Queensland - See ya later, mate!

The time has come to say goodbye to Queensland and Australia (for now).  I must admit I've been (mostly) envious of the weather Brisbane has been having since I started this blog.  There's certainly logic behind Queensland's popularity as a holiday destination and as a place to retire.  We always think of things being 'upside down' in Australia and in that respect, the Gold Coast and beaches of Queensland are the equivalent to Spain for British holidaymakers and retirees. 

I've blogged about aspects of Queensland's culture that have appealed to me.  I read no less than three novels by Queensland's writers (I didn't blog about the last novel, The House at Riverton by Kate Morton which, although it was really interesting, was set in England and didn't have anything to say about Australia.)  I also watched movies such as Swimming Upstream and Praise.  I cooked kangaroo meat and went on a nostalgia trip with Savage Garden. 

As usual though, there was so much more that I didn't have time to blog about.  As is becoming a traditional in my final blogpost, I'm going to summarise some of the other things I learned about Queensland.

I learned that Queensland is three times the size of France, but has a similar population to Ireland.  I learned that the state was almost called Cooksland, as some people felt one Australian state named after the British queen (Victoria) might be enough.  Queensland's flag used to contain a portrait of Queen Victoria, but this was changed when Queenslanders complained that it was too difficult to reproduce.  I learned that the crown on Queensland's flag is changed with every new monarch. 

I learned that Brisbane was originally called Edinglassie, a combination of Edinburgh and Glasgow.  I learned that approximately 95,000 Brits live in Brisbane and that a million US soldiers were stationed there during the Second World War, this precarious 'colonisation' being described in the famous phrase 'they're over-paid, over-sexed and over here'.

I learned that thousands of Kanakas, workers from the Pacific Islands were deported from Queensland in the early 20th century, as part of the new nation's White Australia policy.  I learned that the name Moreton Bay was the result of a spelling mistake and should have been called 'Morton Bay'. 

I learned that Australian swans are black and that the term semelparous refers to any creature that only lives long enough to reproduce once.  I learned about Queensland's state bird, the Brolga, which is known for its elaborate mating dances, aspects of which have been reproduced in the dance and culture of the native Australian tribes.  I learned that just 1.5% of Australia's land surface produces 95% of its agricultural yield and that most of this is located in the Darling/Murray basin. 

I learned about Macademia nuts, eskies, XXXX beer and Tim tams.  I learned that you can go helmet diving in Cairns and that it takes 28 and a half hours to travel from Brisbane to Cairns by bus.  I learned about the wizard of Kuranda and the Min Min lights of Boulia.  I learned that the small outback town Quilpie has named most of its streets after birds. 

I learned that Cape York peninsula is about the same size as Belarus, but has a population of 16,000 people. 

I'm sure there's even more to learn about Queensland and I look forward to visiting for real one day :-)

Image credits:

The photo of the Brolga is by flickr user anthonycramp who is from Dulwich, which is a suburb of Adelaide (not just London!).  Thanks Anthony for sharing this with us using the Creative Commons License. 

Queensland - The Shire of Barcoo, Qantas and Waltzing Matilda

No experience of Queensland would be complete without reference to what is probably Australia's most famous song, Waltzing Matilda.  The words were written by bush poet Banjo Paterson and the song has been, at times, controversial - most people assume that it was a political anthem, a scarcely-disguised retelling of an incident that took place in Queensland during the Shearer's Strike of 1891, others believe that the song has been misappropriated and politicised by the left. 

Whatever the truth may be, the song is a classic.  The tune is believed to be based on a traditional Scottish song called Craigielee, although others believe that the words and the tune more closely resemble a traditional English song known as The Bold Fusilier.  There are many awful versions of both on YouTube, if you want to compare them. 

I remember learning this song in school and it was one of my favourites, being fascinated by exotic words like billabong and jumbuck.  Apart from hats with corks in them, kangaroos and koala bears, Waltzing Matilda was the only 'cultural' knowledge I had of Australia as a child.  Well, until Neighbours came along!  And to think that the song might have languished in the back of beyond in Queensland, were it not for a popular radio jingle for a tea company, which made the song popular all over Australia.  Apparantly, they had to change the words somewhat, as the tea company didn't think references to drowning conjured up an appropriate image of their product!

Banjo wrote the song during a stay in Winton, Queensland.  Ever since I blogged about Mongolia, I've been determined to find a Bayan-Olgii for each state I've blogged about since - Bayan-Olgii meaning that part of the state/country which is physically and/or culturally removed from the rest.  I've decided that the Shire of Barcoo, where Winton is located, should be Queensland's Bayan-Olgii (I also like the Tolkienesque quality of the name:).  Not only did Winton give us Waltzing Mathilda, but it was also the place where the Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Service Ltd., aka Qantas, was founded.  I guess the motivation to fly was high in Winton, a remote outback town, with massive distances to cover if you wanted to get to the big smoke. 

Modern-day Winton proudly hosts the Waltzing Matilda museum, probably one of the few museums in the world dedicated to a single song!  As well as Waltzing Matilda, in my adult years I came to love another song, often played by folk bands in Ireland, called And the band played Waltzing Matilda.  It's very poignant and, if you haven't heard it before, give it a listen (link to YouTube video below). 

The song was written by Scottish-born Eric Bogle and deals with the young Australian soldiers who were killed and injured in Gallipoli during the Great War.  He plays around with the tune of the original song and tells the story of a young man, disabled by a Turkish attack, then sent home to Australia, where he will never be able to waltz again.  It's also a very political song, being written around the time of the Vietnam war. 

Image credits:

The image of the swagman has been provided by the State Records of New South Wales - they have published a whole lot of images on flickr, you can follow their stream at http://www.flickr.com/photos/state-records-nsw/ I think it's great that a government body has done this - old photos can tell us so much about history and it's really enjoyable browsing collections of old photographs like this - especially from the other side of the world!

In keeping with State Records NSW's request, I'm pasting in the following information about this image, so you can properly source the historical record:

Description of the photograph:  A Sundowner, Riverina District


Dated: by 11/05/1908

Digital ID: 14086_a005_a005SZ847000022r

Rights: www.records.nsw.gov.au/about-us/rights-and-permissions

Queensland - Leichhardt and 45 million years of separation

Apologies to my regular readers, as I've had a flu these past two weeks and not had a chance to update this blog, or move on to a new country this month yet.  I still have a couple of posts to do before I can justify moving on from Queensland, so bear with me for another few days :-)

In my learning about Queensland, I've come across the 19th century explorer Ludwig Leichhardt.  Born in Prussia, a country that no longer exists, he made his way via Britain to Sydney of the 1840's and Australia, a country that barely existed in most people's minds at that time, large parts of the outback being un-charted and blanks on the map.  I've always been curious as to the motivation of the 19th century's great explorers.  I can understand the need to go where no man has ever gone before, but I still find it hard to imagine, in our globalised world of package holidays and itineraries, what it was like to head off into the unknown and beat your way across a hostile landscape, with an uncertain destination. 

The name Leichhardt is probably more familiar to Australians today, as the suburbs named after him, in Sydney and Ipswich (Queensland), but there was a time in the mid-19th century when his exploits caught the imagination of an emerging nation barely coming to terms with its physical geography.  For the first Europeans coming to Australia was like stepping into another world.  With mammals laying eggs and trees shedding their bark rather than their leaves, it must have seemed as though their whole world had, literally, been turned upside-down.

Australia has been separated from all other land-masses for no less than 45 million years, allowing its flora and fauna to develop in a completely unique way, unrelated to or influenced by the evolutionary changes that the rest of the world was experiencing.  Australia in the 19th century was quite possibly the closest a European explorer could come to seeing alien life forms!  From a geological point of view, the importance of soil in Australia shouldn't be underestimated.  The land in Australia is very, very old.  Whilst other continents have been undergoing geological processes that have renewed and re-fertilised their soils, Australia has been in, what is the equivalent of, a geological coma.  The earth there is incredibly fragile, leached of all goodness, the soil can literally be blown away in the wind. 

I guess for that reason, more than anywhere else on our planet, native Australians learned to live in a symbiotic relationship with the Earth, nurturing the fragile landscape that they inherited.  Native Australian culture respects the land in a way that the new European arrivals could barely comprehend.  What little I know about aboriginal culture, I'm impressed by this relationship with the Earth - it reminds me somewhat on the deep reverence native American peoples have for Mother Nature.  In stark contrast to other parts of the world, where mankind has tried (not entirely successfully) to master the environment and make it conform to the needs of the human population, I get the impression that human culture in Australia is defined by the landscape, rather than being part of a landscape defined by man. 

You can read all about Leichhardt's first (successful) expedition in his memoir, Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia, from Moreton Bay to Port Essington, a Distance of Upwards of 3000 Miles, During the Years 1844-1845.  Catchy title, eh?  Thanks to the Gutenburg project and an iPhone application called Wattpad, I was able to download Leichhardt's journal and dip into the enthralling world of a 19th-century adventurer! 

It's not the kind of book you would necessarily read from cover to cover (all 659 pages of it), but that's the joy of having so many obscure texts published free online.  I didn't have time to read the whole thing, but at least I could get a sense of what the journey was like, from an original source document.  His first journey wasn't particularly well-funded, although he had no shortage of men volunteering to accompany him on his adventure.  His companions included a man who was released from prison for the journey and an Aborigine called Harry Brown (I can see Michael Caine in the film version!).  Before they even started their journey they travelled from Sydney to Brisbane by boat, a journey that normally took three days but, because of inclement weather, took them almost a week. 

Leichhardt was a natural scientist by profession, with a keen interest in botany and his journal is a world of plants and flowers.  The Brigalow tree features highly in his descriptions of the landscape, as does the Bastard Box and a peculiar animal that he calls the rabbit-rat.  The name rabbit-rat makes me giggle a bit, it's obvious they couldn't make up their minds exactly which animal it was most similar to, so they settled for this double-barrelled moniker! 

The psychological strain of the journey begins to show after the first month or so and one of the expeditioners, Mr Gilbert, has some kind of falling out with the servant boy Charley.  Charley is given the option of leaving the expedition and making his way back to Brisbane, but without any supplies, one month into their journey - understandably he apologises to Mr Gilbert and the voyage continues.

For better or worse, Leichhardt's first voyage across the northern part of Australia, setting out from the Darling Downs in what is now Queensland, was a great success, securing further support for repeat voyages, including his third voyage when he and his entire party mysteriously 'disappeared', melting into the landscape, as though they had never really made an impression on it in the first place.

Image credits:

The image of Ludwig Leichhardt was painted by Friedrich August Schmalfuß and is used as the main image for the Wikipedia article on the great explorer.  The copyright for this image has expired and it is deemed to be 'in the public domain' 

Queensland - How to eat Kangaroo

I decided to use the word 'eat' in my title, rather than 'cook', as I didn't want to give the impression that I really know how to cook kangaroo.  This was my first time to try, so I'm sure I would have different ideas about how to cook it next time round.

It's not a specifically Queensland dish, as such - but I thought blogging about Queensland would give me a chance to do something more adventurous and try to source kangaroo meat, rather than substituting with something more familiar, such as beef!  The adventure began with finding the meat.  I imagine you can find most things in London, if you know where to look, but you won't exactly find kangaroo at your local supermarket or in your local butcher's. 

So I had a butcher's online and found http://freedownfood.co.uk/ They do all kinds of exotic meats, including kangaroo - everything is kept in big freezers, you place your order online and go to pick it up the next day, or a few days after.  They also do deliveries around the UK, if you don't live in London.  Their office is very close to Queenstown Road station, which is in the heart of Battersea, South London.  I'd only ever passed through Battersea before and I felt incredibly important striding along with my kangaroo meat in hand, between a myriad of railway lines, in the shadow of Battersea Power Station. 

I must admit, it felt strange handling this meat that had been flown from the other side of the world - not a very green thing to do, but all part of the experience.  I really wanted to cook kangaroo steaks, rather than burgers or steak pieces in a casserole and I found a recipe online with a nice mushroom and white wine sauce.   http://www.recipes4us.co.uk/Poultry%20and%20Game/kangaroo_steak_with_mushroom_sau.htm

I kind of did the menu back to front, making the sauce first and then cooking the kangaroo steaks.

The ingredients included:

Rice, kangaroo meat (two steaks at about 250g each). Mushrooms, one onion, some flour, butter, vegetable oil, dry Australian white wine, coconut milk and a big handful of coriander. 

I started by preparing the rice.  Then put the onions and mushrooms into a pan, fried them for a few minutes before adding the white wine.  I let them reduce until most of the wine had evaporated, then added in the coconut milk, sprinking in some black pepper (you can also use salt, but I tend to avoid it in my cooking). 

I've eaten kangaroo before, but only in burgers and I don't think I ever really understood the texture of kangaroo meat.  It seemed totally different to beef steaks, the feel of the meat was more like tofu or something, it's hard to describe.  Also, the colour, as you can see in the photograph, was an almost luminous red, unlike any meat I've ever seen before.   

Kangaroo is considered to be a game meat, which should be eaten rare to medium rare and this was the most difficult part of the experience - ie. knowing how much I should actually cook the meat.  I guess the reason the recipe demands that you coat the steaks in flour, is to stop you from over-cooking the meat.

I like my steak medium rare in any case, so it wasn't a problem for me and I don't mind a wee bit of blood on my plate!  My partner Zhenya, on the other hand, likes his steaks well-done so, even after frying the meat, we had to pop his in our George Foreman grill to cook it a little bit more.

Again, although I've eaten kangaroo meat before, this is the first time that I really tasted it properly.  I'm convinced that you lose a lot of the flavour from game if you cook it too much, which is why the kangaroo burgers I've had previously didn't really taste of anything. 

The meat I had last night was delicious - really tender and almost sweet.  It was incredibly filling as well.  I don't actually eat a lot of meat, I usually stick to veggie food during the week and have some meat at the weekend, so it really felt like a feast!  Not sure I could eat kangaroo steaks all the time :-)

Image credits:

All photos were taken by me. 

Queensland - A Kindness Cup by Thea Astley

One of the main reasons I started this 'journey' was because I wanted to come across literary gems like Thea Astley's A Kindness Cup.  I have a feeling Astley is better know in her home country than here in the UK and she certainly deserved the acolades that the Australian literary world rained down upon her.  The ironic title is taken from the Scottish poem/song Auld Lang syne which is horribly sung again and again at the end of the novel, as the 'good guys' are beaten down by a community that refuses to accept its past. 

Set in the fictional town of The Haws, somewhere in Queensland, the book deals with a week-long festival celebrating the town's 20th anniversary.  One man in particular, Mr Dorahy, wants to remind the town's inhabitants of a terrible incident that happened in the early days of the settlement, when a group of Aboriginal tribesmen were murdered in cold blood, the perpetrators of this horrible crime having become esteemed citizens of the town. 

Astley paid a lot of attention to the language she used and, unlike Malouf's Remembering Babylon, I struggled with this novel a bit in the beginning, until I got into the rhythm and language of the text.  I also think it's a generational thing.  People have so little patience for big ideas and complicated sentences these days.  Malouf is a very modern writer, he tells an incredibly complex story, using clear and simple phrases.  Astley, writing almost four decades ago, revels in the literary twists and turns of her story and the reader needs to put some work in to keep up!

Dorahy is the village school teacher, jaded by his new life in this dull village on the frontier of the relatively new Australian colony.  Astley gives him the words of Livy to teach the boys of the village and there is a subtle hint at the danger of teaching young Australian boys about Roman war tactics and that this somehow could have led to their desire to kill the native tribes and establish their own empire in the Australian outback.  But Dorahy is a man of principles and he is the main source of conflict in the novel, turning up at the town's 20th anniversary, hellbent on reminding the townsfolk of the injustices of the past. 

The main event centres around the massacre, of course, but there is the added complication that a (stubborn) white man, called Lunt, who had been living peacefully with the tribe on his land, tries to protect the tribe and also becomes a victim of the town's vigilantism, losing a leg and almost dying the in process.  It is ostensibly on Lunt's behalf that Dorahy launches his campaign.  The fate of the indigenous tribe is an even harder truth that the townsfolk aren't willing to face.

There are two sides to this story.  On one hand is Dorahy, Lunt, a peaceful family called the Jenners and a very compassionate newspaper editor called Snoggers Boyd.  On the other hand is the arrogant young Buckmaster (he's still called this, even when he is old, in deference to his father) and his cronies, Sweetman, Armitage and Wilson.  Buckmaster is ultimately responsible for the massacre, but gets away with it, although he is given a stern warning from the court, because he didn't seek approval at state level before punishing, what he claims, are criminals.

Some of the main characters leave the town in the intervening years, including Lunt who moves to an obscure backwater further up the coast.  Dorahy insists on bringing Lunt back for the 'celebration' and enlists the support of Boyd in doing so.  It's interesting when they pass the site of the massacre, a small mountain called Mandarana, both men fall into their memories of the place and it occured to me that the landscape now had meaning for the whites - the fact they attached memories to Mandarana and imagined the horrific events of the day as they were passing by.  Perhaps, they'd finally made a connection with the land, although under horrible circumstances and this reminded me of the traditional dreaming ceremonies of the Aborigines, singing the land into existence.

Lunt is a very unwilling rebel, but agrees to come back to the town out of curiousity.  He gets caught up in the politics of the situation and is a classic victim, being beaten by one side, lauded by the other and made out to be something he's not.  In some ways, Dorahy and Boyd do as much damage to the old man, as their enemies. 

Another interesting character is Gracie.  She sings the songs, Home Sweet Home and Auld Lang Syne and used to be the belle of the ball, back in the day.  Now she is older, has gone through two husbands, the second one a violent wife-beater and come out the other side full of regrets and with her dreams crushed.  She hides her sadness very well with an overbearing gaeity when she is in company.  It's clear that she is totally dependent on the adoration of the men and is happy when a man, any man is 'in dutiful attendance'.  She has an amazing revelation about her life, towards the end of the book and does good by Dorahy and Boyd, if only for a short time, but at great personal risk.  One line about her that I loved was:

'But is she any happier, for having glanced sideways too often?'

I'm picking up on some of the themes of Australian literature, both with Astley and Malouf - themes of guilt and isolation, disorientation in an unfamiliar landscape, sadness at the violent defence of the land.  An interesting theme that runs through both novels is the theme of anarchy.  Dorahy is the schoolmaster - he taught Buckmaster, Sweetman and the rest of them, unwittingly humiliating Buckmaster, through his own boredom and dissatisfaction with his lot in life.  The boys are resentful of him and the novel is all about throwing off the shackles of Dorahy's world - the constraints of civilised behaviour and the emphasis on a culture than seems far removed from their everyday reality. 

I'm going to leave you with another song that Gracie sings, a hymn this time, which she used to sing when she was a young girl.  I thought it was quite poignant and expresses the melancholy of wanting to escape.  The official title is 'Hear my Prayer', although in the book it's referred to as O, for the Wings of a Dove.  The music was written by Felix Mendelssohn. 



Image credits

I couldn't find a copyright free image of the book, so I took a photo of the cover myself.  Does the job nicely :-)

Queensland - Where are you going?

Following on from the Daylight Saving Time debate, the Labor MP for Cairns in North Queensland, Desley Boyle, has suggested this week that, if the southern part of Queensland adopts DST, then they might as well separate the state in two and bring into reality a (supposedly) much desired new state of North Queensland, with its capital at Cairns.  As I've been following the Queensland news this month (a welcome respite from Icelandic volcanoes), I've been very aware of the 'second capital' debate, with Townsville being touted as a suggested second capital for the state of Queensland.  It's been suggested that a new state in Northern Queensland should have its capital at Townsville.  Some people have even suggested a capital at Cloncurry, wherever the gunya that is!

The separation debate is by no means a new one.  Even before the Australian states federated in 1901, the Central Queensland Territorial Separation League had been founded, based in Rockhampton, again with the intention of separating from the southern part of Queensland, namely Brisbane.  The book I'm reading right now, A Kindness Cup by Thea Astley deals with members of this league and it was a movement that was revived again in the 1950's. 

From an outsider's perspective, it's hard to see what all the fuss is about.  It sounds as though there are some regional economic issues that need to be sorted out and perhaps more funding for local government.  In Europe, we're trying to federate nations that are historically diverse and were generally murdering each other a mere sixty years ago.  The idea of breaking any of the Australian states into smaller segments doesn't seem economically viable.  I'm sure there is a good deal of political career making involved (as always).  Still, the mayor of Townsville, Les Tyrell, thinks it's not a matter of 'if' but 'when'. 

On a completely different subject, I've also been reading about famous Queenslanders and I want to grab this precious hour of blogging to highlight one woman whose life I've found really inspiring.  The name she is best known by is her native one, Oodgeroo Noonuccal and she was a poet, political activist and campaigner for the rights of indigenous Australians.  She was born on Straddie (that's Stradbrook Island to the unfamiliar!) in 1920 and led an amazing life that involved working for the Australian Women's Army service in WW2, joining the Communist Party and being awarded an MBE for her services to the indigenous community.

She was also the first published poet from an indigenous Australian background, publishing a book of poetry called We are going in 1964.  The main poem in this collection, with the same title, is quite poignant and describes White Australia, as seen through the eyes of a 'semi-naked band' who have come back to their old bora ground (used in tribal initiation ceremonies) 'where now the many white men hurry about like ants'.  She returned her MBE in protest at the Australian Bicentenary celebrations, pointing out that the arrival of Europeans hadn't exactly benefitted Australia's indigenous populations.  I can't think of a better reason for accepting an MBE than being able to hand it back some day in protest :-)

I'm going to leave you with a short poem by Oodgeroo called Understand Old One that captures the conflicting worlds of outback Australia and the roaring cities of the Europeans. 

Understand Old One by Oodgeroo Noonuccal

What if you came back now
To our new world, the city roaring
There on the old peaceful camping place
Of your red fires along the quiet water,
How you would wonder
At towering stone gunyas high in air
Immense, incredible;
Planes in the sky over, swarms of cars
Like things frantic in flight.

Image credits

The photo is an image of the sun setting over Townsville, Queensland - taken by flickuser Douglas O'Neill, thanks Douglas for sharing this with us, using the Creative Commons License.

Queensland - What time is it anyway?

One thing I've noticed about Queensland, more than any other country, is the difference in time. Since my Mongolia blogs, I've been finding people on Twitter and getting an idea of what everyday life is like in each of the countries I'm blogging about. I've found quite a few interesting Queenslanders on Twitter, who I've been following these past few weeks (and some of them are following me, thanks guys!) But when I get up in the morning, they're getting ready for bed. When I'm attempting to blog after a hard day in the office, they're still not awake.

Time is such an interesting concept. I do a lot of walking around London with my best Ozzie friend and recently we passed through Pett's Wood, where there is a memorial to William Willet, an Englishman who campaigned passionately for the introduction of daylight saving time (DST). The story goes that Willett came up with the idea whilst riding through Pett's Wood on a lovely summer morning. Most of the curtains in neighbouring houses were drawn and Willett thought about how much daylight people were wasting.

His proposals weren't that great, to be honest, 15 minute changes for a succession of months during the summer. Most of us struggle with the twice a year changes, can you imagine if the clocks were going backwards and forwards on a monthly basis!

Eventually his proposal was refined to a one hour change, twice a year. The main motivation in the end was economic, as Daylight Saving Time was adopted as an austerity measure during World War 1 (to stop people burning too much coal).

More surprising than any of this, and something I didn't realise until I started researching the topic, is that Standard time was only really adopted in Britain in the mid-19th century (based famously on Greenwich Mean Time). Before that there was something called Local Mean Time, which meant that each town or village could calculate their own time, in relation to the passage of the sun. Inconceivable in our modern era of nine-to-five, clock-in, clock-out, checking in for flights two hours before departure! The growth of rail travel spurred on a change, after all, one needed to be sure when the train was going to depart and arrive (not sure what went wrong!).

By 1885, Britain had adopted Standard Time based on GMT. New Zealand also led the way, being one of the first nations, apart from Britain, to adopt a standard time for the whole country. One look at Australia's time zones and you can see how complicated things got 'down under'. Things got off to a good start with Western Australia, GMT +8 , great, we can handle that. By the time South Australia got involved, things started going a bit awry. I mean, GMT +9.5? Maybe it's a European thing, but I just can't be doing with half hour differences, what is that all about?

Victoria, New South Wales and Tasmania all behaved themselves, adopting a reasonable GMT +10, but when Daylight Saving Time came along, Queensland, being that much closer to the Equator, opted out - as did the Northern Territories from the Central time zone. When the time changes in summer, Australia's three continental time zones become something more like five! Phew! At least they've had the decency to synchronise the dates for time changing.

I started looking into this topic after an article this week in Queensland's Courrier-Mail about the issue of Daylight Saving Time. Queensland's Premier Anna Bligh caused a heated debate in the Twitteverse by suggesting that the state should have a debate on whether or not Daylight Saving Time would be a good thing for South East Queensland only. Queenslanders have voted against DST before, but not specifically voted on this option for the South East. Western Australia has also had four public votes on DST in the past, each time people have voted against it.

I don't blame them in many ways. I find DST an inconvenience, although my gadgets are getting smarter and updating themselves automatically these days. Still, I hate the moments of panic when you look at the clock and think you're an hour late/early for an appointment when, in fact, someone's forgotten to wind their blooming clock back/forward. Also, I've been through this twice already this year, once in Cuba and then again when we got back to London!

There is also a debate going on in the UK as to whether or not we should adopt Central European Time here. I was really surprised to find out that Britain did adopt CET, as an experiment, between 1969 to 1972! It didn't last though, probably too close for comfort for the Eurosceptics :-) There are very good reasons for abandoning DST in the UK. Sorry, Mr Willett, but it seems as though DST is costing us millions in energy bills and is bad for the environment. Strange that it's the same reason DST was introduced in the first place.  I guess, our habits have changed over the years.  The advent of television means we spend more time indoors and stay up later in the evening than our grandparents did.

Well, it's 21:40 in London right now, which makes it 06:40 (tomorrow) in Brisbane. Good morning Australia!!

Image credits

The image of William Willett is from Wikipedia and is copyright free.

I wanted to find a very special and beautiful image of time from flickr.com and I was lucky to come across this one by flickruser ToniVC a.k.a. Toni Verdu Carbo, a very talented photographer from Girona in Catalunya (Spain) - by the way Toni, I love Girona and thanks for sharing your photos with us using the Creative Commons License. 

Queensland - Remembering Babylon

The thing I love most about this virtual journey around the world is that I'm reading books I would probably never have read otherwise.  In reading Remembering Babylon by one of Queensland's most famous writers, David Malouf, I would like to think that it's a book that would have eventually found its way to me.  It's exactly the kind of book I love to read and I really savoured every moment of it.

I guess I'm not the first person to draw parallels between Queensland and an exotic (or savage?) garden and Malouf's title is incredibly significant, as the Hanging Gardens of Babylon become a metaphor for the enchanting, and often frightening world, that the European characters stumble in to.  There is a pervasive sense of fear in the book - set in a pioneering European community in 19th century Queensland, you really get a sense of the uncertainty in the lives of the settlers.  Most of them have given up everything to 'make it' in Australia and there is a fear that the unknown will overwhelm their community, that the seed of colonisation is sown in an incredibly fragile earth. 

The novel centres around Gemmy, an aboriginal tribesman who stumbles out of the wilderness and comes across a group of three children belonging to the McIvor family, orginally from Scotland.  Except Gemmy is not really an Aborigine.  It turns out that he is an Englishman who was shipwrecked as a boy and rescued by an Aboriginal tribe that adopt him as their own.  Gemmy's presence in the new community causes all kinds of conflict and unease.  His complex identity also raises important questions about race and culture - it becomes apparent as the novel progresses that Gemmy's white skin is pretty much irrelevant to the majority of the community and they prefer to think of him as an Aborigine.

Gemmy's savage appearance and behaviour embarrasses the settlers.  At a time when 'being civilised' is of utmost importance to the psychological survival of the community, Gemmy clowns around, speaks a half-forgotten English and seemingly parodies the settlers and white culture.  The men are afraid of him because of all the things he might have experienced when he was living with the Aborigines.  Although nothing is explicitly stated, it's implied that he has witnessed and participated in all kinds of sexual deviance - homosexuality amongst other things - they are also afraid of the things he has eaten and even suspect him of cannibalism. 

Mr McIvor is a very reluctant defender of Gemmy's presence, but defend him he does and comes across as being one of the more sympathetic characters in the book, refusing to bend to the will of his neighbours and refusing to lose all sense of reality, when the other men hysterically accuse Gemmy of convening with the natives and practising some kind of black magic, using a (non-existent) stone.  When the men come for Gemmy, they come in the night.  As though their deeds won't be recognised in the dark.  Mr McIvor rescues Gemmy from the aggression of his neighbours, but the incident hints at a much darker aspect.  By attacking Gemmy, the neighbours are, in fact, attacking the McIvors.  They are undermining the safety of the community and, without realising the seriousness of their actions, they are bringing the situation to the point of anarchy.

The role of the women in the novel is quite different to that of the men and it gave me an interesting perspective in how women managed to hold things together in the early days of the new colony.  Mrs McIvor is a romantic woman.  Coming from the Scottish mining town of Airdrie, she saw all of her brothers go into the mines, coming up pale creatures, spiritually crushed, the whole mining community crammed into a damp corner of Lanarkshire, she dreams of sunshine and wide, open spaces.  She falls in love with Mr McIvor because of the warmth of his skin and his resoluteness in the face of the harsh environment of the frontier in Queensland.

She inspires her daughters with this romanticism, especially the oldest daughter Janet who dreams of Scotland, her mother's world 'more alive and interesting, more crowded with things, with people too, than the one she was in.'  There is a balance of the sexes in that the McIvors take in an orphaned nephew from Scotland, Lachlan, and the story also belongs to Lachlan and Janet.  One of the images that most appealed to me was the image of Janet's mother, Mrs McIvor, washing a dress with a pattern of larkspur on it, thinking how she might never see larkspur again.  The European plant on her dress clashes with the natural world she finds herself in.

Malouf is known for his interest in language and the problems of communication, especially between men, and language is central to the story.  Babylon is not just an exotic garden, it is also Babel, the land of mixing languages and cultures.  Scottish, Irish, English and Aborigine.  The Hanging Garden of Babylon was built by Nebuchadnezzar II for his homesick Persian Queen, Amyitis.  In many ways, the Europeans try to tame the Australian landscape, to feed the homesickness they feel inside. 

At the end of the novel Janet, or Sister Monica, as she becomes, offers an apple to Lachlan, opening up an intimacy that helps them reminisce about their childhoods.  Babylon is also a kind of Garden of Eden, a loss of innocence with the coming of European civilisation.  Janet and Lachlan find themselves in a world that is beyond their creation or control.

I would definitely recommend reading this novel.  It's so full of poetry and it would seem as though every single word is in the right place.  It's easy to read, but deals with incredibly complex issues. 

Image credits:

The image of the book cover is from http://www.openlibrary.org/

The image of the bee and the larkspur is courtesy of flickuser Bruce McKay who is a school principle working in a First Nation community on the Yukon/British Columbia border in Canada.  Thanks Bruce for sharing this wonderful image with us. 

Queensland - Truly Madly Savage

I must admit, I've used the fact that I'm blogging about Queensland to go on a major nostalgia trip courtesy of Aussie band Savage Garden.  Mind you, I didn't know that Darren Hayes and Daniel Jones are from Brisbane when I started researching Queensland, so it came as a pleasant surprise.

Savage Garden are a band that has lingered at the edge of my musical taste - what I mean is that I've always been vaguely aware of them, but never been an actual fan.  The fact that I associate Savage Garden with the time I lived in Derry (Northern Ireland), which was 1999, shows how long it took for their music to penetrate my subconscious (they became really big around 1996/97). Also, somehow, when I started listening to their music again this week, I realised that I'd liked individual songs (three in particular) and never really connected them together, as being Savage Garden songs.

Of course their biggest hit will always be Truly Madly Deeply, a (seemingly) classic love song and one that I really associate with one person in particular, who was once very special to me.  Even hearing him play it five times in a row didn't put me off, but only endeared him to me even more, in a way that's only possible when you fancy someone :-)  I made the mistake once of trying to sing this song at a Karaoke (in an attempt to impress this same person) and, what you realise in a moment of sheer horror, in front of a packed pub, is that this seemingly 'slow' song has got an awful lot of words, packed tightly into almost breathless sentences, so you end up rapping, rather unromantically, especially when you don't actually know the words of the song!
This breathless, rapping quality is what makes Savage Garden so good and immediately caught my attention the first time I heard I Want You, their first big hit and the song that made them famous.  Hayes delivers the opening lines at an impressive speed:

Anytime I need to see your face I just close my eyes
And I am taken to a place where your crystal mind and
Magenta feelings take up shelter in the base of my spine
Sweet like a drink of cherry cola

Don't think I'll be trying this one at Karaoke.  Great song though!
Quite predictably, the third Savage Garden song I really like is To the Moon and Back.  I'd never really listened to the words though, not properly anyway, and I've realised that the lyrics are actually quite dark - it's a song about loneliness and feeling that the rest of the world doesn't understand you.  No doubt if I had been a teenager when Savage Garden made it big, I would have clung to the words with a sense of angst that you can only really have in your teenage years.  In that sense, like many bands before them, Savage Garden has no doubt meant so many things to many people around the world and I'm sure their lyrics have helped people get through hard times, provided the soundtrack for love affairs and the opportunity for many disastrous karaoke attempts.
I was a Goth in my teenage years, clinging to the words and music of The Cure and I see elements of this in Savage Garden's music.  Indeed the name, Savage Garden, is taken from Anne Rice's book The Vampire Chronicles and the quotation;

The mind of each man is a savage garden.

It is an incredibly cool  name and, in a world of constant revivals, will no doubt continue to fascinate people, well into the 21st century.  Not to mention the fact that they are probably the biggest-selling band ever to come out of Queensland (and Australia!). 

If I was to take it a step further, I would say that 'the savage garden' is an apt metaphor for the Australian outback - an environment that is unforgiving in the cycles of survival, but one that has, in some ways, been tamed by the European (and other) settlers who came to live there.

One footnote (of minor importance) - I was really surprised to find out that Darren Hayes was straight.  I'd always presumed he was gay.  As soon as I found out he'd been married to a woman, then it turns out that he is gay after all! 

Image credits:

The image of the Queensland flag has been created for Wikimedia Commons by user Denelson83 who is male and comes from Vancouver Island. He has contributed a lot of flag images to Wikimedia Commons, so thanks Denelson83 for sharing these with the world!


It's incredibly difficult to get copyright-free images of celebs on the internet, so I have embedded some YouTube videos instead.  Apologies to those readers who are receiving this by email, as you will only be able to view the videos online.

For lyrics I often use http://www.sing365.com/ - it's a website I've used since my teaching days and has generally been reliable, although I do listen to the songs to check the lyrics as well.

Queensland - Close Encounters of the Easter Bunny kind

I thought it might have been an April Fool's prank when I read the article in yesterday's Courier-Mail reminding all good landowners to kill as many rabbits as possible this Easter. I guess it's a bit of a culture shock, for a reader in the UK, but the article was deadly serious and, judging by the raging debate in the Comments section, controlling Queensland's rabbit population seems to be a very emotive and divisive issue.

There also seems to be a real city/country divide in this debate. On one side are the concerned housewives of Brisbane, totally appaled by the bad taste of the article and the recommendations to rip up the rabbit warrens, a cruel but effective way of dealing with overpopulation. On the other side are the farmers, struggling to eke an existence out of an already quite challenging soil.

Being a rabbit myself (according to my Chinese horoscope) my instinct is to side with the bunnies and their, very natural, desire to breed and prosper. Europeans (well, one Victorian settler in particular) created this problem, right? Maybe we need to live with the consequences and let Mother Nature find a solution?

If this was just a question of rabbits eating up human profits, then I'd probably stick to this, however (apologies to my fellow bunnies) rabbits are a pest that have caused untold devastation to the fragile ecology of Australia, outeating native mammals (like the incredibly cute Bilby), destroying native plants and causing major soil erosion. It might cause some mirth to people here in the UK, as we're tucking in to our chocolate bunnies and eggs this weekend, but it's an incredibly serious issue for people in Queensland and one that may be difficult to resolve.

I was genuinely surprised to find out that owning pet rabbits is banned in Queensland and you can be fined up to 30,000 Aussie dollars if you contravene this ban. Although plagues of rabbit were first reported in Victoria and Tasmania, the year-round warmth in Queensland has encouraged rabbits to breed more than they would in Europe, where they seem to 'take a break' during the winter.

If only they'd had time to evolve in the way native mammals like the Antechinus has done.  The male Antechinus (a type of rodent) only lives for 11 months, the first ten of which are spent eating and growing.  Like many male mammals, the Antechinus' thoughts eventually turn to reproduction and males spend their eleventh month engaged in this noble pursuit, dying with exhaustion as they literally shag themselves to death.  A lack of male Antechinus after the 11th month, means the female of the species has less competition in terms of feeding herself and a new generation.

Ironically, it's highly likely that the rabbit populations only survive in Australia because people do. I'm sure that the Australian outback is an incredibly hostile environment for rabbits and it's only human interaction with the Australian soil that has created suitable conditions for farming which, as well as feeding the human population, has also sustained the 400 million rabbits that are estimated to live in Australia.

Of course (European) spring is an apt time to talk about rabbits and it's no coincidence that rabbits appear, in chocolate form, as part of our Easter celebrations. In many cultures rabbits are associated with fertility and survival instincts. In some cases, like Israel, this is interpreted as cowardice, rabbits being the Hebrew equivalent of 'chicken' in English, eg 'to chicken out' of doing something.

In other cultures, like the myths of West Africa and the Cherokee tribes of North America, rabbits are considered to be extremely clever tricksters. This mythology has been handed down to us through the Br'er Rabbit stories and, ultimately, cartoon characters like Bugs Bunny.

The playfulness of rabbits has been applied to human sexuality, especially in advertising products for women, so that everywhere from an Argos catalogue to a hen party in Blackpool, you will see that supreme icon of rabbit mythology, the Playboy bunny.

Interestingly, Oriental mythologies, such as those in Japan and Korea, associate rabbits with the moon and, I can't help wondering if indeed it's our entire planet, not just Australia, that has been taken over by these furry fiends!

Image credits:

The image of the Queensland flag has been created for Wikimedia Commons by user Denelson83 who is male and comes from Vancouver Island. He has contributed a lot of flag images to Wikimedia Commons, so thanks Denelson83 for sharing these with the world!


The image of the rabbit is from flickruser Wolfpix a.k.a. Jack Wolf.  Jack is from Albany in California and is an incredibly talented wildlife photographer - you can see more of his images on his commercial website http://www.imagekind.com/
 
The image of the Playboy Bunny Tattoo was provided copyright free by flickruser cwalker71 a.k.a. Chuck Walker - Chuck is a freelance photographer from Pitman, New Jersey and you can also visit his site http://cwalkerphoto.com/
 

Queensland - G'day mate

Queensland, Australia - what a journey this is going to be!  For those of you who regularly read this blog, I'm just back from two weeks of 'real' travelling around Cuba and it feels like centuries since the last time I blogged.  One of the great things about Cuba was that I got a break from 'being connected' with the rest of the world.  As much as I love Facebook and Twitter and my blog, it does no harm to get some time out every now and then.  On the flight on the way over to Havana, I watched Julie and Julia which was an amazing movie and I can understand now why people draw parallels with what I'm doing, although it's vastly different (apart from the cooking bit).

I've been writing this blog for seven months now and I've really enjoyed it.  I've had over 1,000 hits, from all over the world and, most excitingly, from places like Lesotho, Oklahoma and Paraguay, ie. the places I've been blogging about.  For those of you who are visiting for the first time, in the next month or so, I will try to immerse myself in the history, culture, music and cooking of Queensland.  As much as possible, I will try to see the world from the point of view of a Queenslander and I will try to understand what it is that makes Queensland tick.

One of my closest friends in the world (and a regular reader of this blog) is from Melbourne so, thanks to her, I have learned an awful lot about Australian culture already.  I've also read The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin, which is a truly inspirational book and really helped me understand Aboriginal culture a little bit and the idea of the first people being 'caretakers of the land'.  I've listened to a lot of Australian music, watched Muriel's Wedding, got addicted to Kath and Kim and Summer Heights High (also the Einstein Factor when I was living in Thailand and had ABC - I wish they would make a British version of this quiz show).  My point is that, with a country like Australia, I will have to dig even deeper to learn new things.

I thought Queensland would be an apt starting point as, compared to Victoria or New South Wales, it's a part of Australia I know very little about.  Of course, we've all heard of the Gold Coast, Brisbane and the Great Barrier Reef.  I know about Queensland's amazing climate, how important tourism is to the state and I've also vaguely heard about the Torres Strait Islanders, although I don't know why.  I guess Queenslanders have had a lifetime of being compared to Victoria and New South Wales - even the name suggests that Victoria got there first.  I get a sense that Queensland's history has been one of playing 'catch-up' with these two bigger states.  One of the first things that has become really apparant to me, in my prelimary reading, is that Queensland today is an incredibly dynamic place.  It seems to hold all the aspirations and drive of modern Australia.  Australians from other parts of the country are moving there in their thousands.  So much so, that Queensland is poised to take second place in the population stakes by the late 2020's, overtaking the older and more established communities of Victoria. 

A brief glance at today's edition of The Courier-Mail, Brisbane's main newspaper, shows me that immigration is somewhat of an issue for Queenslanders (and all Australians?).  The main newspaper article is about a group of 'boat people' from Afghanistan and Kurdistan, who've been taken on a shopping trip to the Centro Toombul shopping mall in Brisbane.  I must admit, I really hate the term 'boat people' - something about the fact that the word 'boat' is put before the fact that they are people.  The image of people floating around in a boat, not identifying with their origins, somehow negates their home culture.  They're not Afghans or Kurds, but generic people who came to Australia on a boat - as if their culture or political repression is somehow not interesting enough to be defined. 

I think it's going to be an interesting and challenging experience learning about Queensland.  I have books, movies, music lined up.  Still need to look at things like traditional recipes (I wonder if you can buy crocodile meat in London?) and I also want to listen to local radio from Brisbane, keep an eye on the newspapers and perhaps find an interesting blog.  I'll also try to follow some Queenslanders on Twitter, as I've found this a really useful way of getting an insight into the daily lives of people in the countries I'm learning about.  If you're from Queensland, please leave a comment and tell us something about what's great about your state!

I'm leaving you with a video from YouTube which shows images of Brisbane - it's (quite strangely) silent and seems to be part of a series by YouTube user pleasetakemeto



Image credits:

The image of the Queensland flag has been created for Wikimedia Commons by user Denelson83 who is male and comes from Vancouver Island.  He has contributed a lot of flag images to Wikimedia Commons, so thanks Denelson83 for sharing these with the world!

The wonderful image of Noosa River in Queensland is by a very enthusiastic flick photographer whose username is neilalderney123 - his real name is Neil Howard, he's orginally from Brisbane, but now lives in the Channel Islands.  Thanks for sharing this with us, Neil. 

Paraguay and the Failure of Australian Socialism

It's hard to understand Paraguay, without understanding the devastating consequences of the War of the Triple Alliance in the 1860's.  I've talked before about 'national traumas', events which have a lasting psychological impact on a nation, somehow shaping the mentality of its people.  I've talked about the Great Famine in Ireland, the destruction of the monasteries in Mongolia, the colonisation of Jamaica and the great floods of the Netherlands. 

I get the impression that the 'War of the Triple Alliance' was Paraguay's national trauma.  A complicated series of events saw Paraguay coming into conflict with its neighbours Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay.  The result for Paraguay was not only a loss of territory, but also the loss of an estimated 50% of the nation's population, including 90% of the nation's men.  I can't even begin to imagine the impact this disastrous war had on the people of Paraguay. 

So, what has this got to do with Australian socialism?  Well, in a strange turn of events, Paraguay witnessed the failure of an Australian socialist Utopia, Nueva Australia.  In the aftermath of the War of the Triple Alliance, Paraguay's new leaders encouraged settlers to come and repopulate the country, offering generous parcels of land to those dreamers and visionaries wishing to establish new societies in this sparsely populated South American nation. 

Amongst those who took up the offer, in the 1890's, were a group of hardline socialists from Queensland, Australia, led by the erratic William Lane, a journalist of the 'firebrand' variety, already far to the left of Labour and disillusioned with the changing nature of Australian politics, the failure of the Shearers' strike in 1891 and the pressures of a serious economic depression. 

Born in Bristol, Lane's father was a Protestant from Ireland who drank his family into debt, forcing Lane to set off in search of fame and fortune, first in Detroit and later in Queensland, where he founded Australia's first Labour newspaper The Queensland Worker.  It might surprise some people to know that Lane was an ardent racist and the downfall of Nueva Australia is attributed to his despotic insistence that all 283 settlers adhere to strict rules which forbade alcohol and mixing with the native Guarani tribes. 

Many of the settlers returned to Australia, including the poet Mary Gilmore (famous for her World War 2 patriotic poem, No Foe Shall Gather Our Harvest) but some of the settlers stayed and integrated with the local Spanish and Guarani populations and their descendents live in Paraguay until this day. 

By the way, Nietzsche's sister, Elizabeth Forster-Nietzsche, also tried to found a racially pure, Nordic society in Paraguay with her husband and 14 German families, called . . . surprise, surprise, Nueva Germania.  Not surprisingly, their experiment also failed and Forster-Nietzsche moved back to Germany, where she later supported the German National Socialists (Nazis).

I'm going to leave you with a clip I found on YouTube, which shows interviews with people like Mary Gilmore, as well as one old man whose grandfather was an original settler in New Australia and who still speaks with an old-fashioned Aussie accent.


Image credits

The photograph is from Wikimedia Commons and is copyright free.  It's probably the most famous image that exists of the settlers at Neuva Australia and Wikipedia uses this image on their site

The image of the book cover is from http://www.openlibrary.org/ and shows the cover of Paradise Mislaid by Anne Whitehead, which documents the story of New Australia.  This book is pretty difficult to get one's hands on, so if you get a copy, don't forget to send it my way, so I can read it :-)

The Netherlands - Dykes and Tulips

I've moved back to Europe this month with the Netherlands and the first thing I've discovered is that there are two Netherlands, the Netherlands (sometimes called Holland) which is the country in Europe, and the Kingdom of the Netherlands, which includes the country in Europe and overseas territories in the Carribean, namely Aruba and the Netherlands Antilles.

Everyone knows that Holland only refers to part of the country, the bits around Amsterdam. What I didn't realise was that New Zealand is called after the small province to the south of Holland, called Zeeland. Australia was first called New Holland, a name which didn't stick and puts the naming if New Zealand somehow out of context.

The Netherlands, like other Western European countries, had a long history of colonisation in various parts if the world. In fact, the Dutch seem to have 'got there first' in many places that were later colonised by the British - New York, Australia, South Africa.

Two of the most important Dutch colonies, of course, are present-day Indonesia and Surinam, on opposite sides of the world from each other. Surprisingly, when Japan closed itself off from the aggressive colonisation of Europeans in the 18th and 19th centuries, only the Dutch were allowed to keep a trading post there, at Deshima.

I've decided not to go with the Kingdom of the Netherlands for this part of my learning journey, but to concentrate on the European Netherlands - a country which I, like a lot of Irish and British people, have visited (= Amsterdam) and which I (like a lot of people?) know very little about, I mean the rest of the country, outside Amsterdam.

Of course there are lots of cliches about the Netherlands, two of them you can see in the title of this blog.  Although it takes a lot more than cliches to get to know a country, they do provide a starting point and, I guess, they exist for a reason.

The national motto of the Netherlands is Je maintiendrai (like the British motto, it's in French, sounds more formal in French, I suppose) or I will endure. My first question inevitably is ... endure what? The most obvious answer is 'the sea'. From what I can tell, the Dutch mentality is shaped by the country's relationship with the sea. I'm reminded a little bit of Kiribati and I can't help wondering what effect the rising sea levels will have on the Netherlands, Holland in particular. The Dutch seem like a very determined people, despite being a small nation, they have managed to survive the pressures coming from their two most important neighbours, ie. the sea on one side and Germany on the other.

The Dutch also have a reputation for 'dourness' and being tight with money, characteristics ascribed to the influence of Calvinism on the Dutch mentality, but not something I can associate with the Dutch people I know. Religion played a big part in the formation of the Kingdom, but it's never been a big issue and the Netherlands' cliched liberalism, spans centuries of religious tolerance and the rights of the individual. A cliche that isn't true is the idea that Dutch people generally have loose morals.  I can understand this misperception, having lived in Thailand.  Our perception of Thai people is that they are very easy-going when it comes to sexual matters and adept at manipulating ping-pong balls etc., when the reality is almost the complete opposite and Thai people (like Dutch?) are incredibly conservative and reserved, in the private sphere. 

I wasn't surprised to find out that 40% of Dutch people consider themselves to be non-religious, however I was surprised to find out that there are more Catholics than Protestants in the Netherlands, at least on paper, as I've always thought of it as a very Protestant country.

In total contrast then to this sober outlook on life - the supposed stinginess of Amsterdam merchants who built narrow houses with tiny windows, so they wouldn't have to pay too much tax, the sea threatening to overwhelm the country at any time, the pragmatic, direct (sometimes perceived as rude) way the Dutch deal with things - is the national obsession with tulips.

The world's first botanical garden was at Leiden and the birth of the Dutch nation and the growing self-confidence, as the Netherlands took it's rightful place in the world, was thrown into complete disorder in a confusing array of colours that became the 'tulip mania'. The most expensive tulip, the Augustus Semper, was reputed to have been worth 10 years wages to a labourer. Not surprising then that there was a tulip mania in the 17th century, fortunes were made and lost, livelihoods built up and ruined, as a nation famous for its self- restraint went crazy over these, admittedly beautiful, flowers.

Although not worth as much today as they were in the past, tulips are very much part of the mythology of the Netherlands. The Netherlands is still the world's biggest exporter of tulip bulbs.  A national cliche, perhaps, but very much a fact.

Image credits

The flag is from Wikimedia Commons and is without copyright.

The beautiful image of tulips is the featured image on wikipedia's site and was taken by John O'Neill who is a high school teacher from Victoria, Australia (New Holland!) - John has been contributing a lot to wikipedia and you can see more information at his wikipedia user page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Jjron

Thanks, John, for sharing this wonderful image with us.