"When the poet Paul Valery once asked Albert Einstein if he kept a notebook to record his ideas, Einstein looked at him with mild but genuine surprise. "Oh, that's not necessary," he replied . "It's so seldom I have one."
This 'Wordle' is based on my Lysander book's text. It's a kind of summary, but I'm not sure it does proper credit to the research. Still, it looks pretty. A bit like writing the book, it's rendering down a huge amount of information into a much smaller, easier format. This does that all over again.Anzac Day is a national day of remembrance in Australia and New Zealand, and is commemorated by both countries on 25 April every year to honour members of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) who fought at Gallipoli in Turkey during World War I. It now more broadly commemorates all those who died and served in military operations for their countries. Anzac Day is also observed in the Cook Islands, Niue, Samoa and Tonga.Wikipedia.
It was lost on the night of bombardment before the first landing, lost in the first hour on the beach, lost on each of the two hundred and ninety-eight days that followed, lost in the planning at Whitehall, lost in the choice of the deranged Ian Hamilton, lost in the luck of getting the genius Ataturk as our principal foe.Bob Ellis
Rear Admiral Steve Gilmore, the commander of the Australian naval fleet told the thousands gathered at central Sydney's Cenotaph for Sunday's Anzac Day dawn service that Australia's national identity was established at Gallipoli.Rear Admiral Gilmore said the nation enjoys the freedoms it does thanks to the 1.8 million Australians who've served in military campaigns over the past 95 years.
Rear Admiral Gilmore said 102,000 Australian servicemen and servicewomen had made the ultimate sacrifice, and he asked that their contribution be remembered on this day.
"Because of Gallipoli our national identity was firmly established," he said, referring to Australia's best known military campaign.
Bob Ellis, ABC.
And many of us believed it, the audacious, denialist spin that a battle ill lost from which no good came was worth being in because it 'tested our mettle' and 'showed what game young men can do'.
Paul Keating, launching Graham Freudenberg's Churchill and Australia said Australia didn't have to prove anything. It already had the highest standard of living in the world, along with female suffrage, pensions, exemplary health care, a literate working class, good writers, athletes, musicians, painters, cartoonists. What was there to prove? That we could perish bravely in war, that great game of drongos?
'I have never gone to Gallipoli,' Keating said, 'and I never will. Kokoda is more my speed. There we fought, and won, a long battle that made a difference to our nation's future. That saved us from something, as Gallipoli never did.'
War historian and author Roland Perry told the service that despite the horrific losses of thousands of young diggers, Australia had had a huge impact on the world stage during World War I.
‘‘The Turks had ruled the Middle East for 400 years but the Anzacs did more than any other force to change the map of the Middle East roughly to where it is today,’’ he said.
‘‘In the four years... Australia had a remarkable impact on the world stage never to be repeated.
‘‘But we are here today to remember the men and women of Australia and New Zealand who sacrificed and served in all wars, not just the Great War.’’
What the Australians won at Gallipoli was huge respect, including from their enemy. It really is time we started making clear to young Australians that the Anzacs didn't die protecting Australia from being invaded. Rather, we were invading a country on the other side of the world - to wit, Turkey - with whom we had no difference as a people outside the larger politics of the day.Surely it is time we owed Turkey, and Turkish Australians, that respect. Look at the respect Turkey shows our dead.
I ask this question most seriously. Does any country in the world - other than Turkey - permit a people who tried to invade it to commemorate the fact of that attempted invasion on their shores each year? I know of not a single one. Imagine if the descendants of the Japanese pilots who bombed Darwin held an emotional service beneath the Japanese flag on the shores of Darwin Harbour each year.
Organisers were hoping for a record 40,000 people at the Shrine of Remembrance, ensuring Melbourne’s dawn service remains as powerful as ever - 95 years since Aussie diggers landed at Gallipoli.AAP, The Age
Trooper Mark Donaldson, who was awarded the Victoria Cross for services in Afghanistan, said it was vital young people take part in Anzac Day.
"You have to keep it alive because if you don't pass it down and make sure they understand what it's about then it's going to be forgotten about," Trooper Donaldson told reporters in Sydney following the march.
In 1983, when his yacht, Australia 2, won the America's Cup, owner Alan Bond acknowledged that at one stage his crew had been losing but added "it was just like Gallipoli, and we won that one".It would be interesting to know exactly how that comment was received in lounge rooms across Australia. Did it feel "right" to most who heard it? My guess is that it did.
Gallipoli was a military disaster. We should note that in justice to the young men who died there. Do we owe them less than we owe those who die in bushfires like Black Saturday? We should also note it in justice to future generations. The voices that urged Australia into the invasion of Iraq were of the same character as those that propelled Australia to Gallipoli in 1914.
Many young families, including bleary-eyed children, came to the service. Lynda Brown said her seven-year-old son Callum had an obsession with war history.
‘‘I have been here before and I thought it was a good for him to come along and hopefully get rid of the romanticism of war and hear some stories and see that some people are upset,’’ she said.
Propaganda was involved in shaping the popular view of Gallipoli from the start. Take the case of John Simpson Kirkpatrick, the man with the donkey. Within six weeks of his death, he had been conscripted into the propaganda war, a newspaper report describing him as ''a six-foot Australian'' with ''a woman's hands'' who said in a British-Australian accent, ''I'll take this fellow next.''
Simmo was a five-foot-eight Geordie with a stoker's hands who spoke in dialect and had fierce Labor politics. His first biographer, a fan of Churchill and acquaintance of Sir Robert Menzies, stripped him of his politics. There was no mention of boozing or fighting. The real Simmo was left in a grave at Gallipoli.
Too many of us have felt the effects, national and personal, of our nation's willingness to participate in foreign wars - because, as Australians, we bizarrely saw ourselves as foreign to our own homeland.
It is often claimed that our soldiers died for ''the freedom we enjoy today''. But to a sovereign nation, being truly free means being independent. Even as our monuments, ceremonies and memories of war endure, Australia is surely now mature enough to learn the lessons of its history and face the hard truths behind its myths.
Tony Wright, The Age.
The Gallipoli peninsula and its pocket-handkerchief of a weatherworn battlefield is the site of a defeat for Australian and New Zealand soldiers (not to mention the British, the French, the Senegalese, the Indians and others from a lost empire), and a defeat that occurred long before any of us who might make the trip now were born.
...
The band of would-be gypsies, each of them Australian, made it to the Anzac commemorative site well before dawn, found a tiny spot on the lawn, laid out their Turkish carpet and hunkered down among thousands of other travellers for the cold wait, a fingernail moon eventually sliding over the crags and ridges, the Aegean Sea silvering.
...
No other people travel in such great numbers over such distances to such a curious destination.
Martin Flanagan, The Age.
It was Ataturk who declared to the mothers of Australia that their sons lay in friendly soil. A group of about 80 Turkish Australians march each year in Melbourne on Anzac Day. Anzac Day would not be the same without them.
The show streams online after broadcast here in Australia, so I hope it's viewable overseas. This is the penultimate episode of the first series. It's a well put together and - did I mention - tempting show. We even forgive him for his previous Sydney bias.There have always been, throughout my lucky
life, squadrons of quite unexpected flukes
awaiting me at every turn; this is, no doubt,
a decent working-definition of the Nature of
Existence – I am not now, nor have I ever been –
a claimant to Originality!
But since I'm old and
faltering towards… who knows what… I just feel
absurdly grateful for a book – it's one I found
upon the small, select, usually untroubled
local library shelf of verse – I open it and find
at once a poem by that twisted, hunch-backed dwarf
I thought I knew, old Alexander, Pontiff of the Lock,
extolling piss, because its fount would lead
a knowing seeker to the Heart!
This morning, home abed and comfortable in
calm, agnostic Winter dawn, I reached across
the bedside table, narrowly avoiding
spillage of the dregs of last night's
whisky, and found the Book – I smiled again at
Alexander's earthy flaunting of the blunt,
ironic purposes of smut and all its masculine
appeal; but suddenly, quite unannounced , an
unknown medieval poet, in eight small lines brings
Mary to my bed foot, claims attention, runs with
utter confidence – I almost hear his smiling voice –
a well-honed lance into the swelling
heart that every parent must acknowledge – mine's
ever full – and tells me in such simple terms
that under all the blue-robed iconography She
was a but Mother, and the Rood was nothing
to her but an invitation to her own death!
A blessed unbeliever, I am swamped by
inundating tears – a mere millennium or
two between us, God's Mother, and a
Father Finite of a Blissful Brood who'll never
read this – or if they do, they'll shake their
heads and mutter, 'I guess that's what
the silly bugger might have thought of then!'
The minaret/bell tower of the Great Mosque of Cordoba, by night - Credit: Hispanofila's Blog
So what's in the box?
On the other side it says 'Business Cards'. Could be a clue.
Yup, it's cards! Moo do good stock business cards in full colour on both sides. They're not cheap, but they are good. (And who wants business cards that look cheap?)
You can use their designs, or your own - for my work, pictures of aircraft that I've taken aren't hard to come by, and with a bit of careful selection, we can make a wall of cards...
LOTS of cards! Only problem is I don't want to give them out. Oh, and the other only problem I know from previous experience is people find it hard to choose which card they want...
For his first six years, Carle lived in upstate New York with his parents, who had emigrated from Germany. In the mid-30s his mother, homesick, took the family back to Stuttgart at a time when everyone was trying to move the other way. War broke out, his father was drafted into the German army and spent eight years as a prisoner of the Russians. Before the war, he had been his son's great ally, a gentle man, an amateur artist. When he came back, he was broken. Carle turns over the memories of this period slowly. He is very careful to get things right.And art, as so often was important - perverted for power or (as the Nazis had it) 'degenerate':
His mother was supportive of her son's love of art - "in awe" of it, in fact - but was in other ways a rather distant figure. She was not a "warm" individual. "She was a good mother. But ... I hate to say this... I loved her, she was responsible, she was good ... But I don't have this feeling which I have towards my father, as something incredibly deep. When I was little, from the beginning, he read the funny papers to me, told me stories, drew pictures, went for walks. Telling stories and walking and stopping and looking; nothing terribly important. But that has been so important in my life. The older I get, the more I know that's so true."
Carle was 10 when his father left for the army and 18 when he came back, "this sick man. Psychologically, physically devastated." Did he try to coax him back to his old self? "We didn't talk any more much. Only superficial things. I had other interests. I was in art school, an artist. I was interested in women." He puffs out his chest in parody of his 18-year-old self. "This old man, coming from Russia, we got along without you." That's pretty much how it felt, he says. "It's so sad."
The other seminal figure in his childhood was Herr Kraus, his high school art teacher, who at great personal risk noticed Carle's talent and invited him to his house to look at banned art; in Carle's memory, it was Klee, Matisse and Picasso, but he can't be sure. Anyway, it was expressionist and it made a profound impression on him. "I didn't have the slightest idea that something like that existed, because I was used to art being flag-waving, gun-toting Aryans - super-realistic Aryan farmers, the women with their brute arms. That was art. Of course. That was a shock."
Eric Carle. Photograph: Maggie Steber, via The Guardian.The Very Hungry Caterpillar was initially conceived of by Carle as a hungry bookworm, eating its way through the pages. His long-time editor, Ann Beneduce, wasn't sure about a worm as a central character and suggested a caterpillar. "Butterfly!" exclaimed Carle, and so it was born.It's easy to project meanings into these books. As vehicles for acorn imaginations, they can be a lot of things. Adults, as ever, can be pretty crude.
"I often joke," he says, "that with a novel you start out with a 35-word idea and you build out to 35,000 words. With a children's book you have a 35,000-word idea and you reduce it to 35. That's an exaggeration, but that's what's taking place with picture books."
The book's success has spawned a lot of crank interpretations. It has been described as an allegory of both Christianity and capitalism. "Right after the Wall fell, I was signing books in the former East Germany and was invited by a group of young librarians to have lunch with them. One said the caterpillar is capitalist, he eats into every food one little bit and then the food rots away. Wasteful capitalist. Interesting. I think that if you're indoctrinated, that's how you will see it."As a kid myself, I was never a fan of The Very Hungry Caterpillar; my graphic requirements from books were always more stringent than the rough-edged collage of Carle. I may not have been a fan, but I can certainly respect the achievement. It remains a justified best-seller.
The success of my books, I think is also due to their emotional impact. Caterpillar, for instance, is a book of hope. It says that you too - an ugly, little thing - will open your wings and fly. Kids who are insecure and young identify with that."Insecurity? They know that the future is unwritten, and who knows what current activities will help them in the future. Perhaps they are just more realistic about life's potential.
A view of Windemere from our 2008 Lakes visit. B
Is there one of these* monsters...
...lurking under here? J
Eamonn McCabe, Beryl Bainbridge’s Room. From Writers’ Rooms. Archival digital print 29.5x42cm, paper size. Madison Contemporary Art, London. 
Eamonn McCabe. Craig Raine’s Room, from Writers’ Rooms. Archival digital print, 29.5x42cm, paper size.
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