George Robertson Glieg (and image manipulation)

 Yesterday I tooted that I had discovered an 1852  edition of George Robertson Glieg's the Subaltern in the Athenaeum's historic book collection.

Glieg  had an interesting career eventually ending up as Chaplain-general of the army and was also involved in the Canterbury association, an association of mid Victorian Anglican gentlemen and clergy that wanted to plant a godly Anglican colony on the south island of New Zealand, and who eventually settled what is now Christchurch in NZ.

Glieg himself never moved to New Zealand and spent most of his life in England.

Given that the date of publication - 1852 - is quite early and predates the founding of Stanley, we can wave our hands and say that it was probably one of the first books acquired by the Athenaeum, and the general historic interest around Glieg, it's a pity that my initial photograph taken with my phone for documentation purposes was quite poor.

The lighting in the Athenaeum is problematic, and tends cast shadows. The obvious answer would be to retake the picture using a light box to ensure even illumination, but in the meantime I decided to have a little play with ImageMagick to see if I could improve the image.

Why ImageMagick?

Two reasons. Most of the online image tweaking tools don't really do shadow equalisation - they can blur and remove shadows, but not normalize them, and besides they want you to sign up - often using your facebook/google/apple login credentials, and I'm not keen on that.

Secondly I have ImageMagick installed on the big old iMac I have running ubuntu.

So, first of all I did a simple command

magick glieg.jpg -auto-gamma output1.jpg

that improved things slightly but not massively, so I then took the output1.jpg image and reprocessed it further

magick output1.jpg -clahe 50x50%+256+2 outc.jpg

which produced a slightly better image

you can still see the shadow, but it's not quite so intrusive.

Getting there I went through several iterations - increasing the clip limit (the +2 part of the command) produces a more contrasty image which is great if you're trying to bring up pencilled graffitti, reducing it makes the image a little more even.

So, not ideal, but a valuable exercise - probably more useful for the doing than the result as I've also now got reasonable experience of image manipulation to bring up faint scripts and markings, as it this example where I cranked up the clip limit to +7

And we've bought a dvd player...

 A day or so ago I tooted a link to an article from the NYT about rediscovering a DVD player and its advantages over streaming.

Well, we’ve been on a similar journey, and have just bought a DVD player to replace our broken fifteen year old unit. (Actually, we bought one twice - we'd forgotten about needing a multi-region player to watch overseas dvds - so we've now got a second dvd player connected to our old tv in the studio)

Now, we are not luddites. We have a fibre optic NBN connection and watch most of our tv as on demand tv - not that we watch a lot of tv, basically the evening news and an hour or two of recreational tv most nights - foreign language crime dramas and BBC classic dramas mostly. 

But, we live in a rural area. A trip to the cinema or the theatre involves an eighty kilometre round trip, and to be honest, the local cinemas are not known for their art house films, and we only get a touring Shakespeare performance once a year.

The content we tend to watch, classic movies, adaptations of classic novels, foreign language art house films and the like tend to spread fairly thinly over the various streaming services available.

And it was a friend who was volunteering at a community op shop that put us on to the fact that there’s a robust trade through op shops as well as ebay and other online trading sites on second hand dvd’s, mostly sitting around $10 - cheap enough to turn into a coaster if it’s a dud disk - making the cost of a multi region dvd player and few second hand dvd’s competitive with the cost of a streaming subscription, where basically you pay for content you don’t watch.

And of course, we can share dvd’s once we’ve watched them with friends...

 

 

Another day at the cataloguing coalface

 Earlier this year we had a problem that none of the insect traps in the historic book collection had been checked since who knows when.

Well we cleaned up, replaced the moth traps with new ones, and waited.

Well today's been three months since we replaced the traps. The moth attractant still smells when you open up the traps to check but there's no evidence of insect intrusion.

Now it has been winter here in the southern hemisphere, which meant fewer flying beasties, but it's now well into spring and there are definitely bugs about.

But the lack of evidence of insect intrusion is a good sign and suggests that we did not have a developing infestation during the period when the traps were not being checked regularly.

We've decided to leave the traps as is until the end of January and do a second check, at which point we'll replace the traps again.

Otherwise the mix has been much as before with Victorian era sensation novels, some sourced second hand from Mullens, golden age mystery novels, and the odd romance, but also a new trend

with the development of the cold war in the 1950s, spy and espionage novels start to make their appearance.

The actual cataloguing process using LibraryThing is working well, but I've moved from using their aggregated Overcat catalogue to using the National Library of Scotland catalogue.

The NLS catalogue has pretty good coverage of the period that the historic book collection covers although some of the entries are quite sparse and sometimes require to be cross checked with the British Library catalogue and the National Library of Wales catalogues.

One slight source of annoyance with the NLS catalogue is that where and author uses a pseudonym, the catalogue 'corrects' it to the author's true name - for example if you catalogue  The silence of Dean Maitland by Maxwell Gray, the catalogue will correct the author's name to Mary Gleed Tuttiet.

Other library catalogues do not do this - it's obviously been a perfectly justifiable design decision by the NLS.

However as the book is filed under G, the author name on the spine, I usually correct the author's name back to the pseudonym and add a comment about the use of a pseudonym and point to a suitable source, usually wikipedia.

Otherwise it's been a pretty productive week. It's been surprisingly cold for October after last weekend's rain, so I havn't done a lot of gardening although I did cut the grass one day. 

My seedlings are going well and my tomatoes will soon need to be potted on for a second time, although the possums have totally decimated my broadbeans.

However, the potatoes are doing well and so far, touch wood, they've left the runner beans alone. I've started a second lot of broad bean plants in pots with the aim of growing them to a possum proof size before planting them out.

I also did a little bit of blogging this week - first about Holderness - and then by a strange but totally explicable link, zeppelin raids on the UK during world war one.

The link is the little town of Howden, that lies to the west of Hull on the north bank of the Humber, and while it's not in Holderness as such the landscape share the same flat open countryside as seen further east, and came to mind while researching both Holderness and zeppelin bases.

I can't say that I ever stopped in Howden, but when we lived in a village to the east of York, the easiest way to get to either the M62 or M18/M1 freeway was to drive south to Howden rather than drive towards Leeds and jiggle about in usually heavy traffic.

Howden was the site of the major British airship base during world war one and later the site of Britain's ill fated attempt to build an airship to match Germany's expertise in the field.

In Holderness

 

A few days ago I tooted a link about ghostly goings on in Holderness, the wild windswept flatlands to the east of Hull in England.

At the time of my toot, I was interested in the fact that  Martinmas coincided with the time around Halloween, and that many of the features of traditional Martinmas celebrations in Germany – turnip lanterns for one – are the same as I remember as part of Halloween, when I was a child on the east coast Scotland, and before Halloween became the homogenised Americanised thing it is today.

Today, Martinmas is celebrated on 11 November, which is of course Remembrance day, something that seems strangely appropriate with its associations with the dead and with ghostly goings on.

Not the cartoon ghosts going ‘woo-woo’, but ghosts as the Romans understood them, those who had died an unquiet death and still walked the earth.

Holderness is itself a strange lonely place, and somewhere I vaguely know.

When I was doing research at Hull University in the very early nineteen eighties, I would sometimes ride my bicycle east from the city to a landscape of windswept fields running down to small coastal villages and old medieval churches hidden away in country lanes and the ruins of abandoned monasteries, left behind after the English Reformation.

At other times, I would get a bus to somewhere on the coast (at that time country buses were still cheap and plentiful, even on a Sunday) and walk along the cliff top path to somewhere else before catching the bus back to Hull.

Marvellous for clearing the mind.

Later on when we lived in York, we would tend to drive to Flamborough and Whitby rather than Holderness for our coast walks, but sometimes we would drive south towards Withernsea, notable for having a lighthouse in the middle of the town – not as daft as it sounds, at the time the lighthouse was built it was surrounded by sand dunes, and the lighthouse was built set back from the coast to protect it from the risk of erosion.

Later, the development of tourism meant that the town crept east to the new promenade, with its railings strangely reminiscent in design of those used at Bondi Beach, leaving the lighthouse in the middle of the town.

Withernsea Lighthouse - geograph.co.uk via wikimedia commons

The other thing, and the reason why we would make the detour to Withernsea was that Withernsea had an excellent fish and chip shop which then, twenty five years ago, bizarrely had a NSW Maritime Services fish identification chart on the wall.

In winter, when the clouds scudded and the wind blew it was a wild and atmospheric place, somehow still strangely isolated

Eve, by S Baring Gould

 Sabine Baring Gould was a priest, a collector of folk songs and a prolific late nineteenth century novelist.

His books are mostly forgotten now, but one of his books was undoubtedly the star of today's cataloguing session up at the Athenaeum

simply because it was published and printed by George  Robertson and company in Australia in 1888.

Quite a few of S Baring Gould's novels were published by Chatto and Windus in London, and I've previously found evidence that George Robertson was producing yellowbacks in Australia using the stereogrphs of the Chatto and Windus yellowback editions - the stereograph being a papier mache squeeze of the plates for the original book from which new plates could be made. (incidentally Rawlinson used the same squeeze method to copy monumental cuneiform inscriptions carved into cliffs in Iran).

Unfortunately our edition of Eve has been rebound, so it is impossible to tell what the original binding was, but the paper is reasonably good quality suggesting that while it might have been reprinted via a squeeze, it was something more than a yellowback.

Other than that it was mosly 1950's romance novels today, along with one or two nineteen thirties crime and mystery novels, but we have even more proof that hygenic libraries were still a thing in the nineteen fifties

The Melbourne Mudies...

 

I was quite intrigued by the use of the phrase The Melbourne Mudie's.

Half an hour searching through Trove not only revealed that Mullen's used the phrase in their own advertising, but that it had entered common parlance. A number of articles used the phrase in contexts such as groups of ladies outside the Melbourne Mudies, suggesting that it was in common use and used as an alternative to Mullen's...

Friday at the Athenaeum...

 

Well it's been an interesting morning up at the Athenaeum.

As I've established, the Athenaeum was buying books second hand from Mullen's circulating library in Melbourne.

Mostly the circulating library labels look like this

and cover the top third of the book. However, this book was different with the label covering most of the front of the book, and the text was different, and said it came from Mullen's Select library.

I need to do a little more digging but it looks like Mullen's, as well as a circulating business were sending out pre selected boxes of books to subscribers to the Select Library living in the country far from any bookseller or circulating library

Also note that in this advert Mullen's was styling itself "The Melbourne Mudie's". Nothing like trading on brand recognition.

The other real find of the day was not part of the historic book collection.

Someone clearing out their father's old shed walked in with some old handwritten ledgers and an 1874 copy of Philips Handy General Atlas of the World, complete with the original coloured maps produced by John Bartholemew, the well known Edinburgh map publishers.

That would be interesting enough in itself, but on the backs of some of the maps there are various notes in longhand.

Now, I have not really looked at the notes, but it looks as if they could be tracking a journey from the UK to Australia, which would be rather interesting, especially if there was a connection with someone's family migration story.

At the moment this is all hand waving, and until we photograph and transcribe the notes we won't really know.

Short term, our major concern has been to find a mylar bag big enough for it - the atlas is a bit bigger than B4, and then enough space in a freezer somewhere to store it for a couple of weeks to make sure that any lurking bugs or other nasties have been killed off...

A little story about technology

 

This is a Lenovo Essentials Smartclock, and it's part of the Google Home ecology.

It's a simple Linux powered device that tells the time, shows the current temperature at the nearest weather station and displays a little glyph to show if it's sunny, cloudy, rainy etc.

You can say 'hey Google' to it and issue voice commands like 'wake me tomorrow at 7am' or 'play ABC news radio'.

Basically it uses a slightly silly amount of software and compute to provide an updated experience of what you used to get from a clock radio,

We have three of these which I picked up cheap from Telstra when they were selling off unsold stock, and we have them in bedroom, the spare bedroom, and on J's desk in the study, and until about six weeks ago they have been utterly reliable, and just sat there doing their job, just as you would expect a well behaved IoT device to do - do one job and do it well.

Then, about six weeks ago, one by one, they stopped showing the weather glyph and the temperature - something which was strangely annoying.

Obviously the server that aggregated the weather data had died.

And it wasn't just us, a web search brought up a load of reddit posts from all over the planet complaining that the temperature and weather glyph had mysteriously stopped displaying.

Well we thought it would be back in a day or two.

It wasn't. It actually took six weeks for the temperature and weather glyphs to start re displaying.

I can't tell you exactly when they came back as we were down in Melbourne earlier this week, and they weren't displaying when we left, but were when we arrived home this afternoon.

Now, let's face it, displaying the weather glyph is not super important in itself. The fact it took six weeks to fix also shows that whoever provides the aggregation service is not deeply invested in maintaining a service for what is now a legacy device.

Software packages come and go. Look at Pocket. Incredibly useful and killed off as it no longer aligned with Mozilla's company plan, despite having zillions of active users, including yours truly. Or X (formerly Twitter) one the global conversation and now something slightly distasteful.

Hardware's different. You expect it to last for years.

I've owned three clock radios in my life - one a WH Smith branded generic device, and two quite slick Sony clock radios, and each of them lasted between ten and fifteen years.

So, similarly, I expect subconsciously, my little Lenovo smart clocks to stay working for ten or so years, just as I expect my smart TV to last as long as our previous TV that notched up fifteen years.

And I won't start about my car - it probably has more in the way of onboard computing power that Apollo 11...

And as our lives become more dependent on devices that themselves depend on external systems and services, we need to ask about life cycle and support expectations.

Sure, not displaying the weather glyph is no bid deal. But our car, our TV, our solar power system, well, that could be different...

Catching up

 Last week was one of the more absurd public holidays we have here in Victoria.

Not content with giving us a day off for the Melbourne Cup in November, the powers that be give us a day off for the AFL Grand Final - actually they don't, as the Grand Final is played on a Saturday, we get the Friday before off in lieu.

As the Athenaeum is technically a council facility, we were officially closed, which of course meant no cataloguing.

However, today we were open, on a morning when in rained with a capital 'R'.

And I can say that H. Rider Haggard was incredibly popular with the late Victorian and Edwardian readers of Stanley.

As well as early editions of the works he's best remembered for today, King Solomon's Mines, She, Ayesha, all of which have been almost read to death - in fact in a couple of cases we have newer editions as well as the old original editions, and editions of a lot of his less popular novels. Originally seen as boy's own tales of derring do, more modern critics take a more nuanced view with some suggesting that both She and Ayesha can be read as tales of female empowerment.

If you want to make your own mind up, almost all his books are available via Project Gutenberg as ebooks, or if you prefer a paper copy, second hand copies of his main novels can be picked up for a few dollars.

Otherwise it was a fairly standard day's cataloguing, though I did find a 1950's romance novel which the Athenaeum had clearly acquired second hand from a commercial circulating library that still had the date stamps from the previous owner inside, suggesting that hygenic circulating libraries that regularly fumigated their books persisted into the mid 1950's in Melbourne

However, it's not all been cataloguing - J has been helping put together the opening art exhibition of the newly formed Indigo Shire Creatives

and I've been doing some support role stuff - registering and labelling the artworks, fetching cases of wine for the opening night party,  and so on, and last night we had the opening night

which was incredibly well attended for a drizzly Thursday night ...

A little bit of Australian publishing history ...

 E W Cole was of the greats of the early Australian book trade.

As well as running Coles Book Arcade - possibly the largest bookstore in late Victorian and Edwardian Melbourne, he imported and resold second hand books from England, as well as new books, produced children's annuals and published cheap editions of popular books. 

Today, while working on the historic book collection at the Athenaeum, I came across this rather  nice example of one of EW Coles discount editions

A copy of Helen's Babies by the American author John Habberton.

Intended as a humourous novel and popular in its time, it tells the story of a confirmed bachelor, who is persuaded by his sister to come and look after her children while she goes off on holiday with her husband.

The book is printed as part of Coles Favourite Library.

Unfortunately the book is undated and I've been unable (so far) to trace when it was published, but I'd guess somewhere between 1890 and 1910. 

Neither the NLA or the SLV hold a copy, and while there is a copy in the NSW State Library's collection, it too is listed as undated.

The book is printed in England on good quality if thin paper and has a decent binding and an embossed cardboard and cloth cover. Perhaps not quite so well made as some of the books produced by mainstream publishers, but definitely better produced than the yellowbacks of the time.

I'd guess that Cole had discovered that he could get his cheap editions produced more cheaply in England than Australia, despite the cost of shipping, which may explain the slow growth of the Australian publishing industry in the early twentieth century...

And how's the cataloguing going?

Over the past year I've been posting updates about my little project to recatalogue the Athenaeum's historic book collection.

 I havn't done so for the last few weeks, not because I've become bored with the project, but because most of what I've found in the collection confirms my earlier suppositions about the Athenaeum buying second hand books, especially in the nineteenth century, to build up the collection as economically as possible.

So, same old, same old. But I do now understand why the original catalogue dating from the late nineteen nineties lists Marian Halcombe as the author of Wilkie Collins' Woman in White.

In the collection we have two very similar looking volumes which at some point have been rebound by the Beechworth Athenaeum - now the Burke Museum.

As books were expensive in colonial Australia, it was not uncommon for very popular books to be rebound locally to extend the life of the book if the original binding became worn out.

And the Woman in White was incredibly popular in its day - something you can see as even the replacement binding is distinctly worn, especially on the covers just where you would hold the book to read it sitting in an armchair.

Whoever did the rebinding stamped the spines with the title of the book  but not the author's name, and also stamped the spine of one volume with a '2' to show it was the second volume in a two volume set.

Now, both volumes have lost their title pages - when books get old and have been well read, the spines become loose and quite often they lose pages from the beginning and the end of the book.

In this case, the first page of the volume stamped '2', has a heading 'The story continued - as narrated by Marian Halcombe.'

Whoever did the original cataloguing was obviously not familiar with the book, and the way it is put together out of accounts by different narrators so the stories intertwine, and failed to spot that Marian Halcombe is a character in the novel, not the author, and then compounded the error by assuming that the unnumbered volume was volume one of the two volume set when in fact the books are from different editions (the typeface and the paper used is slightly different between the volumes).

I'm not quite sure how I'm going to document this but at least I now know how the error must have happened.

Otherwise, it's the usual mix of mysteries, crime novels, and romances, which shows that reading tastes have been pretty much the same over the last hundred and fifty plus years...

Digital disenfranchisement and the elderly

 There's an article today on the ABC's website about how older people, especially those in rural and regional Australia, are having increasing difficulty in accessing services as they move online.

Some of the reasons are predictable, lack of a decent internet connection, not owning a laptop, etc.

It's what in the 2000's we used to call digital disenfranchisement, and we used to worry about how students from poorer backgrounds would cope with an increasing move to online learning, and without having decent access to online resources.

Well, I suspect it's still a problem for some students, but at least we can now be reasonably confident that they have the basic skills to carry out a web search, access wikipedia, fill in an online form, or create and share a Google Docs document.

For older people, that's not the case.

They never learned to use a computer or acquire the bag of cultural skills that means that they can find their way round a windows manager, add a new wifi connection (one thing I've learned from being involved with the Athenaeum is that a lot of family history people, while they can download and annotate docments and do lots of clever things, connecting to wifi is something that they don't know how to do - someone set it up for them at home, so they never learned), deal with a different text editor, do markup, or indeed deal with a different note taking application.

They simply never learned. And remember these are overwhelmingly motivated intelligent individuals, but I do have to say that a lot of them are around my age, which I regret to admit is seventy.

Now I am different from a lot of people in my age group.

In the 1980s I did IT support for botanists and wildlife scientists at a field research station, and then later on more general IT support for a large research orientated university.

This was at a time when desktop computing was beginning to become common and a lot of researchers needed a little bit of help, be it choosing a laptop to take out into the field (literally in the case of botanists, archaeologists and geologists), setting up a device, installing software, or indeed just some basic text processing skills.

At the time there a lot of different applications and different computer systems, so I learned pretty rapidly to find my way round various bits of software.

Basically I'm a hack.

Most people in my age group are not.

A lot of what they have learned is by means of magic spells - want to pay a bill online? Well you click here, add the payee's account details here, click confirm, type in the amount here, set the payment date with this calendar widget, click confirm for a second time, review the details, and click OK.

And we don't make it easy for them. My bank has two different calendar widgets in their online banking system, and which one you get depends on whether it's a person to person transfer or a bill payment.

I'm going to guess that a lot of people don't understand that to the bank, a person to person transfer is different from a bill payment, so it's processed by different software system written and maintained by a different team who decided to use a different calendar widget. And why should they know this?

And I could go on. Want to report a hazard to my local council? Well, you fill in an online form that asks you a lot of questions, name, street address, phone number, email address, before asking you to select a hazard type from a pick list (tree down, flooded street drain, etc) and submit a trouble ticket.

It does at least have an 'Other' category with a 128 character free form text entry field - useful when the hazard is a dead fox lying in the middle of a residential street.

I could go on and on. Medicare, Vehicle registration, the Tax office, they're all online, and they all want information presented in a different way, and if you've only learned magic spells, you're lost.

Likewise showing people how to do things doesn't really help them, it's just another magic spell, it doesn't build the skills to navigate online systems.

What we really need is a set of common design guidelines, like the early Mac user interface design manuals, that mean that everything looks the same, the menus have the same names and the options are the same - this was really they key to the early success of Apple computers - everything just worked, and worked the same way. (I once helped a visiting Korean researcher install a printer on her Korean language Mac, not because of any Korean language skills on my part, but simply because the menu options were in the same order as in the English language version of the operating system).

Sure, information literacy training would help. But most training available for seniors is task oriented, that brings us back to the world of magic spells.

And remember, quite often it's our older citizens that need to access the pensions office, Medicare, book a doctor's appointment, or lodge an escript with a pharmacy, or even borrow ebooks from the library, something that needs quite a bit of skill, and I can't help feeling that better interface design would help.

And of course, if you can't do these things, and always have to get one of the grandkids to help you, you end up in a state of learned helplessness.

And it's happened to me.

Some time round about 1986 a girlfriend and I decided to take a train to the Spanish border from London.

At that time the only way you could only book an overseas train ticket for travel in the next day  or two was directly from a British Rail office in Victoria station in London. Amazingly, no other BR booking offices could process international bookings, and if you wanted an onward ticket from England, you had to get the train to London and then line up for a boat train ticket and a connecting SNCF ticket for onward travel in France.

It was almost as if, having understandably withdrawn the international booking service in 1940, they were yet to fully reinstate it.

Admittedly, some travel agents could book international tickets as well, but it took them days to do it.

Now, British Rail could book you a ticket on French Railways, but not on Spanish trains, that you had to do yourself at the station in Irun, if you wanted to go further into Spain or Portugal.

The other thing British Rail could not do was sell us a seat reservation, our tickets only allowed us to get on the train, but they airily assured us that SNCF could reserve a seat for us at the Gare d'Austerlitz up to an hour before departure, subject to availability of course.

Well that might well have been the case, but when we got to the Gare d'Austerlitz, after about four hours sleep on the overnight boat train from London, the booking office clerk told us 'C'est tout electronique, utilisez le minitel publique' and gestured at a row of terminals in the booking hall.

Well we tried. The terminals had AZERTY keyboards, and the system was only in French. After ten minutes swearing we gave up and decided to chance being able to get two unreserved seats together. We stood most of the way to Bordeaux...

Mary Beard: talking classics

 Recently, I finished Mary Beard's latest book, Talking Classics - the shock of the old.

I was disappointed.

Rather than a spirited anecdote laced defence of  'the classics' - the study of Greek and Roman culture - I found it read more as a defence of teaching classics.

Now the classics have a difficult history.

During the nineteenth century the study of the classics was the mark of an educated gentleman, and looking at Charles Dodgson's (aka Lewis Carroll) school timetable, one can see why. Apart from a bit of religion and a smattering of mathematics, they studied little but Latin and Greek, several hours a day, every day except Sunday.

And it was just Latin and Greek. No Roman history or archaeology, nothing quite so vulgar as a discussion of politics, corruption or what happens when some individuals become wealthy enough to buy control of the state, the res publica, the commonwealth, as one of Cromwell's men might have understood it.

And somehow a knowledge of Latin and Greek became required for getting into university, even to study sciences or medicine, and this of course meant that only those who had studied it at school could gain access to university, which of course produced a privileged elite.

By the time I went to university in the seventies, the specious requirement for competence in Latin and Greek, had gone, even though its ghost still howled in the darkness.

So why should one study classics? Or Russian? or anything else difficult and complex?

Let's take Russian, which I did study. Studying Russian was not simply to help you say 'я подчиняюсь' (I surrender) correctly, as the grim cold war joke went. Nor was it to read Dostoevsky or Tolstoy in the original - it was to try and gain some understanding of the opaque enigma of the Soviet Union and try and guess exactly what was happening, and this mean learning to assimilate a lot of complex and often obscure material and drawing sensible conclusions.

So with the classics, so with Egyptology, so with half a hundred other things.

The skills to learn, analyse and understand. If the history of the last fifty years teaches us anything it's that the future is unknowable,

And that's why the study of difficult things is important. To build understanding, not to be 'job ready'...

To ancient Rome via the Gertrude street tram

 

Earlier this year, J had a minor bit of surgery in one of the big city hospitals in Melbourne.

 Last week it was time for her post-surgical review, and that meant another trip to the city.

 The timing of her review was such that we would need to stay two nights in Melbourne, and since the hotel had a three nights midweek for the price of two deal, we decided to take the deal and have ourselves a day in the city.

 Doing so gave J an opportunity to visit a decent art store and pick up new paints and brushes, and let us do a bit of face to face rather than online shopping.

 We also did some fun things like a trip to a proper Japanese sushi restaurant where in true Tokyo style you picked your plates off a conveyor belt and stacked the colour coded plates on your table, and paid on the basis of the number of plates (two blue, one green, one yellow, etc)

As a fun twist the restaurant also had a range of specials, which you ordered via a touchscreen on your table and were delivered by a little delivery robot that ran along a track on top of the sushi conveyor belt.

 Silly, but fun.

 It also gave me an opportunity to visit the Ancient Rome exhibition at the Melbourne museum.

 This was a touring exhibition from Italy of mainly early imperial period sculpture, artefacts and frescos, and included something I had only read about – a removable marble hairpiece for a sculpture.

 

The Romans used these on statues of Imperial ladies so that they always had a fashionable hairstyle.

 There were other interesting items, a cute little pottery pig from a child’s grave, mass produced Samian ware and some Roman glassware.

 The exhibition is structured around various aspects of Roman life, such as the baths, formal dinners, death, religion and so on.

 The focus is on early Imperial artefacts, probably because that is the most materially rich period, but they do attempt to show the rise of Christian belief as the dominant religious belief in Rome and how it provided a degree of continuity with the period after the formal end of the empire in 476CE.

 Getting to the exhibition was fairly simple – we took the 96 tram from the city to the corner of Gertrude Street and walked past the exhibition building – which was hosting a graduation ceremony for the University of Melbourne that day – and into the museum.

 Unlike some visiting exhibitions this one was not particularly busy, giving you plenty of time to look at the artefacts. Obviously, your mileage may vary on this – when we visited, it was a typical cold damp Melbourne winter day, and the tram system was warning of disruption to trams running past Parliament House, as it was the day of the anti One Nation/Pauline Hanson school strike.

 As  it was, we didn’t see anything of the demo, and by the time we rode the tram back to Parliament station to change to a Metro train back to our hotel, the manifestation was most definitely over, and the greatest risk was crowds of newly minted graduates and their proud parents making their way home.

Agatha Christie, and more Agatha Christie

 I seem to be going through a bit of an Agatha Christie period of my life.

Not only have I read two or three of her mystery novels as my bedtime reading - and I certainly did not expect the ending in the Murder of Roger Ackroyd, today I catalogued the Christie novels in the Athenaeum's historic book collection.

Apart from an early edition of the Seven Dials Mystery, most of them were post world war two crime club editions, and not particularly remarkable.

As I've written elsewhere, I'm fascinated by the fact that she simply took the train to Iraq in the nineteen thirties when when she accompanied her husband, Max Mallowan, on his archaeological excavations in north eastern Syria, and in Come, tell me how you live she describes catching the Taurus Express - the Orient Express's eastern cousin at a remote railway station just across the border in Turkey, and how this train of blue Compagnie des Wagon Lits carriages appeared out of the desert, and train conductors wearing smart uniforms loaded her luggage and helped her onto the train before continuing its journey across the wilds of eastern Turkey.

But that wasn't the most adventurous journey. 

The bus from Damascus to Iraq in the 1930's must have been quite something - no roads, just a hard packed desert track across the emptiness.

I havn't been able to find an image of the track from the 1930's, but I did find one dating from 1970, when it was still a wild unpredictable track across the desert...

However, it wasn't all Agatha Christie today, a couple of golden age crime novels, 

including a copy of John Dickson Carr's Death watch, evidently just about read to death, given how scuffed the cover is, a few romances and an 1874 edition of Wiiliam Carleton's The Black Baronet

Twenty three years...

 

Way back in 2003, when we moved to Canberra from York in England, we needed a car - so after driving a rental Pulsar for two or three weeks we bought ourselves a second hand Subaru Impreza - three years old and a hundred thousand kilometres on the clock.

Arguably the number of kilometres it had done were a bit high for its age but it drove well and had a full service history.

For a time it was our only car, and I caught the bus or rode my bike to work most days.

When we moved further out in Canberra, we ended up with a car each and the old Impreza became my daily commute.

It lasted well without major problems, and by the time we moved to Victoria ten years ago, it had done 275,000 kilometres and still drove well. 

We did talk about selling it then, but decided to keep it as a backup, and I used to use it to transport all my cataloguing equipment between Chiltern and Beechworth when I was cataloguing the contents of Dow's pharmacy and Lakeview.

By the time I'd finished with the National Trust it had done over 300,000km and was beginning to show its age, even though it still rattled along at a decent speed.

Latterly, we found it was basically just sitting there, so today we sold it to a recycler.

We'd had hopes of selling it to someone who wanted to buy it to restore, but the fuel crisis and cost of living squeeze put paid to that, so the recycler it was.

Kind of sad to see it go, it's probably been one of our better buys car wise, but life moves on.

We're going to try having just one car for the time being despite living in a rural community with distinctly sketchy public transport. We can walk to the local shops, library and post office and consequently we don't drive the distances we used to, and we reckon we should be able to manage our calendars to share our car effectively ...

Weird weather we're having...

 A couple of weeks ago I blogged about what a mild winter we've been having.

Since then we've had a week of cold freezing sleety rain followed by a week of even colder overnight temperatures and cold clear blue skies during the day - but cold though it is overnight, it climbs to the low to mid teens during the afternoon, warm enough to work outside in the garden for an hour or two.

The jonquils and daffodils are blooming, and the snowdrops are out, and the grass is beginning to look like its needs cutting again.

On the other hand our bower bird has abandoned his bower and gone wherever bower birds go to escape the cold. Despite the cold overnight temperatures it actually feels like early, very early, spring. with trees starting to bud and the broad beans poke their heads up.

I guess we can only wait and see...

A chilly day's cataloguing

 Up at the Athenaeum this morning for another cataloguing session.

Absolutely freezing with sleety rain making me wish I'd had the sense to wear a pair of my Swedish army surplus wool socks - light enough to wear with ordinary shoes yet infinitely warmer than regular socks.

First task of the day wasn't really cataloguing related, but I went round and removed all the old moth traps, and disposed of them. I'd planned to replace them with new ones - we are supposed to have them in stock, but they seem to have been hidden somewhere.

Given how cold it is at the moment I don't see any self respecting moth or other insect pest doing any damage just now but they obviously need to be replaced before spring.

Other than that it was simply more of the same cataloguing the collection.

No real finds this week, other than what would have been a nice example of early Australian book publishing from 1888 - a copy of This Wicked World by Caroline Emily Cameron (who usually published as either Mrs H Lovett Cameron, or simply Mrs Lovett Cameron).

Unfortunately it has been professionally rebound, meaning that the original cover and binding is missing, which is a pity, as intact it would have been an almost unique example of early Australian publishing.

Other early books catalogued today were an 1867 copy of A Lady's Confession by Pamela, Lady Campbell, and an 1888 reprint of Wilkie Collins' After Dark, otherwise it was a fairly predictable mixture of post world war two and early 1900's fiction ...

Is this climate change?

 Well, I don't know if it's climate change. El Nino, or just some random event, but we seem to have had a relatively warm winter so far.

Not only have I just cut my grass (bear in mind that this is in Beechworth in the foothills of the Victorian Alps) but our resident bower bird has rebuilt his bower and had been busy collecting bottle tops, clothes pegs and anything else blue he can lay his beak on in preparation for the mating season...

Phillip Island

 It was J's birthday this week, so we decided on a few days away on Phillip Island to celebrate.

This of course meant no cataloguing at the Athenaeum this week, but, as they say, all work and no play makes Doug a dull boy.

We drove down on the Monday. The weather over the weekend had not been the best and Monday wasn't much better, meaning it took most of the day to get there.

We avoided the city by driving down the back way via Yarra Glen and Cockatoo to Pakenham where we picked up the main road to the south and south east of Gippsland. 

We'd taken a chicken stew a bottle of wine with us, which was a good thing as we arrived in the dark at our AirBnB and it was pouring with rain, but our host had left the heating on, so we hunkered down with a bowl of stew and a glass of wine or two.

The next day the cloud and rain cleared to a windy, sunny, day. 

We'd planned to do a coastal walk, but actually didn't, driving round the island, and then picking up fish and chips from the San Remo Fish Co-op, beautiful fresh fish , and a glass of wine for dinner.

We'll go for our planned coastal walk tomorrow we told ourselves.

We didn't. The local Nordic myth re-enactment society had decided to stage Ragnorok.

We drove over to Wonthaggi to look at the new art space, all the while hoping for the weather to clear.

It didn't.

We drove on to the dinosaur beach at Inverloch in the hope of the weather clearing. The weather got worse and was now doing a decent imitation of the west coast of Scotland with incessant grey cold smirr.

We decided games were off.

However that night we treated ourselves dinner at Anerie in Cowes, and damned good it was too. 

(For some reason a lot of places on Phillip Island are named after places on the Isle of Wight in England, 

there's Cowes, Ventnor and Newhaven, and while there's no Ryde, there's a Rhyl - I've often wondered if someone got mixed up and meant to name what is now Rhyl, Ryde).

On our last day the weather again cleared and we had a bracing walk at the Nobbies, where there were hordes of Cape Barren geese, nesting, sitting on eggs, escorting gaggles of goslings, and occasionally walking out in front of cars with an arrogance that suggested a direct line to God

That, and a second windy beach walk, and we were done.

We ate at the Phillip Island brewery that evening, and the next day we were up early to drive home, almost retracing our route, save that after Cockatoo and Woori Yallock, we headed north through Healesville and up the Black Spur through the fern forests to Alexandra.

We'd bought some sandwiches and a bag of designer chips, somewhat bizarrely illustrated with a photoshopped picture of Nicholas II and George V clutching potatoes and a vinegar bottle,  from a 7-eleven we'd stopped at for petrol outside of Pakenham and had planned to sit in the park and share our picnic with Princess Alexandra, but it was foggy, chilly, and barely 7 degrees, so we ended up huddling in car,

By the time we reached the freeway at Benalla the sun was out and it was a balmy fifteen degrees, giving us a straight run home in time to pick up our mail from the post office and some things for dinner from the local supermarket.

While the weather was against us, we had fun. We might not have done everything we planned to do, but as always with winter trips it's a matter of taking pleasure in small things...