Friday night is pizza night

Most Friday nights, for the past sixteen or so years, we have got together with our dear friends: our mirror family, as I call them. Two academic parents, one blond child, and a bunch of similar interests, politics and lives. When various family members are away, we meet anyway. We eat pizza (or sometimes cook), we drink an extra glass of red wine, we eat chocolates and lollies. We argue, we laugh, we tell jokes. We look forward to it from Thursday evening, sometimes. Joel has his last lesson (piano) at 5.30 on a Friday. Once we pick him up, the weekend begins as he starts to relax, too. And when visiting scholars come through town, we love to welcome them along and induct them into Friday night pizza.

Last night was a mega-version of this ritual. The six of us were there, plus two of Paul's research partners and their partners, plus our neighbour, plus a visiting Candian, her partner and their twin daughters. There's a head missing from this photo, but this was fifteen people sitting down to eat pizzas from Al Albero (tiny pizza bar down the road: ring ahead and given them plenty of time, and pick up from the shop; ask for thinner base than usual, if you don't like a light but turkish bread-style base; recommendation? slow cooked lamb, or marinara with giant prawns and scallops). We had the twins on the old piano stool at the end, and you can see Joel and Eva, his Friday night sibling, on the left. Friday night bliss!

Queen of cities; queen of cheeses

If ever you were in doubt that Melbourne is the queen of cities, you need consider only this: it's possible to return from two weeks in Italy when you ate burrata mozzarella every second day, and were utterly ravished by its soft, creamy clouds and twists, then come home and on one day be offered fresh buffalo mozzarella at The European for lunch, but turn it down, because at home you have a tub of fresh burrata you bought the day before, at La Latteria, a "mozzarella laboratory", and milk, yoghurt and cheese shop that is literally on your way home. This place makes burrata and other varieties of mozzarella fresh daily on the premises in Carlton, from buffalo milk from Queensland and Mildura. I bought crumbed bocconcini, which we had last night, a tub of yoghurt cheese with chilli and mint, and a tub of two big balls of burrata. I can't wait to go back and try their cream; and their other cheeses. It's even tempting to think about buying milk there and recycling the bottles...

Paul is away tonight, and Joel is in Italy on his school trip (ahem), so I treated myself on my own: a big plate of fresh spinach, shaved avocado, a Roma tomato, salt, fresh pepper, green olive oil, and lemon juice. I then took the soft white ball of burrata — about the size of a cricket ball — out of its tub and sat it in the middle of the plate. It sat there, gleaming, wet, and shimmering. Then mustering my courage, I poked at it with the tip of my knife, and as the woman in the shop promised, the soft creamy insides spilled out, and I lifted off the outside skin. And the finishing touch? The balsamic glaze, which I used to write crazy scripts of sweet, dark caramel lines and hieroglyphs across the plate. I took myself off to the couch, and demolished the lot. It was just as well no one was there to see me eat this: it would not have been a very edifying sight.

But I'm sure it's on the strength of this feast that I wrote two brilliant sentences of Chapter Seven tonight.

Eating in Public again (kind of): Vindaloo Against Violence

It's hard not to get the sense that the problems of street violence and racism in my beautiful city are somewhat intractable. Yet it was also hard not to be swept up in the popular movement of eating Indian food today to demonstrate solidarity with Indians resident or visiting or studying here. Indian restaurants have been booked out for the day, and there's a big facebook group, apparently. I was going to suggest we ordered Indian take-away tonight, but when P came home he went straight into the kitchen and started preparing a delicious eggplant curry. It's not just about celebrating multiculturalism in the way we now eat globally, but the idea of commensality — sitting and eating together — with a common purpose.

So I'm going on record to say I abhor violence altogether: whether it's racially motivated, the opportunistic copy-cat drawing of a knife, the murder of a little girl, a classmate in the schoolground (two recent examples from Queensland), or ... I don't know ...  the everyday and everynight violence against women, too. If cooking and eating together can slow down even a little such violence, I don't care how daggy or idealistic it seems: pass me another poppadum.

You know it's really too hot to ride home when ...

... the water in your water bottle is almost too hot to drink.

It was not too bad when I left the house this morning, but after three hours of intensive Italian (sono nel livello quatro, ma forse questa classe e troppo difficile per me), the temperature had soared. In at the office, someone had sensibly turned off most of the lights in the corridors, so it wasn't too bad. I did a few emails, started some desultory filing, booked a ticket to Perth, filled out a bunch of travel forms, then rode home, very slowly.

When I got home, I felt a bit weak. After all it was 42 degrees out there (now 43). I had something to eat, then drank a couple of litres of water to replace the fluid I'd lost.

Now, a little Italian homework for tomorrow, then back to my paper for Wollongong. I finding myself running this very elaborate argument that the medievalism in Australian parliaments helps to define Australian notions of modernity. I might try and post a bit of this work soon, but I have to finish by Friday, so I can fly up to Sydney on Saturday morning.

The house is feeling quite schizophrenic. Downstairs and in the front, the rooms with brick walls are still pretty cool, because although it's been warm, it's not been ferociously hot till today, but upstairs and out in the back added-on sections, which are made of wood, it's downright steamy. It's going to be a hot night (maybe getting down only to 30), so no one in Melbourne will get much sleep tonight; and then the change will come through early afternoon. And then the back sections will cool down very quickly, while the front of the house will seem warm and stuffy by comparison.

Our household is so lucky we have me to police the strategic opening and closing of doors and windows.

Update: At midnight, it was still 36... hottest night on record in Melbourne, apparently.

The mortality of elm trees

I don't know if we'd plant them now, in this era of climate change and the move away from European "exotic" plantings, but in the front of our house, there are several "stands" of elm trees. They are probably over a hundred years old. Like other elms in Melbourne, they are part of an ageing population. They also have regular infestations of elm-leaf beetle, and so every few years we have them injected with stuff that kills the beetles. Last year we left it rather late, and so by midsummer, when the air was burning, our normally dark green canopy was riddled with lacy holes in the desiccated leaves. It was a sad and grim sight, but we trusted that the next season, our trees would recover.



(Not my photo, but this is what the leaves looked like.)

This week I've seen elms elsewhere in Melbourne coming into bright green leaf, while ours remain bare. They normally produce millions of flaky dry seeds that fall all over the car and the roof and the paths. We were starting to fear our trees would not make it; that somehow the drought and the extreme temperatures of last summer and the beetles might have combined to bring about their end. It was dreadful to contemplate: presiding over the death of these magnificent creatures. The house itself was starting to feel denuded; the bare trunks and branches a sign of our shame.

You can tell from the tenses in that paragraph that I haven't given up all hope yet. Today was warm and beautiful, and I can now see little buds and tiny flashes of delicate green leaves. Don't know what's happened to the seeds, but it looks as if our beautiful trees might be ok.

This is not my photo either, and not our trees, but this picture shows you how beautifully these trees sit in Melbourne's European style parks. Read about Melbourne's elms here.

Garden fragrance in the city

Many years ago, when the Wednesday afternoon research seminars in my department (the fur on Dr Cat's back has just stood up) used to be a cross between gladiator fights at the Coliseum and episodes of The Office in their intensity, competitiveness and general social malfunctioning, one afternoon in spring a young man who had grown up in Melbourne but who was visiting from some advanced comp.lit. programme in the US, came in to sit behind the desk and laid on top of it a long spray of jasmine, commenting on how it reminded him, more than anything else, of Melbourne.

Today the sky is blue; high clouds are racing by; and the air is filled with the sweet scent of jasmine. I could even smell it when I came out of the gym this morning, which is on a busy road. There are more exotic varieties of jasmine, perhaps, but this one drapes itself luxuriously and expansively over garden fences all over the city, and on sunny, windy days like this, it fills the streets with its extravagant fragrance.



It smells like home.

You Know You're in North America ...

• when you can buy organic blue corn chips, and scoff them down with divine spicy mango and lime salsa (yep; found a great deli on 13th street) from a jar, but tasting fresh and not over-pickled. I don't know how American folk survive in Australia when the only corn chips you can get are over-processed and taste like twisties. Love that dark blue crispy goodness. The packet says blue corn is a Hopi and Zuni tradition. I don't know where those tribes are from, or where they are now, but blue corn makes great chips.

• when the streets are named after numbers or trees. Philadelphia was laid out on a grid, like Manhattan (and Melbourne), so 1st street runs north-south along the eastern side of the city, and along the Delaware river, and then the cross streets, running east-west, have names like Vine, Spruce, Walnut, Chestnut, Pine, Locust, Cherry, Lombard and Filbert, though with the exception of the two widest streets that intersect neatly at City Hall, the even more generically named Market and Broad. It will be blindingly obvious to locals here, but I hope useful to prospective first-time visitors to the US to note that the numbers along the streets don't always run consecutively, but locate the address much more precisely in relation to the numbered streets. So, my address is 1601 Sansom, because it's on the corner of 16th street. The numbers go along a bit, then start again at 1701 on the corner of 17th st. Makes it very easy to know which block of the street is the address you want. (Took me several visits to work this out, I'm sorry to say.)
  
• (and at one of the great ivy league universities) when the library is still busy at 6.30 on a Friday night. I spent the day in the well-stocked library yesterday, and was impressed by how hard everyone was working. If there was a moment's talking, it was only a moment. And at 6.30, it was still busy. David's graduate class is full of voracious readers. He says you give them a chapter to read and they are just as likely to read the whole book. Currently, at least, on Penn's home page is a picture of the recently re-modelled stairwell in the English department. Pretty nice, huh? Wonder if they change that picture of Will around much.

• when, after a hard day's slog in the library (really, really working hard to see if the insights of medievalism can help us read medieval texts), you decide to treat yourself, and you can walk just five blocks from your apartment, waltz in to the Kimmel Centre, and pick up a ticket for that evening's performance of Gil Shaham playing Khatchaturian's Violin Concerto and the Philadelphia Philharmonic belting out Dvorak's 8th symphony. The Centre is amazing. It is several venues enclosed under a soaring glass arched roof; and the concert hall we were in is like being inside a multi-tiered cello: all curves like a cello's body (sometimes just one or two rows of seats along the side walls), and all — floor, walls, ceiling — made of lustrous dark red wood (Cherry, perhaps?). I was in the front of the top tier, but the sound was still pretty good. I don't go to that many classical concerts, but this was splendidly enjoyable, and I'm not sure why I don't go more often. I am also honouring the injunction of (a different) Paul who recommends "lots of treats" to counteract homesickness and the exhaustion of study. So, in the next few days, I have to send off the latest draft of the paper Tom and I are giving here on Friday, work on the revisions of my ANZAMEMS paper from Hobart for submission to a journal, and also put together a talk for NYU on Thursday. Chapter One is now locked into place, so I'll extract from that.
• when, generally, you feel the mixture of exhilaration of being in a different place and the luxury of hibernating away, writing and reading in a pristine apartment with few distractions, or a calm and productive library, but you are also looking forward to the rest of your family joining you in a couple of weeks for the pleasure of exploring another city. I'm almost at the end of the quietest writing time of my trip away, and will start travelling and socialising a bit more quite soon.
  

Wednesday Melbourne musical medievalism blogging

Thoroughly recommended...

Royals and ribbons: public and private

There is an article in today's Age about the young princes signing the condolence book for the victims of the Victorian bushfires at the Australian Commission in London. They are wearing yellow ribbons*:

*Photo is attributed to Getty Images: I'm never sure about rights and issues of reproduction here. I wrote to associated press before Christmas for permission to use an image of the Queen in her garter robes and haven't heard back yet, so I'm assuming these big companies don't care when their images are so widely available. Will take this down if anyone objects....

The article goes on to report that the princes "promised privately not to remove them before the Ashes series is over". Fantastic! Just like the Garter, really. The Ashes? cricket test series between Australia and England. So named after the first occasion Australia beat England, and the stumps were burned and preserved in a tiny, now exceedingly fragile urn as a trophy for England, to remind them of the day they were subdued by their colony.

What part of this promise is "private", then? And will we truly see them wearing yellow ribbons throughout the cricket season? And how do we read royal emotion? The report says the princes "expressed deep shock and sadness" about the fires, but then goes on to talk about Harry, "jovial and relaxed" making the "quip" about the summer cricket.

This little report encapsulates much of the fascination with the Order of the Garter, and the much-discussed story of its origins (woman drops garter; courtiers laugh at her; king puts garter on own leg and promises to found a chivalric order all those now laughing will want to join): the way it teases us with the possibility of access to the private emotion of public figures; the playfulness of royalty and its love of making symbols. It's also a reminder of how ribbons and garters (or green girdles [Gawain]) function, too.

And can I just say, for the record., that it started raining at 8.30 this morning, and it's still going, though it's very light. I think this is only the second time this year we've had any rain. The roof tiles are so dry it's taking a while for there to be any run-off, but I'm hoping the tanks might start to fill. It's great as we gear up for another horror day of heat and wind on Friday. Hope it won't be as bad as Black Saturday. Best description of the weather that day? The emergency services co-ordinator who said he was out at midday, as the temperature climbed to 47C, before the fires had really got doing, and knew we were in for horror when the wind was hotter than the sun.

Monday Melbourne Medievalism Blogging (6) Montsalvat

Not sure when The Age started reporting on weddings (not long after it started putting Paris and Britney on the front page of its website, I guess), but my attention was certainly caught by this medieval/gothic wedding at Montsalvat.

I like the way medieval and the gothic run into each other here (tattoos; guests all wearing black; bride wearing big black boots and mauve corseted gown). Whatever their original significations, these terms are both used together here to signal "non-conventional", even though this is completely contradictory, like "breaking with tradition" to use an old truck, or proposing in the Northland (the outer suburban, very unchic shopping mall we quite like hanging out at) carpark, but espousing conventional values like family dinners and insisting on marriage before children. And the very idea of a themed wedding to begin with.

Montsalvat (it is three-quarters of the way from here into the heart of the worst of the fires) was founded in the 1930s as an artists' colony, and is still the base for a dozen or so artists. Concerts are held there too, though it is principally known as a wedding venue.







Sarah Randles writes about the ideology of medievalist architecture in Montsalvat in Medievalism and the Gothic in Australian Culture. But as a setting for a wedding, it reminds me of the heterosexual romance of the medieval: that sense that people are comfortable in invoking its ethos to give meaning and shape to their relationship. It isn't always coded, then, as historical.

Monday Melbourne Medievalism Blogging (5) Postera Crescam Laude

Well, yes, again, it's Tuesday. But better late than never.

I'm thinking of writing something this year on the various coats of arms of Australian universities, as a kind of medievalism through form and structure, if not imagery as such. Heraldry is alive and well in the life of institutions; and students and staff at Melbourne and other such places work daily under its signs and symbols but it's not often considered as a version of medievalism. There are some great examples of Australian universities using heraldry to signal their allegiances or affiliations. Sydney, for example, combines the arms of Oxford and Cambridge in its coat of arms, while Macquarie University cites Chaucer's clerk in its motto: "and gladly teche".

The University of Melbourne's coat of arms is a blue field with a figure of Victory (presumably for Victoria, the state; and Victoria the queen [the university started teaching in 1854], surrounded by the four stars of the Southern Cross, with the motto postera crescam laude. This used to be translated as "later I shall grow by praise", but in recent years the standard translation has become "We shall grow in the esteem of future generations."

I used to know a bit about how to blazon, but this one defeated me. However, I found it in A.C. Fox-Davies' A Complete Guide to Heraldry, and it's fantastically elaborate, given that the shield shape is not divided or quartered:

Azure, a figure intended to represent Victory, robed and attired proper, the dexter hand extended holding a wreath of laurel or, between four stars of eight points, two in pale and two in fess argent

The azure is of course the blue background or field; the or and argent name the gold and silver of heraldic colours. In pale and in fess refer to the vertical and horizontal axes across the shield where the stars of the Southern Cross appear.

Here are two images: the first, a sculpture on the east side of the Union building (note the gothic arch made of cream brick):

Second, a rather lurid painting in the Council Chamber (click to enlarge):

The previous vice-chancellor's growth strategy was called "Earning Esteem", and when the new VC appeared at Melbourne, he gave a lovely disquisition to Academic Board in this very chamber on the Horatian ode from which the motto comes, and eventually launched the current strategy, "Growing Esteem", from which the very controversial "Melbourne model" emerged.

I'm actually in favour of the intellectual and academic program of the model (broader undergraduate degrees; deferring specialisation into law and medicine, for example, into graduate programs), though the process of change and reform has been immensely difficult.

Recently, I had occasion (ahem) to give my card to Somerset Herald, who was in Australia on a lecture tour; and then in the second lecture he gave, he held up my card and observed that the University had now altered its shield substantially, by repositioning the stars to the left side of the shield, and actually adding a fifth star, for a more naturalist image of the Southern Cross. Of course, as he said, the University can do what it likes, but this new shield, shown below, is not the coat of arms as it was granted to the University by the College of Arms, and as it is registered there.


Such radical change (to curriculum, as well as coat of arms) naturally needs an advertising campaign. There have been a series of expensive television and media advertisements. Here's a link to a news item produced by the university, which features a tiny grab from the "dreamlarge" campaign. "Dreamlarge", as an advertising logo, has displaced the coat of arms, to some degree, while the university also wants to hold on to its traditional appeal.

You'll see in this video an awful banner, saying "The Evolution Starts Here", which for two years I could see out my office windows (just above the right ear of the man speaking). It's now been replaced, I'm glad to say, with the much less problematic "Welcome"; but this very insistent signage is everywhere.

It's easy to tell the difference between a coat of arms, a Latin motto, and an advertising slogan. But when a (medievalist) coat of arms is modernised, at what point does it become a logo?

You Know You're in the Middle of a Heat Wave When...

• you welcome the little breath of cool air that comes out from the air-conditioned bank when you withdraw cash from the ATM
• the hot air coming out of the bottom of the fridge is heating up your kitchen so much that you think someone left the oven on
• you are too scared to turn the fans or the little air-conditioner in the bedroom up too high in case it triggers a black-out in your suburb
• and when you think it's better to be riding your bike home at 7.00 at night, when the temperature is still 43, than being stuck on a crowded train platform because the train tracks have buckled in the heat.
• and when you know that however bad it is in Melbourne, it's worse in Adelaide

[Update: later that same day: still 43C]

• when your sunglasses get almost too hot to wear on your face
• when the pavement burns your feet through your sandals
  
• when the thermostat inside the car registers 50C
• when the bitumen is breaking up on the roads
• and when there are fires on Hoddle St and a bookshop in Carlton, because the air conditioner exploded. Watch this space.
  

Really looking forward to that cool change they are promising: just 35 tomorrow!

Three Big Nights

Three hot summer nights: three wildly different forms of entertainment.

Tuesday: after an appallingly hot day, an evening picnic (pea, leek and mint frittata: chicken and apricot salad; and raspberry bakewell tart: all made by my own fair hands) in the botanical gardens, followed by a lively performance of Taming of the Shrew. The cool change had come in and by the end of the evening I had wrapped the picnic blanket over my knees, and those of my parents. As night darkened, the stage was beautifully lit against a backdrop of cypress and eucalypts. Possums appeared in the trees; flying foxes flew above us; and moths circled in the floodlights. But what a difficult play it is. This was a fairly "straight" comic production, with a nod to the cross-dressing Rufus Sewell BBC version. Oh, what the hell: why shouldn't we have a picture here?



But really: surely this play should put an end to the idea of Shakespeare as the man for all seasons and times kind of thing? I think there are a number of ways around its difficult politics: something allegorical about the accommodations required in all marriages, perhaps. Or something about the deliberately provocative final speech, delivered by a boy in women's clothes? something like the envoi in Chaucer's Clerk's Tale? But none of these rationalisations is straightforward! Anyway, lots of discussion as people made their way to their cars. If Shakespeare's plan was to get men and women talking to each other, it worked!

Last night, a different kind of Melbourne event. We booked tickets for the tennis a few days ago, not knowing who'd be playing, and really lucked out to be part of the jubilant, warm, excited crowd that welcomed Jelena Dokic back into its arms. The poor girl still looks dreadfully troubled, even damaged, but the crowd was willing to recognise the struggle she has had with her father and all (and is of course desperate to find an Australian tennis champion). And she played brilliantly, and emotionally, narrowly losing the second set in a tie-break, but eventually edging out the No. 17 seed. We all screamed and yelled. Joel was at first very disapproving of any applause of poor play by Anna Chakvetadze, but was soon yelling out "c'mon Jelena" with the rest of us. We were part of a record crowd for a single day of any Grand Slam event. We got there around 5, and caught fragments of a few matches that were finishing up; feasted on gourmet sausages (my lads); and nori rolls and rice paper rolls (me and Paul's mother), before we headed up to the fourth back row of the stadium. But who cared? The atmosphere was electric, and our sight of the court fantastic. I've half a mind to go again next week.

Tonight it was time to stay home, and chill out. One of Joel's friends had lent him the Julie Tamar film, Across the Universe. Here's the trailer:

A wonderful, wonderful film, though probably much better on a big screen. But in your loungeroom, you can sing along. I'm going out tomorrow to buy a copy of Abbey Road.

Monday Melbourne Medievalism Blogging (3); OK, it's Tuesday, but surely that's ok...

Hmm. Have slowly started cleaning up my office at work in preparation for eleven months' absence; and am very slowly going through my list of things to do before I can really get down to some writing: examining PhD theses; assessing journals for the ARC; chasing up signatures from colleagues on new graduate applications; hunting down illustrations for an essay for antiTHESIS; deciding on the content of another essay; trying to find accommodation in Philadelphia and New York. It's also been very hot. It got up above 40 in Melbourne today, and then suddenly crashed to the high 20s. Much more comfortable.

Anyway, yesterday's medievalist blog topic was voted by the readers of the Melbourne Age in 1987 as Victoria's favourite building. It is the "Gothic bank" in Collins St, designed by William Wardell, a devoted follower of Pugin who migrated to Australia in 1858. It is magnificent.



And possibly looks even better in black and white:


Scroll down here for best images, especially of the interior. Keep scrolling on this site: there are some great shots here.

ANZ also built a skyscraper with postmodernist neo-Gothic arches up the top behind the bank, which you can see in the first picture above:



Discussing Wardell's building (we'll have occasion to re-visit his work on future occasions, especially when we look at St Patrick's Cathedral), Brian Andrews, in Australian Gothic (p. 25) quotes J. M. Freeland, Architecture in Australia on the building boom that was responsible for much of this very elaborate building style:

The pumped-up prosperity based on over-extended borrowing which was to envelop the whole of eastern Australia during the eighties was to reach its hysterical climax in Melbourne. In that town financial caution was to be thrown to the winds; crazy ventures were to be launched with loans over-subscribed within an hour or two of opening and with people fighting for the opportunity to invest their money: clever unprincipled financiers, many of them penniless when the decade began, were to float dozens of finance companies and building societies and, by the peak year of 1888, create an artificial and frantic land boom which was to be the prelude to the greatest and most terrible of depressions in Australia's history.

Sound familiar?

And a personal note. My aunt, who now lives in Sydney, was a very resourceful woman, who used to love coming into the city from Moonee Ponds and Keilor, where she used to live. In fact, she would take friends and visitors around to visit various banks of architectural or stylistic interest: and this was always the centrepiece of the tour. My uncle was not really one for much travelling or going out at night; and I can remember marvelling one evening, when my mother, sister and aunt and I had seen a movie in the city one evening, and Muriel commented on how beautiful her beloved city looked at night, all floodlit, and all. For she had mostly only seen it during the day. It was just one of those moments that consolidated the difference in our lives, just one generation apart.

Adelaide one day; Melbourne the next

In all the vagaries of summer weather, one thing is pretty sure: whatever they're doing in Adelaide, we'll probably be doing half a day later, though not always in such an extreme fashion. Same goes for blogging, with Pavlov's Cat and me. Not for the first time has she pre-empted me on a bloggy topic.

This morning she mentions the hot night, and opening up the house when the temperature drops. In our house I am the one who obsessively patrols the doors and windows, opening and closing according to the time of day, the angle of the sun, and the direction of the wind, constantly modulating to maximise comfort.

Last night was Melbourne's third hottest night on record, going down to a minimum of 28.1 (that's 86, by the double-the-number-you-first-thought-of-and-add-30 method of conversion). We were heading for 39 today, but the cool change came in much earlier than expected, and we only got to 32 before the south-westerly breeze blew in. I'm now sitting with the french door in my study open; and it's perfectly pleasant. Because we'd had only one day of extreme heat, the old brick part of the house hasn't heated up at all, so we are off the hook for a few more days, I think, till the temperature climbs again. Hope it's pleasant on Saturday when we are off to the tennis for the final of the Open lead-up tournament. I also hope Roger Federer makes it through to Saturday...

OK, back to work now.

Monday Melbourne Medievalism Blogging (2)

... and here are the ruins of the old city walls ...

I hadn't been down this part of Royal Park for years, but we rode past these little ruins a week or so on our way to dinner with Heikki and Katerina in Parkville. Riding back at night they looked even more mysterious and gothic, and I wasn't even sure what they were, but I've just ridden over in the early evening sunlight to photograph them; and of course, they are crenellated gatehouses.

Or perhaps guard boxes.

With extra piles for flagpoles.
On the outside they are beautifully pointed with lead.
And here is how you make crenellations when you have cut big blocks: just tip them up on their sides.
Further up the road the mystery is revealed: this was the entrance to Anzac Hall.
From the www.australia.coop website.

Anzac Hall is part of the Urban Camp. It was built between 1940 and 1941 for the RSL as a cinema and recreation hall for troops at Royal Park.

In 1942 a large part of Royal Park was used as a staging camp for US troops on route to the Pacific. The Americans called their area Camp Pell.

After the war Royal Park was the principal demobilisation centre for all Victorian service personnel and the area known as Camp Pell was used by the Housing Commission for emergency public housing until its demolition during a clean up campaign for the 1956 Olympics in Melbourne.

Why Camp Pell? Does anyone know what this refers to?* The Urban Camp is used for country kids to give them a means of exploring the city. There was a group having a meal, so I didn't go too close, but here's a taste of its current architectural style.

Anyway, I'm struck by the survival of the gate houses in the modernisation of the 1950s — even though they weren't very old, someone must have thought them distinctive enough, or invested with enough heritage value to preserve — and also the choice of medieval crenellations for the 1940s. When we think of medievalist architecture, we often think of ecclesiastical, education or commercial applications, but military ones are probably just as common.**

And now I know why Gatehouse St has its name. It's not particularly near these gates, but I wonder if there were, or are, others, closer to that street.

It was a beautiful time to be out riding. The day is pleasantly warm; and because it's still school holidays, there's very little traffic. I rode over almost entirely on bike tracks and parks, and rode back through the empty car park outside the zoo. A large roaring could be heard. Bear? Lion?

* answer. Ahem. Should have looked this up in Brown-May and Swain's Encyclopedia of Melbourne. Major Floyd J. Pell was a US airman killed in 1942, defending Darwin against a Japanese air attack.

** correction: seems that Royal Park was used as a barracks in the First World War, too, so the gatehouses may well be much older than the 1940s. Will have to do some more work on this one. Here's a history of the Park. Brown-May comments that in 1946, 3000 people were temporarily housed at the camp, which became known as "Camp Hell", and was "popularly represented in slum stereotypes as a hotbed of immorality and disease, while its residents struggled with the vagaries of rotting wooden and rusting metal huts, inadequate amenities and streets turned to mud whenever it rained" (Encyclopedia of Melbourne, p. 109). Lovely!

Why I love Melbourne, Part whatever...

Well, we always knew Melbourne was the cafe and coffee heart of Australia, thanks mostly to our post-war Italian and Greek immigrant population. This was confirmed a few months ago when Starbucks confirmed it was closing down 61 of its 84 Australian outlets. Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne had most of these and they were always going to struggle against a specialist coffee culture that was well entrenched since the 80s. Melbourne in particular prides itself on its European-ness, in places like Carlton and St Kilda; and I must admit I do love to try out the tiny cafes in the network of arcades in the heart of the city.

We found ourselves in the Royal Arcade at Christmas, looking for the Oxfam shop to buy goats and vegetable gardens, and were reminded of the magnificent Gog and Magog clock there....


Here are a few other pics I've found: the arcades range from grand ones like the Royal and Block arcades (note the Hopetoun tea rooms on the right below: great place to meet your aunt for afternoon tea) ...

... to the less formal lanes that criss-cross between the arcades...
... to the somewhat more jazzy ones west of Elizabeth St. This is Hardware lane:
In this last one, note the sign on the left: this is one of a number of chocolate bars and cafes that now dot the city as the cafes do. There's a lovely article on this new chocolate culture in the paper this morning. Makes me want to forget those pesky New Year's resolutions and head down for a Belgian hot chocolate with chili. Shudders in anticipation...

Sign of the Times

You know times are tough in your workplace when for the first time in my memory of it, no one's had the energy or the spirit to organise a sweep for the Melbourne Cup. Many's the year I've crowded round a TV or radio at work with a glass of warm champagne and cheered on a horse I'd never heard of till a minute before. And often have I marvelled at those folk who had actually placed real bets. Even last year, in the first flush of collegiality in our new school, we had so many people that we ran about four sweeps, I think.

But of course, it's the same loyal hard-working office staff who run the sweep, and this year, after dramatic shifts and changes and instabilities and re-organised workloads and grumpy academic staff, they've had enough. And I must say, I don't blame them. There was even talk of not having a Christmas party for the same reason, so I have rounded up a few folk with a commitment to both organise and clean up after a party next month.

It's the day before I get on a plane, so it's the usual crazy rounds of laundry, tidying up loose ends in the office, getting my photo taken for the Canberra awards ceremony on the 25th, and now coming home. I watched the race with Paul and Joel. Paul was the bookie, and stood to lose a lot of money if any of my horses (Nom de Jeu, Barbaricus and Moatize [ridden by Clare Lindop]) had won. None of them did, of course. But the Reserve Bank has dropped interest rates by .75%, so that is better than a win!

So now it's time to finish the Ned Kelly paper, sort out the powerpoints, finish a reference and some revisions to an article and do the ironing, and then the packing, meanwhile drinking lots of water to hydrate in preparation for the flight to LA, flying into Obama time, I hope.

I'm off to lovely Riverside, in California, first, then on to Wooster, outside Cleveland, for some quality writing (and tennis) time with Tom. And then a day in LA on the way back: I'm just getting too old for those 27 hour trips without a night in a bed in between...

Archiving collective memory: Once and Future Medievalism

In 2004, we held a little conference at Melbourne: Once and Future Medievalism. Selected papers from the conference were edited by Philip Thiel for antiTHESIS online, the web-based arm of our most excellent, fully refereed, co-operatively run interdisciplinary graduate journal, antiTHESIS. In the nature of an annually-changing co-operative, however, it's a bit hard for the collective to retain its collective memory, and for a while these papers weren't available.

They have now been archived by the National Library, however, and if you follow this link you'll be directed to Philip's intro. and the table of contents. If this link doesn't work, go here and put "antiTHESIS" in the search box.

It's great to look at these essays again, and see the tremendous range of things it's possible to study as medievalism. Most of the titles are self-explanatory, but readers interested in video games are directed to Darshana's essay. And check out the afterword that John Ganim wrote for the collection:

Once and Future Medievalism - Stephanie Trigg

Translator as Navigator: Two medieval texts in the Tudor court - Hope Johnston

Historical reconstruction or imaginative recreation? The nineteenth-century approach to the early medieval - Pamela O'Neill

Competing Medievalisms: Walter Scott, James Hogg and chivalry - Graham Tulloch

Holy Wars: British medievalist fictions as cultural struggle - Andrew Lynch

Enlightening the 'Other': western rhetoric, violence and the 'medievalised' third world - Sashi Nair

Medievalism and Sorority: The Princess Ida Club - Helen Hickey

The 'Medievalism' of Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ - Lisa MacKinney

How Fiction Writers Use the Middle Ages - Gilliam Polack

Solving the Middle Ages: contemporary anxiety and the medieval murder mystery - Philip Thiel

The Once and Future Emblematic - Darshana Jayemanne

Once and Future Medievalism: A Belated Afterword - John Ganim

Ned Kelly's boot and other relics

As part of my work on Ned Kelly, Joel and I rode down to the State Library. We walked through part of their relatively new permanent exhibition, past the medieval manuscripts, and early Chaucer prints, and took the lift up to the fifth floor. I had never actually seen the Kelly armour, but there it was in a glass case, complete with his rifle and ... a single, tall, cuban-heeled boot. The armour I had seen in a hundred reproductions and images, but this single boot is particularly haunting. It looks as if it has been cut open. It was probably pretty-much blood filled by the time they captured Kelly, who had, despite the armour made of plough-shares, been shot twenty-seven times, mostly in the leg.



The boot is on loan to the Library from the descendants of Jesse Dowsett, to whom it was awarded as a trophy for his role in Kelly's capture. Unlike the extraordinary and iconic armour, shown below in Joel's dramatic floor-view shot, this boot is both an ordinary item of the everyday, while also a semi-sacred relic.

If the armour seems unreal (poised, as I think it is, between influences drawn from medieval romance, the Chinese armour the gang would have seen at the Prince of Wales' birthday parade in Beechworth, and an enchantment with an industrial modernism), the boot belongs to a different order altogether. It's a bushman's riding boot that has been kept as a souvenir of the notorious outlaw, but unlike the armour or the death mask, hasn't been replicated a thousand times. I've only started my work on Kelly (and his associations with Robin Hood), but this is the first time I've seen the boot. Its preservation speaks volumes about the iconic status of Kelly, and the mystique and veneration in which he is held. "Oh yes," said our landlady in Milawa a few weeks ago, "Saint Ned!" And indeed, it looked very much like a saint's relic.



It was a day of firsts, actually. That thing about touring the world and not seeing the things in your own city? One of Melbourne's great tourist attractions is the old Melbourne gaol, where Kelly was hanged in 1880. I must have passed it a thousand times without going in, but today we did. It's a most creepy place indeed, so much so that I forgot to take photos, really, apart from this image of a perspex woman's silhouette that I think is supposed to haunt you; and this three-tiered belt they would considerately strap around you to protect your kidneys while they flogged you.


The gaol has three levels of cells, arranged along either side of a long corridor. The cells are of course tiny, with enormous bluestone flagstones on the floor. Most of them were open; many with displays about the various men and women who'd been imprisoned there: the two Aboriginal men who were the gaol's first hanged men; the Philipino; the Spaniard (who realised he was going to be hanged only ten minutes before the executioner came for him); the Chinese; the women accused of baby-farming and infanticide, and of course, Kelly and his mother, Ellen, who was allowed to visit her son shortly before his death. She was working in the prison laundry when he was hanged. As we walked in and out of these cells, I got quite jumpy. It was bad enough seeing a life-sized figure of a prisoner standing or sitting in his cell; but the spookiest moment was walking into a cell with a narrow mattress on the floor and a grey blanket, not folded up, but in a heap, as if someone had just got up. I found myself almost apologising for intruding, and backing out again.

There was also a two-actor show, dramatising scenes from Kelly's life, that was surprisingly good.
After this we did the tour of the old watch-house, that was used as recently as the 1990s. A young female sergeant marched us in, separated men from women, and locked us up in a cell and turned out the lights. Even with the good-humoured women and children in my group, it was still pretty scary, as was the large padded cell they showed us, too.

Hoping for a good night's sleep tonight, then.