Paul Hemphill

What Have the Romans Done for Us?

Paul Hemphill 3 Comments

What? Caligula didn’t really put his horse Incitatus into the Senate, order his legionaires to gather seashells for his combat with Neptune, God of the Sea, or sleep with his sister and later kill her? Nero didn’t fiddle whilst Rome burned, or attempt to drown his mother in a collapsible boat? And kicking his pregnant wife to death may have been domestic violence carried too far.

What? Julius Caesar didn’t cry “Et tu Brute?” to the leader of his assassins? Augustus’ second wife Livia was not the arch-poisoner portrayed by Robert Graves in “I Claudius”?. Tiberius wasn’t won’t to swim with naked little boys nibbling at his naughty bits? Claudius wasn’t a gentle old duffer who wouldn’t hurt a fly?

In her highly readable, popular history of Royal, Republican and Imperial Rome, acclaimed British historian Mary Beard consigns these and other popular Roman apocrypha to the Urban Legend file. Which may cause a certain degree of distress for those of who like their history garnished with a few saucy anecdotes (click on Roman Holiday in the menu above this post).

She attributes these highly entertaining stories to prurient scandal-mongering, sensationalism, and the vicarious pleasure of folks with dirty minds, and, significantly, to political spin and perception-management on the part of the kings, tyrants and emperors, and of heirs and successors responsible for creating, embellishing, and sustaining the public record. At one point, she states matter-of-factly that those who were assassinated were portrayed post-mortem as tyrants, sadists or perverts – or in a case of “the worse the better” “all of the above”! No wonder Roman emperors portrayed in “sword and sandal” movies from ‘The Robe’ and ‘Barrabas’ to ‘Gladiator’, are, like Lord Byron, “mad, bad, and dangerous to know”.

Caligula may or may not have been the bad lad we know so well, via Bob Guccione and John Hurt. Beard insists on calling him by his proper name, Gaius, rather than his childhood nickname, the horrorshow-sounding Caligula. The amiable, bookish Claudius was as ruthless and as brutal an autocrat as any of his predecessors and successors, dispatching scores of recalcitrant or lecherous senators to Hades (incidentally, it was Domitian who liked hurting flies). So too was Marcus Aurelius, the “philosopher king”, author of wise sayings and aphorisms, and beloved of adolescent philosophers.

Nero might not have been any worse or better than the others. Indeed, Beard argues, the fact that several Nero pretenders popped up, lyre and all, in various places after his death, demonstrates that he mightn’t have been all that unpopular, particularly in the provinces. Indeed, Beard suggests, Rome’s subjects in far-flung provinces would have had very little knowledge of or interest in the political shenanigans and sexual peccadillos of their rulers. Their only acquaintance with their emperor would have been with statues and the royal visage on the change in their pockets.

With Rome’s tabloid icons falling like flies (Domitian liked to torture them, by the way), thank Zeus Mary kept her revisionist hands of my all-time favourite classical baddie, King Herod the Great.

SPQR – Senatus Populusque Romanus, the Senate and People of Rome – challenges assumptions and preconceptions about the history of Rome, about the expansion of its empire, and about its citizens. For example, the accepted belief that the Romans were more rapacious and war-like, and much better organized than their neighbours – in early days, those who lived near the city state, neighbouring lands in Italy, and after a very short time, kingdoms, states, and chiefdoms as far apart as Caledonia in the west and Armenia in the east.

Rome’s neighbours and rivals were indeed just as aggressive, territorial, and acquisitive as the early kings who expanded their territories throughout Italy, the republican consuls and imperial generals who pushed the frontiers into Western Europe, the Balkans, Asia Minor, and the Middle East. Rome’s rivals, peers and enemies included formidable leaders and war lords with names like early contemporaries like Alexander and Artaxerxes. Enemies like Hannibal Barca, Spartacus, Vercingetorix, Armenius, and Boudica.

But SPQR isn’t all just about personalities and geopolitics. Beard delves into the dynamics of power in the state itself. How Rome, the city state and later, the empire were actually run. How powerful and influential individuals collaborated and collided in their quest for wealth and influence. And how rewarding and also how tenuous and dangerous life at the top could be. Whilst Beard would question Robert Graves’ portrayal of the Augustine emperors, she would not quibble with his take on the tension, uncertainty and risk endured by ambitious Romans who gambled for high stakes rather than going with the flow and keeping their heads down.

Most, indeed, did choose to keep their heads down, and endeavour to live a quite normal life. A life which, for those at the top of the social and economic ladder, could be very comfortable indeed. For those further down the socio-economic staircase, all was not so pleasant and delightful. Rather, for both free man and slave it was a life of toil and hardship literally from the cradle to the grave. Child Labour, long hours, unsafe working conditions, seven days a week. No weekend rest, no retirement benefits, no insurance cover. Ordinary people worked as soon as they could hold a pick or shovel, until injury, age or infirmity rendered them unproductive and expendable. But there was time for leisure, and contrary to modern preconceptions, it was not always bread and circuses. As in our own day and age, folk were more likely to have sought solace in the bottle and good fortune in the dice.

Using the limited archeological sources available – whilst the lives of important Romans are well examined, those of ordinary people are rare indeed – Beard illuminates her narrative with snapshots of the everyday lives of regula Antonys and Antonias. Although bits and pieces have been unearthed in settlements from North Africa to the Balkans, Pompeii and Herculaneum are a particularly rich source, as are the forts along Hadrian’s Walls, on the northern edge of empire. The wonderful Vindolanda tablets have preserved a picture of the oh-so-normal lives of transplanted souls so far away from home. See my earlier post, Roman Wall Blues.

The vignettes of Pompeii and Vindolanda illustrate one of Beard’s leitmotifs – the fact that Rome and Romans were much, much more than the city founded by the wolf-raised twins Romulus and Remus. Roman-ness and Romanization were as much a state of mind as a temporal, political imperium. People of all races, tribes, nations, and faiths from Spain to Syria, from Caerleon to Carthage, adopted Roman ways, institutions, commodities, food and beverages, artifacts, and even Latin names, to a greater or lesser degree depending on their proximity to Roman camps and towns, to Roman trade routes, and ultimately, to Roman authority. And many acquired Roman citizenship. And they entered Rome’s service, as soldiers, scholars, public servants, and politicians. By the end of the second century, some fifty percent of the senators were provincials.

Other histories of Rome have ended with the conversion of Constantine to Christianity in 337 CE signaling the end of pagan antiquity, or with the sack of Rome by the Visigoths 410. Beard closes instead with the “culminating moment,” in 212 when the emperor Caracalla declared every free inhabitant of the empire a full Roman citizen – almost thirty million provincials became Roman overnight in one of the the biggest grants of citizenship in the history of the world. Beard comes to no definitive conclusion as to why the underwhelming Caracalla made this move, but it’s effect was momentous insofar as it eroded the distinction between the Romans and the people they had conquered, colonized, and ruled – the culmination of a process that had been going on for almost a millennium.

The final pages describe how in form, function, and faith, the Rome that departed the Third Century was not the one that Augustus built and Caracalla bequeathed to the many, short lived emperors who followed him in rapid succession during a time of political and social instability, rebellion and civil war, barbarian invasion and plague – until Constantine established his capital in the east and built the Roman world anew. And this new Rome, the Byzantine Empire, with its capital Constantinople, was to endure until it fell to the Ottoman sultan Mehmet the Conqueror in 1453. The Holy Roman Empire, in Central Europe, was brought down by Napoleon in 1806, but as Voltaire observed, it was “neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire”. Take that!

Unexpectedly, Beard does not conclude her thought-provoking, and entertaining survey of Rome’s first millennium with a catalogue of the many ways we have benefitted or suffered from our Roman heritage. We do not have much to learn directly from the Romans, she writes, but we have much to learn about ourselves and the past by engaging with the history of the Romans, their poetry and prose, their controversies and arguments. “We do the Romans a disservice if heroize them, as much as we if we demonize them. But we do ourselves a disservice if we fail to take them seriously – and if we close our long conversation with them”.

On that note, concluding an invigorating walk down what Welsh poet RS Thomas called ‘the long road of history”, I will leave the last word to Monty Python.

Postscript

This post is my own take-out of an entertaining and educational ride through Roman history. Every published review approaches it from different angle according to the perspectives and passions of the writer. And I have done likewise.

Some Further Reading:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPQR:_A_History_of_Ancient_Rome

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/oct/28/spqr-history-ancient-rome-mary-beard

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/12/the-secret-of-romes-success/413143/

https://howlinginfinite.wordpress.com/roman-holiday/

http://www.vindolanda.com/

And some pieces from my ‘Roman’ period:

If You Go Down to the Woods Today

Paul Hemphill 8 Comments

We live in heart of the Tarkeeth Forest, some ten kilometers from the seaside town of Urunga on the mid north coast of New South Wales. The forest lies between the Bellinger and Kalang Rivers, and these are connected tidally to the ocean at Urunga – the only place in Australia where two rivers meet the ocean together. The forest rises from the rivers to to ride the Fernmount Range, the easternmost extension of the Great Dividing Range that spans the eastern edge of our island continent. Above and between the two rivers, it is a rain-harvesting, filtration and stabilization ecosystem vital to the rivers and to the wetlands around them, and is a habitat for bird, reptilian, mammalian and marsupial wildlife, including koalas, quolls. wallabies, echidnas, goannas, owls, fruit doves, and cockatoos. The east-west Fernmount Range Trail is an ancient highway highway from the plains to Urunga, known to the Gumbaynggirr nation as a “place of plenty”. The forest contains areas of significant indigenous culture, recalling song lines and stories of the Dreamtime, places of ceremony, of birth and burial, and of atrocity.

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This land was rainforest once. In the late nineteenth century, much of it was cleared manually and laboriously for dairy farming, and in the late sixties, most of the landowners sold their farms to Australian Pulp Mills. APM cleared the farmland and established the flooded gum plantation that is now Tarkeeth State Forest to supply a paper mill that was to be built just south of Coffs Harbour. This never happened – the projects planners had inexplicably overlooked the lack of a massive water supply. Eventually, the plantations were sold to the government-owned State Forests News South Wales – now the Forestry Corporation. The plantation is now being harvested – clear felled, actually – a matter of considerable concern to us forest neighbours and to many in the Shire.

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Now, we are all aware that the forest is legally designated a plantation, and that harvesting is considered to be both necessary and legitimate by the powers-that-be in state and local government, and among many in the community.

But it is the aggressive nature of the proposed harvesting that is the issue: the large area involved, and it’s ecologically sensitive location; the decision to clear-fell rather than selectively harvest it as in the past; the plan to burn what cannot be sold off in windrows; and to ground-spray the cleared land with a cocktail of toxic chemicals. All this in a forest highland situated between the large rivers, where with heavy rains and frequent flooding, everything – soil, ash, poison, will flow downhill. It happened last year on the Never Never, with predictably bad consequences for the Bellinger river system. Clear-felling the Tarkeeth will add to the cumulative impact of similarly aggressive harvesting operations in other forests the the Coffs Harbour and Bellingen region in recent years.

Wrong plantation, wrong place, wrong method.

Forestry Corp does not present its Tarkeeth operations as a profitable excercise, rather as the write-off of one asset – a neglected, failed plantation of uneconomical flooded gum – replacing it with another – a plantation of blackbutt which be better managed and more valuable, together with some tallowood to compensate the dispossessed koalas for the temporary loss of their habitat. In short, a financial loss with the promise of a profitable plantation outcome in two generations.

This is lush farmland on the flood plains of the two rivers, with dairy farms, cash crops, and organic farms. There are oyster farms in the twin estuaries, whilst the confluence of the rivers and the lower Kalang are a fisherman’s idea of heaven. This part of New South Wales is called the Holiday Coast, and tourism is is the backbone of a local economy that boasts attractions that range from the rainforest and waterfalls of the Gondwana World Heritage Area of the Dorrigo National Park, to the well-preserved historical township if Bellingen with its federation facades, cafes and craft shops, to the long, golden beaches of Hungry Head and Tuckers Rock.

Tarkeeth Forest contains areas of significant cultural significance to the Gumbaynggirr nation – the traditional landowners, who have identified scar trees, artefacts and sacred sites, and stand to lose this precious history if this forest is destroyed.

Then there are the protected and endangered species that some folk say do not live in the forest, but we know are here in the understory and old habitat trees because we live here, between the eastern and western compartments. These include koalas, quolls, sooty and powerful owls, great barred frogs, and fruit doves. Forty years of native forest ingrowth and plantation neglect have ensured the development of a biodiverse ecosystem. Nature hates a vacuum and has filled the Forestry Corp’s  neglected vacant lot.

Broad-scale clear-felling by two mechanical harvesters is quicker and cheaper than the selective logging of marketable species. And large, open stretches of bare earth prepared by bulldozer and fire makes spraying and replanting much easier. The aim is loss-reduction, with some recoupment   from the sale of trees felled, rather than money-making. But the non-financial loss is incalculable: The destruction of “in-growth” native forest that has survived previous thinning and flourished, and of preexisting habitat trees, flora and fauna, and the loss of topsoil. And the potential for environmental disaster on the rivers when the rain and the floods come.

Tarkeeth Sunrise

Tarkeeth Sunrise

Images of Isengard

Images of Isengard

Whenever governments put economic and environmental values on the scales, the mantra of “jobs, jobs, jobs” always trumps the preservation of our forests, plains and waterways. But what “Operation Tarkeeth” does not provide is work. Jobs, local jobs for loggers and mill workers. The days of the logger with his chainsa, selecting and felling the best trees, are gone in this mechanized workplace. We watch the logging jinkers heading east to the Pacific Highway loaded with blackbutt poles for the Grafton mill, some 100 kilometers away, whilst good pulp logs are trucked to Queensland. The trucks come from Grafton too. Local mills get what’s left. The jobs created by this destructive operation are in haulage, and in security – as protests and trespass into the harvest zone have halted work on several occasions.

And yes, there are protests, and there is also division. Nothing divides a small rural community more than logging the nearby forests. And particularly a community that still remembers the last forest war. It has been thirty years since the ferals and the grannies took on State Forests in the old growth wildernesses of Chaelundi and Wild Cattle Creek, since the lock-ons and the tripods in the deep dark woods, since the time of division and derision, since the passionate defense of the jobs of the loggers and the businesses that depended in the local mills for a livelihood, on the one hand, and the people who believed preserving the forest as a future heritage was more important.      That war ended with a change of government and direction, and a truce as forestry agreements were made and national parks were extended.

A new generation has come of age since those days, But memories and loyalties, perceptions and prejudices are inherited, and are resurrected down the pub, around kitchen tables, and on social media. The old hatchets may have been buried a long time ago, but many folk still know where they buried them.

We played our own small part in that old war, as the Sydney base for the Wingham Forest “stump truck” that toured the state with two huge, old tallowwood stumps on its flat-bed. We thought that our days of rebellion, of rising up against the empire, were over. But the rebel heart is beating yet.

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Featured Image:  Nothing quite prepares you for the devastation of clear felling. Joby, a Gumbaynggirr elder, surveys the Tarkeeth.

Read also:

http://www.bellingencourier.com.au/story/4071463/when-a-tree-falls-in-a-forest-then-locals-hear-the-sound/?cs=483

https://howlinginfinite.com/2016/08/18/tolkiens-tarkeeth/

Small Stories – A Tale of Twin Pines

Righteous Among the Nations

Paul Hemphill 1 Comment

During the Shoah, the biblical word for ‘the destruction”, and today, the standard Hebrew word for The Holocaust, the Nazi’s progress towards the Final Solution was aided and abetted by governments, armies, auxiliaries, officials, and individuals in the many countries that fell under the Axis thrall between 1939 and 1945. But there were also many, many people of goodwill and extraordinary courage from all walks of life who risked their lives and often, those of their families and friends, to protect Jews from persecution, and to save them from capture, deportation and extermination. untold numbers perished along with their charges. Many survived, as did thousands of Jews.

As of January 1, 2016, the 26,120 people from over fifty countries have been honoured by the Yad Vashem World Holocaust Remembrance Centre. These are The Righteous Among the Nations. 

For Oscar Schindler, Raoul Wallenberg, and the ‘Righteous Gentiles’.
In the words of the Talmud, “he who saves a life, saves the world entire”

We said “the worst is over”,
When the laws began to bite,
And our people crouched in silent fear
That fiery crystal night.
When they burned down the synagogues
And made Jews wear the star.
“this madness will not last”, we said,
“Nor reach us where we are”.

And we said “the worst is over”,
Bought the optimistic line.
We shared the hopes of millions,
Prayed for peace in our own time.
And we listened to our elders,
And we kept our fears controlled.
And we thought the worst was over.
Until the panzers rolled.

Then we thought the worst was over
When our army laid down arms.
And we went back to our daily lives,
Dismissed as false alarms
The rumours that these conquerors
Would wipe us from this earth.
It didn’t take us long to learn
What such false hope was worth.

Still, we thought the worst was over
When they made us wear the star,
And gathered all our people
From their townships near and far.
And they forced into ghettos
And set guards upon the gates.
We had seen worse persecution
In the history of our faith.

But we knew the worst still to come
As we watched the trucks appear.
And whispered talk of death camps
Gave dark substance to our fear.
When they sent in dogs and soldiers
To cull those trapped inside,
The ghetto was a station
On the road to genocide.

In the world beyond the wire
None could hear our people crying
As silence like a curtain fell
And cloaked a nation’s dying.
The ears of men were stricken deaf,
The eyes of men were blind
As the free world’s incredulity
Built the wall we died behind.

But we believed that at the hour of death,
When all our hopes had gone,
From the ranks of Gentiles
A just man would soon come.
He would part engulfing waters
With bold deeds and sleight of hand.
He would lead a tortured people
To a safe and promised land.

And, we believe
That when all doors are bared against us,
He will come.
When all hands are raised against us,
He will come.
When no man will defend us,
He will come
Into our darkest day.
He will walk up to our sepulcher
And roll the stone away.

Yes we believe
That in the hour of our worst torment,
He will come.
Like an angel in the darkness,
He will come.
When all our hope is dying,
He will come.
And in our blackest day,
He will walk up to our sepulcher
And roll the stone away.

Featured Image, from Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Centre

Oscar Schindler's grave, Mount Zion, Jerusalem

Oscar Schindler’s grave, Mount Zion, Jerusalem

Once in Royal David’s Citadel

Paul Hemphill 2 Comments

During its long history, Jerusalem has been destroyed at least twice, besieged 23 times, attacked 52 times, and captured and recaptured 44 times.

The Citadel or Tower Museum at the Jaffa Gate, the westernmost entrance to the city, is all the history you can eat in a four hour sitting. It’s a four thousand year old story: from the Canaanites and the Hebrews to the end of the Mandate and the establishment of the State of Israel, via Egyptians, Assyrians, Persians, Greeks, Hasmoneans, Romans, Byzantines, Umayyads, Abbasids, Fatamids, Crusaders, Ayyubids, Tartars, Mongols, Mamluks, Ottomans, British, and even Australians. Each left their mark on Jerusalem, and most planted their brickage upon and within the Citadel.

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There is a long roll-call of famous names who may or may have not resided in the place.

King David didn’t, despite his name being given to the place and the apocryphal story that he once spied on the bathing Bathsheba from its ramparts – indeed, her bathroom is said to be underneath the New Imperial Hotel, just across the way. Nor did his son and heir, Solomon, builder of the First Temple. Conquerors Nebuchadnezzar and Cyrus did not. They just wrecked the joint. Judah Maccabee might have, and those other famous Jewish rebels, the Zealots didn’t, but during Great Revolt, they retreated there and trashed the place. Herod the Great, a psycho with an serious edifice complex, resided here. As did also Procurator Pontius Pilate when he was in town (he preferred the luxuries of Caesaea Maritimus (Latin for “on Sea). Historians now believe that the Citdel was where he actually cast judgement on Jesus, and not in the Antonine Fortress which overlooked the Temple (where the Haram al Sharif now stands) throwing into question the whole basis for the existence of the Via Dolorosa.

Roman general and future emperor Titus would have taken up residence therein after he destroyed the city in 70CE, leaving only the citadel standing. His troops needed somewhere to crash. Constantine didn’t, but his mom Helena most likely did when she “discovered” The True Cross, commissioned the construction of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, and single-handedly invented the Holy Land pilgrim industry that endures to this day. The Muslim conquerors Omar Ibn Khattab, Salah ud-Din, and Baybars may have, but Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the magnificent, who built the city walls we see today, never set foot in Jerusalem, and nor did his successors.

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Ottoman troops occupied it, and General Djemal Pasha would hang Arab Nationalists in the Square before it. General Allenby declared Jerusalem and Palestine liberated on the steps leading to the citadel in 1917, but most likely stayed across the square at our wonderful East New Imperial Hotel (the Kaiser stayed there too when he visited Jerusalem in 1898). British troops garrisoned it during the Mandate years – like the Roman legionaries before them, they’d’ve needed a place to lay their heads. The British-commanded Arab Legion of then Transjordan took control of it in during the the battle for Jerusalem in 1948 and defended it successfully against the new IDF. They did so again in 1967 only to lose it and the Old City.

If the stones could talk, what a tale they would tell. And indeed, the museum now does just that, in content and in form. We sit on the roof garden of our hotel, directly across the street on Omar Ibn Al Khattab Square, and look across at its towers, ramparts and gardens, and sense it’s story in our souls. We watch present generations passing beneath its walls, and the young folk dancing on the ramparts, all part of the passing parade of humanity that has lingered by and upon these ancient walls.

For further reading, you can’t beat Simon Sebag-Montefiore’s Jerusalem : The Biography (Phoenix 2011).

See also in In That Howling Infinite, The Grand Old New Imperial Hotel, and Nova Via Dolorosa. For other posts about Jerusalem see: O Jerusalem

History Lessons

History Lessons

Carnivale

Dancers from the Son et Lumiere promenade

There Rides a Peace Train

Paul Hemphill 1 Comment

“Cause out on the edge of darkness, there rides a peace train.
Oh peace train take this country, come take me home again.”
Cat Stevens, Peace Train

Completed in 2011, the Jerusalem Light Rail unites east and west Jerusalem. This how a light rail should be – small, light, and frequent, on a traffic free Jaffa Road. It links the Jewish suburbs of west and northeast Jerusalem with the Arab suburbs of the north and east of the Old City. The featured picture shows two trains passing at Jaffa Central, underneath a neat mural that shows one weaving down Jaffa Road through vignettes of Israeli urban life. Their destinations are shown sequentially in three languages. Synchronicity determined that in the picture, both were in Arabic.

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It was controversial when first mooted, and extreme elements on both sides of the conflict opposed any such normalization of relations between the Jewish and the Arab communities. There were demonstrations in European countries against the “line that divided a city”, but these petered out when polls showed that Arabs in East Jerusalem found the line to be a blessing. It got dad to work on time; it got mom to the cornucopia that is the Mahane Yehuda fresh food markets, just four stops from the Damascus Gate; and it delivered the kids to school and back safely and punctually. It is said, with some justification, that earlier attacks on the line were perpetrated by thugs incited by Fatah, the political wing of the Palestinian Authority, which is alleged to control the taxi industry of East Jerusalem.

During the recent unrest, the line was often blocked and trains attacked during demonstrations and street fighting, but service was resumed quicksmart. Arab passengers were at times abused by Jews, and stations were the targets of random rammings by cars and heavy vehicles – the so-called “siyarah intifada” – with many Jewish casualties and “neutralized” perpetrators.

If you’ve ever ridden the light rail in Jerusalem, then you’ve seen the section with the chairs that go down when you sit on them – each has a wheelchair sign because people in wheelchairs get priority there since there’s space, but if you’re a mom and you’ve got a stroller, you can sit there, too, and that’s where these two women are sitting: I watched them both get in, one wore a hijab and the other wore a sheitel, and they both had their arms and leg covered, and no collarbone, no sir, and I watched the struggle through the crowd on the light rail with their strollers, big and blue and bulky, match match.

They each took a seat on opposite sides of the row where the wheelchairs go, and they put their strollers in the middle. Each woman stared straight ahead out the window as Jeursalem went by in one long smear, looking straight past each other.

Strangers on a light rail, with their matching strollers, but by accident, their strollers faced each other, and the kids met eye to eye — both bundled up in winter coats and hats and shoes, both brown eyed babes with pink cheeks, and curly hair, well fed and well loved, and they could have been brothers. And while their mothers stared straight ahead watching Jerusalem blur by, the two boys smiled at one another, and chatted back and forth as only little babies can, but as everybody should.

But calm appears to have descended, and folk of good will on all sides of the literal and figurative line pass in peace through Arab and Jewish Jerusalem.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerusalem_Light_Rail

“I believe that one fine day all the children of Abraham
Will lay down their swords forever in Jerusalem”
Steve Earl, Jerusalem

Light Rail Mural, Jaffa Road

Light Rail Mural, Jaffa Road

Facebook Postscript from Sarah Tuttle-Singer, 20th February 2023

If you’ve ever ridden the light rail in Jerusalem, then you’ve seen the section with the chairs that go down when you sit on them – each has a wheelchair sign because people in wheelchairs get priority there since there’s space, but if you’re a mom and you’ve got a stroller, you can sit there, too, and that’s where these two women are sitting: I watched them both get in, one wore a hijab and the other wore a sheitel, and they both had their arms and leg covered, and no collarbone, no sir, and I watched the struggle through the crowd on the light rail with their strollers, big and blue and bulky, match match.

They each took a seat on opposite sides of the row where the wheelchairs go, and they put their strollers in the middle. Each woman stared straight ahead out the window as Jeursalem went by in one long smear, looking straight past each other.

Strangers on a light rail, with their matching strollers, but by accident, their strollers faced each other, and the kids met eye to eye — both bundled up in winter coats and hats and shoes, both brown eyed babes with pink cheeks, and curly hair, well fed and well loved, and they could have been brothers. And while their mothers stared straight ahead watching Jerusalem blur by, the two boys smiled at one another, and chatted back and forth as only little babies can, but as everybody should.

Sarah is an author, blogger and photographer who lives in East Jerusalem and writes The Times of Jerusalem. https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/review-of-jerusalem-drawn-and-quartered-by-sarah-tuttle-singer/

Sarah Tuttle Singer, East Jerusalem

 

 

Small Stories – A Tale of Twin Pines

Paul Hemphill 11 Comments

One of the pleasures of moving to the Australian bush and living in Bellingen Shire is discovering its often overlooked history. This is the story of Twin Pines. Not as dippy as Twin Peaks, nor as sinister as Wayward Pines, it is a story of ordinary people doing extraordinary things.

When I first came to this land,
I was not a wealthy man,
So I built myself a shack,
And I did what I could.

I called my shack
Break My Back,
But the land was sweet and good,
And I did what I could.

When I first came to this land,
I was not a wealthy man.
So I built myself a farm.
I did what I could.

Prologue

We in Bellingen Shire , some ten kilometers west of the seaside town of Urunga on the mid north coast of New South Wales. The Tarkeeth Forest lies between the Bellinger and Kalang Rivers, and these are connected tidally to the ocean at Urunga – the only place in Australia where two rivers meet the ocean together. The forest rises from the rivers on either side of the Fernmount Range, the easternmost extension of the Great Dividing Range that spans the eastern edge of our island continent. Above and between the two rivers, it is a rain-harvesting, filtration and stabilization ecosystem vital to the waterways and wetlands around them, and is a habitat for bird, reptilian, mammalian and marsupial wildlife, including koalas, wallabies, echidnas, quolls, goannas, owls, fruit doves and cockatoos. The east-west Fernmount Range Trail is an ancient highway called the Yildaan Dreaming Track. It led from the plains beyond the Dorrigo massif to what is now the seaside town of Urunga, known then to the Gumbaynggirr people as a “place of plenty”. The first people would descend the spurs on the north and south flanks of the range to fishing and ceremonies on the riverside. The Tarkeeth Forest therefore contains areas of significant indigenous culture, recalling song lines and stories of the Dreamtime, places of ceremony, of birth and burial, and of atrocity.

The Fells of Twin Pines

Exploring the history of the forest, I chanced across Lloyd Fell’s story of the Fell Family Farm. This was located close to the present Twin Pines Trail, just east of Fells Road on South Arm Road, and west of the new bridge across the Kalang. It’s a great story of how the road got its name, and of how, in the late 19th century, Moses Lacey, the first selector, ran a store on the river bank. How back then, there was no road along the river, the South Arm (of the Bellinger), and access to farms along the river was by small jetties. South Arm Road was built to serve a quarry, now disused, just west of the present Fell’s Road.

Lloyd tells the story of how in 1926, New Zealand farmer, solo-yachtsman, and returned ANZAC Chris Fell first saw the land that became the family farm, purchasing it from Moses’s deceased estate for a thousand pounds. Chris was impressed by the two mature pines that stood on either side of the track leading to a rough timber house that already stood there – and these gave the farm its name. He cleared the bush, felling and hauling timber (helped by his neighbour Bennett’s bullock team) until he had sufficient land and capital to run cattle. In time, he built up a prosperous dairy business and cattle stud, and he and his wife Laura, a Sydneysider from a well-to-do Vaucluse family, raised their three children there. It was a hard life on the land back then – one of dedication, hard work, and perseverance. Power did not come to the South Arm until 1959. Many in the Shire still remember Chris and Laura and indeed, went to school with Lloyd, Bill and Margaret. When the kids were young, they went to the small Tarkeeth school house located just west of the present Fells Road junction. There are quite a few folk who remember attending the little school before its closure in 1972. Indeed, since I published the story on a local FaceBook page, and a former pupil published a picture of the Tarkeeth School’s “Class of ’68”, old aquaintances and school chums have reconnected with each other. Here is the History of Tarkeeth School. It can be obtained from Bellingen Museum,

Twin Pines is no more. When Chris could no longer work the farm, Bill took over the business. In 1966, with changes in the dairy industry rendering to business unprofitable, he sold it to the Errington family.They sold it shortly afterwards to Australian Paper Mills who in the early ’80s, sold it to State Forests – now the Forestry Corporation. APM cleared the land and established a flooded gum plantation thereon and on adjacent blocks – today’s Tarkeeth State Forest. That plantation is now being aggressively harvested – clear felled, actually – a matter of considerable concern to us locals and to many in the Shire. in the South, the forest comes right down to the Kalang River, and this too is a cause for concern as the harvesting and reforestation operations involve clearfelling, burning and spraying with herbicide. The consequences of an extreme weather event could be dire.

The farm house was not demolished. When the plantation was established, but was destroyed by fire years later. The school was sold to an Erik Johannsen who lived there for many years with a collection of animals. Tragically, he ended his own life after setting fire to the school. Fells Road puts the family name on the map, and whilst the Errintons did not linger here long, they are remembered in Erringtons Trail, a well-maintained forest track linking South Arm Road to the Fernmount Range Trail and thence the Bellinger Valley. Bennett the bullocky has a trail named for him too. Walking through the Forest Corp plantation, you can still just make out the place where the house stood. There is an old dam in the heart of the bush where tomatoes were once grown. In the the forest, amongst the plantation trees and native regrowth, you will come upon large, old angophera, grey gum, bloodwood and black butt habitat trees, their broad, spreading branches indicating that these once grew in open pasture.

The pines are still there, some ten metres in from South Arm Road. They are not on what is now the Twin Pines Trail, but at the beginning of a trail just to the east of it. A pair of big and beautiful hoop pines. And next to one of them, an old gate post, a dumb signpost to a a vanished past. Furthermore, they have had loads of babies. There are small hoop pines close to their parents, and eastwards along the road towards the new bridge over the Kalang. Nature never sleeps.

Hoop pines at Twin Pines, Tarkeeth

Nothing remains of the Fells farm except some old fence posts, but standing there, it is easy to imagine what it would have been like in those days. But one thing has not changed. Walk into the bush halfway between the pines and Eastern Trail, you will see what Chris Fells discovered back in the ‘thirties:

“Down on the left as you looked out of the house, there was an especially thick, almost impenetrable circle of bush surrounding a small lagoon. Within this, was a haven for all kinds of wildlife such as bandicoots, native possums, snakes, frogs, and and a great assortment of birds: parrots, kingfishers, kookaburras, currawongs, black ducks, bowerbirds, honey-eaters, and by the water itself, the beautiful egrets, ibis and spoonbills. If you peep into the lagoon from the road, its great white paperbark trees, knee-deep in thick green water, gave it an air of mystery and magic”.

And indeed, as the photographs below show, the Tarkeeth Lagoon is still quite special. Folk who grew up on South Arm Road and explored the area as children, still remember the mystery of the place. Those animals and birds still live in the Tarkeeth, but the tall paperbarks have long since fallen and lie as moss and epiphyte-covered sculptures beside the water.

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Read the full story of Twin Pines here in Lloyd Fell’s small but captivating book:

Click to access TwinPinesStory.pdf

Local historian John Lean’s new book “Settlers of South Bellingen and the Lower South Arm”, his “Settlers of the Upper South Arm and Spicketts Creek”, and also, “The History Of Tarkeeth Public School” are available at the Bellingen and Urunga museums.

For other posts in our Small Stories series of ordinary folk doing extraordinary things, see: The schools of the Tarkeeth, another tale from our neck of the woods; The Odyssey of Assid Corban, the story of a Lebanese migrant to New Zealand, and The Monarch of the Sea, the rollicking tale of an unlikely “pirate king”. There is also  No Bull! a true though somewhat overwrought local saga of battling bovines – set in Bonville, not far north of us.

Chris Fell – The ANZAC Story

A century ago, on 31st October 1917, the Australian Light Horse charged the Turkish trenches during the Battle of Beersheba in one of history’s last great cavalry charges. The 31 light horsemen who fell are buried in the Beersheba War Cemetery along with 116 British and New Zealand soldiers who perished in the Beersheba battle. There are 1,241 graves in the military cemetery, soldiers being brought in from other Great War Middle East battlefields. It is a tranquil, poignant, and beautiful place in the Negev Desert, where the bodies of young men from Australia and New Zealand and from the shires of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales were laid to rest. “Lest we forget”.

In his ebook The Twin Pines Story, Lloyd Fell tells how his father served as a mounted machine gunner with the New Zealand forces in the Gaza ampaign of late 1917. His war record reports that he was one of the machine gunners who fought through the day before the famous charge to knock out the Turkish machine guns on the strategic al Saba Hill east of Beersheba. Had these fortifications not been overrun, the Light Horse  would have been prevented from advancing on the wells. Afterwards, the machine gunners and their Kiwi mates took part in a bayonet charge against the enemy.

As Jean Bou wrote in The Weekend Australian:
“The New Zealand brigade was sent against Tel el Saba, but this steep-sided hill with terraced entrenchments was formidable. The dismounted horsemen, with the limited fire support of their machine-gunners and the attached horse artillery batteries, had to slowly suppress the enemy defences and edge their way forward. Chauvel sent light horse to assist, but as the afternoon crawled on, success remained elusive. Eventually the weight of fire kept the defenders’ heads down enough that the New Zealanders were able to make a final assault. The hill was taken and the eastern approach to Beersheba opened, but nightfall was approaching.
See:
http://specialreports.theaustralian.com.au/888793/a-remarkable-feat-of-arms/

Beersheba War Cemetery, Israel

This post opened with that great troubadour Pete Seeger singing Oscar Brand’s celebrated pioneer song. I conclude with his rendering of David Mallet’s tribute to the simple life.

Inch by inch, row by row,
Gonna make this garden grow.
Gonna mulch it deep and low,
Gonna make it fertile ground.

Pullin’ weeds and pickin’ stones,
We are made of dreams and bones
Need spot to call my own
Cause the time is close at hand

Postscript – About Bellingen

We have been visiting Bellingen Shire for the last thirty years, and moved a house onto our bush block over twenty years ago. Bellingen, the Bellinger Valley on the Mid North Coast of New South Wales, is well known as a picturesque, well-preserved (founded in 1870) country town. In former times, it was the centre of a thriving dairy and timber industry, and more recently, as a popular tourist spot between the university city of Armidale and the country music capital of Tamworth to the west, and the Pacific “holiday coast” of Coffs Harbour, Sawtell, Urunga, and Nambucca Heads, to the east, with their sand, surf and sun.

Between the two is the Great Dividing Range, the rolling, high country escarpment of the New England Plateau with its gorges and waterfalls, and the world-heritage Dorrigo National Park with it timeless, untouched rainforests – a “land that time forgot”. And linking them all, the old trunk road, aptly if touristically named Waterfall Way.

Bellingen is popular for its cafes and coffee shops, craft industries and shops, music festivals, and federation facades. It’s visual appeal, and it’s bucolic rural environs have seen the town used on many occasions as a film location. In the seventies, it was a Mecca for young people seeking an alternative lifestyle. The hills thereabout are still scattered with cooperatives and communes, or, in local council-speak, multiple occupancies. In the old days, no love was lost between the “hippies” and the farmers and loggers, and politics were dominated by the rural, conservative “born to rule” National and Country Party. Nowadays, it’s heir, the National Party still dominates the political scene, but its clear majorities decrease fractionally election by election, and by the turn of the century, there may no longer be a National Party member. But demographics do change, as does society. The hippies’ children and the farmers’ kids grew up together, attended the high school together, played, partied, and paired together, and now, there are grand children and great grandchildren.

As the timber and dairy industry has declined, Bellingen’s economy has changed. Once exclusively agrarian – including a time as one of the prime producers of cannabis sativa – tourism now plays a vital role. Bellingen advertises itself to visitors and to present and future residents as a clean, green and sustainable shire. Nature’s wonderland, from its golden beaches to its mountain rainforests and waterfalls. A Tourist Heaven with a cornucopia of recreational activities for young and old – from lazy bathing and picnicking to energetic rambling and trecking, camping and climbing, canoeing and fishing. A cultural mecca with many cafes, live music, craft and artisan shops, and music and writers’ festivals.

Two years ago, the online magazine Traveller published a breathless paean to “the bohemian town that is heaven on earth’. Happy traveller Sheriden Rhodes wrote: Some places are so beautiful; it feels like holy ground. For me, Bellingen has always had that consecrated feeling. It’s obvious, given the name the early pioneers gave the Promised Land, a scenic 10 minute-drive from Bellingen’s township itself. Here the land is so abundantly verdant and fruitful; it literally drips with milk and honey. It’s a place so special the fortunate locals that call it home, including its most famous residents George Negus and David Helfgott would much rather keep all to themselves”.

This is the marketing spin hyped up by the council, the chamber of commerce, and real estate and B&B interests. The reality is somewhat different. Bellingen and the “Holiday Coast” generally have seen a large influx of city folk seeking a different lifestyle for themselves and their children, and also of retirees seeking rural or seaside tranquility – in such numbers that Coffs Harbour and its seaside satellites have become in many ways the Costa Geriatrica.

Many newcomers are not fully aware that the Coffs Coast generally is one of the poorest areas of rural New South Wales. Statistics for youth unemployment and senior poverty are among the highest in the state with all the attendant economic, social and psychological impacts as evidenced by high rates of depression, domestic violence and substance abuse. Health and transport services outside the urban centres are  pretty poor. Rising property values and high rents price low-income families and singles out of the market. Decreasing profit margins have forced many of those attractive cafes and coffee shops to close.

Nor is the clean, green, sustainable shire as picture perfect as the brochures portray It. There is environmental degradation with clear-felling and land-clearing, and flammable, monoculture, woodchip-bound eucalyptus plantations that encircle Bellingen – a potential fire bomb primed to explode during one of our scorching, hot dry summers. There is generational degradation of the Bellinger’s banks and the graveling up of its once deep depths. And there the encroachment and expansion of water-hungry, pesticide and herbicide reliant blueberry farms,

But on the right side of the ledger, we in the Shire are indeed blessed by Mother Nature. The coastline boasts magnicent headlands and promontories, and long, pristine and often deserted beaches. The World Heritage Gondwana rainforests are a national treasure, and surrounding national parks truly are a natural wonderland. We never tire of the drive from Urunga to Armidale via Waterfall Way, as it crosses the Great Dividing Range and the New England Plateau. The Kalang River as it flows beside South Arm Road and between the Tarkeeth and Newry State Forests is itself one of the Shire’s hidden and largely unvisited secrets, a haven for fishermen, canoeist and all who love mucking about in boats.

Compared to many places on this planet, we’ve really not much to complain about …

Sic semper tyrannis

Paul Hemphill 5 Comments

You come at the king, you best not miss.
Omar Little, The Wire (after RW Emerson)

The phrase “one man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist” is at once apt, correct, and yet often oversimplified to the point of disingenuousness. The word “terrorist” itself describes its goal. To instill fear in the heart of the enemy. In the past, the target would have been the king, the dictator, the ruling class, and those who served them and upheld their rule. Politicians, officials, solders and policemen. Today, terrorists indiscriminately target whole societies. Irish bombers blasted communities of the rival faith, murdered shoppers, office workers, and pub patrons, as well as soldiers and policemen. Palestinian suicide bombers hit malls and pizza bars in city centres. ISIS, al Qa’ida and the Taliban detonate cars in busy city streets and publicly execute prisoners in callous and calculating “lectures in flesh” (the phrase is civil rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson’s, from his chilling account of the trials and execution of King Charles I of England and those who sentenced him, The Tyrannicide Brief.).

But targeted and random terrorism has a long historical pedigree. For centuries, it has been the desperate and nihilistic weapon of last resort of resistance and rebellion against perceived oppression and injustice, and against invaders and occupiers.

In the second century BCE Palestine, the Maccabees used assassination in their resistance to the Seleucid Greeks, and a century later, the Jewish zealots, the Sicarii, named for the easily concealed small daggers, paid the Romans in like coin, and ultimately in an insurrection that culminated in the destruction of Jerusalem in 70CE and the scattering of the Jewish race (giving history the emotive and symbolic last exit that was Masada). In an etymological irony that Mark Twain would have been proud of, the present unrest in Jerusalem, a large number of young Palestinians have perished in attempting to stab jewish soldiers and civilians. Their jaquerie is called the “Intifada Sakni-in”, the ‘Knife Uprising – an echo of those long-dead Sicarii “dagger men”.

Nowadays, one would be excused for thinking that “terrorism” and “terrorist” are synonymous with Arabs and Muslims. And a historical precedent reinforces this erroneous assumption. The Hashishan or “Assassins” of Middle East fame (yes, that is where that noxious noun originated) were Muslim men and boys mesmerized and mentored by Rashid ad Din as Sina-n, the “Old Man of the Mountain” (and all this, before Osama in the caves of Tora Bora), and were Twelfth Century  hit-men contracted out to rival Muslim princes in the internecine conflicts that plagued the Levant in the wake of the Crusades and the demise of the great Arab Caliphates.

But the assassin’s knife (and in modern times, the gun and bomb, and latterly cars and trucks) predates these medieval hoods and links the Hebrew rebels of old to the Irgun and Stern Gang who encouraged Britain and the UN to abandon Palestine in 1948, bequeathing most of it to the new state of Israel, and triggering the Palestinian diaspora. European anarchists and Irish rebels and loyalists were adept at shootings and ambushes. In Algeria, during the ‘fifties, the nationalist FLN and the “colon” OAS shot and bombed each other and those unfortunates caught in the crossfire. The IRA perfected the improvised explosive device that today has crippled thousands of American, Canadian, and Australian soldiers in Iraq abd in Afghanistan. Hindu Tamil separatists of Sri Lanka introduced the suicide bomber, an economical and efficient weapon against soft (civilian, that is) targets, deployed today by Islamist killers in the streets of London and Lahore, Damascus and Dar es Salaam, Jerusalem and Jakarta. Whilst Arabs – and particularly Palestinians may have given the world the hijacking of aircraft – a tactic that fell into disuse due to diminishing political returns and rapid response forces – other Arabs showed us how to fly them into public buildings as the whole world watched in horror and disbelief. The shockwaves of this one are still reverberating through the deserts of the east and the capitals of the western world.

In going up up against their occupiers, the Palestinians have an old heritage. In my old country, Boudicca and Caractacus fought a losing battle against the Romans in Britain during the First CE. The Roman historian Tacitus ascribed to a vanquished chieftain the memorable words  “solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant” – they make a desert and they call it peace. After the battle of Hastings in 1066, the defeated Saxons pushed back against the Normans and brought the genocidal wrath of William the Conqueror down on their heads with the devastating “Harrying of the North”. The Green Man and Robin Hood legends are said to be a retrospective and romanticised remembering of the Saxon resistance. Warrior fugitives from that failed guerilla war fled as far as Constantinple, where many joined the Emperor’s acclaimed Varangarian Guard, (see When Harald Went A Viking) 

In the streets and the countryside of Ireland, my parents’ birthplace, the United Irishmen, Fenians, Free Staters, IRA and Unionists fought against the redcoats, tommies, and black and tans of the British Army. Fought amongst themselves, fought against each other, and killed and were killed in their centuries long war of liberation. And in my adopted country, indigenous Australians fought a futile frontier war against settlers and soldiers just as native Americans did, albeit on a much smaller scale, and paid the price in hangings, massacres, poisoned wells, dispossession, marginalization, and “stolen children”. The legacy of those times lingers still – see The Frontier Wars – Australia’s heart of darkness.

In Central America, Juarez led the Mexicans against the French, and Sandino, Nicaraguans against US marines. Spaniards rose up against Napoleon’s forces, giving the world the word “guerilla”, or “little war”. Russian partisans ambushed the Grande Armé and the Wehrmacht. Throughout occupied Europe, the very term “resistance” became synonymous with the heroic unequal struggle against tyranny. In another of history’s ironies, muqa-wamat, Arabic word for resistance, unites sectarian rivals Hamas and Hizbollah against Israel.

And not just resistance to invasion and occupation, but also against oppression by one’s own rulers. Religious tracts tie themselves in knots reconciling the obligation to obey our rulers with the right to resist and overthrow those that rule badly. The unequal struggle against tyranny – or what is perceived by the perpetrators as tyranny – is the cause that inspires men and women to desperate acts.

The most celebrated in fact, film and fiction is the death of Julius Caesar at the hands of peers who feared that he intended to usurp the ostensibly democratic Republic (ostensible because democratic it was not) and institute one-man rule. That ended badly for the conspirators, and for Rome, as it precipitated years of civil war and ultimately, half a century of empire).

In 1880 the reforming Czar Alexander II of Russia, discovered the hard way that liberating the serfs did not inoculate himself against the bomb that took his legs and his life. His fearful and unimaginative successors hardened their hearts and closed their minds against further reform. setting in train the crackdown on dissent and democratic expression that led eventually to the storming of the Winter Palace on Petrograd in 1917. Narodnaya Volya, the killers called themselves – the People’s Will. And that is what terrorists do. They appeal and owe fealty to a higher court, a greater good, a savage God.

So it was when student and Serbian nationalist Gavril Princip assassinated Archduke Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary in June 1914 and ignited the spark that lit the conflagration of World War 1 which precipitated the demise of the old European empires.

So too when John Brown and his sons brought their broadswords to bear on slavers and their sympathizers and made a date with destiny at Harpers Ferry. Their famous raid may or may not have accelerated the downward slide to the secession and civil war that erupted the following year, but it provided a moral and symbolic prelude and also, the resonating battle hymn of the republic. John Wilkes Booth bookended this bloody era with his histrionic and public murder of Abraham Lincoln, shouting “sic semper tyrannis”, “thus always to tyrants,” attributed to Brutus at Caesar’s assassination – today, it’s the Virginia state motto. Brown and Booth were quite clear in their motives. As was were the segregationalist shooters who did for African Americans Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King. Less so were the killers of the Kennedy brothers in the sixties.

To conclude, sometimes that savage, rebel God is one of faith, sometimes, of blood and soil. In some instances, it is revenge for wrongs real and imagined – the reasons at times lost or forgotten through the passage of time and fading memories. And often, “the cause” is corrupted by the immoral economics of illicit commerce, including contraband, kidnapping, blackmail and extortion. Sometimes all merge in an incongruous hybrid of religious passion, ethic identity, libertarian or anarchistic fervour, and protection racket. As was the case in Northern Ireland, in Lebanon, in sub-Saharan Africa, and currently so in Syria and Iraq.

But most times, terror and turmoil is simply a political weapon planned, targeted and executed as a mechanism of regime change. Rebellion, revolt and revolution. Resisting, opposing, challenging, confronting and defeating the central authority. The seizing, holding, consolidation and keeping of political power.

And one thing is for sure. The outcome is unpredictable. History does not move in straight lines, but often follows a bitter and twisted path. Cliched as it is, the phrase “be careful what you wish for” is an apt one. And when, as Bob Dylan sang, “the line it is drawn, the curse it is cast”, there is no going back. To quote WB Yeats’ famous lines, “all is changed, changed utterly”.

Terrorism, then, can shift the course of history. If we were to stumble into the swamp of alternative histories, imagine what might of happened

If Caesar had walked home from the senate on the Ides of March
If Lincoln had been able to guide the Reconstruction
If the reforming Czar had introduced democratic government to Russia
If Gavril Princip’s shot had missed the archduke
If Kennedy had returned from Dallas
If John Lennon outlived George Harrison
If Yitzak Rabin had left the peace concert in Tel Aviv
If the Twin Towers stood still

To quote “Stairway to Heaven”, a curiously apposite title given the millenarian mindset of many terrorists, “Oh, it makes you wonder!”

Thermidorian Thinking … a revolutionary reverie

Paul Hemphill 6 Comments

I fought in the old revolution
on the side of the ghost and the King.
Of course I was very young
and I thought that we were winning;
I can’t pretend I still feel very much like singing
as they carry the bodies away.
Leonard Cohen, The Old Revolution

‘Thermidorian’ refers to 9th Thermidor Year II (27 July 1794), the date according to the French Republican Calendar, when Robespierre, Danton and other radical revolutionaries came under concerted attack in the National Convention, resulting in their downfall and execution.

Grim travelers butt each other to establish dominance. One lot plays Danton to another’s Robespierre, with the moderate Manon Roland and her Girondins trampled underfoot in the melee. On the scaffold, Madame Roland is said to have exclaimed “O Liberté! O Liberté! que de crimes on commet en ton nom”. Maximillian Robespierre destroys his erstwhile friends and slaughters thousands, precipitating the Jacobin meltdown as the ascetic and purist Marat is murdered in his bath. Robespierre and Saint-Just are guillotined by those who believe “the Terror” had gone too far, soon to be followed by fellow Jacobins Georges Danton and Camille Desmoulins. [Hilary Mantel’s excellent door-stop of a debut novel, A Place of Greater Safety, tells the story of all these revolutionaries. The bones of most of them rest amongst those of tens of thousands of others in the famously macabre Catecombes de Paris, a “tourist” attraction I highly recommend]

I would argue that this “Thermidorian Reaction” – the ostensibly “better angels of our nature” (Abraham Lincoln said that) reasserting themselves – is a rare bird indeed. Inevitably, things get worse, much worse, before they get better. As WH Auden observes in his sombre eclogue The Age  of Anxiety, “many have perished: more will”. 

Revolutions are unpredictable. They never run in straight lines. They reverberate, the shockwaves expanding and impacting on their vicinity, and way beyond. The shots ricochet, like drive-bys and crossfires, and you never know who will be hit, where the bullets will come to rest, and who will be damaged or destroyed. Many people will be liberated, and many enslaved. Many peoples will prosper, and many, many will perish. As TS Elliot wrote, “between the idea and the reality falls the shadow”.”

Stalin seizing Lenin’s crown as the father of the revolution lay dying. Trotsky launching the Red Army against the sailors of Kronstadt whose guns had heralded the fall of the Romanovs, and who then fought to last man against their former comrades. Stalin and Trotsky wrestling for control of party and power as the old Bolsheviks disappeared into the gulags and the execution cells. Stalin’s long arm putting an ice pick through his rival’s skull in Mexico decades later. Trotsky knew a thing or two about “permanent revolution. See Red and white terror – the Russian revolution and civil war and Stalin’s Great Terror

Adolf Hitler making his move against the corrupt and sybaritic Rohm and his Brown Shirt bully boys, a threat to his control of party and state, in the “Night of the Long Knives”, and setting the course for a Germany’s slow spiral to damnation with the plausible deniability of the similarly dramatically named Kristalnacht. The German language has surely given the world ominous words of iron, including Nacht und Nebel; Storm und Drang; Weltanschauung, Blitzkrieg and Schadenfreude – none of them boding well for tyranny’s unwelcome attentions.

It is a zero-sum play book well-thumbed by latter-day revolutionists like the Baathists Saddam Hussein and Hafiz Assad in their relentless and merciless accession to power in Iraq and Syria respectively, like the cruel and vengeful but infinitely pragmatic regime that has ruled Iran’s Islamic Republic for these past forty years, and the kleptocratic dictators who lord over much of Sub-Saharan Africa. In the manner of revolutions past and present, each one has “devoured its children”, harrying, jailing, exiling and slaughtering foes and onetime allies alike.

The sad reality in so many countries is that when the going gets tough, the mild get going, and the hard men ride roughshod over their people.

Vengeful, vindictive. Merciless. Unforgiving and never forgetting. Do no deals. Take no prisoners. Give no quarter.

Also in In That Howling Infinite:  A Political World – Thoughts and Themes

Bolshevik recruiting poster 1917

Danton, Robespierre, Desmoulin, and Manon Roland

Danton, Robespierre, Desmoulins, and Manon Roland

 

Fact or Fiction = Friction

Paul Hemphill 3 Comments

A Contemplation of Historical Fiction in Book and Film

A post in the British Medieval History Facebook Group a couple of years back happily anticipated the upcoming showing on US TV channels of the adaptation of British author Philippa Gregory’s War of the Roses White Queen Trilogy. A tiny stone created large ripples. Over 400 comments weighed the pros and cons of the book, the film, and also, the fact that a fictionalized version of history was being discussed so enthusiastically among the ought-to-be seriously-minded group. Much midnight oil was burned over its historical accuracy or lack thereof. There was even hint of transatlantic conflict with American members being overwhelmingly ”pro” for each of the aforementioned and many – but not that many, really – British members being “con”.

I joined those in favour, contributing a mini review: “Good-looking historical soapie, but a story well told, well presented, well cast, and well acted. The whole yarn is there. The power plays, the politics, the treachery, and the bloodletting. The princes in the tower. Clarence drowned in the butt of booze. My horse, my horse, my kingdom for a whole posse of horses. The lead, Rebecca Ferguson, the blonde with the sword in our featured image, was the Bond girl in Spectre, but don’t let that put you off. Richard of Gloucester, who became R3, was perhaps too good looking. He is played by Aneurin Barnard, a fine British actor who did very well as Cilla Black’s beau Bobby in Cilla, as  photographer David Bailey in We’ll Take Manhattan, as Boris Drubetskoy in the BBC’s recent War and Peace. And James Frain, who played a smooth and sinister Cromwell in The Tudors, is an obsessive, controlling Warwick the Kingmaker”.

The robust exchange of views among group members inspired me to contemplate the connection between historical fiction and the real deal. What follows is a subjective amble through some of the highs and lows of historical film and fiction. It is a personal reflection, self-indulgent, and replete with comments, asides and digressions.

I confess a liking for slash and bash, doublet and hose, cloak and gown, suddsers. Indeed, to enlarge the historical envelope somewhat, i am partial to the “sword and sandal” epics or yore also, but I’ll l leave those for another day. Whilst I very rarely read the books (there are just too many other things to absorb nowadays), I relish the film adaptations – usually with a nice wine and an iPad and Wikipedia on hand to fact check. I am not too fussy – or high-brow – when it comes to entertainment. I am of the “I like what I like school” of literary appreciation, and I can watch the good, the bad, and the “this doesn’t really do anything for me” (although I have been getting fussier of late).

The Tudors

Tudor eye candy

Some can be excellent. The Tudors was addictive and sumptuous to behold, with its more gorgeous-than-life casting of the lead players. Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn will forever be Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Natalie Dormer for me, notwithstanding Nat’s gorgeous but doomed Marjaery Tyrell in the “you either love it or you hate it” Game of Thrones mega mythology and JRM’s sexy soccer coach in Bend it Like Beckham. The series was bright, glittering, and sexy, with an air of perpetual treachery and danger. Wolf Hall, by contrast, was dark and brooding (not just the candle-lit interiors), dour and doleful, with an air of perpetual treachery and danger – but it was not a patch on Hilary Mantel’s masterful novels.  The jewel in the crown has to be the late-seventies sword and sandals saga I Claudius, the life and times of a typical dysfunctional, incestuous, and vicious Roman family that was, to  borrow Lady Caroline Lamb’s description of Lord Byron, mad, bad and dangerous to know. All three were  relatively historically accurate, though with a fair bit of poetic license for dramatic effect.

I Claudius

I Claudius

Not all are this good, however. The adaption of Ken Follett’s cathedral-constructing edifice, The Pillars of the Earth, was like watching paint dry, and its sequel, World Without End outdid it in ennui and melodrama, notwithstanding its concluding twist on what may or may not have really happened to bad, sad King Edward II. The adaptation of Kate Mosse’s Labyrinth, a strange hotchpotch of magic and modernity told a story of the Albigensian Crusade and the persecution of the Cathars in 13th Century France, and was laboured and contrived. But even with these lacklustre longueurs, I hung in to the literally and figuratively bitter end. Historically accurate? Yeah, but, no but, yeah but…

Even second division movies like King Arthur, Gladiator and Kingdom of Heaven can draw me in if well directed, well told, and cinematographically well depicted. When it comes to film-making, Ridley Scott, who directed the latter two, can do no wrong, although he can be hit and miss when it comes to the story line (he fares much better with Sci Fi – think Alien and Blade Runner – than with history). There are exceptions: Braveheart (and not just because the wigs looked like they were purchased from the people who gave us Conan the Barbarian), Troy, which was, well, kind of odd (including, as it did, Brad Pitt’s grumpy, well-buffed Achilles), and Oliver Stone’s Alexander which was actually unwatchable – I gave up on it, and I reckon Colin Farrell would leave this one off his cv.

King Arthur

King Arthur

Fine fiction and, indeed, fine plays often make for fine films. Ian McEwan’s Atonement (prewar England and Dunkirk), David Lean’s Dr Zhivago (the Russian Revolution and Civil War) and Margaret Mitchell’s “Gone with the Wind” (the Old South, before, during and after the Civil War). Alexander Dumas’s La Reine Margot was transformed into a beautiful, brutal and sad film by Patrice Chereau (dynastic skulduggery and religious persecution in sixteenth century France). Then there is Robert Bolt’s A Man for all Seasons (Thomas More versus Henry VIII), James Goldman’s The Lion in Winter (Henry II versus his wife and sons), and Jean Anouilh’s Becket (Henry II again, versus his troublesome priest). Though all talk and no action – this trio were plays after all – they were beautifully rendered with stellar casts, each portraying a king who had to deal with opinionated, difficult people, each echoing Christoper Marlowe’s Edward II: “Was ever king thus overruled as I ?”

Moreover, high-end historical fiction has entered the literary canon. Like Robert Graves’ I Claudius, Alexander Dumas’ Three Musketeers, Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities,  Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Mikhail Sholokov’s And Quiet Flows the Don, Boris Pasternak’s Dr Zhivago, and Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. Each of these have made the transition to film, some with more success than others. Are there contemporary works that might enter the pantheon? What do you think? Maybe Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy – and also, her debut, A Place of Greater Safety, a French Revolution door-stop and a masterful retelling of those tortured times.

Queen Margot

Queen Margot

Probably the most controversial historical film of all time is David Lean’s “Lawrence of Arabia”. Historians, critics, and partisans of all faiths and factions have argued about this one ever since it first screened back in 1962. It is a deeply flawed film insofar as it reflects a condescending Orientalism, but a timeless masterpiece nonetheless. Love it or loathe it, one cannot deny the charismatic performance of Peter O’Toole, and the magnificent wide-screen vistas of Jordan’s Wadi Rum. That first vista of the desert sunrise with the music of Maurice Jarre. Man! Another film of that ilk – and also one of my all time favourites –  is John Huston’s “ The Man Who Would be King”, a ‘boy’s own’ venture based loosely on a story by poet and Empire booster Rudyard Kipling.

Sean Connery and Michael Caine go “undercover” in The Man Who Would Be King

I tend to skip the Mid Nineteenth Century and early twentieth century, which rules out quite a bit of Victoriana and Edwardiana – including “Downton Abbey”, Dickens, Jane Austen, and Emily Bronte. But that is more a matter of personal taste than a dislike for this period. Where does the recent Rajarama “Indian Summers” fit into this mix? A steamy, scenic, well-dressed melodrama of class, caste and copulation set in exotic and tumultuous times. Or the Anglo-Indian ‘upstairs-downstairs’ film “The Viceroy’s House”, a Romeo and Juliet story set against the political duplicity, violence and death of the partition of India in 1947.

To my mind , one of the most enthralling and memorable of historical dramas I have seen is David Milch’s magnificent “Deadwood”. It is set in the eighteen seventies, and is a western too! It ticks all the parental guidance boxes: substance abuse, sexual scenes, strong language, and adult themes. And as a bonus, the acting is superb, the characterization likewise, and the script that traverses from the sacred to the (very) profane and borrows heavily from the raw vernacular and language that channels Shakespeare and Melville. Its lead, Ian McShane, portraying the vicious, conniving, whore-master Al Swearagen, went on to play eccentric Swearagenesque cameos in the aforementioned “Pillars of the Earth” (with predictable, and in that bland film, welcome profanities), in “Game Of Thrones” (an imagining of Al as if he were later to repent and forswear his wicked ways?), and even in a Woody Allen B-movie (“Scoop”, in case you’re interested).

Deadwood

Deadwood

The historical dramas I enjoy can be relatively modern too if they reflect and contemplate well how folk lived, loved and perished in the near past. “Foyle’s’ War”, for example, captures perfectly the ethos and the spirit of place of Britain during the Second World War. Likewise “The Hour” beautifully recreates Britain during the nineteen fifties, just as “Mad Men” draws you back into moods, manners, music and mores of the sixties and early seventies.

But, let’s return to where I began.

Does historical fiction have a place in a History Group forum? Particularly if it plays fast and loose with the established historical record and substitutes glitz and glamour for historical realism.

Historical fiction is for many folk the portal into a lifelong passion for history. And so it was for me. As a young lad growing up in early sixties Birmingham, I devoured Louise Andrews Kent’s “boys own” explorer series.  I “went with” them all: Columbus, Marco Polo, Drake, Magellan, and Vasco da Gama. In a sense, I am still travelling with them and their successors both noble and notorious: Cortez and Pizarro, Lewis and Clark, Burton and Speke, Gertrude Bell and Freya Stark, and many others. My adolescent yearnings were sublimated by Sergeanne Golon’s almost soft-porn melodramas featuring the beautiful and pneumatic heroine Angelique. This was my introduction to the history of seventeenth century France: Richelieu, Louis Quatorz, Huguenots, Versailles, and the rest. She was actually bedded by the Sun King himself, and on another exotic frolic, amongst the Barbary pirates, landed herself in the Sultan’s harem. Such thrills for a young lad!

The seed was sown. And good teachers can inspire deeper, and even intense interest. Once my interest in history had been piqued as a youngun’, it was a fabulous teacher who channeled that interest into exploration and inquiry, and a charismatic and wise tutor at university, a Hungarian emigre and refugee of 1956, who despatched me down academic paths. The times were right too – the mid to late sixties, when questioning and dissent were in the air, and old shibboleths were being broken down. Timothy Leary advised that we ought not believe what those in authority told us, and this applied to all authorities, be they political, spiritual, social or intelkectual. I did not cleave to an academic path, however. Travel, romance, and music cast me up on other shores.  But the spirit of history still moved me and moves me still.

As for my historical education, the rest, as they say, is history. Or, to quote Saint Paul, “I put off childish things”, and got into the heavy stuff. My point being that young persons’ fiction, and grown-ups’ mass-market (some call it “pulp”) fiction like that of Philippa Gregory, Paulina Simons, and Bernard Cornwell’s Grail Quest, Sharpe and Anglo-Saxon series are inspired by and in turn, inspire an abiding interest in history. An old soldier once told me that he reckoned Zoe Oldenbourg’s “Heirs of the Kingdom”, a tale of the First Crusade and the bloody conquest of Jerusalem, was probably one of the most realistic and visceral depictions of warfare that he had read.

Talking of ‘series’, there is a worrying tendency of writers these days to fail to stop at the red light of one book. I blame it all on Frank Herbert and the fourth, fifth and sixth volumes of his “Dune Trilogy” (he really should have stopped at two!). There was, however a series that I devoured back in the nineteen seventies: George McDonald Fraser’s rollicking, picareque, and quite political incorrect Flashman books. These saw the eponymous anti-hero (the unreconstructed villain in Thomas Hughes’ Victorian yarn “Tom Brown’s Schooldays”) roving and rogering his way through the late nineteenth century, somehow managing to escape by the skin of his teeth from one military disaster after another, including Custer’s famous demise at Little Big Horn, and the last stand of the 44th Foot at Gandamak during the disastrous First Afghan War of 1842, One outstanding volume sees the pusillanimous Flashie fleeing eastwards out of The Crimea having precipitated the disastrous Charge Of the Light Brigade (Captain Nolan was fitted up – and we have had a long poem and at least two questionable films inflicted upon us) and making his way through the vast Asian hinterland, one step ahead of the invading Czarist armies, and of sundry Muslim warlords. Amidst the humour is a poignant reminder of those ‘lost worlds’ that succumbed to the relentless blade of progress,

Gandamak

                                                                          Gandamak

So, to conclude this self-indulgent post, I think my own position on the usefulness of historical fiction is transparently in the affirmative notwithstanding that I am a history tragic and news junkie, and most of my reading is non-fiction. I love walking down what Welsh poet RS Thomas called ‘the long road of history. My favourite quotation is that of Irish writer John Banville: “the past beats inside my like a second heart”.

Because as human beings, one thing is for certain:  we all love a good story. As they say, in Arabic, as indeed in all tongues, times and places, “ka-n ya ma ka-n bil ‘adim izzama-n wa sa-lifi al aSri  wa la-wa-n”‘ or, “once upon an time”.

The Man who Saved the Wall

Paul Hemphill 3 Comments

One of the highlights of last years’ travel in northern England was our visit to Hadrian’s Wall. In Roman Wall Blues, I wrote of the magical museum at Vindolanda, the Roman town just south of the wall, and contemplated the lives of those memorialized within. Earlier that day, we had walked through Chesters Fort, where the wall crosses the Tyne, the best preserved Roman cavalry fort in Britain.

image

Adjacent to the fort is a small but significant museum. It was here that we learned that what we are able to walk through and and wonder at today, we owe to the dedication, foresight, and finance of one man: John Clayton, one of the great unsung saviours of Britain’s historical heritage. His monument is the Chesters Roman Fort Museum which houses the Clayton Collection of 5,500 catalogued items from many sites on the central section of the wall.

A classically educated Victorian gentleman who combined demanding roles running the family law firm and acting as town clerk for the city of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Clayton had a passion for archaeology and the Roman military legacy in his beloved Northumberland.

Were it not for Clayton, large parts of Hadrian’s Wall would have disappeared as the industrial revolution fuelled the demand for stone to build factories, mines and mills. His role in the preservation and survival of Chesters Roman Fort is undisputed.

During the early 19th century, Clayton lived at Chesters House in the parkland surrounding the Roman fort,  and from an early age he was fascinated by the Roman relics surrounding him. By the 1830s,  he began buying land to preserve the Wall. This was at a time when what is now a World Heritage Site was little understood, and indeed, was being unthinkingly destroyed through  the quarrying and removal of its stones for reuse in industrial and urban development.

Clayton’s enthusiasm helped preserve the central stretch of Hadrian’s Wall that includes Chesters (Cilurnum), Housesteads and Vindolanda. He carried out some of the first archaeological excavations on the Wall, carried out restoration work, and brought early tourism to the area by displaying some of the finds at Chesters. Clayton managed the estate and its farms for sixty years, generating the funds to finance to fund further preservation and restoration work on the Wall. He never married, and died in 1890.

The museum housing the Clayton Collection was opened adjacent to the fort site in 1903, 13 years after his death. Today, it is privately owned, but is curated by English Heritage on behalf of the Trustees of the Clayton Collection, and it has been refurbished to brin to contemprary standards of conservation, display, and interpretation. And yet, great care has been taken to respect its period character, and to retain the feel of a 19th century gentleman antiquarian’s collection,  with  many of the labels and original cases having been retained.

Click his name to read more about John Clayton and his museum.

see also my alternative Roman history in Roman Holiday. 

And the video, Roman Holiday in History.

John Clayon

Adele walks down to the best Roman baths in Britain

Adele walks down to the best Roman baths in Britain