Everyday life for a soldier in Egypt in 1941 included some pretty unpostable activities: rifle practice, wrecking tanks, sinking ships, covering the bodies of dead comrades in the desert. However, the activity in this photo looks fairly harmless. My father captioned it ‘Shufty’, which comes from an Arabic word for ‘a look’, as in ‘take a shufty at this’.
Three curious things I’ve considered: What are the tubular projections behind the men? What is the Egyptian boy doing? Why is one man naked while all others are clothed?
One hot October afternoon I ate ice cream in this café because I liked the red awning (red is my favourite colour). On the left, a waitress is clearing a table. It was mine.
Of course, you’ve seen part of this photo before. It’s my header.
I found this photo in my father’s album from his time in Egypt in 1941/42 with the Australian Army. It’s simply captioned ‘Roxy Theatre’, though I’m not sure if it’s in Cairo or elsewhere. Searching online hasn’t turned up anything quite like it.
This photo from my father’s album of 1941 is captioned by him “Electric trains”. I initially believed this building was the old Palace Hotel in Heliopolis, a suburb of Cairo, but today I contacted someone in Heliopolis about my photos and he has corrected me.
This building is in the same area as the Palace Hotel which is now one of the presidential palaces, but the photo shows the el-Korba (the curve) district of Heliopolis which was once occupied by aristocratic Egyptians and some Europeans. The architecture of the area was commissioned by the Belgian Baron Empain in the early 1900s; the building in the photo was built in 1907. The architecture is unique, consisting of European-style arcaded balconies and broad colonnaded sidewalks combined with Islamic (Moorish-Persian) domes and geometric and arabesque patterns. The area was neglected at the end of the twentieth century as a reaction against old colonial influences, but after Heliopolis celebrated its centenary in 2005 the locals began to plan for the preservation of the architecture as part of Cairo’s heritage. Since 2005 a festival has been held annually to celebrate the Korba district and its uniqueness. In January this year a group of volunteers established the Heliopolis Heritage Initiative (HHI) with a vision to revive the area’s architecture and culture and to reduce the gridlocked traffic, which was clearly, looking at this photo, not a problem in 1941.
Ailsa suggested we post a photo of a memorable sunset this week. On her blog she has photos of US sunsets in soft lavender, pink and yellow hues: http://wheresmybackpack.com/2012/08/17/sunset/
The best sunset I’ve ever seen was almost a physical experience. Unlike the US sunsets, this one was a solid ball of gold in an unclouded New Caledonian sky. I had noticed the fiery sun low in the sky, just above the ocean, but before I could become too contemplative, it descended into the water and I couldn’t look away. Only seconds passed from the moment I first saw it to its disappearance below the horizon, as though it had drowned in the sea. I could almost hear a hiss! I stood in confusion, knowing that the earth had moved, not the sun.
I’m currently translating a small book of New Caledonian legends by Claudine Jacques, colourfully illustrated by Papou, so when I saw Ailsa’s suggestion of sunset images I immediately thought of late afternoons in Noumea, the capital of New Caledonia. This Pacific island, not far from the north-eastern coast of Australia, is a French ‘special collectivity’. That is, it used to be a territory colonised by the French from 1854, but now the people are working towards independence and power is gradually being transferred from France to New Caledonia over a 20 year period, looking towards 2018. Unless the French can convince them otherwise.
11th August – My oldest son is composing a piece of piano music. I’ve never known a composer before. He’s posted it on his blog: http://lukeworth.wordpress.com/
12th August – Saw a tiny finch digging in a planter box hanging from my porch. I looked in and found a slanting tunnel dug out beside the pansies.
13th August – When we read in a grammar exercise that King Charles Spaniels are named after Charles II, my ten year-old student told me that King Charles II liked to party. She learnt it on Horrible Histories.
14th August – A male and female finch are sitting on the winter-bare branches by my window. Now and then the female flits over to the planter box and scrapes a few more grains of soil out while the male stands guard on the branch just above. Now I have an unusual problem: how can I water my pansies without the tunnel collapsing?
Male and female finches nest-building in a planter box
15th August – Researched a holiday resort online and found many variations in prices for the same room, same dates. Rang the resort and told the owner we’ve stayed there several times over the past 25 years; he gave me a $200/week discount.
This week I photographed a sign that is also unambiguous. I was tutoring a student who had to make a brochure to educate drivers on the combination of alcohol and driving. We talked about ways of preventing people from driving after drinking, and I thought of this sign on one of the freeways in our city and wondered if it’s successful in preventing accidents. I don’t drink alcohol, so I giggle darkly at this sign and its unsubtle message and try to imagine its writer. But I’d be interested to know what effect it has on drink-drivers.
Something is wrong about this photo. When an Englishman stands behind African men in one of their feluccas on their river in their country, when he is the passenger, not the worker, when he’s wearing a white pith helmet and smoking a pipe with his hands on his hips, it’s clear he’s dominating them. And that’s always wrong.
This confident colonial chap seems to have been living under a hot sun for quite a while; his skin is almost as dark as the sailors’.
Ailsa (http://wheresmybackpack.com/2012/08/04/leading-lines/) has proposed that we find a photo containing ‘leading lines’. Well, I’m no photographer or artist, so this was a technical term I had to look up. I now know they are lines in an image that lead the eye to a point, either in or out of the picture. In my father’s 1941 album of Egyptian photos, there are a few urban scenes with streets disappearing into the distance. But in this one, below, the roads coming towards us are leading our eye to the centre of the photo.
It was taken in what was called, in the 1940s, Soliman Pasha Square, now known as Talaat Harb Square (Midan Talaat Harb), a short distance from Tahrir Square. In the centre of the square, in this photo, is a statue of Soliman Pasha which stood there from 1874 until 1964. Soliman Pasha was a general, born Joseph Anthelme Sève in Lyon, France, who served under Bonaparte and then in Egypt was a military expert in the army of Mohamed Ali. He converted to Islam and took the name Soliman Pasha.
At the far right of the photo is the once-opulent Groppi’s, formerly a Parisian-style café, tearoom and patisserie. Giacomo Groppi, a Swiss pastry maker, opened it in 1926 following success with other patisseries in Egypt. From the 1920s and through the war years, Groppi’s was the place to be seen. During the war, officers often stopped by for coffee or dinner or to find some female company.
While at the time this photo was taken the British were the resident colonials – hence the Australians were there defending Egypt – in the previous century it was the French who were leaving their mark. In the 1940s French influence is evident everywhere, not just the Frenchman on the plinth and the patisserie that sold pastries made from secret recipes written in French, but the architecture is also of French neoclassical style from the era of Soliman Pasha in the 19th century. Note some of the signs are also in French. In the late 20th century Egyptian governments wanted to remove reminders of colonialism and so today, so I’ve read, much of the European-style glamour is neglected and dusty. The statue of Soliman Pasha has now been moved to a military museum and a statue of Talaat Harb, an economist, stands in its place.
