stuff 'n other stuff

Last Tuesday, we needed to go to the city (actually St Kilda, but never mind) and instead of driving we caught the train to celebrate our becoming eligible for Seniors’ travel cards.

In a lot of places, a 500 km round trip in a day on a train would not be remarkable, and certainly we’ve travelled longer on more ambitious journeys in Europe, or indeed even on the night train from Bangkok to the Lao border, but trust me, longer train journeys is just not an Australian thing. With the exception of our single trip on the Sunlander, our use of trains has been confined to suburban services in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane.

Even all the years we lived in Canberra, we never once took the train to Sydney. It was simply easier, quicker and cheaper to drive or fly.

However, our wrinklycards made the train an option, avoided the pleasure of paying to sit in a traffic jam on the Melbourne tollway, not to mention donating several body parts to park anywhere sensible.

However the train is not a totally straightforward option. First of all there’s only three each way in a day, and secondly it takes three hours to cover the 250km at a fairly bucolic 85km/h.

However it does work – the 0730 train gets you to Southern Cross for 1030, giving us time to hop on a tram to Pelligrini’s for an excellent coffee and strudel before making our way St Kilda to do what we needed to do, and leaving time for a little bit of shopping on the way back to catch the 6pm train home. A long day, especially as you need to add on the drive to Wangaratta train station and back, but eminently doable.

The train was reasonably comfortable, even if the coaches were a bit old and battered and had clearly seen better days, and the on board cafe could produce a reasonable coffee and sported a range of reasonable looking sandwiches at a reasonable price. As it was we only tried the coffee, we took breakfast bars and bananas for the journey down and bought a couple of upmarket focaccias in the station for the journey back.

There’s no wifi on the trains, but the seats all had fold down tables meaning that you could work if you wanted. However not that many of our fellow passengers seemed to, though those that did seemed to either be reading documents on tablets, or else working offline.

(Interestingly there wasn’t a Mac to be seen the day we did it, it was small Dell ultrabooks all the way)

So, comfortable enough, but the first question to ask is why so slow? (The Melbourne/Sydney train, which is operated by the NSW train operator, does the same journey in two and a half hours, using one of their superannuated XPT trains, which are based on the British Rail Intercity 125).

Well, despite V/Line having invested in some pretty spiffy high speed trains, they are broad gauge (1600mm) only and the line from Melbourne to the border with NSW is now standard gauge (1485 mm) meaning we have to make do with some converted carriages and a freight locomotive, and V/Line simply don’t have the capacity to provide more trains or indeed have the trains to run a faster service, even though you could have thought they could have sourced some reasonable refurbished trains from Europe.

We’re also not alone in still having the rattly old country trains, some of the less busy longer broad gauge country services still have locomotive hauled services.

It’s galling though that in 1897 Mark Twain commented on the lunacy of Australia’s disastrous rail gauge muddle, and nearly 120 years later we’re still living with the consequences …

It was pouring with rain today, too wet to do anything outsider or much inside, so I treated myself to some downtime researching how Australian newspapers reported the abdication of Nicholas II.

Of course, Nicholas II was not the only ruler of a Slav state to be styled tsar, and not the only one to abdicate, Ferdinand of Bulgaria was also styled ‘Tsar’ and also abdicated, although in October 1918, after an Entente breakthrough on the Macedonian front.

Most anglophone histories of the First World War ignore the conflict with Bulgaria, despite the involvement of troops from the British and French colonial empires, not to mention Greek and Serb soldiers.

Yet, at the time this was seen as a crucial breakthrough, isolating the Ottoman Empire from Germany and causing financial panic in Berlin. (It’s also interesting how newspapers reported what was happening by relying on correspondents in neutral countries who had access to newspapers published in Germany and AustriaHungary).

Clearly it was felt in Germany and AustriaHungary that the collapse of Bulgaria had certainly brought about the endgame in the middle east and that the war was increasingly unsustainable, and that the loans made to their Balkan allies and Turkey had little if any chance of ever being paid back …

In Beechworth, we have a park known as Queen Victoria Park. As some of the streets round about have Crimean war names  I always sort of just assumed that it was laid out in the 1850’s just as Beechworth was turning from a mining camp to somewhere altogether more respectable.

Not a bit of it, the park and its ornamental ex navy cannons date from 1901, and was established on the site of what had been the Botanical Gardens, which date from 1861. It was renamed Queen Victoria park in memory of Queen Victoria, who of course died in 1901.

The original botanical gardens had been laid out according to a design by a Hungarian gentleman J A Rochlitz.

Rochlitz is quite an interesting individual – as well as the botanic gardens, and later obtaining plant material for them, Rochlitz was one of the first to plant vines in Beechworth, in Havelock road in 1856, and also worked in a daguerrotype studio in Ford street in the 1850’s.

This is quite interesting – firstly it suggests that Rochlitz was a man of some education in the sciences, which is not terribly surprising as any gold mining town would have attracted people with scientific knowledge to work in assay offices. What’s more interesting is the suggestion that by the late 1850’s the town was changing, with winemaking, and possibly other agricultural activities beginning to compete with gold mining.

Equally, it tells us that there was money about and that people were prepared to pay to have their photographs taken either as mementos or to send to relatives to show they were doing well …

Way back in 2012 I wrote about the story that Lenin spoke English with a Dublin accent. At the time I was mildly incredulous, but in a comment Dara O’Rourke suggested that I follow up the story of Roddy Connolly, son of the Irish revolutionary James Connolly, who actually met with Lenin in Petrograd in 1920 and is the source of the ‘Dublin accent’ story.

which is to say the least interesting, as when one thinks about revolutionary socialism, Ireland is not the first country that comes to mind, but that is of course to forget the impact that the October 1917  revolution made on the organised trade union movements around the world, and seemed to offer a better world among the chaos and collapse that accompanied the end of the first world war in Europe.

One story that my mother, who was born in 1918, used to tell was of being held up at their apartment window by her father when she was very small to see a parade of men in work clothes with red flags, and being told ‘that is the future’.

Her father, my grandfather – who I never knew – was a manager with the Co-operative society, so it’s fair guess that he too was enamoured of the changes that socialism might have brought.

I’ve also now found some partial corroboration of the Dublin accent story – while Arthur Ransome may not have recorded how Lenin spoke English, H.G. Wells did, and said that he spoke with an Irish accent …

Ever since I first visited Turkey twenty years ago I’ve been aware that the Ottoman empire’s role in the first world war is something, with the exception of Gallipoli, we tend to ignore in the English speaking world, tending, understandably, to concentrate on the meat grinder of the western front. Even in Australia, where despite Australian forces having a significant role in the conquest of the middle East, we tend to focus on Gallipoli and the western front.

Yet, the history of the end of the Ottoman empire and the attempted partition of Turkey under the treaty of Sevres after world war one are important for understanding why we’ve ended up where we are in that troubled region.

Histories written in English about the conflict tend to concentrate on the victors rather than the vanquished, but I recently came across the amazing Rafael de Nogales Mendez, a Venezuelan soldier of fortune who fought in the Spanish American war, was a double agent in the Russo Japanese war, and eventually ended up as an officer in the Ottoman army, where he witnessed but did not participate in the Armenian genocide and who fought in the middle east including the siege of Kut.

He also apparently encountered T.E Lawrence on one occasion.

De Nogales wrote a book about his experiences with the Ottoman army which I thought might be interesting to track down and read, thinking naively that there was bound to be scanned version online somewhere, and that at worst, one of the Indian print on demand houses would be able to make me copy, much as I did with Ernesta Drinker Bullitt’s diary.

Not a bit of it. The Spanish language edition of de Nogales book was published in 1925 and the English language edition by Charles Scribner and sons in 1926, three years after the public domain cut off date of 1923, so despite Nogales dying in the late 1930’s, the work is still in copyright until 2021, on the assumption that the publisher renewed copyright as required.

Now that in itself isn’t a problem. If I was prepared to pay for a print on demand copy, I was prepared to pay for a second hand copy, except that there aren’t any available via Abe (I tend to use Abe due to their global coverage, I guess that there might be a copy lurking on one of the militaria sites that I missed.)

There are reprints available via the Armenian Genocide documentation centre, but they are not particularly cheap.

Living in a rural area means that I no longer have easy access to a large public library, and anyway, a worldcat search suggests no large library in Australia holds a copy.

So, what we have is this – digitisation makes access to original source material incredibly easy, but the 1923 public domain horizon essentially means that anything published after that date won’t be available 2019 at the earliest.

Equally,  old books are difficult to track down and purchase, in part because of the economics of the industry where the global book barns that mainly sell recent second hand paperbacks have come to dominate the industry, and have taken that lucrative section of the market away from second hand bookshops, making the specialist second hand bookshops less profitable, and hence either more expensive or non existent …

Beechworth started out a grazing community, but with the discovery of gold in 1852 the town suddenly exploded acquiring banks, a post office and doubtless pubs.

But there’s another little monument up a back road celebrating the first Congregationalist service in 1858

suggesting that the wild days of the gold rush were over and life was becoming more respectable …

While we were in Byron there was an online spat about a documentary that apparently suggested that Greek craftsmen may have worked on the terracotta army in Xian.

I’ll say apparently as I havn’t seen the documentary, but something that the discussions seemed to miss was the influence on Bhuddist art in Afghanistan of the Greeks who came in the wake of Alexander the Great’s expedition to Afghanistan and India.

There are some quite nice and distinctly Greek looking statues of the Bhudda dating from around the time of the terracotta army, and given that many Bhuddist missionaries and monks travelled north from what is now Afghanistan and northern Pakistan, and they may have taken their Greek influenced sculptural traditions with them, which may have also influenced Chinese sculpture in general…

Eureka Pioneers memorial, Eureka NSW

Earlier this year, we’d moved to Beechworth in Victoria. While we’re pretty content with things in general, we decided we needed to do some remodelling of our house plus a modest extension and a new hardwood deck – and as we’re in a heritage area that meant endless paperwork and permits.

On top of this we’d had one of the wettest winters for years – the backyard developed permanent pools that we half expected to be colonised by tadpoles.

All of this meant I hadn’t got the garden laid out, or the builders had been able to start, so we decided on a trip away to the Byron hinterland in northern New South Wales where, being sub tropical, it was warm and dry.

Rather than Byron itself we stayed in a studio in Eureka, a small village about 10kms out of Bangalow, which is an older if touristy town with some nice old nineteenth century shopfronts, a decent restaurant or two and some pleasant coffee shops.

Eureka had hardly anything. The shop, the post office, the pub had all gone, all that was left was a primary school and a couple of churches, which made for a laid back atmosphere. In contrast, Federal, the next village along had kept its post office and shop, and had acquired a really fun outdoor Japanese cafe – excellent Japanese vegetarian food – and a weekend only restaurant that did a small selection of classic American dishes like ribs and pulled pork, all served with the trimmings. Cash only, bring your own beer, and very relaxed.

While Byron is pretty touristy, and there’s a lot of people with ‘proper’ jobs in agriculture, there’s also an alternative vibe on the back of the protesters who came to protest at the clearing of the old growth rainforest in the seventies, and who put down roots and stayed on.

This makes for a lot of hippie weekend  markets – more an event or a day out that a seious market. The weekend we were there it was Mullumbimby’s turn so off we went to the market, which was a little bit like a small scale eighties festival with people selling veggie food – somosas and chickpea empanadas anyone ? –plus Indian cottons and people selling spiritual awakenings – made me quite nostalgic for my time in mid-Wales in the eighties and worth it for the retro alternative vibe.

The rest of the time we bushwalked in the rainforest – swimming in the ocean was off the menu due to a constant onshore wind.

The other really good thing we found was the Tweed Valley art gallery – a small regional gallery which had inside it a recreation of Margaret Olley’s Sydney house cum studio –definitely worth a visit if you’re in the area. (The Margaret Olley connection comes through the fact that her family had a property in the area and Margaret had to row across the Tweed to catch the school bus in the 1930’s).

On the way back south we overnighted in Armidale (having gone the long way via Bellingen, another alternative hangout) and Dubbo in the central west. I can’t say much about Dubbo as it was pouring with rain and we took the easy way out and ate in the hotel, but Armidale looked interesting – good solid nineteenth century buildings in the town centre including an array of big solid brick churches. We ate in a pretty good Indian restaurant but the town – which is a university town after all – was amazingly quiet on a Thursday evening – hardly anyone seemed to be out and about.

The next day we stopped off in Tamworth for brunch and I had a chance conversation in a bookshop with someone who used to work in Armidale – apparently UNE’s move to online teaching has meant that the number of students on campus is down, and of course, with material online, they’re not buying books are they? (or if they are it’s either e-texts or books bought online), an interesting take on the online revolution.

Our final day driving back was longer than it should have been – we were going to take the back way via Wagga, but when we got to Forbes we found the road south was still closed due to flooding, so we ended up dog legging across the country to the Sydney Melbourne freeway, including a complete failure to find anywhere for lunch in Cootamundra – it’s one of these towns where everything still closes at twelve noon on a Saturday – including the cafes …

Well, we’ve had two unrelated stories that hint at there having been more contact between Rome and contemporary cultures in China, Korea and Japan.

Personally I tend to dismiss this. Roman mirrors and glass have previously turned up in graves in both Korea and Japan, but that doesn’t imply direct contact, merely that the artefacts were traded on from one to another.

Like the Roman coins reportedly found at Oc Eo, it doesn’t mean that there were any Romans there. The fact that the Okinawa coins are reportedly copper, and hence low value items, suggests that they weren’t used as portable wealth, but were there as curios, perhaps along with the Ottoman coins found alongside them.

And sometimes, coins, due to being made out of hard indestructible materials do turn up in unexpected places, such as my finding an Isle of Man 10p coin in a bag of river gravel mulch in Canberra.

The skeletons however tend to suggest something more – skeletons usually being indicators of people. And people do tend to go everywhere – two Japanese sailors ended up in Tudor England having been captured from a Spanish treasure ship by English privateers. And of course Pliny has a story of people who might have been Inuit being washed into the mouth of the Rhine, so while there might have been a couple of people of east Asian origin who ended up in Roman London through some strange sequence of events, it doesn’t mean that they were running the felix draco takeaway or that they themselves are representatives of a larger community, it was pure happenstance …

Some time ago I read a novel set in Moscow during the Russian civil war which mentioned people drinking carrot tea – something I had not come across before.

Google was not much help – the most I could turn up was a discussion on stackexchange, so I decided on a little experiment today when I was making a carrot salad for lunch:

first of all I grated some carrot quite finely using a carrot grater (you could use the shredded carrot that some supermarkets sell, or grate the carrot with an ordinary box grater, but the result is not quite as fine as you get with my genuine Russian carrot shredder).

I then took some of the shredded carrot (which was quite wet – carrots hold a lot of moisture) and stuck it in the oven at 130C for round about three quarters of an hour.

The result was something pale orange in colour and slightly crumbly. Coarser grated carrot would probably take longer. I’m guessing that traditionally the grated carrot would have been dried on the stove.

Once it had cooled, I put it in a teapot and poured hot water on it, producing an orange coloured brew slightly reminiscent of a mild assam tea:

It had a slightly earthy after taste and was not at all unpleasant.

Personally, I didn’t find it wonderful enough to want to repeat the experience, but it was perfectly drinkable.

If you do a google search for “морковь чай” – literally carroty tea – you’ll turn up a number of Russian recipes, including this one, which shows I was not too far off. Interestingly there are other variants, including carrot top tea, carrot top tea with shredded carrot, carrot tea with blackcurrant leaf, all of which are touted as being good old peasant remedies for hypertension and urinary health.

I’ve also come across some literary references to people adding dried currants to carrot tea, but that’s an experiment for another day …