longlines

Richmond, Queensland

2015-03-02T07:09:00.000-08:00

Birdlife Lake Fred Tritton Richmond Queensland

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.

Marcel Proust

Each time I stop in Richmond I promise myself that once

a. I have more time, or

b. a better car, or

c. the weather cools down

I’ll do the tourist thing and go fossil hunting in this area.


Kronosaurus Korner Richmond Queensland

In the meantime as it seems to be my luck to travel the Flinders Highway during periods of high heat, often in the early 40s, a break at Kronosaurus Korner is always a treat. It has a fossil museum, a gift shop, and a café that employs a brilliant pastry chef. This is the best café between Townsville and Mt Isa, with Cloncurry coming a reasonable second.

Like so many Queensland towns Richmond has had a chequered history. Its main income has been from sheep and cattle grazing. But today it is not sheep and cattle that visitors come to see.

In the late 1870s Richmond Downs, named after the Richmond River in New South Wales, was taken up as a pastoral lease. During this time the Queensland gold rush was on and gold was discovered at Woolgar just north of Richmond Downs. Coaches carrying miners to the gold fields stopped where the road met the Flinders River, near the station. In 1882 a township was surveyed at the coach stopover. The town was named after Richmond Downs.

Lake Fred Tritton Richmond Queensland

During the cretaceous era an inland sea covered this region. The first major dinosaur fossil discovery (of Kronosaurus queenslandicus) was made in 1929. After the 1989 announcement that the 100-million year old remains of a pliosaur had been found on a nearby pastoral station interest in this area increased and a viable tourism industry was established.

Six years later ‘Kronosaurus Korner’ was set up as a fossil museum and has since expanded to include not only the café and gift shop but also research facilities. Two major recent finds of dinosaur fossils have enhanced the town’s reputation as a centre for fossil hunting and research.

Fossil tourism has changed the face and fortune of this town and slowed the population decline that has afflicted so many Western towns, especially during the recent drought.

There is shaded parking in the centre of the street outside the café - a bonus for the traveller with a dodgy car air conditioner and an aged dog as the occasional travelling companion.

Shaded Picnic Table & BBQ Lake Fred Tritton Richmond

If I arrive in Richmond early morning (on my way East) or late afternoon (heading West) the shores of man-made Lake Fred Tritton on the Eastern edge of town is a great spot to stop for a picnic. Any other time of day at this time of year and the lack of shade for vehicles turns the car into a heat death trap. The picnic tables on the lake shore are covered against sun and rain and the birdlife is wonderful to watch while relaxing in the cooling breeze off the water. Black winged stilts and black fronted dotterels were breeding on the edges of the lake the last time I stopped there.

Roadsign Richmond Queensland

Richmond also has the best road signs I’ve ever seen. It’s almost worth the 500k trip from Townsville just to be astounded, then enthralled by them as you manoeuvre over the road ridges caused by the black soil base on this section of highway. This said, the traveller is warned well in advance of the rough surface and if the recommended speeds are abided by then the trip is pleasant and quite smooth.

When you visit the museum, have refreshments at the café and order the homemade apple turnovers – the best I’ve tasted – ever.

Claire Wood

longlines

Email: longline8@gmail.com

Just Claire Wood, In the Atmosphere

For more information on Richmond go to:

http://www.richmond.qld.gov.au/

http://www.kronosauruskorner.com.au/

http://www.queenslandplaces.com.au/richmond-and-richmond-shire

http://www.fossilfestival.com.au/

Cloncurry North West Queensland

2015-02-23T00:10:00.000-08:00

Cloncurry: Meld of Architectural styles & eras

"It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.”
― Ursula K Le Guin, The Left Hand Of Darkness

Cloncurry Post Office Hotel

When I was a young mother of two small white haired children I longed to live in Cloncurry. My reasons were practical. Cloncurry had a permanent doctor, a hospital, and fresh milk and vegetables were available on a regular basis.


Awning Cloncurry Central Hotel

It was outside, or so we were told, the plume from Mt Isa and the lead- laden air of that city. There were regular flights in and out of Cloncurry, and there was a sealed highway all the way to the coast. It was all about good healthcare, nutrition and safe travel in those days.

During that time I was told about a man who walked into a Cloncurry pub and announced he had just been bitten by a king brown snake. No one took any notice of him until he fell dead in the doorway on his way to look for help elsewhere. That story did cool my desire to some small extent, but still, Cloncurry was top of my wish list.

I never lived in Cloncurry and I have no regrets that I did not. However I have a sneaking affection for the town that was my benchmark for a family friendly town in the West in the long gone days of my innocent youth.

Cloncurry Central Hotel

There was also a time when I longed to live in Normanton, but that is another unfulfilled dream that is not regretted, and another story to be told.

Cloncurry is only one and a half hours west of Julia Creek. With a population of about 2,500 it is more than six times the size of Julia Creek and has more facilities. However most of them I have no need of nowadays. Still it is a lovely town to visit, except of course for the dearth of shaded parking in the town centre. What is the story behind that town planning decision I would like to know.

Cloncurry Mary Kathleen Memorial Park Sign

The Mary Kathleen Memorial Park on the eastern outskirts has shaded parking, undercover picnic facilities, a playground, an outdoor museum, gift and souvenir shop and a wonderful geology museum that is highly recommended for the tourist and a must for the amateur rockhound. It would take days to properly absorb all the information it has to offer, to view all the meticulously labelled specimens. Congratulations to all those involved in the upkeep of this valuable asset.

Cloncurry Mary Kathleen Memorial Park Childrens Playground

The small air conditioned theatre beside the information centre and souvenir shop presents a history of Cloncurry which is both informative and enlightening.

Mining and beef have always been the mainstays of the economy of this city with tourism a later addition. So I decided to duck out to the cattle saleyards to try to gain some insight into the beef industry. I was in luck and thank those people out there who were so helpful with information.

Cloncurry saleyards cattle being loaded

The saleyards operate mainly as a transit point for cattle being shipped to feedlots before export or for cattle being transferred elsewhere in the state. They are set up with loading and unloading ramps, dipping facilities, etc to cater for this use. Cattle sales are only held at these yards intermittently – about every two years.

While I was there a road train was being unloaded in one area and another was being loaded elsewhere. Utilities were delivering bales of hay to the occupied pens, each of which was provided with long deep and full concrete water troughs. In an industry that comes in for criticism, often with good cause, it was pleasant to come across a humane and well set out facility.

Cloncurry Saleyards Road Train being loaded

Back in town I cooled off in the very comfortable and well equipped library and then took in an excellent exhibition in the art gallery adjoining the library.

I may no longer desire a Cloncurry life but it was great to lunch at a café with a choice of good healthy food on the menu and to enjoy a latte before heading home to the East along the Flinders Highway.

Cloncurry Saleyards Road Train being loaded

Claire Wood

longlines

Email: longline8@gmail.com

Just Claire Wood, Inthe Atmosphere

I intend spending more time in the Cloncurry area once the cool weather sets in after Easter. At the Tourist Information Centre at the Mary Kathleen Memorial Park I found Cloncurry Trails: A Guide to Off-Road Touring around Cloncurry and Mt Isa (2013) by Gary and Wendy Baker. The book is copyright to Baker Photographics and is printed by Hamilton Printers, PO Box 520 Charters Towers, Qld, 4820. This book will be of great use for my future travel plans.

There is a wealth of information on the net about Cloncurry and the town and the area have been written about from many points of view and over a very long time.

Fullarton River North West Queensland

2015-02-15T22:05:00.000-08:00

Life is like the river, sometimes it sweeps you gently along and sometimes the rapids come out of nowhere. Emma Smith http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/river

Bridge Over Fullarton River North West Queensland

A few years ago my children presented me with a pair of ruby earrings for my birthday. My grandmother and my mother both loved rubies. My mother had to settle for garnets as a substitute and she developed a love of both of these stones. I too love these gems. Last year, l decided to find a ring to match my earrings.

A friend, tutor, skilled facetor and jeweller had spent time on holiday with his wife in the Fullarton River fossicking area. Fortunately for me he found garnets and cut and set one in a gold ring that was perfect for my needs. It is a rich red garnet with the distinctive purplish tinge that is a mark of a Fullarton River garnet.

Jewellery is more than mere decoration. It is a means of remembering those who have given it, or made it. It is a link to people and places.

My garnet ring is a link to my forebears through memory, to my children through the earrings it matches, and is a link to the person who made it. Is also a link to the Fullarton River which crosses the Flinders Highway 67 ks west of Julia Creek.

The fossicking area in which my ring originates is far to the south, upstream of the river off the Landsborough Highway. However each time we cross the bridge on the Flinders Highway I feel a certain emotional tie to this long and complex river.

The eastern side of the Fullarton River Bridge is a lovely place to stop. Kites have been flocking here since the rain stopped. Bee eaters and apostle birds are busy nesting along the banks.

Bee eaters at Fullarton River North West Queensland

It has a history, the Fullarton River. Like all watercourses in Queensland it has been crossed in many places, by many people, by various means. It has been the site of numerous untold stories. In flood and in the Dry it meanders from its source in the Selwyn Ranges. Its channels and tributaries flows into the Cloncurry River system and then into the Flinders from where it debouches into the Gulf of Carpentaria.

In November 1883 a surveyor, using the pen name ‘Christophus’, wrote about a trip from Dalgonally Station to Cloncurry in the previous months. His party camped on the banks of the Fullerton (sic) River, probably not far from where the bridge on the Flinders Highway is now.

Ninety nine years later Tony Jones was believed murdered in the same area. An unidentified woman alleged he was shot and his body disposed of in the river bed on the southside of the highway.

It is thirty two years since Tony Jones disappeared and in that time the extreme climate of this area has left its mark on the country. Drought has turned the floodplains to dust. Floods have washed through hundreds of kilometres on the circuitous journey to the Gulf.

Kettle of kites over Fullarton River

Since ‘Christophus’ and his party hobbled their horses and laid out their swags on the banks of the Fullarton, through extremes of heat and cold, through Dry and Wet, during drought and seasons of abundance the kites have wheeled in the sky. Ascending and descending on currents of air, vigilant, ever watchful for prey, they are utterly indifferent to the human memories, longings and dramas taking place beneath them.

Claire Wood

longlines

Email: longline8@gmail.com
In The Atmosphere Just Claire Wood

There is an abundance of material on the web about both the Fullarton River area and Fullarton River garnets. Below is a list of some of those:

YouTube video about digging for garnets at Fullarton River:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-g6K46Klpg

Other websites of relevance

http://www.exploreaustralia.net.au/Queensland/Outback/McKinlay/Fullarton-River-Rest-Area

http://www.bonzle.com/c/a?a=p&p=213512&cmd=sp

http://gemfossicking.com.au/fullarton_river.html

http://www.geodata.us/australia_names_maps/aumaps.php?fid=145217&f=144&name=Fullarton%20River

http://www.mindat.org/loc-257928.html

http://www.researchgate.net/publication/264101823_Gahnite-Sillimanite-Garnet_Mineral_Assemblage_from_the_Host_Rocks_of_the_Cannington_Deposit_North_Queensland_Australia_Relationship_between_Metamorphism_and_Zn-Mineralization

Useful map to garnet fossicking area:

http://www.frostysaussieadventures.com/Fossicking/QLD-FullartonGarnets.htm

Detailed and interesting article on the Fullarton River area, the Selwyn Ranges and the Cloncurry area on the Royal Geographical Society of Queensland website:

http://www.rgsq.org.au/21-141c

Julia Creek

2015-02-13T00:13:00.000-08:00

The nice part about living in a small town is that when you don’t know what you’re doing, someone else does

Immanuel Kant http://www.searchquotes.com/quotes/author/Immanuel_Kant/

Burke Street, Julia Creek, Queensland

I planned my first longlines blog of 2015 to be an introduction to my home for the next few months. Julia Creek is a small town in North West Queensland, Australia. It is, in my opinion, the prettiest town along the Flinders Highway between Charters Towers and Mt Isa.

Post Office Julia Creek

All afire with enthusiasm for my new home, and relief that I had not landed in a hellhole, I began an internet search to establish a base of knowledge to work up this blog. Within a short time I came across this website:

https://sites.google.com/site/tanksinker/Home/max-burns-tanksinker

On this site was the image of a book, a big beautiful book bound in leathers, that attracted my attention and my internet search ended right there in a library of data. Guy Burns has done an enormous amount of research on this area, has gathered into one place enough data to keep me reading for six months and put paid to the idea that I could cover the history of this town armed with a few readings and a few short words. Thank you for sharing that Guy Burns.

So, before I settle into some serious reading I’ll take advantage of living in a small town and walk to the library and Post Office. Later tonight a starlit walk before bed and in the morning I have my dawn walk to the free camp just out of town to plan the coming day. I predict my stay here will involve, if nothing else, a lot of walking.

RV Rest Area Julia Creek

Claire Wood

longlines

email: longline8@gmail.com

Just Claire Wood In The Atmosphere

For further information on Julia Creek, check out the following websites:

http://www.queenslandplaces.com.au/julia-creek

http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/dwo/IDCJDW4067.latest.shtml

http://www.outbacknow.com.au/index.php/towns/detail/queensland/outback_north/julia_creek

http://www.dirtndust.com/

http://www.micrrh.jcu.edu.au/Our-Region/julia-creek.html

Day Dreaming in Morpeth

2012-05-02T06:08:00.002-07:00

Morpeth in New South Wales probably never had a hope of becoming the great port that its rival in the 1800s, Newcastle, eventually achieved.

This picturesque town on the high bank of the Hunter River, 34 kilometres by road from Newcastle, but a much longer journey along the winding river, overlooks a verdant valley.

Lieutenant Close selected land at Morpeth in 1821 and by the 1830s the town was thriving as a river port. At its peak Morpeth boasted 18 inns which provided accommodation and refreshment to the sailors, bullockies and other tradesmen who frequented the town.

In Morpeth’s early years there were probably great stands of cedar growing along the river valley. This timber was harvested to build the homes of the Sydney gentry. During this period coal was still being shovelled straight from riverbanks onto the ships of entrepreneurs out to make a fast buck from the region, while official mines were being established around Newcastle.

The Newcastle and Hunter River Steamship Company established regular services from Morpeth to Newcastle and Sydney and freighters and passenger vessels plied between these ports throughout the 19^th century.

On 10 December 1831 the Australian Agricultural Company officially opened Australia's first railway which did not service Morpeth. Two years later, on 3 May 1833 the same company received land grants at Newcastle and a 31 year monopoly on that town's coal traffic. These developments in Newcastle and the deforestation of the valley led to Morpeth’s eventual decline as a trading port.

Enthusiastic and ambitious public building projects continued in Morpeth until the late 1800s providing the town with a legacy of fine buildings.

Autumn deciduous trees and the crispness of the upland air enhanced the soft light of the change of seasons in this village which cloaks its boisterous beginnings in genteel arts and crafts shops and fine wine and food merchants.

As we strolled along Swan Street after indulging in a gourmet pizza and after sampling the fine wines of the Morpeth Moonshine Distillery and Wine Cellar the temptation to set up a Wordsworthian existence in one of the town’s quaint backstreets was only overcome by the harsh reality of a paid-for but non- refundable ticket out of New South Wales and the knowledge that Australia boasts few financially independent poets.

Claire Wood

longlines

Email: longline8@gmail.com

See also: Just Claire Wood, In theAtmosphere

Wednesday 2 May 2012

Almost Home, Kakadu revisited

2011-05-26T20:42:00.000-07:00

Brisbane Flood January 13 2011


Nankeen Night Heron

Lotus in Flower Kakadu

When the first Darwin blog was published on November 24, 2010 I did not realize that within a few months I would have had a dramatic lifestyle change and be living within a couple of hours drive of the home I had left many years ago.

This past wet season was one of the wettest on record. The floods which began in northern Australia in November moved slowly south and Brisbane was inundated on 13^th January. Enquiries into the flood and its aftermath are currently underway in various parts of Queensland.

Victorians also counted the losses from floods while those people who live at the mouth of the Murray saw the river in an entirely new light as it flowed to the sea for the first time in decades.

While the East Coast was flooding the West was fighting bushfires and it seemed as we travelled north into two cyclones in one week that this country, blessed as it is, must suffer natural disaster to counterbalance the many social, political and economic benefits that it has to offer.

However our natural disasters became part of a series affecting the Southern Hemisphere when floods hit South America followed by a devastating earthquake in Christchurch.

The Japanese earthquake and tsunami demonstrated that we truly are global. The worldwide effects from this disaster will not be known perhaps for years to come.

And now the latest series of tornadoes in the United States unites us in sympathy for all those who this year have suffered in natural disasters.

Brumby, Eagle, Ibis, Jabiru Nest, Kakadu

Jabiru and Crocodile compete for fish carcase

It was not only natural disasters that occupied the news but also the outburst of unrest across the Middle East.

The atmosphere of freedom of speech and action that is taken for granted in this country was a tonic when contrasted to the situation in those Middle Eastern countries.

I delighted in the sight of people dressing how they liked. It was wonderful to know that in the eyes of the law the man driving the garbage truck, the woman cleaning the toilets in the shopping centre, the young man covered in tattoos sleeping in the back of his battered ute and the very young mother trailing her tribe of children against the “don’t walk” sign not only enjoyed the same rights and protections as the highest in the land, but took those rights and privileges for granted.

One of the pleasures of arriving north of the Tropic of Capricorn during the Wet Season was the abundance of birdlife, particularly waterbirds, shorebirds and waders.

Eagles performing aerobatics

Little Egret, Kakadu

It was the abundance of birdlife that made the visit to Kakadu late last August so memorable.

Kakadu National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage listed site, holds a special place in the hearts of many Australians. The size of a small European country it has been continuously occupied for at least 40,000 years and the quantity and quality of Aboriginal cultural sites within it reflect this long occupation.

Kakadu extends along the Northern Territory coast from the mouth of Wildman River to the mouth of the East Alligator River and includes Barron and Field Islands. Nitmiluk National Park is on its south west border. Kakadu surrounds the controversial Jabiluka and Ranger Mineral Leases and the Koongarra Mineral Lease.

Arnhem Land, largely closed to visitors, is on its eastern boundary.

Graceful Egret

Crocodile and Burdekin Duck, Kakadu

Pied Heron, Kakadu

Entire libraries of books have been written about Kakadu, about its culture, flora, fauna, geology and complex history.

Any search on the Web will bring up numerous sites littered with extravagant visuals and a depth of information.

Because of the long and late Wet season earlier in the year Wurrgeng, the cool weather season (of the six seasons of Kakadu) was still on the land and made for easy travel.

Yellow Water and Nourlangie Rock were the highlights of the trip, although the size and numbers of crocodiles that inhabited every body of water left a lasting impression.

Yellow Water Cruise Boat

The Yellow Water wetland cruise is conducted by professionally trained and enthusiastic wildlife guides who respect not only the environment and its inhabitants, but also the visitors, many of whom have travelled around the world for this experience.

My visit after a long absence was brief, a side trip from the main purpose of my journey, but a trip that left me determined to return and spend more time in this beautiful and complex area.

Darter with fish catch Kakadu

Claire Wood
Observer
Monday, May 9, 2011
Longlines - http://longline8.blogspot.com/
Email: longline8@gmail.com
Follow me on twitter: http://twitter.com/longlinesBlog

Crocodile & Whistling Ducks Kakadu

Darwin Revisited

2010-11-24T00:34:00.000-08:00

I cannot rest from travel: I will drink

Life to the lees: all times I have enjoyed

Greatly, have suffered greatly, both with those

That loved me, and alone; on shore, and when

Through scudding drifts the rainy Hyades

Vexed the dim sea: I am become a name;

For always roaming with a hungry heart

Much have I seen and known; cities of men

And manners, climates, councils, governments,

From ‘Ulysses’, Alfred, Lord Tennyson

South end of Mall facing Waterfront

Unlike Ulysses most people can rest from travel. However before the ‘rest from travel’ are the places on the journey which are strung together like beads on a string. These places often have nothing in common. It is as if the string of beads had been fashioned by a mad, wayward child - precious stones and bits of rubbish collected and randomly strung together.

Darwin is a bead on the string of my journey. It is a small complex nugget that changes with the light, the angle of vision, the seasons.

Australia’s northernmost city does not face north to Beagle Gulf and beyond to the Timor Sea. Situated on the end of a south facing peninsular Darwin is tucked into Darwin Harbour. The harbour is approximately 20 miles (32 kms) long with several deep arms branching from the main body. It is such a vast and complex environment that a twelve day fishing tour offered by a local company does not guarantee more than a taste of the area.

Twenty years ago the last journey through Darwin was to enter Australia with eight suitcases and two children, the noise of the crowded marketplaces of Asia still echoing in our minds. Beyond the airport perimeter Darwin lay sweltering and abandoned in the buildup to the Wet. As we exited the plane onto the tarmac, perspiration sprang from our pores. Within seconds we were saturated. The air was so thick each breath was like inhaling hot soup.

Public Art Darwin

Darwin during the Dry season is a different town. Darwin two decades later is also a different town. It still straggles around the peninsular, its multiracial inhabitants are still friendly and easygoing. But the city’s population has almost doubled. Taxi drivers are now long term residents, not geologists, anthropologists and archaeologists waiting for the next mining boom. And public art litters the sidewalks and parks. Like many northern Australian towns, time has been kind to Darwin, and tourism even kinder.

This is a town rich in history, with layers of occupation going back at least forty thousand years. It is a town that sits lightly on its foundations. The few remaining historic buildings have been rebuilt after the ravages of disease, wartime bombing and cyclones.

Darwin mall - criticised when it was first opened as being inappropriate for the climate, considered a
‘southern’, alien development - is crowded. People sip coffee al fresco, wander through the art and souvenir shops, photograph each other outside the historic Victoria hotel.

In 1888, Ellen Ryan, one of the richest people in the Northern Territory contracted a local builder to begin work on the North Australia Hotel . It’s name was changed six years after opening to the Victoria. The Vic Hotel was the first building in Darwin constructed from the local multi-coloured porcellanite stone. The hotel has survived several cyclones, the bombing of Darwin and rioting between occupying forces during the Second World War.

It has been a focal point for political and social activity throughout the past 120 years of history in the Territory. In 1908 the first motorists to cross Australia from south to north stayed at the Vic and in 1915 with political turmoil and union unrest threatening what eventually culminated in the Darwin Rebellion, the Vic and several other hotels were ‘nationalised’ by the Northern Territory Administrator.

Darwin Mall

In 1920 Ellen Ryan sold the hotel to Christina Gordon who turned it into a first class hotel and required men to wear jackets in the dining room. As air routes between Australia and the Northern Hemisphere developed the Vic hosted most of those involved. In 1919 pilots from the England to Australia air race stayed there as did those that followed during the pioneering days of air travel.

During the Second World War United States and Australian naval personnel stayed at the hotel, which was damaged during riots by troops stationed in Darwin in 1941.

On 19 February 1942 the same Japanese fleet that bombed Pearl Harbour in Hawaii bombed Darwin. More bombs were dropped on Darwin than on Pearl Harbour and at least 243 people were killed and the entire town damaged. Further bombing on the town continued but the Victoria Hotel suffered little damage.

In 1946 the hotel was sold to the Lim family who operated it until 1965. During that period crocodile shooters, buffalo hunters and mining prospectors took over as the main customers of the hotel.

On Christmas Day 1974 the hotel lost its roof for the third time to the third major cyclone in the hotel’s history when Cyclone Tracey destroyed or damaged 95% of the city and killed 71 people.

As the entire town had to be rebuilt after Tracey it was four years before the Vic was reopened.

Victoria Hotel Darwin

Today the hotel hosts many of the huge numbers of tourists who have discovered the Top End over the past decade.

From the Vic in the mall it is a short walk to The Esplanade.

On the walk to The Esplanade a visit to Lyons Cottage is a pleasant diversion. Built in 1925 it was originally home to the company engineer of the Eastern Extension Australasian and China Telegraph Company Ltd. This company was the successor to the British Australian Telegraph Company (BAT) and laid cable between Australia and Java.

Lyons Cottage was built in stone – a wise decision in a white ant infested and cyclone prone area.

Today it displays historical photos of Darwin and houses an Aboriginal crafts association that sells handicrafts from around the region.

The quality and beauty of the items on sale evoke a surge of regret at the very small bag that, of necessity, accompanies me on this trip.

Mementoes of Aviation Link to Victoria Hotel Darwin

The professionalism of the staff, their open friendly manner are a wonderful welcome back to the area.

Memories of stays in Darwin over several years flood back as I walk down to the refurbished Esplanade.

Right along the Esplanade from Knuckey Street and the Novotel Atrium hotel is a block away. The clear sky and the sparkling water of the harbour are overlaid by memories of watching from the then Atrium Hotel huge thunderheads sweep across the harbour. They heralded violent thunderstorms that culminated in evening lightning displays that seemed to crack the night apart. Below, along the beach, crocodiles were reported to sun themselves or go for forays into the harbour.

Today the number of people using the beach and park area would not encourage any crocodile save the most foolhardy to slide up onto the beach.

On the point, bounded by Herbert Street and Harry Chan Avenue are places that have been the site of events that changed the course of history of the area.

Lyons Cottage Darwin

In 1869 Charles Darwin had become an unpopular figure in England and when George Goyder, Surveyor-General of the Colony of South Australia, arrived in a coastal barque to establish a new settlement he re- named the area "Palmerston", after that great believer in gunboat diplomacy and forced Irish emigration, the then late Lord Palmerston.

Fortunately for all, except of course the 500 Larrakia people who were displaced by Goyder when he established the site of the settlement, in 1911 the town reverted to the name of Darwin.

Observer
24 November 2010

Longlines - http://longline8.blogspot.com/

Email: longline8@gmail.com
Follow me on twitter: http://twitter.com/longlinesBlog

Interiors

2010-08-29T07:02:00.000-07:00

Window

The architect I. M. Pei said, “...people do not stay outside looking at buildings when it is hot ... .[In the Arab world]. ..exteriors are severe, [but the] interiors [are] ... beautiful ... a remarkable variety of patterns and lighting.’

Pei’s touch is always light, his historical references always subtle. As Oliver Watson says, Pei’s design is ‘accessible ... to those who know about history, and to those who do not...’

The Museum seems to glitter in the mid-day heat. Instead of an external dome the building is topped by a cube reminiscent of the Middle Eastern wind tower.

In countries where wood suitable to use for spanning large spaces was unavailable, where brick, stone and marble were the building materials, the arch and the dome dictated the development of architecture.

Pei has used the arch to emphasize, not interrupt, the planar exterior of his building design and as a subtle reminder of its architectural heritage. The simple roman arch, the horse shoe arch, the delicate pointed arch that for many is identified with Islam, all are traced lightly on the external surfaces.

Shadows at Entrance to Museum

It is only the slit like modernist elliptical arches cut into the tower that offer relief from the glare. Deeply shadowed they are like the eyes of a warrior, protected by a helmet.

Fountain in atrium

At the museum entrance the perspiring visitor treads through bars of shadows that pattern the ground, walks through the massive glass doors and is halted by the shock of the interior.

The momentary suspension of sensation lifts. The skin cools, eyes adjust to the absence of glare, voices welcome the visitor.

Beyond the shadowed reception area is a light-filled atrium space, partly illuminated by a 45 metre-high tinted glass window revealing the salt-laden Gulf that surrounds Qatar on three sides.

Looking up to internal faceted dome

The newcomer is immediately drawn to the window, but on looking back across the atrium realizes that there is no position from which this space looks best. Through his use of stone, concrete, glass, steel and marble Pei has provided a sculptural space in which the visitor is enclosed by, and becomes part of, pattern and light and geometrical variety.

A black marble fountain delineates the space in front of the window.

Beyond the fountain the eye is drawn upward to the stainless steel faceted internal dome through the oculus of which pours more daylight.

Chandelier below dome and over staircase

Here Pei has played with geometry. “From circle to octagon to square to four triangular flaps that angle back at different heights to become the atrium’s column supports,” is the description given in Watson’s book. Yet this array of shapes and angles soars away from the eye. It is intriguing, never confusing; revealing not obscuring.

Glass bridges connecting balconies

Below the centre of the dome the floor is inlaid with intricate patterns and a curved double staircase sweeps upward to the U-shaped balconies that are cantilevered around the atrium.

Between staircase and dome hangs a circular ‘chandelier’ that glows even in this light filled space.

From the top of the staircase the light seems liquid and the glass bridges that connect the balconies become bridges of light on which human figures float in luminous streams.

There is time now, before entering the galleries, before departing this space to go back down the stairs, buy a coffee and sit at one of the tables overlooking the gulf, abandon all thought and merge into this radiance.

Observer

Sunday, 29 August 2010

Longlines - http://longline8.blogspot.com/

Email: longline8@blogspot.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/longlinesBlog

Ref:

Watson, Oliver, Museum of Islamic Art, Doha, Qatar, Prestel Verlag Munich.

Light and Heat in Qatar

2010-08-15T19:35:00.000-07:00

Qatar vies with Lichtenstein for the position as the richest country in the world.  Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, Emir of the State of Qatar, came to power through a bloodless coup in 1995.  His accession was a turning point for the country.  The Sheikh has proclaimed his intention to make his country a centre for culture and education.  His second wife Sheikha Al Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani has been active in helping him achieve this goal.  In November 2008 The Museum of Islamic Art in Qatar was opened.

Corniche Doha, Qatar

It is 10.30 in the morning. The temperature outside is 44⁰C with the promise of increasing heat. The plane thuds on to the tarmac and hurtles to a stop in the richest city on earth.

The passengers, oil workers and their families returning from shopping trips to the Emirates, disembark and charge into the dust and heat haze, leaving the lone tourist alone to savour the moment of arrival in a new city.

Parkland facing Museum of Islamic Art Qatar

The hotel shuttle bus driver seems bemused, but enthusiastic, at the idea of the city as a tourist destination.

The trip to the hotel through a tangle of streets lined with crumbling concrete buildings is blocked intermittently by orange and white plastic barricades. Behind these barricades crowds of indentured Asian labourers shovel dirt out of ditches.

The first impression of the city is that the Qataris cannot be accused of flaunting their extraordinary wealth, although

Doha, Qatar’s capital, does have the usual collection of odd-shaped glass-clad high rise buildings and a dust shrouded tower to celebrate the 2006 Asian Games.

On the southern tip of the crescent-shaped bay, at the end of the corniche along which the working men are not allowed to walk, is the jewel in Qatar’s crown.

What a jewel it is. The first sign that true progress has come to the country. The next day, the driver points out the new education and medical precincts - further proof that money is being spent wisely in this country.

But it is the breathtakingly beautiful Qatar Museum for Islamic Arts that has placed Doha on the international map.

This building is I. M. Pei’s design and proof that the creative process burns deeply and strongly to the end of the artistic life.

Entrance to Museum of Islamic Art Doha

I.M. Pei has many great projects in his portfolio, but is probably best known for his controversial upgrading of the Louvre precinct in Paris which opened in 1989.

The story of I. M. Pei’s quest for ‘the essence of Islamic architecture’ is told and re-told in the Middle East. Cordoba in Spain, Fatehpur Sikri in India, the Great Mosque in Damascus, the fort at Sousse in Tunisia, were visited by the architect,but none of these inspired him to begin his design. Finally he came upon the simple lines of an ablution fountain in a Cairo mosque and from this drew the inspiration for the Doha museum.

I. M. Pei's Museum of Islamic Art Qatar

The museum is located on a man- made island sixty metres from shore. It is a stripped back, almost minimalist design which does evoke images of the ninth century ablutions fountain in the mosque of Ahmad ibn Tulun in Cairo. But the building is more than an evocation of early Islamic architecture.

Pei has embraced the harsh light and heat of the Arabian peninsula. The sharply defined facets of the building enhance the interaction not just of light and shade, but of variations of light and shade and the interplay of watery reflections.

As the temperature soars beyond 48 degrees, the water shimmers beneath heat waves, and the building invites the traveller to enter into a promise of a vast cool interior.

Museum of Islamic Art Qatar

Observer
16 August 2010
email: longline8@gmail.com
Longlines - http://longline8.blogspot.com/

Death, Religion and Family in Venice

2010-07-24T17:42:00.000-07:00

The church of Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari (the Frari) was established in the 1230s. Within the church the three motifs threading through the lagoon’s history unite to reveal the uniquely Venetian aspects of death, religion and family.

Linked to the Frari collection is Titian’s Pièta in the Accademia Galleries in Venice. The Pièta is not only the culmination of a life of artistic work but a profound reminder of the transience of life and of the basic fear upon which the republic was founded.

Heliodorus the fourth century Bishop of Altinum retired with St Marcellus to live out his life on the lagoon island of Marcelliana. Heliodorus was only one of the many early Christian recluses who sought isolation on those low islands which offered a space for contemplation and prayer in the everchanging light between sky and sea, between East and West.

The hermits were followed by two waves of refugees fleeing death at the hands of invaders.

Settlements built in swamps are vulnerable to disease and environmental hazards.

In the centuries following the first refugee settlement in the lagoon, flooding destroyed some of the islands and silting of the channels encouraged mosquito borne disease. Outbreaks of malaria forced whole communities to relocate to other islands. When the settlers regrouped the communities which today make up Venice were established.

The hermit tradition encouraged a separation between Church and State. Wealthy families supported the work of monks and nuns, and the building of churches. As the Venetian community grew, political authority was developed so that no one family controlled the State.

However Venetian wealth and power was built on fragile foundations.

No sooner were the ravages of malaria brought under control than the first plague pandemic swept through Europe in 1346.

For the following 333 years Europe was subjected to waves of plague outbreaks. By 1400 the continent’s population had been halved by the disease which attacked in three forms. The most common form was bubonic which killed 80% of sufferers. The other two forms, septacemic and pneumonic, had almost a 100% death rate.

Albert Camus in his allegorical novel about the Nazi occupation of France describes the symptoms of bubonic plague:

Between 1361 and 1528 (part of the period of the second plague pandemic) there were 22 outbreaks of plague in Venice. During an outbreak between 1575 and 1577 fifty thousand (one third) of Venice’s inhabitants were killed by the disease.

At the end of the fifteenth century or the beginning of the sixteenth as another plague outbreak began to spread through Europe, ten year old Tiziano Vercellio (Titian) and his brother Francesca set out from their home village of Pieve di Cadore high in the Dolomite mountains to begin apprenticeships with the Bellini family in Venice.

By 1516 Titian was recognised as the master of Venetian painting, a position he maintained for the next sixty years.

His work for the church of the Frari was the foundation upon which his reputation was based.

Behind the plain, imposing late Gothic facade of the Frari is a classic Latin cross-shaped space filled with light.

Within the gilded frames and marble niches of the church are no idealised portraits of semi-divine creatures immersed in religiosity but strong, determined people existing in an uncertain world.

The saints are grounded in the reality of the artist’s times. Bernardino Licino’s group in Virgin Mary and Saints (1524) in which St Clare, austere and observant and St Francis, ironic and knowing, flank a concerned Bonaventura are good examples. Giambatista Pittoni’s Hagar, vulnerable and weeping in Hagar in the Desert (18th Century) is another.

In Titian’s Assunta (1516-1518) the virgin, her body thickened by childbearing, her tragic life stamped on her features is absorbed, afraid yet resigned, into the afterlife. She may be being elevated to the divine but she remains a woman of the earth.
Titian’s touchingly young Madonna of Ca Pesaro (1519-1526) struggles to restrain her rebellious infant and, interrupted in her maternal duties, turns, polite yet impatient, to acknowledge the obeisance of the retinue of Jacopo Pesaro.

In the chapel of the Milanese Alvise Vivarini (1503) shows St Ambrose’s careworn face imbued with gentle concern. Bartolomeo Vivarini’s St Mark (1474) is alert to events beyond the frame as he raises a hand in an admonitory blessing.

Donatello’s statue of an emaciated St John the Baptist is formidable. Transfigured by self-mortification and dressed in animal skin John the Baptist raises a hand that does not admonish the viewer. It merely draws attention to this embodiment of the illusory nature of earthly reward, the fragility of body and mind, the inevitability of death and of whatever lies beyond.

Beyond the Presbytery and Chapels inside the Frari, the massive funerary monuments that line either side of the aisle are a reminder of how important death has been in Venice.

Titian was the only plague victim to be buried in a church, but his funerary monument was not erected until the 1850s.

His Pièta, unfinished when Titian died on 27th August 1576 was intended for the Frari. It is now in the Accademia and is a magnificent, awe inspiring work.

Gone are the glorious skies, the vivid colours of the Frari Madonnas.

Within the ruined claustrophobic space of the Pièta man confronts death at the outbreak of plague. Reduced by age and the depredations of disease, he begs for eternal salvation, while Mary Magdelan gestures furiously at an inevitable fate. The Venetian lion, helpless and turned to stone, grimaces in fear.

This is the end of the Venetian blogs for the time being. Dante, a Florentine, who used the image of the Venetian Arsenal to help describe Hell, will have the last word.

Observer
Sunday, 25 July 2010
Longlines - http://longline8.blogspot.com/
Email: longline8@gmail.com

References:
John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, 1879, Project Gutenberg.
F. C. Hodgson, An Early History of Venice, 1901, Project Gutenberg.
Albert Camus, The Plague, Penguin Books 1947.
Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), The Inferno, www.worldofdante.org

Something to Consider

2010-07-07T04:19:00.000-07:00

A computer crash has delayed the last of the Venice blog posts. for this I apologise. However in the meantime I recommend readers to look at the blogs I follow.

There is the gorgeous visual record of John and Gail Cross' travels and place of residence in 'John and Gail in UAE'. Then there is Ann Alcock's equally engaging yet totally different approach to photography in PhotoVoice Australia.

Margo Tesch in 'Spring Creek Station' gives the reader an insight into life in rural Australia. Jo Burton's snippets in 'Footloose with Jo' talk about life travelling and in Malta and are always thought provoking.

Make a cup of coffee and spend a bit of time reading Bryce Alcock's reflections on literature and the literary life in 'The Echidna and the Fox' and add to your wish list of reading matter at the same time.

Observer
Longlines - http://longline8.blogspot.com/

Torcello

2010-06-08T07:03:00.001-07:00

The islands of the Venetian lagoon have been populated for millennia. The lagoon is a productive fish habitat and a beneficial environment for a large range of shellfish. The salt marshes provide nesting and over-wintering sites for over 60 species of aquatic birds, the largest population of water birds in Italy. Long before the Romans, fishermen and fowlers inhabited the islands.

Torcello is often portrayed in literature as a place of refuge, enlightenment or respite before the confusion, the harshness of reality descends on a character. For example Du Maurier’s characters in “Don’t Look Now” experience a brief respite from confusion and sadness while on the island. Ignoring the messages offered to him on Torcello sets the protagonist on the path to certain death.

In “The Stones of Venice” Ruskin’s pose as the superior, expert judge of all things Venetian can be irritating beyond belief. His many errors of fact and interpretation - for example he was blind to the presence of Burano and Mazzorbo a few hundred metres across the water from Torcello - have engendered fury in his critics. But there is, beneath the pose and the elaborate phraseology, a humanitarian instinct and a vision that makes reading his book worthwhile. His lyrical description of Torcello begins:

Seven miles to the north of Venice, the banks of sand, ..., attain by degrees a higher level, and knit themselves at last into fields of salt morass, raised here and there into shapeless mounds, and intercepted by narrow creeks of sea. One of the feeblest of these inlets,... stays itself ... beside a plot of greener grass covered with ground ivy and violets. On this mound is built a rude brick campanile, of the commonest Lombardic type,

This “rude brick campanile” is the bell tower of the Basilica of Santa Maria Assunta.

Long before the bell tower was built, long before Christianity came to Italy people inhabited the marsh islands.

By 100 A.D. grand Roman holiday villas were situated on Torcello. Torcello first rose to prominence as a refuge for the people of the mainland escaping the invasion of the Huns in 452 A.D. By 466 the first steps toward a united community in the lagoon islands had been set up.

Torcello was abandoned within a few generations of the signing of this agreement because an earthquake in Northern Italy generated a tidal wave that flooded Torcello and sent the survivors fleeing back to the mainland or to other island communities.

When the Lombards invaded Northern Italy in 568 A.D. refugees fled once again to Torcello. This time they stayed.

By the time the building of the cathedral began in 639 A.D. a monastery and the lagoon’s first nunnery (both dedicated to St John) had been established.

Over the following centuries with their rise in fortunes the inhabitants of Torcello extended the cathedral until by the end of the first millennium A.D. it looked very much as it does today.

The bell tower was built at this time and the building of Santa Fosca church, a martyrium to house the saint’s remains, had begun.

Torcello became a hub of industry, an important port, a link between Italy and the Adriatic, and interestingly, a glass-making centre.

It was on Torcello that Venetian-style glassmaking developed from the earlier Roman techniques which were first employed on the island. These skills were then transferred to Venice and from Venice to Murano. Murano later became a centre of glassmaking and, for a time, a world leader in the development of a range of glassmaking styles and techniques.

In the twelfth and thirteenth century the exquisite mosaics for which the basilica of Santa Maria Assunta is world famous were installed. Although Torcello was producing glass at that time research shows that the original glass used for the mosaics was produced in the Levant and then reworked at Torcello.

In the 1300s Torcello was abandoned because of silting in the lagoon and outbreaks of malaria. As Venice increased in power and prosperity Torcello declined and its buildings were demolished, the materials moved to the rising star of the lagoon, for building materials were scarce and expensive in that watery environment.

The low lying open space of Torcello gives it a tranquil atmosphere that has drawn many famous writers.

Hemingway was one. He wrote “Across the River and Into the Trees” during a stay on this island in 1949.

But it is a lesser known writer whose comments about Torcello and its inhabitants who most appeals to me. W. D. Howells visited Torcello during his period as American Consul in the 1860s. He wrote about this experience in “Venetian Life”. His quote is in blue print.

His observations about his visit to Torcello contrast with those disappointed comments about the island by Henry James, and the remarks about Burano by the anonymous author of the New York Times article of 1880.

Torcello has a Devil’s Bridge over a small canal. It is probably so called because it has no hand rails. A visitor after indulging too well at Torcello's Locanda Cipriani, a restaurant almost as famous, and expensive, as Florian’s in St Marks Square, could well topple into the canal from the bridge.

Today Torcello is as Ruskin, James and so many others described it: an island barely above sea level with a small group of buildings which includes the Basilica, the church and the belltower at one end, with a small population of guards, guides and souvenir sellers who welcome the visitor. It is easy to imagine staying there for an extended period, observing the rise and fall of the tide, the cycle of the seasons beneath those open skies.

Observer
9 June 2010
email: longline8@gmail.com
Ref:
W.D. Howell, "Venetian Life", 1867.
F.C. Hodgson, "The Early History of Venice"
John Ruskin, "The Stones of Venice", 1879

Henry James, "Italian Hours" 1909
Ernest Hemingway, "Across the River and Into the Trees" Jonathan Cape, 1950
Daphne du Maurier, "Don't Look Now and Other Stories", Penguin, 1973David Hewson, "The Cemetery of Secrets" Pan Macmillan 2001

Colour and light in Burano

2010-05-15T05:29:00.000-07:00

Burano has been home to commercial fishermen since at least the sixth century AD. The houses of Burano were painted bright contrasting colours, it is said, so that fishermen could find their way home in the fogs that sometimes settle over the Venetian lagoon. Today, however the Venetian council controls which colours the houses may be painted, and Burano offers more than cuttlefish cooked in its own ink as a local treat.

From the vaporetto the leaning tower of the sixth century San Martino church, whose interior houses a painting of the crucifixion by Tiepolo the elder, is the first indication that Burano is coming into view.

The soft mud and clay of the flood plains and islands of Northern Italy is the foundation upon which numerous towers and campaniles have been built. This geological feature has led to a proliferation of leaning towers and the consequent architectural innovation of building towers separate from the main buildings. These towers topple when subsiding foundations send the fragile balance of the leaning structure to the point of collapse.

Burano has more to offer the visitor, however, than a leaning tower.

We must give Hemingway his due. There is indeed something distinctly feminine about Burano. All those lace and fabric shops might have something to do with this impression, plus the brightly coloured houses, the abundance of tea and coffee shops. But perhaps it is more to do with the women, women everywhere, from toddlers to great-grandmothers, women of all shapes and sizes, yet with one thing in common - wide welcoming smiles, encouraging each and every visitor to come, view her textiles, drink her coffee, taste her baked goods.

Burano was the poor relation in the Venetian lagoon for centuries. In Roman times it was an outlying village of Torcello. Its star rose during the peak of the trade in lace, after which it reverted to being just another lagoon island.

Today Burano is a trendy address for the well heeled in the European art and design world. Phillipe Starcke, the French designer whose furniture features on the long running American television series Boston Legal is reputed to own a number of houses on the Island.

The island has its own art movement, the Burano School, established in 1910 when a group of artists moved there and, inspired by nineteenth century French schools of painting, adopted a “simple poetic rendition of the landscape” through modern use of colour, and a stripping back of sentimentality. Ironic when one considers the history of the Lagoon Islands and the effect of the French on their history.

In A Venetian Island: Environment History and Change in Burano, Sciama emphasises that Burano is separate and different from Venice, although ‘part of Venice’s administrative and bureaucratic structure’, the island’s relationship with Venice is ‘changing and complex’, with its own ‘strong kinship links’.

Burano’s size and place in the lagoon may have helped develop its own distinct style. The district of Burano is over 50 square kilometres in area, the second largest district in the lagoon, although only half a square kilometre of that area is dry land.

Burano is part of a small triangle formed with the islands Torcello and Mazzorbo. Burano had links and loyalties to Torcello long before Venice even existed. It is also connected by a flat pedestrian bridge to Mazzorbo which is home to the 14th century church of Santa Caterina.

Santa Caterina, Catherine of Alexandria, was reputedly one of the most intelligent and beautiful woman of her day. She was beheaded by the pagan ruler of Alexandria in 305 AD at the age of 23 after being tortured by being splayed on a wheel.

The Crusaders brought the story of Catherine to Europe. The Catherine Wheel (both the children’s gymnastic feat and the fireworks) and the Catherine or Rose window were named after her. Catherine’s ability to defeat philosophers in argument was not celebrated. Instead she became the protector of young unmarried girls. The wheel of her torture became the symbol for wheelwrights, spinners and lace-makers.

Of course, in due course, the French not only lured lacemakers from Burano but also established their own rival protector of young girls and lace makers, the French priest, St John Francis Regis. John Francis’ life and times are more prosaic and more based in fact than those of Catherine.

Whether or not it is the beneficence of Catherine wafting across oceans and mountains and one thousand seven hundred years of time or some other quality in the light and the hospitality of its inhabitants, Burano is an island the visitor can imagine settling into. It is tempting to wonder what life would be like to wake in its small hotel, take a dawn walk over the bridge through the parks of Mazzorbo, drink morning coffee at tables along its cobbled streets, or just sit by the canal each evening and watch the sun set over the lagoon.

Observer
15 May 2010
Blog: Longlines - http://longline8.blogspot.com/
Email: longline8@gmail.com

Points in the Air: Lacemaking on Burano

2010-05-11T00:38:00.001-07:00

Lacemaking was one of the early ‘women’s industries’, a means by which many women achieved a measure of financial independence. Before the French broke the Venetians’ control of the lacemaking industry Burano was one of the main centres of lacemaking in Europe.

The Burano vaporetto stop is a small ferry terminal opening to a wide, grassy, treed area on which children play under the watchful eyes of grandmothers, and where youths lounge around waiting for the excitement of whatever will arrive from the other islands.

After a ferry trip in which drunken men sparred – a display more of linguistic than physical abilty – the sense of space under a blue spring sky was a relief, an escape.

Burano is famous for lacemaking. Authentic Burano lace is no longer sold in the town's street stalls. Burano lace is now a luxury item, priced according to the time and skill that goes into its making.

Much of the lace sold in Burano shops is today made to order in countries where labour is cheap.

The visitor can still watch lace being stitched in the Scuola dei Merletti (School of Lacemaking) whose museum traces the history of lacemaking on Burano.

Burano’s lacemaking tradition evolved from the influence of Venetian imports of gold and coloured embroideries from the East. These inspired Venetian craftswomen who supplied the church cloths and vestments. They developed white embroidery to trim these items. Needlepoint lace developed from white embroidery.

The first lacemaking is, in spite of competing claims from orientalists, Francophiles and the numerous other voices clamouring for recognition of their area, not really known. Many forms of decorative fabric trim were in existence long before true lace evolved.

But it is interesting that the two regions of Europe where pictorial art flourished in conjunction with great trading skills, north Italy and Flanders, were where lace making first evolved as an important industry.

Lace came into being at the end of the fifteenth century and lace designs evolved from embroidery designs.

The first needle lacers were Venetian. In the 16^th century Venetian women realized the monetary value of lace. It was not only nuns cloistered in convents who made lace. The women of Venice filled their palaces with relatives and servants and bales of thread from Salo on the shores of Lake Garda. They produced lace edgings by the thousands of metres to trim cuffs, collars, hems because, in the early days, lace was used as a trim.

These relatives and servants in turn began making lace at home and the skill spread to the islands.

Lace was a non-perishable product, that could be made in spare moments in the course of a woman’s day. It was not dependent on timing or the season or the weather.

Soon Murano, Chioggia, Burano and Pellestrina set up schools. The translation of the Italian ‘scuola’ to the English ‘schools’ is confusing. Italian ‘scuola’ were artisans’ guilds with strict rules and control over the products made under their auspices. The scuola controlled who worked in the guilds, who trained the artisans and how, who sold the products, to whom and for how much.

In the sixteenth century the women of Burano developed a fine, delicate form of lace known as “punto in aria” (“points in the air”) which transformed the island into one of the most prosperous lacemaking centres in Europe. Burano represented the standard for lacemaking in Europe until the end of the 18^th century

During the 17^th century women broke away from the strict rules that had grown up around lacemaking for the church and developed new styles.

But within the mercantile spirit lies the seeds of its own destruction. The Venetian Republic aspired to become the publishing capital of Europe and the Venetian dialect had been adopted as the official language of lace makers.

Printers, authors and designers of manuals on lace making emerged on the fondamentas, salizadas, calles, campos and cortes of Venice. Guides to lace making were published and became best sellers. Outside Italy these guides were copied and translated or written by expatriate Venetians.

Those wily French and Flemish lace makers soon were providing serious competition for the women of Burano. In order to encourage home-based industries the French imposed duty on imported lace and established their own factories for making all types of thread work. The Venetians responded with their own import duties and bans.

From the 18^th century lace became a commercial enterprise. Venetian lace makers were paid large sums of money to go to France to work in the lace factories there. The Venetian Republic retaliated by introducing laws against the emigration of lace workers, as they had done previously with the glassworkers of Murano.

The conquest of Venice in 1797, and the subsequent collapse of its commercial power, resulted in the economic ruination of Burano and by implication of Burano’s women and children, although Burano was already declining as a lacemaking centre. In 1872 the present day lace-making school was founded in the hope that it would revive the island’s former fortunes, but buyers were not prepared to pay a living wage to the lace makers.

Nineteenth century male writers seemed to take particular pleasure in recounting stories about Burano’s women and children, beautiful yet reduced to aggressive begging.

An article published in the New York Times on 2^ndJuly 1880 typifies this writing:

“[We] soon drew up in a bad smelling canal, before a dirty broad street or narrow marketplace, ... we pushed our way through the crowd of begging children to the lace school. We were accompanied all the way by one particular dirty little girl ... who begged persistently and dolefully. ...

In spite of being unable to locate finished pieces of lace to purchase the writer found at least one compensation for the trip to the island:

The Buranese women are among the prettiest we have seen in North Italy. When we went back to the gondola, we found the landing swarming with beggars. We were paddled away from Burano, followed along the sides of the canal by the troop of begging children among whom the frowsty-pated little girl was still prominent and quite unabashed by her utter want of success.”

It is almost certain that canals throughout the lagoon smelt badly in those days. They still are not that fragrant. One only wishes the ‘frowsty-pated little girl’ had flung great handfuls of mud from the stinking canal onto the backs of the mean-spirited but doubtless well scented retreating tourists.

Observer

11 May 2010

http://www.longline8.blogspot.com

Email: longline8@gmail.com

Note:

There is an enormous amount of information about lace and Burano on the web. There is also an almost equal amount of printed literature on the lace makers of Burano. Below is just a sample listing.

http://www.museocaprai.it/en/index.htm

http://www.topak.cz/text/en/history.aspx

The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Art of Modern Lace Making, by The Butterick Publishing Co.

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/22325/22325-h/22325-h.htm

(Good for techniques and styles of lacemaking, but with dubious historical information)

Migration, Minorities, and Technology Transfer in Early Modern Europe* by Salvatore Ciriacono, University of Padua

New York Times Archive for 1880
The Sciama book is an excellent sociological study

On the Way to Burano

2010-05-01T05:55:00.000-07:00

The trip from Venice to Burano takes a little under an hour and is a pleasant way to observe some of the lesser known islands of the Venetian Lagoon. These islands are treasure troves for the archaeologist. They have been the locus of important moments in Venetian history. For the visitor with a few days to spare and a copy of the Actv vaporetto timetable they can be engaging and rewarding destinations.

On the way to the vaporetto stop for Burano we passed the first spring crocuses dancing in the wind in the Giardini Papadopouli. Filaments of cloud spun across a cerulean sky. At the changeover stop at Fondamente Nuove a brisk breeze ruffled the waters of the Rio dei Gesuiti.

It seemed a perfect day to visit the island that Hemingway described as the feminine equivalent of Murano, to drift across the lagoon in the wake of Byron, Shelley, James Fenimore Cooper - the armies of tourists and visitors who had plied the route since the days of the Romans. Burano as Henry James said, is “a pretext … for a day on the lagoon”.

A self guided tour group from New York and a group of locals returning to Burano packed into the vessel. Inside the cabin, the air was thick with the fug of humanity overlaid with wafts of expensive perfume, stale cigarette smoke and wine. Obviously somewhere in Venice wine was being dished out in generous amounts early in the morning.

After the requisite amount of jostling those few individuals not belonging to either group were squashed in the middle. A young Venetian man, his English girlfriend and a scattering of other nationalities gazed across a sea of heads at the lagoon beyond windows that were firmly shut against the outside world.

The vaporetto chugged past San Michele, the cemetery island of Venice where the remains of only a privileged few find permanent rest. The less fortunate being consigned, after a suitable period of interment, to the charnel house.

Reflections on the reality of death in the lagoon were interrupted as Vignole floated green and lush far to starboard, a reminder that even Venetian vegetables grow on islands.

No one went ashore on Murano, but more Burano-bound passengers squeezed on board. There was standing room only. This was off-season. Where had the information that few people visited Burano come from?

As we departed Murano the ferry in front of ours turned south-east to wend its way through channels cut through the mud flats that have protected the island of St Erasmo for millennia.

Then someone opened a window. Wind gusted through the cabin. A man began yelling in heavily accented English. An American on the starboard side shouted back. The window was slammed shut.

The two men leapt to their feet, trading insults across the heads of startled passengers, cutting off the view of Isola San Giacomo in Palude on the port side and of Isola Lazzaretto Nuovo on the starboard.

Ancient Greek and Roman artefacts have been unearthed on these islands. But it is their history as ‘plague’ islands and later as military installations that links the two.

San Giacomo in Palude, or “paluo”, (St James in the Marsh) was originally a Cistercian convent. During the plague of 1456 lepers were moved from San Lazzaro to San Giacomo. At some stage the convent was transformed to a Franciscan monastery and remained so until Napoleon dismantled most of the religious institutions on the lagoon islands. He transformed the island into a garrison and it served a military purpose for various armies until 1964.

Lazzaretto Nuovo was Venice's second quarantine island. Around the turn of the first millennium the monks of Saint Giorgio Maggiore built the church of Saint Bartholomew on the island and it became known as Vigna Murada (the walled vineyard). In 1468 the island was renamed Lazzaretto Nuovo, to differentiate it from the first quarantine station which now became known as Lazzaretto Vecchio.

All incoming merchant vessels, their crew and cargo had to be processed here. Life for ships’ crews temporarily quarantined on the island was usually comfortable. However anyone from the merchant ships who exhibited signs of the plague was summarily removed to Lazzaretto Vecchio and certain death.

Periodically, plague victims were brought from Venice and left to die on Lazzaretto Nuovo. Some historians believe that at least eight thousand people died here from the plague.

Napoleon’s, and later the Austrians’, enthusiasm for military installations saw Lazzaretto Nuovo reborn as a gunpowder store and it remained in military hands until 1975.

Through all of these changes the herons and egrets have maintained their still and careful fishing in the marshes surrounding these islands.

However ancient and natural history were far from the minds of the passengers aboard this vaporetto on an early spring morning in 2010. A modern blood feud seemed to be evolving. Loyalties were being established.

Voices were raised in support of the protagonist, or against the antagonist. The air was thick with testosterone.

The New Yorkers adopted shock tactics and engaged their foe in Italian. There was a momentary silence as the opposing side absorbed this surprise blow.

Then someone flung out insults in dialect. Touché. The Americans, however, were prepared and responded in kind.

Translations were muttered for the benefit of the neutral centre who understood neither Italian nor dialect.

The welfare of ‘the children’ – sturdy young men and women accompanying their older, and presumably more responsible family members on tour or home to Burano – was at stake.

American ‘children’ apparently cannot tolerate closed windows, Buranelli ‘children’ wilt in the wind.

What a fine linguistic display it was!

San Francesco Deserto slipped by unnoticed by most
.
This island had been inhabited intermittently since at least the first century.

In 1220 Francis of Assissi, accompanied by Brother Elias, Francis’ friend and supporter during difficult times, hastened back from a peacemaking mission in the Middle East to avert a crisis in his congregation in Europe.

Like all travellers from the East he passed through the Venetian Lagoon. Over the following few years Francis grappled with the problems besetting his congregation before returning to the Middle East in 1223. Here he instituted the practice of erecting a nativity scene at Christmas time to illustrate to the faithful the extent of the poverty in which Christ was born.

Earlier in this same year Jacopo Michiel, a relative of the Doge of Venice donated the island to the Franciscan order.

However Francis’ desire for peace among men of all faiths and nationalities was not being celebrated by the passengers on the vaporetto.

Calls on both sides for the captain to intervene and control the opposing party were studiously ignored. No actual physical contact between the two parties had occurred. But there was much pacing and milling and waving of fists to accompany the shouting. The vessel remained well balanced as each side aligned port and starboard.

Isola di Crevan, of which all that is known is the dubious fact that its oysters are safer to eat than those from islands closer to Venice, slipped by as the vaporetto turned into the channel leading to the Burano stop.

At the disembarkation point each group determined to beat the other on shore. A bottleneck ensued. Old ladies sitting under the trees in the park beside the vaporetto stop rose, curious, ready to participate in whatever drama was coming ashore. The boatman yelled a few exasperated words. Whether it was his words or the shock of fresh air and a blue sky is not entirely clear, but the arguing stopped as suddenly as it began.

One group of the antagonists headed for the public housing units on Mazzorbo. They glanced back as they crossed the footbridge that connects the two islands at the opposition who had proven such worthy adversaries.

The Americans headed for the cafes.

Had this, after all, been just an opportunity for an international family squabble to be made public?

No one cared any more.

Women in black surged from the entrance to Fondamenta Pontinello inviting the disembarking passengers to come into their village, purchase lace and embroidery, tea and cake.

The sun was shining, the canal sparkled, the brightly painted houses glistened. The air was clean and sweet. A filigree of cloud flitted across the sky.

There was lace everywhere, draped from doorways, across display tables, in shop windows. Business was going to be brisk.

Observer

1 May 2010
Note: The map, as all my maps are, is a 'mud map' and is for reference only. Not to be used for boating in the lagoon!
References:
Website for Actv Servizio Navigazione Linee urbane
Canticle of the Sun, Francis of Assisi
Italian Hours, Henry James

Murano Glass

2010-04-15T04:37:00.001-07:00

They have been making glass for over 700 years. The industry has survived invasions, competition, wars, the invention of plastic, changing fashions, and previous economic collapse. In spite of the broken windows in the abandoned foundries, the rotting boards on the docks that speak of hard times being endured on the island, it is difficult to believe that Murano will not once again undergo a revival of its craft

The shrine was made of glass: a glass mosaic Virgin and Child in the Byzantine style. The floral offerings on the ledge below the icon were moulded glass in red, pink, yellow, orange, and blue. The virgin bore her child like a medallion on her chest. Her glance, alert, almost fearful was caught by something to her right. Her gaze, intense yet distracted, rendered irrelevant the opulent ornamentation surrounding her. What, the observer could only wonder, was she looking at? On this damp grey day in early spring the shrine gleamed, refracting the light caught by the glass mosaics.

On Fondamente Cavour the shop windows glowed. Glass in a myriad of colours and forms illuminated the town’s shopfronts.

It is glass that lures Venice’s visitors on the 40 minute vaporetto trip to the island of Murano.

Glassmaking probably began in Mesopotamia 4,500 years ago, but it was the Romans who industrialized it. During that period glassmakers travelled throughout the empire freely exchanging ideas and techniques.

Twenty years after the death of Jesus Christ, the technique that revolutionized glass production, glassblowing, was developed in Jerusalem. Glassmaking became a portable industry, producing lighter weight vessels than the available pottery and metal. It was cheaper as well, for glass is easy to recycle.

Some historians believe the original glassworkers of Northern Italy were descendants of freed Syrian and Judean slaves who spread their craft through the Roman Empire. Whoever these early craftsmen were, the tradition of glassmaking has deep roots in the area. By the first century AD Northern Italy was exporting small coloured glass bowls.

In Hemingway’s Across the River and Into the Trees Richard Cantrell extols the masculine virtues of the Muranese – their resilience, their fishing and duck hunting skills, their fecundity.

With its rows of solid brick buildings along the seafront and the workmanlike steel bridge over Murano’s Grand Canal, there is something masculine about Murano, in spite of its delicate, dazzling products.

Yet Murano’s early history is not about glass. Unlike the nearby island of Torcello, during the first millennium Murano produced no glass. The Muranese were refugees from besieged Roman cities, hunters, fishermen, salt harvesters and boatmen.

The Via Annia, a Roman road followed the Adriatic coast as far as the glassmaking centre of Aquileia. The road passed through the ancient settlement of Altinum, and here it came close to the shore of the Venetian lagoon, close to the inner lagoon islands, including Murano.

Refugees from Altinum escaped Attila the Hun’s invasion of

Italy

in 452 A.D. by fleeing to these sparsely populated islands. Within a few decades twelve of the lagoon communities, including Murano, formed a cooperative council, the first step towards a Venetian Republic.

When the Lombards invaded Northern Italy in 568 A.D. refugees once again streamed onto the lagoon islands and the Muranese continued to work as fishermen, salt traders, hunters of the waterbirds that abounded in the shallow backwaters of the lagoon. They also controlled the port on the nearby island of St Erasmo and generated income by servicing and trading with vessels that used the port.

The new millennium saw Murano’s fortunes on the rise. Proof of this was the island’s acquisition of its own saintly relics in 1125. The remains of St Donatus and some remains of the dragon he slew were brought from Arezzo and installed in the renamed Church of Santa Maria e San Donato. In Byzantine Europe any city worth its salt had to have its own saint, and saintly relics.

Then in 1291 the Venetian Doge Tiepolo changed Murano forever when he closed down the glass furnaces in Venice and moved them to the island.

During the years that followed this move the Venetians tried to retain the lead in glass production in Europe by isolating the glassmakers and imposing strict secrecy laws on them. They well knew the value of trade secrets.

The move benefited both the Venetians and the Muranese. Venice acquired the space left vacant by the departing glassmakers, and ensured that only Venetians would trade in Venetian, now Murano, glass.

In return the Muranese were provided with their very own medieval-style state of the art industrial estate. They were elevated socially and their daughters married into the families of rich Venetian merchants. The craftsmen immediately began to expand their product range, revived ancient glassmaking techniques, invented new ones. They kept the balance of trade with Europe on the plus side for the merchants.

Today tourists visit Murano as part of the Venetian experience to tour the glass museum and those glass factories open for inspection.

They are following a well trodden path. In the Middle Ages Murano was a popular destination for visitors from Venice who went to enjoy the clean air and to walk in the gardens. By the 15^th century Murano was famous all over Europe. People came to watch the glassmaking process.

Within two hundred years all Murano’s ‘secret’ manufacturing processes had been copied in other parts of Europe and it was no longer the remarkable destination it once had been.

In 1797 Napoleon invaded Venice, ending over a thousand years of republican government. After Napoleon the Austrians took over as occupiers. During the following decades travellers in the lagoon risked being pulled over by customs patrols. Books, food or jewellery in their possession were often confiscated and heavy on-the-spot fines imposed.

By the mid-1800s few people risked visiting the islands, except for the young and adventurous. Byron, Shelley and James Fennimore Cooper were numbered among those who braved the lagoon trip.

Murano suffered a further blow when the Austrians built a deep water shipping lane from Mestre to Lido and the Muranese lost their income from servicing shipping.

Glassmaking did not die out entirely, however. Although only five foundries survived, by the late 1800s Murano was back in commercial production. The foundries turned out glass mosaic tiles as part of the restoration of Venice’s churches, in particular the mosaics in St Mark’s.

The resilience of the Muranese saw them ride the economic roller coaster of the 20^th century, the wars, the sudden shifts in fashion. Vittorio Tosa Borella led the glass revival on Murano in the early part of the twentieth century. He was followed by equally talented and farsighted artisans. But the Second World War brought hard times for the industry and in the years after the war Muranese craftsmen worked hard to regain their popularity and their customer base.

By 2001 Murano was once again turning a profit. One third of the 5,000 people on the island worked on their own as artisans or shopkeepers. 27 industrial glassworks processed 13,000 metric tons of raw glass a year.

Such a run of good fortune could not last. The world wide economic collapse in 2008 shattered the tourist industry. The glass artists of Murano fought back. For Christmas 2009 they put on their usual glittering, colourful public display – an antidote to the bleakness of the northern winter.

On a damp grey day in early spring in 2010 small groups of tourists wandered past the brightly lit windows of the glass shops, or sipped coffee in the restaurants. Few were buying.

By afternoon the rain was falling, rivulets of light flowed from the front of the shopfronts into the canal. A sudden surge of children released from school filled the street. The children skittered across the iron bridge. Their mothers, impeded by prams and strollers, calling warnings as they struggled to keep up with their charges. Soon they were gone, mothers and children, down the lanes and alleys.

A Venice bound vaporetto pulled in. The few tourists rushed from the café beside the stop, jostled to board it without getting wet.

In the momentary silence that followed the departure of the vaporetto the icon glimmered through the rain, the virgin still alert to whatever danger lurked nearby.

Observer

Thursday, 15 April 2010
World by Itself: Tradition and Change in the Venetian Lagoon

New?Delhi : Journey's End

2010-04-02T00:34:00.000-07:00

The days in Delhi had been spent time-travelling – hopping from the era of the early Mughuls to the twentieth century then zipping back to pre-Islamic and early Islamic times. The increasing heat bearing down through the thickening humidity forced early morning trips to sites. Rajasthan beckoned. On that final day a dust storm swirled across the city while we travelled to the end days of yet another empire, to structures built over a village reputed to be the remains of the very first settlement in Delhi – the ancient settlement of Indraprashta.

We followed in the footsteps of kings and travelled up Rajpath to look at part of Lutyens’ Delhi.

Although many British architects were associated with the public buildings of New Delhi during the Raj, it is Lutyens whose name is remembered and who also evokes the most controversy.

Edwin Landseer Lutyens was born in London. His father of German immigrant descent was a minor painter of his time. His mother was the daughter of an Irish protestant policeman. Edwin Lutyens was a sickly child, the ninth son in a family of thirteen.

It seems apt that the government that gave the most opportunity to the English working and lower middle classes to acquire wealth and some status as expatriate workers in India should have commissioned a man whose childhood, if not exactly poverty stricken, was certainly not that of the privileged classes.

In 1911 King George V announced the British were moving India’s capital from Calcutta to a new site in Delhi. Lutyens, married to the daughter of a former Viceroy of India, was already a well known and respected architect in England.

In 1912 Lutyens served on a committee with Herbert Baker and Mr Lanchester to advise the Indian Government on the practicalities of building a new capital. Lutyens and Baker then drew up a plan over which they squabbled for years.

The government enclave was finally completed in 1929 and inaugurated in 1931 when the British Viceroy in India moved into his new vice regal residence on top of Raisina Hill. From here he could gaze across Vijay Chowk down Rajpath to India Gate.

Wide avenues may have been Lutyens’ idea of opening the city to the light, a reverse of the closed, often claustrophobic designs of earlier rulers of India. But on first arriving in front of the former vice regal residence, now known as Rashtrapi Bhavan and home to the President of India the view down the hill evokes images of despotic rulers and grandiose military processions. It takes a shift in perspective to view it for what it is.

An entire army could parade effortlessly down Rajpath. And that is exactly what it is used for. Each year on January 26, Republic Day, the Indian military parades its might before the celebrating citizenry.

Delhi residents are proud of the enclave. The Rashtrapi Bhavan has been described as “architecturally quite brilliant”. If you read nothing else about this part of Delhi, read Dalrymple’s description in City of Djinns.

He begins by saying:
“This was Rajpath – once the Kingsway – one of the great ceremonial ways of the world. It was planned as an Imperial Champs Elysees – complete with India Gate, ... But it was far wider, far greener, far more magnificent than anything comparable in Europe ...”

I will leave the rest for you to read yourself.

The maidan around India Gate at the foot of Rajpath is a venue for families to escape the claustrophobic clutter of the city and relax on cool afternoons.

Look at a map of Delhi. From the seeming chaos of the ancient lanes there emerges an elegant symmetry. The “wheel” of Connaught Place articulates with that of India gate. The two harnessed by wide roads to the oval of the President’s Estate.

Birla Mandir was completed in 1939, just eight years after the capital was moved to Delhi. During the building of both of these structures Gandhi was bringing the situation of India to the attention of the world, embarked on a journey with an inevitable ending.

Within twenty years of the Viceroy moving into his residence India was partitioned and the last occupying forces had departed.

Observer
Friday, 2 April 2010
http://longline8.blogspot.com/

Email: longline8@gmail.com

For a brief thought-provoking discussion about Lutyens and others involved in the design of public buildings in Delhi see
http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?235665

Another worthwhile website:
http://www.city-journal.org/html/8_2_urbanities-architect.html

The following is a great blog from Delhi:
http://thedelhiwalla.blogspot.com/2009/04/capital-walk-raisina-hill-lutyens-delhi.html

Dalrymple on Lutyens:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2004/nov/13/architecture.india

Complexity in Qutub

2010-03-08T21:07:00.001-08:00

The earth in the complex is saturated with the voracious ambitions of millennia. The light refracted through the dense humidity of this pre-election day in Delhi glances off the Iron Pillar, forces people to shelter in very small groups beneath the colonnades. It is a day of premonition, of words carefully chosen. There is more than the weight of history draining the energy from the day.

Lal Kot, Qila Rai Pithora (Pithorogarh), Qutub Complex – these are more than a litany of names. They are a summation of over twelve hundred years of the history of one place.

At least eight waves of occupation have been identified in this area. There are records of people living here intermittently from 2,500 B.C. and proof that humans inhabited this site continuously from the Mauryan period in the 4^th century B.C. until the Mughals left in the 19^th century. Their remains – the detritus of empires - litter the landscape.

The ghost of Anangpal of the Tomar Rajput dynasty is raised. He founded Lal Kot in 736 A.D. One of Anangpal’s ministers was a powerful Jain merchant by the name of Nattal Sahu. Nattal Sahu built the Jain temples, the remains of some of which, together with the remains of Hindu temples, form the colonnade under which today’s visitors shelter from the early rising heat.

The six ton Iron Pillar is the first known example of wrought iron manufactured on earth. It is at least sixteen hundred years old. Originally erected on a site in Udaygiri near Bhopal in present day India, it was part of an installation along the Tropic of Cancer which combined astronomical observations with religious worship.

The date when it was removed from its mountain top and transported over 700 kilometres north to Delhi is disputed. Some claim the second emperor of the Muslim Slave dynasty Iltutmish, who ruled from 1211 – 1236, ordered the pillar moved. The explanation favoured by the guide at the complex is that Chandragupta II installed the pillar in the middle of the assortment of Jain and Hindu temples that were on the site in 1052.

One hundred and thirty years later the Chauhan King of Ajmer conquered Lal Kot and renamed it Qila Rai Pithora, but this was a short lived victory. The face of empire in India was changing.

These changes grew from two events that together led to the present day Qutub Complex in Delhi.

One of these events began in 1145. 1,900 metres above sea level, in Ghur, in what is today Afghanistan, the city of Firuzkah was founded as a summer capital of the Ghurids. Four years later the Ghaznavids captured and crucified the brother of the ruler of Ghur and sent his head to the Sultan in Iran. Legend has it that revenge was swift and intense. The Ghurids massacred 60,000 Ghaznavids, took the survivors prisoner and mixed their blood with mud to build Ghurid towers.

Twenty years later two brothers ruled Ghur. During their reign a 65 metre high mud brick minaret was built in Firuzkah. Incidentally, less than fifty years later Firuzkah was destroyed by the Mongols. Only the minaret survived. It has stood in that high valley in Afghanistan for over eight hundred years and is known today as the minaret of Jam.

One of those ruling brothers, Mu’izz al-Din (known in India as Muhammad Ghori) was the man who changed the face of empire in India.

While the minaret was being built in Firuzkah, the second event was taking place. The Mamluk dynasty was being established in Egypt. Originally the Mamluks were the spoils of war, captured as children, sold on in slave markets, and raised as Muslims. Brought up in the military, Mamluks over time attained prestige and political power, and ruled colonies on behalf of their powerful owners. In the 12^th century no aspiring empire builder was without his Mamluk army. The brothers from Ghur were no exception.

Qutub-ud-din Aibak (Aibak), was a favoured slave soldier of Muhammad Ghori. Together they came out of the hills of Afghanistan and invaded northern India. In 1192, only twelve years after the King of Ajmer renamed Lal Kot, the Afghans conquered the ancient fort. The following year, in his role as Governor on behalf of Muhammad Ghori, Aibak began construction of India’s first mosque.

First he destroyed the 27 Jain and Hindu Temples and defaced the images of the pagan gods carved in the few remaining pillars. He used the material from the temples in his building project.

The remains of these temples is the colonnade that once formed part of Aibak's Quwwat-ul-Islam Mosque.

Aibak was not the first, nor would he be the last to proclaim the replacement of one religion, one culture, with another through destruction of and building over earlier buildings.

In 1199 Aibak began construction of the Qutub Minar, of which Dalrymple, in City of Djinns says,

The tower still stands above the walls of the old Hindu fortress a tapering cylinder rising 240 feet in four ever diminishing storeys like a fully extended telescope placed lens-down on a plateau in the Aravalli hills. The tower is a statement of arrival... (p. 260)

Tower building seems to be a theme of empire building. The Emperor Ashoka who lived from 304 B.C. – 232 BC was not averse to erecting the odd tower. Some of the massive stone Pillars of Ashoka still stand, inscribed with edicts for the edification of Ashoka’s subjects.

Ghori was murdered in 1206 and Aibak took over as ruler of northern India. At first he ruled from Lahore but eventually moved the capital to Delhi. He became the first Muslim ruler of Delhi and established the Slave Dynasty which held power for most of the next century.

When Aibak died in 1210, his son-in-law, an ex-slave, Shams-ud-din-Ultutmish, completed the Qutub Minar. Ultutmish named as his successor his daughter Raziyya. She was murdered after three years in office. She was the first female ruler of Delhi.

Although the Qutub Minar is not mud brick but red and buff sandstone, it bears a striking resemblance to the Minaret of Jam and is a link not only to the origins of Islam in India but to a now remote area of Afghanistan and a little known period in Afghani history. It is also a timely reminder of the fugitive nature of right and the transience of might.

Observer

Tuesday, 9 March 2010

Longlines http://longline8.blogspot.com/

Email: Longline8@gmail.com

Ref: Dalrymple, William, City of Djinns: A year in Delhi

, Penguin, New Delhi, 2004.

Early Morning in Delhi – encounters with Vishnu and Lakshmi

2010-02-19T06:01:00.000-08:00

The story that a Hindu saint told Mr Ghanshyam Das (G. D.) Birla that if he did not rebuild the Lakshmi Narayan Temple in Delhi he would lose his fortune probably has a basis in fact. Mr G. D. Birla had inherited the Marwari family’s money lending business, expanded, diversified and prospered.

He had become friends with Mohandas Gandhi in 1916 and financially supported Gandhi and advised him on the economic issues facing India. In 1926 Mr Birla was elected to the Central Legislative Assembly of British India. The 1930’s saw an increase in his friend’s radicalism – the salt march, Gandhi’s hunger strikes and riots between Hindus and Muslims.

At the same time Hitler was on the rise in Europe, and Europe and America’s emergence from the Great Depression was not following the optimistic arc predicted. There was political violence and famine throughout much of the world. In January 1933 the Pakistan Movement was officially launched. It was going to be a memorable decade.

Mohandas Gandhi agreed to inaugurate Mr Birla’s rebuilt temple on condition that it be open to people of all religions and castes, especially untouchables.

Mr Birla went on to build temples in many places in India, as well as hospitals, schools and institutes of higher education. The Birla family is today one of the industrial giants of India and continues to support and maintain the temple commonly known as Birla Mandir. For those interested in intricate and dramatic dynastic tales, a review of references to the family by The Times of India over the past ten years is entertaining reading.

The Birla Mandir is, appropriately, dedicated to Lord Vishnu the preserver and his consort Lakshmi the Goddess of prosperity and wealth.

The original temple was built in 1622 and renovated in 1793. The rebuilding between 1933 and 1939, ensured that almost all the gods of the Hindu Pantheon are now represented and, in a gesture of inclusiveness rare in those times, a Buddha shrine was included.

There is something refreshing about a Hindu temple – the combination of blatant commercialism with the crowds of poor whose tiny offerings of flowers and rice reflect the immense optimism of the human race; the open-armed welcome that these temples offer and the flamboyant, complex decoration; the gentility of an ancient religion and most importantly the inclusiveness that is true Hinduism. That this temple is open in the early hours while there is a hint of coolness in the air adds to its attraction.
Observer
19 February 2010
http://www.longline8.blogspot.com

longline8@gmail.com
p.s. Temple hours are 7a.m.-12 noon and 2pm - 9p.m, but always check first.

The Red Fort Delhi India

2010-02-11T14:23:00.000-08:00

The Red Fort loomed huge through the haze of heat and dust that was Delhi. During the pre-election days in 2009 security was intense and very visible, yet the people in the street seemed unaffected by this inpending event. Perhaps this had something to do with the history of Delhi, a survivor of invasion after invasion. Its population has been repeatedly driven out, their temples defaced, torn down, built over.

The Mughals were late-comers in Indian history, but reminders of their reign are everywhere stamped on northern India, especially on Delhi, the city of the plain that has existed since prehistory.
History is a means of making events in the past explicable and, sometimes, acceptable. In 1638 Shah Jahan the Mughal Emperor moved his capital from Agra back to Delhi and began to build his new capital Shahjahanabad. One of his wives, Mumtaz Mahal, had died seven years earlier and Shah Jahan had commissioned the construction of her tomb, the Taj Mahal in Agra. In spite of the tales of devotion of husband for this, his third wife, Shah Jahan stopped the construction of the Taj Mahal until Shahjahanabad, The Red Fort and the Jama Masjid were completed. The Taj Mahal in Agra was completed 23 years after the death of Mumtaz Mahal.
The new walled and defended capital city was completed in 1648 and the building of the Red Fort, a city within a city was commenced in the following year.
The cities that, until the economic crash of 2008, were springing up all over the Middle East were not modern phenomena, just historical repetition.

Completed in just nine years Lal Qila or Red Fort was twice the size of the fort at Agra.

The Red Fort became the centre of Mughal power. The emperor and his court resided within its walls along with the Mughal administration, a military garrison, arsenal, the treasury, craftsmen and shopkeepers.
Two main gates, one on the west and the other on the south, called Lahori and Delhi gates, lead into the fort. While the walls, gates and a few buildings in the fort are constructed of red sandstone, marble is the material used to build the palaces.
The fort has played a major part in the history of India since the days of Shah Jahan and deserves more than a brief visit. It was from the fort’s main gate, the Lahore gate, so named because from this gate the road lead to Lahore, that the Indian flag first flew on declaration of India’s independence in 1947.
From Lahore Gate the fort is entered through Chatta Chowk the covered bazaar that has been part of the fort since its inception.
In the Hall of Public Audience (the Diwan-i-Am) some of the most intricate stone inlay work outside of Italy is to be seen. The art of cutting and fitting polished semiprecious coloured stones together in a marble bed to give the effect of painting is still carried out in Rajasthan. The floral inlay panels in the Hall of Private Audience (Diwan-i-Khass) are reminiscent of the less intricate work see on the pillars of the Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi.

From this hall Shah Jahan’s original Peacock Throne, valued in 1665 by the French Jeweller Tavernier at six and a half million pounds sterling, was removed by the invading Persian general Nadir Shah in1739. This removal was seen as a symbol of the true end of the Mughal Empire although it remained in power in name only for another one hundred and twenty years.
The story of the pillaging by the Persians segued into the convoluted and bloody history of the Koh-i-noor diamond and its continued illegal possession by the British who acquired it when Victoria was proclaimed Empress of India in 1877.
The guide who, as a Muslim, had been that morning justifiably proud of the Jama Masjid, grew gloomier and gloomier as the trek through the fort continued, the heat and humidity increased and stories of betrayal, familial violence, destruction, thievery and abandonment compounded by incompetence and greed piled one on the other.
The Moti Masjid, the Pearl Mosque, built by Aurangazeb, Shah Jahan’s son, is a small walled building in one corner of the fort. When questioned about the mosque the guide indicated the high walls around the mosque. Aurangazeb, he said, was a religious fanatic who ruined India. He needed these high walls to protect himself from being assassinated while he prayed.
Aurangazeb, the guide hastened to add, was a genuinely religious man who acted solely from genuine religious belief.

Although made in a moment of high emotion, this statement was probably not far from the truth. Aurangazeb broke the tradition of Mughal rulers’ tolerance of Hindus and had the dubious distinction of being the first Muslim ruler to impose sharia law on his non-Muslim citizens, and reintroduce the jizya, a poll tax on non-muslims. This was a move not designed to make friends outside his own religious circle.
In 1857 the British sacked Delhi, took over the Red Fort, demolished ‘architectural treasures’ and built in their place a solid brick army barracks which stands today.
The Mughals did leave a repository of great architecture. Their fusion of Hindu, Persian and Islamic styles resulted in elegant and practical public buildings that continue to influence designers and architects around the world.
By mid- afternoon the air in Delhi, spiced with that smell of burning plastic that is endemic to the Asian olfactory experience, was thick with humidity. The recurring tales of invasion, repression, plunder and pillage only added to the oppressive atmosphere.
From The Red Fort to Gandhi’s memorial was a relief. As the heat and humidity stabilized in the late afternoon, the violence and turbulence of Indian history was put aside in the contemplation of the simple plinth that celebrates the life of a truly great leader.
Observer
12 February 2010
http://longline8.blogspot.com/
Email: longline8@gmail.com

Hazy Daze in Delhi

2010-02-06T23:16:00.000-08:00

This journey began in Delhi ten days before the 2009 elections, five months after the Mumbai bombings.

The Jet Air flight from the Gulf to Delhi was full, crammed with workers returning home at the end of their overseas contract. There were two incoming tourists on the flight.

Delhi was hot, humid and very secure, if the sandbag gun emplacements outside the airport were any indication.

The list of places to see was long, the time was short. Adiga’s words from The White Tiger were still fresh:

Let the driver tell you the truth. And the truth is that Delhi is a crazy city. ... all the roads look the same, all of them go around and around grassy circles in which men are sleeping or eating or playing cards, and then four roads shoot off from that grassy circle, and then you go down one road, and you hit another grassy circle where more men are sleeping or playing cards, and then four more roads go off from it. (Adiga, p. 99)

Therefore the Indian Tourist Bureau’s ability to provide a knowledgeable guide and an experienced driver for a reasonable price seemed a good idea.

The trip to India was sudden and unplanned so a map was bought, and plans made over dawn coffee in the hotel.

Maps are wonderful things. They impose the mirage of order on chaos, encourage the traveller to believe in the accessibility of cities. Lay a map of Delhi on the table, pencil over it a grid with Connaught Place in the centre. There, with a little jiggling of the grid, Delhi can be divided up into a few days sightseeing. Simple really.

The guide was a shepherd through the mazes of security screens thrown up around any structure more than a metre high. On this, the first day, Mughal monuments predominated so the guide was an expert in this field. He also provided protection from the beggars, thin on the ground in the heat and dust. Desperate touts formed phalanxes of invaders at the sight of rare tourists. But all, beggars and touts, were remarkably polite - insistent, but polite.

The number of armed police and soldiers patrolling the streets and lanes demonstrated that a safe tour of Delhi had come at an enormous cost to the Government of India.

What a city Delhi is, the outcome of over 3,000 years of habitation, a complex, ugly, noisy city, battened down against attack from within and without, a city of parks and gardens and horrific slums.

Yet Delhi is a democratic city with all the trappings of democracy and the problems and corruption of the developing world. It is a vibrant city where even in those tense pre-election days the optimism among its people was palpable.

It was, however, not politics but historical monuments that were the reason for this stopover.

The driver knew which grassy circle led to which road. And the first road led to the Jama Masjid, Shah Jahan’s Friday mosque, because this was not a Friday, and the mosque was open for visiting before the thick blanket of humidity swaddled the city and turned the mosque courtyard into a sauna.

The Jama Masjid is the largest mosque in India. Entrance to the mosque is free, but a ‘photography fee’ is charged. Women must wear the floral covering provided at the entrance – an article of clothing so ugly that even if Bollywood stars Aishwarya Rai or Bipasha Basu were wearing it there is no risk any man would be overcome with lustful thoughts at the sight of them.

Shah Jahan completed the Red Fort in 1648 and then turned to the construction of a mosque opposite the fort.

This large red sandstone structure was built on a rise on the Delhi plain on a base raised a further ten metres from the ground. It is said that it took 10,000 men six years (1650-1656) to build. Getting mosques up in a hurry seems to have been a aspect of the Mughal reign. Aurangazeb, Shah Jahan’s son and ursurper, built the Badshahi Mosque, the biggest in the world for 313 years, in Lahore, in the two years between 1671 and 1673.

In spite of the fort-like appearance of its exterior the mosque is interesting both architecturally and historically and a good example of the Mughal style.

The three main domes are of white marble with accents of black. The minarets also display innovative combinations of sandstone and marble. The cool, arcaded cloisters with intricate marble facing were occupied mostly by sleeping men and beggars careful not to harass the tourists.

Two bomb explosions within the mosque in April 2006 aimed, apparently, at the then liberal minded Imam do not seem to have resulted in any over-zealous security – or at least what would be called over-zealous in security-minded Delhi.

This Imam was, in accordance with tradition for the Jama Masjid, a direct descendant of the Imam invited from Bukhara by Shah Jahan to inaugurate his mosque on 23 July 1656.

In City of Djinns after a visit to the Jama Masjid for Eid prayers Dalrymple wrote:

...Islam has always been an urban faith, ill at ease with the wilderness; its civilization has always flourished most successfully in the labyrinths of the ancient bazaar towns of the East. Certainly there can be no doubt that Islam looks at its most impressive in a great urban cathedral mosque, ...(p. 251)

His reflections were perhaps inspired not only by the sight of “twenty or thirty thousand” Muslim men at prayer, but also by the mosque’s proximity to the crowded lanes that lead to Chandni Chowk. This former Mughal boulevard lead to the Red Fort. Now it is the hot, noisy, congested main street of Old Delhi, which still leads to the massive citadel of Shah Jahan.

Observer

2^nd February 2010

Email: longline8@gmail.com

http://longline8.blogspot.com

References:

Adiga, Aravind, The White Tiger, Simon & Schuster, New York, 2008.

Dalrymple, William, City of Djinns: A year in Delhi, Penguin, New Delhi, 2004.

Journey Interrupted: Al Ain, Thesiger, Buraimi, Sohar and Ras al Suwaidi

2010-01-26T00:02:00.000-08:00

On 7^th April 1948, Wilfred Thesiger rode his camel into the settlement that is today called Al Ain. His party approached the settlement from Abu Dhabi, and travelled through the red sand dunes that still protect the town on that side.

“... we approached Muwaiqih, one of the eight small villages in the Buraimi oasis. It was here that Zayid (sic) lived. As we came out of the red dunes on to a gravel plain I could see his fort, a large square enclosure, of which the mud walls were ten feet high. To the right of the fort, behind a crumbling wall half buried in drifts of sand, was a garden of dusty, ragged palm-trees, and beyond the palms the isolated hog’s back of Jabal Hafit (sic) about ten miles away and five thousand feet high. Faintly in the distance over the fort I could see the pale-blue outlines of the Oman mountains...” (1, p. 268)

Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, the first president of the UAE, was born in Al Ain and the town is still a centre of political power in the country. The town has a National Museum, a Palace Museum, restored forts, archeological sites, a zoo, a large modern fruit and vegetable market and livestock and camel market, as well as those contemporary icons of the Middle East – Shopping Malls. However Al Ain’s shopping malls are strictly utilitarian.

Oases offer the visitor a good opportunity to view the ancient ‘falaj’ system which was (and still is in places) used to irrigate the date plantations.

Al Ain means “the spring” in Arabic and the town is part of the Buraimi Oasis which was divided when the border between the UAE and Oman was agreed on. The reason for the division was tribal allegiance as Thesiger explained,

“Zayid, as Shakhbut’s representative, controlled six of the villages in Buraimi. The other two acknowledged the Sultan of Muscat as their nominal overlord...” (2, p. 271)

Omanis and Emiratis move freely between the two towns divided only by a border fence and the distinctive headdress of Omani men is a common sight on the streets of Al Ain.

For the traveller who has ended up in Buraimi, neighbouring Al Ain offers reasonable accommodation and is easy to drive around. Excepting during peak hours when the town’s residents become possessed of the mad driver genie that lives at the heart of all Gulf States citizens. A word of warning – if you decide to drive around Al Ain buy a map. The town sprawls around oases and wadis and the sharp ridges of the foothills of Jebel Hafeet intrude into the outer suburbs. Confusing? It seems not until you are faced with your desired destination on the other side of an unbridged wadi.

Between 50 million and 30 million years ago the Tethys seaway covered most of northern Africa, Jordan, Syria and Iraq. It extended across this area and joined the Indian Ocean with the Mediterranean sea. Proof of this is the fossils of all descriptions which are found in the area, including large fossilized corals which are found in the Jebel Hafeet area.

Jebel Hafeet is not, as is often claimed, the highest mountain in the UAE, but is certainly the best known. The road to the top of the mountain climbs almost 12 kilometres around 21 corners and has been featured on “Drive” and other motoring shows on television. Every year in January a cycling competition up the mountain attracts international competitors.

Thesiger described striped hyena, Arabian tahr and Arabian leopard on the mountain. None of these animals are seen on the mountain today.

Thesiger’s account of tahr on Jebel Hafeet is set out in Arabian Sands:

“While I had been at Muwaiqih I had hunted tahr on Jabal Hafit, camping for a week under the mountain with bin Kabina and bin Ghabaisha and two of Zayid’s Arabs. ... They resembled goats and had very thick short horns. It was exhausting work hunting them, for the mountains rose four thousand feet above our camp, and the slopes were everywhere steep and usually sheer, without water or vegetation. The tahr fed at night round the foot of themountain, but the only ones we saw were near the top. The Arabs shot two females and we picked up the skull of a male. We had made ourselves sandals from green hide, without which we could never have climbed these cruel limestone rocks.” (3, p. 274)

Today Thesiger and his mates could have dropped into the Mercure Hotel near the top of the mountain and enjoyed a cool drink and a steak sandwich while watching the sunset over the desert.

Hunting of big mammals is now officially banned in the UAE. In October 2007 accounts of Arabian leopard in the Musandam, and mountain gazelle and Arabian tahr in the area around Dibba were published.

Al Ain Zoo was established by the late Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan in 1968 at the foot of Jebel Hafeet. It is a research centre for animals from the hyper arid deserts of the Peninsula. The zoo also has an active ongoing breeding program for endangered native animals.

From Al Ain and Buraimi the traveller to Sohar once again journeys through the Hajar Mountains. This pass opens onto the Al Batinah region, the coastal plain between the Western Hajar Mountains and the Gulf of Oman. If the trip is from Dubai then the Hajar Mountains are crossed further to the north.

For the sports minded Al Batinah is well-known for horse and camel racing, and bull butting – a more humane version of the Spanish activity. In the Oman version two bulls are pitted against each other. The first one to retreat is declared the loser.

Sohar is yet another site of an early capital of Oman. It has a fort to emphasize the fact, fish markets in the modern style, a souq, a memorable mosque.

Sohar’s links to Oman’s seafaring heritage are very strong although the city’s claim to be the birthplace of Sindbad the Sailor is based on very shaky ground. These stories within stories place Baghdad, the City of Peace according to the narrator, as Sindbad’s home.

The claim that the city was the home of Ahmad ibn Majid, the Lion of the Sea, a renowned Arab navigator and cartographer is more believable. Majid was purportedly born in Ras Al Khaimah. Sohar would have been a natural base for the author of the first navigation encyclopedia. Vasco da Gama used Ahmed ibn Majid’s maps as an aid when he navigated the first shipping route between Europe and India.

Sohar’s prosperity comes from the old real estate adage, position, position, position. Reputedly the oldest city in Oman it possesses an accessible port and is built close to ancient copper mines. Copper was mined in the region from the early Bronze Age and shipped to Mesopotamia and what is today known as Bahrain

The huge recently developed industrial area of Sohar is the base of the Omani Governments attempt to diversify away from total reliance on oil revenues. As well as a state of the art aluminium smelter and plans to become the Gulf Cooperative Council’s (GCC’s) leading producer of steel the city boasts one of the world’s largest port development projects.
In spite of its industrial base, good planning has preserved Sohar’s picturesque qualities and the visitor need never view an aluminium smelter.

In keeping with its aim to seamlessly meld ancient and modern Sohar boasts some stylish, though expensive, hotels. The city is half way between Dubai and Muscat (200 kilometres in either direction) and is a good place to relax and break the journey.

The trip from Sohar to Muscat continues along one of the least inspiring coastal roads in the world. A detour to Ras Al Suwaidi is a good way to introduce a bit of variety into the trip, have a meal, a swim, ride a horse or a camel, see an old fort, or just stroll along its wide, wide beach.

From Ras al Suwaidi to Muscat is a short drive. Past the horse race track, the camel race track, the bull butting arena and you have arrived, alive, in spite of the insane behaviour of other drivers on the road. Your hire car is covered in dust which must be washed, because after all, it is illegal to drive a dirty car in Oman.

Observer

http://longline8.blogspot.com/

Email: longline8@gmail.com

Reference :
Thesiger, Wilfred, 'Arabian Sands' Penguin Classics, 2007

“The Voyages of Sindbad”, Penguin Books, London, 2006

Bagnold, Ralph, “The Physics of Blown Sand and Desert Dunes”, London, 1941

Heard-Bey, Frauke, “From Trucial States to United Arab Emirates: A Society in Transition”, Motivate Publishing, London, 2007.

Silver, history, pottery, mountains, wadis, desert: An Oman Journey

2010-01-20T23:26:00.001-08:00

Imagine a curve, an irregular curve with the deep part of the concavity one third of the way from the right hand edge. Wriggle it around a bit. Now imagine the mirror image of the curve inverted above it. Wriggle it around a bit also. Join the curves at each end and you have a loop.

It is this loop you will follow. Like Ariadne’s thread it will lead you on a journey and safely back to the beginning.

In Oman car hire is easy and the roads are reasonable. From Muscat the loop through Nizwa, Bahla, Ibri, Buraimi, Sohar back to Muscat, for the traveller willing to risk the insane driving endemic to the Arabian Peninsula, this route is rewarding.

November to February is cool and often clear and the best time to travel. Summer travel through the Hajar mountains is more than unpleasant – it is dangerous with temperatures usually well above 45 degrees Celsius.

Highway 15 from Muscat crosses the Tropic of Cancer before rising abruptly from the narrow coastal plain. It runs through a mountain pass along the base of Jebel Nakhal. Samail, at the foot of Jebel Nakhal was the home of Mazin bin Ghaduba, the first Omani to embrace Islam. Samail is the site of Oman’s first mosque.

Nizwa, an hour and a half from Muscat is worth an extended stop.

In 1949 Wilfred Thesiger, with a warrant out for his arrest by the Imam of Oman, camped with his party “within ten miles of Nazwa(sic). The town itself was out of sight, hidden behind a rocky ridge, one of many in the broken country that lay between our camp at the foot of the Jabal al Akhadar [Green Mountain]...”¹

Sixty one years later the party could have backtracked along the superhighway for a few kilometres, taken the turn off to Birkat Al Mauz, and shortly thereafter turned into the empty car park of the echoing hulk of the Golden Tulip hotel and there enjoyed a fine lunch and a restful night.

While Thesiger was hiding out in the back country, Sulaiman bin Hamyar, Sheikh of the Bani Riyam and head of all the Ghafaris lived in Birkat al Mauz. He was reputed to be a tolerant man, at odds with the fanatical Imam, and owner of Jebel al Akhdar. Today, appropriately, Birkat al Mauz is the site of the University of Nizwa.

Thesiger was not, on this occasion, to have the privilege of entering Nizwa, one of the cities that enjoys the privilege of being an ancient capital of Oman, nor of meeting with the Sheikh. The infidel was sent packing, back to Murwaiqih and the protection of Sheik Zayid, another great leader and a tolerant far sighted man.

Nizwa is enclosed by the mountains that Thesiger described in Arabian Sands as:

[‘The Green Mountain’], “a name which seemed singularly inappropriate, since its slopes and precipices looked as bare as the hills that surrounded us. The atmosphere was unusually clear and I could see its entire length. For fifty miles it stretched across our front, its face scored by great gorges – streaks of purple on a background of pale yellow and misty blue. The Jabal al Akhadar is a single continuous ridge ... Ten thousand feet high, it forms the highest part of a range which extends unbroken for four hundred miles from the Persian Gulf to the Indian Ocean.”²

Thesiger was looking at the slopes of Jebel al Akhdar which flattens to an extensive plateau 2000 metres above sea level and which can be freezing in winter. The Saiq plateau is famous for its roses and for the rosewater which is produced there.

The run-off from the mountains ensures a perennial water supply for Nizwa. In the desert water is everything and the main falaj in Nizwa, the ancient Falaj Daris, has been declared a World Heritage Site.

Nizwa is an oasis in arid stony country and today it welcomes travellers.

Its fort symbolises the power and importance of this city which was a crossroad on the caravan route, linking the interior of the peninsula with the port of Muscat to the east and with Dhofar in the South.

But it is for silver that Nizwa is best known today. Anyone who has been to Mutrah souk, the Omani Heritage Gallery in Muscat or indeed any one of the souqs and malls on the Arabian peninsula will have come across Omani silver. Nizwa silver is purported to be the best in the country and the curved dagger (the Khanjar) for which Oman is famous is a specialty of Nizwa silversmiths.

The walled city of Bahla, forty kilometres from Nizwa in the foothills of Jebel Hallat, claims to be one of the oldest continually inhabited places in Oman. Bahla Fort, 50 metres above the town, is included in UNESCO’s list of World Heritage Sites. Over the past few years the fort has undergone extensive restoration under the guidance of UNESCO. Bahla produces the pottery that was once a major export industry for Oman. Funded by the Bahla Project, it is one of the attempts by the Omani government to preserve the traditional art and craft of the country.

The road from Bahla descends the foothills of the Western Hajar Mountains to Ibri, once a major camel market on the caravan route. Thesinger camped briefly at Ibri on his trip to Murwaiqih, then:

“[f]rom Ibri we rode northward along the foot of the mountains towards Jabal Hafit...”

The highway from Ibri runs north following the base of the mountains, across a stony plain. To the west are the sands and dunes that straddle the border with the UAE.

About half way between Ibri and Buraimi the highway again crosses the Tropic of Cancer near Wadi Dank.

The border crossing into the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is conducted at the Hafit Border Crossing 50 kms from Buraimi. The road then passes through UAE territory before once again entering Oman in Buraimi. Because of the complexity of the border in that area no foreigner can enter Buraimi from either country without a passport and the visitor should check beforehand what visa requirements are imposed.

While Thesiger was riding through this country, the Arabian American Oil Company (ARAMCO) was surveying the coast of Abu Dhabi in the search for oil. At the same time Dick Bird, who represented the Iraq Petroleum Company, was trying to persuade the tribes in the Buraimi area to let the company look for oil. Dick Bird also at that time possessed, apart from a memorable name, the only other car in Buraimi apart from Sheikh Zayid's.

These events (the oil search, not the car possession) re-inflamed old hostilities and triggered a series of incidents during which the Saudis laid claim to the Buraimi oasis. The dispute, which was the culmination of centuries of disagreement, was laid to rest on October 26, 1955. The Sultan of Muscat and Oman and the Ruler of Abu Dhabi, supported by the British, moved into the Buraimi oasis and forced the surrender of the occupying Saudis.

Buraimi is a border town flung up against the barbed wire topped border fence with the UAE. The town continues as Al Ain on the UAE side of the border. Jebel Hafit does not so much tower as crouch over the twin cities.

The town has a long and complex history. Archeological sites in the area trace man’s presence here back for 4,000 years and Buraimi was the site of a decisive battle in the Muslim religious wars of the 8th century AD. It became a major caravan terminal for traders from the Arabian Gulf ports of Sharjah, Dubai and Abu Dhabi en route for Sohar and other ports on the Gulf of Oman, and is today known for the 'Buraimi dispute' which festered for more than a decade.

Buraimi’s main purpose today seems to be the provision of border controls between the two countries. From here the traveller can continue in Oman towards Sohar or into the United Arab Emirates via Al Ain.

Observer

January 21 2010

longline8.blogspot.com

Ref: Thesiger, Wilfred, “Arabian Sands” Penguin Classics, London, 2007 p. 316

Please be aware that the sketch of the route is a 'mud map' and not to be relied on. If you do this journey, buy a decent map.

Note: Arabic words are spelt in various ways in English e.g. the word ‘jebel’ which means ‘mountain’ is seen as ‘jebal’, ‘jabal’, ‘jabel’.

‘wadi’ is a (usually) dry creek bed in the bottom of which travellers could often dig for water during the dry season.

'falaj' (singluar), 'aflaj' (plural) : irrigation channels

Lazy Days - Muscat in Winter

2010-01-11T05:11:00.000-08:00

There is something irredeemably laid-back about Muscat. Perhaps this is why no great books or memorable stories have been set there. It does not have the dark side associated with the North African trading ports. Think Hedy Lamar and Charles Boyer brooding around the casbah in Algiers, or Bogie and Bergman steaming up the screen in Casablanca. No, Muscat is more Cliff Richard and Lauri Peters in Summer Holiday with a little more style and a lot less singing. Muscat lacks the brashness of Dubai, the superior airs of Abu Dhabi, but it is fast becoming a favoured tourist destination. Albeit only for those post global economic crisis tourists who can still afford a pricey place to sip their low fat soy lattes.

The origin of the name Muscat is unclear, but generally it is accepted that it means anchorage. People fished along those rocky shores for 6,000 years before Muscat was given positive press in the first century AD by Pliny the Elder. He was followed in the second century AD by Ptolemy, in his Geographia. Or at least so some historians claim. For the next 1800 years or so Muscat underwent the invasions, occupations and evictions that are to be expected of a site with two natural deep water harbours and protected from invasion from land by steep rock mountains – the highest in the Arabian peninsula. Muscat also colonised parts of the east African coast (more of that in a later edition) and like all colonisers was eventually forced back to its base.

On July 23, 1970 peace descended on Muscat and Oman. On that day Qaboos bin Said, son of the Sultan, staged a bloodless coup in the Salalah palace and, funded largely by oil revenues, set the scene for a stable and prosperous future for his people.
.
Today visitors can join the locals on the weekend at upmarket coffee shops overlooking the Gulf of Oman. They can browse the Omani Heritage Gallery for traditional handcrafts, explore the old city and the numerous forts that sit atop almost every hill around the city. Or they can just loll on the private beach offered to its guests by the Crown Plaza Muscat.

However the greatest attraction within the city of Muscat is Mutrah Souk.   A beautifully designed covered market on the Mutrah Corniche, Mutrah souk is where one goes to buy aromatic frankincense from Salalah, silver from Nizwa, and gold from any or all of the countries on and around the Peninsula.

So if you are stopping over in any of the Arab cities on your way to somewhere else consider a side trip to Muscat. It is a safe and friendly place with the usual Middle East traffic snarls. But here, unlike in many of the other Gulf states, you will encounter local people living normal lives. Your taxi driver, tour guide, hotel clerk, shop assistant will very likely be Omani and proud of their heritage and be happy to share information about their country and its culture with you.

But beware, those impressive Hajar mountains turn the city into a humid sink hole in summer. Visit in winter.

Observer
longline8.blogspot.com

Camel jam on a winter's day in Al Saad

2010-01-05T04:41:00.000-08:00

It was a camel jam at Al Saad that precipitated this blog. Al Saad is a featureless town off the highway that connects Abu Dhabi and Al Ain in the United Arab Emirates. Drivers of vehicles at the waiting place near the roundabout the other day were treated to the sight of a small herd of camels being driven across the overpass, creating a back log of traffic onto the highway.
The animals plodded slowly down towards the roundabout and then streamed across a paddock on the outskirts of town with all the indifference of creatures who have served mankind well for more than 3,000 years*.
Camels, as everyone probably knows are divided into two main groups – dromedaries (one humped)and bactrian (two humped)camels. There is no space here to discuss their cousins - the lamas, alpacas, guanacos and vicunas. These migrated to South America millennia ago when the larger camelidae family abandoned North America for Asia and Africa via that famous long gone land bridge between the continents. Dromedaries are spotlighted here today. Of bactrian camels more will be revealed another day.

There are no wild dromedaries (camels as they will be referred to from now on) anywhere in the world except Australia. The 3.3 million square kilometres of semi-arid desert of this country are home to almost a million wild camels. Even in Somalia which claims one quarter (2 million) of the world’s camels, all are domesticated.

Camels still provide wool for clothing and shelter, bones for carved utensils, leather, milk, meat and transport for a large number of people.

Any visitor to India will still see camels pulling carts through the narrow streets of towns throughout the country.

It was this species that carted equipment to build Australia’s overland Telegraph line; to develop bores and wells and lay tracks for ‘The Ghan’ rail line.

Camels still provide an income for many Australians.
Central Australia was settled and developed on the back of the camel. For over half a century in the late 1800s and early 1900s Australia imported a range of breeds of camel from India, Pakistan, Oman, and various parts of Africa and Arabia. The Bishari riding camel, the Bikaneri war camel from Rajasthan, the Khandarhari freight camel are a few examples of the variety imported.

With them came cameleers from the same range of places. These men were the “Afghans” of Central Australia. They had little in common but their trade and their religion. They were Australia’s first Muslim settlers. Australia’s first permanent mosque was built at Heggot Springs on a crossroads for camel trains in the desert in northern South Australia in the 1860s.
Many cameleers stayed on in Australia, established families and businesses, grew rich (or poor) and became part of the the melting pot of Australian history. Others returned to their country of origin.

But it is the Middle East where camel breeding has reached dizzy heights. In April, 2009 the Camel Reproduction Centre in Dubai announced the birth of a cloned camel, as part of an ongoing programme to preserve the genetics of its racing and milk producing camels.

A visit to the Al Ain camel market is a worthwhile trip for any visitor to the UAE. Here camels from all parts of the Middle East, Africa and the sub continent (mostly Pakistan) are traded every day. There are the dark coated Saudi camels, camels for meat, milk and breeding. The ‘camel boys’ who also come from the same countries as their charges could well be descendants of those cameleers who returned to their home country after establishing the industry a world away over a hundred years ago.

Anyone who has seen four young camels being loaded into the back of a ute can testify to their extraordinary vocal range. Roaring, bellowing, grumbling, grunting and bleating they are hobbled then secured by a complicated series of rope knots. The ute pulls away from the markets and the animals then settle into passively regarding the passing landcape and chewing their cud.

Most of the camels that pass through the markets are destined for the abattoirs, but some are dairy camels and a privileged few are sold as breeding stock for the lucrative and once controversial camel racing industry. Today in the UAE children are no longer used as camel jockeys. Electronic whips with built in sensors are mounted on the backs of racing camels and operated remotely by the camel’s owner or trainer during the race.

Today camels play a large part in the tourism industry in the dry places of the earth. The writer has ridden camels in Australia, the Middle East and India.

The camel has a rolling gait that many people find more comfortable than the gait of a horse. The camel is a calmer animal than a horse, less likely to shy, as its only natural predator, other than man, is the tiger.
However the camel is also more likely to buck for no good reason. A camel can carry a greater weight in hot, dry conditions than a horse, but is less predictable and can be downright contrary if not trained by a very experienced cameleer.

A tip for those readers contemplating an extended camel trip. The Australians make the best and most comfortable camel saddles.

As the camels and cameleers made their way past Al Saad, they provided a snapshot from the past – men and beasts have changed little over the centuries. Except now the herd was followed by utes carrying fodder and water troughs.

Observer
longline8.blogspot.com
Ref: * Mansfield, Peter, "A History of the Middle East", Penguin, London, 2003, 2nd Edition.