken seriously.

Agreed, Robyn. I worked for a national AIDS organisation in Australia for a number of years and our letters were sometimes particularly interesting – ranging from red ballpoint bible verses decorating envelopes to an inventor in Taranaki who had constructed an electrical cure for HIV/AIDS. I liked Alice May Williams a lot – in her odd nobility and desire to communicate with well-regarded scientists as an equal. The Mt Wilson astronomers replied to her at least once, but I could not locate the letter. I also liked her self-belief while her life was unravelling around her… I really would like to know how her story developed and ended.

I had a guy call me from Damascus last year (when I was still working in the US), to say he had worked out that the moon actually orbited the earth in the opposite direction from the one you find in the textbooks.

He was very polite, but also insistent, so eventually I had to cut him off and get on with my day.

But if he really was from Syria, people were being shot dead in the street as the revolution there got underway that same week.

There is a surprising volume of this stuff out there. Some of it is merely eccentric – I am sure there are more “armchair cosmologists” with their own theories of how the universe works in New Zealand than paid professionals (although the latter list is fairly small, so it not that surprising I guess), whereas others are clearly mentally ill.

When I was a post-doc one of my senior colleagues was the writer of several high-profile popular books, and another edited a major journal. They got this stuff by the boxload, and had a friendly rivalry as to who got the most :-)

Thanks, David. Delightful.

One point confuses me: you say at the end Alice lived "with her husband in a lighthouse" yet earlier, about Hugh Williams, that "His relationship, if any, to Alice also cannot be confirmed."

There is a surprising volume of this stuff out there.

The number of amateur climatologists in NZ who are passionately convinced 'global warming' is hooey is quite astounding.
And that's just at our local pub :)

The number of amateur climatologists in NZ who are passionately convinced ‘global warming’ is hooey is quite astounding.

But they're generally rude old men. Not nice, like Alice.

Hi Sacha, I probably wasn't clear. Alice was married and she stated 'we' lived at the lighthouse five years before Letter #2 (written Jan 29th 1933). I presume this 'we' meant her husband and herself. She says she has photographs of her and 'the other keeper's wife' which again I presume means that she was married to a keeper. I cannot prove this. Hugh Williams was the only Williams I could trace in the appropriate time-period to a South Island lighthouse. As you suggest there was some amount of deduction involved... and at times I went down a number of wrong tracks. I also admit to listening to the Clockwork Orange track 'I Want To Marry A Lighthouse Keeper' during the writing:

Ta. Might need to make the two statements match. :)

But they're generally rude old men. Not nice, like Alice.

And worse still, many of them intersect with the Intelligent Design and neo-crusader mobs.

Fascinating work, David. It must have been so fun to track down the locations and connections, even if Alice herself cannot be pinned down in any definitive way. Richard is right, that there's a lot of this sort of thing (and thus this kind of mind) out there, but there's something particularly appealing about this trove - the handwritten letters, the gulf of time and place, the thought of a down-under Alice urgently communicating her own mental wonderland to the chaps manning the telescopes...

There's something at once soothing and frightening about her vision of the world; the way the Martian machines sound like lighthouses through the looking-glass. Makes me think of Percival Lowell and his fantasies about the Martian canals, although his theories were perhaps more grounded in observation... He died believing there might still be people on Mars. (One of these days someone should write properly about the links between his Martian imaginings and his whimsical writing about Japan; romantic aliens were very much his thing).

Also, I can't help wondering whether Alice lived long enough to read Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles, published only 17 years after her last letter. What she would have made of them?

It was fun seeking out the Auckland locations – it made an interesting under-history of the city. I was surprised just how fluid the names of streets were – two of the three had been renamed, and I am fairly sure K Rd has been renumbered, but I couldn’t satisfy myself about this by the essay’s deadline. K Rd (always a venue in my own mind) was made a richer place by her references.

You are right about the appeal of Alice’s letters. The Museum of Jurassic Tech has them as a centerpiece of a collection for some time – and has valued them accordingly. The very mention of Alice May Williams to them received a lots of ‘Yes!’ responses, just as if they were waiting for someone to notice… I also found two Americans who had took time out on tours to visit the Auckland addresses they could find. I loved the opera, especially the fact that Alice was played by a black American woman. There was something nice about the fact that she was valued, fifty years on, especially in the USA which had formed such a part of her intellectual life as indicated in the letters.

I only quoted a small part of Alice’s astronomical speculations. Her Martians and the scheme of her heavens were both far more complex constructions than I had space to cover. In an ideal world I would have liked to trace the sources of some of her other thoughts about them.

I’m with you on Percival Lowell and the Japanese connection, which I didn’t know. I’ve just been reading ’China Under The Empress Dowager' by Bland & Backhouse (1910) which is this odd history, from a European point of view, that makes this component of Asiatic History alien and erotic for the Edwardian Gentleman. I actually said to someone that it was nearly Edwardian sci-fi. I could see how it had affected everyone from C.J. Cherryh to Frank Herbert.

And, yes, I do wonder about Alice’s after-life. I hope happiness and ease eventually came her way.

[Lowell’s] fantasies about the Martian canals […] were perhaps more grounded in observation

though of course, unbeknownst to Lowell, his observations were, at least in part, of the blood vessels in his own eyeballs.

Fuller description here (PDF).

This story has great meaning for me. It evokes the universal loneliness that comes from each of us having knowledge that no one else will ever possess. Others may know about it, but never as we-to-whom-it-happened know it. There is a vast gulf between knowing something and merely knowing about it. As I get older this thought comes more frequently and with deepening poignancy.

What I am saying here is that this has nothing to do with whether the things we know are true or false, or crazy or sane.

So true, thanks. And welcome to Public Address.

Hi David,

Thanks for this article! It’s been a gold mine for me with regards to a school project that I’m working on. I live in LA and came away from the museum, utterly blown away. Alice sounds like such an incredible personality and I would love to know more about her. I’ve emailed the museum for more info but would be grateful for any tips and advice from you about where I could research.

Incidentally I’ve lived and studied filmmaking in Auckand and was happily surprised to know she hailed from there as well. Dominion Road, Mt Eden, K rd… these names sound hauntingly familiar – wish I’d known about her earlier.

The Princess of Mars

…whether Alice lived long enough to read
Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles,

Though she may well have been exposed to Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoom and John Carter of Mars…

She also puts me in mind of Philip K Dick, but less disturbed…