Since we don’t live by politix alone (I sincerely hope), what did people get up to this weekend? Join in, share some tales, regulars and lurkers all!
Life, Culture and Politics from BrisVegas
Larvatus Prodeo was an Australian group blog which discussed politics, sociology, culture, life, religion and science from a left of centre perspective. more»
Just finally got my arse out into the back yard to start hacking through the jungle and making it presentable again.
Removed about 12 metric shitloads of biomass from the perimeter: Good.
Moorpark apricot iz ded. Bad.
Cold, overcast day here in Freo and so a wonderful indoors reading-all-day day. Doris Lessing’s “Alfred & Emily” has taken me back to my own years in Africa, not in Rhodesia, but in Kenya in the early sixties. Usually for me Lessing brilliantly reveals the self, this latest book of hers evokes place and society. Her Rhodesia of the thirties and forties before the war of independence there was not unlike the Kenya I knew post Mau Mau when Uhuru had been proclaimed and when in 1963 Jomo Kenyatta became President of an independent Kenyan Republic, albeit within the British Commonwealth.
We lived in the capital Nairobi where my daughter was born in in 1962 and then in Eldoret where my son arrived two years later. Perhaps pregnancy and giving birth cocooned me from the realities of recent life there which many long term settlers were continually dramatically relating to me and which coloured their outlook for present and future.
Although until then inclined to introspection and self doubt I listened with surprising equanimity to their horror stories of African servants of long-standing loyalty betraying trusting and good bwanas and memsahibs to Mau Mau terrorists. Treachrously given keys to security gates they would burst in to dinner parties with drawn pangas to hack both masters and servants to bloody pieces.
Perhaps it was my having read newspaper reports of the Mau Mau uprising of the fifties before agreeing to accompany my new husband to Nairobi which made me inclined to be a bit sceptical of these accounts. Though vividly true in in some few cases, the overall picture was rather different. Final body count after a decade of horror headlines showed that some 36 Europeans, including security forces, were killed throughout the Mau Mau rising compared with more than thirty thousand Africans who died in its suppression and inter- tribal fighting.
With my good English working class scholarship girl attitudes I went to Kenya determined not to be a memsahib with servants. It took less than a month and queues of would-be house, cook and shamba boys begging to be allowed to clean, cook and garden for us before I became persuaded of my responsibility to employ.
And there began my four year idyll as an East African memsahib, free to relax and read and to pamper my thickening body, attend pre-natal classes and to really enjoy the birth and early years of my children’s lives. Mwangi, the house boy, Joseph the cook, Mary the ayah and a succession of shamba boys looked after us all. In retrospect I can see it staved off the inevitable strife of a bad marriage overstressed by domestic chores and sleepless nights which inevitably arose when we migrated to Australia.
It wasn’t just the leisure provided me by those so called servants which made that a happy time for me and gave my children a such a sound start in life. Those gentle African voices and their cheerful presence were a constant joy and support. They were uncomplaining and loyal to each other and always willing to laugh at and correct my efforts to learn Swahili. They were amused and thrilled as the children started to speak both English and Swahili and to translate for us.
I shed tears of the real regret one feels on leaving friends for ever as we drove away from Eldoret in our little black VW. Kenya looked to be so promising for Kenyans in 1968 though winds of change were blowing elsewhere through the continent.
Spinach pie in the oven, yummo
Interesting tales Patricia WA. Methinks worth a post or two.
Early to Farmers Market, got some nice kale, Belgian Chocolate tart and 5 hyacinth plants. Thought ‘bugger the obedience lesson and me and dog took lovely stroll around the parklands were the Victoria Race Park is situated.
Planted the hyacinths in the afternoon, naming them Hyacinth, Richard, Daisy, Onslow and Elizabeth
Made a batch of Thai fishcakes. Ate eight by myself, full to the gills now. Utterly delicious!
Saw ‘Balibo’ on Saturday, a brave and moving film about those events in Timor nearly 35 years ago. It’s a silent scandal that we still don’t know the truth of what happened, not only to the 6 Australians, but also the hundreds of Timorise who perished at the hands of the invading Indonesian army.
The film suggests that there was complicity by the Australia government at the time, in at the very least turning a blind eye to these tragic events.
adrian, while I think the Australian govt behaved very badly over the Indonesian invasion of East Timor (and may well have been complicit), Whitlam had a lot on his plate at the time. My recollection is that he was dealing with a Supply problem. He never had much interest in Foreign Affairs at the best of times.
I should add, I think it’s unconscionable that Whitlam hasn’t once, in the last 35 years, said something like, “Yeah, we fucked up on East Timor.” I know he’s a living saint and all, but still.
As an aside, one of the proudest moments of my life is when my mate Michael and I burst out of the crowd at one of the Moratorium marches in Adelaide and squirted Gough in the crutch with a couple of water pistols. We’d previously been carrying posters of Mickey Rat picking his nose for peace, which we handed off to some gullible, slightly younger, folk. That’s the Psychedelic Left for you! Responsible, with a capital I.
David Irving [no relation]
Just to reply to you about my GSIing nephew.
You wouldn’t know him, he got his degree and the first job he got was overseas from where he has just returned after some years.
Lucky lad has landed an excellent permanent job in his field and has promised me lots of map type goodies, I love maps.
Progressed well over the weekend with research. Hope to be able to have begun writing chapter three of book in earnest by this time next week. Few more books to buy, though. [Sighs: ah, the espense.]
One of the more fascinating, just received and devoured with glee, partly over the weekend, is – The Evelyns in America. Excellent for British army life in Boston, 1775. Unfortunately, most of the letter, memoirs, etc are from the officer class – not a lot of history from below stuff, though I have come across one I might order on Thursday.
Quietr Tv watching. Live a dull life.
Patricia WA, fascinating stuff about 1950s/1960s Kenya. (One place I’ve always beeb intrigued by. Since reading Robert J. Ruark’s books, way back when.
Yes, Patricia WA, very interesting and surely deserving of a longer post/s, if you have time that is!
Adrian @6 – Saw Balibo a week or so ago, when I came out of the cimema there were people crying in the toilets
Yes, my wife and I both felt emotionally drained.
Today it’s reported that Ramos-Horta wants his people to forgive the Indonesians and wants the UN’s Serious Crimes Unit disbanded so they can ‘put the past behind them’.
Haven’t been on here for a while but this weekend went to the new William Robinson Gallery in Old Govt House in Bris (belongs to QUT Gardens Point campus), and thought I’d mention as really worth a visit – amazing landscapes. Entry is free – apparently the collection will vary from year to year.
Ate gorgeous vege souvlaki dinner…mushrooms, squash, zuchinni, cherry tomatoes, capsicum, pineapple, tofu, pak choy, onion on kebab skewers…cooked in a sauce made w/ garlic, homegrown herbs & spices including parsley, oregano, rosemary, chillies…& quality balsamic vinegar and lemon juice that eventually caramalises. Put in souvlaki bread w/ hot sauce & tahini…or on bed of rice.
Watched final episode of The Life of Mammals on BBC HD. Amazing how many humans act like chimps.
Worth thinking about:
Attenborough visits Tikal, the capital of the Maya people, who achieved sophisticated advances in architecture, mathematics and astronomy. However, the Maya couldn’t sustain their population — and, Attenborough warns, we may be precariously close to a similar catastrophe.
“Three and a half million years separate the individual who left these footprints in the sands of Africa from the one who left them on the moon. A mere blink in the eye of evolution. Using his burgeoning intelligence, this most successful of all mammals has exploited the environment to produce food for an ever-increasing population. In spite of disasters when civilisations have over-reached themselves, that process has continued, indeed accelerated, even today. Now mankind is looking for food, not just on this planet but on others. Perhaps the time has now come to put that process into reverse. Instead of controlling the environment for the benefit of the population, perhaps it’s time we control the population to allow the survival of the environment.”
– David Attenborough, in closing
(Wikipedia)
N’
Officially had enough rain – our drought is broken, there’s water everywhere and it’s at the point now that more rain will cause harm, not good. What we’d like now is some generous early spring sunshine please.
so, rained in on the weekend so couldn’t tackle the veggie garden or other outdoor tasks. Bought lots of really good seafood instead and made smoked fish chowder, oyster stew and a wonderful traditional french scallops dish – gently poached scallops then baked in a rich garlic, onion, red wine and mushroom sauce that you’d think would overwhelm the scallops but doesn’t at all.
Rounded it out by making cornish fairings, and attempting to ameliorate any deleterious health effects by playing lots of Wii frisby golf.
I’ve been watching Steven Fry’s tour of America. Highly entertaining stuff, especially when his dry wit just goes straight over the head of the Americans..
wpd, Adrian and Paul thanks for your interest, but memory does lead one astray a bit after half a century! Re-reading my comment I see I suggested that people were optimistic about Kenya at that time. I think that’s hindsight. The optimism then centred around Uganda! There were great hopes for the Kabaka Freddie who had been educated at an English public school! The Colonial Office had somehow administered that country differently, cooperating with the existing tribal chiefs and their Kabaka. We all know now how things turned out.
There are times though when the political is truly and dramatically personal. I can recall the general pessimism at ritual Sunday club curry lunches about Nyerere in newly independent Tanganyka. In the Congo Patrice Lumumba was assassinated around that time. A neighbour came across to tell me about Dag Hammarsjeld’s death as I stood with a toddler in my arms admiring butterflies among our cabbages. Another time our cook and shamba boy came rushing in with stories of trains coming into Eldoret crowded with refugees fleeing violence in the Sudan.
Somehow none of that alarmed me. I felt quite safe driving alone with the children some sixty miles up-country to outlying farms to buy furniture crafted by local Indian fundis at auctions where old settlers from South Africa had settled after their discontent with the post Boer War settlement. Now they were planning to trek in caravans again, this time south, in trucks rather than wagon trains, and back to a South Africa which was more to their political taste under apartheid. They were now leaving a Kenya whose new President, Jomo Kenyatta, had not so long before been described (by Harold Macmillan?) as a “leader of his people into darkness and to death”.
Having none of the Boer or even East African settler baggage I was not myself unduly alarmed at the rate of Africanisation in the Kenyan public service imposed by the British colonial office. Not that is until we were burgled in our hitherto safe company provided bungalow on a boma of some twenty other European homes. Oddly the police arrived within minutes of my screams when being attacked by a slim, grey clad figure wielding a long, silver torch. I had surprised him riffling through cupboards in our adjoining seemingly vacant guest wing. Apparently there had been break-ins in neighbouring houses and the police were at hand. I formed the distinct impression that my attacker was himself a policeman and was later told that opportunistic theft by attending officers was becoming increasingly common.
This though was not the determining factor in our leaving for Australia. Hospitals, doctors and ancillary services had been first rate for the birth of our children. Gradually though the professionals had begun to leave. When my two year old son almost died at the hands of the one remaining doctor, notoriously prone to treat all illness as malaria related, diagnosed our baby’s simple diarrhhoea turned ulcerated gut as intestinal malaria I instinctively picked him up and left the hospital to take him sixty miles away to another more reliable GP who was herself on the verge of departure to the UK. Matt who had been starved for almost five days and weighed next to nothing did survive. My confidence that we could still be happy in Kenya did not.
We left as soon as paperwork and processes permitted. Those last two unhappy episodes though cannot dim my warm recollections of those few years with our African friends. I can still see them standing on the red dusty driveway waving goodbye and Joseph, like me, smiling through tears.
I wondered why the transcript of Qanda two weeks ago was still not on the interwebs.
Because it was the only decent program they’ve ever put to air?
It’s time to stop moping and START APOLOGISING!!
http://guttertrash.wordpress.com/2009/08/31/were-sorry-for-the-abuse-and-neglect-again/#comment-3678
Got woken up by a canon. Bloody defence force in the park again.
Oi, Lorna, don’t blame the defence force for that. Slate it home to the Catholic Church. They’re responsible for canons. The buggers will do anything to get you out of bed and into the pews on a Sunday morning.
Canon law is it GregM?
Bridge to Brisbane fun run for me… now very sore
hannah’s dad @ 9, see if you can get some Swiss maps out of your nephew. The Swiss make the most beautiful maps.
Was perplexed in Tokyo, lost in Ginza and thinking I’d found a polling booth for the election with about 50 private security guards around the building directing traffic and pedestrians: it turned out to be a Japanese TAB.
Bought three 16Gb memory sticks and an expensive dancing Sony Walkman that I accidently left behind in Tokyo.
Flight out of Narita was delayed by about an hour due to engine troubles, and the flight home was diverted because of a typhoon.
Not quite as good as the previous Sunday, which ended with me drinking beer with the Yakuza.
me drinking beer with the Yakuza.
in a big hot jakuzi?
No, outside a little pub that was behind the temple.
“I wondered why the transcript of Qanda two weeks ago was still not on the interwebs.”
It was, rummy, it later disappeared. Perhaps McKew’s brainsnap at the end may have had something to do with it?
Shame about ‘Art2Lunch’ being banned from 4ZzZ.
Perhaps you could blog on that Mark? Apparently they were banned by the board for breaching the Prostitution Act (1999), although the only possible section I could find is S93, and that would be totally bogus.
Here we are back in the Joh days but nobody cares because it’s labor doing the censoring, it seems.
“Shame about ‘Art2Lunch’ being banned from 4ZzZ.”…
I’d like to know about that too.
Breaching the prostitution act with a radio show??? Did they manage to work out an analog broadcast version of cyber sex or something?
If we’re mentioning things to blog about, it seems that the Cairns Magistrate’s court has chucked out the charge of procuring a miscarriage laid against the girl in question but has retained the charges against her male partner. There’s so much to comment on in that little tidbit that I’m not sure where to start…