The remembrance of books past

 A few days ago someone emailed me out of the blue to say that they'd bought a science fiction paperback from a used book store and it had a sticker with my name on inside the cover.

Curious, they'd googled me, found my cv online, and from that my email address.

I was so amazed that I tooted about the email and emailed the person back to admit that it was indeed me.

The story as to how my name ended up on a book from the early eighties is quite simple.

Back then I used to read a lot of science fiction, and as I used to lend them to people, started putting stickers inside, just as I did my more technical books on botanical surveying and the like.

Anyway, long story short, around about the millennium we decided to move permanently to Australia.

Everything that we brought with us had to fit in a single twenty foot container, including our nearly new washing machine, our equally new Habitat furniture, etc etc.

Not everything would fit, so we only brought the technical and specialised books that would be difficult to replace plus a few sentimental favorites, and the rest went to charity.

I thought I must have given my science fiction books to charity, but I remember that I gave them to the university science fiction society.

Obviously at some point they must have given the books to charity.

Now, what struck me about this episode is that, in the same way that when I was documenting the contents of Lake View I would some times try and trace the previous owners of the books used to dress the house, or trace the addressees of nineteenth century postcards picked up from ebay.

It's a sort of sleuthing.

When I do some family history stuff I try and do much the same, rather than simply recording births, deaths marriages and other relationships I try and form a picture of the individual, what they did, where they lived and what sort of world they lived in.

And of course for people who lived loved and died in the latter half of the nineteenth century and early part of the twentieth, there are digitised records, digitised newspapers and the like to show the world they lived in, so for example in the case of Fanny Elizabeth Bull, a young governess who was assaulted in 1885 on an underground train in Brixton, you find that the authorities did take the case seriously, with the railway company providing a lawyer to support Miss Bull.

And women travelling on their own is a reflection of a changing society, in which even middle class young women  might have jobs and go out to work.

And out of this one can build a picture of how a society functioned and the impact changes, both in the availability of transport and women's increasing freedom...

Rosella news

 Well it really does look like we have a pair of Crimson Rosellas setting up home in an old elm outside of our house - they've scratched and widened the entrance to a hole in the trunk and are simply just hanging about - I'm guessing they don't have eggs yet, otherwise they'd be taking it in turns to incubate them.

I did try and photograph them from a distance yesterday, but all I did was spook them, though they came back after a few minutes ...

Our bower bird is back

 

Our resident bower bird has come back from wherever he went to avoid the cold, has rebuilt his bower and is now raiding our peg basket for blue pegs.

At the same time, a pair of crimson rosellas seem to have designs on a hole in one of the 150 year old elms on our nature strip, so we might be in for a month or so's cheeping if they manage to raise some chicks...

Quite productive this week

 This has been quite a bitty week, catching up with not quite finished projects after a couple of weeks away in FNQ.

Shortly before we went to FNQ, I successfully installed a lightweight version of Linux, Crunchbang++, on an old Chromebook I'd bought earler this year.

This has turned out to be a success with the machine functioning as a lightweight minimal writing machine to put together text.

I'm basically working with it the way I did my paperless documentation of the kitchen at Lakeview - create a document either using Geany or AbiWord, upload it to Onedrive and finesse it on my windows machine.

Less successful was my installing Crunchbang++'s competitor, Bunsen Labs Linux, on an AMD Ryzen based machine with Radeon graphics.

At first it seemed to be impressive, but the screen would develop an annoying flicker in use.

Replacing Bunsen Labs with Ubuntu improved matters but was not a complete fix. After a voyage down a maze of twisty passages I ended up installing AMD's Ubuntu drivers over the standard Ubuntu set.

Doing this has more or less got rid of the flicker - it's possible to provoke it occasionally, but the display is as stable as it was under Windows 10, when the screen would occasionally go blank and recover.

Up at the Athenaeum it was basically administrivia, bushfire planning and the like. We've not yet had any movement on the recataloging project, but hopefully we can get that going over summer.

And, inspired by our trip to Cooktown, and the story of the Cooktown gun, I've done a little bit of work on the Russian invasion panic of 1885...

FNQ again

 We've had ourselves a little holiday, flying up to Cairns and Port Douglas like we did last year, and much of what we did was only really of interest to ourselves, and to be honest much of it was the same as last year, swimming in the warm Pacific Ocean from Four Mile Beach and staying in the same holiday apartments as last year.

We did manage to get out to the Reef, to Low Island, to go snorkelling one day, which was a blast with great shoals of trevally, angel and zebra fish, and far too many to count little fish, almost like going for a swim in an aquarium.

Low Isles lighthouse

Some things were a little different of course, one night in Cairns we ate at Little Sister, a Japanese fusion restaurant that I don't think was there last year, and Port Douglas didn't seem quite as busy with a few empty shops on Macrossan St, the main drag

Plant growing through floor of empty shop

and this year, instead of going to the Daintree, we went further north to Cooktown where we stayed at Mungbumby Lodge, an eco resort once patronised  by David Attenborough, and where we'd stayed in 2014 when we took our own car up to Cairns on the Sunlander, the last time you could take your car on the train

To get there of course we needed a car. Last year the rental car lottery delivered us a surprisingly impressive Haval Jolion. This year we ended up with an MG ZS with a tad under 60k on the clock.

When MG's - the Chinese made models made by SAIC, not the original British sports cars - started to be imported into Australia, people were disparaging, just as they were about Korean cars when they started being imported twenty five years ago, and while I never drove one of the earlier imported MG's, I had a ride in one once or twice and it's true, they sounded a bit rough and noisy, but then so did a Hyundai Getz when they first appeared.

Not this one. Quiet, comfortable, yes the automatic transmission could have been a little slicker, but the little MG not only could rattle along comfortably at 110km/h on the road up to Cooktown, it took the dirt and gravel road to Mungumby in its stride.

It's easy to see why it was the best selling small SUV in Australia for the last two or three years, and indeed why the more established manufacturers are increasingly abandoning the small SUV space - they simply can't compete on price and quality, certainly the little MG ZS was better than both the Ford Focus SUV and the VW Taigo we had in Europe in 2023 and had just as much luggage space.

While at Mungumby we had a day out to Cooktown to see the Botanic Gardens.

Cook's Monument, Cooktown

In 2014 when we visited Cooktown was a tatty, end of the road sort of place, a little run down, but all the more interesting for that.

Post cyclone, they've tarted up the waterfront a bit, but it still has a definite end of the road feeling.

There's one little puzzle though.

It used to be said that in the 1880's at the height of the Palmer River gold rush, Cooktown council panicked over the threat of Russian invasion, and requested help to defend itself.

At the time, Cooktown was a significant settlement with steamship links to China, and a telegraph link to the south. If search for 'Cooktown' in digitised newspaper reports of the time, a lot of the overseas reports are bylined as 'via telegraph by Cooktown' or something similar.

After the Panjdeh Incident  there was a major panic that there might be war with Russia and that the Russian Pacific fleet might be used to attack Australia.

The story goes that the government in Brisbane sent the town an old Napoleonic wars cannon, something that would be singularly useless in the defence of the town against the Russian fleet.

Cannon and crest

and certainly there is a George III era cannon in Cooktown.

The Russians were certainly in the area, as were the Germans occupying part of what is now PNG, and since Cooktown was an important port for the Palmer River goldfields, worries about the defence of such an isolated community were perhaps not as silly as they first sound.

However, the sign by the cannon has changed. It's now described as a gift from Queen Victoria, and furthermore it claims that the worries about Russian invasion originated from Townsville 700km to the south, and that there is no record in the council minutes of the time of help with defending the town being requested from the colonial government in Brisbane.

What the actual truth is, I don't know. 

But certainly there is a report in the Queensland Times from April 18th 1885 that the Cooktown Council passed a resolution requiring the Mayor to contact the Government in Brisbane to see if they would cover the cost of evacuating the women and children in the event of a threatened Russian attack.

Certainly I can see that people might have been worried about the defence of the town in the 1880's given the isolation of the community, and might also have requested help from the colonial government to defend the town.

Artefacts and memorabilia

 Up at the Athenaeum I had a fun morning documenting artefacts we had borrowed from various local orchardists  to form part of an exhibition we had on the local apple industry in the first half or so of the twentieth century.

Even though we are not a collecting institution we thought it was important to record the items and their provenance while there were still people around who knew and understood the significance of the older tools.

I basically used the same paperless methodology that I used documenting the kitchen at Lake View.

As such it worked well and let me practice my documentation skills.

I've also returned to one of my old interests, the first world war and have blogged both about a British propaganda postcard I picked up recently, as well as the history of the both the German and Austro Hungarian (really the Hungarian) coinage during world war one and after when they replaced the low value cupronickel coins with coins struck from iron.

And I had a technical triumph of which I'm quite proud - I managed to successfully upgrade an old out-of-updates Chromebook to linux, something that will hopefully extend the life and usefulness of the hardware.

And in a very real sense the workbench I made out of recycled materials has come into its own, giving me a space to disembowel computers, set up lightboxes and photograph artefacts etc.

It's quite refreshing to finally have a dedicated workspace after years packing equipment away in boxes and never having quite enough space to do things ...

Marmalade

 Way back in 2020, in the first winter of the pandemic when everything was locked down, and life was singularly depressing, I planted a blood orange tree.

For the first couple of years it did nothing much, but for the last two years it's produced a few decent oranges every year.

This winter it came good and produced a decent crop. 

Strangely the possums seemed to like them as well, so we had to mount a rescue operation and harvest them before they were decimated.

So, a few days ago we turned about half of them into marmalade, mixing them with calamansi's from the plant we have on the back deck.

They have produced a satisfyingly bitter traditional English style marmalade

as for the rest of the oranges - we sliced them up and dried them in a food dehydrator to add to cakes  and perhaps to soak in vodka further down the track for something truly decadent ...