A nice pair of postal covers from 1905

 

A nice pair of postal covers from 1905 posted in New Zealand and addressed to the Commercial Bank in Hobart, Tasmania. 

Note the postmarks on the rear of the envelopes to show when the letters were received in Hobart. It's slightly galling to realise that mail from Wellington to Hobart took about a week, if anything rather faster than today!

One of the envelopes has two red one penny stamps and the other only one.

If you look closely at the stamps you can see the phrase 'Universal Postage' under the allegorical figure of Zealandia

This is because in 1901 New Zealand introduced the universal penny post, where by a letter could be sent anywhere in the world for a penny (roughly A$0.80 today).

A lot of countries, including Australia, refused to participate in the universal penny post scheme for fear of bankrupting their postal systems, and insisted that the cost of sending mail to and from New Zealand should remain at two pence (roughly A$1.60 today, or a little more than half the actual cost of sending a letter from Australia to New Zealand today).

There is also a little bit more of historical interest.

Each envelope has had a hole punched through it - it was common practice in offices of the time for correspondence or invoices once dealt with to be placed on a spike before filing, as in this rather bent example from the dispensary in Dow's pharmacy in Chiltern

The Commercial Bank was founded in Melbourne in 1866 and operated until 1982 when it merged with the Bank of New South Wales to form Westpac.

The Commercial Bank did not operate in New Zealand until 1912, but as can be seen, it had business dealings in New Zealand before then.

Where's the time gone

 At the start of this year I made a sort of resolution to try and post something diary-like roughly every fortnight.

Well, this month there's been a bit of a hiatus. Not that I haven't been busy, but it has all been bits and pieces - for example up at the Athenaeum it's been itsy bitsy bits of administrivia around funding, and getting purchases approved by funders.

There's been no real progress with recataloguing the collection - I'm increasingly minded to do some of the work myself as part of a 'pilot study' that sort of turns into a guerilla recataloguing exercise and gradually drag other people into the process, rather than continuing to work on a formal project plan that will probably go nowhere and seems likely to become mired in endless discussions about funding etc.

Certainly, the idea of getting volunteers to help with the work seems a non-starter. One of the problems of living in a rural area is that we actually have a very small talent pool to draw on. 

While we have hordes of tree changers in the area, they are on the whole more interested in dying fabrics and making pots from local clays than recataloguing a few thousand books. Nice people, who would undoubtedly bring great enthusiasm to the project, but who are lacking the basic skills required, and who, less face it, are not that interested in what will be a rather boring and repetitive task.

At the same time we went down to Melbourne for a couple of days.

You may remember we had had a trip in July which turned into an endless set of public transport cock ups which included a medical appointment for J.

Well J had to go back for some tests, so we decided to drive, especially as she might be a bit wobbly after the tests.

Personally, I loathe driving in Melbourne, but sometimes you just have to suck it up and get on with it.

As it was, it turned out to be one of our better decisions as the hospital rescheduled the tests from the afternoon to the morning at the last moment, so we drove down the night before accepting that we would be donating several of our less essential body parts to cover the cost of overnight parking in the city.

We rationalised this to ourselves by saying we might go to Ikea on the way back to pick up some bits and pieces.

As it was, J was a bit wobbly, so we skipped Ikea, and after a quick stop in Doncaster to pick up something for dinner headed straight back home.

Otherwise, it's not all been bad. Spring, having spent well over a month teasing us over its imminent arrival, seems finally to have got its act together arrived properly, and I've been busy in the garden, planting, pruning and weeding, something that is good for the soul, scrabbling around in the dirt...

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.