Tag Archives: travel

The National Capital

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‘We desire to have a city that will be the Gotham of Australia … [and] in a few years will rival London in size, Athens in art and Paris in beauty.’ King O’Malley in 1904, an American masquerading as Canadian so he could be a member of the Australian parliament, taking on the job, as Minister for Home Affairs, of designing and developing a capital for Australia.

1907: The minute containing Sir John Forrest’s report to parliament on a site for the national capital.

Dalgety, about 150km south of the ACT, got the initial nod for the site of the new capital but the NSW government wouldn’t cede the land. Too hard and expensive to build a rail connection certainly, but also too far from Sydney. Canberra was second choice from eight options.

The word ‘Canberra’ may be a corruption of Ngambri, the name of one of the four Indigenous tribal groups living there prior to the disruption and assumption of their lands. Or it may mean (in Ngambri) ‘space between a woman’s breasts’, the breasts in this instance now called Mt Ainslie and Black Mountain.

Alternative names proposed at the time included: Austral, Aurora, Captain Cook, Caucus City, Cookaburra (😬), Dampier, Eden, Eucalypta, Flinders, Home, Hopetoun, Kangaremu, Myola, Meladneyperbane, New Era, Olympus, Paradise, Shakespeare (🤔), Sydmelperadbrisho, The National City, Union City, Unison, Wattleton and Wheatwoolgold. Probably lucky some of those didn’t get up.

1927, the opening of Parliament House by the Duke of York.

Not the Duke of York, but almost certainly with more claim to the land.

Imagine. It would have been a very strange life. Government from a paddock. Note the comparative absence of trees.

Building of the new ‘old’ parliament house commenced in August 1923 and was completed, after what must have been a constant series of construction and other challenges, early in 1927. It was not designed by the Griffins, Walter Burley and Marion Mahony, but it could have been. Very Chicago School: clerestories, very strong horizontals, interesting sight lines, furniture matching walls matching floors matching fixtures matching ceilings. Passionately symmetrical, built round the two houses — Reps and Senate. Snug, I thought. A building very easy to warm to if not to heat.

The old King’s Hall with King George V standing guard.

The view via this transect through the House of Reps frames the War Memorial (invisible here) perfectly.

John Smith Murdoch, Australia’s first Commonwealth Government architect, did design it in what was called the ‘stripped classical’ style. Good job, but it was only ever intended to be temporary. It does seems like a lot of work and effort for a temporary building.

The Prime Minister’s Office, to my eye perfectly fit for purpose. Bob Hawke’s voice is heard.

The Prime Minister may have had ample space but a run-of-the-mill MP and three aides would work in an office smaller than this, about 4m x 2.5m. Shall we say limited confidentiality which, who knows, may have been a good idea. New Parliament House where more than 5000 people work on sitting days has nearly eight times the floor space of the old one.

Labor gets a surprisingly good go in the displays, away, that is, from the John Howard Library. And, yes, that is The Australian Constitution being kicked downstairs.

Always was …

• • • • • • • •

‘You won’t find a whole settled essentially stable community that is so smug, so bourgeois, so comfortable, so well-educated. I mean this may be fucking paradise. I’m not saying it is. But it’s as good as it gets.’ (Jack Waterford, staple of the Canberra Times, legend. And I know just what he means. It has occurred to me every time we go there. All those facilities. All that cycling and jogging.)

It can be quiet downtown.

Although there will usually be a jogger to add to the vibe.

It will also be socially aware, generously so.

With plenty of thoughtful instruction.

• • • • • • • •

In his very good book about Canberra, Paul Daley suggests ‘the role of a [national] capital is to host its legislature and judiciary, its memory (the National Library of Australia; the national archives, the galleries), its conscience (the Aboriginal Embassy and the National Museum of Australia with its vast collection of Indigenous remains and relics) and tell the story of disastrous events that almost derailed a fledgling federation (the Australian War Memorial).’

In a recent visit we made the most of these, especially its memory.

One of the reasons for our visit was to have a look at ‘Fit to Print’, the exhibition in the National Library curated by Mike Bowers of press photos printed from glass-plate negatives (one chance only). A very generous selection and display from the 18,000 or so held by the Library in its Fairfax Collection. All round 1930: another time, another life.

Moments caught at a performance by Inge Stange’s dance gymnastics students, Sydney 1933. ‘This type of physical education is better adapted than almost any other for inspiring inner cheerfulness and new courage to face life in these uncertain times.’

William Lygon, 7th Earl of Beauchamp and, for a time, Governor-General of NSW, with some chaps at Bondi. ‘I doubt’, he observed, ‘whether anywhere in the world are finer specimens of manhood than in Sydney. The life-savers at the bathing beaches are wonderful.’ Using certain information about his activities which could only be described as salacious, his enemies were able to move him on. Smith’s Weekly noted that when his wife divorced him at the time ‘it came as little surprise’. But, bless him really. He’s having such a good time.

The National Library also had its customary display of ‘treasures’. I liked these two among others:

At left, Major Mitchell’s sextant; and above, Banjo Paterson’s ‘Diary used as a notebook’ open at a draft of ‘The Wind’s Message’. Not his finest work, but ‘The Man from Snowy River’ is just over the page.

And … you can look at Leonard French’s glorious windows while you’re having your coffee.

National Library: 9.7/10. At least.

And then there was the Gallery. You must go to the Gallery, but it was looking and feeling a bit Brutalist, just a tiny bit stuck around 1980, those enormous rooms bullying their contents which examined closely seemed like they might be second choice. The new Gaugin, the new Monet, the new Munch: not my favourites anyway, but the sort of thing you might mention when you are talking about examples of the absolute range of an artist’s work including when they had a go at something that didn’t quite work.

Best thing downstairs by a mile —

What a very great painting that is. And what a cultural landmark. It was time.

Upstairs was ‘Golden Summer, Eaglemont’ in its very fancy frame. A Mention Honorable at the Paris Salon of 1892 is noted. I’m confirming golden and not just because it’s the Dandenongs in the background. This was the title piece (called ‘Golden Summers’ at the time for some reason) for the best exhibition of Australian Impressionists ever mounted, NGV 1985. I remember it indelibly.

Also upstairs was this, ‘Bush walkers’ by Freda Robertshaw painted in 1944.

Intriguing. So carefully painted, and so formidably un-bushwalkerly. The figures, frozen from inception to completion, would not have been capable of walking anywhere let alone in the bush. Could they be aliens perhaps? Which is not to deny the considerable interest of the painting. I’d be happy to look at it carefully …hmmm, four times a week. Evidently the same genre as Charles Meere’s iconic ‘Australian Beach Pattern’ (which can be found in the Gallery of NSW) from just a bit earlier. Similarly carefully painted. Statuary, with a sea made of actual glass. That ball, suspended forever. (You might note the hint of domestic violence in the deep background. Us Aussies! Always up for a laugh.)

Just incidentally it is on record that Englishman Meere really didn’t like the beach, and he may have painted himself into the picture as the chap at left looking at least thoughtful (perplexed?) if not entirely discomfited.

Also on display was an exhibition of contemporary ukiyo-e, Japanese woodblock prints, the best known example of which is Hokusai’s ‘The Great Wave off Kanagawa‘. In his Hawaii Snorkel Series Japanese-American Masami Teraoka offers his own take on the slightly libidinous shunga tradition. His ‘View from Here to Eternity’ is below. The placement of the woman’s head provides a challenge.

There was also this glorious ‘Lotus Table’ by A&A Design, 1200mm in diameter and made out of ‘custom-dyed rye straw’.

The Drill Hall gallery had a very large exhibition of conceptual art which we think we are unable to explain except that some conventional thinking is involved as well as aesthetic appreciation. I liked it but not as much as a series in the same place by Simon Gende, an artist from PNG. (When did you last see paintings exhibited by an artist from PNG?) Even more exotic was that the theme of the series was the attack on the World Trade Centre and subsequent events stalking, capturing, killing and burying Osama Bin Laden.

This is ‘Twin Towers’. The legend in always so attractive Pidgin at the bottom says ‘Tupela balus bumpin Twin Tower long America USA‘. ‘(‘Two planes [balloons/ birds/fellas] crashing into the Twin Towers which belong to/in America USA.’)

In the museum, one-third closed for a new exhibition when we were there, we found the last day of Pompeii, so to speak, a good deal made out of not very much but with its moments …

and a pink van plus Holden. Good. And someone taking a somewhat decontextualised selfie.

It is a city — now, so very much not in 1927, and not really till the 1970s — of public art … (You can tap on these pics to see them better.)

and edifice. Hard to move without bumping into, or at least experiencing, an edifice.

The Gallery (bottom left), the High Court building (‘Gar’s Mahal’) overwhelming two galahs as it does its users, the massively over-engineered Bowen Place pedestrian underpass, and the mysterious ‘Commonwealth Place’, the outcome of a competition, from front and back, itself just in front of John Dunmore Lang Place. John Dunmore Lang, a Scotsman, a Republican and an Australian patriot who didn’t live to see Federation. I don’t know what he’d make of Canberra today. His Place is largely a blank of struggling lawn.

But just along from here is Reconciliation Place which does have a range of features including these standing stones each of which incorporates some First Nations art.

As appropriate the art is representative of different traditions and cultures, quite easily recognisable like the one on the left. But I have never seen Gwion Gwion (at right) with all their complexities anywhere other than the Kimberley. Perhaps a courageous decision.

And trees. Trees trees trees. Hundreds of thousands of them. One of the great arboreal projects of Australia. What a wonderful thing. Especially thinking back to the bare paddocks of 100 years ago. It was autumn of course and there was ample evidence of the extent of alien deciduous planting …

and the absorption with monocultures, a version of town planning aesthetic concerns dominating the truths of ecology, but at least they’re trees.

A bit of the National Arboretum from its main pavilion.

Perhaps the most signal image from our trip was this: round 9pm, Lonsdale St as downtown as you get, temperature minus 4, queuing up at the Messina gelato bar for ice cream. You might imagine otherwise, but you don’t miss out on a thing in Canberra.

SYD

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Yes. ‘Sunday’. Ken Done. Dominant in its gold frame at the public threshold of the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

The attached note says: ‘Sunday was painted from a beach house on the Wyargine Point in Sydney Harbour that Ken Done calls “The Cabin” nestled into the landscape of Rosherville Reserve and overlooking picturesque Chinaman’s Beach. … While Sunday was painted from and inspired by this setting, Done says it’s not a direct representation. It “reflects a feeling that shows the joy of being in this space. The pattern of the clouds, the boats, the people on the beach … it is a feast. And if colour is a language, then the language for Sunday is joy.”‘

It would have been unthinkable not so long ago. Ken Done? Not to be taken seriously. A bit awful really. Hopelessly commercial. For tea towels, place mats, cheap scarves, possibly swimwear; and for people who don’t know anything about art.

But, frankly, how absolutely correct that placement is: Sydney as it would like to see itself and sometimes is. Gorgeous.

The Harbour was covered with scales of sun glitter, the bridge exhibited itself like a formidable flexed (and symmetrical) bicep, the Opera House was perched on Bennelong’s Point like a ruffled cockie. And then in the evening there was the breeze, an erotic whisper, the fag end of the Southerly Buster massaging your sensibilities and because it is summer leaving dainty beads of humid sweat.

Melbourne to live, but Sydney for a visit.

We’d come as the final leg of the Tour de Siblings to celebrate my 75th birthday — we’re all getting on — and this was to see 90 year-old Dorothy. I thought we would stay at Kings Cross. I hadn’t been there for a while and the station is handy. It was also just a walk to her church in Waterloo where we would meet.

I had some uncertainties about the accommodation I’d booked and paid for. It had been very hard, impossible actually, to get in touch with the property owners to find out, for example, how we would get in. So I was disappointed rather than flabbergasted to arrive at a laundrette with no obvious place to sleep or make a cup of tea. I had two ideas in my pocket. The first provided a room but with no view and we needed some offset for our distress. The second — the Hotel Indigo, warmly recommended — had everything we needed including wide perspectives through our windows over Woolloomooloo to the city.

The Cross has tidied up and gentrified since I last looked, especially the Potts Point end (which was always pretty schmick).

In the 1930s buildings of this sort

were replaced by buildings of this sort

with entrances like this.

Art Noveau Deco run wild. [There now Graham. Okay now?] And after nearly a century they’d still be good those apartments.

Just for the memories.

The Gazebo, the ‘Gazza’, once a hotel and for a long time my Sydney accommodation of choice, now apartments and a distinctive building visible from many points of the skyline.

I knew this was the El Alamein Fountain but thought it was located in Anzac Square. I now discover that acre of paving and concrete is the Lambert Peninsula National Park and think that to be a bit weird.

The walk from the Cross to South Sydney Uniting ambles its way through the tree-lined streets of Darlinghurst and Redfern full of blunt but picturesque Georgian cottages tight to the footpath. Every 100 or 150 metres there are hole-in-the-wall places with a dozen boxes or stools on the footpath where people eat pain au chocolat and drink coffee. Runners pad past in their leisure wear; torsos often naked for the men, nearly so for the women. Buff bodies everywhere. Gay couples (in the week before Mardi Gras) lean in to each other, sublimely indifferent to public interest. These streets are theirs.

There are cities in the world that would kill for areas like this. There are other cities which would kill them off promptly and decisively.

Dorothy is 90, a sweetheart and a bit of a dag. As well as that she is the Reverend Dorothy McRae-McMahon, resolute pioneer of the place of women in the church, the author of a dozen popular books of liturgy, and a warrior — without necessarily meaning to be so, it came to her as naturally as breathing — for the rights of the downtrodden.

She has a gift for saying and writing things that people can connect with, especially those living with trouble, helping to ease their pain. God has spoken to her mysteriously but directly. Her certainty of that is complete. You can make of that what you will but in her line of work it is practical.

For many years she was the minister at Pitt St Uniting in the heart of the city. But now she is a parishioner at South Sydney, a most remarkable church on the southern fringe of its inner suburbs. The church property is 100m from Redfern Park where the Rabbitohs used to play, and more saliently where Paul Keating gave the Redfern Address, still a vivid reminder of what all Australians should know, remember and take to heart: “It was we who did the dispossessing. We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life. We brought the diseases and the alcohol.”

The church’s congregation is unusually diverse: in terms of sex and gender; in terms of affluence; in terms of cultural and ethnic background; in terms of education; in terms of health and wellbeing; in terms of drug of choice (which might be Ceremonial Grade matcha). Dogs, kids, people in off the street looking for some shelter just absorbed into the mass which I remember on my visits as being striking for its relaxed intimacy. Stuff going on all over the place, but still having a purposeful shape, capped off with a shared feed.

That’s a church service. But a year ago. Various parts of the church building are being renovated because the Sydney sandstone of its decorative front has turned out to be porous and flakey. The service I went to most recently was held in a community centre a short way down the road. But just the same sort of thing. Everyone publicly welcomed by name, the minister providing the homily but not a lot else. There were a dozen ways to contribute and perhaps 20 people did, reading lessons, providing notices, or mentioning people and their situation to be remembered in thoughts and prayers.

One reason I wanted to use this photo is because Andrew Collis is in it. It is shared magic, but he’s the magician. Slight, quiet, but both deft and definite, he is such an admirable presence. There is not the slightest sense of disorder, nor is there anything about these services that is dumbed down. A lot of the ideas discussed are chewy and testing.

The text for that Sunday’s thinking out loud — like everything else, so carefully prepared — was Luke 4: 14-30, a curly one made more so by the reality of its rendering.

Jesus goes home to Nazareth and at the synagogue reads from Isaiah: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed.” He rolls up the scroll and sits down. You can see it. This is direct reportage. Then he says, ‘It’s me. You heard it here first. I’m the one.’ After the ‘That’s Joseph’s lad though isn’t it? I thought he was a carpenter’ moment, “All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth.”

There follows a bit of to and fro where Jesus seems to be demanding to be a prophet but without honour in his own country. The history of prophecy, he suggests, is that people like Elijah and Elisha largely ignored local issues and did their best work elsewhere. But “when they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage. They got up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff.” A sharp turn, about which you’d like more detail for full comprehension. However, and what might or might not be the moral of the story: “But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way.”

It’s a story with its share of puzzles, but this day it seemed to be about courage in the midst of adversity, about adhering to your principles, about being honest and open regardless of the consequences. And that would all fit.

Andrew has been there for 10 years and I imagine the fact that there is a garden and chooks in a chook pen at the back of the church might be at least indirectly down to him. I grow in confidence when I look at the list of the church’s working groups: Arts, Mirrung Garden, Hospitality, Ministry Development, Property and Finance, Safe Church, and the ‘South Sydney Herald’ a monthly with a circulation of 10,000. How do these things grow out of such apparently sparse resources? Andrew has been there for 10 years, but for only a few weeks longer. I hope another hero emerges.

This might be the modern church everywhere. I don’t know. I’m not an adherent. I don’t as a rule go to church. But this is the ultimate Anti-Trumpism, alive and well. However modestly, ‘Great’ in actuality rather than as a word on a red cap. This is lived and productive and sustaining diversity, equity and inclusion — the much maligned DEI — and proof that it can happen at least somewhere and be beneficial for all concerned.

• • • • • •

Finally the gallery seems to have been tarted up. There’s better stuff in the new building; there has been some re-hanging among the Victorians for the first time in living memory; the Asian section has been re-imagined. My arts correspondent tells me there is a new director. This turns out to be only prospectively true. July. So it wasn’t that. Just time for a bit of house-keeping, and the revelation again of the superior quality of the AGNSW’s Indigenous collection.

A fine way to finish. Ginger Reilly at his best: Nyamiyukanji, the river country with gnak gnak, Ginger’s Jukurrpa, in the foreground.

Bonus Xtras

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A collection of pics that didn’t really go anywhere else of things I’d like to remember from Japan in 2024.

Atmospheric. At an izakaya (small neighbourhood pub that serves food and beer) under the main northern rail line flyover near Tokyo Central Station. It’s hot and the end of a long day. We are eating edamame (‘A great source of plant-based protein, fibre, healthy fats, vitamins, and minerals. It is also low in calories’) and salad and, like the gentlemen nearby, drinking excellent Japanese beer.

Our bedroom at the Sonic Apartment Hotel in Dazaifu. Plenty of bed, not much room. I am standing in the shower.

Where salarymen have their smokes in central Tokyo, but you need a phone as well.

Korakuen (‘Lake Paradise’) of Okayama, one of the four ‘Great Gardens of Japan’. Michael and Myrna thought it was pretty good. I was disappointed. I wanted more variety and inventiveness in the layout. But what do I know?

A motorbike shop over the road from our hotel in Nagasaki. There was something about the busy-ness of the illuminated highlights and also the way the T-shirt rises so ghostfully out of the machines.

The trams and tram stops of Nagasaki. Trams several decades old with very peculiar driving control mechanisms which produce a great deal of jerking, but otherwise just so functional. And cheap to ride. Panels at each tram stop include a stylish floral decoration.

Nagasaki again. Looking closely behind Myrna you can see the tori which became one-legged after the atomic explosion. But to the right arrayed along the hedge behind the seat and protected by bollards is all the rest of it. A fine act of remembrance.

This is some of what sits under the red heart on your iPhone. Often not terribly reliable. If you want to know exactly where and how far you’ve walked you need another version of a GPS. Or a GPS. Either will soak up a large amount of power. The red heart doesn’t. Usually you don’t even notice what it’s up to. And as for being accurate I’m sure it didn’t know what time I went to bed and may have interpreted being carried around as being awake. It doesn’t seem to have registered how my walking asymmetry was going — it would have to have been much worse than that as I staggered along. On the other hand, I’m not sure how it registers ‘Flights climbed’ but 237 both seems about right, and seems like a lot. That benchmark edifice, the Empire State Building has 102 floors and the tallest building in the world Burj Khalifa in Dubai only has 163. There is some suggestion that a ‘floor’ equals 3m. which would make sense. So we might have climbed 711 m. How much is that? The Empire State is 381m high. Burj Khalif is 828m, but only 585m can be occupied. This was the last day on the Kumano Kodo and my sense of things is that all that’s missing is the additional descent of 237 floors.

The walls and power poles of Kyoto. So good looking and such an expansive policy. I hope he got in.

Tokyo’s National Art Centre. A photo of a photo from an art society’s massive biannual exhibition. Stairs, pain, effort, teamwork, artificially added difficulty, a religious icon. Can you get more Japanese than that?

Shibuya. Rich Tokyo. He is not part of the display. He has simply walked in for a photo. The heads are wagging backwards and forwards, up and down. I think the eyes opened and shut as well. It is a sunglasses shop.

Takeshita Street, Harajuku, a suburb of Tokyo. Somewhere everyone should visit to be reminded how much variety there is in the world. (See also The Substrate.) Thrilled to have her photo taken. This was just over the street from the Micropig Cafe. I have video of this which I can’t load here which would show small pigs running over people sitting on the floor of a room. In this instance these people include our granddaughters along with another customer who appears to have three pigs climbing on her one of which might be being kissed. Otters were also an option.

One of the reasons we went to Japan was because Simon, our son-in-law, wanted to see Mt Fuji again. Fuji-san, one of Japanese Buddhism’s three sacred mountains, peak 3776m above sea level 600m higher than any other Japanese mountain, World Heritage Site, social and cultural icon, Japan’s national visual branding. And very often hidden by cloud. And that’s pretty much how it was for the three days Simon and family spent at Kawaguchi. It might have peeped out once.

It’s our last night in Japan and I’m cleaning my teeth in our hotel bathroom. Peer out the window … and look it might be Tanzawa but, right direction right size, I’m calling it Fuji.

Wandering around Kyushu

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The writing on the shop window at left says: EAT IN TAKE OUT ATELIER PORCEL ARTS LUNCH COFFEE SMOOTHIE BEER KUSHIAGE [grilled food on skewers] PASTA. That surprises me. It is somewhere near Kumamoto which in turn is somewhere near the middle of Kyushu which in turn is Japan’s fourth island, the one off the end heading towards Korea and China. The one which seems to consist mostly of volcanoes in various states of tumescence. The one more obviously tropical, more wetter, more typhoony. It’s a long way from Tokyo, closer to Seoul actually, and quite far enough from Kyoto. And they would be some of the reasons you see fewer European tourists there than in other parts of Japan.

They might have reason to visit Fukuoka, the largest city on the island, with its gracious boulevards and general air of self-sufficiency. They might have come to last year’s world swimming championships which were held there when Australia won twice as many gold medals as the US (if not more medals overall, but that’s not how we count ’em. No way. 😐).

I haven’t been everywhere in Japan, but I’ve been to enough of it to know that out of town is different to in town. You get something quite different. Five years ago I developed a big Kyushu travel plan in that expectation. I even made an at-the-time invisible friend on Yakushima as we went back and forth negotiating our stay. And now I expect to see Kentaro in Melbourne quite soon. That scheme became disrupted by what Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene refers to as the coronavirus hoax. This time we made an effort to complete some of that plan.

What we wanted to do was built around three substantial day walks, none of which we did. It was too hot. Over 35 every day, nearly 40 in Dazaifu. Look at these people in the yard of Kumamoto Castle:

a couple of defiant nongs out in the sun, the others huddled in the shade of the giant gingko, under shelters, umbrellas or basking in the vapour sprays. So we drove around in air-conditioned comfort having a jolly time, seeing things we wouldn’t have otherwise. I’d do all this again any time.

We flew from Tokyo to Nagasaki where we spent four nights in a really good hotel with a very large air-conditioned room, a first-rate breakfast and most congenial staff. This may have coloured my roseate view of Nagasaki. Don’t know. Then we got the train back to Fukuoka (had to return our car to the pick-up point), found Michael and went for a drive.

The Toyota Sentia Hybrid 7-seater convertible van: highest praise. If they sold them in Australia I’d give purchase strong consideration. Drove 900kms in great comfort using one tank and $4 worth of petrol. The $4 worth was to procure a receipt to indicate we had bought petrol. Might have been necessary, might not. But it’s Japan … always better to be on the safe side.

Kumamoto

We were really only going to Kumamoto so we could get to Mount Aso early the next morning.

But I knew that it had an impressive castle which had been substantially restored and when our plans changed, they included going to have a look and to ascend to the top storey which provided an excellent view of the city and its surrounds.

We left thinking you might find many other things of interest in Kumamoto.

And then Mount Aso …

Mount Aso is the largest active volcano in Japan and among the largest in the world. It last erupted in 2021. That is to say, recently. Its upper reaches are dotted with masonry beehives for the protection of visitors should it be required. It has a very large caldera, the outer ring of what was there once and which has now collapsed, about 30 kms from one irregular side to the other. This is visible on the map further above. The elegant little cone to the left is to be found inside that ring.

Aso’s peak area is dramatically bare of vegetation, but there are several preparatory areas for leisure activity. We drove past a massive aggregation of cars on our way up and wondered why on earth they were there. It was a golf clubhouse. Look at the courses carved into its flanks. It is otherwise a national park. There was a well-patronised lookout, and then there was the comfortable party area with restaurants, cafes and horse rides (off to the right below).

From the small off white spot in the middle of the photo above of the whole mountain complex it is possible, on payment of ¥500, to drive to another even smaller off-white spot to its left and, on occasion, to walk and climb Aso’s five peaks. Visitors to the upper reaches are rewarded with views of the bubbling sulphuric stew in the active crater.

They are also subject to a barrage of warnings both visual and aural in various languages which are especially for people with asthma, bronchitis or heart problems.

We were walking around the rim on the track closest to the crater when the warnings increased in intensity and were accompanied by arm-waving. It always does to obey warnings in Japan even if you don’t feel they’re warranted. Obedience is the priority. Several things happened at once. The air did seem to thicken up a bit. Then we started coughing. It was one of those things you don’t think will really happen. Nah … that’s just what they say, etc. But there WAS too much sulphur in the air and, after putting up the windows of the car rather sharpishly, we drove away.

Having driven across the caldera, we are looking across its paddyfields to the rugged hills on the other side.

We were off to spend the night at Ukiha. It was a great drive, first through another national park and then along a series of river valleys. This (below) was an onsen establishment clinging to its hill next to some woven concrete holding that hill together. So much of Japan is beautiful but not much of it is untouched.

Ukiha


Why? Who goes to Ukiha? No one. This is one of those finger-on-a-map (to jump off to climb Hiko-san the next day; didn’t happen) and-then-find-suitable-accommodation moments. And in this, despite booking the wrong date, we were unaccountably successful.

Brand new hotel, so very stylish in the middle of not very much, so much room to park the car (hoorah, always an issue in Japan), no food, but beer, a wide variety of chips and lollies and containers of formidably excellent grapes in the vending machine, several very nice places to sit and drink the beer, and wonderful staff one of whom was very excited to practice his English.

While they mightn’t have had food, they had excellent recommendations about where to eat. At their suggestion we searched for and found a fairly well hidden eatery (pictured below the two pleasant sitting places at the Ukiha Fairfield) and had what Myrna thought was the best meal of the trip. Severe Momma, dutiful daughter serving, husband cooking in a rather grotty kitchen. But oishi, delicious. And then for breakfast you could visit the farmer’s market which operated next door. You couldn’t identify much, only marvel. We did buy some nashis. I can’t remember what else.

It was round then I discovered we had been staying in an establishment, a Marriott hotel, owned by members of the Church of the Latter Day Saints. ‘Marriott International is the largest hotel company in the world by the number of available rooms. It has 36 brands with 8,785 properties containing 1,597,382 rooms in 141 countries.’ Its headquarters are now in Bethesda, Maryland but when it was founded by J. Willard Marriott they were of course in Salt Lake City. That’s what you can find out when you travel.

And you can also visit Ukiha’s Inari Shrine: you can climb 300 steps through 91 (and no, I have no idea why) torii to the entrance or, as we did, you can drive up. (There is another much more famous and heavily visited version of this near Kyoto.)

Inari (also applied to a type of sushi) means ‘rice harvest’ symbolising the idea of good fortune, blessings, something for which we should be grateful. It is a modest shrine but the hillside is covered not just with orchards — this is one of the fruit capitals of Japan — but also with what I imagined initially to be grave markers. They’re not. They’re posts with snatches of poetry written on them. ‘Looking out across the valley I think I see the distant spring blossom of Tsukushi (a suburb of Fukuoka an hour’s drive away).’ ‘Wearing a robe I was enveloped by the scent of my mother.’ ‘I fear the velvet night no more.’ ‘The full moon shines with brilliant light.’ That’s not something we have necessarily.

We determined that we would like to see the sea. There were murmurs about having a swim as it was still spectacularly hot. We found a road east along the Yamakuni River which provided satisfying spectacle around every corner.

We found its mouth but no, not swimmable. Both banks of the river were built environments as they had been for 40-50 kilometres. But here there were sets of steps like tiered seating every 30 or 40m as far as the eye could see. What for? We also tried to imagine what could be behind the giant fences but couldn’t. It turned out to be a marina (with a complex of football grounds on the other shore). But again, why? Mysteries.

We had ended up at another shrine, Hachiman Kohyo, which has been in its present location since 535 CE. The mouth of a decent-sized river, … that could be enough to incite a shrine. And there it was. Insofar as it is famous — not very far, it is well out of the way — it is for its lion dogs.

It was this sort of neck of the woods really: another Japan. Just as interesting. (The words on the front of the Isuzu in for repair say: ‘earth-friendly environmentally-friendly people-friendly’.)

It was near enough to 3 in the afternoon and we hadn’t had anything to eat since our rather desultory breakfast (bananas and grapes I just discover). I thought I would provide a solution by finding the nearest coffee shop. It would be bound to have food as well. So we headed off to Umi-san (coffee and cheesecake) in the very very back blocks of Yoshitomi, imagining iced coffee with a great dollop of softu crema or something equally interesting in it. We’d drink that while consuming extra large slices of cheesecake.

We found Umi-san under a tarpaulin attached to a shed. He was so overwhelmed by a visit from Australians he was rendered close to immobile. He wanted conversation. Wanted to know where we’d been and why. All via Google which I was, I’ll say, too faint with hunger to operate effectively. He had no cheesecake but he could make us some coffee. But first he had to spend quite some time finding and lighting a mosquito coil. Very thoughtful of course, but we were starving.

It took him just on half an hour to make the coffee which appeared, actually very good coffee, with two ice cubes in it and nothing resembling dairy. Quite correct really, but the doctor hadn’t ordered that and was pretty disappointed. I drank what I deemed to be respectable amount, a respectful amount, of what we’d been provided with and we fled to a Lawson to find something with plenty of calories.

The Lawson. Along with the 7/11 and the Family Mart, staples of the Japanese consumer economy. But the Lawson … so very reliable.

Mojiko

We were on our way to Mojiko to stay at this hotel. The Premier. I had read, I think, that it was on an interesting site stuck out into the Hanmon Straits which separate Kyushu and Honshu and that it was nested in among an unusual collection of art deco or ‘Retro’ architecture as you will find it referred to. That turned out to be true.

On our way to find some dinner I discovered these gals arranging themselves for a low-action selfie. They have found a boat named ‘Moji’, and they have managed to include the very ostentatious ‘Observation Room’ towering over the old Customs House. To the right you might just be able to make out clusters of lights and what might be marquees and canvas shelters. That’s what they were. We ate outside from a restaurant in the Customs House after strolling through what seemed like a dog fair with all things dog: prams, pushers, capes, hats, bells, bones, shark skin, dried meat, glow collars, anything you can imagine really, with several hundred perhaps a thousand dogs being catered for.

You may note their mmm dunno … dresses? their personal fan and the preparedness of the one at the back to have his or her photo taken.

There were beautiful buildings to contemplate. The former headquarters of the Mitsui OSK shipping company.

Breakfast suggested that there would be a story to be told about the hotel. It wasn’t overly expensive, mid-range I guess, but it was a place to take your family for a weekend away or a special occasion if you were a well-heeled member of the Japanese haut-ish bourgeoisie (congregations of whom are not always on display in Japan). And I think the highlight, the very special thing, about the Premier might have been its buffet breakfast. You could get simply anything, and if it wasn’t there they’d make it for you. I watched prodigious feats of eating, almost to the point of applause, especially by the younger members of the absolutely packed house.

But our schedule said Dazaifu, so Dazaifu it was.

Dazaifu

What’s a photo for Dazaifu? There could be so many.

The timber decoration of the Starbucks in the Baba Sando Line: this is so noteworthy it appears on guides as a tourist attraction. To its right the bustling throng is pushing their way forward for icy poles. They might have been plum-flavoured. The shrine that the customers were on their way to or from is surrounded by sacred plum trees. This was just a window in a wall near monster Japanese sweets cafes which were nearly empty. The owners had something going on.

Digressing momentarily, they were making equally popular plum cakes just a little further along the street via a sort of conveyor belt process. It would have been so incredibly hot where she was standing.

Continuing clockwise with the photos, the interior of Motsu Nabe, the restaurant in the bottom of our accommodation. Great food which could have been better if we’d worked out how to cook it properly (at the table) and decide when the cabbage went in. And then Myrna’s new Issey Miyake top on the shrine’s footbridge. An excellent colour match.

Could have been any of those; they all have stories attached. But I think this is the one.

Its existence saved us on several occasions. It is the interior of the Dazaifu Roll, an idea the specifics of which we never tested. More importantly a) it was air-conditioned, and b) unlike many of the other establishments in Baba Sando Line it was never crowded out, and c) it advertised and served excellent iced coffee.

The Baba Sando Line (just a street name really) is the major entrance way to the Tenmangu Shrine, a shrine of great importance, size and activity. The photo above is not mine because if it was it would have hundreds of people milling around in it searching for shade. The temperatures reached their apogee at Dazaifu, their zenith, their pinnacle, their peak, their apex. The energy bounce off that pavement was blinding.

Returning to the Dazaifu Roll, outside its door is the actual entry to the avenue of approach. But instead of dragons or lions or torii at the entrance to this holy collection of souvenir and lolly shops there is a takeaway yakisoba noodle joint on one side and the Dazaifu Roll on the other.

Dazaifu could today be considered an outer suburb of Fukuoka about 20 kms from the centre of the city. I thought staying there would be convenient for its Historical Trail, a half-day walk that sounded interesting. Because of the walk I knew that Dazaifu had been the seat of imperial power and the centre of politics and culture in Kyushu from the late 7th to 12th centuries — quite removed from Fukuoka — and that there had been a major complex of government buildings there, now in fairly modest ruins tended beyond any hint of authenticity. And I did know that it had an important shrine.

Dazaifu’s Tenmangu Shrine was founded in the 10th century. It is dedicated to Michizane Sugawara, a late 9th century politician and scholar who rose to pre-eminence at court. However, he chose the wrong faction in a dispute — probably the good guys — and was shamed and then banished from Kyoto 800 kilometres away from where we were. The ox pulling his cart brought him here … then, perhaps understandably, refused to move any further. Shortly after Kyoto was struck by a series of deadly storms and floods attributed to Michizane’s powers and there was a fairly hasty revision of his status. By imperial order he was renamed as ‘Tenjin’ or ‘Tenman’ and worshipped as the Shinto god of literature and learning. A shrine was subsequently built here, the head shrine of 12,000 Tenmangu shrines across Japan.

Almost guaranteeing popularity, one of Tenjin’s areas of oversight is success in exams. People here are lining up to rub the nose of a statue of Goshingyu, the ‘wisdom ox’ who decided to camp here, and to say their prayers possibly turning a C into a B+. In the foreground is one of the sacred ume (plum) trees, Tenjin’s favourite fruit.

The ancestor of one of these trees, mid-ground right in the photo, is believed to have flown here from Kyoto such was the power of the master and his poetry. The other feature of this photo is the rather dramatic thicket of vegetation growing on the roof of this temple building. It has its own story.

‘In 2027, the shrine will hold the 1125th anniversary of the Grand Ceremony of Dazaifu Tenmangu. This commemorates the death of Sugawara Michinzane, a scholar and government official who is now enshrined as the deity Tenjin.’ (Not sanctification note but deification; that’s different and worth thinking about.) ‘The main sanctuary of the shrine is undergoing extensive repairs, the first for 127 years.’ A ‘temporary residence for Tenjin’ has been built to last for three years while the work is completed. ‘It is crowned with a “floating forest” teeming with diverse plant life that transforms with the changing seasons.’ That’s the ‘floating forest’ you’re looking at.

Staying with trees, which we were that day, sacred and otherwise, here is a cedar old enough to have its own devotees.

Another reason to visit Dazaifu is the Kyushu National Museum, the terminus of the Historical Walk. Its remarkable waveform is built into the hill above the Shrine. It was full of treasures one of which was a brass mirror, something I’d never seen before. To the right rises Sonic Apartments, a satisfyingly exotic place to briefly call home.


A couple of hours separates these photos from our window. In that time it had rained, the temperature had dropped a few degrees and the cost per hour at the car park had fallen ¥100 (1 AUD) an hour.

Fukuoka

We took the car back, a small matter, and then walked 12 kms around Fukuoka, a larger one. The art gallery was closed so we walked around Ohori Lake and watched these cormorants with their throats flapping and click-clacking as they tried to manage the heat.

• • • • • • • •

This is a digital rendering of a photo of a postcard of an oil painting. So you couldn’t say you were seeing it at its best. But you still might infer that it is a very attractive piece of work. The artist is Hiroshi Ikushima but as far as I know it doesn’t have a name.

What could it be? What’s going on here? She is preoccupied well beyond her modelling. Her hands suggest it is not a vacant, even an innocent, pensiveness. I think, perhaps, that odd combination of uncertainty and guarded determination of a woman in conditional love. But the symmetry of her features and her unquestionable beauty take the edge off that anxiety. Or do they? I’m not sure.

It was in use as the poster for an exhibition of art at the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, an exhibition which was devoted not so much to Asian Art as examples of stunning achievements in realism.

You could grate the peel coming off the lemon below.

However as we got further into the exhibition things took a turn: the young women had fewer clothes and the men looked creepier.

That was characteristic of our experience at the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum. Closed at 6.00, we arrived at 5.15 and were encouraged to buy unusually expensive tickets to two exhibitions discovering at 5.28 the second one had packed up and shut the doors. Turned around, and so had the first one.

One reason why we arrived so late was that we stopped to have some sustenance. The Tomoyasu Cafe and Burgers provided genuinely outstanding thickshakes. But it was the other customers a few tables over who caught my eye. A couple, perhaps mid/late 20s. She was wearing a kimono and was perfectly made up. Perfectly. Like a very high end ad. Sometimes this sort of costume is complemented by one or more stray wisps of hair. Not in this instance. She was also strikingly beautiful. Startlingly. Like something off a film set. In my journal I’ve described him as roughcast, and I think that would be appropriate. A tradie who has washed up after work but not much more: jeans, slippers, T-shirt. They’re on a date but I’m not quite sure what type. It is 4.30pm … and it is taking place at the Tomoyasu Cafe and Burgers. She’s having a parfait. He’s having a burger. She’s doing most of the talking, bright but not familiar. She takes selfies that are hyper-organised, using a (clean) spoon, for example, as a prop. She could be very young but she has a throaty gurgle for a laugh which suggests that, regardless of her age, she probably isn’t. I couldn’t possibly take a photo. It may have a been a commercial transaction we were watching. At 4.30pm … in the Tomoyasu Cafe and Burgers.

• • • • • • • •

Fukuoka is known for its yatai (lit. ‘shop stand’), street food served from pop-up boxes, suddenly there and later suddenly not. We were a bit early to encounter the full schmeer, but we dutifully sat here and ate yakitori and oden, a mystery dish that we were assured was vegetarian. (Footnote: ‘boiled eggs, daikon or konjac, and processed fishcakes stewed in a light, soy-flavored dashi broth.’) Drank beer, memorably good on a hot night. It was all good. We were having An Experience.

We’d been summoned by a very lively tout who spoke bits of at least Russian and Chinese as well as English and knew enough about Australia to make a joke about Melbourne and coffee. When we left he said, ‘Copacetic?’ And I said, somewhat bemused and in the nicest possible way, ‘Yes. Most certainly.’ Copacetic! Extraordinary.

If copacetic brings anything to mind it might be well-built American sophomores in the 1920s or 30s, men never women, wearing large lettered jumpers exchanging agreement about the very positive nature of something. Anything. Jay Gatsby might have said it when Scott Fitzgerald wasn’t listening. It may occur, expressed hopefully, in Tender is the Night from the mouth of one of the more troubled characters. It is not something you hear every day, now or then. Neither William Faulkner nor Ernest Hemingway would have had anything to do with it.

Merriam-Webster describes it ‘as probably better known for competing theories of its origin than any other word of everyday use in American English.’ It appears in a 1919 novel about the young Abraham Lincoln. It might be like a term from Acadian French from Louisiana, coupe-sètique, which is of course only a breath (or a pee) away from meaning ‘septic tank’. African-American tap dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson (1877-1949) used it in radio broadcasts during the 1930s and claimed it as his own.

Copacetic. He said it. A hot night on the banks of the Naka River. Unprompted. And he was right. Copacetic.

• • • • • • • •

Just as it was sliding into its dock before taking us to Okayama.

Nagasaki and Dejima

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In the woodcut above it is the Dutch flag flying over Dejima (‘exit island’), an artificial island barely attached to the city of Nagasaki which on completion in 1634 was about 120m long and 75m wide. That elegant curve was shaped by its junction with the Nakashima River at its outlet into Nagasaki Bay, a traditional landing place for ships. At the right hand end it has a sea gate. It is connected to the mainland by a modest bridge that had a guardhouse at each end.

Two years earlier the Tokugawa Shogunate required 25 local merchants to build the island as part of a project to curtail the spread of Christianity and what was seen as the predations of Portuguese merchants (and missionaries) while still enabling a trickle of bilateral trade. After some muscular diplomacy and an undertaking that there would be no dabbling in any sort of religion, the Dutch East India Company was chosen to be the responsible partner.

As well as the major staples of trade, Japan was introduced to beer, coffee, chocolate, sundials and astrolabes, tar-based paint to caulk ships, badminton, photography and many new foods including cabbage and tomatoes through the sea gate of Dejima.

For just over 200 years at any one time only about 40 people lived on the island, 15-20 of them Dutch half a world away from home, supervised by around 50 Japanese officials some of whom lived on the island which was also visited by cooks, carpenters, interpreters and other essential workers.

There were no Dutchwomen there. Yūjo (‘women of pleasure’) were included among the essential workers.

Kawahara Keiga documented life at Dejima in the early 19th century in hundreds of paintings of which this is one.

The Dutch officers could, and did, eat right here most nights.

Once a year only they left the island to go to Edo (Tokyo) to pay tribute to the Emperor, of the material as well as ceremonial kind. To glam these annual events up the Dutch sometimes included exotic animals: an elephant, a cassowary, a leopard, and on one occasion a camel.

Dutch East India trading ships would visit — on average, it did vary — just twice a year in May and June, the season of favourable winds. During the years Napoleon controlled the Netherlands no ships came. For Hendrik Doeff, the Chief Factor during this period who ended up living on Dejima for 17 years, this must have been an existential puzzle. (From his log: ‘Nobody who is not here in person can imagine our state of mind. Separated from all community, attached to a place which is never visited let alone passed by ships, not knowing, not hearing, not there, in the whole other world going on outside.’)

Dejima is now embedded in city buildings and surrounded by office blocks and shops with a strip of restaurants calling themselves ‘Dejima Wharf’ between the island and the bay. 18m was carved off the inner curve in 1888 as part of a diversion of the River. Today, from one angle, it looks like this.

From another, like this.

And this, I think, is my favourite photo from our trip. Taken by Myrna. It is a shadow as well as a figure against one of the Dejima warehouses. And I don’t know where the blue flash came from, but there it is.

• • • • • • • •

Dejima is a fertile place to start talking about Nagasaki, a city full of important stories and a great place to visit. Known largely in the west as one of the sites for exploding an atomic bomb, it is so very much more.

The city streams, long and narrow, down the valley of the Urakami river. Its population today is about 430,000, not big for a Japanese city. It was about 240,000 in 1945 when the bomb was dropped. It has a substantial and sheltered deep water harbour with industry at various scale lining its western banks. (Massive ship yards with a giant gantry on the left.)

It has always been a place where things were made: Japan’s first porcelain and glass, metal filigree and silverware, textiles and lacquerware as well as steel, machinery and armaments. This is one consequence of its location: the obvious first port of call for contact with China (silk, ceramics and lacquerware), Korea (glass) and later for European traders (the filigree and other products associated with precious metals).

You would have to assume it has always been cosmopolitan. It is a city at the edge. Edge cities … oddities like the sale aisles at Aldi — surprising enough to throw you just slightly off balance, but comfortably embedded in their own context. Nagasaki has distinctive flavours and shapes very much of its own. Customarily, there are regular attempts to rope such cities back into the mainstream. That adds to their character.

It also has an unusual religious history.

The Jesuit priest St Francis Xavier was the first Christian missionary to arrive in Japan (in 1549), first at Kagoshima in the south of Kyushu but then, more productively from his point of view, at Nagasaki and Hirardo in its north. He had matched tenets of Christianity up with aspects of Buddhism and persuasively evangelised in these terms. Hundreds converted to this version of religion quite quickly, expanding into thousands over several decades (possibly to 300,000 by the end of the 16th century; most of the inhabitants of Nagasaki for example). One of these converts was the daimyo (magnate, overlord) Omura Sumitada who in 1580 vested control of the Nagasaki prefecture in perpetuity to the Society of Jesus. Remarkably the Jesuits had their own substantial administrative region in Japan. Just think about that.

This didn’t last long. Toyotomi Hideoshi, the ‘Great Unifier’, placed the Nagasaki region under his direct control in 1587 and ordered the expulsion of all Catholic priests. He had the example of the Philippines to consider. It was not paranoid to assume that Augustinian and Franciscan friars had paved the way for the colonisation of those islands by the Spanish. In 1596 a Spanish ship, the San Felipe, had foundered on the coast of Shikoku. Those on board, including Catholic missionaries, rather foolishly suggested that they were the precursors of a much larger Spanish presence.

Within a fortnight Toyotomi stepped up the urgency and stringency of his suppression of Christianity beginning with the arrest, public humiliation, torture and crucifixion of the ‘Twenty-six Saints of Japan’: six Franciscan missionaries (four Spanish, one Mexican, one Portuguese), three Japanese Jesuits and 17 Japanese members of the Franciscan community, including three young boys who served as altar boys, one aged 12. This process included an 800km forced march which ended at Nishizaka Hill above the heart of Nagasaki, a destination chosen pour encourager les autres, of whom there were many at that time.

A 17th century Japanese rendering of what occurred.

There were many other subsequent examples of Japanese martyrdom as the authorities sought to enforce the nation-wide ban on the practice of Christianity. But the Twenty-Six Martyrs, the first, beatified by the Church in 1627 and canonised in 1862, caught the wave and are widely memorialised to the extent of being the subject of their own Museum. There is no challenge in finding renderings of the event.

Shūsaku Endō’s prize-winning and brilliant book Silence provides a fictional account of this period and in particular the practice of having to stomp on fumi-e, images of Jesus or Mary, as part of a process of renunciation of Christ and Christianity. (Martin Scorsese made a film of the book starring Adam Driver and Liam Neeson.)

Read the book to find out what happens, but nearly the last word is given to an official who speaks to Rodrigues, the priest: “Father, it was not by us that you were defeated, but by this mudswamp, Japan.’

• • • • • • • •

This story could head off in a number of directions because the themes of politics, religion and commerce in this context are so intertwined. But the basic underlying issue is deeply familiar: how do you get what you want from an innovation/ new situation without all the bits you don’t want as well? (See eg social media, or the internet in general.) There were major benefits to be gained from contact with Europeans, not least the prospect of making a lot of money. But what were they bringing with them? Among other things, an untidy mess of alien mysticism and creeping insubordination.

In 1571 the port of Nagasaki was officially opened to world trade, at the time a limited concept. Among the first ships arriving was a Portuguese vessel which left behind cases of syphilis and other previously unfamiliar health disorders. And yet it also brought the first velvet the Nagasakians had ever seen, along with a host of unfamiliar spices from Indonesia. It offered silk and unknown types of woven cotton from China, and its traders provided good prices for Japanese silver, copper, ceramics and camphor. What do you do?

By the first few years of the 17th century the rulers of Japan had decided. They instituted Sakoku (‘chained country’), a series of directives that enforced self-isolation from foreign powers. From the Edict as it evolved in 1636:

‘No Japanese ship … nor any native of Japan, shall presume to go out of the country; whoever acts contrary to this, shall die, and the ship with the crew and goods aboard shall be sequestered until further orders. All persons who return from abroad shall be put to death. Whoever discovers a Christian priest shall have a reward of 400 to 500 sheets of silver and for every Christian in proportion. All Namban (Portuguese and Spanish) who propagate the doctrine of the Catholics, or bear this scandalous name, shall be imprisoned in the Onra, [the common jail of the town]. The whole race of the Portuguese with their mothers, nurses and whatever belongs to them, shall be banished to Macao. Whoever presumes to bring a letter from abroad, or to return after he hath been banished, shall die with his family; also whoever presumes to intercede for him, shall be put to death.’ 

Strong.

Foreign powers were entirely banned from any diplomatic and trade relations, with the exception of the Chinese … and the Dutch at Dejima. This situation didn’t change until the mid-1800s, when Japan was forcibly ‘reopened’ by naval emissaries of the United States.

Japan might have been closed, but the door was still open just a crack at Nagasaki. This is one of the things that makes the city special.

It had then and has now, unusually for Japan, a Chinatown at Shinchi (its current entrance at left). For most of its life this was a high-walled enclave which seems to have been treated more strictly than the European compound.

Among the Dutchmen on Dejima there was always a trained doctor. Engelbert Kaempfer and Carl Thunberg were two of these in the early years, skilled, professional … and endlessly curious. Both wrote books about aspects of Japan on their return from Dejima which clearly indicated that they had made the most of the crack in the doorway. It is hard to imagine that even in Japan the strictness of the observation of the rules of interaction would not have waxed and waned, particularly when there was perceived benefit.

In time Japanese and especially the well-to-do were coming from long distances to be treated by Dejima’s Dutch doctors. By 1823 when Philipp von Siebold arrived there must have been some relaxation of the rules because, after curing the illness of an influential local military officer, he was invited to set up a practice off-site and a year later he had developed a school for more than 50 students studying western medicine.

It was also Von Siebold who introduced the first piano to the nation of Yamaha and Suzuki. What a man he must have been. He is pictured below with a telescope, (‘Dutchman watching an incoming ship’, another Kawahara), along with two Japanese women one with the flame-haired child he fathered at Dejima.

This daughter, Ine (pictured somewhat older at left, but still with reddish hair), became the first trained female medical officer in Japan eventually becoming physician to the Empress. A son from his Dutch family introduced the study and practice of archeology to Japan.

Von Siebold wrote a six-volume treatise on a vast range of subjects related to Japan. Some of his collection of 12,000 Japanese plant species remains at Leiden University in Holland. He also began a huge collection of ethnographic material which provides the foundation for collections in several major museums including the British Museum.

Along with all his gifts and interests Von Siebold seems to have been arrogant and pushy with a tendency to misjudge his own indispensability. He had his own set of rules. He illegally smuggled the seeds of tea plants which became the foundation of the Indonesian tea industry to Batavia (Jakarta). Later he pressed the court astronomer for maps of Japan and Korea, also an illegal act. By chance, court officials discovered them in his possession. He was accused of high treason, was subject to house arrest and then expelled from the country. This is how his initial contact with Japan ended. This was 1825. He had done so much in that time.

The Japanese were also absorbed with the possibilities of western technology and military science. Along with medical knowledge, these fields became known as rangaku, ‘Dutch studies’ or ‘learning’ and became the foundation for a series of academies which grew up in Nagasaki over this period. Dutch had already become an influential lingua franca of the immediate region. Over time, more than 15,000 books were imported from the Netherlands and translated into Japanese for the practical value of their contents.

Despite criticism from Japanese traditionalists, Nagasaki flourished for decades as an important seat of learning. By 1853 when Matthew Perry brought his gunboats into Edo (Tokyo) Bay, as well as Siebold’s medical school, Nagasaki had a naval academy, western-style steam ship building yards, an academy of sciences with interests in physics, chemistry and optics, and the beginnings of steam engine manufacture among many other adventures into western ideas and technologies. Nagasaki was one of the heartlands of the explosion of activity which took place during the Meiji Restoration when Japan re-opened to the world, and ready for it in ways the rest of the country wasn’t.

• • • • • • • •

On display at Dejima. It might be construed as a commentary on gender relations during the Edo period; the tag says something about balloon fighting. But I think it is 玉突の場 (‘Ball striking table’). The game of billiards was introduced to Japan via Dejima in 1746. Intercultural exchange can be a strange and wonderful thing.

• • • • • • • •

Along with a relaxation of the rules regarding contact with foreigners came a relaxation of the laws relating to religious practice. Some Christians jumped the gun. When Nagasaki’s Oura Catholic cathedral was newly consecrated in 1865 a group of several hundred Kakure Kirishitan (‘hidden Christians’) appeared, largely peasants from the upper reaches of the Urakami valley. For their imprudence they were deported to various distant parts of the country. But in 1873 when all restriction was lifted more than 30,000 people claiming to be Christian emerged — after more than 200 years in the wilderness. Their various doctrines were not immediately recognisable to the priests of Nagasaki (French at the time) who declared them Mukashi Kirishitan, ‘ancient Christians’ and not part of or welcome in the orthodoxy. But Oura cathedral is still very much there.

And it’s still there at the end of one of those tourist avenues where you can buy your fill of soft serve, biscuits, souvenirs, Castella cakes (a remnant of Portugal) and on and on.

And that really is my point. There are vestiges of this rich history everywhere.

Some of the treasures we found in this imposing building, the Nagasaki Museum of History and Culture which we pretty much had to ourselves, apart from the customary rash of attendants. Look at it. Enormous! And very good.

In the background and to the left of the pic below is where the 26 Martyrs met their end. But it is buried from this perspective behind one of the several giant pachinko parlours, office blocks, electronics shops just there, a major tram stop, a construction site and I am standing on the terrace of Amu Plaza a giant shopping centre attached to the very stylish Nagasaki Rail Station.

We got control of the city’s four tram lines fairly early in the piece and used them extensively to get around. But to get out of the valleys in which they run you need to walk. This is one of the things we found,

… the ‘One-legged Torii’, a reminder that there is another story at Nagasaki. There is the matter of the bomb.

Kumano Kodo

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The Kumano Kodo is a series of ancient pilgrimage routes that crisscross the Kii Peninsula (as below), which is south of Kyoto and Osaka. These mountainous trails were and are used to reach the Three Grand Shrines of Kumano, at Hongu, Shingu and Nachi. Shrines of what? Shugendo Buddhism borrowing extensively from and influenced by Shinto and other local forms of animism.

It was the Nakahechi variant (in yellow) where we were going, left to right.

This area has been visited as a site of religious significance by pilgrims seeking healing and salvation for more than 1000 years. More recently it has become a popular walk for tourists, including many Australians and New Zealanders. I’m not 100 percent sure why. It’s not far from Kyoto and Osaka; it is heavily marketed by several dozen companies (who benefit from conveniently located accommodation); and it is a physically-demanding challenge, some of it especially, but not outside the limits of feasibility. All strong reasons, but there are lots of options for walking in Japan which would offer more. That said, a great time was had by all and there was so much to enjoy.

Four and a half days walking after three hours on two trains and half an hour on a bus, gradually getting further and further from the conurbations of the Kansai plain, and marvelling yet again at the genius of Japanese transport engineers as we slid along beside rivers and were swallowed by tunnels.

The first day — for anyone, this is a heavily standardised process; in some cases there is no way of getting off the track end-to-end — was from Takajiri-oji to Takahara. (‘Oji’ literally meaning ‘the younger brother of one’s parent’, but in this case subsidiary shrines pointing the way to the major shrines.)

Clockwise: Takajiri-oji with its torii or gate framing the shrine itself. The bridge which provided access from the bus stop to the information centre and the beginning of the walk which is very well waymaked. A case in point: when it says ‘Start’ that’s what it means. Note the person fishing in the river just to the left of the pole. An engraved stone typical of Shinto shrines, large and small. Among other things. We decrypted one that looked like it might have some particularly cosmic insight and it said this building (a toilet block) was opened by the governor of blah blah prefecture on blah blah date. Shinto adherents believe that natural features are often enlivened by kami, spirits, and that special ones like many of the mountains on the way and the Nachi waterfall have profound powers. A spider, because it was there. A good one though. Tigers’ colours.

Had the smile wiped off my face pretty smartly. ‘Climb steadily through the forest’, the notes say, as they often do. A climb of 350m in a kilometre. Stern. And it was very hot, although not as hot as it had been. But it is a pilgrimage, what do you expect? A bit of pain and suffering might be taken as given.

Clockwise again: One typical version of the track. A lot of it was far more broken and difficult to find footholds than this. Recently tended jizus in a small shrine on the way. Among the endless mysteries of Japanese Buddhism, a jizu is a bodhisattva, a representation maybe of a person who could have reached nirvana but has chosen not to do so that they can help others. Jizus are particularly supportive of mothers who have a child who has died in childbirth, early or stillborn. The oddity was not to see them here, but to wonder at how few there were. When we were walking on Shikoku whole hillsides would be covered in them. Arriving at Takahara (which means ‘plateau’ or high ledge’, we had gained about half a kilometre), passing a gardener at work, the mountainous, and verdant, surrounds, and a lane in the late light.

One of the features of the walk is where you might be staying and what you might eat there. The company we went with, Oku, is very good at choosing interesting minshuku or ryokan, guesthouses of various scale, and Kirin-no-sato at Takahara was an excellent example.

This is our host taking his own version of a selfie. Described by three widely distributed sources as a ‘special Japanese’, he was. Very much the exception to the rule. He sang, he danced or cantered at least, he uncovered the origins of his 20 or so guests and made a cheery little speech about the virtues of internationalism. Then he played flamenco guitar, and not for too long. Below I am pictured pledging my everlasting admiration.

It rained that night. From our bedroom window it looked like this about 5.30am —

and like this at the front door an hour or two later.

It was incredibly humid all day but didn’t rain.

Up past the backyards again — I do like Japanese backyards walks, and there are many of them —

— and into the forest

where we stayed all day. The pictures with Michael and I in them are anomalies. We are not walking through cedar forest. This might be true of 5 percent of the day and provided one of the talking points with comrades of the track. At least one found the monocultural nature of the cedar all about the same age mystifying. He pointed out the absence of bird and animal life (true), the very limited understorey (true) and ground cover (true), and wondered if it could be natural. Sitting in an onsen with him I said I thought at least some appeared to be growing in straight lines about 1.5m apart even though it would mean planting in ridiculous situations on slopes of 70-80 degrees. Subsequently we found obvious evidence of forestry, two harvested coupes in particular on from Jizo-chaya on the last day that looked like they had been subject to intense military bombardment. There were also foresters’ signs up claiming various plots. But is it all like that? Thousands of square kilometres? Could it possibly be? And here, blow me down, just to hand, is the answer I have been looking for. ‘The vast majority of forests are monoculture plantations which were planted to rebuild after the destruction of World War II.’ Planted! When you see the topography of these forests this is simply super-extraordinary. So Ian (son of a Gerrigerrup soldier settler; one for you Ned), we were right.

It also means that there are very few long views but the short views were often quite compelling.

I also notice just now that we climbed another 600m before a 5km descent to get to Chikatsuyu, and that we recorded the absolutely no doubt correct distance of 10.5kms as 14.6. We do tend to wander. Probably just looking where to put our feet.

Chikatsuyu was spread through rice paddies. (Yes, we were down. Proof.) There was even a lookout with a rest area to confirm it.

(Immediately above, this would be Michael checking the race results; and look at her, not even puffing.) ‘During one of the first Imperial pilgrimages here, Emperor Kazan (968-1008) was constructing sutra mounds when he picked two kaya reeds to use as chopsticks. Noticing damp on the red stalk, he inquired whether it was blood or dew. Chi ka tsuya?’ That’s what it says. I’m just passing it on. Oh, and the answer was tsuya. You can relax.

Tonight we would be in the Minshuku Chikatsuyu, prima facie suburban but with an onsen and wonderful food of which this was a small sample.

A typhoon was due the next day, he said casually. Oku have a branch, small but indicative of how much business they do on the Kumano Kodo, in an old tea house in Chikatsuyu. We thought we should consult with a knowledgable person about what our plans should be. The next section could be done at three levels of difficulty by judicious use of buses. He suggested that, given the likely weather, we pursue the easiest option. Even though my wife demurred I thought that sounded terribly wise. Insightful. Even first rate. So … you know. We cheated and took the bus with our friends from Toowoomba and various other pilgrims to Hosshinmon-oji …

where it was pissing down. Furiously. It was an umbrella day, but full of feature and interest and fun. Maybe, just maybe, because it wasn’t so far (supposed to be nearly 8, our instruments said 10.8. Wandering again.), but I think it was the day I enjoyed the most. And it was just the tail of the typhoon. The bigger winds had passed nearby the night before.

It included arriving at Hongu, one of the three Destinations, and how wonderful it was.

‘Cosmic time: Past.’ Quite. And then a few hundred metres out of town at the side of the Kumano River,

was this, the largest torii in Japan …

a gateway to a vacancy which, for whatever reason, moved me profoundly.

As far as I can understand the signs, the temple complex used to be here before it was washed away in some massive floods (I note the levees along the banks of the Kumano now), and it has been left. Vacant. Oyunohara, the place where the foundation deities descended to earth in the form of three moons in the branches of an oak.

Oyunohara, where Yatagarasu, the three-legged crow appears. Yatagarasu, the mark of rebirth and rejuvenation, the creature that has historically cleaned up after great battles, symbolizing renaissance after such tragedies. (The Japanese soccer team wears Yatagarasu on their team uniform, and it is an honoured badge for the winners of the Premiership league to wear for the consequent season.)

This day, the rain had stopped and it was very quiet. The man in the background is a worker picking up rubbish. He would find very little. And it was still. We bought wonderful softu kurema and Michael remembered his stick.

That night we stayed at Yunomineso, a short bus ride away, which describes itself as a ryokan, but one which you would have to say was a long way up market, so far up market that

a) it offered, without asking, a shoe dryer;

b) it provided an illustrated face-to-face lecture with guidebook on how to go about your business there before handing over the keys;

c) it is very close to Yunomine Onsen, a very famous version of that genre (see below) and has its own mineral springs which can be drunk, cooked in, bathed in and which turned my silver ring a bright gold;

d) it has its own indoor and outdoor onsens. Perhaps I should explain. The weary traveller strips off in the dry room, enters the wet room, washes very thoroughly, often sitting on a stool and using a small wooden bucket to contribute. After getting absolutely every vestige of soap off, same enters a large public although gender-separated bath, the onsen, often quite hot, often with mineralised water. The effect is claimed to be restorative, meditative and so on. I usually found them to be too hot and preferred a good scrub under the shower.

e) it does serve a renowned and very fancy kaiseki, the traditional Japanese version of a tasty and tasteful feast. And here it is, but without the river fish.

And here are the instructions and order of consumption supplied to each consumer with additional verbal instruction.

I tussled with the boiled sea snail but found the duck ham on apple very much to my taste. There is a photo of Michael scarfing up the horse sashimi. However, not much for the vegetarian here or often elsewhere in Japan. Myrna ate a lot of rice.

Here’s the river fish.

Don’t eat the head and bones.

Our room. Such comfort really. AND, permitted by both the weather and the building, unconditioned air at last.

We left the next day from Yunomine Onsen, a five-minute drive from our ryokan and a very popular spa town.

Yes. Hot. The bus driver told me that the water bubbling up in the cage behind Myrna was 90 degrees Celsius and I have no reason to disbelieve him. On the basis of visual evidence, it was heavily mineralised.

Ukegawa to Koguchi. We managed to buy some nashi pears at Ukegawa. They are heavy to carry, as big as a handshake and expensive, but they were remarkably refreshing and satisfying for a snack.

It was another day in the forest, distinguished by two things. One was that it was a beautiful day, clear, sunny, mid-20s, comparatively low humidity. The second was that there was a view. One view.

It was a long climb out of Ukegawa’s paddyfields too, 500m up but over five kilometres, steady rather than crippling, and then about half way along this day’s section of the track there is a sharp bend where the trees have been cleared, Hyakken-gura, which looks out over the ‘3,600 peaks of Kumano’. The second photo, from the edge, shows some of the places where logging has occurred recently.

Mr Fit had run ahead and we found him cooling his feet in the river at Koguchi.

Our accomodation that night was Minshuku Momofuku, the building down to the right of this road with the grass in front of it.

It had been a school building with two long single-storey wings joined by an office block.

The river ran past within 20m of our room, a lovely sound, and the windows opened wide. The food was a bit like a school canteen in that you could get what you liked and there was plenty to like. For the first time in several weeks I had cereal and fruit for breakfast.

Probably our favourite accommodation.

And then the final day. Perhaps it is appropriate for a pilgrimage to end with suffering: 14.8 kilometres, all of them difficult. We did end up walking more than 20 that day but there were extra bits at either end.

You start by sneaking in behind a small house with a pale blue (not customary) sign on it to Nachi. After most of an hour we’d done 2 ks. and it wasn’t too bad, in fact it flattened out a bit, and I thought we’ve got this beaten.

The easy bit

The young Belgians who had done the entirety of the third day in the typhoon’s rain came up and offered the idea that it was just up, then across, then down and we were nearly up. Myrna pointed out, correctly, that that was errr never true. But hope springs eternal. Anyway then it got hard, really hard.

I have noted before how hard it is to take a photo of ‘steep’ but at least you can get a bit of idea about the state of the track. You’d get to a corner and think that’ll be it. It’ll ease off. And round the corner there’d be another equivalent stretch, and then another, and then another, and then another … It took a long time to get to the first of four peaks. And then there were three more.

I look a bit done, but I shut my mouth and looked fine.

And of course, it wasn’t flat across the top. It was a constant series of sharp up and downs.

About mid-way this day there is a rest stop (accessible by a narrow road) with a shelter and vending machines. Iced coffee, ah iced coffee, has it ever tasted so good? Had lunch — rice balls, folded omelette, a bit of fish — moved on.

The view below signalled the end of the climbs. Our eventual destination, Kii-Katsuura on the coast, is visible in the background but we were getting there by bus. The temple complex at Nachi was the walking destination.

There was the small matter of getting down.

I usually find it harder than going up and it wasn’t any different this time. The surface varied. Steeper sections were often covered with rocks, sometimes stepped, sometimes flat, at times more slippery than the gravel. I found it quite hard. I think it was quite hard. I’ll say quite hard. The photos peter out around here.

Eventually we stepped out into a parking lot which signalled the edge of the Nachi compound. It had a view which led to the next descent through what I can only assume was a mighty adventure playground: huge slide, dramatic climbing frame, giant swings. And then the next section began. My knees at this stage were beginning to crumple. Steps only for the next 600 metres. I would think literally several thousand. The next sign said ‘500m to Nachi’. We stepped down for 10 minutes or so, signage says ‘450m to Nachi’. Ooo I hate that. I know we’ve gone more than 50m. We’re going down zig-zags which are about 80m long and we’ve done four. It’s a lie. Do it again. Signage says ‘400m to Nachi’. It’s a test. I’ve lost all confidence in advice and just don’t think until Myrna steps out on the first flat bit. There … and there I notice is a comparatively civilised sample of the steps. We are in Nachi.


I’m sure there is some bright witticism one could make about arriving at a temple, the Three-tiered Pagoda no less, and finding that it’s just a photo on building fabric. Does the Wizard of Oz step out perhaps when summoned? At least the Nachi Falls to its right were in honest fettle. Whatever disappointment I felt (negligible) was overtaken by the revelation that we now had to go down another 2-300 steps to get to the bus stop. I’d given over my role of navigator to take up the position of grump and did my best to grimace and moan all the way down.

What would the Buddha say? Probably chuckle and say, ‘Well did you make it or not?’ And I’d have to shut up and say, Yes. Happy in the service. It was memorable, and I’m better for it.

• • • • • • • •

We stayed at Manseiro that night, the six-storey building on the other side of Kii-Katsuura bay: a ryokan with a straight up and down version of the rules with communication via Google Translate. Dinner complex and sophisticated, I have no doubt their very finest work. I’m not sure why the gaikoku hito get parked out of the way by themselves, probably so that their infamies are not widely observed. But we were all a bit tired and I didn’t feel like too much intercultural interaction involving effort. That said, the Manseiro satisfied my two priorities: a load of washing clean and dry, and a comfortable bed. The next day, Kyoto.

CAVEAT EMPTOR: Tullamarine

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A journey of 30,000 kilometres begins with a tram ride.

Number 19 (in shot), up Sydney Road from Grattan St to the terminus at Baker St. One kilometre walk to the intermediate destination in Coburg North to deliver a mended jumper (in the plastic bag). Private transport to the airport. Actually a hotel at the airport because we needed to be there at 4am to get a 6 o’clock flight to Sydney connecting with a flight to LA. I thought this was a good idea because you could change the sheets, make the bed, clean the floors, check the fridge, get rid of the rubbish, that sort of thing, in a leisurely manner rather than trying to go crackers at 1.30 in the morning. Plus you’d already be at the airport.

That all went like a dream, a good omen, because what was ahead was reasonably ambitious. A tour of Mexico covering a lot of country, an investigation of Boston and the north-east of the United States, a walk in Provence’s alps, a big drive through France with time spent in Burgundy and Alsace, some time in Singapore … well, that’s just how the thinking turned out. It covered what we thought we would like to do, albeit in something of a hurry. Seven weeks, six countries, one twice, 27 different beds and a night spent in a bus, 9 flights with 7 different airlines, a dozen bus rides, commercial, private, big, medium, mini, for about 2800 kilometres, a lot of them pretty bumpy (Mexican speed bumps!! Bloody hell), three subways, two lots of trams, trains exotic and otherwise, company known, unknown, recovered. Yes I know, heroic. Plenty of opportunity for things to go wrong.

But I felt pretty good about those Things when we got to the airport for departure. We were in good time and good fettle. I had a folder full of bits of paper all backed up on my phone that were proof against surprises. They were all well rehearsed. I could visualise issue and response. Then a bit of a hiccup: we hadn’t filled out our Qantas authorisations to fly. Just the details of our COVID vaccinations. No issue: I had the records to hand.

Then the swiping of the passports began. Whatever she did, the Qantas checker-in could not bring up our ESTAs, the US Electronic System for Travel Authorisation without which you cannot enter the country and in fact without which the computer will not issue a boarding pass. The ESTA is not a complex affair, straightforward personal data, vaccination info, the questions you still fill out on the form to enter Australia. It’s just quicker and more efficient now.

I was only a bit bothered because I knew about ESTAs. It wasn’t a surprise. I had done ours some weeks before and had paper and digital copies to prove I’d done so.

But the computer said no. And no. And no. And no. And no again. Time was passing, and instead of being in good time for our flight the boarding time came and drifted past. This was a BIG issue, because with a round the world ticket if you miss any leg the rest of your ticket is immediately cancelled. Were we to fall, catastrophically, at the very first hurdle?

A supervisor who had been hovering was summoned. He took our passports and bits of paper away while we stood, faint, moving off after clogging up that lane of the check-in for 45 minutes. He came back with what I would describe as an intent look on his face. ‘How much did you pay for these?’ he asked. ‘Fifty-eight US.’ I knew all this. I’d done it. I’d been careful. I had the proof. It must have been their computer. ‘It should have been 21. You’ve been scammed I’m afraid. There is no record in either case of an ESTA. Without that we can’t issue you a boarding pass.’ So what do we do? ‘You can apply now, but it can take up to 36 hours to get a response.’

We sat on a luggage belt and began the applications on our phones. Phones have small screens when you’re freaked out and your fingers get unaccountably fat and there are several steps including the transfer of money and we were just sitting there with no concrete prospects and why were we doing it anyway because where we really needed to be was Mexico City rather than LA. Maybe just say, fuck it and give up. Write the whole thing off … too hard …

Did it take 15 minutes? It might have, I can’t remember. It might have been twice that. But we finished them and clicked Send. What now? Two old folks sitting on a luggage belt in an airport departure centre right out of the game.

Another actor arrived, a deputy supervisor who invited us to stand at a different counter and talk to her. We considered various options. As we spoke my ESTA arrived. Just the faintest glimmer on the horizon. The faintest. She looked and looked at her computer, and went off and spoke to people, and came back and looked some more, and made noises which were neither encouraging or discouraging. Went off again and came back and said, ‘We think we can get you on direct flight to LA tomorrow afternoon. Would that work for you?’ Yes it would. Salvation. Qantas did that for us, Qantas, which also provided flights at least as comfortable, reliable and efficient as any other airline we subsequently flew with.

So we went downstairs, got a cab (during the ride Myrna’s ESTA came through) and went home, messed up the bed, may have brought dirt in on the floors, found nothing in the fridge and the internet turned off, put some rubbish — the fake ESTAs — in the bin, and slept fitfully. Tomorrow was going to be another day.

• • • • • • •

That sign says ‘Hollywood’.

GATED COMMUNITIES

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DSC00351It doesn’t look like much. A bit tinny in fact. Rendered cement block pillars with concrete cappings and a gate made out of slender hollow aluminium extrusions with spear points I suppose for the joy of it. All it says is don’t come in. The sign notes that this is the entrance to houses 12-13-14 only, so you can’t get in to the whole place that way, the whole 14 houses, properties more correctly, that are tucked in behind this fence and this gate in the expensive part of Toowoomba.

It doesn’t look like much, but for whatever reason it ruffled my feathers. What was in there that needed this sort of protection? Gold? Jewels? State secrets? Julian Assange? Does the pizza delivery boy have a key I wondered, to save the nuisance of answering the gate call?  And what about the drivers of ambulances and fire trucks, cops for that matter if they’re ever needed? Maybe gated communities don’t have emergencies.

But then as fences and gates go this one wasn’t much more than a gesture. The real question for me at the time was just who, in assertively egalitarian Queensland, did the occupants think they were? What flag were they waving at me?

                  Before I built a wall I’d ask to know/ What I was walling in or walling out,

                  And to whom I was like to give offense./ Something there is that doesn’t love  a wall,

                  That wants it down. …

The emboldened print in the real estate ads suggest that the idea of a gated community is a big  drawcard. According to the 2009 census more than 10 percent of the occupied houses in the US at that time were in gated communities, a 53 percent rise from 2001. In the south and west of the country this figure was as high as 40 percent. Many of these communities are in what Joel Garreau calls ‘Edge Cities’, the new developments on the fringes of older cities, farmland become ‘technoburbs’, where the shopping malls, the office tower blocks, the corporation headquarters are, and where their inhabitants live in new gated communities. Some time ago Garreau pointed out that there were 190 ‘Edge Cities’ larger than Orlando (the City Beautiful, a fairly random benchmark) in the US; but only forty downtowns the size of Orlando.

But what do we discover about how these communities operate? In the wealthiest ones domestic workers are the main source of activity during the day. (A fascination of mine. It’s tradies, cleaners, gardeners and pool boys who wallow in this luxury as a rule.) Studies have confirmed that in general, gated communities in the US constitute dormitory towns for their inhabitants. Most daily activities – work, leisure, study, or purchasing activities – happen elsewhere.

In a bitter critique of this development, Tom Vanderbilt says ‘Edge City is fundamentally hostile to community. … It is aggressively designed to keep others out. … What Edge City boils down to is not only an economic and cultural distancing from people of a different race and class, but a purposeful withdrawal from involvement in and responsibility for the greater politic of the city.’ He cites as an example Atlanta Edge City coalition ‘where 75 chief executive officers of major firms joined together to substitute for and supplement governmental actions affecting quality of life … funding equipment needs for mall policing, providing improved roadway access, support for the public high school, marketing the community through an annual guide book….’ Hardly malicious or illegal; just a narrow definition of the body politic. Liberté, perhaps egalité, but fraternité only with folks like us.

‘What are you doing round here?’ is the last confirmed recorded comment made by George Zimmerman, volunteer neighbourhood watchman for Twin Lakes gated community in Florida, before he shot dead Trayvon Williams, a 17 year-old black teenager who was staying with a friend who lived at Twin Lakes.

 * * * * *

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Gated communities can be larger and more autistic.

La Rouvière on the outskirts of Marseille consists of seven giant buildings comprising 2,200 dwellings with a population of about 9,000. It was built originally to house settlers (colons) returning from Algeria in the 60s and 70s and, with its internal shopping, schools and leisure facilities, could be called self-contained. Its gates are closed at night.

As real estate agents say, it has been tightly held. Operating exactly like an engorged body corporate, its management monitors the background of any prospective new buyers. Its boss is quoted as saying, ‘New residents all belong to the same class (white, lower middle class) … Immigrants know they will not be welcome. That is the case and it’s a very good thing.’ There is a consensus among its populace that people who live there are courteous and there are no delinquents. There is certainly no graffiti. About half the votes cast in its polling booths at the last election were for the Marine Le Pen’s Front National, but you can’t leap to judgment. Courtesy, hard-working youth, clean streets … who’s complaining? And I think the La Rouverians would draw a causal connection with their vigilance.

However as the Syrian (and North African) refugee crisis sweeps through Turkey, Greece, Italy and into various parts of Europe where are the fences and gates to be erected? They’re going somewhere, these several million people. They don’t simply evaporate. For those with longer views these are the tidal surges of history. One of the more recent was in 1938 with a different crew involved. A solution was proposed and enacted.

And what is this doing to the grand vision of a comparatively borderless Europe embodied in the European Union? A great deal is the answer. Yanis Varoufakis, the former Minister of Finance in Greece’s Syriza government has written a new book And the weak suffer what they must? It draws a picture of how the governments which produced and insisted on the Sisyphean solutions to Greek’s economic crisis are now being populated by anti-semite and anti-refugee xenophobes. He believes that the far right has achieved a position of being ‘in power if not in office’ in many of these countries. Today’s headline in The Guardian: ‘Austria’s lurch to the right shocks EU’.

Fear of the other (Muslim or infidel, Jew or Palestinian, and so on in very long list) is meat and drink for authoritarian/ nationalistic political movements. These are apparently not times for generosity of spirit. That’s for fools.

 * * * * *

And they can be larger again.

Gating of a residential areas is a very old phenomenon, and may have had always had similar bases — the primary one being to keep unwanted people out.

It was a way, for example, to assist the aristocracy with managing riotous behavior as well as the various plagues which ran through the locals. But on a larger scale the idea was that security would be enhanced by protective walls.

wall-cloudsWhether even this one, all 21,000km of it, worked is moot. Around 1600 the wall did its job for 40 years. But in 1644 the Manchus (the northerners of primary concern) overran the Shun and Ming overlords via the gates at the Shanhai Pass. With or without a gate, a wall will inevitably present challenging problems, but a gate will always be a weakness. Despite its triple-decker walls and fortifications which are impressive even today, Constantinople fell in 1453 because someone left a postern gate open.

And there’s this one.

images-1In 1992, the idea of creating a physical barrier between the Israeli and West Bank Palestinian populations was proposed by then-prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, following the murder of an Israeli teenage girl in Jerusalem. Currently more than 500km of the barrier has been completed. Another 212km is planned. The impact on the occupants of the area, especially the Palestinians, has been profound. One fairly sober account of that impact can be found here.

IsraeliFenceWall2011Banksy-Israel-Wall-620x350Palestinian boy climbs through opening in barrier in Shuafat

And Donald Trump wants to build a wall, I beg your pardon, he insists that Mexico build a wall along the border between that country and the US. That border is around 3,200km long. In his defence there is already, at the behest of the US Senate, some sort of fencing for 1,125 km of that distance at a cost of USD2.4 billion.

 * * * * *

‘The gated community is nothing but the legitimate and natural response of a people who through hard work and enterprise have come to the point in their life when they can give themselves and their children a quality of life the state is unable to offer.’

— Indian businessman/ property developer Rohit Gore, responding to a journalist’s question in Mumbai.

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‘So pervasive has neoliberalism become that we seldom even recognise it as an ideology. We appear to accept the proposition that this utopian, millenarian faith describes a neutral force; a kind of biological law, like Darwin’s theory of evolution. But the philosophy arose as a conscious attempt to reshape human life and shift the locus of power.

‘Neoliberalism sees competition as the defining characteristic of human relations. It redefines citizens as consumers, whose democratic choices are best exercised by buying and selling, a process that rewards merit and punishes inefficiency. It maintains that “the market” delivers benefits that could never be achieved by planning.

‘Attempts to limit competition are treated as inimical to liberty. Tax and regulation should be minimised, public services should be privatised. The organisation of labour and collective bargaining by trade unions are portrayed as market distortions that impede the formation of a natural hierarchy of winners and losers. Inequality is recast as virtuous: a reward for utility and a generator of wealth, which trickles down to enrich everyone. Efforts to create a more equal society are both counter-productive and morally corrosive. The market ensures that everyone gets what they deserve. 

‘We internalise and reproduce its creeds. The rich persuade themselves that they acquired their wealth through merit, ignoring the advantages – such as education, inheritance and class – that may have helped to secure it. The poor begin to blame themselves for their failures, even when they can do little to change their circumstances.

‘Never mind structural unemployment: if you don’t have a job it’s because you are unenterprising. Never mind the impossible costs of housing: if your credit card is maxed out, you’re feckless and improvident. Never mind that your children no longer have a school playing field: if they get fat, it’s your fault. In a world governed by competition, those who fall behind become defined and self-defined as losers.’

 — George Monbiot, The Zombie Doctrine (read it all, and you should, right here)

* * * * *

The gated community at Toowoomba that sparked these reflections is innocent and trivial in this world of comparisons. But what reinforced the strength of these feelings was something else I wrote about in the blog on the Darling Downs: the massive shift towards the privatisation of Australian schools. The really serious issue driven by the neoliberals of our current government — in whatever party — is the reallocation of public resources to the private sector: to ensure that there is a second suite of tennis courts, or a new arts and music centre, a new auditorium, a training pool, a campus in China leaving the residualised public schools — still educating two-thirds of the population — with minimal support for kids with special needs or for providing additional literacy support.

Because it is right here, absolutely on this point rather than anywhere else, that the cost to the community of exclusion (partial, symbolic, financial, themed, whatever) becomes most apparent and the issue most palpable.

First, you can run neoliberal arguments about entitlement related to adults if you must. But children (aged 5 for example!), ipso facto, are not in a position to control their development and thereby their destinies. They need help, support and direction — all of them, not just a select group.

Second, no country can afford to deliberately choose to have an ill-educated and disaffected sector within their community. The cost of that is appalling; and it is a cost to the whole community, everyone, in liveability if not in taxation. That vast cost is also only about remediation to some sort of maintenance level; it is not investment in growth and development. We don’t get that much out of the AUD2.6billion we spend annually on keeping people in prison, a very high proportion of whom are illiterate or close to. AND, suggestive of the presence of this problem right now, the reason Australia’s international test scores are as bad as they are is because of the extraordinary spread of performance. The bottom end has a long tail. It’s that mob outside the gates talking back.

And then there is the question of walling out or being walled in?

When I went to university I lived in a boarding college which had a preponderance of graduates from private schools, some of my closest friends today in fact. But I also had friends among the private school boyos, many of whom are now highly placed in the professions and commerce. Unless they were good at sport, high school boys puzzled them in so far as they thought about them at all. High school boys were never likely to understand the exigencies of life because they hadn’t been inducted into a lifestyle where the one certainty, beyond the existence of hierarchies in which everyone had a place, was that they belonged to a group that was different, better and therefore entitled. In so far as they thought about high schools girls, they were probably sluts, and that was that. Resolved. Simple.

There’s a lot missing from that picture and not just as I have sketched it. My point: the personal cost of having such a distorted and cavalier view of the world from this sort of ‘gated’ and socially-ordered perspective is profound. Walled in, you miss so much.

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At Kłodzko in southern Poland I remember looking in wonder at the fort which dominated the town with its layers and layers of fortifications, accretions from 1300 until the second world war, and being forcefully struck by the resultant sense of enclosure and imprisonment — walled in. And like the invisible darkness full of the unknown around the corner in a horror film, a source of terror.

For those who were away the day Romania was done

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I got an email the other day, a while ago now, asking me to explain where Romania was because my correspondent couldn’t work out the screen shot in a previous post. I thought this might present an opportunity to stick in some bits and pieces that don’t obviously go anywhere else and to answer some questions. Geography. Okay. There. That’s Romania. Bordered to the north by the Ukraine and Moldova (now there’s another new (but actually very old) one for you), to the west by Hungary and to the south by Serbia and Bulgaria. After providing the southern border, the Danube turns sharply north at Silistra and drains through a vast marshy delta into the Black Sea. There is a sprawl of seaside resorts down this coast which continue all the way to Turkey and beyond. The Carpathians curl across its north and down through its centre leaving the Pannonian Plain to the west, and to the east the coastal plain which is part of the steppelands which finish somewhere near Siberia. It is almost exactly the same size as Victoria but a lot harder to get around. This is where we went. Maramures is a region not a city.

The people. I took this photo not just because the ice cream was good, which it was, but because this charming Romanian at Sighisoara seemed to suggest a much more widespread physical type: smooth olive skin, neatly defined features, warm brown eyes, slender, sometimes tall but generally not. I don’t know whether you are allowed to talk about physical types; probably not. But at Brasov (‘brush-off’) I had this sense of being surrounded in the Square on a party night by hundreds of very good looking people with similar features.

At left Mircea Eliade, the great Romanian philosopher and writer. Ionescu fits. Even Ceaușescu, at right, at a pinch.

History. Romania doesn’t get its name from the many Romany (‘gypsies’) who live there. That’s a story for another day. It gets its name from its inhabitants’ desire to be clear that they are ‘citizens of Rome’, and in fact one of the very last remnants of that classical empire. But both Herodotus and Thucydides are clear that the people who originally lived between the Danube and the Tisa were Dacians (not to be confused with Thracians who lived where contemporary Bulgaria is).

In the second millennium of the Christian era, this was part of the Ottoman empire, the dominant ‘international’ political influence of at least half that period. It wasn’t a heartland of the empire in the way that the western Balkans and Greece were, and in fact when Mehmet II was at his peak so was Vlad Tepes, (‘tsepesh’ if you care, also ‘The Impaler’) providing constant interference and harassment from the northern provinces of Wallachia, much of today’s Romania, and Moldova. (Vlad had a son called Mihnea ‘the Bad’. If you were his dad wouldn’t that set you back? It would me. But in the circumstances, it may have been his father who coined the tag.)

I have found the vestiges of the Ottoman empire irresistible, and its story bears greatly on this whole area. So, indulge me a few glimpses.

I must have been away the day the Ottomans were done, an empire that lasted 600 years, possibly about 10 times longer than the international dominance of the US of A. (The Persian Empire wasn’t covered in great detail either as I remember. As for Ashoka … well! The new National Curriculum will resolve these problems I am sure.)

The Ottomans emerged from nowhere if that’s what we can call the Anatolian foothills. No city, great or small; just raggle taggle bands of nomads who got a taste for real estate which eventually extended from the Persian Gulf to the walls of Vienna and from North Africa to the Crimean peninsula and beyond. This was the Abode of Peace, Dar ul-Islam, and areas outside it Dar ul-Harb, the Abode of War.

Although this expansion had been going on for a century or more, the first recorded battle is a giant landmark in Balkan history which remains a bitter and provocative memory today. On 15 June 1389 they destroyed the Serb forces at Kosovo on the Blackbird Field and swept north. Their ‘capital’ was Bursa south of where Istanbul is today near the shore of the Marmara Sea, and their playground for hunting and leisure was Edirne now on the border of Turkey and Bulgaria where our bus was stripped and our luggage searched at 1.30 in the morning before we were sent on our way. At its height its armies were assembled each year on 23rd April, St George’s Day (how odd that the patron saint of both England and the Ottomans was St George, and that both versions are depicted, as we saw in Cappadocia, slaying a dragon), and the season of conquest — north, south, east or west, whatever had been chosen — would begin. After six months or so, for 200 years, these armies which often included the sultan would return fat with the spoils which would make them temporarily rich and new tax regimes which made them rich for a great deal longer.

The Ottomans won (for several hundred years, invariably) because they had cannons and because they were organized. Theirs were the first armies in the world to have uniforms, to be paid timar, a regular stipend, and to have a band playing to egg on the warriors. (We heard what such a band would sound like in the 1453 Museum in Istanbul and it would have been suitably terrifying.) The shock troops were janissaries, a quite particular form of levy. Every three years towns, especially in the Balkans and Greece but more widely spread as well, would be visited by a representative of the empire to select the finest Christian youths — the fittest, the strongest, the best looking, the power forward match-winners (in a localised football note, think Carey, Brereton, Brown, Ablett snr.) — to serve the Sultan in a complicated form of slavery. They were taught Turkish, fed, housed, educated and trained and never allowed to marry. This semi-desirable situation was not available to Turkish Ottomans because Muslims could never be slaves.

Here we see Kemal Ataturk, hero of modern Turkey and its President for 15 years, in a janissary uniform.I can’t help you with why. The remarkable head gear is said to be shaped like a sleeve of the gown worn by the founder of the Dervish order.  Its name, ketche, can be literally translated as ‘felt’. It was worn by all janissaries without exception.

The janissaries became soldiers, and those who displayed particular aptitude for study became kapikullari, the bureaucrats who provided the empire with its strength. The CEO of the empire was the Grand Vizier who walked the finest of lines between being all powerful and subject to strangulation by the Sultan’s bowstring (among the jobs of the Head Gardener). Of the 36 Grand Viziers who followed the Sultanate of Mehmet II, 34 were not Muslim born and several were Jews. The Grand Vizier who caused the building of the bridge over the Drina, Sokolovic, was doing his Serbian home town a favour. (For a visual sample of the area and an aural sample of the book click here.)

The Ottomans were comparatively benign rulers. At left is a copy of the edict of Mehmet II guaranteeing religious freedom to Bosnia in 1458 for example, which enabled Bosnia to survive as such an unusual amalgam of Muslim Turk (or Bosniak), Catholic Croat and Orthodox Serb, for as long as it did. (Digressing, Ottoman script is truly remarkable as this close up of a ‘deed’ describing the towns and villages to be administered by one pasha illustrates. One story says that it derives from the illiterate Osman’s signature, inking his fingers and swirling them across the page.)

The Ottomans didn’t interfere much with local culture or language. As a rule, new, or old, subjects were not required to become Muslim. A rough but comparatively consistent form of justice was instituted. They weren’t traders; that was left to the Armenians who built their own niche in the empire’s workings. They were rentiers, and the rent was, for the times, fair. The real violence was kept for the palace and its inhabitants.

Sultans were lineal descendants of the House of Osman and, for the first few centuries at least, when a Sultan was near death or died, fratricide was the standard and accepted practice. The son who got in first and organized the killing of his siblings (often half siblings considering that at its peak the Sultan’s seraglio had around 4000 women) would ascend to the throne. As with many of the royal houses of Europe this did not produce an especially healthy lineage.

The taking of Constantinople (from the remnant members of the Byzantine Empire) was a high point in Ottoman history, not least because it united ‘the two halves of the world’. It’s a story too long to be told here, but it includes the portage of dozens of large vessels over Pera (where we stayed in Istanbul) to be refloated behind the giant chain which cut off access by water to the Golden Horn. Ten metre long brass cannon which could fire shot weighing ¾ of tonne moved by carts pulled by 30 bullocks and attended by 700 men damaged the walls. Mehmet had an army of what may have been 300,000 men, but even so was constantly being counseled that this was inadequate to defeat the fortifications defending the 4,983 (names recorded) inhabitants capable of bearing arms. The deep defensive ditches (correctly, fosses) between the double walls were filled with the bodies of the dead so that other forces could cross them. But in the end it appears that the Ottomans won simply because someone from inside left a postern gate, the tiny hidden entrances used to nip in and out while a siege was in progress, open. The failed siege of Vienna 150 years later where the Ottomans were defeated by what we now call an extreme weather event is an equally dramatic tale.

Albanians were still paying tribute to Turkey in the 20th century, still sending delegates to a parliament which had become a shell game with no pea.

This is the empire described by Tsar Nicholas II as ‘the sick man of Europe’, a phrase which has delighted sub editors ever since. The bigger it got, the more flaccid it became. It never seemed to learn that there were other sources of wealth besides plunder; and when the plunder dried up, the cost of the war machine broke the country. Among other infamies, the janissaries began charging ‘tooth rent’, a cost to food suppliers generated by the act of eating, and famously revolted  before being disbanded.

One of the Sayings of the Prophet that had strong currency in the Empire was: ‘Every novelty is an innovation. Every innovation is an error. Every error leads to hellfire.’ Time was thought to be circular rather than linear. Evliya Celebi (at left), a janissary who among many many other things wrote, describes himself looting the same house he looted one year previously and looking for and finding the hatchet he had left there, a small proof of the ubiquity of eternity. Great empires become encrusted with a thousand types of cosmopolitanism, all too digestible when the direction is strong and the leadership inviolate. But when the order changes what is left is a potpourri of romance and memories.

After that modest digression, back to Romania — Food. Superb. Delicious. Wonderful. Here’s a portion of what the Intrepid trip notes had to say about food: ‘Vegetarians might find the menu selection less varied than they would see at home. Vegetarianism is not as common in this region and generally the choices are basic, involving vegetables and fried cheese. Vegans will find it even more challenging. Vegetarians might choose to supplement meals with supplies bought from home, e.g. protein bars, dried fruits and so on.’ Not so.

A full tilt Romanian evening meal is likely to consist of soup (phonetically ‘chorb’ or ‘chorb-uh’ everywhere in the eastern Balkans and Turkey) often vegetal, salad (anything up to 10 or 12 on a restaurant menu, variations on a theme, with shepherd’s salad the heartiest with corn, cheese and nuts), stew (the Hungarians do not have a mortgage on goulash), cake and fruit. Polenta in various forms appeared as an option at most meals. Cheese was a staple. At one hotel where we had breakfast I counted 14 different types. Snacks come out of the street windows: a score of different types of pretzels, and layers of filo, rolled or flat, filled with cheese or fruit. Shops selling gyros (the meat we get in souvlaki) were everywhere. Breakfast was bread (often home made), hard and soft cheese, excellent yoghurt, tomatoes and peppers — and when I say tomatoes and peppers, I mean tomatoes and peppers straight out of the garden such as you have never tasted. Four of our five local guides commented on the exodus of young people from country regions. Each of them, remarkably, used the image of there being no one left to tend the tomatoes to describe the calamity that was in the offing.

It is true that we were there at the height, or just after, of the harvest; but what we ate was food rather than salt, sugar and fat. Here are the highly photogenic Mat and Luz eating in a hotel in Velika Tarnovo (Bulgaria actually), the sort of meal we could have had although from memory I think I had a cheese omelette and Myrna a salad at the same table. What you are looking at is a ‘sache’ (that mysterious English word) of roast vegetables, another of pieces of pork, some bread which has been on the griddle and some polenta.

Accommodation. Great. Clever. Very well located 3-star hotel accommodation, very clean, very comfortable, everywhere with wifi internet connection. Three ‘homestays’, which could be better described as very good quality bed and breakfast places; not, definitely not, sleeping on straw palliasses being nudged by donkeys. At right Myrna is on the stairs of the one we stayed in at Sighitu, and yes that is a Jag in the driveway. To the considerable amusement of all those not concerned, Chris and Joop did have drawer beds in Viscri. Our room had an ensuite and a gorgeous ceramic stove just in case the weather turned cold which, of course, it never did. Why did I become interested in eastern Europe? I’ve been wondering that myself. It could have been getting excited about Balkan music after watching Emir Kusturica’s film ‘Underground’. It was so gay, so crazy, such a exhilarating mixture of east and west. And that’s an interest I’ve pursued. But it might have been reading Neal Ascherson’s book The Black Sea, a masterpiece, which introduced me to the Samartians, the Scythians and the Pechenegs and the prospect of ecological catastrophe if the Black Sea turns itself upside down (which is all too possible). I also think it introduced me to the idea of the Saxon villages in Transylvania which ever since I have wanted to see. And then during the troubles in the mid-90s I was reading Robert Kaplan’s Balkan Ghosts and Ian Malcolm’s Bosnia: A Short History and Rebecca West’s Black Lamb Grey Falcon. All these are from a genre of writing which attracts me greatly: going somewhere and thinking out loud about what it means (another master, the Pole Ryszard Kapuściński).

More recently I’ve read Patrick Leigh Fermor’s Between the Woods and the Water. An 18 year-old Englishman determines to walk from Amsterdam to Istanbul and has adventures on the way. A Time of Gifts, devoted to the first section of the walk is not as good, but once he crosses the Danube at Esztergom, in Hungary but on the Slovak border (in 1934), the story just gets so interesting and the language begins to sing. As well as being a war hero, a boxer, a horseman, the lover of a Romanian princess and an historian, Leigh Fermor is a stylish magician with the English language.

There is a story attached. Not only did he write this book in his 70s, five decades after the experiences he describes, but he left all his notes at a Romanian country house he was staying at in the 1950s. They were miraculously recovered 25 years later.

This book sits with Robert Byron’s The Road to Oxiana, Eric Newby’s A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush and maybe Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia (a bit disappointing on a recent read) on a list of the great contemporary travel books ever written. There is vivid curiosity, exuberance and joy, all great human qualities, in each of these books, all that I have mentioned in fact.

Was our trip anything like these adventures? Of course not. We were cosseted middle-aged tourists, and anyway the world has changed so very much. But still, there were times when the fragrance of these experiences of travel could still, just, be sniffed in the air. Now where were we? Ah yes. Three favourites.