Tag Archives: photographs

Signs and Street Art

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One of my quirks (not twerks) is noticing some of the advertising hoardings and signs. It is not for the advertised product, but more for the play on words, incorrect spelling or the just plain odd. Similarly I have come to enjoy the vibrancy, colours and artistic skills in some (painted) street art as well. I hate graffiti that is just mindless vandalism. The following images have been taken in Berkeley, California and Winnipeg, Manitoba during the past ten days. [double click on any image and you can scroll through them and read the captions]

Earmaked for demolition–Winnipeg.
Winnipeg
Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley
I haven’t seen this word for a while.
Winnipeg
Berkeley Campus
The food was good–Berkeley
Berkeley
Winnipeg
Berkeley student’s watering hole
Blackboard IQ questions and then there is the “readings”.
I didn’t understand it, but significan detail in the artwork–Winnipeg.
The sign says it all
Bronz reproduction taken from a photograph–Winnipeg.
Same words–different meanings
Love not war next to a shop selling bondage knick-nacks
In the grounds of Berkeley Campus.
A play on words.
History joins us: building donated to Jewish young men during the depression.
Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley
Drinking from the toilet bowl–Californians may need instructions.
Winnipeg
Winnipeg
A hamburger Cafe in Winnipeg

 

 

Pearl Denton’s 21st

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I visited my mother’s 21st birthday celebrations last night, or in the vernacular of the 1920s, ‘her coming of age party’. While researching something quite different I stumbled across two newspaper reports of Miss Pearl Denton’s – my mother’s maiden name – celebrations.

Such were the cultural formalities in Adelaide in 1925 that the celebration could not be held before her actual birthday and since her birthday (September 20th) fell on a Sunday that year, it was improper to celebrate on the day of worship. So the party was held on Monday September 21st at the Parkside Masonic Hall.

Over the years and some four decades later my mother would occasionally talk of her twenty-first birthday party. According to the short newspaper reports, in the Adelaide Register and the Mail, games were played amongst the guests. This confirms my mother’s stories of playing: pass the balloon, musical chairs, mystery package, and surprisingly (for me) indoor bowls, played on coconut matting. While the newspaper reports mentioned dancing, apparently this scandalous activity was condoned however there were strict guidelines on what was permitted between any non-married couples.

The Mail (newspaper) listed the names of sixty-one guests, the hosts, Mr and Mrs R. L. Pearce (my mother’s older sister and her husband) and my future father, H. R. Sweet was one of those present. Reading through the list of attendees, I can recognise a few names of aunties and uncles, and quite a number of family friends, or those whose names were part of the dinner-table conversations over the years.

The supper tables were laden with food and decorated with Iceland Poppies, according to the newspaper reports. Fifty-years after this event my mother was still growing poppies. I remember, as a child, our home being decorated with these flowers each spring. My mother would lightly burn the base of the stems and blanched them with boiling water so that the displays lasted longer.

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Undated, possibly 1926 and may have been at the Oakbank Easter Races.  My mother is at the front looking back at the camera.  Her elder sister, Myrtle and her husband, Bob Pearce, are seated at the rear left of the photograph.  Their daughter is on the right of her father.  It is also possible my father, Harold Sweet took the photograph.

Whether my parents were betrothed (engaged) for my mother’s 21st, I have no record of that. They were married eighteen months later in April 1927. Similarly, I have little in the way of stories from either of my parents about how they met, what they did for entertainment, or their ‘courting’ days. Both my elder sisters are also dead so I cannot chat with them as to what they may have been told either.  If there are any photographs of the 21st celebrations, or of my mother from that era,  I have yet to discover them.  The photograph (above) is one of the few showing my mother with her elder sister and brother-in-law, who were the hosts of her ‘coming of age party’.

This is a continuing regret, for me, and a gap in my history of the family.  Each of us should look too these narratives and photographs as an important legacy for future generations.  I found it serendipitous that this inadvertent discovery of two small newspaper articles published ninty-one years ago caused me to reflect and remember a little more of my mother.  Our way of life, our means of enjoying, our family celebrations and our entertainment are different now.  I have not written this to compare and claim one period of time is better than another.  They are unique.  Yet each should be celebrated, remembered and passed on as an important legacy of our family history.

If you haven’t used Trove, I highly recommend it, but be careful, it is addictive.

Kicked three goals – but I’m 30 meters out for the fourth and running hard

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I have kicked three goals – three abstracts submitted and three acceptances. That is a turn up for me.

The first paper is: Nostalgia and Legacy of the family photographic collection, with the NZ Studies Association conference at the Vienna University in the first week of July. Then in September I will present a paper titled: Vida – a pastor’s wife (an oral history) at the national Oral History Conference in Perth (my former stamping ground). Paper number three, I have just been advised is at the inaugural IABA Conference in the South Pacific, here in Adelaide. That paper is titled: Three Generations – oral history through photographs on display.  

Photos on the Wall

As for goal number four, the thesis, I’m still at the 30 meter mark, but dead in front of the goal.  Keeping up with the Aussie Rules analogy, a good drop punt will sail it through the two big sticks (the two independent examiners).  So between now, plane flights to Austria, a return via the Philippines, and preparing for the Perth National Oral History conference I will have the thesis wrapped up in a nice little bow – soon.

I wish I had the photograph

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Just over 95 years ago [March 23, 1920] Kingsford-Smith, later to become Sir Charles Kingsford-Smith landed his Vickers Vimy (a World War 1 bomber bi-plane) at the culmination of the first plane flight from England to Australia at the Northfield aerodrome on the outskirts of Adelaide.  It is now an inner suburb.

As a young boy, during our car trips through this area, my father would often tell, and retell, the story of his moment of being part of this historic event. Now lost over time, there had been a photograph of my father as an eighteen-year old taken on that March day in 1920. P1000498  My father [eighteen at the time] had walked and hitched rides from his mother’s home at Parkside to watch the Vickers Vimy land at Northfield.

The press of the crowd, reported to be in the thousands, was too great for him to catch any more than a glimpse of the Australian heroes, but he was there.  He saw the plane and his stories made that historic moment mine as well.  Dad had a photograph of his moment, amongst the crowd, at the landing.

From the old photograph that was buried in the bottom drawer of the sideboard in our dining room at home, I can remember my father in his suit and tie, white shirt, and bowler hat, jauntily smiling at the camera. Why is this important to me, and today?

Wearing my father's 'restored' bowler hat.

Wearing my father’s ‘restored’ bowler hat.

The old, black, bowler hat had been one of the heirlooms that somehow has been in my possession for thirty or more years.  Over time it had been severely damaged and I had often contemplated tossing it out.  However, I kept it.  Today I collected this special piece of history from ‘Adelaide Hatters’ in the Adelaide Arcade, where it had been beautifully restored.

I have my father’s bowler hat, but I wish I still had the photograph.

I’m struggling with nostalgia

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Class Photo, Glen Osmond Primary School 1955

Class Photo, Glen Osmond Primary School 1955

Nostalgia is a word that is commonly used to describe those enjoyable moments in our respective pasts.  We may recall times of riding push-bikes or playing marbles in the gravel on the way home from school.  Or for the girls it may be those special dress-up events when they became little pink princesses, or created elaborate afternoon teas.  No I am not being politically incorrect or sexist, that is just the way we played as kids.

So why are Baby Boomers nostalgic for that past, the ‘other’, which is so different to the experiences of today?   Often the call is made: “It so nostalgic to remember those good old days“.

The defining and understanding of the term nostalgia has changed over more than two centuries of use. Its genesis comes from the Greek nostos, which means a return to your home and algia, meaning a hurtful or agonising ailment.  According to Davis (1979, p. 1), nostalgia was a medical condition described by Swiss physician Johannes Hofner, in the eighteen hundreds, as a disease showing signs of melancholy through to suicide.  It was caused by extended absences from a person’s home.

However, over prolonged time its medical determination transformed in to a popular understanding of nostalgia being a sentimental yearning for a past that is gone and cannot be relived.  Yet there is this desire by many to remember previous times with a degree of longing and angst of loss (Pickering & Keightley 2006, p. 920). Their discussion emphasises that this ache for nostalgia should not be censured, but embraced to show ‘how the past may actively engage with the present and future’ (2006, p. 920).  Nevertheless, a blanket acceptance of the comforting cocoon of nostalgia does not assume that this ‘past’ is analytically assessed (Hutcheon 1993, p. 245).

In recounting war-time activities with New Zealand soldiers, Hutching maintained that nostalgia is ‘about their activities as young men’ (2011, p. 237).  In a personal observation Australian sportsman, author and journalist Peter FitzSimons (2010, p. ix) views nostalgia as: “through my own experience and that of my family, the simplicity of a time long gone in Australia’s past” is realised.  It should not convey sadness or a sense of loss, but needs to offer the magic opportunity to recapture those former and glorious moments (Holak & Havlena 1998, p. 223).

Yet is unrealistic just to evoke, or call on the ‘good times’ and feelings of nostalgia.  We cannot bring bygone days to life, and as commented upon by Holak and Havlena (p. 222) this promotes the feeling of sadness and loss, because there is no return to the past.  The memory of the “good old days” sets up the conflicting emotions of desire and melancholy. A longing for the past is not necessarily about recalling essential details as it is claimed that “one can be nostalgic for something one never experienced” (Green-Lewis 2000, p. 66).

Nostalgia is a ‘coping mechanism’, helping to support our identity and provide an avenue for forgetting (Mannik 2011, p. 87).  It is in our individual memories however they are created, that we recall the myths, emotions, memories and richness of nostalgia.

This outlines why I am struggling with nostalgia.  I see it as encompassing both the good and the bad from my past, the happy and sad times and those exciting memories and times of embarrassment.

Still the question remains, what actually is nostalgia?  Above I recounted its medical basis and historically it has been described as a cerebral disease and a serious psychiatric condition (Routledge et al. 2011).  Marketers and advertisers have ‘tapped into’ this nostalgic concept more recently as it can shape consumer preferences (Holbrook 1993, p. 255; Holbrook & Schindler 1996, p. 36; Stern 1992).  Those interested in cultural studies and sociology consider that nostalgia is more than a return to our home; it is the desire to experience the past once again, or to languish in sentiment and the status quo? While the definitions vary somewhat the understanding is similar.  The perfection of the past or the future is seen against accepting and embracing the present (Wilson 1997, p. 132). Wilson (1997, p. 138) concludes with the observation that:

Perhaps the real secret pleasure of nostalgia is … experiencing the reality of change, the passage of time, and the existence of that great hinterland of ‘lost time’ that yet somehow is still within us.

She seems to be claiming that while we embrace change we yearn for the past, a paradoxical position. It is argued that nostalgia is searching in the past while concurrently it is a starting point as a guide into the future (Pickering & Keightley 2006, p. 921).   I prefer to see nostalgia in a similar manner to that of Routledge et al. and it is more than just a positive memory (2012, pp. 458-459):

It is the self-focused emotional process through which people recollect experiences that imbue their lives with meaning.

There are many facets from which to reflect upon nostalgia.

However, my emphasis and understanding is on the comfortable acceptance of it being memories, cloaked in a warm fondness that can be experienced now and conveyed into the future. To this point I again draw on Wilson and her acquiescence of the ambivalent nature of nostalgia and it embracing both the past and the future (1997, p. 139).

So do you understand nostalgia?

PS.  Can you find me in the photograph above?  I’m in the back row, third from the left.

Death can be a release

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On Saturday October 4, 2014 my sister Judith died.  She was 79, but her life was lost five years ago with the onset of dementia.  Earlier this week, at her funeral, I had to give the hardest speech of my life, Judith’s eulogy.  I have added it to the stories in this Blog as part of our family’s oral history.  You may enjoy my memories of Judith.

Looking for Yip Yau

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Let’s see how good the internet actually is for research.

I’m trying to trace the life of Yip Yau, born in 1896, (locality unknown) died in central Australia (possible near Alice springs or further north) in July 1943 (aged 47 years).

I have a photograph of my father at his grave taken in the latter half of 1943. Yip Yau was of Chinese ancestory. The English writing on his grave stone says: “In memory of good friend, Yip Yau. died July (28th?) 1943, aged 47”.

Chinese grave near Alice Springs, taken c 1943. Standing is Sgt Harold Sweet, father of David Sweet

Chinese grave near Alice Springs, taken c 1943. Standing is Sgt Harold Sweet, father of David Sweet

The grave as you can see from the accompanying photograph is/was quite substantial indicating that either his family had the finances and/or that he was respected in the community.

Any glimmers of hope would be appreciated.

Adelaide Photo treasures from the 1920s

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What is in your ‘shoe box’?  This beautiful series of photographs of Adelaide in the 1920s.  I quote form the ABC web site:

Discovered in a filing box left in the old City Engineers Department of the Adelaide City Council in 2011, it is believed the photographs were taken from the bell tower of the General Post Office in the city.

Judging from the skyline and buildings, Adelaide City Council archivist Rob Thorton believes the photos were taken in either 1921 or 1922.

The first detailed series of photographs taken of the skyline since a panoramic shot taken in the 1866, the photos detail the progress of expansion and development over the five decades.

“We were amazed that these had lain dormant for all this time.

“We spent quite a lot of time almost drooling over them,” Rob laughed,” because it was such a comprehensive record of what the city looked like at that time.”

Black and White Adelaide – A collection of panoramic photographs show eight of the 12 photographs, enlarged and reproduced on canvas in the northern gallery of the first floor of the Adelaide Town Hall, 128 King William Street, from 12 May till 30 May 2014, as part of the About Time Festival.  Admission is free, so check it out.  

The Link to the ABC article.