Creaking back into normality

 If you ever want to invade Australia, do it in early January, when it seems like almost the entire country is on holidays.

When I was working, I never got into the holidays-in-January thing - it always seemed like an excellent time for major hardware and software upgrades - there was no one there to notice if you went over time, and then you could have time off in early autumn when the weather was still pleasantly warm and most places were fairly quiet - apart from the Labor day weekend that is.

Now I'm retired, we still prefer to go away in early autumn, so I've been down at Lake View, working on the displays of early medical instruments, and my nemesis, the Victorian hat box

This one was made of leather and designed to carry a top hat - one a little like the one worn by Churchill at the Sidney Street siege in 1911

this particular hat box came with a provenance, which is good, but unfortunately the provenance was wrong, not only did the supposed maker of the hat box die in 1814, when the hat box was supposed to date from 1825 or thereabouts.

I suspect that, like most other leather hat boxes for top hats it in fact dates from the 1850s when the top hat was popularised by Prince Albert,

Unfortunately the hat box is too fragile to open up to look for a maker's mark inside, so its date of manufacture will remain a mystery for now.

The original ownership of the box is not in doubt, and I suspect the story of its provenance has been garbled as it passed down through the family.

Interestingly, despite its original owner being Australian, and someone who died in 1909, it has a fragmentary Great Western Railway luggage label to Oxford on it

And that's another little puzzle.

The original owner was a wealthy grazier, who like many nineteenth century members of the squatocracy, never really considered themselves Australian and retired back to England to die.

However the puzzle is that stylistically, I would guess the use of a sans serif font would date the label to the 1920s, and not the Edwardian period.

I doubt that anyone would have gone to the trouble of sending a hat box, or indeed other personal effects back to Australia, so I am guessing that the original owner never took it with him and passed it on to a family member, and the GWR sticker is the result of one of the original owner's descendants taking the hat box with them on a trip to England.

But it’s not all been puzzles and fonts.

Up on the Athenaeum we've been working on the historic book collection and working out a methodology to improve the data quality, something which I find both intellectually demanding but strangely stimulating, but then I've always been a bit odd...

Meta, fact checking and social media

 Meta have announced that they are ceasing fact checking on social media posts.

People have predictably reacted by announcing that the sky is falling, but I don't think it is.

Moderation, in whatever form, reflects the cultural biases of those doing the moderating (try posting a picture of an Egon Schiele nude and see how long the post stays up if you have any doubts).

However, we need to think about the fact that with the exception of TikTok, all the major social media platforms, other than those in the Chinese and Russian walled gardens are owned by large American corporations, whose owners, for one reason or another seem to have an increasingly uncritical view of the incoming US administration.

Personally, I've always been of the view their company, their service, their rules, and if you don't like it, you leave - which is in part why I left social media eighteen months ago.

When I left, I did wonder if I was cutting off my nose to spite my face, but in fact I found I didn't really miss it, and with one exception not having a facebook, instagram or X account didn't really lock me out of anything

However, I do recognise that for some people social media and the contacts it  provides are highly valuable emotionally. I remember how isolated I felt as an angsty lefty teenager with an interest in science fiction, and can readily imagine that I would have found something like facebook highly valuable.

Which is why we need to move on from a simplistic anti social media position to one where we discuss the ownership and the role social media has in our society, and what the alternatives are ...

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 ...