My Unwelcome Stranger

A man for all tongues (3) FINAL

2012-03-11T12:47:00.002+11:00

home | WHAT'S NEW! | stories from my past

Now to the final part of my saga, the point where I intended to start. What reminded me of Alan in the first place, after talking generally about word meaning changes, were these lines of a poem I happened to be reading from a fascinating collection of newly-available old Serbian verse and tales:

So the warriors were prepared for battle,
And the Turkish hosts approach Kossova.

The word that matters here is "host".

In one of his lectures, Alan Treloar made a rare aside and picked up this word, transliterating it through a series of languages I can't remember (I think through the Cyrillic script languages - Russian, Serbian and all that); one to the next. Rather like the old game of Chinese Whispers, he traced its variations through to modern English, yielding its meaning as an enemy, as in the Serbian poem above.

Then he started in the same place in time and geographically, and traced this same word in a westerly direction through to Greek-Aryan-Germanic to English, and so we acquired one word with two opposite meanings; host as in enemy, and host as in friend; those who look after you when you come to their house.

Hey, what about that? Not two words accidentally the same, but the same word, transformed. In fact, through the Arab world, you can go to your "host" - your enemy, and he must offer you food and protection according to that custom. He is your host in both senses of the word simultaneously!

"Hostage" is similar. It was common in many cultures to give an enemy a daughter in marriage, or have a son live in an enemy court, to show good faith. Same derivation. Sadly, hostages these days are rarely given the privileges of the hostages of more ancient custom.

A book came out recently on gutenberg.org, dated 1892. It's entitled Villainage in England: Essays in English Mediaeval History. This book itself has a fascinating history... but stick to the point, Wright! OK?

The point is the spelling of "Villain". These days we have a meaning for that word which is "low scum". Someone who would stoop to any meanness and, well... villainy!

But Vinogradoff, the eminent Russian scholar who dared to lecture the English about English serfdom, was talking of people who worked the land but didn't own it; not wicked people, but "low". Simply because of class notions, "villain" acquired its modern meaning - a reprobate you wouldn't associate with for quids.

Historians since tried to get around this abuse of the poor landless peasant, the serf, by spelling it "villein." That's the way we spelt it at high school, so our Pythonesque Holy Grail characters slopping about in the roadside mud being scorned by knights of the realm could acquire a bit more dignity.

All this started with my finding the word "slut" in a nursery rhyme! I had a couple of other words with an interesting etymology, but why do that when googling "etymology" would tell that story so much better? All I'm doing is to connect my thoughts via a truly amazing genius I had the great good fortune to know personally.

✺ ✺ ✺

I asked Alan to come back every year to lecture my Indian history students for as long as that was possible. I sat at the back of the theatre enjoying it more and more every time, taking in fresh insights I hadn't the nous to pick up earlier.

Sometimes it was the same lecture, because nothing in the research on that topic had changed. At others, fresh pages of neatly written script pointed to subtle or tectonic shifts in the philological research on a topic.

Some students loved it, especially the Distance Education students up in Armidale for Residential Schools. They were generally older than the Internals and realised they were getting a totally unexpected treat.

Others, sadly for them, thought it all a gigantic waste of their time. So be it.

✺ ✺ ✺

I have one final story to share with you concerning Alan Treloar; one that deserves its own piece because of the extraordinary man it brings into the story, but I'll try to reduce it to a virtual footnote and move away. Just be aware that I do not use the word "extraordinary" lightly.

Nitya

His name is Nitya Chaitanya Yati. He died in 1999.

In the late 1970s, this man, who had nine million dedicated followers around the world, came to Armidale. That's yet another story, but suffice it to say now that he met me at the university and he came to my house for one or two meals. Once, he cooked, in my kitchen, a beautiful South Indian vegetarian meal for us - a party of about ten. Focus, focus! This isn't about food....

Scientist, philosopher, poet, writer. I wrote for his journal about mysticism, and have his books still. He was the most intelligent, serene man I ever knew.

One evening, I told him about Alan Treloar and that he was lecturing to my students the following day, and he expressed a desire to go to the lecture. Alan was fine with this. He read his lecture to the class in the same manner as always. I think the lecture was on the major Vedic texts and how they influenced Indian society from top to bottom.

Nitya sat with me and listened with complete absorption. At the end of it, he quietly congratulated Alan on its quality and they spoke for a little time; two great minds needing to exchange only a few words, as great minds do.

To me, Nitya quietly said as we left the lecture theatre:

"That is the second time only I have ever heard a lecture by a Sanskrit scholar who is not an Indian deliver a flawless lecture on Sanskrit and its society."

Whoever the other one was, some scholar at the University of Hawaii whose name I can't recall, must have been awfully good. And Sanskrit, I say again, was a sideshow for Alan.

Sometimes I wish I'd told Alan about that, but... you know what? I don't think it mattered in the least.

Source

home | WHAT'S NEW! | stories from my past

Background | 1 | 2 | 3

A man for all tongues (2)

2012-03-08T21:17:00.004+11:00

home | WHAT'S NEW! | stories from my past

Background | 1 | 2 | 3

Before I go on, I want to make one thing clear. Sanskrit, unquestionably one of the most difficult languages in the world to learn well, was merely an academic sideshow for Alan Treloar to his most ingenious philological research. His real focus for many years was on the area that used to be known as the Near East, with languages such as Hittite, Akkadian, Sumerian, Ugaritic and Eblaite included in his specialties (if indeed he had any one over the other.) It's almost a case of 'Pick any language north of the Equator, ancient or modern,' and he had proficiency in it, Old Icelandic included. And of course, that included the written script.

For the lectures he gave my students on Vedic India, he had read the available literature from the original sources. He had no need of secondary ones.

As I approached the lectern on the first day, I noticed he was holding twenty or thirty pages of quarto lined paper, closely written in a very even hand. I can still see that writing vividly now and could pick out his style from amongst any number. There was not a crossing out or an addition in the margin; I can't even remember if there was a margin down the side. I don't think so. He didn't believe in wasted space.

The fairy-story part of the tale at this point would be that he held the entire room spellbound as he delivered his first lecture.

This was not the case. He picked up the sheaf of quarto leaves and began to read, in his deliberate, measured style of speaking. The structure of the sentences was such that the paper could have been typed out and published verbatim in a learned journal. But this wasn't a style of lecture most of the students were used to. Nor would it have pleased the ABC's venerable Aleisha Bonfield, who had hammered script-writing techniques into me a few years before.

In my lectures, I had made it easy for them, even though I didn't use the blackboard much. When I did, it was mainly to write Sanskrit terms. I would underline important words or phrases verbally as the lecture went on, so they could jot down key points rather than write too much and not take in what I was saying.

Alan had in effect prepared a lecture more like a military briefing; something I daresay as a senior Intelligence officer during World War 2 he would have done many times. Every word was exact in its meaning and there was no wasted phrase in any sentence. Every paragraph was a package of orderly, detailed information. Each page was a literary gem.

Like maybe twenty percent of the class, I was delighted by the depth of the information he was giving us, and his clarity of thought and insight. I had had the good fortune to be fairly well acquainted with this subject matter for several years as a tutor in Asian Civilisations at the University of Queensland, via a mixture of primary sources in translation, and commentary by the likes of de Bary, Max Müller and Moriz Winternitz. I'd had the benefit of evenings of discussions with Devahuti and Damodar, and Sanskritist-historian Sarva Daman Singh, but it was all new to these first year students. This was being thrown into the deep end, sink or swim.

I reckon as the lecture progressed I could probably have graded that class of students by their reactions. At the very least, I could have classified their intelligence and attention span. Fifty minutes of solid concentration was beyond most of them. Some who had started writing notes at the beginning and who were used to the verbal underlinings and asides in my lectures just gave up. It was all too hard. Everything was important! But at least giving up writing gave them the chance to listen, and some benefited from that. Maybe. I hope so.

The weakest students found it all too much. Who was this bloke in the gown reading one page after another in this measured tone, going on and on about things that were too hard to understand? Why spend time reading a hymn sung by the brahmins to frogs?

In the lectures he gave that followed, the anti-frog brigade dropped out.

I was glad about that. It was no use their being there, shuffling in their uncomfortable seats, resentful and bored. They'd come back when Mr Slightly-More-Entertaining delivered lectures on ... other things. Not frogs.*

The fact was that my students were getting the standard of lecture Alan would have given to any audience in any place anywhere in the world where he could safely assume that his listeners were intelligent, but not necessarily well informed. I did not care that there were people in my class not up to it. The best of my students were getting an experience they could expect to have in a lecture hall at Cambridge or Oxford, and that was what really mattered.

Not that it was all dead serious. Alan had an impish, if dry sense of humour, the punchline delivered in the same way as other lecture information was, and this added an element of surprise and colour. In his lecture on the Sanskrit epic, the Ramayana, his long military experience came into play when speaking of Lakshman(a), devoted younger brother of the hero, Rama.

"Lakshman exhibited all the characteristics of a Grenadier Guard," he said with a straight face not quite concealing a glint in his eye, "he was very brave and very loyal - but not very bright."

In one short sentence he had encapsulated something that was central to a very complicated plot. The good ones would get it.

At the end of each lecture, there was often a student who would come up to him and tell him how much they appreciated the lecture, and ask him a question or two. I always remember how he would step down from the lecture dais when he spoke to students, his head slightly to one side, taking in the question carefully, and invariably treating the student with respect and courtesy. His reply would be very direct, clear, and exactly to the point.

Alas, my story has run away from me once more, or is at best barely on the leash. My feet are frozen with the change of weather, and it seems an excellent time for me to sleep for a while. Next time, I swear, I will come to the particular point I started with, but I've no regrets leading you down this path. Some people deserve more public recognition than is often given to a man with a crazy job like a comparative philologist and war hero, and no-one can stop me!

(*Oh, and do you want to know why the frogs poem? I'll tell you if you like....)
.

Full Story

home | WHAT'S NEW! | stories from my past

Background | 1 | 2 | 3

A man for all tongues (1)

2012-03-08T00:11:00.005+11:00

home | WHAT'S NEW! | stories from my past

Background | 1 | 2 | 3

In an earlier piece, I rabbited on about how the meaning of words has changed over time; notably, because of its appearance in a nursery rhyme, the ugly word 'slut'.

I haven't quite finished with words, because this subject reminded me of a wonderful demonstration of how word meaning changes; a lesson given to me by one of the most remarkable people I have ever encountered in academic life.

Officially, he was a comparative philologist, but he was much more.

If you don't know what a philologist is, here's a short definition. A comparative philologist does even more challenging things, but one thing they're really good at is showing exactly where and how word meanings are changed by circumstances, place and time.

At least, if they're anything like Alan Treloar, they're brilliant, but he was one of a very rare kind. I'd put him in the unique category.

When I began teaching at the University of New England, appointed as the new Lecturer in the History of South Asian Civilisation, the Head of the History Department (my boss), was Professor Arasaratnam.

"Alan Treloar used to give some lectures for me when I was covering your course," Arasa said. "I'm sure he would do it for you too."

Alan Treloar

At the time, I confess to not knowing much about Alan at all, but I was aware that he was regarded as an authority on Sanskrit, the ancient Indian language that scholars of Indian origin are best placed to speak and study.

I was not a scholar of Sanskrit. Far from it. But it seemed like a good idea to me to take advantage of the expertise, were it on offer, of someone who was. I walked along the corridor and knocked on the door of his very modest study in the Classics and Ancient History Department, introduced myself briefly, and put Arasa's suggestion to him.

"I'm happy to do that,' he said in his quiet measured tone, "on what subjects would you prefer me to speak?"

"Ah."

What subjects would I prefer? I wasn't sure, but didn't want to look too much like a dummy.

"Well.... it's cultural history rather than language, but if you could talk about Vedic literature, particularly the Epics, and the life of the Vedic Indian.... Indo-Aryan culture.... Oh - and the Upanishadic era?"

"Yes," he said without the least hesitation. "Tell me how many lectures altogether that you would like. When do you want me to begin?"

How many would I like? What say the whole term? No, I couldn't ask that much, even though it would have been wonderful - for me at least - to sit at the back of the class and learn from the Master. He was, as I was quickly to discover, a true scholar in the traditional sense; a sense that has been lost almost entirely in many universities today. He would have given a dozen lectures without blinking an eyelid, had I been so presumptuous as to ask that of him.

But of course I wouldn't. I had other fascinating topics in Indian history and culture to talk about, and more than 2000 years of history to cover.

We settled on six lectures, which was a task well beyond the call of duty. I had just completed my lectures on the proto-historic Harappan Civilisation, so the next week was a perfect time to start.

Came the day of his first lecture, and he was there when I walked in, at 11.07 am. Morning lectures began at ten minutes past the hour and finished on the hour ahead; fifty minutes in all. His precision came as no surprise, but it was not punctiliousness. He simply left the appropriate minute or two's leeway.

His dress was unexpected to the students as well as myself, though it wouldn't have been any shock for me had I known him better. This was the mid 1970s, and informality was the order of the day.

Over his crisp white shirt and discreetly patterned tie, his tweed jacket, and tailored trousers, he wore a simple black academic gown. An Oxford cap, the legacy of his time as Rhodes Scholar at New College, Oxford, lay on the lecture bench in front of him.

No-one ever wore academic gowns to a lecture in the 1970s, except on the most formal of occasions. I introduced him to the class with practically no ceremony, and he began the lecture.

But here I must pause, because my account, which was intended to have a brief paragraph on Alan Treloar and his tracing of just one word through a variety of related languages has decided to tell itself instead, and I can't think of a good reason to stop it.

As it is, I'm going to have to cut it short, and leave out things I know to be true of his role in World War 2, which his official pledge to secrecy will probably leave untold for all time. Let me finish for now with this:

Colonel Alan Treloar ... went on to serve with the 2/14 Battalion in 1940-44, with overseas service first in the Syrian campaign, where he was seriously wounded, and later in Papua on the Kokoda Track.... then moved to the army's intelligence corps.

home | WHAT'S NEW! | stories from my past

Background | 1 | 2 | 3

Wright's Gutenblog

2012-03-05T12:57:00.001+11:00

home | WHAT'S NEW! | stories from my past

Why am I bothering? Any of you who chance upon this page may well wonder.

Why? I'm not sure, except to show you what insights a few excerpts from one day in the life of Gutenberg.org may reveal.

Every one of these comes from just one day's new releases - in this case, 3 March 2012. Each choice has a purpose, but I'll leave you to ponder that, with minimal comment from me.

I realise that few will look at these short excerpts. But, to quote one of the greatest personages of history, "there will be some who understand."

[NOTE: I now have a dedicated section of the blog for Gutenberg snippets. Please have a glance through them. There is a link to them permanently on the right hand navigation section, called The Joys of Gutenberg.]

❁ ❁ ❁ ❁ ❁

Dealing with the expert!

Our Journey to the Hebrides (1890)

by Elizabeth Robins Pennell and Joseph Pennell

Excerpt:

Dr. Johnson says that "to describe a city so much frequented as GLASGOW is unnecessary," and again we are willing to take his word for it. But its Cathedral was the first of the many surprises Scotland had in store for us. We had heard of it, but that was all. One young lady of Glasgow, fresh from a tour on the Continent, told us that she had never seen it. We were therefore prepared to find it no great thing. The exterior did not disappoint our expectations, but we have seldom been more impressed with an interior, and this though we had just come from the loveliest churches of England.

The crypt, or rather the under church, is its pride, as indeed it well may be. A verger stood smoking a pipe at the south door, and we told him what we thought. J-----, after three years' work in the English cathedrals, felt himself no mean authority.

"It's the finest in the world," said the verger.

"In Great Britain perhaps, but not in Europe," said J-----; for we had been but a moment before comparing it, as it now is, a cold, bare, show-place, to the under church of Assisi with the frescos on the walls, the old lamps burning before altars, the sweet smell of incense, and the monks kneeling in prayer.

"I only tell you what those qualified have said," and the verger settled the matter and J-----'s pretensions.

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/39026

Our Journey to the Hebrides by Elizabeth Robins Pennell and Joseph Pennell

❁ ❁ ❁ ❁ ❁

No comment necessary!

Ladies in the Field: Sketches of Sport (1894)

by Beatrice Violet Graham Greville

Contents and Excerpt:

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/39025

Ladies in the Field: Sketches of Sport by Beatrice Violet Graham Greville

❁ ❁ ❁ ❁ ❁

The first stanza of this brings to mind the movie Like Water for Chocolate! The clever use of broken English gives authenticity.

3.
Servian Popular Poetry (1827)

by John Bowring

Excerpt:

And the maiden look around the circle

And within her sad heart sighing deeply,

Once again she ask the marriage-leader:

"Who is he upon that white horse seated,

He who bears so high aloft the banner,

On whose chin that sable beard is growing?

And the leader answers thus the maiden:

"He‚ the hero Suko of Urbinia;

He who for thee with thy brother struggled,

Struggled well indeed, but could not win thee.

When the lovely maiden heard the leader,

On the black, black earth, anon she fainted:

All to raise her, hastening, gather round her,

And the last of all came Mustaph Aga;

None could lift her from the ground, till Suko

Sticks into the earth his waving banner,

Stretches out his right hand to the maiden.

See her, see her! from the ground upspringing,

Swift she vaults upon his steed behind him;

Rapidly he guides the courser onwards,

Swift they speed across the open desert,

Swift as ever star across the heavens.

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/39028

Servian Popular Poetry by John Bowring

❁ ❁ ❁ ❁ ❁

Europe in political as well as military turmoil during and at the end of World War 1. The battle lines between Communists, Anarchists, Social Democrats and the Right Wing reactionaries is played out, as this episode illustrates.

The Future Belongs to the People (1918)

by Karl Paul August Friedrich Liebknecht

LIEBKNECHT'S TRIAL AND RELEASE

On June 28th, 1916, Karl Liebknecht was sentenced at secret trial to thirty months' penal servitude. When the public prosecutor asked for this secrecy, Liebknecht exclaimed:

"It is cowardice on your part, gentlemen. Yes, I repeat, that you are cowards if you close these doors."

Nevertheless, the court decided to exclude the public, upon which Liebknecht cried to his wife and Rosa Luxemburg, in the audience, "Leave this comedy, where everything, including even the decision, has been prepared beforehand."

Following the announcement of the sentence given Liebknecht, the Potsdamerplatz in Berlin was the scene of a serious outbreak.

The next day (according to reports from Switzerland) strikes of protest against the Liebknecht case took place in Berlin and some 55,000 persons were involved in them. In other cities strikes and demonstrations of protest also took place.

An appeal was taken but resulted only in an increase in the sentence to four years' and one month's imprisonment at hard labor. Furthermore, he was deprived of all his civil rights for a period of six years after he should have served his term.

[Associated Press Dispatch]

PARIS, October 25. - An enormous crowd assembled before the Reichstag building in Berlin yesterday, calling for the abdication of Emperor William and the formation of a republic, according to a special dispatch from Zurich to L'Information.

Dr. Karl Liebknecht, the Socialist leader who has just been released from prison, was applauded frantically. He was compelled to enter a carriage filled with flowers from which he made a speech declaring that the time of the people had arrived.

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/39023

The Future Belongs to the People by Karl Paul August Friedrich Liebknecht

❁ ❁ ❁ ❁ ❁

Interesting to see what was being taught then in Bible Studies in the US, and the methods. There is some keenness to link religion and science. Have things changed?

The Dramatization of Bible Stories (1918)

by Elizabeth Erwin Miller Lobingier

Illustration:

"Shepherd"

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/39022

The Dramatization of Bible Stories by Elizabeth Erwin Miller Lobingier

❁ ❁ ❁ ❁ ❁

In the wake of the American Civil War, the fate of African Americans had to be decided. A lot of Gutenberg literature released recently centres on this traumatic period of US history.

6.
Memoirs of Gen. William T. Sherman, Complete (1885)
by William T. Sherman

Excerpt:

HEADQUARTERS MILITARY DIVISION OF THE MISSISSIPPI, IN THE FIELD, NEAR SAVANNAH, GEORGIA, January 16, 1865.

1. The islands from Charleston south, the abandoned rice-fields along the rivers for thirty miles back from the sea, and the country bordering the St. John's River, Florida, are reserved and set apart for the settlement of the negroes now made free by the acts of war and the proclamation of the President of the United States.

2. At Beaufort, Hilton Head, Savannah, Fernandina, St. Augustine, and Jacksonville, the blacks may remain in their chosen or accustomed vocations; but on the islands, and in the settlements hereafter to be established, no white person whatever, unless military officers and soldiers detailed for duty, will be permitted to reside; and the sole and exclusive management of affairs will be left to the freed people themselves, subject only to the United States military authority, and the acts of Congress. By the laws of war, and orders of the President of the United States, the negro is free, and must be dealt with as such. He cannot be subjected to conscription, or forced military service, save by the written orders of the highest military authority of the department, under such regulations as the President or Congress may prescribe. Domestic servants, blacksmiths, carpenters, and other mechanics, will be free to select their own work and residence, but the young and able-bodied negroes must be encouraged to enlist as soldiery in the service of the United States, to contribute their share toward maintaining their own freedom, and securing their rights as citizens of the United States.

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4361

Memoirs of Gen. William T. Sherman, Complete by William T. Sherman

❁ ❁ ❁ ❁ ❁

The Native Americans were also locked in a fierce struggle for their lives and livelihood in the mid-1850s. Tales abound of the battles and skirmishes that took place. We are reminded that the US Army doesn't hesitate to engage their opponents (terrorists, no doubt, in today's parlance), across national borders.

Personal Memoirs of P. H. Sheridan, General, United States Army, Complete (1888)

"Death of a Drummer Boy"

About mid-winter a party of hostile Lipans made a swoop around and skirting the garrison, killing a herder - a discharged drummer-boy - in sight of the flag-staff. Of course great excitement followed. Captain J. G. Walker, of the Mounted Rifles, immediately started with his company in pursuit of the Indians, and I was directed to accompany the command.

Not far away we found the body of the boy filled with arrows, and near him the body of a fine looking young Indian, whom the lad had undoubtedly killed before he was himself overpowered. We were not a great distance behind the Indians when the boy's body was discovered, and having good trailers we gained on them rapidly, with the prospect of overhauling them, but as soon as they found we were getting near they headed for the Rio Grande, made the crossing to the opposite bank, and were in Mexico before we could overtake them.

When on the other side of the boundary they grew very brave, daring us to come over to fight them, well aware all the time that the international line prevented us from continuing the pursuit. So we had to return to the post without reward for our exertion except the consciousness of having made the best effort we could to catch the murderers. That night, in company with Lieutenant Thomas G. Williams, I crossed over the river to the Mexican village of Piedras Negras, and on going to a house where a large baille, or dance, was going on we found among those present two of the Indians we had been chasing.

As soon as they saw us they strung their bows for a fight, and we drew our six-shooters, but the Mexicans quickly closed in around the Indians and forced them out of the house - or rude jackal - where the "ball" was being held, and they escaped. We learned later something about the nature of the fight the drummer had made, and that his death had cost them dear, for, in addition to the Indian killed and lying by his side, he had mortally wounded another and seriously wounded a third, with the three shots that he had fired.

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4362

Personal Memoirs of P. H. Sheridan, General, United States Army, Complete

❁ ❁ ❁ ❁ ❁

Making the best of things. The final sentence which has become a mantra for all subsequent US Governments, is ominous if not totally prophetic.

8.
Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, Complete (1885)
by Ulysses S. Grant

It is probably well that we had the war when we did. We are better off now than we would have been without it, and have made more rapid progress than we otherwise should have made. The civilized nations of Europe have been stimulated into unusual activity, so that commerce, trade, travel, and thorough acquaintance among people of different nationalities, has become common; whereas, before, it was but the few who had ever had the privilege of going beyond the limits of their own country or who knew anything about other people. Then, too, our republican institutions were regarded as experiments up to the breaking out of the rebellion, and monarchical Europe generally believed that our republic was a rope of sand that would part the moment the slightest strain was brought upon it. Now it has shown itself capable of dealing with one of the greatest wars that was ever made, and our people have proven themselves to be the most formidable in war of any nationality.

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4367

Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, Complete by Ulysses S. Grant

❁ ❁ ❁ ❁ ❁

Has anything changed? Really?

9.
The Great Conspiracy, Complete (1886)
by John Alexander Logan

"What next?" - you ask - "What next?" Alas, it is not difficult to predict! Power, lawlessly gained, is always mercilessly used. Power, usurped, is never tamely surrendered. The old French proverb, that "revolutions never go backward," is as true to-day, as when it was written. Already we see the signs of great preparations throughout the Solid South. Already we hear the shout of partisan hosts marshalled behind the leaders of the disarmed Rebellion, in order that the same old political organization which brought distress upon this Land shall again control the Government. Already the spirit of the former aggressiveness is defiantly bestirring itself. The old chieftains intend to take no more chances. They feel that their Great Conspiracy is now assured of success, inside the Union. They hesitate not to declare that the power once held by them, and temporarily lost, is regained. Like the Old Man of the Sea, they are now on top, and they:

MEAN TO KEEP THERE - IF THEY CAN.

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7140

The Great Conspiracy, Complete by John Alexander Logan

❁ ❁ ❁ ❁ ❁

home | WHAT'S NEW! | stories from my past

A joyous murder

2012-03-04T10:16:00.001+11:00

home | WHAT'S NEW! | stories from my past

Adapted from Sources One and Two

Last Friday, a wondrous thing happened.

Well, it was wonderful to me, though may seem not so significant except for the others involved, who understood why it meant so much to me and made it happen.

I've mentioned many times the story of how we discovered I had a brain tumour. The important thing to today's story was that I had only barely started to cut down the runaway portion of the hedge at the side of the house when the events occurred leading up to finding myself in an ambulance on the way to hospital for emergency treatment.

So the small group of large stems a metre above the remainder of the hedge remained uncut as we dealt with a much bigger pruning problem in my brain.

In the months of treatment in Melbourne, friends from the ADMS* and elsewhere got in and had working bees on our garden to keep it in order. It's a middle-aged kind of garden, if you understand the analogy, and with a good growing season and no maintenance, can quickly get out of control. We were terribly grateful for this and the garden always looked neat and tidy even though we were away for those months.

Only one section of the hedge remained in the too-hard basket: the part where I had begun the earnest task of solving it on 3 December 2009 and ended up in hospital.

Tracey and Christian worked on the garden in the months that followed; months that stretched to years. We have had extraordinary succession of growing seasons; mild, wet seasons all round, and it was difficult to maintain the garden. But it got done, made easier at times by the intervention of friends.

I am usually up first in the mornings. Each day I pull up the blind in the kitchen to let in the light. Most days have been quite grey, but there was always one constant in my view.

That was that growing, expanding privet, gone now from bush to vigorous tree. Trees. And in that one spot before my eyes, expanding daily, like a cancer. Every morning it seemed, it had grown visibly larger.

Ironically, privet is a Declared Noxious Weed in these here parts, which means if it is not controlled by the owner, the local council can take action and destroy it; for a considerable sum, no doubt. When it's in flower, it can be deadly for asthma sufferers and a constant source of irritation to those with allergies.

Friends had gladly offered to remove it, but every time a privet removal party was arranged, it rained, or the arrangement broke down because life intervened, as it does.

And so, to cut a privet-like story short, I was reminded daily of unpleasant events going on in my brain by the cancerous growth outside the window; my first view of the day, each and every day. For the most part, I kept these thoughts to myself. Knowing how I felt about it, Tracey had done everything she could to have the four metres of out of control hedge removed, but it just seemed doomed to failure.

This became an obsession with me. I could do nothing about it myself. I had even tried, early on, but it ended inevitably in a seizure, and I was banned from any further attempts.

Each day looking out that window, I wanted it gone. Each day, it grew bigger.

Finally, early last week, when our dear friend Julie was here on one of her all-too-rare visits - rare only because she fears too much that she might intrude - I (or was it Tracey?) blurted out to her my daily reaction to the privet bushes (trees) in total view out the kitchen window, and their effect on me.

Julie went away. Shortly after, we got an email. She and Michael and our other good friends Joan and Carl would come on Friday, and deal with the monster. Michael, armed with chainsaw, and Carl, with trailer, Christian, who had put off a long-awaited camping trip due to begin on that day in order to take part, Julie, Joan and Tracey would make it disappear. It would only take an hour, said Julie. Ho ho, I thought.

It was sunny and warm on the day, and the working bee arrived, fully armed and ready for action. There were a few things about those four metres of hedge that they didn't know, but were about to find out.

For one thing, the privet was full of thorny climbing rose and other tough-stemmed vines, and there was also a wire trellis hidden from view deep within; not something to discuss with a chainsaw, for in spite of all those great chainsaw massacre movies you might have seen, all sixty teeth on a chain can be blunted or wrecked in less than a second by wire in a hedge.

And that wasn't all. There was a fence to fix afterwards. Not one, but three trips to the recycling depot. 15 minutes there, 15 back, and 15 to unload, times three. Not quite the one hour, Julie. I knew that was a bit optimistic! It would take an entire morning, with six people hard at work on an unusually hot day for Armidale.

But, my friends and rellies, it's gloriously gone. I look out the window this morning in the sunshine, and ... well, to be truthful, the neighbour's garage, not in great repair, and the side wall of their house are in some ways less attractive to look at than a large green tree, with the last of its illegal privet blossoms. But there's far more light streaming in.

And it's gone! That burgeoning cancerous mass of luxuriant growth has been erased from the order of the rest of the hedge.

Now, thanks to the Friday Working Beavers, I feel I can focus on that other one for the first time.

I can't thank you enough, dear folks. One blight has been removed from our lives.

*ADMS stands for the Armidale Drama and Musical Society, of which I am a Life Member. Various members and other friends and relatives helped us hugely when it came to such things, as well as raising the money to pay for Avastin which has helped so much to keep me alive so far.

I wrote 'ADMS' in lower case when drafting this posting. Curious, I wondered what the spelling-checker would make of the 'word' and what it might suggest. This was the result!

home | WHAT'S NEW! | stories from my past

Classics for February, Gutenberg

2012-03-02T16:11:00.006+11:00

home | WHAT'S NEW! | stories from my past

These are the 'classics' released by Gutenberg in the month of February 2012 (I use the word 'classic' fairly loosely.)

In this batch, a swag of writings by Mark Twain. These are beautifully illustrated, hence my advice below.

I have also chosen some other writings in different categories that I think may appeal to the tastes of some. These I'll post shortly. There are some wonderful ones. I am still figuring out the best way to display them and not dominate the blog. I have an idea. It all takes time....

What to do:

1. Install Kindle Reader on your PC or Mac. That way you can choose the fully illustrated versions when the illustrations are important to the pleasure of reading. You don't need to own a Kindle Reader. Calibre works just as well. Both are free.

2. Now click on any title below. It will take you to that title on Gutenberg's site.

3. Choose your desired format and download the book. (EPUB is the one for Calibre.)
.

4. Doubleclick on the downloaded file and it will take you from there.

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Mr. Standfast by John Buchan

The Outlaw of Torn by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Bleak House by Charles Dickens

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

The Borgias by Alexandre Dumas

The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas

The Vicomte De Bragelonne by Alexandre Dumas

Twenty Years After by Alexandre Dumas

Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell

North and South by Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell

Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham

Moby Dick, or, the whale by Herman Melville

The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Emmuska Orczy

Esther by Jean Racine

The Cloister and the Hearth by Charles Reade

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain

A Tramp Abroad by Mark Twain

Following the Equator by Mark Twain

Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain

Roughing It by Mark Twain

Sketches New and Old by Mark Twain

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain

The Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain

The Prince and the Pauper by Mark Twain

Around the World in 80 Days by Jules Verne

My Man Jeeves by P. G. Wodehouse

home | WHAT'S NEW! | stories from my past

I'm going to be Amaze-ing!

2012-02-29T22:00:00.002+11:00

home | WHAT'S NEW! | stories from my past

Alice swims across Port Phillip Bay

My daughter Alice is a bit of a soft touch when it comes to helping others. She's always been like that. She's her father's daughter in that sense. I think it's a good quality myself, though can be inconvenient at times.

Last night she emailed me and asked if I could help her by posting something here about what she's agreed to do.

Here it is in her own words (this was written for an internal Monash University publication for distribution amongst her colleagues):

I'm going to be Amaze-ing!

Once again I am endeavoring to test my athletic limits as I have signed up to be part of the Monash Team to swim in the first Marathon swim of this kind in Australia! This is a fundraising event for Autism Victoria (Amaze).

The 42 km swim crosses Port Phillip Bay from Point Lonsdale to Brighton, and takes place over 2 days, 10-11 March. I will be doing this as part the Monash Corporate relay team of 10 swimmers. The ABC will be making a documentary about it, so I could be famous!!

I am not a super-fish; I am an average swimmer and I really didn't like the swimming carnival at school. This is a BIG challenge for me. I am very excited about it and to be able to do this for all those people who can't.

I'm also looking forward to achieving something I have never done before.

We have a fund raising page

http://www.everydayhero.com.au/monash_university_3

If you can spare a few dollars, please sponsor me (and the Monash Team) via this website. Any support will be greatly appreciated, and will spur me on to swim as hard as I can!

I am a late entrant so am way behind in the fundraising stakes, but hope I can make a late charge and still make a difference for Amaze.

Many thanks

Alice

I went to the site and yes, as you'll see at the bottom of the image, her participation does look a bit sad. Coming in late she's had no chance to raise any money yet for a very worthy cause.

Autism is a particularly difficult condition for all concerned, but there is a lot of research going on, and a lot of thought going into making life better for autistic children and their families.

It's just a matter of going to the website and providing a little sponsorship.

Any takers? Or, should I say, any givers? Any help at all would be appreciated.

The team. Alice Wright (far right)

Giants of the Bay Website

Help me please? For an autistic child....

home | WHAT'S NEW! | stories from my past

A bitter pill to swallow?

2012-02-29T11:04:00.001+11:00

home | WHAT'S NEW! | stories from my past

If you never have any problem pill-swallowing, or don't know anyone who does, don't bother going on reading this - just try swallowing one of these instead!

A lot of people do have trouble swallowing a pill or capsule. Do you find that no matter how hard you try, glass of water in hand, that the pill often still ends up in your mouth, and it just won't go down?

I ask you this because I used to have a great deal of difficulty, and even after knowing for sure that I'd swallowed the pill, I was left with the sensation that it was stuck in my throat.

So there are two separate annoyances here

getting that pill from mouth down your throat, and
that feeling it's stuck halfway after swallowing.

Even now, occasionally, I get this latter unpleasant feeling (which, by the way, is illusory, however real it feels), but I have some ways round the problem of swallowing the pill.

Just as a brief explanation: until the past couple of years, I rarely took a capsule or pill in my life. If I'd had a minor headache, I'd just use soluble aspirin and drink it down. But now I am forced to take pills and capsules every day, several times a day, and it was only when that routine started that I discovered I often had trouble as I've described above.

I was going to tell you all the wrong ways I tried to solve it, but let's cut to the chase. It was Tracey who put me straight with this.

The most common mistake is to put the pill in your mouth, as far back as you can, take a sip of water, tilt your head back and try to toss the lot down.

This usually results in drinking a lot of water and finding an often-nasty-tasting pill still securely in your mouth.

A lot depends on the instructions on the pill bottle or what your GP tells you about whether a pill is taken with or without food. If you can't or don't want to take it with food, then go to plan B.

Plan A. With food.

This is the simplest solution to the whole problem. Take a bite of the food, chew it up to the point that you're about to swallow, slip the pill or capsule into or beside it, and it's all gone when you swallow. If it's particularly nasty tasting - and one of mine is! - slipping it right into the middle of a piece ready for swallowing and quickly doing so works for me. And - it leaves no sensation that there's a pill stuck halfway down my gullet as I keep on eating. YMMV.*

Plan B. With water.

Here's the trick.
(a) Place the pill on the top of the tip of your tongue, and take a good sip of water without dislodging the pill. Trial and error will give you the right amount of H2O no doubt.
(b) Tilt the head forward. That's right. Angle it down, not up. It seems counter-intuitive. Don't tip your head back. Gravity is not involved here! Not directly anyway.

Now gently swallow the mouthful of water and simultaneously roll your tongue along the roof of your mouth, using it like a mini-broom to push the pill down the hatch. Keep your head inclined forward, not back.

Somehow it works. Don't ask me why; it just does. [STOP PRESS: Tracey just reminded me why. At this angle, the pill floats to the top in your mouth, and just gets pushed down the throat like a barrel going over the Niagara Falls!]

Don't give up if you have a failure or two. You'll get there. And most of the time you won't have that annoying sensation that the pill's still in your throat.

Dedicated to those many people who have a real problem getting those damn pills into their stomachs.

*YMMV? You don't know what it means? Come on, get with the cool-talkin' peeps. Your Mileage May Vary. In other words, you might end up with a different result from mine. (It's OK, I didn't know what it meant all that long ago either, but I googled it, and the oracle revealed its secret.) You are now one of the Beautiful People, AFAIK. AFAIK? Google it yourself!

home | WHAT'S NEW! | stories from my past

Where the wild things ought to be (3)

2012-02-27T21:23:00.005+11:00

home | WHAT'S NEW! | stories from my past
wild things 1 | wild things 2 | wild things 3

The Night of the Slut

It's children's bedtime, and I'm reading nursery rhymes to two little girls; old rhymes that are quirky and whimsical, something like this funny little verse in the Big Book of Nursery Rhymes:

And then I start reading this one, not having read ahead:

"What's a slut, Dad?"

I would be sure to have been asked by one or the other of those little girls, or both. Inquisitive little devils, they were.

So what are you going to say, Dad?

Of course, that would have been 25 years or more ago, if I had read that verse. The 'Slutwalk' appropriation of the term that's happened recently, with its strongly serious message and undertones, reminds us how a word's meaning can veer off from a past understanding of its intent.

I've no intention of getting into the current debate here. It is championed by more articulate people than I and I leave it to them. Words are fluid in their use and no-one should be surprised when they push different buttons in people's consciousness at different times in history – or if, for that matter, they are deliberately chosen to carry a message.

That's what happens to language. Words that are still regarded as obscene today (a diminishing number, admittedly) were in regular use in polite company at various times in the past.

But it was not all that long ago that 'slut' carried a less harsh meaning than it does now. As with other words, it depends on how barbed the arrow is.

Used with intent to wound, there is still probably no more hurtful and degrading word, I'm sure, than for a woman to have it thrown at her, in spite of the strong moves in the recent past to rehabilitate it and give it dignity. Today it's seen in a more strongly sexual context than it did, and not all that long ago. Now it conjures up a very recent imagery.

The word 'slut' derives from 'slattern,' which is in the same group as 'slovenly.' In this nursery rhyme, the meaning of 'slut' is far more associated with that group: 'careless' or 'lazy.' Or dirty. The nursery rhyme carries this intent – an insult more often than not hurled by women at women who failed to conform to the standards of the day.

But 'dirty' too is a loaded term. It has always been linked with relaxation of the sexual rules at best, or further down the moral scale, to licence or depravity. Dirty books. Movies. Jokes. Or illicit sex, not conforming to what were often prim, proper or puritanical standards supposedly the hallmark of an earlier era, especially the Victorian one.

There's no clear separation in the meanings for the term. Licentious, naughty, dirty, cheeky, inappropriate, sexy, lazy, untrustworthy, willful, slovenly. All terms aimed at women, the real meaning dependent who it's aimed at and who's aiming it.

The illustration for the poem shows a female (a very little, very innocent one) standing at the bath, so I could easily tell my little daughters that in the olden days, it meant someone who should have bathed every day, as they did, rather than wait till the end of the week as this one did, the naughty little grub. I'd have added that it's not something they should call any other person these days, or it could make them very angry.

But... it's not really the whole story. Could it not also be about a woman who in those days waits till the end of the week not only to wash her body, but the family's clothes? There were days in a Big House (think Downton Abbey!), when washing, ironing, polishing and dusting were done to a fairly strict weekly routine.

Social classes tend to ape their betters, and even in a working class family of an earlier era, woe betide the slatternly non-conformist girl or woman sitting in the sun smoking a cigarette in her scarf, dressing gown and slippers, way past breakfast time.

'Oh, the slut!' a neighbour secretly envious of the "slut's" failure to conform might say.

'Yes, a slut indeed,' the disapproving wife's husband might well echo, angry and frustrated that his prim and proper lady couldn't be a bit more like the pretty neighbour at times, sitting on the doorstep lazing in the sun.

Here's the mañana lady who epitomised it all a half-century ago – though slightly more glamorous, scrubbed and non-Latino than the next door neighbour or the Mexican belle she's supposed to be portraying. Both Peggy Lee and the neighbour are probably equally unavailable to Mr. Righteous the Disapprover; hence his anger is fueled by her "sluttish" behaviour.

Who knows how that resentment might manifest itself? Welcome to the 21st Century.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oUT6mTq5ekM

home | WHAT'S NEW! | stories from my past
wild things 1 | wild things 2 | wild things 3

Where the wild things ought to be (2)

2012-02-26T21:17:00.005+11:00

home | WHAT'S NEW! | stories from my past
wild things 1 | wild things 2 | wild things 3

I was reading a book of nursery rhymes the other day, as you do.

The reason is that I wondered how many I remembered from my childhood of the large collection in front of me, and was well pleased that I knew the majority of them. I don't mean 90%; but more than half. There are some there that are gems I've never seen before.

Still, it's a goodly number, considering how many rhymes are there.

Then I asked myself exactly why I knew so many. Most of them derive from the nineteenth century or a good deal earlier – Tudor times at the latest, as we know from some of the references to the Black Death, and Mary Queen of Scots, Humpty Dumpty etc.

I won't go into how so many are veiled references to important political figures of their era, parodied, lampooned and derided, as these analyses have all been done before.

But reading them now I can see how many also poked fun at social figures, men and women, with plenty of sexual overtones that would escape children completely – though not their parents, particularly at the time of the rhyme's invention, I'll bet.

Don't tell me this was what the gentlemen were after!

The reasons why there are so many stuck in my head vary. One is that our house was full of books of one sort or another, suitable to our ages as we grew up.

Mum knew well, instinctively, the enormous worth of verse and song, rhythm and rhyme, and how valuable they were to our neural development.

Thus she read and sang them to us and we sang them with her while looking at the pictures. Links and associations developed in our brains and cemented memories there. The alphabet was learned with no effort. Pre-TV Sesame Street in our own accent, some nursery rhymes were.

All sorts of children's games also played their part, linked as they were to verse and rhythm. Some in the 1950s which we thought utterly harmless would be very incorrect politically these days. My sisters will readily remember one clapping game that starts:

Mary Mack,
Dressed in black

Silver buttons down her back

She likes coffee

She likes tea --

(And supply the final line, girls!)

Or the rhyme to choose something:

Eeny meeny miny mo....

(You know how it goes. Of course you do!)

A lot of these games were girls' games, but in a small country town there was a good deal of cross play. I had three sisters and many girl cousins, and in the spare time in the weekend, boys and girls would often play the same games, whether rounders or skipping. When numbers were short and you needed a backstop in rounders, it didn't pay to be too choosy.

All the girls had their personal skipping ropes, but the best fun in skipping was communal.

We boys were a bit funny about this, as it was pretty much a girl's art, but sometimes a strange fancy took us all and we'd decide to play as well.

The girls didn't mind. Society was still strongly gendered; the Swinging Sixties were yet to arrive. This was one thing they surely proved publicly that they did better than the boys. They were happy to demonstrate it and remind males of their inferiority in these quite physical pursuits.

Some girls were expert at turning the long heavy ropes in perfect time. We learned to run 'in' without stopping the rope, and skip in time, along with five or six or more others. As with all things, there was an art to this and the skill didn't always come easily.

As well, the girls sometimes got two ropes and the turners interwove them, turning one clockwise with one hand and anticlockwise with the other - a bit like an egg-beater only different....

That action doubled the pace and the skill required. Even to 'run in' without stopping either rope was quite a challenge and required split-second timing and coordination.

I wonder if they do this at schools these days, anywhere, or if the 'double-rope' skipping is a thing of the past? I hope not. Maybe it still exists in country schools, or is more widespread than I think. It's the sort of thing multicultural schools in the cities just might have reimported with the arrival of some new culture group.

I'm guessing. It was so good for kids in so many ways. No wonder we were lean and healthy. Or plump and healthy.

Just healthy, yes. Many a somewhat plump little girl could skip all day.

The point of all this is that songs were always sung to go with the skipping game, whichever one was chosen, and quite a few of them were based on the old nursery rhymes too, so it's hardly surprising that we never forgot them.

Now this brings me to the surprise package in the Big Book of Nursery Rhymes. Or is it really so surprising, or outrageous?

I refer to the slut! I contend, Yer Onner, that it's much less outrageous than we might think.

Next time, final part. I promise. Scout's honour. Hey, here it is!

home | WHAT'S NEW! | stories from my past
wild things 1 | wild things 2 | wild things 3

All images come from the online version of The Big Book of Nursery Rhymes, available at http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/38562

There are various formats, but I recommend highly installing a Kindle Reader program on your PC or Mac computer (you don't need to own a Kindle Reader tablet) and enjoy the beautiful illustrations as well.

home | WHAT'S NEW! | stories from my past
wild things 1 | wild things 2 | wild things 3

A Journey in Other Worlds

2012-02-25T01:07:00.001+11:00

by John Jacob Astor

Snippets from the Gutenberg Collection: free downloads 2012

home | WHAT'S NEW! | stories from my past

books1 | books2

"The Signals from the Arctic Circle"

I have to call this a fantasy rather than science fiction. There is no recorded date of publication but it's clearly around 1900.

What I find interesting is how much it reflects the character of its age. As the reference to a jolly good hunting trip on Jupiter indicates, it's more like a safari to Africa than to another planet: the Darkest Africa so beloved of the glory days of European colonialism and imperialism. The idea of the 'draining of the swamps' to make the land 'productive' is in the best late Victorian mercantilist tradition.

At the same time, its illustrations also indicate the influence of Darwin's The Origin of Species - or perhaps The Voyage of the Beagle even more so.

It's a fascinating snapshot of an age of romance, self-assurance, and pride in inventive science. I hope you enjoy the design of the spaceship. Clearly the concept of the bullet fired into space was the best way (the only way imaginable at the time) to escape from earth.

"A Battle Royal"

Here's the tiny excerpt:

✵ ✵ ✵ ✵ ✵ ✵

Until the Callisto entered the planet's atmosphere, its five moons appeared like silver shields against the black sky, but now things were looking more terrestrial, and they began to feel at home. Bearwarden put down his note-book, and Ayrault returned a photograph to his pocket, while all three gazed at their new abode.

Beneath them was a vast continent variegated by chains of lakes and rivers stretching away in all directions except toward the equator, where lay a placid ocean as far as their telescopes could pierce. To the eastward were towering and massive mountains, and along the southern border of the continent smoking volcanoes, while toward the west they saw forests, gently rolling plains, and table-lands that would have satisfied a poet or set an agriculturist's heart at rest.

"How I should like to mine those hills for copper, or drain the swamps to the south!" exclaimed Col. Bearwarden. "The Lake Superior mines and the reclamation of the Florida Everglades would be nothing to this."

"Any inhabitants we may find here have so much land at their disposal that they will not need to drain swamps on account of pressure of population for some time," put in the doctor.

"The Combat with the Dragons"

"I hope we may find some four-legged inhabitants," said Ayrault, thinking of their explosive magazine rifles. "If Jupiter is passing through its Jurassic or Mesozoic period, there must be any amount of some kind of game."

"The Journey Home"

✵ ✵ ✵ ✵ ✵ ✵

A Journey in Other Worlds by John Jacob Astor

Downloadable free in various formats from gutenberg.com

home | WHAT'S NEW! | stories from my past

books1 | books2

Fairy tales, facts and fantasies

2012-02-24T11:58:00.001+11:00

home | WHAT'S NEW! | stories from my past

books1 | books2

There is a story in Hans Andersen's Fairy Tales that I particularly remember. You may know it if you were brought up on with these tales, as we were. It's called The Tinder Box. I'm betting the older you are, the more chance there is that you've read it.

Perhaps it was the illustration in our edition as children that first took my fancy. It featured a gnarled dead hollow tree, a soldier and a hump-backed old woman, no doubt referred to then as a crone; the sort who was a likely candidate for classification as a witch in medieval times. Women like her were burnt at the stake watched with morbid fascination by a public eager for entertainment, and probably a great deal of glee by a neighbour of high public profile with an eye to acquiring her property.

Sadly, not our original version

Just to be sure, I found the story and re-read it. Until I did that, I didn't realise how much of the story had settled in the dark recesses of my memory. But it's there. As I've discovered, I have lost nothing I have ever learned; I just fail sometimes to recall it.

The story comes back to me as I read it; every word, every phrase, every mental image. If only it were so easy to drag back to the forefront of memory! That's the tricky bit.

The only part I do remember well is relevant here. A soldier is asked by this old woman, who in the story I see now is indeed called a witch, to go down into the hollow tree where there is wealth below. He agrees, and finds a room as full of copper coins as is Scrooge McDuck's money bin with cash.

Happy at this, he fills his knapsack with as many as it can hold, but then decides to visit the next room. He finds it full of silver coins, so empties out the coppers and refills the knapsack with silver. He decides to risk going into the third room (as each room is guarded by a fierce dog), and you will be astounded to learn, no doubt, that it is full of gold and jewels. Once more he gives the contents of his knapsack the flick, and stuffs it with the choicest of the riches in the third room.

The story really heats up after this, with gory things happening, as they do in these sorts of fairy tales, and has a happy ending of course, as they also do, except for the victims of various murders and executions; but what I've described already contains the moral of my tale below.

If you've been following my posts to any extent you will probably become aware that I've developed something of an addiction to gutenberg.org Daily I've gone through what's been released each 24 hours, and found some wonderful things in the oddest of volumes.

I wanted to share some of them with you, so I read those that appealed to me (sometimes purely on instinct). I took some trouble to extract a tiny bit from each, together with illustrations where there were any, and started building a collection.

What happened was that I carefully edited these, and planned to release them at intervals, but I am like the soldier with his knapsack. The more I read, the more I feel the need to throw away some of the older excerpts stacked away in my knapsack of curiosities.

Where I differ from the soldier is that I am reluctant to throw any of my riches away, even the copper coins as it were - but I will have to.

It's impossible to know what will appeal to you most, but I'll keep the excerpts very short. I wasn't harsh enough in my editing with the one on snuff, but I think I've learned my lesson, and what will come should entertain you, especially with pictures!

One is coming up shortly, if I can hold the grey matter in my skull together for long enough. Very shortly....

home | WHAT'S NEW! | stories from my past

books1 | books2

Our family farm in the 1950s (5)

2012-02-21T15:35:00.001+11:00

This is the final part of my mini-series on milking the cows.

By the end of Part 4, I finally managed to get milk into the cans; now let me tell you about the final stage for one milking session.

By the time I could really help, we had acquired one other essential piece of equipment. A car. A brand new 1957 Holden ute, i.e. paid for in full with a cheque on delivery from Anderson's Motors.

I've colorised the Holden! This is "Surf Green"

Paying something off was a concept never envisaged in Dad's world. You bought something only when you had the cash for it showing in the bank account. Until then, you did without it. Nor would you buy something second hand. That was inheriting someone else's trouble, in his book.

'Surf Green' it was, according to the Holden colour chart. I'm not sure surf is that colour, but it was close enough. NBT 372 was the number plate. 'No Bloody Trouble' it stood for, Dad would say with pride. The ute changed our lives a great deal for the better.

EnnBeeTeeThreeSevenTwo was backed up to the shed 'cargo bay', and we'd load the milk cans into the back. Each can had a brass plate welded on, the owner's name stamped neatly on it.

The milk cans were solid and heavy on their own, which they needed to be.

Full of milk, they weighed quite a bit for a kid of 10. Lessee now, remembering my school tables, the cans would weigh say 10 lbs at least on their own, a gallon of milk weighs 10 lbs, 10 gallons to a can, so 110 lbs per can to move from the dairy fridge into the tray of the ute.

That's 50 kgs for you decimal babies. Throw that around just by grasping two little handles, without removing one of your bare toes, chillen.

No wonder I once had biceps and triceps from milking the quadrupeds - quintessentially, dare I say? (This sentence would have been my entry for the Bulwer-Lytton awards, were it not for the fact that they are for fiction, not narrative.) And little wonder, with those muscles, I was able to break School Bully's arm owing to an Affair of Honour at High School.

Sigh. Look at those arms now.... No, don't. You'd never guess these days.

By the way, the winner in the purple prose section of the 2011 Bulwer-Lytton competition was this:

As his small boat scudded before a brisk breeze under a sapphire sky dappled with cerulean clouds with indigo bases, through cobalt seas that deepened to navy nearer the boat and faded to azure at the horizon, Ian was at a loss as to why he felt blue.

But I digress, I confess, no remorse for the mess. Now I return:

The milk was handed over at the depot. We kept our own record of how much milk went out daily in the various sized cans we had. The empty cans would be back at the depot down-town by late afternoon, steam-sterilised at the Butter Factory after they emptied them.

At least we hoped they were sterilised, but you couldn't take a chance on that. Strange things have found their way into food containers, haven't they? We re-washed them scrupulously before milk went into any of them. Lots of boiling water and CalHypo were required.

On that subject I must add this. When our milk arrived at the PCD, samples were taken routinely every few weeks, and a bacteria count done. Mostly, the milk passed, but a few times I can remember, disaster struck. It may have been just that the can tested had a higher than usual count, but whatever; if your sample failed the test, when you came to pick up the empty cans in the afternoon, you'd find your entire day's milk production returned in full. One-seventh of the week's income was gone.

But that wasn't the worst of it. This was a crisis. It meant that before next milking the following morning, all the milking machine components; many metres of pipes, teat-cups, vats, buckets, the shock-cooler, cans - anything that came into contact with the milk from udder to can - would have to be dismantled, sterilised by a complicated manual process I won't go into here, and reassembled before dawn the following day.

Hurricane lanterns would be set up for the night's work (no electricity, don't forget!), tons of water boiled in a copper over a wood fire, and the job worked on non-stop till it was done.

The only beneficiaries of the disaster were the poddy calves, who would be given as much of the creamy returned milk as they could hold (this milk was not contaminated, and all farmers know by the smell when milk is even slightly off.) The calves' bellies stuck out like balloons afterwards; they must have welcomed the rare change from skimmed milk.

What they couldn't drink was poured into the troughs for the pigs to squeal and bicker over. Jeez, pigs are... pigs. And if you think your kids have turned their bedrooms into a pig-sty, then you've never been near a real pig-sty. Stay upwind, that's my advice.

One last thing on this crisis. If you had your milk returned, they tested it thoroughly every day for a week to ensure that the bacteria count was down to their acceptable levels. It was an anxious week for the farmer, as another return would have been unthinkable.

A second failure in a week never happened to us. Few bacteria would have survived what we did to them after a milk return. If there were one miserable bacterium in there somewhere, it would have been damned lonely.

But back to a normal milking session. Any milk left over beyond our quota would go to the cream separator, and be given to the poddies, and the cream collected. What we did with that I'll tell you another time maybe.

You might think that's the end of a milking. No such luck. The really tedious bit now begins. All the equipment had to be given a normal clean and sterilisation, and there was a lot of it. The bails had to be swept out with a yard broom, or swilled out in mucky weather. The yards themselves had to be cleaned. I'd have the inglorious but necessary task of shovelling any newly created cowmuck into a barrow, and from thence to the manure heap. And boy, can't sixty or so cows produce some, in the hours while they wait to be milked! Barrowloads.

Finally, it would all be done, by about 10 am on a Saturday morning if we were lucky. Having taken part in half the milking, done most of the washing of equipment such as the myriad of cream separator bits and other tidying up, Mum would scoot off home to cook a proper breakfast for the workers, if Jan and Lyn weren't then living at home. Of course, if they were, they would have done as many household tasks as possible by the time Mum came home, including meal preparation, but everyone worked to full capacity. Idlers would have got short shrift at Sunny Hills.

There were plenty of other farm jobs to be done after breakfast; fencing, ploughing, farrier work on the horses, digging and watering the vegetable patch, periodic mustering and dipping.... no end to it.

Oh, let me remind you. Most of what I've described in the previous two parts was just one morning's work. At 2 pm on the same day, the whole process would start again. Think on that.

That's twice a day, every day, of every week, rain, hail or shine. Farmers don't get holidays. Nor do farmers' wives, unless you count having babies as holidays. [I hear loud howls of protest. OK, I withdraw that remark.] Nor do their kids get much of a break, as often as not - except for school. And none of them can afford to get sick.

So. When you're sleeping in on a Sunday morning till noon after a leisurely Saturday and a massive night out, give a thought to the farmers presently being screwed by the big retailers into getting the lowest possible return for the relentless labour of an entire farming family.

If any group ought to be bolshie, it's those on the land. Where's that bloody guillotine? And don't you dare try to remind me that 1789 came before 1917 - I escaped from the farm by becoming an historian, m'kayyy?

Snuff and nonsense

2012-02-20T02:03:00.001+11:00

home | WHAT'S NEW! | stories from my past

They were all into it, you know. Addison, Bolingbroke, Congreve, Swift, and Pope, e.g., - the whole lot of them! They were all hooked on snorting the finely ground-up weed. Tobacco.

This is an extract from England in the Days of Old by William Andrews. I think you might like it. Snuff is good for your kids, for a start. So it says. Read on....

(EXCERPT)

The Age of Snuffing

In this country old customs linger long, and although the age of snuffing has passed away, in some quarters the piquant pinch still finds favour. Our ancient municipal corporations have been reformed, but old usages are still maintained and revived.

In 1896 we saw an account in the newspapers of an amusing episode which occurred during a meeting of the Pontefract Town Council. One of the aldermen, noticing that the councillors had "to go borrowing" snuff, suggested the re-introduction of the old Corporation snuff-box.

The official box, in the shape of an antler, was unearthed from underneath the aldermanic bench amidst much amusement, and the Mayor promised ere another sitting the article in question should be duly cleaned and replenished with the stimulating powder.

Not snuff, but he snuffed it

Sir Albert K. Rollit, the learned and genial member of Parliament for South Islington, when Mayor of his native town of Hull a few years ago, presented to his brother members of the Corporation a massive and valuable snuff-box. The gift was much appreciated....

In bygone times taking snuff was extremely popular, its palmy days in England being during the eighteenth century. Snuff was praised in poetry and prose. Peer and peasant, rich and poor, the lady in her drawing-room and the humble housewife alike enjoyed the pungent pinch. The snuff-box was to be seen everywhere.

The earliest allusion we have to snuffing occurs in the narrative of the second voyage of Columbus in 1494. It is there related by Roman Pane, the friar, who accompanied the expedition, that the aborigines of America reduced tobacco to a powder, and drew it through a cane half a cubit long; one end of this they placed in the nose and the other upon the powder.

He also stated that it purged them very much.

Snuff and other forms of tobacco on their introduction had many bitter opponents. After the Great Plague the popularity of tobacco and snuff increased, for during the time of the terrible visitation both had been largely used as disinfectants.

There is a curious entry in Thomas Hearne's Diary, 1720-21, bearing on this theme. He writes as follows under date of January 21:--

"I have been told that in the last great plague in London none that kept tobacconists' shops had the plague. It is certain that smoaking was looked upon as a most excellent preservative. In so much that even children were obliged to smoak. And I remember that I heard formerly Tom Rogers, who was yeoman beadle, say that when he was that year when the plague raged a schoolboy at Eton, all the boys in the school were obliged to smoak in the school every morning, and that he was never whipped so much in his life as he was one morning for not smoaking."

Pepys says in his Diary on June 7, 1665:--

"The hottest day that ever I felt in my life. This day, much against my will, I did in Drury Lane see two or three houses marked with a red cross upon the doors, and 'Lord have mercy upon us!' writ there; which was a sad sight to me, being the first of the kind that to my remembrance I ever saw. It put me into ill-conception of myself and my smell, so that I was forced to buy some roll tobacco to smell and chew, which took apprehension." ...

... Preachers of all sections of the religious world delighted in a pinch of snuff. Sneezing was heard in the highest and humblest churches, and it even made St. Peter's at Rome echo. The practice so excited the ire of Pope Innocent the Twelfth that he made an effort in 1690 to stop it in his churches, and "solemnly excommunicated all who should dare to take snuff."

Tyerman, in his "Life of Wesley," tells us the great trouble the famous preacher had with his early converts.

"Many of them were absolutely enslaved to snuff; some drank drams, &c., to remedy such evils, the preachers were enjoined on no account to take snuff, or to drink drams themselves; and were to speak to any one they saw snuffing in sermon time, and to answer the pretence that drams cured the colic and helped digestion."

Mr. Wesley cautioned a preacher going to Ireland against snuff, unless by order of a physician, declaring that no people were in such blind bondage to the silly, nasty, dirty custom as were the Irish. It is stated so far did Irishmen carry their love of snuffing, that it was customary, when a wake was on, to put a plate full of snuff upon the dead man's, or woman's stomach, from which each guest was expected to take a pinch upon being introduced to the corpse.

(END OF EXCERPT)

What have the following two illustrations to do with the above? Nothing, but they were in the same volume, and I found them curious.

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/38905

home | WHAT'S NEW! | stories from my past

That splendid England!

2012-02-18T13:06:00.040+11:00

home | WHAT'S NEW! | stories from my past

Imagine a parcel of books being dropped on your doorstep every morning. You don't know what they are till you open the package. All you know is that they are not just any old books... well, there's a fair chance they could be old; much more than a hundred years old.

I have a pleasant time each day, if things go right, opening this electronic parcel and seeing what's in there. I've got several lined up to share excerpts with you at a later stage, but the paintings below are twenty of the best from a fascinating book published in 1914. The text of this book is also engaging as a top-down view characteristic of the period.

I'll say no more, but if you have an eBook reading program on your computer, you can read the text as well as all the paintings, and see how England looked through the eyes of a gentleman just before World War 1 broke out.

The captions are taken directly from the text, including the spelling, so don't be surprised if it's a little different here and there from today's.

I hope you enjoy viewing them as much as I did selecting them.

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/38790

England by Sir Frank Fox

Richmond, Yorkshire

Norman Staircase, King's School, Canterbury

A Kent Manor-House and Garden

A Sussex Village

The Bridge of Sighs, St. John's College, Cambridge

Broad Street, Oxford, looking West

Harvesting in Herefordshire

Cricket at "Lord's"

Trout-fishing on the Itchen, Hampshire

Dean's Yard, Westminster

Sailing Boats on the Serpentine, Hyde Park, London

Watergate Street, Chester

Thames at Richmond, Surrey

Spring by the Thames

Glastonbury Abbey, Somersetshire

Anne Hathaway's Cottage near Stratford-on-Avon

Gipsies on a Gloucestershire Common

The Tower from the Tower Bridge, looking West

Hyde Park, London

Changing the Guard

home | WHAT'S NEW! | stories from my past

Walkin' the walk

2012-02-17T01:16:00.001+11:00

home | WHAT'S NEW! | stories from my past

I don't quite know why it is, but every time we go on our walk around the streets of Armidale, we meet someone we know.

Well, I do have a fair idea really, given that Armidale has a population of about 25,000 or so and I've been here over 35 years. The mathematics of probability on that count combined with the fact that I've been heavily involved with more facets of life here than the Hope Diamond has cut into its surface will readily explain this.

We'd barely left the house and were about to cross the street when we saw a car approaching, about 100 metres away. At my velocity that's probably equivalent to about 10 metres in your case.

It was the only car within sight, so we crossed to the middle of the street as the car approached, waiting for it to go by so that we could complete the three metre trek to the other side of the roadway.

The car slowed to a crawl as it approached us.

'What the hell?' I said to Tracey, 'why doesn't he just go on? Is he wanting us to cross in front of him?'

He didn't. Instead, the car drew level with us and stopped as the window rolled down. He must want directions, I thought, remembering vividly our experience giving directions about a fortnight before.

There was a face at the window I dimly recognised as one from a distant past; twenty years or so at least.

'Hello,' he said, as if we meet like this every day. 'I thought it was you. I live in the flats about four doors down from your house. I've been there since 1984.'

'Really? I thought you were working in Queensland.'

'On and off.'

Amazingly, and I want this recorded for posterity, I remembered his name, and introduced him to Tracey. She was standing near enough to the rear of the vehicle to inhale the exhaust gases emitted by his car's idling motor, so wasn't too keen on an extended conversation. We were on our walk, after all. Sadly, no car was coming up behind to assist in this process of moving him on.

Don't get me wrong now; it was nice to be able to say hello after all that time, and he's a good chap who wishes me nothing more than the best.

'I hear you're in a bad way,' he grinned breezily.

'I've been better.'

'So what do you do?'

I study advanced calculus. I ride racehorses and win buckjumping competitions in Gunnedah, cut down virgin forests with a very large chainsaw, teach street fighting and mountaineering, and practise tantric yoga when it's raining. I am guru to a flock of animists.

No, that's what I would have said if I had my brain in gear for proto-witticism, not focused on putting one foot after the other.

'I read and write a bit. And I walk. Matter of fact, we better keep moving on.'

'OK. Good to see you. We might meet again!'

He revved the engine and was gone.

In a bad way. No-one had put it quite like that to me before, not that I minded. It's not inaccurate. He'd been in Queensland long enough to be blunt about such things.

We set off.

From the point of view of walking, the early part of the walk is comparatively easy.

What people with motor-neurone disease, brain injury or stroke recovery will understand, as well as those whose brain motor centre doesn't work properly because of interference by a brain tumour, is that something as simple as walking - which we all take for granted till we can't do it - has to become a conscious process.

That means you have to think about each part of the operation as you do it.

As I walk up the hill, the right foot might drag once or twice. I adjust.

More angle in the knee.

Then, as the muscles tire, more thought has to go into other joints.

The hip.

Now, adjust the direction and height of ankle movement.

Now the ball of the foot. Push harder with the toes and the foot muscles. And bend the knee in the middle of the step. Not quite that much.

All these actions aren't simultaneous. They're microseconds apart, and need thinking about - in the right order!

Each step. Always each and every step. Lose concentration and the limp is pronounced. Or the foot drags.

Arm movement. You wouldn't imagine it would matter, but without thinking about it as well, it can lose synchronicity with the legs, with implications for balance. Without it, I may veer to the left or right.

I watch for humps and bumps in the road. Half a centimetre vertically makes a difference. Don't allow for it, and we're back to dragging the foot or doing the drunk impression.

We're at the top of the hill and the path is horizontal. All the angles for the foot now change, just enough to feel unsteady after the climb. Adjust. Focus.

Now we're going downhill. In some ways, this is harder than going up, especially as the hill gets slightly steeper. All the muscular and tendon relationships change. I feel unsteady.

At the kerb to cross the street, I take Tracey's arm.

This is very steadying, but it also fosters dependence. It gives me a false sense of balance. As soon as we get to the other side, I let go of her arm.

She walks just slightly ahead, always on the left. She knows that if she's on the other side, if I trip and start to fall, my right arm won't respond fast enough to catch hers, and doesn't have the strength to help save a fall.

Don't think for a moment of walking on the grass. It has more traps than you can imagine.

As the walk comes to the last half, there's a new element aimed at defeating me. The muscles down the right side of my torso start to tire.

The effect of that is similar to aiming a large heater at the right side of a snowman. I begin to list badly to starboard. I have to think about forcing my body straight, as there's really nothing physically weaker about the side; mainly the problem gets to be the slowing of or interference to the signals from the brain.

Now, in order to maintain balance unassisted, I have to think about staying upright continuously, as well as my arm movement, the hip, the knee angle and direction, ankle lift and strength, to push off the toes; and the spot where the foot will land.

Little wonder that when we reach home, I can barely lift the leg to plough through the thick carpet of kikuyu lawn, and make it up the stairs. Just three of them. Standing still at the door is quite unsteadying. I'm glad to sit down. Tracey brings me a glass of water.

That's today's walk. Tomorrow's may be easier or it may not. Each day is unpredictable that way.

One thing's for sure. If I have a seizure before the next walk, it will be back to the drawing board for the mechanics of walking, and next time, the whole walking process will need re-adjusting.

home | WHAT'S NEW! | stories from my past

Where the wild things ought to be (1)

2012-02-14T00:47:00.003+11:00

home | WHAT'S NEW! | stories from my past
wild things 1 | wild things 2 | wild things 3

For many years, my mother was a Teacher-Librarian. That is to say, she was a teacher who, after classroom teaching for some time, was appointed Librarian of the South Gladstone Primary School, and her role was to teach children the joy of books, not just to organise the school library.

At the time, I was also beginning my first years of classroom teaching, aged 18. While she taught at one school in the town, I taught at another, Gladstone Central.

When we came home after school, she would regale me with stories of the children in her library classes. One of them was an unfortunate boy (or fortunate, if you're a devoted Presley fan) who was named Elvis. Elvis Stanley. And, out of thousands over the years whom she taught in the Library, she also taught another lad whose parents, we believed, couldn't make up their minds which way his name should be spelled. Spelt. Whatever. He was named Stepheven and that's what was on his birth certificate.

Now it just occurred to me that there really may be a legitimate name 'Stepheven' and our reasoning all these years could have been wrong. So I check with the oracle, Google. Sure enough, it is a name, and obviously not quite as uncommon as I still think it ought to be. There is e.g., a Stepheven Lord on FaceBook, but you don't need the poor chap's details. Check it out if you must. Google is your friend.

Oddly enough, at Gladstone Central I taught a Stephen Lord, whose parents had the good sense to spell his name as I have. I remember him because he'd transferred from New South Wales into the Grade 4 class I was teaching, and started cursive writing in their style a year or two earlier. It was unattractive spiky style, and he had to learn cursive all over again to suit our Queensland copybooks. He resented this deeply.

And then it occurred to me after my checking on the existence of Stepheven as a real name that there are probably scores of Elvis Stanleys in a world of seven billion people, given that both Elvis and Stanley are fairly common names, and sure enough, Google tells me there are plenty of them.

One, I see, is an unfortunate who was murdered just a couple of weeks ago. The poor chap owned the Love Shack Bar & Grill on St Kitts, and Clayton “Massive” Thomas denies plotting to kill him. If he didn't, someone sure did.

I sincerely hope it wasn't our Elvis who was shot dead in the Love Shack Bar & Grill in the Caribbean; but then, if it's not, there's still one Elvis Stanley who saw in the New Year 2012 and failed to get any further than the end of the first month.

But I digress horribly from my tale within a tale within yet another tale. Fortunately the parents of Stepheven had determined that his name should be pronounced 'Stephen,' and I say "fortunate" for obvious reasons. So let that be....

My mother often narrated the story of Stepheven (or "Steve-even" as she called him at home), and his joy at reading the recent books she was ordering for the library.

Source

Amongst them was the then-newly-released Where The Wild Things Are, by Maurice Sendak.

It's a wonderful book and I'm sure many of you who have or have had or happen to be kids of the right age will remember it well, as it was a favourite with my girls - and let's be honest, a tale I never minded reading to them.

I can't say I was as keen on other more girly books. I won't say which, but I read them just as enthusiastically, I believe. Fake sincerity and you've got it made; if I may I paraphrase from George Bernard Shaw's Man and Superman.

My mother believed that kids knew better than adults which books they wanted to read and that almost the only thing you had to do for a child was give them a love of books and reading. If they were read to, and if they wanted to read for themselves and could, they were set for life - providing they knew their basic maths tables. She didn't dissuade us from reading comics - whatever we wanted to read, even jam-tin labels - she'd never stop us. It's interesting what you could learn from old jam-tin labels, anyway.

She was not a fan of the terrible formula-style books of the 1950s being churned out by some publishers, and as an artist herself, wanted truly creative books for children, both in text and artwork. This was why she was so affronted at what happened when I exchanged my book with that of Alan Long (a very short tale you might to read.)

My mother shared the joy of kids like Elvis Stanley when they grappled with the words accompanying the brilliant Sendak illustrations. Elvis was far from a brilliant reader, at the time at least. If you're reading this, Elvis, then you've just proved my point; you've made it into the high art form of blogging, so don't be offended. My mother was on the right track.

So now I emerge from one of my tales within a tale to mention a fascinating letter by Ursula Nordstom that I came across today, which tied in so perfectly with my mother's philosophy on kids and books. The piece is better told in its own context, but I'll extract just one paragraph, which says enough to complement this story of mine:

A Witty and Wise 1953 Letter from Legendary Children's Book Editor Ursula Nordstrom

by Maria Popova

"Did I ever tell you that several years ago, after the Harper management saw that I could publish children's books successfully, I was taken out to luncheon and offered, with great ceremony, the opportunity to be an editor in the adult department? The implication, of course, was that since I had learned to publish books for children with considerable success perhaps I was now ready to move along (or up) to the adult field. I almost pushed the luncheon table into the lap of the pompous gentleman opposite me and then explained kindly that publishing children's books was what I did, that I couldn't possibly be interested in books for dead dull finished adults, and thank you very much but I had to get back to my desk to publish some more good books for bad children."

My mother was on just that wavelength, as indeed she was when she taught painting to the very young and the very old and many in between. Again, a similar story of inspiration and triumph on the micro-scale of human achievement. Another time perhaps.

Now where was I? There were a couple of other asides, like the adult book I decided to read at the age of twelve that pained my mother when she saw it, because she knew I wasn't ready for it... but I can come back to that another time, if I get the chance.

The truth is, what I really wanted to talk about was a slut in a book of nursery rhymes, but you'll have to wait now. This time around I've used up all my current brainpower on these Tristram Shandy-ish expeditions.

home | WHAT'S NEW! | stories from my past
wild things 1 | wild things 2 | wild things 3

Slipping into autumn

2012-02-11T15:45:00.008+11:00

home | WHAT'S NEW! | stories from my past

Some of our friends were surprised when I told them the the autumn colours were beginning to show.

'Already? Isn't it early?'

It may seem so, yet I've noticed in many seasons we can see the first signs as early as January that the European trees are going to colour. The sap stops rising and, amazingly, each tree commits a form of suicide by denying itself the essentials for growth, or even preservation.

Come with us on our walk a week or so ago, pictures taken over just two days. We'll show you the sights, and maybe a few oddities. Tracey did the camerawork - beautifully - seeing things that I often don't, especially as I need my eyes on the path a few metres ahead.

Maybe we can surprise you with a slideshow.

You can never be quite sure of what's on the pathway ahead till you get there.

I'm not sure why trees of the same species change at different times, but I guess it has to do with location and water and nutrient availability.

These pistaceas are in full summer regalia.

The native trees don't change for the winter.

Here's the mix: various gums. I know for sure the one on the left is a stringybark.

Honeysuckle or Crepe Myrtle?

The first signs of autumn start to show....

More yellows against the green.

Sometimes it's nicer that the grass in the laneway isn't cut.

The little golden ashes in the centre start to colour.

Some pistaceas go a bright yellow.

And the mix is on. Some are turning red beside the giant gums....

Some seem keen to put on a salmon-red display.

Showoffs.

A brilliant burnt-salmon display against the green ivy.

These are the paths that make it easy for me to walk; very level, with no lurking dangers.

...whereas, this is the opposite. The council paints a warning where the pistacea roots have pushed the concrete up. But I have to be ever watchful.

And now, a few snaps in passing. A letterbox, with its warning for all those who read French about the fearsome guardian animeaux!

A closer look.

Cannas - brilliant colours.

But what's in the dying petals at the top? I see images. A closer look is below.

Is there a pregnant lady, arms drawn back, facing right - towards a dragon? Or is another lady, arms forward, face skyward to the left, with a Tinkerbell dress? Or is that a knight, on the right, on his rearing charger? (I have a vivid imagination, obviously.)

Now something a little different below, but colourful. As Tracey says, not many people have a red letterbox in their garden!

Low maintenance pets!

Just roses, against the wall and the green ivy. Roses are blooming everywhere right now, and the ivy will turn scarlet before long.

The Armoured Personnel Carrier at the barracks just down the road from our place. We're safe!

Just a big beautiful gum. I'm not sure of the type. Blue gum?

The path ahead....

home | WHAT'S NEW! | stories from my past

Our family farm in the 1950s (4)

2012-02-09T08:27:00.001+11:00

I've written three little segments of this and haven't even got a cow into the bail. This time I will. And we'll get them milked.

The business end of the dairy layout was the milking shed itself, where six cows could be accommodated at one time; three double bails. This meant that a person worked between two cows in each pair of bails, and three people could work at the same time.

We'd start by putting a cow in three of the six bails. As there was usually only Dad and I in the dairy to start with, we'd take a bail on each end as our own, and either of us would work the middle bail when we had things under control in our own bail. That way, two could do the work of three and cut the milking time down a lot, but there wasn't much time to spare!

Believe it or not, there were actually left-hooved and right-hooved cows, by which I mean they had a preference for which side bail, left or right, that they were milked in. The older cows were aware that they needed to have the back leg closest to us in a back position, in order to expose the udder. So a cow who went into a left-side bail would need to have her back right foot back, and vice versa for a cow in the right-side bail. (Got it?)

We deliberately trained our cows to do this automatically they came into the bail. If they didn't, a gentle push on their hip bone would make them adjust their balance and put the correct leg back.

On some farms, cows were leg-roped if they were prone to kicking the milker or otherwise playing-up. This meant tying the leg back that was nearest the milker. We rarely needed to do this as our cows were generally well behaved.

Why were the cows so cooperative? One sure-fire reason: they were always fed when they came into the bail. A four-gallon drum cut open and nailed to the front end of the bails for each of the six spots contained something to eat. As long as the food end of the cow was preoccupied with stuffing her face, she didn't care too much what was happening at the other end.

That was the secret, and it paid large dividends.

Usually they each got a large prune-tin full of chaff with half a prune-tin of pollard on top. How much they got depended on how good or bad the season was. In drought time it might be the only feed they got in a day, so were give more than in good times when there was plenty of grass around. No food for the cattle meant no milk, so we fed them well. There was extra urgency by the cows in lean times to get into the bail.

Hence each waited at the gate with some degree of impatience for her turn in the bail, and had no hesitation in coming in. The matriarchs expected to be first and were most indignant if some lesser beast were called before them.

The cow's udder was washed with a mild detergent. In cold weather we added hot water to the washing bucket, both for our comfort and for the cows'. We'd put the cupset of the milking machine on to each of their four teats and the 'cups' would stay in place via suction - the same suction that would pump the milk up the flexible rubber pipes to the static steel pipes above all our heads.

Milk would flow through these pipes to a large vat inside the processing area of the dairy.

Steel milk-bucket

Well into the ten or so minutes it would take for the milking machines to do their job for the first three cows, we'd let others into the other three bails, and prepare them for milking in the same way. All six units would now be full. Then we'd switch the machines over to them, and start the process of 'stripping' by hand, milking the last litre or so from the cows who had just been milked by the machines.

(I have to say "who" - a cow is a person, not an "it"!)

This added a lot to the effort on our part, but if you added up all the stripped milk, it was significant. Machines just couldn't extract that last bit, and a cow left with milk in her udder might produce less next time.

Usually, that was just enough time to complete the job on each before the cow had eaten her quota of chaff and pollard. She'd be let out, and the food replaced for the next cow.

Sometimes in a hurry, we might forget to put the food into the drum before the next cow was let in to the bail. She would be very cranky about that and toss her head until the victuals arrived. With apologies.

And so it went on. When Mum came up after doing things in the house, she'd bring tea in a thermos flask, and something to eat. Dad would have his first, after working solidly for three hours or so by then with nothing in his stomach. Mum took over his job milking while that happened, and then I would take my turn to get a cup of tea and a bite to eat too. You can't imagine how good that tasted.

Towards the end of the milking, the shock-cooler would be turned on. Here's where the third job of the diesel engine came in. As I said before, the engine had been cranked up and running the moment Dad got to the dairy, not much after 4.30 am.

The reason for this was that it ran the compressor for the large farm fridge housing the milk from the previous afternoon's session. The engine needed to be on for much longer than the actual milking time just for this job alone, to keep the fridge temperature down far enough.

So the diesel ran the fridge, the milking machines as well, and the shock-cooler, which had its own compressor. The milk that came from the cows was of course quite warm, even after the time it poured into the vat through a filter. The water in the pipes of the shock-cooler was just above freezing point.

The warm milk flowed by gravity over the series of chilled pipes from the vat via a tap. By the time it got to the tray at the bottom it was thoroughly chilled. From there it was filtered again before filling milk cans one by one, and each can of ice-cold milk went into the fridge.

The shock-cooler was worth its weight in gold. As kids, we would fill a cup with fresh, ice-cold milk, and to us, nothing tasted better in the world. Warm milk didn't appeal, but full-cream jersey milk, so fresh and sweet and chilled, tasted nothing like what's in a milk carton these days.

Nothing, I swear. Scout's honour. Cross my heart and hope to die!

(continued)

Flying over the cuckoo's nest

2012-02-07T08:02:00.000+11:00

home | WHAT'S NEW! | stories from my past

Pardon my French!

2012-02-06T17:22:00.004+11:00

home | WHAT'S NEW! | stories from my past

Original caption unreadable: 1841, France

.
It's true. I'm a sucker for exotic drawings, paintings, or photographs. It runs in the family. My mother, sisters and nieces were or are all painters, sketchers, and illustrators. Me? Almost by accident, I'm a lover of Oriental art, or arts, which doesn't mean I don't appreciate western and Islamic art.

I've said several times now how incredibly enriching a trip to Gutenberg.org can be for those who can cope with on-screen viewing of one sort or another. This was brought home to me in many ways, but one I didn't expect was in having a look at two volumes of a lately released French journal, L'Illustration; one edition from 1843, and one from 1913.

The funny thing is, I discovered I could read the French in these journals with comparative ease, and I think I know why. The French here is of the formal style we learned at school, not French as it's spoken in the street today. It's no more that than our idiom is that of Jane Austin or Charles Dickens.

But it means I can easily read the text to accompany the illustrations - and the articles as well.

That having been said, here are a couple of examples of what occupied the minds of the people of mid-nineteenth century France (you can safely read 'Europe' for 'France' if we learn anything from Dostoyevsky's novels), and from Europe that in 1913 was about to be plunged into a ghastly war, and had little idea of what was ahead of them. I won't comment on them much, if at all. Make of them what you will.

Above:Diorama invented by Daguerre, the father of modern photography. This 3D modelling was a wonder of its time. It depicts the street where the church Saint-Paul-Hors-les-Murs (on the left) had been, after a fire which all but destroyed it.

Above: I thought when I first looked at this that it was a Chinese painting; it could so easily be! But it's not. It's Saint-Baume, a place of Christian pilgrimage in France.

Below: A foretaste of things to come. The battles on the periphery and the personal miseries.

Below: Preparing for the looming battle; what would become the Air Force of France. The height of aerodynamic efficiency in 1913.

Below: to me, a brilliant but inexpressibly sad photograph: I thought at first it was a tiger, which didn't make sense in open country like that, but of course it's a lioness. This was bound to be fate of all creatures in competition with humans. The shooter and the photographer were either very brave or very foolhardy. Perhaps both.

Below: something slightly more amusing, but which many might regard as symbolic of the press these days as well. The caption reads: Comment, au lendemain de la prise de Scutari, s'est exprimée à Cettigne la malice populaire à l'égard de la presse autrichienne. --Phot. Voukotitch.

Loosely translated, this means: How, shortly after Scutari was taken, what the local population thought of the Austrian press who covered it. In other words, blind and stupid (with my apologies to the ass.)

Ah well, as we say in France, Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. "The more things change, the more they stay the same."

These two issues:

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/38729
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/38725

home | WHAT'S NEW! | stories from my past

"I am your Dentist"

2012-02-05T01:29:00.001+11:00

home | WHAT'S NEW! | stories from my past

Not quite The Little Shop of Horrors, but in the spirit of your never knowing what I might embarrass myself by writing about, I'm on about teeth.

This foray into dentistry was precipitated by the fact that I'm now in possession of two vital pieces of equipment I came to, or came to me, only after I fell ill. I can't say how grateful I am to have both.

I'm aware I could be telling you stuff you know about better than I do. But here goes.

The first is pictured here. It's a flosser. Well, that's what I call it - as good a name as any; better'n some. Disposable, of course. Use once, throw away.

I hasten to add that the principle of flossing is hardly new to me. I flossed my teeth regularly for many years, but with the standard dental floss that needs two hands to use.

When I lost the effective use of my right arm and hand for such tricky operations, I was stymied in terms of how to do it. It's not something you want someone else to do for you. I wouldn't anyway.

That's when Tracey remembered about these. The beauty of them for me is that they are operated with one hand. I was very pleased that the gauge of floss thickness was perfect for my teeth, and very strong, and that after getting familiar with using one, I could reach every crevice between teeth on both sides.

And the other device? I'll come to that in a minute. Firstly, let me tell you a story. Once I remembered that it was an ABC story, I located it online, so that saves me a lot of trouble. Thanks, Auntie, for your brilliant archives.

So, I can cut to the chase and you can read the full story for yourself. The main thing here is that a team of forensic specialists was allowed to do some post-mortems on bodies in nineteenth century graves being relocated in Adelaide.

It turns out that in colonial Australia, one of the common causes of death - and painful death at that - related to teeth problems. Adults and children. Here's a brief excerpt:

Dr Renata Henneberg, Odontologist, Adelaide University: Here we have a lot of cavities, and huge ones. The tooth is half way eaten up. Many of the teeth were still present in the jaws causing very bad breath.

Tim Anson, Project Leader, Flinders University: So this person would have been in a great deal of discomfort?

Dr Renata Henneberg: A great deal of pain, obviously, yes. And you can see here as well rotten teeth. The infection went down the root, the bone was rotting and producing a lot of puss. The puss opened the hole in the bone and was released through the hole. If the pieces of bone were infected to the stage [to cause poisoning to the blood], could even have caused the death of one of the individuals.

Narration: It's not just the adults that suffered with their teeth. Even more telling are the records left in the dentition of the young.

Lara: I was really intrigued by the teeth, they're very bad for a young child, and some of the second teeth have come through and already have cavities, so [in this case] dental hygiene was obviously not an issue.

Narration: In fact this girl's bad teeth are symptomatic of a much more serious problem. A terrifying infection that most likely killed her.

Prof Maciej Henneberg: Oh! This is beautiful. This is a classic case of congenital syphilis, the affected crowns of permanent molars and permanent incisors. All have been affected at birth.

Tim Anson: So clear case of an eight year old contracting it from parents.

Prof Maciej Henneberg: Well from mother, in the womb. The girl, depending on how badly she was affected, would have. If the child survives, the child might have some developmental defects.

Tim: So we're getting a clear idea of diseases that would have affected whole community.

Holy molar. That would surely confirm anyone's faith in the necessity for flossing! Trying it for the first time often results in blood coming from the gum between each pair of teeth. That could signify the first stages of gum disease, but with regular flossing, that bleeding doesn't happen any more. Any smell is rotting food being dragged from between the teeth, most probably, and no amount of brushing gets it out. Flossing will.

The other thing I've taken to using? I confess it was arrogance and ignorance about toothbrushes that stopped me using one of these for so long.

Braun

Yes - an electric toothbrush.

I believed, based on no good evidence at all, that they were just gimmicks, and I could do the job just as well manually. I was wrong. Using a high quality one of these is like comparing using a power drill to a brace-and-bit; or maybe, a current model sewing machine to an old Singer treadle. All of them might get the job done, but which would you use if you had the choice?

Like most things, I found it took a little practice to use it properly. The powered toothbrush uses very high vibration as well as movement in different planes to strip off tartar in a way that you just can't with a plain old toothbrush. It's not as powerful as the gadget dentists use when they rip away all the crud caked on the tooth surface, but after using one regularly, you realise what it's getting rid of, bit by bit, and what a regular toothbrush just can't do.

My advice, for what it's worth? Treat yourself to both, if you haven't already. Use floss and an electric toothbrush, and you could possibly save yourself heaps of money (and pain?) avoiding the dentist. You might even live longer.

Postscript Saturday, 25 February 2012 7:40 PM.

I found this site:

http://www.abc.net.au/health/talkinghealth/factbuster/stories/2012/02/15/3430307.htm

It backs up what I say. I added this comment on their site (if they accept it!):

I think it is important when using an electric toothbrush to use only gentle pressure with it on the teeth and gums, and let the toothbrush do its work. Heavy pressure serves no useful purpose. Move it slowly and methodically along the teeth, top, back and front surfaces.

With a little practice - and opening WIDE to get right to the back teeth and gums - a high quality electric toothbrush is wonderfully effective.

I believe it's also important not to allow the highly vibrating plastic brush head itself to come into contact with the teeth any more than you can avoid; just the soft bristles. This avoids the 'jackhammer' or 'hammerdrill' effect, which could possibly be harmful to tooth surfaces.

By the way, I am NOT your dentist. Each person is different, and you pay dentists highly because they have the professional knowledge. I'm just a guy with flossing equipment and a good electric toothbrush.

home | WHAT'S NEW! | stories from my past

It's all God: Christmas in Shekawati

2012-02-02T16:38:00.000+11:00

home | WHAT'S NEW! | stories from my past

This story is not mine. I'd be very happy if it were....

It was written just days ago by Julie Marsh, a former student of mine who completed her studies all the way through Indian history to a brilliant Ph D which drew many elements of Indian culture together.

She and her husband Michael Maher have been travelling in and writing about Asia, India in particular, for more than 30 years. They both know Indian culture very well, and love it dearly.

Unlike many, they do not look at India with rose-coloured glasses, unless roses are in front of them. Their knowledge of Indian philosophies and traditions are deep, and while some Indians might protest at my saying this, they understand some aspects of Indian culture more deeply than some Indians, who now live in a globalised world with globalised values.

And so this is Christmas, 2011, celebrated in a world far away from their cottage 15 kms west of Armidale. Enjoy this extract from her diary!

It's all God: Christmas in Shekawati

Christmas in Bikaner

By chance, Michael and I had arranged to leave Bikaner on the Sunday that was Christmas Day. Each day was nameless to us by this stage, dissolving into the dust of timelessness. The sights, walking, sleep, impressions, were left in picture or sense memories which seem selected quite inexplicably. Why remember one moment more than another? I've heard that emotion prints memories, so perhaps I was feeling touched by some extra awareness just at the instant of rounding the curve in the road, bringing into sight that long, dull red line of the fort wall; the girl child with the smile. It's all dust, gritty dust, ankle deep, ground up stone of ages, some of it yellow, some almost purple, trodden by millions over millennia. You feel the oldness of the earth here, the 'used-ness'.

On the road to Nawalgarh

Pooja knew it was Christmas (and of course, I did too, thinking of everyone at home). She came to the breakfast area with a large fold out paper Christmas bell and hung it from the bookcase, then brought a small Christmas tree, put it on a tall stool, with a Santa doll, and arranged a few toy objects around it - a tiny gold paper box, some nameless humanoid creatures, an anthropomorphised crocodile, two foreign Christmas cards. It was really for her children, the little boys, who were excited and absorbed, as only children can be, by this magic.

Back of a truck, on the road to Nawalgarh

I showed them an animated sparkly card my brother had emailed me, and soon after the eldest boy began surreptitiously jiggling the stool, in order to get the tree to move the way the animation did. No use. I sang 'Twinkle Twinkle Little Star' instead. (yes, odd choice, I know!) The grandparents emerged to wish us Happy Christmas, the mother giving me a large hug and a fairly horrible celebratory scarf of scarlet and yellow tie dye. In return I desperately scrambled through my bag and came up with an expensive Australian hand cream (with, I admit, some unChristmaslike feeling of regret). You can see we weren't really in the spirit , more concerned with our departure and that feeling of slight concern about what the day would bring.

Typical small town, on the road to Nawalgarh

I'd imagined that by Christmas we'd be in the South where Christianity is big, and we'd go along to enjoy that enthusiasm; although they are Hindus, Pooja and Jitu were taking the family to church later in the day, as Indians do like to join in all religious days - it's all God after all, and celebrations are such fun. But our journey to Shekawati began this morning; we were going by car to avoid the interminable bus, and the driver would take us past the Catholic Church on the way out. Namastes were made to the family and Raja the German Shepherd, and we set off.

Train passing crossing while vehicles and people wait, on road to Nawalgarh

The church was on the scrubby edge of the city, and as the car stopped we foreigners were quickly and enthusiastically spotted by the lines of 'Special Day' beggars. Mothers with babies, old women, lepers, all hurried to the car and began tapping on the windows - it was hopeless, we couldn't get out, or we'd be mobbed; and there are just times when you have the energy for beggars and times when you don't. If that sounds cruel, it may be, but it remains one of those unsolvable India dilemmas. You could spend all your time, and all your money, and all your health, helping beggars and as a visitor it would make barely a drop of difference. Yet each day, I see individuals that make my heart cry. We give them bits of money, or food - but so what? It won't change their lives, though it may alleviate the hunger for one day. But abjuring the poor on Christmas Day… Weeks later, when reading comedian Russell Brand's autobiography My Booky Wook in Alleppey, I found I agreed with his awkward childhood sense that 'special' days did not necessarily feel special. Instead, 'special' comes at unexpected moments, just as happiness does. Christmas is a day designated by humans; the love advocated by the idea of Jesus is always there, an inexhaustible well. But it's still good to be reminded. In a sense, we really did visit the church that day.

Women and kids on roadside, on way to Nawalgarh

For hours then we drove through the countryside and towns of Shekawati region, north-east Rajasthan, on our way to the town of Nawalgarh, where we'd stay a few days. It was desert country, but productive, much of it cultivated and irrigated, by ground water, I imagine. It was interesting that the scrubby trees that grow so well here are in fact also a crop: the leafy branches were being harvested for winter fodder, so that most had only one 'maintenance' branch remaining. Raptors circled overhead, as they do everywhere in this country, cleaning the bones of death, and no doubt controlling rodents, too. The towns, of old stone and new cement blocks, sun bleached, blended shabbily into the wastelands of garbage, of rural thatched huts becoming submerged by the push of suburbs, edged at times by the camps of semi nomadic herders of goats or sheep. Trucks, buses, camel carts, cars and motorbikes vied for the narrow tarred road, all halting together at level crossings. Everyone seems equally entranced by the trains; there's no sense of impatience, but a companionable focus, and a frisson as the long carriages go by.

Fatehpur with haveli in background, on road to Nawalgarh

At Mandewar, we waylaid for lunch at a hotel painted up to resemble the famous havelis of this district. Bright pictures of gods, birds, Raj gentlemen, Rajas, women bearing pots or babies, flowers, covered every surface of the white marble. It becomes saturating, and after the Jain temple in Bikaner all else pales into parody. More intriguing, and enjoyable for us, was sitting on the rooftop watching the neighbourhood kids flying kites from their rooftops. For it was a Sunday after all; extended families and friends came together in this age old game. It's great the way Indians use their flat roof space as a recreation area; it's breezy there, open, while below at street level there just is no room at all. We could do the same in Australia!

Detail on the walls of a haveli in Fatehpur

After that, a young man who acted as a tourist guide inveigled us to take a brief, unwanted tour of several nearby havelis. He distressed us by his mannerisms, clearly imbibed from young backpackers - he was cooler than cool, slick, a small town guy who wished to be far away - and who could blame him, at his age. He proudly announced he'd been drinking beer with an English girl the previous night. But it felt as if he was losing his soul: Western tourism has a lot to answer for in India. Yet I suppose it opens possibilities, too, in places otherwise on the fringe of changes that seem so desirable when seen on the movie screen.

Bishnoi huts along the road to Nawalgarh

Back on the road, and soon to the dense, busy, crumbling town of Fatehpur, where the rutted roads are almost impassable and where the havelis are the oldest of all, but to me the most beautiful. Here, the paintings are faded visions in exquisite soft colours, depicting scenes from religious stories, on falling walls fading into mould, or glimpses on the tops of shopfronts, or beyond green trees in forgotten gardens. A French woman has restored one of these havelis, though we did not find it, as we wanted to press on. Besides, there is something in me that likes the unrestored. I wish they could just be kept lightly cleaned, and not allowed to decay entirely … and if the surroundings were cleaner too, how romantic, evocative Fatehpur could be. Must once have been, when it was on the main desert trade route. But such are not the people's concerns; I guess they have the pressing matter of earning their livings, raising their children, to attend to. The old world has such value, beauty and knowledge, a loss surely that it is so disregarded, except by the few.

Haveli in Mandewa, where we stopped for lunch along the way to Nawalgarh

In early evening, we came at last to Nawalgarh, and the Shekawati Guesthouse, an oasis of calm, in this otherwise typically shabby but lively Rajasthani town. Kalpana had great foresight when she decided to develop an 'organic' farm into a haven for the newly evolving trade in haveli tourism. She and her husband Gajendra designed and built six Bishnoi style huts (round in shape, mud walls, thatch roof) with modern bathrooms, naturally, for the visitors; also several rooms were made available in their own large traditional family home. Kalpana greeted us and said “It's Christmas! I'll be serving something special for dinner.”

Cottages at Shekawati Guest House

At 7 pm, we presented ourselves at the dining room where two other tables of guests, Europeans, were gathered. We helped ourselves from tureens of vegetable curries: one of baby eggplants (brinjal), one of cauliflower, one of a type of chic pea dumpling, along with rice and chapatis, tomato salad, and to Michael's delight, a strong, delectable garlic pickle. All were subtly flavoured and different to any other Indian food I'd eaten: this made me realise that home cooking is very different to commercial fare, at least, to the type that we can normally afford as daily sustenance. Next, Rahul, the boy who helped with serving, and was quite mischievous too, ladled out sweet, luscious gulab jamuns, round balls made with milk, flour, flavoured with cardamom and swimming in sugar syrup. Yum! But this was not the 'special treat' for Christmas that Kalpana had promised. She came in personally bearing a cake, a bought cake, iced with several shades of pastel cream and some sort of piped decoration, and with great fanfare set it in the midst of the guests. Next, she set candles all around it and, with some difficulty, lit them. By now I was puzzled. Was it someone's birthday?

Shekawati Guest House owners, Kalpana and Gajendra

“How many are there?” she counted: including her family indoors and us, 12 and, we pressed her, what about the dog? Her little white dog was ecstatic about the cake. He danced about below unable to take his eyes from the treat. It MUST be his or he could not bear it!! At the next table, a young French woman stood up and said she would cut the cake. So! I thought, perhaps it is her birthday. But it wasn't; it was the birthday of Jesus, dummy! Happy Christmas: our little group of strangers, made one by sharing this singular, but caring, moment, then wandering to our huts, under the hazy stars in distant Nawalgarh.

home | WHAT'S NEW! | stories from my past

My top 25 free eBooks released Jan 2012

2012-02-01T10:23:00.001+11:00

home | WHAT'S NEW! | stories from my past

Bless you, Gutenberg. These are my Top 25 pick of the free books which Gutenberg released in January 2012 either to read online or to download if you have any sort of eReader.

De gustibus non disputandum est! Which is to say, suit yourself.... There were scores there to choose from. Click on one below and it's yours. There are no copyright issues with any of these in Australia.

Classic Novels - Adult and Children

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

Middlemarch by George Eliot

The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

The Lady of the Lake by Sir Walter Scott

The White Peacock by D. H. Lawrence

The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame

Waverley by Sir Walter Scott

What Katy Did by Susan Coolidge

What Katy Did Next by Susan Coolidge

Intriguing or Seredipitious!

Early Days in North Queensland by Edward Palmer

Empires and Emperors of Russia, China, Korea, and Japan by Péter Vay

Folk-Tales of Bengal by Lal Behari Day

Love Sonnets of an Office Boy by Samuel Ellsworth Kiser

Notable Women Authors of the Day by Helen C. Black

The Art of War by Sunzi

The Big Book of Nursery Rhymes by Various

The Black Moth by Georgette Heyer

The History of the Ten "Lost" Tribes by David Baron

The Sufistic Quatrains of Omar Khayyam by Omar Khayyam

The Sunny Side by A. A. Milne

The Thirteenth by James J. Walsh

The World's Sixteen Crucified Saviors by Kersey Graves

What Is Man? and Other Essays by Mark Twain

home | WHAT'S NEW! | stories from my past

Our family farm in the 1950s (3)

2012-01-31T10:37:00.003+11:00

I started off talking about the life of a dairy farm boy by mentioning a number of essential items of machinery, the diesel engine being the main one.

But I hadn't answered Christian's question about what a normal day was like for me.

My mother would wake me at 6 am with a cup of sweet tea and a piece of toast. Obviously, she'd been up long enough to have lit the Crown stove and it had burned down enough to make the toast over the coals. The stove wasn't designed to stay alight overnight as it was generally too warm in the house for that.

She would have been up by 5 am. Dad was up and walking to the dairy soon after 4.30 am. As soon as he got there, he'd start the engine. Why do that, with no cows in the pens yet? I'll tell you later.

Why such an early start? The same reason as a baker (in the old days at least) had to start round 3-4 am. If he didn't have his ovens up to the right temperature and the dough kneaded before baking by that time, he wouldn't have had fresh bread for his customers by 7.00 am when they expected it.

Likewise, we had to have our sixty or so gallons of milk, in six to ten gallon cans, down at the depot for the milk truck to pick them up by 9.30 am.

10 gall milk can

If it wasn't there by then, we'd miss out, and without a truck ourselves, that was it for the day. We'd lose a seventh of a week's income and possibly have our milk quota reduced as a penalty. Come hell, high water or engine breakdown, the milk had to be at the depot at the appointed time.

So that's why a 4.30 am start was essential for Dad, and why I'd be trudging up to the cowshed at 6.15 am at the latest. Without starting by then, all the things that had to be done just could not have been fitted into the hours to 9.30 am.

When I got to the dairy, Dad would already have been out on one of the horses to round up the cows and pen them next to the cowshed where they would be milked. It was more pleasant in summer, as there was more light and it wasn't chilly and dark as the day started in the winter.

With dawn breaking, and all equipment sterilised and checked, it was time to start milking.

Cows, let me tell you, are interesting creatures, though after milking them twice a day year after year, there's not much novelty left. But you do get to know them very well. There was a 'pecking order' in the holding pens every bit as rigid as for chooks in the henhouse - but let's keep the chickens out of it for now.

Cows are very much creatures of habit. I've said that before. They like routine and order, and dislike it intensely when that changes, except when it was to their advantage (just like humans).

Every cow had a name. This was nothing to do with sentiment, as you may think, but was very practical. It meant that if you needed a particular cow in a particular bail, you could call her in. Needless to say, each knew her name. If she were sitting down, as often she did, chewing her cud and waiting her turn, she'd get up quickly and come to the gate to be let in to the bail.

Why would a cow want to be milked, and come when called? There could be a few reasons. Here's one. If she were a good milker, there would have been discomfort when the udder was full, and it wasn't unusual to see a cow sitting down before milking with a steady spray of milk coming from her teats, making little foaming puddles in the dust.

Mothers with babies might well sympathise!

In these cases, the cow was called in as soon as possible. If she were young and down the pecking order, this would annoy the older matriarchs intensely. They expected to be first, and they'd be waiting for her at the gate. She'd have to run the gauntlet getting through. What looked like a guard of honour as she approached was nothing of the sort. She'd waste no time threading her way through and hoping for not too many bunts in the ribs.

That was usually a forlorn hope, but as the cows were dehorned as calves, at least daggers weren't involved. It was just Liverpool kisses for the young ones with an overstretched udder making a dash for the safety of the bail.

Continued.

The village idiot

2012-01-28T12:53:00.001+11:00

home | WHAT'S NEW! | stories from my past

'My shoe's eating my sock,' I said. 'I didn't lace it tight enough. Can you fix it for me?'

We were at the highest point, topographically, of our 'daily' walk around the streets. The 'daily' is in inverted commas because the days have been so damp and grey it's a bit of a stretch of credibility to use the term for the past couple of weeks.

We'd walked up the quiet little avenue that takes us out to Dangar Street - what used to be the old highway through town before they put in the city bypass. There are gum trees up that lane and we've noticed a few small dead branches on the ground as we pass. Tracey picks one or two up as we walk by, and they add to the 'morning wood' basket that will be useful when we light up the fire again.

...which won't be long away, by the way things are going with the seasons right now.

Tracey bent down and loosened the laces, dragged the sock back up where it should be, and re-tied the lace.

Just for the record, there's no way I could get down and do that for myself right now - not without taking ten minutes anyway.

At that point, a car stopped beside us. A woman was driving, and an elderly guy wound down the window.

'Can you tell us the way to the Racecourse?'

'Sure,' I said. 'Just go till you get to the lights, turn left till the Pink Pub, turn right there and keep going. You'll run into it.'

'Hang on,' said Tracey, waving the stick she'd collected, 'that's not right. You have to go straight down this street, turn right at the first roundabout, cross through the traffic light and go straight on, and the Racecourse is on the left.'

The car's occupants looked at me as if I were a loony. Well, why wouldn't they? They'd just come across me having my shoelaces tied for me by a woman with a switchy stick (obviously to keep the idiot in order.) They looked at each other with that 'he's a bit simple, obviously' look in their eyes.

A car towing a horse float went by.

'Maybe we'll just follow that,' the woman said. But as the horse-trailer could be going anywhere and not necessarily to the racecourse, she did wait to hear Tracey's simple, clear and correct instructions repeated.

Off they went.

So did we.

'There were just a few things wrong with your instructions,' Tracey said.

'Firstly, you didn't tell them about turning right at the first roundabout.'

'Second, you told them to go left at the lights, not straight through.'

'Third, the Pink Pub hasn't been pink for at least five years.'

'Fourthly, you were sending them to the Showgrounds, not the Racecourse!'

She was being picky, I reckon. Everyone knows about the first roundabout, except for... well... strangers....

Let's not dwell on these little details. Anyone can make a minor mistake. About the colour of the pub, for instance. And the destination....

We walked on.

Tracey could see me deep in thought, but with a bit of a grin on my face.

'I know what you're going to do,' she said, waving the stick at me again. 'You're going to write about this on your blog, aren't you?'

'I mite of bin thinkin bout it.'

'Might of' I can't bear not to add, is a running joke in our family that only lost its joke quality when we said it so often that Christian, as a kid, started believing that 'might of' was how it should be.

We went on.

'And you're going to embellish it, aren't you?' she added.

'What's there to embellish? It's perfect as it is.'

'If I were going to embellish it,' I added, 'then I'd substitute for the shoe-eating-my-sock incident what happened a fortnight ago when the lace of my tracksuit pants was too loose and they kept falling down, and I couldn't tie it with just one hand and all, and everyone was ogling at the sight of this tall blonde, bending over and interfering with this shambly old bloke in his groin area in broad daylight on the street....'

'You've said more than enough,' she warned, waving the stick perilously close to my nose. 'Just stick to what really happened. Burn this into your poor little overworked brain, my Doctor. I control your medications!'

home | WHAT'S NEW! | stories from my past

Camels, Indians and Australians

2012-01-26T11:30:00.000+11:00

home | WHAT'S NEW! | stories from my past

This can't possibly be about what you think it might be! If you guessed right, you're a better man (and that includes you Memsahibs) than I am, Gunga Din.

Thursday, 26 January 2012

Image Source Indian & Aus flags

It's Australia Day, and, I've no doubt, will be celebrated in typical Australian style one way or the other, regardless of some dire weather forecasts for the day.

What many in Oz may not realise is that it's also one of India's special days, a day which in many ways compares with Australia Day here.

It's Indian Republic Day, though it's easy to get things confused, because Indian Independence Day is 15 August, the anniversary of independence for both India and Pakistan in 1947. But unlike the trauma of that event, Republic Day is a much more joyful occasion.

So it was that on Friday, 26 January 1973, I was in New Delhi. I'd had a leisurely breakfast at Vishwa Yuvak Kendra, the International Youth Hostel in the suburb of Chanakyapuri.

In those days, Delhi still retained some of the charms of a large village rather than the frantic urgency of a modern westernised city. In 1973, it still had the scent of the smoke at dusk from, and aroma of, countless domestic cooking fires outside the small dwellings scattered round the city.

I noticed that there seemed more activity than usual that morning. A lot of people were headed in one direction, towards the centre of the city.

'What's going on?' I asked the grey-haired gentlemanly waiter who always brought us breakfast.

We always had a joke as he would rush fresh-cooked steaming chapatis to our table. Some mornings I would have a boiled egg for breakfast.

'Ek egg?' he would ask, and we'd smile at the pun on the two words, because 'ek', meaning 'one' in Hindi, sounds almost identical with 'egg'.

'Ache ache,' I'd respond, clutching my head.

We'd laugh. It was a weak joke, but it was ours.

He had a little hut just across the way from the hostel. I'd see him walking to it sometimes, after work, in his neat uniform; a tall, slim proud man, his back straight as a die. His wife and children would greet him, and he'd sometimes sit cross-legged on the charpoy beside the front door as a friend would drop by.

'The parade,' he said. 'That's where all those people are going. They're walking to Janpath.'

'Why not walk with the crowd?' I thought. Good exercise. It's a fair distance.

It turned out to be an interesting walk at a smart pace, just tagging along with a group of men and women in traditional Punjabi dress. They were smiling, inclusive, happy.

For one thing, we didn't necessarily go along roads; we went through wire fences, little alleys, private (in theory!) backyards, over low brick walls, down tiny lanes between dwellings... places you'd never go without people who had an idea where they wanted to end up.

Janpath it was. People took up vantage points and the parade started.

I wish I had pictures of it, but they are on slides, unscanned, and I don't have time or coordination to fiddle with them any more. You'll just have to take my word for the colour and spectacle, but I will mention just one thing.

The Camel Corps. If you've never seen military or racing camels, then you won't truly appreciate what magnificent beasts they are, and the spectacle they added to the parade. Tall top-bred Dromedaries, they were as proud and fierce-looking as the men mounted on them. Clipped neatly and perfectly all over, they had the shape of sleek, elegant greyhounds with slightly pyramidal backs. They were trotting along at a perfectly uniform lively gait.

Source Camel Corps

That was my enduring memory of the Independence Day parade of 1973, with all its pomp and splendour as it moved towards Rajgat.

Expect the unexpected when you go to India. I've been reminded of that many times over the past forty years. Never imagine you've seen it all.

We'll share our day, India. I won't even mention the cricket!

home | WHAT'S NEW! | stories from my past

Sisters for sister

2012-01-25T14:05:00.000+11:00

home | WHAT'S NEW! | stories from my past

The Grammar School laundress

2012-01-23T12:18:00.001+11:00

home | WHAT'S NEW! | stories from my past

You know, when I think about it, it's no wonder that my mother lived to nearly ninety. After marrying my father and taking on the role of a dairy farmer's wife, she had a tough life. I mean, really tough - and I don't know the half of it, because I was a kid and, like any other kid, I just accepted that things were how they were.

I was going to write today the next part of life in the dairy from my point of view, but I woke up thinking not about that as what it must have been like for Mum, and to the extent I know, for my sisters.

There was a clear division of labour in the household, though some tasks carried over into a joint venture independent of gender. Some women's and girls' tasks were indeed women's business and men stayed out of them, while others were men's. Neither would have wanted it any other way, given the attitudes of the time. I won't go into that. You can easily work it out even if you don't belong to that generation.

Crown oven

When I was really little, we lived a life more akin to the nineteenth than to the twentieth century, and the brunt of this fell on my mother and older sisters. The kitchen had an old cast-iron Crown stove; not even a Rayburn slow combustion model owned by some of our relatives and friends, even in Calliope itself.

Rayburn stove

All crockery and utensils were hand-washed and dried. There was no running water in the kitchen; just a tap from the rainwater tank in the corner near the stove. There were no cooking gadgets that came with the electrified life of the cities - just pots and pans blackened by the fire in the stove. There were mops and brooms; no such things in the house as vacuum cleaners! Those would have been regarded, especially by the men and even with electricity connected, as somewhat frivolous luxuries. After all, their own mothers did without them, didn't they?

The best example of all this, and how well it shows up the sheer drudgery of housework for my mother, was washing the clothes. It wasn't even glorified by the term, doing the laundry.

Yes, this attractive!

There were three basic implements; a copper boiler, the washtubs and the clothesline. The copper vessel had to have a fire set under it, filled with tank water and brought to the boil. That meant the water had to be bucketed into it, incidentally. And, if I remember rightly, there was no plumbing for the laundry tubs until we got the Simpson Wringer-Washer. The tubs were filled using a steel bucket and emptied the same way. The water used was usually put on the garden, often dying of thirst as it was in the Queensland heat.

The godsend

Dirty clothes were sorted into piles according to types and colours and ones where the dye might - or would - run, men's clothes and unmentionables that didn't exist as far as I was allowed to know or would have understood. Each load was boiled. I can still remember them bubbling away gently like the Christmas ham cooked in the same copper at that time of the year.

One thing's for certain; anything washed in that copper was sterilised, and maybe cleaner in that respect than clothes that come out of many automatic washers these days.

Each steaming item was dragged out of the copper by a pole (usually an old broom or rake handle) into a laundry basket, woman-handled to the tubs to have the detergent (Rinso, in our case!) rinsed out of them. By hand. The item was then wrung - again by hand, preferably between two or more women or girls in the family. It would go into a rinsing tub, white items with Reckitt's Blue.

I don't know what was in Reckitt's, but it whitened the clothes markedly. They'd have been a dull grey otherwise, after having the bleach boiled out of them to within an inch of their life.


Top: 'Normal' pegs. 'New' model below

It was also a great curer of poison insect stings - ants and wasps and hornets. Many a kid walked around with an arm or foot stained blue by the Reckitt's. I don't know what it would have done for a Redback spider, because more by good luck than anything else, I never got bitten by one. Even Reckitt's has its limits.

Anyway, the clothes went through that second rinse while another load was simmering in the copper, and wrung out again. They were then carried to the clothesline, quite a distance from the house, out where the breeze was best.

You're going to think Hill's Clothes Hoist, right?

Don't be silly now.... We didn't go in for that trendy stuff everyone downtown was having installed in their backyards. We had a real washing line, with the line being held up in the middle by a sturdy forked pole as in the background below. (Ask Tracey; even now, we don't have one of them newfangled Hills Hoist gadgets....)

Wet washing, even wrung out with all strength mustered is damned heavy. Woe betide washing operations if the pole was dislodged and the washing came down in the dirt. That occasioned a good deal of grief, as it was back to the rinsing tub (at best) and the whole operation repeated.

In short, nothing was simple and not much was made simpler that might have been until we got electricity. The washing machine, however primitive the wringer model would seem now, made things much easier even if it didn't save much time. Mum had washing to do for four young kids and I guess that would have been pretty much a daily operation at times. Plenty of stinky nappies too, I don't doubt.

Often clothes were almost dry in the hot Queensland sunshine and a bit of an easterly breeze before the last ones were pegged up. As soon as possible, clothes were unpegged, folded and brought in. I won't dare go into ironing, but just think flat-irons on the stove and agonised howls from teenaged girls when they ironed a black mark from the stove on to their Saturday Night dance dresses.

Washing was just one part of the operation, and Mum had no choice but to do it solo until we got big enough to help to make the manual load lighter. She also came to the dairy to do her part of the milking for hours on end.

Such was a tiny slice of the early married life of the Grammar School educated teacher who could spout Latin and French in the dairy while shovelling cowshit. But she taught us all the Latin and Greek roots that have been invaluable ever more to me, from Grade 1 to a Ph D thesis.

Now you know why scholarships have been created in my name to educate Bangladeshi girls, so that even if they are unable to do anything else, they can teach their kids to read and write.

Much, much more could be said about my mother and her courage and joys and great sorrows, and the part my sisters played in farm life. They may tell those stories themselves, and make them part of the great historical archive of this country, along with those of the males, who think their contribution is so much more important.

It isn't. And fellas, we're not tougher either. That's why my mother made it almost to ninety.

home | WHAT'S NEW! | stories from my past

Visiting seriously ill people - dos and donts

2012-01-21T13:38:00.004+11:00

home | WHAT'S NEW! | stories from my past

"Do you agree with this?" wrote a friend yesterday who referred me to this site.

It was about what to say and what not to say to seriously ill people you are visiting.

I read it, and then passed it on to Tracey, without offering an opinion on it myself.

"What do you think of this?" I asked her.

To put you in the picture, if you're not already aware of it, I am one of the people to whom the article applies. I have a malignant brain tumour; a deadly one, which by all medical histories, is not going to go away.

But I am fortunate to have quite a few friends and former colleagues who visit me.

When we compared notes verbally, it turns out Tracey's views are pretty much the same as mine, and neither of us agree with everything in the excerpts in green below. A lot of it is right according to our views, but some things I have quite strong reservations about.

Here's what was said (and I thank Mia Freedman wholeheartedly for bringing this matter up):

Bruce Feiler author of “The Council of Dads: A Story of Family, Friendship and Learning How to Live”, recently shared an excerpt of his book in The New York Times. Bruce had bone cancer; he also had 3-year-old twins, a working wife, nine months of chemotherapy and 15 hours of reconstructive surgery to deal with. When someone asked his advice on how to handle a mutual friend's brain tumour, he came up with a list of things not to say to someone battling a dire health situation:

1. “What can I do to help?” (Don't ask, be proactive).

My response: I don't agree. It is not necessary to be proactive unless you are certain what it is that they need or want. For me to expect proactivity is often asking too much of the friend, who is probably already aware of their own limited knowledge of the circumstances. If they think I expect proactivity, it may even keep them away.

Asking sincerely what you can do to help is fine, when you don't know what you can do that will help. It could be that your 'proactive' help creates more problems than it solves, however well meaning it may be.

2. “My thoughts and prayers are with you” (A tired cliché)

My response: I don't agree. These words, sincerely meant, are perfectly valid and appreciated by me, regardless of my personal views on religion or particular religions. I find this being referred to as a "tired cliché" quite offensive to the sincere views of the well-wisher.

I have had Christians, Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists AND a Wiccan all tell me that I am in their prayers. I am grateful for those, fully accepting of them and absolutely respect their intention.

Likewise - and often it comes from people who are not religious - to be told I am in someone's thoughts is an uplifting experience and one I value greatly.

3. “Did you try that mango colonic I recommended?” (Leave treatment advice to the doctors)

I'm fairly much in agreement with this one, although I don't mind in the least someone referring me to possible treatments and giving me the opportunity to consider their merits. But suggesting I should be 'trying' something they've chanced across which could totally stuff up my current treatment.... no, don't do that. Do it only if it's cured you personally of my terminal condition, and you can provide all the evidence!

4. “Everything will be OK.” (You don't know that)

Agreed. That is a totally pointless, meaningless and even insulting thing to say. BUT... sometimes people say things like that when they really mean, "I wish that things would be OK" - and a seriously ill person should always be prepared to accept such well-meant slip-ups with good grace. Hell, before I got this thing I wouldn't be surprised if I had blurted out something inappropriate myself to others with serious illness, especially if caught on the hop by it, so one has to allow some leeway.

5. “How are we today?” (Sick people aren't mentally diminished infants)

Well, true enough, put in that patronising way, but being asked how I am feeling when a friend meets me after some time seems pretty normal to me. They better be prepared for comments about how I really am feeling though, if the question is sincere....

From my own experience, and what I've seen and read, people in my category are happy to be very frank about their illness, so don't shy away from asking anything if you want sincerely to know. Naturally, I reserve the right to answer it or not, but you can be fairly sure you'll get a straight answer. Not that the ill person always has an answer.

6. “You look great.” (Don't focus on externals).

Again, it all depends on the sincerity of the compliment. It is a great irony in my case that my face does look better than it did three years ago, and I'll tell you why.

I was living then on about five/six hours sleep a night, which I'd done for many years. I was rather proud of that in a dumb way, but one time I fixed a videocam in place for an event we were filming and crossed in front of it and looked back at the lens, so it recorded my face looking into the camera.

After I was diagnosed with a brain tumour and began treatment, I was sleeping much more. People visiting me subsequently would often tell me how much better my face looked (always a back-handed compliment, but never mind....)

By accident one day after months of treatment for my illness, I came across this tiny clip of before-diagnosis video that had caught my face staring into the camera, and I was shocked at how weary, strained and lined my face looked. Before I got sick!

I too had got used to my 'new' unlined face with much less prominent frown and bags under my eyes.

So it just might be that you DO look better, even though you might not be feeling that way. Why should one assume insincerity?

Still, the author is right to suggest not to focus on externals.

On this last point, one of my friends had stomach cancer when she was younger and lost a lot of weight during treatment. She works in fashion and I vividly recall how colleagues would say, “You look fantastic”. Even when they knew why she was so thin. Maybe they thought it would cheer her up. It simply made her upset.

I guess it could, but that's because her perspective was quite different, and it's sad that she didn't realise they were probably telling it exactly as it was from theirs, unless she knew they were not being sincere.

But OK, I can see where she's coming from, especially in that industry.

Meanwhile, Bruce Feiler's list of things you should say includes:

1. “No need to write back” (Keeping up with correspondence can be overwhelming)

I very much agree with this one. People often write, and ask a long series of questions. They are doing it out of genuine interest, I'm sure. I really don't mind the questions, but I do reserve the right to decide how, what and when I'll reply to them.

To be told there's no need to write back is comforting, as long as I can believe it's sincere. Given I have only one typing hand, some friends can have no idea what they are asking of me if they expect full answers - much as I would like to give them.

That tension between answering and not answering can be very frustrating for me, because it looks like I don't value their friendship and concern, and nothing could be further from the truth.

The irony here is that most of the answers to "how are things going?" questions can be found right here on my blog in the WHAT'S NEW! section. I know a blog is impersonal but corners have to be cut. If you've read that section and still have questions, that's fine. Ask away. I really appreciate knowing that the person has checked with the blog first.

2. “I should be going now” (Short visits are best)

Very, very true. I love visits by friends but become very animated because it's so enjoyable, but they can take a lot out of me. The best friends are those who keep their visits shortish - but, do believe me if I tell you to stay a little longer. If it is time to go, I won't say that, and don't be offended if I readily agree with you that the timing is right. Tiredness can hit very quickly, no matter how close a friend you are.

If you feel visiting is your duty or a task, and not a pleasure, then please stay away. We'll both be happier if you do.

3. “Would you like some gossip?” (Distraction is helpful)

Yes!! Nothing like hearing some good gossip (or common-interest discussion)! Housebound as I am, it's amazing what things I don't get to see and hear, especially on the local scene.

Gossip is great - though remember it's a two-way process. There's no need to fill momentary silences. Occasionally friends have left and I haven't had a chance to say or ask what I would like to!

4. “I love you” or “I'm sorry you have to go through this” (Honest expression of emotions are a powerful gift).

Yes. Well said. No need for me to embellish that.

I sent his article to several girlfriends at various stages of their health battles - some in the middle, others out the other side - and they agreed with every point.

As you see, I don't agree with some of what's said, and it would be wrong to assume agreeing with "every point" is how every seriously ill person feels.

You will note there's one word that runs through this whole thing. Sincerity. You know what? That's all I ask, really. I know that it can be terribly hard to know what to say, and every person (patient or visitor) is different. What may be a negative trigger for some has the opposite effect on others.

So if you're visiting someone - or being visited - do think about these things, and don't expect to get it perfectly right. No-one should be expected to be. If you're the ill person, visitors have as much right to courtesy in what can be very difficult circumstances for them as do those being visited.

Just be sincere.

Disclaimer: I've not read Feiler's book so it may be that what's above is out of context or covered differently in some other part of the book, but I've been exposed to just what the readers of the article have been.

home | WHAT'S NEW! | stories from my past

Our family farm in the 1950s (2)

2012-01-17T20:47:00.005+11:00

I have to say that we were quite poverty-stricken when we produced nothing for sale but cream; the subject of my previous story. This changed when the Butter Factory (the Port Curtis Dairy Cooperative, aka the PCD) offered to buy whole milk from us.

There was a decent living to be made from this in good seasons, but it meant many changes. The herd had to be improved and new equipment bought, as there was no way we could fill our milk quota consistently without it. If you failed to make your quota, you'd be given a lower one, and it was a lot harder to get your quota increased than to have it reduced.

That demanded investment in new machinery, and my father, who had always been thrifty, had managed over the years to put some money aside to do this. I should add that any chance to save a shilling or two was also due to our mother's ability to think ahead, and also to make things out of nothing, but that's another story.

We didn't have electricity at this time, and even when we did get it, it could not have been connected to the dairy (about half a kilometre away from the house as the crow flies) without prohibitive cost. So the first priority was to buy a milking machine.

The milking setup you might see these days is totally different from what it was in the 1950s. If it were then as it is now, we'd have done the milking better and in less than half the time.

So, we needed to build a new dairy designed for milking machines 1950s style, to install them and a number of other critical items of equipment to make us competitive in the whole-milk selling market.

At the very heart of all this was one magnificent piece of machinery which ran everything else. This was the diesel engine. Rolls Royce could not have done a better job of its design (so say I!) In our neck of the woods, American-made Lister farm machinery was generally favoured, and theirs was well-made.

Ours was a Southern Cross engine, a model first released the year I was born (1947). It rarely failed us in all its years of service, and was never replaced by a new one. Bolted to its mounting block, it stood as tall as I was.

The extraordinary thing about these diesel engines was that they were so efficient they could almost run on the proverbial 'smell of an oily rag'. Our engine had to be going for a minimum of ten hours per day, seven days a week. We had a 44 gallon drum of diesel fuel behind the dairy that lasted a very long time. 44 gallons is approximately 166.55811832 litres. (I just worked that out in my head....ho ho.)

Here's why the diesel was so critical. These are the four essential items of equipment it ran simultaneously:

The milking machine for three bails, including the cam to provide reciprocation, the pumps and the suction chambers.

A powerful compressor and pump for the farm fridge, holding up to 100 gallons of milk. (378.541178 litres. Again, a rough calculation.)

The new model belt-driven cream separator.

The milk shock-cooler compressor and pump.

My father had been raised with a lifestyle practically devoid of heavy farm machinery except for horse-drawn plough, which we still used at the time; the windmill and manual chaff-cutter. All of these, like our first cream separator, were manually (or horse-ually!) operated. We did not have a car, a tractor, a hammermill or any other devices like this - not even a motor-mower. Dad could wield with great skill a scythe of the type reminiscent of that in the arms of the Apocalyptic Grim Reaper; but fuel-driven engines were alien to him.

Good maintenance of the diesel was essential, so what he did do was to learn how to strip down thoroughly and service that one particular device. He knew its vagaries in cold and hot weather or when something was amiss, and kept it in excellent condition for all those years. Including the colour, it looked almost exactly like the one pictured above (which, let me say, I'm rather proud to have manufactured with a lot of Photoshop time).

Below is a link to a fairly similar model diesel to ours, and it's useful to show the handling of the engine. Ours was mounted very firmly on a large concrete block, so it was far more stable than the one in the video.

1947 Southern Cross diesel engine startup.

It's worth a look just to see how slowly and solidly it runs, even on this unstable mobile platform. Dad would have been offended by the poor appearance of this one! (By the way, when you hear it slow down it's not stopping; it is just climbing down to its normal running speed.)

The exhaust pipe didn't stick up in the air like that on a diesel truck. When it was installed, a long galvanised steel pipe took the exhaust gases out a few metres away from the back of the dairy. I suspect we would have been poisoned by carbon monoxide if that wasn't part of the design. We had to be very careful stepping over the exhaust pipe that our bare legs didn't touch it, though.

Touching the exhaust pipe when the engine was running was something you did only once. That was the OH&S method back then. Experience.

What that meant was that there was no muffler, but the noise was pretty much restricted to outside the part of the shed we rarely went. Otherwise, the gentle pop-pop-pop of the engine exhaust out the back was part of the rhythm of milking life.

There were rare occasions when the engine did break down beyond Dad's ability to fix it. It was then all-hands-on-deck to milk manually till normal service was resumed. The cows, being very much creatures of habit, were nervous and unsettled, and likely to play up if the doof-doof beat of the diesel was missing. They hated the eerie silence, or the noise of the sharp clatter of steel buckets, and any talking usually masked by the sound of the engine.

We whispered. If you were going to get kicked, that was the most likely time for it. The cows thought it was their noise-maker and were just as likely not to let down their milk under the stress of abnormal conditions. As in the classic Australian movie, the Castle, when the familiar noise of an engine came back, the cows would smile and say, "Aaahhh - the serenity!"

Well, not quite, but you get what I mean. Once that engine started up again, the cows relaxed, and chewed their cuds while lying down waiting to be called by name for their turn to be milked.

Don't laugh. I can tell you, a breakdown of the engine was a production crisis greater than all others. You can crank the bloody thing all you like, but if a piston ring fractures, you're done for until it's fixed.

Such a crisis would lead immediately to an explosion of language from Dad that would be quelled only by the fear of upsetting the cows too much, unprotected by the doof-doof ambiance. Some of the words would have been too... robust... for your shell-like ears.

And now I can get on and tell the story! (continued)

Sonnets of an Office Boy

2012-01-16T14:34:00.001+11:00

home | WHAT'S NEW! | stories from my past

One of the new offerings through Gutenberg is a very short sequence of poems by Samuel E. Kiser. I confess right now that I'd never heard of him before, but he seems to have been around Chicago in the 1920s and 30s.

When I started reading the anthology (there may be a better word for it; I'm not sure), I immediately thought of the great populist poet of Australia, C J Dennis, with The Sentimental Bloke.

They seem to me to be on the same wavelength, but for their respective cultures. I'm really not sure if the latter is exportable, especially to North America, because of the street slang (almost a dialect!), but there's no problem with Kiser coming back this way. I'd say that Kiser predates Dennis, but not by all that much.

It's downloadable from Gutenberg and readable on any computer with the programs Kindle and/or Calibre. There's a plain text version, but you'd be crazy not to get the illustrated one. The cartoonist is the Pulitzer Prize winner John Tinney McCutcheon, so Kiser isn't a nobody.

Here's how it starts, just to whet your appetite. If you're a C J Dennis fan, you'll enjoy it. By the way, you can download The Sentimental Bloke, or read it online here. Sadly, the great illustrations in the hard copy versions of it are not in the Gutenberg edition. They ought to be. Happily, that's no problem with Kiser's poems.

home | WHAT'S NEW! | stories from my past

Our family farm in the 1950s (1)

2012-01-15T13:04:00.003+11:00

A few days ago, we were sitting at the dinner table, as we do every night.

"What was it like each day, working on a dairy farm?" Christian asked. "I mean, how did it work? What did you do?"

What could be a more irresistible opportunity for reminiscing about life on a dairy farm in the 1950s? It occurred to me only then that in all the years Tracey and he and I had been together, ever since he was six, I'd never explained how a dairy farm worked.

Of course, things have their time. Five years ago, he may not have cared less. Now he was asking. That's different.

I'd never told him the most basic things about milking a herd of sixty or so cows twice daily. Neither Tracey nor he had much idea of how the dairy itself worked, why the yards and sheds were laid out as they were, or what happened when the cow went into a bail. ("Bail" or "bale"? I'm not sure. If you bail something up, you restrict its movement, so that's probably it.)

Well, if Christian was interested, then I was delighted to trawl back over those things, and revisit them through the eyes of an adult.

If I start at the very beginning and try to tell it all, there's a fair chance that I'll never get finished, and you'll get bored, and we'll all be disappointed.

I'll just tell you first about a vital piece of equipment that we couldn't do without in the days when we didn't even sell whole milk. We sold only cream to the Butter Factory. That was it. Any other income came from wherever we could make it. That's another story - it's too early to get side-tracked with such details.

That piece of mechanical marvel - and indeed it is - was the cream separator. Creamy milk went in, pure cream came out one spout, and skim milk out of the other.

Full-sized cream separator

I tried hard to find a picture of one that was identical to ours, and I couldn't, but this isn't so different. To be truthful, I'm quite pleased with something that looks fairly similar - my sisters will agree, I think.

In those early days, we milked by hand. We didn't have the money for milking machines.

When I say "we", I mean my parents, as I was too young to help at all then. They milked our jersey cows, jerseys being famous for rich cream production.

The milk went into that large top bowl, and was steadily poured via the tap into the separator, after the centrifuge hidden inside was cranked up manually to the right speed. Magically, it seemed to me, out of one spout poured a small stream of cream, and a larger one of skim milk came out of the other.

The principle for a modern cream separator in this video is identical. The video presentation you see here is lousy, but it shows what happens. And I'll bet my pants that's Friesian cow's milk, not Jersey's. It's too thin.

OK, your pants then. I'll bet them.

The other piece of equipment is a truly beautiful piece of mechanical engineering. This machine is the heart of the dairy, no kidding. But that's for next time.

Stick with me. This will all come together, you'll see. (continued)

The Great Illusion: a prophecy for a century

2012-01-13T20:56:00.002+11:00

home | WHAT'S NEW! | stories from my past

Yesterday a new book came up on Gutenberg; one that I bypassed first time around.

There's nothing on the site to indicate what the book they've just released is going to be about. I saw it there once more as I looked through today's offerings, and curiosity got the better of me. After all, the author was a great political figure in the early Twentieth Century, and a Nobel Laureate. What was this great illusion?

Norman Angell

I skimmed through the first few pages quickly, and confess I haven't yet read much of it, but what I saw as the opening thesis grabbed my attention. The reason for this is that it could have been written as a proposition for the present, yet it was penned a century ago.

The publication date is 1910. It was startling in its accuracy for 2012.

Bear in mind that it was composed before two catastrophic world wars, financial and social upheavals the like of which the world had never experienced before. It was a time of unshakeable optimism that the world was in a great period of industrial progress and a wonderful period of human history was beginning.

Titanic was about to be launched just months later; in May 1911 - the greatest moving object ever created by human beings. The magnificent ship was a triumph of its age. A vision of Manifest Destiny enveloped the world of Europe and America, yet world war - the world of Europe at least, was just four years away.

No-one, you would think, could have prophesied what was to come, yet look at the timeless words below. Would that they had been able to drive the European and American vision in the past one hundred years....

home | WHAT'S NEW! | stories from my past

Another new life opportunity

2012-01-12T14:46:00.001+11:00

home | WHAT'S NEW! | stories from my past

My co-Board-Member and President of BODHI Australia wrote to me yesterday:

The second recipient of the Denis Wright Scholarship for Underprivileged Girls through UCEP (in Bangladesh). Like the first recipient, she also wants to be a nurses' aide. She is the youngest of 8 children and lives with her sister in a tin shed. Her parents are dead. She works the longest hours of all the girls presented and seems to have it the roughest....

Her income is presently 1600 taka ($18.50) per month - about 60c per day, or less than $5 per week - and out of that has to pay her share of all household expenses as well as food, travel and personal items.

This scholarship with put her on the first leg of her journey to fulfillment, security and, as a corollary, nation-building for Bangladesh.

If you want to know more about this scheme view here and here.

Other site and contact addresses:

csbutler@sctelco.net.au
http://www.bodhi.net.au
http://www.facebook.com/home.php?sk=group_104257095831&ref=ts
http://www.twitter.com @BODHIgroup

home | WHAT'S NEW! | stories from my past

A Heian lady's view of men

2012-01-11T12:01:00.001+11:00

home | WHAT'S NEW! | stories from my past

When I first published this piece, I simply said:

Sometimes it's wise just to include something entirely without comment. Make of it what you will!

I now look at this and wonder if I was giving the impression that I was mocking, or jeering at this period of Japanese society and history or at Sei Shonagon.

Nothing could be further from the truth. This is just a window into a remarkable courtly period in Japan where 'the rule of taste' prevailed above all others, and is probably not all that much different in some respects from its parallel in Eighteenth Century Europe.

Perhaps I didn't need to preempt such a criticism, but decades of teaching Japanese cultural history I wouldn't want misunderstood.

From Sei Shonagon The Pillow Book (Penguin Classics) More information on this Eleventh Century Japanese court lady.

home | WHAT'S NEW! | stories from my past