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 ...

Maybe, just maybe, spring is coming

After what seems like an endless winter, although in reality it has only been a couple of months of freezing weather, punctuated by the occasional multi-day downpour of freezing sleety rain, there are signs that spring is coming.

While it’s still cold at night, the afternoons are beginning to actually feel warm, warm enough to sit out in the sun, even if sometimes you need a jacket to shield yourself from the chilly wind off the mountains.

And even though it's still chilly after dark, we managed a barbecue sitting under the stars, drinking wine and talking, even if we were wearing puffer jackets and beanies.

Certainly the magpies think spring is on the way, squabbling and fighting over nest material, and the parrots are beginning to cheep and squeak the way they do when they are feeling amorous.

Nothing much is happening in the garden yet, except that the broad bean plants have begun to poke their heads up and the kale plants I started off in early winter are beginning to come on.

Up at the Athenaeum, we are in limbo with the recataloguing project, it’s a big job, and we are investigating if we can get some museum or library interns to help.

As always we have no money, the Athenaeum runs on a shoestring, and being in a fairly remote rural area we don’t have that much of a talent pool to draw on, although I’m sure there must be some retired librarians or English teachers we can persuade to get involved.

Otherwise we took down our successful winter exhibition about apple growing in the region on Friday.

We had had a mystery object competition

no one guessed the correct answer, so we decided to give the prize to the funniest suggestion - a device to train snakes to perform circus tricks.

The actual answer is that they were bottle cutters - you heated up the ring and slipped it over a wine or beer bottle. When the ring cooled it compressed and cracked the bottle, leaving you the top section that could be used as a plant cloche, and the bottom could be filled with kerosene and a floating wick to protect delicate plants from frost.

The bottle cutters (and a few other objects to do with the early twentieth century apple trade) are not ours, and were borrowed from farmers in the region who found them at the back of various sheds.

We’ve made the decision to fully document them before returning them, and then perhaps work with the owners to find some local collecting institution - which we are not - to add them to their collection before the knowledge of their purpose and provenance is lost forever

Should have been easy ...

We had a simple plan for a couple of days mid week in Melbourne.

J had a medical appointment and it was three or four days after her birthday, so we thought it would be fun to have a couple of days in the city and take in the French Impressionists exhibition at the NGV.

We booked the train, and booked the cats into the cat motel for three nights as we’d be back too late to collect them.

Turned up at the cattery, and they had lost the booking.

However they had space free so we checked the mogs in. So far so good, and the cattery did call us later to say that they’d found the booking and apologised for the inconvenience.

Then on to the bus to take us down to the train station at Wangaratta.

As always it turned up five minutes late.

However, we had a shock when the bus driver asked us where we were going.

“Melbourne, Southern Cross”, we said. 

“There’s no trains” he said.

It turned out that the trains had been cancelled due to an incident involving the fire brigade.

So off we went down to Wangaratta.

When we got there, V/Line had swung into emergency backup mode.

Our bus, the bus from Beechworth, was going express straight to Southern Cross - we were to stay on board for as soon as they loaded up some of the other people going to Melbourne we were off down the freeway to Melbourne.

V/line did an excellent job sorting the problem and getting us there, but the bus wasn’t ideal, a bit past its use by date, with cramped plastic synthetic leather seats, a tiny toilet designed for a dwarf at the back. It was kind of like being stuck on RyanAir or AirAsia but with less space.

On the way out of Wangaratta, we passed a group of fire trucks and police utes clustered around a crossing on the train line. I’m guessing that whatever the problem had been, that had been where it was.

Despite my quibbles about the bus, it drove at a steady 110km/h most of the way down and deposited at Southern Cross a little before 4.30pm.

Now, we had a little problem. J had lost her Myki card, or perhaps more accurately couldn’t remember where she put it after the last time we came back from Melbourne, so we’d phoned it in a day or two before, reporting it as missing.

Normally they send a replacement card in the mail, but as we were travelling to the city, they had said we could pick up a new one at the Public Transport service centre in the train station.

That worked really well, we showed a nice friendly lady the email saying we had reported the card lost, and she issued J a replacement card on the spot.

That was the good bit. The bad bit was that J noticed in the service centre a big sign saying that trains on the Hurstbridge line were suspended due to a derailment at Clifton Hill.

We’d splurged a bit and booked the Pullman in East Melbourne because it had been J’s birthday a few days before (which was why news of the derailment had totally passed us by) and because it’s bang opposite Jolimont train station on guess what, the Hurstbridge line.

Our idea had been to get the train to Jolimont.

Jolimont station - no trains

Obviously that wasn’t going to happen, and peak hour was beginning to rumble into action, which meant the tram, never a good idea with travel bags, was really not going to be an option.

So we jumped on the train to Flinders Street and grabbed a cab from the taxi rank outside. Ten bucks later we were checking  into out hotel.

So far so good.

Our plan had originally been to go out for dinner, but we were knackered and ended up eating in the hotel, and very good it was too. Not the cheapest, but good.

The next day was dull and cold as it often is in Melbourne at this time of year. We had initially planned to go down to the city centre on the tram, but the day was so grey and dispiriting we contented ourselves with brunch at the East Melbourne branch of Laurent - the people who do a lot of artisan breads and so on - and a walk down Bridge Road and then loop back through the gardens, while J reminisced about living in a flat in Clifton Hill while she was a student and riding her bike to Uni through the gardens some time in the Seventies.

Along the way we stopped off at a pharmacy for something and noticed quite an amazing display of old pharmacists bottles on a shelf above the 21st century display items (ever since I documented Dow’s I’ve had a thing for nineteenth century pharmacists’ bottles and jars…)

Basically, we then continued our wander up Bridge Road - lots of empty shops - and then back to the hotel for an hour or two before J’s medical appointment.

That evening we ate at Gepetto’s trattoria - a wonderful traditional family run restaurant - good solid traditional Italian food.

The next day started out with J having a group call with Canada as part of a specialist art course she’s doing.

After that we rattled down to the NGV on the tram for the French Impressionist’s exhibition - like all NGV winter exhibitions it was too crowded - the NGV really don’t seem to have realised that if you sell timed tickets for exhibitions you should cap the numbers in each time slot, and not allow walk ins to buy tickets at busy times.

The exhibition was good, though not brilliant, a few Monets and Pisarros and the odd Renoir.

There were people taking pictures, but J, being an artist, probably confused people by taking close ups of brush strokes and the like as exemplars of the artists’ techniques rather than the pictures themselves.

Because it had been J’s birthday a couple of days before and it would be our wedding anniversary at the end of the week we treated ourselves to a genteel but overpriced lunch in the gallery and a glass of bubbly, followed by a walk round the new acquisitions and a couple of the other galleries of nineteenth century British art, before catching the tram back to the hotel to pick up our bags and get a taxi down to Southern Cross, the main rail station in Melbourne.

Knowing that V/line’s attempts at catering on long distance trains are sporadic and unexciting we picked up some sandwiches from the Woolworths Metro before boarding the train.

The train left on time, arrived in Wangaratta on time, and apart from a slightly annoying child who clearly had behavioural problems, relatively pleasant.

Wangaratta station was a surprise though.

For the last ten years passenger trains in either direction have stopped at platform 1 outside the old ticket hall. As there’s only three passenger trains each way plus a couple of NSW XPT’s that wasn’t a problem.

However this time it was different. As part of the redevelopment of the line they’s built a new platform, platform 2 surprisingly enough.

Now our connecting bus to Beechworth left, as it always has, from outside the old station building on platform 1 and there was no obvious way from getting from platform 2 to platform 1.

However a kind lady, seeing our confusion told us there was a lift at the far end of the platform (aren’t they always) down to the underpass to save us having to drag our bags round the station precinct.

The bus back to Beechworth was slightly late, but was not crowded and delivered us back home on time.

After that it was a case of putting the heating on, a couple of whiskies and a nibble, and then to bed.

It should have been an easy trip, but the problems, none of which were really anyone’s fault made it more of a hassle than it should have been …

 

A fairly flat fortnight

 The last two weeks have continued cold, possibly even colder than the previous two. To add to the joys we've had freezing rain and sleet on and off. 

Games have most definitely been off. Even the cats have refused to go outside and there is no point attempting any serious gardening, although our Siberian kale has sprouted. (The Tuscan kale also sprouted a few days after the Siberian kale, but grudgingly and reluctantly. Of the chard and beetroot, there's no sign, we need a few days of sun and comparative warmth.)

It's been the sort of weather where your inner child hopes for snow, if only for an hour or two, but instead we have days of depressing wet chilly greyness.

Talking of snow, apparently they did get a dusting up at Stanley, but it had all disappeared by the time I was up at the Athenaeum yesterday putting in an hour or three on the publishers list.

It was however cold, so cold that even at midday the wash hand basin in the outside public toilet was still full of ice.

Other than that I've done very little other than go down an internet rabbit hole in pursuit of some anarchists who cycled across Europe to beg a meeting with Tolstoy.

As in all of these stories there is a nugget of truth - the anarchists did meet with Tolstoy in the middle of winter, but it's unlikely in the extreme that they rode their bicycles across Europe in a freezing winter to get there.

I'm still trying to get my head around Constance Garnett and her involvement with the Russian exile community, and had been researching Louise and Aylmer Maude, who as well as competing with Garnett in the translation of Tolstoy's novels, were Tolstoyan utopianists, and had more in common with William Morris's idealistic view of a world dominated by small self governing communes of artisans, rather than the more classic form of state capitalism envisaged by the Russian revolutionaries of the 1890s.

It was while researching the Maudes that I came across the loopy tale of the bike riding anarchists - it's the sort of footnote to history one wants to be true, even if it can't be.

I also had a little triumph as regards home maintenance.

I was cooking dinner while J was in the bath, and I heard a shout. The bath tap knob had fallen off when she tried to turn it off - we have one of these multi degree of freedom taps - left right for hot cold and up down for on off.

I pushed the knob back on and that at least let us turn the tap off.

On inspection I found that if you unscrewed the adjustment lever from the tap boss there was a little otherwise inaccessible grub screw that had slackened.

The screw needed to be adjusted with an allen key.

Now I had plenty of allen keys from assembling flat pack furniture and routine bike maintenance, but they were all too big, but fortunately I found one of a fine enough gauge in a box of left over computer spares, and once I had an allen key that fitted, it took only a minute or two to disassemble the tap, remount the knob and reassemble the tap.

Job done. 

And I felt extremely pleased with myself for fixing the problem.

Now, we have the same tap in the main shower and the little guest shower in our second bathroom, so I've invested in a set of allen keys, so that if it happens again I won't need to spend half an hour furiously scratching about looking for a hex key that might fit ...

The first two weeks of winter ...

 So how's the past two weeks been?

In one sense the big news, my finishing the cataloguing of Lake View House for the National Trust was underwhelming.

I'd told them before the close off meeting that I was going to resign, having worked myself out of a job, so it was simply a matter of quickly reviewing what had been done, shaking hands, and exchanging a few pleasantries.

I was far more excited by my finally building a workbench out of recycled materials in the outside studio.

And then the weather turned cold, then cold and wet, then even colder - the last few days we've been waking up to a thick layer of ice on the cars in the morning, and the heat pump has only just been coping in the mornings, but it's unusually cold for Beechworth so hopefully it will warm up a tad to normal winter chilliness.

All this cold and wet weather has of course meant no gardening, but it has allowed me to delve into how a 1890s Russian exile support group inadvertantly led to the popularisation of nineteenth century Russian literature in England, mostly through the work of Constance Garnett.

I've been finding that this delving into anti tsarist politics has been helping me brush up my very rusty Russian language skills, which is useful - for what I don't know, but I'm sure I'll find a use for them somewhere.

Up at the Athenaeum, it's been the grind of working through the supposed publishers and creating a controlled vocabulary.

I'm finding so many errors that the whole collection probably needs to be recatalogued, but for the moment it's a pretty mechanical exercise, chasing down obscure nineteenth century publishers. It's also a problem that, Australia being a small place then - the population at around Federation was only about four million - smaller short lived Australian publishers from the nineteenth century left little or no trace.

But even so there are snippets of interest.

Besides an 1863 edition of Darwin's Origin of the Species, there's an 1863 edition of Huxley's Lectures to Working Men, which is essentially a defence of Darwinian evolution, and an 1869 edition of Fritz Muller's (the discoverer of Mullerian mimicry) Arguments for Darwin, suggesting that one or more of the subscribers to the Athenaeum library was taking an active interest in evolutionary theory.

It also suggests there may have been an active Natural History group in and around Stanley, and tracing them and their meetings might give an insight into life in the goldfields after the gold began to run out and Stanley became a more settled community.

And along the way I've had a minor family history triumph, recovering some missing photos of J's ancestors from a twenty five year old CD-R, which is normally considered the upper limit for standard non archival CD's.

Not that I can claim any great technical skill, it was pure chance that the scruffy machine that lives in the outside studio that I use when I need to look something up had a working CD drive that could actually read the disk.

Still, all good experience...