When the University of Melbourne’s undergraduate course in Australian literature was not offered last year, there was an uproar – not just from the literary community, but from the students themselves, who organised their own Australian literature study group. The university was quick to reassure appalled onlookers that the subject was only resting; it is back on the syllabus this year.
This year, the university is dismantling its Australian history undergraduate program – and dramatically cutting back its Australian studies program overall. The Sunday Age recently reported that the teaching staff for the university’s Australian Centre will be cut back from 4.9 to one full-time position, a director. It ‘will effectively become a research-only centre, with postgraduate students and no undergraduate students’.
The student response has been noticeably non-existent. Which surprises no one: undergraduate Australian history has recently had the lowest enrolment of all subjects at the University of Melbourne.
La Trobe University has no undergraduate Australian history program either. Sydney University is also struggling to get numbers in first-year Australian history, compared with strong interest in American and European history subjects.
‘Schools killed Australian history,’ wrote Christopher Bantick (former head of history at Trinity Grammar in Kew) in the Age yesterday. He said it has been reduced to ‘a brain-deadening subject where nothing happens.’
Anna Clark, who interviewed 250 history teachers, students and curriculum officials from around Australia for her book History’s Children, agrees. ‘‘There is a real turn-off that comes out of school education when it comes to national history … It didn’t matter what school they went to or what region they grew up in, kids I spoke with said Australian history was often dull and repetitive,’ she told the Australian.
‘In Grade 6 you sort of study the same things as Year 10 … It’s just like you do the same thing over and over and over again,’ said one typical Year 12 boy.
Marilyn Lake, president of the Australian Historical Association, agrees that kids are put off the subject by learning it at school. She is critical of the way history has been taught, particularly the increased focus on military history over the past 15 years. More money has been spent on educating children in military history than any other field of history in Australia, she says.
She believes this was a deliberative initiative by the Howard government to ‘literally … change the subject’, moving away from the much-debated history wars and 19th-century massacres of indigenous people to the 20th-century wars fought by the Anzacs and their descendants.
‘The line run about Australia having proved its values and identity in war is related to the fact that we now seem to be always at war. In other words, this [has] normalised war.’
But while Lake is concerned that the dominance of military history in our schools is putting students off the subject, Clark found in her research that the Anzac legend is the one area of Australian history kids warm to. The most hated topics were indigenous history, because of the repetitive the way it is taught, and Federation, which even one teacher confessed was ‘sort of mind-blowingly dull’.
The future for teaching Australian history, Lake told ABC Radio National’s Saturday Extra last week, is folding it into global history rather than teaching it as a stand-alone subject. At La Trobe University, where she is chair of the School of Historical and European Studies, one undergraduate subject that has gained rather than lost enrolments in 2012 is Global Migration Stories, which incorporates a good deal of Australian history. The subject, which is four years old, is an example, she says, of the need to think in new ways when it comes to teaching Australian history.
Trevor Burnard, head of the school of historical and philosophical studies at the University of Melbourne, concurs that students are ‘less interested in exploring Australian identity and more interested in exploring Australia in the wider world’.
Lake is hopeful about the future of teaching Australian history in schools, and the new national history curriculum, currently in development. ‘From what I’ve seen of it, I think it looks very progressive and exciting to me.’
And as for Australian history in universities, she says students do come back to it later, after an undergraduate gap year – in second and third years, and when they’re doing their honours.
The Wheeler Centre’s Australian Literature 101 series launches this Thursday, with Ramona Koval talking to Wheeler Centre director Michael Williams about Watkin Tench: A Narrative of the Expedition to Botany Bay. This free event will be at the Wheeler Centre from 5.30pm. Bookings are recommended.
Watkin Tench was one of the texts featured in last year’s popular Must-Read Histories event, which you can now watch online.
Working with Words is a new Wheeler Centre web series, where we’ll talk to writers and publishing folk about their work – and other bookish things. This time, we talk to Booker Prize-winning novelist Alan Hollinghurst.
Alan Hollinghurst shot to a new stratosphere of literary fame when he won the Booker Prize for The Line of Beauty, his elegantly satirical social comedy about Thatcher’s Britain, in 2004. But he’d long had a devoted following among readers who’d been devouring his novels about gay life in the UK since his ‘sex-drenched’ debut The Swimming Pool Library. His latest book, The Stranger’s Child, traces the growing fame of an early-20th century poet across the generations, and in so doing dramatises the development of gay culture in Britain.
What was the first piece of writing you had published?
A poem in the Listener magazine in 1974. I had just won the Newdigate Poetry Prize at Oxford, and this felt like the beginning of a career as a poet; but it wasn’t to be, and I haven’t written a poem now for 25 years.
What’s the best part of your job?
Being self-reliant, free to invent, and master of my own time.
What’s the worst part of your job?
Having nothing to fall back on, getting stuck, rushing to meet deadlines.
What’s the best (or worst) advice about writing you’ve received?
The best advice: read, read, read.
Do you read your own reviews? If so, how do you approach them? If not, why?
I read all of them, unless particularly warned off by a kind friend: there’s no point in upsetting oneself by reading abuse. But I’m interested in how my books are received, and as I bring one out so rarely the interest (to me) is greater. As I get older I’m less vulnerable, and capable of reviewing my reviewers fairly objectively. I’ve been a reviewer myself for over 30 years, so I know what’s going on.
If you weren’t making your living by writing, what do you think you’d be doing instead?
Other than temporary teaching jobs, the only permanent job I’ve had was as an editor on the Times Literary Supplement, which I did for 14 years before leaving to follow a freelance career. If I’d not been able to leave, I expect I would still be working in that field.
There’s much debate on whether creative writing can be taught – what do you think?
Creativity can’t be induced out of nothing, but where it exists it can of course be nurtured. Writing is a craft whose techniques can be instilled and enhanced in a receptive student. We could all do with writing better.
Do you buy your books online, in a physical bookshop, or both?
I enjoy the virtuous feeling of supporting my (excellent) local independent bookshop, and paying full price; but after a few drinks in the evening I forget my principles and order books at huge discounts online. I also buy second-hand books heavily through abebooks.com, whose existence is one of the great transforming blessings of the internet era.
What’s the book that’s had the most significant impact on your life or work – and why?
Probably a school anthology called Fifteen Poets: Chaucer to Arnold, which I read exhaustively in my adolescence, and which created tastes, particularly for Romantic and Victorian poetry, that have stayed with me ever since and I suspect have become subconscious models of form, rhythm and euphony to me in my own writing. I still have swathes of Tennyson by heart.
Alan Hollinghurst will be in conversation with Michael Williams at the Athenaeum Theatre at 7.30pm on Friday 2 March. Tickets are $20 or $10 concession. You can book your tickets online.
A new biography of Kurt Vonnegut has invoked a ill-tempered man consumed by bitterness and loneliness, a shadow of the avuncular persona well known to his adoring fans. The biography alleges that Vonnegut was convinced his work was undervalued by the American literary establishment despite the massive impact of such novels as Slaughterhouse Five and Breakfast of Champions. The biography raises an age-old question: should we judge a creative work by its creator?
In a recent Wheeler Centre event, literary critic Simon Leys argued that we mustn’t judge a writer by their work, nor a literary work by its creator. “The greatest creators in world literature,” said Leys, “literally do not necessarily know what they are doing. They may intend to do one thing, but what they actually achieve may be quite different.” Citing Cervantes, Gogol and Tolstoy, Leys noted that time and again writers have misunderstood their achievement.
But Leys identifies an even more perplexing conundrum, which he calls the problem of biography, citing several authors to testify to the dimensions of a great paradox. “Biography does not explain one damn thing,” wrote poet and essayist Joseph Brodsky. “Every life viewed from the inside would be a series of defeats, too humiliating to contemplate,” said George Orwell. The ever-controversial VS Naipaul said, “Everything of value about me is in my books only.” French poet Paul Valery wrote, “Every individual is inferior to his most beautiful work.” Hilaire Belloc wrote, “I never knew a man who was consonant with his work, when the work is of genius. When the work is of genius, he is far below it … it is not the mere man who does the thing, it is the man inspired. No man is himself a genius. His genius is lent to him from outside.”
Citing two great French writers with Fascist leanings, Leys goes on to ask, “How can one ever explain this contradiction between a work and its author? Greatness of the work, mediocrity of the man; beauty of the work, vulgarity or downright ugliness of the man.” Leys cites Proust’s theory of two selves to explain the conundrum: “A book is the product of a different self from the self manifest is our habits, in our social life, in our vices. If we would try to understand that particular self, it is by searching our own bosoms, and trying to reconstruct it there that we may arrive at it.”
A new exhibition at Paris' new-ish Quai Branly museum has become the most talked-about exhibition of the season, according to the Guardian. The exhibition, ‘Human Zoos: The Invention of the Savage’, traces the history of publicly displaying indigenous people. The practice began in 1492, when Christopher Columbus returned from his landmark voyage to the Americas with six indigenous Caribs, who were put on show at the Spanish court. By the end of the 19th century and the early 20th century, indigenous peoples, including Indigenous Australians, were being displayed in zoo-like enclosures as curios and freaks for public entertainment, often under the pretext of public education. Some, like Congolese pygmy Ota Benga, were displayed in actual zoos (in Benga’s case, Bronx Zoo). The last such display was in Belgium in 1958.
The cover of Roslyn Poignant’s 2004 book, ‘Professional Savages’, published by Yale University Press
The exhibition was curated by Lilian Thuram, a former soccer player (and World Cup hero) of Caribbean origin. Thuram’s World Cup-winning teammate Christian Karembeu is of New Caledonian origin. When his grandparents migrated to France, they believed themselves to be ambassadors. Upon their arrival, they were displayed in cages, first in Paris and later in Germany, under a plaque that read ‘cannibals’.
Indigenous Australians were co-opted to be displayed as curios and freaks in Europe and North America too. In her 2004 book Professional Savages: Captive Lives and Western Spectacle, historian Roslyn Poignant wrote about a group of Australian Aborigines shipped to the US for this very purpose. The story was also the subject of a 1997 exhibition at the National Library of Australia.
She was the only daughter of one of the most famous and ruthless tyrants in history. She said she was doted upon, and only once did her father threaten to hit her, but when at 16 she fell in love with a 40 year-old filmmaker he was banished to Siberia.
Her mother committed suicide because of her father’s cruelty. So did a half-brother and, arguably, her elder brother. She authored books and mixed in the Soviet Union’s highest official intellectual circles. She even had a perfume named after her – (Svetlana’s Breath). And, in 1967 and at the age of 41, Stalin’s daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva became one of the most famous defectors in the history of the Cold War. Her subsequent life would last another 44 years, outlasting the Soviet Union itself, only to end yesterday.
The defection was organised by the CIA from India, where Svetlana had travelled to bury the ashes of her lover, an Indian man she referred to as a husband despite having been denied permission to marry him. She left two children behind in the Soviet Union, with whom she would remain permanently estranged despite a brief return to the USSR in the mid-1980s. At a press conference in New York soon after her defection, she said of her infamous father in a press conference, “I loved him, I respected him, and when we was gone I have lost maybe a lot of faith, just personal faith and respect. Of course I disapprove many things [about Stalin], but I think that many other people who still are in our Central Committee and Politburo should be responsible for the same things for which he alone was accused. And if I feel somebody [is] responsible for those horrible things – killing people, unjustice [sic] – I feel that responsible for this was and is the party, the regime and the ideology as a whole.”
Following her defection, she briefly married an architect and engineer closely tied to the Taliesin West headquarters of Modernist architect Frank Lloyd Wright. When she returned to the USSR, she disavowed her time in the west, but family ructions caused her to return to the US shortly after. She settled in small-town Wisconsin where, over the years, Svetlana became increasingly reclusive. In a documentary she complained of the burden of the expectations of others: “I’m neither this nor that. I’m somewhere in between. And that ‘somewhere in between’ people don’t get.”
This sad news comes the day after a Wall Street Journal look at the children of China’s ruling class.
It’s the 48th anniversary of the assassination of US President John F. Kennedy in 1963. The New York Times has published a short film by noted documentarian Errol Morris called The Umbrella Man, in which he interviews Josiah Thompson, writer of Six Seconds in Dallas. Here’s an excerpt of Thompson’s speculation about what the assassination means for historians:
“In December 1967, John Updike was writing [the] ‘Talk of the Town’ [column] for the the New Yorker and he spent most of that ‘Talk of the Town’ column talking about the Umbrella Man. He said that his learning of the existence of the Umbrella Man made him speculate that in historical research there may be a dimension similar to the quantum dimension in physical reality. If you put any event under a microscope, you will find a whole dimension of completely weird, incredible things going on. It’s as if there’s the macro level of historical research, where things sort of obey natural laws and usual things happen and unusual things don’t happen, and then there’s this other level where everything is really weird.” Watch the film here.
The Morris documentary is based on what’s known as the Zapruder film – footage of the assassination captured on a hobbyist camera by Abraham Zapruder. While it’s not the only footage of the assassination, it’s considered the most complete and the only one that clearly shows the president’s head wound. The film has thus been extensively surveyed by amateur sleuths and professional investigators ever since, despite the fact that the vision is extremely unstable. Now, the Zapruder film has finally been stabilised – although we must warn you that the content is extremely violent.
We’ve come a long way since then. Last week, a pepper spraying of Occupy protesters by police at the Davis campus of the University of California was captured on a variety of handheld video capture devices – let’s call them phones. The image of a policeman casually releasing pepper spray from a shake-up can is now a meme. Four of these videos have been synchronised and can now be viewed simultaneously. It’s led some to write about the birth of the citizen reporter – but, as Zapruder’s film shows, citizen reporting isn’t exactly new. What’s new is the platform, which is why the emerging debate about internet censorship looms as a critical one. (Read our recent story on the debate between the champions of DIY journalism and the defenders of traditional, institutional reporting.)
Far more disturbing though is footage of the public unrest in Egypt. This Guardian footage is bad enough – this Al-Masry Al-Youm TV footage may give you nightmares. “The age of authoritarianism is over, no one can tell the Egyptians what to do anymore,” says a young Egyptian revolutionary quoted in the Guardian, one of thousands of Egyptians protesting against the ruling military junta that has triggered the resignation en masse of the interim government and threatens to derail elections scheduled to be held in a week. So far, the protests have claimed the lives of 33 protesters. Here’s video of the Wheeler Centre’s recent event on the Arab Spring, where former diplomat Paul Bowker warns that the Arab Spring could take five to ten years and see many twists and turns.
A Jane Austen scholar believes it highly likely that Jane Austen died of arsenic poisoning. Although she won’t rule out the possibility that Austen was murdered, Lindsay Ashford believes Austen is most likely to have been prescribed medecine in which arsenic was an ingredient. The Guardian reports that tests on a lock of Austen’s hair currently owned by private collectors has found an unusually high level of arsenic.
Jane Austen was only 41 when she died, and the cause of her death has been the cause of some speculation among Austen scholars. Arsenic – the byproduct of purification techniques for copper, lead and gold — was a plentiful by-product of Britain’s booming mining industries. In Austen’s day, it was “handed out in the form of Fowler’s Solution as a treatment for everything from rheumatism – something Austen complained of in her letters – to syphilis,” according to the Guardian piece. Here’s more on the medical uses of arsenic in Victorian England.
(Click to watch video.)
Historian Bill Gammage’s recent Lunchbox/Soapbox event was subtitled ‘How Aborigines made Australia’. In the course of his address, Gammage gave the audience a bird’s eye overview of what central Melbourne would have looked like when Batman and co first arrived in 1835, using eyewitness accounts of the time.
North of the Yarra, the land was ‘park-like’, ‘open grassy forest, rising into low hills’. But it was not all the same. Imagine a line from the bottom of Swanston Street to Flagstaff Hill. Southwest, hill and valley were grassy with scattered trees. Northeast was eucalypt woodland, open but with dense forest patches. One patch east of Swanston Street and south of Bourke Street perhaps shielded a dance ground, while at Fitzroy and Treasury Gardens open forest suddenly gave way to ‘dense gum forest’, mostly manna gum. Hilltops varied. Flagstaff Hill was ‘covered with a beautiful grassy surface … [It] had the appearance of a large lawn’. Batman’s Hill (Southern Cross Station) was grassy but topped by sheoaks.
A creek down Elizabeth Street separated two hills, ‘rising and picturesque eminences … on the verge of a beautiful park’, one cresting east at Spring Street, the other west at William Street, each burnt differently. ‘The Eastern Hill was a gum and wattle tree forest, and the Western Hill was so clothed with sheoaks as to give it the appearance of a primeval park’. Both were ‘lightly wooded’, which means regular fire, the west topped with mushrooms, the east with a grass clearing between the Museum and Parliament House. Along the river stood tea-tree patches, as you’d expect of a shallow stream choked with debris and flooding easily, but the patches alternated with grass, which you wouldn’t expect.
All this, Gammage argued, was to promote grass and suppress tea-tree to encourage animals such as kangaroos to feed, and all of it was a landscape managed by just a few families. Gammage’s book, The Biggest Estate on Earth, systematically outlines for the first time how the Australia European settlers found from 1788 on was not a wilderness but in fact a continental-sized garden carefully tended by Aboriginal Australians in a mosaic pattern to maximise its natural abundance.
All the wealth in the world adds up to just under $200 trillion dollars (the world economy is worth $60 trillion a year, as we mentioned in a recent story), most of which was created in the last two centuries and two-thirds of which is owned by Westerners, who represent just a fifth of the population. That’s a thumb-sketch of the world economy given by economic historian Niall Ferguson in a recent TED talk called ‘The 6 killer apps of prosperity’. What explains this ‘great divergence’? Not geography or national character, says Ferguson, but a half-dozen ideas and institutions that set the west apart from the rest: competition, the scientific revolution, property rights, modern medicine, the consumer society and the work ethic. “Any society can adopt these institutions,” says Ferguson – and in fact it’s already happening. The average American, who used to be 20 times wealthier than the average Chinese, is now five times wealthier than the average Chinese, and soon the multiple will be just 2.5. Indeed, says Ferguson, China is tipped to become the world’s biggest economy in 2016.
“This Halloween, give someone a scary book to read.” That’s the message Neil Gaiman is spreading this Halloween in a clip promoting All Hallow’s Read, an attempt to inaugurate a tradition in the UK of gift-giving every Halloween. Gaiman is an English author whose work crosses several generic divides: short fiction, novels, comic books, graphic novels, audio plays and films. He’s best known for the comic book series, The Sandman, and he’s penned the novels Stardust, American Gods, Coraline and The Graveyard Book.
Image from ‘Haunted Air’, a collection of photographs of late 19th century/early 20th century American folk Halloween costumes published by Random House
Traditionally, Halloween isn’t a tradition Australians have widely embraced. It seems to be a Christianised version of a Celtic harvest festival known as Samhain. While its popularity in Ireland and Scotland has dwindled, Irish and Scottish immigrants exported the holiday to North America, where it turned into an occasion for ritual mayhem.
Halloween costumes have tended to mirror the American cultural zeitgeist. Haunted Air is a new book by Ossian Brown published in Australia by Random House that gathers together photographs of folk Halloween costumes from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The costumes reveal a visual culture that was more vivid and disturbing than that of today.
These days, what passes for scary often speaks volumes for our own prejudices – one law firm specialising in morgage foreclosures has gathered unwelcome publicity for staging a company Halloween party in which staff dressed as homeless people.
In fact, a group of students and teachers at Ohio University called STARS (Students Teaching About Racism in Society) have launched a campaign called ‘We’re a Culture, Not a Costume’. The campaign consists of a series of posters discouraging people from wearing Halloween costumes that draw on racial stereotypes. Here’s more.
Poster of a Queensland production of the Casey Bennetto musical, Keating!, via Jiggs Images/Flickr
In a recent Wheeler Centre event celebrating great speeches, a variety of guests read their favourite orations. Actor Noni Hazlehurst read the Redfern speech, a speech delivered by former PM Paul Keating in Redfern Park on 10 December, 1992. The speech didn’t receive much media attention at the time, but it has gone down in history as one of the great Australian political speeches. It came in at number three in a 2007 poll of favourite speeches among listeners of ABC Radio National, behind only Martin Luther King’s 1968 ‘I have a dream’ speech and Jesus' sermon on the mount. Here’s edited footage and here’s a transcript.
In his classic political memoir, Recollections of a Bleeding Heart, Keating’s speechwriter Don Watson provides background on the event. At the beginning of the speech, he writes, “there were intermittent catcalls from the back” from disgruntled indigenous locals. The catcalls stopped when Keating began to speak about “recognition”: “Recognition that it was we who did the dispossessing. We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life. We brought the diseases. The alcohol. We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers…”
“The first principle of the Redfern speech,” Watson notes, “was that the problem could only be solved by an act of imagination. The country had to acknowledge certain notorious facts – indisputable facts, not hedged about with doubts and qualifications, nor as elements of a partisan agenda. There was no hope of a useful debate if the truth was not acknowledged and consequences of it imagined. The consequences were trauma, alienation, anger, despair, suicide…”
Inevitably, there was a backlash to the speech. “The problematic word was ‘we’. From ‘we’ the inference has been drawn that the present generation of Australians is responsible for the actions of previous generations. This was not intended.”
As a result of the publication of Recollections, Paul Keating and Don Watson – “the puppet master for the highest puppet in the land”, in Keating’s words – are no longer on speaking terms. It’s a rift that journalist Michael Gordon, in a Saturday Age feature, calls “one of the most enduring, unexpected fallings-out in modern Australian political history.”
(Click to watch video.)
“Countries and nations are born out of geography, they are born out of history, out of politics, and out of demography.” So began Amos Oz, Israel’s most internationally-recognised novelist, when he delivered the Monash Israel Oration at the Melbourne Town Hall late last month.
“Israel,” he continued, “was born out of a dream, and everything – everything at all that is born out of a dream – is destined to feel like a slight disappointment. The only way to keep a dream perfect and rosy and intact and unspoilt is never to try to live it out. A fulfilled dream is a disappointing dream. This is true of writing a novel, this is true of building a house, this is true of living out a sexual fantasy, and this is true of building a nation. Israel has a certain air of disappointment about it, but this is not in the nature of Israel. It is in the nature of dreams.”
But the paradox in which Israel finds itself is more complicated still, says Oz, because Israel was born not of a single dream but “out of an entire spectrum of dreams – a federation of master plans and blueprints and visions. And many of those initial dreams of the founding fathers and mothers of Israel were contradictory and mutually exclusive.”
The novelist used his oration to define doubt, argument, compromise and secularism as virtues – and more pointedly as hallmarks of Jewish, and Israeli, culture.
(Click to watch video.)
Image courtesy Robert Scarth/Flickr
Click on the ‘What’s New’ page on the website of the Project for the New American Century and you’ll notice that the Washington DC-based neo-conservative thinktank hasn’t published anything for a while. Not since December 2006, in fact. Yet five years earlier – a decade ago – the Project for the New American Century was the most influential thinktank in the US. Founded during Bill Clinton’s second presidency, its mission was to advocate that what was good for America was good for the world, and it came into its own at the start of the first Bush presidency, particularly in pushing for a war in Iraq.
The apogee of PNAC’s power came in in September 2000 – a year before 9/11 – with the publication of a report called Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategies, Forces, and Resources For a New Century. It was a hawkish American call to arms: “America should seek to preserve and extend its position of global leadership by maintaining the preeminence of U.S. military forces,” it said.
A little more than a decade later, the Project exists in name only. The US is in terminal decline, economically, militarily and diplomatically. It will struggle to emerge from its recent military adventures with any semblance of victory. How did the American century end so quickly?
It was a theme weighing heavily on the mind of New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman last Friday at the Melbourne Town Hall. Never a neo-con, Friedman has over the years assumed the mantle of the voice of American liberalism.
In an extended presentation, Friedman explained why US domestic politics are so central to its adventures in foreign policy, and what he means when he says that the American dream is now “in play and in peril”.
Friedman read from his latest book (co-authored with Michael Mandelbaum), That Used to be Us: What Went Wrong With America? And How it Can Come Back. The book is a kind of call to arms for a broken and demoralised America, describing everyday signs and comparisons that signal the nation’s struggle to keep up with new powers like China. Friedman outlined what he reads as the four great challenges facing his country.
Friedman summed up his idea of the importance of America to the world with a joke he attributed to his grandmother: “never cede a century to a country that censors Google”. He closed the event as he started it, with an exhortation to Americans that, in order to progress, America must look inward.
(Click to watch video.)
(Click to watch video.)
The Wheeler Centre recently hosted an event in our series, ‘The Late, Great…’, on Ruth Park. Today, as we publish the video/podcast, Marion Halligan reminds us we must preserve the legacy of Ruth Park, and other pioneers of Australian writing.
“One boiling day I was writing in my garret when the murderer knocked on the door below.”
This is the opening sentence of Ruth Park’s second volume of autobiography, Fishing in the Styx. She goes on to describe the murderers who lived in the vicinity, including “the rabbity women who had done in their newborns but got off on a plea of insanity. In those days of the second World War it was widely believed that women who had just delivered could reasonably be expected to be off their heads.” It’s a bit of a worry for the pregnant Ruth. “I was outa me mind,” the women say. “All me milk went to the brain. I suppose it curdles.”
The murderer knocking at the door runs a few girls but is mainly an enforcer, the most feared underworld figure in Sydney. He has come to inquire, courteously, if Ruth’s landlady can put a few stitches in the torn lining of his coat pocket.
This keeps you turning the pages. It is full of energy, is funny, and wonderfully black – like a lot of Park’s writing. She began as a journalist and was on her way from New Zealand to a job in San Francisco when the bombing of Pearl Harbour put a stop to Pacific travel. So she went to Sydney instead and married D’Arcy Niland, another writer. They resolved they would make their livings by writing, a near-impossible task then, as it is today. But they managed it, by putting their heads down and just doing it. Not for them the luxury of sitting in despair in front of a blank sheet or suffering the anguish of writer’s block. Park sat at the ironing board, with children underfoot, at the kitchen table with the onions and the carrots, churning out anything and everything. Articles, plays, radio scripts (more than 5000), serials, children’s programs. When, after the war, the Sydney Morning Herald offered a £2000 prize for a novel, Park knew she had two subjects: journalism and the slums of Surry Hills where she was living. She was afraid she might be sued for libel if she wrote about journalism, so that left the slums.
When The Harp in the South (1948) won the prize it was a scandal. I was a small child at the time, and I remember it. The problem seemed to be a woman writing about such things, and one from New Zealand at that. Drunkenness, wife beatings, abortions, prostitution, sly grog, all the life of the streets about her, not from a judgmental point of view but as an inmate, the details intimate, comical, forgivable. Slums? said authorities, there are no slums in Sydney, and then proceeded to clear them away and move people out west, which filled her with guilt. The priest of her church preached a sermon against the novel, saying that the Virgin Mary in her lifetime would never have stooped to write a book of any kind, let alone one published in the Herald.
Park made her dream of living by writing a reality. The Harp in the South has never been out of print. She has won a Miles Franklin and an Age Book of the Year for non-fiction. The Muddle Headed Wombat was a long running and beloved radio serial. Playing Beattie Bow has been devoured by generations of children, in print and on screen.
Park was 93 when she died in 2010. She spent her life spellbinding her readers with her story-telling. We need to make sure we are the grateful heirs of her legacy, something we are not always good at in this country. When writers get old we tend to forget them, and when they die they pass from our consciousness. Park showed us our world as it was, and we must not forget either the writer or her subjects.
The next event in our series, ‘The Late, Great…’ is on Marcus Clarke, 16 August.
At the start of the Tour de France, we published the translation of a report by Albert Londres of the race’s beginning in 1924. Today, to coincide with the race’s end, we publish an extract of his final report of the same race, won by Ottavio Bottecchia.
For a month, they’ve battled the road. In the dead of night, at first light, at noon, they struggled through fog thick enough to give you stomach-ache, against winds you could lean into, under a southern sun that threatened to knock them off their handlebars. They straddled the Alps and the Pyrenees. They saddled up, on occasion, at ten o'clock in the evening, only to dismount the following evening at six o'clock, as we saw on the Sables d'Olonne-Bayonne stage, for instance.
At times, the roads they travelled were hostile. At others, they were blocked. Railway crossings barred their paths. Their legs became entangled with cows, geese, dogs and men alike. And that wasn’t the worst of it. The worst of it was with them from beginning to end: the cars. For thirty days, they were flanked by cars on roads going up and roads coming down, throwing up clouds of dust. With eyes stinging and mouths parched, they put up with the dust without complaint.
They cycled on gravel. They copped the great big paving-stones of the north. At night, when it was too cold, they blanketed their stomachs with old newspaper. During the day, they threw jugs of water over clothes that would drip until dried by the sun. When they fell and bloodied legs and arms, they saddled up again. At the next village, they’d find the nearest pharmacy. Sometimes on a Sunday, as happened in Pézenas, the pharmacist told them he was closed. Rather than shake him by the lapels, the cyclist simply muttered, “Very well!” and saddled up again.
You’ll witness the arrival of Bottecchia, the Friulian mason. Bottecchia pierces you not with his eyes but with the tip of his nose, sharp as a blade.
Image of Ottavio Bottechia, winner of the 1924 Tour de France, celebrating after winning the 1925 Tour, courtesy Marcel Segessemann/Le Site du Cyclisme
You’ll witness the arrival of Mottiat, wearing his blue jersey. He’ll flash you his divine smile and look at you with grateful eyes, as if it were you who’d raced and he who’d been entertained.
You’ll witness the arrival of Tiberghien. I offered to sew onto his jersey the love letters he had found stashed in his refreshment bags, hidden between a chicken thigh and a sausage. He replied, “I’d need two jerseys.”
You’ll witness the arrival of Frantz, who gained everyone’s respect: he practically swallowed the Tour de France the way you’d swallow a glass of water. He cycled as if holding a book in his hands, reading a boy’s own adventure novel. I suspect he won’t even realise he’s arrived in Paris and will keep on pedalling for another seven or eight months.
You’ll witness the arrival of Cuvelier and Alancourt, those tenacious mongrels who bite at the heels of all before them, even those great Saint-Bernards, Brunero, Aymo and Lucien Buysse de Loothenhulle.
You’ll witness the arrival of Alavoine, alias John XIII, king of the tarmac, a man who belongs not to the roads but in the highest literary circles, endowed with a prodigious gift of the gab. Find me a writer, a marshal, a duke, a lawyer, a poet who, suffering nausea while climbing the Pyrenees, instead of saying, “What luck to be ill at such a time,” will rather exclaim, “How importunate, at this evil hour, to be assailed by such an inconvenience!”
You’ll see Garby and Nevers, who was reduced to tears in the Pyrenees. And Vertemati, who averaged three chickens, a dozen eggs and two legs of mutton daily. He carries not an ounce of fat. And you’ll see Kamm who, from the start, pedalling all the while, told me about his ambitions for the future. He once was a newspaper vendor, and the job still appeals. “Do you think I might be able to go back to selling papers?” he asked me between Brest and Les Sables. Between Perpignan and Toulon, he neared my car and asked, “About that job selling papers. If it could be anywhere near where my relatives live, I’d be much obliged.” Beween Nice and Briançon: “Or else of course at a pinch I’ll just go wherever I’m told.”
To read the end of the report, click here. Translation by Alex Landragin.
In this Lunchbox/Soapbox, author and academic Sarah Maddison tackles the issue of mainstream Australia’s unacknowledged, unresolved guilt over the brutality of white settlement over two centuries ago — as well as its poor relationship with the indigenous population now. How can we redress injustice and convert our awareness of the past into a productive force?
The challenge, Maddison says, is an adaptive one — and it won’t be overcome without a painful and uncomfortable process of introspection. But, she continues, “by taking account of past injustice in this work, we may have the opportunity to experience ourselves as truly moral, rather than as defensive and anxious about the past”.
At stake is also the authenticity of our national identity, or “diminishing the gap between the values people stand for, and the reality they face”. In other words, we must reconcile our closely held idea of the fair go with our racist past.
(Click to watch video.)
Leave your comment
Do you believe that guilt, evasiveness and awkwardness surrounding our past hinders progress on indigenous issues?
Can we rely on public institutions to lead the way on adapting to moral truth? If not, what’s the best way to address our nation’s brutal beginnings?
Affirm Press have just launched A Break in the Chain, the first novel by academic and author Tangea Tansley. Tansley was born in Zimbabwe into a family that boasted of its ancestral family links to Prussia and Australia. Her father’s stories included tales about a Jewish side of the family that had been jewellers, and about a rift between a father and a son over a beautiful woman that caused the son to abandon his faith as well as his adopted country. Tansley moved to Western Australia and started a career as a researcher of comparative literature as well as a writer of non-fiction. When she began looking deeper into her family story, she discovered that the family of which her father had spoken was the famous Melbourne jeweller Kozminksy, which dates back to the gold rush. What began as historical research is now a novel. Here’s a blog post by the author on the background to the novel.
The Tour de France, which this year is 98 years old, begins Saturday. To celebrate, we’re publishing, for what we believe is the first time in English, an extract of a report of the first stage of the 1924 Tour.
Image of Ottavio Bottechia, winner of the 1924 Tour de France, celebrating after winning the 1925 Tour, courtesy Marcel Segessemann/Le Site du Cyclisme
Last night, at half past eleven, the men were still dining in a suburban Parisian restaurant. The scene was carnivalesque: from a distance, dressed in their gaudy jerseys, they could have been taken for Chinese lanterns. They downed their last drinks and rose from their seats to leave, but the crowd lifted them in high triumph, for these cyclists were about to compete in the Tour de France.
As for me, approaching one o'clock in the morning, I took the road to Argenteuil, overtaking perfectly respectable men and women pedalling in the night. One would have never guessed there were so many bicycles in the département of the Seine.
The number 63 tram was going about its daily business – which is to say, ferrying passengers to Bezons-Grand-Cerf – when these same respectable men and women brought it to a halt, shouting, “Out of the way! They’re coming!” And so they were. The competitors gathered at Argenteuil for the start of the race.
Soon enough, the suburb began to spring to life. Window sills were adorned with spectators in their pyjamas. The city square rumbled expectantly. Elderly ladies who’d normally have retired at dusk sat before their front doors. If I saw no infant suckling at its mother’s teat, it’s only because it was obscured in the darkness.
“Look at those thighs!” admired the crowd. “Just take a look at those thighs!”
The competitors gathered among the shrubbery for the count-down to the start time: one o'clock.
“Are we or are we not leaving?” asked one cyclist, enraged. Another chimed, “Don’t lose your nerve.”
A steward went through the roll-call: 157 names. French cyclists replied, “Présent.” The Italians replied, “Presente.” As for the Flemish, I have no idea what they said.
Then, “Allez!” shouted the steward, and from the crowd, a woman’s small voice was heard shouting, “Good luck, Tiberghien!” And 157 men took to the road.
Within a quarter-hour I came across number 223 changing a tyre on the side of the road – the first unfortunate. “Well, well,” I said, “out of luck already?”
“Someone has to be the first,” he replied.
Then a sudden volley of insults: “Swine! Snob! Flea-bitten scoundrel!”
I couldn’t help but notice that, though not in the slightest bit flea-bitten, the scoundrel was none other than myself. My car was blocking the forward march of a whole impassioned army that was following the cyclists with Olympian vigour.
It was night still, and we’d been driving for an hour through a forest emblazoned throughout by great savage fires. Were these tribes-people cowering from wild tigers? No, they were Parisians, keeping vigil beside these bonfires, waiting for the ‘kings of the road’ to pass by. At the forest’s edge, a woman shivered in her squirrel coat beside a gentleman wearing a cocked hat. It was 3:35am.
Day breaks and it is clear that, on this night, the people of France haven’t slept a wink. The entire province stands at its doorway in curlers.
Still the cyclists are on the treadmill. Number 307 is the first to succumb to stomach pain. He pulls a round loaf from a wine-red shoulder bag and bites into it toothily.
“Don’t eat bread,” advises a race veteran. “It bloats. Eat rice instead.”
A railway gatekeeper splits the peloton in two: a train is about to pass. Five guys who didn’t cross in time dismount, lift their bikes and skip across the tracks as the locomotive practically grazes their shoulders in passing. The gatekeeper can’t help but shriek in fright. And already the five cyclists are back in the saddle, pushing down on their pedals.
At Montdidier, there’s a refreshment break. I sidle up to the buffet, hoping the kings of the road, masticating politely, might be so considerate as to invite me to partake. All the more fool I… They pounce on pre-prepared satchels, snatch at cups of tea, step on my feet, sideswipe me, spit on my handsome coat, and clear out. They aren’t here to sightsee, as I’d thought, but to compete. Today, they’re racing all the way to Le Havre, barely pausing for breath, as if fetching a doctor for a dying mother.
Albert Londres was one of the 20th century’s great journalists, and is credited with having helped invent investigative journalism. In a series of reports for ‘Le Petit Parisien’ – at the time the highest circulating newspaper in the world – Londres reported on the 1924 Tour de France, a race that was then only 21 years old. The reports proved enormously popular and were eventually published as the collection, Tour de France, tour de souffrance (‘Tour de France, Tour of Suffering’, Le Serpent à Plumes, 1996), which has never been translated in full. This translation copyright Alex Landragin, 2011.
Manning Clark is a giant of Australia’s cultural landscape. His impact and influence on our history and our way of understanding our history constitute a lasting legacy – which is exactly what Clark would have wished. In Mark McKenna’s new biography, An Eye for Eternity, the self-styled historian-sage emerges as a deeply complex man, riddled with obsessions that included Australia’s national identity and a more personal quest to be remembered.
Mark McKenna is one of Australia’s leading contemporary historians. Seven years in the making, his biography of Manning Clark is his most ambitious project to date. Here, he discusses his work – its burdens and revelations – with Michael Cathcart, suggesting some of the material he uncovered appears to have been left by Clark for a posthumous biographer to find.
Cathcart and McKenna discuss Clark’s parents, his occasional stoushes with the academic establishment, his obsession with Australian national identity, his journey to becoming a public figure, his identification with Dostoevsky, his relationship with Patrick White, and his desire to ensure his own immortality.
(Click to watch video.)
While the Chilean volcano Puyehue continues to spew ash that has caused air traffic chaos halfway around the world, Chileans are grappling with another kind of combustion altogether. A Chilean judge has ordered that the cause of death of Pablo Neruda be investigated after it was alleged that the poet and Nobel laureate was assassinated by the Pinochet regime. Manuel Araya, Neruda’s secretary at the time of his death, has claimed that the cause of his former employer’s death less than a fortnight after Pinochet’s coup in 1973 was not advanced prostate cancer, as was previously believed, but politics. He’s alleged that Neruda was poisoned, a claim denied by Neruda’s estate.
Neruda during a Library of Congress recording session [1966], via WikiCommons
Neruda was a friend of Salvador Allende and a looming figure in the leftist politics of the time. When troops ransacked his house after the coup, he’s reported to have told them, “Look around – there’s only one thing of danger for you here – poetry.” Neruda’s death is one of 725 dating from Chile’s version of the ‘dirty war’ currently under investigation. Last month, Salvador Allende’s body was exhumed to investigate his cause of death. Although not conclusive, the evidence points to the possibility that Allende was assassinated, and didn’t shoot himself as was previously believed.
We referred in the Dailies of last Friday to a controversy in Spain about the depiction of General Franco in a new national dictionary of Spanish biography. Neruda wrote poems that were stingingly critical of Franco’s regime (‘I’ll Explain Some Things’ and ‘Curse’ are fine examples). Here’s the last poem Neruda wrote before his death.
This week has been a veritable hotbed of controversy. Here’s our wrap.
Amina Arraf, a lesbian Syrian blogger, was abducted by Syrian authorities during the week, prompting howls of protest around the world – at least until it emerged that she may be the figment of someone’s imagination. If that’s the case, it would be a distasteful distraction from the life-and-death struggle many Syrians are engaged in – even 13-year-old boys.
Linguist and political commentator Noam Chomsky has won this year’s Sydney Peace Prize amid controversy surrounding his reaction to the assassination of Osama bin Laden. Less controversially, Canadian troubadour Leonard Cohen has been awarded a major Spanish literary prize for “a literary work which has influenced three generations around the world by creating a sentimental imagery in which poetry and music are melded into an unchanging worth.” Cohen’s lyrics are deeply influenced by Andalucian poet Federico García Lorca.
But many bookish Spaniards have been outraged by a controversy of their own, concerning the historical legacy of General Francisco Franco, the country’s far-right dictator from 1936 to 1975. A new state-subsidised national dictionary of biography has portrayed Franco’s reign as “authoritarian, but not totalitarian”. The Franco entry was penned by Professor Luis Suárez, an 86-year-old medieval historian known to be a Franco apologist.
There seems to be something inherently dark about the human appetite for storytelling – even among children. After all, Jack and Jill might well have gone up the hill, but Jack broke his crown and Jill came tumbling after. But when is the darkness too dark? An article in the Wall Street Journal last weekend about the darkness of much young adult fiction has sparked a fascinating debate. Here’s an overview of the reaction.
Even the Smurfs have weighed in with a controversy of their own. They have, according to one French academic, done the impossible and merged Stalinism and Nazism. Antoine Bueno created headlines this week when he labelled the cartoon characters, created by Peyo in 1958, as deeply racist, thus deeply offending all across the world lovers of the blue characters known variously as Schtroumpfs in France, Pitufos in Spain, Torpikek in Hungary, Sumafu in Japan and, in China, lan jing ling.
And finally David Nichols has just published The Bogan Delusion through Affirm Press. In this essay in The Conversation, he asks, do bogans actually exist?
A volume of lavishly-illustrated drawings for children by a pioneering Australian woman will be auctioned next month. Charlotte Waring arrived in Australia in 1826 at the age of 29. She’d been hired to be a governess to the children of John Macarthur’s nephew, but instead she married agriculturalist and author James Atkinson, whom she’d met on her way to the colony.
As well as writing and publishing the first Australian children’s book – A Mother’s Offering to her Children: By a Lady, Long Resident in New South Wales (1841) – an Age report describes Atkinson as “a child prodigy; a fiercely independent, well-educated woman; a single mother of four left to run one of the most important colonial properties in the Southern Highlands; a young widow who was reputedly raped by a notorious bushranger; a battered wife who fled her alcoholic second husband, though it left her penniless.”
In 1843, Charlotte illustrated a 30-page notebook for her daughter Emily’s 13th birthday with coloured drawings of the flora, fauna and indigenous people of the Southern Highlands region. That notebook has come to light after languishing in the drawer of a descendant for some 25 years, and will be auctioned on June 12 by the Aalder’s auction house in Sydney. Another of her daughters, Louisa (1834-1872), became a pioneering writer, naturalist and feminist.
Cover image of ‘Circus: The Australian Story’, by Mark St Leon
Jugglers, lion-tamers, bearded ladies and freak shows – the world of the travelling circus is increasingly a relic of a bygone era, before entertainment was hijacked by screen culture. Indeed, the circus is the backdrop for a major Hollywood film on current release, Water for Elephants.
Australia has a proud tradition of circus culture that continues to thrive to this day. Names like May Wirth and Con Colleano may have regrettably slipped out of the public consciousness, but once upon a time they were internationally renowned giants of their craft who travelled in luxury train compartments. Here’s a video of “Australia’s bareback queen” May Wirth in the 1920s, while this video features Con Colleano, an indigenous Australian tightrope walker who was billed as being Spanish. Colleano, dubbed ‘The Wizard of the Wire’, was inducted into the International Circus Hall of Fame in 1966.
Australia’s tradition of circuses stretches back to the early 19th century, and 2011 marks 175 years of the circus in Australia. Circus: The Australian Story is a new book by Mark St Leon, himself a descendant of a venerable Australian circus family. The book traces the history of the Australian circus in loving, and lavish, detail. In the 19th century, when Australia was one of the most enticing destinations for Europeans in the world, many European troupes would tour the colonies. “So enamoured of Australia were some visiting circus artists,” writes St Leon, “that many remained behind and joined local companies”. Thus, it can be said that they left their own circuses to run away and join the circus.
Its publication was a milestone in the making of modern England. For centuries, it was all the literature many English speakers around the world ever knew. It peppered our language with phrases like ‘let there be light’, ‘a fly in the ointment’, ‘new wine in old bottles’ and ‘how are the mighty fallen’. It “gave us not only cadences and rhythms but metaphors and references,” writes Melvyn Bragg on its impact on his youth. It’s still commonly found in the bedside drawers of many hotels and motels. In fact, in one gaol in South Carolina, it’s still the only book prisoners are allowed to read.
It’s the King James Bible, and it’s celebrating its 400th birthday, prompting all kinds of wild parties… if by wild parties you mean some books and documentaries. Melvyn Bragg’s new book is just the tip of the iceberg. There’s the movie, the BBC doco, the preview of the BBC doco, the special edition (you know, the one that works miracles), there’s the book that isn’t by Melvyn Bragg, and the other book that isn’t by Melvyn Bragg.
Lord Byron in Albanian dress, by Thomas Phillips, 1813, collection of the British Embassy, Athens, via Wikipedia
The History channel’s website has a neat feature: a day-by-day ‘This Day in History’ that you can filter for literary events. On this day in 1810, for example, a young Englishman called George Gordon, better remembered as romantic poet Lord Byron, swam the Hellespont. The 22 year-old Byron was on his Grand Tour, and the Napoleonic Wars plaguing Europe prevented him from following the usual routes across the continent, forcing him to concentrate on the Mediterranean world. He failed the swim on his first attempt, but succeeded on the second, in one hour and ten minutes, swimming breast-stroke.
Now better known as the Dardanelles, site of a World War One campaign that included Gallipoli, the Hellespont is a strait – 4km wide at its narrowest point – that connects the Aegean Sea with the Sea of Marmara. It’s not to be confused with the Bosphorus, further north and around which Istanbul sprawls, that links the Sea of Marmara with the Black Sea. Byzantine legend has it that Leander swam the Hellespont every night to be with his lover, the priestess Hero. Byron, who would have been familiar with Christopher Marlowe’s poem relating the story of the amorous couple, swam the strait to prove it was possible. He was a passionate swimmer on account of his club foot.
Byron’s swim is historically significant because, six years later, Byron would be forced to go into exile for reasons that may have something to do with his voracious sexual proclivities. At this point, he resumed his love affair with the eastern Mediterranean, travelling widely through the region and in the process becoming an influential political figure in the birth of modern Greece. His interest and influence in what was then known as the Levant (a French word dating back to the Crusades meaning ‘rising’) was a milestone in Europe’s cultural and political history. It also marked another chapter in the decline of the Ottoman Empire (aka the Sublime Porte), which would ultimately crumble during World War One. His swim has since been replicated by others.
Image of this morning’s flashboards by Sarah Masters
The death of Osama bin Laden is still sending shockwaves through the world (or is it?). It cost many lives and $1.3 trillion – more than the worth of the entire Australian economy in a single year. Readers wanting to catch up on the whole sorry saga would do well to begin with these two books. Of course, it’s no secret that Pakistan – the world’s fifth-largest nuclear power – is a deeply troubled country, as a new book by Anatol Lieven explains. Fatima Bhutto – writer, poet and niece of the late former Pakistan prime minister Benazir (who claimed Bin Laden was killed in 2007) – has written extensively on failures in Pakistan’s leadership. Here’s a reading list on Pakistan she compiled last year.
In the print media, Bin Laden’s death has triggered another skirmish in the flashboard wars. On a more serious note, it’s also prompted a major change in editorial policy at the New York Times, which will no longer refer to him as Mr. bin Laden. The Grey Lady has dropped the ‘Mr.’ – a small step for mankind, perhaps, but a giant leap for a newspaper. In the social media universe, keen-eyed observers will have noted a Facebook page created to memorialise the occasion. It’s gone viral with close to half a million ‘likes’ at the time of writing.
The news set a new Twitter record of 12.4 million tweets per hour. Initially Twitter reported that 4,000 tweets per second were being sent at the beginning and end of Obama’s televised address; it’s now reported the figure was more like 5,000 tweets per second. For the record, the highest amount of tweets sent in a single second was 6,939, during this year’s Japanese New Year.
It also transformed the life of a humble IT consultant who just wants to lead a quiet life. Sohaib Athar, who tweets under the moniker ReallyVirtual, left the hubbub of Lahore for the quiet, tranquil life of a hill town an hour from Islamabad. Abbottabad is noted “for its pleasant weather, high-standard educational institutions and military establishments” – it’s home to the Pakistan Military Academy, which adds a whole new meaning to the phrases, ‘hiding in plain sight’ and ‘diplomatic tensions’. When ReallyVirtual tweeted, early Monday morning, “Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM (is a rare event)”, he had no idea that within hours he would be, in his own words, “the guy who liveblogged the Osama raid without knowing it.”
Portrait of General Sir James Abbott dressed as an Indian noble by B. Baldwin, 1841, courtesy National Portrait Gallery, London, via Wikipedia
Something that is often overlooked is that Osama bin Laden always had a keen sense of historical irony. The name of al-Qaeda, for example, is thought to originate in an eerily prescient Isaac Asimov novel. The World Trade Centre was the brainchild of David Rockefeller, whose father John D. (the richest person in history) played a large part in founding the global oil industry that helped shape the world into its current configuration. Indeed, the twin towers were conceived as a paean to international free trade, a passion of David Rockefeller’s. “The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries,“ he wrote. And Abbottabad was founded by Captain James Abbott (pictured, later General Sir James Abbott) after the British colonial authorities annexed the Punjab in 1853. When Abbott left the town, he penned a poem, now engraved on a stone in English and Urdu in the town. Although it’s not a very good poem, we couldn’t resist quoting it in full:
I remember the day when I first came here / And smelt the sweet Abbottabad air
The trees and ground covered with snow / Gave us indeed a brilliant show
To me the place seemed like a dream / And far ran a lonesome stream
The wind hissed as if welcoming us / The pine swayed creating a lot of fuss
And the tiny cuckoo sang it away / A song very melodious and gay
I adored the place from the first sight / And was happy that my coming here was right
And eight good years here passed very soon / And we leave our perhaps on a sunny noon
Oh Abbottabad we are leaving you now / To your natural beauty do I bow
Perhaps your winds sound will never reach my ear / My gift for you is a few sad tears
I bid you farewell with a heavy heart / Never from my mind will your memories thwart
Pakistani writer and poet Fatima Bhutto will visit the Wheeler Centre on May 18, in conversation with Anton Enus.
Twenty years to the day since Nicolae Ceauşescu's communist regime was overthrown in Romania, a revolutionary figure of another type is celebrating an anniversary.
It is 100 years since the birth of playwright Eugene Ionesco, one of Romania's most important cultural figures. But, as the Australian reports, there has been little evidence in his homeland that anyone has noticed.
Browse by content type
Explore by area of interest
