My post has only two colours: black and white. The photo is entitled ‘Water cows’ (water buffalo) and comes from my father’s war album of photos taken in the Middle East. This one is in Egypt, where the water buffalo is the most important domestic animal.
If farmers traditionally transport their cows on foot along a certain route, then an expanding city will just have to accommodate them.
The weekly photo challenge instruction is “Share a photo that makes you dream”. When I look at news footage of Syria these days, I wonder if it will ever again look like it does in this photo from 1942. Let’s dream it can be this peaceful some day. Soon.
The 2/15th battalion of the Australian Imperial Forces, which my father was a part of, went to Syria in January 1942 for several months of frontier garrison duty. I have several photos of the region from his album, but the Biblical tone of this one makes it the best. Click it to see the detail.
7th July – Researching the El Gala’a Bridge in Cairo for a ‘Night’ photo challenge, I discovered it opened for feluccas by pivoting the central part around to perpendicular, making two passageways for the boats.
The first photo below is my father’s (that is, it was in his album but possibly not taken by him) which seems to have been shot from an identical position as the ‘Night’ photo. Following this are two photos (undated but taken during WWII) in the National Library of Australia collection, by war photographer Frank Hurley, of the bridge opened for felucca traffic. When closed, the bridge seems to have been only for pedestrians in those days. I searched for recent images of the El Gala’a Bridge and found that it now carries heavy vehicular traffic, and during last year’s revolution was jam-packed with Egyptians heading for Tahrir Square.
“English Bridge”, Cairo (El Gala’a Bridge), 1942
8th July – Bought a green leather bag which was half-price ‘because of the colour’.
9th July – Spent hours searching the Internet for an image matching my camel bridge photo. Finally found a postcard from the early 20th century showing the same bridge. The Internet is an amazing resource!
10th July – Tried to get out of a 3-hour free carpark. Put the ticket in the machine and it shot out and landed in a puddle where 6 other tickets were being rained on. Mine was the driest, so I picked it up and put it back in. It shot out again. I hit the red ‘Help’ button and a muffled voice announced the free parking had been reduced to 2 hours. The boom was generously raised anyway.
11th July – Learned that Joni Mitchell’s song ‘Both sides now’ was written as a poem. It’s great read aloud.
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.
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:
French Gardens and Monument to Khedive Ismail, Alexandria, Egypt, 1940s
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.
S. Chambers and friends, with the domes of the Roman Catholic Basilica and the suburb of Heliopolis, Cairo, in the background, 1941
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.
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.
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.
