Acres of dead crabs. 1912.

Examiner 29 July 1912 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article50662881

I wonder how so many crabs lost their claws all at once and what it was that caused their deaths? Pulling the claws off crabs doesn’t generally result in their death. Sure, they are not very happy about it but this is something that happens to them at times and eventually they grow back.  Surely an undersea disturbance that could do that much damage would not have been selective enough to only remove their claws and it would have been hundreds of acres of crab mush instead.

Two miles of dead crabs must have been and amazing amount of them, millions. I wonder what sort of crabs they were? I am sure there were some pretty happy and well fed bird around for a while.

Kangaroo or Mad Gorilla? 1932.

Hmmm…. Kangaroos can grow quite large, taller than a man, and you don’t get to be an old man kangaroo without being quite fierce when necessary. That said, there is no way you could mistake a kangaroo for a gorilla, even in the dark. This creature is reported to have had four white tusks as well. Scary. The description of it being 7ft tall and like a clumsy deer sounds far more like a fire-blinded kangaroo than a mad gorilla or a grizzly bear. The hunters seem to have accepted that a gorilla or grizzly bear could be loose in the Australian bush far more readily than I would expect. Why listen to local speculation about a known creature in a perfectly plausible situation when you have the chance to terrify the masses with a creature that has very little chance of being lost in the Australian bush. Where would this mad gorilla have come from?

Nuttall sounds like a real hero. ‘Ride like mad! Some strange beast is attacking me’. Admirable presence of mind. If something I identified later as a gorilla was attacking me, my friends wouldn’t hear a carefully worded warning, all they would hear would be AAARRRGGHH!!!! It didn’t even hurt him and only managed to rip his shirt. Lucky man. His horse bolted but hung around a short distance away to bear him to safety. Lucky again. The alternative version of his story is that he panicked at a strange noise and rode off madly, tearing his shirt on a branch. No, I am sure it was a mad gorilla.

I am sure some of these people saw something strange in the bush at night but having done a lot of camping I can tell you that in the bush not a night goes by without something unidentified making a scary noise near you. Late one night a possum jumped from one tree to the next right over the top of our campfire. We were the brown trouser brigade that night, no matter how manly some of the campers were. It doesn’t take a gorilla to scare the average human in the dark.

The Mail 27 Feb 1932 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article59303056

Margaret Olley.

 

 

The well-known Australian painter Margaret Olley died on the 26th of July.

In 1948, at the beginning of her career, William Dobell’s portrait of her won the Archibald Prize. This year, fittingly, the prize was won by a portrait of her painted by Ben Quilty.

The director of the Queensland Art Gallery predicted an outstanding future for the 26 year old Margaret Olley in this newspaper article from 1951. I think he was right. She was finalizing paintings for yet another an exhibition right up until her death on Tuesday night, aged 88.

The Courier Mail. 10 Apr 1951  http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article50095426

Sir Charles Hotham Hotel and the Queens donkey.

Morning Bulletin 14 Jan 1950 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article56930194

Once I finished yesterdays post about the Sir Charles Hotham Hotel I couldn’t help myself and kept looking for the follow ups on the articles I used.

The article I put in about James Creely being found dead in the loo of the Sir Charles Hotham Hotel in November 1949, had a twist when a 27-year-old labourer named Albert Anderson was arrested for his murder in December 1949.

Further articles tell me that in early March, after two trials in two weeks (the first jury failed to reach a verdict), he was finally aquitted of the murder and the death of Creely was found to have been caused by a fall. Two trials in two weeks! The wheels of justice move far more slowly these days.

When I read the article yesterday about the miner having his thirty pounds worth of gold stolen I wondered what he was doing with that much gold in his hotel room. It would appear that the gold, like the miner, never made it to the hotel room and that the miner was too drunk to know where he had been robbed that night. I wonder if he had been robbed at all, did he just leave the gold-filled bag in a gutter and stagger off for the next drink?

This article also has a reference to the Queen’s donkey and her ‘strapping gillie’ so I get to add a buried word to this post. A gillie is a Scot word for a hunting or fishing guide and also used for the male attendant of a Highland chieftain. A gillie is also a shoe without a tongue, but I doubt the Queen took a special shoe with her everywhere she went. I wonder why the Florentines thought her gillie was a male ballet dancer. Muscular calves?

The donkey part of the article was a surprise to me. Queen Victoria was a large lady and suffered from rheumatism and had donkeys that she used with a donkey-chaise to transport herself around instead of walking.  The donkey and chaise were transported with her on all her journeys abroad and one of her last acts before her death in 1901 was to drive her donkey-chaise around the grounds of Osbourne House.

The Argus 9 June 1893 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article8562406

Sir Charles Hotham Hotel. 1897.

Barrier Miner 11 Nov 1897 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article44200487

The man of the house and I spent the weekend in the city at a work function arranged by his employer. Not our usual kind of thing, we don’t spend time in the city, and we would have looked like real hicks as we wandered around the streets looking up as though big buildings were something new to us.

Whenever we go to the city we love looking at the buildings hiding behind the modernized shop fronts, and, really, everything over the level of the ground floor. It is like a different world. When you look up, you see what the building looked like originally and get an idea of how different the city was in its early years.  I wonder how many people walk past these old buildings every day and only see the modern cafe or boutique clothing shop and don’t have any idea of the true age of the building.

Sir Charles Hotham Hotel, Melbourne.

The Sir Charles Hotham Hotel on the corner of Flinders and Spencer Street was a perfect example. We were crossing the lights and I whipped out my camera and took a photo, vowing to look it up on Trove when I got home. Apologies for the quality of the photo but I was trying to pretend that the 7 eleven that made up the ground floor didn’t exist. When people drop in there for a packet of fags or the paper do they notice the age of the building, or do they just see the bit they use at the bottom? I am sure the people who stay in the upstairs accommodation notice that the building is far from modern, but I bet they just moan about it and never wonder about all the things that have happened there.

I found quite a few articles reporting events that have occurred in this building. Among others, it was 114 years ago that those cricket lovers were assaulted from above and 118 years ago the miner Edward Murphy had a small fortune (for the time) in gold stolen.

The Argus 8 June 1893-nla.news-article8561663

The death of John Creely in 1949 may make you feel uncomfortable if you ever have cause to use the loo out the back.

The Argus 25 Nov 1949 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article22794130

Drought in Africa, 1859.

I am going to bore you today. Please make yourself comfortable while I clamber up on my soap box and prepare my notes….

I am sure we have all seen the photos and video of distressingly emaciated children and blank-eyed adults in the canvas-walled field hospitals of the Horn of Africa at the moment. I am the right age to remember the famine in the 80’s that gave a select group of rock stars plenty of air time to tell us how much they cared and wanted us to help. They are still rich, some massively so, and people are still starving in Africa. Things never change.

The Sydney Morning Herald 12 Dec 1859 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article13034307

In 1859 this article acknowledged the fact that drought was a regular occurrence in South Africa, suggesting a severe drought occurred every 8 – 12 yrs and less severe ones every 5 or 7 years. That suggests there are more dry years than wet years, and I think it would be safe to assume a similar type of cycle occurs elsewhere in Africa.

I am aware that there is a world of difference between the Horn of Africa and South Africa but, clearly, as this article tells us, conditions that make life hard in Africa are hardly a recent development. It wasn’t hard to find a multitude of other articles of a similar vintage referring to famine in other parts of Africa, for example;  Algiers in 1868 and Zambesi in 1863, George (Western Cape) had no rain for four years as reported in 1862 and in 1903 a summary of cable news reports on the scarcity of water retarding the British expedition in Somaliland. Why is it then, when this was known so long ago, are there still so many people suffering?

The 152 year-old newspaper article above points out that the land can only support so many and, due to the increased load of stock and humans, may have already exceeded the amount it can handle. It also suggests that unless this is addressed, and the infrastructure is improved, these circumstances will continue, and the suffering of the people will only escalate in future. Surprisingly for the time, this article even uses the bible to suggest people who think it is too troublesome to store water and don’t ‘keep the land and dress it’ should not ‘increase and multiply’. Parts of Africa have the highest population growth in the world. How many people are supported by the same amount of land that was struggling to support their less-numerous ancestors?

The West Australian 20 Jun 1899 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article3229133

Added to the growing population, the fact that much of Africa is a place that is constantly under pressure due to unrest, poverty and lack of infrastructure, makes the slightest variation in weather conditions a potential disaster for those least able to cope with it. These people need education in order to help themselves, no amount of food drops and overworked doctors are going to solve their problems. Thousands of starving Mombassan locals were being given aid in 1899 and today aid is still flowing through Mombasa, although considerably more than thousands are dependent on it now.

What has changed? Nothing. Hearing that this famine is the worst for 60 years as I have seen reported in some media, is an irrelevant fact. The life expectancy for most Africans is, tragically, less than 40. Very few people who survived that famine will still be with us today. You can’t learn anything from something you didn’t experience. The problem with food aid is that every dollar spent on it is a dollar that can’t be spent on developmental aid. It is wrong to let those that are currently needy suffer, but feeding them means their children and grandchildren will still be receiving aid and not helping themselves. No, I don’t have a solution and I am not going to pretend I know enough about Africa to tell you whose fault it is, or whose responsibility it is to fix it. My point is, if drought is a new thing people are allowed to be unprepared for it and not know what to do. We can’t blame the popular evil of climate change for any of the past droughts or the current situation. I know it is not a popular view, but uncontrolled population growth, anywhere in the world, is only going to contribute to the hardship of the existing people.

I wonder if there will ever be a change in the situation in Africa or if the cycle of famine and aid will continue indefinitely, with already dwindling public donations causing the aid efforts to become less and less effective. The eventual outcome of this course of events is a terrible thing to contemplate. What can we do to change this? What can they do to change it?