postaday - Sounds like wish

12 September, 2015

Thank you

Yesterday I read two writing prompts that gave me ideas. The first one was the Daily Post’s prompt, Handwritten, and the second was in the ebook, 365 writing prompts, where the prompt for 11th September is Thank you. The task is defined:

“The internet is full of rants. Help tip the balance: today, simply be thankful for something (or someone).”

It was funny they should say that about the internet and rants, because I was grazed by this combination today. I was feeling thankful for something that happened because of the internet: a nomination for a literary prize by the editor of Eleven Eleven literary journal. Last month the journal published my translation of Jean Lorrain’s Princess Mandosiane. Knowing little about prizes, I made what was perhaps a mistake and searched for online information. Within seconds I was reading a rant about the meaninglessness of nominations, the unlikelihood of winning a prize, the embarrassment of being one of tens of thousands of nominees. Don’t put it in your bio, pleads the ranter, don’t put it in your résumé.

One moment I was thankful, the next I was fizzing. It took literally seconds for an internet rant to douse my small flame of pleasure.

Digging deeper and reading wider, I found a number of positive articles, a number of writers reminding readers, and me, that it’s incredibly hard work to get something published, let alone to be nominated for a prize, and that that’s something to put in your bio, something to write home about. In fact, since I’m away from home, that’s something I’m going to do.

Today I’m simply thankful for Eleven Eleven journal and for the editor’s opinion of my work.

To illustrate my little achievement, here’s a photo I took at the beach this morning when I saw this rocky man laughing up at the sky. Ha ha ha, you ranters! A nomination is a reason to be cheerful.

*****

12 September, 20155 February, 2018

Handwritten

The Daily Post writing prompt for 11th September was Handwritten: When was the last time you wrote something by hand?

I write by hand many times a day, and indeed was handwriting something for another blog post only moments before I began typing these words. But writing for this blog is something I do infrequently, unfortunately. Translating literature is what I do every day, writing the translation by hand before keying it into my computer. Usually I write with a cheap ballpoint pen or pencil on cheap note paper. However, a German friend recently sent me a calligraphy pen and coloured inks, and a French friend sent me a Clairefontaine notebook with its silky smooth papier velouté. To test them both out, I wrote the fourth verse from St. Patrick’s Breastplate:

The last lines are particularly meaningful to me, for I love the sea and its rocks, not to mention stability… Just this morning, in the small bay of Lilli Pilli Beach, I was snapping waves as they crashed against rock projections:

LilliPilli Beach NSW — Lilli Pilli Beach NSW

I once heard that when you’re focused on a subject or scene to photograph it, you can’t feel depressed. Your brain is too busy getting the shot right. Similarly, when you’re writing out your thoughts by hand, your disappointments and confusions flow out of your head, through the pen and onto the paper. But no one needed to tell me that.

*****

6 September, 201511 September, 2017

Weekly photo challenge: Connected

Here’s a direction sign from World War II Libya. The photo taken in about 1941 is in my father’s war album, and is marked as “Signpost Libyan Desert”. The camps are named after Australia’s state capitals, and might have helped the Australian forces to feel (slightly) connected with home, several months’ sail away.

All the capital cities are there except for Hobart. But this board is a palimpsest, a surface where earlier writing has been removed, scraped off, to make way for later writing. Here, the former text has been rubbed or washed away but if you look closely you’ll see the ghosts of smaller words, including the name of Hobart. Whatever happened to Camp Hobart?

There’s also a bit of graffiti on the bottom where a few blokes have scratched their names.

Searching for the locations of the other place names, I learnt that Ikingi Maryût was in the Western Desert outside Alexandria, Egypt, to Libya’s east. But I’m not sure about Abd-el-Kader, though it had been the name of a popular nineteenth-century leader of Algeria, to Libya’s west.

Thanks to WordPress for the photo challenge. See what the word ‘connected’ triggered in others.

*****

27 July, 201527 October, 2018

D’arcey

Tonight at 7.52 when it was 6 degrees Celsius and blowing an icy gale, I took this photo of D’arcey Richard Nottingham Shaw’s name projected onto the Australian War Memorial. It was hard to hold my camera still in the wind, but the photo is not too bad. D’arcey was killed in action on The Somme in France in 1917, yet he has no grave; his remains were never found. On his Roll of Honour card, digitally available on the A.W.M. website, it is noted that D’arcey Shaw’s wounds were the result of being buried twice from bombs bursting near him in Pozières. How ironic that they should write that, when in the end he was buried nowhere.

DRN Shaw AWM — D R N Shaw, projected onto Australian War Memorial, 26th July 2015

Because he died defending Australia, his name was written in light for 30 seconds tonight, perhaps for my benefit alone. As far as I know, none of his other family members live in Canberra. Since I’m just ten minutes away, it’s easy to whip down to the Memorial and see the names when they come up between sunset and sunrise.

D’arcey was my grandfather’s cousin. I want to remember him and his two brothers who also died in France, in the war to end all wars, because my grandfather was there too, but he didn’t die.

Nineteen-year-old D’arcey was the second son in his family to be killed in France. The first one was George, and there would be a third, Frank Percy Shaw, whose name was projected onto the War Memorial on 21st June, a night that was cool but not freezing like tonight. I wrote about him here.

As I was leaving around the back of the Memorial I saw four kangaroos standing guard in the dark. They’re delightful at a distance and are happy to be photographed from a car window, but if I’d got out and approached them they would have either hopped away or hopped towards me and treated me as an enemy.

Kangaroos AWM — Kangaroos at the back of the Australian War Memorial

The next date that I will have a relative’s name up for viewing is in early spring. I’m happy knowing it won’t be another chilling evening.

*****

12 July, 201511 September, 2017

Land meets water

Where land meets water in a large city, we build homes and offices for the short walk to the beach and the long view of the open sea. It’s a place to turn our backs on all that disturbs us in society.

For Ailsa’s Land Meets Water photo challenge, here’s a photo of Stanley Bay, Alexandria, Egypt in about 1941. The corniche, the road running round the coastline, was constructed in 1935. The descending levels of concrete bathing cabins added on the shoreline form an amphitheatre that looks onto the Mediterranean. Here in 1941 people are bathing in the sun and sea, and, by all appearances, are unafraid. Yet in May, June and December of that year there had been fierce enemy air and sea attacks on Alexandria with hundreds of people killed and injured. In this scene there are bathers on the sand, in the water and on the rocks, as though all is well.

Today Alexandria is not facing the same threats, but the population has multiplied. Modern photos show the corniche lined with high-rise apartment blocks, not as picturesque as those in the 1940s, and with not nearly as much space to roam between buildings. And town planners seem to have had second thoughts about the bathing boxes, which have disappeared. Only the sea remains the same.

The photo is from my father’s WWII album.

Stanley_Bay_Alexandria — Stanley Bay, Alexandria, Egypt, c1941

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4 July, 2015

Photo challenge: Independence

Yesterday, a French friend asked me to define the word ‘yoke’. She looked in her bilingual dictionary and came up with ‘constraint’. But it’s more than that, I think, and I tried to explain that it can be a mark of servitude. Or slavery. Or it can be a metaphor for a burden, anything that keeps you coupled to a problem.

Today I passed this yoke, and took the photo to show her.

A yoke is a binding thing. A piece of wood fastened to the necks of two animals, then attached to a plough, forces them to work obediently and stops them escaping. When the yoke is removed, and especially once it’s nailed to the top of a post, the animals are free to roam and go where they please. Independence.

Thanks Ailsa for the ‘Independence’ photo challenge.

22 June, 201527 October, 2018

Frank

Last night I went to the Australian War Memorial for an 8:58 pm appointment. At this moment, Frank’s name would be projected onto the exterior wall of the Hall of Memory, an honourable way of remembering the soldiers who died for Australia in World War One. Every 30 seconds a new name appears. There are 62,000 names on the Roll of Honour which will all be displayed several times between 2014 and 2018, from sunset to sunrise.

Frank was my first cousin twice removed. Or, if you like, my grandfather’s cousin. He was the third son in his family to be killed in action in France; the first one died in 1916, the second in 1917, and Frank in 1918. He was 23, had been promoted to Lance Corporal, was twice recommended for decorations and was congratulated for conspicuous gallantry and daring in reconnoitring enemy positions in February 1918. Five weeks later he was killed by the enemy on 5th April, 1918 in France.

After receiving news of the death of a third son to die on the Somme, Frank’s father asked the Defence Department to send home his personal effects. And so, in July 1918, the effects of Frank Albert Percy Shaw were sent with the SS Barunga. In case no. 1153 were a two-Franc note (damaged), a wallet, a note case, photos, two prayer books, a letter and a YMCA wallet cover. On 15th July, the Barunga was torpedoed by the enemy and was lost with all cargo. But, at last some good news, she was carrying invalided troops back to Australia, and all on board were saved.

The Barunga, with the personal effects of a number of soldiers who had died, is still sitting on the ocean floor off the Isles of Scilly, south-west of Lands End, England.

*****

31 May, 2015

On the way

Last week, for the first time in a long time, my son and I met for morning tea in a café, and on our way back to the car I caught sight of some writing engraved into the concrete as we stepped up on a kerb. I stooped to take a photo, and at that moment a bus turned the corner. My son thought I was crazy, crouching down on the road, focused on photographing a bit of concrete graffiti while a passing bus was leaning into the corner. But he was missing the magic of the moment.

Here’s what captured my attention: a grey concrete kerb, utilitarian and ugly, made ‘beautiful’ with a few words and autumn leaves collected in the hollow of the gutter.

Thanks WordPress for the challenge to photograph something on the way to somewhere.

7 May, 2015

Eltville, Germany

In recent months I discovered that my husband and sons are descended from a German couple who came to Australia in 1856 from Eltville, Germany. Now, I’ve just been to Eltville, and found it a lovely restored town along the German Timber-Frame Road (Deutsche Fachwerkstrasse), a tourist route passing through towns where houses are half-timbered. It was very pleasant to stroll through the winding mediaeval streets and see houses with centuries-old dates marked on the front, including one from 1365. This date might not blow your mind if you grew up in Europe, but for me, having lived my life in a young country where nothing is much more than 200 years old, it’s precious. I had to photograph it so I wouldn’t forget how old it all is.

Eltville on the Rhine is known for roses and wine, in particular the sparkling wine, Sekt. I bought a small bottle of Sekt and it came in a rose-printed bag. Our family ancestors would have seen the Electors Castle every day, a former residence of the archbishops and electors of Mainz. But the rose-growing began after they left, so they wouldn’t have seen this rose-filled maze beside the Castle. When I was there the rose bushes were in new leaf.

Eltville, steel engraving by William Tombleson, c1840, image courtesy Creative Commons

Electors Castle and rose gardens, Eltville, Germany

Along the Rhine there’s a pleasant promenade beneath an arbour of pollarded trees. In their early spring nakedness I found them amusing. I’ve seen pollarded trees before, but not as bulbous as these here in Eltville, which have been cut back quite severely. The amputated branch stumps are nobbly in the dormant season, but I’m assured that the compact, leafy canopy that grows in spring and summer creates a spot for romantic rendezvous beside the Rhine.

Pollarded trees on the Rheinpromenade, Eltville — Pollarded trees on the Rhine promenade, Eltville

Eltville. In the mid-nineteenth century some of its winegrowers left this lovely village to make the long journey across land to Hamburg, then to make the long journey across the seas to Australia, where they would plant vines and make wine in their new homeland. But the descendants of those who stayed in Eltville have kept their town beautiful and inviting. I doubt anyone would want to leave this lovely place now. Unless they’re a tourist, like me.

*****

5 May, 2015

Weekly photo challenge: Intricate

This week’s WordPress Photo Challenge is for something ‘intricate’. The Oxford Dictionary defines intricate as ‘very complicated or detailed’, from the Latin intricat- ‘entangled’, and from in- ‘into’ plus tricae ‘tricks, perplexities’.

Tricks and perplexities.

When I read about the challenge, I was in Barcelona looking at intricate architectural details on buildings all around me. Barcelona does intricate very well. There’s Barcelona Cathedral with its decorative west facade constructed in the 19th and early 20th centuries:

There are the individual architect-designed houses in the Passeig del Gràcia, including one of Gaudi’s, which had hundreds of people outside and inside and which I therefore passed by, and there was this one, the Casa Lleó Morera a few doors away, which I prefer. It was designed by Lluís Domènech i Montaner for Lleó’s mother in the early 1900s.

But, for me, what was most tricky and perplexing were the bench-lamp-posts designed in 1906 by Pere Falqués et Urpí, a Catalan Modernist architect. There are 32 of them along the passeig. The benches are covered in ceramic mosaics, a technique typical of Catalan modernism (think Gaudi), and the lamp posts are of wrought iron rising up from the bench in a whiplash form, a characteristic of Art Nouveau generally (known as Modernism in the Catalonia region of Spain, which includes Barcelona.)

I sat on this bench to read a city map, looking for famous Barcelona art and architecture. But I was sitting on something more interesting than all the tricky buildings and their perplexed spectators. For, when I stood up, I saw the shadows cast by the twisting entanglements of the ironwork and the complexity of the mosaic tiles over the curved edges of the seat, and realised this was an excellent way to make art publicly useable and inclusive rather than exclusive. When you sit on the bench, you are part of the art.