Posted on

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
Posted on

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
Posted on

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
Posted on

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
Posted on

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

Posted on

Weekly photo challenge: Sun

I found this photo of the early morning sun over the Mediterranean coast of Egypt, probably Port Said which faces east.  It was taken during the war, in 1941 or 1942.

I selected it because of the sunrays bursting out below darkish clouds.  I love the silhouette of the lamppost and the large tent, but what I love even more is what appears on an image like this, one that I’ve looked at for the past fifty years as a Kodak 4″ x 3″ photo in an album, when I brighten it with an image editor and all the detail of the tents, the lamppost, the fence and the man in white becomes evident.  The scene was captured by a Brownie box camera, but no one back in Australia knew what was below that morning sky, until now.  It’s an exquisite pleasure to draw details from a black and white photo which have hidden there all these years.  See a photo I submitted during the February photo challenge, where some words I had ignored, because barely visible on a tiny photo, became plain as day with a bit of image tweaking.

Here’s the photo for the Sun challenge, as it looks in the album:

Early morning sun, Mediterranean (Port Said?), 1941/42

And below is the photo with adjusted curves.  For me, someone with bad night vision, this is what I imagine it’s like to see in the dark.

Edited image of early morning sun, Mediterranean (Port Said?), 1941/42
Posted on

Weekly photo challenge: Two subjects

The subject of this photo is clearly the architecture.  But then, I can’t stop looking at its left edge.  The photo is one of many in my father’s World War II album, from the months when he was in the Middle East, mostly Egypt.  He entitled it “Temple”, though I’m pretty sure the photo was taken in a mosque.

I have a carpet on my floor closely resembling those on the “temple” floor, which makes me feel the 70 years which have passed since the war are nothing in the history of Oriental carpet designs, and nothing in the history of geometrical forms covered in stylised vines and wreaths, all of it hinting at the perfection of God.  The written messages fascinate me, all the more because I can’t read them.

Posted on

Slouch Hat

The photo I submitted for this week’s photo challenge, Journey, reminded me of a poem in my father’s poetry book about the hats in the photo:  The Old Slouch Hat. The name of the hat reflects the way it is worn ‘slouching’ on one side while the other side is often pinned against the crown to allow a rifle to be slung over the shoulder.  It was worn by Australian soldiers in the Boer War and World War I, then again in World War II, and every war since.

The handwriting is my father’s but the words are by a ‘soldier in Tobruk’, Libya.  My transcription follows these images.

First verse of “The Old Slouch Hat” by a soldier in Tobruk, Libya, 1941
Fourth verse of “The Old Slouch Hat” by a soldier in Tobruk, Libya, 1941

 

The old slouch hat,
It’s not exactly glamorous,
The old slouch hat,
It’s not exactly chic.
But there’s something more than beauty,
A glorious tradition,
In the old slouch hat
That will ever to it stick.

*****

The old slouch hat,
It’s not exactly elegant,
The old slouch hat,
It might be rather plain.
But it showed the world the stuff
That Aus. sons were made of,
Did the old slouch hat,
And it’s doing it again.

Posted on

Weekly photo challenge: Journey

On-board, en route to or from the Middle East, 1941 or 1942

When I chose this photo of soldiers on-board a ship on its way to or from the Middle East in 1941 or 1942, I noticed, for the first time, the hat shadow.  And then I thought about Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and The Little Prince.  Perhaps Saint-Exupéry had seen soldiers’ hats when he was in North Africa in the 1930s.  If the on-board photo is flipped horizontally, the shadow looks just like the Little Prince’s “drawing Number One”:

Drawing Number One, "The Little Prince", A. de Saint-Exupéry

If you’ve never read his story, you won’t know that the Little Prince showed the grown-ups his masterpiece and asked them if his drawing scared them.  “Why be scared of a hat?” they asked.  But he tells us, “My drawing was not a picture of a hat.  It was a picture of a boa constrictor digesting an elephant.”

But back to the photo challenge:  these soldiers are going on (or have been on) a journey that most of them will regret.  Yet they look pretty relaxed here.  Actually, pretty hot.  They were probably travelling close to the equator.  My father wrote some poetic lines about the boredom and wretchedness of being on-board a troop ship for weeks at a time.  When you’re 20 years old and volunteer to go abroad to defend your country, it probably feels adventurous.  And then you sail off, no turning back.