Disaster looms … no “gazole”

14/05/2013 By cliochronicles in France Tags: dordogne valley, St Emilion Leave a comment

The next morning we collected the Renault Espaces at Bordeaux airport without any problems but, because of the gazole shortage Renault Eurodrive would give us just ten litres of fuel in each van. It was 100 km to the farmhouses we have rented near Riberac in the Dordogne valley, so what should we do?

We will go of course!

Full of excitement, we packed all the luggage in and set off for the medieval village of St Emilion. Within 10km of leaving Bordeaux, we were lost, going around and around various roundabouts looking for the sign to Libourne. A major hurdle for us tourists to overcome is the way French direction signs point to the roads, there is one sign on the left and another on the right and we found out by trial and error that this indicates that straight ahead is the way to go, NOT to go right or left. Fifteen minutes into our journey and I am feeling really stressed. My brain keeps shrieking … You’re on the wrong side of the road … get over to the left and my heart is thumping in my chest, my palms beginning to sweat. To my dismay, I see that we are heading down the same street we’d been on just a few minutes earlier. Suddenly, Ed shouted F**k and hit his fist on the side of the steering wheel. With a skid of brakes, we screeched to a smoky halt and mounted the footpath, Olwyn jumped from the other Renault and headed in my direction for the first of many roadside conferences. We decided the turnoff just had to be further up the road, so we made for the roundabout for the fourth time. Suddenly, there it was — Bergerac-Libourne Est-St Emilion-N89, how on earth did I miss it before? It had to be the right road because we were driving east. It was a brilliant day, clear blue sky, warm and a slight breeze to cool my fevered brow. To the left and right, vineyards stretched as far as the eye could see, interspersed with maize fields. The engine was purring, the silver van was right behind us and I could see that Ian, the driver was smiling. The muscle in the side of Ed’s jaw had stopped twitching and his hands had relaxed on the steering wheel. Life was good … for now.

The turnoff for St Emilion was one kilometre ahead on our left and I found it easily. The village looked enchanting, the Eglise Monolithe carved from the steep limestone cliff, and the small honey-coloured houses had red-tiled roofs. One look at the narrow street winding up the hill and we made the wise decision to park the vans in the shade of the giant plane trees in the Place Maréchal Leclerc and walk up to the village. It would save some of our precious gazole as well. St Emilion was a truly breathtaking spot with magnificent hillside views of the Dordorgne valley, a medieval monastery village with a church high on a hill, sunlight and shadow accentuating different aspects of the architecture. We devoured our lunch of freshly-baked baguettes spread with soft, delicate blue cheese, tomatoes and lettuce, then delicious macarons, thin crispy biscuits made from egg whites, sugar and ground almonds from a recipe developed in the 17th century by local Ursuline nuns.
St Emilion was so lovely that we later regretted that we did not spend more time there, but the fuel gauge and the rapidly declining level had everyone feeling decidedly nervous.

I had abandoned our earlier plan to drive to Riberac along the beautiful back roads and small villages for the safer option of the larger “D” roads … At least we will able to flag down a passing motorist if we run out of gazole I confidently told the others. So we headed south from St Emilion to pick up the D936, then the D9 north through Montpon-Ménestérol and then the D708 to Riberac. We were bowling happily along through the green countryside when a huge, bright-yellow icon of a petrol-pump appeared on the dashboard. Surely it couldn’t be nearly empty, we had at least 60km to drive. My stomach began fluttering widely, all the service-stations we have seen have been closed …Fermé – en panne d’essence. Another roundabout looms and we swing into the left lane, Wrong Way! comes a strangled shout from the back of the Renault. We are heading left around the large roundabout with a flowerbed in the centre with the silver van in our wake. Heading straight for us in the southbound lane is a huge road van. Its bristling chrome klaxons on the roof are blaring and the driver is gesticulating out the window, hand waving up and down, fingers waggling, mouth wide-open … probably shouting French swear words at us. Both vans cross the south-bound entrance of the roundabout seconds before the truck arrives. What to do? If we keep going around we will end up meeting the truck head-on. Ed grips the wheel, stares straight ahead and drives over the beds of petunias and into a nearby parking lot. We come to a sudden halt on the baking bitumen with the others right behind us. Whew, that was close

We drive through the area of the Dordogne known as the Perigord Vert but we have no inclination to admire the lovely rolling hills and lush farmlands that are so different to our native Australia. Everyone is mesmerised by the luminous yellow sign on the dashboard and we are free-wheeling down hills to try and save fuel … my ears straining for the first sound of a spluttering engine that will herald the end of our journey. However, cruel Fate had another trick up her sleeve for just around the corner, and about fifteen km from Riberac, we found the road blocked by farm vehicles. F**k what now! yelled Ed, I don’t bee-leeeeve it! We shuddered to a standstill and all of us gaped at a farm worker perched precariously on the tines of a raised bail-stacker. He was tying the ends of a white banner to the electricity wires strung across the road.

Transporteurs, Agriculteurs, Entrepreneurs

Artisans même combat

Usages rejoignez-nous

A qui profit la hausse?

20% pour le pétrolier

80% pour l’Etat

C’EST DU RACKET! = VIE TROP CHERE

Tous avec nous!

We piled out of the vans to stand in the shade and we women clucked sympathetically, we had to show working-class solidarity after all. The males were transfixed by the sight of a woman worker in a skimpy green top and even briefer white shorts that gave increasingly larger glimpses of nut-brown, tanned buttocks. Paul was deep in fractured Franglaise with a smiling farmer who told him the delay would be short and they chatted haltingly about gazole, Australia, and evil taxes. There was a feeling of resigned good humour even though cars and trucks were queueing up on both sides of the blockade. Suddenly there was a commotion ahead with the sound of raised voices and staccato French. A young, very agitated woman in a tiny rattling Renault with two kids crammed in the back was weaving through the queue, screaming abuse at the picket line. She had a doctor’s appointment; the kids were ill; she’d left the gas on; her husband would beat her if she was late; her gazole was running low and much, much more. She was voluble, and very, very angry. She made a mad dash for the gap left by the bail-stacker but she was too late. A shout of fury went up from the gathered farmers and the stacker, with lowered tines like some angry bull headed for the gap while other farmers rushed to block her way. We all thought that the car and the woman and the kids would be skewered and the fact that they weren’t was pure luck. It was like being caught up in some Pixar film.

The furious woman promptly burst into tears while the farmers yelled abuse at her.

Doesn’t she know never to challenge a French farmer’s blockade? If she gets through, what’s to stop all these bloody tourists from following? Is she trying to make them look foolish? Who does she think she is? Where the hell has she been all these years? … bloody Australia?

Well, that was Paul’s translation anyway.

A special Greek cake

05/04/2013 By cliochronicles in Cooking Leave a comment

A lovely cake to share with friends on a beautiful Easter Sunday in Canberra.

Lime Halva cake with Labneh and Orange Flower icing decorated with home-made crystallised Lime leaves

Cake

185g (6oz butter)
185g (6oz) caster sugar
4 eggs
Juice and rind of 1 large lime
315g (10oz) semolina
2 teaspoons of baking powder
125g (40z) ground almonds

Grease a bundt tin with butter and heat the oven to 180°C (350°F). Cream the butter and sugar until very light and fluffy. Beat in the eggs one at a time (this is important or the mixture will curdle) and mix well before adding the rind and juice of the lime. Add the semolina, baking powder and ground almonds and mix well.
Pour into the tin and bake for 40 mins until the top is golden.
I reduced the temperature of the oven to 170°C after 30 minutes because it was getting a bit too brown.
While the cake is cooking, prepare the lime syrup.

Syrup

250g (8oz) sugar

200 mls (1/4 pint) water

Small stick of cinnamon

3 tablespoons of lime juice

Simmer the sugar, water,cinnamon and lime juice together until it has thickened slightly (about 10 minutes). When the cake has cooked, remove it from the oven and pour the hot syrup over it. You can use a small skewer to make holes in the cake, this will help the syrup absorb. Leave the cake until it has cooled, then turn onto a serving dish. It’s best to use one with a rim, because the syrup can ooze from the cake.

This recipe is a very old one, and one my children adored. It was published in the Australian book “NMAA cooks”. You can substitute lemon or orange juice for the lime, and they are equally delicious

For the crystallised lime leaves, follow the recipe here and substitute lime zest for the orange.

Labneh and Orange Flower icing

240g (8oz) Cream Cheese (I used Philadelphia)
240g (8oz) Labneh (Bought at middle-eastern delicatessen)
4 tablespoons of icing sugar
1 -2 teaspoons of Orange Flower water (Bought at middle-eastern delicatessen)

Break up and mix the cream cheese and icing sugar in an electric beater until smooth, then add the Labneh and mix well. Add 1 teaspoon of orange flower water and taste. It can be very strong, so you need to test it. Add too much and it will overpower the lime flavouring of the cake.

Mmmmm, see how long it lasts in your house

Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics: Graham Butler ~ Writing the History of the Australian Army Medical Corps in WW1

26/03/2013 By cliochronicles in Australia, World War I Tags: AGButler, Australia 1 Comment

This is the flyer for my upcoming seminar at the Australian National University for Anzac Day

Advanced Dressing station on the Menin Road during a battle. September 1917

The First World War marked a watershed in the history of military medicine and surgery. It was a ferocious encounter with enormous numbers of casualties and, at its conclusion, Colonel Graham Butler believed that the Australian casualty records constituted a body of accurate statistical material that was unequalled, surpassing that of Britain. His firm conviction was that the clinical records of every Australian battle or non-battle casualty had been forwarded to the Medical Research Council in Britain, where a large team of clerks had been busy abstracting, coding and tabulating the figures from the field medical cards for later statistical and epidemiological analysis. As well as details on the wounds sustained by the troops, Butler was confident that over 1800 different diseases had also been recorded.

Regrettably, he was to be proved wrong. In 1922, Butler reluctantly accepted the position of editor-in-chief for the medical history, and it was not long before he became aware of the parlous state of the records for the period covering the arrival of Australian troops in Egypt in December 1914, until March 1916 when AIF headquarters was transferred to England. However, the situation was far worse, and it would later be revealed that most of the medical records had either been destroyed, or did not exist. Graham Butler would completely underestimate the work involved in documenting the history of the AAMC during the First World War. However, he was not entirely to blame. In my opinion, the official historian, CEW Bean, and the two other members of the Medical History Board, Major-General Neville Howse and General CBB White, should also shoulder some of the responsibility for the fact that the history took almost twenty years to complete and not the three as planned.

Britain had not documented its medical history throughout all its previous wars, and the medical profession was eager to rectify what it regarded as a serious omission. Following the declaration of war against Germany in August 1914, the War Office established a Medical History of the War Committee and it was planned that the records of the Dominion forces would be dealt with as part of general British records. However, Canada disagreed with this arrangement, and appointed its own officer to supervise all its records. In Australia, no provision had been made for developing and maintaining the records of an overseas expedition until General Bridges arranged for the establishment of a special records department for the AIF with Defence Headquarters in Melbourne. But coordination between the AIF and the government in Australia was substandard, and rife with distrust. As late as 1916, the government was still refusing to communicate directly with the AIF in the field. Policies on evacuating Australian wounded from the field in France were passed to the High Commissioner in London, who communicated with the Colonial Office, and subsequently the War Office which then contacted the AIF.

Once the first contingent of the AIF left Australian waters in November 1914, it came under the command of the British Army. Accepted protocol was that the AIF would continue to feed, clothe, pay and equip its army but would not be responsible for its medical care. General Bridges concluded that the War Office would arrange medical treatment for all the troops under its administration, but confusion would reign about exactly who was in charge of caring for Australian sick and wounded. This uncertainty would be the major contributor to the chaos that developed when trying to clear the wounded from the beaches at Anzac Cove on 25 April 1915. The medical arrangements on the Gallipoli Peninsula were so bad that they generated feelings of guilt, grief and helplessness in Graham Butler, who had gone ashore with the first wave of troops as RMO of the 9^th Battalion. The experience of watching men with treatable injuries suffer and die for lack of proper medical care at Anzac haunted him for the rest of his life.

After reading the records of the administration on the Gallipoli campaign, Butler was deeply troubled that none of them detailed the arguments and rows between those in GHQ who formulated the decisions, those who gave the orders, and those who had to carry them out. All he could recall of his time as an RMO at Gallipoli was:

“battling with the OC, the OM, the DADMS and the Admin while all the time trying to look after the wounded and finding a good possie for my aid post. I cannot get any peace of mind about the whole thing.”

The desire to do the right thing by the men, and to set the record straight, led him to accept the task of writing the medical history of the AAMC. It was, I believe, an endeavour for which he was ill-equipped, but one into which he poured his heart and soul, ruining his health and reducing him and his wife to poverty.

Polio ~ “What’s for Lunch?”

22/02/2013 By cliochronicles in Australia, Polio, USA Leave a comment

Stories about how polio affected lives of many in the twentieth century have become more common, especially from the middle class. Unfortunately, stories of how the poor and the marginalised coped with the disease are few, mainly because their stories lie submerged within case histories in our public hospitals and institutions, buried within statistical analyses of prognoses, treatment and outcomes.

We all like to portray ourselves in a positive light, and memories can often be selective, as well as notoriously unreliable. While I was researching polio for my doctoral thesis, I read and listened to many moving and poignant stories of polio survivors who were trying to make sense of what had happened to them after their exposure to the virus. Most of them talked about the terrible pain they experienced and quite a few related their struggle to come to terms with a different physical body than the one they had been born with. Certain patterns revealed themselves. The polio epidemics were a cruel lesson for those who suddenly became different in a world that valued conformity in body shape. Awareness of severe pain during the acute phase of the disease was almost universal. It is important to remember that polio patients retained full sensory awareness and, unlike patients who suffered spinal cord injury, polio sufferers could feel the pain in their limbs, and quantifying the extent of that pain to outside observers was fraught with misinterpretation.

Naturally, memories recalled some years after the event are sometimes coloured by an individual’s reflection on how the experience of having polio affected their later life. In “What makes Oral History Different”Portelli maintained that:

Oral narrators have within their culture certain aids to memory. Many stories are told over and over, or discussed with members of the community; formalized narrative, even meter, may help preserve a textual version of an event.

Many polio survivors have shared their story with others in support groups and formalised their experience of polio by having it published on the Internet. Time and again, these and other interviewees were recalling events that occurred in their childhood, at a time when they had little understanding of what was happening to them and were offered little explanation.For children, hospitalisation was often a terrifying experience, and the memory remained with them for the rest of their life. Strong feelings of loneliness, bewilderment, and abandonment were common in children, while resentment at losing their independence, and of being ‘treated like a baby’, surfaced frequently in adult accounts. And, of course, there was always the topic of hospital food.

For Australians hospitalised during the epidemics, the food in hospital was usually appalling, tasteless, and lacking any nutritional balance. Little in the way of fibre was given, no fresh fruit and just a few vegetables which, if offered at all, were more often in the guise of unpalatable slurry. In “The Great Scourge”, Anne Killalea gave an example of a typical hospital menu in Tasmania in 1937.

Bread constituted breakfast, and bread and custard for tea. Lunchtime alternated between a choice of tripe or mince.

For some in-patients, doing something to avoid eating the unpalatable food provided some relief from the boredom of life on the polio wards. In Fairfield Hospital, young Brian did not ‘ like hard-boiled eggs, so we’d wrap them up and lob them up into the ventilating shafts … they are probably still there,’ while Edna, who ‘hated porridge’ used her tin plate to ‘fling it out onto the lawn, it must have been thick with porridge, ghastly, lumpy stuff. We had porridge seven days a week for breakfast, and that’s all we got.’ Also in Fairfield, Marguerite remembered being given ‘baby food through a bent glass straw before graduating to grated apple mixed in with almost liquid mashed vegetables.’ Another remembered jelly that was ‘so rubbery’ that we used to throw it at each other. Some children were physically ill after being forced to eat food they did not like.

I could not eat that milky hospital food. The nurses would feed me rhubarb and custard, one would stand one side and hold me, and the other would shove food into my mouth. Then I would vomit. I lost a lot of weight.

Ian loathed the fact that he was a ‘prisoner to hot milk —with this bloody little jug thing coming towards you. It looked like a teapot, but it was for pouring milk into people’s mouths.’ Many parents and visitors were appalled by the quality of food provided, and brought in supplies from outside. Sometimes they had to smuggle these past a hawk-eyed Ward Sister: one woman remembered lowering down a rope ‘so our husbands could send up meals we’d ordered.’ Grandparents were enlisted to help: one devoted couple came in to visit several times a week carrying ‘a baking dish full of rice pudding,’ while other parents ‘lobbed chocolates over the hospital walls’ for the more mobile to retrieve and share with others.

More often than not, the junior nurses joined in the rebellion against hospital food and ‘would take the hat around, and one would go to the corner shop and buy eggs and make us scrambled eggs.’ Sometimes bribery was used to cajole patients to eat: ‘we were allowed to listen to the radio in the afternoon if we ate our supper. One day I didn’t eat my green beans and the nurse wouldn’t let me listen.’ Many patients hospitalised in Fairfield during the 1950s had trouble swallowing the food and were fed by nasal-gastric tubes for long periods. Noel recalled that the first food he ‘could keep down was ‘Cheddarette’ biscuits, and when I came home people said I was like something out of a concentration camp.’

Having polio in the mid-twentieth century usually meant an extended stay in hospital, generally around twelve months and sometimes as long as four or five years. Some, like June Middleton in Victoria, never went home. June spent 60 years in an iron lung, and her dearest companion was her labrador dog “Angel”.

Multicultural Canberra

15/02/2013 By cliochronicles in Australia Leave a comment

Last weekend we went to the Canberra Multicultural Festival in the heart of the city. It’s a celebration and sharing of culturally diverse traditions, dance, food, performances, exhibitions, and concerts. It was fabulous, and we enjoyed it. The poodles Jules and Jim were keen on the the abundant tasty tidbits that fell like manna from heaven, but they weren’t so keen on the forest of legs, pushchairs and scooters that threatened to squash their paws and tails.

And we were celebrating outside, and what is omnipresent at almost every Australian picnic or BBQ?
Blowflies of course.

In the early seventies, the word “multicultural” was almost unknown, especially when paired with “Australia.” Once upon a time, Australians all thought that assimilation was a good thing, that the people who emigrated to our shores should, by rights, all end up the same as we were … predominantly white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants. In the early 1970s, these questions came to a head with the end of the war in Vietnam and the waves of refugees. Did we want our new immigrants recast in a giant melting pot, or did we want a colourful, ethnic mosaic? National identity became a national obsession.

In today’s Australia, one can find a full spectrum of ideas about multiculturalism, from those who, while agreeing that ethnic tensions exist, still maintain that multiculturalism is working in Australia. At the other end are those who think the whole thing has failed miserably, and freely express feelings tinged with resentment, alarm and outright anger. Those who occupy the middle-ground struggle to find anything really good to say about multiculturalism, apart from the oft-quoted increased variety and sophistication of the food on our tables and in our restaurants.

Are we there yet? Are we still on the journey? Or should we never have untied the Imperial apron strings?

gone troppo

20/01/2013 By cliochronicles in Australia, Knitting, Projects Leave a comment

What does one do when it is 42degC (107F) outside and a howling gale is blowing? Knit a scarf of course and watch the Australian Open Tennis.

It’s a free pattern called L.1 by Antonia Shankland and available on Ravelry I am knitting it with Holst Garn 100% Merino and some of Sunday Knits Nirvana, a lovely soft merino/cashmere. The pattern uses four colours but I am using five because I don’t think I have enough of the medium blue Surf, so will use some Icicle as well. I love the way it’s knitting up.

Holst Garn

Sunday Knits

Am almost finished a “Rasta Neckwarmer” cowl in Malabrigo Rasta in the colour Archangel such a gorgeous combination of pastel shades.

… Three weeks later and all finished. I love this scarf, it is beautifully soft, airy yet warm. I think it will get a lot of use.

Happy Knitting

The day my city burned

18/01/2013 By cliochronicles in Canberra Tags: bushfire Leave a comment

Ten years ago today a firestorm penetrated deep into the suburbs of Canberra, my home town, and the capital city of Australia. It’s difficult, almost impossible, to imagine such a peace-time catastrophe arising in London, Washington, Paris or Berlin. Yet it could have been avoided.

It was just ten years ago, but even in such a short time, the way we communicate with each other has changed immeasurably. Now we have Twitter, and Facebook and mobile phones in our pockets, and we can find out in an instant what’s going on in the next street or across the world. Ten years ago, we knew deep in our hearts that something wasn’t right, that the plumes of smoke far south in the Namadgi National Park and the Brindabella Valley were getting closer and closer to us every single day. And nobody told us anything.

On that morning of 18 January 2003 we had been five years in the grip of a fierce drought. It hadn’t rained for weeks, and the air was so dry that the leaves were curling in upon themselves, silvery undersides upturned to the sky. The trees around us had a brooding intensity, a hanging-on look, an air of desperate expectation. The grass was the colour of straw, just a slight sprinkling of green shoots pushing through into the hot, arid air. And it was so still. By 9:00am smoke was everywhere, and by 11:30 it was thick and acrid, an eerie yellow light adding to the feeling of unreality. The wind starting to intensify, whistling through the casuarinas, blowing needles against my face and Ed was on the roof, clearing out dead leaves from the gutters.

I turned on our local ABC radio around 12:30 but nothing much was going on. There had been reports of bushfires around us, large blazes, but everything seemed under control. By 2:00pm the announcer was telling people to return to their homes, but still no real information. At 2:45pm the ear-splitting sound of a klaxon came from the radio, and a state of emergency was declared. 15 minutes later, houses were alight in the suburb of Duffy just a few kilometres away from us. We were under threat and I raced to put the dog, a few cherished photo albums and a portrait of our son into the car … no jewellery, no other possessions … nothing else mattered. We did not have a clue where we would go to find shelter.

And then it was almost upon us. Fire, smoke and ash blocked the sun and it was pitch black. Streetlights came on and the sky turned orange, then red, then black. Ed was still up the ladder, clutching a hose, a tiny trickle of water coming from the end. The noise was incredible, like a jet was landing straight above us, burned branches of trees clattering down on the roof tiles like machine-gun fire, gas bottles exploding, an occasional shout from a neighbour. Not a fire engine to be heard, anywhere. We could see the fireball heading straight towards us over Mt Arawang. I thought we were going to die, nothing could save us.

But the golf course across the road did. The wall of flames, finding nothing to burn, suddenly veered away to the east and into the heart of our suburb. We survived. Our backyard was littered with smouldering branches, twigs, leaves and the bodies of birds, the life sucked from them during the inferno, and it was so quiet. Everyone was in a state of shock.

A few days later, I roamed around streets close to our home. So much devastation, we had been so lucky. For weeks, starving kangaroos made a nightly visit to nibble on the parched grass, they were so hungry they did not move away when we approached.

Today there are public commemorations in Canberra to mark the anniversary of the day Canberra burned. A day when four people died, over 4000 sheep were burned along with countless other animals, and 500 homes were reduced to ashes.

I don’t need reminding.
No one who was here on that day does either.

clio chronicles

Musings on history and my life