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Ailsa's travel photo challenge: Oceans

Readers, before I begin, I want to thank Ailsa for her challenge and her ideas here:  http://wheresmybackpack.com/2012/06/08/oceans/

Oceans lap the Australian coastline on three sides.  To the east there’s the Pacific;  to the west, the Indian Ocean;  to the south, the Southern Ocean.  The northern coastline is lapped by seas not vast enough to be called ocean.  They’re the Timor Sea and the Arafura Sea, separating us from the islands of New Guinea and Indonesia.

In 1941 ships crossed the Indian Ocean to take Australian troops to the Middle East and back home again. The photo below shows the Aquitania leaving Sydney Harbour in 1941 before she was painted battle grey.  Before being assigned as a troopship the Aquitania had been a luxury liner in the Atlantic and before that she had served in the First World War.  She was the last surviving four-funnelled ocean liner.  The photo was possibly taken from the Queen Mary, another liner transformed into a troop carrier.  There was a convoy of converted liners in Sydney Harbour in April 1941 taking on board thousands of soldiers.  The Aquitania and the Queen Mary made a number of these journeys across the Indian Ocean and back.  Of course, Sydney is on the east coast of Australia and the ships were heading west, so it was a long trip just to get out of Australian waters, let alone across the Indian Ocean.  My mother told me that my father went on the Queen Mary, and his service record tells me he left Sydney on 1st September 1941 and arrived in the Middle East on 25th September.  About three weeks at sea.  On the ocean.

Aquitania, 1941
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Ailsa's travel photo challenge: Rhythm

Ailsa proposes ‘Rhythm’ as this week’s photo topic, which is great for me!  Since the WordPress weekly photo challenge is proposing ‘Today’ as a topic, I can’t draw on my father’s black and white photos from seventy years ago!  But I can for Ailsa.

See her Rhythm story here:  http://wheresmybackpack.com/2012/06/01/rhythm/

And here’s mine, the only photo from the album in which someone is playing a musical instrument.  I imagine this monkey is dancing to the beat.  It was amusing enough for a few people to stop and watch and for at least one soldier to stop and photograph.  My father wrote ‘Kan-Kan’ under the photo, so that must be the monkey’s name.

An Egyptian man with a dancing monkey is generally a beggar who lives on alms.  He is called a fakir (so I read), an Arabic word for ‘needy man’.  In Western countries, the use of animals for street entertainment is frowned upon now, though I did see some online  images of dancing monkeys in India and Pakistan.  I suppose it’s like busking;  there’s probably some talent involved in training the monkey.  But from then on it has to dance for its supper.  It’s something which leaves me ambivalent:  I have a real (Western) pleasure in Orientalist images, whether they be paintings or designs or photos like this one.  I feel the same when listening to gypsy music like that of Django Reinhardt, which makes sense:  the word gypsy comes from Egyptian.  The colourful elements of Middle Eastern life are like chocolate to me; they’re rich and mysterious.  Here’s to ancient peoples!  We owe them much.

Kan-Kan, Egypt, 1942
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Weekly photo challenge: Summer

The photos I’ve submitted so far for the weekly photo challenge have been from North Africa in 1941 or 1942, but my father, who took those photos, missed out on an Egyptian summer.  He left Australia in spring to go to war in the Middle East where it was autumn followed by winter followed by spring, then returned home to autumn followed by winter.  However, in the album there are photos taken a few years later when he and my mother had a holiday together, in what looks like summer.  Well, it was in Queensland, where it’s hot for at least nine months of the year.

My father’s face was heavily shaded by the hat, but editing it to increase the brightness revealed his features.  This is how he always looked.  I don’t think I ever saw him without a cigarette dangling from his lips.  However, something that’s unusual to me is his short sleeves.  I never saw his bare arms.  I was born about thirteen years after this photo was taken, and by then he was wearing long sleeves and trousers in all weathers.  I always wondered what he was covering up, especially when temperatures were up in the high thirties of summer.

The romance implied in these two photos is somewhat comforting.  ‘You take my picture and I’ll take yours.’  They seem to be enjoying their holiday.   My mother is about 24 and gorgeous in clothes she made herself;  my father looks healthy, tanned and muscular.  This is not the man I knew all those years later.

Dad in front of the Hotel Scarborough, Queensland, c1946
Mum in front of the Hotel Scarborough, Queensland, c1946
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Ailsa's travel photo challenge: Street markets

Ailsa (http://wheresmybackpack.wordpress.com) proposed Summer for her photo challenge last week and I was inspired to look long and hard for the right photo to submit.  There were no summery images in the war album of photos taken when my father was serving in the Middle East, during the northern winter!  So I had to resort to my own recent photos.  Now, coincidentally, here’s that summer theme again on this week’s WordPress photo challenge.  But I don’t feel disappointed because I have a photo I’ve looked at many times and wondered what theme I could use it for – and low and behold, coincidentally again, Ailsa has put out a new challenge… for Street Markets.

Cairo markets, 1941/42
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Weekly photo challenge: Hands

To an enemy, our hands are the most immediate threat.  With our hands thrust as far away from our body as possible, most of us are defenceless, except for those with awesome kicking skills.  Here, two soldiers play at war as if they were boys, except the gun and bayonet are real.  And the war is real.  But so are the smiles, for now.

AIF soldiers, Egypt, 1942
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Weekly photo challenge: Blue

My submissions for the weekly photo challenge usually come from my father’s war album filled with black and white images.  So, in that album I find nothing blue.  However, in his sketch books, while he usually favoured green (don’t know why), I found this painting of a seascape with blue sky and blue sea.  It’s a photo challenge, so I submit this, a photo of a painting.  Before photographing it for this post, I had never noticed the edge of a sunset on the horizon.  Nor the signature on the right.

I did, however, submit a photo of real life for the unofficial challenge by Ailsa (see my previous post).

R.E. Bruce, untitled seascape, c1939, © Patricia Worth
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Weekly photo challenge: Unfocused

This photo has a smudged look which resembles my own unspectacled vision of lights.  Unable to focus, I can’t tell where a light begins and ends.

The photo comes from my father’s war album and has the caption “King Pharouk celebration”, though the name is more commonly spelt Farouk.  At 16 years of age in 1936, he was crowned King of Egypt, its penultimate king.  I’ve searched through Google images for photo clues and found one showing him at a celebration of the Prophet Mohammed’s birthday, standing near a huge crown with draping lights, as they are in my photo here.  The date would be in the early 1940s.

Though Egypt was neutral for most of World War II, allied troops including Australians were posted there and Egypt thus became a potential target for German and Italian bombing, so cities were blacked out at night. But the extravagant King Farouk who lived a lavish life refused to turn off the lights in his palace in Alexandria.  His fellow Alexandrians were not happy.

King Farouk celebration, Egypt, early 1940s
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Weekly photo challenge: Together

The photo I chose for the ‘Together’ challenge shows soldiers far from home, undoubtedly lonely for family and not wanting to isolate themselves from the local people.

It reminded me of the concluding words of George Sand (pen name of Mme Aurore Dudevant) after spending a couple of months in a deserted monastery in Majorca, separated from almost everyone except her family and her lover, Frédéric Chopin. Two paragraphs express her need, not for solitude, but for companionship:

“In the stormy days of youth, we imagine that solitude is the great refuge against attacks, the great remedy for battle wounds. This is a grave error. Life experience teaches us that when we cannot live in peace with our fellow man, no poetic admiration or pleasures of art are capable of filling the abyss that forms in the depth of our soul.

I had always dreamt of living in the desert, and any simple dreamer will admit he has had the same fantasy. But believe me, my brothers, we have hearts too loving to get by without each other; and the best thing left for us to do is tolerate each other, for we are like children of the same womb who tease, fight and even hit each other, and yet cannot part.”

George Sand, A Winter in Majorca, 1855 (My translation)

AIF soldiers and some local boys, Egypt, 1941/42

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Anzac Day

In Australia, 25th April is Anzac Day.  Anzac stands for Australian and New Zealand Army Corps.  On this day, in both those countries, we remember all those who have fought to defend their people and to retain the freedom and peace we love, through all the wars we have been involved in and those we are currently fighting in.

I’ve been submitting photos to this blog from my father’s war album, from his time in North Africa in 1941 and 1942.  He wrote a few poems during that time, including one about the Anzacs.  It’s several verses long but here I’ll give you the first and last pages.  There are some spelling errors and other slips in his handwriting;  my transcription following the images will correct them.

Ron Bruce, “Anzacs Forever”, 1942, first verses, © Patricia Worth, 2012

 

Ron Bruce, “Anzacs Forever”, 1942, last verses, © Patricia Worth, 2012

Anzacs Forever

This camp’s getting stale,
You could hear the boys say,
Wish they’d make up their minds
And bung us away.
They wonder why we won’t stay in,
Why we try to dodge the parades,
You could see them taking the old French leave,
Not one, but bloody brigades.

Then came one bright Sunday,
One chocked full of surprise.
“Move out tomorrow,” the Captain said,
Then did the gleam come to their eyes.
So, as you strolled past all the tents,
You could hear them chat
Of women, the race horses,
This, the other, and that.

*****

For those gallant sons are Aussies
And they’ve ne’er been known to flinch,
It’s just the stuff they’re made of,
They’re soldiers, every inch.
They’ll fight for King and Country,
Protect the friends they know,
They’ll even fight for the weaklings
That are afraid to go.

Let’s hope and pray
It won’t be long
Before they are returned,
To carry on, just like before,
With the freedom they have earned.
They’ll go back to their jobs again,
Some may prefer the track,
But they’ve upheld the name of
The great and glorious A.N.Z.A.C.

R.E. Bruce
© Patricia Worth, 2012