A quiet place.
Movement: each of the three creatures here is raising a foot to move forward.
My father captioned this photo “Camel Bridge”. I’ve done some research and found it is a footbridge over a boat passageway through a dam wall on the Nile. It’s known in English as the Great Delta Barrage. In Arabic (from Google Maps) it’s Alkanater Kheireya. The wooden bridge was lowered for foot traffic, and when boats needed to pass through, it was folded up against the building wall.
Ailsa from http://wheresmybackpack.com/2012/06/29/travel-theme-art/ proposed this week’s theme. Thanks Ailsa!
This is Millie. I’ve been tutoring her once a week for a few years and now she has travelled to Sydney to take part in a special program to learn to read.
Millie and I have something in common: our Dads both like to draw and paint. This week, instead of showing you my father’s art, I want to draw attention to Stewart McDonald’s art.
He draws like this:
And he paints like this:
You can see more, and perhaps even buy originals or prints of his works, here:
http://www.redbubble.com/people/stewartmcd
Here’s some fleeting street photography from 1940s Egypt:
Ailsa proposes Parks this week. See her great park story here: http://wheresmybackpack.com/2012/06/22/travel-theme-parks/
Here’s mine:
In the heart of Alexandria in Egypt, there is a green square running down to the esplanade along the sea. It’s called the Midan Orabi or Orabi Square, or Place Mohamed Ali. At the end of the square is a neo-classical monument donated by the Italian community in 1938 and originally dedicated to Khedive Ismail (‘Khedive’ is a title, like Viceroy). He had studied in Paris and held diplomatic missions in Europe before his appointment as viceroy of Egypt from 1863 – 1879 under the Ottoman suzerainty. He incurred massive foreign debt, borrowing from European financiers, and this mismanagement led to British intervention and the occupation of Egypt in 1882. If this hadn’t happened, I wouldn’t have this photo.
My father had this picture in his album of photos taken in 1941/42 when he was there as an Australian defending the British Empire.
Khedive Ismail being remembered for not much more than his hateful administration and the introduction of colonialism, the monument facing the Mediterranean sea, or more specifically, facing Europe, was recycled in 1966 into a monument to an ‘Unknown Naval Soldier’.
Modern photos show Orabi Square still with tall palm trees though at ground level it is now quite cluttered and busy, not neat and open as it was in the 1940s when the area was known as Place Mohamed Ali, or the French Gardens, and it looked like this:
I bet he smells sheepish.
SECRET PLACE
When I’m in France I go into churches and sit by myself and think and pray. They’re all good for this, whether a large cathedral or a small village church, because most of them are open during the week. It’s a privilege I don’t enjoy here in Australia where I live. Inside these ancient structures it’s surprisingly quiet, even if the church is situated in the heart of a city. The stone walls block out most noise and it’s very easy to focus without distraction. Because I experience this particular solitude only in France, it came to mind immediately when Ailsa proposed a ‘secret place’ for her travel photo challenge. See hers here: http://wheresmybackpack.com/2012/06/15/secret-places/
The churches in French villages are particularly peaceful and very often are empty on weekdays. This photo is of l’Église Saint Mathieu, the church in the beautifully restored mediaeval village of Oingt, north-west of Lyon. I went there with a couple of friends one day in 2010 and we were the only people around, except for a few staff in the small restaurant and art gallery.
It reminded me of another day a few years before: I was a student in Lyon, and my brother died but I couldn’t get back to Australia for his funeral. Another student suggested that if I wanted to get away to somewhere peaceful for a day, I should go to the ancient village of Pérouges, also north of Lyon. I went on a Wednesday and was all alone for about two hours, walking the cobblestone streets and narrow ways, the ruelles, between buildings. But the most precious gift that day was half an hour alone in the church, l’Église Sainte-Marie-Madeleine de Pérouges, sitting in the back row of old wooden pews and looking at the stone floor of the aisle, grooved from centuries of footsteps. It was comforting to know that in the 1400s, people were worshipping and praying to God exactly as I was, looking at the same stone walls and walking down the same aisle.
I have several photos taken in Egypt of soldiers smiling together with their arms around each other, close mates in a time of war, establishing friendships unlike any they had back home. This photo is interesting for its depiction of friends but also because of the background the photographer captured. They seem to be standing on top of a building showing off Heliopolis, developed in 1905 as a model suburb of Cairo by Baron Empain, a Belgian industrialist. One of the buildings he ordered his architects to design was the Roman Catholic Church (behind and to the left) known as the Basilica of the Virgin Mary, or l’Église Notre Dame d’Héliopolis, built in the heart of the new suburb in 1910. It’s a small copy of Hagia Sofia in Istanbul. When the baron died in 1929 he was buried in the crypt.
The mosque in the photo (behind and to the right) is described in the photo album as the ‘wailing mosque’. It does not appear in any present day web photo search, nor on Google maps. Many buildings have been demolished or altered during the last century, particularly during the 1970s, and this must have been one of them.
My father gave this photo the caption “S. Chambers”, though I don’t know which of them it is.
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.
Today my husband and I went to Old Parliament House in Canberra for lunch. We then played at being politicians in the old House of Representatives and acted as journalists recording an interview with an ex-Prime Minister (one of the activities for visitors). As we left the building I took this photo of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy on the opposite side of the street, an unofficial and often-in-the-news embassy that has existed since 1972 on the lawns in front of Old Parliament House which, in 1972, was the only Parliament House. A new, much much larger one has since been built on the hill behind it. The tents are out of view to the left and right but in the centre is the sacred fire which burns continually. The two people to the left of the sovereignty letters are on segways which can be hired to ride around the lake, a popular weekend pastime.
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.
