The walls have ears

Caricature of Oscar Wilde from an 1884 edition of Vanity Fair. (Source: Wikipedia)

The poet and playwright, Oscar Wilde has sometimes been quoted as saying that he liked talking to brick walls. They were the only thing that didn’t contradict him he said, but then this was coming from the man who also alleged he was in a war to the death with his wallpaper. “One or the other of us has to go,” he explained to a friend shortly before cashing in his chips for the last time.

There are lots of walls. We use them to separate cities, to protect borders and to divide. On an emotional scale they save the sensitive and protect from melancholy and despair, but if as they say, the walls really could speak, I wonder what they might say about the last 150 years of life here at Yallambie?

“Come right on in fellas. I’ve had a touch of the old lumbago down the hall of late, but nothing you’ll find a lick of paint won’t soon put right.”

The late Glen Dudley, piper of the Clan Lachlan Society of Victoria at Yallambie, 1998. (McLachlan)

Sometimes it seems to me that the life and times of an old building get absorbed with time into the fabric of a place. It happens in ways that aren’t altogether explainable, and to tell you the truth, are not even entirely rational. It’s a part of the bigger picture of living they will tell you, but what is really meant by this is that it’s part of a much, much smaller picture, the vibrational frequencies of the structures of all things in the face of a chaotic universe. To our brains this translates into mathematical equations which are used to explain the fundamentals of science, but to our ears it takes the form of musical ratios measured between sonic frequencies. Many therapists believe now that music and sound can play an important role in mind-body mechanisms, aiding consciousness, communication and emotion in ways that promote general health and well-being. I don’t know if this might be overstating the case, but we all know how a heard piece of favoured music can make you feel and how it can take you off to another place in time and space.

Light trap at Yallambie in the 1890s with people pictured on the verandah holding musical instruments. (Source: Bill Bush collection)

The Colonials, a Australian bush band playing at Yallambie, 1996. (McLachlan)

Poetry readings by members of the Banyule City Theatre, 1998. (McLachlan)

Harpsichordist, Priscilla Alderton at Yallambie, 1999. (McLachlan)

Music was apparently always going to be part and parcel of life at Yallambie Homestead and provisions were made for it at an early point when the original drawing and smoking rooms were combined into a larger space. When the skirting boards were removed and replaced in the resulting, rather long and skinny room at the front of the house at the start of this century, I found the boards in there had been marked on the reverse sides by a builder from an earlier era with the simple inscription, “music room”, giving some idea to the expected function of the room. It’s certainly served us in this way more than once over the years and we have used it as a stage for concerts of various type, from soulful jazz and Australian folk to poetry readings, piano concertos and harpsichord recitals.

The Tre Fontane Music Ensemble at Yallambie, 1998. (McLachlan)

The latest instalment of this story started last year with a chance encounter at the MCG with the widely regarded Australian lutenist, Rosemary Hodgson. We’ve known Rosemary for a long time, ever since she played at Yallambie on a couple of occasions in Early Music ensembles at the start of her career, but in between barracking for Geelong, we managed to ask if she’d be interested in doing something at the house again. She told us that she was curating an Early Music festival in 2024, the inaugural Melbourne Lute Festival for which she would be bringing the world-renowned, Swedish born lute player Jakob Lindberg for a series of small concerts and lute master classes. Would we like to be involved?

“The walls have ears.” Jakob Lindberg and ear. here, April, 2024. (McLachlan)

Jakob Lindberg takes a bow, April, 2024. (McLachlan)

So it was Jakob Lindberg played here on a Friday afternoon earlier this month, choosing Thomas Wragge’s original dining room at the back of the house as his stage after testing the acoustics of the smaller room. It was an honour and delight to meet this talented and unassuming musician, to hear his music and to mix with an audience of mainly Early Music players, including a lutenist (lute player) from just across the River in Montmorency and a luthier (lute maker) from not much further away, in Ivanhoe. The lute is an ancient instrument with origins in the Near East, made popular in the Courtly life of the European Renaissance, but apparently it is an instrument that for all this is alive and well today in the middle suburbs of Melbourne.

Jakob’s playing sounded wonderful, the exquisite notes of lute and theorbo seeming to hang in the air before fading off into the outer silence beyond. He played expertly and with feeling, using Stephen Gottlieb built instruments lent to him by Rosemary for the occasion. Jakob told me later that the lute he plays at home in the UK is a late 16^th Century original made by Sixtus Rauwolf, a German maker from Augsburg. A quick look at Jakob’s Wikipedia entry lists dozens upon dozens of his recording projects, presumably with and without this lute, but almost as an afterthought, Wikipedia also gives him a screen credit for a 1983 appearance in an episode of Dr Who.

Now you’re talking. A musician with a touch of the Time Lord about him. It’s beginning to make sense.

Two album recordings by Jakob Lindberg.

I’m left to wonder at what it must feel like to be a Time Lord, to play with skill on a musical instrument of such antiquity, an instrument built at a time when Terra Australis was yet unknown to Europeans. Whose fingers once formed notes on those ancient frets? Where were those notes heard and how much dust are those fingers now? These questions remind me of a place, a camp at a ruined Crusader castle years ago on a lonely hillside somewhere in the Middle East where I listened in the still air of the evening dusk to an album of Troubadour music that I had taken with me on my travels. I remember the feeling as I closed my eyes to the music and imagined the place alive again. As I close my eyes today in Yallambie in 2024, I remember the music and I see that place, even now.

“…a lonely hillside somewhere in the Middle East…” (McLachlan)

So called “Neanderthal Flute”, a 60,000 year cave bear bone with apparently deliberately spaced tone holes. (Source: Wikipedia)

That’s the thing about music. It has this ability to take us off at the time of listening to another time and another place. Music is the one thing that unites us as a human species, crossing barriers of language and emotions. Some scientists would have us believe that the process of producing sounds artificially and arranging them into pleasing progressions even crosses the divisions of nature, and indeed is older than the species itself. This is a hotly debated subject you can bet, but the finding of a 60,000-year-old cave bear bone in Slovenia, pierced with what are apparently deliberately spaced holes forming an object somewhat resembling a flute, has been proposed by archaeologists as evidence of the music making abilities of Neanderthal man. Imagine that. A caveman hopping about on one leg like a prehistoric Jethro Tull, blowing down the hollow bone left over from his lunch. Not so very different to Ian Anderson in his heyday, really.

As for that great master of the epigram, poor old Oscar Wilde, I don’t suppose at the end there was too much music left in him, banged up as he was inside the solid masonry walls of Reading Gaol in the last years of his life. By then I reckon Oscar would probably have welcomed a bit of conversation, even the occasional contradiction from the walls as he marked off the days of his lonely existence with scratch marks onto the paperless bricks of the prison cell.

Of the condemned man at Reading, Oscar would write:

It is sweet to dance to violins
When Love and Life are fair:
To dance to flutes, to dance to lutes
Is delicate and rare
(From The Ballad of Reading Gaol, by Oscar Wilde)

For them the dance has ended, but the music goes on.

An early version of the Early Music ensemble “La Compania” at Yallambie, 1997. (McLachlan)

A Monkey on the Outback

“but that which was the pleasantest surprise, was a largish clump of what in England we should not look for in a garden, yet what once filled in England the soul of Linnaeus with delight, covered over with its golden bloom—gorse; the seed whence it was raised taken from a common near Nottingham.” (Richard Howitt describes weed gorse growing at Yallambee, from Impressions of Australia Felix, 1845)

Rabbit hunt at Barwon Park in Victoria’s Western District. (Source: State Library of Victoria)

We’ve all heard tales told of “Jimmy Grant”, the English immigrant none too satisfied with Australia, and all things Australians. For the early settlers this meant those strangely silent birds that didn’t sing like the ones of fond memory, the dreary Australian forests where the trees kept their leaves throughout the winter and dropped them in the summer, but most of all, it meant those funny looking animals hopping back and forth across the Australian landscape. Animals that simply wouldn’t sit still long enough to be shot at or chased around by a pack of the squatter’s hunting hounds.

William Howitt. (Source: Wikipedia)

It was all a bit strange looking and to be frank, just not as good as they remembered things, “back home” in ’ol Blighty. By jove, something needed to be done about it and done fast. No use waiting for that new-fangled theory of Darwinism to catch up with the Antipodes. What was needed they said was a good dose of European flora and fauna, spread thickly across the thinly constructed Australian landscape.

Exotic birds were let loose upon the wide Australian skies, foreign fish went into the waterless, inland waterways and rows of softwood timber trees replaced the solid Australian native hardwoods. As the English traveller and writer, William Howitt observed when visiting Yallambee in 1852.

“But, spite of foreign vegetation, the English stamp and English character are on all their settlements. They are English houses, English enclosures, that you see; English farms, English gardens, English cattle and horses, English fowls about the yards, English flowers and plants carefully cultivated.” (William Howitt, Land, Labour and Gold, 1858)

While William recorded seeing a wide variety of fine fruits growing during his visit to Yallambee, his record also included of all things, “great fleshy prickly pears, with their oval leaves stuck one on the end of another, and their purple fruit.” (William Howitt, ibid)

Pre-cactoblastis pickly pear growing out of control in the Australian bush. (Source: National Museum of Australia)

Post and rail fencing at, Yallambie, c1890. (Source: Bill Bush Collection)

Baron Sir Ferdinand von Mueller, KCMG, chalk lithograph c1880. (Source: State Library of Victoria).

Grown initially for its fruit, the pear cactus was also commonly used as an alternative to expensive post and rail fencing, becoming along the way a rather troublesome environmental weed by the 20^th Century. It’s part of a pattern that has been repeated again and again throughout our history. The pear was just one in a long line up of weeds that were let loose on an unsuspecting continent, some by chance, others by design. The first Government Botanist of Victoria and Director of the Melbourne Botanical Gardens, Baron Sir Ferdinand von Mueller was a champion of indigenous plant species but is often cited as the main culprit behind the spread of one of the worst weed plants, the English blackberry throughout Victoria. Mueller is thought to have shared plant material around Victoria, including legend would have it with Robert Bakewell at Yallambee, but when it came to the blackberry, it was the seeds he took in his pockets on his trips into the bush to scatter randomly that did the most damage. A Mrs Fraser is quoted as having said of the Baron, “He used always to carry a packet of blackberry seeds with him, and whenever he boiled his billy, he scattered a few around the ashes of his fire. He said that the poor people in time to come would bless him for his thoughtfulness.” (As reported in the Victorian Naturalist, 1959, p33).

Blackberries collected from the bottom of a Yallambie garden.

Take a walk along the Plenty River at the end of summer in any year and you’re bound to see the result, whatever your current socio-economic position. But look out for the signs when you do, warning where the bushland crews have sprayed poison along the River environment to contain the apparently inevitable spread of the Baron’s handiwork.

The foundations of Coulstock’s Plenty River, c1841 Mill at Janefield, under a cloaking cover of blackberries. (Source: Picture by Dave F, 2021) https://adilettanteofarda.wordpress.com/2021/08/27/coulstocks-mill-a-quick-look/

It’s difficult now to get hold on the mindset that drove so many in those early years to want to introduce foreign species into Australia, but harder still in the cases where those species came without any apparent benefit whatsoever.

“Mr Wilson wrote out to us to the effect that he was a thorough acclimatiser and that he went in for the acclimatisation of monkeys for the amusement of the wayfarer whom their gambols would delight as he lay under some gum-tree in the forest on a sultry day…” The Governor of Victoria, Sir Henry Barkly addressing the first meeting of the Acclimatisation Society of Victoria in 1862.

Mr Wilson might not have got his way with the introduction into Australia of those so-called amusing monkeys, but there were plenty of other attempts besides. You name it and there was probably some fool attempt at one time or another to introduce it onto what started out as a virgin continent. Acclimatisation experiments in Australia in the 19^th Century, with their hang the consequences attitudes, remind me somehow of that old Porky Pig cartoon where Daffy Duck as a hotel manager supplies one animal after another to Porky, who initially only wanted to rid himself of a mouse in his room. You know the Toon. A cat is sent to frighten the mouse, a dog the cat and on to an elephant, which then needs the mouse brought back because since as every good children’s television watcher will tell you, elephants live in terror of the cartoon mouse.

“Oryctolagus cuniculus” at Yallambie.

The hopping animal with the floppy ears and cotton tail is probably the most infamous of these acclimatisation experiments gone wrong. Introduced as sporting entertainment for the squatters, once established there were belated attempts to contain the spread of rabbits including, believe it or not, the release of countless hundreds of feral cats into the bush. Using some sort of warped, Porky Pig thinking, it was hoped that the cats would eat the young rabbits. This they probably did, at least to a degree, but bunnies breed well, like rabbits, and it wasn’t long before cats had given up and gone on to eat plenty else out there in the bush besides. For all the destruction the old bunny caused though, at least it could be said that the rabbit made a good feed when baked and served up with a few peas and carrots. The same could not be said for that other hopping animal, the poisonous, wart encrusted Cane Toad, the later deliberate introduction of which made absolutely no sense at all, then or now. Let loose into the North of Australia in the 1930s by those who should have known better, it was hoped the toad would prey on beetles which by some report were proving to be a kind of nuisance in the sugar cane fields of Queensland. The hilariously named scientist Walter Froggatt was one of the few who tried to stop the release of the ugly amphibians, warning to deaf ears of the environmental consequences. Froggatt had started his career in an earlier century as a protege of Baron von Mueller, so maybe he had seen a thing or two. It soon became apparent that about the only thing the fat blighters wouldn’t eat were mature cane beetles, with the native invertebrates of Australia paying a heavy price ever since.

European settlers to Australia were amazed by the waist high fields of kangaroo grass that greeted them on arrival in this country, but were equally shocked by how easily these were turned to dust by their ungulate herds. The green fields of our modern farmland in fact have always been an invention. Ever since nomads in Asia Minor settled down and started collecting and planting certain types of grasses that grew better than others around about 10 or 12 thousand years ago, human beings have been modifying their environments. The 16^th Century would see the start of a rapid international interchange of plant material around the world, with some crops like so called Indian Corn, or Maize, far more productive than the European equivalent of wheat and rye.

This has always been a story of a fine balancing act, a tightrope walk between what to bring in and what to leave out of a country. It’s a story that has featured both the good, the bad and in the case of the toad, the bad and outright ugly. The trouble has always been that once introduced, whether by mistake or by design, there has never been much chance of going back. What’s here now we must learn to live with. That said, the next time you find yourself resting under a “gum-tree in the forest on a sultry day”, spare a thought of what might have been. Thank your lucky stars that there isn’t a monkey up there in the branches throwing gum nuts at you.

At least not yet.

More

With the over-abundance of four-footed animals that were introduced onto Australia’s sweeping grasslands in the early 19^th Century, it’s hardly surprising that the average Australian at that time lived very much a meat and three veg diet. Meat was routinely dished up at every meal, morning, noon and night, on chipped plates of blackened steaks and hearty puddings. If Australians were riding on the sheep’s back, then it’s the sheep’s legs that were sitting on their kitchen tables.

The Station Plenty, (Yallambie) view I by Edward La Trobe Bateman 1853-1856. Distant view of station with cattle in foreground. (Source: National Gallery of Victoria)

Kitchen meat hook, used now to hang puddings.

On sheep runs like Thomas Wragge’s up-country Tulla Station, labourers commonly received a weekly ration of 6kg of mutton, with a little flour, tea and sugar thrown in for good measure. Possibly things were not much different here at Yallambie where the evidence is that the farm supplied the homestead with its own food needs, including large cuts of meat and home-made bacons. This meat was suspended from a row of four large, strategically placed iron meat hooks hanging from the kitchen ceiling. Uncured, meat might last for three days like this in hot weather, or up to 10 in the colder months.

Old butcher’s block used now as a potting table.

This was in the days before home refrigeration of course, something we all take for granted now, but in the 1870s when Wragge built his Homestead, attempts were underway to export frozen meats to a wider world. Thomas Wragge was a shareholder in one of the first of these meat freezing ventures, and while the first attempts at exporting frozen meats from Australia were a failure, by the 1880s, frozen meat was being exported regularly to London where it sold well. In 1894 Thomas Wragge sent 1,900 six-tooth wethers from the Tulla flock “to freeze” and soon after the Riverina Frozen Meat Company in Deniliquin was opened, access to which must have made Thomas’ country operations significantly easier.

In the 19^th Century, it is recorded that Australians ate more than twice as much meat as the average Englishman, or four times as much as a Frenchman, but then I’m guessing it takes a lot of frogs’ legs to add up to a single leg of mutton. By the 1890s, the average Australian of any age was eating at least a third of a kilo of meat daily, but heaven help anyone if that supply was ever found wanting. In Charters Towers, miners protesting at the expense of beef, tied ropes to the wooden butcher’s shop and pulled it down around the ears of the leather-aproned, meat cleaver wielding butcher inside. Imagine what they might have done if they found out what a butcher generally puts into a sausage.

Jack Jones the butcher, behind the counter of his shop. (Source: from the classic BBC television comedy series, “Dad’s Army”.

The Heidelberg butcher Thomas Davey shared more than a first name with Thomas Wragge. Both were one time Heidelberg Shire Councillors, both were staunch members of the St John’s Church of England congregation at Heidelberg, and both died in the year 1910. Note the “neighbour’s dog” in this picture. (Source: A Pictorial History of Heidelberg since 1836, Heidelberg Historical Society)

The classic butcher’s shop with its offal and sausages, cuts of meat, tiled interiors, chopping blocks and sawdust covered floors became an institution during the 20^th Century. The village butcher was usually regarded as every bit as essential to a local community as the pub, blacksmith shop or even the Post Office and like the milkman, he could even be relied on to send out home deliveries. Much to the delight of the neighbour’s dog.

These days the old time butcher, armed with his scabbard and sharpening steel, has been somewhat replaced by supermarkets and the speciality butcher shops that can be found in most suburban shopping centres. Some people will tell you that growing food grains for farm animals has always been an inefficient way of feeding a population, saying that the grains could have been better eaten by people without involving the animals. All the same, Australia is one place in the world where there is basically a choice. Statistically, over 1.5 billion people worldwide eat no meat what-so-ever, however of these people, 95% say they would eat it if they could. This means that most vegetarians across the planet are only living this way due to economic reasons.

About 12% of Australians choose to live a vegetarian diet today, a practice that arrived in Australia in the early 1830s as part of a religious movement but which in practice was not really popularized until the 20^th Century. People choose vegetarianism for a variety of reasons. A belief in the sanctity of animal life is definitely up there near the top but another idea often mentioned, the idea of saving the environment, is a little more complicated than when taken at face value. It has been suggested that 7kg of Australia’s ancient and irreplaceable soil is destroyed for every kilogram of bread we produce and while estimates can vary widely, the contention is that there are only approximately 60 harvests, or 60 years, before the planet’s soils are too barren and eroded to feed the population.

“My Harvest Home,” picture by John Glover, 1835. (Source: Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery)

30 years ago, the acclaimed scientist, explorer and conservationist, Tim Flannery wrote in his first book of popular science:

“Australia is one of only half a dozen reliable food-exporting regions worldwide. Presently, world population stands at 5.4 billion, and is increasing at the rate of approximately 100 million per year. At the same time the world’s soils, forests and oceans are all rapidly becoming exhausted. Any nation that counts upon buying massive amounts of food far into the next century is likely to face severe difficulties and increased costs.”

(Tim Flannery: The Future Eaters, p370, 1994)

Australia still exports much more food than it consumes, exporting around 70% of its agricultural production. Since Tim Flannery wrote, “The Future Eaters” though, the population of the planet has tipped past 8 billion. Just to be clear, that’s an eight, followed by nine noughts. Australia’s population stands at almost 26 million. Incredibly, the population growth in Australia in 2023 was 2.2%, the highest increase on record. It’s part of a government policy to achieve a net growth in the economy by encouraging a net growth in the population, mostly through immigration. But the finite resources of one planet can only grow for so long before something’s got to give. Suddenly that old Charlton Heston film depicting a dystopian ecological catastrophe in an overpopulated world where people have given up questioning what they chow down on doesn’t seem so far-fetched.

Various suggestions have been put forward for saving the environment while still feeding the world, including one from the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization, FAO that would have us eating protein rich bugs to increase nutrition. All those three-legged sheep wandering around Australia must be breathing a sigh of relief. If you ask me though, I reckon the old butcher’s shop, if it even still exists by then, is going to look a bit peculiar when the only thing on display in the window turns out to be a load of oversized caterpillars. The UN says that more than 2 billion people globally already supplement their diets with bugs, so what’s the big deal? Don’t hold your breath though, expecting any of those 8 billion people plus to come back asking for more when the time comes.

Like Dickens’ Oliver, I think most of us will be going hungry.

The City on the Edge of Forever

By any sort of a measure, forever is a very long time. The whole of human civilization is usually dated from the end of the last ice age about 10 or 12 thousand years ago, give or take, while recorded history can only be measured from the emergence of the first city states and the invention of writing, about 5000 years ago.

Of course, nomadic peoples across the world like the Indigenous people of Australia were roaming the world long before these dates, but that’s still nothing when compared to the idea of forever. It’s the largest number you can possibly think of, plus one. So when a Melbourne newspaper listed on the weekend the median hold period of real estate in Melbourne suburbs under the headline, “We’ve been there forever,” I wondered what sort of yard stick they might be using. Reading on into the story I found that they had examined data sourced from a property data and analytics group called Corelogic which had collected statistics about the length of Melbourne home ownership. The dataset was calculated by comparing the length of time between resales in suburbs throughout 2023 and, wouldn’t you know it? Of all the suburbs of Melbourne, there was Yallambie sitting right up there at number six on the list where the median time of home ownership is recorded at 17.2 years. Number 6 was the position on another list, noted in these pages in 2017, which listed Yallambie as number six on the nation’s most “in demand” suburbs. That list came from the REA Group Ltd and yes, I could hardly believe the figures myself back then which I remember were apparently based on the number of views of property listings on a real estate web site. Yallambie is a small suburb and usually has comparatively fewer property listings on a monthly basis, so I’m thinking that maybe there’s a trend developing here.

The Melbourne Age reporting Corelogic data showing suburbs with the highest hold time. https://www.theage.com.au/property/news/we-ve-been-there-forever-the-melbourne-suburbs-no-one-wants-to-leave-20240118-p5ey8z.html

When I first started writing this blog nearly 10 years ago, it was a bit of a standing joke at home that nobody seemed to know where the suburb of Yallambie was. The very first words of that very first post begins:

“The glazed look that creeps across a face when you tell someone you live in Yallambie is the motivation behind this…”

Back then, I would generally tell people I lived in some out of the way place you’ve never heard of, between Heidelberg and Greensborough near the Army barracks and leave it at that rather than attempt to explain. Yallambie retains that small suburb feel to this day but dare I say, it’s beginning to get a bit better known these days. The North East Link project may have contributed something to that, perhaps adding some sort of notoriety to the area. All the same, I’m reliably informed that when the Link opens, it will add something to property prices in the area. Well, at least to those properties not located within spitting distance of the eye sore.

Borlase Reserve woodland, May, 2019 photographed before its removal for the North East Link project. (Picture by I McLachlan)

We’ve lived in Yallambie considerably longer than the 17.2 year average and I guess that in that time we’ve seen some changes in the area, not necessarily all for the better. Yallambie Park I’m afraid presents itself as more and more sadly neglected by Council these days, a problem that seems to have been exacerbated by Yallambie becoming part of Hawdon Ward with its Viewbank centric outlook. In saying that though, the time that we’ve lived here is nothing compared to the older residents of this suburb who built their homes in the original estate at the end of the 1960s and into the 1970s and for who Yallambie remains very much their “forever suburb”. As one older couple now well into their 80s told me a while ago, “Our grandchildren tell us to down size, but why would we ever want to leave here? It’s got our memories and everything we would ever want.”

Folding brochure from land auction during subdivision of the Yallambie estate

One of the points made in that newspaper story about “forever suburbs” is that, based on Corelogic data, people seem to hang onto their houses longer in those suburbs where real estate is more expensive. But here I think Yallambie is an exception. It is in the affordability stakes, at least in the older Jennings part of the estate, that the suburb’s appeal is based. This has long been an issue across Melbourne and the current cost of living crisis and resulting auction signs put up in front of houses across the suburbs reinforce this. Taking this into account, together with the gardens, parkland amenities and a sort of backwater appeal and I think you can see why this suburb is popular with people in the know.

The pond at Streeton Views Reserve, Yallambie, May, 2020. (Picture by I McLachlan)

Rather than attempt to explain this appeal and the advantages of living in this small and out of the way suburb in writing, I’m going to end this short post here with a slide show gallery of pictures I have taken and used in these pages over the course of the last decade. It might not be a forever, but Yallambie is as good a place as any to start.

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The long and the short of shortbread

In the wee, small hours of a chilly winter morning on 10 February, 1567, a massive explosion rocked the darkened streets of Edinburgh. The Old Provost’s House at Kirk o’ Field was completely destroyed by a blast that could be heard across the town. Hardly a wall was left standing, right down to the foundation stones. Curiously, the two occupants of the building, Henry Stuart Lord Darnley and his night servant were not killed outright by the blast. Instead, their strangled bodies were found outside the ruins in their night shirts, the presumption made that they had been killed as they attempted to flee.

Somebody really wanted to make sure Darnley was deaded that night, but who was responsible? It’s not like there was any shortage in a long line of suspects to choose from. As the capricious second husband of Mary I, the Queen of Scots, Lord Darnley was almost universally despised and not least of all by his wife. Darnley had fathered an heir apparent with Mary in the first year of their marriage but by the second, many reckoned it was time he was pushing up the daisies. Given the oft violent history of the kings of Caledonia before him, as King Consort to Queen Mary it’s hardly surprising that Darnley’s days were numbered, almost from the moment he said, “Aye, I do”.

Henry Stuart Lord Darnley and Mary Queen of Scots. (Source: Wikipedia, from an original at Hardwick Hall, Derbyshire, the National Trust)

Mary had moved her husband into the Old Provost’s House in early 1567 while he recovered from a bout of smallpox, or some said syphilis, visiting him there regularly from Holyroodhouse. There is no evidence that she knew the cellar of the building had been stacked with gunpowder, but then there did seem to be an awful lot of barrels down there in the basement didn’t there? When we note that Mary had ordered the removal from the house of a new bed with expensive black velvet hangings just before and had it replaced with an old and shabby one – one she wouldn’t miss let’s say in the event of an explosion – the whole arrangement takes on a decidedly shonky feel.

The Queen was out dancing on the night of the murder and it’s said, was greatly disturbed by the death of her husband. All the same, this didn’t stop the merry widow from marrying again just three months later, this time to the Borders hard man, Lord Bothwell.

The Borders hard man, James Hepburn, the 4th Earl of Bothwell. (Source: Wikipedia, from the collection of the Scottish National Gallery)

James Hepburn, the 4^th Earl of Bothwell was a powerful figure in Scottish politics. Conveniently he had divorced a pre-existing wife just after Darnley’s death but unfortunately for Mary, he was also widely thought of as the main suspect in the murder plot. To this day there is a sound of crickets when anyone asks, who killed Henry Stuart Lord Darnley although I doubt any reader of an Agatha Christie would have a problem sussing it.

At the time, a number of possible conspirators, read that scapegoats, were rounded up and executed, for the sake of appearances. The first was, like a character out of a Rowan Atkinson television series, a man called Captain Blackadder whose only crime it would seem was being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It’s said Blackadder on hearing the explosion ran outside from a tavern where he had been staying to see what was going on. “What’s up here?” we picture him asking the night air. Himself it turned out as he would soon be left dangling – hanged, then drawn and quartered just for good measure. Other executions followed while Mary and Bothwell themselves high tailed it and raised an army to argue away their innocence in the matter.

By July Mary had been forced to abdicate in favour of her infant son, James VI, the future James I of England and who at age 9 months was one of the few people in Scotland not actually implicated in the intrigue. Bothwell went into exile and went mad while Mary herself fled to England where her English cousin Elizabeth I promptly placed her under arrest.

Mary at about age 17 years framed with the Royal Arms of Scotland, after a portrait by François Clouet. (Private collection)

It was a pretty pickle for the Queen of Scots, a woman who at one time or another had been styled, at least in the Catholic world, as the legitimate Queen of multiple kingdoms – France, Scotland, England and Ireland. Her life had promised so much. Crowned Queen of Scotland at an early age, Mary had grown up in France during the latter days of the Auld Alliance where she learned everything likely to impress the kilted warriors of Caledonia – music and dancing, languages and poetry, falconry and horsemanship. Tall with striking red hair, on her return to Scotland at age 19 Mary brought with her the trappings of French courtly life, including that most important of all things to anyone thinking of establishing a home base in a country where haggis is considered food, a team of French pastry chefs.

“…a tartan tin box decorated with scenes of a lonely piper standing on the Highland moors.”

Have you ever wondered why it is that the shortbread you get at Christmas time comes in a tartan tin box decorated with scenes of a lonely piper standing on the Highland moors? Although the evidence is mostly secondary, the story of shortbread has always been strongly associated with the legend of Mary Queen of Scots, along with all the tales of her tragedy, romance and dare I say, those allegations of mariticide. When she arrived in Scotland, Mary is supposed to have asked her French pastry chefs to develop a simple sweet recipe from something that had been around in Scotland in one form or another since the 12^th Century. “Bread biscuit”, or twice baked bread, was something that had long been made in Scottish Alba from left over dough after bread baking, although in its original form it must surely have been rather hard and certainly would not have been sweet. The shortness in the name, shortbread comes from the butter which is used in the recipe. It’s not really so much a bread though as a cake and like cake, shortbread uses added sugar for an introduced sweetness. Originally brought to Europe in small quantities by returning Crusaders, sugar was in the 16^th Century an exotic status symbol, rare outside of wealthy and Royal households.

“…the bigger the triangular lumps, the better the Greedy Boys picnic, I say. “

The butter and sugar in a shortbread mix gives it a slightly crumbling texture when preparing, making it a little tricky to roll out. Mary’s shortbread is thought to have been typically formed into a large circle and cut into triangles, the round edges decorated with a fork in a pattern called “petticoat tails”, a name which has been suggested was either a corruption of a French word for “little cake” or after the actual shape of Mary’s own dresses. Petticoat tails is the way we prefer it and the bigger the triangular lumps, the better the Greedy Boys picnic, I say.

Simple ingredients for a shortbread mix.

Baking shortbread is a Christmas tradition for many people. The recipe we use is a simple one passed onto us by my wife’s mother, and her mother before her. Of course there are any number of variations on the classic Christmas shortbread recipe, but this one is simplicity itself.

Nan Ferguson’s Christmas shortbread

1 lb butter
3 cups plain flour
1 cup rice flour
1 good cup caster sugar, (or icing sugar)

Place flour, sugar and rice flour into a large bowl. Use a wooden spoon or hands to work the butter into the dry ingredients to form a dough. Press out to form a large wheel shape on a greased baking tray, trying to make the shape as even as possible. Use the tip of a sharp knife to lightly mark out lines from the centre. Use a fork to mark the rounded outside edge, then prick all over.

Bake for 20 minutes at 325°F on the second bottom shelf of the oven, or until the shortbread is beginning to turn a very pale gold around the edges. Remove and sprinkle with caster sugar. Leave to cool for at least 20 minutes, then cut into triangles using the lines marked as a guide.

The imperial measures used might be a little confusing, but this mixture is so simple that you can guess the amounts without going too far wrong. Mixing the dough by hand or with a spoon is preferable to using a beater as you want to avoid introducing too much air into mix. Nan Ferguson’s recipe suggests using icing sugar as an alternative to caster if you are wanting a softer type of shortbread. Either way is yummy but I rather prefer the icing sugar version. When preparing, make sure your fork goes all the way through when you prick the top of the shortbread. This isn’t just decorative as the little holes allow steam to escape, stopping the dough buckling while baking. Cooking time will be variable depending on the oven but don’t over cook. When it’s ready, you will smell it.

Petticoat tails.

In any event, whatever you decide to include in your Christmas bake this year, puddings, cakes and biscuits, remember to leave a slice of something in front of the kitchen chimney on Christmas Eve with a glass of milk. Every good boy and girl knows why we do that. I’m betting you will find it gone by the morning.

Unfortunately for Mary, the Queen of Scots, there was never going to be any chance of her being gone in the morning. Like historical opinion itself, not even Santa knows now whether Mary had been naughty and nice, or bad and good. She was to remain a prisoner in England for the best part of 20 years, stitching embroidery, nibbling Petit four shortbreads and dreaming of lost thrones. Those dreams eventually included entrapment into a hair brained and altogether unlikely scheme to seize the English throne from Elizabeth, for which the English Queen was reluctantly inveigled to order her cousin’s head separated from her body.

After which I expect Mary rather lost the appetite for shortbread.

It’s time

Some people kill it. Others put a stitch in it. But for most of us, there never seems to be quite enough of it.

Given the inscrutable nature of that thing we call time, it seems little wonder that the devices we use to mark it are made in the way they are. We say there are 24 hours in a day, but we only mark 12 of them on a typical analogue clock face, and we start the count not at zero, but at 12. Most of us can calculate at least to 10 in old Roman numerals, but it looks like horologists at some earlier point had other ideas. Have you ever noticed that the number four spelled out as Roman numerals on a vintage clock face is almost always recorded as four capital “I”s, or I,I,I,I, and not the letters “IV”? Early clock makers supposedly believed the face looked more symmetrical this way, but that doesn’t necessarily make it right.

Number 9, number 9: Face of the Oatley clock, No 9, made in 1821 by the famed clock maker and one time convict, James Oatley. On display at Old Government House, Parramatta, NSW. (McLachlan)

It seems on the face of it that the very first mechanical clocks came without faces. They chimed on the hour to keep something vaguely resembling time and were accurate only to within 20 minutes or so of the day. This didn’t matter much as time was relative just to place, and not space as it is now. All that was needed back then was a count that kept time to some sort of local standard. It wasn’t until the end of the 14^th Century that somebody had the bright idea of adding numbers to a rotating dial, with rotating hands on a fixed dial only coming later.

Erection of the Great Melbourne Telescope in the Botanic Gardens, 1869. (Source: Museum Victoria)

In the early colonial era of Melbourne, local time was set by lowering a ball at 1pm from a tower at Williamstown and another at Flagstaff Hill. These “time balls” were watched by shipping in the Bay and used by captains to set on board ships’ chronometers, which were of course vital in calculating correct longitude. By the 1860s the task of time keeping had been taken up by the Observatory in the Melbourne Botanic Gardens where time was checked by a nightly calibration of the stars and set on a Frodsham scientific regulator. An accurate time reading would be telegraphed to the Town clock the next morning from which people would check their own time pieces. These days in a world gone full circle, we’re more likely to check a public clock against the mobile device in our pocket than the other way round.

Laghu Samrat Yantra sundial at the Jantar Mantar observatory, Jaipur. (McLachlan)

Up until the 19^th Century, the most common way of keeping time anywhere in the world was with a sundial. At Jantar Mantar, Jaipur in India an enormous stone sundial was built in the 18th Century capable of measuring time to an accuracy of just two seconds. Most other sundials were accurate to within only half an hour and, it must be said, there was always the small matter about what to do when the sun went behind the clouds or at night.

At Yallambie a sundial was present from the earliest days but whether this was for measuring time or simply as a garden aesthetic is debatable. Ethel Temby in her memoir recorded that it was located next to the old Bakewell oak at the south-west corner of the house. The sundial she said was firmly fixed to a large tree stump, the stump painted white and sitting in the shade of the massive Bakewell oak. It would seem reasonable to assume therefore that the dial was put in place at a time when the oak was still a relatively young tree and before the shade from its branches might be in the way of the dial’s performance. Ethel speculated that the stump had been there for as long as the Bakewell oak and lamented the fact that by the time the Temby family took possession of the property, the dial had been removed.

The Bakewell Oak at the SW corner of Yallambie, c1890. (Source: Bill Bush collection)

“A huge oak tree was probably an early planting by the Bakewells. The tree (from an acorn they brought?) is near the south-west corner of the present house. Perhaps as old as the tree – about 140 years – is the stump with remnants of white paint on it now almost completely in its shade. When the Tembys bought the house from A. V. Jennings the stump supported a sun-dial.” (Ethel Temby, writing in about 1980)

The fact that sundial technology had been developed in the northern hemisphere has resulted in our present understanding of what it means to do something in a “clockwise” direction. The word “clockwise” refers to the path the shadow of the sun follows around a sun dial in the north, so if sundials had been invented first in the Southern Hemisphere, “clockwise” would have been reversed. Therefore, if the Bakewells had brought a sundial with them from England, I’m afraid they might have found Yallambie time here going from back to front. Hmmm, this might explain a lot.

The divisions on a sundial, and by association a clock face, are based on the ancient Babylonian sexagesimal system of counting. You see, the Babylonians didn’t use fractions and 60 and its multiples are evenly divisible by 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20 and 30. They also gave a circle 360° after noticing that there were a little over 360 days in a year.

Lord Howe Island off the NSW has its own Time Zone. (Picture taken with an plastic Instamatic by this writer, a long time ago.)

Standard time zones were introduced into Australia in the 1890s when all of the Australian colonies adopted them. Before then, each city or town was free to determine its own local time, which was referred to as the Local Mean Time. It was the coming of the railways that demanded a universal standard, although there were arguments about what would constitute that standard. The debate was a bit like the argument over the numerous standards of railway gauge used in the Australian colonies, an argument which has never really been properly resolved. These days we have Australian Eastern Standard Time, Australian Central Standard Time and Australian Western Standard Time. We also have other time zones for Lord Howe and Christmas Islands, and separate daylight-saving adjustments in the summer across the States, just to confuse things still further.

“These are accuracies which I freely admit are not so much use to me.” An old, worn clock showing the scars of too many morning alarms. (McLachlan)

Modern, quartz time pieces are accurate to within a few seconds of the year and Atomic clocks, which use quartz to measure the frequency of atoms, achieve an accuracy of seconds within millions of years. These are accuracies which I freely admit are not so much use to me. As mentioned in a previous post, time is kept in our kitchen by an old cuckoo clock whose occasional lunatic tune seems to me to sum up the story of our lives. Similarly, when I wear a watch I choose a vintage mechanical thing which is accurate enough for the way I tend to organize my day, if you know what I mean.

Singer of an “occasional lunatic tune.” (McLachlan)

“It was old fashioned when he wore it…”

I have a couple of clockwork watches. One belonged to my wife’s grandfather. It was old fashioned when he wore it and he’s been dead 30 years. The other is even older and it has an intriguing story. You see, years ago my then girlfriend, later wife, gave me a travelling toilet kit that she had picked up in a junk shop for just a few dollars. She gave it to me because it was old fashioned, and I’ve always liked old fashioned things, and because it had been engraved at some time in the dim, dark ages past through some sort of chance coincidence, with my initials – I. McL.

“…and it has an intriguing story.”

These are the sorts of kit bags which were made once upon a time to contain toiletries in separate chrome topped containers for soap, toothbrush, and comb. These days you sometimes see the containers sold individually as collectables in vintage shops. Well, inside the toothbrush container, along with a decrepit toothbrush, I found somebody had hidden at a time in the past a gold, Deco era wristwatch. The crystal cover of the dial had been smashed and the movement was all rusted so I guessed the watch had gone into the pot a long time ago to hide the evidence of an accident.

This is a sort of thing to which I can relate. I appreciate the mechanical nature of old watches and the hands on skills that went into making them, but mostly I love speculating about the origins of this particular story.

“Has anyone seen my watch?” asks Dad.

“No,” said with a straight face, hands held behind back while putting something out of sight into a small bag. “I’m sure you’ll find it around here though, one of these days, if you look long and hard enough. Mind that little bit of broken glass there, won’t you?”

Good luck to you, Dad. You’re surely dust now which is where time is leading us all eventually. I guess you never did find your watch and I don’t suppose that anyone ever ‘fessed up. Funny that we shared the same, Roman numeral like initials, with lives separated today by almost a century of time. Call it synchronicity if you like, Carl Jung’s idea that events sometimes appear related even when they have no apparent connection at all.

Father time: detail from an old postcard, c1910.

There is a thing about time which extends beyond just the mechanical recording device on a dial placed out in the sun, the clock looking down at me from the wall or even that old thing buckled onto my wrist. These are all just the counters we have invented to mark the passage of time. They are not time itself. But I wonder, if there were no clocks, no people, indeed nothing in the universe and nothing to mark the passage of time, would there still be time?

Hanging rocks at Hanging Rock. (McLachlan)

It’s an age-old conundrum which launches into a philosophical realm. “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” The answer, at least according to an old way of thinking, is yes, the tree did make a sound because God alone heard it. The modern way of thinking about this though is that the temporal dimension we call time never really existed until space and time came together in some sort of Big Bang. More recently however, others have suggested that it was hanging around even before there was anything to bang on about. The people who use maths to argue about such things say there are Tachyons and rabbit holes with no return, and multiple dimensions and multiple universes beyond that. Then they start talking about Quantum superpositions and a cat left in a box that is both alive and dead and the whole thing gets a bit out of the question.

Our memories might seem to travel in a line from the past to the present and not beyond, but in Block Universe Theory the past, present and future are equally real. Or unreal? As one famous thinker put it, rather sensibly, “The past, present and future are only illusions, even if stubborn ones.” What I remember is not necessarily what you remember and what I remember isn’t necessarily what happened, anyway. A white rabbit in a waist coat rushing about, checking his pocket watch and exclaiming, “I’m late, for a very important date!” A Victorian school girl in white Edwardian dress running through the Australian bush screaming, “Miranda!” The timeless afternoons of childhood where time just stands still and pictures taken with an old plastic Instamatic. Fact or fiction? Past, present and future. Simulation or illusion? It’s time.

“Miranda!” (From Peter Weir’s classic 1975 film, “Picnic at Hanging Rock”)

A concrete way of thinking

The next time you’re handed one of those most improbable of all monetary units, the $100 polymer banknote in loose change with your litre of milk, take a moment to check out the moustachioed gentleman on one side. I’m not talking Dame Melba here but the intrepid General himself, Lieutenant-General Sir John Monash to give the old boy his full title. On their website, the Reserve Bank tells us he’s famous not just because of his soldier reputation but for something else entirely. Something I suspect not common to most military men.

Where other generals generally like to break things.

John Monash liked to build things.

Did you know? Monash was acknowledged as one of Australia’s foremost experts in reinforced concrete for civil construction projects. (Reserve Bank)

The State Library of Victoria with domed reading room prominent, seen from across Swanston Street c1915. (Source: State Library Victoria, Accession No : H3956)

Cabinet card of Melba, alias Helen Porter Mitchell, dear daughter of David Mitchell.

It’s a sometimes forgotten thing, but the famous First World War General, the Australian John Monash was by trade a civil engineer. In the years leading up to the “war to end all wars” while others sharpened swords, the civilian Monash spent his days sharpening his drafting pencil. He played a significant role in the introduction of reinforced concrete engineering practices into Australia and in partnership with the builder David Mitchell, (who coincidentally was the dear, old Dad of the Dame on the other side of that aforementioned banknote), he had a business that worked on concreting projects throughout Victoria and South Australia. The famed dome of the State Library of Victoria, the largest ribbed, reinforced concrete dome in the world when built, started out as one of his. The structure followed an original design planned by Monash in 1906, at a time when it’s clear to say the idea of reinforcing concrete was still a relatively new thing. The first English textbook on reinforcing concrete only appeared in 1902 and the first British Code of Practice for Reinforced Concrete came in 1910, the year before the State Library dome was completed.

Bartram’s silos on Banyule Rd, Viewbank, October, 2023. (McLachlan)

When milk came in glass.

Then, like today, you didn’t have to look too far to find somebody, somewhere building something in concrete. In this district, the old silos that stand above Banyule Rd in Viewbank are one notable example that show what can be done with a little bit of determination and a whole lot of concrete. They stand testament not only to a lost farming era, but also to a spirit of do it yourself enterprise on a need to basis, back in the day. Harold Bartram of Viewbank Farm built the silos in the years before the Second War as fodder storage for his dairy cows, siting them at a prominent place overlooking the Banyule Rd and using plans he found in an Australian Home Beautiful homecrafts series, “Concrete and Cement Work”. Bartram’s farm supplied distributing dairies in the area like Gillies at Eaglemont until both the farm and Dairy disappeared with the spread of suburban sprawl. The silos themselves have somehow survived and in 2016 when a storm blew the roof off one, all three silos were subsequently re-roofed, which I guess made a whole lot of pigeons happy as Larry.

Orchard with water tower beyond, September, 2019. (McLachlan)

Water tower and stables, corner of Tarcoola Drive and Lambruk Court, c1970. (Source: John Botwood collection)

Sketch of homestead and water tower by Harry Ferne, 1980.

A little earlier at Yallambie, sometime near the end of the 19^th Century, a large reinforced concrete water tower went up over the farm buildings. The tower was used to store water pumped from the Plenty River during the farming era. Given the era of its construction, it has been speculated that this was a project that would have appealed to Monash, although there is certainly no evidence of his involvement. Despite looking a little bit crumbly now around about the edges, it survives as a fairly unique sort of structure inside a suburban environment.

Concretes of various types have been around since Antiquity and some Roman concretes have survived over 2000 years. Roman concrete was made using a mixture of lime, sea water and volcanic ash in various ratios. The Pantheon is one famous example of Roman concrete and remains to this day the largest, unreinforced concrete dome in the world.

Water tower standing adjacent to motor garage, October, 2018. (McLachlan)

When the early settlers arrived in this country they made a very effective soft lime mortar by burning shells over hot fires. In some cases the shells are believed to have been sourced from Indigenous shell middens which were at first numerous in the landscape. It’s an odd thing when you look at it this way, but some of our earliest colonial buildings are probably held together with material collected by the First Australians over millennia.

After lime mortar, the settlers started using a manufactured product called portland cement, spelled without the cap “P”. I used to think when reading the label on a bag of cement that the product came from some sort of factory producing the stuff down Portland way on Victoria’s south west coast. What a dummy. Portland cement of course gets its name from the way it is used to imitate the look of stone, namely English Portland Stone. It’s a common enough finish in Victorian buildings of the era. Yallambie Homestead is coated in a stucco render made from the stuff with lines having being drawn into the wet cement at the time of construction in imitation of a pattern of stone blocks called “Ashlar”.  It’s a style which remained popular throughout the Victorian period. So much so that Victorian weatherboard houses were built to imitate the look in the form of the classic, block fronted weather boards that we see in many inner city neighbourhoods. Thus we have weatherboards imitating cement which in the first place was imitating Portland stone. Funny when you look at it like that.

“From the middle of the century cements came into their own and suburbs, particularly in Melbourne and Sydney, illustrate the skill of the plasterer. Like cakes, brick buildings are ‘iced’ with cement render in the most decorative way to simulate the art of the stonemason.” (From Conservation and Restoration of Buildings – Australian Council of National Trusts, 1982)

Some commentators of the 19^th Century hated the artifice of stucco ornamentation which for some reason was ridiculed as “elephant colour” when left unpainted. These days builders use stuck on, cement rendered polystyrene cladding as ornament. By which point I might say, is funnier still.

John Monash standing on a chair in 1868, age 3. (Source: Wikipedia – Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales)

So to return to the small matter of that hundred dollar banknote. It has been said that John Monash as a soldier “was trying to evolve a science of war which would be as exact as the science of engineering. He wanted to be able to rely on a battle in the same way he could rely on a bridge.” As a battlefield commander Monash devised well organized, combined operations involving infantry, aircraft, artillery, and tanks in carefully coordinated attacks. In style and indeed in outcome, these tactics were quite unlike the massed formations seen earlier in the War when soldiers, led by officers armed with riding crops, had tripped over each other in the chaos found in front of the enemy trenches. At the meticulously planned and carefully calculated Battle of Hamel in July, 1918 in a small but operationally significant victory, Monash set what became the blue print for the larger successes that finally broke the stalemate on the Western Front. Yes, the arrival of a newly minted army of American troops helped somewhat, but some people will tell you and especially in this country, that it was an Australian General who won the First World War.

In 1920 with the fighting over, the Victorian State Government turned to the newly returned civilian John Monash to plan for them a State wide electricity power grid. His solution was to build Greenhouse gas producing, brown coal burning power stations in asbestos and concrete up and down the country, which dare I say seemed like a good idea to everyone at the time. But that’s another story.

John Monash sitting on a chair in 1918, a bit older. (Source: Wikipedia – Australian War Memorial)

What we see in this tale is the work of a species that innovates and excels in creating structure out of nothing. For some reason it’s part of our DNA and indeed, the ability to do so would appear to predate even the species itself. At Kalambo Falls in Africa, archaeologists this year announced that they had found evidence of building practices dating back nearly a half million years. That’s a long time I think, longer than I’ve been writing this blog and longer even than the accepted existence of Homo sapiens. The evidence apparently has been found in two interlocking logs joined by a notch dug up during an ongoing archaeological dig. It’s not much to go on I’m sure, but what it does show is that the earliest people wanted to modify their world, just like we do today.

I wonder whether Bartram’s silos will be around half so long?

Tempered intemperance

“He persuaded a man from Geelong to pose as a buyer, and that man finally made a deal with Mrs Beaton, paid a deposit and obtained a receipt which he handed to Thomas. It has been suggested that Thomas promptly rode over to the pub, ordered everyone out of it and burnt down the building.”(Calder: Classing the Wool – recounting Thomas Wragge’s solution to Beaton’s sly grog trading at Tulla)

There are plenty of pubs in Australia but only so many matches in a box. While burning down the local might be one way of getting your men back to work, in the settled districts there are just too many pubs to make this practical. Along with the previously recounted story of the Plenty Bridge Hotel in Lower Plenty, in Thomas’ day there was no shortage of drinking places in the Yallambie area, with multiple hotels located at Greensborough and Heidelberg and country style public houses located at other places.

Thomas couldn’t burn them all down. Well, could he?

Monaghans’ Farmers Arms Hotel, Greensborough was replaced by the present day Greensborough Hotel in 1925. (Source: Greensbrough Historical Society)

Another Greensborough Hotel, on the corner of Grimshaw and Church Streets, was destroyed by fire in 1896. It is unclear whether Thomas was seen nearby with his box of matches. (Source: Greensborough Historical Society)

The Old England Hotel, Heidelberg with the roof of the pre-gold rush era building visible at right. (Source: Peter Blackbourn collection, FB – restored picture)

The Plenty Bridge Hotel, c1928. Panorama made from colourized screen stills of original footage of the opening of the Heidelberg Golf Club.

Wragge wasn’t the first nor was he the last to attempt to impose some sort of limit on the availability of intoxicating liquor in Australian society. The ups and downs of this story date back to the start of white settlement and Governor Phillip’s laudable if futile attempts to put a ban on the hard stuff. It was a ban that was fraught with impossible difficulties for as Robert Hughes explains in his popular history of Australia, “The Fatal Shore”:

“Colonial Sydney was a drunken society, from top to bottom. Men and women drank with a desperate, addicted, quarrelsome single-mindedness.”

New South Wales Holey Dollar, (Source: picture by State Library of New South Wales – Wikipedia)

Banished to the other end of the world and torn from everything and everyone that was near and dear to them, rum was their drink of choice, which was handy since it was also the chief form of monetary currency. Coin had developed an annoying habit of leaving the colony with traders just as soon as it could be imported, a problem not rectified until they started punching the middle out of Spanish dollars. A barter system was what was needed and that’s where rum came in. You could drink yourself into the poor house, or an early grave. Quite often both. The First Fleet convict and skilled blacksmith, William Frazer was one who insisted on payments only in rum and not surprisingly it wasn’t long before he was dead after going out on one too many benders. It spoke volumes about colonial society that a man could drink himself to death at the same time so many lived on the very brink of starvation.

The New South Wales Corp, the infamous “Rum Corps” of history, saw an opportunity and in defiance of East India Company trading rights, set about cornering a monopoly in rum, enriching themselves in the process in ways more akin to the later gangsters of Prohibition era America than the officers and enlisted men of a regiment in the British Army. The coup d’état that ousted New South Wales fourth governor, William Bligh in 1808, was sparked initially by the attempted arrest of the former Rum Corps captain, John Macarthur who had attempted to import an illegal still. Successive governors had previously attempted a total ban on the distillation of spirituous liquor in the colony, but the publication under the very nose of authority of a how-to guide for making bootlegged brandy in the fourth issue of the colony’s first newspaper, the 1803 Sydney Gazette is a good indication of just where they were going on this.

“Whose shout is it?” The arrest of Governor Bligh, 1808, artist unknown. What some people will do when it comes to paying their round.(Source: Wikipedia, in the Mitchell Library of the State Library of New South Wales)

William Howitt (Source: Wikipedia)

The soldiers involved in removing Bligh and installing his deputy, Major George Johnston would never have owned up that they were engaged in a Rum Rebellion when they allegedly pulled Bligh out from under the bed where he had been hiding. They would have told you they were engaged in a fight for freedom, which was a bit rich given that they were living in a convict colony and that they were the jailers. In essence, the rebellion was an attempt to maintain the soldiers’ happy go lucky trading monopoly and it wasn’t until 50 years later when William Howitt called it a “Rum Rebellion” in “Land Labour and Gold”, a book in which we remember he also described his visit to the Bakewells’ Yallambee Park, that the term really caught on.

This trade in hard liquor may have been seen by the early chroniclers as a sign of a sort of moral failure of the colony, but the on again, off again nature of the business did not preclude a number of legally appointed legitimate attempts to start a home grown wine and ale industry. As early as 1802, Governor King received a letter from the Secretary for the Colonies Lord Hobart, applauding him for his efforts to stamp out the improper importation of spirits into Sydney while suggesting instead that, “The introduction of beer into general use would certainly tend in a great degree to lessen the consumption of spirituous liquors.”

The First Fleet convict, James Squire had begun brewing something which it’s said vaguely resembled beer soon after arriving and continued to do so in the years following, with and without official sanction. It’s alleged that without hops to flavour his first attempts, James resorted to using horehound herb stolen from the First Fleet medical stores as a sort of substitute, getting away with the crime because the court judges liked a drink. Or so it was said. Eventually Squire managed to establish himself as brewer of possibly local distinction and certainly of considerable wealth, although an epitaph of one of the regulars at Squire’s Malting Shovel Tavern recorded in a cemetery at Parramatta in the early days, perhaps suggests something about the quality of the colonial product:

“Ye who wish to lie here, drink Squire’s beer.”

Beer drinkers at the Plenty Bridge Hotel in the late 1940s. (Source: John Irwin Family Collection)

The bar at the Plenty Bridge Hotel. (Source: John Irwin Family Collection)

Beer drinking was actually seen to be a healthy alternative to drinking water at a time when local water was so often contaminated by pollutants and disease, the fermentation process rendering the water safe. By the time of settlement in the Port Phillip District from the mid-1830s, colonial brewing practices had become pretty well established. James Graham, the Bourke Street merchant and second owner of Banyule Homestead in Melbourne, records in his letters instances where local beers were preferred over the imported products, the colonial beer being not only cheaper but more readily accessible.

But it was Howitt who described the goldfields and recorded his observations of the mine workings where the passage of the diggers was recorded not only by the holes made in the landscape but by the piles of empty bottles left behind. Later, in the pastoral era at a place called Innamincka, on Cooper Creek in South Australia, a famous bottle dump grew to be over 200m long and 2m high. The pile of empties was mainly empty rum bottles. To the surprise of no one, there were no Tarax or Fanta bottles. The man-made glass mountain at Innamincka stood for years like a gleaming beacon, long after the place itself had become a virtual ghost town, glistening in the sunlight with a sparkle that could be seen from miles away like a monument to the unquenchable outback thirst.

The bottle pile behind the old Innamincka Hotel, South Australia,1930. (Source: State Library of South Australia)

The 1830s was the decade that saw the founding of the Temperance Movement in Britain, a movement that advocated a complete abstinence from alcoholic drink. The idea when it arrived in Australia eventually resulted in the creation of coffee palaces which were seen as an alternative to public houses. At 400 rooms, one of the largest of these was the Grand Coffee Palace in Melbourne, (now the Windsor Hotel) which famously and ceremoniously burnt its liquor licence when opened in 1886. It was a show of principle but a show not necessarily rooted in business reality. The liquor licence was returned when it had to be admitted by all concerned that plenty of surreptitious drinking of alcohol was actually taking place at the establishment. The Coffee Palace was fighting a losing battle.

The best hotel in Linda, Tasmania, population less than 10. (McLachlan)

Dead blacksmiths and army insurrections aside, it seems that there’s always been a want for this stuff. Show me a one horse town these days where the pub has closed down and I’ll show you a town teetering on the edge of extinction. Even the Yallambie General Store is selling booze now, in its new role as an off licence trader. That store happens to be located opposite our kindergarten, which seems to me to be some sort of a contradiction but then this wouldn’t be the first. Years ago I had a part time job at a licenced grocer in Rosanna from where we would go out in the grocers’ van delivering orders. One regular customer I recall was a trip to the Sisters of Mercy Convent in Rosanna Rd. We left a weekly supply of a dozen bottles of Fosters there, religiously. The nuns used to say that the bottles were for the workman in his garden out back, but I wonder?

Sisters of Mercy Convent, Rosanna, c1928, photographed from the air by Charles Daniel Pratt. (Source: State Library of Victoria)

Armed with his box of matches 150 years ago, Thomas Wragge didn’t burn a liquor licence, but a look at a page from a Yallambee day book of the 1860s at a time when Wragge was subleasing the property shows another possibility. In those pages is recorded a surprising detail of a trade in whisky, brandy, ale and aged sherry. Barrels and barrels of the stuff. Maybe Wragge would have told you the sherry was for the cook?

Temperance in its original meaning signifies a moderation of action, thought or feeling and it was only later that it became generally associated with its other meaning, the meaning with the capital T. With a well-stocked cellar and an established tradition of wine making already in place at Yallambie, Thomas Wragge, like many a nun and Colonial Governor before him, and kindergarten teacher after, had arrived at the consensus.

All things in moderation.

Voyage to the Bottom of the Seeing

It’s been claimed that in the heady years of old Empire, in the years leading up to the First “Great” War, senior British naval strategists resisted the temptation of introducing new submarine sailing technology into the Royal Navy, convinced that submarine warfare represented a wholly unwanted and cowardly way of conducting the time honoured practice of naval fighting. If allowed, they worried the Admiralty would risk slipping from the hands of gentleman officers with braid on their cuffs into the hands of riff raff upstarts who heaven help us, would operate without a proper understanding of the long agreed boundaries of shooting at each other with big guns from big ships.

Truth or not, it was a way of thinking that was quickly shown to be flawed. Early in the First World War, with German U boats sinking Britain’s merchant marine in the North Sea and the failure of the Allied Entente surface fleet in the Dardanelles, it was an Australian submarine, the HMAS AE2 which first managed to transit the Dardanelles Strait into Sea of Marmara as a curtain raiser to the ANZAC Day landings. The activities of Allied submarines operating in the Sea beyond the Strait would prove to be a rare tactical success in the Gallipoli campaign and for a time forced the Ottomans to abandon the waters as a transport route to the ANZAC front.

HMAS AE2 at Sydney in 1914. (Source: Wikipedia)

Confederate States submarine engineer, Horace Lawson Hunley, (Source: Wikipedia)

The First World War was the first war in which submarine warfare would be conducted extensively. The idea of building a ship capable of submersing had been around for centuries, ever since the days of Leonardo da Vinci, but finding an effective way of propelling a boat under water was a long time coming. During the American Civil War, the CSS H L Hunley was powered by sailors turning a crank driven propeller by hand. The crank driven Hunley was named after a crank inventor, Horace Lawson Hunley who drowned along with the three different submarine crews who dared to venture on board. A reliable means of propulsion of submerged vessels was what was needed and it eventually came in the form of electric battery technology, charged mostly by Diesel motors while the boat was on the surface.

Submarine Torpedo Boat H.L. Hunley, Dec. 6, 1863, oil on panel by Conrad Wise Chapman. (Source: Wikipedia)

Diesel-electric submarines remained the norm throughout two World Wars and have been the preferred technology of the Royal Australian Navy for more than a hundred years, or at least it was until the sudden cancellation without a by your leave of the Attack Class submarine contract with France in 2021. That decision, made with indecent haste irked the French no end but cleared the way for a new trilateral agreement between Australia, the UK and the USA, the so called AUKUS pact in which Australia has committed to commissioning nuclear powered submarines, initially by leasing American Virginia Class submarines and then by building something similar in partnership with Great Britain.

It’s only going to cost us $368 billion and take about 20 years.

Strange to relate, most people seem to think that this is a pretty neat idea. The torpedoing of French subs has upset the French of course, but upsetting the French makes the English happy. It miffed a certain unnamed Pacific neighbour to the North too, Australia’s largest trading partner, but this apparently makes the Americans happy. As they say, “You can please some of the people all of the time, you can please all of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all of the people all of the time.”

But I ask you, why do we need nuclear powered submarines at all? Yes they can stay submerged for months at time, but unless you are going to operate them away from Australian coastal waters, and potentially arm them, perish the thought with atomic weapons, what’s the point? Conventional submarines would work just as well in opposing any attempted future blockade of Australian sea lanes, the stated long term strategic purpose of AUKUS. What this Boys with Toys decision really means is that Australia will have a submarine fleet capable of working in the South China Sea, which is precisely what the Americans want while effectively handing over sovereignty of the fleet to the US and Britain, without whose help it will not possible to maintain the submarines during their operational life.

Here’s the rub in the sub then. The power plant of this sort of submarine will be supplied as a closed unit and will be American or British technology. Now, in the fine print of the AUKUS agreement, there is a clause committing Australia to a policy of managing the highly radioactive reactor waste produced by the submarines when they reach the end of their operational life. The reactor of a nuclear powered submarine is small by comparison to a nuclear power electrical plant but even so, weighs over a 100 tonnes and contains about 200kg of weapons grade, enriched uranium. Where will we put that I wonder? We currently can’t even manage to properly dispose of the small amounts of low level radioactive waste produced by the medical and mining industries of this country.

ARPANSA, September, 2018. (Picture by I McLachlan)

The Yallambie Creek at the back of the newly completed Australian Radiation Laboratory (ARPANSA) in 1979. (Source: National Archives of Australia, item no. 30750073)

In September 2018, I wrote in these pages about the storage of radioactive waste at the ARPANSA facility on Lower Plenty Rd, Yallambie. 35 cubic metres of radioactive material from a Melbourne University building site had been secretly brought to Yallambie for what was termed “temporary storage”. Volumes aside, in terms of radioactivity the Melbourne University material was comparatively low level and it’s said, represented only about 1% of the radioactivity in storage at the site. Apparently this sort of thing has been going on there for decades. The devil would surely be in the detail if ARPANSA was prepared to release any details.

“This is a longer term issue, because that material is pretty long lived and that hazard is not going to diminish over time. In the long term, it’s probably not an ideal place to store hazardous materials.” (ARPANSA’s Stephen Long, quoted in the Citizen, March 2020)

“Kimba on South Australia’s Eyre Peninsula”, with apologies to the white kitty of manga fame. (Source: Wikipedia)

As I showed in my 2018 story, the ARPANSA facility at Yallambie was built under an earlier understanding that radioactive waste material would NEVER be stored on site. Five years on from that post and the materials I’m guessing are still there, along with who knows what else. The collapse last month of a plan to store radioactive waste at Kimba on South Australia’s Eyre Peninsula made minor headlines for a few days, and now we are supposed to be surprised. It followed other failed plans at Woomera, SA, 20 years ago and Muckaty Station in the NT 10 years ago. It means the material is going to remain here at Yallambie for a long time to come I think.

Just how long is a half-life?

“…without serious reference to the surrounding community.” Robyn McConville was pictured with her daughter in The Sun News Pictorial in September, 1974 protesting the ARL proposal.

So like an exercise in a Voyage to the Bottom of Seeing, the question remains, what are we going to do with these submarines when they reach the limits of their service life? The silence is deafening. When pressed about this on Thursday, the Prime Minister said that they were looking at “Defence sites, defence land”, but that of course “obviously, this isn’t something that is imminent”. Well just remember that we ended up with ARPANSA at Yallambie in the first place only because Defence Department land at the Simpson Barracks could be used unilaterally without serious reference to the surrounding community.

“There was a time in Australia not so long ago when this country was reluctant to even dig our export uranium resources out of the ground…”

Recent calls for Australia to develop a cutting edge, Small Modular (nuclear) Reactor (or SMR) which could theoretically be slotted straight into the existing electricity grid to my mind shows the direction the decision makers are wanting to take us. There was a time in Australia not so long ago when this country was reluctant to even dig our export uranium resources out of the ground for fear of what it might be used for. The radioactive waste at ARPANSA is going to pale into insignificance when compared to what we are going to inherit from some of these moves. It might be a problem that seems so far off in the future right now that we don’t need to spare it any thought. A bit like what they used to say about climate change, and hasn’t that become a hot topic all of a sudden? Kicking any discussion of this like a can down the road of the future might seem to be the only option for us right now and yes, many of us will be dead by the time it comes to clean up our act. If you were to ask me though, I would like to tell you I was hoping to die of old age in my bed in the far off, hopefully distant future and not due to a sudden case of radiation poisoning in the meantime.

The Ukraine War has shown us lately how vulnerable traditional battle technologies have become to 21^st Century drone attack, both in an aerial and submarine form. Like those pre-Great War, British Empire naval strategists of another time, history has a way of repeating itself.

Choosing a nuclear future for Australia in this century might seem like a new way of thinking to some people right now, but it actually represents an old way of thinking, a way of thinking tried for the first time nearly 80 years ago. It’s said that as he watched the fireball of the first Trinity test in 1945, Dr J Robert Oppenheimer turned to a line of Hindu devotional text as a way of trying to make sense of the blinding light of what he had seen.

“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

It’s been 50 years since Australia ratified the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. Today, sticking to those principles has never seemed so important.

A 2018 view of the ARL ARPANSA site surrounded by the suburban streets of Yallambie and Viewbank.

“Look Mum, I found a Cornflake”

The French historian Philippe Ariès claimed sometime in the middle years of the last century, “in medieval society, the idea of childhood did not exist”. The Frenchman’s idea was that children in history had been treated like sort of miniature adults without a separate phase in life of a clearly defined childhood. I don’t know whether growing up in France was necessarily all that different for Ariès, but it was a new and novel way of thinking back in his day. It influenced a generation of historians and social thinking, but lately, nobody’s quite so sure. You see, the argument has never been about whether once upon a time children were adults, but whether nowadays adults can still be children.

J M Barrie, otherwise known to us now as that diminutive Scottish writer of Peter Pan, devoted years to finding a solution to one side of this argument. He famously founded a cricket team in which he enlisted the greatest writers of his age, playing light hearted games on village greens up and down the English countryside in the years before the First World War. It was all a bit of fun back then although now we might call such behaviour an example of “Peter Pan” syndrome, a modern, popular pseudo psychology term reserved for adults who exhibit frivolous childish behaviour in adulthood. Barrie would have baulked at the description. For him, childhood games were his raison d’etre.

The first line of Barrie’s famous story states, “All children, except one, grow up,” a sentence in which in just a few words he signals all the fleeting fantasy and melancholy of lost childhood. Anyone who has a fond recollection of their childhood appreciates this. My dear old, long departed dad called me “Mouse” when I was little, a pet name he coined after he heard me scrabbling inside a large toy box one day. The end of him using it marked my arrival into adolescence.

A display of “live” steam engines at the London Toy and Model Museum. (McLachlan)

A dangerous toy? The Gilbert Atomic Energy Laboratory with real radioactive materials, a toy released in 1950, never really caught on. I wonder why? (Source: Wikipedia) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilbert_U-238_Atomic_Energy_Laboratory

One thing universal to childhood is the toys children play with, although the types have changed through history. Children have played with toys since prehistoric times, banging two rocks together or poking a stick at a bear – a dangerous toy if ever there was one. Little boys love toys and sometimes those boys turn out to be not so little. There was a time back in the day when it even became fashionable to say that he who dies with the most toys wins and while that was a sort of throwaway line largely aimed at life’s excesses, what it was really about is that as we get older, the toys get more expensive. Likely as not you have a Lego building, usually male adult relative somewhere in the family. He’s probably the one with the collection of robot tin toys and toy cars, kept on a shelf alongside a half built wooden model ship and propped up by a childhood stamp album.

“…finished to the point of rigging”

Before X-box, kids made things. I have a half constructed, kit supplied model boat sitting here which I’m guessing will never be finished now but then my father-in-law has one too. His is a wonderful model frigate with a painstakingly constructed copper sheathed hull, both ships finished to the point of rigging which is where these tasks get properly hard and are usually abandoned by big boys.

“…the sail all torn and waiting to be fixed.”

When I was at school it was a bit of a thing to draw up a blue print and carve out a planked model ship in Carpentry Class. While the result of my efforts in that classroom went to Davy Jones’ Locker a long time ago, I do have an old, secondhand sloop rigged pond yacht here, the sail all torn and waiting to be fixed. It was while attempting to sew a new sail recently and doing my darndest to find a way around the possibly gender specific task of winding fresh cotton onto the spool of an old sewing machine that I started thinking about this topic as a general distraction.

Frank and Carrie Wright with their son Frankie at Yallambie, c1900. (Source: Wright/Calder collection)

Fragments of “the lost layers of childhood once lived.”

In an old house, it’s likely as not that generations of children have learned to walk in the corridors, slid down the bannisters or played hide and seek in the corners. Sometimes the fragments of those past lives remain like a sort of echo of the past. We’ve found glass and banded agate marbles here, gaming chips, an arm from a doll – even a lost toy pulled from under the floorboards. The children who lost them are grown long ago and some of them were probably dead more than a century back, but it makes you wonder for a moment about the lost layers of those childhoods once lived.

Nursery room at Clarendon House, Tasmania. (McLachlan)

Launching a pond yacht on a dam at Yallambie in the 1950s. (Screen still from the film “Yallambie”, by Peter Bassett-Smith).

“…who else remembers a time when the cereal box contained a plastic toy of some type?”

In Peter Bassett-Smith’s film showing Yallambie in the last days of the farming era, there is a short scene of young Bill Bush and a friend launching a pond yacht onto one of the farm side dams in the late 1950s. Pond yacht sailing used to be a popular thing with the young and the not quite so young and sailing clubs were created dedicated to the past time. It’s not so popular these days, not by a long shot, but then most men my age will probably remember building Airfix plastic model planes and boats as a child, and who does that now? The playground has always been the world of fast fashions, from Coca-Cola yo-yos and spinning Hula Hoops to Pokemon Go. Whatever the latest fad trending in the school yard. Who else remembers a time when the cereal box in the morning contained a plastic toy? The best ones were those that required a small amount of building of the plastic toy inside, like the Kinder Surprise of today. It inspired The Goodies into parody with a child seated at a breakfast bowl filled with plastic spacemen exclaiming in wonder, “Look Mum, I found a Cornflake.”

As if?

Goodies Plastic Spacemen, (BBC, The Goodies, Episode 8).

“That must have been before she left Clannad…”

One of my early memories is of building diamond shaped kites with my mother and older sister, using string, butcher’s paper and the bottle of ubiquitous childhood Clag to create something roughly capable of flight in a hurricane, the paper decorated with a smiling face to look down from the clouds. On the weekend my father would take us out to fly our kites at a high point at the end of Banyule Rd at a time when there was still little traffic out there. I thought it was some sort of magic belonging only to my parents that kept the kite up in the air. Later I built box kites painted in camouflage to look like the flying machines of World War 1 and model planes, including huge papered and balsa wood sparred gliders with wingspans that measured rather larger than myself. When I started doing a paper round, I saved up my money and bought an Enya, single cylinder model petrol engine to mount in my flying models.

That must have been before she left Clannad I’m thinking.

Children preparing to fly a tissue paper constructed, model hot air balloon at the Beverley Rd Oval, Heidelberg. The old Banyule High School and half constructed football pavilion at rear. (Mueller collection)

I collected modelling magazines, purchased at the corner shop, and studied one that had a plan telling how to build a hot air balloon. I spent hours and hours building these things as a ten year old, my efforts nearly always destroyed in a fiery conflagration at the slightest suggestion of a breeze. It was all par for the course, of course. Hours of work gone in seconds. The charred body of the crashed balsawood pilot would be gently removed from the basket of the burnt hot air balloon and buried in the garden with great solemnity.

“…the flying adventures of Biggles.”

Ah, the memories of a Peter Pan childhood. Memories of frost on the grass on cold mornings and the smell of new mown grass on summer days. A football kicked on the street in front of the house, in between dodging the occasional car, and cricket played with a tennis ball in the backyard. My reading was the old fashioned flying adventures of Biggles, bought second hand with my comic books from Bill’s Book Bar and my maths was spent calculating how many years it would take me to save up my pocket money and how many paper rounds I would need to buy a real Cessna. That childhood quixotic lack of reality remains a part of my thinking to this day but maybe that’s not such a bad thing. It might even go some way to explaining our lives in this old and impractical house and give a clue to the motivations behind the long writing of this blog, a passion project that turns 9 years old this month.

I saved up those modelling magazines with the hot air balloon plans from that craze of my childhood, thinking that if I ever had a son of my own I would build balloons with him. When the time came he never showed any enthusiasm, or any other sort of model making interest come to think of it. A child of the modern age with his nose stuck firmly in computer gaming. All the same, if you know somebody about the right age, check out this link here to read about how to build a model balloon. Maybe that somebody doesn’t even need to be the “right” age you know.

As I said at the start of this, my father called me “Mouse” at a time when I was still small enough to fit inside a toy box, but maybe in his jest lives an underlying truth. Apparently lab rats raised in an enriched environment of toys and changing spaces have been observed to have enhanced brain development, at least compared to those raised inside a plain environment. So forget about that Frenchman Ariès and what he said about childhood. There’s always been room for childhood, and in my Biggles book of thinking, that’s something that is true of any age and in any age. If we find the lines are sometimes blurred, well is that so much a bad thing?