Putting the beach in Beechworth

 Our nearest ocean beach is a four and half hour drive away on the other side of the Australian Alps.

It's a long drive and too far to go just for a swim in the ocean, but we do have a beach at Lake Sambell.

Lake Sambell is an artificial lake, well really a large pond,  on top of the old 1850s gold diggings. Despite being an artificial lake it's ecologically good, supporting a population of fish, ducks and moorhens, and has a flow of water through it which means it doesn't go stagnant.

All of which means, providing you don't mind sharing with the resident waterfowl, you can swim in it. Moreover we have about 10 metres of gritty sandy beach in a bay, with a little car park and picnic area.

So, since yesterday was stupidly hot in the afternoon and today was forecast to be much the same, we were up at 0630, yes on a Sunday, and jumped in my battered old Subaru and drove down to the beach.

It was almost deserted, only a couple of other cars in the car park, and some people who had ridden their bikes down to the beach as part of their morning bike ride.

Strangely no one seemed to be swimming except for one guy who'd been in for an early morning swim.

 Apart from some people in a canoe, we had the lake to ourselves - the water was cool, not cold, clear except for the odd bit of weed and duck feather floating on the top.

We didn't swim seriously, but did enough to get the blood flowing and our bodies moving, and felt a hell of a lot better for it...

Finally, a bike ride

 In summer I like to ride my bike round town early in the morning - usually about 10km - as well as exercise I take pleasure in the flocks of nameless little birds feeding on grass seed on the verges and  rabbits bounding suicidally across the road near the golf course.

Last year, my summer bike rides were cut short due to my sclerotherapy, and this year I despaired of getting out on my bike due to the seemingly endless rain we had in spring.

Well, today I finally got out on my bike, setting off just before seven and weaving through the people setting up stalls outside the Anglican church at the top of Church Street for the monthly farmer's market, down the hill, up Mellish street and back along the bike path.

A little bit of a shorter ride than usual, and I'm not sure of my performance as I forgot to put my fitness tracker into bike riding mode, but an enjoyable little ride before it got too hot.

My ambition is to build my fitness and stamina from here out with the aim of repeating my ride to Baarmutha station, and perhaps a bit beyond by early Autumn ...

Amazing, an almost normal Christmas break ...

 

Well for what seems the first time in ages, we’ve had a relatively normal Christmas and New Year break.

No bushfires, pandemics, unseasonable hailstorms, surgeries or anything else, just a normal warm sunny Australian summer.

Well, actually, no.

As always at this time of year, some days have been stinking hot, and I’ve used these days when it’s been too hot to work in the garden to blog about a postcard from 1886 I recentlyI bought, plus a couple of speculative posts about the use of female agents by the British special branchat the beginning of the twentieth century.

Other than a morning up at the Athenaeum, where even though we are having a break we open up the building for visiting family history researchers – we recognise that this can be the only time people can get away for a field trip, so we open up for a couple of hours on a Friday morning during January.

Anyway, this was one of my Fridays providing cover, and yes, we did get a visitor, a lady researching her family history who was trying find some house sites – road get renamed, buildings get abandoned and fall down, and we had a good conversation with her about local history and gold miners.

I’m back down at Lake View for a day next week, when hopefully I’ll get the surgery finished, which only leaves one other room in the main house to do...

It's a wrap !

 Yesteday I went down to Lake View to get a day's work in - I'd hoped to finish the medical instruments in the display case but didn't quite get there but I did sort of finish on a high note with a beautifully made set of male uretheral dilators made by Franz Hajek in Vienna around 1890

The set is interesting as it  belonged to a Dr Charles Fitzmaurice Harkin (it's his name on the box) who bought Lake View in 1890 as well as the medical practice associated with it from a Dr Walter who was to die a year or so later in mysterious circumstances.

Harkin didn't stay long at Lake View buying another house in Chiltern in 1892 and moving his practice there.

What's interesting of course is the Dr Harkin's instruments are one of the few items in the house collection that has a direct demonstrable connection to the house.

Identifying the instruments has been fun - I've been using Google Lens to help me identify the objects but even then it had been a little hit and miss, with objects being misidentified as car components, or else over identified - one set of forceps looks much like another, but another annoying feature of Google Lens is for it to be overly exact.

If it only has ovarian forceps in its data set, it will identify the objects as ovarian forceps, even if there are also instruments of a similar design used for a different purpose. As I've said elsewhere it's best not to accept the results uncritically.

At the Athenaeum, all we did was go out for a Christmas lunch, which was enjoyable but I've been thinking about those damned prayerbooks and the use of pencil, which lead me to put together a little blogpost about the use of pencil in the latter half of the nineteenth century.

And that's probably it for 2024 ...

Amazing - no rain

 For the first time in what seems like ages we've had a week without rain, which has given me a chance to make a start clearing all the weeds that have sprouted  in our last few weeks of wet muggy warm weather.

There is of course a downside, we are forecast to get temperatures in the high thirties/low forties over the next few days which means a lot of watering not to mention early morning gardening before it gets too bloody hot.

Hopefully, once this burst of hot weather has passed, it will be cool enough in the mornings to let me out on my bike for an early morning ride.

Up at the Athenaeum, I've been doing some more work checking the quality of the data in the heritage book collection, and an hour or so's work has convinced me that the whole collection will have to be checked as there's quite a few incomplete entries, and while we can trace the books online, we still need to check whether we've identified the correct edition from the incomplete information.

There's also been some more work on the deconsecrated bibles and prayerbooks. No rude drawings this time but names to checked against a list of families known to be in the area in the 1860's after the community became formalised and ceased to be a mining camp with a floating  and often untraceable population, especially as the records of Miners Rights, ie mining licenses issued to individuals working on the goldfields, have largely been lost.

(It's an interesting little aside that while many of the prayerbook's owners' names are written in ink, most of the doodles are done in pencil - in the nineteenth century writing in ink required a dip pen and a bottle of ink - meanwhile pencil was much more spontaneous and didn't require anything special.)

We also have a little puzzle as to why a packet of Federal parliamentary papers dating from August 1980 was sent to the Athenaeum.

Trawling through the records of parliamentary business for August 1980, there's nothing that stands out other than some documents relating to the canned fruit industry, and even then there's no obvious link.

Given that included with the papers are committee reports on whale protection and regional television broadcasting my best guess so far is that someone who was particularly interested in these issues used the aegis of the Athenaeum to obtain copies of some documents they were particularly interested in.

Down at Lake View. I've been working on cataloguing some nineteenth century medical instruments, 

Like my work at Dow's it's a fairly mechanical process of pick an artefact, photograph it, generate a short description and also try to put some context around it, which is where Google Lens come in, as there's no real online reference guide to surgical instruments in the nineteenth century, which makes identification tricky.

I suspect that as surgical techniques have changed so much in the last one hundred and fifty years, any one without a knowledge of nineteenth century surgery would struggle ...

Not the best week...

 Well, obviously this week the main event was our internet router frying itself, but equally that's only of concern to those of us who were directly involved.

J, who had been working on the annual Arts Society exhibition, preparing the labels, a role which involved not only getting the labels for the artworks on display but also producing a set of checksheets, so that items delivered could be checked off against the list, titles and prices confirmed, and to make sure that the artists' contact details were correctly recorded, had a bit of a struggle when we were off line as Office of course wanted to save the documents to the cloud and couldn't.

As I've said elsewhere, having a machine with no external dependencies is a better solution for offline working, whether, like my distraction free machine, it's designed specifically for offline documentation work, or my Lubuntu machine, which come dependency free out of the box. However, neither solution gets you out of the hole when you lose the internet.

An ingenious work round, suggested by the local physio of all people, was to go to the library, save copies of the key documents to a USB stick, and the work on USB stick copies.

This worked, and what's more she could print the USB copies directly at the library, showing that sometimes sneakernet is best.

Down at Lake View I finished documenting the contents of the dining room and have moved on to the room that at one time served as a doctor's surgery and houses a mildly alarming collection of nineteenth century gynaecological instruments, all of which will need to be photographed using my cheap Temu light box - which should be fun, and a real test of the light box.

At the same time I've been working on and off on the heritage book collection, and reading through the spreadsheet, I've noticed a few inconsistencies and errors - perhaps the most spectacular being that Marian Halcombe is listed as the author of 'The Woman in White' - it should of course be Wilkie Collins, so it probably means checking each of the entries against the books themselves, which sound like a mammoth task, but actually, having once entered our book collection into LibraryThing shouldn't be that bad, especially with someone to help me with the reshelving.

entering books into library thing in 2011 using an eee PC701

And in the course of my readthrough or the spreadsheet I found we had a copy of The Opera House Murders - a 1930's mystery novel by Dan Billany . (Strictly speaking, it was published in 1940, but really belongs to the genre of 1930s detective mysteries)

The name seemed strangely familiar, and I'm not sure why.

Given that he was from Hull, my best guess, and it is only a guess, that they must have had a retrospective or some event about him at the University Library when I was a research student, but really, I've no idea.

Minor crisis - our internet router died ...

 I was sitting in my study on a Sunday afternoon, idly looking online for a Christmas stocking filler for J when web pages suddenly stopped loading.

I looked up and the google smart display I use for playing podcasts was offline, and then I realised that the internet modem was not showing any lights at all, but the fibre optic transceiver was still flashing away.

So I unplugged the modem, and plugged it into a different power socket. Still nothing.

Plugged it back in to the original socket. Definitely dead.

Now in the ideal world, I would pull out the portable internet modem I use when I’m cataloguing artefacts where there’s no internet, or even use my mobile phone.

But I couldn’t. Due to some quirk of topography we don’t have a usable mobile signal at home, especially since they turned off the 3G service. Normally we just use wifi calling and everything is fine, but of course we couldn’t. And because wifi calling and texting is usually ultra reliable, we don’t have a mobile booster or anything like that.

Just to add to the fun, it was a Sunday afternoon, and anywhere with public wifi, like the town library, was closed.

So I walked up to a park next the town hall where I could get a signal, and contacted our ISP, Telstra, via their messaging app.

Well it was a half hour wait, but they did call me back, ran some tests, and agreed it was probably the router.

One of their standard tests they ask you to do is press reset on the modem for fifteen seconds, which I hadn’t done.

So even though it was pointless I walked home and did the test, having arranged for they to call me back in 20 minutes. Then back to the park to wait for the call.

I guess I could have lied, after all the device gave all the appearance of being as dead as a doornail, but who knows, weird things sometimes happen with routers.

They did call me back, agreed the unit was dead, and as it was still under warranty, they would ship me a replacement, but it would be Thursday at the earliest before they could get a replacement unit to me.

This of course left us with a problem.

No internet meant no phones, no internet radio, no access to all our documents stored in the cloud, including all J’s documents for an exhibition she was working on, or since I was due for an eye test on Monday, my previous optical test results.

I couldn’t even go and collect a Christmas tree we had ordered as we needed to call the store in advance to confirm the item was ready for collection. Fortunately J had a local copy of the email on her iPad so we photocopied the iPad using a multifunction printer.

So, Monday morning when the library was open off to use their free and rather slow internet.

Look it worked, and while there were a lot of people using it, it let us do those things we had to do, check email and the like, make sure bills had been paid and all the rest, plus a lot of furiously writing down phone numbers in a notebook, all to the background of story time for three and four year olds - almost like working in a open plan office.

Then out into the park to make the calls we had to make, plus a chat session (again) with Telstra to confirm the delivery address, as well as a text message to say they’d increased the quota for router’s in built back up 5G connection.

Back at home we dug out an old boom box that J had had when she rented a studio at the old lunatic asylum for a few months, and that gave us radio - other than our emergency radio we realised that we didn’t own an AM radio any more - everything else was FM only or else a dedicated internet radio receiver or smart speaker that played the audio stream.

That afternoon I had to drive into town to go have an eye test. I could have cancelled it I guess, but I also had to collect the damn Christmas tree as the store understandably would only hold it for a few days.

So I drove in, got there early and sat in the shopping centre checking emails on my phone and then had my eye test.

As always they were worried about slightly high pressure in one eye ball, and wanted to do a more precise test test which involved putting anaesthetic in my eye.

I refused.

Last time I had the test, despite their cheery ‘it’ll wear off in ten to fifteen minutes” it was an hour until I felt it was safe to drive.

I did agree to have the test at a later date on a day when I have to come back into Albury to do some things and it doesn’t matter if I end up sitting in the Art Gallery cafe doing nothing much for thirty or forty minutes, and I should probably get a new pair of middle distance glasses - not essential but my prescription has changed sightly in one eye.

As it was I drove out to collect the Christmas tree, and got some really helpful advice when I showed them J’s photocopied iPad - apparently if you put the iPad into dark mode you get a much more usable copy.

Christmas tree collected, I then sat in the shopping centre carpark and scanned my optical prescription using Office Lens and uploaded it to Evernote, before heading home.

It’s an interesting experience being without the internet. It’s not that you can’t find ways round it, like using the library’s wifi, but it is a bit like the early nineteen nineties, but without things you had then, like a daily postal delivery, newspapers, AM radio, and of course only free to air TV.

Not having internet tv streaming is a bit of a pain - we have a liking for Scandinavian crime dramas and currently our Sunday night binge is watching a 20 year old version of Wallander on demand, but it’s not like we can’t do without our internet TV.

In fact it’s not a complete washout. Fortunately, we still have a TV antenna, and we can watch the free to air channels, but there was nothing of the Sunday night dramas we remembered - in fact the offerings were so dire we ended up watching a programme about a farm shop in the English Lake District purely as eye candy, followed by an early night. Monday was much the same - a travelogue about the Missisippi and then an hour or so reading a Catalan crime novel in translation.

Fortunately we both have a couple of part read novels on our Kindles, so we had some bedtime reading, and if we run out before the router is fixed we can always borrow something from the library.

Tuesday is the day I normally go down to Lake View in Chiltern for some cataloguing and documentation work.

There’s no fixed internet at Lake View, so I’ve been successfully using my 4G travel modem to allow me to back up my data to OneDrive as well as look up things as I work, such as potters’ marks and oil lamp manufacturers.

Well, we needed some shopping delivered - we normally get an order via Woolworths home delivery service for the bulk standard things like cat litter, toilet paper, kitchen roll and the like, as well as prepackaged things we’ve run out of.

So I went down to Chiltern about half an hour earlier than usual, set up, and did a Woolies order as well as reading my email and catching up on news.

And there was some welcome news - an email from Telstra saying they had dispatched our replacement router - via StarTrack - unfortunately the auto generated message didn’t have the StarTrack tracking number so I couldn’t use Australia Post’s tracking app to see where the package had got to, but experience suggested that if StarTrack had really picked up the item from Telstra's  Melbourne dispatch centre, there’s a better than evens chance it getting on a delivery truck from Albury the next day.

And things turned out better than they should.

Despite saying it was coming with Star Track it actually came with a different courier (Toll)  and arrived the next afternoon.

I configured it, and everything came back to life – sure a few things like the TV box in the bedroom needed a restart but basically everything was normal – all that remained was to send the old unit back to Telstra which I did the next day.

So what was it like being thrown back into the nineteen eighties?

Tough - like I said the real problem was that we didn't have all the things you had in the eighties, like landlines that worked even when the power was off, not to mention regular postal deliveries and newspapers.

But the other revelation was just how much of a time sucker the internet is, I reckon we got back an hour or perhaps an hour and a half by not having the internet to play about on ...